genuinely, frighteningly unable to think of clever hed
Thursday 18 September 2008 | 5 cookies in the jar
Because I just taught, and next have a meeting and a three-hour class, and then I go straight home and the Brujo and I immediately hit the road for…Santa Fe, and the annual creative music festival, and our 45-minute-long ”improvised opera” (el Brujo having “composed” said opera and contributing conduction/percussion, and the rest of us, five in number, contributing text, improvised voice, dance and oud, not necessarily at all in that order). Oh God.
The whole thing has me vaguely hysterical and downward-spiralling at this point, as is seasonally appropriate as well as topically—our ostentative subject, or loose focal point: the Persephone myth. Freely interpreted to include, you know, Levi and Bristol and subway schedules and embalming instructions and Dear Abby columns and Homeland Security bulletins and liberal saltings from the letters of Aurelia Plath, the screenplay for Secretary and excerpts from Infinite Jest. Because this is how our brain works; or anyway how it gathers lint and then hacks it back up in fuzzy dusty irrelevant clumps.
At this point it all feels rather like, as the B. says nervously, vaporware; but he also alleges that improvisational pieces are supposed to feel like this, that is, like you’re about to lose bladder control from anxiety, and then it all somehow more or less happens and it’s over and you think of the fifteen things you wish you’d said/done/read/played/sung. But oh well, they got what they paid for. Perhaps.
And it’s all ratcheted up a notch by the fact that I basically missed the first half of this week THANK YOU menstrual faeries, and so am behind my usual degree of behindness; and by the fact that I’ve fatally flaked on calling people and/or emailing them to let them know we’d be in town, arranging get-togethers and sleepovers, so as far as I know the B. and I will be wiping icicles from our noses every morning in the ski basin, because we’re camping. As is only fair, because we wouldn’t have any time to spend with our hosts anyway, because we’re only there two days, and somewhere in there is also sandwiched my beloved’s birthday, but his present will be mailed here and not there, because I failed to order it ahead of time, and I feel like a great big disorganized blurt of an accident scene, going off half-cocked, half-arsed, and all crazy. And guilty. Because I should be having tea or lunch or dinner with many dear people, and I probably won’t be.
And I have somehow managed to convince myself (?!) in the middle of all this, as though channelling Woody Allen but not in a GOOD way, that I have a terminal illness. Despite having only one, and a sketchy one at that, of half-a-dozen requisite symptoms. And I’m too embarrassed to even think of going to campus health and requesting a blood test, because won’t they just a) fall out laughing and b) refer me immediately to the counselling office? Which, come to think of it, obviously deserves a visit from me right about now? Since my newest symptom is apparently being a PARANOID HYPOCHONDRIAC?
This is, by the way, a completely unedited and ill-advised post which I am certain I will regret, typed from the graduate computer room, all unprepossessing black angular PCs and ugly wrinkled gray indoor-outdoor carpeting. I’m not sure to whom I’m writing or why. I just wanted to explain, really, that the B. and I will be crammed into a car for most of tonight, Friday, and Monday; and in between we’ll be listening to (and helping invent) some of the weirdest excuses for music to emerge from the mind of modern manunkind. I predict that he will be in hog-heaven and I will be befuddled and introverted, lurking around the artist tent/canteen because of the cornbread and green chile stew and because of its great gas-powered heat source—because yes, it will also be 40 degrees there at night, while here it’s still often in the 80s. I haven’t been back to SF since we moved and for whatever weird reason I’m petrified. Though it’ll be fun to road-trip with Pluto himself; he always tells long rambly wonderful stories while he’s driving, and I learn things about him which I’d otherwise never find out. And who knows, perhaps we’ll see a flying tire.
(Flying tire post TK after I get back.) (Assuming no flying tires land on us.)
This brain of mine, she is murky and turbid. Is that a word. Turgid and tangled and swollen and not talking right. The students exchange glances and snicker because my imagery is macabre and throaty, a blunt instrument, and I push them to ditch their sickly sentimentality (don’t ask for examples, I may just give them to you) and go for the reader’s jugular.
“I like this poem, because it really flows.”
“Okay, so we keep saying flow, but what does that mean?! Is that, like, metrically, as in, it follows a metrical form? Or do you mean it hypnotizes you, or makes you sleepy, or what? I just don’t know what you guys are talking about with this flow thing. Because frankly the only thing flow means to me is something they’re always talking about in commercials for sanitary napkins.”
I write the word FLOW on the chalkboard and draw a big circle around it, with a slash through it. “No more flowing. You have to explain what you mean by that.”
I dust chalk off my hands and waver there, nervously. I’m thin and dress in thrift-store dresses and I look, if the bathroom mirror is any guide, a decade older than I did last year. The purple under my eyes startles me, nearly fluorescent against my pallor. The Brujo says he can’t see any difference. I wonder sometimes if it’s just that the lighting at the State School, and in our Slumlord-owned home, is all singularly unflattering. I sit back down awkwardly and the students continue to struggle to justify why they prefer sentimental, meaningless tofu-flavored drivel over strong, single-edged images and language. But at least this time they don’t use the word “flow.”
The days shorten and I feel whirlpooled and distracted by distraction itself, not to mention weirdly abruptly convinced that this unbudging throb over my right kidney is actually a developing exit strategy a la Gilda Radner. And you can’t imagine how much it bothers me that I’m typing on a PC and can’t figure put how to put an accent aigu over the A.
There can be no graceful exit from this PREPOSTEROUS post and I apologize and will try to make it right when I next have some gray matter available. Flying tires! Ciao, bellas.
5 cookies in the jar
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Nice post. It really flows. I like how you put words together to make sentences. The words you use are really good. I like how you combine them together. Some of the words maybe could be better to make it flow even more. Great job!
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Fellow
slaveteaching associate: A+ for making me guffaw aloud.How odd that you are on your way here. I had a dream two or three nights ago that I had moved to Arizona and was temporarily staying in a motel in which, coincidentally, you and the B. were also staying in. It was quite a strange experience. I felt more comfortable with you there.
Enjoy your time in the Fe.
I’m not sure how reassuring this will be, considering how crazy I’ve been feeling lately, but this post made perfect sense to me. An improvisational opera? In front of an audience? Holy shit. Will we get to hear how it went?
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Libretto-feigning narrator: Yes, “holy shit” pretty much captured the entire experience, very little of which I can actually remember. But I will try to reconstruct it for y’all nonetheless. Yay for crazy!
Aap, I kept thinking about you! It was weird, so weird, so very very weird, to be back in the People’s Republic. Did I mention how weird it was?
I have a similar problem, getting the kidz to describe anything they or anyone else does as anything other than “wicked” (or its various antonyms).
I mean, I don’t want to crush all the joy out of the response - in a way, “wicked” is a good first instinct to have a thing. God strike me down if I ever stop thinking, deep down, that a piece is wicked.
But why, cherubs, is it wicked? What makes it so? How can we get to the wickedness in our own work? There, I think, the dialogue often grinds to a halt. Sigh.
How do you fix that?
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Flummoxed instructor: Well, so, see, what I do is, I write the word in all-caps on the board, and then draw a circle around it and a slash through it. And then when anyone uses that word, I make an angry alarum sound and mimic, with my arms, the action of a trapdoor opening in the floor to eject the thoughtless pupil from the classroom.
Obviously, a better plan is needed.