I want to say a great deal more but you guessed it—too much work still to do today. But we’re getting there, we are getting there—load of laundry in the washer, five of the remaining twenty-five student drafts open before me now (oddly I have only received one disgruntled snowflake email, of the “where the hell is my draft” variety, which, since I met with them in 15-minutes slots and already TOLD them what I think about their drafts…next time I am going to put the pen in their hands and FORCE them to take notes).

Further, I am NOT going to get lured by Ms. AB into a discussion of Lorrie Moore! Even though I desperately want to go look up the story she mentions, and read it for cleverly concealed subtext. Non! Je refuse! A quiet cabin in Ajo awaits the virtuous (comes furnished with one medium-sized overcaffeinated Irishman. Houris optional).

In the end my “answers” to the three exam questions (which questions of course I parsed and haggled over and negotiated and disagreed with at their very core and defiantly refused to answer in the terms in which they were given and wrote about other stuff entirely) wound up totalling about eight thousand words, and since I was writing steadily for just over eight hours, even my peabrain can determine I wrote a thousand words an hour. Or, let’s be honest, it was more typing than writing. Too bad they don’t pay by the yard. Somehow a large portion of this, thanks to my infallible stream-of-consciousness technique, wound up being about Rilke? I can’t even explain how that happened. I was accosted by Letters to Cézanne, which I think I last read in 1993. In fact I know it was January 1993 because I was on my way back to the Women’s College from DC, and I was sitting at Dulles at like 7 am waiting at the gate for my flight, sitting on my suitcase reading my paperback copy, and then I looked up and saw…that my plane had boarded and flown away without me. Because of Rilke! They don’t make ‘em like that no more, folks.

Toasted. Now brain is toasted. Still have student papers too, but that is my fault. The Brujo, by contrast, energetically hoovers and washes dishes, while I lethargically pick tufts of cat hair up off the carpet and stare dully at the laundry: “I want to get the flock OUTTA here.” Dear Alison had suggested this as a possible venue for the Brujo/Unreliable Spring Break and lo and & behold we are going! for a couple of nights anyway, and then on to a similar (but cheaper) bunch of cabins in Ajo. If I weren’t so toasted I’d be so excited—mostly excited to lie in bed all week with a book and a pen and tea and no thoughts of anything much and hopefully no anxiety nightmares either. Speaking of which.

Last night’s terror was really splendiferous—it turned out the comps were a competitive timed oral examination, like swim-team trials or something, and we were all vying against one another in a group. Our indefatigable program manager Ms. K. had a stopwatch and kept yelling “Thirty seconds! Fifteen seconds!” and we were supposed to do arithmetic with pencils and 3×5 cards, no calculators. And the first question was: “How many hours of classwork have you missed since you began the MFA program?” I was immediately stumped—let’s see, if I’ve missed, let’s say, five classes a semester, and I’ve been here not quite six semesters, and the classes are three hours a week, but does this mean classes I’ve taken or classes I’ve taught—I just couldn’t work it out, with her shouting and my dumb pencil and piece of paper. And everyone else in our cohort was so suave and prepared and diligent, and none of them had missed ANY classes so they didn’t even have any math to DO. And then in the dream I would tempestuously burst into tears and flee the exam, causing Teh Drama, and various well-intentioned people would come after me and cajole me back into the room to try again, and then I would try again, and fail again, and not fail better, and burst into tears again, until by the end everyone was just looking at me with open undisguised dismay and disgust, and worst of all was that in the very back row of the exam room (the room where we do have our defenses late in April) was the department chair of the program which just waitlisted me, and I could tell by the fastidious yet appalled look on his face, his polite but barely concealed horror, that there was now no way I was ever getting into his program. Cue further floods of tears, which just made me more disgusting to everyone, and I stormily fled once more.

Then I woke up. Then I wrote 8,300 more or less completely incoherent words, not including these, which are, like another seven hundred.

Okay that is ENOUGH out of ME. I leave you with the immortal words of Homie.

addiijct jCjjojjdjijejsjjuho paoogoeoook

(Italics hers.) I absolutely cannot be blogging today. There are 17 papers needing commentary before 11 am, so I absolutely cannot be blogging. Nope. Can’t do it, can’t do it, shouldn’t do it, won’t do it. Also just allow me to remind myself politely that comps are due Friday, thesis due first week of April, and I won’t know the fate of my New State School waitlisting (three PhD slots and I am number four! I love being number four) until April 2. And the Brujo and I, despite differences, are grown-up enough to declare an armistice and flee together on Friday to a desert hole somewhere for our spring break, and we are not emerging until no one makes us grade anything.

So instead of something decent from me, why not read this from Jim Behrle, on how to become the most famous poet in America overnight. Or this from Don Share, on how writing 3,070 poems over the course of a lifetime can, by contrast, make you an eventual “quiet king of the quotidian.”

Or, here’s a fun website in which poetry Regulars ask poetry Élites all our prurient and rude hoi-polloi questions, and they (sort of) (in general) answer! (Sample blunt question to Jorie: “Do you think you’re a better writer then the readers are readers?”) Or finally, peek at the ephemera in the newly assembled DFW archive for which the University of Texas must have paid, as they say, handsomely. Most alluring to me are the juvenalia (“Viking Poem”! I may have to travel to Austin someday just to read “Viking Poem”) and the marked-up dictionary. Neroli. Talion. Gravid. Uxorious.

Anyway here I am, waiting for student #1 to appear so we can discuss her ENTHRALLING paper on lowering the drinking age—and in the meantime, what better way to start the week than by musing on men’s infidelity and women’s suicide? Well *I* couldn’t think of one!

Publishers Weekly ends their squib on the 2006 Assia Wevill biography Lover of Unreason by asserting:

This will be an important book for Hughes scholars, primarily for the authors’ exclusive 1996 interview with the poet, in which he identified the poems he wrote alluding to Assia after her death, which he felt no critic had ever interpreted correctly. Newly revealed letters and interviews reinforce previous accounts of Hughes’s sexual attraction and the dedicated philandering that drove two women to suicide. Photos.

Italics mine. Yeah, that’s right. I’m going there. (“Photos”!)

So my question to the world today is: Why are we, on the one hand, so coy about admitting that men’s actions sometimes cause women enough pain and suffering that they would hurt or kill themselves—and on the other, patently accept that this is sometimes the case, at least in the popular imagination (though let’s face it, fucking Publishers Weekly is hardly a telenovela)? As a good doctrinaire feminist, I certainly don’t want to give anyone else (especially a dude) that kind of agency over me, any more than I want to accept the politicized wastebasket diagnosis of borderline, etc. But don’t we have a squilzillion exciting cultural narratives about unfaithful men and the La Lloronas their behavior directly incurs, the murderesses their testosterone-fueled activities create? And has it not been, in the words of Anse Bundren, ever so?

Like most other agons, this one is probably best worked out in the creative imagination of a culture (Anne Carson’s “sleep mind“) and not its public rhetoric. So I’m just saying. If Elin Woods were less fabulously wealthy and less, um, Swedish? Would anyone be surprised if she—

Like the poem says, it could be otherwise. I certainly got myself very worked up about various young ladies, worked up enough to deposit myself in a couple of hospitals. I can imagine men destroyed by philandering wimmin, broken, spiritless, despairing, despondent, taking the babies down to the river at night. But who has all their estrogen pour out of them once a month, leaving them drained and tragic and non-resilient? And who has the money and the status? And how come it’s never Bill standing grimly by a publicly repentant, shame-faced Hillary? You know why.

Now you all hate me but there, I said it. Yes, by cheating on someone, you can make someone else miserable. It’s true. And I’m not even going to put the word make in scare quotes. If humans can be traumatized by other kinds of physical and psychic harming, why not by sexual betrayal as well? Doesn’t whatever floods your body with adrenaline, leaves your heart pounding and mouth filled with metallic water—doesn’t it leave a physical trace in your tissues and your brain? I’m arguing that it does. I’m arguing that…

Here two students came for help with their papers and I forgot what I was arguing, other than droning over and over, “You need more proof/evidence/vivid examples to support your claim that racial profiling is bad/marijuana should be legalized/nuclear power is safe.” Then a bloggy brainy colleague and I started talking about his beautiful old postcard collection, including this fabulous Massachusetts state mental hospital; and then we talked about Loren Eiseley and Lewis Thomas and Edward Abbey; and then “The Death of a Moth,” by either Woolf or Dillard, comme tu préfères; and now I have finished my tea and I am hungry but have no food and it is 11:15 a.m. and the day turns on, the clouds have lifted but the pavement is still wet and it is cold but bright blue.

“O yes, he seemed to say, death is stronger than I am.” I think the “is” should be read as if in italics. With some degree of wonderment.

•

So the usual weekend knot begins to knot itself in my chest only this time I decide I’ll just go ahead and let it start NOW instead of fighting it until Sunday night. I am therefore thoroughly miserable, in part because of the literal tons of student verbiage out of which I cannot make myself dig, plus the comprehensive exams, plus I am missing a new AlAnon meeting right now (and I wanted to go and support the new people, why did I not get dressed and go?), but also I am making myself unhappy because I think el B. should apologize and I know it’s the farthest thing from his mind. Why should he apologize? Why on earth?

I don’t know. I seem to remember only that he expressed his distress Thursday night throgh the medium of, having a royal go at me verbally; and then he expressed yet more distress (which still looked a lot like attack) over the fact that I should decompensate in the face of such vigorous healthy self-expression. He told [our couples therapist of 45 minutes' duration] that he is afraid to speak any of his truths because he fears (the usual thing, I got this from the Monk all the time too, so it’s obviously true) that I will become overwhelmed with shame/weeping/self-harming/ideation etc., and then he’ll feel awful/to blame. The only thing about this revelation that surprises me is that it seems to me all I ever hear is his truth, without much regard for how it’s expressed or how it’s going to leave me feeling—so I can’t imagine what are these further horrible truths/complaints I still have yet to hear.

It would not be the fair and balanced news coverage of the Fox Network, however, if I did not further reveal that he also said to New Couples Therapist that he wished he knew how to be more compassionate with my feeling hurt about his [behavioral choices, redacted]. He stated that while he disagreed with me, and thought his personal private behavior wasn’t significant or relevant or any of my business or whatever, he also wished he could feel more compassion. I think he means, that he could validate my feelings even though he disagrees with why I have them? New Couples Therapist asked if I had known about this, because I had a funny look on my face, and I said no, I had not been previously aware that the B. wished he could behave/speak differently, mostly because he never mentioned it before.

Anyway that is the meat of the nut out of its shell. It’s 11 am and we’ve not spoken a word all morning (other than “Morning?” which he said timidly as I passed his office door, and I waved weakly in response). If all things were well, and I weren’t nursing a terrible lonely grudge-bruise, I can imagine a realm in which such morning silence would be heavenly, but instead I react with feelings like: stifled, nauseated, despondent. And wishing I lived somewhere else.

Fair enough, what you suggest: that men culturally express hurt feelings or anxiety or insecurity by dominating speech-acts, and/or asserting in clipped and loud voices why you are wrong to feel that way, until their unwittingly designated “debate opponent” just says, Okay, okay, you’re right, I’m wrong, would you please just stop kicking me now? Because I am totally DOWN. See my tail between my legs? See how I’m licking at your mouth? You win.

Confusingly, in my experience they then claim, “I never get to say anything!” and walk out and leave me on the floor scrambling for telephones and tissues and my brain/adult ego back.

•

The above was written in response to Mandarin’s more reasoned musings: “I think men are intensely fragile often shame-driven and thus avoidant creatures. We try to engage and they get frightened/threatened. They depend on us because they maintain no other intimacies—no ring of comforting women holds them. Just us. So when I said that with my ex, anything that wasn’t total capitulation on my part (from my perspective) was perceived as a vicious unprovoked attack, I think that generalizes across a spectrum of penis-bearers. [...] I know that I tend to discount male distress because it seems so tiny, looks like irritation instead of hurt or pain, emotions that are more heart-opening for me to witness. So the browbeater is expressing his distress as browbeating (as I heard through the floor last night) and the browbeaten says/thinks: But I should be mad at you! You’re the person who violated our trust by ________, and mysteriously the browbeater becomes more angry. (Again, two whole other examples of this happening close by me.) Anger means never having to say you’re sorry because it means not having to actually FEEL.”

Penis-bearers are invited to disagree/adumbrate/redirect. You can even do so in all-caps, in case you need to shout healthily. No one will curl up on the floor and cry, because it’s the Internet. Or as Amy Gardner once said to Josh Lyman, “That’s how it is in the NBA.” Funny how completely and self-possessedly I have her kind of balls in print, but seldom in person—anyway not when it comes to what AlAnon refers to obliquely as those “special relationships.”

Which is how I feel, sitting here in the library typing on my little laptop. The Brujo thoughtfully gave me a ride to school this morning, since he’s meeting me here this afternoon for our therapy intake anyway and then also can give me a lift home. I have a beautiful half-chai, in the gobelet magique—the nice barista at Café Bibliotheque makes it with their fancy looseleaf chai but only puts about half as much in the little silk baglet thingy, which is dangling from the plastic stirrer, and then she fills the gobelet with steamed milk and drizzles of honey. Last time she made this for me, I didn’t put the lid on all the way (because of the whole precarious dangling-bag-plastic-stirrer arrangement) and the tea wound up cascading all over the tiles of the ladies’ loo on the third floor. A friendly cleaning woman helped me by mopping it up and giving me plastic trash bags to put my (suddenly tea-sodden) raincoat and scarf into, and my stack of (miraculously non-tea-damaged) books. I then toted these bags around for the rest of the day. In the rain, ha ha! Anyway, this amazingly kind cleaning woman even reassured me that people pour their tea/coffee all over the floor all the time, and that she was not put out at all to mop it up, this tremendous volume of fluid. I was astonished, how much ten ounces is, when it’s spread out on institutional tile. It was like blood, there was so much of it. I told the barista about it ruefully today and she said, next time just come back, I’ll make you a new one!

Everyone is so nice in the world. It’s sunny and students are starting to come into the library, happy and young and talking animatedly. I still feel like someone gave me a working-over while I slept.

I’m writing this, not grading. You may have noticed, or not. I teach in about an hour and I promise you my students will certainly be observant of the fact.

So why was I crying?

It is hard to explain. I feel confident no one is listening anymore, though, so I will try. There are three possible explanations:

1. I am a lily-livered weakling and as soon as the Brujo is the least bit assertive or shows any self-respect, or offers an opinion which differs from my own, or points out any of my inconsistencies to me, or behaves in the least way as though his own amour propre is more important than mine, which of course it absolutely must be—in short, as soon as he stops babying me and pandering to my Great Special Fragility, and sticks up for himself like a normal person, then I completely fall apart and can’t handle it and regress and undercompensate and just in general, obviously, well, have serious problems and am a Terrible Girlfriend. (As you can imagine, reaching this conclusion last night didn’t really help with the sobbing.)

2. The Brujo is somewhat uncommunicative and isolating these days, particularly when it comes to the differences which are making our relationship tense and fraught, and, why wouldn’t he be; and thus when I finally badger/wheedle/accost him into finally telling me what he’s thinking/feeling (which I know better than to try to do, but I do anyway, cf. Terrible Girlfriend), he therefore logically enough expresses himself fairly vehemently and forcefully, yet without a good deal of skill or tact or consideration or validating, so that anyone would feel trampled upon by such ham-fisted, brute-squad “assertive” speech-acts. And therefore I just shouldn’t evoke them.

3. Something else entirely.

My failure to determine which is the Truth, though none of us alive today believes in the capital-T truth, is what drives me to drive us (resistant and unwilling and complaining) into couples therapy. Also, I am tired of the sobbing and tired of the hangover. Also I am tired of going through some kind of evil breakup every 3-5 years over roughly the same issues. Also I want to stay out of the fucking hospital. —Even though the Brujo’s point last night was that my depressive symptoms/unskillful behavioral choices have absolutely nothing to do with certain behaviors of his which I have experienced as betrayals; or with our flailing, gasping relationship in the wake of these (whether his actions or my experiencing them stupidly as betrayals when they in fact are not); or with my anxiety/grief over possibly losing the relationship. All these things, he argued convincingly, are quite disconnected. You were unable to get work done long before we were together, and you were unable to get work done even when we were together and when everything we going swimmingly between us. He continued to make this point very emphatically and with a great deal of compelling evidence, until at last I agreed completely and asked him please to leave the room, because having him watching me sob felt like someone staring as someone else throws up.

My beloved former DBT told me again and again that the purpose of DBT was not to enable one to tolerate everything, including bad behavior. (In DBT they consistently use the term “bad behavior” without the least dialectical regard for its being totally normative and judgmental language, which is so odd and singular a lapse that I wonder whether it comes from Linehan; whether it is deliberate; or whether it has simply crept into the loci communes by custom, and no one is examining its having shouldered its way into the lexicon so firmly and decisively.)

So, I don’t want to tolerate “bad behavior.” I want to be able to speak up for myself if someone is just lashing out at me and having at me. Something with which historically I have had difficulty.

But, I’m also clearly “overly sensitive.” Anyway I have been told this my entire life. So how do I know if someone is genuinely being an a-hole or if they’re just communicating in a forceful and clear and forthright, Mañjuśrī-esque manner? And if they are, how can I learn to disagree respectfully but with plenty of validation, so that he still believes himself “heard” and I do not experience myself as “trampled”?

Too many fucking scare quotes. That’s some kind of sign of something right there.

Nietzsche said, “Truth never yet hung on the arm of the unconditional.” Thank you, Fritz.

I am hoping that blogging about this will help me feel less beaten-up. I tried not to blog about it, for months I tried, and friends worried that it might be contributing to my spiralling-down-blackly depression of November/December; and they might have been right. I don’t know. I try blogging, I try not-blogging. I don’t know anything. That should be bloody self-evident by now.

He is not abusive, and I am not saying that. I’ve been with (unintentionally) abusive and I know what that looks like. With the Brujo, once I am *in* an undercompensating puddle (and then I worry/blame myself, that I secretly, occultly only wanted to get into the puddle so that I could elicit caretaking from my environment), he doesn’t leave the house until I can get my therapist on the phone and get coaching and start to be more or less okay. He makes sure I’ll be okay. He brings me pajamas in the hospital. He just won’t, can’t, won’t, isn’t going to, and will never concede that it might be anything he did or said which in any way even remotely slightly contributed to my being in the hospital/puddle in the first place.

Which, fair enough. How could it have been? Impossible.

So why do I keep trying to “get him to understand” how rattling all this has been, for my tiny stupid worldview?

I offer you something which I find comforting and helpful, and which, for all I know, the Brujo (et al.?) would find irritating pap, or worse. I have no idea. But I’ve mentioned it to some of you so many times I feel honor-bound at this point to supply it. It’s from Charlotte Kasl’s book Women, Sex, and Addiction. I first read at this book back in 2003 when the Monk and I were briefly in some species of “therapy” (e.g., I think we had like four sessions, and he played merrily in the sandtray [not metaphorically, literally—she did sandtray therapy], and I mostly sobbed hysterically and uselessly and was completely suicidal, and the therapist just cut us loose in disgust or something. Honestly, I can’t even remember why we quit going—probably we had no money). The therapist urged it on me, lent me her copy, but at the time it made no sense why she was giving me a book about women struggling with sex addiction, when it was my boyfriend who was making calls late at night to phone-sex numbers, and then not telling me about it, and then I’d be all naive: Hey, wow, the phone bill sure is big this month! and he’d alternate fury with chagrin and fresh resolution, etc.

Well, so it turns out I think that she was giving me this book because of the two chapters I’m now sharing with the world/someone/no one, probably breaking all kindsa copyright law but HEY CHARLOTTE KASL GIVE US A BREAK, we’re trying not to kill ourselves out here. I recently re-encountered it one rainy night in the independent bookstore and bought it for $6 and hid the title from a colleague whom I, of course, met at the cash register and who was buying, like, Camus, or Céline. Anyway these two chapters are for women who are in some way codependent, or let’s say “other-directed,” which is my new made-up preferred term, for those of us who can’t think what we feel or how we want to live our lives, because we are so busy focusing on other people’s feelings, and managing them efficiently so that we don’t lose them OMG OMG I CANNOT BE ALONE ANY WARM BODY IS BETTER THAN NONE etc.

Of course I don’t know whether I believe in all this either. Frankly I am becoming more agnostic and cynical when it comes to human social systems/theories, by the second. And by the same token, I increasingly feel like Tommy Lee Jones shouting at Harrison Ford:

Harrison Ford: “I didn’t kill my wife!”
Tommy Lee Jones: “I…DON’T…CARE!”

None of them can be either proven or disproven, so why bother? Twelve-step, DBT, Zen, codependency recovery, meds for mood disorders…they are all obnoxious in their own way, and repellent, and genuinely harmful and disgusting and bad and wrong. You know what? I’m doing them anyway. Because not doing them, when it doesn’t leave you drinking activated charcoal in the ER at 3 am and trying to explain why there aren’t ligature marks on your neck, because you are such an incompetent amateur, leaves you hung over from crying yourself half-sick. Not doing them doesn’t work either.

At first I tried accusing various friends of having done it, but no one would ever cop, so let me just say: Whoever you are, mysterious soap-buyer, you rock my tiny world (and have improved my hygiene) (somewhat). And so tonight, after an hysterical (but non-uterine) attack of shame and sobbing and hyperventilating, I ran a bath and kind of poured myself into the water, and there was my little nigiri soap to keep me company. (Confession: I had to pull off and discard that black “nori” strip, which was dyeing my skin and the bathtub and the shower curtain with inky bespattered flecks of indigo.)

Thus begins a small litany, like the flowers which a friend dreamt I sewed to a long string, as part of my weird work as the Mother of Contemporary Poetry.

1. Soap. Sushi soap, soap that smells like oranges, yuzu, green tea, nutmeg, basmati rice, cherry blossoms, crème brulée, vanilla, almond, birthday cake. Soap.

2. Tea. I am overpowered with gratitude for tea. Someone, somewhere—a woman—picks all those little blossoms, and someone dries them, and someone pokes them into little bags and jars and boxes. And then I pay somewhere from $2.99 to $12.99 and I receive them. And I place them in the hot water and thus am graced, magically, with tea. Tea! Life-and-serenity bestowing tea! I can speak no more; I am too affected by this earthly manifestation of divinity. But lately I am all about Sweet Thai Delight, because of the coconut.

3. Teapots. This one from Paula Deen recently replaced my old Le Creuset wedding-present teapot, cherry-red and adored, but whose enamel became, within, eventually all pitted with ragged aluminum lesions. I love Paula’s robin’s-egg spackling and I take very good care of her. Being stubborn, in that I want a non-whistling teakettle, because they are awful when they shriek; but also I wander off from the kitchen and am always forgetting about the kettle and boiling away madly all my wasser. I need a clothespin to put on my fingers, à la Annie Dillard.

4. Therapists. Especially practical New York Jewish therapists who totally get your sense of black humor, speak fluent Yiddish when you’re sobbing and make you laugh, and who call you back at 8 pm, even though they have the same throat-sinus-postnasal thing everyone else has (and that maybe you even gave to them, by borrowing their pen on Tuesday) and who do breathing exercises and body scans and relaxation practices with you until you stop hiccoughing and shrieking, and can calmly put yourself in the bathtub and loll there bemusedly, watching your nigiri sushi float along the bubble-foam.

5. Friends. All the ones who respond to all the emails I send constantly forth, as though I have no integument, as though I am chronically so low-esteem that I need hourly inputs of narcissistic supply—but they don’t comment on this, just suggest new varieties of potato chips and cookware and chocolate bars (Vosges has this one now, the Frieda-Hughesishly named Woolloomooloo—with “roasted & salted macadamia nuts + Indonesian coconut + hemp seeds + deep milk chocolate”—zomg.) and offer me seemingly unlimited and ungrudging virtual hugs and support and warmth and kindness via gchat.

And bonus: The department chair of the program that just wait-listed me, who called this afternoon and was very apologetic and lovely, and who tried to encourage me without encouraging me too much. Who says, we loved your application, we loved your poems, we love you—we just could only scrape together funding for three slots, and if any of these guys drops out, you are IN, we want you here, and will you please reapply next year? He is just gracious as HELL and I hang up feeling somewhat less lowly, like Lowly Worm.

(Does anyone remember Lowly? From the Richard Scarry books? Or is that just me? Did I identify with him, because he is a big dork and doesn’t even have the sense to realize how Lowly he, in fact, is? Lowly Worm. New blog title, perhaps.)

No matter. Thank you all—none lowly, all inestimable. I love you wildly.

(PS that cute little Liz Phair tune’ll take you back, too.)

(I also didn’t apply to more programs because the Brujo doesn’t want to live in the cities/states in which the programs appear. Or anyway that’s what I told myself.)

Anyway this particular PhD program found funding for six slots and they ranked me number seven! Hey, I’m lovin’ it! It feels good to be number seven! So good that I want to celebrate! Listen to Iron Maiden baby with me, woo-ooo-ooo….

So here’s this—a consolation prize from a sly Mlle Bovary, who knows me but too well.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Really, where to begin? So much to say, so few words. Genuinely speechless. A mosquito, my libido. My favorite part is probably the bubbleheaded “sports” commentary. Or maybe it’s Scott’s AUTHENTIC FLANNEL SHIRT.

2. Wandering around the house this morning after a largely sleepless night, boiling the steel-cut oats, making the rooibos chai, quietly ausfreaked in my own personal low-affect way, it becomes even more evident that I was kind of hoping I’d get to have one aspect of my life be determined. But I don’t get that. My current job/program ends in early May when I graduate; the Brujo’s and my lease is up June 31; and I don’t know if we’re staying together. And of course in the back of my head I was hoping that even if he and I were totally up in the air (stop-motion, bullet-time, freeze-frame) that something else would be for sure. That I would know where to move to next.

Nothing’s for sure; if four monastic practice periods and a gaggle of sesshins didn’t teach me anything else I hope they (plus sitting at Maman’s sickbed, plus my general lifelong choices of indigence and transience and serial monogamy) have taught me that: Nothing’s for fucking sure.

And, as I put grade B maple syrup on my oats (from a refrigerator, run by electric power which I did nothing to help produce) nothing would be sure even if I *had* been number six instead of number seven. I remind myself of this, maturely and sanely. Maybe I would have been MISERABLE in the PhD program. Maybe I will experience great JOY in finding a job where I can be useful, even if it’s not the job I think I want. If I can’t teach what I want, to whom I want, I can teach other things to other people.

And I can be a community-college adjunct again or be a high-school teacher or be a whatever, and still write. Other people have done it, do it. I’m not special and delicate; I won’t fucking break. (She groused at herself, and stirred in the maple syrup.)

3. So one of the side benefits of cyberstalking the Monk all these years has been that I’ve had my fucking consciousness raised. Can you believe it?! What a blow.

Anyway he’s continued and extended his work with the homeless and every time I read one of his articles I actually goddamn LEARN something. One of the things I’ve been noticing in myself is the tendency to give people I see in public adjectival tags, mentally or verbally, in later descriptions of events: “There was this homeless guy on the light rail last night”—in much the same way that, a decade ago, I might have said, “I was talking to this black girl after class,” or, “This gay guy was telling me about his new job.” So now I’m stubbornly seeking to eradicate the gratitutous, irrelevant modifier: “There was a guy on the light rail last night singing about Jesus.” Is his housing status important to the story? No. The story is really a story about someone who’s mentally interesting. Would I say, “There was a crazy guy on the light rail”? I might. But only if it were part of the story. What’s part of the story? What needs to be part of the story?

I don’t know, and I don’t have to know. I just try stuff to see what happens. I still ignore the people I denominate “homeless”—as a woman I give men in public a wide berth anyway, whether they’re in neckties or cardboard. No eye contact, closed body language. As I get older and our culture erases my sexual availability, maybe I can experiment more with being more open to strangers. I’d like to be that way, like a nun, like a caring open nun.

One thing I do know even as a closed-off, cowardly person is that there are words on this page that bother me, and words that confuse me. Which sounds about right, for a cultural reaction to/definition of mental illness. And this is me saying I’m bothered and confused—and I’ve sat with some of these people, and had workshops with them, and I’ve heard that fucking Kisagotami story about ten squillion times (plus I revised/wrote my own version of it for the Dying Book). I’m lay-ordained in this lineage; and, stuff still bothers me.

I’ve also known about Daigu Knight for quite a while (though I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting him); but these words in particular unsettled me, which words aren’t his: “He manages his extreme mental and emotional states with Zen and small amounts of one psychiatric medication.” Just SMALL amounts. They’re really just very SMALL. When you click to read the whole article about Daigu, you learn further that “with a regular zazen practice, 12 step work and Christian contemplative prayer he has been able to get off all other psychiatric medications and reduce the one he is currently on.” It’s only ONE! One is good. One is okay. More than one…that’s bad. That’s really bad. That shows how unholy and out-of-control you are…how bad you are at Zen and spiritual practice! (I know, that’s not what it says. But…that’s kind of what it says.)

Don’t get me started / where do I start. I’m dealing with pretty much the same speechlessness that one encounters with “Nirvana on Ice,” really. Here, you know what—for now I’ll just let Andrew Solomon do the talking for me.

Since I am writing a book about depression, I am often asked in social situations to describe my own experiences, and I usually end by saying that I am on medication.

“Still?” people ask. “But you seem fine!” To which I invariably reply that I seem fine because I am fine, and that I am fine in part because of medication.

“So how long do you expect to go on taking this stuff?” people ask. When I say that I will be on medication indefinitely, people who have dealt calmly and sympathetically with the news of suicide attempts, catatonia, missed years of work, significant loss of body weight, and so on stare at me with alarm.

“But it’s really bad to be on medicine that way,” they say. “Surely now you are strong enough to be able to phase out some of these drugs!” If you say to them that this is like phasing the carburetor out of your car or the buttresses out of Notre Dame, they laugh.

“So maybe you’ll stay on a really low maintenance dose?” they ask. You explain that the level of medication you take was chosen because it normalizes the systems that can go haywire, and that a low dose of medication would be like removing half of your carburetor. You add that you have experienced almost no side effects from the medication you are taking, and that there is no evidence of negative effects of long-term medication. You say that you really don’t want to get sick again. But wellness is still, in this area, associated not with achieving control of your problem, but with discontinuation of medication.

“Well, I sure hope you get off it sometime soon,” they say.