scraggly
Thursday 25 March 2010 | 12 cookies in the jar
pretty much describes the state of my soul right now. Also my hair. And my sweatpants, which even Pyewacket sniffs at with suspicion. But I don’t much care, because I just ptinred <—ahem printed out the 85-page thesis (to be publicly defended four days WEEKS, sorry, from today) and it looks, well, actually it looks pretty awful to me. The Brujo was prodding me for why I can’t celebrate and be all WOOHOO I WIN AT LIFE HIGH FIVE etc., after literally formatting the thing from 8 am until 8 pm tonight, and I explained, pushing lank strands of unwashed hair out of my face and pulling on a sweater so we could go for a much-needed walk:
1) I feel dread, because now my committee, comprised of the Duende, the Alcoholic Poet, and Walt Whitman’s ex, will have at the ms and probably hate large swathes of it and want it dismembered and strung back together with twine like Frankenstein’s turkey, whereas Walt has so far been all beneficent and kind and accepting of it basically just pretty much exactly the way I handed it to him; and I also feel some dread in re: an incomplete from last semester (I owe the Alcoholic Poet two poems), and of course the vasty ACREAGE of ungraded student papers; and then
2) I feel guilty, partly because the thesis committee members aren’t getting very long to do their dismembering and rearrangements, but mostly because I still haven’t finished or properly revised the whole shmear’s modest little pièce-de-resistance, a long 25-page poem about…well, I don’t even know what it’s about, only that Jesus and Mary are characters, and Mary turns out to be a porn actress with some mental health issues. Some parts of this poem are so graphically…graphic, that Drian Biamond opines this is why my former G5 probably melted down in February. Yep, pretty sure I’m definitely going to hell now. Anyway the poem doesn’t exactly END yet, it more just…stops, despite many heroic efforts at improvement directed at it by Ms. Rizzle (without whom, there just would be no thesis happening at all). And, finally, in conclusion, why I cannot celebrate wholeheartedly:
3) I feel ashamed, because it’s not perfect.
We wandered around our little corner of suburban purgatory as we talked, the same few lawn-bound blocks we’ve walked over and over these last three years…it’ll be weird to take evening walks in some other dopey Arizona suburb, in a few months. And the Brujo shared with me some of his student challenges, about what it’s like for him trying to prepare his 150 entitled snowflakes for the assaults of the State School, for those who are going on to university in the fall. They have a new classroom slogan now: “There are no tissues in college!” (This because one young man was bashing aggrievedly around the math room complaining because there weren’t any boxes of facial tissue, and what the hell was the world coming to anyway, whereupon the Brujo pointed at him sternly and said THERE ARE NO TISSUES IN COLLEGE! and so now all the students think that’s the funniest thing ever, and say it like fifty times a day.)
I’m actually so physically tired from sitting at this desk all day that my LEGS hurt. They were all rubbery during our walk, it was funny. I am funny. Bodies are funny. I don’t like my poetry. Yep, I am definitely having a thesis; I am very thoroughly having a graduation (in that sense of Mandarin and I saying to each other, I hope you have a sesshin). All is exactly as it is supposed to be. It just kind of feels like a beat-up on some level. Part of the rite of passage, I guess.
PS—via redredshoes—this pretty much sums it up for me tonight:
denied!
Tuesday 23 March 2010 | 7 cookies in the jar
On the one hand, BOO on the Other Grad School for not taking me, and instead accepting THREE BOY POETS over me. (All of whom, of course, in our uncertain economic climate, accepted the offers.) May they get what they deserve, all of them, in their testosterone-soaked, beery vines & groves. Hmp.
On the other hand, I can maybe find a part-time job next year that doesn’t involve the reading, commenting upon, and grading of acre after acre of woeful student rhetoric (and dealing with the inevitable fallout that results when the grade is not that of A-double-plus).
And when I searched for an image to accompany this post, these were the top five choices (click on the image for full horrifying effect)—so maybe I just narrowly escaped another 3-4 years of entitled snowflakes and their miserable parochial sexist/racist attitudes. I mean, if you have to live with this, is it worth it to be Doctor Crazy Lady? (Yes. It would be worth it.)
So, okay, if it’s still worth it to me, maybe I’ll reapply to the Other Grad School next year and maybe there’ll even be another pair of XX chromosomes in my cohort. And now maybe we are going to move to Tucson instead of L.A.—maybe together, and maybe everything will somehow be—okay? Is that possible? Is it conceivable? Is it too much to ask of the universe? Maybe I’ll get to teach in a tribal community again, maybe with the Tohono O’odham—maybe at a community college, maybe at the Other State School in the state, maybe work at a non-profit and do something useful for a change?
We can’t know. We can only guzzle today’s chai morosely (Yogi Classic India Spice, a gift from allycomelately) and hope for some kind of miracle with regard to our puny little poetic existence, which is somehow now in the plural, but like most things, we don’t know exactly why.
last post redacted
Monday 22 March 2010 | I like a cookie
owing to hurt feelings and big fight and yelling and tear-rain-shower and parting of clouds and pale but optimistic gleaming of sunlight with el Brujo. Followed by Vietnamese food and three more ibuprofen.
So instead I leave you with this image, which is a bumpersticker I have optimistically purchased to go on my new car, which I have not purchased. Yet.
sprung broke
Monday 22 March 2010 | 3 cookies in the jar
Monday morning, library, bleary. Post-spring-break. Menstrual, three ibuprofen in pocket, waiting for Café Biblioteca to open so I can go get milky half-chai to fuel the teaching part of the day. Painkiller makes overpowered with sleepy.
Hungover from: nine days of cheerfully pretending I don’t have thesis and 80+ papers ungraded: hungover from: great natural beauty and desert/mountain vistas and peace and quiet, with (unexpected blessing) no wireless or cellphone: hungover from: tentative reconnection with the Brujo, and great anxiety resulting from same; but mostly right now honestly hungover from: my own reaction to: last night’s escalation of: the Brujo’s running feud with: our neighbor in re: neighbor’s nuisance-barking dog.
If you can follow that you can have half my madeleine.
So last night Brujo “slept” I think on living room floor with camping pad and sleeping bag; I stayed in bed with earplugs, too stoned on ibuprofen to move/interfere with what was going on. Suspect neighbor/s now deliberately leaving dog outside all night to annoy Brujo/us. Brujo called police around midnight; police visited neighbor and dog was of course brought inside so not barking; phone message from police informs Brujo that dog is service animal protecting property and that he is not to enter property ever again or contact owners or make contact with dog in any way.
Three weeks ago Brujo went over at 1 a.m. and shouted/cursed at said neighbor (which is presumably where the whole banned-from-property thing originates). On that occasion neighbor slammed door and has not responded to email/FB message or voicemail left on female half’s cellphone.
Female half of neighbors has multiple sclerosis and two small boys. Large “service” dog has knocked her down before my very eyes and I stood there stupidly, not knowing what to do. Dog has been barking consistently for three years, with brief halcyon hiatus between when former service dog died and new replacement arrived. Our bedroom window is basically in neighbor’s backyard.
I jokingly suggested moving bed to living room and I think Brujo thinks this is actually a good idea. I am not sleeping in living room for next three months.
What is my part in it, as half of the complaining neighbors? What is for me to do here? Am I supposed to take cupcakes over and make the peace? Or do I want to? What is the next right thing? A wise woman on a forum elsewhere said this, about something else, but I think it is probably pretty solid:
You are feeling out of control, because you are waiting for him to do something. Don’t hinge your sanity on his actions. Connect with yourself. [...] And once you are doing something constructive, you will feel better. I promise.
Just: what? What is to be done? Blogpost as prayer. What I do now?
Well, for the moment, chai. If not grading or thesis formatting or mending what the Big Book calls “sweet relationships.” Nightmares asleep, nightmares awake. I’m not in the hospital, though. Not today. Today I’m wearing clean jeans and my hair is brushed and the B. gave me a ride to school this morning and now I’m ordering chai. And he and I have therapy Wednesday and perhaps more will be revealed. Or perhaps clarity is not a gift the gods are choosing to give me at this time. Doesn’t matter. Work on poems. Poems I can cling to.
Poems. Thank you, poems. Thank you. Monday post spring-break thanks you.
entitled snowflakes
Friday 12 March 2010 | someone left a cookie
This is my new favorite blog, and I came across it via this, my new favorite post, which the Brujo sent me. The picture says everything. I half-think it was taken in the industrial, thirty-stall women’s bathroom across from the classrooms where I teach M/W/F. And I swear I’ve received that email before, too.
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).
comps: i haz wrote them
Thursday 11 March 2010 | I like a cookie
And I managed to use beefcake pictures of Uncle Ezra AND Walt, ha ha, I win!
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.
they just made a terrible life choice
Wednesday 10 March 2010 | 3 cookies in the jar
i will helps you tyep!
Tuesday 9 March 2010 | I like a cookie
Pyewacket tried to help me tyep a comment just now, in my last post which, God help me, references Elin Woods. She’s not a very good tyeper; it looked like something Wol would write.
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.
blueberry lollipop
Monday 8 March 2010 | 6 cookies in the jar
As in, I, queasy, just had one for breakfast. Yes, I did! And I’d do it again. Followed by a great lot of Sweet Thai Delight from the gobelet magique, as I’m waiting for student conferences to begin (17 today, 42 by Wednesday afternoon). My whole lollipop thing is kind of well-known at the State School, as in, colleagues and students always come to my desk to get them—but I don’t think they know it started just because I’m phobic about hard candy. Lollipops make me feel safer: if I did somehow inhale/swallow one, I could just reach right down in there and grab its little paper stick and yank that sucker out. Which I suppose is very likely why lollipops were invented.
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.
“…” means never having to say you’re sorry
Saturday 6 March 2010 | I like a cookie
Where ” . . . ” could stand for: being oblivious, being scared/ashamed, or being angry/self-righteous. Excerpted from email to Mandarin. Consider its source: id est, me. No boyfriends were harmed in the making of this blogpost. All narrators are unreliable. The sentence on the front of this t-shirt is false.
•
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.”
