New Year's Day and we're off to a poky start

Two posts in December, eh? That's a new low for me, I think. Hm. Maybe Resolution # 4 will be to do something about the pitiable rate-of-blogging around here.

Anyway, the holidays were fine etc. etc. Relaxed at Mom's house until we just sort of had to...escape. I can't relax for too long, I find. (I used to claim that I didn't understand the need to "relax," but somehow having an actual job has changed my tune there. I've noticed that I have a propensity for making sweeping and unfounded pronouncements of that sort. It could be endearing. I suspect that it's annoying and bizarre.) Anyway, after a few days of Mom's House of Decadence--with the wine, and the cookies, and the hugely fat cat, and the squishy dusty sofa, and the movies on demand--I kind of start despising myself. I need activity. So it was a lovely visit and it was lovely to come home.

I'm feeling a bit put out about how 2010 is starting off, though. First, I am, frankly, anxious about next week's very very safe "procedure"--the heart thing--and am even more anxious (I hate to admit) about the $1700 price tag. I mean, thank goodness I have insurance, etc. (If I didn't, though, I just wouldn't have had this checked out, and the likelihood of its actually killing me is minuscule, soo...? Okay, are my priorities completely off here?) But that's a solid slab of cash. And TM and I, with our loans and on our salaries (hooray we have full-time jobs, but still--Field just ranked in as the lowest-paying college in the state, at least among colleges and universities that shared their salary information), are not rolling in dough. The money issue alarms me. I'm also hoping to go on a couple of trips next year--one to Ireland with my mom, and one to an overseas conference, and there's talk of going somewhere fun for spring break--so...yeah, my priorities are ridiculous. Never mind. Writing this paragraph has made it clear that no one should pity me at all.

Nonetheless, this stuff is stressing me out, and, since we start classes on the 11th, I'm feeling that I won't really have the chance to restore myself and get all organized and refreshed for the semester ahead. And I am also consequently beating myself up for not being more upbeat and energetic during these last weeks.

Another reason for the sluggishness, at least today, is that I celebrated New Year's Eve with a scorching urinary tract infection that hit me just before midnight. (Prior to that, TM and I had a lovely quiet evening together, full of fun and delight. It wasn't all bad, by any means.) So I stayed up in the bathroom until 4 am reading and shivering (it's damn cold here) and drinking appropriately calibrated fluids. It's pretty much gone now, though I'm still guzzling cranberry juice to make sure, and I've had some naps and things and feel okay. But heck, today has not been the restorative and energizing January 1st that I typically enjoy. And the irony of getting this infection really no earlier than 11 pm, so that it fully hit me right around midnight, after more than a decade with no such troubles--hell, what's that about? In a completely irrational way I'm a little worried about this year.

But okay, it's time to move on from all that. 2009 was, in many ways, pretty awesome. TM and I got engaged, moved in together, and got married. We traveled to Dominca and France. I gave papers at Kalamazoo and Leeds. I got a book contract and scored an extra course release for next semester. My brother and his wife conceived a child. In fact, other than the irritating medical issues and, oh, the health care debates, wars, etc., it was a pretty good year.

Here's what I'd like to think about for next year.

1) I want to work on learning to promote my research and to network better (an idea I got from a recent post of Dr. Crazy's). I suck at these things, actually changing the subject when people ask me about my work, and this is a problem.

2) I want to more consistently make time to exercise, but I need to give some very concrete thought to what this will look like before I make some kind of resolution, since amorphous "exercise more!"-type resolutions don't work very well. In fact, I need to be more concrete about no. 1, too.

3) Work on my relationship with money. I don't like the fact that what scares me about my procedure is the cost (which is not even all THAT unreasonable, and which I can cover quite easily from my savings), and that the price actually makes me want to cancel it, despite the preceding parenthesis. Anxiety about money hampered my enjoyment of our France trip last summer. These things bother me; I am not at all wealthy but neither am I about to starve. I am not profligate, so the occasional bigger expense is not a catastrophe. I'm trying to see next week's credit card hit as an opportunity to work on how I think about money: to be grateful, for example, for its ability to cover such costs without actually affecting my day-to-day living at all, rather than begrudging its removal from my account. I think that it's very important that I try to do this.

There are other things I'm kicking around, too--I sure do love me some self-improvement--but I think that that's enough for now. Time for a glass of cranberry juice. And happy new year, everyone!

Not dead yet

I don't know why I haven't blogged in so long, and this isn't going to be a long post, either. I think that my last post sort of paralyzed me, blog-wise, because on the one hand I figured I should answer Maude's question re. proposal and ring (it's my grandmother's, by the way, so we had to wait a little while for it to arrive in the mail--it came with documentation from 1932! Perhaps I will show you later); on the other, I had work-related stuff going on that could have been interestingly bloggable; on the third, I felt that, while it would be weird for me to completely ignore the engagement business, I also felt an obscure pressure to blog something more academic. And so, in a triumphantly decisive gesture, I blogged nothing.

I was also absurdly busy last week: on-campus writing contest, guest writer visit (dinner and lecture), insanely important person's visit to campus (there were snipers leaning out of the window of the office next to mine, I kid you not; and also, the maintenance people painted all the peeling windowpanes), and then an overnight conference trip with a dozen or so undergrads (we got back last night amid rain and wind). Today there was a huge pile of snow on top of all the daffodils, so I stayed in quite happily, reading Virginia Woolf in my bathrobe and taking a lovely nap. Now the snow is mostly melted and I'm bracing myself for the next absurdly busy week. In fact, all of the remaining five weeks of the semester promise to be absurdly busy. If only the absurdity were of the amusing kind.

And summer will be busy, too, but in a more fun way: Kalamazoo, followed by a long lingering six weeks of watching the garden grow, then a trip out east, a month in France, and then about 2.5 weeks before we go back east for the wedding. Meanwhile, we'll also be looking for a place to live, and God knows when we'll actually move in together.

It's ironic: I know married couples who have to live apart because of their careers, but we'll be living apart because of (ahem) our gardens. I mean, the tomatoes will continue fruitful through most of September. We wouldn't want to miss that, would we?

(Actually, what we might do is move in together in mid-August or September or whenever, and then either keep our leases through September or try to work out a deal with the new tenants. What problems we have, indeed.)

Enough for now. I need to go to bed, where I will try to convince myself that another Spring Break begins upon the morrow....

Oh! And thank you, everyone, for all the lovely kind wishes! I agree with Crazy--being able to share good news makes blogging great. You made me smile, a lot. Thanks!

Was It Always This Easy?

Something has...happened. The refrain around here has been "I hesitate to blog about this," and I could repeat that in this post, too, but for entirely different reasons. Whereas before I didn't want to divulge too much about my personal "situation," now I'm afraid of jinxing it. Or embarrassing myself with corniness. Whatever--suck it up, heu!

So I was feeling really awful last week, and for most of the week before that. Really, really awful. Teaching on the verge of tears awful. (That was only one day, thank god.) Not awful all the time; I felt okay sometimes, but there was this terrible fragility and that awful feeling that my future had been emptied out, lost, rendered meaningless. It took work, serious work, for me to feel okay enough to function. Then I had that realization on Saturday, that my life isn't in that mythical fantasy apartment in Brooklyn or whatever the hell I imagine it to be, but is this thing, right here. And that night I went out with some colleagues and had a wonderful time--I was looking at them, and the restaurant, and the band, and feeling what I might describe (if I didn't fear flakiness) as a transcendent joy--these were good people, this was fun, life was good.

Here's what's weird. I haven't really lost that feeling. It's Wednesday, and I have been so happy for the last--what is it--five days? I honestly can't remember when I've ever felt this happy before. I mean, I've been happy in recent memory--joyful, even; I'm usually a pretty happy person--but there's something about this happiness that makes it different. The thing about it is that it isn't based on anything. There isn't some circumstance that has made me happy. It's precisely that lack of specific, external circumstance that's important. The circumstances are just circumstances, and my circumstances now aren't all that fabulous (same busy job in same middle of nowhere, same long distance relationship, same distance from friends and family, same--well, technically different, but essentially same--stack of grading to do), but that just doesn't matter. And honestly I no longer feel that my situation is so bad.

And as a result, I'm suddenly much friendlier. I'm not bitching all the time. I'm talking to my colleagues, and honestly I like a bunch of my colleagues. A lot. And they'll be my colleagues next year, and I can keep being friends with them.

But that's not the point. It's not that I've found some light in my situation, it's that I've quit fighting against my life.

A Buddhist teacher I knew years ago once gave me an image to understand the idea of letting go--and I'm sure this isn't original, but it's apt: Imagine that you're hanging off a cliff, clutching a small branch. You're terrified of falling and so you cling to that branch with all your might, struggling to pull yourself back up. This goes on for a long long time, until you're simply too exhausted to hold on anymore--and you let go--and discover that you were only an inch or two off the ground the whole time. Yeah. That's what this feels like.

Of course I've thought about that a lot before, and I think that I understood what it meant. But thinking it and feeling it are different things. I don't think that I ever felt it before--not in a sustained way, not through the ordinariness of showers and meetings and work and dishes. This is new.

Unfortunately, I can't really talk about it without resorting to horrible platitudes and words that I hate--like "breakthrough"--but something good has happened, and all of a sudden my life seems vast and spacious again, and I feel wonderfully free from so much of the anger and fear that I've been carrying around for quite a long time. Maybe the two weeks of emotional wreckage has done me good. I fully expect to get over this delight and return to my usual belligerence within a couple of weeks. But with luck, I'll remember how this has felt, and even when I'm not feeling it, I might know that it's possible.

If nothing else, I'll have this post to remind me.

Exactly How Lame I Am

Why can't I write emails? or make phone calls?

Today's list of Things To Do is made up entirely of emails that need writing and phone calls that need, um, calling. I've managed to get through most of them, but it seriously took me all morning, with little rewards in between (I'll just send that one email to set up lunch with my friend, and then I can have breakfast!). There aren't even all that many--like 4 emails and 3 calls--so the length of time it's taken me to do this is totally unjustified. And none of them are scary. The phone calls have been, so far,

1) to tell my landlord that I forgot to leave him the rent and will give it to him on Monday when I get back in town (and since I'm never late with the rent, and am a very good tenant, there was no chance that he'd be mad about this), and

2) to ask how much doctoral regalia costs and when I can come in to order some.

The third call is slightly trickier because it's about an apartment for next year. But seriously. This is so pathetic. And that's the only thing left on my list for the day. Maybe I'll eat a sandwich and then make a new list of things I want to ask about when I make that call? And then actually call? And hope that I get voice mail and can redirect the entire conversation over to email?

Yes, I am that lame.

More productively, I've been revising my article like crazy this week, and I think that it's much better. I can't finish up until I'm back in HomeCity, though, because I don't have all the books I need. Still, I think that I'm very much on track to get it done by the end of next week, which is quite satisfying.

Home home home

Ah, jet lag. Yes, it's 6 am; and no, I didn't go to bed early, like a smart jet-lagged person; although I got back to my apartment at 10:00 I stayed up for two more hours, fixing a pot of spaghetti and watching "Sex and the City." And unpacking, albeit in a rather haphazard fashion.

Today's just going to be kind of a grind, is all. I have three things to do:

• file my dissertation (10:30 am)
• have my picture taken for the brochure pertaining to my fellowship (11:30 am)
• stay awake in seminar (12-2)
• come home and expire from fatigue.

Okay, that's four things, but the fourth clearly doesn't count.

(Upon rereading this list, I fail to feel any self-pity. My schedule is so absurdly light. Where do I get off complaining?)

So where am I back from, you ask? Iceland! I can tell you that, because of course my conference wasn't actually in Iceland; I simply stopped over there on my way home. It's a weird and interesting place--I kind of feel like the entire time I spent there (about 48 hours) was a dream. There are so few people and so much wind. Yes, the wind is terrific. And everywhere there are flag poles with no flags on them, banging away in the wind. I don't think I ever actually saw it get fully dark, either, since I went to bed at around 10 on both nights and the sun seemed to be all the way up by about 4:30. The light is also remarkable, being always on the slant, and so the colorful houses on the hills of Reykjavic look terribly picturesque. Reykjavic itself, however, was not as picturesque as I'd imagined. In fact, it's somewhat stark, being neither particularly quaint nor particularly modern. The houses are mostly covered in corrugated metal which is then painted; the paint was usually chipped and peeling, owing, I imagine, to the harsh climate. This picture will give you an idea of a typical street:


It's also extremely expensive. Here's the cafe where I ordered The World's Smallest $12 Sandwich:


Seriously, it was about the size of a cracker. It was good, though. I ate only one actual "meal" per day while I was over there; it was all I could afford.

I started to write a more detailed post about where I've been, what I did, etc., but I'm not sure that such a thing would be all that interesting. I'm not particularly interested in writing it, at any rate. So here are just some thoughts and observations, in no particular order:

• Whiskey is a good thing. I knew this before, but my love for it has been renewed.
• It's okay for me, a WOMAN, to go to a bar by myself. Always before when I've traveled alone, or been alone on an overseas trip--at 25, 27--I've been somewhat apprehensive about Going Out by myself. Which is a shame, because on those trips I often found myself somewhat restless and lonely, and kind of bored in the evenings. But I thought that going to a bar alone would make me too much of a target, or something. And so it might. Within reason, however, it can certainly be done, and on the second major leg of my trip (I was in Scotland; the odds of anyone using that information to track me down just seem too remote), I went out a couple of times and had a beer by myself. And it was fine. Oh, my stupid social anxiety. Most nights I went pretty early--like dinner-time--but for some reason even that used to scare me. And the one night when I actually went to a bar at night, because I wanted to hear some live folk music, I sat at the bar with my book and had a lovely time. It's true that men talked to me, sometimes, and in fact at this particular bar I ended up having a rather long conversation with a 28-year-old guy with OCD who has recently become interested in Wicca. But that was fine, too, and frankly it's nice to talk to someone now and again. I wasn't taking any weird risks, and I wasn't drinking very much, and so there wasn't much more to be afraid of than there is in the normal course of affairs. (There was one guy who was less fine, and hit on me rather too freely, on a different night; but that was at 7 pm, whilst I was writing some postcards, of all provacative behaviors, and he was clearly very drunk, and the bartenders sort of hovered around keeping an eye on things until the besotted fellow took his leave. That was annoying, and unpleasant. One should never declare that one is in love with a person that one has met less than five minutes previously, by the way; it doesn't quite ring true.) Anyway the point is that I realized I'm capable of handling myself, of making it clear that I'm not interested in anything flirtatious, and of not denying myself a small pleasure that I desire. It was actually kind of exciting.
• I don't think that I want to spend my whole life in a city. Every time I came into a new city, I was vastly more interested in whether I could get into the surrounding countryside--of course, it helped that I was in some places with exceptionally beautiful countryside. But this is a tendency that I've noticed in myself before; when I had to go to Denver for a conference a few years back, for instance, I managed to get out to Boulder within 48 hours of my arrival.
• Youth hostels aren't all that bad, if you can ignore all the other people. Especially the deranged 37-year-old gamblers who are on an overt husband hunt (and who think that the 14th century refers to the 1400s. Gah!). Remind me to tell you that story some day.
  
• I've spent a weirdly long time crafting this post.

And on that note, I think I'll finish up. More later.

Oh hey! I got some good news at the very end of my trip. An extremely obscure, tiny literary journal would like to publish one of my stories. That makes two extremely obscure, tiny literary journals in which I will have published!

Formed A Band, We Formed A Band

If blogs are the garage-bands of the new millennium, it's high time I join in.

I was never in a band, actually, and I still see this as one of my great failings. I was once asked if I would play bass guitar in a death-metal band; not knowing how to play the bass, or being particularly attracted to the death metal genre, I declined. Still, I was flattered. Clearly the discomfort of my steel-toed combat boots paid off in the image department.

Not that I aspire to the reaches of such rockstars as the in the middle or bitch, but I do feel the...the pressing need for confessionalism, for ranting, and for a lot of pointless discussion of the details of my life that can no longer be sustained within my actual relationships. I like to make things. I like to talk about myself. I also have this vague fantasy that this will help me to engage in some kind of Academic Discourse of sorts--or, at the very least, get me to think about things and write about them.

I've titled this post after Art Brut's song of the same name. "Yes, this is my singing voice. It's not irony," Eddie Argos deadpans halfway through the track. Calling attention to itself through the putative denial of its very obvious irony--well, I can't help but think of how deeply self-conscious this post, and indeed much of the world of blogging, actually is. I'm kind of embarrassed to be writing here. Yes, I am embarrassed. I admit it. And I'm not sure how widely I'll be publicizing this latest endeavor of mine (or how long I'll actually keep it up).

So, in an attempt to surmount my embarrassment by claiming my actions--and "claiming" an action, or an identity, is a dare that no academic can resist--I'll finish this introductory post by appropriating the most triumphal moment of Brut's chorus:

Look at me! I formed a blog.