Such Strange Beauty

oh man, i'm sullen as a sleep-deprived camper on a thursday afternoon, and it's all because i had a boring bad day. you know the kind - the kind that aren't bad enough to really count as bad days, because nothing acutely awful happens, but when a steady stream of small annoyances erode at what little is left of your grace, patience, and charming personality. i should have seen it coming when i got up and put on the cropped black tank top that is a torn leftover from the late nineties and that i usually accessorize with grommets and excessive eyeliner, pretending i'm the punk i always wanted to be. that shirt often signals a surly streak these days. it used to be my writing shirt, my bad-ass alter-ego that got shit done. now it mopes. but yeah. i realized it had been a boring bad day after i had this conversation with my roommate:

her: was it an awful day?
me: no.
her: so it wasn't really a bad day. i think you're just wanting it to be a bad day.
me: no. it wasn't an awful day.  but sometimes those are worse. i have no legitimate reason to be this snarly. i can't get sympathy. i can't say, "my dog died" or "i found out i have cancer." no. all i can say is, "i had several awkward conversations about cheese and it's supposed to snow when i'm driving into the mountains." bah. and now i splashed hot water on my hand. see? nothing really bad.  blarg.

that about sums it up. several awkward conversations about cheese, an unfavorable weather report, a string of long-delayed phone calls, a sense of disconnection, fear for the future, fear for the past, all mixed up with an inability to tap dance and burlesque my way through my slushy feelings. that's my normal MO. i'm the queen of hilarious angst. i'm the person whose weepy or angry rants inspire laughter in others, so that even when i'm down in the dumps i get a bit of an ego boost, remembering that i'm so very witty that even unhappiness can't cover it. but today, nope. when i wanted to be witty, i was just rain-drenched and flat-footed. instead of sarcastic and snide, i was just surly. instead of having a wry twist on the darkness of life, shot through with a zesty bit of devil may care, i just had a three-day headache and a melancholy born of thwarted hopes and tired patience.

we rewatched the lord of the rings recently, and i've been thinking about hope as a result. those movies are so about hope. it's all, "have hope and the rohirrim will come." that's why the charges of the rohirrim always make me cry. it's not just that i love horses. no way man. or horn blasts. i love all those things, but what really gets me about those scenes is the way they make hope look concrete. i know that feeling - the feeling that the dawn will never come and you will go down swinging feebly in the midst of orcs. orcs are ugly. to die in a pile of orcs is to feel like a failure, to question the meaning of the whole engagement, not to mention your value as a king. i am so king theoden today, just moping around in my horse armor and saying, "so much death...what can men do against such reckless hate?" everything about the world depresses me. the greed of the rich. the insecurity of us all. the overemphasis on sexual relationships. our inability to be generous and kind from within our myriad lonelinesses. the isolation of work and the energy we spend on so many things that don't give life, either to ourselves or the world. fear. so much fear. and i feel like all my defenses are feeble, the ten year old farm boys of emotional excuses. i try to tell myself the old line that anne lamott parrots, adapted from the dalai lama: that when so many small things are broken or breaking in our lives, it's because something beautiful is trying to get born and that thing needs for us to be as distracted as possible so that it can get born as perfectly as possible, without our interference. but it doesn't feel like that. it doesn't feel like the beginning of beauty. it feels like orcs at the gates, the end of an age, and that end will be ugly and smelly and covered with warts and pulled from the industrial decay of the beautiful world. oh, melodrama. 

ARGA;KJA;LSKDGJLK;J!!!  see?  right in the middle of writing this post, my track pad somehow turned itself off, which it used to do all the time but hasn't done in months. i was all hunkered down in bed with my laptop and my hot water bottle and i had to go dig my USB port mouse out of my desk and prance about in my pajamas in my cold, cold room, googling "how do you turn the effing hp track pad back on."  this is the kind of bad day i'm having. one million tiny things, and right when my melodrama or some wine and pizza or a lovely bike ride through the not-as-cold-as-i-expected rain starts to leaven the bad mood, another tiny thing goes wrong and bite bite bite whole chunks of my equilibrium get digested.  and then i overreact and i realize i'm a horrible person with the personality of an aging, half-deaf pitbull, and then i realize that because of this combination of bad luck and bad personality, the rohirrim are never coming. there is no hope, because the orcs of your self-loathing are going to clobber the shit out of you and leave you bleeding. and you don't even have a handsome viggo-mortenson-as-aragorn to tell you, yes, yes, blow the horn of helm hammerhand and get your effing horse charge on because some wizard magic is gonna come running down the hill with light. you don't know if light is ever running down a hill, because in real life, it seems more like small efforts of the heart and small moments of grace are what we get to aid us in our battles. and some nights like tonight, that just doesn't seem like enough. we need something big. we need sluices of grace. we need shadowfax to lead this charge pronto. moments of grace, moments of balance, small peaceful moments, tiny mercies, laughter at small things is the bread and butter of making it through but just doesn't seem sufficient in the wee hours of the morning, in the face of so much death and darkness, even if the daily death and darknesses are small themselves, are just the small deaths of loneliness, selfishness, fear, and greed.

the thing that erodes hope is waiting, and i'm in a waiting time. everything about my future seemed sparkling with hope back in december, but now i'm in the siege of waiting and there have been casualties and options seem to be closing in or closing down. i know there is always hope. i know that i need to stop my anglo-saxon sulking, put my weary hand on the sword, and get back to it, the business of keeping on. but i just...am having one of those nights, where i wanna ask, where is the horse and the rider? and flail about a bit more in my melodrama. it's one of those days where i'm melodramatic when i want to be witty or kind or cool. and i guess sometimes you just have to take what you can get and charge ahead anyway.

Late night, Christmas Eve typing has become a tradition of mine; there's always been something about the space after Christmas Eve services and before Christmas morning that haunts me. I think it has something to do with waiting, and with potential, and with hope, and with longing. While there are many things that I'm skeptical about, I have never been a Christmas cynic; I've always loved Christmas, and I think part of it was that church becomes so much more ritualistic and mysterious around Christmas time. When I was a child, I didn't know that what I was really longing for in my church-going was something more ancient and full of ceremony. I just knew that when Christmas came around and we began to light candles, sing old songs, and share stories that were thoroughly familiar, I felt alive. All of Advent is a waiting, a building-up to culmination for the church. And yet, Christmas Eve I often came home feeling hollow. I think it wasn't just a religious thing; American culture also glorifies Christmas, building our visions of family and romance around holly-wreathed staircases and trays of egg nog. Christmas is supposed to mean something, to be something special. And I would go to church on Christmas Eve and revel in the glorious ceremony - the evergreen trees sparkling with white lights; the hundreds of candles winking while we sang "Joy to the World" in full organ-backed thunder, the snow fluttering around the car as we drove home afterwards. And it was never enough. I didn't want the feeling of holiness, or ceremony, or celebration, or anticipation to end. Christmas mornings have always been bittersweet for me - because I don't actually want to open the gifts. I prefer the mystery of still-wrapped gifts underneath a tree. I prefer sitting on the couch on quiet evenings watching the lights on the Christmas tree and murmuring with my family as we drift towards sleep. I tended towards the melodramatic in my desire to somehow further save and sanctify the space right before Christmas began: singing Christmas carols in the snow with candles with my sisters; typing by candlelight on an old typewriter in the kitchen after everyone else had gone to bed.

At least this year I expected to feel weird on Christmas Eve - I expected an intensification of hollowness. It's my first Christmas not at home, remarkably enough. For 27 years, I managed to crawl home from wherever in the world I had been and spent the holiday at my parents' house. But this year, with big conferences the first week of January - with Kelli's recent move to Seattle - the Sexton sisters decided to spend the holiday at Tabbi's new house up in Seattle. And here I am.  Tabbi's out at work. Bekki's reading in bed with Mulligan the dog. Kelli's wrapping Christmas presents. We spent the night watching Bend It Like Beckham and sipping leftover rum drinks from Tabbi's Christmas party. Now, Christmas is coming in the morning, and I don't know what I feel or how to feel. Life is so confusing and amorphous right now. I don't know where I will be in six months - if I'll have a job - if I'll be moving to some strange new city. I don't know if I'll have job interviews in a little over a week. It's such a period of waiting, and though Advent is coming to an end, my own larger life period of waiting has not yet stopped. I'm still waiting to see what's next, where I'm supposed to go, what I'm supposed to do. And the holiday feels so odd for me. Anti-climactic, but also unanticipated. Like the holiday just snuck up out of nowhere and hence...it doesn't seem truly significant. Not totally surprising; I haven't gone to church much since Paul left; church is hard for me alone. I have this aching feeling of not belonging - since every time I do go to church I feel like a fugitive, an interloper, and an angry Marxist all at once.

Take tonight. Kelli just moved out here to attend seminary, so she's on the hunt for a new home church. I went with her last Sunday and then to another new church tonight. As we pulled into the parking lot, it was like a flashback to the Midwest. This was a Big Church. Perhaps you Midwesterners knows the kind: giant projector screens; flat, blank, white walls; rows of interlocking, padded, folding chairs; a coffee shop in the foyer. I immediately felt ill at ease, and what I realized as the service began was that my discomfort was not just a Christian thing but also a class thing. It wasn't just my usual certainty that what passes for my theology would be unacceptable to most of the church-going crew; I also felt like I was in a gathering of likeness - people who have a certain kind of jobs, and a certain income level, and a certain notion of what constitutes a family. These were people living the life I've gradually been realizing that I don't want at all - the life that I've become increasingly happy that I don't have, even though the rest of the world seems to tell me this is the life I need. As my discomfort grew, I abruptly realized how little time I spend among the upper-middle class during my time in Eugene. Between the co-op and graduate school, most of the people I live with are (not currently) living an upper middle class lifestyle. While many of my friends aspire to the big-house, big-car, big-family life eventually, they can't have it yet, which I guess gives me a certain daily amount of smug satisfaction. I smugly feel better that I am happy poor. I thrive in the cramped economic conditions that make many resent grad school. And in the insular little world of the co-op I'd gotten used to the general assumption that a) capitalism was horrible and unethical b) people with money should probably feel somewhat guilty for it c) living an alternative lifestyle is a cool if not morally important thing to do. But at church I felt abruptly shabby. I felt like I scanned as a hippie from across the parking lot.I was in the middle of a church full of people wearing a certain kind of clothes - I don't even know, I can't even explain - but somehow you could see that most of them have money. And my smugness flipped on its head and turned into judgment; I was sure that these people felt fully entitled to their money.

It's the old problem of humility: according to Christian teachings, I have no right to judge people or feel superior. It's a nasty human trait, that readiness to feel better-than. But let's be honest: that's how I felt. I was sitting in the congregation alternating between an acute self-consciousness that left me queasy and a sense of moral superiority fueled by what my housemates have deemed "my socialist rage." And you wonder why I don't go to church much anymore...

I realized tonight that money and attitudes about class are part of what's holding me back from participating in Christian communities like churches. I think I'm just too angry for church. I loved the church I was going to for a while in Eugene because it was small and held together by the work of people that went there.  There were committees to mow the lawn; people sewed the banners in the sanctuary, baked the bed we used for Eucharist.  There was no flash and fuss at my church. Mega-churches are the opposite end of the spectrum: here I was tonight, with a color-coordinated light show, and a professional sounding worship team, and fancy coffee drinks in paper cups, and witty jokes in the opening about how we should just relax, we couldn't do anymore shopping tonight anyhow.  Hearty laugh. Stereotypical jokes about husbands trying to please their wives by getting just the right gift.  And I felt so hollow and lonely.  Here? Here in the place where we're supposed to believe in the radical potential of the divine to change our lives, to free us from the dictates of society? Here, where we were celebrating something as strange and mysterious as incarnation - the irruption of divinity into the midst of the mundane? I didn't want to laugh about our total capitulation to the capitalist version of Christmas and admit, okay, we all do it, but let's just take a time out and think about Jesus for a bit. You can get right back at it as soon as the candles go out...I wanted to celebrate radical alternatives, not wink at each other about iPods and jewelry and Best Buy.

It's the old conundrum for me: I first got radical because of my Christianity - because Christ seemed too radical to allow me to go on ignoring the many injustices of the world - and now I feel too radical to fit into what count as Christian communities. While I'm not perfect - while I have yet to live up to all the commandments Christ made of people, especially socioeconomic commandments - I guess I just don't think Christ was kidding when he told us to give all we had to the poor if we were going to follow him. I don't think you can be a rich Christian, and that makes me judgy and angry. Because even though I know we're never going to overcome human nature and get everybody to give everything up - myself included; abject poverty sounds a little daunting to me too - I still think that's what we're told to do. Just like we're told to love our neighbor as ourselves. Just like we're told to love the Lord with all your heart and soul and might. Christian commandments aren't super-easy, even plausible, but there they are. Why is it most of the time we talk about the abstract, gauzy ones like loving and trusting and having faith and ignore the more unforgiving ones, like caring for the poor and the distressed? Food pantries aren't enough; there are finite resources in the world; if you genuinely care about the poor, you have to have less. If you can't face that, fine - but let's not pretend then that we really want to put Christ first in our lives and all that Christian language. I guess that's why these issues become hardest at Christmas: because we spend the most time in church talking about giving and generosity and having our priorities straight as compared to the "rest of the world," but then we turn around and refuse to challenge ourselves, saying that if we really are going to face up to the Savior we proclaim is coming, we're going to have to give more of our time and things. Stop being a model employee, student, citizen; give all we have to the poor to follow Christ. Scary shit.

Okay, now my Marxist leanings will out, but I just have a hard time hearing about the Christmas story in such an unabashedly lush setting. And it's not some Puritan thing. I have been marginally Episcopalian for a while now, and the more lavish the liturgical services, the better. There's just a very particular blend of evident church-wealth that gets linked to a certain class-background in my mind and immediately renders me both uncomfortable and judgmental. I don't like that I get so judgy. But I also feel like it really is a problem if the church doesn't ask us to think about our class and our economy - just like I think it's a problem if the church doesn't ask us to think about gender, sexuality, environmental stewardship, and race in liberating, challenging ways. The church needs to be pushing us to think about how to be more radical, not giving us a brief reprieve from the woes of our comfortable classed life.

Hello? Class issues (well, okay, they wouldn't have been called that then, but you know what I'm saying) are all over the Christmas story. Jesus wasn't born in a manger just because God thought it would be a goofy twist. Poor couple having to schlep around the ancient world because of imperial censuses, having babies in stables. Poor shepherds coming in from their hard work in the fields to check out what's going on. Some rich magi show up, but they have to lie and sneak around because they don't want to piss off the king in charge.  Clearly, the nativity is not something you can just roll up to in between latte-and-gift runs at the mall. But as the sermon went on, the pastor kept telling me that I needed to put aside my anger and just worship. This idea of worship really bothers me. This kind of worship feels like an escape, a sedative, a way of avoiding very real problems in the world. Okay. Yes, I believe fixating on all the injustice in the world can be counter-productive and can just lead to depression, cynicism, or despair. But I think that real worship needs to be something that creates change, that radicalizes - whatever your religion. To really come in contact with divinity....well, it seems like that wouldn't leave any of us the same. Maybe we don't want to change; but then we shouldn't put a nice face on it and call it having a saviour in our heart or something like that.

In my last post, I talked about the sacrifice of praise and the need for it; but to me, that's somehow different than the need to acknowledge valid anger at injustice. And it's not that I hold any individual people in that room responsible for the state of the world; I don't hate any of them for being who they are or doing what they do. I was just suddenly so angry at the way that Christianity has also been co-opted by capitalism and by the powers-that-be. Christmas is an opiate for the masses if we let it be about a facile kind of peace: peace on earth, meaning, put down your cell phone for ten minutes and smile happily at your family before you all go back to the whirlwind circle of pursuing self-improvement. Study! Get jobs! Make more money!  But take one night for peace; hope you already bought the refreshments that you need to keep your day calm tomorrow. But don't worry; someone poorer than you will probably be working at Safeway in case you forgot that much-needed cake or some extra candles for the holiday photo shoot.

I know. I'm verging on angry now. I risk sounding like a Christmas cynic.  But I still am not.  Not at all. It's the same sense of loss I feel when I know that Christmas Eve is ending, that potential is giving way to what-is, that hope will have to go back to its more daily appearance: steadiness and toil and patience and contingency rather than garlands and carols. There's so much potential in Christmas, in Christianity, to promote radical ethics. If we really want to talk about how "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God" - if we really want to talk about how all are born into a world of sinfulness - then why can't we stop fretting about individualistic sins and also recognize that sinfulness is more than lusting after someone or losing your temper at work? The sin of covetousness extends to capitalism too, kids, and that means that all of the ethical and political injustice that occurs because of our quest to get more, more, more is a sin, too. The sin we are born into is a world of entrenched injustice; it's not any individual's fault, necessarily, that they are born into certain privileges, but such a lack of blame does not give anyone a free pass to just keep pursuing a certain kind of lifestyle. At least I don't think so. If so many churches believe that a) sin is an inherently "corrupt" nature that makes us want sex and drugs and booze and anger but also that b) we can overcome these naughty urges through moral self control....well, that means that we are capable of and responsible for overcoming whatever circumstances we are born into once we become aware of them. By that logic, we should be capable of overcoming the capitalist world that we've been born into and exercising restraint in order to contribute to the ending of injustice, environmental degradation.

Yeah. I sound like a raving hippie now. It's just so hard for me to see a holiday that is supposed to be about possibility - about the chance for real change that challenges entrenched systems of behavior and injustice, that demands we become more loving and less self-centered visions of ourselves - that asks us to really think about incarnation, about being a blend of soul and body and mind and community - it's hard to see this holiday become about having a peaceful moment and then letting life go back to the way that it was. So when the pastor ended the sermon by telling us we had to go out and share the good news of Christ, I smiled to myself and decided that a little Christian Marxist rant would be my own attempt at a testimony.

The other day, biking to the pharmacy through the rare Eugene cold-and-sunlight combo that has been gracing us lately, I suddenly realized that it was mid-December; that Christmas was a mere 10 days away; and that, as usual, I had done none of the intentional, soul-cleansing things I had half-consciously promised myself I would do. I like Advent more than Lent because Lent has been so thoroughly co-opted by secular culture as a kind of self-help holiday: prepare for Easter feasts with a 40 day beauty fast!  Not. The. Point. And while Christmas has been thoroughly co-opted by capitalist ideology, Advent has not; the weeks of preparation are meant (for the capitalist true believer) only for shopping, but nobody calls their shopping period "Advent." So, while Lent and Advent are similar in many ways - times when you're supposed to enter a period of reflection in preparation for some major Savior-action - I find participating in Advent more rewarding because it feels counter-cultural. At least in principal. Since I always forget to actually do much for Advent, like go to church. But really, biking along beneath the patchy blue sky, I still thought that I could benefit from some reflections on gratitude and rejoicing.

Christmas, like Easter, is supposed to be a mega-celebration for those inclined towards Christian faith. God is coming to Earth. Putting on gratitude seems like a pretty important step to really embracing this holiday. But what all the feel-good essays about gratitude and thankfulness don't tell you is that real gratitude is actually a pretty tricky thing. Real gratitude is not listing all the things you have that make you happy and would make anyone happy - that's self-congratulation. Real gratitude is not a kind of public performance of fulfillment that, consciously or unconsciously, points out to everyone around you how rich your life is. Gratitude should not be a competition. Rather, gratitude is about learning to be thankful no matter what conditions you're in - for things that aren't obvious blessings. Anyone can say, "I'm so grateful for my nice home! And my kids! And my loving husband! And my job!"  I'm not saying we shouldn't be grateful for those things - and yes, in America, even recognizing such blessings can be a counter-cultural act, given our propensity towards entitlement and anxiety. But I think the real work of gratitude is learning to see things you're thankful for as something you don't deserve and can't earn - that don't actually constitute you or your identity, but that are present in your life and can leave at any moment. And learning to recognize the gifts you get through not-having, through suffering, through getting things you don't want or not getting things you do want.

****prose pause****

The reason I like poems about gratitude and thankfulness is because a) I think cultivating an attitude of conscious, constant gratefulness is one of the most important things one can do for one's spiritual and mental health and b) because I think it's really hard to say anything about thankfulness that doesn't sound cliche. So to start, here are some poems about gratitude.

my ol' poem:

grace
 
graciously, father, we try and thank you,
angry as we are.  sputtering engines and
aspen trees, my own wrinkles pressed between
my bone-thin fingers – how do i lay down or
kneel?  my skin is cracked, and the blue sky
sings so lovely.  we pray like the shaken tail
of a dog, like the twig that falls under
rainfall, like the yielding of old seams or
wet earth.  we breathe on embers and scoop
handfuls of soil to our noses, drinking
anything with which we fill our cup.  we ask
straight lines and angles, maps, clear enemies, but
inside, always balancing, like a singing
thrush, that voice that thanks and thanks again,
 shaking the leaves and fluttering our eyelids.


the poem that inspired me:

Thanks
by W.S. Merwin

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

****resume prose meditations****

I love Merwin's poem so much because it points out that gratitude must be cultivated from within suffering. I think what I hate about so many public performances of gratitude is that they are so insular: they are personal moments of gratification, piled up to block out the rest of the troubled, dangerous world. I am thankful for my own home, my own family, our own food, our own wealth, we say, meaning by that, Thank God that I am not adrift, alone, hungry, poor. We sit for a moment and feel pity, and then we continue on our lives. And that kind of thankfulness has nothing to do with the Christianity that continues to interest me so thoroughly. If God becomes incarnate in the world, it's not to bring us all nuclear families, safe homes, and prosperity; it's to force our eyes wide to the kinds of injustice and cruelty we perpetrate on each other. God is coming, and not into a safe, traditional home or a safe, comfortable life. God is not going to get a good education, a good job, a good family. God is going to be executed by a repressive social system - the same kind that we continue to fight today. (I feel the need, given some of the really awful interpretations of Christ's life that float around out there, to very carefully specify that I don't think Jewish society was responsible for the death of Christ. Rather, Christ's life is politically instructive because it shows us the way that imperial, oppressive systems of government like the Roman Empire execute threats to their continued, unchallenged power. It's not about any particular historical group of people and their levels of involvement; it's about a pattern that existed before Christ and that continues to play out in all societies, with all our participation. Thanks, James Allison, for that bit o' theology). 

Okay, I'm getting all liberation theology sidetracked. But what does this have to do with gratitude?

Well, my years singing in the gospel choir at Hope College first put me into contact with liberation theology anyway, and these were the people that taught me about the radical possibility of genuine rejoicing. My gospel choir director taught us to think of gratitude and rejoicing as sacrifices, not self-congratulations. One of the few things God's people have to do, he said, is be grateful; but we have to give thanks at all times, even when we don't want to, even when we don't feel thankful. We have to give thanks from within the mess of life, for the mess of life - not just sit on the surface and give thanks for what protects us from life, for what we can salvage from hardship and suffering. The sacrifice of praise, he called it, explaining how when you come into sacred space and give thanks, you might not feel great, but you get to a better place - you start to act like a better person. Thankfulness has a liberating potential when it isn't thankfulness that is cut off from the complexities of life. If thankfulness needs to be in a safe hothouse to flourish, it doesn't have much potential; but when thankfulness lives within the rich mess of life, it doesn't risk disappearing with every disappointment and change of plans. Of course, such thankfulness also needs to be cultivated by acts of gratitude: praise, giving thanks, even just consciously reflecting on the way limits become possibilities, challenges become genuine growth, and pain becomes new possibilities of being open and loving to others.

With Christmas around the corner, I have so many things to be thankful for. I'm thankful that most days I haven't behaved like a total asshole, and that when I have, I've managed to ask forgiveness and make amends within the community in whichI live. I am thankful that graduate school has not, despite my worst fears starting out 6 years ago, made me totally self-absorbed, disconnected from the things that make my life meaningful, or a slave to my work. I'm thankful that my sense of self has not been totally tied to my professional or social accomplishments. I'm thankful that somedays I've managed to make art, call people I love and rarely talk to, send a letter, read a letter, go for walks, stop staring at my navel. I'm thankful for the many, many people who have been part of my life this year, in varying capacities - from cups of coffee to potlucks to day-long discussions over wine to long walks in the rain to tear-filled phone conversations on hard nights. I'm thankful that I get to eat dinner almost every night with a table full of thoughtful, hopeful, passionate people. I'm thankful that I've seen the ocean and the mountains this year. I'm thankful that I've learned to fix my bike, every time I go for a ride and it feels like pedaling a cloud rather than grinding the chain. I'm thankful that I've had so much time to think and reflect this year, that I've finally begun to let go of a number of old hurts that I'd been keeping close to my heart - as armor; as weapons against myself; as self-reproaches. I'm thankful that I get to go see some of my family, and we can all sit down and share our hurts and fears and shelter each other a bit against the shortest part of winter, the insistent changing of the year, the season when we're supposed to have and buy and give so much but instead often feel shortchanged by all we can't have, can't give. I'm so thankful to be moving in a circle of homes, so that this hard Christmas, when I'm waiting to see if I get a job - when I'm not going back to my parents' house for the first time ever since my birth- I can move from the warm circle of wine, party lights, and night bike rides that is my co-op home to the rambunctious dog antics, champagne, and late night movies of my sister's house in Seattle. Maybe gratitude - real gratitude - is just another version of seeing better, that idea I keep talking about this year; to be really grateful, we can't just check things off a pre-formed list called "middle class success story," but instead have to have moments of startling recognition, where the real fullness of our life drives away all our insecurities and insufficiencies, turning lack into bounty with a quick sleight of hand.

the camp i worked at for four years was a weird, weird place, yet somehow i managed to stand out as weirder than most. the moment that really stands out as my demarcation-of-weird occurred during my second year on staff.  i was a member of what we still called "random staff," then - i had been hired to help with all the odd jobs, from driving canoe trailers north to leading trail rides; i lived in the staff house, not in a cabin with kids. on this particular day, a sudden burst of rain had sent everyone running indoors for an extended rest period, but the random staff were still schlepping around and cleaning stuff up. my boss later told me that he looked up from his office paperwork to see me running in big, loopy circles around the flagpole in my swimsuit and flip-flops, whooping and dancing as the rain fell harder and my co-workers watched. he told me he thought, "what a nutbar!"

i was thinking about that moment this morning as several girlfriends and i were sipping coffee on the couch, rehashing our latest weekend exploits and talking about the collage of characters who make up our co-op house. as bri started describing how she imagines various housemates, she told me, "you- you're just a goofball!" i started thinking about that, because my oddness has been on my mind again lately.  i live with lots of people who do lots of weird things - just like at camp, where most of the staff at various times participated in outlandish and wild antics. so what is it that marks me as so extra-weird - that makes my veteran boss of many a camp summer dub me a nutbar, and makes my long-time housemates who can party like rockstars call me a goofball? there seems to be some fundamental weirdness about me that i both love and hate and that i'm trying to make my peace with.

a couple months ago, i got riled up by the new tv show New Girl's portrayal of weird femininity and wrote about it over at girls like giants. my problem, as i stated there, was the way quirkiness gets co-opted in service of conventional femininity and sexual appeal. in other words, the girls that mainstream media tells us are "weird" are not really that weird. they're conventionally pretty, non-aggressive, and - most importantly - they can pass. i can't for one minute believe that zooey deschanel, quirkiness and all, would have the same trouble fitting into normal social groups that i have had - and what has been on my mind lately has been trying to put my finger on what separates the quirky-yet-pretty zooeys from the genuinely weird-and-uncomfortable luna lovegoods of the world. It's not just prettiness; some very pretty girls that i know are insanely weird, not just cute-n-quirky. part of the formula seems to involve a genuine inability to fit in. my only way of interacting with people is through oddness.  when i try to small-talk with people, my attempts are full of non-sequiters and surprising leaps. but they aren't painfully awkward in the way that, say, zooey's attempts to flirt in new girl are. they're just a little...off.  think luna lovegood, helpfully volunteering information about dirigible plums in a way that totally fits with the context of the conversation but isn't what the average person would say. real weirdness runs deep, i'm thinking; when you watch zooey's character, you get the feeling that at any second she will take oddness off, like a funny costume that a camp counselor puts on for capture the flag. in quiet moments, zooey's character will be photogenically pretty and doing something normal; her quirkiness feels like an illusion around her. whereas i'm pretty sure luna is just always odd, reading the quibbler upside down whether you're watching not, like me running about in the rain with no idea that my boss was watching and shaking his head.

but i also think something about genuine weirdness is a love for it. i mean, i feel sad and awkward at how hard it is for me to fit in. this came home hard for me last weekend when i went to a party with urooj and a bunch of second-remove friends. it had been so long since i partied outside the co-op, the english department, or some group of people that i already semi-know; never had it been so painfully highlighted that i don't know what to do at a party full of strangers. they were doing goofy antics; but i didn't know how to play along, so i sat awkwardly in a corner. but while part of me is thinking why do i seem so odd? why are the other girls all good at flirting and getting boys to come home with them and making friends with strangers, another part of me feels happy that i'm abnormal. it's so narcissistic and strange; i know i'm not the only one that feels like i don't often fit in; but then i'm also getting all this outside feedback that there is something genuinely odd about me - a goofiness that is not just a flirtation or a temporary incongruence with my surroundings, but that is a deeply rooted unusualness.  i can't pass.  if i show up to a party, i'm either going to be sitting quietly in the corner or prancing around in a costume made out of sequins and fire; there will be no talking about school and pleasantries, but immediate inquiries about your deepest personal beliefs and jokes about your personality.

but weirdness isn't an i don't care what people think about me! freeness, because i care deeply what people think about me and often feel comfortable because i don't know how to have easy, swinging social conversations. weirdness isn't being a social outcast, because i have lots of friends that value my weirdness, that want to be my friend specifically because i'm odd. so what is it?  i know a lot of you out there are weirdos too - that's probably why we're friends - so i'd be interested to hear other people's thoughts on what it is that makes us more than just on-again, off-again prank-players and costume-wearers - what makes us goofballs and nutbars...

Grade complaints. Stacks of grading. People driving the wrong way down one-way streets by taking over the bike lane. People packing up their dry cleaning in their SUVs by parking in the bike lane. Everyone complaining about everything, from laughter to music to accidental dropping of things. My closet rod snapping and dumping all my clothes on the floor. The ongoing discovery of mouse poop in every untouched cranny of my room. Mock job interviews on Friday. Emails from schools saying that due to Veteran's Day mail delays my applications got in a day late and will not be considered. The only Wells-Fargo ATM near my house being mysteriously yanked out of the cement. No running because I banged my ankle up on something last night and it's disproportionately swollen (disproportionate in comparison to the amount of force with which I banged it). Writing for 10 hours yesterday and still not getting my James Agee writing sample done in time for a job application. Dark circles under my eyes that no amount of sleep seems to make go away.

I am officially too grumpy to function.

clearly i should be working, because i have all kinds of hella creative energy going on and i want to write everything and grade zero essays.

i've been seeing lots of thankfulness lists on facebook marking the beginning of november.  i want to write some.  i just want them to be weirder.  here's one:

why i'm thankful i live in a co-op
hot water dispenser in the sink
giant tables where you can play air hockey using stale loaves of bread
stale loaves of bread for recreational purposes (including putting in the road for cars to hit) (we never did that, just imagined it) (true?)
climbing the shelves to get at my personal food
an awareness of tempeh, quinoa, and kohlrabi
consumption of all of the above
massive vats of soup
bike brigades - good for parties and formal events
costume/theme parties - involving sequins and gratuitous make-up use
the strobe light in our ceiling
dancing with the strobe light on weeknights because we want to
coffee chats on the front porch
cats chasing chickens
chickens chasing rats
chickens kicking chickens (in the hand)
goat manuring the raised bed and growing lots of kale (separate times)
bruce chasing housemates
bruce howling at the fire alarm
bruce howling when we whistle
sushi nights
thanksgiving every year
learning how to: change a bike; lay a floor; hang a shelf
buying food from local organic producers IN BULK
nutritional yeast popcorn, with real butter please
playing guitar around the fire
quirky mugs and mismatched dining ware
throwing things at the ceiling fan
pranks
drinking wine around a candle in the hallway
sometimes falling in trash cans because it's fun
raunchy dinnertime conversations
10 people in my room after i tried to hide my crying
5 people in my bed drinking wine because it's fun
sunsets from the rooftop
persimmons being nailed to the roof and put in people's pants
movie sleepovers any day you just decide
pizza research institute excursions
beautiful red bike trailer!
persimmon tree full of christmas lights
hullaballoo homecomings for long lost friends

running
i’m gonna go ahead and say horses and fire don’t mix – brooke
 
three years into wondering, now, if i lost something
when my head hit the packed earth outside the corral
and i crawled to keep the pain back, panting, swearing
that my helmet must have come off with the impact. my friends
swore it stayed on – but each outburst, each hard day,
each eye twitch could be from the slipping saddle – from the hands
that finally unclenched, from dodging pounding hooves.
we got back on our horses, and sometimes, sitting
at my desk and dragging thoughts from an unyielding brain,
i wonder - even if my thoughts were slowed – would i have traded
that hard hit for the morning speed that followed, swooping
through the corners of cornfields, punching branches
from my low-crouched face with a fist, pablo’s broad back
humming like the racehorse he once was,  my one hand
on the reins like a painter’s, all flourishes? we all know running
has its risks, but how to give up the edgy light, the sweet danger
that cries, be awake – your balance or your life?
one night i paraded patches through each village, our ceremony
mixing with the lore we stole from native peoples. he shook
his head, used to the fire, used to the drums, the lines of children
walking silent by the water’s edge – used to the fiery arrows arcing
to the lake, the canoe ride and the singing – used to the long run
up the hill between the narrow lane of torches.
i clutched the reins and whispered, we can’t run, but his hooves took off
when we passed the beech tree, and we ran – bareback, desperate,
blurs of flame, until i toppled in the grassy field, unscathed,
he now still. three years, and my thoughts, always running,
back to the corral and the woods, back to the dark of ceremonies –
scattering the birds from beeches and from cornfields, shying
from the bright flames meant to mark the path. this running, his running,
such a danger – i still dream it.
 

I have no game face today.  Yesterday was a blaze of glory: job applications! essay rubrics! using SafeAssign! lesson plans! teaching lectures! revised writing samples! Until I had my first mock interview and fell flat on my face, wobbling on the verge of tears.  The question? Tell me a little about your dissertation.  Seriously.  I can talk about almost anything else. But this question fills me with terror because my dissertation is so big and I've been thinking about it so much and there's too much to say.  I pulled it together and managed to give a brilliant precis my second time around.  But those two hours of mock interviews left me drained, and I just couldn't get back on the work train.

Which is why I'm facing another Tuesday complete with 26 ungraded essays.  I wanted to grade last night.  I really did.  But I just don't have any juice left in me.  Y'know how I used to be so good at all-nighters and thrived on stress? I still do, when it's work that's mentally stimulating.  There are many things that are mentally stimulating about teaching, but grading revised essays is not one of them.  It's just draining. It's all about trying to see if the paper is logically consistent, so it requires this kind of meta-concentration that literally squeezes the invisible muscles of my brain and doesn't give much energy back. I want to just talk about their ideas, but this is an intro writing class and that would be doing them a disservice. Cue up the substitute teaching that I'm doing today and it's just a day full of highly demanding tasks that take lots of concentration but don't feed back into my energy reservoirs.

In other news, I think I have two kick-ass writing samples now - one 19th and one 20th century. At first, paring 50 page chapters down to 20 page samples felt like a dizzying waste of time in the race against the diss clock, but actually, I think these compressed versions could go back in the chapter - they're a lot better and they make space for MORE writing.  Also, I'm finally going to try and submit to a journal in coming weeks, so having svelte little manuscripts done is a-OK.

I'm learning so much about myself and how I handle stress.  Mostly, I think I'm handling this super-intense quarter pretty well.  I've been very generous with myself.  I let myself sleep in at least one extra time a week, so that I'm not feeling so brittle and wobbly. I think sleep deprivation is the number one reason why I get depressed sometimes.  So sleeping. I've been trying to exercise, mostly by playing lots and lots of ultimate games, both pick-up and league. I'm going to go dancing tonight. I've been carving out space for little heart-to-hearts with close friends. I've been calling Tabbi often to vent about people and therefore managing to behave like a decent human most of the time. I've been laughing a lot and eating a respectable number of vegetables every day. But then there are these weird, weird ways my stress suddenly erupts, like oobleck just bursting from a seam. Like the last two nights, where every noise sounds like a sneaky, sneaky rat to me and so I can't sleep but prowl around my room, looking for stealth-rodents. Or the panic-attack I had in a bar two weekends ago, when people were crowding me and crowding me so I climbed up on a bench and curled into a ball. Or my sudden ability to be super-obsessive with a single crappy pop song for days and days on end, just winding my brain up in my booty-shaking security blanket.

But there.  Rather than beat myself up for sleeping in an extra hour due to ratsteria, I've started typing. Time to fill up the coffee mug and get some grading done before launching myself out into the day. Time to remember the good things I'm fighting for on days like this; maybe today I'm not living like I'm dying, but I'm getting my work done so that I can play with Eugene friends on Thanksgiving, frolic in Seattle for a month, apply for several more jobs this week, go to a music school party this weekend, dance tango to Mood Area 52 tonight. I'm working hard so I can write poems and play music later, so I can run on sunny afternoons or play ultimate on rainy ones. I'm working hard so I can graduate in June, wherever I end up going. I'm working now so if I get a gosh darn interview I"ll have time to mock up answers that are better than my fumbly ones yesterday - just keep up the process of learning how best to show who I really am, rather than trying to make myself into who I think someone else wants me to be.

Sometimes I think that I don't make art anymore.  Then I look at all the poems I'm jotted down or tinkered with on evenings just like this - me too tired to work well, my mind racing and full of words.  Here are some I've salvaged from the hard drive:

when parting
 
like lightning left too long, sometimes
we flatten, lose the flash within
the larger brew of storm.  how long
could you look and still see
the streaming particles between
the dirt and sky?  no, our eyes bar
the glare and birth new blackness,
negatives burned where light last
preened, shaking its rough corners
and unfolding.  when you froze,
arms flung wide to seine your gazing
and light poured out from the rattle
of your teeth, i loved you until love
hollowed itself and seared its reverse
shadow on my palm.  i felt you
once.  this flashes.  we can't know dark
in dark, on darkness holding steady.

****
cold feet
 
it really did rain as we curled
on the porch in brown skirts
and you hurled your beer bottle
on the wet flagstone, glass
now winking shyly from the tufts
of our scrub lawn.  just western
rain, drizzling for an hour, while
i waved my cracked toes
under the eaves, watched dust
spatter and hiss off skin.  who can we
be, pressed around by these
questions, wet on dry, begging
rain in drought times?  who can you marry,
and how can i let you go?  your hair hung
in knots even the rain couldn’t untangle,
and we watched the cars creep
up the one way street – each one
not his.  we’re sitting in the evening,
eyelids low like the horizon.
***

burn
 
up the mountain, fire burned clean,
cedar chips and ash lining a pocket
for days.  smoke hung blue
when i hefted saplings to the flames,
somehow glad that embers would gnaw
the wet dirt for weeks after our burning.
this, i said, is how a forest should be - alive
with flame, lit bold devouring its own
debris, what we have named unneeded.
 
one night, when i was sleepless, i walked
out to the husk of the bark burner, flicked
a flashlight through its shingles, dared myself
inside.  beneath a single hole, splintered
chair frames, rusty bed springs crouched
fierce with their uselessness.  the air smelled
dead with smoke, though nothing had burned
for years.  who knew that some short weeks
 
would find me cleaning out a room, last to leave, dragging
dried beans and muddy socks from corners
with a crooked broom.  the only fire rustles
in my stove, and i watch flames until i sleep,
frightened by the vaccum's roar so that i pull the plug
and wait for morning, defeated
by all that's left behind by all we rootless. 

***

( More Poems! )( Poems and poems and poems. )

two in one night!  it's been so long!  yeah poems!

stigmata
 
On the back of my right hand, on the center,
a dark circle that for two weeks was a red
and ragged crater.  You put a finger on it, asking
me what trials I endured – what visions I have seen –
to earn this marking. I shake my head and show you
how I rubbed my hand to rawness learning
to crack-climb. I cup my fingers, push my curved hands
against the walls of air – thumbs together, a shift, then
the pinkies – both palms facing the same smooth
surface. I show you how I point my toes and jam them
into fissures, seeking nubs of rock, even slow and constant friction
to push against, to rise against. We do not climb by holding on,
I say – we climb by tensions, pressures, opposition. I try to show you
how I hang, arms straight, my tiny muscles nothing, my weight
cranked on my bones, onto the pressure of my flesh pushed
into stone. With skeletons and rocks, I rise – half-scrabble,
half a dance. Sometimes I bleed. The rock outside
is rough but soft, forgiving. It was the indoor walls
that rubbed my hand backs so the blood ran. Once, outside,
I stuck my hand into a crack and loosed a swarm of beetles.
Their hard bodies were the same blue you love best -
the blue of night sky when it’s cold but early; the stained glass
in Eastern churches where Christ’s robe crosses
his white shoulder. From up there, on the cliff, I saw
all the valley where I live. The sun hit my back as I fell,
yelping, bugs pinging at my face. I know which is worse, I say
– not the blue bugs and the tumbling and the soreness. But
the slick blood inside, smelling hot, leeching
into my softest skin, as I practice the motions of ascent. 


A Wanting Poem

He broke your heart with one deft snap,
a pain that could not register for days. But it is kind,
you say, the clarity with which he breaks the present
from his future – draws lines between trajectories
and choices. Sometimes, a certain loss
is merciful. I once gave up a man
when some girl threw her arms around him
at a party. He touched her back, eyes half on her, half on
the empty room. Sometimes, we catch a sideways eye
and do not even know what we are losing. When you saw loss,
you nodded and said “yes” to everything
you can’t accept, that cannot be; we learn a grace
in grief, a way to both surrender and defy. I rode my bike
out in the night and bit at the cold air. I made up new
religions, danced on countertops, wove necklaces from string.
I bought four brushes - to shade my eyes – to coax
the brightness of beauty from browns and beiges, hints
of white. I practiced posing in the light, drank wine,
and sneered at strangers. This old game- the eyes you want to catch
not seeking you; the stares that seek you, tense
and coy, not stirring any feeling. I watched myself
 – This is me, walking. This is me, being free. This is me,
 not wanting. Like scientists with microscopes – like ballerinas
watching others dance – like coaches, shaking their gray heads
in seats far from the sidelines, we shake our fists and drag
our wooden heels – not letting go; not hanging on; not knowing
where body ends and longing starts, what we can want
or what we can surrender. I watch a bird. I dance
and turn my face to catch the light. See my bliss.  See my perfection.
See how I have forgotten him, have never wanted him,
have wholly lived between the jags of loving.
Like you, old friend, curled towards your knees and praying
to your old God - to tell him of your disbelief.