Such Strange Beauty

The other day, in an email, a friend asked me what I dreamt of doing once the dissertation was done...which, by the by, is this Friday.  (Don't think I posted that in this forum yet. Too much cyberpresence!) As I started to respond to him, I felt this flood of possibilities and hopes and things to do just coming from nowhere. I laughed and cut myself off.  But I'm feeling like ground-down-grass-and-grunge right now. I graded 25 essays and 25 peer reviews AND came up with a lesson plan, all since 2 pm, and including a break for dinner and a break to look at dog photographs with my housemates, hahahaha. So I've been a beast, indeed, but I also just am like ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh because I have to shower and then hit the edits hard again. No sleep for the weary until Friday. So that starts the list off here...

After my dissertation, I dream of......

Sleeping for 8 hours. From a reasonable time, like 1 am until 9. Yeah, that's reasonable.

I want to play my guitar until my fingers bleed. I want to learn how to play Gotye's "Someone that I Used to Know" and I want to finish learning Neko Case's "This Tornado Loves You" and I want to write a new song or two and I want to sit on the back porch and play and flip off frat boys that whoop at me, but they can't see because of our fence.

I want to run in Hendrick's Park and on the bike trails by the river. No more of these crappy 2 mile runs squeezed in between assignments.

Baking! I want to bake some real #*$%, like a cheesecake or something. Yeahhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Cleaning my room.

Doing laundry. I seriously considered buying some underwear this week because it would be faster than washing my clothes.

Bringing all my library books back to the library. Well, not 'til after the defense. But that will be a glorious day. Chitihra did it using the bike trailer because she had so many books, and I think that would be a classy way to go. I hope someone documents that shit.

WRITE SOME POEMS!!!!!!!!!!! No, I want to have the mofo poetry reading Chitty and Lisa and I dreamed up last quarter. I wanna do it. I want to share art with people!!!!!!!

I want to dance at the house, just 4 or 5 housemates, the party light going like crazy, maybe some bike lights too for good effect, a bottle of wine open on the table, so familiar and happy and wild and uncontained.

Call everyone in my family and then probably a bunch of friends, because I feel like a really overly cybernetic monk these days.

I want to go to GLAM and dance until 3 am and then eat pizza dumplings and then bike home in the warm summer night. I intend to wear gratuitous amounts of eyeliner, as well as the turquoise eyeshadow and the bright red lipstick I bought as coping mechanisms. Yes, I costume while writing. Speaking of which.....

Anne Lamott taught me to be gentle to my lonelinesses, and I got hella lonely spending 10, 12, 15 hours a day holed up in my room making footnotes and reading books. So I started documenting the crazy costumes I made up to entertain myself. So keep your eyes peeled for an LJ post that documents the stages of madness that come out of dissertating!

[I am now drinking cabernet out of a pint glass. This is how I got drunk the first time ever in my life, when I was in Scotland, at a cast party, after I was in a production of "Much Ado About Nothing." This resulted in Kathryn having to walk me home through the streets of Aberdeen, while I shouted Shakespeare lines at the sky and yelled, "Raccooooooooon!" repeatedly, as I kept thinking I saw raccoons in dumpsters. Ah, the memories.]

I want to go to Sam Bond's for bluegrass night as often as possible, because most of my favorite favorite memories from Eugene involve biking to and from Sam Bond's on warmish summer nights and swaying to bluegrass while among an ever-changing circle of friends. 

[Now I feel sad. It is hard, this getting ready to leave a town after 6 years business.]

I am going to just go crazy and buy myself a new summer dress, though I clearly don't need one.

Throwing frisbees for hours with friends. Already been doing that, but why stop? I want to play ultimate. I want to go out with C and Laura and throw and throw until we hit that sweet spot, and it's like I'm 19 again and grinning while guys stop to watch how far I can drive a frisbee when I'm in the zone.

Maybe I'll play my fiddle for the first time in years. I want to do creative things, can you tell???

Write more Girls Like Giants blogposts!  Yes yes yes yes yes. I don't know what exactly I want to write about yet, but there will be time to watch TV and movies and music videos and feel excited about them. Maybe Kimbra. She's intriguing me lately.

Get a lot of music to get ready for a life without fast streaming Internet. My music tastes have changed significantly in grad school, but I've been addicted to Youtube and Grooveshark, sooooooooooo.........

Write letters to many friends that are long-suffering, long-deserving recipients. Paul, Liz, Rust-a-move..........

Have a big blow-out party at the co-op.

Make a Dr. Sextron costume. For after the defense. And find some excuse to wear it, whatever it turns out to be.  That's the nickname that C? Eve? one of the co-opers jokingly bestowed upon me. It has become a stand-by, and you only become a real Dr. Sextron once in a lifetime, so carpe freakin' diem.

Go for spontaneous walks with friends because I have time.

Go to the David Minor theatre or the Bijou by myself. I like going to movies by myself. It's odd, I suppose, but I love it, and I can't wait.

Hike at Pisgah. Maybe go up Spencer's Butte for old times' sake.

Barbecue and drink beer on the back porch of the co-op and spend a whole day not having one thing that I'm supposed to do.

Have long "life death birth infinity" conversations with friends. My heart is already splitting along all its fault-lines, anticipating separation, and it's been harder than ever to tear myself away from friends. I want to stay up all night talking about everything - school, politics, house problems, romance, broken hearts, the past, hilarity, old hurts, hopes and dreams, silly videos, scary moments, our fears, our dreams. My heart is so hungry for this connection again, and I can't even express how freaking BLESSED I feel that there are so many friends that I can just fall into this easy groove with again as soon as I come out from my isolation. What a rich life! [/end cheeseball exclamations that sound like floral greeting cards].

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Okay. Now for the working. Just three and a half more days of this relentless grind and I will be in a space I can't even remember, a space without the hovercraft cloud of this dissertation.

remiss in my writings again...but I have no indignation left with which to flog myself.  Too tired and full of half-baked feelings. About two weeks of diss revisions to go, so of course I'm trying to re-write the entire first chapter. Why make it easy?

All this journal-ing has helped me to hold it together somewhat. That is, I've remained marginally self-aware, which is both painful and life-giving. I think the best way to dissertate would be to amputate the feeling parts of your brain, just become an automaton that makes correctly formatted footnotes and processes massive academic tomes into concise sentences of wonder. But I'll take my baggy sentences and my flailing about and the constant ache in my brain (it's like a foot asleep, asking why? why are the vital bits of our life getting no blood?) if it means that I can keep the ol' soul-heart beating just beneath the madness.

Do you see what this madness is doing to my sentences?

Anyway, with all this self-awareness lately, I've noticed a new catch-22 these days. When I'm in a bad mood, I have such a hard time getting started on my revisions. But nothing will improve my mood except just getting down to it and working. I troll Facebook like a lifeboat around the Titanic, searching the impossible sea for survivors, though instead I'm hoping to find the funny video, witty one-liner, or overlooked post from a friend that will make me feel alive for a few seconds, shaken by laughter before I plunge back into the rhythm of self-doubt and narcissism that is writing at this point in my life. I listen mournfully to every song and wonder if I'm dead inside. I try to clean my desk, fail, and continue to oscillate between incredible self-loathing (I can't even keep pairs of socks together and put them in a drawer?) and maddening grandiloquence (who has time for the banalities of clothing the body when there are such great thoughts to be thought? I AM WRITER).

Anne Lamott remains the wisest ever about writing...so, as usual, you have to put up with more of her thoughts. For my sanity, I just needed to type out whole chunks of Bird by Bird. Particularly my favorite chapter ever, "Radio Station KFKD."

"If you are not careful, station KFKD will play in your head twenty-four hours a day, nonstop, in stereo. Out of the right speaker in your inner ear will come the endless stream of self-aggrandizement, the recitation of one's specialness, of how much more open and gifted and brilliant and knowing and misunderstood and humble one is. Out of the left speaker will be the rap songs of self-loathing, the lists of all the things one doesn't do well, of all the mistakes one has made today and over an entire lifetime, the doubt, the assertion that everything that one touches turns to shit, that one doesn't do relationships well, that one is in every way a fraud, incapable of selfless love, that one has no talent or insight, and on and on and on."

"So. You sit down to work at nine in the morning, and do the prayer or the small-animal sacrifice or whatever, and then breathe for a moment, and try to focus on where your characters are [or why the hell post-structuralism has anything to do with environmentalism, if you're me], only to discover that your mind has begun to wander just a little. Typically, you may find yourself wondering how some really awful writer you know is doing, and why he is doing so much better than you, and what it will be like to be on David Letterman's show, and whether he will mock you or laugh at all your jokes and let you be his new best friend, and what you should eat for lunch, and what it would feel like for your hair to be on fire or for someone--like a critic [or a committee member] or something--to stick a sharp object in your eye. Not to worry. Gently bring your mind back to your work."

"I'm sorry. I wish there was a sharper, slicker way to do this, but this seems to be the only solution."

***
OKAY, this is so therapeutic, and such a nice change from worrying about whether the grad school will let me talk about commercials or if I need some form in triplicate to do that...that I'm going to quote some more from the next chapter, "Jealousy."

"Of all the voice you'll hear on KFKD, the most difficult to subdue may be that of jealousy. Jealousy is such a direct attack on whatever measure of confident you've been able to muster. But if you write, you are probably going to have to deal with it, because some wonderful, dazzling successes are going to happen for some of the most awful, angry, undeserving writers you know--people who are, in other words, not you."

"You are going to feel awful beyond words. You are going to have a number of days in a row where you hate everyone and don't believe in anything. If you do know the author whose turn it is, he or she will inevitably say that it will be your turn next, which is what the bride always says to you at each successive wedding, while you grow older and more decayed. It can wreak just the tiniest bit of havoc with your self-esteem to find that you are hoping for small bad things to happen to this friend--for, say, her head to blow up [. . .] You get all caught up in such fantasies because you feel, once again, like the kid outside the candy-store window, and you believe that this friend, this friend whom you now hate, has all the candy. You believe that success is bringing this friend inordinate joy and serenity and security and that her days are easier."

***
Oh Anne Lamott, you funny wonderful person. I hope someday in my life I get a chance to thank you for the way that your many books have helped me work my way, hand over hand, down the tenuous rope of grad school. I was having SUCH a grump-night, and finally settled into my work and felt reasonably frumpy-but-functional, and now just these chapters have me lit up with light again. As she says, "I started getting my sense of humor back" and this, this is that life that seems so bloodless lately, all my zombie emotions. Hmmm, I'm like the opposite of a zombie. All that's left alive of me is my brain...

To all you out there sludging your way through the end of your degrees, this one's to you.  Celebration is right around the corner. And I'll celebrate it this weekend - first with Passover with friends (and some Good Friday reflection on my own) and then with Easter on Sunday. Divine life...it's coming.

i felt much better about my simmering resentment and occasional boil-overs of rage today when i considered just how much #*$% went down in this past term. no wonder i'm so grumpy about term starting again on monday! not all of the events are fit for public consumption, but here's a sampling of some of the crazy that happened this term in my personal life and in the general life of the communities i inhabit (particularly grad school and the co-op)

*our rat infestation got so bad we had to have a 4 hour emergency meeting to strategize on how to keep housemates from moving out. we finally decided to use kill traps on rats and hire a poison-free contractor, but not before much yelling, crying, and wringing of hands.

*before that, there were trashcans lined with peanut butter in our kitchen. they were full of water, and there were these little spinning beer can bridges over them to try and get the rats to fall in and drown. we also had to add an official rat catcher position to our job lottery.

*we had a big house debate about keeping chickens, since their feed attracts rats; we ended up getting rid of them after much roundabout discussion.

*our roof continued to leak so badly that our bathroom floor became a slippery death-trap

*our downstairs toilet broke two different times, both because of a spindle that was accidentally flushed down and effed up the plumbing. the bathroom smelled like mold, rotting poo, and old urine for weeks.

*we passed around two separate death colds, one of which hit us all with fevers; the other gave us all chest colds.

*my back went out again and i could barely walk for 3 days. of course it was during finals week.

*also during finals week, my computer just STOPPED TURNING ON. this meant that my faulkner draft couldn't get turned in on time. still hasn't been turned in, though the computer is now back.

*my students had the usual horrible time, but i had 40 of them. there were deaths, divorces, custody battles, and mission trips. there were huge athletic events. it was a scheduling nightmare, and for the first time ever, i flaked on meeting with students.

*i went to MLA in seattle, was totally stressed about my job prospects, and had no interviews. i did have some fights and intense discussions with friends.

*everyone in my program was applying to jobs and we mostly got a steady string of rejection letters, saying things like, "thanks. you're awesome. 300-900 people applied to this position. try again, okay?

*i drove down to southern oregon in the midst of incredible sleet and wind. i got offered a job and had to decide if i was going to take it or not, which meant deciding how i felt about being the only single person in a super-small community. this also meant i had to rent a car, borrow chains, get driving directions, pack, and try to figure out how to get back in time to teach on monday. i had to facilitate a meeting right when i got home.

*we had a snow day at oregon. rainy, wet, heavy snow that totally soaked everything. branches were down all over the town. finals were cancelled. all hell broke loose.

*i wrote two chapters. together, unrevised, that's a page count of 130. oh, and many pages were cut before those rough drafts were handed in.

*two of my housemates got hurt ice-skating, so there was much schedule re-arranging and trying to help them get where they could go. aka, driving a prius and trying to figure out the robot car.

*bruce the dog had to have surgery, which meant days of worrying about his infected IV injection site and trying to walk him while he was on massive drugs.

Okay. It's been a crazy, crazy term. I can only hope spring is a little less intense...Though with a dissertation defense on the way, I'm not too hopeful...

today i am angry. it is friday; spring break is almost over; and i'm still working on the chapter i was supposed to turn in before spring break. everything is pissing me off. it's raining and raining. everyone in the house is taking up so much space, and i want everyone to go away again. my mom called and said, "i hear something in your voice. it's like you don't want to cry or drink but you might want to beat someone up.' that is exactly right. i'm seething inside. i'm eating pizza pringles and wearing soaking wet pants. i have no patience left, and i think everyone is mostly a jerk, except a few people, who are my friends, and i don't know how the hell they put up with me. i'm like a big lumbering dinosaur of angry and RAWWWWWWWWWWWWWR i want to be in my cave typing my dissertation with my little T-rex arms, not having to be patient and kind and open and giving and broken-hearted and sweet and understanding and long-enduring and patient did i mention patient did i mention how i want to just lay in the sun and eat something better than pizza doritos and have maybe a margarita and maybe my guitar and just sing and feel blowing winds no more of this hunkered down waiting crap. unless i get to be an extinct carnivore. those are my terms.

several times lately, i've been startled by catching a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror out of the corner of my eyes. and i think what i've been feeling has been a sudden of surge of tenderness - surprised tenderness. it's like that feeling when you recognize a friend across a room. or that feeling - perhaps you know the one - where you recognize that you're falling in love with someone, but not because of any big grand thing; you recognize the tenderness over something small - for me, it often seems to be i catch myself looking at the way a man's hair falls at the back of his neck, and i catch myself feeling tenderness for him. that's about how i've felt, brushing my teeth and flipping through a ratty paperback, suddenly catching eyes with myself in the mirror. a mix of recognition, tenderness, pride, contentment, surprise, almost shyness.

i think part of what it is involves a recent unfamiliarity. i wrestle with vanity as much as the next girl, and especially in the past few years, i've learned to manage my appearance as a way of soothing and corralling the emotions running rampant underneath. sometimes such soothing is a form of damage control: appropriate brown eyeshadow and mascara to hide the dark circles, to add some light to tired eyes, to layer some confidence over what would be furtive and hiding. often, for me, such appearance control involves a kind of emotional drag: turquoise eyeshadow for non-existent fierceness; too much eyeliner and punked out pants to create some sass. but for the past few days, i've been heavy in writing mode. my lower back is completely out from the number of hours i've spent at my desk. i produced and revised a 70 page chapter draft in the past two weeks; all the revisions got done in the past two days. i haven't been looking at myself.

trust me. it's not a sudden form of self-acceptance. i think it's just that i've worn myself out, using up all my scorn on my words. what an idiot! what ugly sentences! i think all day. so that when i catch a glimpse of myself, i'm such a surprise. so young. so human. so me and yet...so tired. the tenderness. so worn and weary. the kindness, the gentleness. i was nothing much to look at tonight - nose rubbed raw from my recent cold; dark circles from last night's 4 spotty hours of sleep; hunched over back that went out starting with ultimate and ending with my desk marathon; hair limp and tied back with a bandanna from yet another shower steaming out the chest. and yet...so welcoming to see my face, looking back at me surprised, like when you startle a loved one (sister; parent; pet; lover) in a moment of naked watching, their eyes absorbed and happy but suddenly catching yours. and just then, tenderness feels like such a welcome, a short hello!, just a little wave before you're back at the teeth and the novel, ticking off things you have to do tomorrow, but feeling a little warm inside to have brushed up against a genuine thing for a minute.

if this lenten journal project were boiled down to two themes, they would be 1) it's really hard to discipline yourself to do something everyday. like, teethbrushing is fairly optional when you're in dissertation land, right? and thus journaling is like brushing or pulling teeth - low priority most of the time. 2) grace comes when you aren't looking for it, when you least expect it. in fact, don't expect it. if you expect it, you will become sullen and self-righteous, thinking, "well, when is that grace coming, hummmm?  i'm waiting." whereas often, it's the very act of buckling, surrendering, throwing up your hands, getting otherwise absorbed that makes you open and patient and soft enough to receive the grace that's been sneaking up on you all along.

i mean, today did not have much going for it. i was up until 4 writing. granted, i got my last full chapter drafted - though it certainly is a lamottean shitty first draft, 69 pages of glorious crazy about william faulkner that ends with question marks trailing into a blank page.  i tried to get up at 10, but c'mon. i've been battling a chest cold all week, so 10 am felt like a slow,constant wheeze and a tiny laser burning through my right sinus. up by 11, but it took serious bribes of latte indulgence to get myself out the door to print up the draft, pick up some more editing pens, and head to the pharmacy. pharmacy got delayed so i could eat cold pasta out of a tupperware. the air was almost icy and rain was coming down at every angle imaginable; the most eloquently worded weather alert that my sister sent me said, "MUCH IS UNCERTAIN AT THIS TIME CONCERNING THE SNOW LEVEL... AS THERE WILL BE A VERY TIGHT GRADIENT BETWEEN THE WARM AND COLD AIR... AND THIS WILL MAKE ALL THE DIFFERENCE IN THE SENSIBLE WEATHER FORECAST."  Thanks, weather.com. It seemed somehow fitting for my life too, all gray and uncertain - cold and wet, certainly, but who knew how cold and wet? Even a latte couldn't kick my brain into high gear; there were 40 essays sitting untouched on my desk, 40 exams looming at week's end, and 69 pages of 3 am crazy to try and corral. Then the pharmacy called and my prescription was finally ready. Thanks to the insurance company, I've only been able to get about 10 days worth of test strips at a time. Y'know, you conservatives that think we're all just crazed drug dealers - I certainly would love to sell my test strips on the black market. You can get really high of microscopic blood loss. So, sigh, it was time to saddle up and bike the 2 miles out to the pharmacy, which is usually fun. Except when "MUCH IS UNCERTAIN" and there is cold air and rain. And a chest cold.

Oh, and did I mention that in spite of my constant hack and wheeze, I played in my first ultimate game of the season on Sunday? The problem is that MUCH IS UNCERTAIN about my aging body right now too, and it's stuck between the warm and cold air of youthful resilience and aging achiness. My legendary Sexton Competitiveness means that when I'm playing sports, I produce sufficient adrenaline to cover any awareness of pain. Seriously. My blood sugar went through the roof last game, which should have been a good sign of how much adrenaline was pumping. But yeah. Feel very little pain. That's how I've played 30 minutes of soccer on a sprained ankle, finished a track season on a torn calf muscle. That's how I climb at all. And that's why I managed to catch two passes by throwing myself to my knees. The second catch was pretty epic - down to the knees for the catch, hop back to the feet to keep going without a single pause. Sure, I botched the pass due to cold hands, but I looked epic. Monday morning I woke and could hardly walk. Today was even worse. My old hip rotator cuff thingy - the one I had to get PT for in high school - was aching like a mofo; my back was twinging ominously; and every time I tried to step over the slowly accumulating pile of laundry and library books on my floor, I teetered over onto my bed as my groin muscles yelled in protest. This bike ride was going to seriously suck.

I got about a half a mile toward the pharmacy, huddled in my rain gear, before my thighs started seriously burning. When did I get this old? I wondered. I usually make up for the shabby shape of my bicycle by riding as fast as I possibly can. Which is pretty fast. By today was all moaning and limping and groans. No waywas I going to hit my normal cruising speed. And for a minute I was snarly and frustrated and wet and mean. Why did everything have to be so bad? I looked sullenly at my rust-trap of a bike, thinking for a minute of how nice it would feel to be coasting along on a real road bike that fit me, knees not knocking into my chest, old deraileur cable not scraping along the ground, chain not grinding against a warped frame. I felt shabby and pathetic and tired and worn. And that was when grace broke through.

See, for the past week, I've done a lot of apologizing for my bike. I know. It's a wreck. I got it for 80 dollars from a retired bike mechanic on craiglist when I first moved here; it didn't really fit me, but I didn't know that yet. It was cheap but not stolen, unlike many of the craiglist bikes. And I liked its eclectic story - the way he'd fitted really old pedals and some weird handlebars onto it, making something that would run out of scraps and leftovers. "Nobody's gonna steal that," he warned me. But I loved it with the fierce love I often save for broken things. It was, I would discover, a terrible misfit in a town of sleek and shiny bicycles - the colorfully rimmed fixies of the hipsters; the shiny roadbikes with the dropped down handlebars and saddle bags of the serious bikers; even the daisy decked cruisers with fresh paint of the new sorority girls about town. And it went downhill fast. The back rack fell off after a few weeks. I crashed it into a bridge rail in a fit of pure absent-mindedness: I was thinking about a book and steered right into the rail. That crash warped the frame and snapped a piece off the front deraileur. I tried to learn to fix it by going to the Survival Center on campus; but while I eventually managed to learn to change brake cables, switch out brake pads, change a tire tube, and adjust my back deraileur, I couldn't muster the patience to replace the front one. The guy I'd bought it from had offered to fix things for free, but he was in Springfield, and no way was I trekking back out there. I duct-taped the old deraileur cable to the frame, lubed up the chain so it didn't squeak too bad, and adjusted the back deraileur so that the chain didn't catch too much on the poor, warped frame. And I continued to bike about town, mostly oblivious to my bike's marginal functionality. Until, in the last two weeks, a series of snide comments about my bicycle caught me off guard. Two separate people remarked, "I'm surprised that thing runs." And I felt ashamed - shabby; stupid. How had I not seen what bad shape my bike was in? It was the same sense of shame that crashed down on me when my girlfriends were talking about their eyebrow hygiene routines the other night - the startling realization that there was something you hadn't even known to worry about. Here I had been, happily gallumphing through life with untamed eyebrows and an embarrassingly warped bicycle frame. Had everyone been pointing and staring, whispering, huddling around and making notes on their Life Report Cards?

But last night, leaving the brewery with the Mesa Verde guys after a planning dinner, I made an off-handed apology for my bike as the guys pulled their shinier, sleeker bikes from the rack. My friend Taylor shrugged. "Everyone needs a beater bike to take around town," he said, looking at it. We laughed at the duct-taped and rusting cable, but then he said, "Hey, is that a Bridgestone frame?" "Yeah," I answered. "Those are cult classics!" he said. "And what cool old pedals. Man, there are way worse things to ride." As he darted off into the night and as I strapped my lights on (one held together with duct tape, the other borrowed from a friend) I had the familiar swelling of self-protectiveness and sassiness. Sure, my bike was a shabby mess. But I was making do, right? Sometimes my bike made me feel ashamed because it seemed to point to how bad I was at taking care of myself: when I broke the cross-chest strap on my Timbuk2 bag, I tied my bag on for almost a year before ordering the cheap replacement piece; I've been wearing leaky boots all winter because I just can't bear to get the zipper on my waterproof ones fixed; hell, I used the crapped out, helicopter roaring, Ubuntu-bearing 2002 laptop for my grad work for years because I just couldn't be bothered to buy a new computer. My bike seemed the same. It was a rusty beater, the cracked flip phone in the world of smartphones, the duct-taped covered Discman in the world of iPods. But just as my shabby electronics point to my laziness, they also point to my frugality and self-sufficiency. Hadn't I managed to keep this bike limping along, just me and some friends, a little help from the bike program, a lot of swearing and wrenchwork and patch kits? Hadn't I had functional if not stylish transportation for 6 years in Eugene, with probably less than 200 dollars total investment? Yeah I had!

I felt ferocious biking home last night, and I felt protective biking along today. Maybe I had a crooked bike frame. Maybe I had a chest cold and an aching hip and 6 hours of sleep. Maybe I was weeks behind on my dissertation and afraid, still plagued by bouts of self-doubt and loneliness and despair. So what? I was limping along, making do with the rusty bits, and fast or slow, squeaky chain or not, I was going to finish this PhD and get to the goddamn pharmacy and survive until June. I cranked the gears loose, started biking slow and light, and suddenly felt devilishly happy in the pouring rain. There were ducks in the puddles. There was a wet, gritty patch spreading up my butt because I was too lazy to put fender on my bike. My chest made a weird wheezing noise when I coughed. My hip ached like broken glass. But I was happily humming reggaeton to myself, on the way to the pharmacy. I decided to buy myself some turquoise eye shadow, to spend the rest of the day in my spandex running tights, and to eat too much ice cream when I got home, throat phlegm be damned. And I was inexplicably, peacefully, mischievously happy.

i fell off the wagon. i got a terrible, terrible chest cold. i'm on the mend, i think - played 80 minutes of ultimate today and only coughed up 1/2 a lung. don't worry, mom. i did my inhaler first.

hope to be back to writing for realz tomorrow.

m

I'm hiding in my room, feeling sheepish today. Sometimes it really would be better just not to know what you said or did the night before...

Last night was the English department's quarterly wine and cheese reception...which, for the past year, has always turned in to some kind of maudlin shit-show for me. Late quarter sleep deprivation + free department wine + a room full of anxious, shouting graduate students = emotional melodrama. Sigh. I don't know what it is about these evenings that triggers such extremes. Last night, I was feeling very nostalgic and old, looking around the room and recognizing so few people. I told my friend Chelsea, over and over again, that I had become one of those advanced graduate students I swore I'd never be - one who never went out with classmates, who didn't know any of the underclassmen. And after a week of poor sleep, many student meetings, and irregular eating and exercise habits, I got tipsy pretty quickly. I went home, went out with my housemates, and somehow ended up making sentimental declarations about love and the past, saying melodramatic things that I don't even really believe. Classy.

I don't know why I'm so upset about last night. It's not like I did anything destructive or dangerous. It's not like I hurt anyone's feelings. It's not like I should even be legitimately embarrassed - the one person to whom I was making these dramatic declarations was one of my really good friends and she just thought it was funny. I think part of why I'm upset is the loss of control such a night entails. And part of that fear about losing control involves a sudden, uncomfortable clarity in how I see myself. I've been feeling pretty good about myself lately, all things considered. Specifically, I've been proud that I'm doing all right. Not thriving, but scraping by, and managing to do it with some grace and class, despite the looming dissertation deadlines, the constant house drama, the constant illnesses, and the ever-present financial burdens of grad school. I've managed to stay half in shape. I've managed to sleep mostly sometimes almost enough. I sleep in too late but I get my work done. And last night, suddenly the walls came down and the cracks showed and I realized maybe I'm not doing as all right as I thought. Maybe what I thought was graceful was always a little tentative. I was dancing on cracking ice and I didn't even know it, but the audience had bated breath as I waltzed and twirled. Because apparently inside of me, pushing up against the calm and the sense of competency and the excitement about my work was also this keening sadness, some sadness that wasn't even about lost love or longing but about something else, some fear or sadness or need, and it's so shameful when such sadness bursts to the surface for everyone to see.

I also feel frustrated with myself, because why do I care so much? Yesterday I was writing empowering feminist statements about letting our walls down and accepting each other, flaws and all, and then today I wake up to think about how I hate my flaws so much, how I wish those walls had stayed up last night, how I don't want people to see the sadness and fear and longing inside of me, in whatever form it takes. I want to be cool and collected, out on the town, triumphantly marching towards a PhD, a job, and a new home. I don't want to be crying in my cup about the past. I don't want to be vulnerable and insecure. And dammit, no matter how much talk I talk about being emotionally vulnerable, it's so hard to keep those walls down! Jim, a prof at the OE, once said "It's a kind of picking-your-cross-up-daily-thing if you want to be deeply connected." Yes. That's what I'm seeing. I do want to be deeply connected - to myself and to people around me. I want emotional honesty, with myself and with other people. And as soon as I'm coasting along, thinking that "I'm nailing it! I'm writing in my journal everyday! I'm really getting to know myself!", then somehow this sneaky little self-deception will start creeping in too, and suddenly it's Friday night and I'm making vulnerable declarations that are springing from some stress I didn't even know was still afoot. I care so much because I thought I was doing okay, and really, I wasn't.. God, it's a putting-your-walls-down-daily-thing to really love and accept yourself, too, because I'm so full of foibles and I get so frustrated with myself sometimes...and I would never hate my friend or think she was pathetic, no matter how dramatic and embarrassing she had been on a Friday night at the end of the most life-changing, demanding quarter she had yet experienced in school. So how do I be kind to myself, in my clumsiness and uncouth dramatics? How do I treat myself with grace when I'm at my least graceful?

Help me, Anne Lamott. You're my only hope....

In her essay "Grace," Anne Lamott quotes Auden: "I know nothing, except what everyone knows--if there when Grace dances, I should dance." She goes on to explain, "I understand that Auden meant grace in the theological sense, meant it as the force that infuses our lives and keeps letting us off the hook. It is unearned love--the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It's the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there." This is a helpful start.

In this essay, Lamott tells the story of the time she was on-stage with Grace Paley and her attempt to improvise a natural conversation with Paley fell terribly flat. How, she asks, can she be kind to herself and keep going when her work with this lifelong idol of hers went so embarrassingly awry? Afterwards, she says of her panicky fear, "my fear of failure had been lifelong and deep. If you are what you do [. . .] and you do poorly, what then? It's over; you're wiped out. All those prophecies you heard in the dark have come true, and people can see the real you, see what a schmendrick you are, what a fraud. Alone in my hotel room later that night, I felt stricken and lurky and dark, a wallflower at the vampire's ball."  But from this fear, she discovers grace: "I remembered something one of my priest friends had said once, that grace is having a commitment to--or at least an acceptance of--being ineffective and foolish. That our bottled charm is the main roadblock to drinking that clear cool glass of love. I remembered what Grace's stories were all about: self-forgiveness, and taking care of one another [. . .] I do not at all understand the mystery of grace--only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us."

Even typing those lines has made me feel better. I feel so blessed and afraid, because I have an amazing job that I'm going to be starting next year and I am trying to be worthy of it. Then I have to remember that I can't be worthy of it - that what made me admire the professors who did this job in the past so greatly was the way that many of them operated from a real sense of humility and grace. They were all trying to accept who they were, to stop battling against themselves, to meet themselves where they were. And I need to keep trying to do that too, and it's more necessary than ever on the days when I'm doing poorly, when I'm not being a great role model or student or teacher or friend. If there's one thing we need to model more in the world, it's grace and forgiveness, and I damn well better start trying to act it out towards myself, for doing little things like being foolishly tired and melodramatic on a Friday night, with a close friend who doesn't think badly of me no matter what.

As Anne Lamott concludes, "I don't know why life isn't constructed to be seamless and safe, why we make such glaring mistakes, things fall so short of our expectations, and our hearts get broken and our kids do scary things and our parents get old and don't remember to put pants on before they go out for a stroll. I don't know why it's not more like it is in the movies, why things don't come out neatly and lessons can't be learned when you're in the mood for learning them, why love and grace often come in such motley packaging." But they do. And so maybe we have to accept our own motley packaging too, and be grateful when grace and love and goodness shine through our clumsiness and fear and trying so hard.

Sometimes, what I find inspiring are my friends. I've been writing on a blog with some colleagues and friends throughout the year, and they are so great and wonderful. Writing for Girls Like Giants has reminded me of why argumentative analysis is fun and important cultural work.

Today, my post points to my friend Sarah's recent, personal, and thoughtful take on girly femininity. I wrote such a long comment to her, and it touches on so many of the questions of identity and gender that permeate this journal, that I thought I'd just point you over there to read her words and mine.

Last night, tossing and turning with my usual bout of insomnia, I suddenly had one of those rare moments of overwhelming gratitude that just slides through your normal perception and shakes everything up. I was thinking about my students, and the hard work they've been doing to write amazing environmental literature papers - so excited to see them thinking about how a cultural tradition has shaped their aesthetic and political responses to the environment, and so excited to see them questioning and challenging their gut-level responses about how nature is pure or non-human or sacred or vicious or any of a dozen reductions that get tossed around all the time. I was thinking about the many good friends I have, and about our fun dinners, and pouring beer into giant cambro containers while pretending to milk cows, and scheming up ways to use fake blood to outprank our housemates and students, and about dancing in the kitchen with the overhead lights off and the bike lights going like a dance floor. And I felt so suddenly overwhelmed, just so amazed, just so awed by the people I get to know, to laugh with, to joke with, to work with.

It's a hard feeling to hold onto, and as I was biking out to the pharmacy today, I was thinking about it - that feeling, the feeling of gratitude, and how it's based on receiving rather than having. That is, I was trying to think of words that expressed the different attitudes and orientations within ourselves that we can cultivate towards relationships and opportunities and material things. It's my way of continuing to chew on the idea of loving with an open hand rather than a closed fist, that idea from "Learning to Pray" that continues to haunt me and challenge me and guide me. When I think about having, it's a closed-fist kind of need. It's greedy, and I don't say that in a reductive way of like, oh, you greedy American. It's...deeper and sadder than that. Greedy isn't just the desire for materialist accumulation, but about need, about loneliness and fear and sadness that goes so deep that you want to cling. You want to push everything you can down your own throat in hopes of capturing something more real, more earnest. You cling to bad relationships. You never rest, but throw yourself at every opportunity. You run from job to job, hobby to hobby, friendship to friendship, place to place, always looking for that one thing that will sedate the aching or feed the hunger or kill the pain or whatever metaphor you choose. It's a tightness wrapped around a hollowness, which is why a clenched fist is such a good metaphor for it. It's the feeling that I get when fear takes over me and I think about moving away up the mountain next year and being alone, when I think about whether I'm good enough or smart enough or kind enough or pretty enough and start frantically searching for some marker of my okay-ness. And the hard part is that the very act of thankfulness that we practice so often can just feed into this frightened hollowness. Thank you thank you thank you that I'm doing semi-okay. It's an unstable, unrooted gratitude. It's a gratitude propped up by happenstance, by luck, by good fortune, by those fleeting and rare alignments of the good things in life. It's fragile. It's stretched thin as water tension over the inevitable turbulence that will follow.

But receiving...that is loving with an open hand. That is the ability to be blown away with the goodness that you have, but also to recognize, acknowledge, and accept the inevitable loss of possession. This moment, this opportunity, this person, this home will not be mine forever. It's such a wild sadness that we fight off tooth and nail, but that really, is at the base of everything. It's one of those most basic Christian tenets that we get so sick of hearing and that loses its startling insight until suddenly we see it anew: we will lose everything. That's not a religious prophecy or an opinion. It's fact. We will die, and every person, home, thing, experience we've ever had will vanish like smoke. It makes you want to keen. It's such a devastating thing, mortality. It seems only natural that we would fight such a recognition. To know you are mortal is to know you will suffer, for loss is painful. The other option, besides suffering, is denial. Sometimes that denial is blithe - nope, we're married, and we have a house, and we have secure jobs, and thus we are okay. Loss will not come. Sometimes such denial is cruel - I do not love. I do not recognize what I have. I take what I can while I can and then move on when it's over. Real love, which is the same thing as real gratitude, I think, lives in the space between these attitudes. It recognizes the value of what is present and it accepts that one does not and cannot exert ownership over the present. One receives it. One receives friendship, romantic love, economic wealth, material abundance the way one receives a sunny day. With joy and gratitude. With celebration. This is a balanced kind of love, a love that cannot endure. Such love knows loss will come, in one way or another, and such love doesn't waste time in clinging or pining. Such love does grieve. Such love does hurt. But it's all the difference in the world between fighting against pain and accepting and enduring pain. Anyone with a chronic illness knows this - we spend so much energy fighting our pains that we generate more. We fight against our very natures, as bodies, as mortal creatures that lose. And that just saps our energy for celebration, joy, presentness, and gratitude. Mourning doesn't. Sure, you don't celebrate from within mourning. But mourning heals itself. Clinging is poison.

It's a hard place to stay, within that balance. I think so often of tango dancing. I've certainly had moments when I've had my center perfect while dancing, and then I can follow any lead, can dance amazing steps, can feel the music, and I feel beautiful and alive and powerful and so, so happy. But more often than not, such exhilaration lasts for one song, one set. Then there's a stumble over a foot, a loss of center, a tensing of muscles, a frantic attempt to recreate what was once effortless. I have these fleeting moments of intense joy, like today, biking home in the cold sun with my bag full of Cadbury Easter eggs, insulin, and a discount bottle of Johnnie Walker Black scotch. I felt so bountiful and alive, stealing a few moments to move my body in the sun and not write, not think, not worry. Back in my room, longing for a day in the sun that I can't have, I'm back to feeling slightly sullen and mournful. But I'm trying to at least become self-aware enough to spot the moments, flickering across the edge of my days like a bird darting through trees. Hey, I felt joy. It was real joy, real love, real gratitude, solid as a bird, a flash of the divine.

We're trading off. I wrote a lot today, but there's no one thing I find super inspiring to share. Just be inspired by me and my Scotch, hahahaha.