carpingtongue

In which the author experiences a glimmer of self-consciousness

2011-01-15T10:19:00.000-08:00

"Nietzsche’s ressentiment is not resentment, but resentment that has become internalized, in which the weak have rationalized their own weakness by inversely privileging it as morally superior to the strong."

(Nicholas Birns, "Ressentiment and Counter-Ressentiment: Nietzsche, Scheler, and the Reaction Against Equality," http://www.nietzschecircle.com/RessentimentMaster.pdf)

The rigors of law

2011-01-10T06:52:00.000-08:00

Yesterday morning I found an admittedly mean-spirited pleasure in reading an article in the Times about the woes of new lawyers. Since I have on several occasions considered and then rejected the idea of law school, even going as far as to register and pay for--but never actually take--the LSAT twice, I like to see that newbie lawyers are suffering. It suggests that my failure to make a decision may actually have been a wise choice in disguise. I have nothing against individual lawyers; I have met some who are brilliant, good people and others who are arrogant, ill-natured, and quite stupid. Still, for some reason, I find it vindicating (a word whose similarity to vindictive I am just now noting) to see the law profession stumble.

As it turns out, law schools, like graduate departments in the humanities are so arranged that, in order for the programs themselves to survive, they must lure in far more students than the future market for their services will support. Law schools, according to the Times, advertise inflated post-matriculation employment rates to make potential students believe that a law degree is a good investment. The tweaking of statistics has produced a veritable army of underemployed lawyers, battalions of temp and contract lawyers, many of whom only manage to earn $60k/year until after the first 10 or so years post-graduation. This, apparently, is insufficient to pay off law school debts and support young attorneys in the lifestyle they expect to attain by attending law school (i.e., purchasing $350,000 homes). The article does not ask us to pity the new graduates exactly. It points out the irresponsible tactics the law schools use to attract students as well as the irresponsible choices made by those students who allow themselves to be attracted.

In addition to my ugly delight in all of this, I was also more innocently interested in the young lawyers' plight because it resembles the experience of many who seek PhDs in the humanities. The article acknowledges--and I think this is important and perhaps the most interesting aspect of the problem to me--that even if the truth were presented to the potential law student in its starkest, most accurate terms, many of those applicants would ignore the dim prospects for success, or at least refuse to see that dimness as relevant to their individual situations, which I guess is the same thing. I know exactly how such unreasoning hope works because I experienced it myself in relation to academia. One source in the article refers to this brand of magical thinking as "exceptionalism," that is, the nearly unshakeable conviction that whatever the numbers say, whatever the science of probability illuminates about the chances of making law school pay (since that seems to be the goal), and whatever you witness through report and individual observation about the experiences of others, any individual poor sop will perceive her own personal chances as better, as bound to exceed the average. She will beat the curve. With hard work, persistence, and good letters of recommendation, she can be a partner, a corporate lawyer, a justice department lawyer. And why shouldn't she think that? Isn't such ambition as American as the McRib? You never succeed if you don't try. Tie your wagon to a star, or whatever.

Apparently, as the young man who headlines in the article reveals, the law degree is a reward in itself, so, even with underemployment and staggering debt, the holder of a JD can find some satisfaction merely in his or her lawyerhood. Or, put another way, regardless of whether one ever works as a lawyer, regardless of what kind of law one practices and to what end, regardless of how well or how honestly one practices the law, and regardless of whether one pays one's law school debts or just waits for other lawyers to engineer a bail-out--regardless of any of this, to be a lawyer simply is prestigious. So, maybe I made a mistake after all. It would seem that self satisfaction and the respect and admiration of others might in fact be achieved merely by earning a bachelor's degree and polishing off a two-year program of torts, patents, civil procedure, and remedial writing at any of thousands of fine law degree issuing institutions. Wonder what I did with that LSAT prep book?

Rich Trash

2011-01-10T06:47:00.000-08:00

Valerie Feigen, who co-owns the Edit boutique on Lexington Avenue — “a luxury shopping experience for women of distinction and style” — has hired Ms. Reich repeatedly over the past three years. “The perfect bag or a great pair of shoes can give you so much pleasure, but it can torture you when you don’t know where to put it,” Ms. Feigen said. “When your possessions are out of control, I think it’s very hard to be organized in general about your life. You don’t want your possessions to own you.” (Organize This! http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09)

Today, the Times brings us a new example of how the rich spend their spare cash: they pay a certain Prada-toting Ms. Reich (or another like her) $150/hr to tell them to throw out garbage bags full of their lightly used toys, clothes, appliances, and other possessions and to organize the rest of their expensive crap into pricey plastic boxes. This is how the rich stimulate the economy, how they create jobs. Ms. Reich's organizing services even help save the rich some money by exposing pilfering by their nannies whom they can then fire.

All of this seems mildly nauseating to me. Perhaps it shouldn't. After all, the rich earned their money and should be free to spend it as they wish, without the judgment of the less enterprising. Plus, such outlays are justified because they reduce stress. And with mountains of unneeded stuff comes a lot of stress. Ms. Reich points helpfully to the leveling character of stress: “It’s a high-end problem, but the stress is the same either way." Biochemically, maybe--and I would want to see some proof of that. But qualitatively, as experienced, all stress is not the same. I despair of the capacity of the rich to conceive of what stress means in the lives of many of the rest of us. Most of the middle class refuse to see the difference as well, because they want to share something with the rich, even if it's just the experience of "hardship." Finally, I wonder what Thoreau would think of Ms. Feigen's (inadvertent?) allusion to Walden in the last line above.

Fun in the Shower and other Ironic Delights

2010-09-02T20:06:00.000-07:00

Tuesday morning in the shower I was doing this thing I do. First I rub some bodywash all over my torso and arms, then I cross my arms and extend them straight out from my chest, so they form a squarish kind of circle. The idea is to create a large, round disk of soap inside the circle of my arms. I then blow downward on this sheet to form a giant bubble. Every so often a wobbly, misshapen bubble comes together for a split second before popping. I never try more than once. As soon as the sphere pops, which is always and immediately, I repress a twinge of disappointment, rinse off, and go about the desultory business of drying and dressing and acting like an adult. That’s where things were headed Tuesday. I blew down into the soapy sheet, the bubble blobbed into shape momentarily, and then it seemed to disappear in a blink. And, I guess I did blink, because when I put my arms down, there it was: an enormous, perfect, iridescent bubble hovering before me. Verily, a bubble as big as my flipping head. And it was there for an eternity of about 1.5 seconds. The rest of the day, whenever I thought of the bubble, which was often, it appeared to me such a gift that my heart would throb and my throat close. The only word to describe the feeling is delight, a pure shimmering delight.

When I told my parents about the bubble at dinner, my dad said, “hmm, maybe it was an angel,” with EXACTLY the kind of cynicism I would have felt if someone told me this story. And strangely, that ALSO filled me with delight.

Some of this and some of that

2010-08-30T14:48:00.000-07:00

It's hard for me to write these days. I think that in changing jobs I lost track of something central to how I've viewed myself for the past 14 years. I'm not sure what that is exactly, but in consequence, I feel newly confused or disoriented in transferring my thoughts into voice--sort of shaky about the voice I hear as I write. Or maybe, I can't think of anything worth filling out with that voice.

I am an undergraduate again and spend my days memorizing facts about the body. I take tests over drug actions and interactions, side effects and adverse effects, peaks and troughs. I learn to operate mechanical beds and tympanic membrane thermometers. I put things in lists and draw charts. I can't think of how to make this interesting.

When I was 12 or 13 and believed that my whole family existed solely to embarrass me, I held my father in the deepest contempt for his appreciation of self-help books. As a college student and then a graduate student, I lowered my eyelids and thought dismissive thoughts about pop-psychology. Now, before I sleep, I read David Burns or pop-Buddhism and try to charm the wrinkles from my brain by thinking about my breath. I wonder: is this getting old or getting dull?

In May, taking me completely by surprise, the Russian asked me for a divorce. He wants to start a family. He tells me that when he sees men with small children at the grocery store he feels pain. Also, my personality annoys him—deeply and in ways that his ESL status prevents him from expressing except obliquely in response to my probing. I suppose these are good reasons not to stay married. Who am I to say nay? I think about how he’d better hurry up and find someone to bear these children, these transmitters of Russian genes, and I wonder why I have no yearning when I see children in the grocery store. Mostly, when I see children I feel dread or irritation, especially if the children are not obviously connected to some nearby adult or are making a loud noise or one that threatens to become loud. The children I know are bright, piquant, and something like frenetic. They create an atmosphere that is exactly the opposite of the dim, dusty library aisles where I have experienced my fullest sense of content. I mean that entirely.

My day and "the like"

2010-06-09T20:29:00.000-07:00

At Kaleidoscope today with my mom, niece, and two nephews, ages 65 to 3, I made a mask, a crown, and a necklace. I ran from room to room, like the White Queen in Through the Looking-Glass, terrified a child would go lost. Later, I escaped to the bathroom to pose and make exasperated faces at myself in the mirror. I stayed longer than was seemly. Going home, my four-year-old niece told me that my g's don't turn up enough at the ends; my a's and e's are "crunched." At dinner, I ate a half a slab of ribs, threw my shoe at a crow with a broken wing, and banged on the fence with stick. Kaleidoscope = "a continually shifting pattern, scene, or the like." I am unexpectedly pleased by this phrase, "the like," and the possibility of being like something that is itself unfixed.

2010-06-07T19:32:00.000-07:00

Backyard Desmesne

I mowed down the violets in mid-April, and
Cut a swath through the daffodils as well—the blooms
Crisply brown—I pronounced their season finished.
I roared with ruinous glee over dandelions and sent clover
Flying, a burst of wet green, the smell of Neighborhood.
I was machined up, a disaster on legs, the lady and the law,
Ruler of all my backyard desmesne.

June 7, 2010

Reassurances

I sought attics and closets as a child and could often be found under a covered table or tucked behind a door. I hid in corners, under beds, and behind recliners—anywhere dark, snug, quiet, and out of view, as if. As if forgotten places could hold off the loud fading of Adult. As if I were looking for a maximum closeness, some limit or boundary that would batten me up, put a brake on the pulling apart and scattering of self into the world. And now, in rare minutes, in a quiet room at low light, I can still find some solid calm of lonely, a steady holding-it-together in my skin.

June 7, 2010

Read My New Essay

2010-03-06T10:30:00.000-08:00

http://www.revolvingfloor.com/

I have a new essay--on the topic "Blank Slate." The essay appears in the journal Revolving Floor, which I like to think of as the modern day cyberDial.

Plus, I like to think of myself as a modern day Margaret Fuller without the snakelike neck and weird gaze.

Also, the painting above is by George Inness, one of my favorite painters, a Swedenborgian enthusiast and transcendentalist from the mid nineteenth century. Of course.

Paterbulence, Key to Gravity, and Cellular Centrifugality

2009-09-09T18:35:00.000-07:00

Me: Dad, if you can turn that down and still hear it, would you please turn it down—if you can’t, nevermind.
Dad: [brusquely turns TV off]
Me: You didn’t have to turn it off.
Dad: Well, if I can’t hear it, there’s no point in having it on, and I can’t hear it with the volume down.
Me: I said not to turn it down if you couldn’t hear it.
[tense pause]
Dad: I didn’t think you’d mind the volume; you had it up the other night during Mystery.
Me: What are you talking about? What does that have to do with anything? You didn’t ask me to turn it down the other night. I don’t see what that has to do with anything.
Dad: I’m just saying, I didn’t complain about the volume during Mystery.
Me: I’m not complaining. I thought if you didn’t need the sound up, you might turn it down. If you need it up that loud, fine. It’s not that big of a deal.
Dad: Well, I turned it off; I didn’t make it a big deal. You’re the one that won’t let it go.
Me: [getting up to leave the room] I asked as nicely as I know how.
Dad: [eyes widening] I will NEVER watch TV up here again!

Imagine this conversation repeated in slightly different forms, 7-14 times per week, and you know one small pattern that orders my life. This is the Pattern of TV-induced Paterbulence.

Other patterns involve attraction and repulsion:

1. The Key to Gravity. Certain zones exert an unusual attraction over my keys. The closer I get to the front door of my parents' house, for instance, the stronger the pull of the earth's core on my keys. As soon as I lift my hand to the lock, gravity yanks the keys from my fingers and sucks them to the ground. Some days, on approaching the stoop, I simply throw the keys down first, an offering to physics, just to get the annoyance out of the way. In one notable variation on this pattern, once, as I rose to exit the passenger's seat in a car, my keys flung themselves from my lap directly into the sewer on a street in downtown Providence. The arc was difficult and precise. I could have practiced tossing my keyes toward that opening for weeks without hitting it.

2. Cellular Centrifugality. Whenever the Russian needs his cell phone, it is "at hand." The phone is not literally in his hand or pocket, which is what makes it so weird. But he has the phone "about" him somewhere. I don't know how this works. The phone rings and he brings it forth, somehow, from somewhere, by means of some magic. In contrast, I rarely ever have my cell phone. I almost never hear it when it rings, because the phone is usually far, far away. My cell phone lives a life independent of me in which it explores places I would never guess to look. I recently spent half a day questing after this cell phone. The Russian finally found it nestled in the pocket of a fluffy hot pink bathrobe, stuffed in a plastic tub atop a bunch of other plastic tubs, in a closed up, box-filled room in our disaster-zone, under-renovation house. I remember dragging out the robe that morning (Me, delighted: "Oh! here's my pink, fluffy robe!) and then, bored, shoving it back in the box, but I have no recollection of putting my phone in the pocket. Why would I do that? Most weeks I will lose the phone variously, in chairs, cars, restaurants, and most often and oddly, in my purse. Indeed, when the phone chemotaxies itself away from me by burrowing into the comparatively shallow depths of my purse, I can forget about laying hands on it for some time, even when I can see the phone light and hear the ring. The phone does this, I believe, as a kind of taunt. Getting the blinking phone to the mouth of the purse before a call goes to voicemail is a project by which I have been defeated on numerous occasions.

My Essay on Faculty Meetings

2009-09-02T14:42:00.000-07:00

A Meditation on Bureaucracy « Revolving Floor

Source: revolvingfloor.com
When I was a university professor, before I quit to go back to school to become a nurse, I found myself nervous and irritated with pretty much everyone and everything all the time. That may be partially ...

Iowa? Nebraska? South Dakota?

2009-08-14T15:38:00.000-07:00

WHY I WILL NO LONGER USE PAYPAL TO TRANSFER MONEY

2009-07-27T09:38:00.000-07:00

This morning I requested a transfer of funds to PayPal from a checking account that I am planning to close. The account is in a bank in another state five hours away. Using PayPal, I withdrew $60 from the account, which holds $90. I left $30 for unexpected-expected surprise fees that the bank is sure to levy for some thing or other before the account actually closes.

After requesting the PayPal transfer, I reviewed the “My Account” page in PayPal, where, to my dismay, the requested transfer appears not once but twice.

I waited a second. I refreshed the screen. Then, I checked the details.

Net amount: $60.00 USD
Date: Jul. 27, 2009
Time: 07:12:33 PDT

Net amount: $60.00 USD
Date: Jul. 27, 2009
Time: 07:12:34 PDT

No big mystery here. Finger spasm. Static electricity. I am sure there are other possibilities.

The real mystery is why PayPal has absolutely no feature in their program to prevent this from happening. How is it that PayPal’s transfer tool allows the entry of two unique transactions in one second without a security feature to question or confirm the separate entries? What if I had been transferring $2000 instead of $60?

Even more puzzling is why PayPal refuses to reverse the request. After wasting 2 or 3 minutes “chatting” with the virtual chat person “Sara” about absurdly unrelated issues, I called PayPal and spoke with a no more helpful but at least live representative who officiously informed me the deal was a done deal. Period.

Other than death there are no periods. None. Anything “done” can be “undone,” modified, or counteracted. The question is whether or not the company with which you are wrangling has instructed its customer service representatives to help customers resolve problems or to recite policy and procedure to them.

My assumption is that PayPal, like other businesses, wants on some level—at least rhetorically—to make its customers satisfied and happy, to create an experience that will leave their customers inclined to return and recommend the product to others. With that in mind, my advice to PayPal:

• the program needs a feature to prevent simple customer mechanical error from creating duplicate transfer requests,

OR, if that’s too tough for the programmers,

• the customer service people need to be trained/allowed to reverse accidental transfers or to apply a simultaneous credit to the bank account that will, in effect, cancel the order.

After beginning this blog, I was abandoned for 10 minutes on hold waiting to speak with a call-center supervisor. I hung up, calmed down, and called back. I spoke to another representative and then waited 15 minutes on hold to talk to her supervisor. Finally, the supervisor reconfirmed that the PayPal system is so inflexibly designed that nothing can be done to credit or reverse the transaction.

I will now get in my car, drive to a local bank where I have funds, and request an external transfer of $60 to the out-of-state bank. The transfer will cost me $12, which is better than the $30 overdraft fee I may otherwise incur from my bank when PayPal withdraws $120 from my underfunded account. Additionally, the whole fracas, initiated between the 33rd and 34th second in the twelfth minute of the seventh hour of this very morning has since cost me 2 hours and is bound to cost another.

While the spasm or electricity was probably mine, I am disappointed and annoyed that PayPal has done nothing to prevent the duplication from occurring in the first place. Moreover, in none of the conversations I had with PayPal representatives did I hear anything like an acknowledgment of the glitch or any whisper of interest in passing information about the problem along to the web techs. I am not even convinced that any of the customer service reps took the time to understand exactly what happened. I will stop obsessing over this now, but in closing, I wonder how many of the merchants with which PayPal does business also show such scant interest in their customers’ needs.

New dill, new lettuce

2009-05-18T15:55:00.000-07:00

My first harvest of the season! So tender, so sweet!

Brain Scrammblage

2009-05-16T22:20:00.000-07:00

I think I may need to see a neurologist. I have had two very frightening episodes of mental confusion in the past two days. I always have a sort of normal muddle-headedness and "too-much-on-my-mind" confusion, but this has been different. Yesterday, at the going-away party my supervisor threw for those of us who are leaving the department, I told my friend Melanie that I had had plans to drive with the Russian to deliver a car to a woman in Charleston, South Carolina, this past week. Oleg and I would have left Wednesday and then flown back today (Saturday). Melanie asked why I didn't go, and I couldn't remember--at all. Oleg went, but on Tuesday I decided to stay. That's all I could remember. I even lost a non-refundable plane ticket back from Charleston, so it wasn't as if I'd decided to not go to the post office or to not do laundry. Still, I could not remember WHY I decided not to go.

After Melanie asked the question, I paused for a really long time; I was frantically scanning, trying to recall what I had been thinking on Tuesday, what I told Oleg, but it was GONE--I had NO idea, I was completely blank. I idiotically said, "I don't remember." I was embarrassed. Then, this morning, it hit me that I didn't go because my department chair emailed Monday to say that she was planning our going-away party for Friday: if I had gone to SC, I would not have been able to attend the going-away party--the party that I was AT when Melanie asked me why I wasn't in Charleston.

Worse, today, I actually got LOST returning from a grocery store located a quarter mile from our house. This is a small, small town. I was not trying a new route--there is no other route--but merely driving the same four roads that I have travelled, how many? 6,000 times or something. Suddenly I didn't know where I was or where I was supposed to go next. I couldn't tell if I was on my own street or north of my house, or whether I had passed the alley or not yet reached it. The houses seemed familiar, which is good, since I drive that stretch of street EVERY DAY on the way to campus, but still I had no idea where I was in relation to my own house--I saw bunch of things that I "knew" but none of them made sense in relation to each other--I couldn't map anything. It took me another block and a couple turns to figure out that I had been one block past and one up from where I live. This is like walking out of your bathroom and realizing you don't remember how to get to your bedroom.

Before I figured out where I was, I got so scared my hands went numb. I thought, what do I do? should I pull over and wait a few minutes or just keep driving until something makes sense? I was ONE block from my f'ing house. I felt nauseated. Panic attack? stroke? brain tumor? residual effects of alien abduction? onset of acute stupidity? overdramatization of normal reaction to stress?

Patriotism in the Age of Torture

2009-05-14T11:54:00.001-07:00

Nothing has made me more wary of blind patriotism in the past several years than the debate over torture--especially the absurd justification of using torture to elicit information from suspected terrorists by the CIA and their contractors. The argument seems designed to answer concerns of utility and efficacy: torture efficiently protects thousands of US citizens at the cost of maltreating one evil anti-American.

The suggestion that torture is somehow warranted because it is efficacious bothers me enormously.

I doubt if fanatics ever consider themselves fanatical. I think of this when footage of Dick Cheney appears in the news. The notion that the US government's mission to protect America puts its actions outside or above the standards of international human rights is a fanatical idea. Why, I wonder, are sociopathic acts committed on behalf of my country more acceptable than similar acts committed on behalf of another country/people/belief system? The acts themselves are unconscionable: who's who seems secondary. Indeed, the implications of a reasoning that deems human rights violations okay if they save American lives seems as dangerous to US citizens as any nightmare a terrorist might dream up. What do we have left that is worth protecting if our own actions gut the country of any principles worthy of our allegiance?

The safest thing ethically, it seems to me, is to be absolutely vigilant about avoiding and vigorous in condemning human rights violations altogether--by anyone, for any purpose. The torture of the very worst human being alive, even one with the very greatest potential to do the world harm, is still torture of a human being; admitting torture at all seems to preclude the notion that we are inherently of value--outside the determination of any group or government that might hold some humans to be more valuable than others. A slippery slope?

So, I was thinking about torture because I am interested in Obama's decision to oppose the release of thousands of "new" images portraying the torture of prisoners who are suspected of terrorist activity. The NYT reported Obama's revised stance on the release of the photographs this morning, and the article included a weighing-in by the ACLU:

"Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the A.C.L.U., said the decision to fight the release of the photos was a mistake. He said officials had described them as 'worse than Abu Ghraib' and said their volume, more than 2,000 images, showed that 'it is no longer tenable to blame abuse on a few bad apples. These were policies set at the highest level'" (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/us/politics/14photos.html?_r=1&th&emc=th).

For my part, I would assiduously avoid seeing these pictures and am willing to trust that they are full of horror. I wonder, though, does the world, the public, everyone have a "right" to see the images? American citizens surely have the right "to see" that their governnment systematically ("policies set at the highest level") employs practices that it exists to protect US citizens from, no?

At the same time, should the people who were first tortured now also be porned nightly on Fox News for three weeks until viewers, with questionable reasons for wanting to see the images to begin with, lose interest?

To the extent that the individuals tortured are guilty of harming or plotting to harm other people--US or not--certainly, they deserve to be tried in fair courts, and, if found guilty, to be sentenced with the punishment that law has assigned for the crimes. But the bad acts and intentions of terrorists cannot--at least as I see things--alleviate the duty of the US to account for its own inhumane practices.

Maybe the question should be whether the images of torture ought to be promptly handed over to an international human rights commission. Let the US atone for acts unworthy of a "world leader" and in that way, perhaps, regain some basis for pride among those of its citizens who need more than a big-screen TV in every livingroom to feel good about being American.

Classroom Miscellany

2009-04-25T07:50:00.000-07:00

I have three more classes before my teaching career comes to a close. Here are some random things I have seen in classrooms during my relatively short teaching career of 15 years, including 10 years of graduate teaching (KU, Brown, Wesleyan, USD):

1. I once had a police officer deliver a subpoena to a student during class. It was an Honors class.

2. In my first large lecture course (67 students), in the second week of classes, I almost blacked out while lecturing. I just kept talking slower and slower, trying to read my notes through the little bright flashing lights and the tunnel through which I could see. Finally, a student in the first row jumped up and made me sit down; then I started sweating profusely.

3. One of my students wrote an entire in-class essay, two single-spaced pages, on how much he dreaded my class and expected soon to see my "rising star" fall hard.

4. A world-class ballerina attending college under a pseudonym cried in my office because she could not understand an essay on Lacan's mirror stage.

5. One semester I failed a quarter of the students in an American Literature survey course.

6. A student in an upper-level course for majors confessed to the class that he had to close the door to his bedroom in the fraternity house one evening because he found himself moved to tears while reading Maria Cummins's 1855 novel The Lamplighter for our class.

7. I rarely showed films in class, but I once showed a movie without first double checking the running time; I started the film in the second half of one class meeting; the movie extended over the next two meetings and into a third.

8. I have apprehended eight plagiarized papers.

9. In one particularly likeable class, there were a couple of young women in the front row who routinely sat with their arms around each other, heads on one another's shoulders, or legs intertwined, and another student who wore a bathrobe to class once a week because he was in an unstructured-dance club that met and cavorted about the green in various stages of undress just before class.

10. I once realized about ten minutes into a lecture that my pants were unzipped so I made a big production of being about to sneeze, excused myself, and ran out of the room. But then I was afraid that the class would know I was just pretending to sneeze, so I darted into the bathroom adjacent to the classroom and noisily pulled a bunch of toilet paper off the roll, which I knew they could hear and which I thought would lend verisimilitude to the phony sneezing. When I got back and started to talk again, I realized that I'd been so concerned about concealing the sneeze that I'd completely forgotten to zip up my pants, so I thought, what the hell, and just reached down and zipped them. But then, it occurred to me that the class might now think my sneeze had been so powerful that it had forced the zipper down on my pants. For some reason, this was intolerable, so I confessed the whole scenario. They looked at me as if I were insane.

And a sort of general note: students have a weird notion either that they are invisible or that the person yawping in front of them is utterly unconscious of what goes on three feet in front of her. As a result, they make faces, roll their eyes dramatically, yawn, pick their noses, scratch themselves and, my favorite, glare at other students. The dangerous thing is that while the professor can see what the students do, it's not always so easy to interpret.

Which reminds me of my own days as a student and two classes in particular, one when I was a sophomore at GWU and another when I was a grad student at Brown. In both, I somehow ended up having to sit next to a person who drove me absolutely bonkers. I recall being consumed with hot, irrational, screaming-inside, almost uncontainable hatred. In both cases, my feelings were prompted by the other person's habit of picking at himself (both were male): picking at his eyes, his ears, his scalp, different parts of his face, his neck. These guys' fingers were so busy excavating their own disgusting surfaces I don't know how they ever took notes. My repulsion grew and grew: I was like a character in a Poe story. I remember in both instances finding some relief in putting my hand up around my face on that side to shield myself from awareness of the movements. I wonder now if my professors saw any of this playing out and whether they knew I was reacting to the person next to me and found it amusing, or thought I was unaccountably appalled by their lectures and found it depressing.

Easter Beer and Pizza

2009-04-21T16:27:00.000-07:00

I went to church with my family on Easter. As I've said before on this blog, I was raised in the Methodist church, but I don't follow a religion anymore. Now that my brother's kids are at the age when the devil or wolves or something might get 'em there seems to be a new movement amongst us to go to church services, at least on major holidays.

Surprisingly, this Easter, even my dad went. My dad has been adamantly atheist since the IRS audited him 25 years ago and forced him into bankruptcy. He seemed unaccountably good-spirited about the prospect of attending church this year, although I did have to persuade him to change his clothes: he originally came downstairs dressed in charcoal gray and black. During the service, I kept looking to see if he was asleep or verging on a fit of some kind, but my mom's head was in the way.

Let me say, things have changed since I was a wee thing dolled up in Easter finery those bright Sunday mornings in spring. For one, few people in attendance were dolled up in anything approaching finery. Also, the Easter service, at least this year, at least in this church, was not held on Easter Sunday but on Saturday afternoon. There was no liturgy to speak of, and we met not in the church, in the nave, but in another room altogether, a carpeted gymnasium with a big stage and a screen. There was a band with a full brass section. People were dancing and clapping. I even saw some hand-raising. There was a video running above the stage. We saw a short film, a passion play produced like an MTV video. The service ended with a short clip from Desperate Housewives and a "tune in next time" joke.

I guess all of that was okay. People appeared to be engaged, energized, full of zip. I guess they thought about rebirth and redemption. The sermon was certainly forgettable--something very short and vague about the variations among the Gospels. I missed singing the Gloria-in-excelsius-deo song. I wondered, too, about communion. Truth be told, I like my church services one of two ways: either teach me something--give me a spiritual or ethical problem to chew on--or shut up and let me meditate (or sulk). In terms of organized Protestantism, that leaves me with the Unitarians or Quakers, I guess. I don't even mind hearing some politics, lamentation, or jeremiad--convict me, give me some thing to stew over. But this . . . variety show . . . too much song and dance. I was ready to go after 8.5 minutes. It didn't help that my niece and nephews, whom I love dearly, sat quietly for 8.5 minutes and then turned into tiny, well-dressed infidels intent on stressing me out. They discovered that they could stick their magic markers together into long, shaky poles which they then waved about dangerously near the heads of the two elder ladies in front of us, or they whacked the poles against the chairs so that the pens rolled into the aisle or under the seats. If you tried to dismantle the markers during construction, the child--whichever one was at hand--would utter a high-pitched sound of displeasure that seemed more disruptive than the potential disaster of poking the old ladies in the hair.

By the end, everyone else looked relaxed and happy, indeed, rejuvenated. My dad seemed in good spirits (which makes some sense: he dislikes the kind of church I prefer). The elderly ladies left without injury. The children recovered from whatever small traumas they sustained in having me growl and glare at them. In contrast, I had a raging headache which did not go away, even during Easter beer and pizza. Tune in next time when I will offer another long-winded, unenlightened and unenlightening account of my religous experiences: Easter service at the Syrian Eastern Orthodox church in Sioux City, Iowa, 2006.

On Becoming Aunt Nellie

2009-04-20T15:59:00.000-07:00

The Russian has gone to Russia. He's looking for a way to become a billionaire--possibly, by manufacturing American barbeque sauce for Muscovites. I miss him, his funny ways, his Russian pride, his chefly way with steak and salmon, his kisses and hugs, the way he calls me, "Squooooorrrell." But I also find myself settling easily into a solitary life. It is familiar and quiet. I find myself becoming increasingly . . . mincing. I recline in my chair, looking around in calm satisfaction: every surface is sparkling clean, and each thing in its place. I eat neat, small, nutritionally balanced meals and wash all but the dishes I'm using before I even sit down. When I go to bed, everything is put away. Even the quilts on my bed lie over me square and flat and folded just so. I move from wakefulness to sleep as I move through the house, leaving no trace, no mess. In this, I can feel my great-great-Aunt Nellie growing under my skin, filling out my life like a balloon slowly inflating within a container.

When my dad was eleven, his mother Dorothy Emma died of Hodgkins Disease. Family photos show her in the year of her death to have had a pale, slightly bloated face, dark rings under sad brown eyes, a tired-looking smile. Dorothy Emma had an aunt, her mother's sister, named Nellie, and Nellie was married to a man named Howard. They never had children. Nellie worked for Ma Bell as a phone operator, a pretty good job for a young woman from the 1920s-70s. Howard was a security officer, although I don't know what he secured, a bank maybe. After my grandmother died, my grandfather, himself a police detective, began to drink heavily and was unable to care for my dad, so my dad was sent temporarily to live with his great-aunt Nellie and his great-uncle Howard.

I don't know much about these two. Here's what I do know: Howard was from the east but his family had something to do with the Native American Indian reservations in Oklahoma. Possibly, his mother or father taught at reservation or Indian boarding schools (we have pictures of assembled classes). When Aunt Nellie died, to everyone's great surprise, she left a hundred thousand dollars to Haskell Indian College, presumably at Howard's request (he was already dead). I have pictures of Howard posing for the camera in his security guard uniforms, or in overalls working in their small garden. My dad remembers Howard as a strong but gentle man, who paid some much-needed attention to a little boy, took time to show him how to do things. Unaccountably, I also have a picture of Howard standing with what appears to be a KKK rally a ways in the background; it is not clear whether he is attending or posing in front of the event. Howard died before I came along, so I never got to pose the question. But I do remember Aunt Nellie.

Aunt Nellie came to live with us in 1981, when I was 11, and she stayed for two years before she passed away. She was in her mid-seventies. The two years she spent in our house must have been a sort of hell for her, with my brother and I bounding around upstairs most of the day, although I would imagine life was better with us than it would have been in a nursing home. The downstairs in our split-level house was finished, had its own bathroom, good natural light, a fireplace, and my parents had had it renovated to form two rooms out of a single big one. When Nellie didn't want to eat upstairs--as was the case most breakfasts and lunches--my mom fixed her meals and took them downstairs on a tray. I cannot say for sure, but it seems like Nellie ate dinner with us most nights. I distinctly remember her smell, not a bad smell, just sort of papery and musty. Her mouth must have been dry, since when she spoke her spittle clicked and clacked like rustling celophane in her mouth. Her nose dripped, so she carried a pressed handkerchief with which she frequently dabbed the tip of her nose.

At dinner, Aunt Nellie liked to have a piece of meat, a soft vegetable, some bread, and always, a nice piece of fruit. Everything she ate, she cut into tiny, neat squares. Once my parents went out, leaving us in Nellie's care for the evening. She fixed hamburgers for dinner on the stove, cooking them in our smallest saucepan: two-inch-diameter hamburgers, one for each of us. The story is a legend in our family.

Now, the family teases me. They say I remind them of Aunt Nellie, especially when I eat. We are enjoying Easter dinner, for example, and I utter some cranky thing about the nuisance of birds and flowers and nature in general, mainly because I am allergic, or I cut my ham into perfect tiny cubes, because I enjoy the way ham slices so neatly under a sharp knife. Sure enough, out comes mom with, "Now, who does that remind you of!" And everyone else chirrups inanely, "Aunt Nellie!"

And, no wonder I am becoming Aunt Nellie. I must have stared like a little monkey at the poor woman throughout dinner, every night for two years. I inhaled her every move. I don't remember finding her especially delightful or repulsive, merely fascinating--precise and defined. Just as a child learns a language, soaking up the sounds and structure, so I soaked up the gestures, the small proprieties and inclinations of Aunt Nellie. And did so in concentrated doses. I had no other opportunity to observe her than at the table. Aunt Nellie had then, as I do now, limited patience for people under 18; she wasn't inviting me downstairs for tea and needlepoint in the afternoons. Even so, my memory was profoundly impressed by the tidy shape of her movements and the tight compass of her expression.

I feel my life at times developing along these lines of inference. And, they are only inference, since I have no idea what Nellie was in herself, to herself, with Howard, or even as a foster mother to my dad. Nor do my parents know any more than I. My dad was a child when he went to Golden City to live with Nellie and Howard, and he remembers only feeling safe and loved in their home. Besides, he only stayed for a year before returning to my grandfather's house. As adults in the early 1980s, my parents were struggling--not terribly successfully--to make ends meet and didn't spend much time with Nellie. I hope that she was not miserable or too lonely with us. She left no letters, no journals, no revealing manuscript memoir. What I am to know of her, it seems, I will have to remember and learn from myself as I get older.

I do have her books. Her legacy to us--to me, in effect--was a library of 200 or so volumes, including a slew of second-rate religious novels (Miss Mitford, Miss Read) as well as the much more congenial Little House on the Prairie series; Alcott's Little Women, Little Men, and Jo's Boys; The Five Peppers, The Five Peppers Midway, and The Five Peppers Grown Up; a nice boxed Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass set; the collected works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the collected papers of Abraham Lincoln, and so on. Nothing particularly surprising, no James Joyce or Anais Nin tucked away to raise eyebrows. A copy of the Grimms Brothers is as racy as things get (that is pretty racy). Over the years, Aunt Nellie clipped articles from various newspapers about the books and their authors, folded them neatly, and enclosed them in the front covers. I read all of these--books and notices--consumed them. They had the flavor of Aunt Nellie.

Some nights, of late, with no Russian to watch basketball on tv in the evening, I pause in my reading to luxuriate in the quiet. The light from my lamp glows yellow on the furniture, the wood dustless, the sofa pillows angled in greeting. Things are in their places. My tea is steamy. I am waiting for my Russian to return, with or without his fortune. I am at peace, happy to be alone while I am waiting. But I am glad that it will end soon. What's that? I feel a tickle, a bit of moisture on the end of my nose. As I move to dab my nose, I bump the tea cup off the table with my elbow. Hot tea splashes against the chair, engulfs my slipper; broken bits of cup go bouncing along, falling into the ornamental grating on the floor. I jump to my feet, hurl my book at the wall, roar, "FUCKING HELL!!" and know with some certainty that whatever the future holds I am not Nellie yet.

Transferences

2009-01-30T18:17:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, my therapist, whom I hired in October because I was thinking again about driving into on-coming traffic, canceled my appointment for this morning. I was out of town during the semester break, so I haven't seen her since early December. The receptionist who called to do the canceling, asked me if I would like to reschedule, and after I said yes, she told me that there were no openings for next week because the Dr. had had to reschedule so many other appointments, so, would I like to schedule for the week after?

I know about transference, yet I haven't been able to shake the feeling of rejection all day. Why does it seem like I am the last in line? The whole thing is stupid and selfish, since I'm sure whatever led to the therapist's need to cancel and reschedule all these appointments is not good. Still.

I told the receptionist, nevermind, I will have to check my calendar and get back to her. The receptionist sounded taken aback. I thought--stupidly--Ha! that will show her.

Then, I had to call and verify receipt of a replacement debit card, since a couple of my credit/debit accounts were closed as a result of a recent security hoo-ha that apparently affected half the world. This turned out to be a far more frustrating experience than I think it ought to have been. After I called and entered my pin number as instructed on the new card, a phone recording told me that the pin number I entered was incorrect. I tried re-entering five more times (even though the recording said I'd be allowed only three total). When it became clear that my pin number was no longer my pin number, I called the woman at the bank, the one who sent the letter apprising me of the security event and the impending arrival of my new card. This person told me I had to select a new pin number, and then she asked me to tell her the number. I said, it's not very secure if you know what it is. And she said, in a comforting-slash-irritated tone, that once she entered it into the computer, it would be gone. I thought, how reassuring.

I used to believe that I might have OCD because I would call and check my bank and credit account balances by telephone--sometimes 2-3 times a day. I would feel anxious until I had established exactly how much money was in (or not in) each. I would add and re-add or just gaze intently at the spreadsheet I created to keep track of savings. God forbid anything weird should happen. When I had a payment arrive late at Citibank in 1998 or something, I nearly lost my mind. I cried until they waived the fee and a supervisor promised not to report me.

Worse, in 2002, a bankruptcy suddenly appeared on my credit report because a bank that loaned me money to pay tuition one semester in college got a co-signer on my account mixed up with someone else. I wasn't even the one involved in the mix up, and I eventually cleared up the mistake, but it took months, and in the meantime, I could hardly eat.

In 2003, when I lived for 9 months in Connecticut, that icon of corporate compassion Blockbuster reported me to a credit agency because I turned in a movie late and then did not pay a $13.00 late fee. I didn't even know I owed a fee! The day I received the credit agency letter was a day the manager of the Blockbuster in Middletown will not soon forget! I rolled into the store, yelled at the people waiting in line, yelled at the clerk behind the counter, yelled at the manager, cried, started hyperventilating. It was horrid. Most recently, someone (I suspect a restaurant worker at O'Hare Airport) sold, sent, or took one of my card numbers to Mexico and managed to charge over $3,000 on my account in a couple days. None of these experiences has had serious repercussions; they've mainly just been hassles. But the level of anxiety--exhorbitant.

These days, I check all my accounts 2-3 times a week and wonder if such impulses may be a fairly reasonable response to new cultural realities. We scatter ourselves across the Web in a million different ways, make facets of ourselves available and, I suppose, vulnerable. And not just our money.

Earlier this week I posted a list of 10 things other people will wish they didn't know about me. This is one of a series of such all-about-me lists that make the rounds on Facebook and email. I have received and forwarded a number of these over the past several years. They are fun to fill out, because, I suppose, like a blog, such exercises ask that we talk about the one thing we know best, ourselves, and because they imply an audience--readers who, because they've chosen to "play," thereby indicate an interest in knowing us and in having us know them. Just passing along one of these lists is risky, though. Beyond the vulnerability I hint at above, the chance, that is, that what I write might be used to my detriment--professionally or personally--there is another risk.

The lists are inherently juvenile--as is Facebook, as is blogging--in their self-centered "look at me-ness." Those who "play" sort of implicitly agree to suspend that judgment about themselves and each other (or conceal it from themselves by calling what they do "networking"). Anyway, the risk is that the recipient of an invitation to share such a list will meet the invitation with a sneer and a groan that reminds us of what we already know--our lives are depleted and consist of juvenile makings and remakings of ourselves in a public that usually agrees to view such things good naturedly, as ways to connect, to self express--like wearing a silly hat or piercing a nipple--but that really knows they are sad and empty. Indeed, at any time, we might be smacked down with a reminder of that fact.

Anyway, to get back to where I started, I deleted my list of 10 Things You'll Wish You Didn't Know About Me not because it made me feel silly but because I began to feel self-conscious about some things I didn't want people to know about me. I've been thinking that I'll probably soon remove the 25 Random Things from Facebook, too. And some fine day, in a fit of self loathing, I'm sure I'll delete all of these posts, and replace them with an image of Anne Bradstreet and have done with it, because too much self-exposure, like too much self-indulgence is a nasty habit, bad for the soul.

MLK Day

2009-01-19T20:21:00.000-08:00

Today I took part in a "MLK Day of Service" event in Vermillion. Some students and staff (not including me) on a whim last October submitted a grant proposal to a national organization and were pleased and surprised (and probably sort of scared) when they got the grant some time in late November or December. The grant called for them to gather several hundred volunteers from the university and local schools, from assisted living insititutions, local businesses, nursing homes--you name it--get all these folks together, split them up randomly into groups, and send the groups out to complete a series of pre-arranged but only partially planned projects. One aspect of the project for each group was to perform the service work assigned; another, which had to take place before and during the work, was to find ways to act together in a context of uncertainty--to work with others who are unknown to or unlike us on a project of largely unset limits and goals. Because this was an MLK project, we were told by a speaker at the beginning of the day to congratulate ourselves, since we would, as King instructed, not just talk but do. The emphasis on practice or action seemed to hit the right note on the one hand, but on the other, I found myself missing what I thought I remembered to be King's emphasis on a kind of action-in-reflection. It's been a while since I read any of Dr. King's writing, but my recollection is that he was adamant about principled, contemplated action. Service, that is, should be more than doing. Anyone can talk or think about acting, and most can also act without bothering to understand why--finding motivation instead in earning service points for a fraternity or sorority, buying a line on a resume, finding a chance to unload the kids for the day. None of these is bad, but none really coincides with MLK's depiction of service. I found the opening speaker's talk itself highly reflective, about as rewarding a sermon (which is what it was) as I remember hearing in a long, long time. But he should not have been the only one creatively to contemplate the day's meanings. There should have been focus groups after the "service" to think about how the externalization of love and care happened within the projects. Action informed by a principle of care--"giving," I guess: it seems different from "serving the public" or simply volunteering. Blogging individually misses the communal element. Still, I'm very glad I took part.

On Leaving the Academy

2009-01-18T08:55:00.000-08:00

I was raised to believe that cause follows effect, and hard work earns--if not reward of a material kind--at least a moral satisfaction earned by having put effort into something. The reward is in the work, not necessarily because you enjoy the work but because it is work, and expending effort and extending care is virtuous. I realize that this is also called the Protestant work ethic. Some sophisticated people are apt to label such an ethic "middle class," where middle class means dull and blindly ideological. I like to wear a sophisticated hat on occasion. My parents never pushed me in any direction, except to do well at whatever I tried and to be happy. Whatever that means. Though I don't remember a particular conversation, I knew somehow that I was supposed to find my talents and my passion and follow them. I do remember hearing repeatedly that I could do whatever I put my mind to. Now, a year shy of 40, as I prepare, in the middle, apparently, of a national economic crisis, to leave my as-yet semi-successful career as a university professor in American literature for an entirely new career in nursing, I hear the message again from my mother, who, bless her, would say the same thing if I decided to become a politician or university administrator (which is the lowest career I can think of at the moment): I just want you to be happy. She doesn't say much about working hard, since it is assumed and, honestly, so far unavoidable that it hardly has the look of virtue anymore.

When I went to graduate school, I imagined the outcome, vaguely, as happiness: the self-satisfaction of having earned a Ph.D. (first in my family); the happiness of having a great deal of knowledge in an area of human culture that I care about; the good fortune to be earning a living through ideas--my task to challenge and be challenged by others--students, colleagues, maybe the reading public--to stretch minds and feel excited about unforeseen connections and all that; the personal satisfaction of cultural capital, of knowing what was the best--the best theatre, music, books, wine, art exhibits, and so on. There was to my mind a built-in reward to the drudgery of graduate school. I believed that the isolation, long hours, insomnia, constant stomach aches, fits of screaming insecurity, a solid dozen years in poverty, and frustration with being treated like an adolescent all the way through my 20s and well into my 30s purchased an alternative life focus in a culture that offers so few alternatives. Everyone else I grew up with might pursue material productivity of some sort, the creation of wealth, but I would make sacrifices to help preserve and add to an intellectual tradition by teaching and publishing.

Anyone who has been in or involved with someone in higher education in the humanities in the past couple decades knows how sad that sounds. At least in the publicly funded institutions, humanities faculty, because they do not draw multi-million dollar NSF grants (the NSF is not interested in Science Fiction literature) and their research does not yield patentable outcomes that will enrich the university and its administrators and regents (aptly designated), these humanities faculty have been transformed through the kill-by-inches method of small policy changes into highly educated administrative assistants. In order to pad their own resumes, university administrators are constantly on the look-out for the next trendy program or initiative--anything to appear as if they are doing something--which projects they adopt and then conscript the faculty into implementing. These include the expensive engagement of outside consultants who impose entirely inappropriate assessment regimens on academic departments, which then have to gather and present data themselves, despite the fact that in many cases (as in literature departments) the faculty do not have the training or the time to go about turning the universe into Likert scales. Administrators also like to impose multi-year strategic planning projects in preparation for which faculty sit through endless speeches and read through endless documents on subjects related to institutional marketing, positioning, leveraging, and other things that do not relate to the area of study in which they worked years to gain expertise, all as part of some initiative to priortize a series of goals that everyone subsequently either ignores or would be pursuing anyway. In the name of enrollment numbers and self-preservation, faculty in departments with graduate programs are quietly under pressure to push ill-prepared and ill-suited students forward into the profession, or, where the students are well-prepared and well-suited, encourage them to subscribe to the same mistaken notions about the life of an academic that the faculty themselves once held.

The myth promoted in academia by scholar-teachers is that talent and hard work pay off in the academy, and the result is a life lived in the rarefied world of political and intellectual engagement, enjoyment of culture and conversation, the production of new knowledge, the prestige of expertise among the general public, and the admiration of students who want to know and do what the professor knows and does. The truth is that the key points of advancement and achievement in academic life are determined too often by, first, arbitrary and often remarkably petty decision-making at all levels--from the departmental hiring committees who read and discuss job letters to the institutional committees that meet to determine whether their colleagues of five or six years have met the standards of promotion and tenure to scholarly-journal editing boards, book publishers, and book reviewers--all serve as sites for some of the most remarkably arbitrary decision-making imaginable; and second, the same ways admission, appointment, and advancement of all kinds take place elsewhere in the world: on the basis of personal connection to powerful people. Furthermore, not a great deal of new knowledge gets produced, at least by junior faculty in the humanities--who cannot say "no" as often as they should--because those faculty are kept so busy attending meetings, formulating strategic plans, writing reports, participating in panels, measuring various outcomes, indeed, assessing everything that twitches, that there is barely time left to grade papers and prep for classes. Forget about reading more than a couple of new books in or out of your field; going to the ballet; spending relaxed, guilt-free time with your children (provided you have time to bear any). There will not be a great deal of intellectually stimulating conversation because your colleagues are too tired or depressed for the most part to engage in it. The drinkers will always find time to drink, of course, and they are probably the better off for the compulsive down-time. Everyone else will spend 10-15 hours every weekend working and will still be sending emails on weeknights until 1:30 am. Students will read about your salary in the student newspaper and then either laugh at you or ask if you're embarrassed about it (yes, that happened to me). Because they believe they or their parents pay your salary, most of them will expect you to jump when they ask for something and will expect encouragement and praise regardless of the effort or quality of their work--or whether they do any at all. If, as is the case with far too many, they do not learn anything because they spend the semester in a daze of alcohol and web-messaging, you can be sure that the Ds and Fs you record will ultimately reflect more poorly on you than them. Student evaluations will register your high standards of student performance or insistence on student attendance as a number, usually a measure of the "quality of instruction," or among students "did I enjoy that class, or was it too hard." That number will later be read by administrators as a shortcoming in your teaching and possibly a danger to the institutional strategic goal of "student retention." The vast majority of people you know--unless all your friends and your parents and their parents and siblings and all their friends were academics (and such are the people who tend to bear up well in the business) will constantly ask you, why did it take so long to get the degree, and what is it again that you do, and don't you enjoy having the summers off, and why did you take a job there if you dislike it so much, and when is your book coming out, and wow, you only teach two classes each semester--that must be nice! Or they just stop talking to you altogether because they resent the fact that you earn a living doing nothing.

As I face my last four months as a university professor ("Assistant Professor"), I hope to shed some of the bitterness that I bear toward the academy and yet also maintain my awareness of the causes of my anger and not let my mind turn in the direction it constantly threatens to go, namely, my own failure to work hard enough, be smart enough, endure long enough.

And in the Hour of Death

2009-01-17T08:29:00.000-08:00

I can't seem to stop wondering about how I would have reacted if I were part of the water-landing of the US Airways flight last week. When 9/11 occurred, I spent, like many people I'm sure, a great deal of time imagining what my state of mind would be in an unthinkable situation like that aboard the planes. Not just, "would I panic?" or "would I have the wherewithal to calm others?" but, in the minute before hitting the ground, water, building, what would go on in my mind? Similarly, but more frivolously, I have wondered, if I were a victim of a serial killer who tied me to a conveyor belt that fed into a wood grinder, as the belt approached the blade, what would I, what could I be thinking? It's hard to conceive that I would be able to "think about" anything--seems like the run of thoughts would speed up, become frantic. Maybe not, though. Maybe, just before death, thought slows to an excrutiating speed for the dying person, like the experience of time moving into a black hole? (Time? Light? I don't remember what seems to go slowly into black holes.) Or, in a different direction, do some people--would I?--have hopes of a last-minute miracle? If the end indeed is death, how tragic that at just at the final moment, one might be falsely preoccupied or distracted with ideas of commutation. I don't know why, but it seems like a sad waste. Yet, when I fly and the ride gets bumpy, I say Hail Marys. I am not and never have been Catholic, and only a teensy-weensy part of me thinks or hopes that maybe, maybe, maybe there's some spiritual force (not "Mary," surely) heeding the general inclination of my chanting (i.e., if there is going to be pain--physical, mental, moral, spiritual--in my future, please don't let it last for eternity. [I realize this puts me somewhere near the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy and have long been shamefully aware of my own spiritual deficits.]). However, I memorized the Hail Mary for the purpose of airplane turbulence, and I find it comforting, in part, because it prevents me from thinking. I like the idea of purposefully abstaining from thought better than cravenly turning, in the face of death, to Spiderman, to the hope he will suddenly appear to bear the plane away to safety. In 1994, in a hundred-year old fruit cellar on New Jersey St. in Lawrence, KS, I huddled alone in the pitch black on a raised concrete platform surrounded by 2 inches of water as a series of small tornadoes touched down nearby. I recited the alphabet backwards, over and over. That was before my adoption of the Hail-Mary, and I was concertedly refusing to pray. I was not hoping that Alphabet Man would rescue me but trying not to suffer uselessly by panicking, in that case, mainly about having been caught at the center of two rings of hell: one, comprising the slugs that lived in the fruit cellar; and the other, the tornadoes bouncing around in the green air outside. I can't tell if there is more or less of dignity in trying to redirect the mind by giving it busywork. I don't know if that is less craven than redirecting the mind by seeking the assistance of a higher power. I don't know what I would think about death, and I find generally that my mind bends like water around its hard surfaces.

Inside Temp and Outside Temp

2009-01-14T18:35:00.000-08:00

Temperature is a relative thing. I am still 97.2 degrees F, but it's beastly cold outdoors (righthand side).

For Love of Puritans and Dunkin' Donuts

2009-01-11T19:11:00.000-08:00

Written Saturday, Bristol, RI

I paid $95 to see a doctor for half a minute this morning in order to get a prescription for antibiotics. It's been 9 hours since I took the initial double dose, and I am still in a world of pain. Indeed, I am running a fever right now. I can feel it--my eyes are glittering and my cheeks bright red. If this were the nineteenth-century, I would be uttering tremendously pious things and would die of consumption in a few pages. Instead, I missed a get-together today with a very dear friend whom I met eight years ago while buying indoor soccer shoes. To console myself, I made the Russian stop at Ocean State Job Lot (which he did not mind, since it is owned by Russians) where I paid 20 cents for a package of three surgical face masks. I've been wearing a mask off and on all day. I'm not sure why this makes me feel better, except that I get gratification from giving other people something to puzzle over. The teacher in me, I suppose. Or the budding exhibitionist. Or maybe I just like feeling woozy from the CO2 overdose, since it seems like I'm sucking in the same damned, hot, moist, oxygen-depleted air over and over.
Today, unlike yesterday, the Russian is in a frugal mood. We've had to talk about the economy before every meal. I don't know what to think about the economy at this point, but I'm not going to eat fast food the entire time I'm in Rhode Island just because I may be starving next year. True, I am unemployed after May, and the Russian is effectively unemployed as well, since Medevyev raised the import tax on automobiles by 30 percent. But I am not afraid. I like an ethic of spareness. In fact, of all that I will miss about my academic life, among the top contenders must be the Puritans. At least once a year, I have had the opportunity to teach Thomas Shepard, Edward Taylor, John Cotton, Jonathan Edwards, and sometimes, if I feel brave and can sneak them in, less well-known separatist figures, to undergrads. There could be nothing more at odds than the instant gratification and pat-me-on-the-head outlook of an American undergraduate and the doubt-piled-on-doubt, the wickedness-piled-on-wickedness of Michael Wigglesworth. I know that I have at least managed to trigger interest and wonder in a few students on this count. Certainly, there was a baroqueness of doctrine and behavior underlying the plain talk of the Puritan New England world. And Wigglesworth must have enjoyed a kind of luxuriousness in the excess of his self-abuse. Still, the stridency of address, the virtue made of suffering and misfortune, and the call to temper all desire is enormously attractive to me. I've always fancied a cloistered life and the Quakers for similar reasons. I guess I've still got Walden on my mind, but even that was just Thoreau's variation on a much older way of living. People should make more of an art out of living--design their lives, live out an aesthetic. I could live a life of spareness if I could make it feel elegant. I might be able to bear suffering if it seemed part design. It wouldn't help the economy much, but it might help me keep my head together. What wicked decadence I am disgorging today. People are out of work and cannot pay their bills. Poverty is not performance art. I saw the other movie by the Super-Size-Me guy. Anyway, to get back to my point: I'm sure I will miss teaching the New England Puritans when I no longer have a job next year and can't pay for my expensive anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medications. I am always feeling elegantly simple when in the throes of a an anxiety fit.

So, the Russian and I are staying in the home of a good friend of mine, one of the most likeable, inspiring, generous people I know. We can call her "N." N gave me a home when I was in the middle of a crappy divorce, and she made sure I laughed more than I cried during my last summer in Rhode Island. She is now 6-months pregnant, still working full-time, and has welcomed us into her home for 7 days as house guests. Every time I am around her I have this weird compulsion to do nice things for others. That's enough about N. I bring her up to mention some disturbing incidents involving her coffeemaker. She and her husband are not drinking much coffee themselves these days, but she knows the Russian and I like a lot of strong, black coffee in the morning, so she dug up a regular drip coffeemaker for us to use. The first morning I make coffee--something I do every day of my life--I pour in the water, insert a filter, and find that I cannot open the vacuum-pak envelope of coffee. I tug and pull and finally start looking for some kitchen scissors. Failing in that, I tug some more. The coffee finally bursts open, sending a quarter cup of ground coffee into the open utensils drawer (where I had been looking for scissors). There is a lot of ground coffee in all eight compartments of the drawer organizer, most of it in the compartment holding baby spoons. I don't know why N has three dozen baby spoons. She's pregnant with her first, but she has a gazillion, tiny rubberized baby spoons. My first thought is "hand-held vacuum," but I didn't know where to begin looking. Plus, these are baby spoons. I picture three dozen, wired babies sucking on coffee contaminated spoons and acting cranky. They all have my face. I feel ill will toward these babies as I wash the caffeine off each baby spoon with soapy water and dry them one by one with a clean towel. That done, I realize the other compartments are also filled with ground coffee and so I take all the utensils out of all their compartments and rinse out the organizer. I forget in what order I removed the six or seven piles of utensils and so I don't know where each should be returned. I imagine N and her husband wondering, "why are all of our utensils in the wrong places? did Amanda rearrange our utensils drawer? did Amanda clean our kitchen?" I finally resolve to tell N later if I can remember. Then, I get the Russian out of bed and go directly to Dunkin' Donuts. This would not be worth blogging about if it weren't for the next morning, when I fail to push the glass descanter fully beneath the drip basket and then go back upstairs while the coffee brews all over the counter. I return to find half a pot of coffee on the countertop and feel sort of awed by my own stupidity but also lucky the mess is not greater, until I realize that a thin, steady stream is flowing--not dribbling--over the edge of the counter, over the front of the drawer behind which lay the site of the prior day's disaster, and on into the cabinet below. With great foreboding, I open the cabinet door and find this morning's coffee pooled in a pull-out shelf that holds N's large collection of plastic storage containers. Dozens of lids, bowls, and boxes of many colors and sizes sit in a cooling millimeter of coffee. I feel numb, bemused, chastened. I rinse and dry each piece of storageware. While replacing everything--no doubt in the wrong places, I fantasize momentarily that I am suffering uncontrollable urges to clean N's kitchen, and that I have been succumbing, guiltily, secretively, cabinet-by-cabinet, day-by-day, the coffeemaker snafus, merely a ruse. I think, "I have an illness whereby I am driven to go to other people's homes and rearrange their drawers and closets. I cannot help it. I am sick." But then I wonder if the truth may not be worse, that I cannot focus on making a pot of coffee without causing a minor household disaster. Why do I drop and lose things, knock them over, and forget so often. Is this a species of dementia or have I possibly been exposed to an environmental biohazard in South Dakota that has compromised my cognitive abilities? Finally, I get things dried and put away, rouse the Russian and head for Dunkin' Donuts.

2009-01-08T18:47:00.000-08:00

Written Tuesday, in Rhode Island: Today, we went to Walden Pond. Oddly--or so it seems to me--(given my eight years studying early American literature in Providence) this is my first visit to Concord or Walden. The day could not have been better; it is cold--40 degrees, maybe--but bright. The pond is frozen to 1-3 inches, and the paths around the pond are alternately damp and squishy or icy and very slick. Despite my shoes, which seemed designed for optimal slippability, and with the assistance of a stick, I did well; the Russian of course navigated himself with great confidence and no wipe-outs that I witnessed. I have read that the pond draws large crowds of swimmers and fishers when the weather is nice. No such crowds today. We had the path to ourselves for the most part, except for the 4 or 5 locals we saw walking for exercise and one couple who, like us, seemed to be there as off-season sightseers. However crowded the park may be during the summer, it seemed beautifully quiet today. The air was crystalline, the small fat birds (wrens?) were hopping around making their short, shrill chirps. We had a bright blue sky, a white wisp of moon all afternoon, and about 6 inches of snow on the ground--against which new green pine needles and the dark ice of the pond itself stand out. The pond showed its ripples through the ice, and wherever the ice had melted around the edges of the pond, we could see quite clearly the round, smooth stones at the bottom. I could easily imagine living in such rooms! I would like to come back some early, early morning in the summer.

The Russian and I share a softness for cold weather activities. Soon after we married, we went ice fishing at Mille Lacs, Minnesota. We scheduled our trip for my school's spring break, and since that was the final week in March, our visit fell just a few days after the day on which ice shacks had to be removed from the lake. Thus, had we come a week earlier, we would have had an entirely different experience. Judging by the left-behind stakes and other detritus of the hard-core ice fishers, the lake had been a veritable fishing city, with streets and neighborhoods. All of that was gone when we arrived. Indeed, other than an old man in a pick-up truck whose ramp we used to drive out onto the ice, we saw only two or three others fishing. Since the Russian had ice-fished in Russia, we had some idea of what we were doing and had come equipped with the short poles with jigglers on the ends, white buckets to sit on, and half-living minnows that the Russian pulled from gelling water and impaled on tiny sharp hooks. I wore special, ice-fishing boots--I could walk to Antartica in those boots--seriously. We wore ski pants and ski jackets. At the time, I had still a Toyota Tercel my parents bought me for college graduation twelve years earlier. I had visions of parking at some tackle shop and walking out onto the ice, our stuff piled up in the big white buckets. But, after haggling with the old guy in the pick up, and without comment, the Russian jumped in the car and drove directly onto the lake, the Tercel's tires crashing through the thin, top layer of ice into the 2-3 inches of water that lay below and nearly sending me through the window. That is, my response to the sound of ice cracking and water splasing beneath the tires was a squeal of panic and a mad rolling down of the passenger's side window (no power windows in the '92 Tercel). The Russian still thinks this is funny, as though rolling down the window would be helpful as the car plunged into near freezing water. As it turns out, the ice was frozen solid down to about 40 inches and only the top-most layers had melted the day before, refreezing thinly overnight. Oh, "ha ha, ha." My revenge was to eschew the Russian's many efforts to get me to sit with him in on a bucket and jiggle a short rod over a hole. Instead, I spent most of the morning hibernating, nestled into my down coat in the front seat of the car, itself sitting lonely on the expanse of frozen lake. When I did join him, I caught three perch right away, all keepers. Later, in the evening hour, when apparently the fish like to bite, I stayed in the hotel room and the Russian went fishing alone. He caught a walleye, which he brought, alive, into the hotel room to show me. Walleyes look angry and have teeth, which seems somehow out of the order of how things ought to work. Fish are soft, fluid, feathery in the water. They have no business having teeth. The thing looked as though it wanted a bite of me; ironically, he ended up the main component of, "oo-ha," a delicious fish soup the Russian whipped up two days later.

Wednesday: Went skiing in a storm at Okemo in Vermont today. Had the worst headache of my entire life.

Thursday: I am sick. My chest is tight and when I cough my whole body hurts but especially my head. I am also dizzy and slightly nauseated. My chest hurts all the way through my back, so that to sit here and type is itself excruciating. I am in a Borders Bookstore in Attleboro, Mass. The Russian is visiting a friend, a Syrian car dealer who helped him (the Russian) get his feet on the ground when he first came to the states. The Syrian is very loud and very fast-talking. I could not bear to see the Syrian today. Later we will go and see some of the Russian's other friends, and I will try to convince them that I am part human and not just a walking pulsation of pain.

New Semester / New Hair / New Year

2009-01-04T15:39:00.000-08:00

Some things I've been thinking about, mainly while driving back and forth from KC to Vermillion: I'm teaching a graduate seminar on literary Romanticism this spring and am polishing up on European romanticism, something that I've always been sort of fuzzy on. Maybe because I never read Jerome McGann, whose work in the 1980s seems to have prompted some much-needed (if unsuccessful) attempts to define generic boundaries. I am looking forward to teaching the course but am also wary of the way sometimes topics like romanticism can melt into an undifferentiated mass of repetitive questions. More angles can mean greater nuance, but the multiple perspectives can also lead to fatally nebulous "thing" of study. Anyway, that has been my experience in some courses. I don't want to end up with students coyly asking if there is any thing other than romanticism? I hate that. Yet, at this point, I am the one asking exactly such a question. The individual and the all?--romantic. The primitive and the oversoul? The revolutionary, cosmopolitan liberationist; the pastoral and localized; the mad, isolationist? all romantic. Celebration of Hellenism?--part of romanticism. Contemporary Greece? Italy? Turkey? India?--absolutely romantic. The Gothic? romantic. The literature of sensibility? much of it romantic. The course is more specifically on American romanticism which complicates things further, since American romanticism, as I understand it, flowered ten to 20 years after the European movement, in 1840s and 50s but also includes writers who were already publishing at the end of the eighteenth century. "American-Renaissance" writers--Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau--are usually considered part of the romantic movement in American literature, but Charles Brockden Brown makes an appearance as well. Cooper--yes. Irving of the Sleepy Hollow tales? yes. Philip Freneau and John Trumbull are surely romantic nationalists, while William Cullen Bryant is of course described as a romantic in the Wordsworthian sense. But so, too, we might call Walt Whitman, and many would consider Emily Dickinson part of the same tradition albeit for different reasons. Owen Wister? Helen Hunt Jackson? Sure. These are hugely different writers, with different styles, subject emphases, formal repetoires. Romanticism can name a tradition of novel writing that overlaps with both the romances of the Revolutionary years, Hawthorne's novels, and the sentimental fictions of mid-century; it can name the poetry of the conservative fireside poets as well as the some of the reform-minded poetry of the abolitionists as well as the more esoteric verses of the Transcendentalists. People often describe regionalist, reunion novels written after the American Civil War as romantic. Despite the trend toward transatlanticism and perspectives and writers outside the canon, I'd really like to concentrate on the nature writings of Emerson and Thoreau, mainly because I am drawn, have always been drawn, to them. Plus, this may be the last serious literature course I ever teach, and I'd like to be concentrating on what I love, uses of the language that made scholarship in literature an attractive idea to begin with. I've just started reading Stanley Cavell's book on Walden. I'm only a few pages into the introduction; already, though, I have hopes that Cavell's reception of Thoreau is similar to my own. For me, there are intensely powerful moments in Thoreau that have to do with a crescendoeing of words, sounds, and ideas, the kind of thing one finds in the very best poetry, anywhere and always. Most of the famous passages from Walden produce this sense of gathering power, and no matter how one takes Thoreau's meanings, most people recognize where the beauty is, where the weight lies--even when answers to the questions of how and why and even what prove elusive. Thoreau bears reading over and over again because the weight cannot be accounted for. Maybe this is a way of saying that the power of Walden cannot be taken out of Walden but must be sought there, in the words, as in in the woods themselves, over and over, "right fronting and face to face to a fact.

Got my hair cut today. I've been going to the same hair stylist and "spa" for about a year. They have massages and other things that I guess qualify them for spa status. Hot stones and foot-waxing? The stylists are Aveda trained, which, to me, means they massage their clients' heads with oil when they first arrive and then massage their hands while the hair conditions. It's not a big deal, but the head and hand massages are nice. Because the place is about pampering and relaxation, signs request that customers turn off cell phones when they enter. Today, the woman in the chair next to mine had her kids with her, little girls who looked to be about eight and five. Thankfully, the woman's hair was just about done, but nevertheless, the entire time I was away from the station having my own hair washed and conditioned and my head and hands rubbed, the two children were jumping around, sitting and then standing in my chair, staring at the mom, at me, at the receptionist in front. I watched them from beneath my cool, moistened eye cloth during the hand massage, just waiting for one of them to bump into and knock over my tote bag which held my lap top. The older one knew I was staring at her; I willed her to approach so I could growl without anyone else hearing. None of this was remotely relaxing. Children are inherently un-relaxing, and any place with "spa" attached to the name and with any intimation of pampering should be understood--however ironically--to be childfree.

My husband and I spent NYE with some friends from Russia, biologists who are in the US working as researchers for science faculty at the same university where I teach literature. They have two young daughters, and the woman's mother is also here living with them. In Russia, people celebrate the New Year for ten days, much of it spent drinking and eating with friends. Since Christmas plays a fairly minor role in Russia (the Communists were enthusiastic about neither the birth of Jesus or the coming of Santa Claus), New Years acts as a catch-all. When my husband was a boy, his parents, both machinists in a factory in Penza, would, like the other workers receive gifts distributed at their place of work for each of their children. This seems sparse and impersonal next to my childhood memories, my grandma's livingroom floor, two-feet-deep in papered and beribboned boxes, evidence of selections made for each, from each, over the year past. I am taken aback by some things Oleg tells me. He remembers standing in line for bread as a child. I have seen and stayed in the two-room apartment where he and his mother, father, and brother lived for his first 18 years and where his mother still lives. Oleg's Ukrainian grandfather slept over an indoor, woodburning stove. But then, at other times, he'll tell me that he had a Moody Blues album when he was a teenager and he read The Scarlet Letter in school. And I've seen photos of him in a late-70s-era silk shirt with a pointy collar and feathered hair. Anyway, our New Year's Eve, like most gatherings with Russians, took place around a table. Americans stand up, walk around, lurk together in corners, break up into groups. Most Russian gatherings in my experience happen around a table, with people sitting and facing one another. The drinking and eating began at 9:30 with five different salads, including the requisite Olivier salad, which, as I am told, someone is supposed to pass out into before the night ends. Alas, no one did so, although Boris modeled what such an incident might look like (see picture). We ate cured salmon, caviar, sliced salami and sausage, prosciutto, brown bread, vodka, wine. At 10:30, out comes a pork shoulder, roasted with garlic and prunes, and potatoes and sweet potatoes. Everything was lovely. As usual, the discussion was about 70-30 English-Russian, so I enjoyed myself but didn't have to listen to all of the US-bashing. I'm not likely to win any medals for hyper-nationalism, but I get frustrated with the endless kvetching. Especially when it is too free-ranging. We were a mixed group--one American, one Russian, one Uzbekistani, one Tartarean, two mixed Tartarean-and something else. We were two children and six adults: four Muslims, one Eastern Orthodox Christian, and me (a skeptic, lost lamb, and sometimes a Jew-wannabe ). We did not argue about religion and very little about politics, except when I tried to persuade the nine-year-old daughter that the song "I Kissed a Girl" and the concept therein expressed need not be rejected with so much ugly scorn, out of hand, by someone as young as she is. This was an argument the Tartarean, Muslim grandmother was thankfully unable to understand, since she speaks no English. My orthodox husband was surprisingly supportive of my efforts.

Treating Asthma

2008-12-23T13:46:00.001-08:00

Last night we took my mom and dad to dinner for my mom’s birthday and then went to their friend’s house to play dominoes. On the way to dinner, we got to talking about my brother’s children, with whom Mom had spent the day “playing.” The topic of asthma came up: all three of the kids have moderate asthma. The two older ones (4 and 9) have been taken on numerous midnight visits to the hospital emergency room after waking up unable to breathe. The four year old takes steroids. So, in the midst of this discussion, my mom mentions that yesterday the youngest of the three had gone for his “asthma treatment,” and I ask, “what treatment?” I’m thinking fancifully to myself of iron lungs, giant syringes, and gurneys lined up on a beach. My dad says, “You haven’t heard? Ben (the two year old) goes and sits in a room while someone else gets a backrub,” and my mom hushes him in an exasperated voice and then tells me that the two year old goes with his other grandma once a week to an accupressurist who puts vials full of allergens in his socks, which she rests against his foot. Then, the accupressurist applies pressure to points on the other grandma’s back while the other grandma holds Ben in her lap. When I finally stop guffawing, my dad says, “that’s what I thought, too,” and my mom acts offended and says she guesses she must be more “open minded about alternative treatments.” I try to point out some distinctions between “alternative treatments” and “magical thinking.” I also ask if they’ve tried faith-healing or at least a good dousing in chicken blood. Have they tried mailing toenail clippings to the Pope? I ask if he even has to go to the appointments—could the other grandma go get the massage and Ben still enjoy the relief, maybe while standing on a box of cat hair at home? I go on and on, until my otherwise highly rational mother tells me I can laugh all I want but it works. And like every poor skeptic who runs up against the broad, dumb wall of faith, I can only sit and stare out into the night.

House-Hunting and Some Observations on Children

2008-12-23T11:32:00.000-08:00

The Russian and I went house hunting with our agent, Paul, in Kansas City Saturday. We looked at 9 houses in 3 hours. Since we're buying the house as an investment for Russian friends, I have to be careful not to become too concerned about what I like or don't like. I constantly have to remember that I will only be in the house for 2-3 years. It does not need to express my personality or be somewhere I can imagine entertaining my brother's progeny's progeny. All that matters is that in a couple years the place will sell for more than we pay for it now. That's cool. It's just hard to remember. Oleg does not seem to have as much a problem with this as I do. Anyway, we found one house that was 2600 sq. feet with three bedrooms, a huge walk-out basement, and two cat doors--one to the basement and one into the pantry. We don't have cats, but cat doors seem like a real selling point to me.

We're staying at my parents' house in KC, which means being around my dad who is pretty much bonkers. He's entertaining and infuriating, at times terrifying. He is frequently inappropriate--really inappropriate. He's been downstairs opening and closing doors for 15 minutes. We don't know what he's doing and discuss the possibilities. Oleg suggests that he's rearranging the basement or building a safe-room in which to hide from birds. Yesterday, Oleg and I saw a tornado room in one of the houses we viewed--it was a tiny space with one open side and three, three-foot-thick concrete walls and ceiling--so he's got that on his mind. My mom has no guess and simply says, "who knows" and continues her game of spider solitaire--but then supposes he's looking for something. My guess is that he's killing a bug. He's made a lot of noise killing a bug before, so this isn't as stupid as it may seem. Neither is Oleg's idea about the birds, since my dad is terrified of birds and there were two or three thousand of them sitting on the roof of the house earlier in the day. We would hear nothing for five or six minutes, and then the birds would scrabble around, making a sound like the frozen tree branches that scrape our roof in Vermillion on windy nights. Then, all at once, the birds would lift silently and, in a body, pass flickering across the sunlight coming through the windows, settling finally in the limbs of the hackberry trees that line the yard. The trees used to act as a windbreak for the farm field behind the houses on my parents' street. In the summer, starlings gather in the same trees and laugh at us. My mom shoots them with a pellet gun because she claims that otherwise they poop on her new deck. All of this causes my dad distress. He suffered some kind of childhood trauma that involved his mother and an aggressive goose, so he has a true phobia of birds--totally loses his mind when birds fly around near his head. Screeches and whimpers. As it happens, he was not building a shelter from the birds, though, or killing bugs. When he came upstairs later, he said he was looking for something, but nothing in particular--just looking around. That seems reasonable to me, since I like looking around, too.

Today, my brother's kids are here. My mom watches them once or twice a week. They're nine, four, and two. She just gave the younger two a bath and supervised the shower of the nine-year old. Like my dad, the presence of these children puts me in a state verging on catatonia, a deep-seated exhaustion that precedes any effort at entertaining--or bathing--them. It's 11:00, and Oleg is still in bed, evidence of the fact that he experiences an extreme version of the same uneasiness. Plus, he has a cold. Mom has been jumping from room-to-room, running baths, drying hair, putting green or pink frosting on waffles (uh, gross), playing alphabet games, finding socks. All I've done of any note all morning is send the four-year-old girl into hysterics by freaking about her putting a plastic bag on her head. I was trying to find a picture of a cicada on Google Images to scare the two-year-old with, and I look up, and Maggie has a plastic bag over her head. I very sternly told her NEVER to put a plastic bag on her head. Told her about six times in a deep, booming voice with blue fire shooting out of my nose and sharp claws poking out of my fingertips. Her very-large-to-begin-with eyes got bigger and bigger, and I could feel exactly how she felt--frozen with fear and mortification and not knowing why this big person suddenly doesn't like me. But my adult brain, feeble at best, I was thinking, "at least she'll remember not to put a bag on her head. I may be saving her life!" But then the walls crack and it's heartbreak and she's four and I'm her Aunt Mandy and there are tears and we "want GRANDMA!!!" Now, she totally hates me. She's standing on the steps staring down at me. I say, "you have Winnie the Poo on your shirt!" and she goes back up the steps, starts crying, and says quietly to my mom, "I don't want to wear these pants." My mom says, "Why? why are you crying?" And she says, "I don't like Winnie the Poo." Winnie the Poo is on her shirt, not her pants, which my mom points out, and then they change her clothes. After the drama, Mom asks what she wants for lunch, and she says, "birthday cake." The two-year old has poked a head-sized hole in his blanket and is walking around like Pig Pen in Charlie Brown, with the blanket trailing after him. The nine-year old is sick and bored. I have a headache that knows no bounds.

2008-12-18T06:02:00.001-08:00

Things were not as bleak as I thought Monday. A couple hours after my Angry Episode with the Toshiba, the Russian (my husband) got out of bed and put the cord back into the converter box whence it had become disconnected. Computer fixed. Then, when I asked him how he wanted to go about retrieving our only working vehicle from the distant parking lot under the current conditions (-15 degrees), the Russian said the car was in the garage, had been in the garage since yesterday evening, that he had not ridden home with another soccer player as he had led me to believe the night before. What a prankster.

Speaking of things that end well, the Shakespeare reading group in which I participate held its last monthly meeting of the semester last week. We meet for 3-4 hours to read a Shakespeare play aloud. I LOVE it. Our hostess is a Shakespeare scholar who brings key info and insights to the material but never seems to be "teaching." I go for the language, the sensuous pleasure of speaking Shakespeare's lines--feeling them on the tongue and hearing them spoken. I like, I guess, the kinesthetics of the tongue, the way saying links to understanding--the song and the sense. I read aloud to myself sometimes; I particularly like to read Hopkins, Yeats, cummings, and Melville--and perhaps oddly, Edward Taylor. Disparate, but they share a lot (besides being all Anglo guys!)--the first and the last, along with Shakespeare, for example, have a great deal of sound play, and all seem to me exemplary of a rich suggestiveness of language, signification that glances off big meanings. I like poems with enough mystery to hold me up--negative capability I think Keats called it. I like to feel on the threshold of an idea. The sound of the line is integral to that enjoyment for me. And plus Shakespeare's words are lovely in the mouth. So, we've been reading the comedies, which are my least favorite Shakespeare works, but I'm not complaining--they're still splendid. I prefer the tragedies. Lear. And I like to teach the sonnets.

One of my students put a book, a gift, in my mailbox yesterday. It's a 1908 copy of Shakespeare's stories--not plays--but stories distilled from the plays and rendered in prose for children. They're wonderfully illustrated, too, with pen drawings of little Kewpie-(Cupie-?) looking children dressed for different scenes of the plays, mainly the comedies and romances. I haven't had a chance to do more than poke around in the book, but it's a quirky, cool gift.

I am feeling disappointed by the blogging experience. I find that much of what I really want to blog about I don't have the guts to write online. A reasonable reservedness or out-of-date fear of transparency? I'm thinking of getting a new, more anonymous blog.

Worser and Worser

2008-12-15T05:24:00.000-08:00

To sweeten my already painfully sweet life, today at 6:45 am, my fucking Toshiba, my only computer with Word on it, stopped working while I was grading papers. There has been a short in the place where the power cable plugs in for a long time; it seems to have given out completely. Then, within three minutes, the whole thing went off because I haven't had battery power for a couple years. Now, I have 14 papers to grade, no MS Word. Just this piece of crap with Works and tiny letters that make the windows to my soul ache. Plus it is negative 15 degrees on my outdoor thermometer, and our only working car is a mile and a half away where we left it yesterday afternoon through a delightful bit of mutual idiocy and poor communication.

2008-12-10T06:33:00.001-08:00

Just a few things before I rush off to office hours and grading drafts of final papers. Life speeds up in the 15th week of the semester, a measure by which time is divided not into two portions but into 16-week segments of progressively frantic reading and writing and grading that will climax in this and the next week before abruptly bottoming out to a luscious calm in the following week. A long way of saying that I've been too busy to write and still am.

This morning I observed a beautiful sunrise and that my fingernails are growing at significantly different rates, something that has never before been the case.
I've had several peculiar dreams lately. Last night I dreamt that I masturbated and had an orgasm, which was pleasant but also disturbing, since I do not like being uncertain about what my body is up to while I am asleep. I also dreamt that I was in a big house and had a distinct feeling that the house should have something peculiar or hidden in it. I spent a long time in silent distress because I could find nothing mysterious. I kept trying to call my mom, who was also supposed to be there, but the buttons on the phone were so tiny I couldn't dial the right ones and had to start over and over. Several nights ago, I dreamt that I was a nanny and was trying to get some children to make their bed. I caught their attention by pointing out how most things in a home are in the shape of a square or rectangle.

Since the dream, I have been unaccountably preoccupied by the banal thought that so many things are squarish in shape--I pondered it through the whole of my one-hour drive to the therapist's office Monday morning, for instance. It's not even very interesting but I cannot get it out of my head.

Thanks and No Thanks

2008-12-03T20:11:00.000-08:00

Having successfully made it through the end of November, I find myself facing just two more weeks of the penultimate semester of my career as a university professor. I am feeling vaguely apprehensive about who I will be in May and am wondering whether people in other lines of work wrap their identities so closely around their jobs. For the Thanksgiving weekend, the Russian and I went to KC--or, rather, I went to KC. Oleg was already there. This year, he would not attend Thanksgiving Day dinner at my aunt's but insisted on staying behind, alone, at my parents' house. A couple months ago, my uncle and cousin offended him, and he has since determined that eating at their house violates his principles. Maybe it's my medication, but I just could not work up the sense of outrage I thought would be an appropriate response to this defection. I tried, but I wasn't that interested. I wouldn't go if I were him either. I wanted to see my niece and nephews, and that was my only chance on this visit. Thanksgiving always disappoints me. People say they prefer Thanksgiving to Christmas because there's less commercialism associated with Thanksgiving. In my experience, there is nothing associated with Thanksgiving. It's nice to see the family and all that, but the holiday itself strikes me as peculiarly empty. If I were calling the shots for Thanksgiving, I would have every Thanksgiving commence with a reading from The Plymouth Adventure. Then we would listen to the President, who, rather than pardoning a stupid turkey, would deliver a radio address at noon in which he would offer a national thank you. There would always be hot apple cider. And, I would try to have something like an apple press going or some corn to husk. People could rake the yard or shovel snow, if nothing else. And, there would be no television at all, and no video games, and everyone would eat in one room, at one big table, no matter how many people, no matter how squished together. I would most definitely do something like go around and have each person say one thing for which they are thankful. And for dinner, we would first have popcorn and squash, maybe some clams. Then venison and hasty pudding. After dinner, we would sit in front of a fireplace and read a few American Indian tales and think about how everything for which we give thanks comes at a great cost.

While in KC, Oleg and I also went house hunting. He has convinced a friend in Russia to buy a house in the US as an investment. We will live in it for three years and then sell the house--making a profit of some sort for the friend and providing ourselves with a place to live. (I don't even want to get started on all the nightmare scenarios that come to mind in relation to this little scheme.) Anyway, while looking at houses, I kept forgetting what we were doing. I kept thinking about whether I would want to live in the house forever, and I would forget to think about whether someone else would want to buy the house from me later. Apparently, no one else would want any of the houses I like, and all the houses I picked out have now been rejected. So, I've lost interest in the search and am working on reconciling myself to the prospect of living in exactly the kind of house I never wanted to live in, likely located in a neighborhood of the sort I so hated and longed to escape as an adolescent. Life seems such a let-down.

2008-11-23T18:06:00.000-08:00

I drank too much Friday night. I do not drink at all these days, although I was a serious toper in college and most of graduate school. I am one of those people who tends to lose the power to stop drinking once she gets started; my solution in recent years has been to abstain from drinking more than one. I will take a glass of wine or a beer with dinner, but even that, only once or twice a week. If I get to three drinks and there is more to be had, all bets are off. The truth is, I am afraid of alcohol. One way to "control" that fear is simply to drink alcohol. Another is closely to police my own and everyone else's drinking. My husband, who weighs exactly twice as much as I do, cannot drink two glasses of wine in peace. Both my parents, but especially my dad, have suffered under the weight my glowering disapproval during family gatherings. I have felt anxiety over the drinking behaviors of colleagues, friends, sibling, soccer coaches, room-mates, parents, husbands, students, neighbors, airplane pilots, ancestors, and college presidents. Like drinking itself, the fear that people around me drink too much and the monitoring it inspires are hard to control. I like to blame all of this on my first husband, who was a bona fide alcoholic and drug addict. I have lurid, frightening stories to prove this, but I know he was only a symptom.

When I was young, my parents were involved in the local Methodist church. They taught an adult bible study class, and my dad went to a synod or some such thing once or twice. As a result of their involvement, my brother and I went to Sunday School and worship services every week. I don't remember much about it. What I do remember was constantly acting as though I misunderstood obvious things during youth group meetings in order to make others laugh. I also remember playing Mary in a Christmas play put on for the congregation. I pretended that Jesus sneezed and so I bent down to wipe his nose. I guess I thought the story needed some creative improvisation--a touch of realism, maybe. I do not remember ever being instructed about drinking or not drinking. I do remember getting upset with my dad for coming home drunk once. I must have been ten or eleven. He brought me my illustrated book of Bible stories and boisterously instructed me to read the story of Christ at the wedding feast. In my experience, some groups of Catholics take a weird sort of pride in drinking a lot. And, also in my experience, some Russians like to joke with one another about Russian drinking--although the 58-year average life expectancy of Russian men makes the humor difficult to comprehend. Methodists are not generally known for drinking, although I don't think they are as inclined to temperance as Muslims, Eastern Orthodox, or Lutherans. I could be entirely wrong, though. Particularly about Lutherans.

In the early and mid-nineteenth century, circuit riders or itinerant Methodist preachers rode throughout the midwest, visiting farms and trying to effect religious conversions among the farmers. Part of the circuit rider's mission involved persuading homesteaders and their families to give up sin and seek salvation, but another part involved efforts to socialize the uneducated, marginally "civilized" people--which included pretty much everyone who lived more than 150 miles beyond the eastern seaboard or south of Pennsylvania. Circuit riders carried valuable lessons to these midwesterners, things like the advantages of having a chair and table in the house, and the need to bathe once a month. Drinking was not unknown among the Methodists--especially, I would imagine, at their big outdoor revivals, where seekers worked up such frenzied enthusiasm about being saved, they were known to get down on all four and bark like dogs. But, for the most part, to be a Methodist meant living a clean life, which meant, ideally, not drinking alcohol, not smoking or snuffing tobacco, and not eating clay. Who the hell eats clay? While, as I said, my own Methodist upbringing did not include prohibitions against any of these things, or did not enforce them in a way that I found at all memorable, I bet I could count on my left hand the number of times that I've gone to bed without brushing my teeth in the last ten years.

I grew up in the midwest, and my family, segments of them that is, have lived in the area--eastern Kansas Territory (dad's family) and western Missouri (mom's family)--since before the 1840s. My maternal grandmother lived most of her adult life just west of Wornall Road in Kansas City, about a quarter-mile from the MoKan border. She could not hear of Kansas without grunting in disgust. Kansas was a bad place, I gathered, because of something having to do with road curbs and "black people." I've never figured out the road curbs part, although I think it has to do with taxes; but the other part seems to have been plain old racism, no doubt jumbled together with residue of the bushwhacker-jayhawker conflicts. Later, I learned that Kansas was also Bad because high school kids could go there to drink. Kansas had a minimum-age drinking law of 18 for a couple years longer than Missouri. A sinful place. I went to KU for six years, of course.

I don't know where I'm going with this. I drank way too much Friday night. I was with Oleg my husband, and our friend Boris. We were drinking vodka, despite all the potential for cliche. By the time we got home, I was sick. Oleg, who did not take part in the frantic merry-making and glass-breaking, had the husbandly sensitivity to take pictures of me getting sick, a whole series of shots. In one I look like an Edward Lear drawing with my legs sticking straight out like scissors and my toes pointed. Oleg said I was moving my legs like a fish. I don't know what that means. In another picture, I have a look of pure agony on my face, and in another, I am making a face like a squirrel. I remember none of this. Now I have a distinct feeling of shame, a kind of sinfulness; I feel weirdly uncouth.

Narcissism

2008-11-11T07:44:00.000-08:00

I woke up this morning at 5 a.m. in the throes of an anxiety attack and with a single word on the tip of my tongue. The word was narcissism. I don't know what prompted me to be contemplating--if I was contemplating--narcissism while I slept. The anxiety took the form of sudden and complete wakefulness and a nagging twisting and burning in my stomach. The narcissism may be my subconscious chiding me for my anxiety; besides myself, I have nothing else to relate it to. What is causing my anxiety? Where to begin! For one, yesterday, a colleague, a social scientist, referred to research he conducted at some unspecified time in the past, in which he learned that many nurses change jobs because they cannot put up with the condescending treatment of doctors and hospital administrations. I guess it seems obvious, but nobody has mentioned this to me (except my dissertation director, indirectly, and I considered her biased) as a danger of nursing. According to my main source on the subject, my mother, the doctors and residents are very respectful and treat her like a professional. I cannot see her putting up with less. I've heard friends in the profession refer to specific doctors as arrogant and moody, but have never heard any of them speak of a broader problem with status conflicts. I fear that such a thing would drive me bonkers. My students who go to med school are very bright, but they are not any brighter than numbers of students who do not. I'm not sure I would handle this arrogance very well. I wonder if that is narcissistic. Do I have a chip on my shoulder already? My colleague said that the nurses he surveyed complained that measures for nursing "empowerment" within the healthcare field typically meant such token moves as letting nurses decide what color ink would be used for charting. What the hell. Oh, my stomach. Second, last night on the phone, my husband, who is in Rhode Island on "business," expressed renewed and intensified interest in removing to New England permanently. He says, "you could work in a private school here." Um, I am getting OUT of teaching--HELLO?! If I were going to teach, I would continue my frigging tenure track job at the university, not switch to a prep-school to deal with an even more entitlement-obsessed student population and their neurotic parents. That would lead to MORE of everything I currently hate, aside from location. Has he just been filtering out my plans of nursing school for the past 12 months? What will be the outcome of this clear break from reality on his part? Besides, as much as I would love to return to RI, to do so now, without a job, would be insane. We could buy a handyman's-special bathroom in Tiverton for the price of a three-bedroom house in good condition in Kansas City. Sometimes I wonder how couples keep it together. Oh, and one last thing, it's snowing.

2008-11-09T07:36:00.000-08:00

Seems odd that we are almost to Thanksgiving. The amount of time it takes me to grade a set of rough drafts for a class I teach stretches out to feel infinitely longer than the amount of time it takes to get from Halloween to Thanksgiving. Where is my focus? Yesterday, I spent scattered moments throughout the day watching the most appalling horror movies on SciFi channel with my husband. The first featured an "abominable" snowman without snow. The film was entitled "Abominable" and the characters very clearly agreed about the creature's not being a "bigfoot," because bigfoots, unlike the abominable, avoid people. The monster pulled a woman through a 2x2 foot window waist-first. You could see her head and feet go through together, although it was very quick. Later in the day, another movie also revolved around an abominable snowman, this time called a yeti, who was terrorizing a group of students who survived a plane wreck in the Himalayas. Whenever the director wanted the monster to run or leap, the film seemed to speed up, so that the monster that was lurching around more or less realistically one second would suddenly and very jerkily leap ten or twenty feet forward. Then I caught the first part of a movie about some giant spiders at a ski resort which were less frightening than the movie's awkwardly developed romance between Vanessa Williams and some cocky, washed up ski champion. Finally, a movie about some British special ops soldiers on a training mission in a heavily wooded area. Since the moon was full, the forest was also soon filled with werewolves who organized themselves to feed on the soldiers. I enjoyed the werewolf movie more than the others, but only because the parts I saw never depicted the creatures full-on; instead, they appeared in fragments and fleetingly, as shadow or silhouettes. Things seem much scarier to me when I can't quite make out what they are. But, things also seem much less scary when viewed broken up through the tiny cracks between my fingers or with the sound off. I kept trying to get Oleg to tell me what he would do if a yeti were attempting to get in the house. He wouldn't respond, but I decided I would dump a bunch of water on the floor, cut the cord of my hair-dryer where it connects to the hairdryer, strip back the plastic to expose the wires, plug in the cord, and wait on the kitchen counter. When the yeti came through the door, I'd throw the cord into the water on the floor. Oleg said this would probably work. I have a number of intricate security systems about the house that I won't get into here. Not to foil yetis, of course.

My outdoor thermometer read 19 degrees this morning. I'm sure it feels colder, and last night my toes began to show signs of pernio, which I get every year. The wind blows all the time which supposedly makes the air feel colder, except in the summer, when it's 92 degrees and the wind feels like hell's door blown open. That is, if hell were filled with cow dung and fertilizer. A friend in Rhode Island says it has grown colder there, too, but she still has flowers blooming in her yard. Her kind heart may explain the flowers, but Rhode Island smells better than South Dakota in general.

My Knee, My Loss of Speed, and My President

2008-11-05T15:27:00.000-08:00

This is my most recent soccer injury. I have decided that this is a "moderate level quadricep contusion." I found that on the internet. The bruise is located just above my left knee (to the right in the picture), where I was cleated by a goalie in a co-ed game. He had no reason to be slide-tackling me. I still cannot bend the knee much past 90 degrees.

When I was in junior high, some 25 years ago, I used to play indoor soccer 5 times a week. We'd have games starting as late as 11:30 at night. I played soccer until I was 19 and then didn't play again until I was 25. I stopped again and didn't start again until I was 33. I hate the way my body has gotten slower. Even when I'm in shape, I don't have the speed and quickness today at 38 that I had even at 33. When I was 33, I played indoor on three teams and was always getting hurt, which should have told me something. But I played with a 45-year-old woman who could run circles around the women in their twenties and I figured I should be able to do as well as she. During that period, I went to the emergency room for concussions on two different occasions, one of which came from hitting my head on the wall and the other from catching a shot on goal in the face. The second hit me so hard that I couldn't fully open or close my jaw for two days. The other time I went to the hospital was for my collarbone, which I thought I might have cracked. There is still a hard lump there. My legs are relatively short and muscular, which is why I think I have never had problems with my knees and ankles. When I trained for a marathon in 2005, I did have some illiotibial band tightness and pain, but I managed.

I was about 33 when I started to notice that I was aging. It's an odd thing, since I'd always heard people older than me joke and laugh about their bodies falling or drooping, cellulite and jowls developing, and so on. Certainly, there had been people whom I noticed aging in the face, their hair turning grey or white, usually friends of my parents. But I never noticed any sign of it in myself. There were a few mornings after long nights of decadence in college when I'd looked in the mirror and thought, wow, this is how I'll look when I'm 50, but things generally snapped back into place after a day or two. I don't have much vanity about my looks--I'm not unpleasant to look at, unless I'm crying or angry. But I am certainly nothing to start writing poetry about either. Still, as a member of a society that places such tremendous value on the visual qualities of most everything (except what cannot be seen), I am certainly conscious of how I look and try not to sicken myself or others with my appearance. What was my point? Right, so my body is getting old. I have a little brown spot on my hand that I know will grow into a liver spot eventually. And there are deep creases between my eyes, over my nose from glaring at computer screens and books and students all the time. I have two grey hairs on my head that appeared around my 30th birthday and even one grey pubic hair. The worst thing though are my legs, especially just over my knees. When I stand with both my feet on the ground, all of the skin and fat sort of settles above my knee. I am pretty active so it doesn't fold over or anything, but I can spot the beginnings of some puckers. In principle, I care nothing about aging; I try to regard growing old as part of living. Aged people are often quite beautiful, especially if they are content with their lives and have their health and are able to participate in something that interests them. Happy people, regardless of their features, tend to be beautiful--animation is part of it, but also happiness is pleasant to look at. In principle, then, I am not opposed to aging or to looking older, but still, one gets used to looking a certain way. And it seems like being older hit me suddenly and accelerated quickly. Really, I am more disturbed by how slow they've become than the appearance; I could attribute my short strong legs to my peasant heritage or something. But the slowing down: where's the burst of speed, the stopping and starting, the weaving and darting?

I was thinking about aging last night while listening to Obama's acceptance speech. Presidents always look much older after four years in office. Somewhere I saw before-and-after photos of several presidents--a magazine article maybe. It was striking how profoundly the stress affected the men's appearance.

While listening and watching Obama's acceptance speech on TV, surfing the web for images of knee injuries that looked like mine, and thinking about how quickly soccer-playing women and presidents age, I was also on the phone talking with a friend about the rhetoric of race, or what there has been of it, in this election. I am puzzled by the repeated use of the phrase "first black president," since the man is bi-racial. Is he "black" because he has chosen to affiliate with that aspect of his heritage over the European? Is it better to be "black" than bi-racial? More noble to claim African descendancy than to claim both African and European? If Obama says, "I am a black man," everyone nods. What if Obama said, "I am a white man"? Would that be equally acceptable? It would be agreeable to think so, but I am skeptical about the public's ability to err in both directions. Is he "black" because fathers are more important to their children's identities than mothers? Is he "black" because, as a nation, we still operate by some form of the "one-drop rule"? Is he "black" because for others or for Obama himself to call him "white" or even bi-racial would look too much like denying affiliation with a racial group that for too long has been denied full credit for its part in helping to begin, build, and keep this country going? Is he "black" because that is the least complicated rhetorical road for him to travel at this point in history? Well, none of this is all that much about Obama himself. I would have voted for him regardless of what racial identification he claimed or that others assigned to him. I agree with my friend Joanna, though, that it seems rather late in our history as a nation to still be having so much difficulty with the idea of bi-racialism or multi-racialism.

2008-11-04T20:33:00.000-08:00

It is a good day for this country, a very good day.

2008-11-03T13:16:00.001-08:00

I was listening to NPR on my way home. The topic of conversation, only the middle of which I caught, seemed to be what listeners think about polling. So, this man calls in and compares two surveyers who recently telephoned him. The caller says that he viewed one more positively than the other, and the host asks why. The caller says that he didn't like the first, that it was a computer. He could tell that the program was designed to generate follow-up questions tailored to his responses. The caller didn't like it. Again, "why?" "I don't know," he says, "I just didn't. I can't put my finger on it. It just seemed so ersatz."

What does that mean? I know what ersatz means (although I'm not entirely sure the caller did), but what kind of "view" is that? Did this guy call up his radio station to share this opinion? Is it just me, or does it seem like we are so caught up in the notion that everyone should have an opportunity to say what they think that we've lost sight of the thinking that should precede the saying? Is it true that everyone's thoughts should be heard?

I have similar questions about student evaluations. Students are not experts in the subjects they take in school, and they are not pedagogical experts either; for the most part, they have never taught, and despite what they would claim, they do not even have that much experience in the classroom--at least not compared to the person teaching them. They don't know what is effective in a broad sense. All they know is what they "like." We are so committed to giving everyone a "say" and making everyone feel as though his or her opinion is valuable, no matter what, that nobody dares to ask whether every opinion really is significant. There don't seem to be many people who have informed reasons for liking, disliking, supporting or not supporting things. And it is scary that, on the basis of whatever whim or dyspepsia or arbitrary bad association, everybody gets to vote, evaluate, and speak out. If I were running for office, I would endorse a public service campaign to promote more thinking and less speaking out.

I guess you don't have to be a card-carrying Derridean to know that this blog needs to end immediately.

2008-11-01T12:16:00.000-07:00

It's a beautiful day in South Dakota--windy, as usual, but warm and bright. My husband is catching walleye at a nearby lake. The phone call came this morning from a friend of his. They had caught four "keepers" in an hour of fishing. The husband was out of bed and gone in a flash.

I am inside looking out my office window. I've been composing a job recommendation letter for a graduate student with whom I work. He's a great guy and a promising scholar. Just received email from another student. She's finished next week's reading early and wants to get a start on her next paper. We won't be discussing the book until Tuesday, but she wants me to email my thoughts on the characters and events to her, so she can begin work. Earlier today I wrote a long blog about my graduate student years and erased the whole thing with one click. I felt awful for having wasted an hour writing when I could have been working. Working?

Have I mentioned that "It's a beautiful day in South Dakota--windy, as usual, but warm and bright." It's Saturday. I feel guilty for not working. I want to reply to my student: "Sorry, I don't work on Saturday." Or: "I am only teaching that book in class--not once to you in email over the weekend and then again in class next week." It's nice that she's so committed. An "exceeds expectations" teacher would probably meet her for coffee this afternoon and have a discussion about the book. Before I got the email, I was reading the "balancing life and work" forum thread in the Higher Chronicle. This is the thread where some faculty go to complain about their jobs and support one another in trying to muster the gumption to quit. One writer says that she has already quit and now feels much, much better. I have already quit, too, but I really don't feel that much better. I still feel manacled to the computer and guilty when I'm not doing something job-related. I constantly have to remind myself that I can relax, find something enjoyable to do, keep the work contained within certain hours. I don't need any more lines on my cv.

I'll be voting on Tuesday. I'm afraid my parents are both voting for McCain, and just thinking about it makes my heart race. I was mulling over whether I might be a Federalist in the car the other day, and Thoreau's words on voting kept coming to mind. He wrote that to vote is pretty much a game of craps, that no choice of moral importance can be made in such a way--at least not for people who feel deeply invested in a question. Thoreau writes, "All voting is a sort of gaming, like chequers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voter is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men" ("Resistance to Civil Government" Thoreau).

What Thoreau says about the character of the voter's not being staked is true. In some sense, we are not supposed to care too much about the outcome of a vote; after casting our ballots, we are encouraged to let go of an issue and let the process do its work. The vote substitutes for my continuing identification with a stance or my moral connection to a decision. I put my preference in the vote and send it out to join the other votes, punchcards. My vote goes into a box and separates from me. Hours later, a decision emerges. The social contract which impels/implies my consent dictates that the decision, the output, be accepted as my law, even if, as Thoreau points out, that output is morally repugnant to me. As a citizen in a republic, I agree to respect the system that allots power to a majority. But the republican form adheres to the majority decision not because the majority is right or wise or moral, but because the system of accepting its decisions is expedient. I wonder if voting itself may be worse than amoral and, in truth, immoral, since it forces a buffer between my knowledge of what is morally right and my ability to live out that knowledge. "Cast your whole vote," Thoreau writes, "not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight." These are brave words, but it's difficult to conceive of what they would look like in action. I've read and seen movies about the people in this country who won't pay their income taxes because, as they argue, the federal government has no jurisdiction to collect taxes on individual income. Nothing ever seems to come of the claim or the resistance--except jail time for the tax-evading individuals. When the Patriot Act passed, one might have expected to see a movement of some sort, but nothing significant emerged. Elections are sometimes called quiet or peaceful revolutions, and certainly they can bring about changes. But I think Thoreau is right to recognize that the changes are morally neutral in as much as they reflect no decision of right and wrong and may be immoral in that they separate decision making from moral responsibility. I will vote, but I am not very excited about it.

In Defense of Anger

2008-10-29T12:01:00.000-07:00

I was raised in a suburb in the midwest. After I grew up and moved away, I learned that, throughout my childhood, the neighbors who lived on both sides and behind my family regarded us as unstable and possibly dangerous. Had I known, I would have gloried in it, but I did not know. Most of the trepidation had to do with my dad. The thing about my dad--there are a lot of things about my dad; he's an interesting guy--but the thing that so alarmed the neighbors was my dad's explosive temper. To illustrate, take a fine fall morning, any weekend, circa 1979, and we find my dad fixing himself a lunch. He gets out the cold cuts, probably olive loaf or those thinly sliced squares of processed beef, and goes to toast a couple slices of white bread in the toaster. He waits. The toaster does not pop up the toast, despite the evident burning that has begun. So, my dad has to try to extract the bread with his finger. By now, he is cursing in a low but intense voice--something about engineers who design things like this toaster. He burns his finger slightly and the cursing gets louder. If you were there, you would be able to hear him throughout the house and from the front or back porch, even if the doors and windows were closed. He turns the toaster over and shakes it, and maybe he yells, "you godDAMN piece of SHIT!" Then, let's suppose that the toaster slips from his hands as he's shaking it and crashes to the floor, dumping his toast and a half cup of burnt toaster crumbs on the linoleum. Things quickly escalate. My dad introduces new, more powerful terms into the yelling, which is coming out pretty much non-stop. The volume rises significantly. At this point, the neighbors hear a word or two from their own yards, or, if the windows are open, from their own kitchen tables. Next, his foot slips on the crumbs. He doesn't go down, but the sudden movement to catch his balance causes the blood to rush from his hands and sends adrenalin pumping through his system. He feels a small spasm in his back. Now, he is in a true rage. Now, he bellows forth the poetry of fury. If the neighbors haven't yet realized a show is on, they learn soon enough when dad yanks the back door open (things get even better when the sliding screen door comes off the tracks), bursts on to the back deck, and cursing at the top of his lungs the whole time, hurls the toaster into the back yard. Then, he turns back inside where my mom has appeared, with her eyebrows up and her lips pressed together. Dad goes and sits on the couch, still puffing a little self-righteously, and pretty soon mom brings him a sandwich. She's not friendly about it, and he will still be trying to get her to talk to him at dinnertime, but he gets fed and the kitchen floor is magically wiped up. Over the years, the toaster is followed by a hairdryer, blender, telephone, a small black and white television, and of course the sliding screen door. No body ever gets thrown into the backyard, but I can imagine them now, the neighbors, half-smiling, feeling superior and biting their lips, peeking around their curtains, wondering if it is really very safe to let their kids play over there.

I don't blame my dad for his behavior, even though I did grow up feeling weird about having friends over and sort of nervous about when he might start flipping out. The really bad thing is that I either inherited or learned his rage--or both. I don't usually throw things, but I certainly get so mad that I can't hear or see, and then I act impulsively and say and do things that most people would never do. Once in Rhode Island during the peak of the shopping season--mid-to-late December, I found myself driving around and around in a shopping center parking lot with a bunch of other cars playing a tense kind of duck-duck-goose game. I stopped when I saw a woman approach and get in a car and start the engine. She didn't move and she didn't move, and she didn't move. I could see her. She was on her phone. She pulled down her sunvisor and put on some lipstick. She lit a cigarette, opened her window a bit. I waited. Finally, I put my car in park, got out, and approached her driver's side. She looks at me. Blows smoke out the window. Are you leaving? I ask. When I'm ready, I'll leave, she says to me, holding her cell phone down from her mouth a bit. I was heart-thumping mad when I got out of my car. Now, for a split second, I cannot see, and there's no specific sound in my head but I cannot hear anything around me either. A dizzy pulsing in my brain, and then it passes. I turn and get back in my car and very slowly roll forward to park directly behind her, so that my passenger's door is pressed up flush against her back bumper. She's still jabbering. She doesn't even notice. I get out and walk about half a soccerfield's length across the parking lot before she realizes she's been blocked in. All of a sudden I hear screaming and turn to see her waving her arms, her face red. I wait as she runs across the parking lot. Ready to leave, now? I say. People are smiling as they walk by. Squawk! Squawk! Squawk! I walk back, get in my car, and go home. I feel good, really good, like I've solved an important social problem, not at all like I am a social problem. I don't know if my dad ever felt like that when he propelled cheap, poorly designed appliances and other household goods into the back yard, but I do sense an affinity between us. All of us face the world with so few weapons; it reminds me of Ahab telling Starbuck of his need to punch through the mask--hit back at the big, dumb uncooperative universe of contrary people and things that defy and withstand our will! Hi-yah!

Why it Seems Like I Twitch a Lot When I Talk to You

2008-10-27T20:35:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I feel guilty for things I haven't done. I don't mean large-scale social injustices like race discrimination. Although I am probably guilty of that, too, on some level, given the unbidden and unearned privileges I enjoy on account of my "white" skin. But I am not talking about that right now. I am talking about being guilty of things like shoplifting or lying. I have this recurrent feeling of guilt in certain situations, even though I am doing and have done nothing blameworthy. Many times I have had the experience while shopping. I gradually feel my neck and shoulders tightening, because I know I am being watched. And once I realize that I am being watched, I feel suffused with guilt, as though I am shoplifting, even though I've never stolen anything from a store in my life. If, under these circumstances, a salesperson catches my eye, I am compelled to look down or away, and I am overly conscious of my arms and legs. I am thinking the whole time about how I'm not stealing anything, don't even intend or want to steal anything, but my body is actively performing as though panicked because I have been caught stealing. Except I am not stealing. Other times, I will be in the middle of talking to someone, looking them square in the eye, centered in what I'm saying, when I am all of a sudden apart from myself (not visually but in my head) listening to myself and thinking, "yeah, right." Even though I always really, genuinely mean what I am saying, another part of me has split away and doubts (or maybe plays with doubting) it, and that part begins to affect the part that believes what I'm saying, so that despite my sincerity, which is real, I can feel my eyes start to look like they are lying. And sometimes I'll stumble over my words, or I'll suddenly scratch my face when I don't even have an itch--a "give," as that old movie about the gambling psychiatrist--House of Cards--called it. And the thing is, I know I am not lying, but I also know I feel like I am and I look like I am. Then, instead of spinning my head around and spitting green stuff, I usually tell my self /ves that I don't really care if it looks like I'm lying, and I bluster my way through, telling sweet truth the whole time but getting none of the credit or enjoyment from it that I deserve. These are the things that make social interaction difficult for me.

2008-10-26T20:02:00.001-07:00

Whew! Glad I got all that off my chest. Today, a fit of nostalgia instead of guilt. I somehow got to thinking about a long-past obsession I had over a Portuguese guy on my co-ed soccer team in Rhode Island about five years ago. Part of the obsession was my first husband's fault. He wouldn't sleep with me for 33 months because I once said he smoked too many cigarettes which made me not want to have children with him. I figured he would be likely to die before they were able to drive. It was not a particularly sensitive thing to say, but the intention was good: I wanted him to quit smoking. Addicts are astoundingly skilled at protecting their habits; he immediately transformed my words into "You are not good enough to be the father of my children, you dirtbag." This imagined insult had such a hurtful effect on him that he never again had sex with me. Really. No matter how many times I told him that my words were directed at a behavior, not at his essential being, he insisted on misunderstanding what I said. It was absurd. So, around the age of 30, at my sexual prime, I was married to someone who, for the next almost-3 years, refused to sleep with me. We never had sex after that point. To keep this short, despite my growing resentment (and increasing libido) I did not violate the agreement that was our marriage until after I filed for divorce. Then, I went after this guy on my soccer team. I didn't and don't even know that much about him. What I did know indicated that it would be difficult to find anyone less likely to be an appropriate love interest for me. Still, the barbed-wire tattoo on his arm and the stories he told about Portugal gave me goosebumps. And when it all came down, I was so overwhelmed by this intersection of my day-to-day life and what had become a painfully constant fantasy world in my head, I really think I lost all sense of reality. This was probably the closest I have ever been to psychotic. The guy was barely literate. He had finished 8th grade. He was nice, but probably not very. Maybe it was chemical. I read in an alumni magazine last year an article about research on the influence our sense of smell has on our emotions. The research reported that a head cold that lasts for two weeks can prevent women and men from processing smells unique to their partners that keep them emotionally primed for intimacy. These are specific smells that attract some and repel others; the scientists have even developed a natural selection process based on smell. Why am I writing about smells? Anyway, I was blown AWAY by this guy--or my ideas about this guy (or his smell?). I don't know how I got anything done that year. All I thought about was being with him--not necessarily sleeping together, although that was a significant part of it--but also the satisfaction of being wanted after being concertedly not wanted for several years. Anyway, today, I was remembering that period and how I had once found a passage in Othello that captured exactly what I was feeling. I looked it up in an online concordance. And the weird thing is that when I read the lines I could feel my heart clinching up and my ears going cold--an inexplicable ache, a yearning in the bottom of my throat.

[ . . . ] If it were now to die,
'Twere now to be most happy; for, I fear,
My soul hath her content so absolute
That not another comfort like to this
Succeeds in unknown fate. (Othello 2.1.974-978)

Confessions of a Political Inactivist

2008-10-24T07:13:00.000-07:00

I fear I have lost all standing--if I ever had any--with the student feminists on campus. I don't blame them. My inactivity is without bounds. For four years, I have been the nominal advisor for the on-campus group that hands out free condoms and tries to raise awareness about reproductive choice and sexual health. These are laudable, nay, necessary activities. I have done nothing, NOTHING, at least for the past two years, to facilitate or motivate their work. When I was told that the group was without student leadership and ongoing membership this year (in an election year?), I shrugged my shoulders and canceled the web page account. When the Feminist Majority Foundation called to see if I'd be willing to lead a student group, I said that I'm leaving campus in May, find someone else. Now, it turns out, there are people who want to continue the first group and, thanks to me, they've lost their web account, email address, and possibly access to the money they raised. A couple years ago, the elected geniuses in Pierre (the South Dakota state capital) shipped in a group of pro-lifers to testify that women who have abortions are thereafter wracked with unbearable guilt and sorrow. The so-called task force appointed by the governor spent months watching this circus and then advised the state to outlaw abortions. Thankfully, there are still enough crusty old, independent-minded farmers and ranch-running frontier women left in this state, not to mention people who have at some point read or heard of the US Constitution and a few who at this late date still recognize the established religion clause, to defeat the measure. In the meantime, though, when it looked like madness would win the day, the feminist activists at USD worked tirelessly and, really, considering the issue, thanklessly, to educate people about the excessive nature of the bill. I was not involved in any of this. Of course I supported defeat of the measure, thought the bill typical of old-boy, midwestern, red-state politics, shot off a short editorial to a newspaper, signed the referendum to have the bill thrown out, and quietly and passively awaited the outcome. I certainly did not go door-to-door, attend meetings or public debates, even watch the returns with nervous dread. I care on some level, but I didn't and don't feel it very deeply; I don't feel driven to do anything. I don't even feel that interested. Hilary Rodham Clinton or Barak Obama--I don't know that it makes much difference. They stand on the same side of the same issues as I do, and that's enough for me. Symbolically, either would be gratifying, but I don't see myself shouting with abandon or being flooded with elation on election night. If someone talks excitedly to me about any issue, I have to pretend to mirror their interest. I don't watch TV news or talk shows, don't read the newspapers, don't listen to the radio. Sometimes it seems as if I feel sharply only what I read in fiction and what affects me directly (see picture of toe below). I can easily feel dazed, awed even, by a line from Moby-Dick, but the economy? Nothing ever really changes in the economy or political news, only in people's lives. And I can't get much sense of them through the media. The feminist group? I am 100 percent in support of their goals, I am a feminist, but I am miserable activist. It makes me sad. They don't need me though, and I am sure the group will rebuild itself and continue to do commendable things.

At Night

2008-10-22T12:31:00.000-07:00

Fold and squint and cringe. I find myself thinking about non-being or, alternatively, the emotional and physical pain of people I love. To hold these thoughts is unbearable and also unstanchable, like the smooth flow of water over a flat plane in a fountain, from one level to another, but seeming like forever.

I dream of the back yard of my childhood. Animals--wolves and deer and other fast-moving creatures--roam the space, trotting across a trimmed lawn and along the back fence. I watch them from the deck and dart inside when I sense they've noticed me. I am full of a nervous foreboding.

Food and other Follies

2008-10-21T18:44:00.000-07:00

Earlier this evening I indulged an abnormal eating behavior that I rarely have time for these days. When I was in grade school and even later, in high school, I read a lot. I was sort of a bi-vert, sometimes an extrovert but often not, and in any case, would spend entire days and nights reading. Usually, if I started a book, I would read it non-stop until finished. I can still do that occasionally, when I take a plane somewhere, for instance or allow myself a day or a couple days in the summer with a novel. As a kid, one of the things that always struck me most powerfully about what I read were scenes that involved eating, especially scenes in which some single item of food was painstakingly detailed--fetishized, I guess we would say. I remember a few of these, though I've probably got the details wrong: little Laura Ingalls's uncle bringing her a delicate, heart-shaped cookie covered in crystals of white sugar in Little Cabin in the Big Woods; Heidi's grandfather toasting thick slices of crusty bread with cheese bubbling on top in Heidi; the crisp brown roast pig and assortment of pies that seduce Ichabod Crane in The Legend of Sleepyhollow; the buffalo hump that Natty Bumppo--or Long Rifle or whatever he's called at that point--feasts on with the squatters in The Prairie (which hump, incidentally I mentioned to a Lakota woman, an author and sometime sojourner in this area; she claimed never to have heard of anyone eating buffalo hump, seemed not to know anything about buffalo humps. Yet just recently I noticed that Melville, like Cooper, refers to buffalo hump as a delicacy in MD, so maybe this is a mythical meal imputed to the mythical West by nineteenth-century New Englanders?). Anyway, it wasn't just that I liked to read about food. I liked to work up little imaginary scenarios for my own eating. I would take a break from five hours of reading and get a couple Saltines or a small bowl of cottage cheese. I'd reach to the back of the shelf where we kept the drinking glasses and get the miniature A&W Rootbeer mug and fill it with milk. Then, I would eat and drink very slowly, nibbling and chewing so daintily that every tiny morsel was completely savored, and I would imagine that I did not eat regularly and felt awed by the wondrousness of each curd of cottage cheese. Or chew the Saltine into a doughy ball and flatten it on my tongue and chew it up again, pondering the whole time how the food had arrived just in time to save my fading life. Then, I would imagine that other people were watching and encouraging me to go slow or else I would make myself sick, since my stomach could surely not handle so much sudden bounty. Or I would put a piece of bread in the microwave with slivers of cheddar cheese on top and stand next to the open back door chewing on soggy bread and wet cheese, listening to the wind whistle and imagining a fire crackling behind me, an old man knitting or darning a sock or something. Tonight, somehow, a chapter of statistics sent me to the kitchen where I thought about Moby-Dick and dry ship biscuit and salty, oily whale steaks and imagined myself a sailor just home from years at sea. My legs felt shaky--probably scurvy. I quickly slurped my way through an overripe pear and tore the skin off a grapefruit. Twice juice squirted directly into my left eye but so intent was my body on the need for Vitamin C that I didn't even feel the sting and kept digging the sour pulpy segments from the skin that clings so tightly. I eyed an apple but decided that my sea-faring stomach needed a rest. It was a harmless indulgence, and the pear needed to be eaten. I can't imagine that anyone would see such a thing as an eating disorder, although I was telling a friend recently, I used irrationally to associate inappropriate sandwiches with eating disorders. This was prompted by a roommate I once had who criticized a sex partner of hers for eating leftover spaghetti in a sandwich. She was majoring in Psych and said told me that putting everything in a sandwich was the sign of an eating disorder. I don't know how much of this I remember and how much I'm making up or made up in my own mind at the time, but I recall that the reason such sandwiches are a problem is that the person making these inappropriate sandwiches does so because he or she feels that by reducing the entree to an on-the-go sandwich, s/he has reduced a meal to a snack. This sort of delusionary behavior = red flag for the roommate who was obsessive about weight, eating, drinking, smoking, and sex.

Having nothing at all to do with food, except maybe the grocery-store setting, here is one of the weirdest things that has happened to me in the past six months. In May, I was getting out of my car in a grocery store parking lot, when the wind yanked the door from my hand sending it crashing into the car sitting in the next spot. I wrote a note with an explanation, my name, and phone number and was walking around the car to stick it on the windshield, when a woman and man approached. I asked if the car belonged to them; it did, so I explained what had happened and gave them the note with my phone number. The next day while I was playing soccer, the answering machine took a message from a woman who identified herself as the person whose car I whacked and left a phone number. When I returned the call, I also got an answering machine, so I too left a message--this is the person who dented your car in the parking lot, I am home, call me, blah blah blah. A few hours after that, I get a phone call from a woman who tells me she called the number I gave her but it was the wrong number. I say, "I'm confused. I only gave you my number and you just called it." So, she says, "I mean the number that that guy you were with gave me--your husband, I think--the number he wrote down." This really confuses me. I tell her I wasn't with a guy, that I was completely alone. I start to think she's putting me on somehow and ask her where the incident she is talking about happened. She says it happened in a Walgreen's parking lot in Fargo, North Dakota, where she was visiting, but that she's now back in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Well, I'm in Vermillion, South Dakota, I say, and my accident happened at HyVee--here. We're both silent. I ask for her phone number and check it against the number I called. I had dialed a single wrong digit . The person whose car I hit with my door had the same phone number except one digit as this other person who had been involved in nearly the same series of events on the same day, and of the ten digits, I misdialed that one. This is so much more exciting if you believe we live in a random universe!

2008-10-08T15:46:00.000-07:00

Last night before bed I logged in to my Sharebuilder account. I've put money into this account half-heartedly, a little at a time, over the past three years, choosing stocks randomly or because I liked their names--Clean Fuel Technologies and so on. The only one that has done anything is Abbott Labs which I chose because I began browsing at "A" and was already bored by the time I reached the "Ab's." I have never had much over a thousand in the account altogether, and the last time I looked, several months ago, there was about $900. Last night, the total read $564, which means that my stock has lost about 40 percent of its total value. I'm not too broken up over it; I had no plans for the money--wasn't counting on it. But it's still mind-boggling. I cannot conceive how horrified people with 401K and other retirement plans must be these days. We are being spanked by the invisible hand.

Like many if not most children, there were periods of time when I was a child that I stayed with a babysitter during the day. These were mothers themselves who took in a number of small children and kept an eye on them for however many hours each day. As I recall, my babysitters were decent people who fed their charges healthy meals and kept them happy and entertained. I had one babysitter who shared my first and middle name. In addition to the name, I remember nothing about her person but her fingernails, which were a high-gloss, fire-engine red. While I cannot bring her face into mind's view, I have distinct memories of her fingernails tapping down rapidly one after another, again and again, on various hard surfaces: a kitchen counter, the metal lip of the kitchen sink, a coffee table in a TV room. With this image comes Helen Reddy singing, "I am Woman," although I can't be certain that the fingernails and the song actually ever met. Possibly "Reddy" and the red nails occupy the same space in my long-term memory.

This particular babysitter had her parents living with her. The older man and woman must have been occupied elsewhere during the day, since we never saw much of them. Or they may have avoided children. I remember the grandfather in particular, because one day when it rained and we were denied the yard, some of the children, including me, wandered down into the unfinished basement. I recall finding what appeared to me to be a very old man with a beard, sitting on a stool in a corner, painting a picture. Somehow, my memory has run the image together with the story of Rumpelstiltskin--maybe, the grandfather told me the story, or maybe he was painting a scene from the story. Or, maybe, my five-year-old mind combined the parts, adapted the scene: a princess (me? the grandfather?) in a dungeon creating something of beauty and value. The man had a long beard as I recall, like Rumplestiltskin's beard, or like the straw--or like Rapunzel's hair, whatever she has to do with it.

During that year or some other, after the grandmother smacked my little brother on the butt with a wooden spoon, we left that babysitter for another.

2008-10-07T17:34:00.000-07:00

I gave notice at my job in August. Nine-months notice. If I were inclined to draw bad analogies, and I am often so inclined, I would say something about giving birth to my new self, which would make this very moment part of my self-gestation. I am creating myself anew, quitting this life for new possibilities. I am torn between viewing my decision as quitting and abandoning, on the one hand, and seizing and storming, moving and rising, and such things, on the other. What does it mean when a person gives up a secure professional life, a good salary, and a certain kind of prestige--all the result of much hard work--in order to start over from scratch? And to make that move as the economy is coming apart at the seams?

I have been trying to think about other things I've quit. I dropped Chemistry my senior year in high school at mid-year. I quit playing soccer after my first semester at college. I quit debating after my sophomore year. I quit being a wife to my first husband after three years, although it took another year to convince the Rhode Island courts I was serious about it. I quit being a Republican when I was 18. I quit smoking when I was 32. I quit ballet dancing when I was 10. I quit throwing tiny celebrations whenever I noticed that the time was 11:11 sometime last year when the time no longer moved me. Quitting has a negative ring to it, like "making excuses." Everyone knows that "losers make excuses" and that when you fall on your face, you get up and try again and again and again and again, even if you hate every minute of it, because when you finally succeed ... oh! Is Benjamin Franklin responsible for this? I can remember in recent years interviewing students for scholarships and asking them to describe their response to an instance when they'd been defeated or opposed in their goals somehow. How would I answer that question? "When I did not get promoted in my fourth year, I quit." "When I realized that 4 out of 5 my students wanted nothing more from me than a snappy performance and a good grade, I quit." "When I figured out that no matter how hard I work I am not going to be as brilliant as all that, I quit." "When I saw that working 65 hours a week would not be enough time and that people would always ask me how I like having my summers off, I quit."

It takes courage to quit this job. This profession. Quitting means more than ceasing to affiliate with an institution. I am throwing off an affiliation, an identity I've claimed for 15 years, truly, a way of life: the "life of the mind," as one of my mentors calls it. A New York Times column last year reported an MIT study in which students were asked to make choices with a mix of known and unknown outcomes. Even when it was irrational to do so, students would keep as many choices available to themselves as possible, refusing to commit to one clearly good choice because it meant giving up others that remained uncertain. The writer of the article contrasts the thinking of these students with that of a legendary Chinese general who was known for his great successes. His strategy was to burn his own ships and supplies when he landed an invading force. His troops knew that retreat was no choice; their invasion would succeed or they would perish. Just before writing and sending my resignation, I reread that article and considered myself brave. I would burn my bridges, cut off retreat. I would not quit my quitting.

2008-10-06T13:17:00.000-07:00

This is my first blog. I should be working on something else. I've never regularly read a blog, "followed" a blog as they say. I once read the entire archives of a blog written by a college kid with cancer, but that's different, more like reading a finished product. I have viewed and admired a colleague's blog, Octopus's Garden. But I'm not sure who has time to read other people's blogs on a regular basis, and I am not sure who would stumble across this one. Even so, I am feeling very self-conscious.

This morning I took a work guest from the small South Dakota town where I live to a slightly larger South Dakota town an hour away so she could fly home to Italy. She has been studying the rhetoric of two recent, female candidates for American national public office, Hilary Rodham Clinton and Sarah Palin. I don't know what she (the Italian visitor) had to say about Clinton and Palin, since I didn't attend the presentation she gave, and in the car we got caught up in bemoaning how hard we work, but I have a few thoughts myself on the subject.

One, neither these nor any other modern political figure, male or female, says much worth hearing. Even when I agree with a candidate's views, her public comments are predictable and flat--newsbite comments. There is no analysis, possibly, because the public wouldn't follow. But more likely, the candidate doesn't know the issues well enough. Any close look at healthcare, the banking system, tax codes, the budget, or global military commitment presents a candidate with the risks of factual error or, worse, with offending some segment of her audience. Regarding the latter, I listened to an NPR program Sunday about the Latino/a vote and the lack of any engagement of immigration issues by the major candidates. The point made by one caller was a good one: neither McCain nor Obama can address immigration--in any way--without making someone (i.e., a group) mad, someone whose vote he needs. There are simply too many strong feelings running in too many directions for a candidate safely to articulate a stance. Instead, they leave out the issue altogether or gesture toward it in overly general ways. Campaign strategy, one might say, thoroughly sucks the brains out of campaign rhetoric. But, and this is two, the science of politics and the strategy of marketing for votes seems to leave us with political speeches and debates that are deathly boooorrrrring as well. Not just dumb but lacking in pathos. No art. Verily, these are not the days of fiery speechmakers like Daniel Webster or even the Hollywood-grandad glow of Ronald Reagan. When the honest antics of political rhetoric do occur they tend to be second-rate--and are followed by such a media go-to as to discourage subsequent performances. Howard Dean howled his enthusiasm and paid a high price indeed. Women, in particular, are pressed to show their professional bona fides by avoiding the appearance of anger, sadness, or undisciplined joy. This unofficial rule has at least a practical (practically monstrous) rationale: who would want a world leader, after all, for whom emotion might influence the decision to make war? Who indeed. Three, it would not be too much of a stretch to describe both Rodham Clinton and Palin as overdetermined by male-dominated political machines that obscure our ability to read their rhetoric as "their" rhetoric at all. Both--not unlike their male counterparts--follow the mandates of political parties, advisors, planners, speech-writers, media consultants, and, in the case of Palin, co-candidates. Seems like Hilary never quite shook Bill's potent shadow, and Palin has yet to register as much more than an obedient puppet (albeit one with a very dangerous potential for autonomy).