Thursday, January 25, 2007
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
a woman before her time
Phew. Well, it's over, mostly. I just stumbled out of my second written comprehensive exam, groggy, drained, and in dire need of a piss. My right hand is so cramped it's hard to type, but I shall overcome.
After the first exam I felt as though nothing short of divine intervention would help me prepare for the second one. In a way I was right, but at least this time I got lucky. One of my questions was about something I decided to review at the last minute this morning, and the other was about one of my favorite people ever, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
For those of you who don't know, Sor Juana was a Mexican nun from the 17th century. She learned to read when she was three years old and begged her mother to disguise her as a man so she could pursue university studies. She studied so fervently that, if she didn't learn all she'd set out to, she'd punish herself by cutting off all her hair. She was, by all accounts, exceptionally physically beautiful; she wrote extensively about love, but rejected the idea of marriage because it would undoubtedly interfere with her ability to study. As a woman living in the 1600's this left her with only one place to go: the convent, an environment in which the petty disputes and constant company of other women both appealed to her tenderness and frustrated her.
Sor Juana claimed she never wanted to be a writer, that if she wrote at all it was because others recognized her talent and wanted a taste of it. She wrote the kind of obscure baroque poems that confound and amaze, as well as others that make playful jabs at the relationships between men and women in all their contradictions and ironies. She possessed a knowledge so encyclopedic that contemporary readers need a legion of footnotes even to apprehend her meaning at times, and yet at others she expresses herself so succinctly and ingeniously that her ideas go down like a drink of water.
It was thinking of Sor Juana a while back that I got hung up on the expression "a woman before her time." I think there's something fundamentally wrong in identifying a person as before his or her time. I mean, here's a woman -- a woman -- who's writing in dark, dark times -- witch-hunting, enslaving, hanging kind of times -- in a distant colony of a backward country struggling to keep up with the rest of Europe. And did I mention she's a woman?
To say she was before her time suggests both that she was an ill fit in her day, and that today she'd be far less extraordinary. She wasn't ahead of her time, she was an incredible, anomalous, remarkable product of that time. And that time had a lot of catching up to do with the astounding talent it somehow brought forth. Come to think of it, I don't think we're equipped for her yet.
After the first exam I felt as though nothing short of divine intervention would help me prepare for the second one. In a way I was right, but at least this time I got lucky. One of my questions was about something I decided to review at the last minute this morning, and the other was about one of my favorite people ever, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
For those of you who don't know, Sor Juana was a Mexican nun from the 17th century. She learned to read when she was three years old and begged her mother to disguise her as a man so she could pursue university studies. She studied so fervently that, if she didn't learn all she'd set out to, she'd punish herself by cutting off all her hair. She was, by all accounts, exceptionally physically beautiful; she wrote extensively about love, but rejected the idea of marriage because it would undoubtedly interfere with her ability to study. As a woman living in the 1600's this left her with only one place to go: the convent, an environment in which the petty disputes and constant company of other women both appealed to her tenderness and frustrated her.
Sor Juana claimed she never wanted to be a writer, that if she wrote at all it was because others recognized her talent and wanted a taste of it. She wrote the kind of obscure baroque poems that confound and amaze, as well as others that make playful jabs at the relationships between men and women in all their contradictions and ironies. She possessed a knowledge so encyclopedic that contemporary readers need a legion of footnotes even to apprehend her meaning at times, and yet at others she expresses herself so succinctly and ingeniously that her ideas go down like a drink of water.
It was thinking of Sor Juana a while back that I got hung up on the expression "a woman before her time." I think there's something fundamentally wrong in identifying a person as before his or her time. I mean, here's a woman -- a woman -- who's writing in dark, dark times -- witch-hunting, enslaving, hanging kind of times -- in a distant colony of a backward country struggling to keep up with the rest of Europe. And did I mention she's a woman?
To say she was before her time suggests both that she was an ill fit in her day, and that today she'd be far less extraordinary. She wasn't ahead of her time, she was an incredible, anomalous, remarkable product of that time. And that time had a lot of catching up to do with the astounding talent it somehow brought forth. Come to think of it, I don't think we're equipped for her yet.
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Bureaucrasaurus Rex
I absolutely don't have time to be writing this right now because I should be studying, but funny thing, it's pretty hard to study when there's a giant steaming turd on your kitchen table.
This particular turd takes the form of a letter from the university explaining that since I am under-enrolled this semester, with only three dissertation credit-hours, I am not eligible for an assistanceship and owe them a $1100 penalty for my underenrollment.
I don't feel underenrolled. In fact I feel less so than at any other time in my college career. I expressly didn't take the second job offered me this semester because I knew how busy I was going to be, what with having to demonstrate three years' worth of knowledge and also start writing a book and all. Even the university argues that a grad student has enough work to do between assistanceships and degree requirements without going looking for trouble by actually trying to pull down any kind of a living wage. Yet suddenly I'm underenrolled and therefore have to pay my tuition...despite rendering 20+ hours of service in the form of an assistanceship, ostensibly granted me to pay my tuition.
Didja catch that? According to the university, for having met my degree requirements thus far and for following the department-authorized trajectory for my course of study, I am to pay a penalty equalling the full amount I am costing them in tuition this semester, and continue to occupy the miserable assistanceship that hauls in a good $800 per student x 20 students in my class. Pop quiz: how much of this money ends up in my pocket? That's right, virtually none, nor does it spin itself into other benefits like health insurance or, in my case, tuition remission.
In essence, the institution that taught me my critical thinking skills would now have me accept that, since I'm costing them LESS this semester, I should do the same amount of work as before and pay them MORE for this privilege. I could just sign up for more credit hours and thereby cost them the requisite amount for THEM to pay ME instead, except that until I paid this penalty, I wouldn't be allowed to register for more classes anyway. Meanwhile, paying it would acknowledge that I owed it, basically anulling any chances I have at them reimbursing me once the dust settles.
Allow me to contextualize this for you. At the bargaining table last month, the university administrators explained to our teaching assistants' union (TAU) representatives that we are expendable and that, from an administrative perspective, we are first STUDENTS and only provisionally EMPLOYEES of the university, therefore any assistanceships they give us are largesse for which we should be unquestioningly grateful.
That's from an administrative point of view. Not from a parking perspective, as it turns out. I got slapped with a ticket for not having my employee parking permit the 2nd day of the semester. I thought there was a week of clemency at the beginning of the semester, I told the Parking Services lady. Sure, she said, for students. AHA, I said, surely I have you on this one, because the administration JUST SAID that we are primarily students and not employees. Maybe, she said, but WE consider you employees of the U and not regular students. That will be fifteen dollars.
I have been at this school for eight years, the last three of these in the same degree program with the same enrollment/assistanceship conditions, yet every semester it's as though the U has no idea who I am or how I got here. They can track my indebtedness to them minute-by-minute with a swipe of my student I.D. but the parking people can't link my license plate with my degree from one semester to the next and issue me a pass that lasts me the whole year. I have to announce my grad-assistant status EVERY TIME to the librarian in order to get an extended due date on my books even though she can press F2 and tell me how much I paid in late fees as an undergrad in 1999. Why oh why can't they tell I work here based on my student account? Why are there six separate operating systems in use on campus and I am not even exaggerating? Ask my students if I work here, somebody please. Even after a weekend of binge-drinking THEY seem to know where to show up for class three days a week, and that I am the teacher.
One of two things is happening here: either the University is a block-headed, utterly ineffectual bureaucracy in which no one sector has any idea of what happens in other sectors and therefore leaves it up to us students to straighten it out for them, since we don't have anything better to do with our time, or the University is a sinister organization POSTURING as an ineffectual bureaucracy in order better to gouge students at its convenience.
I'm not sure which of these I find more infuriating and frightening. At least if the U is posing as useless in order to get more of my money, I can count on its consistent efforts to gouge me and anticipate the ways in which this might happen. If it really is a matter of random irresponsibility, it could strike any time, anywhere. I'm picturing Bureaucrasaurus Rex, this creature with a gaping, screeching maw I feed with my money, and it responds by waving its puny forearms and dropping these glistening reeking monolithic turds on my kitchen table at the WORST POSSIBLE TIME, a time when I have absolutely no emotional or intellectual resources with which to address them.
Where are my minions??!! This is the kind of time a girl really wishes she had some minions.
One thing is clear to me: inept people and institutions never know they're inept. If ever they suspect it, they are nonetheless rotundly untroubled by it, because it's never their time that their incompetence wastes, it's always yours.
This particular turd takes the form of a letter from the university explaining that since I am under-enrolled this semester, with only three dissertation credit-hours, I am not eligible for an assistanceship and owe them a $1100 penalty for my underenrollment.
I don't feel underenrolled. In fact I feel less so than at any other time in my college career. I expressly didn't take the second job offered me this semester because I knew how busy I was going to be, what with having to demonstrate three years' worth of knowledge and also start writing a book and all. Even the university argues that a grad student has enough work to do between assistanceships and degree requirements without going looking for trouble by actually trying to pull down any kind of a living wage. Yet suddenly I'm underenrolled and therefore have to pay my tuition...despite rendering 20+ hours of service in the form of an assistanceship, ostensibly granted me to pay my tuition.
Didja catch that? According to the university, for having met my degree requirements thus far and for following the department-authorized trajectory for my course of study, I am to pay a penalty equalling the full amount I am costing them in tuition this semester, and continue to occupy the miserable assistanceship that hauls in a good $800 per student x 20 students in my class. Pop quiz: how much of this money ends up in my pocket? That's right, virtually none, nor does it spin itself into other benefits like health insurance or, in my case, tuition remission.
In essence, the institution that taught me my critical thinking skills would now have me accept that, since I'm costing them LESS this semester, I should do the same amount of work as before and pay them MORE for this privilege. I could just sign up for more credit hours and thereby cost them the requisite amount for THEM to pay ME instead, except that until I paid this penalty, I wouldn't be allowed to register for more classes anyway. Meanwhile, paying it would acknowledge that I owed it, basically anulling any chances I have at them reimbursing me once the dust settles.
Allow me to contextualize this for you. At the bargaining table last month, the university administrators explained to our teaching assistants' union (TAU) representatives that we are expendable and that, from an administrative perspective, we are first STUDENTS and only provisionally EMPLOYEES of the university, therefore any assistanceships they give us are largesse for which we should be unquestioningly grateful.
That's from an administrative point of view. Not from a parking perspective, as it turns out. I got slapped with a ticket for not having my employee parking permit the 2nd day of the semester. I thought there was a week of clemency at the beginning of the semester, I told the Parking Services lady. Sure, she said, for students. AHA, I said, surely I have you on this one, because the administration JUST SAID that we are primarily students and not employees. Maybe, she said, but WE consider you employees of the U and not regular students. That will be fifteen dollars.
I have been at this school for eight years, the last three of these in the same degree program with the same enrollment/assistanceship conditions, yet every semester it's as though the U has no idea who I am or how I got here. They can track my indebtedness to them minute-by-minute with a swipe of my student I.D. but the parking people can't link my license plate with my degree from one semester to the next and issue me a pass that lasts me the whole year. I have to announce my grad-assistant status EVERY TIME to the librarian in order to get an extended due date on my books even though she can press F2 and tell me how much I paid in late fees as an undergrad in 1999. Why oh why can't they tell I work here based on my student account? Why are there six separate operating systems in use on campus and I am not even exaggerating? Ask my students if I work here, somebody please. Even after a weekend of binge-drinking THEY seem to know where to show up for class three days a week, and that I am the teacher.
One of two things is happening here: either the University is a block-headed, utterly ineffectual bureaucracy in which no one sector has any idea of what happens in other sectors and therefore leaves it up to us students to straighten it out for them, since we don't have anything better to do with our time, or the University is a sinister organization POSTURING as an ineffectual bureaucracy in order better to gouge students at its convenience.
I'm not sure which of these I find more infuriating and frightening. At least if the U is posing as useless in order to get more of my money, I can count on its consistent efforts to gouge me and anticipate the ways in which this might happen. If it really is a matter of random irresponsibility, it could strike any time, anywhere. I'm picturing Bureaucrasaurus Rex, this creature with a gaping, screeching maw I feed with my money, and it responds by waving its puny forearms and dropping these glistening reeking monolithic turds on my kitchen table at the WORST POSSIBLE TIME, a time when I have absolutely no emotional or intellectual resources with which to address them.
Where are my minions??!! This is the kind of time a girl really wishes she had some minions.
One thing is clear to me: inept people and institutions never know they're inept. If ever they suspect it, they are nonetheless rotundly untroubled by it, because it's never their time that their incompetence wastes, it's always yours.
Friday, January 12, 2007
A.B.D. or D.O.A.
Wow. T minus 3 days for my comprehensive exams. If I don't know it by now, there's no way I'm going to learn it before I go before the Jedi council on Tuesday. At least now I know who the Jedi council consists of and which exam I'm taking first. I know they wouldn't start me on my comps if they weren't confident I could pass them.
I say that, but last night I couldn't stop my hands from shaking, there was a pit in my stomach not entirely due to the gallons of coffee, and stress has been doing some creative masonry on and around my spinal column. Meanwhile I have developed Teflon-Brain; I see the words, I read them, sort of, but nothing sticks and soon I realize I can't remember reading the text on the facing page, let alone thirty pages ago.
And although studying isn't working anymore the only thing that makes me feel better is more studying. Every once in a while I have a breakthrough and manage to really learn something new, which in turn makes me nervous because it only calls attention to all that I don't know and could learn if only I had more time.
And here's the really fascinating part: maybe it's all the crazy living inside my own brain that's creating this illusion, but there's some kind of creative explosion happening in me at the same time. Like I'm seeing through the chinks in the cosmos, seeing the connections that hold the Whole Damn Thing together. It's like the intellectual equivalent of runner's high. I fear they're like those genius inspirations you have when you're super-drunk and then they turn out to be basically vapid. I'm afraid I'll never have time to attend to them before I forget them, or else they'll seem really stupid and obvious and not worth it when I finally do have time.
I am definitely cracking up. It's no wonder so many academics are totally barkers or, at best, incapable of relating to normal human beings. It's hard to get through mundane tasks like ordering a sandwich once you've seen through the chinks in the cosmos. Serious.
I say that, but last night I couldn't stop my hands from shaking, there was a pit in my stomach not entirely due to the gallons of coffee, and stress has been doing some creative masonry on and around my spinal column. Meanwhile I have developed Teflon-Brain; I see the words, I read them, sort of, but nothing sticks and soon I realize I can't remember reading the text on the facing page, let alone thirty pages ago.
And although studying isn't working anymore the only thing that makes me feel better is more studying. Every once in a while I have a breakthrough and manage to really learn something new, which in turn makes me nervous because it only calls attention to all that I don't know and could learn if only I had more time.
And here's the really fascinating part: maybe it's all the crazy living inside my own brain that's creating this illusion, but there's some kind of creative explosion happening in me at the same time. Like I'm seeing through the chinks in the cosmos, seeing the connections that hold the Whole Damn Thing together. It's like the intellectual equivalent of runner's high. I fear they're like those genius inspirations you have when you're super-drunk and then they turn out to be basically vapid. I'm afraid I'll never have time to attend to them before I forget them, or else they'll seem really stupid and obvious and not worth it when I finally do have time.
I am definitely cracking up. It's no wonder so many academics are totally barkers or, at best, incapable of relating to normal human beings. It's hard to get through mundane tasks like ordering a sandwich once you've seen through the chinks in the cosmos. Serious.
Saturday, January 6, 2007
are you my ideal reader? take this easy quiz
"From this we may conclude that the literary work has two poles, which we might call the artistic and the aesthetic: the artistic pole is the author's text and the aesthetic is the realization accomplished by the reader. In view of this polarity, it is clear that the work itself cannot be identical with the text or with the concretization, but must be situated somewhere between the two. It must inevitably be virtual in character, as it cannot be reduced to the reality of the text or in the subjectivity of the reader, and it is from this virtuality that it derives its dynamism. As the reader passes through the various perspectives offered by the text and relates the different views and patterns to one another he sets the work in motion, and so sets himself in motion, too. -Wolfgang Iser, from The Act of Reading
[...]
"Nevertheless, no one would deny that there is such a being as a contemporary reader, and perhaps an ideal reader too, and it is the very plausibility of their existence that seems to substantiate the claims made on their behalf." -(idem.)
In consideration of this, I have chosen to take much of the guesswork out of this whole business for myself as a creator of discourse and you as a recipient of the same, and prepared the following simple questions in order to identify my ideal reader. If you'd be so kind as to complete it, we'll finally know: could it have been you all this time?
#1: What do you know about Roland Barthes?
a.) ...Barthes' work extended over many fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiology, existentialism, Marxism and post-blah blah blah...
b.) He was a French guy who killed authors. Can we talk about something else, please?
c.) Dude I totally saw him on Conan O'Brien.
#2: Which of the following could be considered surreal?
a.) a duck smoking a cigar and saying the word "quack"
b.) a duck smoking a cigar and saying the words "bag o' doughnuts"
c.) Ozzy Osbourne getting his own network television show
#3: What do you think of Wilco?
a.) I don't like listening to them, but I respect their music
b.) I like those guys, those guys are good
c.) I'm not really into country music
#4: Does this dress make me look fat?
a.) Not...exactly.
b.) Only in the sexiest possible way.
c.) I still can't get over Jennifer Lopez's enormous ass...enormous for Hollywood, I mean.
#5. Hablas español?
a.) So-Low oon pow-KEE-tow (nervous laugh)
b.) ¿a quién jijos le importa?
c.) If you're gonna come in my country you better learn to talk Amerrrrrrrcan.
Scoring: give yourself one point for every 'A' answer, two points for every 'B,' and three points for 'C.' Add them up. If your head hurts after doing this, have a stiff drink in my honor and go take a nice lengthy nap.
0-5 points: get off my blog, you pretentious asshole.
6-9 points: Hey you. No, you over there. I like-a you face-a. You can stay.
1o-15 points: Maybe you should have someone come over and help you turn off your computer now. Is there anybody here can give you a ride back to the Amoco station?
Congratulations, 6-9-pointers! You are perfectly average in every way, and therefore uniquely qualified to continue soaking up my outpourings of staggering wit and genius. Keep up the good work.
[...]
"Nevertheless, no one would deny that there is such a being as a contemporary reader, and perhaps an ideal reader too, and it is the very plausibility of their existence that seems to substantiate the claims made on their behalf." -(idem.)
In consideration of this, I have chosen to take much of the guesswork out of this whole business for myself as a creator of discourse and you as a recipient of the same, and prepared the following simple questions in order to identify my ideal reader. If you'd be so kind as to complete it, we'll finally know: could it have been you all this time?
#1: What do you know about Roland Barthes?
a.) ...Barthes' work extended over many fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiology, existentialism, Marxism and post-blah blah blah...
b.) He was a French guy who killed authors. Can we talk about something else, please?
c.) Dude I totally saw him on Conan O'Brien.
#2: Which of the following could be considered surreal?
a.) a duck smoking a cigar and saying the word "quack"
b.) a duck smoking a cigar and saying the words "bag o' doughnuts"
c.) Ozzy Osbourne getting his own network television show
#3: What do you think of Wilco?
a.) I don't like listening to them, but I respect their music
b.) I like those guys, those guys are good
c.) I'm not really into country music
#4: Does this dress make me look fat?
a.) Not...exactly.
b.) Only in the sexiest possible way.
c.) I still can't get over Jennifer Lopez's enormous ass...enormous for Hollywood, I mean.
#5. Hablas español?
a.) So-Low oon pow-KEE-tow (nervous laugh)
b.) ¿a quién jijos le importa?
c.) If you're gonna come in my country you better learn to talk Amerrrrrrrcan.
Scoring: give yourself one point for every 'A' answer, two points for every 'B,' and three points for 'C.' Add them up. If your head hurts after doing this, have a stiff drink in my honor and go take a nice lengthy nap.
0-5 points: get off my blog, you pretentious asshole.
6-9 points: Hey you. No, you over there. I like-a you face-a. You can stay.
1o-15 points: Maybe you should have someone come over and help you turn off your computer now. Is there anybody here can give you a ride back to the Amoco station?
Congratulations, 6-9-pointers! You are perfectly average in every way, and therefore uniquely qualified to continue soaking up my outpourings of staggering wit and genius. Keep up the good work.
Thursday, January 4, 2007
strange confluences
I always used to think my cousin was kind of a delightful nitwit. She's extremely pretty in that all-American, Britney-Spears-before-all-the-nonsense kind of way. She once made a statement that at first seemed incredibly shallow to me but that I would, over time, come to staunchly believe in, and in fact I admire her for figuring it out a good ten years younger than I did. She said, when I meet a man, the first things I pay attention to are his shoes and his teeth. Cynical, you say? Unromantic, perhaps? Try it. She's right.
It's this kind of shrewdness in a young person that makes me think we may not have oh so much to talk about, she and I, but I certainly never worry about her ability to get on in life. Which is why it's so shocking when my aunt calls to tell me that she's just picked up her daughter from the cops, drunker than she's ever seen her, and has to physically restrain her so she won't run out into the street thinking she's going to drive or walk or whatever the fifty miles back to where his sorry ass is evidently real sorry for how he treated her starting at four o'clock this morning. How is this happening? my aunt asks me. Like I'm supposed to know, I'm thinking.
Except actually I do. Who is this guy, seriously? He's poison, poison. He's not your type and you're the only one who can't tell. He's not bad, not really, just not for you, you've nothing in common, he just comes around and you can't get him out from under your skin, even you can't really explain it. He's like heroin: way better than real life and all you can think about is how you're going to secure your next fix. And you want to know the worst part? He loves you. You can tell he does, he's just too emotionally vacuous to own up to it, to act upon it in any kind of meaningful or consistent way, and then just when you decide you've had enough, he dispenses just enough affection, reveals just enough of himself to keep you hooked. Any woman, I think, is a potential psycho girlfriend thanks to these unearthly creatures. You do things that would never have occurred to you in deeper, healthier, more satisfying relationships.
I was driving along in the rain tonight when I realized that, through a combination of self-reflection, healing, and sweet sincere loving from a small man and a smaller dog, without noticing when or how it happened I have forgiven my own heroin man-- and perhaps myself, at least for a couple of things.
The Sharks is back from Puerto Rico. He wants to have lunch next week. I'm glad he left for a while, and I think he's detected that the basket-case tone is gone from my voice when we talk. I'd like to explain to him another something I seem to have stumbled onto in all this: my impatience and frustration with his indifference a couple months ago was deep down a cartoonish attempt at gaining closure with that man, which -- I'll spare you the suspense, or maybe this is painfully obvious to everyone but me -- with a heroin man, never comes. I probably won't tell the Sharks, because this would only more deeply entrench his impression of me as a basket-case.
Gawd, I had so many pithy and fascinating things to say. Smart ideas, I've got billions of the damn things, and at least a couple dozen of them have nothing whatever to do with boys. But then too, I finished "Sight Hound" by Pam Huston today (Sweet Jesus, I've never cried so hard I couldn't see the pages before; my dog, who can't read, can't figure out why I've been clutching him for solid hours), and she had this to say:
"If I had a daughter, I would tell her what a funny thing love is, how it never looks the way you think it's going to, how no matter how old you get, it is love that keeps surprising you. How in the songs sometimes it involves beaches and champagne and chocolate-covered roses, but in real life it is just a prematurely balding man standing in a drought-dried field telling you that he loves you , and that you should do whatever on earth you want.
"But I don't have a daughter. I have dogs instead, and they know more about love than anything."
It's this kind of shrewdness in a young person that makes me think we may not have oh so much to talk about, she and I, but I certainly never worry about her ability to get on in life. Which is why it's so shocking when my aunt calls to tell me that she's just picked up her daughter from the cops, drunker than she's ever seen her, and has to physically restrain her so she won't run out into the street thinking she's going to drive or walk or whatever the fifty miles back to where his sorry ass is evidently real sorry for how he treated her starting at four o'clock this morning. How is this happening? my aunt asks me. Like I'm supposed to know, I'm thinking.
Except actually I do. Who is this guy, seriously? He's poison, poison. He's not your type and you're the only one who can't tell. He's not bad, not really, just not for you, you've nothing in common, he just comes around and you can't get him out from under your skin, even you can't really explain it. He's like heroin: way better than real life and all you can think about is how you're going to secure your next fix. And you want to know the worst part? He loves you. You can tell he does, he's just too emotionally vacuous to own up to it, to act upon it in any kind of meaningful or consistent way, and then just when you decide you've had enough, he dispenses just enough affection, reveals just enough of himself to keep you hooked. Any woman, I think, is a potential psycho girlfriend thanks to these unearthly creatures. You do things that would never have occurred to you in deeper, healthier, more satisfying relationships.
I was driving along in the rain tonight when I realized that, through a combination of self-reflection, healing, and sweet sincere loving from a small man and a smaller dog, without noticing when or how it happened I have forgiven my own heroin man-- and perhaps myself, at least for a couple of things.
The Sharks is back from Puerto Rico. He wants to have lunch next week. I'm glad he left for a while, and I think he's detected that the basket-case tone is gone from my voice when we talk. I'd like to explain to him another something I seem to have stumbled onto in all this: my impatience and frustration with his indifference a couple months ago was deep down a cartoonish attempt at gaining closure with that man, which -- I'll spare you the suspense, or maybe this is painfully obvious to everyone but me -- with a heroin man, never comes. I probably won't tell the Sharks, because this would only more deeply entrench his impression of me as a basket-case.
Gawd, I had so many pithy and fascinating things to say. Smart ideas, I've got billions of the damn things, and at least a couple dozen of them have nothing whatever to do with boys. But then too, I finished "Sight Hound" by Pam Huston today (Sweet Jesus, I've never cried so hard I couldn't see the pages before; my dog, who can't read, can't figure out why I've been clutching him for solid hours), and she had this to say:
"If I had a daughter, I would tell her what a funny thing love is, how it never looks the way you think it's going to, how no matter how old you get, it is love that keeps surprising you. How in the songs sometimes it involves beaches and champagne and chocolate-covered roses, but in real life it is just a prematurely balding man standing in a drought-dried field telling you that he loves you , and that you should do whatever on earth you want.
"But I don't have a daughter. I have dogs instead, and they know more about love than anything."
Tuesday, January 2, 2007
la perdida
This time last year I was unloading my luggage at the Mesón de la Merced in Querétaro, México, in preparation for spending five months as teacher, camp counsellor, mom, chaperone, cultural interpreter, immigration consultant, dance instructor and cockroach exterminator to a group of fourteen undergraduate exchange students.
Last January 2nd I spent all afternoon learning how to acquire and operate a phone card, taking my first uncertain steps through downtown Querétaro in search of a working public telephone. Finally, around 11 p.m. Mexico time, I called my future ex to let him know I had made it. He wasn't home so I left a message. I tried his cell phone. He didn't answer.
Hey, it's me, the message said. You know, your spouse? Yeah, so that foreign country I was flying to today, I made it safely. Um, I'm not going to have a phone number for a couple of days at least, so I'll try e-mailing you one of these times as soon as I have access to the Internet. So, that's it I guess. Sorry I missed you, hope it's because you're doing something fun. Catch you later.
It was two weeks before we spoke.
As I write this a new group of students is discovering Querétaro for the first time, being soothed by the mild weather, the fragrance of the orange trees and the babble of the fountain in the patio of the converted convent where they'll stay tonight. Tomorrow they'll meet their host families; these must be at least steps one through 27 in Querétaro's conquest of their hearts and imaginations.
I've been back now for nearly as long as I was there and still there are mornings when I pause before I open my front door, hoping against hope that when I open it I will find not a dreary, Kalamazoo winter on the other side, but a clean, bright Querétaro morning, the streets alive with people, music everywhere, pale purple jacaranda blossoms littering the pock-marked sidewalks. It's an irrational, momentary failure to accept being back that I haven't got past just yet. As painfully wistful and nostalgic as it is, when I do get over it I will have lost something.
Coincidentally or perhaps subconsciously I chose today to use my Christmas money: a graphic novel called "La Perdida" by Jessica Abel about a gringa unstuck in Mexico City. Her narrator visits a Mexican neighborhood in Chicago hoping to score some decent tacos. She writes:
"All I wanted was a little taste of it, just to feel it a little bit. I can't shake the feeling that I've ruined something precious. That I lost something there. I want to search for it...But I'm an exile. I can never go back. Can you be exiled from a country that isn't your own? I don't think you can. So I'm simply 'not permitted.' That doesn't sound half so bad.
But I feel like an exile."
The introduction is all I've allowed myself to read for now, since I have so much other reading to do, but I can already tell this one will be by my bedside for a long time to come.
Last January 2nd I spent all afternoon learning how to acquire and operate a phone card, taking my first uncertain steps through downtown Querétaro in search of a working public telephone. Finally, around 11 p.m. Mexico time, I called my future ex to let him know I had made it. He wasn't home so I left a message. I tried his cell phone. He didn't answer.
Hey, it's me, the message said. You know, your spouse? Yeah, so that foreign country I was flying to today, I made it safely. Um, I'm not going to have a phone number for a couple of days at least, so I'll try e-mailing you one of these times as soon as I have access to the Internet. So, that's it I guess. Sorry I missed you, hope it's because you're doing something fun. Catch you later.
It was two weeks before we spoke.
As I write this a new group of students is discovering Querétaro for the first time, being soothed by the mild weather, the fragrance of the orange trees and the babble of the fountain in the patio of the converted convent where they'll stay tonight. Tomorrow they'll meet their host families; these must be at least steps one through 27 in Querétaro's conquest of their hearts and imaginations.
I've been back now for nearly as long as I was there and still there are mornings when I pause before I open my front door, hoping against hope that when I open it I will find not a dreary, Kalamazoo winter on the other side, but a clean, bright Querétaro morning, the streets alive with people, music everywhere, pale purple jacaranda blossoms littering the pock-marked sidewalks. It's an irrational, momentary failure to accept being back that I haven't got past just yet. As painfully wistful and nostalgic as it is, when I do get over it I will have lost something.
Coincidentally or perhaps subconsciously I chose today to use my Christmas money: a graphic novel called "La Perdida" by Jessica Abel about a gringa unstuck in Mexico City. Her narrator visits a Mexican neighborhood in Chicago hoping to score some decent tacos. She writes:
"All I wanted was a little taste of it, just to feel it a little bit. I can't shake the feeling that I've ruined something precious. That I lost something there. I want to search for it...But I'm an exile. I can never go back. Can you be exiled from a country that isn't your own? I don't think you can. So I'm simply 'not permitted.' That doesn't sound half so bad.
But I feel like an exile."
The introduction is all I've allowed myself to read for now, since I have so much other reading to do, but I can already tell this one will be by my bedside for a long time to come.
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