mini-Purge

There are words and pictures in my skin and I’m feeling powerful tonight. The tattoo, on day two, is at its puffiest, so when I rub the clear, antibacterial liquid hand soap into its lines, my flesh is braille. I’ve posed for pictures never taken in my webcam, in my mirror, in the reflection provided by the glass of a front-loading dryer. I can’t get enough of my own image. I’m in awe of my changing body, as it ages, as it tones up, as it bloats, and I’m aware all the time of the passing of time and how much more I have of it before I’m gone. What I’m doing with it while I’ve got it. I’d rather spend my time alone.

Facebook has become a really comfortable way for me to carry on relationships with people. I’m one of those users who posts, like, a lot. Not that I have to justify my behavior, but here’s the reason: I am basically involved in a monogamous, long-term relationship with Facebook. I’ll read for a while, get on FB, clean my apartment for a while, check FB, go to the gym, FB, make food, FB… It’s not that I don’t have a life; I do stuff. It’s just that instead of sharing what I do with a partner who’s down the hall or across the table, I’m sharing it with my FB friends. 

Freud's traumatic endowment to humanity

I've always been drawn to psychoanalysis and particularly to its Herr Sigmund Freud's earth-shattering notions that we have a subconscious mind that we can communicate with -- or at least hear stories from. The more I read about Freud, the more I was convinced that he is one of his own beloved case histories: a subconscious that we can read through the stories it tells us. He was scared, traumatized, and even held captive, in a way, by a profession and a career path he needed in order to succeed and so adjusted his findings in order to corroborate the story being told to him. When Freud first began working with disturbed females, he found that their problems could most often be traced back to early childhood exposure to a sexuality it wasn't quite prepared for -- and usually by a male member of the girl's own family. Judith Herman says it better than I will:

"It was Freud who followed the threat the furthest, invariably this led him into an exploration of the sexual lives of women" (13, my emphasis). Now, before I continue, this sentence is fascinating, if even for only one reason: the word "threat" is a typo. This quotation begins a paragraph; the last sentence of the preceding paragraph ends with Herman quoting Breuer, who, to pick up on Herman's syntax, "describing his work with Anna O, spoke of 'following back the thread of memory.'" The sentence which follows should instead read "It was Freud who followed the thread the furthest," but instead, in a classic Freudian slip, chooses, through multiple edits and now two editions, "threat." Indeed, this word choice/slip does much of my argument's convincing work for me in that it points to the threat to Freud's institution which his following the women's threads would cause. It also foreshadows the threatening situation these women as young girls have found themselves in. (Fascinating that the editors and publishers and proofreaders and even the author has "missed the threat"... now in its second-edition misprint/misread.)

So, starting again, Herman writes:

It was Freud who followed the thread the furthest, and invariably this led him into an exploration of the sexual lives of women. In spite of an ancient clinical tradition that recognized the association of hysterical symptoms with female sexuality, Freud's mentors, Charcot and Breuer, had been highly skeptical about the role of sexuality in the origins of hysteria. Freud himself was initially resistant to the idea: "When I began to analyze the second patient . . . the expectation of a sexual neurosis being the basis of hysteria was fairly remote in my mind. I had come fresh from the school of Charcot, and I regarded the linking of hysteria with the topic of sexuality as a sort of insult -- just as the women patients themselves do."

You have to keep in mind that at this time, hysteria was being treated with medical orgasm and tonics and the like. It was a condition swathed in uncertainty and confusion and myth and hearsay. It was a wack-science, indeed, because it had anything at all to do with the fairer sex. Freud was initially resistant to this idea, so his mind was expecting not to find it. He was completely unprepared for what was about to happen to him.

This empathetic identification with his patients' reactions is characteristic of Freud's early writings on hysteria. His case histories reveal a man possessed of such passionate curiosity that he was willing to overcome his own defensiveness, and willing to listen. What he heard was appalling. Repeatedly his patients told him of sexual assault, abuse, and incest. Following back the thread of memory, Freud and his patients uncovered major traumatic events of childhood concealed beneath the more recent, often relatively trivial experiences that had actually triggered the onset of hysterical symptoms. By 1896 Freud believed he had found the source. In a report on eighteen case studies, entitled The Aetiology of Hysteria, he made a dramatic claim: "I therefore put forward the thesis at the bottom of every case of hysteria there are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experience, occurrences which belong to the earliest years of childhood, but which can be reproduced through the work of psycho-analysis in spite of the intervening decades. I believe that this is an important finding, the discovery of a caput Nili in neuropathology."

Freud completely bought into this reality-based construct of memory and hysterical symptoms. Sounds pretty sure of himself too, right?

Within a year, Freud had privately repudiated the traumatic theory of the origins of hysteria. His correspondence makes clear that he was increasingly troubled by the radical social implications of his hypothesis. Hysteria was so common among women that if his patients's stories were true, and if his theory were correct, he would be forced to conclude that what he called "perverted acts against children" were endemic, not only among the proletariat of Paris, where he had first studied hysteria, but also among the respectable bourgeois families of Vienna, where he had established his practice. This idea was simply unacceptable. It was beyond credibility.

Herman later summarizes the next hundred years of psychology as "founded in the denial of women's reality." Freud passed on his unresolved trauma to us transgenerationally, vicariously, hegemonically.

I'm afraid of what people are thinking

Therapy. Massage, psycho, hypno, physical, trigger point.

The point to therapy, no matter the type, is biofeedback. Tapping into the systems that sustain us, "driving a shaft" to find core elements in conflict. Always listening for dissonance. The point of therapy is to shift one of the "notes" ever so slightly so as to shift dissonance to harmony. But when there's layer after layer of inharmonious vibes occurring at multiple levels, the inner cacophony takes years to shift, one layer at a time. The result, in therapy, is the creation of a very slow harmony, one shifting note at a time. I imagine it to sound like the warm-up of a large orchestra; the sounds, all mashed together, inseparable from one another until each discordant note shifts, shifts, shifts into harmony with the pure, solid "A" note of the oboe. (As an ironic side note that bears on my own biofeedback, I'm unable to sustain an "A" while singing (the A440), so if I'm my own oboe, I'm a little off.)

The practical meaning behind all of this is this: when one note shifts into harmony with the notes around it, progress is made, but its harmony makes the listener aware of another dissonance lurking just beneath it. In my own life, when I shifted my own perception last year during hypnotherapy, and now that I've adjusted to the new sound of inner discordance, I have heard a brand new dissonance, one that, if I am able to adjust it, might set a number of inharmonious vibes right.

Sitting in my Own Shittiness

Today, I made a terrible mistake. I inadvertently sent an extremely negative evaluation of my teaching group to the entire Writing department at my university. In case you're not an academic, here's the scoop. Worst-case scenario: I lose my job because this thing comes back to bite me in the ass (how, exactly, it does that would have to be pretty contrived since my only real "sin" here is replying to all when it should have been to only one; the unfortunate part is, of course, that the content of the email was a negative evaluation). Best-case scenario: the Writing department sees this as a wake-up call and reassesses the teaching mentor system so that it's not ultimately useless.

Either way, I'm sitting in my own shittiness right now, without a clue as to what tomorrow brings. My stomach is in knots. I feel like a douchebag. The truth is, I stand behind everything I wrote in the evaluation (included below). I just wonder if, now that's it's said, I can ever live it down... or if I even want to. Okay, so -- two sides. One side of me feels like shit that I would ever have said anything negative about anyone at that place, that I'm not, like most of the other TAs I know, just toeing the line, getting paid, learning. Why must I always play the antagonist? Which brings us to the second side, which feels like, since nobody else is saying it, I'm going to. Granted, I didn't mean to do it in such a formal and public way, but it's done, and now I have to ride it, whichever way it turns.

It's kind of exhilarating, actually. If I come out of this on the other side, and it all turned out well (best-case scenario), ummm....

I mean, I only say this because, while I would be devastated if I lost my assistantship and had to leave school because of it, I would survive. I would work my ass off at Starbucks or find a part-time teaching job somewhere if I could. I love graduate school, but it's not all that I am or all that I have going for me in my life. Truth be told, I've been feeling like a fresh start somewhere would be nice. Even if I lost my job tomorrow, I'd still have a plane ticket to Colorado for Christmas, a trip to Kentucky planned, and a bunch of people in my life who would put me up for any amount of time until I got back on my feet again, and I've been missing them like crazy lately. Would I miss academia? Sometimes, yes. But usually, no. The people here aren't very nice at all, and everyone is under the impression that they have to separate their work life from their "real" life, which baffles me, since we work all hours of the day and night... I talk to people's facades all day; it's exhausting, and it quickens my disenchantment with all of it. I could afford an extended break from academia, in fact.

I better stop now before I talk myself into something rash(er than the fucking email I sent out today without checking the "to" line).

***

[In response to question about mentor group:] Mentor group never helps me with anything. It’s a waste of time. Most of us catch up on other work while we’re in there because none of us are invested in the end-of-semester “project” you want us to do (because it, too, is unhelpful). The whole thing is a time suck that prevents me from focusing on what I came here to do. Maybe TA group should only be for those people who have never taught before? Also, why do we spend so much time ripping on English/Literature students and what they do if you keep hiring English/Literature students? That’s unhelpful, and it makes Lit students feel bastardized (maybe that’s the point; see my comment about her bad attitude below).

[In response to question about teaching evaluations:] How is it helpful to be told what I already know? I understand that you’re required to visit my class, but so far, it’s not been beneficial to me at all. I self-monitor, and we also have peer evaluations.

[In response to question about the mentor herself:] What an attitude problem! She’s constantly telling us that she told us to do something when, in fact, she didn’t. Then she gets hostile with us when we don’t do what she didn’t tell us to do. Very bizarre behavior; I don’t take her seriously because of it. Oh, and she kept saying that we were “the worst class she’s ever taught,” but… TA group isn’t a class.

[In response to question about the future of the TA mentoring program:] Like I’ve said for three semesters, I think TA group needs to either a) go away entirely or b) be evaluated in an entirely different way (because these forms never get anything accomplished). I think that TAs should be responsible enough to arrange meetings with their faculty mentor if things come up; otherwise, leave us alone and let us do the job we came here to do.

Full Disclosure

I should be going to bed right now. My right eye is twitching from the copious amount of reading I've done in the last two weeks. It's actually sort of impressive, so allow me to toot my own horn:

1. Jennifer Barker's The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience
2. Vivian Sobchack's Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture
3. Lisa Gitelman's Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture
4. Thomas Augst's A Clerk's Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America
5. Mary Ann Doane's "The Voice in Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space"
6. Kaja Silverman's "Body Talk"
7. Teresa de Lauretis' "Oedipus Interruptus", "Desire in Narrative", and "Strategies of Coherence"

All told, that's around 950 pages of history and philosophy spread across 5 full days and 4 half days (full days are days when I don't have class or other engagements and half days are when I devote at least 6 hours). When I say "full days," I do not mean that I wake up and am reading within fifteen minutes, that I only lay the book down to sprint to the bathroom, wolf down some cold pizza, and speed-shower. I mean that I read until I hit a saturation point, then I watch an episode of 30Rock or check Facebook and Gmail while I cook myself some food. Then I start reading again, then I take a break to go to the gym or work out at home. I read like a normal human being would read: while she's also living a life and finding time to enjoy what's going on around her. I also took the entire Friday after Thanksgiving off to give thanks to myself (ergo, my laundry didn't get done this week. We all make sacrifices, Lemon).

If you're another PhD student, or if you've already been through this always already new and fresh hell called graduate school, then you know that it is totally not okay for me to be spilling this kind of intimately personal information about the number of pages I read a day and my penchant for 20-minute sitcom study breaks. If you're not one of "us," then the unspoken rule to keep these kinds of details silent might feel as stupid and nonsensical to you as it does to me, and I apparently belong here. So I'll continue as though you're not one of "us" (hey, me neither!).

In a typical week this semester, I set aside all day Sat-Mon to reading and I tend to get 150-200 pages a day during those days. I'm a pretty slow reader; I read aloud a lot, and when I'm reading silently, I "read aloud" to myself in my head, so it's at the same speed either way (though, if you know me, you know how fast I can talk, so...). I've tried to improve my speed, but I have no retention unless I take it slowly, and even then, I find myself rereading quite a bit, stopping for long periods to take notes or explore an idea that the reading has triggered, etc. I average about 20 pages an hour of theory/philosophy, though the speed tends to increase as I move through the book because those first chapters, I'm still trying to figure out how the writer is saying what she's saying. It's only after I get into the writer's grove (if she has one, some don't) that I'm able to pick up the pace. Reading history goes a little faster, more like 25-30 pages/hour; these history books I'm reading blend close reading, philosophy, and history (of the book), so they're strange. One minute, I'm speed reading, and the next, I've had to slow way down to catch the flow of a particularly quirky close reading, especially if it's of a text I've not read before (or watched, as is often the case when I'm reading film theory).

On Wednesdays, I wake up at 9 (because, as you can see from the time stamp on this entry, I go to sleep in the wee hours of the mornings after an intense Tuesday out and about in the world). I hit the gym for some awesome step aerobics, come home and shower and feed myself, go to TA group, and I don't get back to my tiny apartment, fed, and settled in to read until mid-afternoon, and because I've been out and about, the unwind time is unpredictable and has sometimes lasted late into the evening Wednesdays, then, are sometimes a bust, but I can usually squeeze in around 100 pages on those days if I'm focused, which, you know, who knows? Tuesdays and Thursdays this semester were insanity. Starting at around week 10, I've been getting up at 7 on those mornings and getting to Starbucks by around 8 so that I can read for 4 hours before class, office hours, and another class, which lasts from 12:30-10pm. I get home around 10:30, which means I've been up and going at 100-mph for 15.5 hours, likely on as few as 3 hours of sleep (and, sadly, because of the crazy stomach/body issues I've had lately, on as few as 800 calories a day, and most of those have been lattes).

The above account doesn't consider the films I viewed for class or for writing a paper (around 8 hours over the course of two weeks), or the paper I wrote (5p, which I ended up spending around 10 hours on, scattered throughout the last week). Or the 8 gym visits (1.5 hours each), 7 decent night's sleep (6+ hours), 7 shitty night's sleep (3-5 hours), office hours (6 total) and TA groups (7.5 hours)... the list goes on and on. I justify my time to both of us. Yet with all this, I still feel like I'm just not giving it enough. Like I'm just not going to pull this off. Yet it's all I do, 6 days a week. On the 7th day, I'd love to say that the goddess rests, but instead, she launders her clothing, cleans her apartment, goes to the gym, and catches up on watching TV for the week (House, Lie to Me).

Truth is, I feel, for the first time since I've been here, that I've really started to figure out this lifestyle: I now know how to do a PhD program, and maybe not get straight A's, but to do the work the best I can and try to save my sanity in the process. I mean, my life is not exactly what I'd call regimented except the schedule the university would have me keep, such as to be at one class at xxx, to have x office hours per week, to attend TA groups. Those things, I show up to at a certain time, but when I'm not doing that, I'm reading, sleeping, exercising, laundering, grocering, showering, typing, or traveling between the places where I do such things: my tiny apartment, Starbucks, the laundromat, the gym, Meijer, and the bus. I sleep at strange hours, go to Starbucks at odd times and for long stretches (6 hours one day last week; got a lot read). I put my earbuds in and listen to this amazing audio track from the CD called Focus on ADHD: Attention and Concentration for Study (which, in case I didn't say so, is amazing); it's an hour long, so I read until the track is finished, then I get up, go to the bathroom, get another latte or americano, and hit play again. It relieves my mind from worrying about when I need to leave to get to class on time, but it also assures me that I'm reading a lot in one sitting, instead of getting up and down every 15 minutes, which is what I'm tempted to do if I'm at home. Enough propaganda; buy the track and see for yourself if you're not more productive when you listen to it. Works with your brain waves, man.

Notes from Hypnotherapy Session #2

From the Energy Reading:

• Two Chakras most depleted are the throat and sacral. The throat is responsible for creativity and voice; the sacral is responsible for groundedness. Hips also depleted, left more than right.
• There's a strong disconnect between my head and heart (mind and body). The mind often acts out of fear; the heart out of love and light.
• My purpose is to spread light and love, to make a difference in people's lives simply by sending out positive energy to them (which must replace the energy of fear and anger I currently send out).
• I have a "guide"; his name is Joseph, and I should ask for his help to meditate. I should choose a word (like "one" or "home") to repeat, keep a pen and paper nearby to write down anything that persists, try to get to silence.
• I have grounding issues. Meditating light into my sacral Chakra (tailbone) and connecting it to the earth will help with feelings of scatteredness; eating root veggies and peanuts, putting my hands in the dirt, and hugging or rubbing my back against a tree will also help me feel grounded. My biggest challenge right now is finding the ground because I'm floating, unanchored.
• The five words she "heard" most often during her energy reading of my body were anger, fear, humiliation, abandonment, and frozen trauma.

From the Hypnotherapy session. The following are mantras we came up with during the session:

• I have important things to say
• I'm doing the right thing, whatever I'm doing
• I want to do what brings me pleasure and brings me joy
• My body is strong
• I can do whatever I put my mind to
• I am a powerful being of light.

[My first word when I was a baby was light.]

Can't Read, So Write

I've sat down 4 times now to read for class Tuesday and can't seem to get focused. My mind keeps going back to a mental image accompanied by a panoply of sounds, none of which are related to the mental image, vertiginous in that its space is out of sync with its sounds.

The Space

It's the conference room in Morrill Hall, the English Department conference room, and I'm there to listen to two ABDs deliver pieces from their dissertation. Only three professors showed up; the rest were PhD students. Small talk, mostly; noncommittal, mostly avoiding eye contact (though not with every single one of them), topics I've already forgotten. In my mental image, it's as though a camera is looking down from the front of the room, ceiling-level, centered onto the room which has three rows of officey chairs in an arc before a podium upon a table. There I am, last row, third chair from the door.

The Sounds

The night before, Thursday, another student and I met with a professor in her office in the evening as we do twice a month to discuss the last 2 books we've read. That night, we were supposed to have been discussing excerpts from one book, which I had painstakingly taken an hour to PDF for the professor so that she could print them out 5 minutes before our meeting. The last time we met, she finished the meeting by telling me that I needed to stop "performing not-knowing" and begin "performing knowing," by which she meant that, in class and in meetings and anywhere when I'm around other English students and professors, I should speak only when I'm sure of what I'm saying, but otherwise, I should remain quiet and absorb what I can from the conversation. If the conversation steers toward a book I've never read, for example, it's bad form to say, during that conversation, that I've never read the book. I'm to refrain from speaking at all until I have something worthwhile to contribute. But this is a tricky situation, because if I don't know anything about what we're talking about, then when the professor calls on me to give an answer, instead of being my articulate self, speculating as to why I think it might be... I'm completely cut off from language, and I blurt out something asinine, because, in my mind, during the entire conversation leading up to this moment, instead of thinking to myself, "how can I put my voice into this conversation," I've been telling myself, "don't try to say anything; absorb what you can." So that when she calls on me, I'm not prepared to talk because, as she's told me to do, I'm refraining from speaking when I know nothing... and now she wants me to talk?

It's madness in my mind when I'm around her. I can't think for thinking about what I'm thinking about, and I can't talk for thinking about what I'm talking about and how it's working in the conversation, and where it might take us, and if I'm prepared, then, to go there as well.........

Stifling.

Anyway.

It is the comment about "performing knowing" that I've excerpted from its time and space 3 weeks ago and it now accompanies the image of the conference room from yesterday. But it's only one layer of sound. The other layer comes from this most recent meeting the three of us had, from last night. In that meeting, after feeling completely closed in upon myself the entire time, fearing that every word out of my mouth would be attacked as too stupid, as not thoughtful enough, as not informed enough, as performing the wrong thing or even performing the right thing for the wrong reason, at the end of the meeting, the student asked the professor if she was coming to the Faculty vs. Student bowling thing this weekend; the prof said she couldn't, the exchanged some sentiments about it. The student turned to me and asked if I was going. She knows from having talked to me a dozen times or so about it that I loathe attending those events, and the more "professionalized" we all become, the worse it gets. So, I turned to her and said exactly what was on my mind: "Ooh, a room full of English professors? Where do I sign up?" And then I walked away.

That moment is another sound byte extracted from its original context and laid over the image of the conference room. One layer yet to go.

The third sound byte might actually help contextualize the last, flippant remark I made to the professor and the student that might otherwise come across as undue bitchiness (it is bitchiness, but it's due). In just this last week, I've had two cases of food poisoning, 3 days apart. Just as I was recovering from one, the other hit. Because of this, I had to make some difficult choices about what to read and what to skip. One of the things I chose to skip was an article for the professor's class that we ended up talking about the entire three hours. When I arrived to the prof's office that evening for the meeting, I began by apologizing, explaining to her the food poisoning situation and having to skip another class at the last minute, and she crucified me by saying the most obvious statement in the world: you know you should have brought the text with you to class. Yes, I know that I should have brought it with me to class, but I didn't. I brought the wrong book. Yes, I know it's not a smooth move for a PhD to come to class without having done the reading. Yes, I know I'm scum for having one off day the entire semester. Yuck. In the last year, I've had exactly one interaction with this woman that was agreeable; the rest have been caustic, aggressive punishment after punishment because she's sadistic, and she'll admit to that (she studies sadism). Her whole agenda is to shape people into these "professionals" who pretend to know things they don't so that they set themselves up to get embarrassed later when it's revealed that they, in fact, don't know. I'd rather just say I don't know and get it over with.

I wanted to say, "I didn't bring the article, but you should know from past experience that I'm a good student who will have a very good reason for not having brought the article." But she treated me like a shitty student who pulls those kinds of tricks every single class period. I don't, but she likes to make students feel like they're just not good enough, they don't know enough, or they don't know well enough how to pretend that they know. It's sickening to me.

So there are the three sound layers:

• You need to stop performing "not knowing" and begin performing "knowing."
• "Ooh, a room full of English professors? Where do I sign up?"
• "You know you should have brought it with you to class."

I'm no longer sick from food poisoning, but my stomach is in knots about this whole situation. The Others seem to be handling it just fine; they all perform whateverthefuck the professor wants them to perform, and gladly. They look exhausted from it. :( But the more they morph into the professors they're going to someday be--the personas they're adopting presently as defense mechanisms against the professors who think grad school is basic combat training--I like them less and less. I don't want to become that. I threw that flippant, bitchy statement in there in hopes of jarring them out of their little bubble for a second to see that the masks they wear make them difficult to be around and impossible to feel relaxed and comfortable around. Why in the world would anyone want to spend extra time with that when they're not required to? Then in addition, the professors are now going to police our behaviors outside of the university? No thank you. For people who study binary oppositions and how our belief and perpetuation of them maintains the current patriarchal (Oedipal) mindframe of the world, they certainly spread the hegemony pretty thick themselves.

Am I wrong to assume that if I'm not cutting it in this field, someone will tell me straight up instead of letting me write a dissertation and then not give me a PhD? I mean, they are really into punishment, so wouldn't the ultimate one be to let me get all the way "through" and then prevent me from calling myself Doctor?