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?

Dorky, Geeky Civil War ephemera

In 1939, the film Gone With the Wind premiered in Atlanta, Georgia. The legendary novel on which it was based had appeared three years earlier, and its author, Margaret Mitchell, was a fierce defender of the traditional South. Indeed, as a child she had happily assumed that the Confederacy had won the Civil War. The theaters in Atlanta were segregated in 1939, and Hattie McDaniel, who was to win an Oscar for her role in Gone With the Wind, was forbidden to enter the privileged whites-only theaters. Even so, some African-American children were permitted to see Gone With the Wind in this venue. Dressed in "pickaninny" costumes, they were on stage as part of the entertainment for the white audience. Martin Luther King, Jr., then ten years old, was among them.

-- Stimpson, in "Series Editor's Foreword," Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War (U Chicago P, 1999).

This anecdote brings it all together: the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement.... ties it all together with a nice King-sized bow.

A Truly Non-linear Rant, for a change...

I'd only been there for about 15 minutes. The entire time, he had been chatty; rapid-fire questions like Been married? How many kids? Your boyfriend come over and hang out with you? I did what I went there to do, and I didn't mind hanging out with him, listening to him talk, watching him lie to try to impress me. But then the conversation turned. Ever thought about getting your card? Are you a resident? You might want to consider getting a card... see, me and a buddy...

I felt creeped out, and then when he started making short, coded phone calls to some man on the phone, hinting that he wanted to see my other tattoos, something inside calmly said, "get up and go, right now." So I got out of there.

I've been experiencing something kind of interesting lately. It's a long story. As you know, faithful reader, I had been, for a few months, quite addicted to LOST. I ended up watching seasons 1-5 at least 4 times, possibly 5, I lost count. I watched the final season only once. The thing I liked most and the reason I found time in my day to watch LOST was because the characters were, imo, so rich and fascinating, and the actors who played them did such a great job. I felt, after watching so much, that I could identify with and probably even speak on behalf of many of the characters, haven gotten to know them so well.

Then, one day, in a fit of nostalgia, I got on Netflix and ordered North and South, the television miniseries from 1985 starring Patrick Swayze. The acting was terrible, the plot was thin and flaky, and there were a number of other issues I won't go into here, but I will say this: I found myself invested in the fate of these people during the Civil War, and I remembered why I loved studying the nineteenth century during my MA program. Romance. The sentimentality, the pathos, the dripping-with-foreshadowing, star-crossed lovers... The characters in nineteenth-century American fiction have a way of seeing the world that goes beyond a pre-9/11 mindset, which is saying a lot; they had a pre-Civil-War mindset, and how that kind of mind worked is fascinating to me. While North and South told the Civil War story in terms of its battles and politics, I found myself interested more in the war characters--John Brown, Stonewall Jackson, and Abe-the-man-himself-Lincoln--than I was with the fictional Mains and Hazards of John Jakes' creation.

North and South disrupted my LOST repetition compulsion cycle, but it did nothing to really try to represent the world as it was in 1840, 1860, 1870... while rewatching the miniseries reminded me of my love for the romance, I knew that it was an incomplete, white, bourgeois, homogenizing, and hegemonic version of history told through a microcosm. So I started watching the Ken Burns Civil War documentary. I'm just now in 1862. I cried this morning when Stonewall Jackson died.

So, in my thoughts, I've been trying as hard as I can to get into this other era--this other space in time and thought and American (r)evolution. As I was driving back home tonight, I started seeing the scenes before me on the side of the road as the "era" we're in now: as a photo essay of Americana in the twenty-first century. I started out in a ghettoized part of town, so I noticed lots of cars alongside the street and in driveways, packed in as close as they could get together, some with windows down, others with various stickers and decals. Run-down. Dark. Apartments lining the streets. When I turned onto a main road, I noticed an industrial scenescape. More signage posted alongside the road; houses and apartments turned into neon-sign-lined 24/7 convenience stores, plopped down alongside an elementary school, a 2-story house, a church. Then there were 4 lanes with signs overhead telling me to go this way, do what we say, and everything will be okay. And all of us got between dotted lines in our sign-inflected cans of tin, rubber, and plastic and toed the line, regardless of whether we had "Al Gore in '94", "Obama 2008", "W", "Buy Local", or "Toyota" stuck to our cars. But along with this industrialized, machine-like part of town came a dark scariness. If one person decided to rebel against the dotted lines or ignore the bright red light hung from lines above us, it could mean death. It could mean that some of us don't finish our delightful drive home. It could mean I never walked back in to my apartment tonight. The scary, dark, and Schroedingerrean feeling of driving through this gothic part of town was, however, quickly forgotten when it turned out into this brightly-lit area of town with an increasing number of people on the streets. Individuals, individuals running with their dogs, groups of girls with black tights and white tee shirts running, groups of boys in long brown coats walking, girls in Uggs, girls in Uggs, girls in Uggs. People everywhere, and no dark dankness, no cars lining the street... yet the same sameness. The same falling into line, doing as we're supposed to do pervades all of these different spaces. Even this one.

Driving from his house to mine, in my condition, proved to be an intellectually and physically stimulating experience. I've been trying to think about the term "romanticism" in a broad, broad way (too broadly for some, probably). Maybe I'm trying to open out the term "romanticism" to include myriad responses to the question, "What do you mean by 'romanticism'?" I mean a lot of things by it. I mean the nineteenth-century American literary period/era/movement; I mean the set assumptions that comes with a label like "romantic comedy"; I mean...

I mean to ask "how is sexual violence romanticized?" or maybe "how does sexual violence function in 'romance'?" Or maybe some combination/relation of those two questions. From there, pending I'm right and it does play a role, I want to explore how it's being represented during the Civil War (and possibly the broader antebellum-bellum-reconstruction years, 1830-188? or 189? -- not sure of cutoff date). I want to compare that representation of sexual violence to another representation (of a representation) of sexual violence: the resurgence of interest in the Civil War during the 1990s. I choose this second time because it was a cultural phenomenon that changed the way the world has "known" the Civil War and therefore the Civil War's representation of sexual violence. I assume I'll find several types of effacement or sublimation of sexual violence in the more recent depictions, but I also suspect that if, as I hope to prove, sexual violence is a cornerstone/lynchpin of "romance" (broadly defined), it should manifest itself in even today's configurations of "romance," though it will likely be hidden or effaced (perhaps to degrees and according to intended audience/situation).

I've eaten half-a-box of Little Debbie cakes just thinking about it.

Recurring Dream... with a Twist

About a month ago, I had a dream that I was living in a small rental apartment (kind of like the one I have now but with some differences). In the kitchen of this space, next to the water heater, was a door that I apparently hadn't asked about or even noticed when I first moved into the apartment. But months after I had moved in, the door suddenly made itself known to me, and after that, I just had to go through it. When I did, I found a basement which connected to the main house that the apartment was in. In going through the door, I immediately found myself in a room with carpet and dank walls, like someone had been sitting in there for years smoking. Through another door, the rest of the basement was what you'd expect: concrete floors and walls with years and years of stored-up junk and memories lining the walls, stuffed into overhead compartments constructed of plywood.

This was the basement in the dream from a month ago. I remember leaving the basement space, going back into my apartment, and closing the cream-colored door and locking it.

In last night's dream, the cream-colored door was ajar, and there was a sizable gap between the bottom of the door and the floor which wasn't there the month before. Through this gap between door and floor, two tiny kittens had crawled. When I opened the door to throw the kitties back into the basement, instead of entering into the dank room from the previous month, instead there was a set of stairs that went even further down into a sub-basement space. I tried to put the kitties back on the stairs and close the door between me and them, but the latch that holds the door to the frame was busted. I eventually wedged a mattress pad under the door to both prevent the kitties from re-entering and the door from hanging open.

I could still hear the kitties meowing from the other side of the door. :(

Consummation

Lately, I've heard it said a number of times: "It's not real until you put it on Facebook."

Posting it has become the consummate act. Gone are the days of telling it to your girlfriend whilst huddled in the corner of the room, as far away from the phone and your parents as the curly, twisty cord would allow. It's no longer shared over coffee between two, chatty women or gay men at 90mph, words slurring into a language slowly crafted by decades of rapid-fire-back-and-forth.

For me, it is no longer told to Shannon.

For years, nothing was real for me until Shannon knew about it. I thought, during those years, that my inner core was connected to her inner core as though by a chord or chain. That connection assumed that I had, at some point, felt confident that I'd accessed that inner-most entity and found it to be like mine, and I'm sure that that's exactly what I thought happened a time or two; but as time has shown me, to assume that there's a singular, unified inner self is not sensible considering how much and often people change over the course of a lifetime. The part of me that I thought had connected to a part of her... those parts existed in and for that moment. There may be traces of past parts, loosely connected for a time, but even that's a residue and not a real, live, breathing, thinking, evolving person. To access that would be... wow... something else entirely. But to believe that I connected to something solid and permanent in another person is a belief I now recognize as flawed.

But to connect is exactly what I crave because I'm human. So are you. It's this need to connect to something solid and permanent that has led humans to construct God. You and me, reader, are probably connected in some way. I probably feel, at times, like telling you something makes it real, makes me real. You probably fill (or are now filling) that role for me at times and in ways. But I know you know what I'm talking about when I say I want a deep connection. I'm talking about penetrating--yes, penetrating--to the uttermost sanctum and deepest interiority of another's being. Some call it a "soul mate."

Notice that so far I'm talking in metaphysical abstractions. I do that. I do that here because I don't really want the body enveloping that inner core. Sure, I think I'd like "a body" now and then, but not "the" body for life--the one body that will be with my one body while we try to penetrate each other's sanctums. I mean, maybe I do want the body, but from all my experiences with lots of other bodies... I don't know. All I know is this: I once thought I wanted to be with bodies, so I did what I was supposed to do and experienced lots of boy/men bodies. When that failed to satisfy me, I switched sides and experienced lots of female bodies. Now that that's not getting it either, I find myself in a paradox: I want another mind but not another body.

John Locke on LOST hired a phone sex operator for this very purpose. But even he, eventually, bought two plane tickets, one for him, and one for "Helen."

Maybe someday the "right" kind of person will come along. I'm not sure at this point if the mind will arrive in a man or a woman, but his or her body will have to turn me on as much as his or her mind does; otherwise, game's over. I guess I'm looking for someone who's pretty intense, like me. Someone who likes to listen and to talk, who speaks freely about what s/he's thinking and feeling and has the intellectual perception to distinguish between and among those feelings in order to articulate them. Someone who likes to analyze and play around with the thoughts that arise from such sport as people watching, reading, watching TV, listening to music, exercising, having sex, drinking wine, eating, traveling, dreaming.

Not that I really anticipate his or her arrival. I guess I'm just saying this because It's not real till I tell someone else. Not yet, anyway.

The Hypnotherapeutic Wedding Catharsis, probably chapter 2

Bonnie had told me that hypnotherapy affects people differently, according to different rules and time tables. I began experiencing a difference immediately.

While my first priority in going to her had been to address the mantra nobody wants to be in the same room with me, on her intake form, which she sent via email the week before, she asked clients to list the 4 most important things, and she went through each one with me when during our hour-long chat before the hypnotherapy session Saturday, a month and a day ago. I didn't keep a copy of that sheet, though I wish I would have now, but I'm pretty sure I listed these:

1. Nobody wants...
2. Motivation/Focus on school work
3. Health/Body: maintain a healthy lifestyle, mind, body, soul, spirit
4. LOST (I know this sounds insane, but I've become pretty obsessed with this television show; I watch it several hours a day while I'm grading papers, cooking, cleaning, working out, changing clothes, whatever; it stays on pretty much all the time, though I have it off right now and during other times when I'm intensely focused on a task, like reading theory or writing).

We worked through the first one on the list; took us 4 hours of talking, me with my voice and with my first finger ("yes") and thumb ("no") jerks. It required past-life inspection and resulted in my "remembering" where I first internalized the message; the exercises we did together was supposed to have allowed me to replace that message into the body that received it and leave it behind, to cleanse it from my aura, or something. Whatever it was supposed to do, like I said, is irrelevant; what it is doing is much more interesting anyway.

For the first few days after the session, I felt like I was on top of the world. The situations in my life were unusually clear to me, and my position in my situations was also obvious; before, I'd not been able to see those things clearly because of the distortion caused by the internal mantra playing on a loop (for 16 years....). Within just a few days, the fog around me was clearing, and the reality of my situation began to dawn on me. I decided that I wanted to believe what Bonnie had said to me about my power and my purpose in this world. I decided that I am going to believe it, and so I have started believing it, and I am believing even right this instant.

(for 16 years is a LOST reference.)

This knowledge--that I am exactly what I am, and that actualizing that is powerful--didn't come upon me suddenly; it took several weeks, whirling around in my mind, and about a zillion speedtalkingconversations with Lisa Day, and a lot of LOST to get there. It was a few days before the wedding when Shannon's mother sent me the following email:

I have waited a while before sending this as my heart won't let me rest without speaking my mind. I cannot believe that you have turned to dishonesty for revenge. We only go through life one trip around and what we make of ourselves is just that. We, I, trusted that you were a good person inside and a fair one. Had I known from the beginning that you were just using Shannon as a stepping stone to boost your ego and advance yourself in life, I would not have accepted you into mine. Call it poor judgement, stupidity, whatever, you got what you wanted. I will help Shannon pay your debts...not for you, but to prevent her from struggling financially. That was very dirty of you to leave owing, but if you can live with the dirt, we sure aren't going to let it get us down. May the rest of the world see you for what you truely are! What goes around, comes around.

At first, I wanted to write her back and tell her she had it all wrong, though I respected that if there are "sides" to be taken here, as Shannon's mother, she's definitely on the right one, and more power to her for sending an email, speaking her mind. It's damn-near feminist of her, so I'm kind of proud of the effort and the intention. I ended up not answering at all, upon the advice of my bff. I mean, I agree with at least part of what she said: "May the rest of the world see you for what you truely [sic, and she's a fucking school teacher?] are." That's all I've ever wanted anyway, is for the world to know me for who I AM and for me to know that person to and be proud of her. I've just wanted exactly what she wants for me, so "we always did feel the same, we just saw it from a different point of view." Tangled up in Blue, indeed.

Anyway.

I ended up also feeling mostly affirmed and relieved (by the email) that I'd made the right choice. Vicki's email might as well have been scripted by her daughter, and I got out of that whole situation to avoid just this sort of victimology. Even so, I took a lot of messy feelings with me when I got in the car Friday morning to drive to northern Kentucky to Zach and Jolinda's wedding.

The night before, I burned an audio book from Librivox.org onto disk for the drive down. Six hours of Willa Cather's O, Pioneers (1913). First of all, it's an absolutely amazing story if you've never read it and need a new one to get into, and second, I highly recommend the Librivox recording. The woman who reads it does a fine job.

I listened to the story on the way to Kentucky. It's about a six-hour drive, so I heard almost the whole thing before I made it to Perry Park Golf Resort in Perry Park near Owenton, Kentucky, near Cincinnati. Listening to that novel as I drove put me in an interesting frame of mind. For six hours before seeing Zach and Jolinda again for the first time, I had been a "reader." My mind was set to "spectator" mode, and I was ready to hear a good story. Turns out Zach's wedding had a few to tell me too. Being in this present-yet-removed position was at first strange-feeling because, typically, with the mantra, I feel disconnected from everything around me and isolated within my own body. Sometimes I used to feel imprisoned by the space around me when I was in public places with people all around me. All in the same room with me. Imagine what they must be thinking. They simply must.

But at the rehearsal, when I saw them again and met all these new people, the defensiveness, the fear, the self-loathing... all of it was gone. I was just there to play a part, to observe, to watch what was going on around me and take it all in. Being in the spectator frame of mind helped me constantly remember that while I was having my own experience over here, Zach and Jolinda were having their own experience over there, and it was, for this weekend, the most important thing. I felt like I could help that happen, because I had, sometime on the drive down here and amid O, Pioneers, I allowed myself to believe what Bonnie had said: that I am powerful, and that there is an energy and goodness inside me that other people just have to see to believe. It wasn't a conscious choice, is all I'm sayin'. It was much deeper than that; I didn't know I was making it.

But I did, and when I started meeting people, I was fully present, aware, in-tuned with my surroundings, and in control of my self in a way I've never quite experienced. I was embracing the power of being me, and I was remembering with each breath that this power has to remain in check, otherwise, things can get ugly, fast. So I stayed focused on what was happening right in front of me, and I let myself be a good, fun, smart, sexy woman in front of everyone in the room, and you know what?

They love me.

They told me so. Strangers. Walked up to me, spent minutes with me, then hugged me and said things like "you're as beautiful on the inside as you are on the outside" and "thank you for being my cheerleader this weekend." Said things like "I am so glad I got to finally meet you" and "Even though you're a small person, you're huge!" Said things like "Zach never told me how hot you are." (okay, I made that last one up.)

I was blown away at every turn. I was letting people see me (like, literally, tiny tanktop at the wedding, strutting around in 3-inch stilettos, but also, like, figuratively, in that I had let my guard down and was allowing these experiences to happen to all of me... for all of me to happen to all these experiences). People's responses ranged from content to completely enthralled by my splendor and majesty. Everyone wanted to be in my room. And I was having the time of my life. Zach and Jolinda's wedding will go down in history as one of the best nights of my life.

I woke up unnaturally early the next morning and was on the road back to Michigan by seven. Ever since, I've been kind of trying to just process all that's happened over the last several months as it's been put into a new perspective by this weekend. Before this weekend, I didn't see the two previous events--the divorce and the hypnotherapist--as connected in any real way, but after this weekend, I see them as a set of three choices that I've made for myself, the first making way for the second two to even be possible. Something shifted in me these last few months, and I'm finally starting to reap some of the reward for the hard years and hard choices I've made these last few years. If it is as Zora Neale Hurston has written, that "there are years that ask questions and years that answer," I'm in an answering year.

The Hypnotherapeutic Wedding Catharsis, probably chapter 1

"Nobody wants to be in the same room with me."

Don't ask me how I developed such a mantra, but it's been with me for years now. Part of me thinks it comes along with calling oneself an intellect; I mean, there's just something about that phrase that's isolating. Add to isolation the notorious "imposter syndrome" that accompanies calling oneself damn-near anything, but particularly anything which requires a certain level of skill or sophistication such as, let's say, literary analysis (though some might argue such skills are worthless... of course, they'd be using the selfsame skills to construct an argument, so...).

Anyway.

Part of me thinks it comes along with being with someone I lost respect for years ago. It's like countertransference: I didn't want to be in the same room as her, and that felt completely normal to me, so it would only make good sense that she wouldn't want to be in the same room with me. Or perhaps I developed it after I admitted sexualized childhood experiences; stigma, shame, and self-defeatism come with that territory. I wore them as shields.

However it appeared, there it's been, entrenched deep within my core for years, and nothing I did unfixed it. It persisted. It stayed. It remained. I could count on it when other mantras came and went. Mantras about school, exercise, food. Mantras about motivation, drive, stamina. Mantras about leaving her, leaving her, leaving her. They didn't take. "Nobody wants to be in the same room with me" took.

But three events in my life have recently loosened this mantra's hold on me: I divorced myself from my former partner, I visited a hypnotherapist, and I decided, for just one night, to allow myself to finally give in and just believe in myself, in what I'm doing, in what I'm capable of. But first, the big D.

Shannon and I had been together for 4 years. We met when I was in my last semester as an undergraduate at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, Kentucky. We'd both signed up for Dr. Day's ENG35? class, American Literature after 1865 (I think). 8am! Spring 2006. I started my MA in Literature the following semester, which means I confessed my childhood sexual experiences to my family, my friends, my therapist, and social services. I also started my fast descent into a deep, dark post-trauma depression that lasted through the winter and well into 2007 and even 2008 though the worst of it was that first year. The best of it was also during that time; Shannon used to say that I became raw from the self-scathing, self-loathing, self-mutilation (in a psychological sense). I was withering away: I shaved my head, lost a lot of weight, and dived into trauma theory to survive. Writers like Cathy Caruth, Dominick LaCapra, Gabrielle Schwab, Dorothy Allison, Sigmund Freud... I wouldn't have survived without them. I couldn't find joy in anything except for the knowledge that every word I read lead me one step closer to identifying with my new self. I've never been so deep inside myself as I was during these dark times. What I found there was at first weak, dark, and sad, but over time, I've come to recognize it as my lifesource, a place of life, light, white energy, my divine spirit. I've said it over and over: trauma theory was my salvation.

Shannon was a source of great comfort to me at the time. We fell out of romantic love slowly over time, when first I was depressed for a year and then she followed quickly on my heels the following year. There were so many times when I convinced myself to stay with her because she had done so much for me; I felt like I owed her the exact same amount of time that she had given to me; I'd later repeat this motion a hundred times, usually with time, but also with money. Nothing was ever even; we were never square. I always owed. In her eyes, I still do. Just ask her mom. (quick jab)

Anyway.

I should have left a thousand times before. I complained for years. I felt completely incapacitated. Like I couldn't make the hard choice because I feared the consequences. I feared that everyone who knew me would think I was a bitch for leaving her, a bad person for not helping her pay for the house we lived in, keep up the animals we raised together, supporting her while she went to school like she supported me. I was about ready to talk myself out of it again until synchronicity came at me from all sides; suddenly, I was hearing the universe, channeled through the voices of my most trusted friends and allies, shouting get the fuck out while you still can.

So I did.

Best decision I've ever made, period.

Moving on.

About 2 months later (I guess, I don't do time), I found a business card at a coffee shop for a hypnotherapist/Reiki healer/"Angel reader," so I made an appointment. Sixty-five bucks for as long as I wanted to talk? I'd pay almost anyone to agree to that. ;) I arrived at the house, which was about a mile from my apartment in a neighborhood I know well. I was comfortable as I knocked on the red door, and the hefty, 40-something woman who greeted me was so kind-faced and maternal that I instantly relaxed and was ready to spill. And spill I did: we talked for an hour about my life and my reason for coming there before we even went into the hypno-room. During that time, I told her about my childhood experience and how I'd worked through it using trauma theory and literature. We addressed spirituality, clairvoyance, psychic abilities, previous experiences with energies and auras... stuff I'm completely comfortable talking about but am not quite sure how much I buy into all of it. In the end, it doesn't matter if I buy it, all that matters is what I end up believing from it... how my experiences with these interactions change the way I make choices about my life.

Most important, I'd find out later, of all we talked about in that intake interview was the impact my Poppy has had on my life. Poppy -- David Elroy Morrison -- was the chief of police in Horse Cave, Kentucky, for 23 years before my birth. He'd already raised a daughter and a granddaughter when I was born in 1980, but he took me in too, and taught me to sing, to read, to joke... so many things I still love and cherish most in life. He started them all in me. I stayed overnight with them all the time while my parents lived across the street, but when my parents began moving around a lot, I usually stayed summer, a week or two during winter breaks, and long weekends. When we moved farther away, I only got out there summers, and when I turned 15, it was no longer cool to do that, so I stopped. I last saw Poppy in the fall of 1998 when I stopped through Horse Cave on one of my many trips between Western Kentucky University and Greensburg, Kentucky, "home" for the moment. I told him that if I ever married a man, I wanted him to be just like my Poppy, and I told him how much I loved him. I knew I would never see him again.

We went into the other room, and I sat in a white recliner in the corner of a small room which also contained a wood stove, a massage bed, several non-descrip "religious" relics, candles, and soothing music. A few plants. Very soothing. I reclined all the way back and spread a blanket over me. I was very comfortable. She was trustworthy. She talked me into a relaxed state as I tensed and untensed all the major muscle groups in my body, imagined the various locations or feelings or colors she described, and released the worries and fears she rehearsed from our conversation prior. Once she got me relaxed and in the zone, she began to establish the rules of our communication as she said she would do: she first explained that she was going to be addressing her instructions and questions to three different parts of me, Ami, Ami's unconscious mind, and Ami's higher self. Ami can speak, but Ami's higher self and unconscious mind cannot, so she established, patiently and by asking each of these parts to move fingers of their choosing, the signs for "yes" and "no" ("yes" was a jerk of my right index finger, "no" a jerk of my thumb).

Through guiding suggestions and then questions, she revealed this scene to me from my unconscious, which she believes comes from one of my previous lives:

I was standing at the top of a long stairway that broke off in two different directions toward the bottom, and I took the one on right to lead me through the door at the end; inside was a library circa 1840ish with a paper-strewn desk and books in shelves stacked to the ceiling, a huge window with the curtain open, and even one of those sliding ladders to allow for reaching books closer to the 10- or 12-feet high ceilings. I was wearing pants and penny loafers, so I assume I was a servant. I couldn't read the words on the books, and a few hours later, I was standing off to the side in the dining room, watching a group of people eat, feeling less like I had to be there than it was the normal thing I always did; it was my job. Nobody wanted to be in the same room with me because I was a slave; nobody sent me positive vibes.

I was in love with the master's daughter, and she, of course, wanted nothing to do with me. I didn't stay there my whole life; I later worked on a train as a waiter, and just before I died, I lived in a big city (think Boston or Philadelphia) and was mostly content with my life, though I wish I'd made more connections with people.

Oh yeah, and I was a black man!

When I "came out" of this "memory," I was crying; I felt great relief, realizing that some of these messages I've been battling have been coming from a place that's been inaccessible to me. After the hypnosis session ended, Bonnie said some very strange and glorious things to me. She told me that I'm a powerful person whose purpose in life is to bring light to the world, to help people see the world in a different way. To reflect positive energy. She encouraged me to educate myself so that I can use this powerful energy to invite good things into my life instead of to keep good things out, because this kind of power can be focused like a laser beam toward either of these tasks. I realized recently that I had embraced the mantra that nobody wanted to be in the same room with me as a defense against the possibility that if I came out as everything that I am, nobody would want to stick around. I feared that being fearlessly me would result in negative consequences that I was unprepared to face.

I shared some of this in its less articulate form with Bonnie just before I walked out, and she said, "when you feel like this, you just call upon your Poppy." I was kind of taken aback, because, you know, it's not cool to talk about the dead in such a familiar and casual way. So I asked her how she knew that my Poppy could hear me, and she told me, "Oh, he came in with you. He's been here the whole time."

...to be continued

Reading Woes/Woos

Every night, I sit in front of this box to a barrage of negative messages. With multiple tabs open and something almost always playing in the background--Hulu, YouTube, Pandora--I search for something good to latch onto. It's worked a few times. Nip/Tuck. The L Word. It happens less regularly with novels, but when it does, they're popular novels. Harry Potter. Sookie Stackhouse. Twilight. The most recent was Octavia Butler's The Fledgling. It's a story about a young girl, who, after being brutalized and left for dead, reawakens to find that she's lost her memory and must relearn many things about herself and about living as an Ina--Butler's word for what we've come to know as "vampire." But Butler's vampires are different. You'll have to read the book to figure out more; it's a great little trip into Ina culture and history.

Next on the docket, at least the one I have picked up to start reading after I publish this post, is Toni Morrison's Paradise. If that doesn't take, I'm moving onto Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, a long-time favorite and one I've read probably half-a-dozen times. If that doesn't take, I'm gonna try a short story collection by either Z.Z. Packer, Dorothy Allison, or Tim O'Brien. Not sure which I'll end up reading. I also have the entire Chronicles of Narnia out here that I might get lost in.

I Poke, You Poke, We Poke

"Oh, so you're a writer?"

The question was asked of me last night at a bar in Old Town, Lansing, called "The Chrome Cat" (or, as my former roommates often called it, "The Platinum Pussy").

How does a person like me -- like us, reader -- respond to such a question? I mean, yeah, sure, I write... much more often and better than the overwhelming majority of a population tht tlks like this 2 each other, evn when they spk! Not saying there's not value in that. Just sayin'.

I've spent the last 7 months of my life escaping the life of the mind. I got my first two graduate B's, broke up with my life partner, and basically ended my relationship to school for a while. I felt completely strung out -- completely untethered to all the things that had grounded me for the previous years. The process over the last 7 months has been to find a new grounding, like, the one at the end of my own legs, the one between them, and the one inside my mind. Trusting that those things can ground me even half as well as she did has been, if not the hardest thing I've ever done, the most isolated. The way I feel about the cleaving cannot be put into words, so I haven't shared it. I'm counseling myself through it, sublingually.

And so up creeps the rebound. They say she looks like her. They say they look like each other. They say they can't believe I never saw it. They say it's so obvious.

These next two certainly don't. One is thin, fit, reddish-brown hair she wears in low pigtails or wild down either side of her face. She's older, has a son, is extremely intertwined with her family. One is softer, brunette, a poet. An intellect. She reads what I read, knows what I know and then some and other stuff but right around the same areas. She teaches. She writes. She's a scholar-wannabe, like me. She has a daughter.

It's hard to find a dyke my age without offspring.

It's actually hard to find a dyke my age.

Neither will identify as lesbian. They're both resisting any identification with that. I get the sensation that they neither involve themselves with the queer community, although The Poet referred to herself as queer (I think she meant in thought and not in affiliation). That's strange to me, since all I've tried to do is to establish a presence in the lesbian community in Lansing/EL these last few months. They both pass for straight on the street. I'd never flirt with either of them if I met her at a bar. Then again, I don't flirt with anyone at a bar. I just dance and let the ladies come to me. ;)

But this is the problem. I'm so nervous about picking up women that I just don't, so if a pick-up takes place, I'm the one picked up! Any old riffraff from off the street can come hit on me; I'll just choose the one that suits my current mood. This has led to nothing but disaster in my past.

I've digressed.

To Be Fair: A Perfect Lie

Time's the revelator.

These last few weeks have been turbulent. Physically. Emotionally. Spiritually. There have been days when I could have blinked my eyes and been, at least momentarily and by absentia, a Christian, basking in the glow of the savior's unconditional love (while ignoring the sting of his father's unconditional scorn). Pushed, pulled. His love is like a see-saw, baby.

There have been days when I could have stayed in bed, a pool of my own filth from not having showered the night before, the night before (the night before?). The point of getting up, though, is to not waste a day. Yet I've wasted days. Before this box, with Net-Flix: L Word, X Files, Nip/Tuck. LOST.

It's a presence that affects me. It's been trying to push itself out, through my pores, the press of my kidneys, the inner lining of my walls, my fifth point of contact. It's an obsession that I can sometimes control. I tell myself I'm living for me. I tell myself I'm living life the way I want to. I tell myself I'm doing what I've always wanted to do. I feel sexy. I feel confident. I feel independent.

I feel like a fraud, on days like today. I look back on the months I've spent here in complete ignorance of some things, incomplete knowledge of others, alternatingly blissful and tormented, and I wonder how I managed to wrestle the presence into such a tightly-confined space, at the furthest outreaches of my consciousness, bound up with abjection. On days like today, the presence is a warm, velvety, glowing orb of light situated so centrally that, as a result, I must look through it to see everything else. It hinders and interprets my visions. It filters all introjective missives, allowing those that fit its agenda, forbidding those which make good and perfect sense.

I'm not an empty vessel, created just to house this presence and let my Me parts hover about its comforting radiations. I am an empty vessel, just not for this.

(The most completely filled I've ever felt was when I was completely filled with sadness. No other emotion can quite saturate my entire being and penetrate the depths of soul as this one. I know I'm not alone, but when I'm there, I feel it. I feel more than anything when I am there. I feel the most I've ever felt, the most of myself I've ever known, when I am there. It's the worst place in the world, the fullness of myself in sadness.)

I've got to tell myself something that will irrevocably connect myself to the deepest part, to see that I'm already filled, to acknowledge what fills and completes me, then to embrace, believe, accept all the good that I already am.

"If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you." -- Jesus (The Gnostic Gospels)

Could it be? Is it she?

Today was unbelievably productive. In addition to snuggling, etc., I ran a few miles, worked legs at the gym, sat in the steam room, read McGrane's Beyond Anthropology, read another 50-or-so pages of Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, and finished the long day by reading the article I assigned my freshman tomorrow, "Fighting for Our Lives," about the way that U.S. public discourse so often utilizes metaphors of battle, war, and games that it's inhibiting our ability to imagine a world outside of binary oppositions. I'm going to reintroduce the term "binary opposition," a term we've discussed a few times, and then throw "continuum" at them at around 8:25am. Welcome back.

Tomorrow after class, I gotta print a copy of my tax forms and be sure they're postmarked by tomorrow, then I got an orthodontist appointment to be fit for my retainers! My inner-dork is uberstoked.

For now, the sleeping. Calm me, Tazo tea.