paisleypiper's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- in the dips between hills I have not known what to write lately � I write a lot for work and for the two classes I am taking and sometimes I just run out of things to write. My brain gets tired or churned up or something. The image of lake water comes to mind � it is clear until people start swimming and then the sand at the bottom gets stirred up and it becomes harder and harder to see underwater, to know where I am swimming. There is the ongoing dorkiness of work. Sometimes when I am talking to Quinn I use a substitute comment to reference the comment I have made too many times to make it worth saying, and yet, the feeling is there, accompanied by the urge to make some declaration�. So I will say �comment 1A� or �comment 10B� instead, which surfaces the strange need to make the comment at all. Because some things deserve observation and to resist consumes more energy than it generates. Let�s call work �work comment 3F� and know that that means that nothing has changed although the landscape continually shifts, that I am finding the faculty joint appointment person interesting and increasingly conversational. (At Christmas she gave me a bunch of paperwhite bulbs which grew tall and bloomed � this was a wonderful gift because it gave me the same sensation as a science experiment as a child when I arranged them, kept them in the dark and cold closet, checked on them every day, finally once forced, set them in the dining room displacing the ponytail palm where they reached up into the morning light and reminded me what care and inspiration can mean.) The esquire suggested we all go for a drink after work and have a meeting about the health insurance situation, it is not a crisis yet, and then no one showed up but the faculty joint appointment and me, which bummed her out, I think, not to get to hob knob with the esquire, but then, after a our conversation, she said we should get together again and talk about movies. Too bad she is in the office only once a week, or work could improve because people get distracted by her and that distraction is incredibly productive for me. Insecure people really like to please professors�. Poetry class continues to surprise me. I never thought I would reach any level of comfort of sitting in class with people talking about our poems and the poetry in books we read. It has to do with the professor, a grumpy woman who thankfully possesses brilliance and a sense of humor to offset the grumpiness�. Her talent as a teacher is her ability to talk about any poem constructively. Not only that, but to find what educators in early childhood call �teachable moments� in several student poems in each class. Instead of leading us through exercises of syntax and form she can pull moments out of poems we read and write to make her point, when she goes up to the board and scribbles lines of poetry in big, messy handwriting. Secondly, she recites many and varied poems to make her points. People who can recite large quantities of poetry intrigue me. And then I think of all of the song lyrics I know and (embarrassingly) commercial jingles and tv theme songs�. and I would cash it all in, wish I could cash it all in for the equal body in poetry. I can sing the songs for television shows I have never watched, like the Greatest American Hero. I can remember and sing along with television theme songs I only saw a few times. I have never been a big television watcher and don�t have cable, yet, I know the song to �The Courtship of Eddy�s Father� far more exotic than the standards like the Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres and Gilligan�s Island (don�t worry, I know those also). The third thing about this professor and her teaching is that she has presence, which makes her memorable, a certain lack of style, a certain way of talking of being out in front of people without being nervous, a great deal of personal power. Few people make me nervous, but she does, only because of this sense of presence and because I want to �do well.� What I won�t miss about being in classes: doing well. Chasing down reading assignments, jumping through hoops of assignments, writing papers, reading more books, saying smart things, learning the language of the way people who have studied English, who have advanced degrees in English, converse about texts. The way many classes render even the most complicated texts full of challenging ideas transparent. I always want to resist getting a perfect handle on some of the more complicated texts. Something mean differently to me each time I read them�. Some works cannot be grasped � they are like giant, wet, slippery balls � to large to get my arms around and two solid to press into for very long. I kind of took a break this weekend and just existed like I would have were I not taking two graduate classes from two demanding professors (no matter how wonderful they are � and really, are excellent teachers and good learning experiences ever anything but demanding?). And now, although it is late on Sunday night, I feel this sense of normalcy, this sense of space and hope that I will get through the week in tact. I�ve been living like someone in recovery � just taking life one day at a time, trying not to look down the road all that far and getting spooked by what waits in the dips between hills. This seems like the best way to stop worrying myself into a tailspin. It really troubles me that sometimes I feel as though I am hugely inadequate and have completely jacked up my life by simply not wanting any of the things so wanted for me by others. Instead, I wanted an entire other set of things. And I wish that I could have gotten started sooner with the entire other set of things I wanted, because, it is funny how they did not go away with maturity, did not fade with other types of success. Perhaps it does not matter so much how the �others� might (and probably do knowing my family) evaluate me, because, they should not be so much with me any way. They aren�t the ones trying to get up as me each day and somehow make it in a world that I find upsetting and distressing, craving the time when I can come home to our happy house and try to keep it all outside the solid old oak door (even I have a dash of Victorian in me). Today Quinn and I were talking about getting healthy. I realized how much of food-related attitudes and habits are socially constructed. How much my mother and her ex-husband seem to be hanging around in the food zone of our lives�. and maybe even others. Kind of a weird thought, but, I keep discovering that I do things related to food like my mother. And both Quinn and I know we should strive to be as saintly as her ex-husband, although, we don�t really want to be, because the man eats the same few things in different combinations every day of his life. But still, it is weird to find those sorts of things figuring into the background sometimes like paint on a wall and sometimes like really loud wallpaper while other times they are a plaid couch in the middle of a living room. I guess this is what baggage is, but I don�t like to view it in terms of baggage, rather, in terms of social construction and social bond. Oh well. It is late, it is late and I must go read William Olsen�s book Trouble Lights. More later. 10:11 p.m. - 2003-03-09 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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