I'm going to squeeze you a little harder than feels good.

RE: LANGUAGE, COETZEE ALREADY SAID IT

2011-08-08T10:20:00.003-04:00

I create myself in the words that create me

--In the Heart of the Country

language, again

2011-08-05T13:42:00.004-04:00

Now that I'm out of grad school, I have these flashes of understanding about a lot of what I learned and read there, these zaps that feel intimate and personal and real.

Today it is naming. How the word for the thing turns the thing into itself. Without the word, the thing might exist, but unspoken, unwritten, unrecorded--it remains a non-entity. It is the tree falling in the forest without anyone seeing or hearing it.

Which makes silence a kind of faith. And language, if we feel like drawing a binary, a kind of science.

Language can be a disorder. An enabler. Say what you will about how talking heals, but I think many times, it can cripple.

I can go about my day, doing. I can do the odd little things I do. I can behave the way I behave, unspeakingly. And I can believe, unthinkingly, that all is well, in my being, in my world. Or I can, I don't know, scamper to the top of one of my piles and start naming what I see and do. Naming the animals in my care, these creatures of my mind. I discover, in saying the words, that I am "obsessive," "wasteful," "vain," "neurotic," that even my neuroses have neuroses. And now I am a steward, officially, of these postures and conditions, and all the other ones they bring to bear, that wait their turn to be announced, made real.

Because once they are real, they demand things. They demand to be validated, again and again. Patterns form. And what seems to be inevitable might actually be avoidable, if I shut up for two seconds.

Silence can be the good kind of murder, I guess is what I'm getting at.

As an aside, I love what Aase Berg says about language and motherhood and madness.

why writing is like loving

2011-06-26T11:52:00.002-04:00

because you have to do it, no matter the outcome

Do I contradict myself? No.

2011-06-22T10:24:00.004-04:00

Last night we went to a summer solstice party in an other-worldly beautiful garden. It was so beautiful I had to keep looking down at my mosquito-bitten ankles, to give myself little breaks from the beauty. At one point I glimpsed Beatrice--dirty from playing in the dirt, watermelon running down her chin--and felt like I understood something, or remembered something, about pleasure, and childhood, and innocence, and nature. I would like to understand and remember it all the time, but there are all of these buttons and screens, buttons and screens that I've given myself to willingly, that I can't denigrate, that I love.

I think I used to be obsessed with paradox and contradiction, and now, not so much. There should be something, a word, that means 'the end of paradox' but not the resolution of it. What is that word? Transcendence? Death?

I mean, I hate to sound like a broken record, but maybe the word is love. The love that contains everything.

where did I go

2011-05-30T13:39:00.006-04:00

I don't know. I've been around. Eating things. Walking. Working. Reading. Exchanging wits with Beatrice, who is an avid talker now. About things she likes she says "it's my favorite thing I ever saw" or "it's my favorite thing I ever eaten." She knows a lot of letters and plays with them on the refrigerator, asks for help making words. She also knows a lot of songs and invents a fair amount, too. She likes the Jeopardy theme song. We watch it together, many nights. There are so many things I could tell you about her.

*

I wrote a little response to Franzen's op-ed about love and the internet.

*

It's been summertime here in Georgia. This house keeps out the heat very nicely. This house and I had a rough start, but we're good together now. I walk around it and think of where things should go, things I save my money to buy. I make some guacamole in the kitchen and admire how it looks in the bowl when I put it on the table. I sit on the front stoop late at night and look at the stars and the silhouette the dogwood tree makes and I feel all sorts of feelings.

*

I will try to blog more. I like it in here. It's like a room.

There is so much disappointment.

2011-03-23T10:11:00.003-04:00

Last night my husband said "everything is always so great at first, and then it turns to shit." We were talking about Hulu. But it's the same progression everywhere. Anticipation, a moment or two of intense pleasure, pleasure waning, pleasure dropping below expectation level, pleasure fading into a fine point of light, pleasure vaporized, a big calcified void in its place, all of that pleasure still ringing hot in your ears, its memory now some kind of aspiration, some archetype of pleasure against which everything will fall short.

In high school you learn that every "good" short story "must" dwell at least in part in desire. What a character wants becomes the driving force of the narrative, how s/he tries to get it arises in conflict. What a nifty formula.

I'm driven by the things I want. When I think about the Theravadan monks who rove in the forests, or beg on the streets for alms, possessing nothing, wanting nothing beyond the most meager means of survival--but there it is. The monks desire survival. Which requires a kind of surrender. If death is a kind of freedom, then it would stand, if my years of reading the existentialists serve me, that life is an oppression, a tiny cell. But we don't, most of us, want to die. We want life and freedom. We want.

My mother says "forget yourself." She has been saying this to me my whole life. "Don't be self-conscious." Before a performance. Before having a picture taken. I used to think it meant merely, don't act in that weird frozen way that unsettles a room. But at its most profound level, it means to die unto yourself. To annihilate your perception of yourself, and your perception of how others perceive you. To be absent the all-consuming desire that dictates how you walk, smile, eat. To forgive yourself your shame, your guilt, your hungers. To be free.

I think the necessary consequence of such freedom is sublime love.

Whereas we may all be so nice, and so appropriate, and so tit-for-tat, and yet find ourselves, when everything turns to shit, all alone. The Golden Rule has fucked us all up. It's not "be kind, so others will be more likely to be kind to you." It's just "Love." Without wanting. Without demanding, or expecting. The hardest thing to do in the world, I think, because I think to really do it, you must be part-monk. Effaced. A vessel.

The wanting must be sublimated by the doing.

Mostly I don't really want this world, I want another world.

2011-03-16T20:21:00.003-04:00

I wish I had more to tell you. Sometimes this place squeezes me like I want to squeeze you. Puts both hands around my windpipe and says SAY IT. And I say "it?" And it says HARDER. And I say "IT"? And then we're both embarrassed and sort of back away from each other.

There is always the desire to say. But there are not always things to say. I don't really differentiate between "things worth saying" and "things." I don't know what "worth" means, mostly. I like free and I like the internet, which is the equivalent of liking dumpster diving. I just mean, things, there don't seem to be things these days that sit still long enough to exist in words, or that exist in words at all.

This is maybe the worst post ever.

I just needed to 'check in' so bad.

I want Indian food.

I don't feel like drinking but I want to be drunkish, which means I want like 1.5 shots of tequila.

If you don't like spicy food then I don't know what to say to you.

If you don't like what I cook when you come over and I cook for you, then I don't know what to say to you.

My daughter remembers everything, what foods were eaten at what rest stops and what Christmas decorations adorned which houses in the neighborhood. Sometimes she likes my cooking, sometimes she prefers straight up hot dogs, which she thinks is my cooking.

I want new dresses and shoes and a few other things strictly for me.

My mom's birthday is this weekend. I don't have any daddy issues, which is probably good news for my husband, but I have what I'm suspecting is a host of mother issues, which I guess might be bad news for Beatrice.

She likes to say "Oh Mommy you're so cute."

what does it mean when you keep injuring your hands?

2011-02-25T11:48:00.004-05:00

All week I have been injuring my hands. Every knuckle on my right hand is either torn, scraped, or burned. And then last night I got a paper cut on that painful flesh ledge between thumb and index finger. I feel it must mean something, beyond clumsiness. Here are some theories:

1. There is too much aggression in my doing/holding/making.

2. There is not enough aggression in my doing/holding/making, and these small violences are telling me to do/hold/make harder.

3. There is something I'm trying to grasp or hold on to, and it is hurting me.

4. There is something I'm trying to grasp or hold on to, and I am hurting it.

5. My right hand doesn't know what my left hand is doing.

6. My right hand has become arrogant. My making has become arrogant.

7. I am not being careful enough, not paying enough attention.

8. I am paying too much attention, and still getting hurt.

*

My mother taught me that not being able to forgive yourself and move on is a form of conceit: too much pride, masquerading as humility.

*

It's funny how much we enjoy pain! And sort of squish our toes in the ooze of it. And then, crestfallen, my toes are all dirty.

*

Some nice things of late, of note:

+ The poems of this person.

+ This person nudging this person and this thing winding up here.

+ Putting grapes in your cereal instead of predictable bananas or berries.

+ Beatrice saying that B stands for Beatrice. When asked what else B stands for, she says Mommy and Daddy. She's not wrong.

+ It's not that I'm not political, it's just that I'm still trying to figure out how to be a human being, what my mouth is for.

+ And also I'm not political.

+ The love of a good man.

DO NOT DELETE, JUST KEEP GOING

2011-02-17T12:05:00.003-05:00

there's nothing to fear
there's nothing to fear
there's nothing to fear
there's nothing to fear
there's nothing to fear
there's nothing to fear
there's nothing to fear
there's nothing to fear
there's nothing to fear
thers nothing to fear
there's tnohign to fear
there's nothing ot fear
there's nothing to fear
there's nothing to fear
there's nothing to fear
there't nothings to fear
thers's nothineg to fear
there's nothing to fear
there's nothing to fear
tere's noething to ear
there's neothing to fear
there's nothing to fear
there's oethng to fear
there's noething to fear
there's noething to fear
there's notehing to fear
ther'es nothign to fear
ther'es nothing to fear
there's nothing to fear
there's nothing to fear
there's nothing to fear
there's nothing to fear
theres nothing to fer
theres nothing to fear
ther'es nothing to fear
ther's nothing to fear
there's ntohing to fear
ther'es nthing to fare
there's nothing ot fear
there's nothing to fear
there's nothing to fear
ther'es nthing to fear
ther's nothing to fear
therhs' nothing to fear

Sometimes I wake up and say:

2011-02-11T06:34:00.002-05:00

+ Will I be a good mom today? Please let me be a good mom today.

+ I wonder what kind of foods are in store for today.

+ Will I do everything I'm setting out to do? Please let me do everything.

+ There's no way I can do everything.

+ What clothes will I wear today? What will my hair do?

+ What will happen?

+ What happened yesterday and what will happen tomorrow.

+ Am I the person I think I am, and who decides that?

+ At what point will I stop using 'I' in every sentence.

+ I wish for at least 2 people to be alive who aren't anymore, so that I could ask them some questions.

What to do when there's "no" food in your house.

2011-02-08T15:00:00.003-05:00

1. Take every vegetable you can find, including ones in your freezer, chop if necessary, dump onto sheet pan, douse with olive oil and salt, put in 400 degree oven for 25 minutes or so. Transfer onto plate, more salt if necessary, and liberal hot sauce. Eat it and shut your face.

2. Spoon + peanut butter.

3. Spoon + Nutella.

4. Beer.

5. Tea.

6. Gum.

7. Call your mom and walk around while talking to her, opening and shutting cabinets, the fridge.

8. Stand in front of your fridge and realize that you're not at all hungry, but continue standing there.

9. Briefly contemplate making something "involved," like pasta, but then stick spoon in peanut butter instead.

10. Pickles.

I'm not going to AWP.

2011-01-26T06:35:00.003-05:00

I'm at that point in the new writing thing where there is the Big Thing that I have to deal with, address in some way, if not resolve, and I'm stalling for all I'm worth. Waylaying it is becoming pleasurable in a not wholly unsexual way. A kind of feat: how many other elements can I bring in? Where else can we go before we Get There? Because I suppose the Got There is scary in some way, like, what if there is no there, as Miss Stein said, there? All of this foreplay for some mild, flaccid, fleshy ta-da. Ta-d'oh!

In other non-news, there is a point every day around 5pm where Beatrice and I find ourselves dancing in our socks and skating across the floor to some jam or other, maybe it's Michael Jackson or maybe it's Jurassic 5, and she likes to say watch this and shake her little head from side to side, and I'm like, I can't believe you can do that, I can't believe how much you can do, I can't believe I made you, did I really make you, what are you feeling right now, have we met.

It's a time of day that reminds me of being in the basement with my older brother and watching him just do stuff and feeling lucky that I was in the presence of something a lot cooler than what I understood cool to be, and something would be on the stereo, once it was the Sugarhill Gang, once it was The Smiths, and he'd know every word, and I'd want to keep very quiet so as not to ruin anything.

sartorial

2011-01-19T07:03:00.006-05:00

I went to Catholic school, which has rigorously informed my sense of clothing and comfort. My uniform was really comfortable. I'd still wear it if that wouldn't be creepy. I'd come home from wearing the comfortable uniform and either keep it on, in some configuration (lose the sweater and the kilt, keep the turtleneck, boxers, and tights), or change into something even more comfortable. My mother cringed a lot in those years, and probably suppressed even more cringes.

I have so many jeans. The oldest jeans I have are from 1999. A couple years ago I finally threw out jeans from high school. I have tiny, skinny jeans, and I have baggy jeans; I have jeans that button at the waist and jeans that sit low. I have jeans that I roll at the bottom and jeans that tuck into boots and jeans that I wear with flat shoes.

I have three robes, four if you count the one I leave at my parents' house, which was my mother's robe before I claimed it, which she got in London at Harrod's back in the 70s. That robe is burgundy and a very soft, fine-knit velour, and it has a plunging, ruffled V-neck. It wraps and ties in a way that never comes untied, and it fits like a Halston evening gown so you can't really wear anything bunchy underneath. Putting it on makes me want to write letters and smoke cigarettes and drink Bellinis, all from a fainting couch near a window that looks out onto a rose garden.

I have a robe that is a light, short, cotton thing, for spring and summer in Georgia. I have a reversible robe that's pink on one side and white on the other and very basic. Ever since the reversible raincoat I wore around age 7, I've really admired reversibility in a garment. I have a robe that I wore when I was pregnant, and I wear it still when I'm feeling a certain way about life. It's light blue, something between flannel and fleece, very thick and generously cut, and it has snap buttons. It might sound like it's a robe you quit the world in, but it actually makes me feel very powerful, like, fuck you, I'm wearing this motherfucker, and I might go eat some leftovers while standing in front of the fridge.

Sometimes when I'm out for the day I like to wear all of my best stuff--lots of jewelry, some lipstick, the pretty clothes. Sometimes I wear sneakers and beat-up jeans and a hoodie and feel fifteen. If we go places at night I generally "dress up." Sometimes I like dressing up for things that I know people won't dress up for. Sometimes I hide behind my hair and will it to be over.

When I come home from a thing to which I've worn many specific things--jewelry and heels and makeup, etc.--I derive an exquisite satisfaction from removing those things and putting on soft pajamas and a robe, or a big t-shirt and thick socks. I like to scrub my face and pull my hair back and sit on the couch under a blanket and discuss what we've seen.

Let's go, America!

2011-01-07T07:01:00.002-05:00

1. Went to the dentist yesterday. I can't believe that we're not perpetually discussing the humiliation that is having your teeth cleaned. Someone is penetrating an orifice for 30 minutes with noisy metal tools, scraping, blasting, and we're just like, great! See you in six months!

2. Can't stop thinking about my cousin's battered edition of MAD's Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions that we obsessed over for a brief period as kids. Drawing of man gathering sticks in the woods. "Are you building a campfire?": "No, I'm cleaning up the forest." Classic!

3. Really not excited by food lately. Sad about this.

4. Early, at least earlier, to bed, super early to rise. It's working.

5. Most children's books are complete crap. Would love to find a truly great children's indie press. Would love to start such a press but I'm just not a starter of presses. Any suggestions out there? My most beloved job was working with children's books for this company but I'm since pretty out of the loop. I want like the Dalkey Archive equivalent for kids.

6. Probably going to do a few push-ups today, maybe a pirouette or two. Happy Friday jailbirds.

Hunger / Happiness / the 'Artist'

2011-01-02T14:35:00.002-05:00

I am thinking about fulfillment, satiety.

These do not seem to be qualities of the artist.

On every level--creative, psychological, spiritual, emotional, intellectual--the artist is not "meant" to be full, or finished. The artist is meant to rove. To be restless. The artist is not "meant" to be unhappy, but the wandering, the wondering, the constant probing--these activities often create unhappiness, or reveal it.

Of course what I've written so far looks like teaching notes for Kafka's "A Hunger Artist."

It's like, no matter what you're thinking about, Kafka's already written a story about it!

(This was how I felt when I first discovered Kafka, and then, like you, I learned how un-special I was, to feel that way.)

KAFKA! The Musical

Wasn't Zadie Smith supposed to have done this already? Maybe she needs help?

Mary P-S, where are you? After we're done the libretto for YERMA! The Musical, we should work on this one.

Anyway, Brian and I were discussing tonight the possibility of "choosing" happiness. It was a long discussion and parts of it were a fight and I don't want to re-tell it here, but to me it's always an interesting question: can you BE happy? Who are the happy ones? Is it a shutting off, or a turning on? An opening or a closing? A yes or a no? There are the prequel questions too, of what is it that makes each person happy, and can a person ever really change the way she is, etc.

Very recently I have become aware of the absence of a certain scale I used to have, some instinct that was always on, always fairly well-tuned, that told me what to do and how, that told me if I was fucking up and how to make things right and where to go next. These days I find myself asking, when I am upset, 'is this something that would upset other people?', and then wishing that a referee or kind stranger could just follow me invisibly, be that instinct I've misplaced. Each of my feelings is so demanding, explosive, intense--and, well, the result of course is some bad behavior.

I don't really identify myself as anyone other than a human and a mother. I love fiercely the people whom I love so I suppose I am a lover. I write words for money, which doesn't feel like being a writer, and then I write other words because I don't know how not to, it is a thing I do the way some people do other things, and I don't know if this is being a "writer" and I don't feel much attachment to that word although I also don't see the sense in spurning it altogether. It is not for me to say that anything I've ever done is "art" so I don't feel much for being an "artist," either. I like making things. I like making food. Maybe even more than eating it. I like making experiences for my daughter. I liked, earlier today, turning an empty tissue box into a paper-and-glue pot of paper-and-glue flowers. It's a lot better than the last two stories I've written.

What I want to know about discontentment, the feelings of sadness that come and go or come and stay a while and lift and then return, particularly my own such feelings, since this is my blogspot and therefore my little attic at the top of the stairs to play dress-up in and French kiss the back of my hand in, is: can I help it? And more importantly, do I want to? Are they part of me? Are they what I am, or what I do? Do they exist because I write, or do I write because they exist? And will all the happy writers please stand up? And then, squinting a little and seeing another side of this, if I'm ostensibly one of the "well-adjusted ones"--married, child, employment, house, family, friends--and I still feel like...well, like this, then who is safe?

The best kind of happy is still dipped in a little sadness. I see something amazing, and my heart fills like a balloon, and it hurts. The line between what is happiness and what is sorrow is a wavy watercolor streak that never dries.

At the end of the day, I don't at all think that suffering (necessarily) creates great art. But I know that for me, words are companions in a way that people aren't. Silence is a companion. Solitude is a companion.

And--and to come to my original point--want is a companion. Longing. Hunger. It is a prolonged state of agony that somehow feels good, until it goes too far, hurts too much, makes me self-destructive or unkind to others.

I think I actually write better--certainly more--when I'm on a fixed schedule, disciplined, clear-headed enough to stick to a routine and work resolutely to see a thing from start to finish, each day improving the previous day's effort. It's not possible for me to do this when I'm too sad. And generally, if I'm down, at least a part of why is because I'm not writing regularly or enough.

But contentment generally looks like a bald, fat, shiny man, licking his chops. Whereas hunger is light, lithe, chic. We complain that models are too skinny, but we are looking at them, and we are registering an ideal of beauty--or, more pointedly, glamour. We see a rosy-cheeked new mother, full-breasted, full-hipped, babe on bosom, and we say, ah, beautiful. And some of us say, that's beautiful because it's not me, I'll keep my size 0 (the size itself, a non-number, a nothing!) jeans thankyouverymuch, but, yeah, wow, go womanhood. Motherhood, particularly new motherhood, often can be perceived as a big, milky mess, repulsive--even to new mothers themselves. And breastfeeding, lordy--the connotations in terms of this dynamic (the feeding off the body, the eating of the body --> cannibalism!) can be downright shocking. And the model, meanwhile? Sexless, contained, the spectre of restraint. When it comes to The (female) Body, we are tortured and schizophrenic.

"Artists," though--there is an absurd strip tease between Consumption and Denial. I love excess. I'm just generally glad to keep it in my head, rather than across my body.

The posture of any artist should really only be discussed posthumously, if at all. Hunger-as-muse is illusory. (Muses are illusory.) The desire to be hungry is a distraction. It is the same as the desire to be glamorous. A desire to be is not an action. It is like confusing Facebook with "real life." It is like confusing "real life" with real life. It is thinking too hard, too long, about oneself (hi blogspot!), rather than just doing it: plunging one hand in, hard and swift and deep, pulling out one's own heart still beating, and using it as a goddamn flashlight, a goddamn bomb.

2011.

2011-01-01T18:10:00.002-05:00

I don't know, I'm mad at every single word I know, everything seems wholly inadequate, not the auspicious start I hoped for. I've already cried twice.

I improvised cookies and they aren't very good. Everything a goddamn metaphor.

Now I'm making soup.

My resolution is to peel myself away from myself; the self that remains, I'm confident, will do a much better job with everything.

Let's talk tomorrow. Today is just too filled with today.

Feelings upon realizing you're like everyone else:

2010-12-26T14:42:00.001-05:00

1. Relief
2. Depression

it's oh so quiet

2010-12-22T01:38:00.012-05:00

I've been home alone for the past 36 hours. First time in this new house, and tomorrow will mark the first time so long away from Beatrice. Brian went with her to my parents' house and I stayed behind to meet a deadline. Work has been a bit insane.

This alone, I am liking it. I stood for a few minutes in Beatrice's room today, and lingered a little while I was putting her laundry away, but I'm not sad. I know she is having fun.

Tonight I intensely craved a body. But I wanted to remain alone. But I wanted to feel the heat of something, skin maybe.

Yesterday and last night, I worked. I did the thing I typically do where I procrastinate obscenely until a kind of fever seizes me, and then I work within what feels like a beam of pure light, drinking a lot of tea and bubbly water and regular water. I slept for a few hours and then returned to the same spot this morning and continued with little interruption until I was finished. Finishing anything is pleasurable, but my pleasure was heavy, because I wanted to have been sitting with my own work rather than the work for money.

My feelings lately have been many. A spindle of hope keeps creeping in and getting strangled almost immediately, and this happens maybe 498 times a day. It's exhausting.

I'm making peace with the house more. We are friends now. I found a couch at an antique store with strawberry thief all over it that I think we will buy. I have wallpaper on a couple walls that makes me unreasonably happy whenever I see it. In general I'm starting to think I should've gone into textiles. Lately they are making me feel better than books and words.

I like to roast vegetables in the oven and then eat them with hot sauce. Today I had a not-short debate in my head about which I preferred, Texas Pete or Sriracha. Last I dropped in, I think Sriracha was still in the lead.

The weekend was very social. We laughed hard with friends who were visiting from LA and other friends who were also excited to see them. It's good to laugh hard with friends, sitting around a table, drinking things.

Tonight I took a bath. I picked a book from a stack in the still boxed-up office and filled the tub and got in, remembering not to submerge my hands. I got in a good reading position and opened this book and immediately remembered that I was about 9 pages from the end. I'd started it ages ago, and though I tried to sort of dawdle, still finished it in about 10 minutes. I really thought I had at least 50 pages to go, and the bath suddenly felt wasted. Getting out and toweling off and finding another book didn't seem worth it, so I just sat for a while, playing with my phone a little, convinced that the ended-too-soon-book-bath would get even worse when I dropped my phone in the water by accident; I really convinced myself that this would happen, and when it didn't, the bath felt like a good idea again, a small victory even.

Edna St. Vincent Millay. I know only the scarcest bit of her poetry and knew nothing about her life before I read the book. I enjoyed it. I like reading biographies sometimes of people about whom I know very little.

We have books in boxes and books in stacks and books on some shelves, but we need more shelves, but we also need a couch, and we figure the books will be more comfortable on the floor for the time being than we will. I'm thinking that when we have room for all the books, I will probably not alphabetize them or impose any kind of specific order, beyond designating a "to read" and "currently reading" area.

I have been sort of riveted by Beatrice lately; I hesitate to say more because I have odd bouts of superstitiousness (Mash'Allah as certain family members might say), but I don't know, I've been transfixed by the phrases and sentences that have been flying out of her, as if with actual wings, and the connections she's drawing between people and places and objects and feelings. I'm also trying to say "fuck" less when she's in earshot. But it's strange, I feel like her infancy was like this protracted enchantment in many ways, there were constant milestones, and each one seemed to happen in slow motion, so I could watch it from end to end, and reflect on it, and then see it again, and it was like this slowly-turning gyre of tiny events like smiling and sitting up and so on. And you know, she's really only rolling over or sitting up in one way each time. But this, this verbal stuff, the development of her understanding and intelligence and emotional response--it's all so varied and unique and her that it's like nine million quarks per second all over my heart and in other parts of me that I can't even locate. I keep meaning to get video so I can play back and watch and process my responses, and I keep not getting video, mostly because our camera is probably under something that we haven't unpacked, but also, I suspect, because it would be a two-dimensional experience of something that has 97 dimensions at least, and then I would want to record everything because I am obsessive, and maybe I'd be contriving scenarios, and I would probably really annoy her and miss out on organic events organically happening because I would be too busy trying to see what I "caught" on film.

It's late. I am driving to my parents' house tomorrow. I will have a little more work to do from there this week. Christmas is soon. I'm getting hungry for breakfast. The house is very still and a part of me wants to just stay in it, in this nice loneliness.

2010-11-30T23:08:00.002-05:00

I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love The reason that I am so good at love I love I love I love I love I love I love is because I was born seemingly with a fierce aversion I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love to logic I love I love I love I have none when it comes to most things I love I love I love no logic I love I love I love I love I love I love I would be a shitty politician I love I love I love I love I love I don't know my east and north I love I love I love I love I love I love I get angry because I love I love I love I love and I forgive really quickly because I love I love I love I love I love I would be a shitty politician I love I am shitty when it comes to politics I love I love I love I love politics and math I love I love I love I love I love I love I love not to equate them I love I love I love I love I love because one makes sense and the other doesn't I love I love but the one that doesn't make sense makes no sense not because of love I love I love I love but because of power and cruelty and manipulation I love I love I love and love is none of those things although I love I love I love although the masks of love I love I love I love I love are often also the masks of those things I love I love I love I love I love I love masks that I have worn many times and I love I love I love masks that I will surely continue to wear sometimes when I love I love I love I love I have been scorned I love I love I love or when my love feels too hungry I love I love I love and hunger is so mean I love such a mean beast I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love willing to steal or kill in order to be fed I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I have found I love I love I love I love I love I love so many people to love to love to love I love I love to love and at every stage there have been people I have loved I love I love I love just tonight in the shower I was thinking about two women I loved I love I love I love in college I love I love and I love them still and I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love and they are sisters I love I love I love and I felt like one of them too I love I love I love I love I love and I didn't like sleeping alone and would sleep I love I love I love I love I love with one or I love I love the other I love and we would huddle I love I love I love so many times I love I love I love within the bonds of a love I love I love I love that we barely paid attention to I love I love I love because we were too busy figuring out I love I love I love I love I love the other loves that were consuming us I love I love and sometimes I love I would be very alone I love I love I love and I would read Anais Nin and I love and Simone de Beauvoir and I love I love I love and I would feel like I was them in my I love I love in my love for them I love I love I love and remembering that tonight I love I love I love I wanted to go back and sit with myself and stroke my head I love I love I love I love I love and say good for you for reading your French women I love I love I love and enjoy yourself I love I love I love I love I love I love I love you I love you I love you I love you I love because I don't know if life will ever feel again quite so glamorous I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you than it does in its exquisite nineteen-year-old sadness I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you and I am so keenly aware I love you I love you I love I love I love of the many things I can't seem to do I love I love I love although I try to change them every day I love you I love you but this thing I love I love I love this love I love I love I love I cannot seem to change it I love you although I wish I could I love you I love I love you because I think I would maybe get more done I love you I love you I love you more written I love you I love I love if I could just stop love I love I love you but I can't stop I love you I love anything I love I love I can't I love even read a map

I fell asleep with a capsaicin hot patch on

2010-11-21T23:23:00.002-05:00

and dreamed about that guy from the American Pie movies, the one who was engaged to Katie Holmes before she married Tom Cruise, he was my camp counselor and love interest and throughout the whole dream it was unclear to me whether we were actually at camp or in a movie about camp. There were bugs and bare feet and his chest was comically broad.

*

I keep wondering what feeling I'm in. What this is. I feel far away from everything.

*

Also there is this cough that feels like it should be producing puffs of dust. Worse at night, like most things.

*

Still at my parents' house and being here it feels a little like I have been sent away. Der Zauberberg style.

*

There are some essays I've been meaning to write, in no particular order, about:

home/condiments
hotels
robes/loungewear
internet/marriage

It's like I'm waiting for something to 'kick in.' Constantly waiting for something to kick in. I need to hire a person to kick me instead. Output has been severely lacking. Input has been severely questionable. Need another Magic Mountain, after this one, to convalesce from the static.

*

One way that I'm feeling that I've pinned down with some surety is 'monstrous.' I've stopped apologizing because I'm overwhelmed by how much I probably need to apologize. My 'attitude'/quietude is some form of penance maybe, some state of constant apology...

*

I love my parents.

*

Beatrice's favorite song as of the past few days seems to be Happy Birthday. She also likes listening to opera with my dad.

*

My heart, it can only take so much. I should probably be pregnant all the time. I think I was a lot tougher when I was pregnant.

*

I don't know. I don't know.

The problem of modifiers.

2010-11-15T16:47:00.004-05:00

I think about syntax a lot, modifiers. As an example, lately I keep repeating in my head:

"I'm a real grumpy asshole."

But what I really want is for the "real" to modify "asshole." I haven't been "really grumpy." I've just been grumpy. But I think I've been a bona fide asshole. It just sounds wrong to say:

"I'm a grumpy real asshole."

If "grumpy asshole" were a hyphenate, that would be a little better. But it's not. But I could make it one.

"I'm a real grumpy-asshole."

F'ing language. I do what I want.

I DON'T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT.

2010-11-10T16:02:00.003-05:00

A ride in an ambulance, trip to the ER, nausea meds, shot in the ass, X-ray, and IV-drip later, and I'm back on my back. Things got really complicated when I fell prey to some horrific stomach virus. A stomach virus when you're virtually immobile is pretty much a nightmare, logistically and otherwise. Think about it. Or don't--I'm trying to forget.

I'm home now, feeling a mix of gratitude and frustration, and a lot of confusion.

Various people, all well-meaning, each a love in my life, have told me that I need to "stress less." And to "take it easy." And that "these things [I'm] worrying about are all temporary and easily fixed." To "remember the big picture." To "be grateful for the good things."

It's the worst kind of advice, the kind that asks you to tinker with your machinery, to be ______. If it was "drink less coffee" or "try not to stay up so late," I would have a better chance of following it. Not that I would follow it, but I could. I could physically not put cups of coffee in my mouth and I could physically climb into bed a few hours earlier.

But how to change the intangibles? I can't help that mountains of boxes make me feel physically weak and emotionally overwhelmed. I can't help that it takes me three hours to make a decision about which drawer is best suited for the "big utensils." I can't help that I regret nearly every action I complete, re-do the action, and then realize that it was better the first way. What I'm thinking is, I'm pretty much okay in my labyrinth of obsessions, undoings, misdoings, unyieldings, and wrongs. It's when that labyrinth gets audited by the map of others, that it seems to go cruel, vengeful. See how normal people do it? What you are doing is not normal. And then my loved ones feel sort of bad for me, and also sort of horrified by me.

I'm the worst kind of patient, an abuser. I hate needing help. "Help" means that you are obliged to accept it as it is, openly, gratefully. "Help" means "someone else's way." And I prefer, too much, my way. Even as a beggar. Even when I feel like I actually may be dying. A light bulb was supposed to come on, that didn't.

*

I wrote this last night. Today I'm walking around, cronish. Please and thank you.

Report from the floor, day 2.

2010-11-06T22:12:00.002-04:00

Feeling primitive. Fuck everything. Tired of trying to find value in bad things happening. Need more books to read but boxes are too far to crawl to and nobody's around. What should I read next. Fuck.

Report from the floor.

2010-11-05T18:22:00.003-04:00

I'm typing this lying on the floor. My knees are up and my computer is tilted, secured at an angle by my hipbones. It's not a bad lap desk, actually, though I wish I could do something about my neck.

Earlier today I was sitting on the floor in our new-home-that-is-old, combing Beatrice's hair, pinning it back with barrettes. I reached for one, and my back completely seized. I tried shifting around, standing, stretching, everything to stop the pain, but it just kept intensifying. More than anything, I felt shock, that I had managed to injure myself by doing a toddler's hair. Beatrice looked at me, curious. Then it stopped being interesting to her, my wincing and contorting. "Mama, up? Up now? Mama gets up now please?" A contractor had been in her room earlier, messing with the electricty, and there were live wires exposed in two of the sockets. She started toward them. They did look enticing, I'll admit. It was like something from a dream--her moving for the outlets, open and frizzing blue and red, me stuck in place, not sure of how to deter her. She's still at the age when actions are more effective than words. (I'm not. Actions interest me very little, generally speaking.) How to get between her and those wires. How to move without wanting to die from pain. Somehow, I squirmed and crawled, meekly uttering "no, no" through an unexpected gush of tears. Which only confused her further.

Brian was able to come to both of our rescues, and then I got a lot of advice from the Iskandrian medical network, and then I got pills. I'm excited for the pills, but more than anything, I'm brooding over what strange humors have been at work in my life, in my body, for some months now. Because there have been incidents. The hallucination-soaked flu in September. The apocalyptic storm at the beach. The move to the next zipcode that has seemed to thwart all normal behaviors of a move (the details sound like a pilot for an HGTV show). And now this, this horrid feeling of bone-against-flesh. Hippocratic medicine revolved around yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, and blood. I'm no Roman, but if I had to guess, I'd say that maybe my blood has thinned, my black bile thickened.

There was a time when I "exercised." (I really did, but somehow that word always belongs in quotes.) I wasn't any kind of iron girl, but I was fit. I can remember an odd moment, when Beatrice was being born, when the doctor who delivered her said, "You have such strong abdominal muscles!" I think I laughed and was secretly pleased.

Now, though? Now. I've gone scrawny and frail. I move all the time, bend, swoop, lift, carry, etc. But I don't "exercise." And this move, this old house, the work we've done to it--all of it just finally won. It was, as they say, a long time coming, a lot of detritus stored all up and down my spine, my back a veritable junk drawer for my body, phone books, take-out menus, a stapler, some recipes, a rusty hammer. I'm sad for my skeleton. And sort of...horrified. Beatrice and I are one year older as of the past ten days. This weekend she was supposed to visit her grandparents and cousins, be feted by them. She doesn't really know that she'll be missing anything, but I'm feeling all of it. And I'm making all kinds of resolutions from down here. To vacuum. To lift weights, gain muscle. To stop, once in a while, and just lay down, maybe on the floor, not because I hate everything or because my back has quit but because it's nice down here. I'm in the room that made me like this house to begin with, a sort of anteroom outside of our bedroom, and I have plans for wallpaper and an opulent lamp in the shape of a lady, and there's a small window, out of which I can, from my patch of rug and pillow, see some clouds.

We're packing up to move to a different house, there's that feeling of inventory hanging over everything, it's tough to even eat a sandwich.

2010-10-13T22:59:00.006-04:00

I want to ask before I say anything else, is it extremely self-absorbed to never watch the news and only sometimes read the news. I'm just trying to collect some evidence for how self-absorbed I may or may not be. I'm aware that I'm writing about my own self-absorption; each keystroke toward that effort is evidence. Fine.

Does every mother feel like the most selfish mother.

I think many mothers feel very selfless.

But maybe the selflessness becomes so commonplace, so baseline, that over top of it is built an at-first rickety, then towering monument, sturdy, of selfishness, desire, entitlement. A tricky sort of thing, because its foundation is understood to be, recognized as, sacrifice.

I don't know where I fall. I fear that I've been sucked a little into a me-vortex. Someone should tell me. I fear the people around me are too nice. My mother would tell me, has told me. And my mother is a mother, with no monument. Or maybe a monument, that I've built for her. I don't want to talk about mothers anymore.

The alone fantasy is so strong lately, and I want to say, I don't want to be without you or without you but I just want to be by myself. I don't want to leave you, I just want to be gone.

To a single room with a single bed in a cold place.

What would happen? To me? Who has been amongst for so long?

A thick, deep quiet. Cigarettes, probably. A lot of words.

I'm thinking a lot, of course, about writers who are mothers. I don't want to talk about it. It's not a conversation I want to enter. It's there, like so many other things. I'm not special. I'm not too special.

Desire. It's the guiding principle. It should be more, love, I think. You can "desire to be loved." Which has nothing to do with love--only desire. You don't have to "desire to love."

You just love.

I'm filled with desire for a tiny, cold place, where I can sit and love quietly and write quickly, until the desire brings me home. Until the love brings me home.

What an embarrassing post.

I walked around bra-less for most of the day, since there's no real difference. And I waited until my neighbor left his front porch and went inside before I checked the mail, because I didn't want to say hello.

THIS STRANGE CHANGE IN ATMOSPHERE

2010-09-30T12:21:00.008-04:00

In general I don't trust the beach. Too many people constantly talking it up all the time, how great it is, how it relaxes. Too many ugly bodies. Too much skin showing. And then there is the matter of sand. Which is a very disturbing kind of matter. I'm looking at the ocean right now, and I guess I get it. But it just feels so obvious, or something. So proud of itself. What's it got to be so proud about. I like the mountains. How still they are. How stern. It's a better backdrop for me, who is always turning, churning enough, as it is. The mountains are the full-stop to my ellipses. The ocean? Too many dot-dot-dots. Too much hithering, thithering, there and back.

From up here, I don't mind looking at it, though.

But I still feel like, 'fuck you, ocean,' a little.

Last night some kind of tropical storm raged. The windows in the room where I am staying shook violently. The wind howled, loud and louder. I laid very still in my bed, and I felt the house sway, struggling to bear itself. I didn't sleep. At first, I enjoyed it. Who doesn't love a good storm. But as everything kept intensifying, to a seemingly impossible degree, I felt real fear. Beatrice's little porta-crib was near the shaking windows, and I dragged it to the other side of my bed. She slept soundly, blissfully even, the whole night--additional evidence that baby humans are their own species--but I kept wondering, irrationally, if I should wake her. To let her know of the imminent danger I felt, and then protect her from it? To hold something small, smaller than me.

This morning a crack in one of the windows near my head and some water on the floor upstairs seemed to be the only evidence of the long night of weather, a night that felt oddly like a vigil.

I have been feeling for some time that my life is being encroached upon by a new strangeness, something creeping and then suddenly roaring in, like a goddamn wave on the stupid shoreline, like weather, like the universe is folding in half, and I am in the crease. And this storm, all of that water and wind and tremor, confirmed it somehow.

Maybe I am harnessing the power of the elements. Maybe the elements are siphoning my abundant stores of confusion, translating them, spraying them all over my flimsy shelter. I feel filled with secrets. I don't know what they are. I wish someone would tell me.

Last night I had the sense that I was walking the plank of my very own self. It wasn't the death-fear. At least not the physical one. My arms were tied and my eyes were covered. There on the farthest edges of my craggiest perceptions, I felt frozen. Waiting for the big push.

*

A few things that, against forgetting, I want to note about Beatrice:

Chicago --> A'cago

flamingo ----> a'mingo

bringing two similar-ish things together and announcing: "FRIENDS!" ("fwends") These could be two crackers, two shoes, two hairpins, a crayon and paper, her blanket and stuffed animal, two shapes on TV.

the way she says names

the way she repeats most of what she hears, in some form or other, again and again, each time pressing it deeper and deeper into herself, further into her processing center

yawn/yarn confusion

I start to sing a song and she sometimes interrupts--"SELF!"--and then begins the song again, solo.

counting to sixteen, counting to twenty, minus a few, with a couple out of place

alphabet singing

"reading" books, with hand gestures

pandapanda

saying "circle" while drawing circle in the air

asking, after something good, "again?"

obsession with "dark," and as of yesterday's trip to weird arcade place, "cayry" (scary)

reading the spines of books near my bed, among them: Body-bear (Baudelaire) and Gogol

"no, no" with "tsk tsk" finger gesture

Dear this Past Week, I'm going to let Mrs. White & Colonel Mustard tell you how I feel. Yours no more, Kristen

2010-09-19T23:26:00.005-04:00

SEE 3:16 TO 3:24, BELOW

Test of the Emergency Broadcast System

2010-09-08T12:06:00.004-04:00

Frequently I find myself responding, usually silently, to the detractor(s) in my head. I'm aware that this is what some schizophrenics do, albeit out loud. If I'm doing something I'm not completely comfortable with, or if I'm putting off doing something that I know I should be doing, or if I'm trying to figure something out and going about it in an unsound, inadvisable manner, or if I'm looking for ______ in all the wrong places, I pipe up, and then I fire back. It's less my conscience that I wrangle with than my inner librarian-stenographer-accountant-life coach-trainer. That bitch is hardcore no fun. I spend a lot of time trying to please her.

She just told me to get up and do fifty jumping jacks and ten push ups, and I did.

Speaking of hearts, last week we found ourselves in a tile store. There are two tile stores in this town, and they are directly across the street from one another. We met in the one that closed earlier, and I'm walking around with Beatrice, staring at large slabs of taupe, completely confused as to what meant what, wondering how we wound up at a place in our lives where this activity was purported to be necessary. Because we are, apparently, moving into a house that needs, among other things, new tile. Sometimes it's like, oh my god, my little bougie corner of the world is too much for me. And then it's like, well, it's not like I'm driving to Walmart in a minivan! But then it's like, wait, a minivan might make sense one day! And look, I'm at Walmart, needing milk! And the voice is like, (disgusted): look at yourself. And then I'm like, but it's the closest store that's open! And I don't altogether hate being here! I mean, but I'm really conflicted about it!

Because, I think, hating Walmart and minivans, etc., is quite passe at this point, no? Hating "what America likes"? I am America, and I don't want to be America, but I don't want to not want to be America, because it's so fucking boring and blind to align oneself with the proclivities of privilege, and then deny the presence of that privilege, all in order to dissociate from a certain "kind" of person or people. Every time someone says, there should be Ulysses board books and organic kefir and wooden toys, not loud plastic made in China and cheap milk, a really dull academic gets its Ph.D., and Walmart grosses like ten billion dollars in compensatory sales.

Speaking of death, so we're at the tile store, a little dumbfounded, at least 2/3 of us thinking about dinner, and I'm observing that the guy who finally emerged to help us is acting a little less than friendly. I feel like maybe this is how it goes when you visit a tile store, how very much we have to learn. And I'm mumbling something about how the tile I want is in my head, based on a tea-set I saw in the window of an antique store in Alabama, white with a dusty rose-colored floral pattern on it, and he's saying, let me show you something in the back, and as we're walking back there, he half-turns to me and says, I know this will sound so weird, but is either you or your husband a doctor. I resisted telling him about my Ph.D. I asked what was wrong. He said that his eyes were swimming, his left arm was dead-feeling, and his chest felt tight. He was like a real-live heart attack brochure. My voice telling him that we needed to call 911 sounded absurdly calm. At first he waved off the idea, feebly, but we persuaded him easily. He was the only one there. Brian went around helping him to lock things and close warehouse doors using a forklift. I kept imagining the man falling to the ground. What would I do. What would Beatrice say. What if he died.

The ambulance arrived in a clamor of confusion--first they went across the street to the other tile store, because I had mistakenly given that address. The man half-hugged Brian as the EMS approached. We stood nearby as they checked his vitals. He looked terrified. They put him inside and drove away quickly.

Now when I think about tiles I think about hearts collapsing. I think about splat. I want to call to see if he's okay. I want to be more okay.

1st & 2nd sections

2010-08-31T23:48:00.002-04:00

The idea being that their baby would have an advantage over other babies. They hid food and spill-proof cups filled with juice and water in every place where these things could fit: the glove box, the center console, the coin holder, underneath the seats, along the rear windshield. They removed the maps and candy wrappers and overdue library books from the compartments along the bottoms of the doors and filled them with homemade zucchini bread and carob brownies and fruit they had dried themselves, all wrapped loosely in waxed paper. They filled the ashtrays with organic cereal, called Oaties. In the deep pockets on the backs of the front seats they placed mementos—a scrapbook with the earliest pictures and documented milestones, some small, soft toys, Marcus’s birth certificate, and their worn, pocket-sized copy of the Dhammapada. They taped photos of themselves to the windows and the rubber floormats.

The first telegram came before Marcus was born. Alex went to the door in a towel, but whoever knocked had left. A small pink slip was wedged beneath the heavy hinge of the knocker.

The meek shall inherit the earth. Plan accordingly.

Alex brought the note to Alex, who looked at it for a long time. She rubbed her belly, filled with movement. She stuck the note on the refrigerator with the magnet shaped like a fish.

“I think it’s a good omen,” she said. She knew exactly what kind of mother she wanted to be.

Alex got dressed and brushed his teeth with all-natural toothpaste. Sometimes, he wished for Crest. He wandered back to the kitchen, still brushing, and looked out the window over the sink.

“It looks like everyone is getting one,” he said, carefully, trying not to spray toothpaste. A man was walking down the steps of the neighbor’s front porch, and across the lawn to the next house. Alex could see a stack of pink paper, like a deck of cards, jutting from the man’s back pocket.

“Maybe he’s a Jehovah’s Witness?” Alex wondered. She was standing in the doorway of the bedroom, which was also the doorway of the kitchen, still rubbing her belly.

Alex spit into the kitchen sink and swished water in his mouth. He rinsed his toothbrush and laid it on the counter before answering. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think Jehovah’s Witnesses maybe ask to come inside.”

Alex went into the bedroom. The bed was still unmade and had small piles of baby things all over it. Seeing them made her feel happy, lusty. She wanted sex all the time these days. “I have to finish folding everything and find a place for all of it.”

She was thinking about how one appetite begets another. Sex made her want to eat, and eating made her want to sleep, and sleeping made her want to have sex. She wanted many babies, and a bigger garden to feed them all, and a giant bed for everyone and their piles to sleep in.

Alex was looking out the window again. The man was still in view, at a distant neighbor’s door for a moment, and then, again, walking briskly down the steps.

“Let’s go to bed,” came Alex’s voice.

“Now?” said Alex.

But he joined her, amidst the mounds of small socks and blankets. Her body felt ensconced in flesh.

2010-08-29T13:37:00.003-04:00

what if nothing works out
what if nothing works
what if nothing
what if
what

one day she will be just like me, i won't be able to reach her, she won't know me, she won't be mine anymore, i will keep trying to catch her, she will keep escaping, i won't know what to do, i only know how to do this, i don't know how to do what comes next, what comes next, i don't understand how people do, live, are,

there isn't enough time
there isn't enough
there isn't
there

my brain is peeling

don't look at me

Whitman's Sampler

2010-08-25T11:07:00.003-04:00

There's a woman at the coffee shop I'm sitting in who has a screaming baby. Screaming really hard and loud and persistently. I have my headphones on, music also loud, but I still hear the shrieks. She is walking with the baby cradled in her arms, and also looking at a menu, which she's holding with the tips of her fingers. The baby's screams are not going to come between her and some eggs. I'm impressed.

*

Some remake of "Under the Milky Way" just came on my Pandora. Why would anyone remake that song? It's just not a good candidate for a cover. It's the kind of song where, no matter what you do to it, it will still sound exactly like the original.

*

Yesterday I felt, toward the world, a throbbing tenderness. I wanted to hug objects, books. I wanted to become a foster parent. I wanted to hold everyone's hand, touch everyone's face, hear everyone's saddnesses. It was this strange, upward expansion, like the beams inside me had been lifted, the roof taken off. Today, I am getting hammered back into something. It's okay. Ongoing construction, etc.

*

Another woman has joined the woman with the screaming baby. The baby is quiet. The women are eating. Between songs, I heard the second say to the first, "...just call me, I'll come right over." And the first say, "Even just for an hour or something." And the second say, "Just so you can get out, yeah, for like an hour." A man across the room has just received his food and is taking a picture of it.

*

Thinking a lot about religion. Like why a sixty-year-old black woman's religiosity is more socially acceptable, or something, than a twenty-something's. Like how some religions are somehow more palatable, or aesthetically pleasing, than others. Like how religion is a form of indexing, imposing order. Books are so religious, in this way. No matter how they want to capture or imitate or create flux, they are, necessarily, stoppages. Two covers, pages sequential.

*

Baby screaming again, and second woman now walking with it.

In the house that is the mother's house

2010-08-18T10:04:00.005-04:00

In the house of the mother there is the mother and all of the furniture. You visit. You sit amongst the furniture, amongst the mother. You are served crescent-shaped things made of meat and sugar. You begin to tell a story. The story hangs in the air, awaiting judgment. Ultimately it succumbs to gravity. Ultimately it is unimportant. You go to the room that is half of another room. There are rows and rows of books about god. You sit in the middle of this room that is half of another room and you feel god behind all of the spines, you feel god lodged in your own spine, you have become a book, also. In the house of the mother it is never too long before you become something that belongs to the mother, a book or a wrench or a passing idea. It's time for tea. The mother observes the time that is for tea. When crumbs fall from the mouth of the mother, the mother uses her finger to put them back. There is no finger more capable than the finger of the mother. It has indicated you. You await instructions.

Put a peach in it

2010-08-11T14:52:00.002-04:00

I live in Georgia. Peaches are kind of its thing, I guess. Quiet down: for the time being, wherever you'd use tomato, except for things like pizza or pasta and probably a few others, substitute peach. Put some peach in your sandwiches. Put some peach in your salads. Put some peach on a piece of cheese and then put some basil on top of that. Put some peach in your mouth to make the words stop coming out.

Not worlds, words.

2010-08-11T12:11:00.002-04:00

Used recently:

pianist
excruciating
parallel
adjacency
agency
solvency
sheetrock
gotta go
befabled
befuddled
draw (n.)
penguin
rape
lassitude
helium

Not words, worlds.

2010-08-09T21:40:00.001-04:00

Also: I want someone to trap me in a fortress of arugula so that I can eat my way out.

Happen

2010-08-08T23:22:00.009-04:00

First of the all, it's too fucking hot here.

*

There is a lot I want to say.

There is a book called The Very Hungry Caterpillar. People with small children probably know this book. It details, in abridged form, the life of a caterpillar. He starts out small and hungry. And then he eats and eats (salami! ice cream cone!) and then he becomes enormous and gets a stomach ache. Then he eats a leaf. Then he builds a cocoon. And on the final pages of the book, there is a giant spread of a colorful butterfly. The book was given to Beatrice by a dear friend, and she spends time with it often.

Last night we read it before bed, and I could see the words and images entering her consciousness in a new way. When we got to the penultimate 2 pages, which show the big fat caterpillar and the big fat cocoon, I asked her Then what happens? And I turned the page and revealed the butterfly. Happen, she said. Happen. She repeated the word no less than ten times, each time turning from the cocoon page to the butterfly page. Happen.

It struck me as a very difficult word to explain. Cocoon to butterfly works, as a definition. The word doesn't actually appear in the story. But the implication, the urge to ask, is intense.

I think it was near four in the morning when she woke up, as though in a nightmare. There was terror in her voice as she called me, and her crying was breathless. I held her and we both fell back asleep. Sometime around dawn, the room filling with shy light, she sat up.

HAPPEN. HAPPEN. Mama. HAPPEN. Fat. Big. Co-cone. Eat. Buh-fly. HAPPEN. Mama. Co-cone. Big. Buh-Fly. HAPPEN. Co-cone. Mama. HAPPEN.

This went on for a few minutes, at least. I sat up and helped her narrate the book from memory. She wanted to emphasize the happen. I wondered if some conflagration of these thoughts and images had created the nightmare that had woken her up. She tends to wake up talking about the things that make impressions on her (like when her ice cream cone fell a few weeks ago...she still returns to this: I-cream FELL. FELL. I-cream fell).

I got out of bed and got the book and in the pink and gray shadows we looked at it. The caterpillar's face has that Halloween mask/clown creepiness, and his swollen body and engorged cocoon nauseated me a little. The butterfly, though, is pretty. I'm guessing that's the point.

We talked about Happen and co-cone for a while, and then had breakfast and didn't mention it again. I'm sure it'll come back up in conversation before long.

*

I've decided, I think, that The Happen is a scoundrel, a bad boyfriend. I keep waiting for him to call, come over. I cannot see the host of happenings, because of The Happen. The myth of The Happen. The Happen that never happens, that holds me in its greasy thrall.

The only real Happen, I think, is the very ugly cocoon that lives in an undisclosed spot, mushed around my organs. It needs me. I have neglected it. I have been looking for it online.

I have wasted too much time.

I have become nettled.

So The Happen that needs to happen now is a retreat of sorts. I need to make a vow to myself, to the cocoon, to this old internet. I have to make the happen happen because the happen doesn't just happen, out of nothing. Which is what waiting is, which is what clicking is: nothing.

I'll report to this space because this space is mine, it's of the moment. I've tried hard to keep it that way. Minimal links and such. I'll respond to emails because I like responding to emails and because I'm obliged to do so for work. But for a little while anyway, maybe a week for now: goodnight, Facebook. Goodnight, Twitter. Goodnight, Bookmarks. Goodnight noises everywhere.

I need more actuals.

If anyone needs me in the flesh I'll be sandwiched between DFW and Clarice Lispector and Baudelaire. Club sandwiches have 3 pieces of bread.

*

I also want to say, and I'm about 398932 months behind (always): read Shane Jones's Light Boxes. It is a book of deep beauty, violence, and love. The love is what I like best. I read about the war on February as the days were starting to get warmer and longer, and it enveloped me that way, like a long, warm light.

Napdream from earlier:

2010-07-31T14:55:00.002-04:00

In the childhood basement. You were dressed like a stage hand and staying in our furnace room. Nobody but me was glad that you were there. You brought with you strange gusts, tremors from forbidden places. The nieces came downstairs as I was telling you not to leave, to stay longer. We fell silent. The nieces sat on the couch and stared at you. They were waiting for you to do something. They had a terrible look. When they went upstairs I continued murmuring to you, and you murmured back. When the mother came down, you approached her, filled with pleading. She stared through you, inched away from you, said a word that turned the room into a baby's throat being squeezed by its mother. I went to you and cradled your wet eyes.

FIN.

2010-07-30T00:00:00.003-04:00

It's quiet, and I'm thinking about sleep, half-believing that I will soon ready myself for it, half-believing that more hours will pass in this state until I can no longer go to it as I would an altar but will rather get dragged there, a prisoner. The table in front of me is covered with clean, folded laundry. Some things with holes. Some things very small.

I can feel my hairs growing. It hurts a little.

I have been compiling a list of Beatrice's words but there are too many, more every day, so that it's beginning to feel like an index of everything in the world. It makes me realize that most of the time I exist in a state of unawareness for any object that is not immediately useful to me or that does not make demands on me.

Lately I'm thinking a lot about the internet, how bad it makes me feel, and how good it makes me feel, and how it very much is in this way like a drug. What is this Facebook, anyway? How long are we supposed to stay on it? I thought about shutting it down and felt genuine fear. I'm not sure, but my guess is that this is not a good thing. I want to use the internet like my mother does. She checks her email, she reads a thing or two, she moves on with her life. I am a terrible mover-on with anything. I might argue that I do not, ever, move on. I stay. I'm a stayer. I stay around and I stay up. To a pathological degree, I can't stand endings. Sometimes I do not start a book because I know I will be loathe to finish it. Then I start it and I read it slowly. Then I put it down and look at the internet.

Because the internet never ends.

Two things: gum and the internet.

This is a solid revelation about myself and about two things I lay claim to.

If I leave a party before the party ends it means it wasn't a very good party.

If the party is good I will have grave difficulty leaving. It will not appear this way to others. It will appear to others as though I have just said a lofty goodbye and tripped on down the lane. But if the party is good I will tie it around my ankles and drag it with me for as long as I can before the rope snaps.

And when the rope snaps I will cry.

And when I cry I will enjoy it a little.

And when I'm finished crying I will feel sad.

Today I laughed so hard that a little bit came out.

Love, asphyxiatedly / Dear Mom / On Vienna Sausages & Bad Radio

2010-07-27T01:55:00.008-04:00

I'm home again, after having been gone again. We were in Portland seeing family and friends who are like family. We were eating and drinking things, kissing babies. We got deep into it and high up out of it.

I think that I am good at loving people. I think that I am better at that than I am at writing, and I am ashamed to feel a true, bitter loss over this.

But I don't know if what I'm doing for/at/near people is loving them, or begging love from them. Or if it is one and the same movement, like throwing a ball up in the air. You know it must come down.

*

The body is in a perpetual state of decay. We know this. We forget, but we always know it, even amidst our forgetting. We are fine, we are good--and then we are sick. It's not one person, one time. It's all of us, everywhere. Acquiring the sickness or the sorrow in the face of someone else's.

*

The sickness within the body of my mother has become a sickness unto me. There is this pain in my back that is specific. I think it is the mother pain. I feel it when I roll around with Beatrice and I feel it when I drive away from my mother. Maybe it is the daughter pain.

*

Dear Mom, I'm trying, but I can't seem to write to you.

*

Can I face the burden of being loved into blindness?

*

I love the wide streak of bad taste that runs through my immigrant family, my dear parents. I am so bored by "good" child-rearing tactics, nutrition, play. When I finished grad school, I felt myself abandon the idea of "expertise." How deadening it is to be an expert--more deadening still to follow one around. I miss our electric can opener that made the cats come running. I miss Billy Ocean at top volume in the brown Buick that baked us while we, unbuckled, waited in the parking lot for the errand to end. I wish sometimes I didn't know what flax seed was. What "time out" was. This is beginning to sound like one of those forwards that I delete before reading but I was struck anew several times over the weekend by the amount of statuary in my parents' house. I used to condemn such things as false elegance and later absolve them as kitsch and now I see that they are evidence of an imagination purer than my own. The leftover relics from the Sharper Image. The Liberty Bell from an inconsequential field trip. The entropy of what has been kept, collected--and what has been lost or hidden. The food in cans. The supremely intelligent, worldly, and accomplished, rubbing against the caricature of the foreigner, the thick socks in summer, the incessant tea.

I want to say something else about love and contempt, the body and the immigrant and suffering.

There & there & back & back

2010-07-07T00:56:00.001-04:00

This past week, I was in some unlikely places. A sports bar that had bowling lanes and rapey music. A Marriot, a beautiful beach house, a Holiday Inn Express, a hospital. That's what happens when one minute you are away at a very fun wedding doing the Jane Fonda, and the next minute you are visiting friends in the same state but on the edge of that state, and the minute after that you are getting a phone call about your mother who has suddenly become very ill and gone to the emergency room. And you think, how did I get so far away? How is it possible that two locations in the same region can be days apart? You feel terrible at math and geography, all over again. As you start driving, you have no sense of scale, because every mile seems only to draw attention to the many miles left to go, and you get pulled over for speeding by an action-figure cop and told that you must, must, appear in court on such-and-such day, or have an attorney appear for you, and what he is saying is making no impression on you whatsoever, and you want to tell him that you are driving fast because because because, but you can't or don't, and then it is over quickly and there are bad feelings in the car and you sit in silence with the ones you love. Eventually you stop for the night and you feel better, distilled, and you take a gratuitously long, gratuitously hot bath, after which you walk in your pajamas down the hall and fill the ice bucket with ice and buy a Coca-Cola and return to your room and fill one of the plastic cups in the bathroom with ice and then with the Coca-Cola. You drink a few sips while you look at your computer, and then you brush your teeth and go to sleep, thick like never, unfurling like all the road behind you and all the road ahead.

I'm tired, now, of second person--

In many respects.

In a hotel room, the actions and routines of human existence and human behavior become autistic, pronounced. The teeth brushing. The bathing. The getting dressed. The lounging. The room is made to sustain us in these moments most of all. Some people might say that hotels are made for sex, secret trysts, etc., but this is untrue. The hotel room can easily become a scapegoat, a locus for our transgressions, a no-place where consequences temporarily stop gushing, scab over, until check-out. But this to me is the least interesting aspect of the hotel room. The most interesting is how semiotic it is, how it can make a person aware of her most immediate and basic needs, and then how resolutely it can fulfill those needs. Plastic cup = thirst. Bed = sleep.

We eventually arrived, and spent time in the hospital, and felt alternately scared, sad, agitated, and reassured. We felt the immensity of family, its stupendous, incomparable weight. We stayed up very late. We brought things to the hospital, and when my mother was discharged five days later, we brought things to her at home. I made her laugh a few times but since her lung is collapsed, the laughter was painful. Still, she is supposed to do things like cough and breathe deeply, to get air back into her lung, so laughter was, actually, medicine. I feel inordinately glad, and sort of proud, when I make my mom laugh. So there were these good moments, too, however laced with wincing.

Now I am home. Today I made a clafoutis and did a fair amount of languishing. Usually when I get cracked open I spend time in repair. I'm thinking I've had it wrong. I'm trying instead to expand the fissure, really break myself apart. To let more in, and more out.

A gamechanger

2010-06-21T23:58:00.003-04:00

I'm going to talk to you about water, since it is a clear and straightforward thing and right now I most definitely do not feel clear and straightforward. My head is all mushy with things that I can't bring myself to think about and I can't bring myself to dismiss.

So back to water: I unilaterally decided today to drink my water from a wide-mouthed 24-oz mason jar. First, I filled the jar with water from the Brita in the refrigerator. Then, I drank it. It tasted colder and cleaner than it does from a regular glass. Afterward, I got fancy, then fancier. I put ice in the jar, and a bunch of slices from a cucumber that I'd gotten at a roadside stand near our house, and also a bunch of slices of lemon. I again filled the jar with water. It tasted amazing. I felt the thirst leaving my body in a brand new way. Being "quenched" is generally so temporary, but this felt permanent, complete. It was as though my thirst evaporated, which is an interesting simile when you pick it apart! And you can eat the cucumber, cold and wet, when you're done! This evening, after I dumped out the lemon slices and rinsed out my jar, I again put some ice in it, and then added a handful of pitted cherries, before filling it yet again with water. Don't even worry about it--it was incredible.

I don't often make suggestions on this blog but I would definitely recommend drinking your water from a large mason jar. You will probably end up drinking more water than you usually do. You will also probably end up adding things to it, because that is the nature of the jar.

Back

2010-06-16T23:17:00.003-04:00

We got home yesterday, early evening. I sat at my computer for a lot of hours and did work for money and felt devoid of all art. When I went to bed, late, I felt emptied out and very light. Today I walked around my house a lot and did more work for money and stayed in my pajamas until around 4. In the morning I ate coffee and raisin bran and in the afternoon, a small sandwich. There wasn't a lot in the refrigerator. I received a number of spontaneous hugs from Beatrice and some soggy cheese crumbles on the shoulder where she decided to kiss me, long and with all of her might. Eventually I took a shower and put on a clean shirt and skirt that I had unpacked before. I tucked the shirt carefully into the skirt. All of us went to the grocery store and made a fair amount of noise, calling to each other from an aisle away and running fast with the cart while Beatrice sang out wheeee. She also pointed to a box of Mucinex that featured an anthropomorphic ball of phlegm riding a roaring wave of Mucinex with a helpless look on its face, and she said wheeee. Of the many things she now understands, I might be proudest of wheeee.

We came home and I made an unlikely dinner of Vegan Meatloaf, which means there was no meat in it, but lentils instead. It was delicious. Absolutely fucking delicious, for real.

The rain has been coming and going and feels more sideways than up and down. I stood on the porch for a while and looked at the lightning and thought about Eco's delineation of delectatio morosa in terms of the first stirrings of a story. The first stirrings of a story are this wonderful foreplay, while I wait wait wait to write it, waylaying the messy climax of actually writing it, just thrumming with this exhilarating could could could.

Wheeee.

Away

2010-06-11T16:49:00.003-04:00

I'm in the Florida panhandle. Oil has washed up close to where we are, but so far, these beaches remain open. I feel them trembling. Their turn will come. We played in the waves the other day and I felt covered in a slick film of sorrow when I got out.

I go to a Starbucks every day for a couple of hours and do some freelance work. I swim in the many pools that are here. Afterward, I feel hungry. At night, I feel tired. I'm not thinking about writing too much, and when I do, it's in a hypothetical, faraway kind of way.

My body has given itself to this thing called vacation, which is a very feeble but sweet attempt that humans have devised to fight the clock, fight the passage of ordinary time, to create a different version of time, to live outside of themselves and their wearying lives. It works until it doesn't.

I'm having a good time. Today I feel poked by a persistent sadness whose finger I can't grasp long enough to twist. Too oily, maybe.

The 5 Stages Of Waking Up Before 6am With Beatrice

2010-06-01T12:11:00.001-04:00

1. Denial: That's not her calling me. That's a voice inside the dream that I'm having. The dream has only just begun. Also, if I can't see her, she must not be awake.

2. Anger: I just went to sleep! I'm tired! Why can't she understand that I stayed up very late doing suspicious and/or minimally useful things? Why does she make me suffer?

3. Bargaining: Oh my god, if she rolls over and goes back to sleep I will buy her a pony. I will go to sleep earlier and wake up at 4:30 every morning to make her biscuits from scratch. I will buy her a pony.

4. Depression: This is going to be the worst day ever. Tomorrow will be, too. I never ask for anything from anybody and all I want to do is lay here. I'm not hurting anyone. I don't even want money or candy. Everything in my life is small and sad.

5. Acceptance: When I take her from her crib she is warm and soft and bready. She fits herself into me. I am tired, but I like this better than not-this.

*

Thankfully, she doesn't often wake up this early.

*

It'd be remiss not to mention one of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets.

Read & eat

2010-05-26T13:31:00.003-04:00

Pretty much ever since I learned how to read, reading while eating has been one of my favorite things in the world. Before school, I read while I ate my cereal. During recess, when I wasn't coerced into doing stunts on the swings or playing foursquare, I sat on a bench and read while eating some stowaway piece of my lunch. After school, I read while slowly eating a piece of cheese or chips or an apple or all three in some combination. Sometimes I was allowed to read at the dinner table. The book was made better by the food, and vice versa. Eating the food was a concretized version of reading the book, a way of holding the words in my mouth, tasting them, chewing and swallowing them. For me, reading demanded this physical and bodily accompaniment.

Maybe this is why some people like to read while on the toilet. Words go in, waste comes out. There are some books over my toilet, but I don't read them. I guess they're there for other people, which might be gross if I think about it too much. I think mostly they're there because I like to have books in every room of the house.

When I was a smoker, I enjoyed reading while smoking, but it was complicated. Usually it meant I had to go outside. Afterward I'd feel the need to drink something or wash my hands. Often, it felt too distracting, and would too easily become more about the cigarette than about the book. With eating, there is tranquility, symbiosis: the body moves toward fulfillment, digestion, while the intellect and imagination similarly churn, break down.

More over here.

I want to be lonely.

2010-05-24T11:21:00.002-04:00

I'm feeling a little like a giant throat that has something lodged in it. Blocked at the output outlet. My mind is whirring, whirring, but nothing is coming out. It's much more frustrating than just being stuck, uninspired, etc. When that's the case, I sort of just succumb, and enjoy the one-dimensionality, things as things are. I lick envelopes. I scrub floors. I consume. And it's all fine.

But this. This is hard. I keep trying to trick myself out of it, but it isn't working. I feel very unlovable. I feel like I need to go to some remote place and stay there for a week, really let some insistent loneliness settle in, seal off all the exits, smoke the words out of myself. If only for some companionship.

When you need the words as friends, that's when they come. Right now they're just trinkets I think.

Talkin' violence

2010-05-18T19:43:00.001-04:00

over at HTML Giant.

Saturday morning. Good.

2010-05-14T10:43:00.003-04:00

1. Very strong, very hot coffee.
2. Ceiling fan on slow speed.
3. Joanna Newsom, quietly.
4. Books, internet. More book than internet.
5. Sleeping baby.
6. Vague hopes for the day, no real plan.
7. Vague feelings of love for people both known & unknown.

teeth / the world gets inside / Pessoa / Smith

2010-05-04T00:03:00.007-04:00

These days my daughter sometimes likes to press her teeth into my shoulder. She is not biting me. She is finding the bone of my shoulder with her teeth, and enjoying a little the give of the skin covering it, experiencing for maybe one of the first times in her tiny life the confluence of soft and hard, the tactile pleasure that it can bring. I have some marks from this sweet chawing. I saw them as I was getting into the shower and sort of liked the way they looked, or liked the fact that this unlikely part of me, small and bony and seemingly inhospitable, gives her some comfort or relief. Mothers need not only be breasts. In the time that has elapsed since I stopped nursing, I've seen how the breast becomes other things--a shoulder, for example--and feeding becomes other things also--gnawing, touching my face and hair, hugging. And this process, this weaning, will keep happening, until it will shift away from the body altogether and becomes something else entirely--identity-building, self-discovery--which will require a whole new code and system of weaning. Sharp teeth are, I think, a necessity, as we try our whole lives to chew away from our mothers.

*

We have this row of windows up near the ceiling on each of the two long ends of the living room (which is the everything-room). And then there are windows down below, where regular windows usually are. The days are getting hotter, and I have been keeping the shades down on the windows below. But when I sit on the couch, I see from the other windows the tops of trees, green and swaying, and swathes of sky, and at night, the moon. It's the best view from any window I've ever had, and I already miss it, anticipating the day when we're in some other place and I look up and only see ceiling. There are no shades on those up-high windows, and I like the idea that there are these squares of outside world that I can't shut out: that while I can hide from what's eye level--people, cars, houses--I can't hide from sky and stars and birds and treetops. Nor, really, do I want to.

*

Oh, Fernando!

When I write, I pay myself a solemn visit. I have special chambers, remembered by someone else in the interstices of my imagining, where I take delight in analysing what I don't feel, and I examine myself like a picture in a dark corner.

I lost my ancient castle before I was born. The tapestries of my ancestral palace were sold before I existed. My manor house from before I had life fell into ruins, and only in certain moments, when the moon shines in me over the river's reeds, do I shiver with nostalgia for the place where the toothless remains of the walls blackly stand out against the dark-blue sky made less dark by a milky yellow tinge.

I sphinxly discern myself. And from the lap of the queen I'm missing falls the forgotten ball of thread that's my soul--a little mishap of her useless embroidery. It rolls under the inlaid chest of drawers, where part of me follows it like a pair of eyes, until it vanishes in a nameless, mortuary horror.

(From The Book of Disquiet, of course.)

In three little paragraphs, more like stanzas, Pessoa touches on nearly all of my obsessions: chambers, interstices, me-as-someone-else, nostalgia, ruin, moon, balls of thread, horror.

*

And then this, from Just Kids, Patti Smith's beautiful memoir of art and friendship:

Our mutual sense of code manifested in many little games. The most unshakable was called One Day-Two Day. The premise was simply that one of us always had to be vigilant, the designated protector. If Robert took a drug, I needed to be present and conscious. If I was down, he needed to stay up. If one was sick, the other healthy. It was important that we were never self-indulgent on the same day.

Brian and I have long used a version of this game. It really works. The alternative approaches disaster.

We saw Patti Smith sing with Bob Dylan years ago, maybe around 1996 or 7. They did a duet of "Dark Eyes" that just rooted me to the spot. Her voice seemed to come from somewhere beyond her body.

I'm not one of those who can easily hide

2010-05-01T00:21:00.006-04:00

You know what this blog's been missing?

Ambient pictures of booze.

And also?

A little EJ.

I hope you don't mind that I put down in words
How wonderful life is while you're in the world.

Haters can blow me. This is the stuff car radios were made for.

How I Know When It's Good

2010-04-23T12:33:00.002-04:00

It's good, usually, if it upsets me. If I can only work on it for a few minutes at a time, before having to get up and walk around my house. These physical interludes--not clicking around online, not refreshing email--generally indicate that I'm onto something. And the something that I'm onto is hot like a flame, exactly like a flame, so that I can only touch it for a minute before recoiling.

(That is a good phrase: "it is exactly like." It swallows itself, semiotically. The thing is, but then, wait--it's not, it is, instead like, but the likeness is exact, making it a facsimile--and yet it cannot be, because it was only ever a metaphor to begin with.)

When I recoil, I sometimes go and walk to the mirror and look at myself for a few minutes. I study all of the imperfections of my face. Sometimes I tweeze a hair. Sometimes I apply thick coats of mascara, which is a very satisfying thing to do. I like to run a needle or a safety pin through the clumpy parts of my lashes. (Although with this stuff--product endorsement alert--clumps are rare. I miss them a little, not them, but the opportunity to get rid of them. I wonder if there's anything else I can say that about.) Sometimes instead of going to the mirror I go to the refrigerator, open the door, and look around for a while. I might eat a piece of Easter candy. I might pour a glass of water. I drink a lot of water when I write.

I might be up, away from my desk, for a while. Walking around, looking at things in my house, or at nothing in particular. I wonder how many miles I logged writing The School? Writing everything I've ever written?

Suddenly I'll think of my next sentence, and I'll charge back to my desk and write it in a rush. Another might follow. But soon enough, I'll get that breathless, too-hot feeling, and have to back away.

I am aware that fear often impedes my progress. I feel frightened that I won't be able to match, in words, the tableau in my head. Precious, I know, but true. I don't want to ruin the thing by creating the thing. The thing is perfect in its potential, in its inchoateness. After a while, this kind of thinking pisses me off enough that I need to just finish, and it's like a reversal of all of my instincts. I mean, I could house-waltz forever, tweezing and nibbling and backing ever away, but at some point, my other personality comes out, the one that leans on the horn and tells the mother to get to the bottom line. And then I write the way I wish I could always write--fixedly, purposefully. But if I always wrote that way, there would probably be less pleasure, less relief. It would be basic, instead of triumphant. Agony is a lady, and ladies need come first.

It's already over already.

2010-04-16T11:44:00.004-04:00

I had this moment the other day: I was stopped at the main intersection in the middle of town, a familiar place, with campus on my left and downtown on my right, and I had been in that kind of driving mode where your mind and the car become one, and all you are is motion. I can't tell whether driving in that state is hazardous, or extra safe--as with meditation, does the mind empty itself, or is it so full as to be sated, or is it filled with an emptiness more powerful than knowledge, than thought?

Anyway, the red light pulls me back into the world, and I look around me, seeing the hamburger place, and the coffee place, and the ice cream place, and the huddle of people waiting to cross the street, and it was like I was seeing it as through my memory, through a visitor's eyes, like I had left and stayed away for a long time, and then come back, and wound up at this intersection, feeling a pleasant sense of nostalgia and relief that everything was exactly as it had always been. I kept thinking of Dylan singing "I'm not there, I'm gone," and feeling like I knew just what he meant.

I've had this experience before, and it usually means it's time to go. But I'm having a hard time deciphering signs and signals, unsure of what is portending what.

Friday FRIDAY

2010-04-09T20:28:00.003-04:00

I'm drinking a tiny martini and preparing to make soft pretzels, courtesy of an Alton Brown recipe, courtesy of my dear friend Damian's comment on Brian's FB status update a couple weeks ago. The internet is a fucking miracle and a vicious, tyrannical lover.

This week went quickly. I went through the five stages of grading papers--plucky sense of purpose, creeping sense of defeat, dilly-dallying, fury, and eyes-gone-soft--until I finally got them done. I did my best to comfort Beatrice through her teething misery. I stayed up late doing nothing in particular.

To the week ahead I say: let's be friends. I love you? Bring me something nice.

Big Other

2010-04-03T13:50:00.002-04:00

It'd been so long since I'd posted over there that I had to reset my password. Nonetheless, I wrote a little thing comparing writing fan mail to writing, well, other things.

I make terrible decisions about sleep on a routine basis.

2010-03-28T23:36:00.002-04:00

In other news, my daughter today wore a dress that she got when she turned one year. It's a size 12M--or "twelve months," since baby clothes are sized by age, for all of my many non-parent readers--and she turned seventeen months yesterday. So according to the standards of American sizing, she is approximately five months too small.

I had a moment today, and I've had a lot of these since she was born, where I looked at her in her little flowery "frock," because it really was a frock, with her little shoes, and her hair curling in these crazy little puffs, and her face completely given over to the concentration that balancing a big book in each hand requires, and I saw a human being who existed in her own rite*, as her own entity, who seemingly had nothing to do with me, except for the fact that my heart threatened to eject itself out of my body, wrap itself around her like a boa constrictor, drag her into the cavity where it used to drone unchallenged, and force her to thump out her wonder and balance her books and wear her frocks in captivity, in my service, in service to my life. It was a moment of wild possession framed by complete detachment, that can only be described as awe.

I can't believe that in spite of all of my blundering, she exists.

*I think the expression is "in _____ own right," but I generally like it better this way. We do, all of us, exist within our own rites and rituals and ceremonies.

I went home, and then came back home.

2010-03-14T13:01:00.003-04:00

Funny how this idea of "home" continues to be such a riddle. Where it is, and what constitutes one, and can there be several, simultaneously. I think I've decided that home is more of a feeling than a place, and to me, it almost always requires some kind of a return. It seems harder for the here-and-now to wear the mantle of home, than it does for the past...the past is big enough, wide enough, porous enough, to sop up the great sloppy spillage that home enacts, and since the past is constantly subjected to revision by time and memory, it's tractable, too. The present moment is more rigid, less forgiving, and therefore more hostile to the feeling of home, the conditions it needs to survive.

Being homesick is a matter of prepositions. I am sick for home, and I am sick of home, often in the same moment. In my frequent yearnings for some elsewhere, I envision a place free of the past, free of the present, unfettered by all of the complexities of love and history. This is what is meant by 'future,' I think. The feelings, the history--they haven't been born. So there's that marvelous sense of possibility, of completion and fulfillment. But the future can't be home, because it always-doesn't-exist-yet, and home exists, I think, if only as a unicorn.

Exeunt, with flourish

2010-02-24T14:56:00.005-05:00

The morning went a little like this: I left the house carrying one Beatrice--who was wearing brown pants and a brown coat whose hood has ears, which made me pause for a half-moment to decide whether or not I should put her in different colored pants or a different jacket, lest "people" think I was dressing her up like a bear, but then I thought, I will not be pushed around by the tyranny of "what people think," not when I inadvertently dress my almost 16-month-old daughter to resemble a bear and not any other time, and it was like this great split-second victory that made me excited about the day---and one diaper bag and one work bag filled with books and papers and one set of keys and one travel mug of hot coffee. I put the travel mug on top of the car and the bags in the backseat of the car and the keys in my lap as I buckled Beatrice into her seat. Then I left the diaper bag back there and brought my keys and work bag up front and shut the door and told Beatrice in a jaunty voice to say goodbye to the house! byebye house! and then I put the car in reverse and backed out of the driveway, still feeling jaunty and sort of good, and then I heard a thud/splash/thonk, and realized, after first believing that the overhanging branch of the pecan tree had finally come down on top of my car, that yeah, I'd just done that thing where you leave the thing on top of the car and drive away.

At this point, what would you have done? Probably stopped the car, gotten out, and retrieved your cup, right?

I wasn't running late. I happened to like the particular cup I'd just done violence to. I'd been excited to drink the coffee on my way into town, but I could have easily replaced the coffee. The cup was the thing to rescue. Which is why I can't understand what I did next. I'd slowed down when I'd heard the first sounds of cup-on-moving-car, to where it probably looked like I was about to stop and get out. I saw in my rear view mirror tendrils of coffee dripping down my back windshield. And I decided to just go. I accelerated, and as I rounded the corner, I saw the cup laying in the middle of my street, top popped off at last, steaming guts pooling around it.

It really felt like a hit-and-run. And when I turned into my driveway this afternoon, baby bear babbling in the backseat, diaper bag and work bag in the same places they were this morning, I saw the cup, top on but askew, perched on the railing of my back porch. Which means that someone guessed it was mine, or, that someone saw the whole thing go down.

I guess it's good to appall oneself every once in a while.

Sad Bastard Peanut Sauce

2010-02-20T21:03:00.003-05:00

Not really. I just feel like one tonight. A sad bastard, that is. Not a peanut sauce. But really, this is the best one in the land. Peanut sauce, that is. Not sad bastard. You can make it, and feel less like the other it. It's good on vegetables. It's good on noodles, with a sprinkle of cilantro. You can dip things into it. It keeps well, too.

From The New Moosewood Cookbook:
(T=tablespoon, t = teaspoon)

6 T peanut butter
1 c boiling water
4 T cider vinegar
1 T sugar or honey
1.5 t salt
3-4 cloves minced garlic
shake of crushed red pepper flakes
2 t lemon or lime juice

Put peanut butter in bowl. Add boiling water and whisk well to combine. Stir in remaining ingredients. Cheer up a little.

Things I've Done

2010-02-16T15:20:00.003-05:00

Washed it, peeled it, ate it, wanted it, hated it, discarded it, envied it, groped it, stuck it, snapped it, dried it, folded it, filled it, lost it, bought it, pulled it, turned it, sucked it, pushed it, picked it, loved it, changed it, returned it, wiped it, cradled it, hushed it, shouted it, mailed it, performed it, packed it, lapped it, flattened it, framed it, hung it, punched it, started it, delivered it, protected it, fought it, fingered it, opened it, zipped it, sewed it, set it, broke it, stopped it

I want to braise more meats. I want to braise meats more.

2010-02-09T23:12:00.004-05:00

I can't say or think the following without feeling like a d-bag, but maybe typing it will be different: we've got a case of the Februaries around here. Nope, still feel like a d-bag. But, grr, it's true. It's chilly and rainy in Athens, Georgia, and the people in the city of my provenance are under multiple feet of glorious snow, and I want snow, something to make this month, these days, stand out, and I'm feeling the urge to buy things like small appliances, rice cookers and slow cookers, and I read Williams-Sonoma magazine hungrily and imagine--even though the thought makes me want to kill myself a little--being the kind of person who fresh squeezes juice every morning in between sliding Dutch babies out of the appropriate pan, looking smart in a crisp monogrammed apron, and I long incessantly for insipid things, and the great, promising writing streak I was on has vanished like hair down the drain, and I feel like that drain, more or less, drained and clogged at the same time, and I'm tired of music and of TV and of books and of people and most of all of the stupid internet, and I'm tired of myself and all of my creations, and I just want to go somewhere remote and sit in a small, wallpapered bedroom and stare at the wallpaper or out the window until this all blows over. And maybe someone could bring me breakfast on a tray once in a while.

You know it's bad when you teach Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" and find yourself sort of envying the narrator.

Give me some money and a deadline.

2010-02-04T10:19:00.001-05:00

Mississippi Review

2010-02-02T23:12:00.002-05:00

Turns out that my story "Small Acts Of Violence Leading Indirectly To The Wiring Issue That Caused The Duplex To Burn Down" is a finalist for the 2010 MR Prize in fiction. I'm pleased about this. Very.

Michael McConnell

2010-01-29T18:00:00.003-05:00

makes beautiful things. Like the above, Spinning Silver Lined Stories, which is the cover of the current Denver Quarterly. And more on his website. They are like blurred, jagged dreams from childhood, glued atop a book of fairy tales, but peeling off at the edges and worn thin in places, so that the cover shows through.

Come and get me, Wednesday.

2010-01-27T09:47:00.002-05:00

I feel ready for anything. Don't know why.

*

Working on a new piece, slowly, slowly.

*

Beatrice is finding words. It feels that way, like she's rummaging around in her throat and locating what happen to be recognizable sounds attached to recognizable meanings. She's been talking for a long time; these days it's fun being able to understand her.

*

After speaking with a dear friend, a resolution has been made: some days will be devoted only to writing and reading. Some days to teaching stuff. Some days to errands and miscellany. I want a chalkboard to write this down on.

Place

2010-01-21T11:03:00.003-05:00

The other night I left my house at 10:45 to drive to the gas station and purchase one can of Coca-Cola. That is an example of a thing that would have never happened if I still lived up North. I think there is something in the air in Georgia that makes people crave Coca-Cola. I rarely drink soda, and if I do, I have generally preferred Pepsi. It seems that some holdout part of me that I never knew existed has finally succumbed.

Another thing that I probably would have never experienced if I still lived up North: the news from a couple months back that an older couple, a couple of miles from where I live, was attacked and killed by a pack of wild dogs.

2010/It's the Future/How Soon is Now, indeed

2010-01-04T15:47:00.005-05:00

I have high hopes for this new year. According to Facebook, so does everyone. Maybe because it's also a new decade. Maybe because 2009 was unanimously difficult. For me, a lot of drudgery and illness. An inert year, in many ways, although I have been expanded, certainly, in many hard-to-reach places. The caves of my heart, notably. The attics of my uppermost feelings. A couple unarguably breathtaking, beautiful, triumphant moments. But not much writing done since early summer, and the nagging sense, always, that I'm supposed to be "farther along" by now. The hint of belatedness that seems to cling, always, to everything good-ish that comes, like a faint mildew.

It's silly, of course, to think that a calendar page, a turning of days, a minuscule milepost in the time-space continuum, could *mean* or portend anything much. But I enjoy the opportunity to pretend that it can, and to hope mightily that along with things, I can get better too.

Part of me feels superstitious about articulating my wants in a public place. Part of me doesn't give a fuck. That part wins. That part often wins. Probably not often enough.

I want The School to be published. I want it to look like a reading primer from 1942. I want a publisher. I also want an agent, but I want a publisher more. I want to get dizzy with book #2. Right now it's all stops and starts and hating everything the next day. I want to read books again, whole books. Motherhood has made me harebrained in this regard, and I also blame our house. I deeply miss laying in bed with a book and reading past a responsible hour. Beatrice shares our room, and she has become a sensitive enough sleeper that after her bedtime, we corral ourselves in the main room until we're ready to sleep. I want to turn the internet off more, which is much harder for me to do than the TV, but I want to turn that off, too. I want our funny little house to sell. I want an office. I want to fret less, in my creating and in my life, and create more, and live better. I want to help Brian finish his album. I want us always to be making, despite the jobs and the drudgery.

In 2009, in the words of The Mountain Goats: "hurt my knuckles punching the machines." And in the other words of The Mountain Goats, "there will be feasting and dancing in Jerusalem next year." Next year being this year, obviously.

Decisions

2009-12-15T14:16:00.003-05:00

Wore really long pants with flat shoes and it's very wet outside today. Other than that, I'm feelin pretty fine.

*

Talking about re/reading over at Big Other. Chime in.

*

The grading maelstrom is almost over. Can't wait to make some Christmas sweets.

Chewing on eyeballs

2009-12-10T23:40:00.008-05:00

I've been thinking about tactility, about synesthesia, about pica. Sort of all in the same mouthful.

(1)
I can still conjure the smell and taste of a particular lipstick that I had when I was a kid. I'm pretty sure it was "Tinkerbell" brand, or if not, it had a Tinkerbell-type avatar painted on the plastic case. I cannot tell you the excitement that lipstick spawned in me when I was young. (Lipstick still makes my pulse race a little.) I loved the shape of it, the texture, the color. When I opened the cap and twisted it from the bottom, and it would rise up, unmarred, unused--it was thrilling. I would do this many times before I ever put it to my lips. And I always stifled this urge to bite the thing, not because I wanted to eat it, but because I wanted the toothfeel of all that color, all that waxiness. There was no food, really, that resembled it. And it went so near the mouth, without going inside it. And I wanted to see what a bite mark would look like at the top, replacing the angled edges--perfect. Perfect enough, almost, to warrant ruining the thing. Because the urge was partly that, too--the desire to ruin the smooth and perfect thing, to trample fresh snow, to smear the birthday cake, etc. When the Tinkerbell lipstick was on my lips--in my room, in front of my mirror, a very private time, with the color looking horrible on me; dark, heavily-eyebrowed kids do not look good in princess-pink--and I'd lick them, it'd taste like something so specific that now, so many years later, I can recall it precisely with all of my senses, without having any idea how to describe it. A perfectly visceral experience, that lipstick. Recently I was somewhere and smelled something that smelled the way it tasted, and I felt frustratingly close to being able to pin it down, but wasn't able to. Beyond, you know, "Tinkerbell-tasting."

(2)
In some book I read and re-read as a kid, some rite or initiation involved eating a bunch of mystery things. Blindfolded, one kid would have to eat whatever (food object, but still) another kid dropped in her hands. Fucking terrifying. Did anyone read this? It's probably in a lot of YA-type books. Judy Blume, maybe? I can't remember. One of the items was grapes. Which were described as eyeballs. I think they'd have to be peeled in order for this to work. But I've always imagined eyeballs as being chewier than grapes. I got contact lenses quite young, and although I didn't wear them on the regular until a few years later, I was pretty fascinated by them. Again, I stifled the urge to put them in between my teeth and then sort of grit my teeth together. I thought they'd have good give while still being firm, nice elasticity. Like an eyeball. Not that I wanted to eat eyeballs, per se. But just to connect to some outlying bodily curiosity. Much of my kin are doctors, maybe that has something to do with it. It was never so much the function/physiology of the body that interested me in science class--and I did enjoy science class, a lot--but rather the feeling and feelingness of the body.

(3)
I'm writing something with a character ("writing down" a character, as the inimitable Mark Leidner might say) who eats things that aren't food, but I don't want her pica to play a central role. It's just a small detail, like instead of eating an apple on the way to the post office, she eats a little Scotch tape. Once I saw an SVU episode that revolved around a character (victim or murderer, can't remember which, just the way Dick Wolf likes it) who had pica. Which means that it's strange, but mainstream-strange, probably. I mean, I've surely read things that featured characters who ate non-food items. But probably someone who has pica could write a Memoir of Pica and sell like a million copies, because it just seems to have that talk-show appeal. I should write a Memoir of Pica. I wonder if I'd have to go on Tyra Banks and eat paint chips for a horrifiedmiring audience.

Apparently, pica comes from the Latin word for "magpie." Fascinating!

(4)
And then there's Salad Fingers.

Poshlust & Thinglust

2009-12-07T15:13:00.010-05:00

The humanoid and I have been home all day together, her with a nose full of snot and me with various rags and tissues and saline spray and the nasal blaster thing. Nobody tells you how sad and severe-seeming simple congestion can be in a baby. She wants to eat and drink but derives no pleasure from it, no relief. Her frustration would be comical if she didn't feel so lousy, I think, and I feel her frustration and her lousiness and it makes me irrationally mad at the small nasal passages she seems to have inherited from her father (anyone who has ever seen my nose knows I can't be blamed here), and sorry that I can't blow her nose* or ingest things for her.

We spent a lovely half-hour on the bed, though. Our headboard is wide at the top, and since there's not room on my side for a bedside table, I keep books up there--a couple that I'm reading currently and a few others that I just like having close by. One of Beatrice's favorite pastimes, easy, is toppling them from on high onto the bedspread, and then leafing through each one. She was alternating between Peter Rabbit and The Body in Pain and I was thumbing through my much-worn copy of Gogol's Collected Tales. I came across "The Overcoat," which I hadn't read in forever, and I started reading aloud from it, more for my own pleasure than for Beatrice's--she didn't seem to care one way or another--and I was sort of delighted by it as though I had never read it before. I skipped around, reading passages I'd underlined years ago, and I felt so keenly that Russian magic that is like three parts sardonicism and two parts existentialism and a half-part almost embarrassing sincerity, and then that hard-to-define-but-unmistakable poshlost.

I'm thinking that this may need to be a Russian Winter, a good, cold**, dark time to revisit Gogol, and Nabokov, and Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy.

And lately I am consumed by thinglust, an insatiable drive for certain objects, and a belief that these things will make me happy, even as I know that they are only "falsely important," as VN might say, and therefore poshlusty in their own way.

* The nasal blaster thing, or aspirator, is supposed to provide the same kind of temporary relief that a nose-blow would, but this relief is usually overshadowed by the trauma (mine & hers) of ramming it up a tiny, inflamed nose.
** Wish it got colder and wintrier in Georgia.

Fifty-Two Stories

2009-12-06T23:56:00.002-05:00

Meet me there. Thank you, Cal Morgan, for being a most excellent & generous reader.

The moon was like one of those gummy orange slice candies.

2009-11-25T01:49:00.002-05:00

We were driving to Birmingham at night and listening to Belle & Sebastian (Beatrice loves it; she's much more emo than Elmo, haha, and with a frequently furrowed brow, and I see this and realize "she is being herself," "she is becoming herself," a process about which I can do precious little, a staggering thing, really, to see a small person becoming a person, with or without you, largely without you, I suspect, the first stirrings of all the letting go yet to come) and I was thinking about how very much I love being in the car, in the passenger seat, particularly at night. The horizon disappears so that it feels like we are driving straight into the night, that we are actually creating the road as we drive. I have this same thrill when I read something good, that I am creating the story as I read, that in my hands the book is becoming exactly what it was meant to become.

Beatrice, the road, the book; Beatrice, the road, the book. All three things becoming.

My brain is developing a mind of its own.

2009-11-17T23:48:00.006-05:00

I don't know, lately it seems to *know* things that it doesn't actually know. Like I will get a lot of answers right while watching Jeopardy, even though the category is one that I recognize only hazily. Or I'll have an idea about someone or something that turns out to be spot on. I can't think of specific examples without making it sound as though what I'm explaining is some kind of sixth sense or a keen discernment faculty or whatever, and maybe that is what I'm talking about, but in its moment it feels more like I learned something while I was sleeping, and upon waking, the essence or aura (or is it the trace? I'll always love you Walter Benjamin) of the thing, the residue of the sleep-lesson, collects within me at a certain precise moment, which is maybe the same thing as recalling a kind of dream, but a very lucid one that can be applied to actual events like Jeopardy and the plots of movies and details about characters in books.

Meanwhile, I feel bored by almost everything that purports to be interesting or innovative (shut up everybody, just please shut up), and vastly entertained by exceedingly banal forms of leisure--television (not the "thinker" shows, either), food blogs (this one is smarter and more compelling than most lit-blogs that I habitually stumble around; it's cooking *and* theory; this post is maybe my favorite so far; Rachael Kendrick, let's mingle), Facebook. So while it seems like one lobe of my brain is getting sharper, completely of its own accord, the other lobe, the one that I'm supposedly more in control of, and probably supposed to be feeding nutritious bits of literature and culture, feels like it's on standby. (I know I'm not using "lobe" in an anatomically correct way here, but it still feels right.)

My diagnosis of this current condition is that it's probably the exactly-right climate in which to start writing something new...my front-most mind is pleasantly dulled, but its hindquarters are snapping and popping and noticing a lot. It's hard to leave The School but I feel like I must commit to trying.

Sniffing 'round your doghouse.

2009-11-06T10:19:00.004-05:00

* A bunch of months ago, Brian and I tried making up some new idioms. The only one that has seemed to stick is "sniffing 'round my/your/his/etc doghouse." It's pretty effective, as in, "I tried to leave the party unnoticed, but a bunch of people came sniffing 'round my doghouse." Or: "Can you skype from work, or will your boss start sniffing 'round your doghouse?"

* Currently wearing jeans, a shirt, and a sweater. Shirt is from 1994.

* Very, very excited to attend the Book Launch Party tonight for my super duper talented friends, who have managed to create two of my favorite books.

* We got a babysitter and everything.

Some thoughts on turning 32

2009-11-01T08:32:00.007-05:00

First of all, ever since I turned like 26 or 27 or something, I've been having a really hard time keeping track of how old I am. When I turned 29, I was somehow convinced that I was 30--all of that baseless, media-induced dread about 30 somehow got inside, and 29 just seemed like a pointless, brief layover of a number, so all of my tumult happened a year early. (I am prone to anticipatory anxiety.) So then actually turning 30 was a very serene experience; I felt happy and sort of relieved to be on the other side. I have loved my time in this decade. I spent a lot of energy in my 20s spinning my wheels. Some people might feel like getting married or starting a family are the things that make the wheels stop spinning, the signals that mean the crossing over (from instability and uncertainty into a kind of safety) has occurred. I didn't get married to feel "safe." If anything, it was almost the opposite: I got married to have adventures. Love is really the least safe activity, I think. We keep growing and, I don't know, molting together, and apart.

Time for a list because I am getting off track:

1. Thanks to my sister, I resolutely believe in even numbers more than odd. So 32 feels, by that standard, nicer than 31.

2. Last year, I was newly home from the hospital on my birthday, and the only thing "birthday" meant to me was Beatrice. Still there was a celebration, for me, or for the person who was turning 31, who was me, who was having a very out-of-body experience. I'd already received so much attention, and now there was this human who would receive so much attention, that opening presents and eating cake felt gratuitous, almost embarrassing.

3. In general I am filled with hope. This is, I'm learning, some fundamental part of my character--I hope. Back in September when I got the horrible flu, I spent about two weeks completely devoid of hope, and it was maybe the most frightened I've ever been. I love new mornings and new weeks and new years, for how they automatically refresh the hope that has dwindled, and give the sense that however badly we fucked up last time around, this time, we will do better. We will do great.

4. I have an earnest desire to live in another country for a while. This has been building over the past year.

5. I am at peace with my vanity, I think. I feel generally cheerful about how I look. I believe I am an odd-looking person with odd features that I have grown fond of. I am happy and grateful that I did not grow up "beautiful." I feel as if I have earned the right to play about with clothes and makeup, and I enjoy doing this.

6. For the most part, I have stopped comparing myself to other people and feeling covetous. I am a person of many jealousies, but they are of a fiercely intimate sort. I long for many, many things, but they are self-designed, ambitions that I've had for many years, that shift slightly in character but mostly stay intact. When I put them in concrete terms, they sound ridiculous, impossible, so I usually don't. They just hover around my life and become visible when I am alone and quiet--like stars in the daytime and then stars at night--and they feel so reachable and amazing, and just looking at them fills me with something wild. And then I feel: I need to act! I need to do more! I'll never get there unless...! But then they blink out and I take a deep breath and go about my life, but perhaps with a little more intensity. I think this is at least partly what I mean when I talk about hope.

7. I thought for a while that there was a deep chasm between my cynicism and my tenderness. I'm beginning to think, though, that these things work in concert.

8. I used to think about myself all the time, and I definitely still think about myself a lot, but I feel that a rather riotous change has occurred, like a great coating of ectoplasm has been pulled away from my most primordial layer, deafening suction sound and all: these days, I think about love. All the time.

9. I want to get better at it. My nicer parts are getting nicer, I think, but my horrible parts might be getting more horrible also. On the other hand, I think that my opinions about things are getting stronger, but my ability to keep them inside is also getting stronger. I used to consider keeping things inside as some form of cowardice, which of course it can be. But it can also be a form of love.

10. I say my prayers. I pray for good judgment. I pray for more love.

11. I love reading US Weekly, etc., at the gym and if I get my nails done, but I have stopped spending time on the corresponding websites. No real statement to make about that--one day, I just sort of stopped. My obsession with famous people is now a bit more limited to people writing books and such, or people doing other small things with great focus and at least the semblance of honesty, people whose lives have been marred and inconvenienced with some need to make art.

I think eleven is plenty. To practice: "I am 32." Thirty-two. Yes. Good.

I woke up with something hard in my throat.

2009-10-30T10:12:00.002-04:00

I'm hoping it's nothing. I hate being aware of my body. I hate when I swallow and feel something, which makes me swallow again to see if I feel it again, and so on, and before I know it I am thinking with considerable seriousness about the quality of my throat, whether it's any different than it was yesterday, and I start making excuses for it, blaming the dryness of the room or the position that I slept in, and all along a creeping certainty creeps closer, that *something is happening in my throat*, that if something were not happening, I would not be having this conversation with myself.

I've become rather terrified of illness.

The real test, though, of true sore throatness: do I want coffee. If I still want coffee, then I tend to think it's nothing serious. Because whenever the real sore throat comes, the thought of coffee makes me cry, and all I want are slippery beverages like Gatorade.

I think everything is going to be all right. I'm drinking a coffee the size of my head.

Just trying things out.

2009-10-28T23:46:00.005-04:00

Sometimes a phrase gets stuck in my head and I have no idea what to do with it. I want to say it to everyone, in response to whatever they might say, and I want to say it unprovoked, and I want it to get stuck in everyone else's heads, so that we can all just kind of nod at one another and not speak and feel the exact same way about something, for once.

A blog is a good place to deposit those phrases. You can put them all big across the top, like I did, and feel a certain relief, like I do.

I did not use time wisely today. I loitered excessively online. Which I'm beginning to think really should never be talked about again, as it has become, I think, the most boring kind of cliche. It's the new "like brushing your teeth." Except it's not a simile. It's just a thing that everything does and then feels the need to confess. It's the new something something. "It's the new" is another cliche. Talking about cliches is cliche.

Speaking of which, why is everyone talking about hipsters lately? Yawn.

Happy First Birthday, Beatrice.

2009-10-27T15:07:00.003-04:00

I can't believe that a whole year has passed. I'm happy and sad. We are going to eat a Carvel ice cream cake tonight and think about things. That's my main feeling, beyond the happy and sad: that I want to sit with Brian, as though we had all the time in the world, and think about things. Go over the past year as if it were a book with pages, turning each one slowly. I am filled with feelings and I just want to look at them.

Mexican Restaurant

2009-10-26T10:43:00.002-04:00

There's a new restaurant in Crawford. It's called Mexican Restaurant. Also, the hot dog place advertises "laundry in rear." And the marquee outside the Pentecostal Church says "I Have Overcome The World." I want to do that, too.

I'm at a coffee shop grading papers.

2009-10-25T11:20:00.003-04:00

The experience of grading papers creates a misery within me that I can't rightly express. It's a cliche among teachers, I know, but I swear that my misery is worse than anyone else's.

On the bright side, I'm watching a guy at a table near mine drink an enormous cup of coffee, eat one donut after another from a store-bought dozen that he brought with him, and work his way through a tall stack of GRE flashcards. I can see a light dusting of cinnamon sugar on his lips, which move every once in a while as he reads from the card. He also closes his eyes, it seems, when he's trying to remember something, before turning the card over to find out if he's right or wrong. His right foot goes tap tap tap.

I'm watching America's Ballroom Challenge on PBS.

2009-10-24T21:11:00.006-04:00

I can't turn it off. It's just so creepy, like wax figures set to motion. I had this jewelry box as a child, white with painted-on pink buds. Open it and a tiny ballerina twirled 'round, one leg in an impossible position, her arms stretched infinitely upward. Her face was only half there, and her fingers were mere suggestions--thin painted lines along her clumsy but delicate, praying hands. These people on TV are like living versions of her. After they bow, I imagine them climbing back into their boxes, waiting in a state of good-natured plasticity until their next performance.

It's just not how I think of dance.

A friend of mine was Isadora Duncan a few years ago for Halloween. She wore a scarf wrapped around her neck, and at the end of it was a wheel that she'd made out of paper. One of the best costumes I've seen.

Today we celebrated my daughter's first birthday. Her actual birthday is this coming Tuesday. I'd made the invitations. I made cupcakes and frosted them to look like rosebuds. I made ginger molasses cookies. I made mulled hot cider. Apparently, I can make stuff. It's always a bit of a surprise to me. There were also cheese and crackers and radishes and butter and bread and olives and other things. It was nice. I wish we took more pictures. I am constantly wishing that we took more pictures.

Beatrice seemed to like her carrot stick more than the cupcake. I think she melted a little under all the attention. Later, when everyone left, she ate a cookie with gusto, and talked and talked. She sat in her high chair in the kitchen and Brian and I stood around, nibbling at things, doing that thing you do when parties are over, only this time she was there, doing it with us, chiming in, waving and pointing at things. Crazy. It was, we realized, the first time we had more than a few people over since she was born. I think she had a good time.

I'm thinking way too much about clothes and boots lately and am a little obsessed with skin care products and that stuff that you put on your cheekbones and under your brows. Highlighter?

I'm reading Aimee Bender's The Girl in the Flammable Skirt straight through for the first time. I'd read individual stories numerous times but never the whole collection. It's good. The kind of book that gives you great ideas, but then you realize that the ideas are mostly hers, and you're just approving of them vehemently. Or you think--why have I never before written a story about a librarian who one day has sex with countless men in the library? Surely it has occurred to me to write about that before? But it never did. But reading some of Bender's stories is for me on one hand a kind of creative deja-vu, and on the other, this crisp, quenching new experience.

A little fidgety, maybe prone to loud swallowing and leaving drink rings on your coffee table--

2009-10-23T00:12:00.005-04:00

but back nonetheless. It's time. I haven't thought about this space but cursorily in ages, although I'm still reading blogs or at least glancing at them kind of a lot. And then I checked in on the multi-talented, multi-lovely Ellen Frances and saw my name linked and felt sort of sheepish, like to follow the link would be akin to looking at old yearbooks or something similarly uncomfortable and not-there-yet.

The last year has been eventful. I finished my book. I got my PhD. I had my baby amidst all of this, and had all of this amidst her. It was a time of wild output and inner, inward excavation and a sort of slumbering away from the world.

Now I have been put in the world again and everything is eminently rusted and creaky on one hand but on the other, the hinges are all different so maybe not, maybe this is just how they sound. I'm trying to find a home for the book and trying to write, and we're also trying to sell our home and trying to move (not far, just closer to town), so it feels a bit like I am either standing in one place and tap-dancing very quickly, or else covering too much ground with tiny, tiny steps. It is the kind of inertia that results from not-being-able-to-move-on-until. I'm trying to push on it, to make it not-so, and I'm wishing very fervently for one thing to tip and shift and galvanize the rest, repeating a line--"Something Beautiful is Going to Happen"--from one of my very favorite Sabrina poems, and I'm wondering every day if, despite how busy I look and even feel, I am actually quite utterly lazy. I think I am. I wish I could say that book #2 is tumbling outward, and that oh my, when baby naps it's like a desperate rush of creative necessity splattering violently onto the page, but it's not.

Now I will go to bed and think about things before falling asleep that will seem so feasible, so ripe for the doing, but tomorrow I bet I will not do them, because I will be doing other things.

I'm not melancholy, though it might sound that way. I'm happy and filled with longing.

2009-04-16T12:19:00.000-04:00

I do participate; I don't participate. I want you close and then far. Try to keep up.

Some field notes:

2009-03-23T08:59:00.002-04:00

In the category of small catastrophes: a sense of urgency that gets stretched out and weakened by too much time. It is better to do first, think later.

Maybe it is the moon, after all.

2009-03-16T11:07:00.006-04:00

There are days when I feel like I don't *do* anything; everything feels like some form of distraction from the thing, unknown, that I am supposed to be doing. As though I am in a waiting room, reading a little bit of Us Weekly and then a little bit of National Geographic, ignoring the book I brought with me, texting someone, restless and a bit afraid to hear my name be called. But then there are days, that don't look any different at the outset, where everything feels exactly right. I make my bed and think "perfect," and I send a text message that seems perfect, also.

I am interested in conducting a prolonged, contemplative study of why, given similar stimuli, similar circumstances, my feelings toward the substance of my days can vary so widely.

Example of Sadness: Dunkin' Donuts

2008-02-07T09:53:00.002-05:00

I don't want to talk about why I was in Dunkin' Donuts. But while there I saw an old woman and an old man sitting across from one another, each drinking a small coffee. They were sitting by the window. A small square of wax paper was between them on the table. They did not look at one another. They did not speak. I caught the old man's eye and he gave me a hard, lonely look.

Example of Sadness: Raspberry Jam

2008-01-01T14:26:00.002-05:00

We were eating breakfast and talking about resolutions. We were saying our own resolutions, and then someone made a resolution for someone else, and then several of us made resolutions for others, and then it was like we were just telling each other what to do, and what we do wrong, and so the conversation--trite, innocent--became this cross-hatched intervention, this vehicle for criticism veiled thinly by New Year's protocol. My mouth felt gauzy and my face felt like it was vibrating between good humor and hostility. The night before we had played Taboo and maybe were still feeling confined by words we could not say. Someone recalled the game of Taboo and said something about how a buzzer would "come in handy" in real-life situations. Briefly we all contemplated this, the implications of the real-life buzzer, life as a board game, etc. A few more pointed, heated things were said about how one of us refuses too much, how another of us is too judgmental, how one person is constantly misunderstanding the other and walking out of the room. One person walked out of the room. Another person absently licked jam off the side of a knife.

Example of Sadness: ATM

2007-12-21T20:27:00.000-05:00

Today I sat in my car behind another car, at a drive-up ATM. The woman ahead of me had not gotten close enough to the ATM, so she had her door partially open and was sort of curled around it, leaning out and pushing buttons. Her window was halfway down, too, so I gathered that she had first assumed she was within arm's reach of the ATM, and when she realized she was not, she opened her door but was too close for it to open all the way. It was a very sad sight, the saddest thing, I decided, that had happened to me all day. I watched with a lot of interest. I imagined that she was me and that I was watching myself, thwarted at every turn by this giant, beeping machine. This is usually how things are translated into 'sadness' in my mind--I insert myself, gluttonously, and the sadness becomes a narrative, a reverie, so absorbing that there is no real 'relief' when it is 'over' because it has already gotten inside, permeated whatever reality I'm in--in this case, a busy shopping center, in my car, from where I could hear the beeps of the buttons as the woman pushed them. Why are they so loud, those Bank of America buttons? They are really loud. They are proud American buttons, blaring out freedom and democracy. The woman was taking a long time. I imagined that the ATM was telling her she had insufficient funds. Interminable sadness for this woman. When she drove away and it was my turn, I made my car get so close to the ATM that my side mirror almost touched it.

Time

2007-11-12T09:47:00.000-05:00

I was emailing with my friend recently, and we were saying that there is never enough time. Even a whole day with no obligations doesn't seem to be enough time. Time for what, it doesn't matter. Brushing my teeth, editing a story--I do everything with a feeling of defeat, a sense that 'after this, there is something else,' a knowledge that I will never 'finish' or worse, 'start.' But the puzzling thing is--and the reason why I keep dwelling on this condition--often, I do absolutely nothing. I sit in a state of utter nothingness, staring at my computer or refreshing my email or noticing the dust on my desk. I am completely idle. Idle and suffocated by the time that is passing, by the time encroaching on my idleness. I have come to a few conclusions:

1. I want unlimited time to be idle. But more importantly
2. I want the construct of 'time' not to exist.
3. The existence of time creates deep despair because
4. I am a materialist, obsessed with 'having,' and my inability to 'keep' or 'hold' time catalyzes an interminable effort to hoard it, to do things in the least possible increments of time so that in the end I will have a 'backlog,' an 'overstock,' an abundance of time
5. with which I can 'do whatever I want,' read novels or write stories or other things I would categorize as 'productive' or 'enriching' but
6. this usually ends up meaning 'time to idle without feeling guilt or angst.'
7. But I always feel vague guilt, and self-loathing for not 'doing more' with the time I am allotted, and not 'doing more' in order to allot myself 'more time.'

There will probably be more conclusions. I suddenly feel very nervous and yes, very hurried.