Cumulating Cumulos

The clouds are heavy and stacked outside my window today, unfortunate for the bbq I'm going to this afternoon, celebrating the end of the fundraising intense tri-athlon my friend Danny dreamed up and made happen. Stephen Lewis is supposed to be at this event, presumably because Danny's been so instrumental in raising money for the SL foundation over the past several year.

Good place for me to keep shedding my vague unsettlement of the past days, a pivot point for a couple of things. The sense of feeling like I need to be more purposeful in my life, with schoolwork and what to do with it, and with my meandering sense of direction on other things. And Stephen Lewis as a key embodiment of that -- not only as an inspirational sort of figure, but because he was the spark for a paper I wrote on the social construction of emotions a few years ago, the first paper that really sent me down the path I'm on.

I remember the interview that triggered that paper on emotion as speech act, the first place I really recognized that emotion is performative, is in service of something, a request, a turn in the conversation, rather than this sort of unbidden, purely "visceral," "irrational" thing. I also remember that as a bifurcation point recognizing that how I see human interaction is so vastly different than how most people do, a perspective that means I sometimes bob along just under the surface of knowing how to talk about it, interpret it, use it in a useful way, because I feel sort of alone in the conversation.

When Suzie heard that same interview, her response was to want to take Stephen Lewis home and give him a good dinner to comfort him. My response was a sort of dawning awe that his emotive response to the AIDS crisis in Africa was possibly the only thing that would evoke the kind of reaction that people would have to pay attention to, and suddenly I understood emotion as a whole grammar in and of itself. And I also felt small and inconsequential in terms of what I've accomplished in my life, motivated to do something more important.

I haven't done anything important. Maybe my research will help further some kind of understanding about connection and responsibility, and if I can turn it into something applied, it might be useful. I hope this bbq will be a good cementing of my commitment to supporting Danny more concretely with his orphanage project in Uganda.

I had a really resonant conversation with my sister Friday night. We were talking about my niece, and she said she and my mom had a conversation about how Lulu is clearly smart, but, my mother said, "smart like me and you, not smart like C." And then she went on about how hard it is to raise a child you think is a lot smarter than you are, how you don't know if you're doing the right thing. I just looked at M, shocked, and she said, "you didn't know we talk about this all the time, about how we're smart but you're in a whole other dimension?"

That was a gaping little moment for me. The exposure of my mother's frustration her whole life, the ridiculousness of overplaying any brains I have, but more than anything, recognition that sure, I might have some capacity, but for so long I've been feeling like that is mostly muffled, unfulfilled, just muddling along, not doing anything substantive with it. I'm 41. I can't muddle anymore.

One of the truly sorrowful things I feel about the loss of the "could be" story with F is how tantalizing it was to envision a space to live into that "better self" -- the sharpening of my mind and resolve, the space to chisel the edges of ideas, all wrapped up in mutual opening up and curiosity. I hate that the timing was off, that it dissolved into more muddying, wet sludge instead of the crystaline, icy light-filled possibilities we found in the interstices. And I have to shake that off and find these other paths for substantive, edged thinking.

And on the way, maybe a little playfulness.