Nomadic Life

My friend A is having this affair right now with a young Berber guy who lives in Morocco, and she keeps texting me from the tops of camels. It sounds so very exotic (except for all the sand everywhere), but I'm not much enjoying this nomadic life right now.

I was supposed to be in denver at an academic conference, but at the airport on sunday, I was feeling crappier and crappier. Flu-ish. There were delays and stuff, and I had the chance to get bumped and get my ticket refunded. So I took it, and spent the last day and a half in bed, more or less. Knitting and whinging.

I'm just feeling... demoralized. I realized last night that F and I are going to have about 3 nights together over a month after this weekend. I feel like crap with a pounding achy headache all over my body. I can't make my brain work, I'm panicked about my deadline. And Linda said our panel was a bust at the conference. In that sense, my instincts were right, but it raises so many questions about how to find our niche when I'm actually done this frickin' phd. The interdisciplinary scholar-practitioner part of this means we have no natural home. Sometimes I'm tired of having no real base in EVERYTHING I do.

Just... blech. Trying to salvage something out of the day, but it's very hard to maintain the energy, not to succumb to the tightly wound ball of whining, panicking, some weird, untethered resentment and anxiety. Wondering whether home is even the right metaphor for what it is I seem to be lacking.

Ex-pat Life II

My, I'm prolific today ;-). Procrastination 101, plus Heating-engineer-in-the-house.

So further to my little blog yesterday about the expat life thing. I think I am feeling a bit unsettled by the orbiting nature of my life. It's predictable -- the harder I find the writing, the more untethered I feel.

So last night F and I were re-watching the final episode of Season 3 of the new Who, the one where captain jack and the doctor are held prisoner by the Master, who has taken over the earth with the highly destructive paradox humankind from the end of the universe, who kill because it's fun? And even when they vanquish the Master, after Martha walks the earth for a year instilling hope and a collective surge of DOCTOR energy all at the same time? Which works because the doctor has telepathically linked himself with the archangel network?

(Hee, I just LOVE trying to recap the plots of sci fi shows -- "so the original creatures from the origin of the universe? They're like these SPIDER PEOPLE living at the centre of the earth?")

So anyway. Once the Doctor and Martha and Captain Jack have vanquished the Master, the Doctor cradles him in his arms and says "I only have one thing to say to you and you have to listen. I FORGIVE YOU."

Because more than anything, the doctor yearns to connect with this sole living example of his species, the Timelords -- and even though the Master is pretty much the embodiment of evil, the Doctor burns to not be an orphan anymore, and believes that if he keeps the Master in the TARDIS, he'll feel whole again?

So after that, I had this dream that just translated this plot and my own sense of dislocation so simply. I dreamed I was working with a guy who had a condition like severe autism, where he couldn't connect with anyone. I somehow managed to find a way for him to communicate with me, and he was so happy. I then took him to meet someone else like him, and it was the first person he'd ever been able to really connect with in his life. He was completely joyful, and they were talking to each other in signs and words I didn't understand. Then I took him home again and he DIED ON THE PLANE ON THE WAY HOME.

So I'm a little dislocated. Not unbearably so, and I do know I'll feel better when I have this draft behind me. But. Still. Makes me think that my six word memoir is more something like:

Always in margins. Usually on edge.

Back home in the suburbs

Again, trapped at home in roc while shower guy was supposed to come back with the door, and the heating guy was supposed to come and bleed the pipes. Instead, shower door guy calls first thing to tell me the custom door is AWOL, no idea where or when it will arrive, and Eliot the relatively hot plumber guy announces that there's a CO leak in the basement and the boiler needs replacing. "I kinda fixed the seals, but you guys get yourselves a CO detector and put it above the boiler until you replace it -- RG&E would red tag it, but hey, just crack a window."

They're tough out here in the suburbs of western new york.

So I need to remind F to get another CO detector on the way home.

M IMed me that he was going to buy his wife flowers. "Get her a CO detector," I said, " Nothing says I love you like a CO detector." "Yeah," he said. "I love you like a deadly odorless gas."

Hand in hand along the seawall

I have a lot of ambivalence about valentine's day in general (hegemonic, commercialized discourse about heterosexual coupledom blah blah blah), but I'm not QUITE as surreal about it as Eve Ensler (how do you make a career out of saying Vagina, anyway?) or the muslim fundamentalists who'll pretty much chop your hand off if you hand out a candy heart.

This picture says it all to me:


This is F's parents. (Well, his mom and stepdad). Throat-lumpingly sweet... and you know, she's kind of prone to hurling abuse at passersby and holding a serious grudge, but they do adore each other.

Happy... whatever day?

Ex-Pat Life

This story's going to get old soon, but it's still burning a bit spicy in my throat. Ex-pat life in its unexpected twists.

So the other night -- the same week as Super-Tuesday, when I was actually deeply engaged in the US election for the first time ever -- we went out to dinner with some colleagues of F's. Nice enough people, celebrating a Big Work Achievement. The guy hosting us was someone I quite like. The first time I met him, his sister made a much greater impression on me. But since then, I've come to know and like M. He and his wife included us at a very Martha Stewarty thanksgiving this year. They're friendly. Nice. Very straight.

So D -- M's wife -- asks me how I'm doing with the drive between here and TO. I say it’s much better since I got a sturdier car, she asks what kind, I say a little mercedes and the chinese post-doc across the table from me, trying to make a badly englished joke, says, “oh, fancy, how do you get a car like that?” and M — sweet, most self-effacing surgeon ever — says “Oh she’s married to — well with — a famous scientist.”
...

Like I DIDN’T BUY MY OWN DAMN CAR!!!???

There's this book about 6 word memoirs making the rounds, and they're doing a 6 word love story version of it on CBC. Apparently mine is “Dyke settles for male meal ticket.”

Sometimes the ex-pat aspects of this life really do leave me gawping like a fish flopped on the deck. The assumptions and role stuff threaded through the simplest interactions, like nearly invisible strands of mercury. Not all that generative in a week when I'm already weighed down by a kinda blah birthday, horrible weather, trying to slog through the next huge chunk of the dissertation. The moments of joy are a little thin on the ground mid-february.

F and I did go dancing after the dinner, hurrying through the grim cold to a cheesy bar in a mall, where a heaving mass of women all wearing nearly identical black stiletto heels, many very big-haired, danced while men in running shoes watched. We had fun dancing, then went home and watched the late showing of Torchwood, cuddled, laughed. So we beat on, boats against the current.

Flashes

Just, because, you know, Kat likes to know where the heck I am as she runs a B&B out of my flat, here I am. In rochester. The storms battering pretty much everyone else I know haven't shown up yet though the creek I can see out of my office window can only be described as swollen.

Very quickly, a flash: after a lot of agonizingly slow distracted attempts to work, I finally cracked the back of a core question in my first analysis chapter today (about a core paradox in the relationship of my "alpha" couple) -- and in doing that, found the hook for my one outstanding Knowledge Area (aka, course, aka, outstanding credit I'll need to graduate in July. Sent a quick but crisp note to my advisor on that KA, and am hoping that this can just burble out in a great flood.

Well, it IS more like the creek -- not quite a flood, but moving briskly. And you know, kinda bloaty with the unbelievable lack of exercise.

Also, I'm knitting again. Because I didn't have enough hobbies. And I like the idea of taking up knitting again in the same year I plan to learn to ride a motorcycle.

Shower Stall

Before we both went away for the holidays, a reno guy came and dismantled the shower at F's place. The old one was really grotty and a bit ramshackle, very mildewy. We had picked out this new corian type frame, this faux marble, and F had the idea that the guys would come and install the new one the first week in january.

Well, of course, it took a month. Bit by painstaking bit. Since that's the only shower in F's house (there are two baths, but no other shower), this was by definition disruptive. The week I was there mid-January, I became pals with the methodical, tidy Ron-the-plumber guy and watched the rebuild take shape inch by agonizing inch. It seemed that every time Ron would put in something new -- like, the water line and the test that the faucet etc. worked -- he'd then take it out again.

For the next two weeks, F would report to me on the phone every night the barely discernible progress. Some of it obvious -- heavy walls raised -- and some of it impenetrable. (Drying? Or was Ron actually off on another job altogether?) By the time F was able to actually step inside and scrub himself, the expensive new shower was completely anti-climactic. "It's a bit... pink," he said, a little carefully.

That shower project mirrors how I'm feeling about this dissertation. Inch by painstaking inch, progress not even notable for the strain of getting there. This whole "wallowing in the data" phase leaving me bloated and distractible... interspersed with intense moments of clarity, deep tenderness toward my couples and feeling like something might one day actually look whole.

Maybe.

Wormholes

I heard the couple upstairs tonight having some kind of fight, and the woman just sobbing. There would be a bit of yelling, and then loud sobbing, then quiet, then more sobbing. This couple doesn't usually make a lot of noise -- sometimes music, sometimes a treadmill or something, sometimes stuff dropped in the bathtub. Once or twice, sex noises. But mostly, they're quiet -- and in the anonymous intimacy of urban living, I actually have no clue who they are or what they look like. (Only that I must not have drilled through their floor the time I thought I had when Barbara was hanging my antique windows -- well, for obvious reasons).

Tonight, overhearing them made me really sad. Just, echoes. All that lumpen weight of sadness. Sometimes, even 3 years after A and I split up, I find myself perplexed that my life isn't what I expected it to be for so long. I mean, I like my life a lot -- I'm someone very different than I would have been still in that partnered-shape -- and my work is engrossing and fulfilling, my friendships so rich, life with F always like emotional yoga, pranayama and stretching and rest. But sometimes it really does feel like I fell into a wormhole and landed in a completely different dimension, where I'm living in fully in another time, but it's folded over a life that I'm still living in parallel. Picard on the dying planet, where he had a family and learned to play the flute.

I think living so long with the assumptions of "forever" imprinted on me in ways I still can't quite penetrate. I have such a simultaneous pull to fuse as tightly as possible with F and to know that that pull is futile -- it doesn't fit either of our stories.

What's emerging in my writing for my dissertation (sadly thin progress today, this stormy lazy day) is that how people create generative interactions has to mirror their stories of self and relationship. I'm still charting this out... but it's hard to keep my own life out of the analysis. And there's something on the tip of my tongue about consistency, and how in newness, there's much less consistency. I keep thinking about the difference between my "alpha couple" -- who've been together 15 years and made a very smooth enterprise of interweaving themselves -- and a couple of my younger couples. The stories with the alpha couple are... not polished, but even the inconsistencies are practiced and familiar.

I think that's one of the hard things this new relationship thing... not knowing where our stories of self, where our stories of relationship really fit together -- especially if our language is different. Finding the ways to hinge them, know that my words for this and his words for that actually can fold together, aren't the paradoxes that they've sometimes felt. Right now, it's good -- it's better than it's ever been -- and some of that is about leaving space for the different words, different stories, to nestle together, layer on top and dock. Sometimes I feel like there is such a very astonishing amount to learn just in the living of the day to day.