Bog people

I'm in the very last moments of the finishing time, the part that if this was a dream I'd wake up with the red hot sensation that I have to go present my work AND I HAVEN'T PREPARED.

And I'm not ready. I've had some time over the last couple of days, and just canNOT concentrate. More than monkey mind, twitter, hummingbird mind. I'm in this weird social vacuum, where F is off kayaking with Eldest Daughter, and just about everyone I hang out with in town is away doing something debauched or cottagey or friend-supportive... and I'm reliving the tailing days of my first MA, 19 years later.

Then, I'd moved back to Windsor to live with my mom for one term (after being on my own for several years) to finish up some course work after my foray into the astonishingly underpaid world of academic publishing hadn't exactly been congenial to writing a thesis I wasn't all that into anyway. Another example of shoveling the bulk of my production into the butt-end of a degree. I was in the middle of an unsettled love affair, and my lover had moved back to TO for the summer.

So I was housesitting, for a month for a prof in my dept. Theoretically, I was cat-sitting. And... the house was vile. VILE. There were stories of how they'd once had 9 cats and had a Room filled with newspaper that served as a litter box. Now there were only two threadbare cats, but the scent of the soggy past clung, and the bathtub was so filthy I didn't even want to have a shower in it. Cat hair everywhere, including on the dusty collection of medieval instruments in the living room. Lutes and dust mite larvae.

The cats were a little resentful of my presence (litotes). None of the doors in the house would close firmly -- thick paint, bunchy carpets, warped wood -- and the older cat in particular -- Charlie -- would hurl himself against the bedroom door at night until he'd launch himself onto the bed. There I'd be, asleep, then there I'd be, hurled into the nightmare of hissing, drooling, angry cat. I developed asthma I didn't know I had.

Theoretically, the cats would "go out in the back yard and come back when you clap your hands and call out "kitty kitty round up." They never came back. Mostly, I found myself under the porch, trying to grab this elderly but agile cat by his giant cat feet. They were, of course, fully clawed and teethed, these cats. And I was fully gouged, track marks of bad judgment in arranging my life.

Against all of this, I was supposed to be writing my final paper. It was on Seamus Heaney, and it had something to do with the poems about the bog people (I was fascinated by the preservation through centuries, the stories that rose to the surface based on the simplest artifact, like the iron age murder weapon), but I can't for the life of me remember what I actually wrote about. I knew that I couldn't make myself focus on it. I tried the kitchen table (eyed by the cats I kept "forgetting" to give their 7 daily vitamins shoved down their throats in pats of butter), I tried my usually trusty library, I tried the back yard. I finally ended up writing this damned paper in pencil on long narrow-ruled paper in a creepy doughnut shop. When I finished, I toted it back to the House of Spores jubilantly... then set up my typewriter and realized that somehow I'd smudged out half the writing with my sweaty little hands.

I managed to decode and make stuff up, and trotted off to hand in the paper to Tom. And the day I did that, I came back to find Charlie... bald. Bald and forlorn. The other cat (much less memorable) had licked the hair off his head. I didn't know much about cats, but I knew enough to find the vet's number Colin had left me, who said "bring him in."

That simple command, of course, required me to go into the CELLAR of this reeking, dusty cottage and retrieve an ancient, heavy cat carrier that looked like a lobster trap and was festooned with sharp pokey bits. And to ... FORCE this ball of demon-cat into it.

When I left Charlie at the vet, I located a previously unknown well of callousness. SO LONG SUCKER rang through my head, and even when the vet called the next day and said he'd done a biopsy but thought Charlie had a malignant tumour and I should let his people know -- I didn't. Care. That cat did not merit my sympathy.

But there I was, left with... a vacuum of time. No more bog people, no more death-dance with charlie, just the subdued other cat who generally left me alone. And the weird completion of a degree with no go-forward plan, a tenuous love affair with someone in another city, friends all out of town, no job and no real home base. I wanted to celebrate, but there was no one to play with. And I was still trapped in this fusty, filthy house until Charlie's People could get back from england.

I needed space to let what was next emerge... and I turned to the mindless kind of obsession that I gravitate to when I'm anxious. A complicated jigsaw puzzle of an escher image. So for two days, I leaned over the (greasy) table in that (grimy) kitchen in that (dusty) house and put together a complicated puzzle of birds turning into fish (or the other way around) and listened to the CBC. There was an ideas program about Mazo de la Roche that I was fascinated by, not having realized that the melodrama of the Jalna series had been mirrored in her life.



So I made the puzzle, and the people came home, and I collected by $200 or whatever for cat-sitting and packed up my Hyundai Pony and drove off to find the next part of my life. Coughed the cat hair out of my throat and never saw charlie again.

This is all alive right now because... I'm in this same space. So weird to realize this. My own mostly dust-free loft (notwithstanding the decaying plants), but a people-free weekend, and an obsession with knitting a complicated sweater instead of carving into the meat of my presentation (which is NEXT FRIDAY, PEOPLE!!!), staying up late reading blogs about ranch wives, letting the frets about what the hell to do with the next part of my life hiss and drool at me in the middle of the night. Not exercising, eating popcorn for dinner. I can't quite locate the equivalent of that sketchy doughnut shop for the last push on my presentation, on the revisions to my diss. Afraid, maybe, to hand in that paper and find that I'm no closer to a life in tandem, in the right place, with the right work, than I was in 1989. Me, bog person, preserved.

The paradox of sox

At one of the first national sessions I went to for my school program, there was a woman sort of drifting from one seminar or event to another who wasn't taking notes, and who didn't have the same air of *anxiety* that wafted off the new students. Instead, she was carrying a big fluffy pile of knitting -- some reddish fuzzy yarn. At that point, I hadn't touched a needle or crochet hook in at least a decade -- but something about the way that she wielded this knitting so casually, her chin set in a posture of curiosity without need, that sparked a burst of envy in me. She was in the conversations but not avidly Trying to Learn.

It was an aspect that I yearned for -- not a reductionist "being done the program" stance, but the presence of mind to participate without the jittery need to Get As Much As Possible from it. Sara did her Final Oral that week, and the undercurrent of contentment that she carried the knitting with matched the calm pleasure she presented her work with.

I must have tucked away that image of Sara's knitting until it popped out about six months ago. I bought my sister yarn and needles for christmas, and paused for a minute in the store. When I was in portland, I kept seeing yarn stores and having an unmistakable yearning to go in, buy some needles and yarn, make a simple scarf. I finally did it a couple of weeks later, and now, I'm making relatively fancy socks.

I'll be done these before I go to Kansas City in 10 days for my own Final Oral and graduation (provided I don't have some other ridiculous screw up -- the first sock was perfect but I had to completely frog the second one and start over because of Inattention and Stupidness -- the Life Lessons of Knitting), but I will certainly be toting something around on needles as I drift from seminar to seminar. The mini narrative of that fluff of knitting in sara's lap obviously became an emblem for me of how I wanted to do this final student week -- engaged and not anxious, navigating complexity, poised.

I'm not quite done the rewrites (how tired is everyone around me of hearing this??). Got a lot of feedback this week I need to absorb, assimilate, distill. Turn the mucky blend of how I can now talk about my work into a single malt. But the paradox of the socks -- what looked like a distraction was actually a frame for getting me to a poised finish.

Floating

I've been reading other people's blogs a fair bit lately and realized with a sigh that this blog has never had a niche, a shape -- it hops around from flippant asides to Deep Thoughts to sheer neglect for months and months. Much like every journal I've ever had.

One blog I read has evolved in a fascinating way from a pure knitting blog to little postcards of her life in portland with her baby and husband and burgeoning garden, although, as a writer, she's very clear that this is neither her serious writing nor her real life. Yet, it's an engaging keyhole. In some ways I think I wanted this blog to be that -- but like everything else that I do in my life, it's about surges and mercurial shifts. But that's me, and so that's what comes out of my fingers.

I think I've never been very good at focusing on just one thing -- like right this minute, what I want to write about includes the blister on my leg that I got on my ex's mentee's Honda Rebel exhaust on friday (which reminds me of a scar on F's arm, and thinking about how our lovers and friends come to us marked, and then my cousin Liz, who burned herself on a moped exhaust in Asia), the turbulence of thoughts about possibly moving and what that means, my observations about how other people make decisions like condo buying, fear, anxiety, history, independence, coffee (more coffee), why I take on more work than I can do, how on earth am I going to really shape my post-doc life, why am I feeling so resentful of my well-meaning committee, Aine and her amazing warmth, how it is I become friends, how much I am loving becoming friends with L, what is it I look like from the outside, and of course, the core core stuff I'm trying to grapple with.

Instead, I focus on the feeling when I lift my road bike up. Pure joy. The lightness of power inherent in it -- knowing I can fuse with it and ride 30, 50, 100 miles. I feel like I rise up when I heft it, and I'm instantly transported into someone who moves, someone strong. Sky ocean strong blue, light and perfect.

I believe that this bike gives me more joy than any material thing I've ever had in my life. Not my hot boots,,

not my first ipod, the perfect bra, not my favourite piece of art ,

not even my first running shoes (which come a close second).

A lick of honey on my soul.

Fragments

I was talking to a client I haven't seen for a while today, and I told him that my graduation date is August 2. He said "wow, I can't believe you're almost done -- it's the only thing that's been consistent for you as long as I've known you." He tagged right into the core, there -- I think the identity story of student has has shaped almost everything for so long that everything is loosened now. Being a student gives me a reason to spend half my time not working on client stuff, flitting back and forth across the border, framing myself as learning and therefore not Finished (and maybe not fully accountable for things?). Framing myself as distinct.

I'm so close to finishing, and people keep asking me if I feel good and I just feel... numb. It's all tangled up with loss, and not having a shaped sense of who I can be WITH a phd, and how it could have meaning for who I could become. I started this process because I wanted to expand ... something. And I don't know if I feel expanded... just... more multiple. Do I feel I've "become a phd"? My life has certainly shifted -- but most of the time now I feel more articulate in explaining what I do so badly.

I think I've lost the habit -- if I ever had it -- of being happy. I have so many shiny pieces --I have a lover who makes my blood rush faster and who is complex, makes me stretch further. I've had multiple clients from my past show up this week saying "I need your wisdom." I have more than a lifetime's worth of friends who delight in and love me and give me so much. I have a woman in my life who was my lover for 14 years and who awes me with her ability to reshape that love. I can climb mountains, and ride bicycles far and fast. I have work partners who are unbelievably strong and meshed with what I need -- and who can tell me that they love me, who finish my thoughts when I fumble, who make me laugh. I am finishing a phd that I worked hard for and I think is a GOOD piece of work -- and can build on it. And I don't know how to fuse all of these pieces together into a mosaic of stained glass and light.

My thesis chair quoted this Raymond Carver poem to me a little while ago, and it stuck:

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

I don't lack for love. I need to learn to feel beloved.

Often comments on husband's strength and masculinity.

33 As a 1930s wife, I am Poor Take the test!

Flowing and drawn

If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
-- Elizabeth Bishop


**

Still rewriting, realizing I've elevated this massive document to another level but now the second half isn't coherent with the elevation I've done... no time to fully rewrite, so contemplating a somewhat schizophrenic version where I think I understand my work now better than is reflected in the written document. I guess that's better than some alternatives.

Panic slowly subsiding, but still feeling drawn, a little tongue-burnt, wondering why I can't do all of this without such intense emotion.

Back to the writing.

Bruxism

Teeth clenching. I've been doing that for at least 3 or 4 years, culminating in biting one of my own molars right off when Kat offered me watermelon gum while I was contemplating buying Jinx BeGone Potion in one of the rickety little stores in our neighbourhood at xmas. Now I'm in the middle of tedious dental work and I am still. clenching, literally and metaphorically.

Finally got all of the feedback from my committee, and trying to assimilate it all and integrate it in a meaningful way to do a revision to my Giant Document is just... hard. Some of it is conflicting, and I can't settle on a context. Some of it is in the realm of "do this to please my committee," some of it is "what do I absolutely have to do to get to the FOR stage," some of it is "how will my Famous Guy external read this, how do I improve it for him?" -- and some of it is, "this is my WORK, this is what matters, and I don't know how to assess it."

And I'm deep in another angstful round of "what exactly happens NEXT." Swirling emotions, displacement onto sock knitting and fretting and roasting chickens, as I move words around and bite off my own teeth.

Pedaling

I had all of this bloggifying to do but it keeps slipping out of my attention. (Like Scarlett O'Hara and a new bonnet, when figures just fall slap out of her head).

FInished a draft of my dissertation, sent it off, and had elation/deflation. Which was convenient in some ways, because I could channel my angst into finishing up the final course paper I was co-writing with Linda, about paradox and generativity and reflexivity.

It's been a really suspended place, this time of waiting for my committee to give me feedback, so close to being done, and so far away from it. Got my first feedback yesterday, from the member of my committee who gives extremely thorough and comprehensive responses to *pieces* -- but I don't have a strong sense of the overall picture from her. It's hard to describe, the flattening of hearing "yes, this 275 page tome is incredibly complex and good, and here are 9 pages of things I didn't understand." And each of those things is a key concept. I don't know how to wade back into these reeds and make anything of it. So I wait for the other two, to triangulate some focus for me. It's sort of weirdly desperate, being so close to being done something that's gone on for 6.5 years, having produced this massive piece of work, but feeling like I'm still swimming and can see the land but keep trying to find the bottom with my feet.

So, diversions. Got a magnificent new road bike -- a Specialized Ruby Comp -- far more bike than I deserve, and not only do I adore it, but I fine it changes the landscape here for me completely. Now this isn't just a flattening suburb, but an expanse of ridable hills and perfect roads.

I've also been knitting my fool head off, and am almostdone my very first sock. It's a bit saggy in the ankle, but it's sock-shaped and I'm very delighted with it. Pics to follow.

And that's it. I ride, I knit, I poke away at leftover bits of work and client stuff, and I grope for the rocks under my feet.

Drafts and Redrafts

Here's what I've been working on:



and this:



Write write write knit knit knit. I actually knit that part of the hat TWICE. Two drafts, as it were. The first time, it was way too small. Apparently, I have Gauge Issues. I'm so glad that this knitting resurgence is revealing a whole new set of potential issues for me. Anyway, the hat is still too small for F, but I think it will fit me, and it's really lovely. The yarn is this really gorgeous merino/baby alpaca/silk from The Fibre Company and it's just beautiful to work with. So soft. But it turns out I'm an anxious, tight-assed little knitter (surprise!), and I need to practice being LOOSE. So I started trying to make a scarf in this complicated lace pattern but made a mistake and couldn't figure out how to fix it. So ripped the whole thing out.

It's all about write/knit, rewrite/reknit. And some of it is beautiful (like the hat is becoming, and how I feel about my methodology section) and some of it is still a scrawly tangled mess. My goal is a full redraft of the dissertation by the end of the week. But I'm not going to get there if I don't head for the library NOW.

Fantasmagorical

My friend Linda did her Final Oral Review of her dissertation on Tuesday, and she did a FANTASTIC job. We celebrated by, of all things, going to DIsney on Monday. I have some predictable things to say about that (reinforcing the status quo, particularly the notion of middle America as the centre of the universe, blah blah blah) but she was so happy to be there that I couldn't be a total curmudgeon about it.

Here we are in a teacup. L is wearing mouse ears that say Class of 2008 and Dr. Herlastname on the back.



Now back into my own serious rewrite.

Sheepish

I knit a scarf. Actually, I knit two scarves. First I made this scarf, but in different colours, which reacquainted me with knitting in ribs. It was for F. Unfortunately the only picture I have of it is him wearing it as we crawled around crazy ice formations at the lake a couple of weeks ago -- and he's shy about having his picture posted on my blog.

Then I made this scarf, which taught me basket weave.



I like it. In between all of this knitting and obsessive reading of knitting blogs, I have been writing my ass off, doing some gnashing of teeth, and trying to see the clear threadline. I finished a more or less draft of my diss, and got good feedback on it, and have some rewriting and tightening and locating to do. I am off to Anaheim on sunday, though, for Linda's FOR, so have been doing sketching and not really writing until I get back. Will spend time celebrating Linda's achievements... and ... we're going to disneyland. Really.

I'll report back from the other side of the Pirates of the Caribbean.

Braindead wordcount

I'm at the point where I can't even watch dvds I haven't seen before -- tracking who all the characters are in Rome or season 1 of Buffy -- which I've never watched and had season 1 sitting on my shelf for a year now, since Renee sent it to me for my birthday last year -- seems like Too Much Effort. Still striving to get something that is ALMOST a draft of this bloody dissertation to bp by the end of this weekend. Will still be short the lit review chapter that I have to spend a couple of days on and the discussion chapter, but the bulk of the writing and christmas pudding of an analysis will be done.

Current wordcount:

chap 1: 2940
chap 2: (lit review)
chap 3: 5300
chap 4: 10907
chap 5: 16337
chap 6: 18301
chap 7: 1205
chap 8: (discussion)
chap 9: (conclusion)

seems like a lot of bloody words. Have to finish chapter 7 tomorrow, review the bits all done with feedback to date, and send it off to my chair. Then write the other bits.

Yeah, that's it.

You know, when I was in the library this morning I had all these brilliant blogging thoughts, but can't begin to remember now what I was even thinking about. This is very draining and I'm a complete and utter klutz -- I cut my knuckle opening a bottle of cheap merlot, and my ass still hurts where I slipped on my clean floor on wednesday night. But I took a few hours off yesterday afternoon and went here:

http://www.bodyblitzspa.com/

It was BLISSFUL. I did the water circuit thing for more than an hour, and steamed and soaked and salted and sweated and showered and steamed, then I had a "body bake" where a nice quiet compliant woman covered me in "glacial seaweed mud" (such bullshit -- um, where is this seaweed-ridden glacier?) and baked me under hot lights and hosed me off like a beached fish. It was amazing.

I'm usually not great at completely giving myself up to this sort of thing, but I just let my brain drain away yesterday -- it was completely, utterly worth it.

Levity

I said to Matt yesterday that I have zero capacity to respond with humour to something I think is Deadly Serious. I am totally irreverent and flippant with my friends, and danny and I regularly fall apart laughing when we're doing work together -- but I'm missing some critical gene that allows me to laugh at myself when I'm Upset. I think cultivating a sense of frivolity in the face of Earnestness would be a very good thing to aim at, if I were to ever have a Resolution time.

So... today, feeling much better -- cleaned my entire flat, changed sheets, flipped futon, etc, felt orderly and managed to write a few good pages with some more pending after dinner. And, trying to be much less Serious about it all.

Ali sent me this link about a crazy bride who had a life-sized wedding cake version of herself. Pure excess. (For some reason I can't copy a shot of the photo). Reminded me of something I was reading a couple of years ago -- I think it was the book by Anne Kingston called The Meaning of Wife. She theorized that weddings have got bigger and bigger because we have a shared cultural story about the idea of "bride" but not so much about what a "wife" is -- so there is this blowout fantasy of the wedding to counterbalance the more contested idea of what comes after. Interesting angle.

(It might have been a different book -- have read a lot of social theory about marriage in the past few years -- maybe CInderella Dreams?>.

Sensory deprivation

I appreciated Kat's comments on my post last night, so much. I do have good and wise friends, and it's reassuring to know that this process isn't mine alone. Less crazy making.

I was talking to Pamela, who's two years out on this, and remember her going through something similar. She's very wise, and she gave me the perfect metaphor. This part, she said, is like being in a sensory deprivation tank with no reference points for who you are and where this fits. Sensory deprivation of identity. It fit, and was comforting.

Then we talked a lot about how to get through it, and she was talking about listening to something about taking care of yourself, and how to comfort yourself, and then sort of had this moment of recognition of what she was saying, and blurted, "I hate inner child stuff so I hate inner mother stuff, but this was actually helpful."

It made me laugh. And now trying to find the thread again. Stress all around, for F as well as me, and we're not fitting together well in this. Makes it all so much more raw.

dropped long ago

This really is the hardest thing I've ever done. I have a magnet on my fridge that has a little stick figure turning the corner and the caption "clyde was about to come face to face with the ball he had dropped long ago." This dissertation right now feels like that ball, like I've dropped a bucket of marbles on the floor and they're rolling around, fitting themselves into corners I'll never locate, sticking themselves into grooves in the wood I'll never fit my fingers into.

I didn't expect the sense of emotional overwroughtness that comes with the kind of paralysis I'm feeling right now. Writing and writing and feeling like I've completely lost the plot, and being so completely on edge that I can barely fight my way through the panic. No idea what I'm trying to say, and a level above that, no idea why I'm doing this at ALL in the first place. WTF has this process been about, where is it taking me?

And through it all, awareness that this level of emotionalism is totally out of proportion with the "real" stuff people are dealing with in their lives, that this is just me with a very first world problem, and that the caterwauling, squalling and sense of panic about it are completely unseemly. I feel simultaneously like a clichéd drama queen and some kind of sea creature with no muscle, no bone, nothing but a raw and exposed nervous system.

It's really just a chapter, among several chapters, in a long paper that a dozen people at the most will read. The ultimate demonstration of student prowess, of capability worthy of admission to some realm I'm not actually that interested in. I wanted it to mean more, and finding this void here is... overwhelming. And so lonely.

Stickiness

So last night we went out for dinner, and we were getting ready for bed and I went into the kitchen, wearing only underpants, to get a glass of water. I opened the fridge and felt... something... on my foot. I looked down, and this SHRIEK just escaped me. There was a sticky trap WITH A DEAD MOUSE ON IT stuck to my FOOT.

I flailed about trying to get it off and I kicked my foot up and hit the bottom of the refrigerator door... and nearly broke my toe. It's all mangled and blue. And the mouse was still STUCK to me. It was very primal.

After much palaver, I got it off and scrubbed my foot madly, and we went to bed, all giggling about it. Then this morning I woke up and we were cuddling and talking and suddenly I remembered and shrieked again. I basically broke my toe on a dead mouse. I am such a klutz.

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.

Haberdashery

At our cottage when I was growing up, we had a closet full of old games from the 50s and 60s -- Head of the Class, some complicated game I can't recall that involved a sort of bingo twirler and little button thingies, DoodleBug, many many card games, of course -- and this bizarrely compelling game called "Park and Shop." I think it was the enculturation companion to Mystery Date -- the players had shopping lists, and there was a small town shopping grid with tobacconists, haberdashers, green grocers, butcher, etc, and the object was to plan your most efficient shopping route and get back home with your car full of shopping.


This game is blurred in my childhood memory with a PSA for seatbelt use that ran when I was about 5 featuring a woman saying "I don't like to wear a seatbelt when I go shopping because it wrinkles my dress." Then there was a Scary Flash and crashing noise and, presumably, she was dead, struck down by her Vanity.

I was obsessed with Park and Shop for several years -- I found the archaic shop names charming (I was sure that the tobacconist smelled so good, and the green-grocer was chock full of shiny ripe lettuces and fat apples), and the object was so simple. There were, I'm sure Obstacles -- red lights, detours, forgotten items -- but the scope was comfortingly simple and narrow. I think I liked it for the same reason I liked memoirs about people with huge families -- thriving-on-love-and-little-money stories of having 8 or 12 siblings.

I obviously imprinted on Park and Shop, because anytime I have to mentally plan a bunch of errands, I find myself imagining the board layout, where there were, I think 3 haberdashers, 2 tobacconists -- trying to plan my route that retraces the fewest steps.

I had a real park and shop day today -- there were a mittful of tedious backed up errands I couldn't put off any longer. Renew car registration (one year or two? two years is more efficient, but will I really still be living here a year from now?), which involved me going first to where the Service Ontario kiosk USED to be (Mowat Block), and plopping all my stuff down on a credit union ATM and not realizing it was the wrong thing until I'd pulled out all my documents. Cracking up security guard sent me back to College Park, where I'd just BEEN. Get photo health card (finally). Go to bank to deposit cheques. Get prescription filled -- which involved 4 pharmacies before I found one that had it. Meeting at one hospital, and another meeting at another hospital. All circumnavigating the same 2 km radius stretching from here to yonge/college, but retracing my steps repeatedly.

Am set up, now, though -- renewed out of country health insurance, paid GST, paid bills, did RSP contribution, etc. And now can't possibly justify another day without writing.

I had a real burst last weekend until Monday, then lost momentum. I have another 3 or 4 day stretch starting tomorrow, and it's hibernation mode again. Then I'll know where I really am.

Field notes

In some way, this blog is becoming more like field notes than anything else. There's something about the potentially public nature of it that pushes me to be a bit more articulate (maybe?) than the scrawl of notes that I make on post-its and in my word file called "field notes" that's a highly inconsistent set of observations.

One thing that's really circling for me -- I was thinking about linda's work, and how infused it is with her deep relationship with linguistics -- how comfortable she is with the architectonics of the analysis, how focused she is on wanting to be precise with her terminology. And *my* analysis, otoh, is much more rooted in my early training in literary analysis -- I analyse the stories and how they're put together, and I'm a lot more imprecise with terms, and have to keep going back to my little lists of practices that I've made over time to know how to name what's happening. I get a little thrill when I recall a term like "constrastive sets" and know that it's the right term, but I'm not nearly as much at ease with the perspicacious distinctions between terms as she is -- and, I really get into the narrative aspects of what I'm analysing. Literary texts and conversations between couples become exactly the same thing for me. I think my early steeping in the kind of new school criticism that whacked the idea of "intentional fallacy" into my head set me up to really *get* the social constructionist psychological position -- what the author MEANT is irrelevant; what HAPPENS is what counts. Same thing in our social interaction.

The other thing I was thinking about is how when I wrote my two proposals, somehow I made the assumption that CMM (Barnett's theory/approach) was more of an afterthought -- I think somehow I thought, yeah, yeah, it's part of it, but not the core. And I realize, in doing this, I don't really know any other way of doing this analysis other than CMM -- apparently, unbeknownst to me, it snuck into my framing in such a way that it IS the way I view communication. The entire analysis of my work rests on being able to map stories of relationship and self-concept through CMM heuristics, and to trace what happens in conversation through CMMish contextual hierarchies and forces. Funny how it entered my veins when I wasn't paying attention and I could no more do this work now without that frame than I could do it without using English.

Acknowledgments

I did something a little out of order yesterday -- when I was having trouble writing, I wrote a draft of my acknowledgments page for my diss. I guess that's the equivalent of the therapy/life coach thing of making you write what you want people to say about you at your funeral -- creating some prefigurative force that requires me to now enact this thing I'm already mentally thanking people for.

It did have the effect on me of reminding me of how many people have been a deep part of making me who I am through this whole experience. I feel pretty surrounded by rich relationships. I feel lucky.

A day of smears

I ate a lindt chocolate last night in bed while watching a dvd of Weeds, and I noticed that some of it seemed to have fallen off somewhere. It wasn't until I woke in a revoltingly chocolate smeared bed this morning that I realized um, I guess that was in my white sheets. I was relieved to realize what it actually WAS, let me tell you.

Then I went off for my annual physical. Any day that includes a pap smear before coffee is not likely to rank as Highly Memorable... though dumping half a blender full of vibrantly purple blueberry smoothie across my countertop, floor and into my silverware and random crap drawers was pretty vivid.

So I ended up spending the early afternoon dozing on the couch, with a headache from my mostly unproductive marathon yesterday at the computer, and woke up staring sort of bleakly out at the sky that really... just a smear of white grey. One of my invisible friends the other day declared that everyone she knew who'd moved to Seattle had left within a couple of years because they couldn't deal with the rain and the grey. Those people have clearly not endured a Toronto january. From my window right now, late afternoon, the sky is a uniform white-grey, colour-blurred with the steam from the ugly ventilation shaft directly across the street, the cheap siding on the little rooftop stairwell on that same building, the snow falling limply, depressed and enervated. Just looking at this sky sucks the energy out of me -- whereas the same late afternoon malaise in Portland had hints of light and a certain kind of vibrancy. I guess we experience it all so differently, but I keep sighing involuntarily just looking outside.

So today, not so productive. Yesterday I did have a bit of a breakthrough, coming up with an organizing principle that seems to be working for me -- but it didn't lead to an explosion of writing, which I was sort of hoping for. I peck away. Simultaneously look forward to my plans for dinner tonight with S and her elusive girlfriend I'd begun to think inhabits another dimension -- and feeling guilty for not producing pages and pages and pages of brilliant insightful analysis.

I paste. I paste.

Stubborn and stuck

Wednesday and Thursday were write-offs from a writing point of view -- lots of distractions and client meetings. So I've been trying to get back into this today, and it's just so hard. Can't figure out at all how to deal with my analysis -- what kind of story I'm trying to tell, how to use the data, how to organize it. How do I get from the mental slurry of jumbled post-its to any kind of meaningful narrative?

GAH. GAH.

Say! What a lot of fish there are!

Earlier in the day I was thinking I should use this blog to work out some useful question that David P, a fellow student, asked me today about my dissertation. It was a really astute question: what happens to your research if you take the term relational out of relational generativity?

I answered him, kinda glibly, and then thought about it for the rest of the day. It really isn't about "how do we have generative conversations," even though that's kind of the way I've ended up shortening the description of what I'm doing to that well-meaning but so naive question "what's your dissertation about?" that comes from the dentist right before she wants to look in your mouth. (It's just as well I have a pat answer, because it doesn't look so good to just let your mouth gape open in the tradition of slack-jawed idiots everywhere).

Anyway, it IS about generative conversations, but the relational part is key. And I realized I can't really TRULY articulate it, yet. Is it about "the role of identity practices in constructing generative interaction?" Or is it about "how do generative interactions relate to our construction of self and other?" Can it be both? I can't quite puzzle through the implications of this. I keep grabbing at this image of binary stars, and know that it's in there somewhere, but I have a horrible feeling that this distinction I just noted is the thing that would sharpen what I'm doing. And until I can really get that, I'm sort of sprawling through this analysis.

I didn't really get very much done today. The morning was filled up with stuff (Age was still here, and I had an 8:00 - 9:30 conference call for a client project, and then I took A to the train, and talked to another client, and decided my rampaging obesity MUST be checked a bit and spun for half an hour, and had a phone call with the aforementioned David. Then I truly tried to hunker down, but only managed to write about 400 words, spinning my wheels, until I had to leave for the dentist.

The dentist was, thankfully, a kindly experience -- at my request, she gave me a temporary solution to the necessary crown, letting me do it after the dissertation work is done and I'm earning real money again. AND she didn't charge me anything for today.

Then I walked home and didn't fall on the ice, and was happy with the crisp air. Got some lime leaf chicken and tried to focus again... and ended up making notes to deepen that analysis I haven't really managed to synthesize into writing yet, fleshed out my record of references for how I arrived at my daisy models of my alpha couple. Not "dwelling in the data" as much as prodding the edges of it a little dolefully.

And now, 8:30 and I can only think in the cadences of Dr. Seuss. So...

Today is gone. Today was fun.
Tomorrow is another one.
Every day,
from here to there,
funny things are everywhere.

Keeping it honest

When I'm at this not-a-laptop (don't get me started on bloody apple who claim to no longer MAKE "laptops" when you phone them to complain about the overheating and whatnot), it's easy to use this blog (and every other nook and cranny of the interweb) as a powerful site of procrastination... so with this enormous deadline, I'm going to try to use it to keep myself honest. No one else will really give a fig about this but me, but at least if I have to document what I *did* every day for the next 6 weeks, there's some kind of rein on any wandering I might do.

So today was partly about getting back in the groove after not touching my stuff all weekend (driving back from roc, errands for F to fondle a new Pentax, an eclectic and past-our-bedtime dance party, picking up Age at the airport and having an evening with her, etc. etc. Unpacking. So now I'm back in TO, and at 7:16 pm, still in my sweats I pulled on when I got up this morning, while Age snoozes off her food poisoning lunch on the couch.

So what'd I actually DO, other than some client work, booking my flight to Denver, paying a few bills, etc? Well, I moved bits of paper around, and finally figured out how to write the intro to my discussion chapter. God knows I don't *exactly* know what I'm saying yet, but I need to start getting some things on paper and building it a bit at a time. So I wrote the description of the structure of the chapter, and detailed my analytical model and the role of the contexts of self and relationship stories, and how I'm using the hierarchy model and the daisy model. And then I wrote the section on the stories of self and relationship for my "alpha" participants.

Oh, and I found some articles and a master list of terms I'd put together that I didn't have with me in roc. That was actually kinda helpful.

Total word count: 2324. None of them quartz-brilliant, but the gabbro of my dissertation -- the sturdy sticky rock of the scottish mountains.

Not BAD output... sedimenting slowly accumulating into some new form.

Please Don't Eat the Daisies

So one of the heuristics I use in my work is this thing called a "daisy model," where we put all of the different stories at play in a little daisy and then shade the ones that are foregrounded in a particular episode. (Was that Charlie Brown grown up speak?) So I'm making all these little powerpoint daisies all the livelong day as I am immersed in my analysis.

And I keep channeling that catchy late 60s movie based on the Jean Kerr book, where the original Yummy Mummy Doris Day was reshuffled from New York City to the suburbs, where she ended up prancing around her yard with a ukulele with her 3 rapscallion boys singing the oh-so-earwormy Please Don't Eat the Daisies.

Perhaps I've gone bonkers, here in the suburbs, grinding away while Ron the plumber painstakingly installs a shower, day after day. I just want to know when I get to get all glammed up and smoke a cigarette with David Niven.

Beware

the ides of march. Caesar aside, that's the date I walked away from my committee meeting with for the first full draft of my dissertation. That left me a little discombulated, to say the least. It's tight for someone who likes to work in fits and starts, and has the possibility of a couple of good trips I'll have to say no to. And it makes me ache with anxiety that I won't do a good enough job. But... I've also been in this program one seventh of my life. I think it's time to get the damned phd and make the next phase happen.

But head-down hardly begins to describe what I'll have to do for the next two months.

Eek.

(Oh, and I'm in roc, btw, for those keeping track at home).

Santa Barbara

I'm in santa barbara, for my annual national session for school -- and my what-should-be-final committee meeting tomorrow. Anxious about timing and writing momentum, but pausing to be so grateful that I get to come here. The view from our balcony, just now.

bridges

Downtown Portland has the Willamette river running through it, and is subsequently criss-crossed with bridges. Generally, I like bridges. One of my favourite places this year -- anytime, really -- was the ponte vecchio in Florence. I kept dragging F back to it, and even though it was a bit touristy and full of the obvious twee musicians, strolling couples, trap-py shops, I loved it.



The bridges in Portland are different from that, obviously, this sort of paradoxical blend of the romantic and downright creepy. There are all these really pedestrian friendly trails *along* the river, and when I run on them it's usually me and other steady breathy folks in water-proof breathable fibres, but there's also an underworld to the bridges, dank little temporary settlements, people Lurking, people toting all of their belongings. Like the ravines in toronto, but less pastoral. Running along the trails, you usually encounter at least one person doing something odd and sketchy, like culling... something... out of the river. And the east side of the river in particular is completely ridged with warehouses, razor wire, bleak stretches without people.

So the river's a draw, and bits of it are all gentrified with restaurants and fancy pedestrian bridges, but there's also an undertow of menace.

I went off to buy new running shoes yesterday, and it turned into a bit of a sketchy adventure. I'm on the west side of the river, and the running shoe store is on the east. I marched across the bridge closest to here, the one I usually run across, but once I got to the other side, I felt kind of creeped out. The light was dim and grey, and while there were a few stalwart cyclists (all of them with bare ankles, despite the chill), there was no one else walking. And I had to kind of walk across an expressway ramp to get off it, and it didn't feel nice.



So after I bought my shoes, I thought I'd go to another bridge to come back, one further north. I asked the woman at the store if I could walk across the Morrison bridge, the one there. She sort of half-heartedly said yes, but it was hard to get on. She was sort of vague, but I found the pedestrian bit, but then I rejected it halfway across when it required me to go down under the road onto a winding out-of-sight staircase on which I could see a lurking sketchy man.

So I walked back to the main road, and about a km to the next bridge -- which featured the rare sight of the drawbridge up and many "SIDE WALK CLOSED" signs. I tried to get down to the river to the pedestrian bridge I knew was there, but found myself in all these dark deserted parking lots, so I scampered back up to the main road.

Now, it was near dark, and I was a bit jumpy. I went further north and asked a guy and he said he didn't think there was a pedestrian way across this (4th) bridge. So I went *another* km or so to the trusty bridge I knew, but gratefully found, the MAX (tram) system, and got myself on. Then I gave a lurking fellow $1 when he asked in karmic relief.

So I rode home on the brightly lit tram, listening to a dykey woman yammer on a cellphone about alligators and giving 50% effort to something, and two other women compliment each other's coats. I was reminded of the way that Madeleine L'Engle described the tesseracts of time travel in her novels, something about the fabirc of time folding over on itself so that everything happened at the same time and yet separately. The tesseracts of the city, criss-crossed in bridges.

And you know what else?

It really freaks me out a bit how facebook makes you dream about people you haven't seen for 20 years, and really have no need to see ever again.

I took a road trip the other night with someone I literally would be perfectly happy to never lay eyes on again. It's like acid flashbacks, but there along with my americano in the morning.

And yet, I can't pry myself away from it.

Contrapuntal

I think Kat and Matt are the only ones who actually read this poor dessicated blog, ever, but I did promise Kat I would do an update or two so she'd know where I was. So, here. Hi!

I'm in portland, OR. Back in the same coffee shop I spent so much time in during my little "emotional shivasana" time back in May/June 06. That was the time when I really sparked with F, really knew that there might be something between us -- so being back here has an inevitable aura of reflection about it.

So much distance traveled in those 18 months. And here I am, still working to finish this phd. My only real goal for 08. If I can put aside all of the angst about money (I feel like I've picked up my bank account and dumped it into the pacific in the past couple of months), and the what ifs what ifs what ifs about what might happen with me and F in the next year, re jobs, possibilities, hopes. Just, living inside the heads of my project participants.

F and I had a really lovely drive up the coast, from Malibu to Portland, between xmas and new year's. The start was perfect, to me -- his ex incredibly welcoming, his 6 y.o. breathtaking. So confident and innocent and hopeful and happy and strong. I feel privileged to have her even on the edge of my life.

The time here has been less perfect -- lots of jibber jabber about trying to get the heat started, the leak from the ceiling in the bedroom irritating, a topsy turvey set of plans for the weekend because of the storm in CA. I was supposed to be flying to the bay area right about now, to meet Linda, and then to drive down the coast to santa barbara for school. We had an idyllic time in Big Sur last year, and I was hoping to repeat it; F and I drove the same roads last week, but too much of it was in darkness, and I was hoping for a few moments on a beach. But I've gotten conservative in my traveling -- I have no desire to be trapped in a crappy hotel by a mudslide, much as I love Linda, and I opted to stay here and fly directly to SB on monday. So now, back into my work.

This week has been funny for work -- wrenched my way into my analysis, but it's not exactly ticking along. There's a little too much of the "this is kind of a holiday" feel about this, along with all of the distractions of gas companies, wanting to exercise, whinging about my bad knee, etc. So now, back into the words of other couples.

Just a few of the noises of the past week that represent this west coast trip...

Knock knock knock on the wall of the big sur lodge, interrupting the reconnecting time between me and F, after an amazing dinner at nepenthe. Same dude woke me up with his wall-penetrating snoring at 5:00 a.m. Tried to figure out what kind of person feels compelled to be *quite* so sex-negative; couldn't imagine. Imagined him fat and full of sleep apnea. Felt better.

Plonka plip plop splot into the bucket in the corner of my bedroom in this flat, as the wind caterwauls around the 8th floor glass walls. This flat, in microcosm; gorgeous, techno and unlived in, and untended. And tortuous as a splot all night long.

Clomp clomp clomp. Our boots on the metal stairs between the upper and lower levels, as we tried to figure out that damned heat. A woman from downstairs, quivering with earnestness, asking F to Please Be Quieter Because I'm Trying to Work. Me on phone, him explaining, asking for her advice about the heat. I get off phone and she persists in repeating her Indignant Request. I hiss at her, like a cat. Not much making friends, here.

The wind, lonely howls. I might as well be on the edge of an outcrop, facing into the bleak ocean. Grateful for the warmth of the duvet, thinking how much more I miss having someone there with me when there IS a someone I want to be with. When I was here before, and single-ish, I was content to be alone in this bed. Now, I miss my big human hot water bottle, warmth made flesh.

And now, to work.

Spot the moment of festive cheer

So I'm at Spot, my favourite café in roc, trying to extend the flow of my day in the library. Finally energized by my writing, feeling like something meaningful is actually being made.



I've been quite offhand about the holidays this year. I put some white lights up around the windows in my flat, and sent out a few -- very few -- cards with little penguins on. B and I had a shared moment of sadness about the boxes of decorations in her basement that are the postscripts of the lasagne-and-tree-trimming parties we had for years. Touchstones of a community. But overall, I'm good with F's resolute focus on new year's as the holiday to mark. I like the shift of the year, and it feels good to let go of the accumulation of jagged raggedness that christmas represented for years -- all the shuttling between families, never a chance to be peacefully at home. The pent up angst of the year spurting out in all the close proximities. It feels right to make new rituals, and I'm excited about the trip we're planning on the west coast between xmas and new year's. The right coast.

And yet, here at spot, the Seasonal Music I much despise mercifully muted, an instrumental version of Partridge in a Pear Tree catches at my ankles. So fused to my memories of my dad, fiercely insisting that the extended family pause to sing along. The dramatic -- if tuneless -- intonation on Five Golden Rings. Missing that moment of optimistic intensity. A moment of yearning.

And then back to a warbling, despised Ella version of Santa Claus is Comin' to Town, and it passes. Time stretched, rift opened, sewed firmly shut again.

Suspension

Self-referential and annoying though this is, I think a little self-conscious meta-bloggery might get me through this sort of fuzzy-headed block I have about my dissertation. What I've been doing since September: collecting "data" and assembling my basic argument. Data, in this case, means asking long-suffering couples to record their private conversations and then to submit themselves to an interview with me.

I finally finished all of that last week, and now I'm supposed to be in the infamous "writing" phase. It's tough. I feel like I've kind of lost sight of what it is I'm trying to say, and the lightest flicker of a distraction can send me off the path. Like, there's a new book related to my topic,and I tried to get it, and it seems to be unavailable, and so this creates some kind of synapse gap in my ability to think about the topic. I *do* work in bursts, but the bursts aren't firing quickly enough for the time pressure I'm under.

So. That's where it is. I'm kind of floaty, and I feel like I keep head-butting into a big foamy block like those things football players slam their shoulders into in practice. Move forward -- SLAM. Fall to the ground on my ass. Hop up. SLAM. Distraction by scrabulous mania, holiday gifts, travel booking, navel-gazing about my relationship, checking BBOD to see if they're finally broadcasting the vital two episodes of Torchwood we missed, intense conversations with those among my compatriots who are near a computer and equally divertible during the day.

That's me, now. Floating and angstful. Now, back to waiting for UPS to arrive.

Beth's Chestnut Story

(This is beth's voice).

Well ....

I was in university and was grocery shopping with Dan. WE happened upon some chestnuts and I squealed in delight, having eaten them often from the street vendor in TO. So I bought some.

We went back to Dan & James' place. I remember them all doing normal things whilst I waited on my chestnuts in the oven (I didn't know how to cook them): Dan was on the phone, James was fiddling, Bill was reading... So, I figure I should check on the chestnuts, but didn't know how I'd tell when they were done.

I removed one from the oven and popped it into my mouth and bit it open. It exploded. There was a loud bang.

I remember vividly Dan, saying to whomever he was speaking to, "Oh my God! A chestnut blew up in the stove!" and dropping the phone and running to the oven and opening the door. He didn't notice me standing there, leaning forward, chestnut dripping from my mouth, until I began loudly grunting, "Oh oh heeew! Oh oh heew! Hewp me!"

My tongue was shattered to bits, all flesh and skin hanging. They had no ice, so James tried to give me a frozen chicken leg to suck on until we could get some. I still retained a spec of dignity and flatly refused, though I kept my tongue stuck in a glass of water whilst Dan drove me across the street to the donut shop, where they gave me a cup of ice, then to the emergency room.

This was back in the days when there was a woman/nurse sitting at the typewriter at a window in the ER. Becauth I couldn't thpeak becauth of the ithe on my tongue, Dan began to explain that a chestnut exploded in my mouth. He barely got the words out of his mouth when he completely lost it, just collapsed with the kind of laughter that comes usually when one hasn't slept in days and is completely on the verge of hysteria. He was weeping with laughter, and as he managed to finish the story of what happened to me?

The lady collapsed, completely and embarrassedly and with complete abandon, hysterically laughing over her typewriter. At one point, I remember she
managed to catch her breath, and she looked up at me and spit out, "I'm ss--ss--ss-orry!" then collapsed again, unable to speak, shaking across the top of her typewriter.

Eventually, someone took me to the examining room. Whilst I waited, my tongue stuck in a cup of ice, I heard shrieks of laughter erupting outside the door. Finally, a small, bright Chinese doctor came in, fighting to keep his composure while the corners of his mouth twitched. As he attempted to examine my tongue, he lost it. I remember him saying, "I just don't know what to do....I mean, I could *try* to bandage it..." then he collapsed.

The next day, my tongue hurt so badly I could barely talk. I went to meet Michael D before our class. As I told him what happened and he began to visualize the story, he completely collapsed. Across the table, gasping for air, pounding his fists, unable to speak. In other words, I was beginning to learn, the usual.

At one point, he managed to catch his breath, take in a deep gasp, and spit out, "I'll bet your deadly with a baked potato" before collapsing again, across the table, and practically onto the floor.

To this day, he swears he tells the story to everyone.

Smacked into posting

"In truth, it is a lonely life." Hm. Miranda said that on SATC when she was pretending to be a stewardess. But I guess it's the life of my blog too. Sma

Updates? Dissertation angst. I wrote 2678 words yesterday, finishing up the section on the methodology of the analysis and part of my intro. Exciting, eh? Some of it I like -- just whispers of it. The rest of it, blergh. Maybe I'll ask B if I can post her chestnut story, because reading it is the most amusing thing that's happened to me in days.

Another thing that makes life joyful? A man you love bringing you coffee in bed. Made perfectly right.

More later.

What would jesus do?

Blog-o-mind

I've been reading about Emergence (for a paper, of course), and Stephen Johnson has a thought-provoking examination of whether the internet could actually become self-organizing, a kind of conscious mind. His conclusion is no (the higher order patterns that do emerge come from the users, not the net itself) but his exploration is pretty compelling.

In that vein, I was reading Kat's blog and thinking I'd link to it, and wondering if the blogs could just eventually start linking themselves. Here. I'll nudge the pattern forward. Link to Kat's blog. She's a brilliant photographer. I loved the image she captured I'm posting -- her blog has some really eyebrow-cocking images of the city.

Grace

I spent labour day weekend climbing Mt. Katahdin in Maine with F, his daughter and her boyfriend.


It was a really good mountain, and the four of us made an easy little team, despite the cold virus we lobbed around the car like a wobbly balloon. On the hike, I was unbelievably ungraceful -- twisted my ankle, fell on my ass once, hobbled over on my twisted ankle as I passed someone who had stood aside to let us go ahead and grabbed at his.. paunch... for balance. But the mishaps were minor and there was real flow to the time -- about 8 hours up and down, 10.5 miles covered, about 4200 feet of ascent/descent.

Meeting J completed the collection of F's constellation of family that started when I met her brother my birthday weekend in February in Manhattan, but which really amplified this summer. I also met her mother (F's first significant ex), which made the grand total four exes, four offspring and two parents.

Seeing your Significant Other in so many contexts really fills out dimensions that can only be hinted at through stories. Ken Gergen talks about the concept of the "inner others" that we're always in dialogue with in any present conversation -- the actual people of our pasts, the discourses we're engaged with. Meeting the people who represent some of F's "inner others" is like being handed a pack of coloured filters for stage lighting -- the shadings are so much brighter, multi-variate, explanatory. I imagine it's the same thing for me when F sees me with my family, with A.

Meeting J really struck a chord with the "inner other" of my dad. Always present, watching J's relationship with F is like stowing away in some alternate universe. Rose and the doctor in the London where her father hadn't died. J is the same age as I was when my dad died -- who was 3 years younger than F is now. It's comforting, somehow, watching F and J engage with each other in the way that my best imagination would have had written for me and Tony, if he hadn't been ill, if my 20s had been less carved over by identity angst and my inability to just be confident in who I was -- with myself, with him.

J has a rare kind of grace. She's the kind of person that I learn things about myself from just by watching how she is in the world. And watching F with her is a little twist of bitterly dark chocolate, a rich rush of intense savour that slows down the tongue. Possibilities unmet, constantly unfurled new strands of life.