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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.