raining in Chicago

I've been dreading the winter for a while. About a day ago I finally pulled my thick Northface out of the closet, it's so well padded you don't need much else until it truly freezes and Chicago becomes tundraland.
I've been traveling a good bit around the US in the past few weeks - a lovely trip to New Orleans followed by Thanksgiving in Miami. I meet so many interesting people when I travel, even if it's in the US and New Orleans turned out to be such a spectacular city. I visited the above ground tombs, (Nicholas Cage already has a giant pyramid sized tomb waiting for him it turns out, talk about delusion of penile grandeur) a voodoo temple where the priestess actually hugged me, drank in the jazz that flows as freely as the booze there.... I met Tim Robbins, that was quite a silly celebrity encounter in a jazz club. I also met an adorable Canadian. I was there for a conference and made some interesting contacts...all in all as perfect as a trip gets.
Now just a little more coursework and writing/revising to get through before I'm free for December in Israel. How lovely that will be!
I feel that I have been pushed around like some imperfect little drudge in a program for genius wannabes. I'm done wannabe-ing, I'm just gonna do and be and I'm going to follow my own damn path.
I have listened to too many self-satisfied white haired men in hefty positions with big books that bear their names. Too many self-applauding people in my life, cyclically, telling me what to do and who to be. Fit me into this box, looks kinda coffin-like that's funny. This supposed drone is no one's clone she owns her cell-f like it or not. I'm falling asleep, I'm dreaming of all the wonderful places I'll go, the beautiful people in my life, the sunshine that will touch my skin in days to come.

reefed in Recife

I'm sitting at the moment in a dark (because the bulb is apparently dead), quiet professor's study in Recife. Tomorrow mid day I will travel on to Aracaju for a long layover and some crab and then finally in the wee hours I will fly back to Salvador. It is becoming more uncertain whether I'll land back in Mama America on the 26th or 27th or what depending on my weird ticket, but somehow it will be fine. Recife gave me space to think and look at myself and Brazil and such. Though too much and too little space. I'm possibly in love with a wonderful man and I have no idea when I'll see him again but I will see him for several days starting tomorrow. You know there is a short story by Vonnegut called Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. You should read it if you haven't. I know that I will let myself be sucked into the rising tide of Chicago again. But this time I will get a much better apartment. And it will probably be in Ukrainian Village. And I will set up shop in this lovely apartment in this chique neighborhood and focus on my studies and plan my ambitious career and imagine how I will come up with something good and useful and insightful for people by the lamplight as the Chicago snow falls outside my window like a spectre and I will imagine the wonderful man in Salvador as he plays capoeira in the summer heat and kisses some other beautiful woman under the sweat of carnival as I sweat under the lamplight from the thought of it and pour myself some wine and the academic musings will turn into poetry on my computer screen as they always do and I will think about love and whether sitting here under the lamplight slaving away for some unseen goal is worth it when I could be holding you right now. Tangibility, friends. It is the difference between dreaming and having. Oh Brazil, thank you for letting me have. Though now I can think ahead how it will feed my dreams. And so the cycle goes. Why is it so rare to have both, and maybe my melancholy will turn into something stronger and I won't feel stuck in some cyclical poetic musing in which love is tragic but the dragon....Cimorene will fly off on his back, I mean maybe some unexpected bizarre fairytale will still come true in my life. I'll lower my hair or weave gold or simply become an empowered heroine. Nevertheless, we're always looking for some expected ending before anything has a chance to happen because we're so damn afraid to turn the page----

too good to leave

Though in other ways a fantastic beginning to the rest of this living. I'm stretching out the time in Salvador more just like I did in Rio I can tell that I will. Though the "flexibilidade" in my airplane ticket and my life only goes so far. Classes will start, a new Chicago move awaits, and I absolutely must visit my grandma the minute I get back. I will insert a few more blissful, tropical weeks --->there. And then we'll see.
I've been waiting and waiting and I'm blooming.

12 minutes or less

until a few new friends come to my apartment in Salvador and we spend an evening drinking and simply enjoying. Maybe forro, maybe just caipirinha.
I have no idea if anyone reads this blog at this point but it's a fun outlet at moments. When I have enough time to stop to think about myself, I remember that I think in narrative form. As if I'm writing the book of my life as I live it. I write as I live in my head. If only I could insert a little laptop up there. Maybe someone will invent that one day. I only re-realize this about myself when I have time to. If I'm moving about frantically, there is no time for head narration and I am simply swimming in somebody else's book.
Since I have a few quicky minutes and a rising mood because I'm about to see lovely people....
Brazil, what I love: a gazillion fruit and plants I've never heard of before that make it all the more dr.seussy exotic like cupuacu and guarana and cacau, people that are blunt and sexual and sometimes even more starving for human connection than I am, music-making in all corners, attempts at creativity and sweetness by strangers, trustworthy friends made within a few minutes time, men who zip up my backpack as I walk down the street, capoeira - a fleshy celebration of every muscle that hurts so good the next day....
what I don't love: being pegged as a money pot and stalked, attempts at thievery and deceit, racism, lack of hot water, electric showers that can easily shock and kill you, hungry children, terrifying cops, crack everywhere popped like a tic tac

pulled into context and loving the living

I'm boiling water without olive oil. It's a kind of useless traveler's way to make pasta but will work just fine. Especially as there is still tomato sauce in the fridge and tomato sauce has oil and salt and all the fixings in its fine little packet.
I mainly blog on slow or tired days when I either really feel like writing something creative or want to procrastinate from doing something else. This is a rainy, tummy achey kinda day.
I can hear the sounds of traffic 13 floors down. I could go over to Carlos' house for wine and snacks and random company. I could keep working on an essay I owe a kind professor, fascinating I swear, on the body in lusophone space.
I also, should get back to writing that groundbreaking novel the world will so love eventually and which will so improve my lifestyle. Mhm. The question is always finding the time and space, mental and physical to produce. To do. Do. Do.
There's some low budget Brazilian soap opera playing on low volume on my tv, there's a woman attempting to melodramatically jump out of a lexus to proclaim her anger as she parades down the highway in stilettos only to stop a giant yellow truck in and jump in. I plan on a less dramatic evening of pasta and writing but who knows, I'm constantly pulled into context these days. ;)

um pouco cansada

I tire myself out so easily. It took forever to figure out how to buy tickets to Salvador...in the end I ended up giving up on the Brazilian websites and booking a flight through good old Expedia. I tried to buy a phone, but I didn't have my CPF number with me (a Brazilian identity number that anyone with a certifiable identity can get by sitting in a room with a bunch of other people and waiting for them to call the number in your hand so they can give you another number) and by the time I started walking down the smoky Copacabana streets for the second time in a row today, I walked for a few miles and it became clear that everything was already closed.
It bothers me immensely that my phone is gone. And that the altercation was so nasty. I walk forever here and feel my legs getting stronger and this in itself is satisfying. I got a little dizzy and light heated because I hadn't eaten much. I stopped in one cafe to buy a chicken pastry. Then I stopped in another for coconut juice + milk, mmm.
Oh yeah, why no phone? One night last week, I was out with some lovely Bostonians I met through the language school. We went to a giant indoor market called Sao Cristoval. It's like an all you can buy, drink, smoke, consume fest inside a building the size of a football stadium. Every trinket imaginable, a plethora of restaurants, clubs, music venues, bars, meat shops, juice shops, it's kinda like a mall but much dirtier, cheaper, funnier, stranger, wilder, poorer, etc. Some big time singer was supposed to be performing that night and this hiked up the entrance fee. As the night wore on it became clear that fans were getting pumped for the performance and I didn't see this but apparently some girl was escorted out, sweating profusely. I had been trying to get deeper into the crowd to catch a peek of Donatello or whatever big time performance man's name was, but at this point the group I was with freaked out and did a 180 towards the exit. I only understood this later, but they caught a cab for us to go home in and bargained on a fixed price for everyone with the driver. As we only live a few blocks away from each other this sounded fine. As soon as we started explaining to the driver that he would be making two stops, one for me and one for them, he got extremely angry saying that that was too much and they hadn't given him enough money. I had a bit more Portuguese than the others and tried to negotiate with the driver but he was a nasty money digger who pretended not to understand. It was a frustrating cab ride. When we pulled up to my building I tried to negotiate again and got into a nasty argument with him. In the heat of it I forgot my cellphone in that lovely man's backseat. I had just received a text from a guy I had met days before who has been inviting me out, asking "where are you beautiful?" But the cell is gone now and has been for days as are many of the new contacts in it. Shit like this must happen when traveling especially alone, frantic, and adjusting. I'm buying a new phone and it will be even cheaper than the lost one and I have a pang of regret in my chest. If only I had been a smoother negotiator when the taxi driver picked up the phone and offered more money or shown less anger and indignation. He asked me, "how much will you give me for your phone?" and when I reluctantly said 10 reais, he decided to take revenge on me and never pick up again.
Anyway, this has been a bit of a tired Saturday, and the night will pick up in beautiful Lapa for some dancing. Rio is so beautiful, how to swallow enough of it, how to do enough. It's wonderful and overwhelming.

Brazil, layered and maravilhosa

I've been in Brazil for a bit over 2 weeks now. Summer has already been incredible and deeply fulfilling.
First I went to see incredible Sicilian sites with my loving family. They are always there for me, to help me breathe and vacate when reality feels overwhelming. Now I'm in Brazil, studying Portuguese on this fellowship and enjoying every minute of the lovely new experiences, the dramatic, funny, kind (and sometimes treacherous,) people, the scenery, the soul moving music. Tudo bom.
The classes are getting a little tiring as they are early in the morning and last for several hours each day. Maybe today needs to be a day off. I was supposed to go to the countryside with a boy but we had a falling out over class differences (he thinks I'm an American princess who looks down on him.) It reminds me of a book I read recently, Goodbye Columbus. Some of the words he hurled at me were way too much, and he ran away after throwing them like useless old rocks. He wanted to take me on a field trip to see poverty, show the over-privileged "Beverly Hills" (he called me,) girl poverty, see how the American ginnypig reacts. His own experiment, his own environment. As much as I want to see the country, I don't appreciate being called Beverly Hills by an angry lover. Hilarious for someone who has been living most of the year on the South Side of Chicago in cheap rooms because a graduate student stipend is hardly enough to cover rent any where in the US. I'm not saying I'm a terribly poor person. I'm not. I've got a great family who supports me when I need it, and even treats me to lovely experiences most people never have. But I'm no Beverly Hills either. Anyway, enough. I wrote him an email explaining...maybe I'll post it here later out of interest.
So either he'll get over the economic battle he picked with the wrong tourist, and I'll go to the country today, or I'll do the more typical bourgeois thing and enjoy the glorious rays at the beach with a couple new Brazilian friends. It's going to be an interesting day regardless, and I'm going to make the best of it. I want to be the best of me but I want respect too. I want to be a good person but I also want to enjoy and enjoy the beauty and truth that is here without being pigeonholed in hurtful ways.

almost free of dead weight...rapunzel spins again

I'm reading this marvelous article on the imagination. Let it set mine free. Tonight the goal is to revise my overwrought thesis to the point of presentability.

I have lived monastically, scholastically, and in a lonely ivory tower for two years now. I am my own witch. I let down my own hair. I climb down my own hair and hope to find a prince or a kingdom or a reward for sitting up here spinster style, spinning, spinning, spinning.

What do I weave with my golden threads? I weave attempts at thoughts that are supposed to be meaningful in terms of the wondrous human experience. They are supposed to fit into the box you give me. Society gives us boxes to fill. I'm sitting in this interesting box. It's lit with candles and full of other isolated spellbound zombies.

I've got my cappuccino and thoughts to keep me company. Courage said Goethe. The Faustian striving spins on, curse-like, making self-punishing soldiers of men.

It's rainy as hell inside and out. If life were a movie this would make for a good depressing scene. Drip, drip, write. Drip, drip, write. The faucet is open again. I want to sink into the waterfall of my imagination with a merman and an endless ocean of time and body. Expanse, expand.

May-be

May's a month of possibility where this caterpillar turns to the ultimate self-fulfilling metaphor and butterflies the pain and shit away.

Ma ma mia
The words the words
to free ya,
are you are you
gonna tell me
the little girl who watched little boys
like ants on her hands kept in boxes
of childhood manipulation fantasy
gets to come out and play?

April creeping up...brushing off the crawlies

creepy, comes from creep. it's an interesting word.
from wiktionary "creep (plural creeps)The movement of something that creeps (like worms or snails)A relatively small gradual change, variation or deviation (from a planned value) in a measure.(informal, pejorative) An annoying irritating person(informal, pejorative) A frightening and/or disconcerting person, especially one who gives the speaker chills or who induces psychosomatic facial itching.Stop following me, you creep!"


So what is implied is creepy, wormy, insect-like slithering movement, either emotional or purely physical that makes the experiencer of this movement uncomfortable. You could say that relationships are in some ways based on movements that we make towards each other communicatively. Communication and interaction is a movement. So "creepy" is a movement that is buglike, uncomfortable...maybe this is where primal fear of the unknown and distrust of strangers hooks up to allow us to figure who we can and can't trust in this short little blip of a life. 

permeability

I don't know about you, but I'm far too socially permeable. I've known for a long time that I can be extremely (or overly) affected by what people say and do towards me. My mood, my thoughts, my disposition...I guess I should live alone again (soon!) until/unless I find people who I'm happing cohabiting with. I'm very high in empathy but at times I wish I could just switch it off. Click.
Really, people can take advantage of the permeability and good will of others. These amoeba layers that separate me from other people, they could use a few body guards in there. I think I'd like a couple Israeli soldiers patrolling mine. Got them. Ready.

helloooo

I want to write an article called: America's Next Top Woman
stay tuned, it will be a linguistic anthro expose of how Tyra Banks is a self-made policer of the American model woman prototype, whitening strategies and all.

I am on a kick that involves bouts of attempting to thesis write and then taking breaks by watching the silly, wise, and rude Patti Stanger. I am a sucker for certain kinds of television. Oh the personalities. And a yenta?
Come on. If Patti calls herself a 3rd generation matchmaker I'm probably at least a 10th. It's just a guess, but come on. I was born in yentaville. I will shuffle love like an easy deck of cards and deal your hand and read it as if I'm psychic except I'm not, I'm in yentaville. I know that doesn't make any sense. Um.

Good night love-wanters. (don't we all)

Brazilian dreams

I found out today that I won a fellowship that's gonna send me to the beautiful Brazil this summer. I'm going to ride this happy wave of anticipation for all it's worth, baby yeah!!!
I've never been to Brazil, and the goals for this summer could include:
1. Improve Portuguese (well this is obvious and the point)
2. Check out potential dissertation research sites and ideas (the second obvious point)
3. Write a novel
4. Learn the capoeira
5. Fall in love
6. Enjoy life
7. Write a novel about:
    a. falling in love to the beat of a Brazilian drum
    b. autoethnographic self-fun
    c. something wildly fictional where Kurt Vonnegut meets J.D. Salinger meet Lev Tolstoy meet Emily Dickinson meet Louise Gluck meet my mother
8. write poems and prose-poems, and stories, and articles and other fun things
9. draw, paint, dance, smile, laugh

I'm into lists at the moment. Lists this organizational thought process where numbering and sub-numbering is supposed to provide order. I'm so damn excited!!!!

on self-displacement

When you were a child, did you cuddle with a beloved stuffed animal before nightfall? Maybe you pressed it to the beating wish for human connection in your chest and recalled stories of Cinderella or maybe Ruslan and Ludmila or whichever love story happens to be passed on in your iteration of modern culture. Maybe when you grew up you met some approximation of this fairytale, adjusted the goggles through which you process reality, and settled down with Ruslan or Charming or Bill. Maybe you didn't. Maybe instead you got a lonely dog or cat reflective of the hungry need that has only increased in its beating from childhood chest to adulthood chest that craves and craves. You got a job as a social worker or a teacher. You got a job as a nurse. You help people. Or you don't, you just own a Sims colony in which virtual families live and die and fart and procreate and tell you that they love you.

The self is hunger. The self is hunger for hunger. The self is hunger for mutual hunger. And however your hunger happens to displace, form, mold itself, the drive is a constant need to eat people. We are the self-congratulatory vampires.


PS: This is why we love dogs and cats so much. They are our own hunger, down on all fours, they have submitted to hunger completely and honestly, always hungry for food and love which essentially becomes the same thing. Food-love, love-food, to eat to love to talk to drink to eat to love to talk to consume, consume me-you. Across the table, the table on which we consume each other. The wedding table the coffee table the dinner table, the consumption slab across which we displace food with love with food.

ta ta and hello

the world is full books and books after hours in stacks and stacks and stacks of them make me dizzy. Which is what happened today. I stayed in the library and sucked up so many ideas into my skull that I fiinally got dizzy after oh maybe 10 hours of this and so then finally, I went home to feed myself and rest up for the next round.

I will get there, damn it. In the mean time the reading and breath-reading (as in inhaling words through the nostrils and mouth, sort of like a knowledge-inhaling human that is produced by overzealous university environments,) will continue. I need to write. First I must read. I have no time. At least I can breathe. In
hale
ex hale.

Good night, shona tova, tova, tova.

sleep-living

My entire day seems to be over-determined by how much sleep I get and when I get it.
Woe to my suprachiasmatic nucleus. I remember first reading about this little mechanism we are all born with that does or does not happen to conform with the 9 to 5, 24 hour, 7 day a week, bla, bla, bla tick tock rhythms of modern society. For example, if you're a lucky little "morning person" you'll probably feel so much happier swinging with the rhythms, getting your coffee and toast when you want it. If you only need what 5 hours of sleep, even better.
I, as you can probably guess from my bitter mockery, am not one of you lucky birdsong at dawn break people. I  love to sleep, need to sleep, sleep to sleep. I'm terrible at getting up. I need multiple incentives or a really amazing one to force my body out of bed at a certain time. If I ever marry, this will be good for my getting up problems because I find that the best alarm clock is definitely another human being. In the meantime, I continue to be monkish, to fall asleep with books in bed with me, sometimes my clothes on, ick. Yes, I'm literally sleeping with my books. And do I want to get up the next...cycle? Not usually. My disrupted rhythm is so bad that lately, because I am "trying" to do nothing but mainly work, I wake up with a headache and hungry belly and an unhappy mood. This little soldier is not a good drill sergeant to herself, especially in the realm of movement. Get up. Get up, woman!

It goes deeper, little nucleus beware. Bed is the place of denial, a hide out, a sleep hide-out from responsibility and life and people and places, and well, no matter what signals you might be sending me, my denial is stronger. I can sleep-hide from my own body...it seems that it is not so hard to corrupt whatever healthy path you are supposed to lead. Intention is stronger than pain.

reaching for perfect

There are so many things I want to do with this life. Just like Sylvia Plath in her terror, unable to deal with the tree of endless possibilities, unable to choose, and the inability to choose causing the possibilities to die but the very act of choosing cutting off all other branches and the tree well it's an endless mind fuck the end.

I'm going to bed, I've over done it and can't examine myself under this bell jar any more this fine night.

My mother still thinks of my freelance journalistic writing with longing. Should I be doing that?

Am I losing myself here, or will I find whoever is supposed to come out between the scholarly citations...I mean can I still be expressive and not over-burdened with academicese to the point of stomping out what makes a soul beautiful. Or will it just be more so?

spillville

The best page is the one that wants to take your words and love them. Cradle them in its expansive white arms and say, yes dear words, you're the little screaming infant voices I've been waiting for. You want the page to love and affirm you. Give you that positive reinforcement every baby or writer-baby seeks from the page, the mother, the other. 


I am writing. Pishu, j'ecris, escribo...and while I don't have much time to deliver these fetal first steps into thesis-writing, I can hear the little voices inching out, they are happening. They have wanted to happen and breathe life and make what I went through worthwhile, ever since I went through it. I mean who donates all this time, researching and working alone, and feeling lonely and inspired and anxious and isolated and terrified and thrilled to not finally hope to bear fruit. 


The pregnant nun goes on giving birth through her fingertips.


What if you are just a figment of me on the page? Mary asked Jesus.

Pinocchio in the Whale

I read some of my poems live last night. First time since this summer, when I read at a lovely Anglophone open mic in Belleville, Paris. Last night was an academic audience in Hyde Park, Chicago, much less random than a bunch of English speakers in a Parisian bar. There was much less anonymity there, my voice was highly contextualized there, because more and more of my experiences are filtered through the highly specific experience of a social sciences grad student jumping through the hoops of hell. Ok, ok, in part it is just obvious that I've been scarred by fieldwork and isolation both in school and out there. Oft repeated themes include: loneliness, isolation, frustration with men, frustration with women too, the shrinking circle of people who relate to the experience, masochistic protestant ethic work schedule, loss of a sense of time, space, body, and materiality, a complete restructuring of values, yes these symptoms are typical and real. Some symptoms are liberating, enlightening, you just want to gloat about them and have a chain-smoking, coffee and liquor drinking festival under the moon. Most symptoms make you fear for your sanity and wellbeing. The smart thing to do is to plan things to look forward to so that the work doesn't swallow you up, so that Marx and complete and total alienation through your work does not become you. Although the truth is, for a while I'm going to have to be Pinocchio in the whale, waiting to get through this storm, learn from it, and become a real girl again.

languages of removal

Português brasileiro, Brazilian Portuguese is my latest language of distance. I am learning it and as it carries no emotional valence for me as of yet, my oral exams are like therapy sessions. Why? Because I get to rant about my life in a language whose signs trigger no emotional memory for me. I am just a neutral passenger, a lawyer cross-examining my consciousness through a vocabulary void of all personal significance.

I get to watch the strange sounds falling out of my mouth, as I "feel" whatever the initial language was telling me to feel. The two languages are temporally and emotionally disassociated. The two languages strip apart my feelings, partitions into the self, and I get to watch.

My brain absorbs new vocabularies quickly, but especially when I'm trying to express myself. Then suddenly whatever new language I'm learning starts to spill out of me imperfectly but forcefully like water. I can feel the meanings lining up like little train tracks, the cogs clicking a new outline of expression into place. A code on a code, a new alignment.

When pain feels language-less, when whatever distress you may feel is suddenly stripped of its vehicle in the strange liminal space of translation, the negative sensations themselves are somehow alienated from their associations. They sit in limbo, in an airport, at a train station, waiting, uncertain. It's a good way to leave your psychophysiological distress symptoms naked without any linguistic clothing to designate their identity.

Multilinguistic experiences demand a kind of clinical self-examination in which one can pick apart layers and interrogate them. Especially when one's thoughts spill out in someone else's sounds to talk about your life. Suddenly you can sit there and you're not even quite thinking about yourself in the first person any more. Just like here I am switching persons grammatically as I write this entry. I am switching between my selves.

**(These thoughts are based on both my own self experiences and my research; I often think that the most insightful thoughts should come from both.)

home? is where the mummy organs are

I moved again...when...was it two weeks ago? The movers finished scooping out my belongings, like so many moveable intestines ready for their next mummification treatment, just in time for my statistics lab.
Grad school, (and we know this from phdcomics but it's much worse than that) is ridiculous.
You pretend to have the carefree existence of a student (or is it the religious devotion to learning of a monk?) while adulthood and responsibility and reality and taxes and ovaries and bills and maybe people named Bill and, and, hunger and thirst and family and Maslowe are all there with you, staring you down as you pretend.
You stay away from tv and stores and people and material obligations and maybe your hair starts to dreadlock and maybe you forgot to make payments and returns and stuff like that and when you try to return crap to stores two months later they don't give a shit that you don't live on the same space-time continuum as the rest of the society...does the ivory tower sound like fun? Hahaha.

So there it is, my STUFF. The internal organs that get moved from one dwelling body to another where I sleep and reorganize the STUFF and re-place it, some of it gets frazzled, abused, lost, a frayed edge, another tragically lost earring.

When mummies move from one world to another nothing is lost. Everything is put into perfect gold jars and it stays so immaculately preserved for archaeologists to fawn over. The artifacts of my existence are less perfectly cared for, I have no civilization of slaves to pamper my every whim or to pack my suitcases. Instead I do this late at night with a glass of wine or a bottle of beer so that I can pretend that packing and moving, this endless transitional process I seem to be in, is a constant party. The life of an amoeba. A jellyfish. A protean squishy creature that remolds herself until it hurts. And it hurts.A boyfriend packed my boxes once. Even some of my suitcases. Boyfriends are good for these things. If you'd care to apply for the position, I accept applications on a rolling basis.

thought-a-thon

So about all of those ideas I keep hidden in my closet, skeletons of genius...when they grow up, grow flesh and emerge will you, will you, oh will you take their hands and accept them? Oh, oh, oh. This is the coming out terror of academia. Ideas are these embodied beasts that come to represent all that you are and wish to be and if the world of your field's experts doesn't love them, woe, woe, woe.

Meet Tommy and Franky and Isabel. I swear I gave birth to these flashy light bulbs, these bedazzling fire crackers, as I labored over mountains of dusty, overly-fingered books, the sweat, the dust, the blood of my brain running in light frothy drips of in
sight. Drip, drip,
get the gore? Get it? If it hurts you better get it. Birthing pains produce a fetus, no? Isn't pain supposed to emerge as productivity in this painstaking life? What if it simply produces more misery? And what if, after all the self-induced eye-straining, scalp-bursting concentration it comes to yawns, apathy. Horror. Horror beyond Frankenstein and zombie monstrosities. The horror of chasm: the yawn, it will swallow you up like oxygen, a simple passage of air into the lungs. The continuation of a diagram. In and out, you are going in, being recycled, one more molecule in a matrix of everything and nothing.

fisticuffs and hallucinations

If the sinews of your hand tighten and the skin is tautly spread over your beautiful knuckles and if your beautiful knuckles travel at 22 miles per hour towards the face of a deserving bully and if the deserving bully doesn't move his head but lets those sweet little weapons of yours sink in will I have my retribution?
Says the voice of the little maiden as she waits to be avenged by the man with the knuckles and the fists and the sinew.

At half past three, a strange picture, a kind of circus of silhouettes begins to play on the moon, the shadows seem to become ever more frantic to the bewildered earthling eye. Little did you know, there is a puppeteer who has taken residence on the moon.

The 7-11 near the Starbucks at the corner of Smith and Harrison is the most exotic place a girl can go after a night of fine wining and gourmet boredom. The all night snacks beckon her horny little head. The cashier has been waiting for her.

At the left bottom corner of his sock drawer is a picture of it. It is slick and thick and perfectly black as the night during which he will finally own it. His fist will bulge with the brilliance of it, just before it slackens.

fantasy inside this memory box

For several hours I did not pine
for my work. I talked to a merman
who swam up to my laptop and reminded 
me of fantasy. It seems like there is always
strange magnetism on this planet
from unexpected directions and it will take 
all my will to stay here
on my little piece of focus,
before it all churns under 
and I become wherever fancy 
wanders or wherever memory streaks.
On a black beach where you pull my hand,
a cold wave where you swim beneath me
merman, a fire around which we croon
to the moon and the light turns to 
tangerine creases in butter.
Yellow morning, we don't even need to wake up
we have been sleepless, kissing and swimming 
like children, 
don't wake me.

open heart un-surgery

Don't pick at your
brain and don't
pick at your heart.
The marrow the arrow the neurons
a part.
Don't tuck or touch it or pull on the glue
of the things that go bump in your chest
in the night the demons
the cupids the vultures
in flight. In transit or utero
dead or alive the pickings
the sickling is moaning
in
side with the hero
open your mouth
but don't pick at the lining
the trimming the cloth.

Open the brainwash book
and close your eyes
sometimes it's just better
to keep it
in
side with the lady
that stands by the road
she's waiting for Billy
to take her on home
where the buffaloes
don't exist any more.

It don't matter she'll never
ask questions that ring
chime or scream
belt or bleep
in the ear of the man
who'll never he'll never
love you again.

poetry experiment

What if I started posting actual poetry here...or what if I used this as an experimental poetic thought space. Poems-in-process, not quite edited, just fresh out of the scull like new brain matter. Just like all of stuff I spew in this space it would be unedited, unrevised, a place for first attempts and half-baked musings. Thoughts and words on the quick. Not perfect but thick in inspiration.

I knew him
there
and there, my mind had prefabricated
every possibility.
The wedding or the parting,
the grandchildren or the awkward goodbye email,
you could be the one or you could be another one.

These cutouts in which we place wished-for lovers,
what if the part can never be played and it is only
when for an instant we stop playing
stop fitting
let it go

and it arrives. Whatever "it" is, the bright eyed
recognition and empathy you seek.

-----

Well that two minute half poem half advice column thingy was done on a very hungry belly...it is early and I need coffee and carbohydrate nourishment. Mmmm. :)

Current song:
http://popup.lala.com/popup/2810527646861754578

Current mood:
motivated, content

script in my head

I seem to be good at...
showing my mind to people like a movie - see the latest episode of my life, friend, here: and then the spiel unwinds. Soon, the close friends who see the show of the episodes of my life that I render in words are asking about the sequels and continuations of the same plot lines, they're asking the same questions, they want to turn the pages. I'm a pretty good self-narrator, narrator of myself. Or at least a pretty consistent one. It's funny when friends run into you at the same time and they are asking about the same page-turning moments in your juicy thriller of a life.
How important is it to be of entertainment value to others? Do we all want a thrilling novel of a life after reading so many succulent renditions of how it could be. Or a thrilling film that shows instead of telling...there is no time to tell a thing in a film unless it's closer to theatre with asides and soliloquoys and a thought-connection with the audience.
The umbilical cord between my brain and those I talk with is mediated by words that wish to be Salinger and Vonnegut and Gluck with some Vygotsky and Durkheim and Foucault....and Freud of course. Do not scoff at Freud if you haven't read him, btw, he remains brilliant.
I know that because I have hardly the time lately to write what I wish to write I have become an endless out-of-breath list of things. I can't get them all in, can barely cram in all the matter, and no time to go back and edit for clarity. Write, write, right.

move

So hello. I'm here but I can hardly catch up with myself. Deadlines come and pass like street signs. Who am I again? What's the point of all the incessant moving...there are days when I have sat in my car inbetween things for several extra minutes, not wanting to go on to the next destination, and then the next. The car a kind of limbo space, a liminal space of escape between all the points of responsibility. Moving, moving, moving...

hilarity and jenga dating

I played a game of "Jumbling Towers" (knockoff of Jenga) last night. I won. And then I won again. And then I won at Chinese Checkers. It looked like an absolutely unoriginal dive bar EXCEPT it has tons of board games, random ones. It attracts an older businessy crowd, and just a middle-aged Chicago crowd. And there I was on yet another "date." Squirming, uncertain what this latest member of team testosterone wanted or didn't want as he caressed my leg and made incessant half-funny comments and quips and soliloquoys flavored with something like a weird blend of intelligence and ignorance. How can people be so intelligent and so ignorant at the same time - I think the sheer ridiculous ratio of intelligent-funny-ignorant had me laughing. This dating thing, it is such a put-on in this obnoxious country. Yes America, I have qualms with you sometimes. I'm beginning to think that WASPy men always have ulterior motives, and the sooner you find out what they are, the better. Relations between men and women are so convoluted, there is constantly some kind of bizarre social and sexual and commitment calculation going on between the guy's brain and his royal member, lets call the royal member Bob and the Brain Bill. Imagine a conversation between Bob and Bill... (forget Ego, Superego, Id, just Bob and Bill)

ACT 1: The One and Only Act

Bob: Ass, I see ass, hot, hot, I want!
Bill: Yes, yes, I want to touch, but....
Bob: Oh Bill, don't be a pussy! Go for pussy!
Bill: But Bob, you know I do think she's hot...but what about Karen?
Bob: Fuck Karen!
Bill: Maybe you're right Bill, I want, I want...
Bob and Bill: We want, we want, we want!!!
-a few hours later-
Bill: Bob, I don't know I have thoughts, and they scare me.
Bob: Ignore them, Bill, they will kill you.
Bill: I have thoughts and insecurities, and, and, and-
Bob: I'm done with you, you wanker.


END

---------------------------------------------------------------------

I wasn't expecting to go there, whoa...but I can say that every day lately has moments when something or someone pulls out that last Jenga block and everything collapses to humpty dumpty smithereens. Except there's only me to pick it all up, and if I really can't stand it, at least I can turn it into caricature. At least I can laugh! When life isn't beautiful, it can still be beautifully funny.

to sleep, perchance to scream

I'm starting a secret blog (that will purge away secret stains and pains and drains on this finicky life,) you'll never find it, maybe you will. I'm staying up and not working, not working, because home sometimes just wants to mean a glass of wine and a sigh of release.

Can you hear it? I can't. I haven't had a released moment in ages, this heart is always beating too attentively, every instant is pitter patteringly hyperactive, manic, maniac, maaaaaaaaama?

This is when the child cries for help, "save me from the unmanageable world, Mother, who hath brought me into this unfortunate struggle where I pee on myself and my stomach hurts and then..."(and yes with a Stewie-like British accent)...but forget receding into infantile helplessness, how about, how about, slowing down this over-stimulated nervous system. Less coffee more REM? Less stress more sex? Less late nights more massages and long walks on Greek or Italian or French or Brazilian or Caribbean beaches, peaches, soft yellowish relaxation zones.

That's what this life requires perchance. A chance to dance, to dance, to dance.

lets talk about sex, american style

Hypothesis: White (straight) american men are more insecure (on average) when it comes to the bedroom, the bra, and the boob. Than whom? Probably than almost everyone else. I wonder if educational achievement correlates with sexual dysfunction? Maybe for some men.... The "smarter" and better in one achievement area, the dumber in the other. The more seemingly secure in intellect, the less secure in lack there of. What if intellect is just totally over-rated when it comes to pure physicality, what if we just disconnect with our bodies and become scared of them? How absolutely awful. Although it depends on the kind of intellectual practices one is socialized into, as well. This could go the other way too, education could open sexually, the right kind of education. So I'm talking Puritan-descended American mentality. If this generalization holds any truth, it all comes down to specifics. The body should be hidden, the body reeks of sin and skin.

This goes for women too. This is a societal problem. More specifically though, it could just be a WASP problem too, the common occurrence of identity diffusion in Wasps is something I'm pretty certain of. So we're talking Christian and mainly European descended, super-mixed descent to the point of almost impossibility to identify with one original cultural group, 1/124th this, 1/18 that...a fraction problem.

(I'm thinking anomie, and the wonderful Greenfeld again.) Anomie, namelessness, the inability to know who and what you are, the inability to locate yourself culturally, spatially, physically, mentally, socially. You have 37.8 careers every minute, you flip your brain like a tv set with 100+ channels, you flip your thoughts at the speed of google - which is why you need to be constantly hooked up to google, your fingers are always picking at your I-phone, you can't make constant eye contact, you can't focus on one lover, one job, one thought, one thought, one thought. You have given yourself ADD when it comes to knowing what you want and when you look in the mirror which face do you see? I am talking about a typical WASP problem.

On a grander world scale, I think Europeans, Aussies & Kiwis, South Americans, etc. are better off than Americans...I think the less regulated dating interactions and the more comfortable the society at large is with bodies and physicality (enter dreaded puritanical history) the better. I think the more socially-regulated and metricalized and fearful of offense and morally and legally inhibited people are in sexually-related interactions, the worse the likely outcomes. If you throw all this grammar between us, between every touch, and interpret in a myriad ways the most seemingly animalistic of connections, you're well...screwed. I mean the more we overthink the more bodily warmth and flow gets sectioned off into over-regulated little boxes. Soon, we could draw a flow chart of the date, and that would seem more sexy than the date itself. Or here's a better idea for regulation: write me sonnets, dream your Petrarch dreams, the metricality of romance is artistic-encouraging of creativity, and with that we have passion and a striving instead of constriction and fear.

Favorite defense mechanism in this life: Intellectualization

Super weapon of choice: charm, intelligence, and fairy tales

And then, the smart little lady lived happily ever after, pursuing thoughts,

those balloons that flow ever upward and offer their stringy little hands

up, up.

it all comes down to escapism

I realized that today...I didn't want my hot little date to be over because a date, and another person, particularly one that has nothing to do with my academic/professional world of warfare, can be such an amazing escape. Another world that has nothing to do with this one. This one which is overwhelming (mentally fulfilling yes,) but draining, and Protestant Ethic crazy...except alas ironically the man himself is a monk of sorts too and ran off to pay his ever-churning dues to the Faustian machine.

Another world I say:

Vacation = another world, but this concept has been sitting officiously in my thoughts ever since Liah Greenfeld's amazing Modernity seminar years ago...one of the students did her paper on the modern concept of vacation, the bourgeois routinization of reality avoidance.... You change location and activities for a specified period of time, so this is the most obvious as escape yes? You vacate your yearly routine, and this is the acceptable way to "stop the clock" and open the wallet or whatever. Time and space are altered, the wristwatch removed, the tummy filled, the skin tanned, the brain emptied like some kind of overfull receptacle of shit. Clean your hard drives ladies and gentlemen.

My point? You probably guessed it, everything except the dreaded (whatever your most constant existence happens to be,) is escape. Everything. This blog, almost everything about the oh-so-efficient but reality-consuming internet, movies, novels, coffee time, tea time, lunch time, booze time, drug-of-choice time, conversation of almost any kind unrelated to "it"...it just depends on how badly you wish to escape from "it" and how much of "it" you do every day. In the neuron-killing dead end jobs of my past, I remember bathroom breaks being escape too. I remember going to the bathroom and hearing my boyfriend's mocking voice in my head "at least they pay us to take a shit, hahaha." - and this was the sad solace of office work for me. The smugness of being paid to take a shit. Any wonder I'm in a monastic, bombastic, soultastic, starvation-causing, existential crisis-inducing, nerve-wracking, brain blowing, PhD program now?

Now too, with the overwhelm that comes with this year, everything that isn't my work is escape...people and places and movies that conjure other worlds all provide pleasures guilty and wonderful. At least the work is delicious if totally terrifying because as you can see I'm a rambler. My ideas coagulate and clot. I have to make sense of them and stick them into academicese. Easier to just be a poet? Probably. Not that poetry is easy, not the kind that gets chopped up on market blocks to fit parameters of editors who are looking for the latest fetishistically styled lines. Little meat parcels, little sushi lines that used to make sense as perfectly good verbalized soul

food.