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.