This imperfect thing we love so much.

About a week, A WEEK, until I fly off to Brazil. It's sinking in and is a little terrifying. I'm terribly excited and as usual I'm finishing up a paper, getting last minute things together, and have not started packing. I lived in denial for 2 days this weekend during which I mainly slept and watched weepy lovesick episodes of Grey's Anatomy. I am a master hibernator, especially when there's work to be done. Ok, I also managed to go on a date on which I had fun stepping outside of myself and pretending to be some random hot woman in a pretty dress on a date, (dates are good for that because the role-playing is such a game), cleaned out my fridge, and had my first yoga class in years. Now I'm drinking some kind of coffee called "European" that consists of egg white and half-and-half and vanilla and attempting to plan a passable paper on the history of childhood in Brazil. (The coffee in my favorite local Chicago cafe is always really funny tasting but I'm mainly here for the calm, studious atmosphere and the soothing young Russian couple who runs it anyway...the caffeine boost can come in odd flavors and I don't mind too much.) Hardly easy considering kids aren't exactly anyone's focus most of the time historically unless considered a problem. My idea wasn't to write about pedophiles or child abandonment...though there it is, entire chapters dedicated to poverty and perversion.

I did however manage to find a subletter within about a day of advertising my place. It is a lovely apartment and made me feel so good to find a thrilled tenant in oh, about 5 seconds.

I also have a sperm donor in case I decide to have a child on my own. I like him a lot, I may be in love with him in a way, whatever that everlastingly loaded term means. God knows I freak out enough for my potential sperm donor and I and our beautiful unborn multi-ethnic babies combined. No committed partner as of yet, but hey Cinderella did you know that modern life would be so darn difficult to navigate for women with standards and brains?

The shoe might fit but we're a little past comparing men to shoes aren't we? Unless you're looking for a two-dimensional life, and some people do of course, a consumer metaphor is hardly appropriate. Fuck the fairy shoe and it's fatalistic implications. Of course, I'm a terrible shoe shopper though when I do find shoes I like they tend to be awesome shoes complimented by strangers so maybe it's not the worst metaphor in the world. But it's not just about taste. It's not just about a Bourdieun understanding of choice and class. There is something else some of us seek, something like the soul that cannot be pinpointed in music and food and the societal niche occupied by the Prince or the Pauper (whoever you happen to fall for.) There's something deep and terribly poetic and painful and inappropriate at the bottom of it all. Your mother probably wouldn't approve of it because it isn't right. It's uncomfortable. The connection with those we have that funny feeling for is somewhere in the neighborhood of the Id and some fairy space called Romance Fantasy and this fairy space is only somewhat rooted in practical teachings and tangible truths. We try not to Peter Pan into the great wide unknown but we do anyway, we have a mutual drugging experience that feeds into the fairy space. We float off. Things don't make sense. We try to explain it to our friends but we can't. We're self-fulfilling madmen.

On that note I'm going back to work, good evening fellow fruit loops. 

chocolate pie ...and this title is complete

I'm wearing a goofy shirt that reads "I <3 Capoeira". It's for a 7-8 year old boy and so it's a tiny bit tight around the sleeves. It reminds me of how when I was a teenager it was popular to wear itsy bitsy shirts and show off your midriff. I have backpedaled into my teenage self and my midriff is slightly on display in this way too small thing I'm not sure why I bought it (except that the mestre with the Arnold Shwarzenegger accent who sold it to me has a charm about him, so if he says it's woman's shirt maybe I'll believe it for a little while,) but maybe I should cut the sleeves off....my little sisters wouldn't approve. It's a high school thing, it's a petty thing, it's a family thing, how to display myself, it's a fashion thing, it's a bullshit, bullshit thing. They always judged me so harshly, my mom and sisters, ridiculing me like a gang of popular bossy girls on the playground. I always succumbed, if not in action, then in hurt feelings. Very hurt feelings and a very sore ego.

I had my first Batizado this past weekend. Mestres and students flew into Chicago from all over the country and world to teach workshops and to graduate students in an order of dancefightloving....I somehow passed, graduated into a level. A white-yellow cord signifying that I have some level of skill: totally unexpected.

I'm in from the "beach," the Lake Michigan Shore...this whole Chicago summer thing is a new and interesting experience for me. It's the first time I've experienced it at all...I'm meeting a lot of nice, fun people in this warm version of Chicago. Well I can befriend for a little while before I re-Brazil my life. Chicago will never be Brazilian or tropical or warm enough anyway. A part of my heart has given up on it even as I discover lovely new nooks and crannies and finally meet the kind of folks I could enjoy myself with.

Things, in some way only have substance if you believe in their thingy-ness. If you believe in them. And I make-believe my own things all the time and that's a good escape from the confines of a mostly senseless world. The only parts that matter are the warm ones. Not their substance but their temperature. Touch my forehead. 

back to the people planet

As if this reconnecting with what I care about meant coming back to Earth. Which it does. As if the sun warming my heart and hopes meant that I could wish and feel empowered on a daily basis about the things that push me out of bed in the morning, that stimulate me into engaging with the world.

When a man in a light pink shirt sat down across from me a minute ago and started staring as if I'm his lunchtime entertainment, I thought, maybe this is my cue to go?
This feels like a weird, unfathomable day/week/something. Span of time punctuated by the kind of heat that usually stays behind shower curtains in Chicago.

I feel, slightly, like I'm bouncing around in one of those pinball machines, back and forth in a frenzy to win points and make contact with momentary discotheques. Ok, it's definitely time to change locations, bump into other silly frenzied points of contact.

unprecedented chill

The more I remember my melancholy imaginings of what this Chicago winter would be like, the sillier it seems. Ok, so I imagined it would be this poetic misery, me sitting alone in a cozy apartment, huddled over a laptop with a glass of wine with enough memories to pretend to be an old geezer writing her memoirs.

Except the problem is this: to get to the poetic, the sweet nostalgic poetic, you have to get past the misery. And the misery my friends, the frigidity that covers the Chicago streets and penetrates the soul, is awfully hard to get past. You have to cross a frozen Styx to get to a place where you can have enough hope to express yourself.

Misery. Misery. Misery. 

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----

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.