Margo, darling

Ten Weeks

2008-10-03T14:08:00.002-05:00

Hello lovelies,
I don't have time for a real post, because we're nearing the end of Maude's mid-morning nap, so I've got to be brief. Life with a newborn/infant is both really hard and really boring. It's really hard because it's a relentless cycle: feed, change, comfort, rock to sleep, work on tenure dossier like a madwoman in hour increments while she sleeps, feed, change, comfort . . . And it's really boring because she's only awake and cheerful briefly, so it's like a long hike with no payoff at the top because you only get to barely glimpse the view before you have to start back down the mountain, which you then climb again the next day. Does that make sense? But I hear that three months is a magical time and that she'll become more and more of a little person and less of a suffering little creature. Which is not to say that I don't adore her, because I do--she's a peppery little elven thing.

What I'm really here for is to post some pictures.

Here she is as an intense two week old:

Smiling big at exactly one month:

Grinning at exactly one month:

(I love this one!)

Staring at the love of her life, her Tiny Love mobile:

Rocking what is my very favorite Maude outfit right now:

Here's what she looks like when we start out on our walks:

This is what we look like three minutes later, after she starts screaming, because she hates her stroller and prefers to be worn in a sling (better work out for me, as a bonus):

Sleeping. (When she wears her sleep sack she looks like a civilian extra on Star Trek. You know how they always wear romper-type outfits?):

Goofing off with Sfrajett:

And finally, what she looked like last week. Happy, chubby, sweet little girl:
(photobucket is being stupid, and not letting me paste this in this smaller and turned around. By the time you see it, maybe the changes will be in effect.)

As promised

2008-08-04T11:01:00.003-05:00

If you're not already a reader, my GF, Sfrajett, has a thoughtful, detailed account of the birth. I love her writing and am so happy to have her account on hand, since all I really remember is the darkness of the room, the interminable ticking of the clock, and how sick I was of Brothers and Sisters after I had finished an entire dvd's worth of shows. Stupid pretty people.

Also, my link to Luches didn't work in the last post. Try this.

Here's a little bit o' Maude:

And then there's Maude

2008-07-31T08:31:00.003-05:00

(I'm sorry; I couldn't resist)

(Sfrajett has all the pictures on her computer; I just have this one from my phone. What you can't see is all her dark, dark hair. More soon.)

So that was much harder than I expected . . .

Birth story in a sec, but first, much thanks to my friend Luches for updating the blog while Sfrajett and I were in the hospital.

We just brought our precious little firecracker home from the hospital yesterday, after 96 long, long hours in the postpartum ward, surrounded by well-meaning, but bossy, nurses, each of which knew exactly how to turn little Miss Maude into the latched on baby of my dreams. Funny how forcing a screaming baby's head onto your nipple doesn't make for a calm, productive nursing experience. But more on that in another post. So we were there for four days post-delivery because, after having maybe the easiest pregnancy ever, I had:

24 hours of labor,
2 1/2 hours of (hard!) pushing (Sfrajett's theory is that our ob/gyn played sports at some point, and approaches the delivery room with the affect of the coach. Me, I'm a pleaser, so I do well with coaching, and when I doctor I already hugely admire encourages me to push harder than anyone's ever pushed before, all I want to do is please her. So really, please believe me when I say I was in the last six miles of the marathon for these entire 2 1/2 hours)
an emergency c-section.

Turns out little Miss Maude was way too big for me. Well, really, it was her gigantic 14 inch head that was too big. After all that pushing--I heard the doctor telling the nurse they were "productive" pushes--baby's head still wasn't quite in the birth canal, only the elongated cone my productive pushes had been making out of the back of her head. The only way I was going to deliver her vaginally was via forceps and I knew that that would mean a lot more tearing, possibly a broken collar bone for baby, maybe a broken tailbone for me--a lot of distress for both of us. So the decision to go with the c-section was an easy one. Twenty minutes later I celebrated my baby's birth by throwing up some vile, bubbling green anti-acid medicine they'd made me gulp down on the way to surgery. As the doctor pulled baby's gigantic self out of little me I could hear her saying something like "wow, that was the right decision."

Sfrajett will write a more thoughtful post about the birth experience, if she ever puts the baby down, because she experienced it much more than I did. I just wanted to check in and thank you all for your beautiful messages of congratulations, and let you know that we're all doing fine here. I'm just glad it's over, glad I have Maude safely here in my arms, glad I have a partner who's a fiercely protective, tender, passionately devoted parent, who can make me laugh in the middle of a sleepless night with her sweet and goofy lullabies, and whose arms never seem to get tired.

For There She Was: Mrs. Dalloway is Here

2008-07-29T04:18:00.005-05:00

Announcing Maude Elizabeth.
July 26th, 8 lbs., 9 oz. 21 inches.
Birth story coming soon.

Sun in Leo

2008-07-23T14:10:00.003-05:00

Edited to change title from Moon in Leo to Sun in Leo. Blame Joni Mitchell. The entire month of July I had the opening lines to "Little Green" in my head: "Born with the moon in Cancer . . ."

You didn't think I could get bigger, did you? This is me last week. I'm now 39 weeks, two days, or six days from my due date. Based on my doctor's appointment yesterday, where I was told that things have progressed very nicely in the past week, and based on signals my body is giving me, I feel like this could happen really soon. But what do I know? It could be another week.

The thing is, I've decided I don't know how to wrap my mind around the idea that I'm going to have a baby. I really like my life. Sfrajett and I have a really cute apartment, we have lots of friends, we read a lot, we adore each other. Everything is peaceful and nice and perfect.

What are you supposed to do with your head when you know that any day now your life will change forever? But since it hasn't changed, and you can't understand that change unless you've experienced that change, and I'm still me, a totally happy, healthy, childless adult, only without the ability to bend at the waist, what do I do with today? I know, enjoy the quiet, sleep as much as I can, get last minute errands done. Okay: check, check, check. But apparently my list also contains: piss off friends for no very good reason, cry for no very good reason, pace the house, be scared shitless about the coming changes, read The Woman in White (why did it take me so long to get to this book?). Cry some more.

What needs to be done

2008-07-16T15:14:00.007-05:00

As of my 38 week appointment on Monday, baby is super comfy and not interested in coming two blessed weeks early. Oh well. I walked, I drank red rasberry leaf tea, I bounced on my exercise ball, I ate spicy food, and yes, I had lots of orgasms. Nothing. Sorry What Now and Perverse Adult, I think Adjunct Whore wins: this baby wants to be a Leo, not a Cancer.

Sitting on my desk is a dissertation prospectus from a grad student at a distant school who is writing on my author. I'm excited she's writing about my person, and I have stuff to say about her proposal, but I just keep putting off writing her. I've had her prospectus for way. too. long. Now, however, I think the universe is punishing me for not being more prompt. This baby won't come until I write up my thoughts about her project. She also won't come until I fold up the newly washed sheets from the house guests we had last week, but I don't want to do that either.

What I want to do:

Sleep
Eat soft serve ice cream (what I really want is frozen custard, but there's none in Chicago, as far as I can tell.)
watch "Brothers and Sisters," which I netfl.ixed (two episodes in, I'm reasonably compelled. enough to keep watching)
Swim in a swimming pool. I want this so badly I could die. But there's no pool, except at the school gym and that's for working out. I want to loll around in the sun and feel the cool water supporting my seriously unbelievably big belly. So. Much. Bigger. than in the picture I last posted. Why do I live in the Midwest where people don't have pools?
Be in Jo(e)'s blog. She always posts beautiful pictures, but this week she's killing me. It's so peaceful and cool and calm in her blog. I wish I could do what Gumby does with books and walk right into her world. Usually we'd be in New Hampshire right now, kayaking on Squam Lake, where Sfrajett grew up. We're both filled with longing for the lake. I tried to find a picture to show you, but they all made it seem too big and impersonal, and in my head it's quiet and smooth and peaceful. It's what I focus on when I'm practicing my Lamaze breathing. Lake Michigan, while lovely and festive, just isn't the same.

What I will do:

get a pedicure. (Yeah, I'm charging it, because I accidentally ran my bank account down and don't get paid until Friday. You wanna make something of it?)
Not write that doctoral student back.
Not fold the sheets.

July

2008-07-03T12:33:00.003-05:00

So this is it, folks. This is the month that baby is supposed to be born. At my 36 week check up on Monday the doctor said she was taking the word premature off the table and that when the baby was ready to come, she was comfortable having her come. GF and I spent the rest of the afternoon plotting how to get labor started--walking, drinking rasberry leaf tea, sitting on the exercise ball (which is suddenly the birth ball, according to all the childbirth books we're reading. Whatever. It's not like it was getting a lot of use as an exercise ball, that's for sure), which is supposed to open up my pelvis and help the baby drop, etc.

Then that night we looked at each other and said WHOA!!!! Why do we want this baby to come a month early? I mean, I'm tired of being pregnant, and my stomach, which was flawless up until a few weeks ago is suddenly covered in angry stretch marks and itches like crazy, and I'm tired of sleeping on my side and not being able to tie my shoes or rub lotion on my legs. But as One of His Moms put it, there are many, many reasons to not wish this baby out early, and to enjoy the quiet and peace of these last few weeks.

But here's the thing: my beloved ob/gyn is going to be out of town precisely during the end of my 38th/the beginning of my 39th week, which is also a full moon, which is when all. the. babies. are. born. DUH!!!!!!! So I either need to get her out of here early, or try to keep her in late.

So I'm walking, and drinking my rasberry leaf tea (which I really like, so no sacrifice there), and trying to keep the house clean, and buying last minute things for baby, (like that thing that pulls snot out of their noses) but I'm also finishing up my book: methodically tightening up chapters, rewriting intros and conclusions, deleting overly-emphatic italics, and adding in juicy bits (read incredibly catty, bitchy excerpts from letters--my research subject was a TERROR) from my archival research last summer. Today I'm going to try to fold in an amazing, anonymous tell-all from one of my person's personal secretaries. It makes Madonna look like a fun person to work for.

You want to know a secret? The real highlight of my day is waiting for UPS to deliver our hers and slightly-more-masculine hers diaper bags. Seriously. I can't wait. Mine is made from 10 recycled water bottles, so I'm feeling pretty smug about it. Hers has flames on it.

The biggest news of today is that we're finally sending in our second parent adoption papers. Unlike many other states, Illinois doesn't require me to surrender my parental rights so that my partner can adopt. They handle it like a step-parent adoption. And as of two years ago, they got rid of the mandatory (and expensive) series of home visits from a social worker. We had to wait, first, until we had enough money to cover the lawyer's check, and then for me to dig up my DIVORCE papers (when will my former life as a married Mormon housewife stop haunting me?), but I've got 'em, and we've got the check, and so that puppy goes in the mail today.

Here's a picture of me two weeks ago, before the attack of the stretch marks. Some of the many, wonderful lesbian mothers-to-be that I read have been dutifully posting belly shots, but I've been too lazy. So here goes:

Margo at 34 weeks preg.

hello, hello

2008-06-19T10:13:00.003-05:00

Hello, Lovelies.

I'm still here. Still pregnant. Still feeling much, much better than a 34 week pregnant woman has any right to feel. The baby is technically due in six weeks, but once I hit 37 weeks she's considered full term and could come at any time. While I really have my heart set on a Leo, I'm starting to seriously reconsider the merits of Cancers.

My stomach is HUGE, but baby is sticking straight out from my body, so from the back you can't tell I'm pregnant. (Except for the enormous, pendulous, size G breasts which are visible from outer space. If it wasn't for them, I swear I'd be the cutest pregnant person ever.) She's running out of room in here, so instead of kicks I get lots of squirmy squirms. She has the hiccups right now, which is fine by me, because it means she's practicing breathing and strengthening her lungs.

I have one more school obligation, a lunch today to celebrate the end of my year-long fellowship (sniff) and then I am free, free, free. Grades are turned in and I am done with teaching until January! Now all I have to do is finish up my book, write my personal statement for tenure, and finalize my tenure dossier. And start researching a totally peachy article my friend BW assigned me that's due in early fall. (Seriously, it's going to be yummy.) And I have a whole 3 to 6 weeks to do it. I'm being sarcastic, because really, that's a lot, especially when sitting at the computer makes my back ache and I can't really get as close to the keyboard as I'd like because of my belly, but over all I feel calm about it all. And happy. And excited.

To all of my bloggy friends, I am sorry I don't update this much, but know that I follow your blogs religiously, and feel so happy to know how you are and what is going on in your lives. Peace.

Here's a bonus sneak preview of baby:

six word memoir

2008-03-27T17:07:00.002-05:00

Adjunct Whore tagged me for this meme last Friday.
Instructions:

1. Write your own six word memoir

2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like

3. Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere

4 Tag five more blogs with links

5. And don’t forget to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!

(Which AW totally didn't do, but that's okay because I subscribe to her on bloglines and never miss a post. Also, I'm not going to tag anyone, because almost everyone has done this except Sfrajett, and I can tag her by walking across the room, so I'm hardly one to talk.)

I immediately knew what I wanted to write:

It's still snowing, and nothing fits.

Because it was snowing last Friday. On March 21st. Snowing so hard our power went out, just as Sfrajett was putting together our new dining room table. (It's getting hard to eat hunched over our old "dining room table," aka the coffee table in front of the television.) At first this seemed kind of fun--new furniture, and a whole day to spend together without the guilt of needing to work because, no electricity equals no computers equals, I couldn't sit down and work on the stupid, worthless, lame book on once beloved, forgotten author who I am wholly sick of writing about/hawking/being invested in.

(Pause for a quick rant: that's basically how my publisher described it when she turned my project down, only her words were "I just don't think we can pull this one off." Even though the two books I've published with her on my forgotten author have, in fact, done well, and got me a great job, and get me recognized at my sub-specialty conference by the very authors who inspired me to do this work in the first place.

Oh well, as my co-editor put it, this publisher seduced and abandoned us and our forgotten subject even as the ink dried on our contracts, so move on, move on. But still, it smarts! Believing in this author is like being Jimmy Stewart in Harvey. I swear, she's right there! I can see her!)

But back to that snowy day in March. Our fantasy of staying in and being cozy and warm in our darkening apartment was ruined by our having opera tickets that night. And not just any opera, the last opera in our series and a Tchaikovsky at that. We'd been excited about this for months. But going out in the snow? To the opera? The problem is that even though we have nose bleed seats up with all the other academics, and aren't expected to do super fancy opera attire, I don't feel comfortable wearing jeans to the opera, and the right now the only warm pants that fit me are my Secret Fit Belly jeans (yeah, that would be jeans with panty hose sewn on the top. Shhhh. It's a super secret!) Because back half a lifetime ago when I started showing it was also winter, and I bought a few pairs of cords with a demi-panel, thinking they'd get me through the winter, if not the entire pregnancy. But it's still winter! And even though they fit my butt and my legs (which is to say, this is not my fault) the demi panel doesn't fit around my no-longer demi belly, and if you let it slide under your belly, like the impossibly cheerful model, it squishes your bladder and makes you sad.

So I had a melt down, because this winter has been too long, and I can't bear the snow, and I don't want to buy more maternity pants, and nothing fits. End of story: I pulled a pair of black pants, their cuffs whitened by salt from the roads because I also don't want to pay to get maternity pants hemmed, from the dry cleaning bag, pulled on a couple of layers of t-shirts and sweaters, and we went, driving through McDonalds on the way, which tasted really, really perfect.

And since it's snowing again today, a week later, and still, nothing fits (though I have nowhere to be, so it doesn't matter) I figured this would be the perfect time for my six word memoir.

Halfway There

2008-03-11T18:36:00.003-05:00

Holy hell, how did it get to be March already? February was one long, dark miserable snow storm, with layers of ice freezing over layers of ice on our narrow street. Thank God for In Treatment, (anyone else feeling kind of crushed out on Gabriel Byrne?) or I never would have made it through the winter. You know spring is almost here in my ugly little stretch of Chicago when the ice has thawed enough that the inexplicable chunks of long, curly, reddish brown hair (which I think, hope, pray came from a wig), which were laying in the street in front of my building before the snow fell, begin to reappear. It's almost as moving as that first crocus.

But this week the temperatures are finally crawling back into the forties and with daylight savings making the days longer, everything is seeming much better. I'm officially halfway through my pregnancy this week (20 weeks). Yesterday we had our anatomy scan, a super thorough, 45 minute ultra-sound at the hospital, where they check to make sure the baby has a spine and ribs and a four-chambered heart and a liver and kidneys and bowels, etc. People like to tell you horror stories when you're pregnant, especially when you're of Advanced Maternal Age, and we've heard some doozies, so we went into this feeling mostly like everything was okay, but looking forward to reassurances.

And it's all good, folks. Mrs. Dalloway, who was really more of a Mrs. Joe yesterday, kicked and squirmed like crazy the entire time (guess I shouldn't have pounded that orange juice in the waiting room), so much so that the doctor (a neo-natal specialist, not my regular ob) got a little irritated, and was so rough with the ultra-sound thing when he was trying to get a good picture of the brain that I left with my stomach feeling bruised all over. I felt like apologizing, thinking, I can't believe my child is already misbehaving in public, but I wasn't really sorry, because I didn't like him. When he walked in the room he was looking at my chart with confusion and said something like, "Well, you're not Mrs. Shall I call you Miss, or Ms.?" I said, "You can call me doctor." Then he looked at GF and said, "And are you a friend, or a special friend?" with a sugary intonation on special. Seriously. I hated having his disgusting, hairy arm all over my bare, lubed-up stomach while he moved the ultra-sound around. Happily the first half-hour was with a dykey technician who was chatty and kind and who worked diligently to get the hyper-active baby into a position where we could see the sex, which was the real excitement of the day.

She found it, and I know I shouldn't care, and I would have reported this news with joy and excitement no matter which sex the baby is, but I must confess to being giddily happy to say that Mrs. Dalloway is a

drum-roll . . . . . .

GIRL!!!!!!!!!

The letter R is purple

2008-01-18T16:46:00.001-06:00

Did you see this article on synethesia in Salon this week? In it Alison Buckholtz describes her lifelong association of numbers and letters to colors. In her mind

numbers have always had their own color -- not just the number itself (though that, too), but the very character of the number, its presence in the world, is a color. An obvious, intrinsic color. Five, for example, is orange. Two is yellow. Seven is green. It is as natural and unchangeable as the color of someone's skin.

I have this! I've always experienced my numbers, many letters, and a few key words as colors, intrinsically, irrevocably, but before now I'd never heard of anyone else who experiences them this way. Aside from disagreeing with her specific number/color linkages, more on that in a minute, this article comforted me, and made me feel a little melancholy. Like Buckholtz, I've thought of my number/color thing as a weird thing about me, something to spin into a self-deprecating dinner-table anecdote, not something to cherish, even nurture. And while I've used the word synesthesia to describe my experience, I didn't know that's actually what I have. I always thought it suggested a cognitive disorder, or a really mild case of a.sperger syndrome.

Here's her technical explanation for it:

Synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon in which activation of one sensory processing system (e.g., numbers or written language) leads to the automatic engagement of a second, distinct sensory processing system (e.g., color) to create a "crossed" sensory perception. For example, as in my case, numbers appear to have their own colors. Or, in other forms of synesthesia, sensory processing is "crossed" with emotion processing, imbuing letters, words, days of the week or months with their own personalities.

According to the article women and left-handers are more likely to experience it. I am both. My form of synesthesia involves color and the processing of emotions, particularly with numbers. The numbers 1-5 are girls; 6-9 are boys. 1 (yellow) and 2 (orange) are toddlers. Everyone likes them because they are cute and don't ask for much. 3 (purple) is saucy, mostly because she doesn't know enough about the world yet to be shy and retiring like 4 (pink) who embodies every negative stereotype of extreme femininity--she is passive and so, so pink. 5 (red) is a tomboy who can take care of herself. She likes to hang out with her boy cousin 6 (blue). When they have sleepovers they become 11 (looks like two sleeping bags side by side). 7 (green) is lucky (kind of obvious, I know), but 8 (light baby blue) is a horror, the most hated and detested of all the numbers. He embodies every negative stereotype of normative masculinity, only his is a failed masculinity: he is a soft, squishy, round bully who takes sweet little four and swallows her up, TWICE! 9 (deep purple/black, because he has three inside him three times, something which somehow didn't bother me the way the 4/8 debacle did) is the oldest cousin. He doesn't have to try to be cool: he is cool, which makes him a good, non-threatening kind of guy who actually has some power.

Synethesia is neurological, but as the drama of my numbers shows, it reflects how biological and environmental influences are impossible to untangle (I'm not saying that quite how I want to, but I want to publish this and don't want to wait until I can say this more cogently.) Maybe this is what I mean: my way of seeing numbers as colors might be neurological, but how I see colors reflects my own nascent perceptions of the world, especially my understanding of gender roles and intra-gender dynamics. Certainly it reflects an early understanding of the connection between male brutality and failed masculinity. My numbers are cousins because I was raised in close contact with my 13 cousins, who formed my earliest social group, my positioning among them my earliest self-identification. I was the eleventh of the fourteen grandchildren and though I felt safe with my cousins, I always understood that, as one of the youngest, my place was to watch and learn, not to call attention to myself. I think I related most to 2, aspired to be 5, feared I was 4.

Sometimes my synesthesia causes me to mix up letters/colors/numbers. I still stumble over 3/R/purple and 4/Y/pink, as those pairing are interchangeable in my head. So I'll write an R when I mean to write 3, for example.

My months have colors too, but I suspect that is because of elementary school bulletin boards more than anything--February is pink, March is green, September is burnt orange. But sometimes the logic of my number narrative creeps in: January is yellow I think because it's the first month (1 is yellow, remember?), which means June is yellow, too, because it starts with J. Or maybe it's because June is the daisy month, and daisies are yellow.

happy new year

2007-12-31T20:07:00.000-06:00

This is just a quick post, because I'm on my way to what promises to be a pleasantly mellow New Years party, but when I saw What Now at the MLA blogger meet-up (Thanks for organizing, Dr. Crazy!) she said it wasn't very clear whether or not I was still pregnant, since I've discussed it primarily in terms of numbers that don't make much sense to people not in the ttc whirl. Oops. Sorry about that.

Yes, as far as I know, I am still pregnant. Since I can't feel anything (other than a little nauseated, incredibly tired and hungry all the time, and like my breasts have been replaced by enormous, pulsing, hot sandbags that hurt from their deepest core.) I have to trust the doctor and ultra-sound technicians on this. I'm about nine weeks along. I've had three ultra-sounds, all of which showed a strong, steady heartbeat and an embryo increasing in size just the way it should.( Actually, now that I'm past eight weeks I get to call it a fetus. Hooray! Recently, though, I keep wanting to call it Simon and Schuster. My friend says that's because carrying it makes me incorporated.)

I graduated from the fertility clinic (which I loved. Any readers in the Chicago area who want to know about it, please drop me a line. They were amazing.) and the day after Christmas GF and I met my dyke ob/gyn. She's delivered two of my favorite colleagues' babies and is straight forward and down to earth, which is exactly what I hoped for. While she didn't do an ultra-sound she did an, uh, more hands on examination and said that I did indeed feel pregnant. (I think her words were, after I anxiously asked, "Oh, yeah, you're pregnant.") My next ultra-sound is in a week, when I'll be about eleven weeks along. Twelve weeks marks the end of the first trimester, when the chance of miscarrying goes down to 5%, but the doctor said if everything looks good next week I can feel pretty confident about this. In the mean time, gf and I are trying to be positive and trying to enjoy the experience of being pregnant, because right now, as far as we know, we are.

So that's my update. I have all sorts of end-of-year things I want to blog about, but I don't know when I'll blog next because I had some GREAT talks with acquiring editors at MLA and they made me want to do a few more revisions on my book proposal (seems less literary is a stronger sell. if that's true, my book is way more done than I had anticipated) and then I need to write the syllabus for that class I'm teaching, starting on, oh, let's see. . .

THURSDAY!!!!!

7 things

2007-12-02T21:36:00.001-06:00

I got tagged for the 7 things meme by adjunct whore. Now you might remember that only two or three entries ago I did a similar 6 things meme, which I mostly pawned off on my cat Manfred. Here goes, briefly though, because I really want to watch Amazing Race and see those awful blonde women who u-turned the already-losing team last week get their car rammed by a bus.

THE RULES:
1. Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 random and/or weird things about yourself.
3. Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
4. Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

1. I recently discovered, thanks to Dr. Crazy's work pulling together a blogger meet-up at MLA, that adjunct whore is a long lost friend of mine. Yay! Thanks, Crazy.

2. I hate watching movies. Hate it. It's like pulling teeth. I'd rather watch a tv show, where I can commit to the characters for a good, long time.

3. I loved Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins (and Hawaii) so much as a child, in part because of her beautiful up-swept hair-do, that I refused to watch The Sound of Music because I found her short hair unfeminine and offensive. I knew that character was no good. (yes, when I finally watched it, I liked it plenty.)

4. My sisters and I have matching names. They all begin with the same three letters and are seven letters long. We do not have middle names. When I was a kid, I thought parents who didn't match their children's names were either irresponsible, or didn't love their children very much.

5. I almost failed out of my first two years of college, even though 2/3rds of my classes were ballet classes, which I got A's in. I wasn't partying either. In fact,

6. I first drank alcohol at 26, but made up for lost time by quickly figuring out that bourbon was the only drink you ever really need.

7. I got the chicken pox at 23. The first spots appeared only hours after I took the GRE, which I like to think is why I did so poorly on the math section.

This meme is racing through the blogsphere, so there's really no one left to tag, although I'm sure we'd all love another post by Sfrajett, so I tag her. BTW, her last post, in which she offers her take on all the big changes in our lives is really, really gorgeous. Check it out. I know I'm biased, but isn't she a beautiful writer? And do you recognize the design on her pumpkin from this long-ago post of mine?

update: so far, so good

2007-11-26T16:00:00.001-06:00

My hcg more than quadrupled since last Wed. Today's number is 1810 @ 20dpo.

In other news, it's really, really cold here in Chicago. Those of you who will be here in a few weeks for MLA, I'm sorry. I hope to see you, though, and am excited that the party (so to speak) is here this year.

We spent our third Thanksgiving in a row at The Land, my friend Exuberant Boy's kind of vacation home in Michigan, where we cooked and ate and watched tv in front of the fire and ate and ate and cooked and read magazines. Sadly, my contribution to the film fest was way less successful than last year's Pippi Longstocking. This year I tried to introduce everyone to what I could have sworn was the scariest movie ever--one of those movies that always seems to be playing on rainy Saturdays when you're alone in the house as a tween--The Other. When the imdb key words are

it's hard to believe it wouldn't be a crowd pleaser, but the 1972 pacing was way too slow for everyone's amped-up 2007 tastes, and everyone figured out the plot twist ten minutes in. Even Uta Hagen couldn't save it. OH. Well. I'm not sorry I bought it. Now that I'm home it's all grading, all the time.

numbers and letters

2007-11-21T15:16:00.000-06:00

BFP @ 10dpo
HCG @ 13dpo: 96.9
HCG @ 15dpo: 218

Translation, for those not fluent in fertility game lingo: this cycle was successful, (!!!) and though it's still really, really early, things are progressing like they should. If my hcg numbers have quadrupled by my appointment on Monday, then we'll still be on track. And if everything stays on track, we'll have a Leo, or possibly a Cancer, if it's a couple of weeks early. I feel a little wary, because it's so early, but the numbers are a million times better than they were last time, so I'm cautiously optimistic and hoping everything will work out well.

tagged

2007-11-14T22:18:00.000-06:00

J. C-K of Our Incredible True Adventures, one of my new blogging friends--part of a bunch of lesbians ttc and blogging about it, tagged me for the Six Random Things meme.

here goes:
1. I don't like sweets, usually, except maybe a little ice cream or a cupcake every once in a while. What I can't get enough of is salt. Recently I've crossed over to the really, really dark side and let myself buy those awful Doritos combo bags with two flavors. I can't stop eating the buffalo wing/blue cheese chips. Repulsive, I know. I portion it out into a bowl, so that I'm not eating the whole bag in one sitting, but still, gross.

2. The only black shoes I have right now are boots and a pair of mules. This is a big problem. I need an in-between black shoe.

3. I am obsessed with trying to figure out how to break up with my current stylist so that I can go back to my old one. Seriously. I think of it about fifty times a day. This is me trying to go to sleep at night:

"I wonder if I'm pregnant."
"Gotta break up with her. My hair is so ugly."
"Did I pay my credit card bill?"
"How do I do it? Do I call her?"
"Was it wrong of me to tell my students how much I hate that one queer theorist?"
"What if I sent her a letter?"
"If I get tenure, are they going to make me be the chair? Can they make me?"
"Should I tell her to her face? do you make an appointment for that?"

I've been with the old one on and off for a decade and she does great, funky cuts at a very cool salon that I love going to, but every few years I go super short and she refuses to take me there and so I stray, and then I come back when I'm ready to grow it out and she makes the process fun and never ugly and it's no big deal. But this time I feel trapped by my super-sweet new stylist who I just don't believe is funky enough to help me grow my hair out, but whom I really enjoy knowing and chatting with. Normally I'd just walk away and not think about it, but she lives in my general neighborhood, which is a small town in a big city. True, I've never, ever seen her outside of the salon before, but I've convinced myself that I will a couple of months from now, and I'll have to explain to her why I never came back. This is a super local lesbian hair salon, and it's infamous for being ridiculously possessive about it's clients. (Mer, you know the I'm talking about, right?)

Okay. I'm out. I can't think of anything else to say about myself that isn't self-deprecating, like how none of my clothes are cute and how I wish I knew what color my hair is. I was going to link to amazing posts I've written in the past that highlight random things about me, but instead I'll finish with three random things about my cat Manfred, who I hate tonight. Maybe blogging about him will make me like him again.

4. He likes baked goods. Our next door neighbor is incredibly sweet and often gives us homemade pie or brownies or banana nut bread. Unless these are in the fridge, Manfred finds them and eats them, even if it means tearing through tin foil to get to them. Tonight I hate Manfred because he knocked a box containing two beautiful cupcakes off the counter and did his best to eat them. I bought the stupid things on my way home from work tonight from a sweet little cupcake boutique in the silly boutique-y neighborhood where I teach to cheer myself up, because I had had really, really bad day. I rescued one of the cupcakes. Sure, I lost the frosting, but I would have scraped most of it off anyway, and the part in the paper was still good. I would have eaten it for breakfast tomorrow, but before I could finish cleaning up the frosting mess from the floor that stupid cat had it down on the ground and had pawed through it. I hope he feels miserable later, but not miserable enough to throw up.

5. We got him at the Shell Station off of Volmer Road on I-57, between Chicago and Kankakee. Not because we were there getting gas and happened upon someone giving away cats, but because that's where the crazy lady we bought him from (I know. That's what I get for buying a cat) wanted to meet us there. She never even got out of the car; she just thrust the little kitten out the window and said "he likes to suck ears. he's driving me crazy."

6. He likes to suck ~~ears~~ my left ear lobe. Only mine, only the left.

My academic bloggy friends have all done this meme, and my new ttc friends tagged each other when they tagged me, so I've got no one to tag.

civic duty avoided

2007-11-12T16:41:00.000-06:00

For the past several weeks I've had a summons for stand-by jury duty on my fridge door telling me to call today after 4:30 to see if I have to report tomorrow. I have a letter from my doctor getting me out of serving jury duty if called, but knowing that I'd still have to drag myself downtown tomorrow morning in order to show them the letter and get myself excused has weighed heavily on my mind. Disproportionately so. But I made the call and since my last name does not fall between the letter D as in Delta and K as in, who even knows--K words are hard, hence all the Scrabble points, and I wasn't really listening at that point--I'm off the hook for the time being.

life in two week increments

2007-11-09T18:17:00.000-06:00

It's only two weeks until the end of the quarter, and this one has both flown by and dragged.

The part that's flown: my work life. Since I have a fellowship this year, I'm only teaching one course this quarter and the next, so teaching hasn't been much on my radar. I'm teaching Feminist Theories and it's going reasonably okay. I think this is the first time I've actually scared students away--once on the first day of class, when I went through my usual spiel. I was sorry to see those students go, but it's a difficult, dense class, and not the appropriate follow up to intro. to women's studies. I hope they'll come back next year, or the next. But then I scared someone off more satisfactorily, when I finally called a bullshit non-major on his bullshit. You know when it's a tough class with tough readings and tense discussions and real, earnest trying on the part of most of the students and then some philosophy student who thinks he knows theory and thought he'd give feminist theory a "try," but never turns in any of the work, and doesn't do a very good job pretending that he's kept up with the readings nevertheless keeps trying to make it look like he's read by repeating what I've just said? Oh no. That wasn't gonna play this quarter, especially not when the other students are trying so hard and taking it so seriously.

Mostly I've been treating this like a research leave--I've only been going in to school on the day I teach and have spent the rest of the time working on my book. I completed a chapter that has dragged on and on and refused to end on a self-imposed deadline, and then a conference paper that forms a crucial part of another chapter I'm revising. (That conference, by the way, was fabulous! a fun, quick trip to Southern California where I got to hang out with friends I've made at this conference over the years, including the fabulous, fabulous Hilaire.) I'll do another round of revisions on The Chapter That Won't End next week, and then will turn to my MLA paper, which will also go into the revising chapter. After that I have two more chapters to revise and an intro., most of which is written. But the thing I can't bring myself to do, really, really can't bring myself to do, is send my proposal to editors. I have a proposal. I think it's a good one. It's snappy and sexy and explains why my book is important and why no other book in the world ever has, or ever can do what my book will do--promises I think the book keeps--but I find that I am loathe to send it out. What if they want my ms., which is still rough? What if they want the ms., see it in its roughness and say no, forever? And of course, what if they don't want my ms? That fear keeps me working and polishing and waiting.

And waiting is the real theme of my quarter. This is my third cycle of IUI and I'm in what ttc'rs (people trying to conceive) call the 2ww (two week wait). Again. It goes like this: you get inseminated as close to ovulation as possible (that's a whole drama right there. Well, two: first the drama of watching for ovulation, then the drama of inseminating, which can either be really pleasant if your nurse is nice, or really unpleasant if your nurse is a homophobe.)

And then you wait, for two weeks. If you get your period at the end of the two weeks, you are not pregnant. But of course you know this way before your period comes, because not only do you start spending all your money on home pregnancy tests starting around 9 days after insemination, you go back to the clinic for blood draws several times a week, first to measure your progesterone, E2, and lh levels, and finally, your hcg levels. (You start to realize that knowing all these numbers doesn't help you get pregnant, it just helps you measure how pregnant, or potentially pregnant you might be, day by day. It makes you crazy.) If you have an hcg level, you're pregnant. But maybe not pregnant enough. I got pregnant on the first try and was startled at my luck, because that's not how it works with me. Things usually take a long time coming to fruition. But there it was: six pregnancy tests saying that yes, I was pregnant. I wanted to be like many of the lesbian bloggers whose Trying to Conceive blogs I read religiously and post a picture of my digital test saying PREGNANT, but I hesitated. Which turned out to be good, because after a weekend of positive tests, my beta at the doctors showed that I was only a little bit pregnant and a day later, not at all. Technically that's called a chemical pregnancy. Not too big of a deal, theoretically, but certainly disappointing and, ultimately, expensive, because two weeks later you're back on the table getting filled with expensive vials of what you hope are super-potent sperm from a stranger.

During the 2ww you take progresterone (estrogen's fraternal twin hormone) to help your body be as ready for pregnancy as possible if 1) you conceived and if 2) your zygote feels like attaching. What makes this super fraught is that while you very well may not be pregnant, you start to feel pregnant--incredibly tired, craving salt, headachy, slightly nauseated, twingy and crampy in your uterus. You start googling things like "2ww symptoms" and then reading pages and pages of entries where women go through their cycles day by day and list exactly what they felt and when they felt it, hoping to find an experience that matches what you think you are feeling and confirms that you are still in the race.

You try to be a normal person and go on living your life, but there's lots of conflicting information: some sites say eat lots of pineapple to help the egg burst out of its corpus luteum; others say No! Pineapple!, claiming that it causes contractions. Some say no deli meats or soft cheeses (which kind of makes sense during pregnancy, but during the part where an egg that may or may not be fertilized floats around your tubes? Really?) Some say no cold drinks, only room temperature. Some say no coffee; some say lots of green tea--the kind with caffeine. Most say no alcohol. Some say have sex as you normally would; others warn to be careful of the uterine contractions that come with an orgasm. Some say the only exercise you can do during the 2ww is "mindful" walking, whatever that is; others say exercise as you normally would, only don't let your body get overheated, or let your heart get above 140. My logical mind says this is stupid: most straight people don't know they're in a 2ww and they run marathons and do cardio kick-boxing and eat whatever they want and have rough sex and their zygotes don't bounce out of their uteri, or shrivel up, or melt. But my illogical mind says, why take the risk? Think of the children.

So I walk, mindfully, around my neighborhood, and I lie around like a Victorian heroine and I take my progesterone, and then, because that first cycle failed because I didn't have a "strong enough" ovulation, my clomid, and the hormones make my body start to feel and, yes, LOOK, pregnant; my pants stop fitting and my button up shirts stop buttoning. I live in fear of someone noticing and asking if I'm pregnant. I crave Doritos. I drink fertility teas made from oatstraw and thistle and red clover and red raspberry leaf. I throw caution to the wind and eat pineapple and let myself have one cup of coffee, maybe two, as I read the paper in the morning.

the next chapter

2007-09-08T00:41:00.000-05:00

There's been a lot of drama in the neighborhood this week. Message boards immediately went up about the gym, with people commiserating about how much they'd miss it and the impact its closing would have on the neighborhood; then rumors started flying and the flame wars began. Some said the owner was going to be on Oprah. NPR interviewed a group of people threatening a class action suit. Then came word the owner had tried to kill himself and was hospitalized. The anger didn't die down. People said really, really ugly things.

Then, today, big signs appeared in our location and the Bucktown location (housed in what had been the Real World Chicago building, btw) saying the gym would reopen on Sunday under new management.

I'm happy and relieved and a little embarrassed at feeling so happy and relieved about a gym. It's been a weird to see both how neighborly and how Lord of the Flies-ish it got around here this week.

There goes the neighborhood

2007-09-05T23:37:00.000-05:00

I almost didn't lift weights yesterday. I had just spent 45 minutes on an elliptical--my first time since surgery--and was feeling pretty triumphant and already a little sore in the legs. Why not just come back tomorrow and lift with gf when she's in town? But I was there, and it wasn't crowded and my ipod still had a strong charge, since I had spent the whole time on the elliptical talking to one of my favorite colleagues/gym buddies who hadn't been around all summer. So I did my full weight routine and even threw in some extra shoulder exercises and went home feeling happy and tired.

I love working out at my gym. I love how it looks like a loft, with exposed brick walls and huge vaulting ceilings and tons of windows. I love that I know, or at least recognize, many of the people who work out there, because we've all been going there for years. I love how gay the gym is, and not in a cliquish, Chelsea kind of way: everyone is nice to everyone there. There's not pressure to be thin or pretty or hip. Purists, who remember the neighborhood before the gym arrived would scoff at this, but I think it's made the neighborhood a friendlier, more accessible place, an impossibly cheerful queer community. In a city where you mostly have to spend money to get community, usually at gay bars, this place offered an inclusive, social, healthy, relatively cheap alternative. Not that there aren't plenty of gay bars nearby where you can go for a post-workout drink, or five.

I have belonged to many gyms in my adult life, more than I can probably even remember, since I've moved around a lot and joined a gym every place I've lived. I've never felt so attached to a gym, felt such a sense of belonging and happiness to be there. Because, really, you're supposed to spend most of your time as a gym member feeling guilty about not going, right?

Today the gym was closed. Forever. A rambling note on the door, from the owner, claimed he had to close the gym (along with his two other locations) because of employee theft, which nobody believes. GF and I walked by on our way home from a bar tonight, where everyone had been talking about the sudden closing, and there were news vans lining the street and swarms of people milling about, reading the sign, and swapping stories about their run-ins with the owner, who has a reputation as kind of a, let's say, troubled soul. There was lots of talk of how he lost the gym up his nose.

GF and I are pretty bummed. We can join another gym--employees from rival gyms spent the day passing out fliers with offers of waived memberships for Gone Gym's members--but we don't want to. We realized, talking with people on the street tonight, how much we'd built our lives around the gym, and how it tied us to the neighborhood. You're supposed to flake on the gym; it's not supposed to flake on you. I'm glad I lifted yesterday.

10 IQ points stupider after yesterday

2007-09-04T12:10:00.000-05:00

Did anyone else find it almost impossible to turn off VH1's Rock of Love Marathon yesterday?

I just got back from visiting my family in California and my otherwise smart, feminist, kick-ass niece introduced me to this show. (I don't think her mom knows she watches it.) I could have finished a syllabus yesterday. I could have worked on my book. I could have bathed, or exercised, or cooked, or gone grocery shopping.

But I didn't. I sat on the couch and watched the trashiest women I've ever seen roll in mud, flip off of motocross cycles, dig through garbage cans, drink until they couldn't stand up, vomit through their fingers, strip off their clothes and fling themselves onto stripper poles, and tear each other's hair out over this guy:

Hope everyone's labor day was as fun and productive as mine.

wet, wetter, wettest

2007-08-20T10:32:00.000-05:00

It's been raining for three days now. Rainy and gray and just the slightest bit hot. Not hot enough to justify running the air conditioner, but hot, and still enough that the house feels and smells like the trunk of a car. An old car. How can it be so still when there's all kinds of rain-induced motion in the atmosphere?

baby steps

2007-08-14T23:01:00.000-05:00

On Monday my podiatrist said I could start wearing running shoes for a few hours every day, freeing me to drive and run errands and do cardio, so long as I don't put weight on my foot, which means, of course, all I can do is the recumbent bike, and even then it started to hurt after a half hour and by the time I got home it was swollen again and I had to ice it back to feeling okay. But it's a start, and it felt good to move quickly again, and what made it even better is that I got to the gym just as a repeat of Star Trek Voyager was starting. And what made it even better than that was that it was one of my favorite episodes ever, "Counterpoint." It's a perfectly generic Star Trek episode, one where the loner captain gets a (brief) fling with a sexy alien, but this one has a classical music soundtrack (because counterpoint, the musical concept, helps Janeway understand how to open a worm hole. Obvious, right?)

The episode ends with my favorite shot in the entire series, this wonderful moment where Janeway sits alone in her chair after she has been betrayed by, and then, in a counterpoint kind of move, herself betrays, her new and/or almost lover. (In the fanfic he's totally her lover. Mostly in a smdb kind of way. It's hot, if you like imaging Janeway having a three-way on the holodeck with the alien and a holodeck version of him, which maybe you don't.) Mahler's 1st has been playing throughout the scene as Janeway checkmates the alien man and sends him away. The music swells as the camera pulls back, and the look on Kate Mulgrew's face--somewhere between stoic and resigned--her body language as she sits, slightly slumped, in her captain's chair, perfectly conveys the total loneliness of her command and, to me, sums up the series' message for women: you can't have it all. You can get your four stars and be a Star Fleet captain, and you can command loyalty and respect, and you can be smart and sassy and you can even beat the Borg Queen, but though you might experience fleeting moments of love and passion, ultimately you will be alone.

It's a great moment, and there is a women's studies 101 connection between my attachment to this moment, which serves as such a powerful, compact meditation on the difficulties of desire and ambition and being a woman in our culture and what I'm going to say next, but I didn't start this post intending to write about Voyager. I started it to add another bullet point to the list from my last post, and to tell why I had foot surgery this summer in the first place.

vials of sperm purchased last week: 2

See, I had to have foot surgery this summer because I'm trying to get pregnant and I needed to stop procrastinating and fix my foot, which had been getting progressively painful over the past year, and which would have gotten impossibly painful if, for example, I suddenly put on a lot of weight.

Those of you who read my partner's blog already know that we've been planning this for a while now. I'm lucky enough to have really amazing health insurance that has a generous fertility plan and covers everything--the blood tests to check your hormone levels to see if you're perilously close to menopause, the ultra-sounds to see if you still have eggs and what your uterine lining looks like (weird to see that. really. weird.), the insemination(s), and, if necessary, ivf. The only thing it doesn't cover is the sperm. So I've spent the last six months researching fertility clinics and sperm banks, getting tested, weighing the pros and cons of using a known donor versus anonymous, taking prenatal vitamins, saving for sperm, and learning how to chart my cycles.

I've been hesitant to blog about this because I feel a little embarrassed about wanting a baby, and a lot superstitious about admitting it. I don't mean embarrassed because there's anything wrong with wanting and choosing to have a baby. I guess I mean embarrassed to admit that I have the audacity to want something so big. I don't know how much I'll blog about it while we're trying to get pregnant. If I don't say anything, don't ask: I'll let you know if it happens.

By the numbers

2007-08-07T15:43:00.000-05:00

episodes of Horatio Hornblower I've watched so far: 0
times I've eaten a tuna fish sandwich in the last two days: 4
On a scale of one to ten, how hard it is to wrap an ace bandage around your foot, by yourself, while standing on one leg: 8
The Cat Who . . . mysteries I've read in the last week: 3
pain pills I took yesterday: 0 (is it because I don't have pain? Not necessarily. It's because I'm almost out and I'm too scared to call my doctor and ask for more because I think she'll think I'm addicted, even though I've only been taking between 1 and 3 a day for the past week)
stitches I had taken out last Monday: 15
times I've left the house in the past three weeks (not counting trips to the doctor's office): 5
Of those times, how many involved bars? 4
hours wasted idly surfing the internets per day: 4
episodes of Big Valley I've watched in past week, after a lifetime of avoiding the show becuase I didn't know how oddly appealing Barbara Stanwyk's blue eye shadow could be: 2

"Live" Blogging from the Couch

2007-07-27T12:36:00.000-05:00

When I optimistically promised I'd be back blogging with a vengeance during my recuperation, what, exactly, did I think I'd blog about?

Gilmore Girls repeats at 10am and 4pm?
The joys of keeping my foot elevated around the clock?
What it feels like to go three days without washing my hair?
Getting a care package from my dad containing no less than 30 The Cat Who . . . mysteries. (Sweet that he thought I'd like them, since I have Siamese cats, but how long does he think I'm going to be laid up? And how many do I need to read to be polite? I read one the first day and it was actually a pretty fun read, though the protagonist/amateur detective is impossible to like.)
The virtues of frozen peas vs. frozen corn as non-melting ice packs?
Having to eat constantly, so that I don't get sick from my pain meds, and indulging in my worst, most shameful, least nutritious, most fattening, least in need of chewing, embarrassingly infantile food desires, including Chef Boyardee ravioli*, Swiss Miss chocolate pudding, and Uncrustables pb&j sandwiches (I always secretly coveted them when I saw my students eating them).
How excited I am for the next installment of Damages? How disappointing I, too, thought Saving Grace was?
How completely tired I am of reading articles about Mormonism/anything related to Mormons? (I gotta say, though, last month Bust had a pretty right-on article about Mormon feminists--I was ready to hate it and them, but it was solid and not afraid of explaining why this is such an impossible position to maintain for long.) But still, enough. Stop it. Doesn't anyone want to write about Jehovah's Witnesses?
How much I wish I was this blogger, spending the summer in Northern California with my beautiful son and fabulous artist spouse, going to glamorous art events and eating amazing, local food on a eucalyptus shaded patio? (I'm guessing about the trees, but it's a good California staple.)

Earlier this week I thought I was almost better and stopped taking my pain meds and started walking around a lot--thinking, "this wasn't such a big deal operation, and I don't want to get addicted, and motion is good so my joint doesn't freeze in place while it heals." But it turns out that that pounding, pulsing, feverish feeling that my foot is about to burst open IS pain! So I'm back on the couch, alternating reading The Cat Who . . . books with work-type books, listening to the radio for company**, and spending way too much time in my head.

* Did you know he was a real person?
**When did U2 start getting played on classic rock radio? Unforgettable Fire seems to be the album my station likes to pull from the most. I always loved its hot pink cover. I feel really old.

convalescing

2007-07-21T17:38:00.000-05:00

I think things went well with my surgery yesterday. The scariest part was getting hooked up to the iv. Do you ever get used to that? I had hoped to be put into a fog quickly--like, within minutes of entering the hospital. But as I was wheeled into the operating room--the brightest, coldest room I've ever seen--I felt way too awake. A nurse reached for my hand and asked if I could scoot off the gurney onto the operating table. I said "I could dance onto the table. I'm way too awake!" And that's the last thing I remember before waking up in recovery.

Now I'm home, with my foot propped up at what seems like a 45 degree angle, doped up on percocet, eating comfort foods (mostly squishy white bread and whole milk, which I never let myself have), and drifting in and out of sleep while I listen to "Deep Tracks Weekend" on my local classic rock station. Their idea of deep tracks isn't all that deep. Right now it's that super rare Elton John song "Where To Now, St. Peter?" Oh well. It's comforting and way better company than the tv, which makes me feel tawdry.

Speaking of which, thanks for the smart tv recommendations in the comments to my last post. I supervised an honors thesis on Wooster and Jeeves a couple of years ago, so that might be just the thing. My stepmother is sending me her beloved dvds of some Horatio Hornblower series. Not really my thing, but I'll watch enough to fake an enthusiastic response, since it is a very sweet gesture.

Back to sleep. Thank you all for the nice thoughts.

Worst. Blogger. Ever.

2007-07-19T13:16:00.001-05:00

I feel that same sense of failure I felt when I tried to keep a diary as a kid. I hate starting every post with a "sorry I haven't posted," but, as Lucyrain once put it, "re-starting is the hardest part."

Thank you to Bess and Marleyfan for asking how things went with my father's visit. Things went fine. Totally, predictably, boringly fine. He and my stepmother seemed to like GF, even though they disapproved of her "hardware" (she has a nose ring. whatever. they had to find something to dislike). They liked our house, though once I mentioned that one of the cats has chronic diarrhea my father didn't want to come in again, and when he did he assiduously avoided the cat. (p.s. the cat has never gone outside of the litterbox--it's not like he'd have it all over my father's leg.) I would have told him about Manfred's little problem a lot earlier if I had known it would have had such an amazing, garlic-around-the-windows effect. But the visit was good. We took them to Mexican restaurants because that's all my father, a native Californian living in Pennsylvania, ever wants to eat, showed them where the highway started, so they could go visit their Mormon friends out in the suburbs, and drove them around our favorite Chicago neighborhoods. My dad's not much of a walker, but he loves Chicago-style architecture. They had such a nice time that they want to come visit again in the fall. Hmmm.

I just got back from three weeks in New England, the last week spent in my author's archive. For the most part it was an uneventful, even boring, trip to the archive. I'm sick of my author, sick of my book, and ready to be done. But I had summer research grants and I have a yummy fellowship for next year, so I needed to put in this time.

The last time I visited this archive I looked up all the literary celebrities my author had been in contact with. This time I was way past being star-struck, so I forced myself through hours and hours of letters with her editors and publishers. Important, but super tedious. My best find was an amazing tell-all manuscript by one of her secretaries, writing under a pseudonym, dishing dirt on her household. It read like the kind of thing that would come out of Madonna's house, with lots of stories about how poorly she treated her servants, dish about how many of the medicines she took were really sugar-coated placebos, and a whole lot of information about her bathroom habits. I don't know if it was ever published, though, because, really, how much do people want to know that a famous poet eschewed normal toilet paper in favor of oblong pieces of silk? But she did. Silk. On her butt. How decadent (and impractical) is that?

I saw that a long lost friend has a fellowship at this same library this year, and so each morning my stomach fluttered with nervousness and excitement as I scanned the room, looking for his curly mop of hair, not sure if I wanted to see it or not. I mean, I did want to see it, but was afraid my sorrow about losing this relationship would make me say foolish things. I didn't see him, though, and so all those conversations stayed safely in my head.

So now I'm back and tomorrow I have surgery for the first time in my life. I've had plenty of visits to the emergency room, but never anything planned. I'm having bunion surgery, which sounds like a vanity operation, or an old person's ailment. Apparently bunions aren't just ugly bumps on the side of your big toe. They indicate a crooked bone in the foot, and so what will happen tomorrow is that they'll go in, break the joint, and then reset it with screws. (Word to the wise: if you are having surgery, don't google image it. I'm just saying.) I'm not scared about the actual surgery--I think the train leaves the station and you just go along with it. I'm scared of a) the puffiness and swelling and yellow-iodineness and pain of the recuperation, and b) of getting really fat and losing all my good muscle tone from the past two years of working out really, really, really hard, and c) getting addicted to pain pills. I've read that this is a common fear and that most people, in fact, under-medicate when they really need it because they're so afraid of getting hooked. Since prescription drugs are the Mormon drug of choice (after sugar), I think I have every reason to be worried.

So look for live blogging from the couch for the next couple of weeks. I've got most of The Riches tivo-ed, and the first season of Maude, and the only season of Firefly on dvd. Any other convalescing tv suggestions? After carrying it around on my ipod for months, I finally succumbed to Ugly Betty--it made great watching while on the train in archive-city. I'm all caught up on Battlestar, Grey's Anatomy, Heroes, and all the HBO/Showtime shows, though I'm struggling with John From Cincinnati, and have never even tried The Tudors. Don't say The Wire. I tried it the first season, but since I lived on a corner where plenty of drug-dealing went on, it felt a little too raw.

More soon about how much room there is in my closet now that I've had to throw out all my high heels.

sorry for the drama

2007-04-09T09:20:00.000-05:00

I'm sorry that after months of silence, I return to this blog full of whining and angst.

It turns out my father is coming this weekend, but that he a) never intended to stay with me and b) doesn't expect me to do more than have a meal with him. On the one hand, that's a huge relief. I still have to switch some things around, but it won't be a big deal. On the other hand, I guess I'm still not sure when we got to the chapter of our relationship where we just wouldn't expect to know each other very well. I thought there'd always be drama and recriminations. I guess this is good, and healthy, then, and actually, just what I've been working for.

In other news, that headache is gone. For a week now. Not, milder, with the shadow still lingering around my eye, but gone. Is it because of all the acupuncture and the expensive massages? Or is it because the doctor finally gave me an antibiotic?

Things that have scared me

2007-04-06T10:29:00.000-05:00

and scarred me. I've been thinking about writing about this ever since What Now's fabulous response to a meme circulating which asked people to list ten things people don't know about them. Somehow What Now's ended up being, in part, about several of her (delightfully eccentric) childhood-into-adulthood anxieties-everything from doing time to being whacked by the mafia. I've wanted to do a similar post for a while now.

1. BYU. Just when I've coaxed myself into believing it only exists in my distant past, there as a rich source of anecdotes with which I can amuse friends and colleagues, something reminds me that it's still there, still educating LDS youth, matching them with their eternal mates, and sending them (the men, or priesthood holders, in Mormon-speak) off to law and mba programs among the "gentiles," as Mormons call anyone who isn't Mormon, including, you got it, Jewish people. Today it was this link, courtesy of The Great Whatsit.

It's been twenty years since I started school there and I still can't wrap my head around the version of Mormonism I found there. For example, Mormons being predominantly Republican. Who knew? I never got that memo, and neither had any of my dyed-in-the-wool Democrat relatives. Honestly, I didn't even have an inkling until a new college friend gasped in horror as I pretended to tear up her Elect George H. Bush bumper sticker. I just assumed she had it as a joke. And don't even get me started on the time I found out Mormons aren't allowed to be pro-choice. . . (p.s. The school's logo has been changed since I graduated. It no longers says "The Glory of God is Intelligence," because, you know, many are learned who think they are wise.)

2. Monstro, the whale from Pinnochio

I found better representations than this, but this was the most I could handle. Even image-searching Monstro freaked me out, and my heart is pounding and I feel the familiar dread resting across my shoulders even as I write this. This is one of my oldest and most lingering fears. (Old women and the wolf from The Three Little Pigs are older, but I got over them.) I never even saw the movie, only a clip from it at Disney on Ice, but that was enough. Nothing could talk me out of my fear, not explanations that whales don't hurt people, and that even if they did, they couldn't hurt you on dry land, or talks about the difference between real life and a cartoon. When we went to Disneyland (several times a year, since I'm from O.C.) my dad would spank me and force me to look at the giant cement Monstro which served as the offical gateway to Fantasyland, believing that if I faced my fears, I could conquer them. At four, this was a pretty ineffective strategy, and I'd wake up more nights than not screaming about whales. My parents had a big coffee table book of The Art of Walt Disney which had a two page spread just of Monstro's eye, with Jiminy Cricket floating past it with his umberella. One of my babysitters used to taunt me with that. He'd say, "come here and look at this beautiful picture of Cinderella," and then when I got near him he'd flip open to the picture of the eye. Cool that he got paid to do that. This has been on my mind a lot lately because of a chapter in Jacqui Alexander's newest book, Pedagogies of Crossing. I have an epiphanic, spiritual post brewing in me, where I'll explain the connection, but not today.

I used to have a reoccuring nightmare that I was sitting on my dad's lap watching Pinnochio, and when it got to the whale part I would realize that everyone in the theater had turned into a whale. Then I'd turn to my dad for comfort and realize that he was a whale, too.

Which brings me to . . .

3. My father. I'm really not interested in using this space to talk about my relationship with my dad. Like so many people, it's fraught and complicated and impossible. I'm the only one of my siblings who currently talks to him and that's because I just think it's easier to have an amicable, shallow phone relationship with him than to be involved in a drawn-out not-talking-to-him drama. I talk to him several times a year, he tells me about Rotary Club and the goings on at church--assiduously avoiding asking me anything about my life--and I listen and laugh politely and go back to my life. I think my sisters are really invested in this idealized image of what a father should be, and they can't stop being hurt that he's not like that. I just don't believe in it, probably because I'm the oldest and remember the best what life was like when he was around. Sometimes men ejeculate sperm, and it makes a human. Period. End of connection. Get over it.

But check this out: the last time my dad and stepmother (who's great, really. I adore her.) visited me was about 13 years ago, when I was in grad school and still married. He often says he's going to come visit. Last fall, for example, he swore he was driving across the midwest to pickup a boat motor in Wisconsin (I don't understand it either. Don't ask.) but fall came and went and he never showed and never mentioned it again. So when he started saying he was coming to visit this spring, I only half listened, assuming a) that it wouldn't happen and b) that if it did I'd have plenty of notice. Yesterday I got an email saying that they were coming the week of the sixteenth and wanted to check with my schedule. I wrote back saying that week in May would work just fine--I would cancel any meetings and start figuring out what kind of things we would do. He wrote back and said, you misunderstand, I mean April . . .

People, that's next week!!!!!!!!!!! I'm mid-quarter, have a formal review due in a couple of weeks, two panel proposals to write, meetings almost every day, etc. I can't even have my house clean by next week! And I don't know if they think they're staying here. They don't usually, but what if this is the exception? I don't know how to ask because if they weren't thinking of staying here, now they will.

What I'm really worried about is upsetting the equilibrium I've worked so hard to maintain over the past several years. When you piss off my dad, he stops talking to you and then there's drama, and if you want to resume contact you have to grovel. I like the shallow, superficial relationship we have. Anyway, the easy answer is, if he can't respect that I have a full life and need more advance notice before a visit, losing him isn't such a loss, and I shouldn't stress about it. Maybe this time I won't grovel. Maybe this time it will be forever. I'll try to make peace with the loss and maybe figure out a way to be zen about it. Acch. Whatever.

update

2007-04-04T10:48:00.000-05:00

A few people have asked me how things went at the doctor's on Monday. What I meant was that I would call to make an appointment on Monday, not that I would be able to go on Monday. So the neurologist can't see me for a few weeks, which I expected.

For now (please, please don't let typing this bring it back) the headache is under control. Luckily GF was home this weekend and so she spent most of Saturday rubbing the back of my neck and my shoulders. I say rubbing, but I really mean pummeling the hell out of. She has big, strong hands and worked mercilessly to break down the knots. Then I laid on heating pads, and lathered up in sweet-smelling ben gay. Sunday the headache was gone and I didn't even have to take any meds. Monday I had an already scheduled massage/acu-pressure appointment and a teeny-tiny woman made GF's hands seem like a child's: she pushed straight into the knots with more strength than I ever could have imagined. I'm seeing her again in two weeks and have an acupuncture appointment for today.

So the headache is under control, for now, though I can feel the outlines of it behind my eye. As long as I sit up straight, stretch frequently, and don't lift weights (for now--gotta figure out what to do about that, because I really, really wanted deltoids for the summer) it should be okay, but one thing I'll do with the neurologist (besides ruling out other, unlikely scenarios) is work on a long-term plan for managing my headaches. Thanks for the concern and the kind wishes.

Right on!!

2007-03-31T21:22:00.000-05:00

You know that blogsphere myth that if you blog about something you've lost or misplaced you'll find it? Well, if you blog about how you've had a headache for three months, but that it's been getting better recently, it will come roaring back.

Working on day three of almost incapacitating pain. I'm scheduling an appointment with a neurologist Monday morning. I'm scared they'll just tell me it's the family thing and there's nothing to do about it, but I'm starting to become even more scared that I'm moments away from an aneurysm or a stroke or that I have a tumor behind my right eye. I don't think it's the last thing, but I do think it's odd that the muscles are totally tensed on the right side of my neck and back and that my headache stretches from my right eye, up and around and down the back of the right side of my head and looping over my right ear to the right side of my jaw. Do I have a disease of the right-hand side? Right-sided tetanus?

And does it have anything to do with being left-handed?

2007 so far

2007-03-29T22:41:00.000-05:00

I've had a headache this year. Since January. One headache. All day, every day. It took me a while to realize that it was the same headache, and that it never stopped. I actually didn't realize it, until GF, who had been listening to me complain about my headaches, pointed out that she couldn't remember the last time I didn't have one and made me go to the doctor.

I resisted the doctor. I grew up in a headache culture. My grandmother had one every day of her adult life; my mother's had one pretty much consistently since she was seventeen. My uncles have them, several of my cousins. It's our family thing. My mother always has darvocet, percocet, and/or tylenol 3 (that's with codine, for those outside of headache culture) on her, which makes her a fun date, if you like mind-numbing painkillers, because she's very generous with her meds. She knows what it's like to be in pain, always. But me, I've escaped the family curse so far. I thought I had it in my early twenties, but it turns out that was just Utah, with its high pressure systems and deep valleys which keep industrial pollution right at breathing level. Once I left, the headaches went away.

Now, they're back. I hoped it was a sinus headache (I'm still not sure it isn't), and that the doctor would prescribe an antibiotic and I'd be free. But she said no. That pain isn't in your sinuses (I still think it is); that's a tension headache. I started to cry. I don't want tension headaches. I don't want to be one of those people, who have to lie down as soon they come home from work, or who have to use phrases like "it's blinding" and "nothing can touch it." I've heard those words my entire life.

The doctor made an appointment for me with a neurologist. I didn't go. Partly, because it was way too early in the morning, but really because I knew they couldn't do anything for me. You know, growing up in a headache culture and etc. All neurologists can do is run expensive tests, that my insurance may or may not cover, tell me I have chronic tension headaches, and prescribe really strong painkillers to mask the pain.

And me, I don't do so well with painkillers. In fact, it says that on the front of my medical folder, in pretty big writing. But my doctor wanted to try giving me a "milder" painkiller, so she prescribed ultracet. She said it was so mild that I could take it during the work day. So on my way into school that day I filled the prescription and popped two (the recommended dosage) on my way into a guest lecture I was giving on queer theory for a friend's class.

The class went well. It went really, really well. I think. What I remember is that the ideas seemed really big and yet completely accessible. By the end I felt pretty floaty, but well enough to go straight from there to a two hour meeting. I had a great time at the meeting. It was the fastest, funnest meeting ever. But by the end I realized I was having trouble writing down what I was hearing, and the pen was getting hard to hold. In fact, I didn't think I should drive home, so I went to a lecture. No big deal, I thought. I can sneak in the back, slump in my seat and listen. By the end I thought I'd feel better, and I'd get points for supporting the center that a senior colleague in my department runs. But there were only four other people in attendance, and there were no rows: the talk was around a conference table. Damn. Damn. Damn.

With two hours of talk/discussion looming in front of me, I tried to be brave. I tried sitting up really straight, I tried leaning back in my chair, but I couldn't get comfortable. I started to sweat. I was really cold. I left the room and threw up. I came back in and tried to pretend I was fine--believe and it will be so, I thought. Finally the talk ended. I stumbled back towards my building. It was going on five hours since I had taken these meds and I was feeling worse and worse. I didn't have a headache, though.

It was late, but I thought I'd go up into my department and see if any of my colleagues were going home soon. One, who lives by me was in her office. As soon as I opened my mouth to talk to her I started to cry, and with a wavering voice I told her I didn't feel so well. She pointed out that my pupils were the size of pinpricks, had me sit down and started talking to me about what I'd taken. Turns out it's not such a mild narcotic, and that she'd had a similar reaction to it. She wasn't leaving, but she helped me corral another colleague, who's one of my favorite people in the department, into driving me home, which she did, generously driving me in my own car and then having her girlfriend pick her up at my house. The minute she left I started throwing up, and I didn't stop for hours. The next day I felt like I had been in a fight.

Last week I started going to an acupuncturist/chiropractor. As soon as he cracked my neck, I actually felt a little better. After a half hour of acupuncture, with these cool vibrating patches on the back of my neck, I felt much, much better. Really. I still have the headache about half the time, but half the time I don't. This past week, for the first time this year, I actually felt happy. I was even able to write--real writing, the kind where you go deep, deep inside your head and stay there for hours. So I'll keep up with the acupuncture/chiropracty and see if I keep feeling better. If not, I think I might have to go to the neurologist after all. Who knows, maybe they'll say it's a sinus infection and give me an antibiotic.

Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa!

2007-01-07T18:04:00.000-06:00

No, this isn't a Ulysses post, but it is about hoops. It's that time of the year again.

This time of the year:

Women's basketball season. Yesterday, three ( THREE!) women's basketball games were on national tv. We skipped the first one (Kentucky vs. OSU) caught the tail end of the second one (where number one ranked Maryland kicked Michigan State's ass by about a million points), and then had friends over for the third one: UConn vs., you guessed it, Tennessee. It was a great, great, great game, but I don't know sports' lingo, and I also don't think sports' talk makes for great blogging, so I won't say much more about that. But really, if you aren't watching women's basketball, you should. It's the right thing to do.

Then, last night GF and I went to one of my school's women's basketball games. I had three players in my intro. to women's studies class last quarter, and when I admitted what a huge Lady Vols fan I am they told me, in no uncertain terms, that I had a responsibility to be THEIR fans. I wasn't really up for that, because our team has a male coach and, well, I don't really like men, or male coaches, but they told me about how he is completely committed to women's sports and that he only hires female assistant coaches, so that he can train them and send them out into the world to be the kick-ass female coaches, and told me, as well, that our entire athletics program is headed by a woman. That, and the fact that our women's team, which is nationally ranked, gets far, far less attention and funding than our crappy men's team, which isn't ranked, and our players are all strong students, some of whom now want to be women's studies majors, pushed me to buy tickets.

So last night GF and I dragged ourselves out of our house and into the not-so-chilly night and went to the big game against a team from that one state with all the cheese, and had a surprisingly great time. I say surprisingly because I am not, actually, a sporty dyke. I'm way more a campy queen. Really, I promise. Or as Djuna Barnes might put it, "I'm not a sporty dyke, I just love Pat Summitt."

Sitting there in the brightly-lit, packed auditorium, amidst lots and lots of what I can only assume are alumni families (I didn't recognize any other faculty members or any students) many of which had elementary aged daughters in brightly-colored shirts with our coach's name on them, meaning they had been to one of his summer camps, we realized how negative our world-view has been these past few years. When a fun night out is sitting in a darkened movie theater or in a darkened bar or, or . . . or when I can't even think of anything we've done socially in the past year that didn't have to do with drinking and/or sitting in the dark, maybe a dose of flourescently-lit, ten-dollars-a-ticket simpleness is in order. Especially when it's all about girl-power.

It was oddly comforting to be in such a happy, wholesome place. And I know that's not representative of the world, and I know that I teach at a pretty posh, solidly middle class university, with alumni who are happy because they're privileged and well-fed and well-paid. I know that these things should make me feel cynical, but last night I didn't want to. Our team didn't win, but the game was really close and my students played well, with even more aggression and fire than I had seen on the tv earlier that day. So I'm thinking it might be time to get out to family-friendly places a little more.

But don't worry, I'm not going over to the light side. Maybe I'll pack a flask, or at least mutter lines from Valley of the Dolls under my breath, just to make sure I keep in touch with my inner-queen. Yeah, I can just see it. Here's me, pushing the pre-teen basketball camp girls to the side as I lurch drunkenly out of the bathroom. "Get outta my way. I gotta man waiting for me."

Checking In

2007-01-05T10:30:00.000-06:00

Hello dahlinks,
I hope everyone had a fabulous holiday season. Except all you lucky people who got to go to MLA and won't stop talking about how amazing it was. Enough, already! Way to turn a blah Philly MLA into something fabulous. Promise me this whole bloggers-at-the-big-convention thing won't burn out by next year when it's here in Chicago, okay?

Because I'm on the quarter system, my winter break started a few days before Thanksgiving and ended this week. On paper, that means six glorious weeks of sleeping in, writing at my leisure, reading, watching tv, and not talking to anyone between the ages of 18-22. In reality, I spent the first couple of weeks right where I had spent the preceding couple of months: in my office, at my desk, ticking through list after list of tasks. But I did end up getting a lot of writing done, including a tiny assigned piece on my author which led me to a really amazing discovery:

You know how I never write on this blog, but when I do it's to explain that, once again, I've revisioned my monograph? Well, mostly what I do is run away from the obvious book that I need to write, because if I don't, and someone else does, I'll never forgive myself. Well, writing the tiny piece on my author led me back into her ample bosom, made me remember what it feels like to really, really, really know a body of work, and helped me realize that I've let enough time pass so that I'm not sick to death of her very name. Which means that all the work I did this past year on an ambitious monograph about a whole genre of author (of which she is a part), all the semi-abstract theorizing I've done about this kind of author can fruitfully be applied specifically to The Author I Really, Really Need to Write a Book About Or I'll Never Forgive Myself and about whom I have written hundreds and hundreds of pages, all tucked away into Someday Files, which is to say:

I'm sitting on a draft of a goddamn, actual, bonafide manuscript. Right now. And it's not my dissertation, which is an impossible and unsaveable mess. It's a new book. But it's a mostly-written book, people. Which is handy, because at the last few conferences I went to, people kept asking me when my book on The Author I Really, Really Need to Write a Book About Or I'll Never Forgive Myself was coming out. So while last year my super-ambitous New Year's Resolution was to memorize "Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight" (still have two stanzas left to go), this year my resolution is to complete the revisions on this book, and get the damn thing on its way to the remainder bins.

Oh, and also, during this break, I discovered my new, very favorite vegetable: celeriac. The texture of a potato, the taste of celery. Amazing.

And also, (because I just slipped this into a list a few posts ago, and didn't let on how totally excited and blown away I am by this) that article I wrote this summer, in one frantic, feverish month? It got accepted. Oh yeah. It got accepted into a HUGELY fancy, hot shit journal, one which I NEVER in a million years would have expected to publish in.

Oh, and tv-wise, it's all about Dexter, my friends. I was cranky for the first five or so episodes, thinking "here's a fancy, cable version of CSI, big deal," and thinking that the show couldn't be that amazing if I could predict every plot twist before it happened. But then I realized they had just been slowly tightening the noose and by episode seven I was in way over my head. Good stuff.

Happy New Year, all my loved blog-friends. I promise to try to play better this year. It's just that I have such a hard time determining what is and isn't post-worthy, but even when you don't hear from me, know that I am faithfully lurking on your blogs and loving keeping up with you.

as seen at Little Prof

2006-12-13T22:08:00.000-06:00

Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.

This is the best quiz ever. I loved the questions, especially the one that asks if you can trace your childhood traumas to animal-related incidents. Hello? Know anything about the whale from Pinnochio? I totally, 100% heart my guy:

A fine, amiable and dreamy young man, skilled in horsemanship and archery, you were also from a long line of dribbling madmen. King at 12 and quickly married to your sweetheart, Bavarian Princess Isabeau, you enjoyed many happy months together before either of you could speak anything of the other's language. However, after illness you became a tad unstable. When a raving lunatic ran up to your entourage spouting an incoherent prophecy of doom, you were unsettled enough to slaughter four of your best men when a page dropped a lance. Your hair and nails fell out. At a royal masquerade, you and your courtiers dressed as wild men, ending in tragedy when four of them accidentally caught fire and burned to death. You were saved by the timely intervention of the Duchess of Berry's underskirts.
This brought on another bout of sickness, which surgeons countered by drilling holes in your skull. The following months saw you suffer an exorcism, beg your friends to kill you, go into hyperactive fits of gaiety, run through your rooms to the point of exhaustion, hide from imaginary assassins, claim your name was Georges, deny that you were King and fail to recognise your family. You smashed furniture and wet yourself at regular intervals. Passing briefly into erratic genius, you believed yourself to be made of glass and demanded iron rods in your attire to prevent you breaking.

In 1405 you stopped bathing, shaving or changing your clothes. This went on until several men were hired to blacken their faces, hide, jump out and shout "boo!", upon which you resumed basic hygiene. Despite this, your wife continued sleeping with you until 1407, when she hired a young beauty, Odette de Champdivers, to take her place. Isabeau then consoled herself, as it were, with your brother. Her lovers followed thick and fast while you became a pawn of your court, until you had her latest beau strangled and drowned.

A severe fever was fended off with oranges and pomegranates in vast quantities, but you succumbed again in 1422 and died. Your disease was most likely hereditary. Unfortunately, you had anywhere up to eleven children, who variously went on to develop capriciousness, great cruelty, insecurity, paranoia, revulsion towards food and, in one case, a phobia of bridges.

rainbow veggies

2006-12-04T10:36:00.000-06:00

(Warning: seriously boring post about vegetables, for chrissake. I'm thinking we should start a meme based on Oso Raro's post about gay bars. What/where was your first gay bar? I've got a long one in me, that's been brewing ever since I started this blog, but it never seems like the right day to write it.)

Every week I get a box of vegetables from a local organic grocery store. The content is always a seasonal surprise and as I spend the rest of the week trying to figure out how to cook what I've got, I congratulate myself on being in tune with the seasons and ecologically responsible--no bell peppers for me, no matter how much I want them--which is to say, I spend a lot of time talking to myself about vegetables. I wish I was kidding. December's kind of a slow month around here, and I'm feeling pretty lonely these days. But I do enjoy my new ritual of spending Sunday nights washing/soaking/rinsing/chopping up the vegetables so that I can cook with them throughout the week.

Yesterday I got a bunch of rainbow carrots, as well as a bunch of rainbow chard. I'm kind of wasting the carrots by eating them on a salad for lunch today, but I can't resist--they're so sweet and so pretty, and I don't want to ruin them by cooking them. (I hate cooked carrots). The thing is, I don't know what to do with the chard. Normally I saute greens in a little olive or sesame oil, with onions and/or garlic, and serve it with broiled cod. But should I do that with chard? Or is there something more interesting I should do with it? It's seriously lovely. I found myself so taken with it last night--each stem is a different, vibrant color--that I lovingly hand-dried each huge, fan-like leaf. Unfortunately, I threw away the stems, based on a recipe the store sent home with the box this week. Just now I saw an article on chard that says you can do all kinds of things with the stems. So any ideas what I can do with chard LEAVES?

schpunkt, or, Thanksgiving in the country

2006-11-26T17:30:00.000-06:00

We spent Thanksgiving in Michigan, at my friend, Exuberant Boy's family's home in the country. By the time we got there late on Thursday afternoon, he and his boyfriend, Sly Enabler, had a fire going in the fireplace, a roast in the oven, and had worked their way through the better part of a bottle of vodka. GF and I did our best to catch up with cocktail hour and by the time dinner was served--which we ate in front of the tv, while watching trashy Thanksgiving programming--we all felt pretty jolly. Jolly enough, that is, to spend the rest of the evening watching Pippi Longstocking. (Which I wouldn't have remembered if it weren't for the fifth season Gilmore Girls' episode, "We've Got a Pippi Virgin Here." Lorelei describes it as an oddly surreal masterpiece, or something like that. She's not wrong. It's also oddly pornographic, teeming with crotch shots and phallic visual puns.)

Sly Enabler and I fell asleep somewhere after the schpunkt exam (if it's been a while, a major plot point entails Pippi "making up" the word schpunkt and then using it in all sorts of ha-larious ways: she loses her schpunkt and interrupts the town gossip's tea party looking for it; she booby-traps a door with a bucket of eggs and paint and catches a schpunkt; and finally, she breaks her schpunkt and has to have it checked, which, thanks to Sweden's fabulous socialized medicine program, doesn't cost her anything: "As always, Pippi," the creepy doctor tells her, "the schpunkt exam is free!") and before the cake party/sausage eating contest, which her father, the semi-comatose cannibal pirate king wins handily.

We got up earlyish the next day, had a huge breakfast, started cooking our real Thanksgiving dinner, watched another movie, were joined by more friends, took a walk in the woods, hauled fire wood, started another fire, got started on another cocktail hour, and finally sat down to our Thanksgiving feast Friday evening. Then we watched Pippi, again.

Known Donors: A Really Bad Idea

2006-11-20T09:53:00.000-06:00

This week's New York Time's Magazine article, about gay sperm donors who are, or want to be, part-time fathers, disturbed me. I'm glad this issue is getting attention, as it's something lesbians who are contemplating how and when they might become parents think about all the time. It's a complicated issue legally, as well as socially and politically, and I'm always hungry to hear how other people are negotiating this in their lives. But the author seemed intent on exposing people who parent queerly as un-queer and super-normative. Neither the women or the men profiled in this article look good. The lesbians all come off as dour, controlling, selfish women who want "the privilege of being able to say to their children, ‘That’s your father,’ without having to really give up anything;" the men read as either careless assholes or born-again believers in a biologically essentialist notion of Fatherhood as a right and a duty.

The family pictured on the cover of the magazine was especially disturbing. According to the non-biological father in this four parent family, there's a hierarchy of parents: biological mother, biological father, non-biological mother, non-biological father. Wow. That's so, ummm, STRAIGHT. If this is a misrepresentation of how power works in this family, it's reflective of non-biological dad's bitterness that although (according to the article) he's the father who plays with the children, changes their diapers, and tries to inculcate them with manners, the biological father (a wanna-be actor who offers the chilling insight that "one of the supreme joys of fatherhood is the idea that one day his sons might see him on television") is treated with respect. In the meantime, the non-biological father is told by the evil and controlling lesbian mothers that "you're only here because of him," meaning his long-term partner, with whom he forged a committment, and essentially formed a family years before these children were even conceived.

Other male interviewees related harrowing tales of facing hostile lesbian mothers in court, flakey women, some of whom aren't even gay anymore, begging for even the smallest opportunity to be a part of THEIR. NATURAL. child's life--two hours a week, the right to say hello to the chid on the street, anything--only to be rebuked/chastised/exiled.

So this is a problem. But is this really an accurate portrayal of relationships between lesbian mothers and the gay men who father their children? The only positive depiction of this relationship came in a parenthetical aside about a rich gay lawyer who makes a long-distance queer family relationship work by taking vacations every few weeks with all of them, which suggests that the struggles of the other families--child care, responsibilities around the house--have more to do with class and limited resources than queerness.

And what about the lesbian mothers? At the very end of the article an anonymous woman who went through a protracted legal struggle with her donor confesses how scared she and her partner were, how isolated they felt and how few resources there were for them to draw on. And who could blame them? How often does the law rule in favor of two lesbians over ANY man? That's a different article, but it's probably not one the NY Times will publish, because as is, this piece fits in with their pattern of pathologizing "non-traditional" mothers. This article might ostensibly be about forging new, queer families, but it's really the same old song: Women have too much power; men are disenfranchised; fathers are powerless and irrelevant. Patriarchy is on the wane. Oh the humanity!!! What this article does chillingly well is foist the tired narrative of Men. Versus. Women. on a group of people who have consciously "opted out" of this culturally over-determined battle.

I picked up this article last night as a woman who planned on using a known-donor to get pregnant. Twenty-minutes later I was on-line checking out the price lists and donor sheets of the local sperm bank.

Clean, not crafted, and random

2006-11-16T12:10:00.000-06:00

My house is clean, that is. I am dirty, having spent the last several hours vacuuming, mopping, dusting, scouring, doing laundry, etc. I have to go into school for a meeting in an hour, so this isn't a totally at-home day, but it's the closest I've had in three months. This means that when GF comes home from school tomorrow (for a whole week!) she will not cough and choke at the accumulated dust, and her feet will not crunch on crystal cat litter scattered (despite my most strenuous and creative efforts to stop this) across the kitchen floor.

The not crafted refers to my blog entry. It's just a quick report from my day--raw and uninteresting--and it goes out with love to What Now, Timna, and Geeky Mom, who, during our totally wonderful lunch last week during a conference, encouraged me to "just blog" sometimes.

So here's the random part: I can't stop thinking about Grey's Anatomy. I resisted this show for two years. No concept of the actors, the characters, the premise, NOTHING. I especially resisted last season's two hour finale. I hated the show just hearing about Denny's melodramatic death. (I'm still not far enough into the show to really get who Denny is yet, even.) And then I finished watching the first two seasons of Battlestar Galactica on my video ipod and needed something else to work out to, so I thought I'd give it a try. It's a soap opera. Pure, old-school soap opera, with class differences, handsome doctors, apparently no hospital regulations or oversight, and lots of sex. The only difference is that instead of over-sexed nurses (well, there's the syphilitic one) we have over-sexed surgical residents, which is supposed to be empowering, but isn't, really. So, of course, I'm hooked on it, and needing my fix gets me to the gym pretty near every day. Yesterday I ended up doing 90 minutes on the elliptical because the episode I was watching was a two-parter (the one with the bomb) and NO WAY was I getting off that machine before I found out what happened.

90 more minutes

2006-11-14T09:36:00.000-06:00

of teaching left in what has been the longest, shortest, hardest, most frantic quarter I've ever experienced. The next time I agree to teach 5 days a week, someone hit me. Hard.

The stats:
10 weeks
3 classes
100 students
2 conferences
4 presentations
8 committees
1 article accepted for publication (YAY!!!!)

Happily the last text of the last day of the worst quarter is the last half of Dracula, and so by the time I've dragged them through Max Nordau and explained why Van Helsing keeps talking about Dracula's "child-brain," and squeeged them out by spending way too much time on the scene where Mina sucks blood from Dracula's chest, pointing out, too forcefully, that, with her arms pinned behind her and his hand pushing her head down and into him, this is really a forced-fellatio scene, it will be time to hand out evaluations, say my goodbyes, and run like hell.

More soon.

Thanks, CD

2006-09-04T22:41:00.000-05:00

I just spent the last several hours cleaning and reorganizing my pantry. I had to, because my friend and former neighbor moved (not too far) this weekend and gave me some gorgeous, gorgeous, heavy pots and pans. I couldn't stick them into the pantry as it was, because there was no order. New stuff in old chaos didn't seem like a good idea. So I took it all apart, cleaned everything that was cleanable--the floor, the old pots and pans, storage containers--and rearranged the stuff that wasn't--canned food, boxes of pasta, oils, vinegars, cereal, the shelf where I keep trash bags and sandwich bags, freezer bags and aluminum foil--and threw away all the scary 2/3rds empty boxes of crackers and bags of stale chips, and now it's really, really pretty and oranized and clean and I can reach my pots and pans without knocking down a tower of mismatched wanna-be tupperware, and I can reach for the balsalmic knowing that I won't accidentally pick up lighter fluid.

Tomorrow, my clothes closet. Shoes I haven't worn in two years and/or shoes with the toe leather worn/torn away are out.

Wednesday, school starts. I'm ready, but not into it. At all.

But I LOVE my new pots and pans. Tonight I used some of them to make my dinner and I realized, as I served myself perfect rice that wasn't stuck to the bottom of the pan, how much not having decent things to cook with keeps me from wanting to cook anything at all.

Outnumbered

2006-08-29T14:49:00.000-05:00

Now that GF is in law school, and living a couple of hours away during the week, it's just me and the cats.

The first week GF was gone my parents were here, so entertaining them kept me busy. Next week I'll be back in school (and teaching a 5 day a week schedule) and, therefore, really, really busy. But this week, I'm out of sorts. I have stuff to do. Syllabi. Conference papers. Research. But I can't focus. I wander from room to room in my seriously lovely apartment and it feels like too many rooms, too many places to sit, too many books I could read, too many movies I could watch, too many channels on the tv, even.

But mostly, it feels like too many cats. They're everywhere I turn. On the newspaper I'm reading; between my feet when I try to walk; in the middle of the bed when I try to sleep; crying by the front door when I try to write (Manfred) or rolling pens off the desk and settling herself on top of the books I'm trying to use as I write (Margo). And they're vocal. I knew this about the breed, but thought, "how bad could it be?" Answer: pretty bad, given that siamese sound kind of like crying babies. I've invented half a dozen games for them, such as:

--dangling the elastic from a conference name tag. They love that, love to grab onto one end and walk away, turning and batting the tension between my end and theirs. They love it for a few minutes, that is.
--gathering all the sparkly puff balls from under the furniture and putting it in one of the drawers in the hallway table. Then I open the drawer and they pull the balls out, one at a time. This works until the balls are gone.
--combining above activities by tying conference tag elastic around a sparkly puff ball. Margo, especially, likes to play kitty tether ball with this. For a few minutes.
--building a fort out of a magazine rack and an old knit blanket. Manfred starts crying for this as soon as I get up in the morning and then immediatly burrows under the blanket until his head pokes out the end. Once he's safely wrapped in the blanket, with the tassles on the end draped over his ears, he's happy to just sit there for a while.

Manfred also has his own favorite game of jumping onto the tops of doors and riding them as they bang back and forth. Margo's is following me into the bathroom and trying to sit on my lap while I'm on the toilet.

Daytime isn't too bad, since that's when they sleep. But night and morning, when there's only one of me, two of them, and endless puffy balls to be dropped on my lap, or wrestled with on the bed at 4am, things feel a little overwhelming.

ice cream soup

2006-08-07T13:59:00.000-05:00

I walked through my house this morning, on the way from the air conditioned bedroom, past the living room where an air conditioner was also running, and into the back part of the apartment, towards the kitchen. It's supposed to get quieter as you proceed away from the parts with the air conditioners to the part with no air conditioner, but as I got closer I heard a roaring sound, and wondered what it was, since there's nothing that whirs or fans in the kitchen. That is, unless one of the cats has practiced his new favorite trick of getting on top of the fridge and nudging the freezer door open. That was the sound I heard: the sound of the freezer trying to stay cool, unsuccessfully. Of course this was only a day after I had finally given in to my summer-long craving for neopolitan ice cream which was now neopolitan soup.

Finished! (for now)

2006-08-02T11:25:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I sent in my article, after a month of almost non-stop writing. One thing I learned from this experience is that one month is not long enough to conceive (as in, not even an inkling that this was an essay I wanted to write until I saw the cfp) and execute an article. I put in hour after hour of feverish writing--twelve hours straight on Sunday, for example--99% of which I ended up cutting because I could not (COULD NOT!) let myself believe that the focus of my essay was as narrow as it was. That beast that rose out of the muck? He rose about three times, rose BIG, and said "Hello? It's me, your thesis. Write me!" and every time I said, "oh no, my thesis is much bigger than that, but you're sweet, and I'll give you a paragraph." He persisted, I balked, and wrote in circles around him until finally I had a talk with a friend who I usually try to pretend is not the HUGE NAME academic she is, because then I would be too intimidated to talk to, let alone cry on the phone to her, on a day when my time was running out and the thesis I thought I could handle was whipping around the room, full of itself and totally out of control, and she snapped me into perspective.

She said, "your desire is an obstacle to its own acheivement." And those words made everything make sense--the office with books stacked on and around my desk, making a little path to my chair, the trashcan brimming with empty TaB cans, Triscuit boxes, and discarded drafts, my unwashed body, my bleary eyes, my aching elbows, sore from resting on my desk while my fingers hovered in mid-air above my keyboard.

Outside there was a heatwave. From my window I could see people dressed in very little clothing entering and leaving the building. I started keeping track of when they left and when they came back, of how many of them were going to the grand opening of the new Target store down the street, who seemed to be leaving out of duty, who seemed to be leaving for something fun. I was becoming Gladys Kravitz. Inside, it was dark and cool. Two airconditioners, a fan, and a cd called White Noise (tracks include rocket ship, dryer, fan, and furnace)tried to block out the noise of the one year old upstairs, running the full length of the apartment, back and forth, back and forth, hour after hour. I was losing my mind.

I wanted to write this article more than anything, because I wanted to be a part of a very special issue of very special journal, but I had seen the cfp way too late, and that pressure was making it impossible to write my very special essay for the very special issue of the very special journal. So I turned off my computer and went to dinner at the friend's house and we talked about the general topic of my essay and I got a reality check about how people who don't write about this subject think about it. I went home, with five days until the deadline, and cut and cut and cut and got down to the most basic thing I could say about my topic and I said it. It's not sloppy or slapped together. It's a tight little essay. Maybe too tight, too little. Best case scenario: the very special editor of the very special issue says, yeah, this is cool, write another 500-1000 words and we're on. Worst case scenario: we're not on, so I give it another 500-1000 words and send it somewhere else.

Most interesting thing I got during a way tangential moment of last minute research: discovered a band from the 70s called Ten Wheel Drive, featuring a singer named Genya Ravan. Check it out. She's a screaming sort of blues singer, backed by a band with lots of horns. "Tightrope" is the song you'll want to know. Totally delicious.

The beast rises from the muck

2006-07-12T08:58:00.000-05:00

This may be the summer I actually, for real, fall in love with writing. (I don't know how to do that thing where you cross out what you've just written, otherwise I would have crossed out fall in love and modified the sentence to say, feel really impassioned about). As soon as I finished my final grades I drug myself back to the coffee shop where, only a day earlier I had been grading and I've been plugging away at it pretty much every day since. Well, except my birthday weekend, pride weekend, the long, long 4th of July weekend, my friend's 40th birthday weekend, that one weekend in between my birthday weekend and pride . . .

Last night I had a totally startling moment of writing grace. I usually have one of these at some point when I'm writing something I really care about, even though I'm always convinced it will never come this time, where my argument rises up out of pages and pages of [mostly unusable]writing and stands there, dripping with mud and sweat and announces his presence. (yeah, the beast is always male. Weird, huh?) Instantly paragraphs rearrange--some sent reeling into the black hole of the recycling bin, others come forward to occupy privileged spaces, where before they were stuck in footnotes, others magically rise from sleeping documents and benevolently settle into places where I wouldn't have imagined them wanting to be. And there is peace in the land, and energy, and I begin to guard my time jealously, craving more and more encounters with my beast, now turned into big, beautiful, bouncing paragraphs.

This moment only comes after writing in about five different directions for weeks, hoping the different threads will all come together, but in the back of my mind knowing that's not how my writing ever works; making master outlines and reorganizing all I've written into different configurations, over and over; walking around with 3x 5 cards and a pen in my purse, pocket of jeans, gym bag, for when the sentence I've been wrestling with reorganizes in just the right way, usually when I'm in the checkout line at the grocery store, or on the elliptical machine at the gym; and stopping in the middle of a productive thought to pull every book I own off the shelves, glancing at them briefly, and stacking them next to my desk because I Cannot. Possibly. Claim. Anything. Without. Them. And, of course, this moment doesn't arrive until I've had several meltdowns, including

1)picking the wrong recovered document after my computer had to be rebooted and undoing an entire day's worth of writing, a day in which it seemed the beast was rising from the muck, but was only peering out from it, and

2)deciding I needed a new printer after not being able to print documents for an entire day, and that this was just another example of everything always breaking and nothing good ever happening to me. My gf, who is a closet computer whiz--really, she's a resolute MAC user, and yet she can dig into programs I don't even know my pc has and fix things--saved me a lot of money when she figured out what was wrong: the printer wasn't plugged into the computer.

So my beast has risen, and it feels like Christmas morning (or maybe Easter morning), and all I want to do is play with it, but I have to go to work (new student advising=summer camp for professors who hang out in the advising pit eating and gossiping all day and get paid for it) and then I leave for a week with my family in California tomorrow. I hope the beast waits for me.

2006-07-01T00:33:00.000-05:00

Since I'm on the quarter system, I've only been done with school about three weeks, but this summer is already much, much, much better than last summer, for two reasons:

1. I am not just about to go on leave without a book project nailed down, which means staring down months and months of unstructured time just waiting to be wasted. Instead I started the summer already pretty deep in a chapter, and while the end isn't in sight--I'm stuck in the middle, halfway through a thought, but if I can dig my way through to the other end of the thought, the second half of the chapter is mostly written and just waiting for some close readings to substantiate a whole lot of suppositions. But I'm neither finishing the middle thought nor fleshing out the final ones right now because I stumbled on an amazing call for papers last week--a whole journal issue devoted to a topic I write and teach about all the time. And what thrills me most about this is that

2. It has a due date. August 1st. That's soon, but this is my area. I know this stuff. I sat down and wrote six pages off the top of my head almost as soon as I saw the cfp, and so I think I can do this. It's for a pretty fancy journal, so there's a huge chance this won't get published there, but I want to give it a shot, and if they don't want it, I'll try some other places because, writing this, I realize that I really need to write this essay, regardless of whether it ends up in fancy journal or not. It's something I've needed to think through and take a strong position on for a long time. The deadline makes me feel giddy, because it means I'll have August to not hate myself for not finishing the stuck chapter. So here's to incentive.

summer scrapbook

2006-06-30T23:29:00.000-05:00

What Margo is drinking:

Isn't she pretty? Aren't I lucky to have a friend who just happened to be in Europe the week of my birthday? So it's a little bit poisonous, but so is TaB.

What Margo is reading:
It's summer, so I let myself read some books I'd been snobbishly resisting for a long time:
1. The DaVinci Code. I held out for a really incredibly long time, but when Lisa over at The Great Whatsit wrote about her friends' incredible DaVinci Code miracle I couldn't resist one minute longer. At first I made a stupid, predictable fuss about how bad the writing is, but then I got sucked into the plot and I liked it. I really liked it. I love Marian stuff. I even got out my Big Book of Goddess and remembered when I was an undergrad and thought Joseph Campbell counted as literary theory. That led to my stunningly sophisticated first published article, though one that, surprisingly, didn't make it onto my cv: "Geraldine as Victim of Patriarchal Oppression in Coleridge's 'Christabel.'" Good stuff. And in a great book. You can order it any time you'd like and they'll print up a copy and send it to you.

2. The Secret Language of Bees. Loved it for a few minutes and then hated it. I think I'll teach it in a unit in intro. to women's studies about Mammy figures and how great it is when African Americans take time out from their lives to educate lost and fragile white teenage girls about their true potential. Yeah, I'll pair it with To Kill a Mockingbird and A Member of the Wedding. It'll be swell. Jeezus.

I started The Lovely Bones next and got about ten pages in before I said NO. No. Can't do it. GF says "get past the rape and dismembering and then it's a really nice story about a dead girl." I guess, but I'd been telling myself that once school was out I could read The Magnificent Ambersons, and I really wanted a fun turn-of-the-last-century middlebrow book so I could both read for pleasure and soak in gender ideals of my research period. But now, 2/3rds of the way through, I know exactly how it's going to end (no, really, exactly: I peeked) and I want off this ride. It sucks when the Orson Welles character ruins his mother's life. GF is trying to get me to read what she says is a really fun, pulpy historical romance, The Other Boleyn Girl. We'll see.

What Margo is Watching:

So You Think You Can Dance. Heidi and Benji are both originally from my home ward (Mormon for parish). I haven't seen Benji since he was a toddler, but I loved his grandmother and his mom and his aunt--when I was a kid I thought they were the tannest, most sophisticated women I'd ever met. His mom was my cheerleading coach. Heidi I'd recognize anywhere, since she's looked exactly the same since she was born and a lot like her older brother, who played Patrick to my Auntie Mame in high school. So go Heidi! Go Benji! Go Mary Murphy, the judge whom I find oddly intriguing.

I'm listening to stuff, too: The new Built to Spill, You In Reverse (loved it so much I sent copies to my sisters); Colossal Yes' Acapulco Roughs; The Jessica Fletcher's Whatever Happened to the Jessica Fletchers?; and Plastilina Mosh's Tasty + B-Sides. I wish I had known about this band since '97, when they released their first album. I can't believe how much of my life I've wasted not listening to them. Mexican-jazz-thrasher-new wave-speed music. If you listen to them on the elliptical machine while you watch The Gilmore Girls with the subtitles on, you will have a very nice afternoon.

beware the ninth of june

2006-06-09T12:59:00.000-05:00

Today is officially my unlucky day. Not that anything bad has happened so far today, except for my NYT not being on the doorstep this morning. But in the past, this has been a bad, bad day.

On June 9th, 1982, two days before my thirteenth birthday I rode my bike to school, instead of getting a ride from my neighbor, as I usually did. I was riding to school because I had permission to leave school at lunchtime and ride to my elementary school, where there was a retirement party for my third grade teacher. And yes, I was one of those students who, much beloved by teachers, if not by classmates, got invited to those sorts of things. I was running late. Later my mother said she felt the promptings of the Holy Ghost telling her to put my bike in the back of the station wagon and just drive me to school, but she ignored it. Funny thing, the Holy Ghost--he's a hindsight kind of helper, more of a guilt-bringer than a help-giver. When she heard the sounds of an ambulance a few streets away she had a feeling it was me. When the neighbor who would have driven me to school showed up at the front door holding my bloody retainers wrapped in kleenex, she knew.

It wasn't a devastatingly serious accident, but it was a messy one. I was crossing a big street at the light and a car turning left drove into me, pushing me several hundred feet. I remember thinking how heavy the car was, and also that this was my fault, because I had been right at that pushing off the ground into a full ride point, not walking my bike across the street, as I had been taught. My bottom lip and my knee got ripped open, and as I stood up, blood everywhere, all I could say was, "We don't have any money, I can't be hurt." The woman who hit me was a total mess and I remember trying to tell her that it probably wasn't too bad. When the paramedics got there I tried to refuse treatment, because I knew it would be too expensive. They assured me that insurance would pay for it, and so, when my mom came running around the corner a few minutes later, that's the first thing I told her, as I lay strapped to a wooden board, getting loaded into the ambulance. Of course we didn't have health insurance. I'm not sure how my mom paid for it.

I had to get stiches in my lip and I couldn't bend my left leg for several weeks. I still have one of those weird knee scars on it; it looks like a pale eye. I can't bear to have anyone touch it--it feels like the equivalent of hearing fingernails on a chalkboard. When I went back to school later that week, limping, lip all swollen and stitchy, a long scab running the entire length of my nose, and resumed my job as salad bar cashier, lots of kids asked me if it was true that I had been raped. I didn't even know what that meant.

On June 9, 1987, I was driving on the 405, on my way home from an audition in Anaheim (can't remember what the play was--maybe Bye Bye Birdie?). Just as I was approaching one of those big, curving freeway overpasses I thought to myself--"Wow. It's June 9th. Five years ago today I got hit by the car. Wouldn't it be weird if something happened today?" Just then the trunk of the car in front of me, which wasn't closed all the way because they were transporting a sofa, bounced open and a sofa cushion flew onto the road in front of me. In that quick, slow moment of the accident I knew that I couldn't swerve, because I'd go off the overpass, so I gritted my teeth and kept going forward. The sofa cushion wrapped around my back axle and made the car fishtail from one lane to the other, coming to a dead stop sideways in the lefthand lane, looking out over the traffic below.

The cars behind me came to a screeching stop, thankfully. I restarted the car and tried to back up. Nothing. I put it into drive and tried to move forward. Nothing. Someone got out of their car and started yelling at me to move my car. I said "I can't. It's stuck on a sofa cushion." The angry man insisted I wasn't trying hard enough, so I got out of the car and let him have at it. While he tried in vain to move the car, I looked underneath it. From the back axle hung shredded cotton and fabric. Someone told me the police were on the way; someone handed me a car phone and I called my mom and tried to explain where I was and that she needed to come and get me. It's harder than you'd think to describe where you are when you're on a random freeway overpass, and even harder to find that overpass when you're coming from the opposite direction.

Everything worked out okay. I wasn't hurt and the car was fine, once a mechanic had pulled out the cushion. But five years later, on June 9, 1992, I didn't leave the house.

Nothing is Dangerous or Sexy When You Drink it in a Denim Jumper

2006-06-07T19:52:00.000-05:00

(photo courtesy of bigredmug.com)

Yes, Dr. M(mmm), there is a connection between the first half of my last post, about Tab, and the second half, about reconnecting with some friends from my undergrad days at BYU this weekend. College Roommate and I drank a lot of diet coke when we were friends. I'm not sure what it's like now, but when I was up to the "Y" we drank diet coke constantly. Not the caffeine-free stuff they sold on campus, but the real stuff, which you could get anywhere off campus, at mind-bogglingly cheap prices, in dangerously copious amounts.

Really, drinking diet coke was about all my friends and I did my first year of college (remember, we couldn't/didn't drink alcohol), beating out apparently less-compelling activities such as reading, studying, going to class. Our favorite place to buy it was Hart's, a convenience store across from our freshman dorm, and later, a quick walk from the humanities building, where I spent all of my time my last few years in Provo. Hart's had the best diet coke by far--way better than Circle K, whose fountain was so syrupy that it tasted more like root beer than diet coke. People drink soda compulsively in Provo; the entire back wall of Hart's was a soda fountain. You could get anything, even red cream soda. And of the two diet coke fountains at Hart's, the one on the left was much better than the one on the right. But you couldn't just dispense it: you had to pump the spout, so that you'd get an even distribution of soda water and syrup. We used refillable mugs, like the one pictured above, which cost about a quarter to refill, and we went about three times a day. That means we were drinking 96 oz of diet coke per day. Which meant we knew all the best gas station bathrooms up and down I-15, Utah's main highway. It's kind of weird to think that we built our lives around diet coke. Weird and embarassing, because I almost flunked out of college my first two years.

So did my friend. She took a year off between sophomore and junior year, the same as me. Only she worked in an Ann Taylor in San Francisco, and I worked for my dad's pneumatics and hydraulics business.

First I was the receptionist. "Hello, P & H. How may I help you?"

Then I was a secretary. Then I was a secretary and accounts payable. And payroll. And accounts billable. And benefits. And then receptionist, too. What I didn't know when I went to work for my dad for a year, was that his company was going bankrupt and he was involved in a bunch of lawsuits. As he laid people off, I had to take over their jobs. That sucked, but not as much as it did when his employees still worked there. They HATED him, and they didn't trust me because I was his daughter. But because I was his daughter, my dad showed me no mercy--no favorites in his office, you know. He hated everyone equally.

It was the worst year of my life. I got a second job at a gym and spent the evenings I wasn't working there, working out there. I taught myself how to lift weights using those big, glossy Joe Weider books, with Gladys Portuguese or Joyce Vedral. I used my refill mug at the WaWa around the corner from work. I lied and said I was going to Philadelphia for church, where they had a special parish for "young adults" (how else are you going to mate the ones who didn't go to BYU?). Really, I was exploring the city.

My friend's year wasn't much better. I'm not sure when she went back to school, but when she did she didn't go back to BYU.

The weekend spent with CR and family was perfect. We had perfect weather, the city was filled with music from the Gospel Fest, and as we walked through gardens and around fountains, and under bridges, and yes, drank big, ice-filled glasses of diet coke with lemon, we fell in and out of conversations easily and naturally. As gf reported on her blog, their daughters were smart, sassy, and completely wonderful to be around. I loved them instantly, even though being with them made me a little sad, because they reminded me of other brilliant and amazing children I've loved and lost contact with in my peripatetic life.

In the comments on my last post bw described Tab as dangerous and sexy. I love that. It's saucy and so, so queer. But Diet Coke is just sad and personality-sucking, gender normativity posing as transgression.

My friends told me that while Hart's is still a Utah chain, the one across from the dorms is gone. RIP, Hart's Food and Gas, University Avenue, Provo, Utah.

2006-06-02T22:58:00.000-05:00

I'm done teaching for the summer. Finally. I still have a week full of meetings and end-of-the-year events, but mostly, I'm almost free. I know this in my bones because I'm starting to feel that slightly overwhelmed feeling of unstructured days ahead, and work mornings slept-through, and the sinking feeling that I just didn't get done what I needed to get done this summer.

One of the things that has gotten me through the end of the quarter, and made office hours my way favorite part of the day, has been my renewed appreciation for the quite possibly dangerous, but every bit as good as I remember it being, Tab. How can you not love a soda that comes in a pink can?

Remember how the sacchrine stays on your lips, so that a half hour after you finish the soda you lick them without thinking and there it is, that sweet, peppery flavor?

A couple of friends from college, one of whom was my roommate for a long time, are in town tomorrow and I'll be spending the day with them and their three daughters. Now, I'm not in touch with any of my undergraduate friends--we might have drifted apart over the years anyway, but my leaving the church and coming out definitely expidited the process. And that's about me as much as them--I ran to the other side of the country and immersed myself in grad school and tried to get as far away from my former self as possible. The closest to Utah I've been in over a decade was a campus visit at UN-Reno, and just the sight of the Wasatch Mts. filling up the horizon, all dusty and brown, and looming and huge, made my heart feel clutchy and pangy and panicked.

I'm kind of scared. But I really loved these two people. They weren't a *they* when I knew them; they married long after college, in their late twenties, which is kind of rare in Mormon culture, and seem to live a really low-key, joyful, tumbley kind of life. So we'll see. They tell me that their daughters are impossibly girly-girls, which amuses and exasperates them, as neither of them cares about stuff like that; they think I'll get along with them famously. I hope so. I think so.

The Last Very Special Episode About Things You Shouldn't Do

2006-05-08T13:12:00.000-05:00

Not having premarital sex? Not smoking pot? Not marrying people your family disapproves of? Didn't pretend to get married when you'd really already eloped on your first date so you could finally have sex? Never trashed the high school gym, got kicked off the basketball team, sent to jail, stolen money from your (seriously odd) infant brothers, and forever after been the loser of your family? Never disobeyed your parents and then been immediately struck by a car/had your dog struck by a car/struck someone while you were driving the car? Then you should feel plenty smug watching tonight's series finale of Seventh Heaven, because baby, you're perfect enough to be a Camden. In fact, you're a lot better than the Camdens, because they've done all of this stuff, over and over, season after season, for an unbelievable ten years.

Today's New York Times had a really funny retrospective review of the series, though I wish they'd gone farther. I loved this:

By the show's moral logic, there is really nothing worse than premarital
sex, certainly not manslaughter: this revelation came when one of the Camden
boys accidentally ran over and killed someone with his car. That incident was
quickly dispensed with, but then came the shocking consequence: the boy's desire
to then become physically intimate with his girlfriend.
The boy, Simon,
appeared in the show's pilot as an 8- or 9-year-old pining for a dog. The dog he
got, as it turned out, was about to give birth to a litter of puppies. That the
dog — presumably unmarried — is named Happy and not Crushed, Devastated or
Destined for a Life of Squandered Opportunity seems, in retrospect, a
disingenuous fluke.

The smartest observation was about the show's schizophrenia. I successfully avoided watching this show for almost its entire run, finally succumbing during a research leave last fall. I started watching out of some weird Mormon-nostalgia, like poking a bruise, thinking I knew exactly what kind of audience it was aiming for, smugly congratulating myself on not being part of it, but then I found myself really liking some of their positions, as when the mother freaked out because her daughters didn't recognize and respect the sacrifices she'd made to be a stay at home mother and the amount of work she put into this career choice, insisting that motherhood is a choice, and it is work, or when she freaked out because the father objected to her going back to school, or when the father freaked out over the sexualization of children, wondering why his pre-teen daughter felt so much pressure to be partnered off with a boyfriend. I think I almost convinced myself the show might be feminist, despite the fact that the credits list the Camden sons before the daughters, instead of listing the siblings chronologically. But since the father's one dating freak out was the last time the show ever shied away from pushing insistent heterosexual match-ups and matings, regardless of the character's age or, as the Times article points out, their educational or career goals, I mostly watched because I was always hoping for another very special episode about the dangers of doing drugs. (Even the mom smoked pot, once, in college, and yes, a car crash did follow and someone did die. Someone. Always. Dies.)

The Times notes that "as distasteful as the series might seem to liberal sensibilities, it is arguably more offensive still to conservative ones, because of the sleaziness with which it puts across the Christian values to which it halfheartedly aspires. . . . It revels in the illicit behavior it condemns and takes pleasure in its own creepy innuendos." Uhh, ya think? I've been wondering where all the NC-17 Seventh Heaven fanfic is hiding, because this show offers lots and lots of squicky subtext that fanfic could go to town on, and brothers and sisters who love each other waaaay too much is just the beginning.

Afraid you won't be able to follow the drama tonight? Check out Television Without Pity's handy Seventh Heaven FAQ.

2006-05-01T23:01:00.000-05:00

I love this post. It is the blog entry I have been waiting for my entire life. Gay Prof takes on misogyny in the gay community:

Regardless of the racial, educational, or class make-up of the queer group, I have been dumbfounded by how easily self-identified gay men fall into misogynist dialogues or jokes. For many gay men, degrading women’s bodies as dysfunctional, inferior, or just plain icky becomes a means through which they attempt to build unity with other gay men.

Come on, boys, we can work this out. Loving cock does not mean hating vaginas.

His blog is called The Center of Gravitas and it's great. He's funny, poignant, hard-ass when he needs to be, and wise. And every entry comes with at least one vintage Wonder Woman comic book cover. What's not to love?

I have way more to say about gay men and lesbians, but I don't even know where to start. Would that post be called "I'm a girl, but I can still be a queen, can't I?" or "Learning not to get pissed off when gay men refer to each other as she"?

Sister Golden Hair

2006-04-15T01:29:00.000-05:00

Lucyrain has me thinking about the people I've lost. I say "the people I've lost," because my understanding of myself hinges on thinking of them that way, but maybe it's time to grow up and acknowledge my own role in losing them. Many people have come and gone in my life, but only a few resurface consistently, persistently, in my dreams, year after year. Why have I lost these ones, more than the other ones?

The person who comes to me the most in my dreams is my best friend from high school. She didn't actually go to my high school--she went to the rival one, across town--but she was a member of my church, and we went to Seminary together. She was my size, had the same hair color, same cut, mostly. In a lot of ways we were similar, but she was shy, and she was rich. Maybe she wasn't shy so much as sheltered. But she didn't really have any friends from her school. I had nothing to lose; I was damn poor and from a trashy family and way out of my league as soon as my '76 wagon started up the long, gradual ascent up the way-too-symbolic hill to her subdivision. But we looked alike and dressed alike, and our names rhymed, and her family let me come on weekend vacations to their home in Palm Springs, driving through the brown, brown desert in their light blue Mercedes, drinking warm Diet Cokes and big slices of red cabbage (takes so long to chew! makes you feel full!) surrounded by the smell and softness of leather, listening to the newest musicals from London, Cats, and Starlight Express. They bought me my own copy of Miss Manners, and introduced me to the world of fine china (English or Western European ONLY! Never Asian; Never American; never off-white or beige; only, ever, purest white!)and gave me the opportunity to pretend that I had transcended my class. My mother resented the time I spent at her house, jealous, I guess, of my fascination with a world so far from my own, powerless to compete with what they had to offer.

What I had to offer, I think, was guilessness, passion. They liked that I was a reader, that I loved Bette Davis and Myrna Loy--they especially responded to my fluency in "The Thin Man" ouevre--and that I had what Mormons would call a "strong testimony"--that I believed in the church in a super-present, super-overwhelming way. If I could have spoken in tongues and channeled my ancestors, I would have. And I loved performing for her parents, working to convince them that I was of worth, even if my parents were divorced and my family was poor.

But her, I loved, in a pure, pure way. I thought she was the prettiest, sweetest, softest, quietest person I had ever met. I wanted to protect her. I wanted to be her. I wanted her, but I didn't know what that meant. I still don't know what that would have meant. I just know that being with her made me happier and sadder than I ever knew I could be. She got a boyfriend her senior year in high school, a younger boy, and we didn't see each other as much. We were roommates in college, and married our college boyfriends the same summer; we even shared a bridal shower. One of the last times I talked to her was when I called to congratulate her on the birth of her first child, and told her that I was getting a divorce. We talked briefly, a year later, when she asked me if what she had heard was true, if I had left my husband because I'm a lesbian. We exchanged a few cards after that, but have never talked again.

But she comes to me in dreams a couple of times a year. Usually we greet each other with joy in the dreams--it's been so long, we have so much to catch up on, so much we want to say. But we also want to look at each other, to soak up the other's presence after so much time apart. I always tell her that I've dreamed of this moment, that time after time I've dreamt I saw her again and that each time I've told her about dreaming about seeing her again and marvel, each time, as though it was really happening this time, that she's really there, that we're really seeing each other again. And each time I wake up disappointed, realizing that I haven't seen her, that this was just another layer in an agonizingly long string of dreams.

But last night when she came to me in my dream, she avoided me. I heard that she was back in town, and that she was walking through the same store as me, at that very moment. I ran up the stairs to see her, but she smiled stiffly when she saw me, and turned back to whatever she was looking at before I came up the stairs. I started in on my usual speech, about how amazing it was to see her after so many years, about how I had often dreamed of this moment, only to realize that it was yet another dream. She looked at me and said "this has to end. We both liked David Bowie, and we both went to the same church, but that doesn't necessarily make us friends." I stepped back, stung. And then I looked at how boring her hair was--thinner than mine, and a dingy brownish color. Her eyes were a pale blue, and kind of big, but her face was unremarkable. I remembered that I had pretended not to notice how bad her acne was in high school, or not to gloat when I made cheerleader at my school and she didn't make the squad at hers. She was nobody. She was my love.

I remember visiting her at home during a break from college, playing bridge in the kitchen with her mother, feeling like now that I was almost grown up, with a degree almost in hand and plans to go to grad school, I wouldn't feel so small in their house. Her mother, trying to talk me into dating the man I would end up marrying, leaned in and smiled her wide, wide, smile. I don't even remember what she was talking about, but I remember her words: "Oh there's never been anyone quite like you, Margo, darling." I remember getting what she was offering, hearing, for the first time, the condescension in her voice, understanding, finally, how much of a service she thought she had been doing, teaching me how to be "appropriate," exposing me to a world of manners and taste and elegance, and I recoiled--obviously not enough, since I married the boy, and kept trying to gain her approval for a few more years. That was the day, after a lifetime of trying to get them to like me, that I started to hate rich people.

Quick, dumb thought

2006-04-14T15:04:00.000-05:00

So I'm about three and a half hours into a seder dinner and we're deep into a feminist retelling of Exodus, wherein Miriam figures way more prominently than Moses, and I'm hungry--all I've eaten is some something green and grassy, representing bitter herbs, dipped in salt water, and my mind wanders and it hits me, re: Gwyneth and Chris's offspring:
Apple=Genesis
Moses=Exodus
next baby's name will have to come from Leviticus. Any guesses? Aaron? Eleazar? Ithamar?

Big Love, or Not in My Family

2006-04-03T22:10:00.000-05:00

It took me almost a week to get through the pilot episode of Big Love. I was excited when I heard the premise--how could you go wrong with a show about polygamy? and nervous and excited about seeing mormonism dealt with in popular culture. But I couldn't get past the wives' sad eyes, their sinking realization that they would never be "the one." And I really couldn't stomach stupid Bill Paxton's reluctant, put-upon patriarch. How sad to have total dominion over other people's mortal and eternal lives. What a heavy responsibility. Get over it, you stupid baby.

But when I finally sat down and made myself watch the episode from start to finish, I thought it was pretty cool and that they are dealing with the complexity of negotiating a relationship amongst several grown-ups in smart and thoughtful ways. Sure, I wanted to officiously shout out corrections at the tv--mostly about their totally unrealistically immodest clothing, a real easy detail to get right, and totally non-negotiable rule in Mormonism, and yes, even, I would imagine, in polygamist, SLC-based "non"-Mormon Mormonism: Dress Modestly. Meaning, NO SHORT ROBES. NO TANK TOPS (not even in bed). NO TIGHTY-WHITIES. NO SKIN, EVER. But there were also many things that they did get right, and what seemed like lots of teasers to let the Mormons (are they watching the show? When I say Mormons, I mostly mean people who still identify ethnically, if not religiously, as Mormon) out there know that they get it, that they are being selective in what they feature. The Mormon girl chatting about Laurels, Mia Maids, and the Relief Society in the fast-food restraunt kitchen was a nice, easy nod to us. So are the opening credits, when the main characters, dressed all in white skate through filmy veils. That was a pretty obvious shout-out. But what about the last shot in the last minute of the credits, when the patriarch and his wives are holding hands around a table and they are on, and surrounded by, planets? Nice touch.

Watching Big Love and feeling a funny stomach-pitching mixture of pride and shame and embarassment and loss comes right at the time that my department is getting ready to celebrate the 20th anniversary of women's studies at my school, and as part of the festivities, we've been filming various faculty members talking about watershed years in their developing feminism. So far I've avoided giving my three minute narrative, because I have no idea how to describe my coming to feminism without also describing my leaving Mormonism, and my growing realization that you can never leave Mormonism. Or at least, that I don't want to. I don't believe the teachings, I don't attend meetings, but I will shout down anyone, member or non-member who tries to tell me it isn't who I am, an ethnicity as real and thick and heavy as any I can imagine.

Anyway, getting to the title of this post, and why I started blogging this in the first place, as many of the other inactive Mormons in the blogsphere have been reporting, I've been asked how I feel about this show quite a bit, and I often end up describing my family's primary polygamous tale, The Curse of Ann Bond. (Imagine a scary mwhahahaha voice intoning this) I wrote this a while back, when I had a livejournal account, with apologies to all my readers (both of them--Hi Mer! Hi Ronit!) who read this a few years ago.

**The Curse of Ann Bond**
The great, great-grandmother I never had left Provo early on an October morning in 1869. She roused her sons from where they slept next to their brothers and bundled them out into the morning with hushes and kisses. By the time the sun rose she was far up Provo canyon, on her way to Heber City, where she still had family. She kept the boys going by tossing a ball up the road and exciting them to get it; over and over she tossed the ball and over and over they retrieved it. She's left her husband and her sister-wives because her husband and the first wife recently returned from General Conference with a fourth wife. She's not upset that there's a fourth wife; she's upset that she, the second wife, and the woman she shares a home with, the third wife, weren't consulted first. She's devastated, and she's not going back.

That's the opening of the novel I want to write. That's what I know.

What comes next depends on who's telling the story. Sometimes her husband comes to get her in Heber, tries to apologize, tries to coax her home. As they talk David, the older son, hides in his father's wagon and returns to Provo and to his Aunt Jane, who's raised him, along with his mother, in a smaller home, at the base of the Wasatch Mountains, away from the first wife's home, in the center of the city. He coaxes his brother to join him, and by the time he's discovered, his mother has given up, tired of fighting. In another version the children don't have to sneak home; once their mother realizes how much they miss their other mother, and their other siblings, she allows them to return with their father. She stays in Heber for the rest of her life. Or she returns to Massachussets and has five more children, all of whom live, as opposed to the five of her seven children from her previous marriage, who hadn't lived past their early childhoods. In one version, her sons are ripped from her in a violent, tear-drenched scene and she stays in the West, slowly, carefully, plotting her revenge. This, apparently the most popular version in my family, has her befriending an Apache shaman and convincing him to curse our family forever, to condemn us to lives of poverty, alcoholism, divorce, incest, drug abuse, prison time, shot-gun weddings, bankruptcys, birth defects--including the completely unforgettable cousin born with a gill--suicides, murders.

This is how I heard the story, about a year ago. After a lifetime of silence, all these different versions came tumbling out of my mother within the space of one phone call. She was actually telling me about a phone conversation she had just had with a cousin who had just finished a sentence for shooting someone in a mall parking lot. His excuse? Ann Bond. I interrupted my mom to say, "Ann who?" because I had never heard of her. Me, the one completely obsessed with her ancestors, the one who didn't leave Aunt Zova's living room to play cops and robbers with her cousins in the deadly Arizona heat, the one who sat at dying aunts' feet and listened to their stories, told in fragile, lilting voices, of life during the time of Geronimo, of fires that lost all but one precious rocking chair, of monstrous births, and Job-like plagues--the time Aunt Naomi had that cauliflower-like growth all over the back of her hand, or the time she gave birth to a fourteen pound child who split her nearly in two--a child who would never hear. Me, the one who cares so much about this family, much of whose identity still rests on having been loved--really loved--by my grandmother, who grew up surrounded by the remnants of this polygamous family, a woman whose vivacious feminine energy and comportment I try so hard to emulate. Me.

I didn't know this story. I didn't even know, really know, that our family was polygamous. We weren't a fancy family. We weren't the upper-class of Mormons, not aristocracy like the Romneys or the Huntsmen, and usually polygamy was a privilege of the most properous. But here it was: the great great grandfather I had spent my life hearing about (he married a woman he met on his mission in England; he returned to the states a few months earlier than she did; she set out in a hand-cart company eager to get to Utah. Having used green wood to build their hand-carts, they got stranded somewhere in the middle of Nebraska and had to be rescued. He rescued her.) had four other wives. My great great-grandmother was the first. That makes me a descendent of a first wife. That's a good thing in Mormonism.

The second wife, the one who left, was named Ann Bond. What do you think of that name? Isn't it great? Isn't it clean and tight and reddish orangish? If I was going to write a book, I'd use that name. Or maybe I'd try to give her a Dickensian name like Jerusha Mudgett, something deeply symbolic for me (Julie Andrews=Mary Poppins=hot=also plays Jerusha in 1970s adaptation of James Michner's novel Hawaii) and charmingly eccentric to the New York Times Book Review reviewer, who is stunned by the novel's beauty, its passion, the naturalness of its prose.

Big Love seems intent on exploring the nuances of an impossibly difficult situation. It's not a pro-polygamy show. As it so powerfully demonstrates, this isn't an institution that makes sense in the 21st century. There isn't enough work to do to justify this arrangement--hence Nicki's frantic consumption followed by boredom and tears. But I still go back and forth in my mind over whether or not this arrangement made sense in the 19th century. During my undergrad at BYU, my first feminist friends and I used to talk about polygamy a lot. We wanted to believe that somehow our female ancestors had been freed by polygamy, raising their children with other women, caring for each other, blessing each other, free to be both wives and not-wives, mothers and not-mothers. As young women trying to reconcile the only way of life we had ever known, and a church we loved, with the dawning realization that there was no place for us in this world, knowing that even though we were being educated, our church didn't really want us to use those educations except as they helped us in our lonely roles as wives and mothers, sister-wifehood sometimes seemed like a utopian option. But, we always ended up conceeding, since sister-wives answer to one patriarch, absolute and infallible in his power, it also sounded terrifying and humiliating. Better to just leave.

Sick AGAIN

2006-03-31T17:20:00.000-06:00

I cannot believe it. For the third time this year, I am sick. This time it's the stomach flu (it's been so long since I had this--like 15 years--that I'd actually stopped believing it exists). I got it on the way home from school, and actually had to pull over on a pretty big main Chicago street and be sick, something I've never, ever done before. It got all over my favorite pumps and most comfortable teaching pants. I know, gross. Sorry. I spent the entire UNC vs. Tennessee women's game running back and forth to the bathroom. That's okay, though, because I've had about enough of Ivory Latta for this season. She's cute and she's strong and smart, but enough already--get out of the way so Candace Parker can make a basket.

So the stomach flu came and went, and now the cold I suspected I still hadn't licked is gathering strength and knocking around my lungs and making me sound like an old man. I've got a couple of posts drafted, one about Big Love, if anyone wants this (ethnically, if not actively) Mormon girl's opinion on it.

At what point do I call my doctor and tell her I think I might have avian flu?

Sloop John B

2006-03-17T11:38:00.000-06:00

I woke up with this song in my head this morning, and it was so persistent that I had to go to itunes and download Pet Sounds. I probably should have had this album before, and I probably should own it for real, but The Beach Boys make me whimper, for all kinds of reasons. I woke up wanting to go home, but not knowing where home is. I think it's because of the made-guy in this week's Sopranos, who, having inherited some money, dreams of moving to Florida and starting over. My mind flashed to a row of fairly cheesy apartments-turned-condos around the corner from the house my family rented for 25 years. I see the red Spanish-tiled roofs, the giant fern plants lining the condo walkways, a eucalyptus tree stretching tall against the yellowy-blue of the sky. I can feel the sweet softness of the dry, dry air.

When I used to dream about hitting the academic jackpot, in my deepest heart of hearts I dreamt of landing in Orange County and buying one of these condos. It was a modest dream, realistic in its acknowledgement of how hard it would be for an academic to buy a home in So. Cal., but it was also a dream about being close to my family, because up until last May, my sister and her family lived in that home, having taken over the lease from my mom when she moved back to her childhood home to take care of her ailing mother. My quick, pangy flash the other night reminded me of something I rarely admit: how much I want to go home, and how impossible that dream has always seemed, even at eighteen, when I first left home.

My dad is the oldest of nine children, so when I was born there were still young children in my grandparents' home, aunts and uncles who were only a few years older than me. Listening to The Beach Boys reminds me of leaning against a giant, stuffed purple panda in a corner of the room my aunts shared, listening to them talk or, more likely fight, while they got ready to go out and do whatever teenagers do. The Beach Boys take me back to that achy, melancholy childhood waiting period when it seems impossible that you will ever be included in conversations, or have a place that is just yours, that time when you wonder what you will look like when you grow up, and if you will recognize yourself. Having lived my entire adult life away from California, I often meet people who tell me about their childhood fantasies of living there, fantasies premised on shows like The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family. They tell me that Southern California seemed like the ultimate place to live, where everyone was cool and attractive and happy. They dreamt of growing up and being able to access that life.

I would like to say, for the record, that kids who grow up in Southern California have this same dream.

Sorry About the Blog Roll

2006-03-17T11:33:00.000-06:00

When I switched my template from blue to white I lost my blogroll. I need to reload it, but haven't, and since I usually read from bloglines, I keep forgetting. I'm mindful of this right now because I've been compiling a list of feminist blogs for a class assignment I'm developing for the intro. to women's studies course I'm teaching next quarter (which begins the week after next, making "spring break" a sad sham) and have been cruising people's blogrolls like crazy.

Let's call him Dr. N(nnnn)

2006-03-17T10:21:00.000-06:00

It feels like I posted about two weeks ago, but checking my actual site (which I rarely do) I see that it's been almost a month. How did that happen? Mostly it's because I owe a real-life post to one of my favorite bloggers and have been ashamed to post here when I haven't written him back yet.

So this is a shout out to fav. blogger: I know, I know I have to get back to you. Just because I haven't doesn't mean I'm not living daily with the guilt of not. My ex-girlfriend used to have a great saying about dissertation writing that comes to mind today: (rough paraphrase) you get to a point where the guilt and shame of NOT writing becomes much harder to bear than just writing.

This Just In

2006-02-24T13:38:00.000-06:00

So I'm spending today buckling down and working in my office instead of taking off as soon as class is over, and I'm listening to WMFU on my office computer (thanks to a great lead from Bryan over at The Great Whatsit) and I'm stoked, because they play a nice and easy Dusty Springfield song. In fact, I'm feeling so pleased, that I almost blog about it. It would have been kind of a pointless blog, more of a Hey, my lady is on the radio, and they're not playing "Son of a Preacher Man," sort of thing, which might have led to a what-I'm-doing-now newsy blog. But I'm too lazy and I've really got to get these papers graded.

But then the DJ breaks in with some news. Not only are they making a bio-pic of Dusty's life, which has been talked about forever, with not much actually going forward, but Ang Lee is going to direct it. And Charlize Theron will play Dusty, with Kate Moss as one of her early lovers. The last I heard about this project, Kristin Chenowith, who played the lead in Wicked, was cast as Dusty, which made me a little uncomfortable, because I really hate the whole musical genre, especially the belting part and, having heard that Chenowith planned to sing the Dusty songs herself, I couldn't imagine that it wouldn't suck.

Charlize Theron, however, seems like a good choice, although with her perky little pug nose, she certainly doesn't look like Dusty. For one thing, I like that she's not shying away from lesbian roles, despite getting a lot of shit for playing so many. For another thing, I think it's kind of appropriate that a South African is playing Dusty, since she's been pretty wildly popular there, way more than in the U.S., at least, since she got deported in 1964 for refusing to play to segregated audiences. Also, I doubt Theron will try to cover Dusty's songs.

Delicate and Indisposed

2006-02-19T12:51:00.000-06:00

I can't believe I'm sick again. This is my second cold since the beginning of the year, and once again, I am totally immobilized by it. Just when I was getting my strength back, and back to at least an hour of hard cardio and an hour of seriously good weight lifting every other day (I was even using the 20 lb. weights for shoulder presses, chest flies and bicep/triceps, and back up to 90 lb. one legged leg presses, which might not seem like much, but really is, if you consider that I'm only about 5') BAM! back to bed.

I blame this in part on the gym, which is, after all, a hot, sweaty, petri dish, and probably not the best place to be exerting myself and taking huge gulping breaths. I also blame my students and colleagues, who, obviously, can't help breathing when they talk to me, or pass me in the hall, passing along their various germs and viruses. I also blame my new upstairs neighbors and their one year old, who clomp around at 6 every morning, prompting me to sleep with a fan on for the white noise. It was already too dry and hot in my radiator-heated apartment; with all that dry air flinging around the bedroom while I try to sleep, how could I help but catch another cold?

But mostly, I blame Sara Teasdale, the neuresthenic, famously delicate lyric poet who I've been writing about for the past several weeks. The more I try to figure out her version of idealized femininity, the more I seem to perform it. And so I sit here on a brilliantly sunny Sunday morning wrapped in blankets, listening to early, way-over-orchestrated Ray Charles, dreaming of princesses while I try to get my head into Teasdale's impossibly precious landscapes, tapping delicately at my laptop's keys, with a snowy-white siamese cat curled up in my lap, head resting on the warmth of the keyboard. And while I've always been reluctant to describe Amy Lowell as butch, she's looking tougher and tougher in her determined pursuit of, and ardent love for, beautiful women, compared with poor pitiful Sara, who, poem after poem, volume after mind-numbing volume, glories in weakness and unrequited love.

A Maiden

Oh if I were a velvet rose
Upon a red rose vine,
I'd climb to touch his window
And make his casement fine.

And if I were a bright-eyed bird
That twitters on the tree,
All day I'd sing my love for him
Til he should harken me.

But since I am a maiden
I go with downcast eyes,
And he will never hear my songs
That he has turned to sighs.

And since I am a maiden
My love will never know
That I could kiss him with a mouth
More red than roses blow.

a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo....

2006-02-02T13:18:00.000-06:00

Happy Birthday, James Joyce. I can't help loving you, even though you didn't share your royalties from Ulysses with Sylvia Beach, after all the money she spent, and borrowed, to get your damn book published. You know you broke her, right? But you made me an English major, and a modernist, and you inspired me to write in books, and underline, and fold pages over, and memorize passages, and study Aquinas' theories of beauty. And you taught me about Kitty O'Shea.

Shortcuts

2006-01-30T13:35:00.000-06:00

"Gertrude had always looked like the dear aunt, and now with her topknot shorn away she did not look like anyone but herself." --Bravig Imbs

So I cut my hair off, again. It's shockingly short, about an inch and a half at its longest point, which is on top. And it's red, again. The friends I have now are surprised--they didn't see this coming. I explain that the blond, swingy bob cut isn't how I usually look, that I've actually had short hair most of my life and only grown it out a few times, and even then, never past my shoulders. I'm really a short-haired person. This is the real me. I say it, but I don't believe it now anymore than I did all the other times I cut my hair off and had to explain to my current group of friends about "the real me."

I cut it because my building has very weak circuits and my blowdryer kept knocking the power off. I cut it because I teach an early class this quarter and this requires no fixing at all. I cut it because I lost about twenty pounds last year and I promised myself that when I got my cheekbones back (sharper, stronger, bolder now, because I'm older) I could pull it off. I cut it because I didn't want to look preppy, or upwardly-mobile. I cut it because I wanted more queer visibility, because it seemed important that I not acquiesce to the tyranny of socially-normative standards of white female beauty (watch for women with short hair on tv tonight. You will not see one, unless she is an old woman in a posture-pedic bed commercial, or a crying contestant on a rerun of last season's America's Next Top Model.)

I cut it because this is the "real me," because it is my fate and my destiny to not be a pretty girl with a swingy blond bob. And if I didn't have to prep for class now, I would give in to the huge, nauseating, introspective confessional narrative welling up in my chest right now. I would settle into my desk chair and let this post really happen. I would unpack that super-melodramatic statement and think through why, having cut my hair off of my own volition, (and actually looking pretty smokin' in this cut) I feel so sorry for myself. Not regretful that I did it, but put upon that I had to.

I would tell you about how much I loved Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins, and how I refused to see The Sound of Music because she had short hair; how I begged and begged my mother to grow her hair out (she didn't); how she cut my hair off when I was about five because I used to knot it while I sucked my thumb (in my head I was making beautiful trees with the strands of hair, like the ones in the Lego playset I got to play with when I visited my grandma's house); how I cried because now I looked like one of the Blockheads in Gumby and Pokey; how I cut my hair off in early high school because I thought it reflected my perkiness and how not one single boy ever asked me out, a trend which contined until the end of my first year of college when, my perkiness broken, my hair almost chin length, I finally got a boyfriend; how I grew it and grew it and grew it until the beginning of my junior year, when I got married; how I cut it off again almost immediately after the wedding and wore it short until just before we got divorced.

But I won't. Class is in a couple of hours and though I've read, I haven't got a lesson plan ready and I've got a steady stream of students starting to drop by with various excuses as to why they don't have their papers for class tonight.

So, I cut my hair. It's short. It's red, (because unless you have enough hairs to highlight some of them, you can't really be blond, only all-over treacly yellow which I won't do.) I've already had one colleague call me butch, and another one call me Sinead O'Connor. I'm not sore about that; they were just being fond and doing the office banter thing. What really gets to me is my own irrational despair, indicative of something really deep and internalized--is it misogyny? is it homophobia? is it me-ophobia?--a belief that if you can't swing your hair while you walk down the hall, or toss it with your hands while you talk, or tie it effortlessly into a ponytail using the scrunchy you keep around the gear shift knob of your rabbit convertible, you're not really a woman.

The best game EVER

2006-01-24T12:06:00.000-06:00

As reported by Feministe, from Sepulchritude.com: The Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf drinking game.

Some Velvet Morning

2006-01-23T23:32:00.000-06:00

Would I be risking jinxing my whole teaching world if I admitted how much I love my schedule and my classes this quarter? I teach a class on Poe MWF from 11 to 12, and then on Monday nights I teach queer theory.

The Poe class is a pure pleasure to teach. Pure, chewy, delicious pleasure. I get to teach really interesting and intellectually challenging classes in Womens' and Gender Studies, but I miss the comfortableness of teaching literature. Teaching all Poe, all quarter, is sumptuous, one of those classes where you kind of can't believe you get paid for teaching it (unless you're doing the grading, then you believe). I love it when Berenice's teeth roll to the floor.

Even though I always tell myself I'll do administrative stuff during the long, long break between classes, or maybe work out, or do research, I always end up doing lesson prep, even if, as was the case today, I had been prepping all weekend. The reason I vow not to prep is because I always take exactly as much time as I have to get ready for this class, so by the time 5:45 comes I'm a little freaked out, because this material is HARD, and no matter how many times I've taught it, I always get nervous that this time I won't possibly be able to explain it and that I've assigned too much, that the students will be resentful, and that I'll say things that are just too dirty or, even if I'm explaining a relatively innocuous concept, I'll use the word "fuck" too many times. By the time it's classtime, I'm really, really tired.

Tonight I had assigned all but the last chapter of Foucault's A History of Sexuality. I knew they wouldn't get through all of it, or even most of it, but I wanted them to at least have the experience of working through some of it. So I spent a huge part of yesterday wasting time putting together a powerpoint lecture. I know that sounds corporate and corny, like I'm running a benefits seminar, but I love finding pictures to go with the text, and writing the text in fonts like bloody drippy vampire font (when I write that people learned to confess "all the insinuations of the flesh: thoughts desires, voluptuous imaginings, delectations, combined movements of the body and the soul") or Bajoran font (when I write "the rise of the nation state"). I like that it means I can leave my notes on the podium and walk around the classroom, because my points are already up there. Tonight, without planning on it beforehand, I ended up using furbies as an example of non-normative sexuality. I think it was a safe example, because probably not many of my students are into that. And even if they are, it's not like I criticized or patholigized having sex in animal costumes. I just mentioned it. A lot.

My favorite part of Foucault night is when I have the students read case studies from the 19th century sexologist Krafft-Ebing. I have a 1946 reprint of Psychopathia Sexualis which still has the really naughty parts in latin. I like to teach this one:

Case 211. D., age forty-four; hereditarily predisposed; drinker, and suffering with lead poisoning. Until the last year he had masturbated much, and often drawn pornographic pictures and shown them to his acquaintances. He had repeatedly dressed himself as a woman in secret.
For two years, after becoming impotent, he had felt desire, while in crowds at dusk, mentulam denudare eamque ad nates mulieris crassissime terere. Once, when discovered in the act, he had been sentenced to imprisonment for four months.
His wife kept a milk shop. Iterum iterumque sibi temperare non potuit quin genitalia in ollam lacte completam mergeret. In the act he felt lustful pleasure, “as if touched with velvet.” He was cynical enough to use this milk for himself and the customers. During imprisonment alcoholic persecutory insanity developed in him.

The first latin phrase has to do with rubbing up against women; the second means "again and again he could not restrain himself from completely immersing his genitals in a jar of milk."

Edited to add: I have them read medical case studies to demonstrate one way (one of the most visible and obvious) sex gets put into discourse, and how sexual acts become medicalized as sexual pathologies. I like teaching this one because the milk part is pretty out there, and I like a good gross out.

Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight! Or, Self-Discipline Gone Awry

2006-01-07T20:19:00.000-06:00

A few days before Christmas gf and I watched Desk Set, a Tracy/Hepburn movie set in a reference department that is about to go automated (or so they think). I chose it because I vaguely remembered a drunken Christmas party scene. (Watching it, it seems that many of the scenes were drunken Christmas party scenes for Tracy, who slurs his words through most of the movie.)

One of the best things about this totally delightful movie is that the reference department under siege is all female, so the movie spends a lot of time showing how much these women know, and they know a lot. At one point Hepburn begins declaiming a poem and her best girlfriend, Joan Blondell, joins in, and they declaim and declaim with great exuberance and wild gestures. Neither of us recognized the poem, but we both immediately recognized that we SHOULD know this poem and that we had missed some huge cultural reference. So I paused the movie and googled the phrase they kept repeating: "Curfew shall not ring tonight." Turns out it was a really, really big poem, right up there with The Highwayman. It was a big hit with the elocutionary crowd, which, at the turn of the century was pretty much everyone.

So I thought, "Hey! I work on popular poetry. I teach poetry. I make my students memorize poems all the time. It's almost time for New Year's resolutions and I don't really have any yet, so I know what I'll do: I'll memorize this poem for one of my resolutions."

Brilliant idea. I found it on-line, printed it out, and taped it to the wall above the kitchen sink, so that I could work on it while I wash the dishes. It's been about a week and I have about half the poem memorized (I'm up to the part where she pushes past the sexton and dashes towards the bell) and I have to say, I hate this poem. The narrative is only mildly interesting--sure, the girl wraps her body around a bell clapper to save her lover, but that's nothing compared to the girl in "The Highwayman," who spends hours trying to wriggle out of bondage in order to lean over the barrel of a gun and shoot herself to save her lover. The rhyme is catchy, but the imagery is tepid--the only descriptive word the author knew, apparently, was white--and the last few stanzas are just a mess. I wish I had picked something more aesthetically gripping, with more luxurious words, like, well, "The Highwayman," or "Ulalume."

But I started it, so I gotta finish.

Four Things Meme

2006-01-06T19:15:00.000-06:00

Four Jobs I've Had
1. Valet/Bellhop
2. Speed-Reading instructor
3. Busboy at Chi Chi's Mexican restaurant in Provo, UT for 20 whole minutes. It was really hard and the trays were heavy. I don't like being yelled at. I started to cry and turned in my two week notice within the hour.
4. "Secretary" for a guy who claimed to be Harvey Korman's cousin. I think we were laundering money. He tried to convince me that dishwashing detergent was more dangerous than any germs that might be on the dishes.

Four Movies I Can Watch Over and Over
1. All About Eve
2. Auntie Mame
3. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
4. Hair

Four Places I've Lived
1. Newport Beach, CA
2. Jackson Heights, NY
3. Downingtown, PA
4. Provo, UT

Four TV Shows I Love To Watch
1. Star Trek: Voyager
2. Seventh Heaven
3. The Bob Newhart Show
4. Dead Like Me

Four Places I've Been on Vacation
1. Paris
2. Provincetown, MA
3. Nice
4. New Hampshire

Four Blogs I Visit Daily
1. What I Made For Dinner
2. More Mama Than Writer
3. Diary of a Lesbian Step-Mother
4. Tiny Cat Pants

Four of My Favorite Foods
1. bread
2. pad kee mao
3. bourbon
4. rice and beans, any kind of rice, any kind of beans

Four Places I'd Rather Be
1. Seeing my niece and nephew in California
2. In a home/condo I own
3. running along the lakefront path
4. in a noisy restaurant with good music, a full bourbon and soda, my girl, and a plate of fried mozzarella.

Four Albums I Can't Live Without
1. Dusty Springfield, Dusty in Memphis
2. Sublime, 40 oz. To Freedom
3. Joni Mitchell, Miles of Aisles
4. The Beastie Boys, Paul's Boutique

Four Vehicles I've Owned
1. 1976 Volvo station wagon named Sonja, because my mom (who had the car first) claimed the car cost more than Sonja Henne made her first year skating professionally. Also, because Volvos and Henne are Scandinavian--not from the same countries, but either my mom didn't know that or thought they were close enough.
2. 1988 Honda Civic hatchback, with racing stripes and Enke wheels. I drove it for 12 years, until a 15 year old joy-riding in a U-Haul bashed into it FOUR times in a row. He hit it, tried to back up and escape, hit it again, tried to back up and escape, etc.
3. VW Golf
4. VW GTI

Four Taggees
I think everyone's done this by now. I'd love to tag
1. What I Made For Dinner and
2. Writer Mama, but I don't know if they like these games.
3. La Lecturess, have you done this? If not, tag.
4. I don't know if she reads my blog (I really doubt it) but Tiny Cat Pants, if you're out there, I definitely want to read your version of this.

Io, Io Saturnalia!

2005-12-25T11:17:00.000-06:00

Happy Hannukah! Merry Christmas! Joyous Yuletide!

Since I grew up in Southern California, I never really got why we celebrated Jesus's birth in December. (Mormons believe not only that his real birth was in April, but that it was specifically April 6th. Go figure.) I mean, I was raised Christian, and so I understood the holiday as a celebration of the birth of the Son, and knew that it was celebrated at the same time as the Roman Saturnalia (technically, Dec. 17-23rd) so that the renegade Christians would be safer and less conspicuous in their celebrations. But I certainly didn't have much of an understanding of how totally pagan Christmas celebrations are, or, more importantly, how totally appropriate it is to celebrate the birth of the Son at a time when you really need to believe in, hope for, and celebrate the immanent return of the Sun. But now that I live where winters are bitterly cold and long and the days are dark and short, I get it. I really, really get it.

Here's our tree:

(Some of you might have seen this over at my girlfriend's blog)

GF and I exchanged gifts last night, after we got back from an amazing Christmas Eve dinner at our friend's home. It will be hard for anything we do today to match the beauty and peace of sitting in our living room late, late into the night, unwrapping gifts by the light of the tree.

Today we'll have about ten friends over for a feast, and then we'll have another half dozen or so over for after dinner festivities, including fondue, paper crowns, and champagne. Last year GF made everyone watch "The Littlest Angel," a 1969 Christmas classic starring Johnny Whitaker, Fred Gwynne, Cab Calloway, and Connie Stevens. (And by Christmas classic, I mean seriously schmaltzy shit: an hour of kitsch that feels like 15). This year she's decided that we will all watch "The Little Drummer Boy," I think because she wants people to cry, and not for the same reasons they cried last year when we made them watch "The Littlest Angel." My holiday movie choices were:
1. Auntie Mame (they have at least two Christmas parties during the course of the movie) or
2. The original Yours, Mine, and Ours, because we're all feeling a little nostalgic for a house full of screaming kids, or
3. Jesus Christ, Superstar, because nothing says Christmas like a rock opera about a skinny, sexy, sanctimonious about-to-be-slaughtered corn god who ditches his political message at the last minute and makes his friend take the heat. Forever. (Remember how Judas is kind of a misunderstood hero in JCSS? If not, you need to see it again. It's all about peace, man.)

But, since I got the new Barbra Streisand television special box set, aka the best Christmas present EVER, last night, I am hoping we can watch a little of it.

Happy holidays to all! May your day be the gayest ever! (Ours will be!)

Back to School

2005-12-17T23:58:00.000-06:00

These are my back to school splurge shoes. Obviously, they're not everyday shoes, nor are they shoes I can wear from the car, across icy sidewalks into the building, but baby, once I'm in my building and don't have/get to go outside again for another ten hours, I'm strutting the halls in these puppies. (You can't tell from the picture, but they're remarkably sturdy--no rock, no wobble, just strut.) It's my Toril Moi look, I guess, though I won't be wearing them with a leather mini--I'm thinking a straight skirt that hits just at the knees. Mostly it's me pushing back against people who may or may not be in my program who are suspicious of theory, queerness, and flamboyant femininity. These shoes say, "Yes, I'm wearing 3 1/2 inch heels, and yes, you might think that makes me suspect as a feminist and a scholar, but I'm marching in to my queer theory class tonight and I'm going to teach Foucault, and my students are going to get it. Can you do that? Then back off, you in the sensible shoes!"

What I Did on My Quarter Leave

2005-12-17T14:33:00.000-06:00

Hello Darlings,
I have missed talking to you; most likely I have lost most, if not all of my readers, but Miss Margo had to stay focused during her leave. That is not to say I totally followed through on my promise to quit the blog world while on research leave. I certainly didn't stop reading other people's blogs. And there were so many moments when I wanted to blog, but stopped myself, insisting that the only writing I could do was academic writing, which meant I often did no writing at all.

Here are the top ten things I did while on leave:

10. Did catch up reading. I never meant to be an Americanist--I'm a modernist, goddammit!--but with all of my publications on a very American poet, that's how I get read. So I spent the first month or so of leave reading twentieth century American history. Ask me anything about nativism. Quiz me on bohemian Greenwich Village.

9. Ate a lot of cottage cheese and Triscuits. It's my new favorite snack food. It's also my new favorite dinner.

8. Stayed home for days on end. Sometimes this meant I didn't bathe. Other times it meant I drew a bath, let it get cold, ran a new one, let it get cold . . .

7. Cut off my hair. I had this ridiculous idea that I'd save money while on leave by neither cutting nor coloring my hair. Obviously, the coloring part lasted about six weeks and then I couldn't live with my trashy roots. The not cutting part just made me look old and conservative, so I got a kicky, shaggy, Beck-like short cut. Speaking of Beck, anyone else enjoying his new album?

6. Worked out like a fiend. This was enabled, in part, by

5. Becoming obsessed with Seventh Heaven. It started innocently enough--it comes on at 5 everyday, and if I was still on the elliptical machine when the Gilmore Girls repeat ended I'd watch a few minutes and try to figure out who the characters were and why the parents were so obsessed with drugs and sex. And then I noticed how much this squeaky clean, and not surprisingly, hateful, judgemental, and sanctimonious family reminded me of the people I grew up with in Mormondom, and I had to watch more. And then I just plain got hooked on the melodrama. Now I do whatever I have to do to be in the gym, on my machine, tv on the Family Channel, by 5pm everyday. I've gone down two pants sizes already, and I'm only up to the third season.

4. Stayed up late; woke up late. Berated myself. Cried. Promised myself I'd go to bed earlier the next night and start an early morning writing schedule the very next day. But then I'd want to watch the Colbert Report after The Daily Show, and then I'd need to see which Will and Grace was on at 11 and then watch just long enough to see Karen, and then switch back to Comedy Central to catch a quick minute of the David Spade show or Reno 911, or Drawn Together, and then it's time to check in real quick with the midnight Will and Grace and then watch just long enough to see Karen . . .

3. Gave a paper at a conference for the first time in two years. After having been ruthlessly over-professionalized in grad school (and bankrupting myself in the process by going to conferences all over the planet) I stopped cold turkey once I got a t.t. job. Conference sessions were as boring and pretentious as I'd remembered, but I met up with old friends, enjoyed some papers, and appreciated having been forced to write something.

2. Scratched the book project I've been planning to write since grad school, decided instead to just revise my diss (which wasn't really that bad) because it would be easier and because I knew people would totally want to read it. Sketched outline of book, divided saveable writing from diss. into new chapters, struggled to come up with a new title, thought about book covers. Then, as per item number 10. did tons of background reading in 20th c. American popular culture and decided I needed to expand my diss. from one figure to a larger project about a whole literary/cultural scene. Sketched out that book, realized single-author book chapter outline would work just fine in this new, expanded book. Did more background reading, decided I didn't know what I was talking about and that what I really, really wanted to write about was the subject of the original book, the one I dumped at the beginning of the leave. Went back to it, wrote a preface and most of an introduction, sketched outline of the rest of the book, started putting juicy quotes and bibliographic info. into the various chapter holder documents I had made. And, ultimately,

1. FELL IN LOVE WITH MY PROJECT. You know how you can shop a concept for a book--at cocktail parties, in departmental reviews, in your diary, on the Works in Progress section of your CV, etc., but until you start writing it, you feel a little apologetic about it and think maybe it's dumb? But how, once you start actually writing and letting your thoughts happen for real it starts to take shape and pull your mind around and synchronize all the courses you've ever taught and all the areas of your doctoral exams, and all the theory that most makes sense to you and starts to become a for real book, one that you would love to read and are completely astonished and excited that you get to write? Yeah, that's what happened. It's my new drug, it's what I think about when I'm driving, showering, doing the dishes, it's what I sneak back in to look at after the 2nd commercial break of the 2nd episode of Will and Grace, what I mess around with until way too late at night/early in the morning.

So that's it, kids. I don't know if I'm back per se, but for now, at least I'm caught up.

This is no country for old men

2005-10-12T00:25:00.000-05:00

What I don't quite understand about the Chronicle piece "Rigid Tenure System Hurts Young Professors and Women, University Officials Say" (besides it being so obvious as to not be news)is the claim that the tenure system isn't working because it discriminates against women and young professors because, as the Havard investigator puts it, "We have structured an academic workplace for men of a bygone era."

Just exactly when was this bygone era, and who are these men who are supposed to have labored and struggled in it? They're certainly not the men who got tenure in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s. They're not even the men and women who got tenure during the 70s and at least the early 80s, when the expectation was that the first book would be written after tenure.

If tenure is supposed to shrink the herd, and cast out those unable to meet the increasingly impossible requirements of their department/college/university, (impossible because they are tied into the financial binds of the academic publishing industry) then it's doing that in spades and we, as well as many of our mentors, and certainly our grad students are indeed those men and this is indeed that workplace. This standard didn't exist in a "bygone era." It's new and it's ours and, not coincidentally, it's working to hurt women and queers and people of color and those who are from the working class. You know, the ones who were never supposed to be in the academy in the first place.

Isn't this what Stephen Greenblatt's ineffectual letter to the MLA a couple of years ago tried to point out? That a whole generation of scholars will be lost unless departments stop relying on an already financially strained university press system to make their de facto tenure decisions for them?

Don't Get off the Boat

2005-09-20T16:21:00.000-05:00

Remember that part in Apocalypse Now where the soldiers get off the boat and are messing around on shore and then, all of the sudden, a huge tiger leaps out of the woods at them, and they race back to the boat screaming "don't get off the boat! don't get off the f****g boat"?

Yeah, well, I went to campus yesterday, for the first time in about a month.

I've been having a pretty great life here at home. I've been reading like crazy, watching a lot of tv (Weeds, Rome--how much do I love Polly Walker!, and Deadwood, via Netflicks), working out (and logging my workouts on Self.com like a big nerd), sleeping in, eating well, growing my hair out, and wearing soft, shapeless clothing. And I've been assiduously avoiding school, even though I've been pretty desperately needing several things in my office. But yesterday I couldn't put it off any longer: I had to go in for a meeting and decided to make the trip productive by finally getting the books and files I need for my project from my office, as well as by going to the library to do that crazy checking-books-out thing, rather than ordering them off half.com in the middle of the night when I'm too manic about my project to sleep.

At first things at school were really pleasant--I had some fun, frivolous banter with colleagues and the student workers, I had a quick and intense conversation about my research with my chair, who gave me some good ideas for additional sources, and I got to catch-up with one of my colleagues from the smaller college that closed. But within the hour I found myself completely caught up on, and caught up in, departmental politics. So fast! So sticky! So scary!

So here I am, back in the safety of my home office, listening to my new favorite album (The Fruit Bats, Spelled in Bones), so grateful not to have to care, really, about departmental politics for a few more months.

Gurlesque Burlesque

2005-08-28T12:09:00.000-05:00

I'm back from California, exhausted in that post-vacation way, and filled with fear that somehow I'll fritter away my precious ten weeks (one quarter) of research leave. So, like many bloggers right about now, I'm not going to be posting much here, not that (and yes, like almost all bloggers who make this resolution, here I go, writing the next obligatory, cliched qualifier) I think anyone's life revolves around reading my blog. In order to immerse myself in my project I'm methodically cutting myself off from distractions, namely:

1. The New York Times. Reading the Times cover to cover each morning is one of THE joys of my life, but it means that my morning "wake up" ritual lasts about 2 hours. I know I can still sneak a peek on-line, but it's just not the same, so I think I'll be able to resist.

2. Blogs. Yesterday I went through my favorites menu and deleted all the blogs I love most--La Lecturess, New Kid, Dr. Crazy, Profgrrl, BitchPhd, etc. Of course, I didn't delete my bloglines account, so I can still peek at them, but I can't pore over their pages anymore, or join in their conversations.

But before I get back to whatever one does on a Sunday morning without the Times (it hurts, it hurts; I feel empty and alone), I have to give a quick shout out to the Sissy Butch Brothers whose seventh Gurlesque Burlesque was last night. As always, this was an AMAZING show. Seriously, it was breathtaking, moving, vibrant, and joyful. Picture a venue packed to the rafters (literally) with dykes of all shapes and sizes and degrees of conformity/funkiness.

Now picture a series of sexy, empowered, politically charged burlesque performances that make you wonder how music ever made sense without women taking off their clothes and dancing to it.

I never leave one of these shows without wanting to write, sing, dance, strip, think, theorize. And I never leave without feeling giddy-grateful that my academic interests allow me to revel in gender performance and hyper-femininity and decadence and costume, etc. This event makes me proud, but more than that, DELIGHTED, even STOKED, to live in Chicago, where the queer community is strong and diverse and intellectually engaging and, most importantly, accessible.

handing off the books

2005-08-10T23:05:00.000-05:00

I'm getting ready to see my niece and nephew next week, after far too long. My favorite part of the preparations is figuring out which books to get them.

The Wednesday Witch is on its way. If it doesn't arrive in time, I can always send it for Rowan's birthday, which is in about a month. Today I got her two books that I would have given her anyway, at some point, because they are two of my first and favorite chapter books. How happy am I that she asked for them!

First, there's the real Mary Poppins, by P.L. Travers. I didn't even know Rowan knew there was anything besides the treacly Julie Andrews movie. She rules.

Then there are the Little House books. I didn't know kids still read these, but I'm glad they do. My favorite was Little House in the Big Woods, because I loved the scene where Ma and her sisters got ready for the dance, in their pretty ginghams, with their hair braided and rolled. I LOVED those women, and wanted to be just like them when I grew up. I also loved it when Mr. Edwards brought Christmas treats, including an orange for everyone's stocking. She's already read that one, so I'm getting her the next one, Little House on the Prairie (this is the next book in the series according to ME! I am not buying Farm Boy, just because the publisher has pedantically numbered the books).

If The Wednesday Witch gets here before we leave, I'll have three books for her. Of course I'm dying for her to be a reader, and she seems kind of maybe interested--not the way I was when i was her age, but I think she's getting more interested as she gets older. My sister is pretty strict about setting aside lots of reading time. I know, I know, Rowan gets to choose her own books and have her own subjectivity. I'm pacing myself, though, and getting reacquainted with the childhood books I don't think she or her brother can live without before I pass them on. Because, really, some of my favorites haven't held up that well. Take my old friends Betsy-Tacy. You might remember their books looking something like this:

I loved those books. I read them several times throughout elementary school. I thought I had never heard cuter names and I used to dream of having twin girls who I would name Elizabeth and Anastasia, so they, too, could be Betsy-Tacy. But, you know, it turns out those girls don't really do much besides hang out and be really girly together, sewing, and making cookies. The one time they go outside, they either ice skate on a semi-frozen lake, or run around in a rainstorm, and wouldn't you know it? One of Tacy's siblings catches a cold and dies. There's a lesson there, kids. You know it's one of Tacy's, because if I remember correctly, she's from the wrong side of the tracks, from some big, poor Catholic family, where children are often lost due to carelessness and neglect. There're just too many damn children to keep alive! That's why Betsy's more genteel, Protestant family graciously allows Tacy to hang out at their house, eat their food, wear Betsy's clothes, sleep in her warm bed, etc. So while I might have enjoyed these books for the insightful critique of class tensions in early 20th century America, I don't think my niece would dig them. Besides, have you seen the new covers? What the hell is this?

2005-08-09T19:53:00.000-05:00

I'm creeping towards the edge of the pool that is writing. That is to say, if writing is complete submersion in water, I'm in the room (my writing pool is an indoor pool), I've changed into my bathing suit, I've got my swimming cap on (because this girl is not ruining her highlights with chlorine) and I'm preparing to walk towards the pool and get in. But I'm not there yet; I don't even have a toe in the water yet.

What I am doing is reading. Reading, reading, reading, reading. I'm going back and dipping into the books and concepts that I couldn't touch when my project was a dissertation. But now I'm ready for them. And it looks like my project is ready for them. The theoretical concept that I tried to use to read my neglected author during the dissertation just didn't work. I spent all my time--at conferences, in meetings with my committee, in my dissertation defense--defending my theoretical lens, which left my neglected author even more neglected. But the theory/movment I really wanted to use, I found/became enchanted with too far into the diss. to let go of my initial reading. The really beautiful thing here is that a lot of what I ended up writing didn't quite make sense precisely BECAUSE it was crying out for the reading I'm ready to give it now. So, not only are there many close readings of primary works that I'll be able to salvage from the diss, I think I'm going to get to return to some of the primary works I was dying to write about while dissertating, and kept circling around, but never quite got to.

And after a year in a women's studies department I feel a HUGE need to indulge my literary critic and stay the hell away from contemporary politics in my writing.

So that's all good, and I spent the morning reading for my project. Why, then, do I feel so blah? Is it because it's in the 90s outside and humid? Is it because Nate Fisher died? Or more importantly, because there are only two episodes left of Six Feet Under? Is it because, after kind of sucking for 5 years, Queer as Folk actually got really topical and relevant and then ended on Sunday with a STUPID denoument? Or is it because my GF is going over the copy edits of her book while listening to The Magnetic Fields, who totally depress me.

2005-08-06T13:35:00.000-05:00

Does anyone else remember this book? My father bought a used hard-cover copy of it for me while on a business trip. I couldn't believe how good it was, and read it over and over, as well as any other Ruth Chew books I could find. I remember likilng another one that featured a flying bathmat. Right now I'm trying to decide between buying my eight year old neice a hard cover copy from Amazon's used books, for $16, or buying a package of 10 paperback Ruth Chew books, including The Wednesday Witch, for $30 on e-bay. I've had a good morning intermittently looking up Ruth Chew sites and reading plot summaries.

Happy August

2005-08-01T12:07:00.000-05:00

Is anyone happy it is August? I'm feeling pretty anxious about how quickly the summer has gone. (And still feeling ripped off that my summer started about a month after everyone else's because of the stupid quarter system.) It's still steamy hot here in Chicago (after a brief reprieve), so much so that the most physical thing I do is walk out on the back porch twice a day to water my friend's enormous hanging plant he left here two weeks ago when he went on his one week vacation. Not to sound like a total lazy-ass, because we're just talking about watering a plant here, but it's kind of a pain and I wish he'd come back for it!

Because I've spent the last two weeks doing advising for incoming students I feel equally ripped-off, time-wise, though the money is really good and, turns out, so is the atmosphere in the "advising pit." (No one calls it that that I know of, but I like saying it.) It's really one of the cheeriest, most supported things I've done at my generally very-supportive and cheery university. Imagine you and 20 or so colleagues from throughout your college sitting in an air-conditioned room, during the hottest days of summer, walking students through their registration at a rate of one student per hour. These are freshman, meaning they have a heavily prescribed schedule and there's not much you have to do: they sign up for a math class, placement already figured out; they sign up for an English class, placement already figured out; they are already in an intro. to college class. All you have to do is choose an elective *or* support their decision to only take three classes (on the quarter system that's a full schedule). Plus, you are surrounded by colleagues in different disciplines who can help you. Not sure which bio. class a pre-med should take? Ask the bio. prof. sitting across the way. Is there, in fact, a photography minor in the Art dept? Ask the head of media studies who's sitting at the station right next to yours. The student is out of there in 20, 40 minutes tops and you spend the rest of the time cruising the internet, reading your summer novel, or, more likely, gossiping with the other profs. One of the things I most appreciate about my university is the colleagiality within colleges. I love it that my closest friends here are from outside my dept. Someone called this advising gig summer camp for professors the other day. I like that. Only, there are no snacks.

Speaking of summer reading, I started off the summer by hopping through three novels very quickly. This left me stranded in New Hampshire with nothing left to read. So I pulled Dickens' Our Mutual Friend off the shelf and started reading it. I like Dickens; I've read a lot of Dickens; I've written about and even taught a good amount of Dickens. But this one is killing me. I'm 400 pages in, which is a little less than halfway through, and I still don't have a good sense of the plot. I can see all the Dickens' tricks--I know who is bad and who is good, I know who has a secret identity and who is not really dead, etc. But the machinations are moving sooooo slowly that I'm having a hard time staying interested and this is making me feel like a failure as a reader, as an English prof. and as a person who did most of their coursework in Victorian. So do I valiantly push on and keep reading? Or do I cry uncle and pick up the Patricia Cornwell Scarpetta mystery I haven't read yet? Has anyone else been following the Salon Summer School series?

A Delicate Matter of Grammar

2005-07-27T20:19:00.000-05:00

I don't want to sound like a school marm, but there's this blog I read sometimes, and I really like it--I like the writer's voice, I like their humility, their humor, their really right-on sense of the academy, and especially of the academy from a humanties prof's point of view. But they continually write a lot as alot. At first I thought it was a typo, but I've since seen it like this in several posts, often multiple times within the same post. I'm not a regular reader, but I stop by every once in a while. I almost want to write a comment and, as nicely and politely as possible, point it out. But I can't, right? I mean, really, I can't.

This is the Place

2005-07-24T12:46:00.000-05:00

Most likely, in Mormon congregations throughout the world, but especially in the western U.S., today is being honored as "Pioneer Day." This day celebrates and memorializes the moment when Brigham Young, sick from the long, long journey, sat up from his bed in the back of his wagon, pointed out over what would soon be called the Salt Lake Valley, in what the saints would call the State of Deseret, but that the United States would derisively name Utah (after the Ute Indians of the region, who were said to run around in very little clothing; the joke was that because Mormon men had many wives, and therefore spent a lot of time attending to matrimonial duties, they didn't bother putting on clothes) and said "This is the place," bringing to an end a journey that had begun in the cold of winter, when the Mormon settlement in Nauvoo, Illinois had been burnt to the ground and the saints had fled the U.S.

Pioneer Day falling on a Sunday means that on this day, sacrament meetings (what the main service in Mormon churches is called--where you take the bread and water sacrament, listen to talks from members of the congregation, and--best part--sing hymns) are being opened or closed with the Mormon hymn "Come, Come Ye Saints," and speakers are memorializing their ancestors' sacrifices, as they left the hostile United States and ventured into the territories. Maybe they are drawing parallels to current times, when Christianity sees itself as under attack, admonishing each other to stay the course, be brave, and have faith. Maybe they are pausing to be grateful for their comfort and wealth and security; for their limbs which didn't fall off from frostbites; for the family members who sit comfortably in the pews in front of them, not having died and been buried in makeshift graves along the road; for the roast beef cooking slowly even as they speak, in anticipation of the Sunday dinner they will eat in a few hours, in their middle class homes, protected from wild animals and the elements.

When I was a kid, my ward (congregation) used to have Pioneer Day picnics in the park, with a childrens' parade. We decorated our bikes and dressed as pioneers. I LOVED getting to wear a pioneer bonnet--I would have worn one every day if I could. I have a distinct memory of playing in the sand afterwards, one year, still in my dress and bonnet, and poo-pooing the new movie all the boys were talking about, Star Wars. "I'll bet it'll be stupid," I remember saying.

As soon as I remembered that today is Pioneer Day, I started this entry, planning on noting the day and then making sarcastic remarks about Mormons and their goofy celebrations and their creamy, squishy, no-need-to-chew food--the treacly-sweet red punches, the cheesy, cream-of-soupy funeral potatoes, the squishy white Parker House rolls and endless parade of jello salads. We have tentative plans to have people over tonight. I thought, okay, I'll run to the store and pick up some ingredients, and serve my friends a Mormon-style Sunday dinner, heat be damned.

But first I pulled up i-tunes and checked to see if they had "Come, Come Ye Saints" in the data base, because I was feeling kind of homesick for it. (Notice the familar Freshman English-style conversion narrative rhetorical strategy.) Of course they did, sung by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. So I bought it, because it's only a buck, right? So I girded my loins and listened to the hymn, (written in 1846, while the pioneers were still mid-journey, and tired, and hungry, and scared, but hopeful) which is THE quintessentially Mormon hymn. Predictably, I cried, because I still don't know what to do with my feelings of pride in my ancestors, horror at their imperialism, sadness at the current church's ideology of exclusion and hatred. But mostly, I cried out of pure longing and sadness. I cried because I left my people, and I'll never really belong anywhere again. I don't often feel like this, but today, as I listened to the hymn, I did.

One year, on a visit to Utah, my grandmother decided to buy each of her grandchildren a copy of this illustration of the Willie Handcart Company, which her grandmother had been in.

The company set out from the east coast much too late in the season, in handcarts hastily made of still-green wood. By the time they got to the Rocky Mountains, the winter snows made it impossible to go any further, and the company lost many members before rescue parties arrived. My great-great grandfather, who had baptized my great-great grandmother in England a year earlier, was in the rescue party and after their snowy reunion they got married. She was the first of his four wives. My grandmother wanted us all to have this picture so that we would remember our heritage, and be proud of it.

Come, come, ye saints, no toil nor labor fear;
But with joy, wend your way.
Though hard to you this journey may appear,
Grace shall be as your day.
’Tis better far for us to strive
Our useless cares from us to drive;
Do this, and joy your hearts will swell
All is well! All is well!

We'll find the place which God for us prepared,
Far away, in the West,
Where none shall come to hurt or make afraid;
There the saints will be blessed.
We'll make the air with music ring,
Shout praises to our God and King;
Above the rest these words we'll tell,
All is well! All is well!

New Thrash

2005-07-24T10:52:00.000-05:00

Today's supposed to be the hottest day of the year. Maybe it already is, but I haven't been outside to check, nor do I plan to. In preparation for this day Girlfriend put in a second air conditioner and so far the house is cool and shady--not a place I plan to leave. Unfortunately, our NYT didn't show up this morning, and so we're waiting to see if it will redeliver. In the meantime, we have four non-paper-reading hours to fill. Exercise? No way. It's too hot to even walk to the car to drive to the gym. But I'm jonesing for a run.

What does it mean that I woke up with Sublime's "New Thrash" running through my head? I like to think that the song in my head at any given moment is an index of subconscious thoughts, but I can't even make out the words to this song, let alone analyze them. And since it's a mosh-pit kind of a thrasher song, and since I'm sitting here feeling anxious and jitery (gotta eat some breakfast, I guess) it seems logical that the sound of the song is as indicative of mood as the lyrics. Okay, wait, I'm listening to it on headphones and I'm on line, duh, so here are the googled lyrics:

I got so much trouble on my mind,
That I feel like I'm always sleeping with the enemy
But I know the real world always gets the last word
And that's why you gotta kick reality.
So don't tease me and try to say I should care.
I might as well go out for mine
'cause everybody's going out for theirs.

Okay, so it's standard malaise. Sleeping with the enemy: Is this about my job? I work for spendy, middle class urban university, educating trixies and frat boys. The last two weeks I've been doing summer advising, which is great, easy money and a good way to figure out exactly what my students' educations look like (anyone else out there who really doesn't understand what their students have to do to graduate because you still see things in terms of your undergrad u's requirements?) It's been eye-opening though, as I see student after student bypass classes in African Black Diaspora Studies, Islamic Studies, Women's Studies, even Art History for god's sake, in favor of Intro. to Philosophy, or Medieval History (sorry New Kid). There are a million ways they can fulfill their liberal arts requirements, but they only want the whitest, safest, most familiar. Unless it's in the English department--they don't want anything that makes them read, no matter how canonical and white it is. In six days of advising I haven't managed to get one student into an English class. They would rather fulfill their religion requirement with Intro. to Catholocism (it's a Catholic U; most of them are Catholic!) or Intro. to the New Testament, than Buddhist Thought, or African-American Religions. Hello! You are wearing a batik shirt and a macrame necklace, and you reek of patchouli: I know that you got all that at Urban Outfitters, but given that you are posing as counter-cultural, don't you think you might want to explore a different culture, even just a baby bit? No wonder the university requires a sophomore-level seminar on multiculturalism.

So maybe the "enemy" I'm sleeping with is my status-quo university. Or myself, given that I offer classes that students fleeing from diversity might take, like the diva class, or my middlebrow lit. class. (NB: my classes are all about diversity, much to the disappointment of some students, and as reflected in ratemyprofessor.com comments that complain about my being too "political" in the classroom.)

Or maybe it's my department, which I really like, but don't entirely trust, since my transfer into it last year was met with a bit of resistance. Do they like me yet? Do they still think I'm too humanities-oriented and too American culture to add anything to women's studies? A year later, would they accept me more readily? or would they have more concrete reasons for rejecting me?

Or is the "trouble on my mind" related to girlfriend's job search and quest for a new direction in her life post-tenure?

Or is it the fact that I haven't been out to California to see my family in over a year and a half and they fully expect me out there this summer, but I don't know how to arrange it? I can't really figure out where to start, but that's wrapped up in many other issues--the panicked need to write (to justify my summer grant), girlfriend's job search, not wanting to leave my cats--and too complicated to think about on such a hot day. But the way it makes me feel is exactly what "New Thrash" sounds like.

Is it because we watched Nashville last night and my sleeping thoughts were puncutated by Altman's 30 year-old reading of a jingoistic, cynically-patriotic, empty-minded America that still looks pretty familiar? (And is it weird that I think Barbara Harris is really hot? You probably remember her as Jodie Foster's mom in Freaky Friday.)

Or is the "trouble on my mind" much simpler? Is it that our bedroom set-up just isn't working? I can't figure out a way to make the furniture fit correctly, and it depresses me to look at when I wake up.

Or is it that, because I sprayed leave-on conditioner on my hair by the side of my bed yesterday, (because it was in my gym bag from the day before) the floor next to my bed was impossibly slippery last night, and everytime I got up to go to the bathroom I had to walk very slowly and carefully, so as not to slip?

Dear Sarah Vowell,

2005-07-16T12:14:00.000-05:00

Dear Sarah Vowell,
You are a very smart woman. You have worked hard to establish a successful career in a male-dominated world of media commentary. You are not afraid to fly your freak flag and loudly proclaim your love of all things 19th century American politics. My god, girl, you've actually managed to get people buzzing about Pres. Garfield. I read your books, I listen to you on NPR, and because of it, I am a different person: I now think about the Civil War more than I ever imagined I would, and I often interrupt road trips to stop at random roadside attractions because you've taught me about their importance in reifying previous generations' ideas about what is worth preserving and revering in American culture. I think you're pretty cool, and I was really happy for you when you did that cross-over bit in The Incredibles.

But your guest columns in the New York Times are bumming me out. I know it's not your fault that there is so little representation of women in media commentary; just because you are a woman who gets the chance to talk doesn't mean you represent all of us, or that your writing should reflect THE singular, liberal, educated woman's point of view. But the fact is, you ARE a woman who gets a chance to talk, and you're talking to a different audience than the This American Life folks, and so you need to think about ditching the cuteness and using your platform to be clearer, more straightforward, and more focused than you've been in the past.

The last few Saturdays and Wednesdays, I've skipped my usual routine of reading the entire front section in order, saving the Op-Ed section for last, and have instead turned immediately to the back page, eager to read what you'll say. We're listening, Sarah, and we trust that you have good things to say. We believe in you.

But you're kiling us here. Please, just for the next few weeks, stop using phrases like "Way, way, way dumber," and "one measly" speech/second/anything. Try beginning your columns with a clear thesis. Tell us what the column is about immediately. Don't make us read all the way through and then try to piece your point together for ourselves. I can do that. I do do that. But that's not what the op-ed page is for. This is not a forum for creative non-fiction; it's a place for cogent commentary. Give us a clear thesis, and then back it up with strong supporting points. Don't meander through your alloted words.

I know you have a signature voice and style, and I get that it's not cool of me to ask you to tone it down for this forum. Why shouldn't your cutesy approach to contemporary politics be okay if that's who you are and that's how you see the world? But you're not just you right now; you are all of us women who think and read and write and hunger for the chance to speak up. You're in a unique and precarious position here. Don't Mary Engelbreit your way through it. Life is not a chair of bowlies, and you are not a powerless, wide-eyed pixie, drolly commenting on the way, way, way bad guys and their super stupid actions.

Happy Camper

2005-07-14T11:25:00.000-05:00

Darlings,
I'm back from the woods. I'm tan, I've read several novels, and I've kicked up my stamina a bit by having gone on several ridiculously long hikes. Long and vertical. I wasn't prepared for hand over foot climbing, but I'm glad I did it because now I finally get why people hike: from up on top there are some pretty amazing views!

"Payoff," my hiker friends tell me, "that's called the payoff."

So now I'm back in the city, eager to maintain my tan, and looking for ways to incorporate exercise into my everyday life. Just last night, for example, girlfriend and I WALKED to our favorite bar.

New Kid's recent success writing has got me kind of excited to get back to work, though. And since I'm living on a summer research grant, I really can't justify not getting work done this summer. But first, I have to fix up my office, so I'm off to Ikea for some good-enough-for-now bookshelves, and maybe a new trashcan.

If you got here via my comments on New Kid's music post, I realize I spelled frenetic and neurasthenic wrong. I didn't want to comment again, because that's kind of hoggy, but I wouldn't want anyone to think I, of all people, can't spell those two pivotal words.

Retraction

2005-06-22T11:06:00.000-05:00

Okay, so The Lake of Dead Languages was a good book, but not better than The Secret History. About halfway through I knew exactly who the villain was and then had to wait for the plot to unfold, which wasn't as fun as being totally surprised and mesmerized for the first half. And then the ending was corny, corny, Scooby-Doo predictable, happily ever after. Gross.

Can't put it down

2005-06-21T14:20:00.000-05:00

It's my first week of summer, first week of my leave, kind of, (leave doesn't technically start until September) and so I'm alternating between feeling totally decadent and wanting to do nothing that has anything to do with my project, and feeling like I've already blown it and how will I possibly accomplish anything over the next few months if I don't even have the discipline to start rereading what I've written and remember where I left off.

Happily, I got sucked into a book so compelling, so dark, so suspenseful (maybe even scary) that I don't have to vacillate anymore. The choice has been taken from me. All I can do is read this book. I'm sitting at work, where I stopped in to have a quick meeting with my chair and pick up my laptop, which I had to leave overnight last night for some software upgrades, and rather than leaving and running errands, or answering my e-mails, or even reading blogs for a few minutes, I'm back in the book. I would have made it out of here within a reasonable amount of time if restarting the computer hadn't taken so long that I had to pull the book out to occupy myself for a few minutes.

I'm reading Carol Goodman's The Lake of Dead Languages and it borders on derivative of The Secret History, but since it doesn't have any awful bully boys named Bunny in it, (in fact, it barely has any boys in it at all) I think it's much, much, much better. It's set in a private girls' high school in the Adirondacks, a feeder school for Vassar. Of course the tortured protagonist/corrupting influence is a Latin teacher (they always are), who was once a tortured Latin student at the same school. There's goddess worship, implications of lesbianism, suicides (or are they murders?), a haunted landscape dominated by a deep, quiet lake, school secrets and legends and ghosts, a big, dark, isolated mansion, and, of course, lots of classical references. Totally delicious. What is it about declensions that turns normal kids into killers?

Speaking of lakes and mountains, GF and I are packing the cats in the car and heading off for two weeks in the lakes region of New Hampshire, where she is from. That means hiking, running in the woods, swimming, kayaking, playing tennis, reading, playing cards, etc., but no television, cell phone reception (except at the top of mountains), or internet access. Sounds good, right? So I won't be blogging on account of being a) blissed out and b) seriously disconnected.

Happy Bloomsday!

2005-06-16T07:53:00.000-05:00

Darlings,
This is one of the holidays I always celebrate, no matter what, mostly by pointing it out to my students (if I'm teaching summer school) over and over and over. As in, "Let's look ahead at the syllabus. Oh, look at that, you have a paper due on Bloomsday!" Or, "If it wasn't Bloomsday, I probably wouldn't accept this late work." Or, "Yes, you may bring me gifts of cash and potted meats on Bloomsday."

Things you can do to mark this important day:
1. (an easy one) Sit calmly above your own rising smell.
2. Carry a bar of lemon soap in your pocket.
3. Eat kidneys and/or liver (you can do this for breakfast or lunch, but if at lunch, make sure you are in an unpleasantly crowded lunchroom. And you might want to get trapped in a political conversation that simultaneously irritates and bores you.)
4. Go to the museum, find a large statue of a naked woman, and ponder the oddness of anuses as you stare at her butt crack.
5. Masturbate at the beach. (You were going to do this anyway, weren't you?) Unfortunately, I cannot condone doing this while looking at a barely-teenaged girl with a limp.
6. Carry the following phrase in your head all day: met him pike hoses. Try to work it into casual conversation.
7. Drink a Bass. As you peel the iconic red triangle label off, worry about your wanton young daughter.
8. Visit a whore house. Find someone willing to put a leash on you and walk you like a dog.
9. Rememberyourfirstloveandhowhekissedyouandhowbeautifulyouwere
andhowstronghewasandahahah.

Have a good and hearty Bloomsday. You will, you will, yes, yes, you will.

Melancholy Professor/Rock Star Professor: Musings on a Bi-Polar Weekend

2005-06-13T00:13:00.000-05:00

This was graduation weekend at my university. It was also my birthday weekend. But mostly, it was graduation weekend, as I had to do double duty and attend two separate college graduations. First up was the small college where I spent the first two years on this job teaching. For those of you just tuning in (or if I haven't actually ever blogged about this before) I teach at a big urban university which bought, and then sold three years later, a struggling liberal arts college in a nearby suburb. I was initially hired by the big university to teach at the smaller college, and then when the board of trustees decided to close the college, I transferred into the college of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the main campus.

This, then, was not only graduation at the small college, but the last graduation ever for a college that had been around since 1868. It was a women's college until 1981 and retained that empowered, creative, women's college aura. Getting my first job at this school was a dream come true. I know, any job is a dream come true, but really. It was a gorgeous campus in a leafy, lakeside neighborhood. I wish I could find a better picture, one that would better show the rolling lawn, or the leafy trees, but this kind of gives you an idea:

The classrooms felt like what you thought college would be when you dreamed about it as a kid: big wooden doorways and windows, antique wooden desks, intricately tiled floors. The long hallways still have giant floor-to-ceiling mirrors on each end where students once checked their clothes and hair in the morning as they got ready for class. We had our faculty meetings in what had been the library for most of the college's life, with dark wooden walls, and a tiny circular staircase leading up to a cat walk that lined the outside edge of the room, giving the room an extra level of bookshelves. I'd sit in faculty meetings and get lost in the paneled ceiling, each pale green panel painted with a golden icon--a heart with a sword in it, a fish, a shepard's cane, and also some really bizarre and arcane symbols that I couldn't figure out. But what a great way to pass the time.

The ground floor was dominated by a chapel, as beautiful and intricate as anything I've ever seen in Europe. I loved going in there and thinking about the generations of students and faculty who had sat in there through the years and I tried to draw some of the energy of their prayers into me. I don't go to church, and my feelings about organized religion would need their own blog and kill the mood of this post, but one of my mother's sayings during my childhood was "never discount the power of faith," something a woman who briefly tutored me in Wicca a long time ago reiterated, and I believe it. If you stand in a place where people have prayed, and cried, and struggled, and believed, and if you let yourself be quiet and still, you can feel their energy.

The top floor, which was mostly abandoned during my time there, except for some art studios, had been where the nuns lived up until the 1960s, when the school became only unofficially affiliated with the order of the Sacred Heart. There was a rumor that it was haunted by the ghost of a nun who had killed herself because she was pregnant--you knew she was there if you smelt roses from out of nowhere. Big university had turned the nuns' rooms into storage rooms, and locked the doors. But sometimes, when I went exploring during downtime between classes, I would find an empty one with an unlocked door and I go in and try to imagine what it was like when it was someone's room. What would it be like to sleep and think and write in a room that high up in the trees? From the nook made by the dormer windows, I could see over the trees to the lake. The nuns' lockers where still there, lining the upstairs hallway, and some of them still had names pasted inside, or contact paper lining, or scraps of paper. It was quiet and dusty and magical. Sometimes I'd open what I thought was a closet and find a whole other room, or a set of stairs.

Once, at the end of last year, just after they had announced the closing, an art history professor who had been there for at least twenty years, and who specializes in architecture, and had therefore been kind of the spiritual custodian of the building's layout and its history, took a few of us on a special tour. We went through old photography labs and art studios, into classrooms that big university hadn't touched, that had been the kingdoms of long dead professors. They still had signs on the walls and some furniture set up in ways that reflected the classrooms they had once been. My colleagues told me about these women, who had been old, old, old when they began their careers there, still respectful and maybe a little fearful of treading in their long lost colleagues' fiefdoms. We went into a tiny room hidden behind a stained glass window that housed the carillon (which hadn't been played for years), and finally, into an unfinished attic, where we picked our way delicately over boards and planks to a ladder that led to the cupola that sat at the top of the building. One at a time, we climbed up the ladder, moved the board the covered the hole at the top, and poked our heads out squarely in the middle of the cupola, just under the Irish cross. And from up there you could see 360 degrees around you, over the grassy land the building sat on, across the trees, and out to the lake, deep dark blue from so high up. While one person went up the ladder and looked out, the rest of us carved our initials and the date into the ceiling beams. At one point I remember looking up and seeing a colleague who had been kind of brusque with me since my arrival, maybe because that's just her way, maybe because I symbolized the onslaught of the big university on their world, but who I wanted to like me, because she was tough and smart and passionate, and as she rotated on the ladder, looking around as far as she could see, the wind caught her long hair and blew it up and around her face into the brilliant blue of the afternoon sky. It was one of those moments that are so perfect and so moving and so powerful that they are almost lost even as they happen, because you can't stop meta-narrating them and just experience them. But as I'm typing this tonight I see her again, see the wildness of her hair in the breeze--like William Holman Hunt's Lady of Shalott--and I get a lump in my throat and have to squeeze my eyes shut to keep them from tearing. I knew I was someplace special, and I knew I had to leave, and I wanted, more than anything, to linger in the powerful, conspiratory kinship of that moment.

I left a few days later and moved my stuff down to the main campus where I settled in among new colleagues and new students and didn't really look back, because that's not something I let myself do, and I had a great year, taught intensely challenging classes, got involved in curriculum design, got swept up in the rhthyms of this new world. I loved my 20 minute commute into one of my favorite neighborhoods in Chicago, and the fact that the cafeteria always had vegetarian sushi, which became my standby lunch. I told myself I had to move down a year before the school actually closed because of my career (true: I needed to acclimate into the program which will hopefully tenure me) and because someone had to be there to help the small college students as they transferred into the larger one. And I did teach a lot of those students this year.

So I got up early on Saturday morning, my birthday, and drove an hour up to my old college, and by nine o' clock was sitting, robed, with my colleagues, under a tent on the front lawn of the school. It was already 90 degrees. The ceremony was passionate and tearful and brave as the students said goodbye, as they must, as they do every year, everywhere, and as my colleagues said goodbye, for real, forever, to a college and a building that had been their lives for their entire careers. Until big university came along, this little school had been relatively cloistered from the nastiness of academia. People came and they stayed; often they taught the children and even grandchildren of their former students. During a celebration of the 100th anniversary of the main building last weekend, I saw several generations of women who had gone to the school stand huddled on the front lawn, looking up at Old Main, and crying.

When the ceremony was over, the faculty lined up in a semi-circle and, as always, greeted each graduate with a handshake. Having been gone for a year, I was amazed at how many faces I had forgotten--I don't usually forget things--as students I didn't really remember hugged me and thanked me and told me what they were doing after graduation. It was emotional, but also a bit of a disconnect, mostly because I refused to go to the weepy place and focused instead on how much better I actually like teaching and participating in the larger college in the cool downtown neighborhood, and on how I was going to go to Target on my way home and buy a charger stand for the new ipod shuffle I got for my birthday. A lifetime of church-going teaches you to look serene and reverent while your mind plans and strategies and narrativizes. I drove away feeling little and lost. There was never a day I taught in that building that I didn't feel awe at its beauty, didn't feel touched by its spirit, didn't feel proud to walk its majestic halls.

Sunday afternoon was the big college of LA&S graduation, and, as this is already way too long, I'll keep it brief. I drove to the venue, a major arena just outside of Chicago (the last time I was in it was during Tori's Choirgirl Hotel tour) with a car full of new school colleagues. We had a good time processing recent administrative changes, talking about departures and lines and general, informational, but not too juicy, school topics. Then we pushed past the hordes of students into the faculty section of the staging area where everyone seemed a bit torn between robing and eating one last sandwich--who wants mustard on $800 robes? Then all the faculty lined up in a narrow, cement hallway and my friend leaned back and said, "You'll see why I dragged you here, you'll see." And then the line started moving, fast, faster and suddenly we emerged from the tunnel into the bright lights of a packed arena, to the strains of Pomp and Circumstance, over and over and over; academic nerds, suddenly transformed into brightly robed super heros under the glaring lights and to the tumultuous applause of a sea of graduates in royal blue robes. The lines split and separated and went down separate aisles and rejoined, dramatically, at the base of the main podium as we marched up the risers, up to our seats facing the students. And it was magic, too. But a louder, more exuberant magic. An I-dare-you-to-be-cynical-about-this magic.

The ceremony was long, and after a while the adrenaline rush died down and then I realized how lucky I was to be sitting between people I liked and could chat comfortably with during the readings and walkings across the stage and handshakings and waves of 1500 graduates. I'll go again next year. I think this kind of thing is kind of addictive--getting to wear your robes and be all Jude the Obscure, (only happy, and with living children) seeing your colleagues in theirs, being in a procession led by someone carrying a medieval mace.

Sparkle, Neeley, Sparkle

2005-06-07T13:49:00.000-05:00

This working out in the morning thing is killing me. I want to like it. I do like it. I look forward to waking up early, because it feels like I'm accomplishing something just by being awake. And I love running along the edge of the lake in the early morning.

Scratch that.

I love being at the edge of the lake in the early morning, but the actual running part makes me feel weak and trembly and so thirsty I think my throat is going to close up just as I'm running under one of the charming, but kind of creepy on account of the homeless people sleeping alongside them, tunnels. But I trudge along, and I walk when I need to, and I tell myself that I'll be stronger soon and won't need to walk so often. And I groove out to my June '05 running mix. Right now I'm completely obsessed with Big Audio Dynamite's "E=MC2," even though they are the very band which turned me onto classic rock in high school, because I couldn't abide their stupid "the horses are on the track" song which K-ROQ played nonstop circa 1986. This is not to say that my taste is super highbrow. Would you still respect me if I fessed up to just how much I love the JLo single "Get Right"? It always comes on just as I'm running up this hill in the middle of the lake front park. I ditch the dirt path when I get to the hill because it works my legs differently. That's my official justification. The real reason I do the hill is because it's an excuse to slow down and because from the top I can see the harbor and the lake and the Chicago skyline. Just after I descend the hill and get going on the path, just where it curves under another bridge, I have to skip the end of the song, because the part where a female child's voice overtakes JLo's and finishes out the song is too treacly even for me.

As I get to the part of my run where there is harbor on one side, and a golf course on the other, narrowing the path and making it a little less scenic, "Barracuda" comes on. This makes me run fast for a little bit, because I want to be tough like Ann and Nancy Wilson. But then I get asthmatic and weary and I talk myself into walking. Just when I reach the half-point turn around spot, Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" comes on. For a cheerless song, this totally cheers me up. No matter what, no matter how slow, I run the entire song. As I get back to the first of the scary bridges Sleater Kinney's "Jumpers" comes on, and I let myself slow down as I think, for the millioneth time, about how sad the song is (it's about jumpers, as in, off of bridges) and how stupid the lyrics are ("the lemons are like tumors. Little suns of sour").

By the time I get back home it's only 8 or so and while I'm super proud of myself, even sanctimonious, as my girlfriend is still deep asleep and maybe doesn't even know I've gone running, I'm also aware that the same headache I've had every day I wake up early and go running is on its way. And it's only 8. And I still have to go into school and play nice in a faculty meeting. And give my diva final. And I don't feel very sparkley.

Today we're having a high of almost 90, so I got up super early, in order to be on the lake path by 7 to avoid the heat. When I got there I saw three of my friends coming out of the water after a swim, on their way to the biking portion of their workout (they're training for a triathalon). I loved seeing them--the neighborhoodiness of Chicago is one of the things I love most about it--everywhere you go you see people you know. That and the glorious lake, which was pale, pale blue in the steamy morning heat.

A Post-Memorial Day Weekend Quiz

2005-06-01T18:34:00.000-05:00

It's memorial day weekend in Chicago and Margo is itching to get out of the house. Where does she go?

1. To a cat show

2. To a leather market.

3. All of the above

Answer: 3

Yes, it's true. After a winter of lethargy and passive television watching, I finally dragged myself out of the house and welcomed in the summer in a big, structured, go-getter way, attending not only the annual leather mart at the International Man of Leather competition and show (it wouldn't be Memorial Day in Chicago without it), but, as well, the Cat Fancier Association's midwest regional championships.

I didn't really want to go to the leather mart. It sounded like a lot of naked butts, paunchy stomachs rolling over leather kilts, police uniforms, and hairy, hairy chests. And I had seen all those the night before, as I sat in a restaurant/bar watching busload after busload of out-of-state leather daddies and boys stream into the leather bar next door. And it would be hard to go downtown, and park, and what if I was hungry and there was no food, or what if my feet got tired.

But I was wrong. It was festive and fun and playful and I ran into way more people I knew than I would have imagined. The consumer-impulse runs strong, and my gf and I hadn't been there long before we, too, wanted to get in on the buying action. And while we don't really need a glass-topped dining room table with a cage underneath it, and we have just about all the rubber hoods we need, we started to want to buy something, anything. At one point gf actually tried to convince me that a metal chain necklace/breastplate would be kind of cool to have. I settled on a leather wristband. She got a wristband, too, and a "bar" vest, meaning it doesn't have buttons and isn't a functional vest (i.e. don't wear it out on the Harley), but is just for wearing out to bars, hence the name.

And while some of the guys were paunchy, and/or hairy, and while there were a lot of butts hanging out (which isn't the right word at all, because these butts did NOT hang--they were very fit and firm), the whole atmosphere was so body-positive and upbeat that it didn't matter. My friends went in their best chaps and vests and looked like younger, cuter versions of this:

Ironically, the CFA show, which I couldn't wait to go to, sucked. I went last year, before we got our second siamese, and loved it--I loved seeing all the different kinds of freaky, expensive cats I had been reading about, and I loved talking to the breeders, whose enthusiasm and knowledge about their breeds was completely engrossing. And I don't even care if I sound like a huge nerd for saying it. I was even looking forward to getting out of Chicago and driving up to Milwaukee. Kind of like a mini-road trip, with a guaranteed trip to A&W for bacon cheeseburgers and fried cheese curds and maybe, maybe, a trip to Mars Cheese Castle for smoked string cheese.

The road trip part was great, and the day did indeed include fried cheese curds. But the cat show smelled bad and was filled with weird, anti-social people. And I don't call them weird because they drove thousands of miles to sit in a stuffy, smelly, flourescent-light lit show hall at the Milwaukee Airport, patiently waiting by their cats' cages for eight hours at a time, eating hot dogs with sauerkraut and stale popcorn and whatever else they could find within the radius of the show hall. They were weird because they wouldn't engage with me, no matter how hard I tried to get their attention, asking polite, thoughtful questions about their breeding programs, or the habits of their particular breeds, hinting that I might like to buy one of their cats one day.

If it was me, and if I was trying to sell a $1500 cat that looked like this

I wouldn't be so sullen and crabby. (That's actually a bad example because this is an exquisite cat--if I could, I'd pay anything they asked for it.) Maybe they were tired, or had indigestion. Maybe they were homophobic.

One really nice man let us pet this cat:

The owner pulled him out of the cage and was holding him to his chest when the cat turned, and like a child, reached for my girlfriend, crawled into her arms, looked into her eyes, put a paw on each side of her face, and gently stroked her cheek. After a few moments he turned back towards his owner and held his arms out to be gathered back into his arms. He was an extraordinarly tender, baby-like cat, and the experience both moved us and kind of weirded us out. So we walked around the hall a little bit more, bought some new toys for our cats, and beat a path out of there, steadfastly avoiding looking at the scary persians dressed in bows and lace collars.

Getting back on the horse

2005-05-24T19:14:00.000-05:00

I've been avoiding my blog for a few weeks now. Mostly this is because of an embarassing run-in with the folks at The Valve. I'm still too embarrassed to write about it, or really, even think about it. Suffice it to say Margo learned her lesson about criticizing smart kids' sites, and about participating on said sites after criticizing them. Good lord, it was ugly. My heart still sinks when I think about it.

But life goes on, even if the blog does not. I'm finishing up the second half of the antepenultimate week of the quarter and then, with the exception of some days doing summer advising, and some random meetings here and there, I'm on research leave until next January.

Good things in my life right now:
1. Following a colleague's example (and, actually, Profgrrl's) I've started dragging myself out of bed early in the morning and going to the gym before I do anything else. The great part about this is that I'm just as tired at the end of the day as if I hadn't already worked out, but because I have, I get to have this great conversation with myself as I leave school: "I should really go to the gym, but I'm so tired. But wait, I already WENT to the gym."

2. I got elected to a one-year term as alternate to the faculty council, which means I get to sit on the most powerful faculty committee (be that as it may), and watch and listen and learn as the big kids wheel and deal. As alternate I get to go to the meetings and sit at the table, (and I mean that, literally. It's an open meeting, but faculty who aren't on the council must sit off to the sides) but I won't be expected to serve on sub-committees.

3. Summer research funds are coming next month. Enough said.

4. SUMMER is coming next month.

5a. Total teaching bliss: I'm teaching Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark this week, which chronicles the rise of a Wagnerian diva, which means I get to do a mini-lesson on Wagner. I always enjoy that, but this time around, the class discussions coincided with the opening weekend of Episode III and so the students are in an epic, musical motif-oriented state of mind. Plus, I think I've finally figured out how to deal with the dangerousness of Wagner's nationalism/anti-semitism. First of all, there's the oft-noted contemporary politics analogy of the film, which drives home the point that there is no such thing as "art for art's sake," and that the lust of a pure, originary narrative and a "simpler" aesthetics can slip into fascism pretty quickly.

5b. But also, this novel, more than any other text we've studied this quarter provides an opportunity to talk about the ethics of divadom. What does it mean to sacrifice everything for art? What does it mean to value discipline and individual acheivement over everything else? And even as this pushes us towards a possible refutation of the diva as triumphant at the cost of any human connection, or as visible (as a woman and/or a racial or ethinc minority) in a way that doesn't actually do anything to raise the status or improve the lives of her community, only single her out as exceptional, it also brings us, as the last minutes of class tick by, to a clear vision of the diva as, above all, queer. Queer as in challenging every normative ideal of how a life should be lead, what should be valued, who it should be shared with.

6. I bought Season One of Arrested Development. This is a great show, and I'd fall for it no matter what, but because it's set in my hometown of Newport Beach, where they really do have frozen banana stands like the Bluth's (kind of a weird Balboa Island thing) it makes me happy, if a little homesick.

One whole hour

2005-05-11T17:56:00.000-05:00

I have an hour that's all mine, for the first time in I can't even remember how long. It's 6pm and I'm at school, where I've been since 10 this morning. I just finished my classes, and now I'm killing an hour before I go out to dinner with a colleague. She and I co-advise the student glbt club and it's election night, so we have to go to their 9pm meeting to count the votes. I know this makes me sound old, but 9pm is way too late.

The day started with a two hour faculty meeting where we sat around a table and really talked about our curriculum--what do we want for our students at the end of their majors, how do we make sure they get that, how do we organize the course sequencing so that we aren't repeating information or totally missing areas. I gotta say, I LOVE meetings like this. I like curriculum development and I love being in a program where I actually have a say in the curriculum, which is why I chose women's and gender studies over the English dept. And I love having colleagues who are all really into this--with only 8 or so of us, there isn't really room for apathy. So we talk about what works, what doesn't, what we wish we had done better, what we hope accomplish next etc. and it feels real, like it's really work, in the satisfying way you hoped it would when you read the Seventeen special job issue when you were a teenager and fantasized about what you would do with your life. (The hideous part is that I actually make just about what I thought my dream job would pay. That is, what I thought my dream job would pay in 1984.)

Today I feel like maybe this is a real place and a real career. I like what New Kid said about post-graduate conferencing. I actually haven't been to many conferences since I got my job, but I certainly went to a lot during grad school and my post doc (which is why I can hardly bring myself to go to them now) and I know the disempowered part of what she is saying. But these meetings, this conversing, this building/shaping/reshaping a program is good stuff. Which is not to say that we all agree or that people don't say dumb things or that some people don't take way too long to say simple things. But if I have to have a job, I like this one today. A lot.

Classes were cakey: in one class I showed Real Women Have Curves and in the other, the diva class, we had student presentations on Celia Cruz, Josephine Baker, and Bjork, all of which were really good--informative, but also highly analytical. And any day which includes an in-depth discussion of Celia Cruz's wigs is a good day, right?

So now I only have 45 minutes left. Should I file those papers that have been sitting on top of my filing cabinet since the fall? Should I grade that stack of quizzes? Should I comment on student project proposals? Should I look at real estate I can't afford on Craig's List? Or should I take out my contacts and crawl under my desk for a quick nap?

The Stuck in the Middle of Spring Quarter with No End in Sight Blues

2005-05-08T15:02:00.000-05:00

So many of the academic blogs I read are gleefully reporting their end of the semester rituals. Only four more papers to go, one more conference, two more college meetings, etc.

I'm on the quarter system and though we're halfway through the last quarter, that still leaves four more weeks. Fall is great: teach ten weeks, get six off. But then we pay and pay and pay: twenty weeks of teaching with one measly little week in between, during which time we finish grading one quarter and hastily write our syllabi for the next.

On top of that, I don't think I've ever had more meetings in my life than I've had this quarter. Every week I have at least three. I'm on my way into school (on a Sunday) to meet with the lgtbi group I advise, making this the 7th day in a row I've had to go into school. Yeah, all day meeting yesterday as well.

And on top of that, my every other year formal review is due tomorrow. I should have had this last year, but my small liberal arts college within the larger university shut down and so my former dean said f**k that and now I have a new dean, a new chair, and a year past due review. Yummy. I've spent any time not in meetings copying evaluations, trying to remember what committees I've served on, and writing it all up in a way-too-long report. Yes, I know this wouldn't have been so hard if I had been more organized all along. Next time, I promise.

So I'm tired and ragged and the very last thing on my list of things to do always ends up being lesson prep. Thank god I'm teaching familiar class and so can go on autopilot a little bit.

Now I'm late. And I can't find my dvd of All About Eve, which I'm teaching tomorrow. Friends, klatch, L-Word viewers: did I loan this to any of you?

Not-Friday Cat Blog

2005-04-27T14:24:00.000-05:00

These are my cats, Manfred, on the left, the bigger seal point, and Margo, the smaller, chocolate point siamese:

This is a fairly representative picture of them because Manfred looks crazed, which he is, and Margo looks alert and engaged, but calm. It's pretty clear that she's not going to leap out of the cat tree anytime soon.

Manfred, on the other hand, is insane. We can't decide if he's more of a danger to himself or us. His hijinx include:
1. Opening the front door by himself. I'm used to being awakened in the night by the sound of him crawling up the front door and hanging onto the chain lock, but one night it was really getting out of hand--it sounded like he was leaping onto and climbing up the front door so vigorously that it was banging open and shut. That's because it was. I had forgotten to lock it, since I only use the front door when I go into the apartment hallway to get the mail. At 3 a.m. the front door was wide open and Manfred was sitting in the hallway, because he's not that brave after all. He didn't want to leave so much as he wanted to have the option of leaving.

2. Undoing a latch that connects a cd tower to a bookcase (Ikea Billy bookcases--you know what they look like) and knocking over the 8 foot tall cd tower, spilling every single cd onto the floor.

3. Pulling an antique beveled mirror off the wall and breaking it into a million pieces. (Margo might have helped in this one, actually)

4. Turning on the burners on the stove as he jumps from the top of the stove onto the top of the refrigerator and back. So if you're wondering why my home, though child-free, has safety knobs on the stove, that's why.

5. And his most recent escapade, the reason why I'm blogging about him today: getting himself wedged between the glass window pane and the window screen. He did this two days in a row. The first morning I woke up to a banging sound and went to reprimand him for hanging on the front door. But the hallway was empty. No kitty in any room and yet the banging continued. I finally realized the sound was coming from behind the drawn blinds. Pulling them up I found Manfred splayed between the windows, a couple of inches off the sill, suspended by his claws from the screen (good for the screen. that's totally coming out of the safety deposit). We left the window open a crack the night before. He wedged it open and then got caught when the window dropped closed behind him. The next morning, same thing, only he was waiting for me, slightly more calmly, at the bottom of the window.

But I am blogging about this today because the super stopped me on my way out this morning and said that a neighbor had complained that we had stuck our cat in the window. Or maybe they just saw the cat stuck in the window and called the super to call us. The super and I had a little bit of a language problem, so I'm not sure exactly how it went. But he did take some convincing that the cat had trapped himself. Because some people do that, you know. They trap their cats between the screen and the window for the whole neighborhood to see.

It's still poetry month, right?

2005-04-26T23:28:00.000-05:00

So I had this dream once. I was a young, impressionable undergrad English major, in the first throes of feminist fervor, discovering Gilbert and Gubar, realizing that the world was unjust and unfair to women, particularly women who write, and I decided to change it.

Well, more like, I knew I could be an Oscar-winning actress, a prima donna singer, maybe even the world's best, albeit least trained dancer. But being kind of lazy, I thought I would chase celebrity via an easier, more sure-fire route, namely academics. More specifically, feminist literary criticism. Smokin' hot, right?

(This Margo, she is not too bright, eh?)

I entered grad school with a plan: find a forgotten female modernist writer, rediscover her, write compelling, irresistable criticism, find some great photos and Voila! I'm the next Rachel Blau Duplessis, or Susan Stanford Friedman. Problem was, they'd already called dibs (and done work on) H.D. Djuna Barnes? Too late. Natalie Barney? Um, she slept with a lot of people and had a great salon, but she didn't really write anything, except Oscar Wilde-type witty epigrams. Could I really write a dissertation-cum-crossover-best-seller based on witty epigrams? Besides, Karla Jay already got to her. And sister, when you're entering grad school in 1992, don't even THINK you're gonna get to write about Virginia Woolf.

By the time I got to my doctoral exams I had resigned myself to correcting the oversights of the feminist literary critics who had come before me--I just needed a good hook, a good way to squeeze them all into one manuscript. A shopping mall approach to scholarship. The hook never came, but the forgotten modernist writer did. Really, when I least expected her, there she was in my Norton Anthology of Women Writers. I fell in love hard and fast.

My advisor had insisted I add some poems by Amy Lowell to my modernist reading list. I resisted, because I knew I knew everything there was to know about her--fat, rich, bossy, more of an impresario than a poet. A gnat circling around H.D., a b-list modernist, Ezra Pound's nemesis. But then I read some and I was hooked. It didn't hurt that I had just begun my first lesbian relationship and these poems were hot, hot, hot. We're talking unfolding flowers, dripping stamens, peeled almonds, the works.

And so began my love affair with Amy Lowell. Since then I've written a dissertation on her, co-edited an edition of her poems, and a collection of critical essays about her. I've been preparing to take my leave of her, in order to prove my academic credibility, but I've got a good job in a supportive department and so I feel like I can take a risk and write my old-fashioned single-author manuscript after all. Tomorrow I'm giving a reading at my favorite feminist book store on her, because it's poetry month and all. And because I asked.

That's the thing about writing about forgotten impresarios. You have to become one yourself. But my product, this Amy Lowell, she's really stunning.

Amy Lowell (1874-1925)

THE WEATHER-VANE POINTS SOUTH
*Published in Pictures of the Floating World (1919) as “The Weather Cock Points South”

I put your leaves aside,
One by one:
The stiff, broad outer leaves;
The smaller ones,
Pleasant to touch, veined with purple;
The glazed inner leaves.
One by one
I parted you from your leaves,
Until you stood up like a white flower
Swaying slightly in the evening wind.

White flower,
Flower of wax, of jade,
of unstreaked agate;
Flower with surfaces of ice,
With shadows faintly crimson.
Where in all the garden is there such a flower?
The stars crowd through the lilac leaves
To look at you.
The low moon brightens you with silver.

The bud is more than the calyx.
There is nothing to equal a white bud,
Of no colour, and of all;
Burnished by moonlight,
Thrust upon by a softly-swinging wind.
Vanity Fair, June 1919

Potty Mouth

2005-04-20T21:08:00.000-05:00

Gotta stop swearing so much when I teach.

Allergic to the world

2005-04-19T19:30:00.000-05:00

It was 80 degrees today in Chicago. The trees are starting to blossom, the lake path is jammed with happy, bare-skinned people and I can't stop sneezing. I've taken so much allergy medicine that I'm sick to my stomach and can't stay awake. A perfect day to grade essays, right? I took a restless, half-awake/half-asleep nap in the middle of the afternoon, as I was reading The Woman Warrior for about the tenth time, because I'm teaching it right now and my half-asleep thoughts took on Kingston's voice--"had my mother roused herself from her sleep, she would have seen a pollen ghost, fat and green, soft like the cotton cover of the couch she slept on." I woke up to a milky-white dusk and the beginnings of rain. Good. Wash away this sticky spring and let me sleep tonight.

What I would have liked to do today:
1. watch The Bob Newhart Show
2. listen to Aztec Camera's Love
3. color

Dusty Springfield interrupts

2005-04-16T14:09:00.000-05:00

Uh, hullo, it's me, Margo's real favorite diva, Dusty Springfield. I know she talks a lot about Bette Davis, but that's because she's trying to psychoanalyze herself on the cheap via an endless recitation of her strange childhood obsessions. But I'm who she really thinks about/longs for/rhapsodizes endlessly about.

You probably shouldn't read anything into the fact that I look almost exactly like her earliest childhood memories of her mother preparing to go out for the evening circa 1972.

Anyway, it's my birthday. Happy Birthday to me.

Internet communities I have known and loved

2005-04-14T19:01:00.000-05:00

The blogging world is new to me, and as I read the pages I like, (or yes, compulsively, the pages I don't like but must check because I feel threatened by them in a wish-I-were-that-cool or who-the-f*ck-do-they-think-they-are kind of way) I try to trace the relationships--who knows who in real life, who reads whose page regularly, etc. But internet communities are fickle and abstract, and even as I try to break into this world, try to establish connections, try to make friends, I think about the communities I've been a part of over the last decade, how they've defined my adult life.

When I first moved east for grad school, married, straight, just out of BYU, not sure how I was going to keep being a mormon, not sure how I could not be a mormon, my community was a group called LDS Women. I think that's what it was called. There were actually two list-serves--one for just women, one for both women and men. As long as you were uncomfortable with Mormon sexism/homophobia/anti-intellectualism, but not enough so to stop dragging your kids to church or turn down a calling. It seemed though they were willing to explain how frustrated they were with the church and its politics, they weren't going to leave it. Similarly, though they could readily and eloquently critique their upper-middle class straight privilege, but they certainly weren't ready to ditch it all and join a commune, like their prized heroine/most feared cautionary tale figure, Sonia Johnson. (A current incarnation of this list might look like this.) I was one of these women too, and as I sat in the computer lab in my new school their green words flashing from the black screen were familiar, their anger tasted right.

That group morphed into a few incarnations, but the part of the list I hung with finally settled into HAAM: Heretical Agnostic Aetheist Mormons, an invitation-only, strictly vetted list-serve for only the most angry, most educated, most intellectually and/or socially rebellious of us. HAAM was hot for a while there. I think it died when two of the most active voices, a lesbian couple, broke up. At least it never seemed the same to me after that. I still see some of the members at MLA every year. We refer to ourselves as the Mormon Mafia, and joke about how nobody realizes just how many of us there are in academia. (There's probably a Western-raised, inbred Mormon with a long English nose teaching Coleridge in a classroom near you. Beware, beware. . . )

My most beloved list-serve was, some would say is, or rather, still could be, Maude, a list for discussing fashion, tv, gossip, general femmeness, that started out of SUNY Buffalo in the mid-90s. Most, but not all, of the original members were grad students there. (Not me. Margo only wishes she had been at Buffalo.)

We started when e.r. was new and exciting and we cared who Carter went out with. We talked about clothes, about shoes we wanted, lipstick colors we loved (as Clinique's Rum Raisin morphed into MAC's Sheer Plum), apartments we passed through, jobs we quit, or lost. We swapped guilty tv secrets and spoke of our significant others as Harrisons. Sometimes we talked about our dissertations, our exams, our proposals, our hostile grad program assistants, our amnesiac advisors, our freshman comp classes, the shitty jobs we took on the side to stay afloat. We talked a lot about our ambivalence towards academia. Some talked about relationships, some more than others. You never deleted a Maude post, although some senders made you roll your eyes. Some Maudes you sought out in the real world.

I don't know when we stopped talking. For me Maude was kind of over when I had a difficult and bitter break-up with my eight-year partner, who was also on Maude. I couldn't talk about it there, because it was her community too, in a way that could never be triangulated like live and telephone relationships could be. Nor did I feel like I could talk about the rest of my life there, anymore. I still don't. I don't even know if she's still on Maude, but I waited a year after I got cats to mention it there, because I was afraid she'd make fun of me, the inveterate cat hater, or that she'd find a way to hold it against me.

Every once in a while you'd get an extraordinary announcement: "So, I got married, and the shoes I wore? Still not sure about them." Or "well, since my baby is due in three weeks . . ." I don't know when we started editing out the parts our lives that mattered, hiding behind lipstick and sitcoms when I think a lot of us felt a deep intimacy, an irrational love, a no-matter-what loyalty. We just barely got a new home a few months ago, on a fancy new server, years after anyone has lived in Buffalo or has really been affiliated with the school.

I miss Maude a lot, and wish she'd come back, but after ten years, after break-ups within the community, marriages, babies, deaths, moves, dissertations done and not done, I'm not sure we've got anything to talk about except wishing there was something to talk about.

I bet you wish I would talk about my time on Weavered.com, an active site and community organized around love of, you got it, Kerry Weaver, everybody's favorite red-haired lesbian doctor, don't you? But I won't. I won't even explain how I was really there for the Kate Mulgrew Appreciation thread, or how I got tangled up with a crazy stalker woman whom I'm still kind of scared of. And no way am I going to spill the beans about The Cat Site.

The thing that always catches me off-guard about internet communities is how quickly they flare up and how quickly they die, how they go from being a huge part of your life--some days you can't think a thought or have an experience outside of the narrative parameters of your current on-line community--to something you only remember when an errant message shows up in your in box, or when you follow the bookmark for the first time in weeks, just to see if there's anyone there you know anymore.

Accidental must-see TV

2005-04-14T10:48:00.000-05:00

No way was I going to watch Revelations. Too Christian, too Terri Schaivo, too everything-that's-wrong-with-our world. But then I read about it in the NY Times last night, just as it was coming on, and I read that it was written by the guy who wrote The Omen. Okay, I'm listening. And then I remembered how much I like Natascha McElhone, and then it was on and then I couldn't stop watching. Is the inability to not watch this show a sign of the apocalypse?

"a rococo palace of blunders"

2005-04-12T12:19:00.000-05:00

That's what Wyndham Lewis called Edith Sitwell's Aspects of Modern Poetry. Lewis was a total dick, and never one to offer real criticism when a smart-ass descriptor would suffice, but I kind of like this one. I work on publicity, personality, and flamboyant excess in modernist poetry, so that's exactly the kind of phrase that grabs my attention. In honor of poetry month, here's one of my favorite Edith Sitwell pieces, (yes, I'll admit, I like to try to recite along with her, in my best Edith Sitwell voice, while I drive). It's much more fun to hear her read it. (Scroll down to the track listings. The preview clip is the whole poem.)

Black Mrs. Behemoth

In a room of the palace
Black Mrs Behemoth
Gave way to wroth
And the wildest malice.
Cried Mrs Behemoth,
"Come, come,
Come, court lady,
Doomed like a moth,
Through palace rooms shady!"
The candle flame
Seemed a yellow pompion,
Sharp as a scorpion,
Nobody came...
Only a bugbear,
Air unkind,
That bud-furred papoose,
The young spring wind,
Blew out the candle.
Where is it gone?
To flat Coromandel
Rolling on!

The Ring Cycle: more like a semi-circle

2005-04-11T09:56:00.000-05:00

So we blew off the last two operas. We started off so strong and brave: two nights in a row, totalling almost 9 hours of opera. But then Thursday, and Seigfried, rolled around and girlfriend had seen it twice (this production, no less) and I had seen it once, less than a year ago, and we both had to teach on Friday, and she was sick (has been for two long weeks) and so not going felt pretty justifiable. (Other justifications included: Me: I don't like Seigfried because he is a boy, and a stupid boy at that and that's not my favorite genre of human being; Her: My seat has no springs in it and I want to crawl out of my body by the end of the first act.)

But we had no intention of missing Saturday's Gotterdammerung. That's the only one of the four operas we hadn't seen and we knew it would be long (started at 5:30!) but it would be worth it, if only to hear the brass section soar during Seigfried's Funeral March. But then it was Saturday afternoon and GF was still really, really, really sick, as in propped on the couch trying to catch her breath between sneezes, and me, I was having a really hard time not being hostile/anxious at the thought of how sick I was sure I would become as soon as she got over the cold, and I was obsessing over my frightened realization that, having been a really terrible, non-sympathetic nurse, I had all sorts of revenge non-care coming to me.

But we got dressed to go and I put in new contacts, so my eyes would be fresh for all 5+ hours of spectacle and we started driving down Lake Shore Drive, but we were kind of late, and we knew we'd be lucky to get parked and into the theater on time, let alone grab food for the intermissions. Then my eyes started to itch from the fresh spring in the air, and someone cut me off driving and someone else honked meanly and I started down a familiar and easy spiral of talk-yourself-out-of-anything panic, complete with tears. I still had so much reading for class; I was still so tired from Paris two weeks ago; I never really liked Brunhilde anyway, because she's such a daddy's girl and I HATE daddy's girls; our seats are really awful and the man who sold them to me didn't tell me they were at the very top of the upper balcony; and even if we did have better seats, the Lyric has terrible acoustics and we wouldn't be ravaged by the power of the music (which is what I wanted). And on and on and on. I'm really good at this mode--can snap into it in a heartbeat, can stay in it forever.

So finally GF said, okay look, we have permission not to go; let's just drop it and get on with our lives. So we called our always-fun friends, who were on their way out for the night, met them at a dark and greasy burger joint/beer garden on the northside, and had a fried shrimp, french fries, and beer blowout, for only about eleven bucks each. By 9 o'clock we were back at home, playing with our new TiVo, drinking bourbons and sodas that didn't cost $10 each, and by 11 we were in bed.

Ah, culture.