oh yeah

My old man is in a deep dissertation zone, under a heavy and scary deadline that he can barely talk about without getting sick. I am fully on board with his plight and am trying to be supportive in the only way I know how, which is to just try to be quiet and make him grilled cheeses and not put anything heavy on him right now, like announcing I want to have a child. HA HA HA

When he is jamming himself into a write-all-day mode he blasts one of two genres on my old MacBook. You will recall I spent a full week after filing my dissertation doing almost nothing but assigning each individual track in my entire iTunes to one of perhaps 15 made-up genres. These genres include:
Crystal Vibrations
Dark Vibrations
Art Nice
Dark Noise
Individuals and Heroes
Art Solos
Instrumental
Sing Alongs
Twin Peaks

For a long time he was putting Art Solos on super loud. He said it gave him direction. These are mostly 18th and 19th century solo instrumental pieces, for example the Bach cello suites, but they also include some small-ensemble instrumental works, such as Schubert’s trio sonatas. This is a very good genre for writing. Lately however he’s switched to Crystal Vibrations, and I find that interesting, because the whole point of the Crystal Vibrations genre is that it DOESN’T have direction in that 19th century teleological way. I wonder which is working out best for him?

I finally finished my grading yesterday in a last epic back-breaking push that left me emotionally spent. Then I went directly to Katy’s house where we are writing a feminist theme song for an entity that shall remain nameless for now. This ended up being the perfect antidote to post-grading malaise, as we struggled to find words that rhyme with “transvaginal ultrasound” and “mansplaining.” Turns out, there are several!

Now it is the first true day of vacation and of course I am spending it poking around on the internet and making a huge pot of beans. I ain’t give a damn. And I will do yoga and try to mellow out and stop waking up at 6 a.m.

Of course new work must almost immediately be begun, for example the syllabi for next semester, the creation of which will involve reading some new books I’ve never read before. I had also hoped to do some of my own unrelated research. To that end, I will be reading an article from a couple years ago that everyone was apparently fighting about but that I totally missed.

CONFESSSIONS:
– I have still LITERALLY never listened to a single track off Yeezus, ever, in my life
– I have still not watched the new Beyonce album and I find myself frankly not that interested in it and I don’t know why. I think I have Arguing-About-Beyonce’s-Feminism-Or-Lack-Thereof fatigue, thanks, feminist internet! You lost Beyonce a customer!!!!!!!!!!!
– I have no desire to purchase christmas gifts for my in-laws or even my own husband
– I am struggling for the first real time with some career-related malaise and I’m not sure how to conquer it. My usual jam when I have malaise is to ATTACK whatever it is that is causing me malaise but this feels too big to really satisfyingly attack. Or like, I’m doing the best I can, and it’s not working out, and maybe it will never work out, and then I will have to come up with a new identity and life plan, and I’ll be right back where I was at age 22 or something, and that just seems nightmarish and I am not sure what to do. And do I have to do that yet, or should I wait another year, or what. I feel like I have come so close several times to getting a real job and then somehow I either actively blew it or it just kind of went away, the opportunity, and like how many more times does that have to happen before I realize it’s not going to happen for me? This weird middle ground where I am competitive enough to get almost there but not enough to seal the deal. I want to change that narrative. Must use bullshit white-privileging rich-people visualization techniques.
– And as many have noted before me, and as often as I pep myself up with this kind of rhetoric, it doesn’t really make you feel better to think of those less fortunate. In fact it makes you feel worse, for still having malaise even though nobody’s ever come to your door and forced you to murder your neighbors or whatever. These guys who are brain surgeons in their country and then they flee civil war to come to America and work 7 jobs and send all their money back home to children they’ll never see again, and then here you are being like, boo hoo, I wish I could buy a house, it’s not fair. But then again, it’s NOT fair, not for hardly any of us! And when will the revolution come, I am tired of waiting!!!!!!
– But my pep talk is also real, which is that I have a lot of love and joy in my life and that’s really all that matters. On your deathbed you probably won’t be like “I wish my career had been more financially successful,” unless you are truly a huge asshole I guess. Or homeless.
– Sometimes I am struck by strong desires for things I usually am uninterested in or even hostile towards. For example, suddenly just now I thought “I’M GONNA GET A TATTOO”
– I think a tattoo would look really bad on my scrawny white arm. Maybe I could get it on my butt
– Making a pot of beans is very centering for me. It ties me to my heritage as a southwestern Coloradoan, and to my family, and it is healthy to eat beans for your body, and it makes the house smell good for the rest of the day, and it’s cheap. I will get some dark beer and have a delightful evening meal, fuck it and fuck all of you
– Does everyone sing songs to their dog? Sometimes we get so immersed in singing a made-up song to the dog that we forget there is another person in the house until they start laughing at the words we are singing. Today for me it was “do you want a banana/are you a banana” over and over. Why do dogs invite songs? Is it the close yet inscrutable attention they pay to your face while you are singing? Is it the fact that they tolerate being bothered so well, thus inviting incessant bothering? Is it the fact that they smell like chips and flowers
– I had a nightmare that I was forced to sleep in a bed with my grandmother and clean up after her bathroom accidents. My poor grandmother, reduced to a Kristevan nightmare source for her closest loved ones. God bless my grandmother, her once-glorious, nay, OPERATIC, horribleness stripped away and replaced by a hesitant, timid, sweet-voiced shell. I talked to her on her birthday and she could barely make words. She didn’t know who I was, but she fucking FAKED IT like a champ, it’s that ingrained Texas social etiquette helping her over the finish line. She said suddenly “they are serving oatmeal in great quantities,” which is a classically hilarious thing for her to say. She almost sounded like her old self for a second, like her old self that is slowly dying in front of us all, almost dead now but lifting its head every once in awhile in its death throes to make itself once more known to the world
– I’ve been going to rolfing sessions and it is ACTUALLY INCREDIBLE. I so urge you all to do it if you have a shit-ton of money to spare or are desperate enough to spend money you don’t have to spare. I have never had a bodywork experience anything like it. I lay fully naked on a burning-hot massage table, with no sheet covering me or anything, while this amazing shaman man moves around me silently, sometimes placing his fingers underneath my internal organs and stretching nerves with a painful burning sensation; sometimes flipping me over and grinding his elbow with unbelievable strength along the entire muscles of my back until I feel I have been flattened into nothingness and then regenerated at the other end; sometimes putting his arm under me in a strange lover’s embrace and using his other hand to physically move the bones in my chest around and I am filled with relief I didn’t know my body was even seeking. I go to the deepest place, where I know I’m not asleep but I am still having vivid hallucinations like dreams, where I have to pull myself back firmly to keep from talking to myself or twitching. Then he has me get up and walk and bend my knees while he sits on a stool and watches, and I feel I am floating into the sky. I can not recommend it highly enough. If you are okay being naked in a fully lit room with a strange dude moving your muscles around on your bones and basically grappling you (one time he put a knuckle directly onto my unmentionable and pressed the tip of my tailbone with extraordinary force and it felt like my whole spine was moving upwards into the top of my head; another time he essentially held my entire pubic region in his hand and used his thumb to dig into a spot underneath the muscle of my right butt cheek that basically made me have a religious vision of pain and redemption), and if you are feeling creaky and crooked and tight and unpleasant in your body in various vague ways you can’t totally define, then I really think rolfing could be for you. It is SO expensive but feels SO worth it to me. I am walking differently in the world. The thing I find interesting about rolfing is that it’s actually NOT THAT WOO WOO. It’s way less woo woo than acupuncture. It feels like a really really intense version of going to the chiropractor, in terms of its woo-woo level. It’s very nuts-and-bolts physiological. Here is your psoas muscle, here is your lingual nerve, here is what I am doing to those things. There is some discussion of “inhabiting a pain-free space” or what-not but for the most part it is incredibly tangible and physical, taking your muscles and sticking them back where they belong; rearranging your bones. Rolfers often take before and after pictures and you can actually see the physical changes wrought upon your whole body. My mom claims she was 2 inches taller after her 10 sessions were over.
– not to diss on acupuncture though, which I love and which I also think is real. Remember when my acupuncturist caught me in a lie just from feeling my pulses? Shit is real. “Oh did you drink a lot last night?” “What? No! Of course not! I would never drink a lot, I am a very healthy and well-adjusted person!” “Huh. Your pulses are really sluggish. It really seems like you drank a lot recently. That’s weird.” “[cold sweat]”

It is a type of weather I really cherish, which is “super dark, sodden, and rainy.” I would just like to pause here to let you know that I am REALLY enjoying my morning. I am using the cool coffee-cup-warmer my dad gave me that my old man hates, so my coffee is still hot. I don’t have one goddamn thing I have to do today. I am going to make beans here in a minute. And it’s cozy as shit in here. What could be better? It is very fun and cool to be alive and a person.

I have been thinking about how weird it is that I am just barely old enough such that a TON of people I went to high school with are not on Facebook and have no web presence at all, from my periodic attempts to find out about them. Such a state of affairs seems like it would be impossible today. All those rich handsome boys I had crushes on, where are they? There are no photos, no blogs, no Facebook profiles. Did they all die? Surely not. I think they all just got married, had babies, and now work for their Dads, and go to barbecues with each other on the weekends. Last I heard, one of them had married a woman with the same name as his brother’s wife, which is entirely as it should be, if you knew this guy. But seriously. The boy I lost my virginity to, where are you boy?? What do you even look like? Do you still wear prescription Oakleys

Two nights ago I dreamed that Tony, my ex-boyfriend who died, appeared under the covers of my bed, and was telling me jokes and being tender to me, and then someone came in and I leapt out from under the covers to talk to them, and then when I went back and lifted them up, Tony was gone. Then I called his phone number from the year 1999 and it was still his same answering machine message. But then a robot came on to tell me “no one has called this number in 14 years.” I woke up with tears on my face, vibrating with sorrow. What does it all mean.

I feel I am having trouble relaxing. I am still waking up at 6 in the pitch dark. I am sure that by the time I finally get back into a more human schedule it will immediately be the new semester. That’s ok though because I like my job. I LIKE MY JOB I LIKE MY JOB

Anybody know anything about this TV show “The Returned” or how a person could watch it when it’s not on Netflix streaming? We are thinking of going back to Netflix DVDs! Remember the joy of seeing that damn red envelope peeking out of yon mailbox?? Netflix streaming sucks, they hardly have any movies you want to see! DVDs!!!!!!!

We also might go even further back, to Facets, if they are still doing it. Support an indie business. Facets version of Netflix is so funny, you actually EMAIL A HUMAN PERSON with your queue or updates to your queue. We have so many jokes about this. “Dear Mr. Facets! I did not enjoy my recent revisitation of Lethal Weapon 2, please re-order my queue such that all 80s action comedies are at the bottom!” Also periodically Facets sends you a random DVD you didn’t ask for, just based on their impression of what you might like, and they are ALWAYS RIGHT. This is how we watched the INCREDIBLE French thriller “Tell No One,” which we had never heard of and which still haunts me and which you all should go watch RIGHT NOW.

Now we are listening to this hour-long Dalai Lama chant my mom gave me

CHRISTMAS BREAK TO DO LIST, HOLD ME TO IT:
– try to bake a loaf of bread
– read 10 helpful things in my discipline
– write something
– 2 syllabi and accompanying course prep
– yoga
– find out about new music
– ward off despair

good day to you