lycanthropia

Hey y’all, remember that time I had a blog? That was cool, wasn’t it! But, hmm, that must’ve been before my semester looked like this:

Wait, no, sorry—that’s a picture the neighbor took a couple of weekends ago when I played hooky (gasp!) and we took a WALK to a nearby PARK. No, the remnants of the semester really look like this:

Only I took that one a week ago and now there’s another week crossed out. Five weeks left of classes. Five weeks of full-on teaching, and then comes that weird week during which I somehow crank out two research papers and a portfolio, which, come on JLowe, that’s not that bad, and it’s not, unless you’re me, and you’re having a hard time doing things other than a) compulsively housecleaning/practicing flea abatement (since Pyewacket is two days post-spring haircut/treatment and still itchy and hopping with vermin), and b) sucking down calories, lying immobilized in bed reading essays and poems online, and sleeping. Also having sex. And then more sleeping. And then more eating, immobility, etc. Repeat play.

I just, yeah. What can I say. Here’s what I can say—would you guys, um, would you mind just keeping an eye on my stuff while I go to the water fountain/bathroom/Starbucks? I’d really appreciate it. Please don’t let anyone plant cocaine or explosives on me while I’m over there? I’ll smile reassuringly at you (but in a polite, distant, airport-stranger sort of way) from the queue. And I’ll be back around the first week of May, brain slightly fizzled and words a little deranged, but all faculties more or less (eventually) fully intact.

I sit in the Daewoo singing. A pouring rain, but one over as suddenly as it started; wet foot-long green grass lush in the backyard, low soft clouds scudding rapidly overhead, what my mom always called “Gulf junk” when I was growing up. Where’d she get that, I think occasionally; is it a Lake Charles thing? (Her dad, my lecherous grandfather, was Cajun.)

calling for my soul
at the corners of the world
I know she’s playing poker
with the rest of the stragglers

Today I handed in grades, and my semester was officially over. The person who received the paperwork thankfully didn’t examine my attendance record (which ends abruptly on November 4, right about when things started to get kind of interesting), and so far no students have burst into emails of outrage (other than one of the plagiarists, who’s hysterical). I returned the videos to the library and was back in the ghostly empty parking lot and on my way off campus by 10 am, smug in the knowledge that I don’t have to set foot back upon it until 2012. It’s an ugly place, one for which I feel a strange sympathetic pity, like I know how it might feel.

Then drove to Whole Foods for celebratory sushi, another box of satsumas (nature’s jellybeans) and a tiny little confection with a single raspberry on top. I was curled up on the sofa demolishing these when the sadness hit me. Piled into my chest the way it does, like—like something that piles into you. Something heavy. A lot of very small rocks? Or wet sand.

Now is when I should be getting ready to go to Mexico

Okay I’m not going to Mexico what am I going to do instead

I poke the chicken-feather-stick under the satsuma box and wiggle it around, for Pye to chase. I hastily google a bunch of plane ticket prices, but I have no money, and will have even less next semester. Somehow I have to, we all have to, pay $750 in fees over the course of the spring. AWP always goes on the credit card, doesn’t get paid off for a year.

People wanted me to come visit. Why did I not plan this better? Suddenly there’s a housesit in Albuquerque? The sofas of all my friends in Phoenix, in Portland? It’s too late for any of that—and there’s the cat—and I don’t want to sleep on sofas—

and if your friends don’t come back to you
and you know this is madness
a lilac mess in your prom dress

I’m here. Can I just be here? Write, sing, dream, sleep. Practice. Get back into my bones.

I’ll set up the piano. I’ll set up my office. I’ll cook, I’ll find a yoga studio finally, I’ll watch amazing films. I’ll write every morning. I’ll do ritual work. I’ll—

I pull Fun Home off the shelf and go crawl under the duvet with the cat.

I forget to turn the heat down and it’s too hot. I dream that I’m at a poetry or Zen retreat, I can’t tell which, and for no clear reason I create a very scary package—I decapitate myself (cleanly, carefully, with a very sharp knife in a neat circle) and place my severed head and two bloody tampons in a paper bag, along with some other symbolically significant objects, feathers and stones, and a bright-pink journal in which I have written poetically about how suicidal I am. This is found (under a bathroom sink somewhere) and retreatants are alarmed. There is an emergency meeting held with teachers/leaders as they try to decide what to do about me. I quickly realize I have made a mistake, that they all are finding this much more frightening than I meant. I start talking to them, faster and faster, pleading, persuading—please, I didn’t mean it the way it seems, it’s just how I write, I’ll just leave the retreat, I promise I won’t cause any trouble—and then when it’s clear they aren’t listening and really do mean to commit me, I start begging in earnest—no, not here, at least send me home, send me back to Arizona, at home I have a whole mental-health team (I list off my five “team members,” though I have trouble coming up with them), just don’t put me in the hospital here, not here in Florida! They’ll think I’m schizophrenic and give me the wrong medication and then I really will be schizophrenic—

Somehow we really are in Florida. Sand and blue water. Why couldn’t I just enjoy it, why did I have to make trouble? I’m begging and importuning. Wash is there, and I’m so happy; he’s a doctor in a white coat, and the only one defending me. Everyone goes into another room to talk about me and I’m relieved to overhear him talking sense through the door. Look, she’s not that crazy, I think she’s just a cutter, I don’t think she’s a real danger to herself, she just wants attention—

I wake up and, addled, pull on running clothes. Why do I feel so shitty. Is it just all that energy suddenly having nowhere to go? Is it really the Mexico thing? Do I really not know what to do with myself for three weeks?

Just as I start out, the neighbor texts would I like to have dinner. I start jogging and deliberate over this. We hung out last night for like 7 hours, and it was kind of ridiculously sweet and affectionate. Are we getting too attached? Am I just being even more extraordinarily stupid about a boy than usual? And shouldn’t I use up that swiss chard in the fridge? I stagger around half of the three-mile dirt path that circumscribes Rice University (such a pretty campus—a real university, with residential colleges and landscaping and architecture), then text him back: okay, but I have to shower. Well, tomorrow might be better for me he replies; I can translate that without difficulty. I shrug mentally, walk home, stretch, shower.

Eat the last of the leftover salsa verde enchiladas while catching up on the Daily Show. Hear girlish laughter outside, turn up the volume.

I guess I’m an underwater thing
so I guess I can’t take it personally

Go to the grocery store, just for lack of something to do. Walk through the aisles unwilling to admit that in the last year of my life I’ve somehow become an emotional eater. Existential emptiness, I remind myself, is always at its nadir the day after the semester ends. Plus I’m PMSing. No reason to get all bent out of shape, draw all kinds of invalid conclusions about myself, about this non-relationship, make a bunch of decisions I can’t actually probably live with.

The bakery is out of cuernitos. The clerks in the store all have to wear either Santa hats or reindeer antlers. They don’t seem too happy about it.

I drive home singing, get out of the car with my cat food, toilet paper, and beer (special seasonal Shiner Holiday Cheer which, damn if it doesn’t really taste like peaches and pecans) and run smack dab into the neighbor and some pert little thing. I say nothing; he says hi like a friendly normal person and I mumble something and they cycle off into the rainy night. He is whistling brightly, he always whistles when he comes and goes on his bicycle. I come inside and shut the door as hastily as I can and Pye and I stare at each other. I clear my throat. “Awk-ward!” But I know I am the only one who has been awkward. Can I do this? But I am doing it.

And now I’m drinking Shiner and wondering what to do with myself between now and January 18. And I know the only way to poems is straight through—through a lot of silence and loneliness and feelings of barren frustration and getting lost in my own head for days on end and deep, deep sadness and fear; so I’d better get real comfortable with all that.

According to Lacan, the sexual relationship—or, more precisely, its failure—represents the primary stumbling block in human relations, a stumbling block that results from our insertion into language. As Lacan puts it, “No relationship gets constituted between the sexes in the case of speaking beings.” “There is no sexual relationship” because the categories of male and female indicate a structural impasse: each position is structured so that it looks for what the other does not have, not for what it has. The desires of the sexes are thus not complementary. This dooms relationships between the sexes to be antagonistic, and it dooms both sexes to a continual battle to overcome this antagonism. The only way out of this antagonism is to turn to fantasy, although fantasy can only overcome this conflict in an imaginary way. Fantasy allows the subject to discover, through producing a narrative around it, a way of creating the illusion that the successful sexual relationship is possible.

[Todd McGowan, The Impossible David Lynch]

I have reached that point in the semester. The make-it-or-break-it point, the moment of truth, the small but powerful eddying whirlpool of black-hole hell down which one is inexorably sucked. In short, grades are due Monday and worst, my research paper is due Friday. And I have fallen headfirst into the classic grad-student trap of, “I’ll just read one more book/article and then I’ll start writing.” Now it’s Tuesday and the paper is due Friday and all I have are pages and pages and pages of notes—

Dead cold panic.  The usual. Cursing my lack of work ethic and all those nights I stayed up late eating tangerines and watching Firefly. (NOTE TO SELF NEVER EVER ORDER FIREFLY UNTIL AFTER ALL THE PAPERS ARE HANDED IN OH MY GOOD LORD.) Wishing I had an extra weekend, that same panic that assaults the hearts of my own students, its icy fist gripping inside their chests, and then in a rictus of fear they google desperately and start downloading and/or cutting-and-pasting. Out of a class of 25 students, 6 plagiarists. I asked four to rewrite their papers, after being stern and scaring the bejeezus out of them; and the others will have official university sanctions, which means I have to write letters and print out websites and document copied passages with a highlighter and colored pens and OH GOD I DO NOT HAVE TIME FOR ANY OF THIS.

So of course, I woke up this morning and immediately started making salsa verde/green chile chicken enchiladas from scratch. You know. Because.

There is really no known terror, for me, quite like the unwritten-writing-assignment terror. Which is kind of hilarious, since I’m, you know, a writer and all. Sometimes I’m not sure how I bore it, working at the alt weekly for as long as I somehow did (thanks mostly to everyone’s studiously and kindly looking the other way as I floundered and gasped and thrashed)—I don’t know why I wasn’t vomiting on like a weekly basis every Sunday night. I guess I was cutting and hitting myself instead, and accusing my boyfriends of being to blame somehow—hang on, I have to peel the blistered skin off the poblano and serrano and jalapeño.

Where was I. Ah yes, reminiscing delightfully about my dashed career as a movie reviewer. And my thwarted career as an academic, off to yet another lurching start. All because writing prose scares the pants off me.

(Taste salsa verde: way too mild. I knew I should’ve bought more serranos. Can I text the neighbor and ask him to pick up some more habaneros or something? Add to list of things I’ve learned to do since my ex left me: Revel in insanely hot Mexican/Thai food.)

Suddenly I have to post this and not write it anymore. It’s a day where I hate everything I write, myself, am convinced my friends all secretly find me a big drag, and why the hell didn’t I start this paper two weeks ago. Just the usual. But when I was looking up whether habanero should have a tilde, I found this Wiki entry on hyperforeignisms, and you should read it, because Americans are silly and we apparently like to gussy up our foreign loan words even more than the foreigners originally did. We mispronounce everything! Petruchio! Empanada! Schizophrenia! Beijing! Maraschino! Now I can be even more snobby.

(PS here is my winterface. This is the face that tries to figure out how Kristeva’s chora relates to Eraserhead, or Lacanian ego development to the construction of the lesbian in Mulholland Drive. This is the face that panics and goes into denial and paces the house, skin prickling with anxiety, and tastes the salsa verde, really pretty amazing with all the cilantro and lime.)

I’m not going to lie, this week has daunted me.

“Certainly like to drink,” Bill said. “You ought to try it sometimes, Jake.”
“You’re about a hundred and forty-four ahead of me.”
“Ought not to daunt you. Never be daunted. Secret of my success. Never been daunted. Never been daunted in public.”
“Where were you drinking?”
“Stopped at the Crillon. George made me a couple of Jack Roses. George’s a great man. Know the secret of his success? Never been daunted.”
“You’ll be daunted after about three more Pernods.”
“Not in public. If I begin to feel daunted I’ll go off by myself. I’m like a cat that way.”

And now I feel, as S. says so well of her fluffy Maine coon friends, like a very small cat in a big cat suit. I am so trying to be bright-faced about all this and pull myself through all the teaching and classes and social interactions but I will confide in you and you alone, mes amis, that I am quietly gutted. It didn’t hit me at first but has kind of been creeping up on me all week. Example: tonight is a reading/party and I can’t decide whether I should go, because what if my new colleagues secretly think I’m trashy and a bad writer and a slimy skeezy yellow-journalist program-bashing sex-wallowing BLOGGER?

Therefore of course I have to go. Just as I have to keep handing into the workshop, week after week, my terrible “confessional” poems, having nothing else to submit, knowing they will be deservedly abused, and I have to be professional and cheerful and appreciative, and I am, I am, only, also: ow. I don’t know why they wanted me here, if in fact they did. Maybe it was a clerical error, and my portfolio got switched with someone else’s.

Of course, it’s also that point in the semester when it seems there’s no way all the things will possibly get done by December 1, no one can humanly finish all the writing projects and all the grading, but then somehow magically it gets done. It somehow gets done, even on days like today when I topple despairingly onto the sofa wrapped in the yellow quilt and fall asleep for two hours when I do not HAVE two hours to sleep in the middle of the day.

I suddenly feel inordinately affectionate, and would hug you if I could. Now I go buy cat litter, toilet paper, matcha, organic milk, and romaine lettuce hearts (the stuff of LIFE, my friends) and then go to this reading/party. All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.