lycanthropia

Night before I bleed, restless, wordless. Trying to write the same poem all day and too agitated/dysphoric, not enough attention span. Not exactly unhappy, just unable to settle down to anything. Jittery, fidgety and teeth-grittingly aphasic. Can’t concentrate to read. Can only strings of nouns, verbs, odd words in odder places. Should have tried yoga. Should probably have taken Klonopin sooner. Tired and wired in equal measure.

Last night, though, finally the girl-dance birthday party of my dreams—thanks to Mark and Kelly’s generous willingness to let us hijack their front room, and Beth’s having portable speakers, as well as having plenty of Erasure, Madonna, Prince, James, Pet Shop Boys on her laptop. On my own iTunes I scrounged up Paula Abdul, the Cranberries, Pulp, Björk, The Cure, Depeche Mode, I don’t know what all else. We sang all the words and hopped around wildly and were literally drenched with sweat, it was glorious. Mark made mojitos, he and Kelly fed us tacos and guacamole and rice, Laura made her amazing fruit salad with strawberries and mangoes, and I brought an enormous fruit-decorated vanilla cake from Whole Paycheck (on sale for $12) and a bottle of Liebfraumilch. At some point there were white tequila shots with orange slices. We partied like it was 1999. My friends performed various sobriety field tests on me and I was judged fit to navigate. I drove home at 1 a.m. crying softly, in love with all my friends who are going to be insanely hard to leave, for a city where I no know one but my beloved hometown librarian, having not seen him in circa twenty years? But I am. I typed an official letter of acceptance and it’s clothespinned to the mailbox right now, for the postal carrier to pick up in the morning.

After the dance party, ibuprofen and faceplanting. I woke late and drank a liter of water. Then all today, post-dance fatigue and a deeper inertia but without relaxation, an agitation, I should be doing something, something, but what, but I am exhausted and allergic and half-menstrual. I managed to put away a load of laundry, wash and hang out another, repot a dying basil plant, plant catnip seeds for Pyewacket, run errands with Beth—I bought a white fitted sheet, which will save me washing sheets another week, and three wineglasses, the fourth in the box being broken, I haggled till I got 20 percent off. They are good wineglasses, a thin bell-like chime when you flick them gently with your fingernail. And I am tired of drinking out of water tumblers. Then I bought a packet of wildflower seed for $1, how could I not, though I have a hoarding problem with collecting seed packets, I am always going to plant them and never do, so I have enough desert-hardy flower seed now to fill a five-acre plot.

All day no appetite, bloated and disfigured, but I force myself to make a rehydrating cherry smoothie for breakfast, and later a small supper, linguini alfredo, plenty of black and pink peppercorn ground on top, sea salt, the last of the Liebfraumilch with ice cubes. The cat licks the empty bowl, chases moths sportively then looks at me over her shoulder to see if I notice. I am half-menstruating, enough to spot the sheets this morning when I blearily sat on the edge of the bed and wasn’t fast enough. Stained the ivory silk gown I once fancied sexy, thrift store $2, why think of it as his when it has always been mine. In the mirror eyelids swollen mauve, face blotched, pocked and scabbed, a unhealthy pallor now used to my skin. That old conundrum: do I look objectively plainer this time of the month, or is my lowered self-esteem distorting my appearance.

I hate this and it is boring and I am keeping writing it.

I fell in love with a woman today in Target, she had an ungainly box in her red shopping trolley, one of those big reinforced cardboard boxes that doesn’t quite fit, the kind with the big copper staples, some lawn equipment or furniture that some man in her life would be putting together. But I looked and she had no wedding ring, just slender strong tanned hands which she ran over the rows of candles. I paused at a nearby end-cap display and sniffed an unscented violet pillar candle, looking artlessly the other way. She wore Teva sandals, brown canvas shorts and a red cardigan. Her hair looked like mine, shoulder-length brown highlighted blonde, but it looked healthier. She looked healthier, little muscles in her calves and forearms, creamy tanned skin. I thought, Have I just seen the woman I am meant to spend the rest of my life with? I thought, Does she look like me? Nose somewhat Roman, cheekbones strong, intelligence in her eyes and hands as she tried on sample moisturizers in the cosmetics aisle. About this time I realized I was behaving like a weirdo so I gave up on watching her and went to stand in line and buy my sheet and broken wineglasses. There’s this new thing with stemless stemware—where they try to sell you just the goblet part of the wineglass. I get this for reds, but not white, surely, where you want it to stay chilled, not warmed by the heat of your hands?

Somehow I stood right behind her in the checkout line, coincidentally. She bought the big mysterious cardboard box, a little ruffled purple bathing costume, um, swimsuit I guess we call it (Jesus I am Edwardian when I feel this lycanthropic), as for about a three-year-old girl, also a little plastic sandpail and shovel. Then she wandered out and I will never see her again.

But all day long I have been trying to write a poem about her, my alter ego, my unknown angelic beloved, like Allen Ginsberg’s Whitmanian longlong line ode/cri de coeur to the darling boys he sees in the frozen meat aisle, “A Supermarket in California“—

           I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
           I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the
pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
           I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.

O beautiful woman, oh you, it is you whom my soul loveth, I have fallen in love in Target but my love does not see me, O see me, here I am, we are meant to be together and write songs and poems and make movies and quinoa salad and lie on the grass and tell stories to each other, we are meant to be each other’s other halves, feed each other strawberries and try on each other’s lipstick, oh love turn your head and see me, I am standing by the candles that make me sneeze, reading their ridiculous names (Birthday Cupcake, Angel Whispers) and wondering what your voice sounds like,—the dream of the twin, growing up with my cousin just a year and a half older than me, how we developed our code language, its secret inflections and vocabulary, I think all my female relationships since then have been compared to that with her and found wanting—do I love you because you are beautiful in yourself or because I think you look like me? Am I even more solipsistic than I have dreampt?

I half-seriously entertained walking up to her and saying, “I never do this. But I think we might have things in common, or perhaps could be friends. Here is my card if you ever want to call or go get coffee or frozen yogurt.” But then I saw the lawn furniture, and the little sandbucket with its plastic shovel. And after all her toenails were painted red and she seemed in such good shape, the way a white woman in her early forties is either already starting to give up (id est, me) or is in the best shape of her entire life.

Oh my love, there you were among the scented candles and now all is lost.

I can’t even tell you what it is I am trying so hard not to say, but it is in there. It is right up in there with being afraid that my parents are actually going to see the inside of my apartment, which means seeing all of my witchy accountrements, like Buddhist statuettes and images of various deities and Feri paraphernalia and book titles, oh dear the book titles, I have few openly sapphically incriminating ones but the pagan/witchcraft books alone would give any good Christian parent an aneurism. The best I can do is be the best daughter I can be, and hope my religion doesn’t come into it.

I’m scared to go back to Texas, from whence I fled in 1991. I admit it.

don’t take me back to the range
back to the range
I’m just coming out of the cell in my brain

The first guy I ever went out with, a nice boy from Katy, Texas, turned out to be gay. But I only found that out about a year ago. In 1986-1987 I had a massive crush on him, I think we went on like two dates and then he pretty much ditched me like he couldn’t wait to get rid of me, I was devastated and confused, and spent twenty-plus years not knowing that he’d broken up with me so preemptively because actually he didn’t like girls.

If I had known that, it would’ve helped. But maybe he didn’t know it yet.

Instead I spent all of my twenties and a good deal of my thirties determinedly reenacting that primary sexual rejection. Trying to get it to come out right each time.

The reasons change—being gay, being unable to commit to honesty—but the take-home is the same: I don’t want to touch you or be near you or call you my girlfriend. How people style it varies, but the outcome is identical.

Probably the Target woman would just invent some new elaborate system of sexual rejection. Was she pretty because she looked like my mother, like me, like my best friends? What is the mechanism of attraction? What is the will of the universe, of the power Greater than myself?

So I came home and tied my new so-called karma bracelet around my wrist. It fits there as if it had always been there. If there ever is a thirteenth lover, s/he can cut the bracelet off. Otherwise it stays there and I stay single. If nothing else, solitude sure is good for the lycanthropy. When I’m feeling jangled and unstable and a few bricks short of a load, I can stay up till half-one blogging and eating toaster waffles. I can stand in the doorway of the refrigerator and squeeze a long stripe of yellow mustard onto a slice of maple turkey and roll it up and nibble one end, giving a microscopic morsel to the cat. I don’t have to tiptoe. No one cares.

Why do I keep yelling at this blog about how I’m going to be single? I’m starting not to believe me, there’s so much repetition and vehemence.

Once again this is not a literary post.

I will therefore conclude by sharing two uselessly pretty things. Isn’t it nice that I can make myself less respectable, diluting my own ethos, by performing my gender and fetishizing illlustrations of fripperies.

First, I do think this Lancôme “L’absolu nu” lipstick looks gorgeous (pronounced GARjuss, if you are Björk; which, actually, if you really are Björk, I have a project I’d like us to do together, but anyway)—it’s so pinkly sheer and nude looking. I may have to splash out on this one next paycheck—Red Chiffon, or Rose Veil? But then there is Japan, and they need my money so much more than Lancôme does.

Then, the second pretty thing is this lovely enamelled necklace my new friend Cambria thoughtfully gave me (mine is the sunset/robin’s egg one on the left). I was blown away, and so touched by what she wrote in the card too. Isn’t it weird to be just now meeting people in time to leave? I think part of the belatedness of these friendships was my being so heterosexistly encoupled. If my ex were stilll in my life, no way would I have had a girl dance party with tequila shots and orange slices and vanilla cake decorated with blackberries. This is something it would behoove me to remember.

So last night my dinner plans fell through, and I was faced with choices—to go to a party I really didn’t feel up to attending, to stay home and couch out and eat yet another of Ms. Amy’s fine frozen meals, or to keep to my original plans and go out for an intimate, quiet sushi dinner, only this time my date would be…me, tout seule.

I bravely chose the latter, bolstered by the memory of an essay by MFK Fisher on dining alone. I resolved that I would sit at the sushi bar, not be neglected by waitstaff, enjoy the ahi tataki and maguro nigiri I craved, and accompany myself handsomely. I further resolved to have a cocktail, and to bankroll all this by means of the fact that I missed therapy this week thanks to the raging menstrual horrors, and so had a $35 co-pay burning a hole in my pocket.

And all of these things, gentle reader, I did. I put on my black leather jacket and my red lipstick and walked confidently into the dazzling neon of the sushi bar, with its curtains made of chains and chairs of glittering chrome. I was seated at the bar by a respectful hostess and ordered a drink called “blush” (on the all-lower-cased menu), which had plum sake, strawberry pulp, lime juice and fresh basil, shaken over ice and then poured into my funny little cocktail glass (consisting of just the bowl with no stem). And, my God, Ms. Allyson is right about the strawberry with the basil! The drink was cool and pink and perfect. I sipped it and waited for the seared tuna, which was everything I remembered and then some. The sushi chef assigned to my end of the bar looked after me nicely and brought me a special garlic sauce, and made a beautiful futomaki for me, with asparagus and avocado and lotus root. I entertained myself by watching him slice, roll, and plate many fantabulous reverse-happy-hour creations, including a caterpillar roll with little eyeballs. And I finished my meal and drink, paid my check, and walked out again feeling all was pretty much well with the world and would remain so for some hours. Or as Mary Frances has written elsewhere: “Fate cannot harm us, for we have dined.”

Then, to finish the evening, I drove home, put on my pajamas (MFK doesn’t mention attire, but surely she didn’t eat her fabulous butter-shirred eggs while wearing an office suit with hat and gloves?), watched The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (about which more later—I think it makes a interesting companion piece to Black Swan, actually), and polished off a small crème brulée. I decided that, after this first date, I rather liked me, and would go out with me again, the next time I asked me. Without, you know, waiting by the phone for me to call or anything.

And now here is the essay by Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher. I typed this out just for you, so I hope you enjoy it. Especially the hilarious ominous bit about “the Lesbian” capital-L who lurks in wait for the unwary single woman dining in public (remember this was written in the forties).

They may call it what they will, it's still corrugated cardboard.

[After bemoaning how she is never asked over to dinner, because she is a food writer]…I drove home by way of the corner Thriftimart to pick up another box of Ry Krisp, which with a can of tomato soup and a glass of California sherry will make a good nourishing meal for me as I sit on my tuffet in a circle of proofs and pocket detective stories.

It took me several years of such periods of being alone to learn how to care for myself, at least at table. I came to believe that since nobody else dared feed me as I wished to be fed, I must do it myself, and with as much aplomb as I could muster. Enough of hit-or-miss suppers of tinned soup and boxed biscuits and an occasional egg, just because I had failed once more to rate an invitation!

I resolved to establish myself as a well-behaved female at one or two good restaurants, where I could dine alone at a pleasant table with adequate attentions rather than be pushed into a corner and given a raw or overweary waiter. To my credit, I managed to carry out this resolution, at least to the point where two headwaiters accepted me: they knew I tipped well, they knew I wanted simple but excellent menus, and, above all, they knew that I could order and drink, all by myself, an apéritif and a small bottle of wine or mug of ale, without turning into a maudlin, potential pick-up for the Gentlemen at the Bar. [This part cracks me up every time. Thank God those Irish women can handle their booze!]

Once or twice a week I would go to one of these restaurants and with carefully disguised self-consciousness [yes] would order my meal, taking heed to have things that would nourish me thoroughly as well as agreeably, to make up for the nights ahead when soup and crackers would be my fare. I met some interesting waiters: I continue to agree with a modern Mrs. Malaprop who said, “They are so much nicer than people!”

My expensive little dinners, however, became, in spite of my good intentions, no more than a routine prescription for existence….there I was, spending more money than I should, on a grim plan which became increasingly complicated. In spite of the loyalty of my waiter friends, wolves in a dozen different kinds of sheep’s clothing—from the normally lecherous to the Lesbian—sniffed at the high wall of my isolation. [Bahaha! I am she!] I changed seats, then tables. I read—I read everything from Tropic of Cancer to Riders of the Purple Sage. Finally I began to look around the room and hum.

That was when I decided that my own walk-up flat, my own script-cluttered room with the let-down bed, was the place for me. “Never be daunted in public” was an early Hemingway phrase that had more than once bolstered me in my timid twenties. I changed it resolutely to “Never be daunted in private.”

The young screenplay doctor at her typewriter.

I rearranged my schedule, so that I could market on my way to the studio each morning. The more perishable tidbits I hid in the water-cooler just outside my office, instead of dashing to an all-night grocery for tins of this and that at the end of a long day. I bought things that would adapt themselves artfully to an electric chafing dish: cans of shad roe (a good solitary dish, since I always feel that nobody really likes it but me), consommé double, and such. I grew deliberately fastidious about eggs and butter; the biggest, brownest eggs were none too good, nor could any butter be too clover-fresh and sweet. [I have to admit that I too am super-fussy about eggs and butter, and prefer to buy both from the farmer's market.] I laid in a case or two of “unpretentious but delightful little wines.” I was determined about the whole thing, which in itself a great drawback emotionally. But I knew no alternative.

I ate very well indeed. I liked it too—at least more than I had liked my former can-openings or my elaborate preparations for dining out. I treated myself fairly dispassionately as a marketable thing, at least from ten to six daily, in a Hollywood studio story department, and I fed myself to maintain top efficiency. I recognized the dull facts that certain foods affected me this way, others that way, I tried to apply what I knew of proteins and so forth to my own chemical patterns, and I deliberately scrambled two eggs in a little sweet butter when quite often I would have liked a glass of sherry and a hot bath and to hell with food. [Yes!]

I almost never ate meat, mainly because I did not miss it and secondarily because it was inconvenient to cook on a little grill and to cut upon a plate balanced on my knee. Also, it made the one-room apartment smell. I invented a great many different salads, of fresh lettuces and herbs and vegetables, of marinated tinned vegetables, now and then of crabmeat and the like. I learned a few tricks to play on canned soups, and Escoffier as well as the Chinese would be astonished at what I did with beef bouillon and a handful of watercress or a teaspoonful of soy.

I always ate slowly, from a big tray set with a mixture of Woolworth and Spode; and I soothed my spirits beforehand with a glass of sherry or vermouth, subscribing to the ancient truth that only a relaxed throat can make a swallow. More often than not I drank a glass or two of light wine with the hot food: a big bowl of soup, with a fine pear and some Teleme Jack cheese; or two very round eggs, from a misnamed “poacher,” on sourdough toast with browned butter poured over and a celery heart alongside for something crisp; or a can of bean sprouts, tossed with sweet butter and some soy and lemon juice, and a big glass of milk. [I'm with her until this last one, which honestly sounds rather nasty to me. Did bean sprouts ever come in cans? How horrible! And if they did, and you tossed them in lemon juice and soy sauce, why would you then drink MILK with them?!]

Mary Frances still at her typewriter, decades later.

Things tasted good, and it was a relief to be away from my job and from the curious disbelieving impertinence of the people in restaurants. I still wished, in what was almost a theoretical way, that I was not cut off from the world’s trenchermen by what I had written for and about them. But, and there was no cavil here, I felt firmly then, as I do this very minute, that snug misanthropic solitude is better than hit-or-miss congeniality. If One could not be with me, “feasting in silent sympathy,” then I was my best companion.

[from "A Is for Dining Alone," from An Alphabet for Gourmets by MFK Fisher, 1949]

PS: And here is some typewriter pornography, just because MFK reminds me that I have been ogling the beautiful sky-blue Smith Corona Silent-Super for almost two years now, and I never seem to allow me to buy one. Well, but I did only just start dating myself; perhaps it’s too soon for expensive gifts.

Almost identical to the one I had in college in 1986-1989.

I have decided the secret to blogging is not to plan and edit every single word I type.

I am in bed clutching a hot water bottle between my thighs, the pain was so bad as I drove to class today that I had to call a friend’s voicemail just to tell another person, someone, anyone: oh, ow, ouch. Then I hung up and hummed and moaned along the highway, wondering if I would pass out. I remembered a little song I used to sing when I was a menarchal girl, dazzled by the output of uterine pain my small body could produce:

pain is but a sensory input
pain merely comes from your nerves
yet when you feel pain
you loudly exclaim
because when you feel pain, it hurts

I like how this patently ridiculous ditty nonetheless tries to contain the dialectic, even though I was thirteen: pain is both a mere excitation of neurons and, also, it hurts like a motherfucker.

Now the pain is back and I laboriously pull off jeans (so much harder to do now that we all wear the skinny kind) and pull on sweatpants and clamber into bed and put the hot water bottle, well, let’s be honest, it’s kind of draped over my crotch at the moment, which is throbbing but not in a good way. It’s hard to breathe when it hurts like this.

But the cat is happy I’m in bed, sitting here purring and washing herself serenely, and I can finally blog about what’s been on my mind for the last twenty-four hours.

(Which is mostly, honestly, my ex-boyfriend with whom I’m still in love.)

But it’s also VIDA. And this whole issue of women’s underrepresentation in literary publishing. Poetry Magazine was plucky enough for a quick head count, and so was The Southern Review, and both journals found that men submit to them more than women. Why, they wondered artlessly, would this be so?

I have a folder full of addressed stamped envelopes and carefully folded poems in my desk, the existence of which offers me several clues as to why this might be so.

First of all, women don’t have as much time and money to submit. And it does take time and money. You need a familiarity with the magazine/book publisher to whom you’re submitting (and that means either access to a good library, or enough income to subscribe to the journal or buy the books). You need postage and you need a computer and a printer. And you need the education, the MFA or PhD or however you acquire it, the familiarity with tradition and conventions and the breaking of them, in order to make your writing any good at all in the first place.

But that’s the cherry on the cupcake, really. Because what you really need, in order to send out stories and poems into the world? is self-confidence. The bomb-proof, Kevlar-coated, unassailable kind, because it will be immediately assailed. You need the confidence to turn around a polite rejection and send new poems to the same magazine immediately, without blanching, without quivering, with a big brassy grin on your face.

Maggie Gyllenhaal encloses her SASE.

And that, I would humbly submit, is what many women understandably don’t have.

A few months ago, I pulled out an old manila folder marked “SUBMISSION” (which always cracks me up, privately, because where is my folder marked “DOMINANCE”?). I had resolved that if my romantic life lay in tattered ruins, I could at least work on improving my shabby professional reputation. Inside this folder I found things which horrified me—kind letters from publishers, handwritten letters with specific suggestions, letters entreating me for more poems at a later date, letters to which I HAD NEVER RESPONSED.

The worst of these, the one that made me feel positively ill, was a handwritten note from Jorie Graham, on Ploughshares stationery, advising me that she had solicited too much work for her guest-edited issue and therefore could not take my poems, but that they were “lovely” and that I should send them “and more like them” to Ploughshares in the spring. The letter is undated, so I don’t know when she sent me this. I don’t even know what poems they were, because I didn’t take note of which ones I’d sent. I hadn’t done as she advised. I don’t even remember receiving the letter. I somehow blocked the whole thing completely from my mind.

Why would someone get a letter like this and never respond? Why would someone hear only the rejection part, and tune out all the acceptance?

(Those questions are rhetorical.)

Next month, at the Exurbia Community College, I will be on a panel for women’s history month. A panel called something like Why I Call Myself a Feminist. We have six minutes apiece to explain why we are feminists. Really I find the whole thing kind of bizarre—the fear of the word, the justifying of it. When, as Ani DiFranco asks, why can’t all decent men and women call themselves feminists?

My ex-boyfriend calls himself a feminist and one of the reasons we got together is that his politics seemed unimpeachable to me. But it turns out that anyone can be impeached. It turns out there are feminists who don’t believe that sex trafficking is the clear result of the market’s insistent demand for something of which there is an unendingly inadequate supply, never enough female flesh for male desire, but merely an area of the economy desperate for legalizing and trade regulations. Like Amsterdam. If I ever hear about Amsterdam again I may throw up in my mouth. (Like these hilarious ladies from Dodie Bellamy‘s blog.)

Anyway, I don’t think I’ll talk about that on the panel, because of the whole involuntary-barfing thing. Instead I’ll probably drone on and on about wage and income disparity and violence against women in their intimate relationships and, yes, professional glass ceilings, like the one in literary publishing. But the truth is that I privately keep thinking that my poems don’t get published because they are, because I am, not good enough. And more truth is, I sometimes think I should have been okay with a more permissive stance on sex work, because sex should be open and free and liberated, and porn and sex work can be/are also beautiful sacred things, and why couldn’t I be down with that, like Annie Sprinkle and Violet Blue and Betty Dodson, etc. etc. (Which is really another blogpost, which I have already written but haven’t had the courage to publish yet. Because it’s half-theoretical and half-personal.)

Anyway you can’t tell the truth to college kids, because it’s too real-time and life-sized and chaotic. You have to tell them something graspable, something to give them hope. You have to be a little bit funny but not too scary. They already think I’m freakish enough for asking them to write “humanity” instead of “mankind” in their papers, and for insisting on calling them “first-years” instead of “freshmen.” We’re in the backwater, here in Arizona. Shocking enough for them that I teach in jeans and sneakers and often go braless.

(Though actually ever since I got a comment on a student evaluation, “Instructor needs to wear a bra!” I always try to remember to put one on before I go teach.)

In other, not unrelated news, I have found the best cosmetics blog in the entire world, Foxy Voxy’s Academic Beauty Collective. My heart fairly swells with admiration for Ms. Voxy and her courage in trying out expensive blushes and eyeshadows, and teaching us how to use all those mysterious cosmetics brushes that come in all those bewildering sizes and shapes. And we can be safely nerdy on her website, and freely admit that we don’t have the foggiest clue as to how to get the eyeliner from its pencil or pan onto one’s lashline. I have read the plays of Shakespeare, but I don’t know how to put on eyeliner! In this as in most things, I blame my mother.

(I’m kidding. My mother tried to teach me, but I paid no attention.)

So, thanks to Ms. Voxy, I have already acquired a fabulous lipstick (Shiseido Natural Red) and an extremely important hair serum called argan oil, which is the only thing ever to smoothe my sun-damaged frizzies. And, in keeping with the rest of this post, we can feel reasonably good (or, well, okay, less awful) about consuming argan oil, because it is purportedly grown and harvested and crushed and extruded and so forth by a collective of Moroccan women!

There’s a moral in all this somewhere but I’m in too much pain to extract it for you.

she wore shiseido red & we drank tea by her side

I am I? Who is this I. This supposed person.

The wolf-girl yips and whinges.

I just got back from AWP. It was as ever blindingly astonishing and also just plain exhausting. I got to spend time with dear friends I love and also meet writers whose work I admire. This is a wrong start, a bad start.

I will start with where we all start, the body. There is a lump on the right side of my throat and it hurts. I don’t know, is it because I got too little sleep for the last six nights running, because I drank too much alcohol, because I had too many brandy alexanders one night, sweet and pungent, staggering through the gorgeously busy-carpeted old hotel lobbies trying to find my room again at three a.m., is it because I had white Russians another night, is it because I shrieked over the volume and noise of the bars, trying to make my voice heard, shouted over the roar of the bookfair, trying to make my voice heard, introduced myself to scores of editors and publishers and reintroducing myself to friends, trying, trying, trying to make my dry pale drab wispy little soprano voice heard?

I don’t know. But I am drinking green vegetable juice and tenderly, ruefully palpitating the sore lump, which is maybe an inflamed tonsil. Celery, spinach, parsley, cucumber, kale, wheatgrass and sprouts. It tastes so strange and herbal it must be good for me.

I introduced myself to Ariana Reines and she signed my copy of The Cow and was kind to me when I fumblingly tried to say that it had been a gamechanger for me, well The Cow and her essay about The Cow, and that her work had given me permission to write my long poem Cherry-emily, of which no one has ever heard of course because it hasn’t been published yet or maybe ever.

I also introduced myself to Kate Zambreno (who had already signed my copy of O Fallen Angel, because she awarded me one in an HTMLGiant contest, though I haven’t yet reviewed it as I promised, though I will) and she was also so obviously brilliantly intelligent, and so kind. So kind! They are such delicate polite good women, as also Cate Marvin seemed to be, though I only saw her from a distance, and I cannot understand why people are afraid of them or mean to them or write them hate mail or anything like that.

We are all actually kind of small. What my best friend calls, a little cat in a big-cat suit. All silky fur and lipstick bravado.

(Bravado is male but there should be a female version. Bravada?)

My throat hurts but I did comport myself as planned, meaning I missed all the good panels and wore a fabulous lipstick and flirted with the prettiest girl in the bar. I’m only six months out of a really bad breakup and that was all I think I really felt safe doing. There’s kind of a pattern for me where after the horrible imploding violent ending of a serious long-term relationship with a man I immediately get crushed out on some much younger, unavailable/straight friend, and I then mope and brood over her until she finally has to forcibly/politely reject me and I get to howl after the moon.

I think I do want to have a girlfriend but am only attracted to girls so femmy that they’re never attracted to me.

I want to have this blog under my real name but what if my parents find it?

What if my ex finds it? What if I find it?

I have been blogging off and on since about 2001, mostly secretly.

It’s warm back here in the desert and it was so cold in DC. I didn’t have boots or tights and I was cold. I’ve applied to five PhD programs and some of them are in cold places. I don’t know how I will live in a cold place again. I drove to my class today, I am a teacher, I drove in a t-shirt and had to turn on the air conditioner in my car because it was so warm. But then it would get too cold and I would turn it off again. On and off, on and off, all the way out to exurbia where the community college is. Then I got there and realized I’d left my keycard at home. The college is all locked up because it’s stranded in the desert and they are scared of shooters and lunatics and lycanthropes and crazy folk like me, so I had to drive by the public safety office and they let me into my classroom.

I am supposed to be teaching “literary analysis” but there is no textbook for the course, so instead I am teaching rhetoric, which I have summarily decided will benefit the students more. I am very nervous about this decision, but I seem to be doing it anyway. Today we watched video clips of Glenn Beck and Rachel Maddow and we talked about the exordium, the peroratio, and enthymemes. I was hired a week before classes started and no one told me I was supposed to be teaching literary analysis with no literature to analyse. If I’d had time to put together a proper syllabus and order a book or two I would’ve loved to teach literature again.

Teaching literature is the best thing I have ever done. I can’t seem to find a job doing it full-time.

Instead I teach rhetoric/creative writing/critical thinking/anything else part-time, and part of the time I am crazy.

Let me say that differently. Part of the time I am a disabled working American.

I am a lycanthrope.

I have a twenty-year history of some kind of mood disorder, mood disorder NOS, which might be bipolar II or cyclothymia or PMDD or major depressive disorder or borderline personality disorder/emotion dysregulation disorder. After so many years I tend to be less interested in what it gets called and more interested in how it gets treated, and most importantly can I still write and read poetry and prose when it is being treated with medication.

There is also in me some social anxiety disorder/general anxiety disorder/obsessive compulsive disorder, and things like that. I get scared to leave the house, scared of my students, scared of my friends, and I tend to organize, sort, and arrange things and objects and concepts and words to the detriment of other better socialized forms of behavior, e.g. work.

Also I was anorexic for pretty much the first 30 years of my life. Also I was raised in an isolated environment of fundamentalist Xianity and political conservativism, and it is often to me a miracle that I have survived it all, at all.

These things you might think are not important but they are the backbone onto which I sew my fascicles, with the sinew which is my spinal cord.

I am running out of things to say: except:

I also write poems. I mean to say, I am a poet.

Since I was rejected by my male lover last year, I had decided that if nothing else I would find a publisher this year who would not reject me. Now it seems, especially after AWP, that I have as little choice about that as I did about whether my partner would reject me.

Is it worthwhile to send my poems out? I have no idea. Once in a while I get on an envelope-stuffing tear, though, and I do it. Once in a while I get busy and start gnawing off my own foot to get free of the metal.

Tomorrow night I am having dinner with an old friend who is town for a conference, now that I am back from my conference. We have known each other since we were maybe thirteen. She’s gay and always has been, ever since we were girls, but she’s trying not to be gay because she doesn’t think God likes it. I don’t want to just keep on telling her I don’t think God cares about her being gay, so instead I just try to smile a lot and hug her and make her dinner.

For the last two months I have been stuck halfway through Moby-Dick, which I was loving, all the multitudes it contains which contradict each other, but I don’t seem able to finish it since I started my new antidepressant. I am definitely not depressed, not crying all the time and thinking about ways to kill myself, but I also can’t really concentrate or read anything difficult.

I haven’t been able to write either, anyway not those long bulimic sieges of writing, that take you by the nape of the neck and breathe all over you and won’t let you sleep until your writing hand is cramped around the pencil. I write one poem every month, premenstrually, a premenstrual poem, and it’s flat and narrative and some of my friends are politely disinterested because the work is not experimental. But I need to be manic to write experimental writing it seems, and I don’t know what I will do about that.

I may stop reading Moby-Dick and start reading I Love Dick, which everyone has read but me and everyone loves.

I wanted to meet Suzanne Scanlon this year at AWP but she didn’t come. Maybe I will finally meet her next year in Chicago.

I picked up dozens and dozens of flyers/brochures/stickers/postcards/bookmarkers from publishers.

Maybe someone will publish Cherry-emily finally.

Or maybe I will write a new book and then I will not care.