lycanthropia

1. The sun is finally out.

2. It’s bloody cold.

3. I woke up with light in my face, smiling, thinking “sunny day” rhymes with “bonne idée”! and I am remaining perversely cheerful despite the facts that

4. It’s bloody cold, and

5. My car key snapped off in the door lock this morning, right after (of course) I had locked the doors. Actually I contributed to this: there was a person pulled up next to me waiting to get out of his car so I was hurrying to get out of the way (admittedly somewhat irritated that he had pulled through the parking space and so his driver’s side door was right next to mine and now I would have to hurry) and tried to walk away with the key still half in the lock and kind of yanked it after me and snap. I hope the campus police will help me break into my car tonight. At least it keeps me from going home before I have the papers graded?

6. Speaking of which oh God I am the laziest person anywhere, I have to grade the papers, why am I writing this and not grading the papers? It’s 2:15 pm and I’ve been sitting at this desk since about 11 am and I am not grading the papers I am not grading the papers I am not grading the papers. (I open one at random, scared but defiant; it begins, “The death penalty is a controversial subject, debated around the world.”)

I am not grading the papers, instead I am semi-thinking about

7. My pizza-making date tonight, with the usual suspect. We plan to put avocado and my mom’s homemade mozzarella and fresh basil and possibly bacon on it. On the pizza.

I keep making half-hearted efforts to break out of this particular really comfortable as it were rut. But the efforts are conspicuously half-hearted. One guy I was messaging with on OKCupid actually cancelled his account in the middle of a chat, I hope not because of me, but one never knows now does one. All the other guys my age seem to have multiple children and no hair, except for one guy who’s 5′ 2″ and lives in Portland and but hey I am trying here, I am trying to keep an open mind and trying to ignore it when they misspell the names of all my favorite directors or say things like “David Lynch lost me with Twin Peaks” or list high-school curricula as their favorite books, presumably because they haven’t read anything new since then. I’m really trying to. Trying to. Trying. Why am I so opposed to people who have children? Or people who can’t spell? I say people but I haven’t met any women. Most of the time I think, I don’t even want to date, I don’t even want to try to have a quote relationship unquote, that just sounds exhausting and frightening and doomed and besides the way my life is just right at this moment I have a booty call I don’t even have to drive anywhere for; which.

Yesterday I emailed the neighbor that perhaps we were ill-motivated to seek out new partners due to our excessively convenient sex-on-tap situation.

“We need to place a ban on sleeping together.”
“The no sleeping may be tenable.”

Which is quite true, we don’t ever actually sleep. This is the only non-in-love lover I have really ever had. It is a very odd situation. When we’re not actively aheming, we don’t touch at all, barely look at each other, are so the opposite of people-having-a-sexual-relationship that you could be forgiven for thinking we might not have been properly introduced yet. Occasionally I try to compose racy emails/texts when I’m stuck (as I was yesterday) in boring academic situations, but I’m embarrassingly bad at this and in fact I think it’s probably only possible to sext someone you actually like. I mean, have a crush on/are falling in love with/love. And it’s not the age difference (that I started college when he turned five) or that he’s a scientist, or whatever; it’s just that it isn’t, and we don’t, and maybe because that part of my heart has been cauterized forever now, just completely burnt out. I mean he’s cute, and I like him. But I don’t yearn after him or wonder where he is and what he’s doing or want to meet his family (gah) or learn about his childhood or wander around hand-in-hand with him picking flowers and exploring the world tra la la hey nonny nonny. I mostly just want to undress him as rapidly as possible, inflict small but nonetheless detectible marks upon his flesh, and then loll around nudely eating ice cream with my head on his chest. It’s too cold now for ice cream but I’m saying.

It’s amazing how hard all that bad-girl shit dies. Just incomprehensibly slowly.

I keep having henid-like vague stirrings about all this, inchoate inner mutterings which approach thoughts; if they were ever able to attain thought status, they might say something like:

a) ah what am I doing, we can’t be doing this, we don’t even really like each other, he’s just using you, or I’m using him, bad girl bad;
b) shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up this is way too much fun.

That’s always pretty much where the conversation ends, so at that point I quit heniding about it and spit out my toothpaste or whatever and go to bed, only to half-think the same half-thoughts at some point the next day. The neighbor being so constitutionally pragmatic, I feel confident that he suffers no such inner debate; and I am not particularly tormented by it, especially as I reckon the whole thing will end in the next few days/weeks when he locates a more age-appropriate female to whom he actually feels attracted; and I will either emulate this strategy or finally truly embrace my inner spinster. (Inner? What? Inner?)

(Embarrassing admission: I would willingly make out with at least three and probably more of my female friends at any given moment. Fortunately they have more propriety/good sense, or more to the point just aren’t attracted to me, which is quite right; and really it does worry and even slightly sicken me because they’re in their late twenties and I’m in my early forties and should be a comfortable maternal-type figure and I’m pretty sure that my interest in kissing etc. them is basically completely gross and reprobate and disturbing, but I don’t really know where to put it. This is in parentheses because it’s something I think about randomly [like when I'm in the bathtub, washrag frozen in mid-air, suddenly paralyzed with guilt] and don’t know where to put elsewhere. And the people I love most in the world are women who live states and states away from me, even countries away, whom I see maybe once a year at most, and I never get to hold them when they’re crying or make them sandwiches or get irritated with their nailbiting or be properly jealous of their boyfriends and all this is preposterous and wrong and utterly true. How is it the people I love don’t live next door?)

(Further embarrassing admission: Sometimes, as last night, at a reading, for no reason, I’m suddenly convinced that all the people in my new program, all of them, think I’m a big weirdo and are politely trying to avoid me, and I stay sitting there smiling mechanically but I have tears in my eyes and feel increasing panic lest someone notice this or try to speak to me and me unable to respond normally. Then fortunately someone always starts reading and mercifully I can tear up in a socially appropriate way, because she is reading a piece about her grandmother dying and crying is o-kay.)

(Final admission: I think about dying pretty much constantly, well we know this right, but I honestly do figure it’s not that far off now, maybe a few more years, and for the most part I don’t mind, though I’m kind of incredulous about what a white-person waste of a life this has been. I’ve mostly just consumed stuff and participated in late capitalism quite merrily and done nothing, really given nothing in return, nothing that didn’t just further feed into the loop of it. The death penalty is a controversial subject, debated all across the world. You could be forgiven for thinking we might not have been properly introduced. The sun is finally out. It’s bloody cold.)

I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless, nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple, desperate, human way. You, with all your undumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed, and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is really just a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this—but oh my dear, I can’t be clever and standoffish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how standoffish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defenses. And I don’t really resent it.

[from Lapham's Quarterly, via Don Share]

femmy and unavailable: just the way we like 'em

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.