"Whatever I think is promptly put into words, mixed with images that undo it, cast into rhythms that are something else altogether. From so much self-revising, I’ve destroyed myself. From so much self-thinking, I’m now my thoughts and not I. I plumbed myself and dropped the plumb; I spend my life wondering if I’m deep or not, with no remaining plumb except my gaze that shows me – blackly vivid in the mirror at the bottom of the well – my own face that observes me observing it." ~The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa.

By the end of work yesterday, I was pissed-weepy in my boss's office, bitching him half into the ground / pleading for either limit of or reward for workworkwork. But of course the rub with all the freedom I have in my job is that when it is killing me, I'm killing myself. "What do you need? What hole are you filling with all this work?..." I felt like a half gored angry animal. I am only doing this to keep my little world safe. "What world?" The one where you still get to read in it, that that's what you do with your fucking time, even though no fucking reading-is-fundamental trucks come around anymore, even though you, the Dean of a liberal arts school, probably don't even remember those trucks or give a shit, and the few people around here who do might only admit to reading Hegel or some other fucking dead white asshole and only do so as compensation like dickless wonders driving sportcarswhatever. "Some people might actually like Hegel." Armscrossy. "Ok, what is your GOAL, specifically?" I want full professor, I want when everything falls apart and I'm standing in the rubble to have a base pay and job description both that means I can at least go read, that I can at least sit amidst the wreckage and have the solace of time and a book, I want to have that so that at least cannot be taken away from me no matter what else might happen. Wa.

"At their core, literature and prayer each carry an element of faith. For me, it takes faith to write, just like it takes faith to believe that "the Word became flesh," that it was given its own skin and bones. Both, I would argue, are redemptive by their own accord."

It's the garden show this weekend. Ligularia, always the star of the show. Almost everything I've planted has not turned out quite like I planned. Little things got huge. Stolid looking things spread like hell. Volunteers showed up. But nobody knows that but me, so I can pretend I intended it all. I think of the whole thing as a tool for seeing my days add up, a secret diary of mostly 'woops'. Yesterday we hid from the tourists, in the backyard mostly where Ears and I prepped a new bed for sweet peas that will barely produce in the mostly shade so we will eat them as one-offs. We like that. It was quiet. Ears said simply, "I like this." Then we took a walk in a very light rain and found discarded loaded mulberry branches and I plucked and ate berries by the side of the road. Today is father's day. I called Tbone a day early, and tipsy on beer in the late morning he launched into his all life is energy speech. He thinks about dying a lot, and when he does he thinks "all life is energy", then he tells you for the umpteenth time "let me tell ya something all life is energy". I handed the phone to Ears who told him about the black hole that NASA found that eats a nearby star and then spits it back out in pulses that sound just like a human heartbeat. I think, I should get a honeysuckle and train it up a tree trunk so the baby will have that familiar flower image in her memory -

- and I wonder, did anyone when I was a baby seed my early life with little scraps of history like that, shrouds for my own dead whose arms did not live to hold me(?).   Later tonight after we've planted peas and peppers, we are going to grill steaks, give presents, then watch the premiere of True Detective. I like the ordinary days best of all. I wish they didn't have to end.

this creased

"Ezekiel 3:1. Eat the scroll."

Still on a Dillard kick. I like how I wander in and out of her, distracted by and then lured into footnotes. Blessedly, Time Warner sucks, and thus I am trapped without Internet except for my phone (my kindle), waiting for the repair guy who never shows, and so I can read.

"You cannot mend the chromosome, quell the earthquake, or stanch the flood. You cannot atone for the dead tyrants’ murders and you alone cannot stop living tyrants. As Martin Buber saw it, the world of ordinary days “affords” us that precise association with god that redeems both us and our speck of world. God entrusts and allots to everyone an area to redeem: this creased and feeble life, “the world in which you live, just as it is, and not otherwise.” “Insofar as he cultivates and enjoys them in holiness, he frees their souls…he who prays and sings in holiness, eats and speaks in holiness…through him the sparks which have fallen will be uplifted, and the worlds which have fallen will be delivered and renewed." ~Annie Dillard, For the Time Being

I'm losing my fucking mind with all this work.  WHY AM I DOING IT?  I know it's some kind of stress response, that I'm trying to contain all the things that might happen by doing everything everwhichway to control the outcomes, that I'm worried about everybody going to college at the same time, Aaron in graduate school (what did we do in grad school besides lose ourselves and sleep with the wrong people? I discovered Derrida, which was not nearly enough of an upside), Ears and TJ getting hit with the first tsunami of Choices To Be Made, the Nun leaving me, all of that, so I work and work and work and the more I work the more work is given to me to do until I'm obliterated. But knowing all of that that doesn't make it stop. I always flee to books for answers but what if the answer I need is to the problem of not having time to read a book?

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/can-reading-make-you-happier?intcid=mod-most-popular

"Thigmotropism is a movement in which a plant moves or grows in response to touch or contact stimuli. The prefix thigmo- comes from the Greek for "touch" (θιγμός). Usually thigmotropismoccurs when plants grow around a surface, such as a wall, pot, or trellis."

(I'm on a Dillard kick.)

I walked into a meeting late yesterday to find that I was in charge of it (again). Either I'm the only faculty member that the VP's know by name, or I'm the only one they're not scared of (I hide my crazy better than most and mine tends toward sad not mad). This time it's FERPA, about which I know utterly nothing except we've been caught breaking the law somehow, like when I looked up Aaron's record back in the day to advise him on this or that, I was breaking the law (who knew?). All I want to do is summer-read, but in five days, I have to submit a report of repentance and reform on behalf of the college to the state. In one day, my current class ends and the day after that two more classes begin. Last night, first dinner with the dreaded in - law in a year; they're still talking about what to do with the dining room set; my theory is that when the steel plants closed in South Buf, the trauma of change was so great that the people who live there counteracted it with statis in their beings and now find existential comfort in never changing the subject. I might find a niche in that, akin to the one I have at work, aka the 'mascot milf' in this case, discussed in the same hushed tones of disapproval forevermore, tsking that hints at but never outright says "she's got our boy by the dick".

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/all-possible-humanities-dissertations-considered-as-single-tweets?intcid=mod-most-popular

Teehee. I love "The name we’ve been using for this stuff is anachronistic. Here’s a better name." You have no idea how many minutes of my precious life that I'll never get back, spent discussing such things as what to call "appreciation" (in nervous hand wringing over what's measurable) or "minority" (in nervous hand wringing over feeling guilty enough about white privilege). Etcetcetc.  Not to mention the time I spent writing the dissertation itself (aka drinking genny pounders).

I love books. Why I can't just be a snob anymore about it, I don't know really. If I could, if we could, could say we read because we read and we think you should too or you'll be a boring dumbass, it might be off putting but at least the humanities might stop acting like the nervous fat ugly kid with daddy/mommy issues cutting itself in cries for help (armscrossy)

"Perhaps reading and writing books is one of the last defences human dignity has left, because in the end they remind us of what God once reminded us before He too evaporated in this age of relentless humiliations—that we are more than ourselves; that we have souls. And more, moreover. Or perhaps not." —Richard Flanagan, Gould’s Book of Fish

card of the day

Yeah I dunno. Work something, I think. But I just can't tell what. Dean and Mathzilla, they're going game of thrones on each other and it's not nearly as cool when there are no flying dragons in the plot. Plus it feels like that's just the beginning of the chum in the water power grabbing that's going to ensue as The Nun pulls up the stakes. What happens to the mascot in situations like that?, I wonder, because that's what I am.

Or maybe it's personal, the Tower. And I'll go insane (again).

"I watched the landscape innocently, like a fool, like a diver in the rapture of the deep who plays on the bottom while his air runs out." Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard

"Inspiring faculty" reads the strategic plan. Someone asks the Planning Douche, what does that mean? He begins to explain inspiration, that "feeling to be more...do great things". Headtilts, like confused dogs, across the room. Someone else asks, "But who is inspiring what specifically?" This goes on for a long tedious set of minutes, maybe just 5, feels like 30. Asshole math chair is behind me talking on her cell phone, Dean is pouting in the corner, we are in charge of people's lives who will borrow thousands to learn from us.  I raise my hand. Planning Douche looks relieved, like I'm going to explain inspiration. "That's a present participle, Ken. It suggests that faculty will be inspired TO something. You don't mean that." Blank stare. "You don't want us to be inspired. You want us to be inspirational. Right?" Yes!! Then say inspirational?, someone suggests in a questioning helpful tone. "That's just semantics," he says. Okay. (What's semantics?, someone whispers to me. "It means fuck you.")

"The truly scary thing about undiscovered lies is that they have a greater capacity to diminish us than exposed ones." Cheryl Hughes