Fun fact: google news feed is entirely different here. It is all shark attacks in Florida and domestic violence shootings. It is Asia Trump barely exists, like mere distant background noise.

I have never stayed in Georgia before, except for that once in Atlanta when I found that 10 story gay dance club and I was the only woman there. Good times that was, but um. Having mellowed quite a bit since then, I am reading a novel naked in my room having napped off a flight a flight of beers I consumed after lunch. This is a good conference. All about teaching, the only part of my job my heart is really in all the way. And this time all these eager souls are with me, anxious as I am to grapple with all that is besetting our students such that their minds have no room to think. This morning was about teaching diversity. What is the desired learning outcome? For the student to take a deep breath, absorb in thought like say about implicit bias, and on the exhale be that little bit less of an asshole. We drank beer and toasted to that.

This is the south. It is 85 degrees and the air is humid like a sexy man's armpit. My curls are *fantastic*


 And the obligatory whine that I am alone...

:p

(Actually, I feel perfectly fine.)

VIRGO Make the choice that feels right. You don't know where it will lead, and right now, no one will tell you. Unlike a jealous sibling who might spoil a surprise meant for you, the universe wants to delight in your startling glee.



Lay it on me Universe!

Today, I bang the gavel in front of 100+ PhD's and my bosses and I ain't gonna sweat it. Then I am off to Georgia leading a group of 9 junior faculty on a teaching revolution (stay tuned for the alone in a swank hotel room pic later). What they don't know is half our students will qualify to go to state school for free as of the governor's budget announcement Saturday. So by the time we get home, half those juniors could be out of a job. Unless we do something radical and bold and unthought yet. I am not sweating that either much. I trust I will think of something. I always do.

pic removed

I should get out more often, except she always sticks me on Facebook :/

no dress rehearsal

The Hip - Ahead by a Century

The ambiance musician played that song last night in a tapas bar I was in. I had been ignoring the music. I turned around and stared him down then. It sounded good. And it felt good. He saw me and curled just a bit more intensely around what he was playing, a slight rising of sound, like hips tipping toward a lover only different.

Moments like that, it is like a gift to be alive. To hear music. To feel pleasure. To FEEL, period. And then I think that I will miss being alive when my time is done, so much, and I am grateful for the breath I am taking. 

Bonus track - turtle excerpt from Animals (self help absurdity)

VIRGO. Relationships are complicated, sure. Is a never-ending, always-growing love even really possible? Believe that it is. Cynicism is the enemy of love.






"I don't know what people mean when they say the word love...I think they're just kidding.”― Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone

Bonus track: only in WI, wtf

a keeper ft. free

VIRGO You can't be completely known, because you're not one definitive way. Different environments and people pull out new sides of you. Today it will feel like you're deciding who to be with every little choice you make. 

 

8 of cups

spring break : sleeping in : long unbloggable dreams (involving Marc Maron, ha)

VIRGO Human decency is the thread woven through the fabric of society...

"You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride.

But if you can do that—well, lucky you."—PHILIP ROTH

Took a nap. What I dreamed, I should not blog.

------

Back to the book, which is a diary comic, which inspires me to wanna record this largely pointless day of mine today

I suppose for anyone reading this blog, t'would be better if next I read a self-help guide to unbridled unfettered milf sex eh? Freedom is wasted on me. If I were a comic, I would have to draw a woman surrounded by enough boots and lingerie to equip a brothel spending her days nesting and reading obscure books. Drafting articles she never finishes on her students' white seeing and other ideas tangled in her vague nagging worries about teaching as inerently political and her social justice failures. Looking at porn sometimes then taking naps like a self-addled inside-cat. Painting kitchen cabinets white (they were already white).

That was yesterday. Today, the kitchen is scary clean I am out of oomph for bathrooms so defiantly gross they will remain. It is the usual cycle, just I move ever more quickly through it (learned efficiency). I can do the whole shmole lickity split. I am at let the kids crack me up self help reading in bed for hours (shut-in instincts, full tilt) resolving to do more yoga again (but not today) drinking some wine midafternoon while cooking for an army pointlessly (briskets and brownies - "aroma therapy") and blablablogging. Best moment of the day (so far): Ears couldn't find the microwave. I reorganized the kitchen and moved it next to the stove. The sounds of quiet confused standing after stirring his hot cocoa and then not knowing how to proceed.

.

Cleaned and cleaned. Like throwing up down to dry heaving.

Then Logan. I cried and cried, it felt like vinegar wrung from the cactus that is my heart. (Good.)

And this figures. Already old news and nobody held accountable in the end. Upshot to everything. It is what it is.

VIRGO It is very important to obey your thirst. The scientists suggest that by the time you realize you are thirsty and go searching for water you are already dehydrated. The same goes for your thirst for certain kinds of attention.

omg fml SEND

Phone rings. 8 a.m.

Me: hi dad
Him: hey darlin! Looks like you have pretty good weather out there!
Me: yea, campus is closed, so I was just sleeping in (oye)
Him: ha ha you know I like busting your balls!
Me: uh huh. How are ya?
Him: Good! I had a dirty dream last night.
Me:
Him:
Me: ya know I assumed there was going to be more to that story but I'm glad there wasn't, gotta say.
Him: ha ha right!
Me: right
Him: well actually now that you asked I woke up thinking it was you and Mark!
Me: I didn't ask. Hey hold on a minute dad... (I walk into TJ's room and hand the phone to him and go back to bed)

Later, sharing one mismatched set of gloves and one shovel, clearing the driveway with TJ.

Him: nice move just handing me off to Tbone this morning lol, that was delightful!
Me: (retell the dirty dream conversation)
Him: hahahahahahaha
Me: hahahahahahaha
Him: wow.
Me: ya.
Him: Mark?? Your dead ex from like childhood???
Me: right? Welp Mark does feel still around kinda although he should have moved on from the bardo by now.
Him: everything you have told me about him suggests he would procrastinate.
Me: true.
Him: he is probably sitting around smoking pot in the bardo designing the art of his first album cover in his next life
Me: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

TJ is the funniest person I know.

"From nothingness, there arose great love; now, its source nullified, that love, searching and sick, converts to the most abysmal suffering imaginable."~Lincoln in the Bardo, George Sanders

Home sweet home. Under a Virgo full moon. Horoscope: A temporary move backward can lead to a giant leap forward.

I do truly love the work I was doing in Houston, but every night it felt like being flayed to be alone and away from here.

Foundational work undergarments, freshly painted toes, a king size suite, conference in a cool city, alone. Again.

Sigh ft. Could be worse.

This presenter was super cool.

View of the medical school from my ocean of a bed

As much as I am down with this, it also strikes me as a bit redundant. You are already doing without women more than not, in so much as we are making our way regardless of you also much of the time (and none of us as economically or orgasmically healthy as one would hope, according to all studies on all aspects of such things). Seems like a GET A CLUE ALL THE WAY AROUND DUH day is more in order.

Meanwhile the end of the world continues.

81 mph winds knocked the grid sideways here. Might be days without power or ... What if the power just never came back? Then what? Then WHO?

Women rely on civilization. So we civilize wherever we go, by design and necessity.

If I can get out, I will be in TX till further notice as of tomorrow.

Bishop - Wild Horses

55 times a year? Seriously - Why would anyone live with anyone under those circumstances? So you can spend the other 310 days frustrated and picking his crap up off the floor and listening to Cops drone in the background of your life as you do all the chores!?? F that. No wonder cohabitation rates are at an all time low.

This related you think? Like in the first place, F that. And in the second place, might as well snack. ?

VIRGO In her poem "Not Anyone Who Says," Virgo writer Mary Oliver looks down on people who declare, "I'm going to be careful and smart in matters of love." She disparages the passion of anyone who asserts, "I'm going to choose slowly." Instead she champions those who are "chosen by something invisible and powerful and uncontrollable and beautiful and possibly even unsuitable." Here's my response: Her preferred formula sounds glamorous and dramatic and romantic -- especially the powerful and beautiful part. But in practice it rarely works out well -- maybe just ten percent of the time -- mostly because of the uncontrollable and unsuitable part. And now is not one of those times for you, Virgo. Be careful and smart in matters of love, and choose slowly

Love shmove - grumpgrumpgrump - think about it, real (REAL) friends you keep for decades, while romances flame up and out like rashes. If we could phone a friend for what we needed instead, we would all be that much closer to winning together than being losers alone.

The kitchen is almost done painted. Seems like that would be unrelated to this train of thought but.  Tj noted when he got home that nesting is life affirming for me and that as my child, my witness (that is all a child is to you, a character witness, and in all other ways their life has nothing to do with you mostly), he has internalized this but is equipped with no skills to do it. You don't need skills in painting or whatever, I tell him. You need peeps. I didn't do one thing myself. I phoned a friend.

As for the painter. How do you know her?, he asked. And I had to think..when have I not known her?? Seems like forever. 22 years. Since she got kicked out of a convent and I met her on the rebound full of that story I so wanted to hear.

Tj is the last witness and he reflects on it. As youngest, he sees all that has come before and how it turned out. He sees all our intentions and where they went. He sums us all up. What fears drive us, what pitfalls we jump into repeatedly, how we mean well. And fail. And that failure is inherent. It is HUMAN. He says of his father, he wants have been a good father even though he wasn't there. I asked him in the car ride home tonight, ok be honest what do I? "You want to have gotten LIFE RIGHT. And you mostly did."

Before, and after. Like on top, and under. Only different.

That counter is sexy. Like, if I were a red blooded counter and that counter sexted me, I would be on it. 

;)

VIRGO It's as though there's something in you that doesn't like to be too good for too long. It's the quality that keeps you absolutely riveting to some people around you. So go on and spice it up. They're expecting you to bring the fun.