http://time.com/3607956/ferguson-is-about-gender-not-just-race/ relentlessly depressing also - I wouldn't want Americans adopting my country's kids either :/

collapsing grout - I try to pretend I'm Lee Krasner circa 1945 or some shit

It feels almost incidental that the sewer pipe beneath my house, which does not have a basement, collapsed and thus I cannot do laundry or use anything in my kitchen and have been eating takeout off paper plates for some time now and that it'll cost thousands of dollars and god knows how much time around the schedules of diva master plumbers (who FINALLY showed up yesterday while I was trapped at the nursing home working, then left again with more $ out the door and still no real plan/clue - sigh) and then to rip up concrete and fix it and I'm just praying that won't include a jackhammer through my kitchen floor, and that tomorrow we will manage the holiday by washing dishes in the decrepit bathtub....that all is certainly a big deal from a certain point of view but I honestly give it very little mental attention. I should be researching pipes but instead I research international adoptions from Peru (which are nearly utterly impossible for an infant under 2 years old through that country's understandable yet draconian and depressing restrictions) and spent a sleepless night worried not about money or the fate of the world either but about Aaron's new job start today and his wellness in general that seems precarious to me but that might be due to my own precariousness entirely. He might be, as he says, quite well finally. And such things as our relayed weeping-urge yesterday over a baby-mirage dangled in our path are just to be expected for two people who have been through so much reproductive hell and intimate catastrophe. All I know for sure are: that the children we already have here are playing X box live while talking in a constant Frankie Valli voice since we saw Jersey Boys (tj) and laid up with what appears to be strep throat coming on (ears) and I can hear their patter right now in the comfortable quiet of the house; that Aaron is gone to new stomping grounds and can't text me and won't tell me any of his new coworkers' names except for David; that he is coming home tonight and is gung ho to smoke a turkey; that before I lived with him, I never took showers with another human but that now it feels odd not to and for the 53 days and 18 hours he was gone, I took baths almost entirely so I wouldn't think about it; that we both want to remodel the bathroom despite the kitchen plumbing fiasco and will probably take a home equity loan to do so in order to get a new tub that seats two and that thus if we break up again I will probably be quite vexed to wash myself anywhere; that I am fine this way except for my own insecurities, in want of nothing more than this life as it is, but just without the constant anxiety that it get snatched away suddenly; that any life can and eventually will be snatched away - I knew that already of course but I didn't KNOWknow (never underestimate the power of denial, my mother often says). And these are the things I mull over, leaving plumbing to plumbers and the weight of the world to people with stronger backs than mine, relinquishing ambitions beyond the one: for this family to be intact and safe for the people in it. A safe place to cry, when necessary, which sometimes it is necessary. And still hold fast. So, able to control almost nothing really when it comes down to it, I DOTE. Nervously. Just like all those neurotic women mothers wives about whom I've always wondered, What's your fucking problem? At least I try to be creative about it. I order Piss Artist (lewd Pictionary) for under the tree for the kids whose memories of me will include a relentlessly inappropriate sense of humor to offset the Betty Crocker mojo. And I make homemade sex scenario lists for Aaron as stocking suffers - can you rattle off 50+ unique ways to give a blowjob? I can, no sweat. A list which sits open on my desktop in case number #53 occurs to me, next to open browser tabs for The Hague and a green bean casserole recipe on the French's onions website.

Almost to the day 6 months later, here we are again, and he's gone to where he was last time for ostensibly the same reasons, and from what I can remember of that day, I am very like I was then, snug in bed with a light undertow of anxious, glad to be off work, thinking about him and where he might be in his work tasks, thinking about puttering stuff like the boys being out of clean socks again already, thinking about how nice it is to simply be home, thinking as I often do (and now more than ever) how frightening it would be to be homeless and crazy instead of home and only neurotic, pretty content with an undertow of sorrow shot through with bolts of something like pure joy to be breathing and not in immediate peril. He texted me sometimes but less than usual, less and less that week, as he slid off his mind and out of his life, me tethered for an impending shared drowning in harrowing cold murk. He was orienting toward his first call weekend a few days later, and he told me that he'd have to be late to do that, and I had a brief knot in my gut about it but I talked myself out of it. I said: "Ok. I love you."

I said that again this morning, as did he. And I must rely on the truth value of statements like that, because I no longer have a gut check. He has to offer to show me his phone, and not just to heal my distrust, he must want to be known too, or he will not be and will thus be on his own all alone with himself. ("Having perfected our disguise, we spend our lives searching for someone we don’t fool." - Robert Brault) There is always a knot in my gut to some degree now, so I can't always check it and you can't assume I will "know" you or what you mean or intend unspoken. If you were to ask me how I felt or thought about anything you might wonder about, if you ever do, a thing that happened long ago or a state that was created because of it and that still abides, and if I were to check my gut about it, the answer would be the same no matter what it was: a little panicky and pulpy-tender. In that way, I no longer have emotional memorIES exactly. My mind is intact, relatively, but emotions are no longer adhered entirely properly to thoughts. I wonder, is there such a thing as purely emotional dementia? I remember when DmS's mom started to really lose her knowledge, she had a moment where the toaster mystified her, and she looked at it like what the fuck is that, it was slightly terrifying in its half-familiarness, so Kel at first tried explaining and demonstrated its function but that did not assuage her confusion or anxiety, so then she just gave her the toast (peanut buttered, I think). That's how I look at people a LOT now, especially Aaron but by extension everyone I love or ever did, like what are you exactly (?), but then again it might increase my anxiety to try to puzzle it out on my own, so I might want to butter and consume your presence instead and leave the life force that creates that presence inexplicable as it is, just hug you then sweep up the crumbs nervously. But maybe in that there is an opportunity of relationship in general. (?) I can no longer intuit anything reliably, if ever I could. And my feelings about people are no longer reliably tied to reasons that I can claim are reasonable necessarily. And I know that. So the tsunami of feeling of the last half year, among other things, washed away what there was in me of explicable grudges. The only grudge, i.e. clear REASON for a feeling, in me I could still attribute to uncluttered cause/effect is for my in-laws, otherwise God only knows sometimes what or why I feel the way I do when I sit down to reflect. Everyone feels dead, if I had to name it, since what I feel a lot is grief, if I had to name it. Accompanied by a searing intense pleasure to Be, too, still. Physical material presence. Aaron and I touch constantly. And even the boys suffer my need of it too, Bruno scrawny and his muscles always tense-poised as if to leap into his life, lets me hug him and gives me the patpatpat and I thinkfeel at him, "I have no idea what all you are, really, but you are alive, and your smell is good like toast (and dirty socks)".

look closely, he's focused inward

In other but related news, Aaron bought me a diamond and is hoping this day of away-from-home overnight-for-work will help pay it off. And we begin again, this time trying to fathom each other's sign systems and meld them into a coherent shared language. Of course, there was the shopping, which was absurd, as I am quite literally afraid of jewelry stores and nearly traumatized by clerks in them, especially the dazzling women with all their appraising-you-face behind which are criteria that might as well be in Hebrew for all I can fathom of it. Aaron is at home in such places while I back up from jewelry counters like I would from the bat displays at the zoo. I learned a little about diamonds (of course I did), and I learned that there are good reasons for them to make a person nervous besides the obvious politics. Like for instance, the more they are not-there, the more they are worth. The perfect ones refract light and are not their own anything to get in the way of that - they have no color no flaw (substance), they are like little holes in the universe through which light gets bent around to dazzle your eye with the illusion of thing-hood. They weigh nothing, and it causes a pit in the stomach to feel that nothingness on your hand at the same time your eye is apprehending a ball of brilliance, kind of like the feeling you get when you look up at a skyscraper from the ground. I started looking at everyone's rings at work, noticing relentlessly, and feeling a little awed that all these women had withstood it and learned to be comfortable with it on them all the time. And I wanted to be comfortable too, to take their rings off and hold them like glittering tarantulas. To be brave. But I kept squirming in parking lots outside jewelry stores instead, nervous stomached and eyespying the Barnes&Noble :/ Finally he talked me into going to the depths of Mordor, his mother's jeweler where he got his last engagement ring set. I remember that story, which I heard mostly as an aside to the story of going to NYC sometimes to visit his cousin Keith who by being gay had escaped The Family, who didn't have to go to any lame birthday parties or assuage his own crazy mother about anything of his own choices/life since they tried not to talk about it, and who instead of dicking around with attending some dumb wedding did way cooler shit like have brunch with Anderson Cooper (who has terrible skin up close, fyi). I remember finding this story very funny, adorable really, the focal point of a trip to the diamond district being to pick up a bargain quickly and then get back to buying good ass jeans with Keith, as his mother was back home in Buffalo gearing up to fuss her face off over a wedding that if Aaron weren't going to be in it he'd resent attending (and actually resented attending anyway). By the time I heard that story, Aaron had built a bridge in his mind from the diamond trip to the honeymoon trip (he does love to travel), eliding the marriage bit almost entirely, and I laughed outright and teased him. But I didn't judge - my own sister, smartest woman I know, had one of those in it for the honeymoon weddings, meh people do it all the time. Like my mother said to me recently, "The only people who've never done anything to regret died in the womb".

But now I'm not so smug about any of it as to tease anyone. I'm not outside or above or below a wedding and a marriage and how it feels to be in this one and what that means to me and to him and how what it means might put asunder how it feels or even if it IS or vice versa, all of it. So it is probably fitting that I find myself there in front of a gruff hefty middle aged Polish-jewish gemologist who listens to the one good diamond story I have to tell (well, there are two: once my mom won a diamond by picking it out of a display of hundreds of zirconia embedded in a giant shit looking pile of clay in the lobby of a bank when I was a little kid and lights went off woowoo, and she took it home and my dad bought her a matching one for earrings that Christmas - I was maybe 6 years old and my mom was embarrassed to own the little diamonds, what she called 'real grown up' jewelry, and my dad was proud and made her wear them and she sewed a tangerine crop-topped pantsuit to go with the earrings for date night), about my grandmother's wedding set.

look closely, he's licking her (repost)

It had a modest round diamond in a square-ish setting, at which point the gemologist lights up, he knows exactly what I mean, a specific setting common in the early-mid 20th century and he starts opening books and rattling off history. What he doesn't know is that my grandmother's marriage survived her husband's adultery and lasted decades thereafter as the benchmark of love-enduring unions in my family.

the ancestor alter on my kitchen counter; they all suffered adultery, and/or dealt it

That my grandmother still cried and was pissed to talk about it, even after he'd died and she was 90. That on my right hand I wear the ring that came from that time when they were young that he gave to her in amends, a chunk of turquoise, and that his affair was with a Navaho woman whose people made this ring.
.

That my grandmother lost her mind and that my mother remembers it. That my grandmother got pregnant in the stormy waters of their reconciliation, and that in a crazy stressed response to pregnancy-caused cavities had all her top teeth pulled at once in her 7th month when she was 26 years old. That I bear the name of the aunt who was born of that, who was never right in the head. That I loved my grandparents fiercely and admired their long marriage, despite her lifelong scary storms of resentment from time to time. That he would say to her when she freaking out, "Lay down, I want to talk to you". That I cast a spell to bring a lover into my life who would be like my grandpa (little able to imagine what he was actually like for a woman to be with, now could I?). Only Aaron knows all those things.

taped to the wall in my office

The gemologist is thrilled with my preferences and dislike of the diamonds we've seen elsewhere. He goes into the safe, gets a little folded up piece of paper and dumps out of it a diamond dirty with human detritus. He hits it with windex and holds it up for me. It is 100+ years old, each facet handcut, as perfect as only a human artist can craft such a thing. It came from the estate sale of an old lady who was surely loved by someone somehow but it predates the whole American engagement ring DeBeer's thing (according to TJ, who knows of course).

keeper of human historical outrages lists

As soon as I see it, I know two things: I want it (and what it means that Aaron has given it to me, knowing full well that much of that meaning will only be clear when I'm 90 years old); and that it's haunted.

it's sitting in a vault in south Buffalo under the eye of that storm, purring sibilant

that's about 2 miles south of campus and right under it is the hospital where Aaron works (worked, actually - new job starts Monday) and down the street are his parents (and horny landlady). If I were a witch .... just sayin ;)

http://www.wunderground.com/news/buffalo-lake-effect-snowband-resembles-haboob-20141118 'haboob' is a cool word, and it just shut down the last 100+ person meeting I was supposed to song and dance my way through for this year - I will take the head cold instead happily and by tomorrow I will let the kids call in for a mental health day too, fuck it, let's melt crayons

hugo - hurt makes it beautiful bonus track:

How he stay faithful in a room full of hoes? Must be the pharaohs, he in tune with his soul

can't you hear me knocking - the stones

cleaning the house come Saturday looks like heaven from the vantage point of Thursday morning

My daily staple all my life, NPR is now on my nerves for no reason I can put my finger on, I just don't want to listen to Meeshell Norris, I dunno, so I convulsively scan up and down the radio dial on my way to work instead of tuning out the NPR drone: I love jesus, I love jesus, two stoned and/or down syndrome guys talking to each other about nothing, shitty country music, I love jesus, then this, which is very seriously awful and which I turned all the way up just to make the rear view mirror shake in a dead traffic stop-crawl-stop as per usual down the miserable 190 in the freezing rain already too late to get a parking spot within a mile of campus

5 7 5

I'm re-blogging the haiku game post - it's obscene, obviously, and self-disclosing in some wrong way whatever, but first of all I can't give a shit about that because I'm not sure that I do in fact give a shit about any of that (probably not), and second of all it's a pretty good game as an alternative to the endlessly nerve wracking rocky relationship "what are you thinking?" game, which is mostly just insecurity masquerading as interpersonal curiosity and about as much fun as a mental wave of nausea.  The haiku game goes like this:  Fighting the urge to ask any (stupid) question at all (like fighting the urge to smoke a cigarette only different), you just throw out a line or two or a title or whatever instead.  If you have any kids around screaming at each other or coworkers yammering on about something you could care less about at some required meeting, it's also useful because counting syllables drowns that right out.  Like this:

I'm diverse within myself (7 syllables)

Unfortunately, all I could think of in 5 syllables was I need more coffee but I texted it to Aaron (who is most likely elbow deep in somebody's corroded arteries with his ex-mistress somewhere nearby throwing shade his way, making us both half nervous wrecks around every damn weekday as if work didn't always suck by half anyways without blood and ass everywhere on top of it) and in less than a minute he texted back reverse oreo (?) and I busted out laughing just as the next meeting was starting and everyone looked at me like "what?" and I wanted to ask 'what is absurd and vaguely racist/classist/sexist and even better if it's obscene and 5 syllables, anybody got anything?' but I said 'voting day - anybody see that castrating hogs ad?' instead, i.e. speaking of political absurdity :/  Then I got distracted because I grew up castrating hogs is also 7 syllables and seems to beg for some kind of poetic S&M comeuppance

monday

I feel like buying an empathy pack of reservation cigarettes for every sorry fucker babbling nonsensically on Elmwood - the distances between now, post rooms full of people all day, and 36 hours ago, and everywhere inside me in between, um, whoa man - and I'm so not the only one half a bubble off plumb, in fact I think I'm noticing that most of the people I know are some kind of struggling to hold it together - I walked into Patti's office and sat down and we just stared at each other, struck dumb by simple daily effort to be okay and competent more or less.  I finally said, Can I see your ring? She slid it off her finger and said "it's filthy, soap scum gets caught between it and the band...why, are you getting one?...I thought you were opposed to all that kind of stuff.."  Yeah, I am, or was, I did the math on that opinion leaving out what HE thought about it and now am radically recalculating that too -  and I've always thought your ring was so pretty to be honest - like sweet."I haven't gotten the other one yet, after some years I don't know, there's a companion diamond band thing."  Does the effort-intensity of the years count or just the number?  "Right?!"  hahahahahah, dude I think you might want to hint to Jim that the effort clock is probably up on it by now. She smiled really big, first time in a long time that I've seen her really smile, "The companion would match that wrap - see it?"  Yup, that's what I always liked about it, looks kind of like petals.  "It's a happy memory for sure, and comforting to look at now when things are a lot harder," (she says shakily).

Sigh.  Want to hear a naughty haiku?  "Totally!"

the haiku game

weekend evening
nipple clamps and Chinese food

(your turn - 5 syllabus..)

married life is nice (ha)
chopsticks in my hair (better! what's the title?)
"Comfort"


rubber spatula 

(your turn, two lines, 7 and 5)
you only did one line
(I did two last time, and I'm still processing the DIY list cz it's only 4 syllables and what the hell would you use a vacuum cleaner for anyway??)
you have to click on the pic of the vacuum then the explanation is in a pop up box
(...ahhhhhhh. ok back to poetry: rubber spatula)
 got it:

"Sunday"
rubber spatula
amateur pornography
the day the Lord made
(hahahaha pretty good, but the Lord made all the days - how about the Lord's day of rest)
better

he cheated on his wife
groan
(shut up, let me think...)
cheated on his wife
diamonds and apologies
payback is a bitch
(snicker - is diamonds 2 syllables or 3? I'm calling 2 - what's the title?)
oye
("Oye" it is!)

Of the many things that have become clearer in the last 6 months, one is that Aaron and I have no community whatsoever outside of the kids. To some extent, my friends are supportive of him, but they're all shut-ins, and Aaron doesn't feel very comfortable around any of them anyway. Although the bonkers-jealous aspect of that has to GO, it's hard to blame him entirely for his discomfort - witches weird people out, and not even academics like academics much so it's hard to even call that a community anyways. My extended family used to be big fans of his, but that is obviously strained now, their grim sense of our relationship being wrong looming in such things as their quiet about holidays and their passive aggression (my dad pointedly inviting me and the boys ONLY to Florida this year, that kind of crap). But at least they're not disingenuous. For Aaron's part, his family were never supportive/fans of me / our relationship whatsoever. He still fields that with them, such as taking their calls when he's driving home from work so that I won't hear the drone of condemnation, the psychologically corrosive nature of which I fear and resent but they are not my people obviously, and besides, it's their voices in his head that's hard. Altogether, we have the kids as our tribe, and that's it, probably one of the reasons why we so badly wanted one more kid.  And given what else has become much clearer in myself and between us, well, what draws us to each other in our sexually-informed identities and outsider sensibilities means that we are just not enough alike other people to have a community much. We make other people uncomfortable, or they make us uncomfortable (?), and now that my extended family is in the mix of losses, even I feel the weight of that despite being long ago alienated from "belonging" and having actually come to embrace the degree to which I personally make people uncomfortable in my own right.  He has been half-sunk by the mis-fitting factor for some time, how we don't fit the hetero script and how HE doesn't ever and hasn't ever fit it and will never do so finally. At least academics are all to some degree and in some ways off-putting so that I can disappear in front of the drapes in my professional life (I'm not that odd in that world where misfits tend to pool). But he loses his job, too, in our reconciliation and in the process very publicly has rejected the more suitable mate choice that his mistress would have been. But you can't love who you don't love. You can't want who you don't want. And it didn't work several times over now - he kept trying to not love me in favor of younger women with fatter ovaries that his mother liked better the entire time I've known him pretty much, including this last mistress debacle.  But you cannot be who you are not in whom you do not love.  Even if you want to want to. And he really did want to want to not want me and not have to be with me. A lot.  And that hurts. A lot.  But I can also empathize some. It is rather lonely and confusing to be lamented.

Welp, our configuration of relation is on the rise, web-md has a support site for it now (sans the sexuality aspects except as a 'problem' - HA), so who knows, maybe we will be okay and someday too it just won't be a thing, and one of us will meet someone else at work or somewhere who is in a relationship like this, and we will make friends with them and their friends and laugh at mutually familiar things, like how he takes turns on the xbox with the kids and like how I say 'album' not cd but how we meet in the middles like both knowing who Bob Saget is because the sitcom that he watched as a kid and I hated as an adult (except maybe to ogle Uncle Jesse a little) makes Saget's filthy inappropriateness funny to us both..

don't threaten me, Cornholio

VIRGO Painful thoughts usually have something to teach you, so try to lean into them instead of rejecting them as negativity. Let those thoughts inspire you to act, resolve things or escape them. I'm inspired to do none of those things, but rather to be mostly still and often quiet. And to choose nostaliac television to watch.

throwback thursday

grief

Me:(sobbing)

Her: I wouldn’t say this to just anybody, but your brain is ramming into itself above your head right now.

Me: I’m sorry.

Her: Do you always apologize for being upset?  I AM a shrink, after all..

Me: I don’t know (sobbing). I have no fucking idea what I always do or don’t do or anything.  I don’t know if I ought to be upset or not or anything.

Her: Is there an OUGHT to being upset?  I missed that memo.  You clearly ARE upset.

Me:  I don’t know if it’s reasonable though, or when it is or not, or anything.  I don’t know what is happening to my mind.  I’m afraid of EVERYTHING.  All the time.  When I’m not fucking the actual life out of him, then I calm down.  Which, is that crazy??, I can’t tell that either, like maybe that is wrong with me too, because from where I’m standing I can understand how a person might want their skin fucked off to let whatever pain it is out or whatever…

Her: Short of permanent damage, no, fucking is fine as a coping mechanism in strained relationships, I wish my partner had more of that impulse (hahahahahaha), Aaron is a lucky man.

Me: (hahahhhaahhaa/sob), I really don’t understand what is wrong with me.

Her: I’m not sure I understand what you even mean, there is nothing WRONG with you that I’m aware of, you’re hurt, that’s not a flaw.

Me:

Her:

Me: Have you ever been cheating on? 

Her:  My husband is an alcoholic, and he cheated on me with the bottle…I’m not sure if he actually cheated on me during that time, nobody has ever asked me that before.  I think if he cheated on me, I wouldn’t take it personally, I’d think of that as a breakdown of his.

Me:  That’s exactly what I used to say. 

Her: Is that true?

Me: Yes, I actually have never even been jealous before, I never really understood that emotion.  And now that I have it, I still don’t get it.  In fact, I’m not even sure that is what I feel.  All I know is, I’m in a panic all the time, every minute of every day I am trying to quell it, and I’m wearing out.  I don’t sleep for days, I often can’t breathe, I try to sleep sitting up when I wake up in the middle of the night because it feels like I’m going to drown in feeling and I don’t know what the feelings are.  I’m LOSING IT.

Her:  You need to get back to yourself.  Your authentic self.

Me:  WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?  If you think I’m going to do yoga or read some shit about my soul some more, you can forget it, I tried that, and it only makes me more frantic as it fails. 

Her: I really think it doesn’t matter, that you need to concentrate on getting back to your own sense of grounded in yourself, but just for argument’s sake, what is it that he’s doing that upsets you?

Me: (insert 100 item list diatribe of worry here)  (sob)

Her:  Okay, two of those things were completely reasonable to be upset about.  The rest…

Me: I KNOW.  I mean, I have had relationship failures before, but I saw them coming, there was addiction issues or I wasn’t a lesbian or he was a relentless asshole or something kind of whatever, ya know, a visible thing coming in it, I could brace myself a little.  My brain just does not know what the hell to do now, from one minute to the next. Like yesterday his phone died, and I thought he’d left again, and I just happened to be standing in front of over 100 people as that went down in my mind, and I just watched my mind stop working.  I was very actually beside myself, and frightened of the level of frightened I was, and I really thought I might lose it right there.  Even though I know I would never do that.  But maybe I would. 

Her:  That list you just slid by me of all the other failures, first of all you realize they were not failures, they were losses – right?

Me:

Her:

Her: What do you like about yourself?  What’s your favorite quality in yourself?

Me: Wtf?

Her: You’re going to have to spend a little time with yourself in your own mind somehow, so let’s find something you want to be with there.

Me: I will ask you something and you answer me honestly, promise?

Her: Okay.

Me: If you were in trouble, and my number was the only one in your pocket, as little time as we’ve known each other, would you bet on me?

Her:  Wow.  Yes, I would.  Absolutely.

Me: (sob)

Her: That’s a good quality, you are loyal and dependable…

Me: That’s what I might have said once, but now I look at those same qualities and think: gullible or deluded or even arrogant. 

Her: I see.

Me: I hope so, because I don’t. 

Her: Your sense of your own worth has been deeply shaken and you have a couple good reasons to be insecure right now…

Me: I don’t even know that much. I look at myself, and I do not know what I’m looking at.  How can I judge it if I don’t know what I am seeing?

Her: Well stop judging it for one thing, but here’s what you’re going to do…you ready?

Me: Hit me.

Her: The couple reasonable things to worry about, give them to Aaron to worry about, and you stop.  Stop reading about relationships.  Let him worry about that.

Me: (sob)  I don’t know…

Her: You trust me?

Me: Yeah, I do.

Her: Then trust that Aaron will worry about what you give him to worry about.  You, you read about grief.  Deal with grieving. That’s all.  There are stages in grief, there are things your mind does with grief – you need to ACCEPT GRIEF.

Me: I don’t know how.

Her: Clearly.

my favorite word

I've been talking since 8:30 this morning non-stop except to have questions put to me or the 10 minute break I took to eat half a tub of yogurt and look up German midwife faces. And every day is made much longer by my fucking nerves are fucking shot, always. Chairing little meetings and running the giant 100 person open faculty meeting and every damn configuration of groups of PhDs you can bear to imagine, words words words, privately my nerves shot shot shot. Earlier in the day, again my boss, a pretty good sport yet he is a boss, so let's face it, they often make life harder (too), suggests to the VP that to solve the space crunch perhaps from now on professors might not need personal offices.

It is true. I am fully aware that it is an immense luxury in this very unfair world for me to have this door that slams shut (this used to be my ex-husband's office space, and his relentless ill humor finally broke the hydrolic hinge, so shutting my door is deafening), behind which I can be alone. And sit here. And shake a bit. Breathing back the ever readiness of crying that now lives just behind my face.

I told him, deadpan, "Well, you can do that, but I will eventually fucking kill somebody."

So now, the day is finally over at work, and not yet started at home, my summoning between what I think of in my head as Buckwheat's voice: Everything is Otay! And into my email pops this from my boss. Like I said, he's a pretty good sport, and he gets props for giving me the two small bits of levity that this day mustered. I'd put it on Crackbook if I still had an account, but all the energy I have for Outward Facing is consumed in the mere practices of my everyday life. If anybody reads this post and still has the personal capacity for social media, repost it for me somewhere because I don't think you could ever say FUCK enough next to everybody's mother fucking tit-selfies, memes and dinner photos.

bonus track, sent from my would-be office mate next door with whom I've made a murder-suicide pact if we have to move into together, who watches it for hours (because her nerves are also shot)

My boss just told me that I run meetings like a mean German midwife in boots.  "I think I come off as harmless and friendly - no?"  NO.  More like Vee are Goink to Bear Down und Get Through Dis face.  Aaron tells me all the time lately, Don't make the face.  I wonder if it's the same face.

He pulls the cord, the toy shakes its ass, repeat repeat. The toy's name is 'Twirk' and it's endlessly amusing (as if this is a lunatic asylum)....(giggle)

“Something can only become an illusion after disillusionment.  Before that it was something real.”  – Lynda Barry, What It Is

I’d reverse that logic.  Before disillusionment, you had uncomplicated faith (if you were capable of faith).  Faith, 1. Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing. 2
. Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence. Origin, Middle English: from Old French feid, from Latin fides. (OED)

Sometimes (more often than you’d imagine), it is useful to have been a Latin geek.  It’s like knowing the secret identity of words, and to some degree that’s a secret decoder ring of what people mean when they tell you something whether they fully know it or not.  If you look up fides in an online dictionary, it will usually give you an incorrect post-Christianized definition of faith.  But the word is more of a verb than a noun, and means to (be known as) act(ing) in good faith, from which we get words like fidelity and confide.  It very much does NOT mean believing in things that are beyond direct knowing or reckoning.  Quite the opposite.  So to say that you have faith, such as in Jesus, would mean that you act (not just speak, but judge, behave, think – all primary human activities) as if you have that faith, and your consistency in that action would be the strength of your faith.  If you don’t do any of that, you don’t have faith, you’re just full of shit more or less.  In that relationship, you’d have to assume Jesus is also acting in good faith with you, and that indeed might be as hard to prove as it would be to disprove.  Hence why I can’t have any faith in Jesus at all.  The spiritual principles I have (had?) faith in are the ones I’ve seen again and again act with the reliability of gravity, such as you get what you give.  That seems like Truth, reminders of which can be delivered daily to your phone via a Dalai Lama radiance app, to help you out when (if you’re like me) you feel like a crabby asshole a lot.  If you walk around projecting crabby asshole, chances are people are going to treat you like you are one, and the reality of that will be reinforced everywhere constantly, until indeed you will have full faith in the fact that you are a crabby asshole.  The way you act will be the way you are treated, the way you think will be reflected back at you like pinging, and you will create your life this way, in how you think and how you act and the peace and love or lack thereof from which you proceed at the center of your Being (and Jesus will not intervene).  Beyond that, having faith in actual human beings is tricky business, not an uncomplicated thing for me these days.  I have lost much faith in words at all, since many times the person using them doesn’t know what the words mean actually even if they are using them as ends (truth) rather than manipulative tools (lies).  An English professor's staple advice: show, don’t tell.   

mahalia jackson - I'm going to live the life I sing about in my song

I had a day at work.  That means I spend the day being the person that people expect and accept that I am.  Mostly, I actually am that person.  Sometimes I’m just wishing everyone dead and have my game face on like wearing period panties.  But after all these years, I’m mostly just who I turned out to be, which in this case is someone associated with distance learning best practices and college strategic planning and academic program assessment.  I had my best work bud, Patti, in the mix and my next best one too, Marta, in successive meetings, making eye contact mid boardroom typa deal.  I need to spend about 150k on a learning management system, which is a thing you put classes on and run them out of.  Every class that we migrate over to that new system costs money.  So only the ones that are halfway decent can go, and everyone else gets busted back to a classroom in the real world.  And let’s be clear: many educators are getting paid to teach classes that they do not at all show up for, and as long as students get an A in those, mostly they don’t complain.  There are classes that have no syllabus, no grades, no evidence of interaction whatsoever.  Then there are the “best practices” standards, which my name is equal to, but I do not meet them.  I know what they are, and I do not meet them fully.  I do not engage with my students daily any more than I eat the right amount of vegetables per day, drink the right amount of wine, think the most productive of thoughts – I do not meet them any more than I meet ANY standard, which is not at all in any case.  I say this.  And people pause and I can see them thinking “whew” or “wtf”, either of which is fine by me. I teach like I (would prefer to) live; I would rather you read some stuff and I read some stuff and some of it was the same but some of it was different (but similar, like, ya know, ABOUT SOME SHIT really, some kinda way) and that we just trusted that was so of each other, and that in the aggregate it was adding up to some measure of an introspective life respectively, which included trying not to be a total asshole if at all possible and sometimes even better than that - so, go read/think some stuff and I will too, and we’ll talk sometimes about it, when that would be useful, and sometimes we’ll talk and it won’t be useful, but that impasse might be useful to one or both of us, and it will go on like that until the end.  I say to the e-Learning monitor, “As for assessing my courses, it’s like asking if I look fat in this, I don’t want you to answer me honestly at all.”  She nods.  Patti laughs.  But she knows I’m serious even as she is dead-set on idealism.  She has to be, she has told me.  The three foster kids she adopted engage in behaviors for which they are about to age into ‘could be tried as an adult’.  About that, I can’t comment further in detail actually.  But the point is that she and I have come to a kind of crossroads: We can’t heal people nor they us in that process.  She cannot heal those children.  She can provide them a context in which they might heal, but that’s it.  And I tell her, truly, in my opinion that is not a failure of adoption, it isn’t a failure of any kind, every person’s life belongs to him or her ultimately.  Even children you have made inside your own body, once they leave it, their lives are more in their own hands than anywhere ultimately.  And they don’t owe it to you, it is not in existence to affirm yours, and they can end it even if they must, and you will die over it maybe, but tough titties.  That’s the way it is.  She can still TRY, of course, and feel obligated to do as good a job as possible of course, but that’s HER life, not theirs, and it’s a decent one as is.  As I am talking to her, I know, this is true of me too.  I cannot heal Aaron.  And if the context of our relationship could have aided that, it probably might have done so by now.  And regardless of whether he is what caused me damage or not, he cannot ultimately heal me of that damage like a magic trick.  He can TRY of course, which might enrich his own life, and it MAY help me (it couldn’t hurt, for sure), but it would probably help him more, and I’d still be in possession of my own life and how it feels and what it means (if anything).  I show this to the kids, finally, and we debate its merits.  Then I say to Ears, ‘You know what I’m really talking about right?’  Yup.  ‘Do not use people [women] as a means to an end, it's fucked, and you will surely not be able to gauge that correctly in any case.’  Yup.  ‘You okay with that?’  It scares the shit out of me really, either way, your being in charge of me or my being in charge of me.  ‘Fair enough.’  My having loved Aaron as best I could did not result in what I wanted for myself or what I wanted for him, did not succeed in effecting either, so by either measure, selfish or selfless/idealistic, it failed.  I would have to measure it differently, some third rail, and I don’t know what that would be at this point.  Patti has a little scrap of paper taped to her desk that reads “faith”. 

"That Uncertain Feeling"

friday is only half over

love home trust body idealism faith scrutiny ability sorrow joy past future present ... I've given all I had of all my concrete and abstract nouns. spent and still coming up short. and unable to quite imagine how to replenish myself. it's nobody's fault, really, the newborns or the husbands or the friends. nobody's but mine. but still, I can see how a(n even) weaker version of myself, drained like this, might be tempted to weep if someone just threw a song at me. ya know?

Rose Polenzani & Rose Cousins: The Book Of Love (The Magnetic Fields)
the decemberists - angels and angles (repost)

The Decemberists – Of Angels And Angles

The Decemberists – Of Angels And Angles

The video is stupid of course - don't watch it, just play it LOUD, really loud. And run a mile at daybreak. High rec

http://m.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29545469 and http://psychcentral.com/news/2013/07/27/love-hormone-oxytocin-tied-to-social-anxiety-fear-in-mice/57652.html

That pretty much explains everything. Why I alternate between fucking his brains loose and feeling like he might murder me. My brain is sad toast :/

I remember the first time I saw Danny's work, long before his first show and I started to buy it then more of it, a piece that resonates and then I meditate on why then I just like it. The Girl didn't like this one, said it was too desolate. I loved it immediately. Scott said it was one of his favorites too. It was really good to see him. He and I have a state of distant friendship after years of layered memory that makes seeing him feel familiar totally yet he's at a distance that he cares but not get bent out of shape type cares. I mean, if I put my arm in a wood chipper he'd be like that must really hurt and he'd really mean it and that'd be it. 

Him: You're like the horse in Animal Farm.
Me:
Him: Ya know? Dropped dead? "Everything can be solved if you work harder"?
Me: LOLOL, um no, I don't remember...(I look it up)...what does that make you?, I ask, reading  the character list.
Him: Are you looking up a synopsis? Seriously?
Me: Well? What? The pigs killed the horse, so.
Him: See what I mean?!
Me: Says here the horse was the donkey's only friend.
Him: Jesus, you're such a dork. The horse was a control freak work happy dork, that's really all I remember.
Me: Sounds like what a cynical donkey [jackass] would say.
Him: Just saying. Work might not set you free.
Me: You got a better idea?
Him: (sigh)
Me: So, I'm going to make you a flowchart of your related jealousy and fidelity issues, by the way - that way you can see clearly how they're connected, for when you see the counselor.
Us: haha haha haha haha
Me: You have driven me insane.
Him: I know.

"You know greed has nothing to do with money right?" (She didn't know.) Iyanla then explained to her that greed is taking more than you give. Oh ok, Shoya said, seeming relieved and suddenly pointing out a million things she'd done to make the project work. But as Iyanla pointed out, all of her examples were of her doing things to invest in the outcome she wanted. She did this and this and this because she wanted this and this and that for herself. She was investing in her agenda. 'That's not giving,' she told her." ~from I Knew But Still

(duh, lol.  and that shit is as funny as it isn't easy, cuz you think you've thought around that corner only to be investing in an outcome of your being able to knock that shit off, and you then you suck at that for a long while ...)

"The fact that man senses his finiteness everywhere and cannot be satisfied with any of it points to a hidden possibility in his nature.  He must have another root of his Being than that of his finiteness.  If he has no pre-knowledge of the unknowable he would lack the urge to enquire.  But he seeks after Being itself, after the Infinite and the Other.  Only this can give him satisfaction." ~ from General Psychopathology

"Intense experiences of a spiritual type may occur during prolonged periods of isolation, physical deprivation or emotional stress.  Spiritual awareness is also said to arise from contemplation of works of art or intense concentration on a task, such that the separation between subject and object becomes less apparent [i.e. tantra].  This includes retreat and religious worship and ritual.  Ecstatic mystical experiences may occur spontaneously but periods of intense reflection or indecision have often occurred beforehand.  There may also be a link between such awareness and an ability to replace the usual focus on oneself with a concern for and interest in others. Religious and secular systems of morality (in contrast for narrower concepts of moralism) concur that we flourish through our ethical and loving actions towards others.  This suggests that although spiritual perception is not usually the result of an effort of will, certain states of mind may favour its appearance.  It also suggests that spirituality is a response to the world.  Rather than cultivation or improvement of an illusory self, it may involve being moved by what is other than oneself.  It is communication of something within a relationship, an interaction." ~ from Conceptualizing Spirituality for Medical Research and Health Service Provision

Now that I don't have Facebook, I have to put my stupid(er) shit here too

Update: I saw my shrink.  And yeah, No.

(armscrossy)