Holiday Glam

The holidays feel...remarkably un-holiday-ish this year. This is my first year of being officially on Christmas strike, and it's really pretty anti-climactic. For some reason, Thanksgiving, a holiday to which I've historically granted very little interest, was much harder than this diva of holidays, Christmas. I got up at 9, went to the gym, did my usual 7 mile run, went home, had some grapefruit and leftover yam biscuits, talked on the phone (to my mother--twice), watched a Sandra Bernhard special that I'd rented, blah blah blah. The eeriest thing about this is that it feels, in most respects, like a normal day. The primary thing separating it from MOST of the days in the year is, together with the absence of my loved one, the fact that I'm still not really working very hard. Luckily, that neurosis is haunting my peripheral vision and little bit more each day. Soon, it's likely to manifest in some kind of all-consuming despair and sense of worthlessness for my apparent inability to get anything at all accomplished.

ABD: Freedom Is Real. Of course, it is real in that sense in which we are all free to languish in that hazy middle ground of the subjunctive. I can think of at least a few people in my acquaintance who have made cozy little nests for themselves in this ABD land, happily or unhappily (usually, depending whether or not they've had kids and that sort of thing) adjuncting at whatever college or university is closest at hand. Hell, four sections of composition a semester (and that fat, sweet 20 grand I could make a year doing it) sounds like bloody paradise. Emphasis on the bloody, of course.

What else--besides the ubiquitous work drama, which does, of course, pursue me through most of my waking hours, especially when I sit down to write something about my immediate life and experiences--could I possibly have to blog about? Really, anything else I'll write will simply smack of complaining, and the most non-productive variety of that. Check, please.

Blah-dom

December is running by more quickly than I really want to intellectually deal with. It's been and continues to be one of the most relaxing and one of the most stressful months I think I've had in recent memory. The major project is slipping by the wayside, an indulgence I'm justifying by telling myself all kinds of cozy, laziness-justifying things like these: 1) Clearly, my brain needs a break. I need to listen to my brain. This is the "work out lie." While true to a certain extent, my vacation has far exceeded my real need for it. Now I'm just taking pleasure in curling up on the slightly furry fabric of my undersized couch, reading a novel through the body buzzing post-exercise and breakfast haze when I really should be reading, say, Imagined Communities. 2) A more logistical excuse. I can't start working because I don't have the books that I need. Again, this is seductive because partially correct. I ordered the last novel that I think I really, desperately, need to read before starting my chapter on the 18th century, and they're taking a very very long time to arrive. Silent scream. This is not, of course, to say that I couldn't be doing other, also quite relevant reading, which I currently have in my possession. 3) The paralysis of the overwhelmed. Do I start, as I said I would, on the introductory chapter? This sounds fun. I could hone my genre and theory chops, flesh out other ideas, make promises that I may find I can never fulfill. Or do I launch into the 18th century? There's something very seductive about starting to do secondary research. Reading about what people have said about specific novels and finding them all laughably inadequate to the task I've undertaken. This kind of research has the advantage of filling one with a sense of the exigency of her work, while also hazarding certain feelings of hopelessness.


I'm setting goals now. Truly. Monday I'll go to the library and try, as they say, to light a fire of some sort under my ass. It would be deeply lovely to have some sense of purpose and accomplishment ensuing from the pending holidays which are promising to be solo drunken revels, perhaps accompanied by insipid popular movies that C has the good taste not to watch.

Ultimate

Like so man things, the ultimate was, finally, not so ultimate after all. This is always the way, though I don't seem to be able to keep myself from getting worked into a self-hating, ego-annihilating frenzy all the same. C points out, and I well know, that this is in some way strategy. I go through all the worst case scenario emotional junk well before any of it even *might* happen. In this way, it freaks me out considerably less when things happen like this:

Well, I think we should start off with M encapsulating her project for us, in just a few minutes, before we start discussing the 27 page document that accompanies it.

Normally, this would tailspin me, but because I've already in my head imagined and dealt with all the really horrible things that could be said, I muddle through. Nobody seems to have caught on just yet that I'm a terrible fraud. With any luck, they never will... So, yeah, (spitting sound) that's over. Now I can actually start writing. How sick is it that I'm actually looking forward to it?

In other news...what? I'm making cakes, and very much agonizing over it. C thinks I'm dwelling too much, and she is undoubtedly right. Right in that truly damning way. A while ago I was swamped with this sudden sense of self-loathing, so intense that I could barely speak. I feel like the protagonist from Nausea, sitting in the park watching the world dissolve around him. Not that I should be writing about vertigo right now.

Penultimacy

Yes, that's today. The penultimate. Well, really, just one penultimate in a series of them, dotted with little flowers and smiley faces, or frowny faces and rainclouds. Why so much pressure on a handful of days? Days like today, and the more ultimate variety, make me intensely jealous of my friends who (magically, it seems to me) manage not to freak out about any of these things. Of course, this is nothing compared to the last penultimate adventure, but I'm experiencing in waves of intensity. Right now I'd give it a 4. This feels a bit like nausea, without the intense pukey-thing. This is more like a desire to expel all my organs, to become empty and thus, I suppose, so much less complicated. After all, if there IS something wrong with such and such project or my master of some idea or another, I would certain be able to identify and deal with it better were it only on the other side of my skin. Is this so much to ask?

Boring, really, this kind of anxiety. Particularly considering that it's neverending...will never stop...never go away. Even leaving the academy wouldn't solve my problem as there would simply follow a slew of other, non-academic penultimate days. And I'd be likely to find them less...significant. After all, the only thing worse than freaking out (penultimately) about something that terrifies you with its significance, would be freaking out (also penultimately) about something that you knew to be truly void of significance, yet somehow important in that existential crisis kind of way. So I'll take my lumps and try not to be too noisy about it.

The VOID

Okay, so everything isn't ever really as bad as it seems. I trip along beneath a partly sunny (as opposed to partly cloudy, an important distinction) skies, skipping over sidewalks and treelawns (though I wish, more frequently, meadows filled with buttercups and daffodils). Occasionally, I fall into an oubliette. The falling is never quite what I remember, but the trip back to the surface usually happens with very little effort, indeed. Something cliche about time healing all wounds...hope springing eternal, and so on.

In my extremely grungy office, doing my very efficient best to make good use of the day, and the otherwise long, tedious hours I have to spend on campus. Of course, I spent a couple of years defending the campus from the ubiquitous complaints of its being sterile and unfriendly...not to mention ugly. I don't know that my own objections are driven so much by aesthetics as they are quite simply the desire for comfortable chairs and good lighting. Okay, maybe that is aesthetic.

Anyway, this week is also spiraling toward Thursday. The day when either I will leave campus feeling elated and inspired, like I've been blown into the heavens on a puff of academic excellence, or I'll have to call C to bring her goo gone and a big spatula to scrape me off the cold tile of the ninth floor. I'm hoping to dream of big, floppy signatures scrawling themselves over everything I write, like my pen is beginning to take on for itself the mask of believable authority. I'll write something and it will be unquestionably approved. The alternative is rather more ghastly. But why think about what will really happen, which will undoubtedly be something between these two, when the extremes are so much more believable? Or so much more dramatic or something. I'm really just hoping to hear a few nice things, with minimal requests for revision, but many suggestions and directions for future writing, and approval...ultimately...always the approval. How sad.

Puddle of Slime

Black slime, that is. Something viscous and abject. The coming week is looming, to be sure. I'm dreading spending another day in the vapid wasteland of North Campus. Somewhere, just peeping around one of the twists and turns of my cerebral cortex, is a ray of sunshine. I just haven't made it there yet. Today was average, quite. Eight hours of work followed by nine miles on the treadmill.

Jane Tompkins admits to worrying about the state of her soul in an essay I've spent several class periods, across several states and just as many universities, trying to explain to bewildered freshman. I don't worry about the state of my soul so much as my measurable quality as a person. Being a blackhole is contagious. You end up sucking in the people around you and smearing a glaze of negativity on everyone you come into contact with. Today I was in the car, having a minor battle of wills with C, when I was struck with one of these moments of doubting, not the metaphysical state of my soul, but my uselessness/usefulness. Black slime. Then came the tortured doubts about my prospectus thinly veiled under a banal lack of concern for all things academic, fantasizing stupidly about dropping out of grad school. Not meaning any of it, really. There's always the crouching, snarling, beast of Montana--my own shadow beast--warning me away from such action.

Maybe in a nice pink future, we'll spoon our brand new Nissans, worry about taking out a second mortgage, whether to rent a house at the beach with two or three rooms, thirty or fifty yards from the crashing waves of North Carolina.

Half Over?

So the grotesquery of Thanksgiving is over for one more year, finishing, as usual, in the annual, celebratory storming of the shopping malls. According to the news on CNN yesterday (as I was pounding out those treadmill miles), some people start lining up at midnight to get the "early bird" specials. This is probably the only time of year when younger people thus get their wings. It's true, too, what they say about Black Friday. The whole thing is such a mystery to me. I worked in an electronics/music store one year, and we opened two hours early at 6 AM, but people really were lined up in the parking lot. I had to walk by their huddled, frenzied forms to get into the store to open my department. Then when we actually did open, they ran. It was remarkable. I've never seen anything like it before or since. We're talking people who don't even usually break a slow amble running. To the best of my knowledge, we weren't offering any special sales. Apparently, though, yesterday is no longer the biggest shopping day of the year. That title has been transferred to the last weekened before Christmas. I guess people are more reluctant to be early birds.
Anyway, though, VERY glad it's over. Christmas is going to be absolutely wretched, and I'm already trying to come up with some coping strategies. Staying busy is key, of course, but how does a well-intentioned holiday curmudgeon pull that off when bloody nothing is open? You have to plan ahead, I suppose. Get food, shop for movies, go to the library, etc. Hopefully I'll be exceptionally good this year and even get some work done on that most overdetermined of all holidays. I need a little bit of the anarchist spirit. Maybe I could dress up and run all over town turning over trash cans or something like that. We'll have to see what the weather's like.

a-meta

Today is Thanksgiving, and I spent the majority of my day slinging natural foods to very nice people who were mostly, I believe, very thankful that our store was open at all. A rather cheery and lucrative (love that time-and-a-half) way to spend the holiday. The rest of the late afternoon and evening I spent riveted to my tv, catching up on movies I've been very much wanting to see, but haven't for one reason or another. The research is always pressing. My students have invariable written something or another I need to evaluate. I'd rather spend time with my girlfriend, and so on. So today was chick film night. By which I most definitely do not mean the Boys on the Side kind of movie, but rather the ass-kicking variety. Infinitely preferable.

And, indeed, the movies took the edge off. I hated the night a little bit less than I would have otherwise, I think. the worst part of the day, hands down, was walking home from work. The streets were mostly deserted. Everyone off to celebrate this most dubious of holidays at some relative's house, my supervisor talking about whether or not she should spend the evening with her boyfriend's parents, my girlfriend away with her family because she can't yet see her way out of it. The entire street that I live on was dark. The usually cramped parking not a problem at all, to say the least. Freaking nobody around...at all. It made me think: Do I live on a street filled with people whose lives are of no lasting familial significance? If everyone goes somewhere else, does that say something about the reality or the permanence of our lives here?

Sickened, truly. I'm trying to pluck up my courage to brave this once again for Christmas Eve at the glorious aftermath. C will once again be gone. Streets deserted. I can see myself walking home melodramatically from the co-op, my canvas bag filled with bruised produce slung over one shoulder, face masked in fleece against a bitter wind. Somehow. A tumble weed. And then long hours of movies. Bad lighting. Leftovers. Trying desperately to tire myself out enough to fall asleep without eyes staring blindly at the ceiling for hours.

I think the worst thing, truly, is that I can't quite work out whether or not skipping the holidays like I think I am makes me a coward. In some proto-rational way, I feel like protesting the artificiality of the day. But this feels cliche because, of course, we all know this, right? So what? So the holidays are a performance, even waxing on the grotesque while still remaining well within the limits of acceptability. Family or something ineffable anyway transcends the meanness of the vacant consumerism. People chuckling over the gobble gobble jokes and all the rest of it. Queer people's non-recognizable lives cast further into shadow. My own effectually finally obfuscated by my critial failure to appear at critical junctures. Like...the holidays...Thanksgiving...Christmas.... .... .... .... And yet. The sense of protest, the imperative to protest, remains. There's something honest about it, beneath all the dramatics and affect.