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.