Family Antics, part 1

Speaking with my sister a few minutes ago, I had an extremely misguided moment when, searching for a topic of conversation, I asked her if she was planning to vote in the primaries on Super Tuesday. She said no. Even more misguidedly, I asked her if she had been following the election campaigns at all, and she said she had and that if she was going to vote, it would be to elect anyone who isn't Hillary Clinton. (For a moment, I had a flashback to a similar discussion about the relative merits of John Kerry vs George Bush in which she stated flatly, and with no reference to any of the issues at all, that she thought Kerry was not a nice man. She just didn't find him likeable, and Bush, at least, is likeable.) Trying a deflect a little, I joked that anyone would be better than Bush. Then she proceeded to tell me that she thinks Hillary is horrible, mean, mud-slinging, a "super negative person," and ambitious. Additionally, it worries her that Bill has spent so much time campaigning with his wife because she [my sister] can't imagine anything worse than having Bill Clinton in the White House again.


Instead of screaming at her, I thought I'd blog instead. Enjoy.

Stalled

Not a point I would belabor, particularly since all of us are familiar with the sensation of being unmoored, as it were. Adrift. This is my feeling about the world today, though. Teaching this semester is surreal and so much less stressful than my lit class last semester that I'm alternately astounded and relieved. The chapters are coming along, with no end to revision in sight. Facing this next segment, though, I feel like I'm trying to drop anchor in a deep and swiftly flowing river, though that analogy probably doesn't make sense to anyone who understands things of the nautical persuasion. I suppose I'm plumbing the depths, if you will. Searching blindly through the tortured recesses of the mountain of research I've already done and which will undoubtedly prove practically useless for my next chapter. What I really want to write about is Serenity and Charles Brockden Brown, and I'm barely resisting the urge to write my conclusion instead of this last chapter. No, I didn't say "last chapter." You must have imagined it. I'm pretty sure I did.

The Rock of Love II is coming along nicely. There's some good drama, the usual dose of hysteria and backbiting, and some particularly good strategists among the new women. One of them actually had the foresight to feed compromising information about one of the other girls to someone else, who then went immediate to Brett with her nasty little tidbit. How it is that these girls don't know that the schemers make for excellent tv but never win the competition is beyond me. It's like they didn't watch the last season or pay any attention at all to the Flavor of Love franchise (now going into its 3rd season!). The exception, perhaps, being the ultimate (?) I Love New York, in which she chooses the most underhanded guy in the competition both, I imagine, because she wanted someone with whom she is fairly matched in terms of competitiveness and because she was really looking for a mollifying lackey--post-Tango disappointment. Right now my money is on Megan. Q's right that Peyton should win, but she won't. Anyone else ready to pick your pony?

And to BEM: Unspeakably lame that you can't get into it, dude. It's not as though I only sat through the first fifteen minutes of No Country for Old Men and proclaimed it to be not my thing. No, indeed. Give it another shot, buddy. Do it for Brett.

Applications, Classes, Pilates

Things aren't so bad. I've been working on the couch for several hours now. Mina is curled up sleeping by my side but apparently happy to wake up now and then when I give her some love. I've been trying to compose my five page dissertation summary for the dreaded CAS fellowship application. I wasn't quite prepared for how difficult it is to do so in five pages for readers who are unfamiliar with your discipline but whom you presumably must impress with the significance of your project. Q, please don't panic, you know I draft long and interminably. It isn't done and won't be. For a long time. So hard. That, coupled with the beginning of the new semester this week, is the less fun part of the week. I've only seen my students once, and it's much too early to get anything like a sense of how things will shake out. They're not yet really laughing at my jokes, but this is to be expected. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. That said, having two of my best students from my last comp class in this one is making me more hopeful than I would otherwise have a right to be at this early date.

My only other news--and brace yourself for how exciting this is--is that I went to my first pilates class last night and totally loved it. Some things were really hard and others were really easy and I could seriously do without the wall of mirrors and the weird sense that the whole thing is so gendered. You have to imagine me and a bunch of tall, thin girls, rolling around on mats and practicing our "pilates 'v'". I'm not even going to tell you all what that is because it's more fun that way. Sounds nasty, doesn't it? Really, though, it's totally hard on your core, which is exactly what I need. I hate working my abs, so this is excellent and included in my gym membership. If I can get my shit together enough tomorrow, I'm going to go to the yoga class. This will surely be me with another bunch of tall, thin girls, rolling around on the floor and stretching or something.

Wow. I really had nothing to say. To distract you from that annoyance, have some baby red pandas, Q's favorite. Almost as adorable as Mina, I'd have to say.
Almost.

Crazy and Obsessed

That's me today. Or, maybe even more accurately, crazy-sick-obsessed. Or some permutation thereof. The sick part is the easiest to explain. I haven't had so much as a mild cold for some freakish number of months now. I was long overdue, but I seem to making up for lost time. Either Q gave it to me or I picked it up at the coop and gave it to her (though the latter seems less likely since she manifested the snifflies a full day before I did). Not that it matters in any case. If you're going to kiss someone on a regular basis you simply can't worry a lot about incubation times and illness probabilities. Or at least I can't worry about that.

The crazy obsessed part is a little more involved. One part is working on the diss, which actually made me into a raving lunatic for the first part of today. Q was, as they say, grace under fire as I shrieked at her about radically unrelated minutiae that, because of my unstable emotional/intellectual state, had become quite blown out of proportion. Then she comforted me and all was well for a short time. This scenario repeated a bit later on a slightly different topic, but I think, for the day, I've finally got it managed. Significantly helpful in this capacity are the three jam thumbprints I brought home from the coop. Never underestimate the power of a jam-filled cookie to soothe emotional sores. (Though in hindsight I don't think the words "jam" and "sores" should ever appear in such close proximity.)

So imagine me, crazy and raving and sniffling, dragging my ass to the gym at exactly eleven o'clock today. I couldn't run because of that sick thing where you pant for breath after even minimal effort. All of this because I simply had to see the I Love New York 2 reunion show. What do you think? Is this a new low? I actually wanted it to end after an hour, but it ended up being a ninety minute show. I walked the whole ninety minutes. It totally sucked.

So that's the saga of crazy-sick-obsessed, though you may choose to apply those labels willy-nilly. Now things have indeed calmed down a bit. I know I promised stories from the holidays in Montana, so here are some brief highlights:

• My uncle and his girlfriend are, indeed, getting married this summer. Also another one or two of my cousins. Speaking with my mom about it, she excitedly began listing the very few young people in my very large family who are of age and could potentially get hitched in the near future. The conversation went like this:

Mom: Wow, who's left? There's your cousin so-and-so, and so-and-so, and that's about it!
Me: Well, there's ME.
Mom: Well, we just don't know what's going to happen with that.

• I ~mostly~ succeeded in not getting into any arguments with my uncle (a different one) who used to a a lawyer and is notoriously belligerent. I have this horrid memory of having him cross-examine me at great length when I was fifteen and just exploring atheism for the first time. Truly painful. He's fond of saying thing like: "Women only have half a soul until they've had children. They will always regret not having them if they don't." The lovely thing was watching my mom tear into him about it, and we even collaborated to antagonize him by blandly generalizing about how "men are." That was fun. Okay, and maybe a little childish. My mom and stepfather also awesomely hopped to my defense when he began a line of rhetorical questioning by asking me why I think milk is poisonous for babies and not just neutral like all other food. Yes, you read correctly, this man used to be a lawyer.
  
• I managed not to be mean at all to my stepbrother's 14 year old son, who has been praised and loved and fought over as the long-sought male heir over two older daughters. I'd like to think that his life will get harder. I just wish I could be sure. And to be fair, it may be that what I can only describe as his "fuckishness" as in "what a fuck!" is due primarily to his age and station in life and is not innately part of his personality.
  
• I had a great time seeing a few old friends and generally hanging with my mom. Perhaps best of all, I didn't fight with anyone or cry at all the whole time I was home. A real triumph.
  

The Shee-ee-eee-eeple

I'll post again soon with holiday recaps and joyful thoughts on the new year...or something. Until then, for your consideration, I give you Lacy Lamb and her story. Enjoy.




The Sheep-Child

Farm boys wild to couple
With anything         with soft-wooded trees
With mounds of earth         mounds
Of pine straw         will keep themselves off
Animals by legends of their own:
In the hay-tunnel dark
And dung of barns, they will
Say         I have heard tell

That in a museum in Atlanta
Way back in a corner somewhere
There's this thing that's only half
Sheep         like a woolly baby
Pickled in alcohol         because
Those things can't live         his eyes
Are open         but you can't stand to look
I heard from somebody who ...

But this is now almost all
Gone. The boys have taken
Their own true wives in the city,
The sheep are safe in the west hill
Pasture         but we who were born there
Still are not sure. Are we,
Because we remember, remembered
In the terrible dust of museums?
Merely with his eyes, the sheep-child may
Be saying         saying

    I am here, in my father's house.
    I who am half of your world, came deeply
    To my mother in the long grass
    Of the west pasture, where she stood like moonlight
    Listening for foxes. It was something like love
    From another world that seized her
    From behind, and she gave, not Iifting her head
    Out of dew, without ever looking, her best
    Self to that great need. Turned loose, she dipped her face
    Farther into the chill of the earth, and in a sound
    Of sobbing         of something stumbling
    Away, began, as she must do,
    To carry me. I woke, dying,

    In the summer sun of the hillside, with my eyes
    Far more than human. I saw for a blazing moment
    The great grassy world from both sides,
    Man and beast in the round of their need,
    And the hill wind stirred in my wool,
    My hoof and my hand clasped each other,
    I ate my one meal
    Of milk, and died
    Staring. From dark grass I came straight

    To my father's house, whose dust
    Whirls up in the halls for no reason
    When no one comes         piling deep in a hellish mild corner,
    And, through my immortal waters,
    I meet the sun's grains eye
    To eye, and they fail at my closet of glass.
    Dead, I am most surely living
    In the minds of farm boys: I am he who drives
    Them like wolves from the hound bitch and calf
    And from the chaste ewe in the wind.
    They go into woods         into bean fields         they go
    Deep into their known right hands. Dreaming of me,
    They groan         they wait         they suffer
    Themselves, they marry, they raise their kind.

 -- James Dickey