Nevermind the Weasels.

So, I'm really not going to write a sad, frustrated, mopey blog. Really, I'm not. The latter part of January actually feels bizarrely hopeful to me. I'm languishing in subjunctivity, but this feels like it has a distinct shelflife. My writerly juices are percolating. I think I can sense them even in my dreams, which have been uncommonly bizarre recently. In one, I was about to go down on Tina from the L-Word when I thought better of it. She'd recently hooked up with this guy who SEEMED really nice, but whom I felt certain the later episodes would prove a total sleazebag. Then, last night, a whole portion of the world was suddenly shrunk down into dusty, miniscule proportions and I was forced to sift through little draws of dust to try to find my books (which were about the size of unpopped corn kernels) and laptop. Sadly, or perhaps ominously, I never did find my damned computer. The whole affair was apparently orchestrated and the villains, with whom I was strangely and suddenly in league, had a special microscope sort of thing that you could put the shrunken objects under to restore them to the regular size. The point in all of this being that an active dream life just must be a good sign, right? Usually in my dreams, I'm swimming with gargantuan sealife--sharks, whales, crocodiles, dinosaurs, that kind of thing--or fishing mermaids out of huge vats of jelly. It's all very chthonic, really. You'd think C would be suspicious of all the womb imagery. We're never having kids. Really, we're not. Unless it ACCIDENTALLY happens. But then the rest of the world is totally fucked, anyway, and we're taking over.

Did someone put my head in a vise?

Stop it, seriously. Something about being at UB makes my front lobe feel like it's being squeeezed ever so gently. Then, eventually, as I meditate on my two possible remedies, it settles into a nausea inducing headache. C calls this the UB migraine. It might have something to do with the flourescent lights in Clemens. It might be the ambiguously unseeing visages of inscrutable fifth year seniors, taking freshman comp for the first time. It might be the silence, which hums just an octave below regular silence, that fills the room right after I make a lame, English-teacher joke. (Q. What do you call Santa's little helpers? A. Subordinate clauses.) But, seriously, what's a well-intentioned TA to do? Crying's always good. Running is better. Where's the pain-go-bye-bye juice in this whole situation? Maybe some light meditation and stretching?

Of course, this is really just first day jitters. You'd think, wouldn't you, that after....what?...eight some years of teaching writing the initial shock of immersion would be somewhat lessened. I've yet to do the thing where you picture them all naked, but I don't think this would do much for my nausea problem. Sometimes I'd kill for a little fuzzy, blurry-eyed, comp rhet action. Maybe I could convince myself that I'm not drumming thesis statements into unwilling craniums, dulled by too much online poker and reality tv, but liberating my students into their own, individual, snowflake-ness. If only I could get my hands on some of those mini-pizzas that the oh-so-creepy John Ritter makes in the Buffy-verse, we could all just chill out about rhetorical styles and introductory paragraphs, pronoun-antecedent agreement and topic sentences. Somewhere, in the dark, little trolls are cranking the big wheels that make this shithouse run! At least some of us know what's really important, right B?

American Apparel, Pending Crisis, Aphasia

A week past the full-blown holiday insanity and everything is settling back into normality, minus the normal part. While not so much in celebration mode about our vacation from school extending even into the first part of next week, C and I are slipping through liminal states. I've been resisting the urge to indulge in utter hibernation, sleeping ten or eleven hours a night, by forcing myself to set the alarm even when I don't really have to get up.

Somehow, regardless, I am getting a fair amount of reading done. Some of this is new stuff, mostly disappointing (luckily), and everything else I've already read and am going over briefly once more to take some more focused notes. Of course, I still have a list of books I want to read that is at least ten titles long... and this before I'm likely to let myself start writing. Really. I say luckily, above, because if everything I read was freaking amazing I might feel like I had nothing to add. So goes the life of an academic. Perpetually disastisfied BOTH with my own work and that of others. I met a psychiatrist when I lived in the Valley (pronounced Shen-n-doh-uh--the trick is to make the second syllable as slight as you possibly can...as though it were the ghost of a syllable) who liked to tell me a story about when he was in med school. Apparently, all the psychiatric med students had a joke about how thankful they were for English majors, apparently because, being the sullen, introspective lot that we are, we tend to bread and butter the pocket books of the profession. Yay us!

Much as I love American Apparel, I've just gone through a month and a half long process of trying to get an order corrected. I won't bore you all with the details, but suffice it to say that the affair has hopefully just ended with a mildy hysterical email to the customer service representative apparently assigned to deal with me. He ended up confusing my replacement shipment with the original, months were flipped around, time collapsed on itself, and I sent a strongly worded message in which I even went so far as to include a not so ambiguously encoded indicator of my dismay and frustration: "(!)" Ah, the power of prose.


Why aphasia? Because it is...