I remember when I had standards. That was a good day.

Poor neglected blog. If I had a little more rage and a little less self control, I'm sure I'd write more. Or if I had more discipline and creativity. Or more gratitude and gentleness. As is, I have been too apathetic these days to do much of anything but exercise and tweak my grocery budget. My body has never looked so good; neither has it ever seen so little action. 

I have been avoiding writing in all forms these days. It takes me weeks to write letters to my friends, even when they offer me up letters like gifts, sending bits of their hurt and heart and love when I've done nothing to make myself worthy. I address the envelopes and stamp them and tuck a piece of paper or a note card into the flap of the envelope and then I carry them around for weeks meaning to write a little note. There are some I've carried around for nearly two months. What could I possible have to say to these, my brilliant and busy and accomplished friends? 

I haven't written a dissertation word in over a month. I have a reading assignment currently. I have discovered some things that genuinely help my project. I have thought to myself, while reading and reflecting on those things, I must write this down; if I can freewrite this, I'll think it through; there's a connection I can make and it's close to the surface. it will come if I just write it out. I haven't written it out. Any of it. I've talked a little of it out. Thought about it. But worked the ideas through my fingers onto a keyboard? No. I can't bring myself to do it. 

I can't take up the long-ish books I need to read because I can't (so it seems) focus on anything of length. Oh, except for Anna Karenina. And The Complete Father Brown. 
 
I have been instructed (by my voice teacher who, except that his middle name is Torquemada,* is actually a nice guy) to make a habit of doing vocal exercises every day. This is not a new idea, of course. I mean to make a habit of meditating every day. Of writing my dissertation every day. Of reading for the dissertation every day. I mean to make exercise a habit and not a quota--to trust myself to work out on a regular, reliable schedule and not to bunch up workouts because I've slacked, or to dread it all day until I actually begin and am pleased. Now, on top of all the things about which I already feel guilty, I have to add the vocal exercises (which are challenging; I am not good at them). 

I laughed, though, when it occurred to me that I have been instructed to do what I want to do, and that about which I am, in a sense, writing. At the core of my thoughts about ethics is the idea (not an original one) that  what is most important are the tiny small things that one does regularly. I am being told to pay attention to what I am and what I do, and there is no difference between attending to silence and attending to self or to aspects of self (like vocal health). I can't attend to silence if I can't attend to the tiny ways that I sabotage my efforts at creating rituals, routines, and habits: to what am I paying attention if I can't or won't pay attention to myself? 

I've lumped things like "reading" and "writing" under "dissertation" or "academia" so regularly that all reading and all writing feels like a chore because I associate it with the reading and writing I am not doing and must do. In this way I have slipped into lethargic apathy. "Singing" is not part of that lump. Now I have only to begin everything again, tiny bit by tiny bit. I feel like a Taoist master. But ask me again tomorrow. 

*But not in a bad way.

things I haven't bought since I redid my budget

(I redid—no,*did*—my budget just a few weeks ago)

Body oil: $30

Hair goo: $22

Tights (I could use about 3 pair): $24

Perfume: $75

Room spray: $8

Gray cardigan: $24___

Total: $183

I can't even say I've saved almost $200, as this is money I never even had. I am currently paying off my consumer debt so I can live on only my paycheck. This is a lot harder than I imagined it would be. I haven't lived this way since college (and I had fewer and cheaper wants/needs then). In college, my rent was just about 25% of my take-home pay. Now, my rent is nearly half of my take-home pay. So there are differences.

I just read an article in which a woman who gave up shopping for a year tallied the dollar (well, pound) totals of all the things she didn't buy for that year. She saved over £5000 that year. I won't be saving any money, but I will be going deeper into debt more slowly (that doesn't sound very good, does it?)

Why am I fussing over this? If I can't (won't) be disciplined with the dissertation, I may as well develop other kinds of discipline in the meantime. Retraining my habits in ways that feel unrelated to the dissertation should help "trick" me into greater productivity and discipline in other areas of my life. Already the ways in which I waste time have been changing. Etsy who?

preparation for resolutions

How do those of you without children, dogs, real jobs, roommates, live-in partners, medication schedules, yoga/spin/expensive class of choice get out of bed at a reasonable hour of the morning?

Is there anyone other than me who fits that category?

note to self

I have this fantasy of being All Set. Fully Prepared. Ready for any and all Contingencies. Although I am only a poor graduate student, I have been using loan money to purchase things like:
* a warm winter coat
* hats that fit my head
* warm woolen tights and well-insulated boots
* a bed and a comforter
* reading glasses (see right)
* wool skirts that suit my shape and fit my body
* a laptop and a netflix subscription (cheap gym!)

The idea being that, if I get these things now, I won't have to worry about them when I no longer have loan money to supplement my income. In a few years, when I've moved on to Exile U, I'll already have a warm winter coat, hats, tights, skirts and glasses to keep me All Set. I'll have a bed and a table and a desk and bookshelves. I won't need to get these things later, I'll already have them.

I am finding that I am nearly All Set. Sure, there are some things I'd like (a few silk slips; classy, versatile earrings that don't turn my ears green; a velvet sash or satin cummerbund. Basics like that). But I have enough shoes, enough skirts (more or less), enough sweaters. I am supplied with tights, with scanties, and with undershirts. I have more glasses now than I need (the old ones are still perfectly good for around the house). My kitchenware is more than adequate. It'd be nice to have a chair that supports my back and allows my feet to rest on the floor, but I think that's pushing it with the universe.

But if I am All Set, that must mean that I am Ready to Go. Which means there is nothing left but to finish my dissertation, find a job and become a Person. This frightens and disappoints me. I don't feel All Set. My feet are warm, I look put together and sufficiently polished, and my things have cozy little homes, but none of that makes me feel any more ready to be the person I have been, ostensibly, preparing to be.

baking for dummies

Imagine that this is the recipe you choose to make:

3 c sugar
1 c oil
4 eggs
1 can pumpkin
2/3 c water
3 1/3 c flour
spices
salt
soda

makes 2 loaves

Now, imagine that, from the start, you decide that that is too much sugar and too much oil. Also, you will use brown sugar, not white. And you'll make muffins, not loaves. You amend to

1 3/4 c brown sugar
1/2 c oil
4 eggs
1 can pumpkin
2/3 c water
3 1/3 c flour
salt, soda, spices

makes 24 muffins

However, you had to dash out for the brown sugar while the quinoa was cooking (oops) and the sweet potatoes, apples and dried cherries were roasting. So

Before mixing together the sugar, oil and eggs, scrape out the burnt quinoa and put the pan to soak. Stir the roasting fruit/veg.

Mix together the sugar and oil. Add the eggs. Realize you have only 2 eggs. The recipe, now, is

1 3/4 c brown sugar
1/2 c oil
2 eggs
1 can pumpkin
2/3 c water
3 1/3 c flour
salt, soda, spices

Decide to use buttermilk instead of water; begin to make purple rice:

1 3/4 c brown sugar
1/2 c oil
2 eggs
1 can pumpkin
2/3 c buttermilk
3 1/3 c flour
salt, soda, spices

Dump in the can of pumpkin, stir the rice and the fruit/veg. Begin to combine dry ingredients in a rather large bowl. Realize you have less than 2 cups of flour. Add oats. Dump the purple rice into the pot of lentils you'd made earlier in the day.

1 3/4 c brown sugar
1/2 c oil
2 eggs
1 can pumpkin
2/3 c buttermilk
2 c flour
1 1/3 c oats
salt, soda spices.

Add the remaining ingredients. Decide to add a shredded apple. Add the roasted veg and fruit to the lentils and purple rice. Eat a bowl. Decide it's bland, but will be better later on with kale and chicken sausage.

1 3/4 c brown sugar
1/2 c oil
2 eggs
1 can pumpkin
2/3 c buttermilk
2 c flour
1 1/3 c oats
salt, soda spices
1 shredded apple - cortland is nice.

Bake at 350 for about 20-25 minutes.

Try one.

Realize you forgot to add the salt. Feel even more disappointed because, had you added the salt, they actually would have been pretty darn good. As it is, they are a little bland. Eat 2 anyway.

replete with excuses

I want motivation, determination, and bravery in a bottle. Take as needed. Now in prescription strength.

I am stalling. I am not working. I am afraid to make progress. I am afraid that I will never make progress. I have devised lovely plans for myself and for my work this semester. Every day I find some reason why I can't start now. Can't start this minute. Can't start today. Tomorrow. Next week. When my dry cleaning is returned. After my doctor appointment. After the weekend. After I hear from my sister. After I've found a better chair. After I've cooked something for dinner. After I've picked up groceries. After I've scheduled the x-ray. After my next workshop. After ...

My goal is five pages every week. This is a very, very doable goal. I could write no more than one page for five mornings and meet my goal. That is such a very small amount of writing! I still have not begun to write.

Sometimes I dream of quitting. I am, quite frankly, a quitter. I simply don't do difficult things. There. I've said it. I could quit, I tell myself in a tone of voice reserved for other naughty suggestions (I could buy a new purse; I could eat a pint of ice cream; I could have a second drink). I could quit and do something easy. Something that would be effortless. Something that would require nothing from me.

I inhale the fragrance of quitting. The minty and zesty top notes of more time and fewer demands reach me first, followed by the watery, floral allure of letting go. These are nearly enough to convince me. The cedary, molassesy, earthy base nudges me out of my reverie. There, at the bottom of the perfume, is the reminder that there is nothing that I can do that will be effortless. Nothing I can do that won't challenge me. Nothing I can do that will require nothing of me. This doesn't inspire me to work but it does remind me of the futility of quitting. I neither work nor quit.

This is how I write chapter two.

Punctuation garden gone to seed

I did not earn my good-worker dress. Darn. Maybe by the end of August I will have earned it. By the end of August, I hope to have 10 pages written. That's worth a new dress I think!

It has been difficult to get through the reading list I created. This is for a variety of reasons:

1. It's hot in my apartment
2. I've been busy with final copies at work
3. I've been catching up with friends
4. Some of the books are so badly written I throw them across the room in frustration. Getting up, retrieving the book, returning to the couch and finding my place in it all take up a surprisingly large amount of time.

It is difficult to avoid being distracted by the disastrous prose I've been reading. My first thought is usually that I missed something--that I read too quickly and so overlooked the word(s) or punctuation that make the sentence or conceit work. Because I am so generous, I re-read the sentence and too often conclude that I was correct - the sentence is badly written. Then I turn forensic grammarian and try to figure out what would have made the sentence work - sometimes it's as simple as a preposition switch or the addition or subtraction of commas. Other times it appears that a sentence's failure can be traced to the author's attachment to a certain phrase within the sentence: the rest of the sentence simply does not fit with the phrase but the author prizes the phrase more than s/he prizes clarity. Misuse of verbs is unfortunately common. Relationships don't cut, you cannot emasculate a thing or idea, and you cannot sever a split. Lastly, it appears there is an all but irresistible temptation to resort to important-sounding vagaries when approaching innovative or original thought. I suppose that it must be easier to leave readers with a mysterious-sounding short and pithy-seeming sentence immediately followed by something different and easier - more familiar that is - than it is to write one's way to an explanation of what one means.

How will I ever learn to write well when I must slog through so much bad writing? Bad writing is distracting. It is self-perpetuating. It is unethical. It is a disservice to everyone. It generates bad karma.

A new carrot!

I've been falling woefully behind on my reading for this summer. Woefully. Woefully. Today, however, I have a plan:

If I can end the month of June only 1 week behind, then I will treat myself to a new dress. I have my eye on one already:
If I do not make up the reading, then I have to wait until I've started writing chapter 2. I think. I think it's a good plan. Maybe I'll treat myself to a hat to congratulate myself for having thought of it:



Addendum: I got this one instead:

hungry

I've had a new breakfast lately, inspired by "Resolution Muesli" but simpler: into a round ziploc container, throw a handful or so of oats, a pile of defrosted frozen fruit, a dash of cinnamon or a drop or two of vanilla and then top with yogurt. Take to work and let sit in bag or on desk until hungry, by which time the oats will have softened, the fruit fully thawed and the flavors melded. Hearty, wholesome but not too virtuous-tasting. Easier than oatmeal. Portable. Non-squishy. Delicious.

I too like carefully plotted lists. I too like perfectly sharpened pencils. In the shelf below my new alarm clock, I have a small vase full of identical sharpened pencils. I find this extremely satisfying.

I do not have a story prepared for this evening's party. Theme: "the best i ever had". This is a story party, we are to come prepared to tell a story related to the theme. But such a tiny little life I lead! Shall I tell a story (ha! a paragraph) about the best mascara I've used? A story about the best poem I ever wrote (not very good, but I liked the conceit: a woman with a ragged hole in her chest, stumbling forward, offering her pulsing, gushing heart to a very horrified man. Silly lady! He didn't want your real heart! It's a figure of speech. You'll die!)? A story about the first time I used the word "fuck" in a term paper (most satisfying use of a naughty word)? About the best (only) date I've ever had with a woman (terribly stressful!)?

It occurs to me that I have no stories. I am story-less. I don't mind the mundane. But I think I might have more to say if I lived in a cloister (at least then I could have a best ever vision of god) (at least then when I talked about my best bowl of oatmeal, there might be appreciative nods and kindled wonder).

M acknowledged that some folks worried that the theme for this party could make the event kind of a downer but insisted that it didn't have to. I agree. But when I try to think of something amusing, it all comes out Miranda July. I like her work a lot, but even when she's funny, she's so very, very sad (or at least I think so). Best date with a woman: Winterson, natch (but subversively. hmm.). First use of the word "fuck": Lydia Davis. Best awful poem: Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt or Lorrie Moore. Flip a coin. Could be either one. All of these: sadly amusing, that is, amusing in sad ways, like a damp hand on soft down. Unless someone brings a heat lamp or the sun, these stories will not do.

It's nearly 3. Still want to work out. Still have 2 loads of laundry to fold and put away. Trash to take out. A shower to take. A story to imagine.

avatars

There was an impotence then. A thorough-going powerlessness. A hardly articulated ever present longing to escape. The moths would gather at the porch light by the back door (but there was no front door. It was the door. The side door. The door). They would cling to the screen and fly in sometimes. It got dark early and stayed dark long and the mornings smelled of mud. Mineral mud and fish and trees and damp.

How I hated it all! Hated it all so much I couldn’t love what I loved: the smell of morning, the pale light through the telescoped tree tops, the smell of fire every evening while the trash burned. These things I remember now and I love them. How I hated them all then, lumped them all together because they were together and they were my life and I wanted to escape. Embarrassed to go into town and stop at the Ben Franklin. Embarrassed at the Laundromat. Embarrassed to hear the story of the red ants. Again. Embarrassed to see the moths flying into the kitchen.

Rushed through the days to earn the comfort of night to remember that night here is just as long as a day. My sister’s curling-up ski slope toenails slicing my ankles in the bed we had to share. Wedged between the wall and my sister’s adenoids, deprived of the breeze that scooted around the bunk bed and hit the door, falling. The adults in the other room, walls cliché-thin, playing canasta (sometimes they’d head to Escanaba which sometimes, to amuse myself, I’d rhyme with “Canada”) or cribbage, voices low, keeping me awake. I was a very light sleeper and listened.

Morning brought the coldest milk I can ever remember. Or maybe it was not cold and I contrasted the warm milk with the perfect coldness which I thought I remembered milk could have. Whether the milk was warm or cold, it is still and always will be the coldest milk I can ever remember. I still wish my milk could be that cold.

This is not to say that there was never pleasure. Pasties with ketchup: heaven. Perfect food. I never did watch a fish being filleted but my great-grandmother certainly fried them up well. Walleye and bluefish. Free blueberries picked in wooded fields owned by no one. Or at least no one charged. I was a model berry-picker: I always picked far more berries than I ate. Like filling my basket or tin or bucket or whatever they gave me with virtue until I overflowed the tin and had to ask for a fresh one. No one picked as many as I did. Diligent. Quiet. Focused. Well-behaved. Sugar-plums, too (though you had to reach for those).

There was the pier and I think I sometimes sat there with a book. I think I also tried to look cool. I think I tried to look tall and lanky and beautiful. How I wanted to escape, escape everything, escape it all.

I don’t think of escape any more. Haven’t for years. I think it has occurred to me that there is no escape. Wherever I go, the days are all as long and the nights are all as dark. What a hopefulness there was behind that longing for night: later, when I’m older, when time has passed, things will be different. Something will have happened to me. Some magic something will have happened and will have taken me away from all of this. Some prince will have come and taught me how to be happy. Now I know that that is not the case. There is not a prince in the world who can give me that, who can teach me that. There is not anyone that can stand between me and myself and lift me off of myself and remove me from myself. I am what I must bear always. And so there is no escape. No running. No hiding. No new beginnings.

Still. What hasn’t stopped is the premonition of a future more real than this present. This can’t be my real life. No. not this. This is not yet it. I am still waiting for myself to arrive. That future one is the one to whom good things may happen. That future one is the one who may be loved. That future one is the one people will respect and admire and adore. This – this current one is merely a stand-in. Don’t get too close! Soon this inadequate one will be replaced and that future one is the one in whom you may confide and to whom you may entrust your very own self.

A new alarm clock sits in my new bookshelf. This clock belongs to that long-awaited future one who will replace me.

I no longer feel so powerless. My days are all my own and my nights are too. I am not consumed by that same helpless rage. I have things to do and often I do them. The embarrassment is not entirely gone, however. This might be already clear to those who know me.

I still think of those moths fluttering around the light at the back door (the side door, really. The only door at which a guest would knock. The door). The steps were red (and if they weren’t, they should have been). Standing at the door, back to the house, the trees formed a green-black wall nearly opaque in the night. It smelled of green and mud and fallen apples and the dying smoke of the night’s trash and the lake out back giving more light than the moon which was invisible for the trees anyway.

I am the one I’ve been waiting for.

Even so. Come quickly!

The Divine Uterus Part I

In the middle of the journey of our life I came to
myself in a dark wood for the straight way was lost.
Luckily, I knew what that wood was,
so powerful and strong that the thought of it renews my wonder!
One less learned than I might have thought
that this place and its memory were so savage and
bitter that only death is perhaps more so.
I knew that I had encountered the door to my
uterus, strange and wonderful labyrinth of dark
and mysterious power.
I really cannot say how I entered there, so full of
sleep was I at the point when I abandoned the other way.
While I stumbled at the entrance, my eyes darkened by
the dark and red light that pulsed beyond the gate,
before me one offered herself to me who through
mystical silence seemed faint.
When I saw her in the great wilderness, I cried out and
begged her aid "whatever you may be, true woman or shade!"
She called herself - some utterance not translatable into
human tongue, the sound of which calmed my human fear.
"You must enter deep into your womb if you wish to leave
this dark and fecund place. There is no way out but in and
no way up but deeply down."
My heart sank at her words and I cast my eyes about within
the darkness that enfolded us.
She spoke, and then she moved, and I followed after her.

The day was departing and the damp and fertile air was
releasing its potency beyond the gates of the cervical city.
I alone prepared myself to undergo the journey which
memory will depict.
O muses, O high wit now help me!,
I sighed as I entered upon the deep, savage journey.

THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO THE CERVICAL CITY
THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO ETERNAL BECOMING
THROUGH ME THE WAY AMONG THE LOST AND FUTURE PEOPLE
ABANDON ALL HOPE, ALL FEAR, ALL THOUGHT, YOU WHO ENTER