WHAT I WANT


...after I deliver these twain into the cruel cruel world is this: a very large, very cold, very dry, very dirty, top shelf gin martini. Shaken, not stirred, and with the olives in it, please. Also, a sandwich made of room temperature prosciutto, good bread, and some very runny French cheese. Then, a plate of tuna sushi. Oh! a small cappuccino in a white ceramic bowl. And then, a glass of that Veuve Clicquot I've been saving.

ONE REASON

...why I might be impatient and tired all the damn time? I've gained 25 pounds of assorted baby-parts. People who haven't seen me in a few weeks gasp now when we meet again.

This is "normal weight gain" according to my doctor, as I was thin before and because I am carrying the twain. It's technically only 12.5 pounds per boy, which isn't a lot, actually. And every ounce of it is from densely nutritional, very healthful food stuffs. It ain't the weight of doughnuts, although I could totally go for an old-fashioned right about now. And as everyone tells me, "luckily" I am tall, so I have "room" to grow.

I am "lucky" also in that, unlike a lot of the women who conceive twins via the miracle of science, I got knocked up the old-fashioned, unintentional way. This is rare, in my demographic, apparently. Indeed, this week I saw another OB/GYN in the practice, and she looked me up and down and asked, "you did this all by yourself?" Friends and colleagues repeatedly tell me that I will be unable to travel and am going to end up on bed rest, &c. &c. (thanks, fuckers, for the votes of confidence!). Because everyone they know who ever had a multiple birth ended up with complications, and bed rest, and was induced at 30 weeks or something. But most of these cases are women in their late 30's who had fertility problems to begin with and conceived via IVF.

"Luckily" I am not infertile, nor am I of advanced maternal age. My body just said, "twins! Why the hell not!?!" So all my assorted lady parts are holding strong. There is no hint of gestational diabetes, or preeclampsia, or "incompetent" cervix. I'm technically quite healthy.

I am just crabby because I am so large already. And I despair a bit because, at 20 weeks, I am only halfway in, goddammit! Am I going to gain another 25 pounds? More? How the hell will I get in and out of my car? How many more tent-like garments do I have to buy? Will my enormous girth ever contract? Will I be returned to my ordinary weight, and thereby able to wear the clothes that most make me feel like myself?

More to the point, how am I going to hoist myself to and from the many campus buildings in which I teach?

Dear Student Who Failed the Same Paper Twice,

I know that thinking is hard and shit, but please. Follow the directions I write out for you. I am neither crazy, nor stupid, nor out-of-touch, nor unable to express myself clearly. I have been doing this for a long time. I have written out my directions as carefully as I can. We have also workshopped those directions several times already in class together.

I have given you the opportunity to revise the paper you failed because you didn't follow the directions. When you didn't follow the directions again, I asked you to come and see me. You brought in a totally off-the-wall "draft" of something unrelated to the assignment. Which you forced me to keep, as a token of "how hard" you were working.

I know that I am asking you to analyze. This may be new and difficult for you. Nonetheless, you still have to do it.

Whatever goofy b.s. you turn in, you still have to follow the directions. Which require you to think original thoughts.

I know that you are pretty, and young, and female, and that your tactic of speaking to your professor in a giggling whisper "to make sure you know that I am taking this seriously and stuff" (while revealing in your "talking" that you fundamentally do not understand the assignment(s) in any way) may have worked in the past. Likely with your male professors.

It is not working with me. Indeed, I am rather irritated with you for even trying.

Also, don't ask me multiple times when our final is. I have already told you that the university publishes that information on the academic calendar, that I don't know because I haven't checked myself, and that you can look it up yourself.

Lastly, please don't call me "Miss [First Name.]" It makes me want to throttle you.

In Pedagogical Love,
Your English Professor,
Dr. Lettriste

THE SLOG


I am sick. I think with a miserable cold that's been going around. Gack. As I can't take the heavy drugs to blast this out of my system, I am crabby and unhappy. Much coughing and nose-blowing has ensued.

I am reluctant to use my sick days, as what I've already accrued I'll be using for maternity leave. Also, my students are dropping like flies and I don't like to set a precedent of absentia.

Do I have a gajillion things to read and summarize for my little-encyclopedia-gig? Why yes I do. Am I lately obsessed with my oft-rejected article, and thus tinkering away at it in every free moment? Indeed.

Would I most like to collapse into bed and not get out for about a week? Yes.

Whatevs. Being pregnant means that you suck up a bunch of unpleasantness, all for the sake of your angelic unborn babies. It also means that people like to boss your shit around. They touch you, unbidden. They wonder aloud, and sharply, as to whether you "should be" taking asthma medication, given your "condition." (Uh, yeah, actually I SHOULD take my asthma meds. Because asthma can kill me, and what use would I be to my unborn babies if I were DEAD?)

Also, I am totally on the fence regarding a flu shot. My aggressively normal OB has said I MUST HAVE IT. But her practice doesn't have any to offer. Pregnant and formerly pregnant friends have refused to get shots because the shots have thimerosal, still, and people wig out about that shit and autism. (Do you WANT to give your unborn babies autism? You bad, bad mother, you!) And as I already have a cold, I am reluctant to jar my immune system again this week. And I can't find any thimerosal-free shots, given the shortage.

Anybody have any thoughts or suggestions? (And for reals, don't start freaking out on me about how I will die and my babies will die if I don't get the damn shot. Because it feels like the choices are "autism!!" or "death!!" Neither of which is tenable.)

In addition, lemme just tell you. Asking the medical professionals in your life as to what they think regarding the flu shot is not productive, neither. Those mofo's is crazy: they think about it exclusively from a self-serving perspective. They don't want to have the shot because they think they don't need it, because their immune systems are vigorous due to their work, because it's burdensome, because they avoid all things medical, because THEY are healthy. They somehow forget in these rationalizations that they are on the front lines of transmission and CAN GIVE THE FLU TO IMMUNO-COMPROMISED PEOPLE.

ON PLACE, WRITING, AND A DESIRE FOR PLEASURE



One of the great joys of fall are persimmons. These are from my neighbor's yard, a delicate little tree now laden with orange globes of sweetness.

And one of the great frustrations of Subtropical City is that, as the land of Ayn Rand ideology and extreme privatization, there is no real local foodshed any more. While we used to be the fig producing capital of America, and still do churn out hella grapefruit, ain't nowhere in town to actually BUY persimmons. Everything gets shipped in from elsewhere, even though our climate is so temperate we can grow gorgeous food 10 months of the year.

TF and I are trying out a community-supported agriculture thing that begins at the end of the month. It's kind of a pain in the ass, as he'll have to drive a half hour each week to go fetch the box. But I'm hoping it'll help us eat well and help me feel connected to this place more fully.

I have been obsessing with place of late, and the values that are attendant to place, and the sense of disorientation that I am lately feeling. This past weekend I went away to visit Professor Poet and his wife and new baby, in their rural SLAC hamlet far from here. We went apple picking, and made pie, and scuffed through crimson leaves. And he and I nailed down this conference paper we're writing. And talked a lot about writing, and our jobs, and writing.

He and I finished our dissertations within six months of each other. He promptly got his plum SLAC job, churned out two books, published the first, and just landed an agent for commercially publishing his second. He writes about kinda sexy, important, very American topics, like slavery and justice and reconciliation. He has a lovely wife who no longer works but attends to their adorable baby and to him. And he works very, very hard. He is ... disciplined. He's also lucky as shit, what with his 2/2 load and sabbaticals.

I did not obtain a plum SLAC job my first year out. In fact, I wrote my dissertation in a white heat, finished it on a Friday, and started a pretty abysmal 4/4 visiting gig the Tuesday after. And I rallied, and worked 12 hour days, and went back on the market, and found a similarly structured job in Subtropical City, with the wonderful benefits of a minimal commute, a functioning institution, great colleagues, and the possibility of tenure.

Somewhat as a consequence, I have yet to publish the cornerstone chapter of my "book," and when I think about writing, all I feel is a kind of torpid exhaustion. When I get done grading 60 crappy close reading papers, I kinda want a martini and a half hour of TV before I collapse.

And I am torn in about thirteen different directions of identity, none of which I can inhabit as gracefully as I'd like. I am growing some babies, and teaching like mad, and serving on myriad committees, and conferencing, and sending out articles, and the writing seems to happen in a little slot shoved off somewhere else, somewhere invisible.

There's certainly writing to be done, in the edges and weekend days and early mornings I can make myself do it. But I don't know for whom I am writing. It's no longer My Two Dads. I don't know if it's for medievalists, necessarily, because I haven't been getting the best reception of late amongst those peeps. It's certainly not for my current job, which doesn't require a book. Nonetheless, I am utterly unwilling to give it up and start something anew.

The way the writing languishes makes me terribly sad. My usual method of working through this has been to but my shoulder to the wheel and get'r done. Even if I am miserable and panicked and bewildered. I was all those things while dissertating, and yet I also made myself join writing groups and go to analysis and find writer friends (like Professor Poet) and join dissertation support groups. And kick out my unsupportive BF of many years and still finish the project in 18 months.

I did it all. But it wasn't pleasant. And I feel like I've been experiencing a longlasting hangover from the experience. I wrote that fucker, and it was pretty good. And when I was in the thick of it, I loved it. But I also hated how lonely and isolated I felt. As a whole, the thing's a mess. And I associate the writing of it with a great deal of anxiety and pain.

So I don't know how to approach my critical writing now in a way that feels pleasurable and productive.* I never figured out how to make it feel generative. Or social. It happened seemingly at the expense of other things, it was slow, it was messy, it was boring, and it consumed me entirely. It didn't make sense to anybody outside of my own small circle, and it certainly didn't make sense to my then BF, my family, my non-academic friends.

But writing must be meaningful. I am trying to figure out how to make that happen, how to make meaning out of something that still feels so strange and isolated. I don't know how to make sweet what has been so galling, so bitter, so wonderful, so very frustrating.

I don't know how to make the private activity of writing more visible. More necessary. More of this place that I now live in, this life I now inhabit. More mine.



* Oddly, or perhaps fittingly, making poems is consistently pleasurable and productive. I quite easily lose myself in it. Critical writing requires me to nail my ass to the chair, however, and makes me feel considerable panic.

CONSUMERISM REDUX


TF's women took me to Babies R Us this past weekend in order to register for a baby shower. I almost had a nervous breakdown.

What did it?

The rigid gender policing of every last good, from toys to clothes to what kind of bassinet the kid should sleep in. And his sisters demanded that I not buy anything, ANYTHING!, pink, for fear of "confusing" the two boy babies I seem to be having.

Because yeah, that's the news from the most recent sonogram. Two sets of what is euphemistically labeled "boy parts."

In the store, I walked down a toy aisle resplendent with trucks, and muttered, "the rest of my life is going to be competing Tonka trucks." And then I alighted upon a sweet unicorn playset. "I hope they can play with something like this too," I said. At which point my two (really rather dear) future sisters-in-law swooped in declaring how lucky I was that there weren't any sisters, because the toys of sisters can be "confusing." I was perplexed. I held aloft the unicorn playset. "But this is cool, no?" I whimpered. "NO!" they declared. "This will be CONFUSING."

Who is actually going to be "confused" by the sight of two babies playing with a representation of a unicorn, I don't know. I doubt it will be me. I doubt also it will be the babies.

And then we hit the aisle of strictly gendered clothing. For infants. I wanted to say, "did y'all know that at the turn of the 20th c. it was de rigeur to put boys AND girls in little frilly dresses for the first five years or so of life? Isn't that fascinating?" But I did not.

I reminded myself instead that the sister who had spearheaded the whole excursion is a very prominent plastic surgeon. She puts tits in people all day. Of course she is going to be down with any and everything "gender appropriate." Indeed, she gets to determine what "gender appropriate" might be and then make it so, via the wonders of silicone and Botox.

I allowed her to buy some extremely adorable "boy" onesies. With trucks on them. In blue.

When I returned home to TF, and for the last several days, I have been a bit teary about the whole experience. I think because such rampant consumerism goes against my religious values. And also, such rigid gender policing also goes against my religious values.

My "fucking Quakers" refrain of the last post might indicate a certain ... irritation with my people, I realize. But at the end of the day, they are still my people, and I did learn some rather decent radical values from them and from our larger religious culture.

For instance: God loves the whole world. No exceptions. Men and women should be treated the same, and men don't get to boss everybody just because they have bigger voices. Violence is an abomination. Stuff doesn't matter. Toys are simply toys. What you wear and what you play with and how you look doesn't matter at all to God. Or to your mother and her family.

And: whatever you believe in you get to decide for yourself. What matters is that you have integrity and honesty.

Quakerism is an invisible set of values, easily swept away by other, more powerful forces. Like capitalism. And a desire to fit in. But they seem to especially matter now that I am foreseeing a future replete with baseball bats and dinosaurs and vrooming trucks. And potential violence. TF doesn't want his sons to get beat up for being weird pacifists. I don't either. But I do want to be able to offer nonviolence as an option of considerable integrity. Especially here, where concealed weapons are lawfully carried and the state murders hundreds of people a year.

After much debating, wherein I railed against the violence that boy children must contend with and my sense that I and my values were going to be totally overshadowed by rampant consumerism and the inculcation of "proper" manliness and whether there was a difference between brutality and self-defense and if so what did nonviolence actually mean, TF and I came to a decision.

He said, "you got their souls. I got their backs. Deal?"

Deal.

INSANE RAIN


Within ten minutes, the weather has gone from sticky ick in the mid-80's, to lashing wind and rain in the mid-60's.

The dog is convinced that God is telling him he's been a bad dog.

Good times along the Gulf of Mexico!