The Rebel Letter

2009-11-05T10:44:00.003-05:00

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.

2009-10-30T10:50:00.004-04:00

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?

2009-10-27T22:38:00.004-04:00

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

2009-10-26T11:27:00.003-04:00

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.

2009-10-21T10:21:00.004-04:00

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.

2009-10-13T10:05:00.004-04:00

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.

2009-10-09T11:51:00.002-04:00

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!

2009-10-06T10:12:00.004-04:00

THE KNEE BONE IS CONNECTED TO THE HIP BONE IS CONNECTED TO THE ...

So my dad had another knee replacement a few weeks ago. He's now got two fake knees and one fake hip. Go arthritis! I can't wait to grow older, myself, and face similar agonies. Anyway, he's in rehab for weeks, to get himself moving again. Since the whole deal is paid for by Medicare (and tell me, again, why we don't want a public option in this healthcare debate? Because old folks get everything covered) and since my mother gets altogether too anxious to advise his physical therapy, he's camped out at the old folks' home up the road.

Recovery and rehab means lots of phone calls from your concerned children. And so my dad has been needling me as to "what the plans are for Thanksgiving." TF and I had mentioned that it'd probably be a good idea to go to the Justice of the Peace that holiday weekend, and get ourselves officially hitched, as his sister and her family were going to be in town. So I invited my family to attend. I proposed a long visit, the better to accommodate all the moving parts therein. TF's sister, with her massive McMansion, wanted to host the holiday meal and likely throw us a celebratory "yay babies!" party too, and all seemed well. She also offered to host my parents, if need be.

His whole family was coming--two sisters, five grandchildren, husbands, grandparents, cousins, &c. You can guarantee that everybody'd "get a plate." And they were asking my family to participate too. That's kind of the entire "plan." Hospitality and eating too much and maybe a trip to some baby-crap store so that we could buy a crib and some car seats.

My father acts as if I am withholding information from him as to "the plan." I think my parents are in love with "plans," even if they never stick to them or plan very much out themselves. They have to be in charge of "the plan" to provide themselves the illusion of control. I tell him that we aren't keeping secrets, it's rather not that big a deal and they should just come and we'd all get to know each other better. ("The plan!" has been my mother's mantra as well. Given the BABIES, you see, we need to have "a plan" collectively as to who is going to do what. But she doesn't want to actually take charge. Really it means that she wants me to set up a Meeting with a Concern for Business. It'd be an awkward formal group consisting of me, TF, his family and mine, where someone else, i.e., ME, has to do the conversational work, and where she gets to sit and judge in silence the efficacy of whether "the plan" is feasible, and then throw a spanner in the works if she's unhappy. And then the whole group will have to come to consensus. Never mind the fact that TF's family wouldn't understand what the hell is going on or why we're doing it this way when it'd be so much simpler to just hang out and talk it through. Fucking Quakers.)

Then I realize that the real deal is that my mother doesn't want to come for a long visit, because according to my father, "she just cannot handle it ANYMORE." (Clearly, she is the victim, here, who must be protected from my evil machinations. She plays no role in any of our conflicts. And conflict is just extremely damaging, you see, and always the fault of the person who points out the injustice or the error. Fucking Quakers again.)

My father says that, as long as I am ACTUALLY having a wedding, they'll come for 36 hours. That's it. I realize then that this is about a ... wedding, a "ceremony." Which we have pointedly said we are NOT really having, at this point. We're going together to City Hall and calling it a day. The anxiety seems to be all about me and my transformation from "their" daughter into "some strange dude's wife." Never mind the fact that I am not changing my name, there are no rings, there will be no white dress, and oh yeah, we're a Quaker family of historical feminists and stuff.

We want to have a big ceremony in about a year, when everything's calmed down and we can focus on it, I explain. (Actually, TF wants this. I'm happy with the JoP.) Now, we're just going to City Hall. The point of this weekend was just to spend time together and get to know each other. (What I wanted to say was, "what? You don't like fried chicken? You don't like red velvet cake? You don't like a free place to stay and lots of funny children running around?")

Then my mother calls. Again, you see, I need to realize how expensive this trip is going to be. Tickets alone are $900. This whole trip is going to cost thousands, and then there will be coming to meet the babies, which will cost thousands again. And she is VERY CAREFUL with her money (i.e., a tightfisted tightwad who'll tithe to charities but will bill her children for minor shared expenses.) I look on Priceline. "Ma, roundtrip tickets from Midwestern City to Subtropical City are $200. What's the problem?"

And so yesterday, after weeks of agonizing and "planning," she tells me that she bought tickets and they will come for 72 hours. NOT for the holiday, which will be TOO much, and TOO difficult for my father and his limited mobility. But they'll be there for most of the weekend, and for Monday. And they want to take everyone out to dinner after the "ceremony" on Monday.

Fucking Quakers.

2009-10-02T10:53:00.002-04:00

OFF! PLEASE.

That's what I command the dog when he's taking up too much of the couch. But it's also what I've felt this week about the merry-go-round bullshit that can consume a semester.

Like the student evaluation I recently read, which commented on how the student "knew that the critical focus of the class was on gender and everything, but I wish that we had done more with OTHER points of view like historicism and new criticism." (Aforesaid student neglected to mention that s/he learned such terms as "historicism" and "new criticism" because I TAUGHT THEM and required students to write papers using those critical modes. I sigh.)

And like the student who turned in a "summary" of Aristotle's Poetics that was actually a summary of an obscure 14th c. poem on our syllabus. But who included a sweet note about how "adorable" I look with my emerging bump, and how she has 4 children of her own.

Or the weird laughter in my classes about the Wife of Bath's Tale and its central knot of rape.

Stranger still is the awkwardness in my poetry seminar about race. Race certainly figures in the writing classes I teach, mainly in the form of the authors we read. And we sure as shit discuss performativity and identity in those classes, too, which largely consist of brown and black students. I don't do as much with race in my surveys, mainly because everybody we read is an old white dude and there ain't much I can do about history. So I feel a bit rusty with the overt discussions of race and literature that are popping up in my poetry seminar.

STCU is very urban, of course. And Subtropical City has huge black and Asian and Latin communities. All of whom are strongly represented in my classes. Visually, my students LOOK like all the students I ever taught "up north." But the classroom dynamics of race, here, are totally different.

The poetry seminar is a genre course for majors and we cover the whole gamut of the poetic tradition. Lately, we've come to read poems by black folks like Phyllis Wheatley (who I adore) and anonymous spirituals, etc. I have taught these texts before, in liberal blue states, and they usually elicit all kinds of lively chatter, from students of the brown, black and white persuasion. And in these past classes, it's the black students who do have the very most to say about Wheatley--they are angry with her, and admire her, and they want to talk about it. And yet we have ALL end up talking fruitfully about the concept of "double-speak" in African-American lit.

This current poetry class is evenly split between black, white and brown. But nobody will talk about Wheatley. And when they do, the black students seem to feel the need to represent in some way. They'll talk awkwardly about "personal experience." Or they'll provide some factual information about the spirituals we've read. But they won't participate further. Some have popped out to go to the bathroom, thus absenting themselves completely from the conversation. The white students don't want to participate much either, beyond giving glib generalities. So then I end up giving a mini-lecture about historical context and form or something.

Perhaps the issue at hand is that in my other classes, I situate our discussion around the central idea of "voice" and "authority," which is to say, I ask of the texts we read: "who is speaking, and how did he get the right to speak?" Embedded in this question is the real truth: "who is being silenced, here?" I haven't done that in the poetry class, in part because so much of our critical work has centered around prosody and scansion. And maybe I should, and more forcefully, because it is a question that lies at the very heart of what poetry is and how it works.

But I also wonder if the issue is a Southern one, if here in STC, "race" is frequently understood to be the exclusive purview of black people. And so necessarily, black folks don't want to represent because it's mad boring and tedious, and white folks don't want to step on toes so they just shut up, and the brown folks don't know what the hell is going on with this crazy country anyway. And there I am, the white lady medievalist in goofy glasses at the front of the room who's likely being "rude" by even demanding discussion of this poem in the first place.

2009-09-27T14:49:00.003-04:00

UPTICK

The marvelous uptick of energy, with added bonus joy of reduced nausea, seems to have visited me. Finally. Oddly, I have gone from ravenous starving hunger to a kind of 'meh' about food. I eat it, but I'm not, like, thrilled. This is not my usual way. As TF has joked, I'd make a really good fireman. (Me: "Because I am so brave?" He: "Because your favorite thing to do is think about what's for dinner.")

The ravenous eating, coupled with extreme fatigue and lack of exercise, has meant that I have gained myself a new ass! As well as a burgeoning belly and tits the likes of which I ain't never seen. I've gained 18 pounds. Only 22 more to go!

I also an growing increasingly bummed when I consider how my light will be spent in a birth plan. The twin thing means I am technically "high risk," so no groovy birthing center with a whirlpool and soft music for me. Nope, I gotta deliver these twain in the operating room. Which of course raises the likelihood of all kinds of other interventions I'd rather avoid. TF, being a paramedic who also happens to be the greatgrandson, grandson and sibling of doctors, wants to pretty much defer to the authority of our OB/GYN, "if anything goes wrong." I am trying to focus not on what might go wrong, but on what I really want, and the disconnect between the groovy hippie doula thing I'd love to have, and the reality of what I am likely going to get is making me sad. And oddly, making me particularly sad about the conflict I am having with my mother.

At any rate, I have been cleaning, packing, cleaning, unpacking, teaching, and grading really bad close reading papers. All y'all have been real helpful with the pedagogy advising. It helps a lot to reconsider the fact that my students simply, truly, fundamentally, don't know how to do it. So there are going to be awkward and ugly attempts at mastery.

Students generally know how to have an "opinion," and therefore have lots of practice with the usual dumb research paper featuring the presentation of that "opinion" (frequently on some topical issue like "is euthanasia OK?" that makes you want to kill yourself), a bit of hackwork internet research that generally discusses aforesaid issue, two sides of a tired debate about it, and then a little bow at the bottom that's supposed to be a conclusion.

But how the hell does anyone have an "opinion" about difficult literature upon first reading? What is the bloody purpose of having an "opinion" about representational fiction? Especially when such an opinion just makes you look like an illiterate asshole? I sigh, with my classes, explaining that my assignment prevents untoward embarrassment, because I am saving them from having an "opinion" they know nothing about.

Analysis of ideas and literary devices strips away their default gesture of having some crap "opinion." This is hard to get, and hard to do, and flies in the face of typical special-snowflake culture in which their "opinion" has long been valued. Necessarily then, they grapple and struggle and get cranky. And write papers about whether or not they "approve" of the romantic relationships of 800 make believe characters.

Also, I have renewed my vigorous hate for the term "relatable." As in, "Chaucer makes the Wife of Bath really relatable." I have taken to scrawling in the margins: "WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?" Recognition, empathy, a flash of understanding I totally get and are really worth writing about. "Relatable" is simply ridiculous, and pointless, and again, a kind of term borrowed from the valorization of everyone's "opinion." You can have opinions about stupid shit all day long. But please, that is not analysis, so don't write your papers on them.

I may banish "relatable" and "opinion" from our literary colloquy altogether.

2009-09-21T10:38:00.003-04:00

THE FILTH OF MOVING, WITH PEDAGOGY ANGST THROWN IN

Why is it so dirty, and I mean really just wads of cobwebs and dog hair in clots and dark grey scuttering dust bunnies and half-chewed dog toys shoved under the couch, to move?

Now, having fully transferred crap to TF's and my flat, I am still left with the detritus of my own domesticity to clean up before my colleague takes over my lease and moves on in to what is now formerly my lil' ole duplex of happiness. I am simply a bad housewife, and so have neglected cleaning my old place AND my new place, over the past month. So that's probably why it's filthed.

Muscular dudes, both of the paramedic and the academic variety, came to help us haul crap to his house this past weekend. TF despaired at the cobwebs he discovered, slapping at them with a broom and declaiming that I am "growing colonies of spiders! Colonies!" (He abhors bugs. Especially spiders. For a burly guy, the bug-fear is kind of ... sweet.)

All of my broken bits and bobs and stained whatevers were on full cosmic view. And I survived. There is nothing so intimate as having friends help you move. Honestly.

TF and I are now shoehorning all of our crap into his place. I don't know how it'll all work, but at least we have a GINORMOUS television and a massive, leather man couch from which to watch it.

His/our kitchen has the absolute worst design of any recent remodel I have ever seen. None of the cabinets are full size. They are all half size. The cabinets that ARE wide enough to hold something like, oh, a plate? 6.5 feet from the ground. It's a good thing we're tall enough to reach. (Bad kitchen design is loathsome, and I am particularly annoyed by it after 10 years of living in mouse-infested former tenements all over NYC, where "kitchen" is a kind of cruel joke.)

We're working on it. And the dog is happy to sleep on the floor next to my side of the bed.

Pictures soon to come.

In the midst of all this, do I have a gazillion bad close-reading papers to grade? Why yes. And doing so is taking YEARS off of my life and making me rethink my pedagogy and my own critical practice.

To wit: why teach this method that students struggle with so massively? Why do students have such persistent difficulty figuring out "what I want" when I write out explicitly my expectations and we discuss it ad nauseum? Why do students simply NOT READ THE DIRECTIONS? Is it their problem exclusively? No. Because what's up with my own inability to develop an assignment that teaches how to do it successfully and in one try? Should I jettison my commitment to the poetics of close-reading, and what that sort of careful analysis can teach students about writing AND reading? Maybe. Because they produce some shitty stuff, and it's freaking killing me to read the same badness over and over: the crappy summaries of a narrative, the blind misreadings, the attempt to congratulate writers like Marie de France for being "politically correct" and "ahead of her time," the absolute lack of coherent theses, the moral judgment of make believe stories that feature sex. I was better at tolerating this and shepherding it towards better drafts and revisions when I only taught 2 or three courses per semester. The 4/4 sucks the joy and patience right outta my pedagogy. It makes me want to give the simplest and most focused assignments possible, the ones that don't even utilize process, but are entirely directive. Or maybe just give multiple choice tests or something.

This is anathema, generally, to my practice. But I am tired, and I am bored with reading the same derivatively crap 70 papers at a time. If it's going to be crap, then let's just do content entirely and I'll use the damn Scantron.

2009-09-18T12:31:00.004-04:00

CHORTLES

Last week I was at a mandatory meeting, sponsored by the dean, for professors in my "college." It was mad boring, as such things are, and it was raining, and there weren't enough chairs, and honestly, this pathetically hormonal and very hungry pregnant lady almost cried when it was discovered that the "free lunch" consisted of possibly-listeria-infected cold cuts. (All meats for pregnant ladies must be cooked to 160 degrees, in order to kill the terrifyingly bad listeria bacterium. Sigh.) Every day I cart along my plethora of food, but that day I had neglected to do so, on account of anticipating being fed. Alas.

Anyway, part of the meeting was devoted to library and librarian-y stuff. I made an observation that chapped my feminist and historicist hide:

The head librarian was showing us a database of historical pamphlets and newspaper articles. The earliest citations dated to the 17th century, and they were all high resolution PDF's, so the whole presentation was fascinating. The database had a tricky search method, and so she used a sample keyword search. "Women" and "education" were her two choices, and so up popped a tasty article featuring 19th century anti-feminism. You know! Like how stupid women are and what a waste of time it is to educate them, especially if their mothers send them to be educated so that those mothers can have free time with which to spend on purchasing fripperies! And it isn't like they can VOTE or anything, so why bother! The librarian, of the female persuasion herself, made a wry joke about the content of the article.

My understanding of this joke was the usual, "ha ha, yep, check out how women were treated BACK THEN. Like the situation these days is so phenomenally different." So I didn't laugh. Nor did any of the other women in the room. Coming face to face with misogyny, even of the historical variety, is always a bit chilling.

But get this: the men present (and they were primarily older white dudes) laughed, hard. As if to effect a "thank god THOSE days are over" attitude. Because we all know that times have CHANGED, right? Especially, I think, if you teach in the humanities and social sciences, you'd know how drastically different it is NOW for laydeez and black folks and stuff, and thank god. And damn but you'd get in trouble if you even wanted to TALK ABOUT this article with your wife or something. Har har har.

2009-09-14T18:24:00.002-04:00

REALLY?

Favorite Colleague today told me that I am expressly prohibited from submitting to any of the K'zoo CFP's. Indeed, I am prohibited from doing anything scholarly for the next year.

"But I love going to K'zoo, and it's important to stay abreast of what's going on in the field! I gotta stay relevant, and visible!" I protest.

No, she declared. My job was to take care of my babies, and not piss off my partner by demanding that they and he follow me to academic conferences in the middle of nowhere. Taking care of babies is difficult and serious work, she said. It is such difficult work that a person can't do both the scholarship and the mothering, she opined, because both are just so tough. Indeed, that's why she hasn't had babies herself.

(I wonder if she hasn't done it herself because she hasn't had the opportunity? Or because she really likes traveling to exotic lands and working herself to the damn bone? Or maybe also because she has huge Marxist antipathies to such boring and humdrum human activities?)

I continued to protest. "Attending this conference and participating in it is obligatory, career-wise. Everybody in my field goes. Plus I'll probably be going a bit crazy with all the maternal hoo-ha, by the time K'zoo rolls around. It'll be good to be around my people and talk shop."

And then I said, "I'm going to need this conference. Plus, I'm really scared I'm going to lose my scholarly chops. I can't disappear from the field."

Well, you just might, she declaimed. You might have to leave the profession, because you can't do this job and be a good mother.

(We know someone at STCU who is technically, a bad mother, having chosen the writing and research over the child. Favorite Colleague said, you don't want to be like her, do you?)

Readers, I am a bit appalled. And also rather bummed.

I will also point out that Favorite Colleague is NOT someone who can multitask, in the least. She does one thing at a time. She goes to one summer conference per year. Her work is very much her life. She carted a wheelie suitcase of papers and books with her when we went to Iona this summer, in case she needed to read something scholarly. She makes friends easily, but has had a hard time negotiating the Southern culture here in ST City.

I am someone who always has ten balls in the air. I go to lots of conferences. I do the poetry and the scholarship thing, simultaneously. I try deeply to take pleasure in small things. I dive into social activities, like dating. I make dog-friends and figure out where the Quaker Meeting is and then I go.

Perhaps we are just differently abled, and differently focused, here? That's likely being overly generous.

Favorite Colleague's been my go-to person for scholarship encouragement and support. She reads my crappy drafts. She urges me to continue when I get rejected. I was assuming she'd be similarly inclined now, and would nudge me forward. Because babies or no babies, I still have a brain, and I still need this job, and I have worked too damn hard to just walk away from being a professor. Even if that means I work a 4/4 at a public, open admissions school in the South. With twins. Whatevs. It's a damn sight better than being an adjunct and going hungry.

I need optimism, and a can-do spirit, and good humor, and nudging forward. Because there ain't anywhere to go but ahead.

I'm so done with avowed feminists who have no children who tell me I can't be a good mother and a good scholar. I am also done with rich SAHM's of singletons who "worry" about how I'm "going to do it all, and without help." I am done with my anxious mother demanding I do shit for HER while I am trying to take care of myself and my pregnancy.

From henceforward, if you ain't offering concrete encouragement and support, fuck off. If you ain't offering me once-a-week childcare so that I can go to the library and get work done, fuck off. If you can't come and visit me and literally help me, fuck off. If you can only criticize and worry FOR ME, fuck off. Really.

2009-09-12T20:01:00.005-04:00

HACK HACK

That's the sound of me, coughing, due to dust-related allergy and asthma issues.

Because I am in the throes of moving in with TF. This requires considerable energy and effort I simply do not possess, being a pregnant lady now. I keep hearing about the wondrous uptick in energy and clarity that arrives, along with the merciful reduction in nausea, around week 13-14. Well, I'm at 14, and things are still the major suck.

Anyway, I am packing and cleaning and hauling and dusting and thanking the sweet baby Jesus that I moved a year ago. No, really. It meant I got rid of tons of crap, and am still relatively organized enough to know where things are. TF? He's been in this condo a decade, solo, and inertia has settled in. Does a man really need 6 old computer keyboards? How about two separate X-boxes? And don't let me even start on the World of Warcraft accoutrements. It's enough to drive Quaker medievalist batty. Simplicity! It helps, lots, in all aspects of the life! And WoW is retarded, I just have to say it, the game is absolutely a kind of medievalist's bad dream of what video games would be like if every avatar were called "Skyr" or "Gwenyvyre" or something. The armor! The motherfucking dragons flapping about needing to be killed! The 'special powers!' The elves and magical elvish priests and shit! I know TF adores it fully and deeply. I am trying to be cool with it.

We have borrowed a truck, and taken piles of the abovementioned crap to the thrift store. And then further piles of more precious crap were taken to the storage unit.

My parents are laying on the heavy guilt. Why won't TF and I come for a visit? We need to. It's imperative. It would be RESPONSIBLE. They simply can't afford to come here THREE TIMES in six months (once at T-giving, once when babies arrive, and once for this visit.) Because, you see, they can't dip into savings. And I earn more than my mother does. (At least they HAVE savings. I don't. And my mother earns so little because she doesn't charge enough for her labor. I earn what I earn because the state determines my salary.) My mother has even started laying the pressure on TF, writing him notes, &c., wanting to know whether he could come to see them. Our tactic? We say, "we'd love to, and thank you, but really, our priorities now are on saving money. We look forward to seeing you at Thanksgiving, though!" It's tiresome, and continues to make me sad. They very much want to control things, and want to exert their judgment over me, and to vet TF.

In other news, I am having anxiety dreams about losing my research mojo. Because my brain won't work, and I have shit to do and limited time in which to do it. And because I have realized that my identity is quite invested in my brain, its sharpness, its heft, its range. I have a dull-edge instrument right now and it makes me feel like ... an animal. Being pregnant in general, I have realized, makes one feel like an animal.

2009-09-08T10:18:00.003-04:00

IS SUMMER 'OVER'?

What is fall? What are years? I no longer know.

A strange fact about my new climate is that the heat of late July and August (and into September) is so intense that everything withers up and dies. You don't even desire to be outside at all. So that the time you most associate with local bounty and outdoor recreation -- corn! tomatoes! peaches! lake-swimming! -- is actually a time when you can't get or do a damn thing. I've signed up for a CSA box and they ain't even starting delivery until October 15th.

But, this climate also means that by September, when the weather grows just a bit more temperate, you can start planting again. The garden stores are thus thick with tomato seedlings, and I have blooms and tiny fruit on my pepper plants. It will go this way until, well, late January. And then everything will REALLY get going and seedlings will be stuck into the ground with fervor. Our 'winter' is the end of summer, oddly enough.

I cannot describe how weird this feels to me. NYC was by far the most temperate place I had ever lived. I have far more experience with bitter, howling, "Little House on the Prairie" style winters. Ones where the skies could dump 18 inches of snow upon you and then the temperature would drop to -40 F. And we would STILL HAVE TO GO TO SCHOOL. Indeed, the phenomenon of "snow days" has long been alien to me. I had a single 'snow day,' in 13 years of snow-bound public education. And it was because it got so cold (-70 F with the wind chill) that it was assumed students might die en route.

Anyway, my plants, as usual, are going to be a hassle to move, when I finally move in with TF at the end of this month. I have a yard. He does not; he has instead a little balcony. He has also a second bedroom and equity, as he owns his place. I just rent.

The stuff's all in pots, because I am a consummate urban gardener, but I have two massive tubs -- one with a flourishing rosemary plant, another with Cuban oregano and the aforementioned peppers -- that will need strategic placing on the balcony so as not to block exits and cause a fire hazard.

What's coming:

A Meyer lemon tree with three somewhat pathetic fruits upon it

A Confederate jasmine that TF almost killed but that I have brought back to life

A pot of Greek oregano and rue (and the rue, which is an ancient anti-flea remedy, is itself infested with some insect and will likely have to be sacrificed. The irony!)

A desert rose that blooms pink in late spring

A lot of amaryllis (red, white and red striped, and pink) stuck into a pretty window box

A big pot of sage

And a bunch of houseplants

And of course the rosemary and Cuban oregano

All told, a lot to wrangle.

Then again, I have a clear memory of moving out of the apartment where I'd spent the first 2.5 years of my life, and into the house where I grew up. My father rented a SEPARATE TRUCK just for the plants. I come by it honestly.

2009-09-04T12:02:00.002-04:00

NOT MUCH, YOU?

A question: why is it that students feel, if they knock upon your (closed) office door and you do not answer fast enough, that they have the right to start turning the handle? This skeeves me out to no end. Especially if I am lying on the floor in the dark, experiencing a moment of extreme nausea.

Another question: what to say to students who inquire as to whether I am "expecting"? I have replied with a curt "yes," and then moved quickly onto whatever the subject is at hand. I'd like to say, "is that any of your business?" And: "don't you know that you ARE NOT supposed to ask that question, ever, for fear of insulting a woman?" (As TF says, from his paramedic days, "even if you see the infant's head CROWNING, you have to nonchalantly say, 'ma'am, is there a possibility that you might be pregnant?'")

A further inquiry: why the motherfucking hell do bras and maternity clothes have to cost so damn much? It appalls me to spend $60 on a decent bra that will hopefully prevent the dreaded gravitational sag, when I am likely only going to wear it for less than a year. Also, I am a bit freaked at the increase in my size. I am an ordinarily flat-chested broad, and quite happily so, and now, suddenly, I have bazooms I don't know what to do with.

As well: what to do with a growing sense of antipathy I am feeling towards dear Colleague who had been my traveling companion this past summer. She is not happy here in Subtropical City, and complains bitterly and with a kind of binaristic certainty as to how and why our town just sucks. It's true that this place has a high rate of violent crime. It's also true that it is neither a bicycle nor a pedestrian friendly city. But hell, we live here. Indeed, I am set to give birth here. It isn't a completely miserable place. Housing is cheap, winters are fantastic, and the cultural mixture is at once terrifying and rather fascinating. It ain't NYC, true. But it is a major metropolitan center.

I think that part of what's up is that I am settling in here, and that dear Colleague wants me on her New Yorker side. She has made many a difficult choice and spent a good chunk of life in NYC fighting the good and impoverished fight. She still maintains an apartment and a relationship there, and is constantly traveling back and forth. She refuses to own a car here, too and thus rides her bike everywhere. And has started to niggle me as to why I don't also just ride my bike to work (as I did last year.) When I explained that a.) I was exhausted and pukey and simply couldn't bring myself to riding in the 90 degree heat, and then moreover, b.) that TF feels very worried and uncomfortable about me biking on busy roads when I am pregnant, she scoffed. "You can't let a MAN run your life, you know!" she said. This struck me as altogether NOT COOL. Especially since she's had some major bike accidents, one involving a broken elbow, in the last two years.

And lastly: why does my brain feel like it is encased in a hood of vague, foggy dumbness? The teaching helps sharpen the thinking. But generally, I feel like a Monet painting or something. I CARE about this lack of focus and am alarmed by it, feeling my scholarship and writing muscles rapidly turning to flab, but I also have very little energy to do much about it. For someone who is paid to think, this alarms me.

2009-08-27T17:57:00.004-04:00

THE WRITING'S ON THE WALL

This semester I am teaching in the building associated with the business arm of STCU. The building is brand spanking new, and smells of paint and dry erase markers, and has lots of fish-bowl-y windows and stuff.

I teach my literature survey there.

There is a sign in the hallway commemorating the opening of this building and the agenda of the business school.

Wanna know what that agenda is?

To provide "reality-based" education.

The poet in me wants to honestly know: what IS that, exactly?

2009-08-22T19:18:00.003-04:00

ONE TOO MANY PRE-SEMESTER MEETINGS, IN THE STYLE OF CHRISTOPHER SMART. Or, JUNIOR FACULTY REDUX

A shout out to my peeps in the rhet./comp. trenches!

For lo! A rubric works only when it is clear.
For also it works only when all present agree on what it is measuring.
For I shall consider the fact that norming grammar is stoopid.
And not really so much of a good marker of content.
For I shall consider as well the truism that seriously, form and content cannot be fully separated.
For I shall urge my colleagues to stop "sharing personal stories" in large meetings.
For also I shall consider my own policy of shutting the fuck up.
For lo! Senior faculty shirk their duties and do not attend Saturday morning "non-optional" meetings.
For this is their prerogative.
For also norming is ridiculous if no one knows what the norm is.
For I shall again consider how bad my compensatory lunch was.
For I shall not be cranky or bitter.
For I offered free labor to my university.
For I used a rubric and normed student papers without knowing what the hell I was doing.
For lo! I normed with aplomb.
For I did not complain.
For I ate the free donuts.
For I have a new office.
For it has a window.
For my syllabi are finished.
For if I complain too much I will be placed on the composition committee.
Or upon the assessment committee.
And then shall desire to claw mine own eyes out.

2009-08-17T11:08:00.003-04:00

PROGRESS REPORT

I did not write a book this summer. I thought, erroneously, that I could. But I was wrong. I've been feeling a bit panicky about all that, but then I decided it would be a better use of obsessing if I actually charted what I DID do this summer.

Thus:

I revised and submitted an article.

That article got soundly rejected.

I went to Kalamazoo.

I spoke to a publisher, and bit off more than I could chew.

I went to NYC and caught up with my peeps, and went to TF's sister's surprise party.

I hauled ass and helped host my brother's shower at my parents' house in Midwestern City.

I taught a condensed writing course.

I did a lot of book-related research, reading, and thinking.

I attended my brother's wedding and did a lot of filial labor.

I got pregnant.

I wrote a conference paper from scratch, and went to Leeds and delivered it.

I realized that aforesaid conference paper would likely complicate my book project, and in a good way.

I figured out a research plan, went to the UK, and conducted manuscript studies for the first time.

I looked at some ten manuscripts and transcribed the relative chunks.

I did a lot of thinking about how these manuscript chunks are going to complicate my book project, and also in a good way.

I found out I was pregnant while traveling abroad.

I therefore was vomitously sick on a variety of foreign trains, buses, ferries, trucks and planes.

I found out I was pregnant with twins.

I struggled with TF about what we were going to do, and for a while there it was pretty touch and go.

I agreed to marry him.

I told my family this news and they acted like narcissistic assholes. And I fruitlessly fought with them.

TF and I decided we should (duh!) live together, and so I began the process of moving out of my (beloved) apartment and into his.

I also moved out of my old office and into a new one.

I proposed a study-abroad course, and developed a bitchin' and rather complex little syllabus for it.

I realized I had to relinquish that course, on account of soon having TWO babies.

I developed a new syllabus for a poetry genre course.

I started working on a encyclopedia-esque gig I earlier accepted, which is due on 12/31.

I told my colleagues and my chair that I was knocked up, and began setting in motion my "maternity" leave. (In reality, there is no maternity leave. There are accrued vacation and sick days, and then 12 weeks of unpaid FMLA. No one in my family believes me when I explain this. They keep saying, "but it's PAID, right?" And I have to keep saying, "no, FMLA is unpaid." And then they say, "but so-and-so who is pregnant and in a totally different profession gets paid leave..." To which all I can do is grit my teeth and sigh.)

I realized that I already have one of the two publications I need for tenure.

I considered the fact that my tenure requirements do not include a book, and that I feel compelled to write one nonetheless. And I thought a bit about how the LACK of pressure to write the book has taken away the vicious energy to work-work-work that I usually feel, and that I have not yet been able to replace that vicious energy with a more productive and more personally generative kind of drive. Am I going to write this "just for myself?" Am I going to write it to remain competitive on the market? Am I going to do it because I feel compelled to please My Two Dads? Am I going to write it to participate in the discourse of my subfield? Is that enough? I don't really know yet.

I had two sonograms. I looked at my two grape-sized babies.

I felt overwhelmed.

I felt excited.

I felt confused.

I felt lonely.

2009-08-12T10:38:00.003-04:00

IMA PUNCH SOMEBODY, NO REALLY I WILL

As I expected, my family has gone beserk at my recent news. So beserk, indeed, that my mother is in the hospital with a possible heart attack.

When I announced, they seemed happy and congratulatory. My mother did immediately go after me about my weight (she thinks I am "too thin." I think this is projection on her part, given the fact that she could stand to lose 15 to 20 pounds. The more she has aged and her metabolism has slowed, the more she has harped about how "dangerously" thin I am. For the record, I have a BMI of 19. That is fully within the normal range.)

She scolded: "You're lucky you even GOT pregnant, with how thin you are! I am going to say this once: you need to stop this crazy skinniness!" (I don't think that weight gain when you are carrying twins is really ... avoidable. And I am not avoiding it in the least. My struggle lately is getting ENOUGH to eat all day so that I don't have the starvation-waking-in-the-night moments. And, as my therapist has pointed out, I am clearly fertile, and so I can't be all that thin.)

Yesterday morning she called me with extreme anxiety and worry about my "health." Apparently, although as she is quick to remind me, I "know nothing" about her and my father's lives, she knows intimately all about who I really am. And according to her, I am sickly and ill, easily stressed, and am in for some serious trouble. She thinks I am going to lose my pregnancy because I am so thin, and because I have ... moderate and well-controlled asthma. (Do I smoke? No. Do I drink? No. Do I have uncontrolled panic-attacks? No. Did she, all through her pregnancies with me and my brother? Yes.)

And, as is her wont, she embarked on a series of terror-provoking, doom-and-gloom streams of thought, about how alone I am, about how dangerous a situation I am in, about how sick she perceives me to be, about the inevitable and dangerous complications I will experience, about how she knows I will need a C-section and complex medical care and we won't even be able to pay for it, how I clearly "don't have a plan" for how to care for myself because I can't afford a nanny, and oh yes, how bad and irresponsible I have been in failing to anticipate all these terrifying contingencies.

"Sorry I didn't marry a rich asshole who could pay for everything so that you wouldn't have to worry, ma," I said. "All we can do is what we're doing: getting married, and living together, and working, and saving money, and figuring it out," I told her.

And then she zeroed in how I "needed to know" exactly how little I could rely on her and on my father, because THEY are so sick and elderly and so poor. I simply couldn't expect any help from them. This added to HER worry, apparently.

"So you are telling me I can't depend on you if I am really sick and need help?" I asked. I haven't asked for anything more than a single week--which TF has offered to pay for--of my mother's time, after I deliver. (He also couldn't believe it when I kept telling him she wasn't going to come. "She's your mom!" he chastised me, "of course she'll come!")

She then grew furious with me. Apparently, I am always spreading lies about how she and my father don't do anything for me, but they are the MOST SUPPORTIVE parents IN THE WORLD. They put me THROUGH COLLEGE. (Uh, I also put myself through college, with a lotta loans and a lotta working. I put myself through graduate school, too. Whatever money they have given me since I was in college I have also received a bill for. I owe it back. Indeed, I got a bill for the privilege of sleeping on a cot in her hotel room at my brother's wedding. I got a bill for the cleaning supplies my mother bought when I moved into my first apartment in Brooklyn.)

She then admonished me that I need to sit down with her and my father and TF and HAVE A CONVERSATION about EXACTLY what can be expected from them. That doing so would be RESPONSIBLE.

I told her that whatever plan I had didn't and couldn't include depending on her or my father in any way. I offered that she and my father come here for Thanksgiving, and meet TF's family, and we can ALL talk about it. She scoffed. "People have LIVES, you know," she said, "we're busy here and this is going to take serious planning. That's a little late in the game."

She wanted to know why TF and I haven't come to see HER, despite her asking us to do so. She's only ever talked to him for 27 MINUTES, and has NO IDEA who he REALLY is. No, I said, you demanded that we take time out of a very busy summer to come to see you, so that we could ask for your permission to live our lives. All of which was clouded by my father going on a racist tear. I don't think it would be in anybody's best interest to come for a "nice-to-meet-you" visit, under those circumstances.

And then, she "felt sick" and hung up on me. I learned later in the day--after calling to check in ON HER--that she went to the doctor, with chest and arm pains, and has been in the hospital all night for testing.

I find it rather horrifying that the crux of our conversation was about how dangerously ill I am and will be, and how little she'll be able to do for me, and how panicked she is about my lack of planning for the incipiently dangerous future that HAS MY OWN LIFE AND THE LIVES OF TWO BABIES ON THE LINE--and she is the one who manifests a heart attack. I know that I am going to seriously pay for the fact that I wasn't on an immediate flight to come be with her.

I think that what is really going on is that she is terrified and anxious that I now definitely will not be able to mother her, and rescue her from her own anxiety, and wife for her, and help her with her various hypochondriacal ailments. Because I will need to mother myself and two infants, and there ain't much room in that equation for HER to be the giant needy baby.

Oh, and my brother thinks that she is justifiably anxious, given the fact that everyone in the family thinks that TF and I will break up before I even deliver, and then I'll REALLY be in a pickle. As my father has also reminded me, I've certainly fucked things up before and have terrible luck with relationships.

I don't get it. TF told me that if they want to write themselves out of our lives, that's their choice. And that's kind of what they are doing. It's horrible, though, and it makes me very sad.

2009-08-10T11:10:00.002-04:00

IN WHICH I MAKE AN ANNOUNCEMENT

Forgive me, if you know me IRL and I haven't shouted this out from the rooftops. Frankly, I've been too busy being sick. It's nothing personal, really, and I love you all hither and yon.

TF asked me to marry him.

I said yes.

We are knocked up.

With TWINS.

9 weeks. We saw their birdfast little heartbeats thrumming yesterday morning. A is the feisty, twitchy one; B is more sedate.

Can life change this quickly? Is my career completely over? What the fuck am I going to do for childcare? How the hell am I going to move out of my apartment and into TF's condo before the schoolyear starts when I can barely get through the day? Lawd.

I was also going to write, miserably, "why do I feel so ill?" Which is what I have been moaning all weekend, but TF made me stop. "You can't ask why, because you have enough to eat when you are hungry* as hell, and you have me," he said.

*The hunger is intolerable. 600 extra calories/day is surprisingly a lot, when you have no appetite and smells make you queasy. It wakes me in the middle of the night with its urgency.

So, go team!

Jesus!

2009-08-05T11:10:00.005-04:00

ONE YEAR AGO...
[UPDATE: Once it's in the NYT, it's clearly really happening. How strange to read of something I once thought so local, so mine! And for the record, I gave her seedlings every year.]

...today, I moved to Subtropical City. Hard to believe it!

As my post of yesterday likely reveals, I miss Brooklyn. A whole damn lot. And especially of late. I miss my friends, I miss the easy sociality of those streets, I miss Prospect Park, I miss the Co-op, I miss my sore feet.

Brooklyn in August is my neighbor's guerilla garden in full glory, and beers on rooftops, and figs coming in, and sunflowers, and the nights growing slowly cooler, and the sky clarifying to a perfect blue.

It is mercifully when the entire city empties out, also, and so suddenly there is enough space to move around. One is no longer besieged by crazy tourists who don't know how to walk down the sidewalk, or by high-powered investment banker types barreling down the subway stairs. There is a certain languor.

And then there is the start of the school year, which means Fashion Week in Bryant Park, when all the most interesting editrixes come out to play. It's the massive September Vogue come to life. Everybody's invigorated, and ready, and that August calm is replaced by a wonderfully haughty energy.

My strange disorientation of living in a seasonless clime, where the a/c is my perpetual friend, where one cannot exercise during daylight, where the mosquitoes laugh in the face of DEET, and where fashion consists of big hair, strappy sandals, and really bright lipstick, remains.

I am girding myself for hurricane season, and hoping to God that we'll be spared a big one. I am thinking also about moving, and starting over, and teaching, and September 11th, which was its own awful trauma. I started adjuncting that morning, at 9 a.m. And I started grinding my teeth then too. (And look at me now!)

My memory's seared, a kind of hard scar around this time of year--and it's both terrible and sweet. I am glad I no longer live in what felt at times like an actual war zone. I am grateful that I do not have to commute, literally, through Ground Zero every day.

I lived what felt like a whole life in NYC. And now I mark time according to a totally different rubric.

2009-08-04T12:53:00.003-04:00

HOW I MISS BROOKLYN

Regards to The Sartorialist.

2009-08-02T12:57:00.004-04:00

FERPA, WHERE ARE YOU NOW?

So I had a student in my summer course who really struggled. He's queer, and sweet, and terribly learning disabled. He can't write worth a damn, despite incredible efforts. He failed, necessarily, to meet the minimum requirements for the course. I gave him an F, which means he has to take the (developmental) course again.

Little did I know, there are two grades developmental students can receive, according to the state. And F is for the cats who totally fuck off and disappear and don't do any work. An IP ('in progress') is for the ones who do the work and show up and still fail. It's kinda like a "thanks for trying!" or an "everybody gets a trophy just for showing up!" grade. They still mean "failure," they just have different names. Such are the vagaries of open admissions. There has to be a gate, or rather, there must be many, many gates, all of which are heavily bureaucratized.

Anyway, this past week I have been deluged by emails from this kid, from the dean, from my chair, and now, from the kid's FATHER, demanding to know why he got an F. I patiently explain, over and over. He got an F because he didn't pass any essays and failed the final.

I know nothing about the IP grade, because ain't nobody ever told me it EXISTED.

The kid can't take a full course-load because of the F, and his daddy is in a tizzy over it. I keep telling the kid, "taking a reduced course load may really help you. You need a lot of time and patience and assistance in order to get through this course, remember?" (We have discussed this ad nauseum. The day he received the F, he begged me to talk to his dad. I of course refused, due to FERPA. He called later that day asking me to please tell him, with his dad present, what he could do to "improve" his performance? I almost cried. The poor thing has serious learning disabilities and cognitive problems that negatively affect his ability to read, write and analyze. He can work all day on "improving" and STILL not get there.)

THIS MORNING, and it's Sunday, remember (and I know I shouldn't even be checking work emails on Sunday, but whatever) I get a message from the dad. He's gotten some special third party something or other to now be in charge of his son's education. FERPA be damned! He demanded a meeting with me ("I would like to meet with you this week, as soon as possible.") He demanded to know "what was going on." He ordered me to "alert" him as to his son's "performance." He has referred to me in numerous other emails as "the writing teacher."

You get more flies with honey than with demanding, obnoxious vinegar, asshole. How about ASKING me for a meeting? How about CALMING THE FUCK DOWN? How about recognizing that I might possess SOME KIND OF EXPERTISE, here?

The kid has to take the course again, and I think he'll likely fail. He is going to probably fail his other courses too, given his deficits and inabilities. Whether he gets an IP or an F, he's still gotta repeat.

And daddy can meet with me all week long if he wants to. It ain't going to change that fact.

I meet with my chair on Monday to discuss. "When I know something, you'll know something," I wrote back to the dad.

Gar.

2009-07-29T09:59:00.004-04:00

THOUGHTS ON LEEDS

I found Leeds to be physically lovely. Like Heu Mihi, I too was sweetly pleased at the little sink in each room, and the fact that my bed was made for me each morning. (I was also a bit weirded out by that too, but that's another story.)

The food was, for cafeteria food, rather OK. I was amazed at the total absence of branding anywhere within the cafeteria space. It rocked! There was food, and it was grown and prepared locally, and there you had it. There was no Coca-Cola dispenser, no Minute-Maid branding all over the juice machine, no wrappers emblazoned with the logo of whoever. And the place was named after an actual person. (At STCU, the cafeteria is called the "Smoothie King Concourse!")

And it was excellent to run into so many people I knew, including Heu Mihi herself, with whom I spent a lovely afternoon conversing amidst the lavender.

What was odd, and/or difficult, were the methods and practices that separate American and European medievalist scholarship. We have really different ways of doing things, which is no surprise, I know, but this conference brought those differences into high relief for me. For instance, and this is of course a big generalization, my training was primarily theoretical and interdisciplinary. This summer was the first time I ever looked at a manuscript, and I don't know shit about paleography or codicology or what have you. This was because I was reading some serious theory when I was in grad school, and this was also because there just weren't manuscripts lying about to ponder. You work with what you have.

My Two Dads, Beloved Adviser and Second Reader, work beautifully with theory--about race, about gender, about identity and humanness, about history, about performativity, about class. This is how they taught me. They will give conference papers that lay out a speculation at the beginning, and consider it. These papers raise many questions that do not necessarily get answered. And they tend to be stylishly written, and frequently brave (from a theoretical standpoint.) These men speak frequently to the fact that there are absences and gaps and silences in history, and that such aporiae might speak to the ideas and identities and people who do not fit the dominant model. Who have never fit that model.

But this theoretical method is not really how European medievalists roll. They focus instead on manuscripts and records and history and fact. They give papers where the thesis comes tentatively at the end, after a whole lot of "serious" and usually concrete research. They closely read, but they rarely speculate. The research is fulsome, and feels powerful, and is deeply gathered.

This method is largely due to the fact that the British education system starts kids young on their career paths. There ain't no liberal arts assortment of classes to take; there ain't no "well-rounded." You decide in early secondary school whether or not you want to be a physicist, and then you take your various exams, and then you take more serious exams in physics, and then you go to Imperial College and get a BA and an MA and become a rocket scientist. (My first love was British, and this was his story.) All you really ever study is physics. You go deep into your field, because you are not "distracted" by other interests or methods or disciplines.

I considered obtaining this sort of an education. I actually got into the University of Leeds to study English and history, and I came within a hair of going there. But one of the things that stopped me was that I am a skeptical and fiercely independent thinker, and I was in love with the possibilities of a liberal arts education. The thought of never being able to take an art history class, or an Italian class, much less music and theater and science &c, made my blood grow cold. So I went to my Midwestern SLAC, and now, here I am.

My SLAC education has meant that I think carefully, but that I am willing to take intellectual risks. I make grand claims and then try to see if I can prove them. I pursue hunches, I listen to myself and my own instincts, and I am not afraid of using other disciplines (like music and theater) in my work. And, I am not afraid of theory.

I gave my paper, which I was told was "quite provocative" (that's a good thing, right?). And I got lots of questions. And those questions also contained statements about how "perhaps" I might want to look at "some of the UNpublished sources" as well? My fellow panelist, a historian, gave a nice paper that used tables. And oh! That made everyone quite happy. Tables! They are so concrete!

What I work on is speculation, though. I think in some ways, ALL of medieval studies is speculation. It's entirely a measure of piecing together cracks and gaps to form some kind of recognizable whole. And often, that whole is NOT recognizable, because of, well, you know, history. But it's true that I haven't looked at many manuscripts, because, for fuck's sake, I went to a broke ass public university for grad school. We didn't even have many printed books! Because the library budget came out of the same pot as the salaries of firemen and policemen, and really, which do you need more? A book? Or an EMT?

I struggle very much, like many academics, with the sense that I am a fraud. And this was brought into high relief at Leeds, for me, I think because I just don't do European or British style medievalism. I guess I provoke. And I don't always have a raft of massive, heavy, serious historical research to "prove" my point. Sometimes all I have is poetry.

It didn't help, either, that I received perhaps the cruelest reader's report rejection I have ever gotten, while I was at Leeds. Apparently, my anonymous (British) reader (I could tell by the spelling) thought I used an "overly universalizing voice," "clearly had not read the sources," "suffered from many errors of historical fact," used American idioms too breezily, used "hackneyed phrasing," and "frankly" that my essay "was just not very well written."

Ouch.

This is the third time the article's been rejected. I am feeling, necessarily, rather dejected about it. Sigh.