Tuesday, August 5, 2008

"Your heart is a colostomy bag and your brain is the Peanut of Abomination"

Unemployment is getting a little weird.  I haven't worked in two months.  I need some sort of backbone to my external life, I think.  Or maybe I'm incapable of being content.

One thing I've gotten much better at in the last two years is my ability to feel bad.  I'm much better at not fighting it anymore, and I realize that my obsession with comfort and feeling good is much worse for me than feeling sad, angry, lonely, or stupid.  But all of this time alone makes me feel all of these things fairly regularly.  Teaching is a great way to avoid feelings.  You're never alone when you teach.  The feeling I have now reminds me of what Pema Chodron says about meditation: once you clear away all of the boring clutter of your thoughts, what is revealed isn't necessarily sunshine and poppy fields.  Instead there are a lot of rotting corpses and old gross junk that comes to the surface.  All of this silence has brought some of this junk forward.  It also makes me think of that demon that comes to the bath house in Spirited Away, the one who comes in all giant and dirty and disgusting, and then gets years and years worth of junk pulled out of him--trash and bicycles and crap--and then turns into a wispy spirit that flies away.  I'm not really at the wispy spirit stage yet.  I do find that meditating makes it easier for me to feel bad.  But it doesn't make me feel better.

I think the poem is turning into a junk-clearing exercise.  I've been writing it for almost two years, though I didn't really write much for about a year.  It's entered a new phase, not really based on anything external at all.  Maybe it's about trying to balance my internal and external worlds.  I'm living in a time where so many things I encounter feel like huge metaphors for existence.  Everything feels like a freaking metaphor.  With so many metaphors surrounding me, I'm not really sure why I even write.  The universe is one big poem.  I do acknowledge that I don't really need to write.  I do feel driven to create though.  And I don't want to have kids.  In feng shui, creativity is synonymous with children and childbirth.  When did I become so New-Agey?  Lord have mercy.

I might want to start writing here on a regular basis again.  This is boring and disorganized; hopefully I won't be such a loser in future posts.  I feel like I don't really know how to communicate with people anymore; I spend most of my hours alone, not even really talking to myself.  This should make for interesting teaching, should I teach again.

 

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Depression Before Spring

Stevens wrote it:

The cock crows
But no queen rises.

The hair of my blonde 
Is dazzling,
As the spittle of cows
Threading the wind.

Ho!  Ho!

But ki-ri-ki
Brings no rou-cou,
No rou-cou-cou.

But no queen comes
In slipper green.



What a freaking weirdo!  I love him.  He's pretty much the only thing getting me through right now.  

I hate stupid money and how it controls me.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

I need serious weed

I also need, in no particular order:

Stevens (I have him, he's sitting right here)
my first book manuscript to get published
for someone else to grade these Raisin in the Sun tests
for someone else to grade these vocab quizzes
8 hours of sleep
green foods that are not high school cafeteria jello
vitamins
skin that is not both acned and wrinkled
long, dense, apocalyptic novels (I don't know either)
Plath (I have her too)
for Alex to please please turn in his Jane Eyre paper it's over three weeks late and I don't want to call your mom again she's psycho
did I mention sleep
for my sister's baby to be born after this job ends
a bathing suit
for my hips to not be rotated tomorrow at my PT appointment 
martinis (can i have a gift certificate for this somehow?)
to fast forward the next two weeks
health insurance
an eye doctor appointment
someone to do my taxes
a dog walker
a permanent job
detachment
bodhichitta (I have it I just need to unbury it)

The healer is paid off as of today.  In two weeks I will no longer have income.  A job is hurtling it's way toward me right now.  It should be here any minute.

I'm tired.  And just the tiniest bit drunk.



Sunday, January 27, 2008

Odysseus the Player

My new job entertains me in a thousand ways.  Though all day I've dreaded grading this small stack of Odyssey essays, I starting laughing almost immediately: the title of the first one I read was Gods Are Better Than Humans.  Another essay argues that the men in The Odyssey are "players," while the women are expected to be chaste and loyal.  I love it when 14-year-old girls write papers with feminist themes.  And use the word "player."

There was a puppet show about Scylla and Charybdis, and a song about Odysseus and the cyclops. At the end of one hour spent in the computer lab, one of my favorite students ran up to me and said this about her Jane Eyre paper:  "Ms. Shrew, I think I'm finished!  And I kept in the stuff about Mr. Rochester's blindness!"  She looked so happy--I remember being that happy when I finished my Scarlet Letter paper when I was her age.  My thesis was about the symbol of light...I don't remember anything else about it really, except sitting at my desk scanning the novel for perfect quotes and circling them in an obsessive way.  

I just wrote a quiz about pronouns.  This is what I do for a living now.  I had no idea how much I would love it or how exhausted it would make me.  I can see myself doing this for a long time, though this job is going to end in a month.  So many things are going to change in a month--I'm going to become an aunt, I'm going to be unemployed again, my dude is actually going to live in my country. 

 Today I told my mom that my boyfriend is getting a vasectomy.  I'm not really sure how or why that came out.  Sometimes I get weirdly confessional with my mom.  The thing I felt weirdest about is not that it's now out in the open that we won't ever have kids together, or that I'm not very interested in having babies, but that now she must know that we're having sex.  Or that we will being doing it in an unmarried way in the future.  I still feel like I'm fourteen when it comes to crap like this--even though I've been married and have lived with people, I still assume that my parents think I'm a virgin.  Oh well.  Mom's response was her sort of fake nothing-you-say-can-surprise-me laugh, the one she reserves for every statement I make on the subject of marriage, childbirth, and all of the other practices from which I seem to be sliding further and further away.  I usually don't talk to her about these things.  It did seem like a nice balancing comment for our discussion of my sister's baby shower.

This is all of the time I've alloted to myself for non-grading.