I returned home yesterday. Big city. Bustle. We biked across the Manhattan Bridge to Brooklyn to see an amazing dance performance for DanceAfrica's 30th anniversary. I once took a class taught by Chuck Davis. I miss dancing, particularly African dance. My father agreed to go with me, but it was clear that this is really not his thing. And I was trying to figure out how my romanticized notion of my upbringing could possibly connect to his seemingly increasing traditional and benighted ways. I know, it's normal to have the moments of disillusionment about one's parents, but it's strange that this is happening in my late-20s. For a variety of reasons, my father has remained pretty unassailable in my mind. The last few years, though, we have actually had a lot more tension than ever before. I suspect that as a teenager I knew I had no alternative, and so I didn't object to his comments, didn't push back against him.
The first time I remember really challenging him was when he had hired an Israeli handyman to repair something in the house. I came back from college, and my dad was out. The Israeli started talking to me, and he started asking me about my sexual experience. It was so jarring and so inappropriate (I'd known the guy for about 5 minutes, and he was in my house, where I was totally alone) that it really freaked me out. When I complained to my dad, he seemed pretty indifferent and pointed out that the Israeli did good work. My father raised me to be a feminist, socially conscious, and my father is gay...I thought that would increase his understanding to what it might be like to be a young woman alone with a strange man who is asking her about her sexual experiences. Apparently not. Ten years later, my father still hires this person to do (shoddy in my opinion) work on the house.
5.28.2007
5.26.2007
4 months, 3 months...time ticks away
I am counting the days, the weeks, the months until I take my qualifying exams (to become A.B.D.). I am in a bit of a panic over the last exam that I am working on right now. But...my goal is to get everything done in time to go to this....I've been trying to go for nearly a decade, and things, people, life keeps thwarting me. But this year...I have the ticket (though last time I tried to go, I did in fact have a ticket, so that is no guarantee, I guess), I've been collecting things for the event, and I'm plotting some costumes. I love costumes.
5.21.2007
the other thing that this is for
Is to keep track of all these strange emotion things since I broke up with someone I loved very much. While I realized when we were dating that I loved him, the last 10 months without him have actually been about realizing quite how much I cared for him. It's very unnerving, and yet it keeps hitting me at strange moments. This deep pang of longing. The amazing sense of attachment I felt the first time I realized I loved him. And the very many things he taught me.
More than anything, right now, I miss the fun. Life with him felt perpetually absurd. He revealed the absurdity in this world better than anyone else I'd ever met. Sitting in my room talking or going out into the world, it was all a huge playground, a huge surreal experience, whether sober or occasionally not -- I laughed an awful lot.
There have been two men in my ilfe who made life fun, who reminded me on a regular basis to loosen up, let go of expectations and failed attempts to 'fit in'. Perhaps this is the secret, that I have never ever fit in, not just in some sort of angsty teenage way, but in point of fact. I am one of those people who has been raised in a series of very non-traditional situations, and I feel like I'm constantly trying to reconcile this with the world around me.
In high school I read women's/girls' magazines compulsively for a couple of years trying to figure out how I was supposed to be. Early form of social observations, I guess, but I knew that most things about my life did not match most people's experiences and upbringings. But somehow I was supposed to participate and fit in. I never do. I always get in trouble somewhere along the line -- I can't handle authority, for example, and yet I'm part of the elite who succeed partially because we're good at following rules (for example) -- like the rules of school, of studying, of committing to an upstanding path. But I hate it, and my compliance freaks me out. I think I've spent a lot of time trying to sabotaging my weird success at participating properly.
So this is where these two men, eight years apart, yet both really significant come in. The first one turned out to be a real fuck-up, and I worry about him a lot, since the few times I hear from him, it always sounds like he's in some bad situations. The more recent one -- I can't be in touch with him right now, as much as I hate to refuse his offer of friendship, it is just too difficult. He got in contact with me a few months ago, seeking a reinstatement of our friendship -- and while his email was as close to perfect as a heartbroken person might want, I realized after agreeing to meet with him, that his request to meet was in fact awfully selfish. The email could have stood alone, and it would have really been enough. Asking to see me was really for his benefit alone.
Still, after that one time seeing him again, I realized all the reasons we can never be together (not that this is a real option, but just a reminder to myself). But I also have been missing more and more all the things that were really good and really unusual about our relationship. And that makes me sad.
More than anything, right now, I miss the fun. Life with him felt perpetually absurd. He revealed the absurdity in this world better than anyone else I'd ever met. Sitting in my room talking or going out into the world, it was all a huge playground, a huge surreal experience, whether sober or occasionally not -- I laughed an awful lot.
There have been two men in my ilfe who made life fun, who reminded me on a regular basis to loosen up, let go of expectations and failed attempts to 'fit in'. Perhaps this is the secret, that I have never ever fit in, not just in some sort of angsty teenage way, but in point of fact. I am one of those people who has been raised in a series of very non-traditional situations, and I feel like I'm constantly trying to reconcile this with the world around me.
In high school I read women's/girls' magazines compulsively for a couple of years trying to figure out how I was supposed to be. Early form of social observations, I guess, but I knew that most things about my life did not match most people's experiences and upbringings. But somehow I was supposed to participate and fit in. I never do. I always get in trouble somewhere along the line -- I can't handle authority, for example, and yet I'm part of the elite who succeed partially because we're good at following rules (for example) -- like the rules of school, of studying, of committing to an upstanding path. But I hate it, and my compliance freaks me out. I think I've spent a lot of time trying to sabotaging my weird success at participating properly.
So this is where these two men, eight years apart, yet both really significant come in. The first one turned out to be a real fuck-up, and I worry about him a lot, since the few times I hear from him, it always sounds like he's in some bad situations. The more recent one -- I can't be in touch with him right now, as much as I hate to refuse his offer of friendship, it is just too difficult. He got in contact with me a few months ago, seeking a reinstatement of our friendship -- and while his email was as close to perfect as a heartbroken person might want, I realized after agreeing to meet with him, that his request to meet was in fact awfully selfish. The email could have stood alone, and it would have really been enough. Asking to see me was really for his benefit alone.
Still, after that one time seeing him again, I realized all the reasons we can never be together (not that this is a real option, but just a reminder to myself). But I also have been missing more and more all the things that were really good and really unusual about our relationship. And that makes me sad.
Fondness for black humor
I'm quite in love with this New Yorker "Shouts and Murmurs" from last week. And then, the first part of this one kills me every time I read it...the dialogue from the dinner party is perfect.
Entry 1, a return to form
This is a strange project to start up again. In the mid-90s I learned basic html and had a webpage on my college server. I was constantly torn between desire for notoriety and the desire for anonymous outlet. Of course, having the page hosted at my college, under my actual name, did not really help for the anonymity -- so perhaps it was the conceit of pretend anonymity that I desired.
I am feeling restless and anxious today. I'm preparing for my departmental exams, which will lead to the ABD status, and the chance to go off to the field to conduct dissertation research. I am currently aiming to finish my PhD within 2.5 years. It is perhaps total fantasy, but the prospect of really being done with school, after 5 consecutive years of graduate school (thus far) is so delicious -- and frightening. Once I take the exams, I'll get to leave mid-sized American city on the east coast that I'm quite sick of. Having grown up in one of the largest American cities on the east coast, living here has been really bloody difficult.
I've been getting quite serious about yoga recently, and I am hoping to use this medium as a chance to reflect on some of my experiences with that. Anonymously, of course. I just took an extended workshop that met once a week -- and for the month and a half of commitment, it proved relatively challenging. What I find even more challenging is sustaining the revelations and insights that I gained during the workshop back out in the world. Yesterday I was charged and energized by the experience. Today I am mopey and tired and achey (we did some unusual exercises in our path toward enlightenment that seemed to have pulled more muscles than I knew I had). I didn't make it to yoga class today, I didn't take the run I thought I would substitute it with, and....sloth sloth sloth. It almost seems like I could write this whole entry on "things I did not do" -- which seems awfully negative and pessimistic. I've been trying to learn not to beat myself up so damn much about things I don't accomplish. It's such a waste of energy, and tomorrow really is another day, so dear god, please shut the fuck up.
The major revelation yesterday, cheesy and trite as it sounds, was to really focus myself on the present moment. I am far too caught up in past slights, deep anxieties about things that have already happened, and vague attachment to some better future not yet now moment (which of course never really comes to pass, as it is always a hypothetical fantasy that never reflects the way things usually progress). In addition, I realized that I live the way I do, in this state of purgatory, because I have chosen it. It feels so easy to get restless (cf. today) as though there were something else I should be doing at any given moment. Something better something different something new something something something.
I tried to remind myself yesterday that what I am doing, when I stop and think about it, is really fucking cool. I love the research project I'm working on -- which took a few years to fully develop (and which I can't disclose here as it would totally give me away and that (not so repressed) vanity of wanting to be the first or at least avant-garde-ish prevents me from talking about it). I'm in the drudge work phase, but it's what needs to be done in order to get into the field and how cool is it that my chosen field includes fieldwork, where I get to travel, see new places, interact with people different from my familiar confines of mid-sized American east coast city (m-s.a.e.c). The whingeing and moaning must stop.
Still, it's been a very intense few years. I don't think I would have ever expected my late twenties to feel so roller-coastery. I really think I'm going through a bit of a protracted adolescent crisis. Yet, the superego that has a tendency to rule my life still feels like it's got a firm grip, which can be exhausting and irritating at the same time.
All this is to say, somewhere in the midst of the above babbling (I have a tendency to be on the loquacious side) is the reason for starting this blog/diary/internal monologue again, ten years after the first time I did this. I have deleted my friendster profiles (twice), refused to join myspace, tribe.net, orkut...etc., and hesitated to join the insane barrage of blogs. But to be perfectly frank, this is here for ME....welcome to the late Aughts, total solipsism, total self-indulgence, total gratification. At least in cyberspace.
I am feeling restless and anxious today. I'm preparing for my departmental exams, which will lead to the ABD status, and the chance to go off to the field to conduct dissertation research. I am currently aiming to finish my PhD within 2.5 years. It is perhaps total fantasy, but the prospect of really being done with school, after 5 consecutive years of graduate school (thus far) is so delicious -- and frightening. Once I take the exams, I'll get to leave mid-sized American city on the east coast that I'm quite sick of. Having grown up in one of the largest American cities on the east coast, living here has been really bloody difficult.
I've been getting quite serious about yoga recently, and I am hoping to use this medium as a chance to reflect on some of my experiences with that. Anonymously, of course. I just took an extended workshop that met once a week -- and for the month and a half of commitment, it proved relatively challenging. What I find even more challenging is sustaining the revelations and insights that I gained during the workshop back out in the world. Yesterday I was charged and energized by the experience. Today I am mopey and tired and achey (we did some unusual exercises in our path toward enlightenment that seemed to have pulled more muscles than I knew I had). I didn't make it to yoga class today, I didn't take the run I thought I would substitute it with, and....sloth sloth sloth. It almost seems like I could write this whole entry on "things I did not do" -- which seems awfully negative and pessimistic. I've been trying to learn not to beat myself up so damn much about things I don't accomplish. It's such a waste of energy, and tomorrow really is another day, so dear god, please shut the fuck up.
The major revelation yesterday, cheesy and trite as it sounds, was to really focus myself on the present moment. I am far too caught up in past slights, deep anxieties about things that have already happened, and vague attachment to some better future not yet now moment (which of course never really comes to pass, as it is always a hypothetical fantasy that never reflects the way things usually progress). In addition, I realized that I live the way I do, in this state of purgatory, because I have chosen it. It feels so easy to get restless (cf. today) as though there were something else I should be doing at any given moment. Something better something different something new something something something.
I tried to remind myself yesterday that what I am doing, when I stop and think about it, is really fucking cool. I love the research project I'm working on -- which took a few years to fully develop (and which I can't disclose here as it would totally give me away and that (not so repressed) vanity of wanting to be the first or at least avant-garde-ish prevents me from talking about it). I'm in the drudge work phase, but it's what needs to be done in order to get into the field and how cool is it that my chosen field includes fieldwork, where I get to travel, see new places, interact with people different from my familiar confines of mid-sized American east coast city (m-s.a.e.c). The whingeing and moaning must stop.
Still, it's been a very intense few years. I don't think I would have ever expected my late twenties to feel so roller-coastery. I really think I'm going through a bit of a protracted adolescent crisis. Yet, the superego that has a tendency to rule my life still feels like it's got a firm grip, which can be exhausting and irritating at the same time.
All this is to say, somewhere in the midst of the above babbling (I have a tendency to be on the loquacious side) is the reason for starting this blog/diary/internal monologue again, ten years after the first time I did this. I have deleted my friendster profiles (twice), refused to join myspace, tribe.net, orkut...etc., and hesitated to join the insane barrage of blogs. But to be perfectly frank, this is here for ME....welcome to the late Aughts, total solipsism, total self-indulgence, total gratification. At least in cyberspace.
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