I re-surface

so the embarrassing truth, is that I've started a blog...under another pseudonym. But that blog is meant to be "work-related" and therefore, I try to avoid any personal reflectiions -- except in how they relate to work. And people who know me read that blog, expecting updates. Including people whom I now regret have access to my thoughts. This is, of course, the problem with the blog -- wanting an audience, but also feeling wary about how much one reveals, and whom you allow that access. Very complicated.

Yet, this blog was started as an outlet for emotions, and now that I find myself back in a romantic maelstrom, of disappointment and expectations, and all sorts of messiness, I crave the semi-public outlet. All well and good, though the reality is that this blog is read even less than the "work" blog (which is barely read at all!). So is this again an exercise in self-pity/an outlet for things that rattle around in my head without expression elsewhere? The irony is that I'm an incredibly direct and forward person. It seems no matter how much I try to make things transparent and clear, I still am miscommunicating, or expecting things from people, that they don't seem to want or care about. A bit exhausting. And I am getting older, so the patience for these ebbs and flows seem so much harder. Loving people is starting to take its toll, even as I want to believe that it's important.

My perverse fantasy

Involves living in a city that does not require me to own a car. I hate driving. The city I currentlly live in is for all intents and purposes a pretty walkable city. Except that it's not. There are huge patches of dead zone. There is no pedestrian culture. And I bike sometimes, but because it lacks a pedestrian culture, I also think it lacks an understanding of bike culture. (Also, I am getting lazy in my old age, and this city is surprisingly hilly...not SF hilly, but more like long continuous hills. At least in SF I could figure out a route with the fewest and shortest hills. And if I got really daunted, I would get off and walk.)

Anyway, this site is cool, though its measurement of what constitutes making a neighborhood walkable is a bit different than what I would use as a measurement device. But then, I am a social science nerd who is constantly trying to show why data are faulty. (For example, the site includes items like Starbucks as markers of things that are within walking distance. I do not consider Starbucks' proximity to my home an attribute.)

Still, for future moves it may be useful. Though the truth is, I'm not sure I need an online tool to help me figure out if my neighborhood is walkable. I don't plan on living in the suburbs anytime soon...hell, NEVER. (Yeah, I fear famous last words...)

A comfort-food kind of blog

I'm sure no one else will find this blog that relevant or comforting, but it's one of my favorite things to read from someone I do not know at all. I'm not a big fan of other people's blogs, and I don't quite get why anyone would read other people's personal blogs (yes, I realize this is deeply inconsistent with the fact that this mini-insignificant blog even exists). But I love Jill's blog. I think partly because her reflections on the world feel and sound so familiar. It's like she's me in a decade (or so). And even though she admits her limitations and foibles, she sure makes it sound like she has her shit together. So, I think she might be my hero. (Not to mention she's a philosophy professor, but in a cool way, which gives me hope. I could never hack it in the academia of philosophy...I ran away to the social sciences.) I realize this could be border-line weird and creepy, but maybe those who have been blogging more consistently and longer than me, are used to strangers' fascinations and obsessions.

In other news, a panel I submitted a paper for was accepted for the annual academic conference. Strange how it actually made me feel bad instead of elated. This is a problem I've been having with my successes, that I end up feeling incredibly ambivalent, when I should be proud and excited...right? Ambivalence seems to be my mainstay emotion these last six months. It's like I can't handle emotions, so I seesaw between them, rather than just choosing one. It's exhausting, and sort of stupid, too. I used to think I was a cynical optimist, but I'm starting to think I'm just a pessimistic pessimist.

arrrggghh

Really, when will it end? Stupid pharmaceutical ads that reduce women to inane stereotypes to get their "message" across. Seasonique's recent ad

Found this on the well-timed period, whose website I greatly appreciate. I don't always agree with her feelings about menstruation, but I am glad she's stirring up the debate a bit. She objects to the insistence of pharma and media that the placebo week of bleeding is still being called "menstruation" -- I object to the grab to keep hold of the contraceptive market by introducing "new" pharmaceuticals. I wonder if insurance companies agree to cover Lybrel (the no-withdrawal bleeding pill just approved) or Seasonique (4x a year bleeding). If so, then shouldn't they also cover more than 12 months of other oral contraceptives? (You can accomplish the same no-bleeding effect by taking any contraceptives without their placebo week, which a number of sources have pointed out.)

Malcolm Gladwell's article "John Rock's Error," from a number of years ago (2000), is an interesting explanation of how the Pill was developed and why certain attributes (28-day cycle) were standard for so long.

I have lots to say on this, but no time right now -- trying to finish the exams!

I really like this cartoon. It feels like the last year of my life. From (unsurprisingly, perhaps) The New Yorker.

Was it ever really love, and therefore is any love lost?

The end of another relationship. One of the more tulmutuous ones. I think I had a lot to do with its tumultousness. I wanted particular kinds of love, particular kinds of future-orientation, particular kinds of...well, security (a false idea I know, but hey, I wanted it anyway). And there were moments when he seemed to promise this great love potential. The oddest part was that he would declare how wonderful I am to his geographically-distant family, but when it came to the everyday friends, I felt effaced. I could never figure out how truly serious he was about me. And in ending (again, and again, and again), he claimed I had only needed to ask for certain things, or to have asked him to wait while I figured out what I wanted. But I think I did -- as much as I could knowing that there were certain things that were non-negotiable. It seems like it was a bit of a double bind. I was supposed to ask, but for what? What was ever up for asking? I wasn't in love with him, and I'm not sure I ever could have been, but it seems, at the same time, that things were foreclosed before they could ever begin. As though we lived in a state of indeterminacy and paralysis before even knowing if something else were possible.

But even worse, I have a tendency to want to be really done with someone once I (or we or he) end the relationship. I don't want to stay friends, because I find it too painful a reminder. And I find the intimate knowledges uncomfortable after the intimacy is gone. But I wonder if that's just strange and neurotic. Why do I feel so unnerved by the fact that someone once had a particular kind of knowledge and access to me? What difference does it make? And I am so hurt if he does not seem to pine or think of me -- I want to be irreplaceable but also distant. And I think that distance only really ends up hurting me in the end. I end up feeling isolated and awkward and lonely and unmoored. Yet, is it not me who has set up the terms to be this way?

Striving toward the present

Where have I been for the last few weeks? I seem to have somewhat regular bouts of...shall we call it melancholia? Where it really does seem my life is an abject failure. Objectively, even when in the midst of such melancholy, I know this is not true. But it seems my friendships all feel tenuous and not meaningful, and that I am directly responsible for their imminent demise. Such anxiety then, of course, seems to feed back into itself, creating more anxiety and more insecurities, and then it's more of a wait-it-out state than anything that I can do that is actually productive. I like tangible concrete problems (not that this has ever been my line of work in any real sense) -- but I like seeking the solutions, the methodical steps that can produce a satisfying resolution. Life seems to be non-compliant on this measure. And somehow, I have the strange fantasy that there will be a moment at which I will come out on top, where it will be a vast plain of manageable emotions, problems, circumstances. As if.

Why do I persist in preserving this mythology? It obviously does nothing but make me feel anxious about its never being attained. I suppose this is a bit like why I am skeptical of religions that promise some higher afterlife. I mean, you never can fully disprove that it could happen or could exist, but the idea of living in some suspended anticipation seems a bit futile. I have an old friend who is determined to be president some day. So much of his life is about planning to do the right thing that will secure his path to ascendancy. It's so odd to me, because it has started to seem to me (as we hobble toward our thirties), that this life is a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. Somewhere along my philosophy studies, I realized I am far less interested in the former. Life ought to be an end in and of itself. If there is some greater reward at the end (whether while still alive or after), I really feel that it's pretty irrelevant. Sure, this could slip into total hedonism and self-interest (which it has at moments), but it is a lot more present-minded.

The irony is, after all this proclamation of a particular life philosophy, I clearly don't live this way. So I guess that's sort of my goal. It's what yoga has been teaching me. It's part of what I talk about in therapy. And yet it's so damn difficult.

The next step...finally coming to pass

Grant #1 just came through. Unlike the subsequent grants I submitted, this one was done with no assistance from anyone. My sociopathic advisor was conveniently unavailable as I was trying to pull this together. I don't think she even read it. But of course, now that I've gotten the money, it looks good for her -- not that she needs the recognition. As numerous people from whom I have sought counsel when the sociopath was too much to bear have pointed out, the sociopath is a STAR. So, given that I don't have a lot of alternatives, I stick with it, even though working with her feels like a bipolar nightmare of ups and downs and regular emotional thrashings. She tends to operate on the passive aggressive neglectful approach, until moments like now, when suddenly my ideas are legitimated by external funding sources. Wait...where was I? RIGHT...my accomplishments.

The great thing is that now I can leave this mid-sized east coast city a lot sooner than I had thought. It's scary. It means I really am going to do this research thing. It also means that after living here longer than anywhere else since childhood, I am going to leave. It's both liberating and terribly frightening. It's like a return to the real world. I feel like I've been on hiatus for the last half decade, even though I've tried not to think of it that way. Real life is happening all the time.

Home again

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.

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.