Carry On Wayward Son

Muscle memory is a bitch.

In general, the second I hear classic rock on the radio, my fingers change the station. It's not that I don't like classic rock, but that my only exposure to it happened for those four terrible, wonderful, terrifyingly full years of high school. So, yes, I get a little nostalgic when I hear "Back in Black" or "Cat Scratch Fever" or "We're An American Band." But nothing, and I mean Nothing makes me react the way I do to "America" from West Side Story or that little ditty by Kansas (see title).

Luckily, the local station doesn't have much use for old show tunes. But for the last three weeks, I've heard the damn song every Thursday morning as I drive to school.

It wouldn't be that bad, if Supernatural didn't also use it as a theme song. Or if the roommate didn't take a certain glee to my wide eyes and panicked breathing. But lately, it's like everywhere I turn, there's those strong downbeats, and my wrists flex without my permission on the steering wheel.

Hence, muscle memory's bitchiness.

This one time, at band camp

It's in the blood. It's the source of shivers (of slivers).
Pulse turned to pulp by the blender beat of drums.
This three minute death and rebirth burns at the crescendos.
Canvass burns at first, but for this we pray:
Love, split lips and numb fingers,
Clear, crisp skies and a hidden flask,
The seamless motion of the stars as our own.
It is born in full from the first,
No rising to life, but complete it bursts
Whole and unwrapped
For bloody mouths and splintered palms to embrace.

(re)Unions

A few nights ago, I got to talk to Kari on Facebook (sucky sucky sucky chat interface), pretty much for the first time since she departed my place in August. We caught up (sort of, thanks to the interface) and exchanged stories of woe about our current geographical locations. It's no secret I have wanted out of Lafayette pretty much since I moved here--and that my displeasure with my surroundings has affected both my mood and my physical state negatively. Not only am I further behind on paperwork than ever, but I owe Purdue mucho dinero. I am also 18 months away from being without funding, and this has me quite concerned on many fronts. Despite the need to be here, be present, be focused (be filling out paperwork), I've been more and more absent, and we can thank the Interwebs for that.

And on the Interwebs, Kari mentioned missing her high school reunion, for lack of communication. It seems strange to me that a class would hold a reunion in the summer before the 10th anniversary of graduation, but, hey, whatev. My own 10 year reunion will be held sometime this summer, I think, if Mr. Greg Humrichouser manages to get it together. And, I just might go. After all, I may have gained weight since high school, but in general, I've been successful. Ish. I'm not un-successful. Or at least I won't be, if I get the paperwork in.

Of course, all this talk of reunions got me thinking about the cultural purpose of reunions...which for me, begins with the word "reunion" itself. Deconstructionists like "re" words and "de" words because we can play with language--in this case, I think I'd be correctly channeling Derrida if I were to discuss the idea of re-uniting as requiring an idea of original unity, as privileging unity, togetherness, and community identification, which is strange in a late capitalist society.

Oops. Jameson snuck in there. Damn.

The idea of unity, is, of course, highly Platonic in nature. Aristotle (who I know is not Plato, but go with me on this) discussed the Unities of Tragedy--of time, of place, and of plot. To unite means to be one, and yet, the verb implies a process of many "ones" entering into One--many kinds and versions of Human entering into the ideal, complete Form of Humanity. As though we are not whole until we are united, and yet reunion implies that we can, in fact, be separated, be functional, be parts of other unions. Are you ever Not a member once you become one?

On Facebook, I found an old classmate from Ashland Christian School, who is apparently a well-adjusted individual. I wonder, sometimes, what it would be like to hold an ACS reunion--are we still a "class"? A whole unit, working as one in order to...to what? As a functionalist, I look to define things by how they operate, what they do. (That which washes that which we wear). What defines a class as a unit, once that unit has been dispersed? And, as Badiou might ask, who instigates the "count" that calls us to reunite, the count that creates a reunion, that recreates a union? How can there be a State to instigate the count, when that which initiated the original union has since graduated, progressed, moved on, to other counted groups?

I have implied that Greg Hummrichouser is responsible for initiating the (re)count for our class, because we elected him long ago. But the "we" that elected him do not exist again until he calls us into being again--but he cannot call us into being as The State, because we, his constituents do not exist until he calls us.

Here is the problem: Either reunions must call their parts into existence from a sort of nothingness, or that once united, a class is never really disbanded. Sadly, I prefer the first. Because being a member of ACS was bad enough when we were physcially present at the geographical location associated with that organization. My baggage is heavy enough.

I miss my Utopia

When I left Bluffton College to go to the scary world of academia I thought I knew what I was doing. Nod your head, my readers. We felt confident in our abilities until about August. When grad school approached, we suddenly realized we were not in utopia anymore.
I wasn't worried academically; my brain is the only part of me that really is dependable (well, as far as literature and rhetoric goes), and the classes seemed to be repeats of things I'd already done at BC. In fact, that first semester they were repeats, but repeats intensified. I didn't even realize I was running myself into the ground until Dad called to tell me Aunt Karen died in December. That was when I started to feel tired.
All I know is that I didn't feel disabled until I went to Boston. I never would have called myself "disabled" or thought about going to disability services for help; the FMS, CFS and arthritis were my little problem, and problems (a la Mom) have multiple solutions which we must weigh for their life-affirming goodness. I handled Boston this way: I dealt with each problem individually, sealing off each problem in a little sterile ziplock baggie. I certainly didn't see it as an overarching decline in my health. I panicked for awhile about the aphasia affecting my career in English, but I didn't mark myself as truly disabled. "I have a little bit of a disability. Nothing to worry about," I told my profs, individually, only when I absolutely had to.
When Rick sent me to Adaptive Services, I was resistant and bitter. See the blog. It was immature and full of psychoanalytic goodies. I wanted to be normal so badly, to fix my fibromyalgia all on my own, that I got angry. Sure, Rick could have been a bit more empathetic, but I didn't help matters along by being flippant and defensively humorous about the situation. Yeah, but except for not knowing where I live somedays, it's not that bad.
Suffering defines us, says Levinas--but only the suffering of the Other defines us. Our own suffering makes us realize the il y a, the something that is almost nothing that terrifies us all. Suffering for Levinas, for me, for three million people with fibromyalgia, and another couple million with CFS, and another few million with Parkinsons and MS and a dozen other neurological diseases-- suffering is reality for us. It's how we affirm we are still here. Sometimes when my medication is especially effective, and I feel no pain, I get scared: Where is my body? Is my leg still there? I panic. Then I get depressed because I realize that what I feel isn't numbness, but normality.
Online, the FMers call non-sick people "the normals." The name of a punk band, but also a name that should be spit out with a twitching eyebrow. They don't know how good they have it. I used to hate, and I still hate, professional sports players who whine about their bad knees. You were healthly, and you did this to yourself. You idiot.
Online, they are angry. They are depressed. They are, for the most part, middle aged moms who lived a normal life until one day they had "the flu that never went away." They are overly fat or thin, white, and feeling helpless. They spend hours thinking about being sick, about what they can no longer do, scouring the internet for breakthroughs.
Once every few months I let myself read their stories. I let myself feel helpless, and I reread everything we know about the damned disease. I reread the studies on HGH and sleep and the mysterious and elusive Substance P that are all ruining my life, and I yell at the incompetent, male doctors who tell us with exercise and sleeping pills we'll be just fine. Then I slam my laptop shut, and decide I'm not going to put up with this anymore, and fight back again. I refuse to become like the women online. I'm not like them.
But Rick was right about a few things: If I am going to be in the University, the academy, I have to get used to the idea of bureaucracy. And bureaucracies require paperwork, and definitions and contingencies and laws. As Edward Schiappa says, we can never really define anything for "real"--there is no "essence" of what is a "wetland." Likewise there is no essence of "disability" that we can know (Sorry Plato); there is no normal against which we can measure all people. But humans, says Burke, says Schiappa act as though there is, and that is what we should study. What counts as X in context Y with constraints A, B, and C?
But there are cracks. The center falls apart, it will not hold. Sometimes what counts as X doesn't have a matching solution Z. Even our carefully litigated definitions don't line up every time. The university says I'm disabled. They say I should be in their system, marked with a giant D on my forehead, and I should talk about my difficulties. They want me to succeed they say. As long as what I need falls under their definitions of acceptable accommodations.
What I need, I told them, is time. I need more time to complete assignments, I need more excused absences, I need less time at the school, and more time in an environment that does not promote stress reactions. My doctor wrote this, my mother wrote this, I told them this.
They said no.
These are not accommodations that the University is willing to make, or that they have to make, or that they will make. We have standards to uphold. This is a University--deadlines and attendance are part of our very definition. Rigor.
What is frustrating is that I know what I need to succeed. When I have those things in place, I can do some pretty amazing things, intellectually. Unfortunately, what I need are not things that can be legislated, placed in stone or even ink. I have to move with my body, flourishing and achieving on good days, and letting myself off the hook on bad ones. The University doesn't allow for that.
Bluffton did. I remember the first time I realized I was getting special treatment. It was junior year, in Jeff's poetry (lit) class. My leg had just jerked me halfway across the room and he glanced up briefly at me, did one of his little chair dances, and said "All right there, Amy?" I said something flippant about Mr. Leg having mind of his own, and Jeff continued his lecture. What is remarkable about that (if you know Jeff) is that he didn't pause to make fun of my language, or the way I had figured my body part as Other, or some other Man as Muppet moment. In fact, he never said another word about my twitching ever again. Jeff doesn't do that.
At Purdue, I was suddenly pushed into thinking about those things, into doing those things, while maintaining my citizenship in the world of the able-boddied. It didn't work, so I revoked my citizenship and became a member of the Disabled.
But I'm not going quietly. Screw the regulations. If they can't give me what I need legally, I'll have to rely on the Blufftonness I see here at Purdue. It took me 18 years to learn to ask for help, and then when I finally did, I got nothing but a sad little letter and a note in my file. Because I'm not normal, but I'm not disabled enough or in the right ways. "Obviously this is problematic for your education, but I just can't see what we can do about that."

The class I'm taking this summer, The Rhetoric of Access, assumes we know what normal is (bad). It does not assume the University can fix problems legislatively (good). It assumes disability is identifiable and thus analyzable. "Usability" and "Access" and "Accommodations" all imply that these are problems to be solved with technology or additions--aids to help one visit the Country of Normals a few times per week.
But not live there.
I am not defined by my illness, but it has shaped me, it is part of my identity. You wouldn't pour white paint over a black person to help him or her gain access to a taxi. You don't "accommodate" women in the workplace by binding their breasts so they can fit into a suit. Instead, the rules must change and thoughts about what is "acceptable" or even "excellent" ("rigor") must change. There are separate Olympic sports for men and women because biologically men have more muscle mass, and excellence must be measured as relative. We don't give up our identities as women in order to be in the workplace, so why should disabled people ("people with disabilities, Amy--the person comes first") have to load themselves down with support and services and devices to create themselves as non-disabled?
Amazon women were said to have hacked off their left breasts so they could better shoot an arrow. What no one stops to think of is : "Why wouldn't they have just designed a bow that worked in harmony with a woman's body?" The crossbow is even more efficient and poses no such breast problem. But Amazon women are held to a male standard of war, and the legends were told by men. To give the women "access" to war, they had to imagine a way around the archery problem, and so they imagined hacking off a breast. Accommodation.
It's that sort of linear thinking (Problem: Breast:: Solution: Remove) that has created the accommodations we work with today. Instead of viewing learning and reading and writing and math and science as flexible fields of knowledge with several entrances and ways to succeed, there is only one way to get an A, one type of excellence, one definition of success (One type of bow, one kind of suit to wear to the office). And so we are left with a limited solution set (remove breast, don't fight, or aim badly). If we could just imagine another way, a third way (yellow) that would not reduce the meaning of the A or change the definition of the university, then these problems would all fall out. A crossbow is still a bow.
I'm afraid I'm in too deep to talk about this in class. That I have too much at stake here. That I still have a hard time not hedging on my own disability (It won't affect my course work; it's nothing I can't handle). I miss Bluffton, where I didn't have to say any of this, where it was implicit in Lamar's nod or Jeff's chair-bobbing. If schools for the deaf are the utopias for the hard of hearing, Bluffton was a utopia for the hard of walking. And I miss it, because I didn't have to analyze my own motivations.

Addictive personality

Coffee. Coffee. Coffee.
I'm obsessed by the bean. By the smell. By the way it enters my throat, trickles down into my veins and infiltrates my brain with life, hope, chi. When I'm awake, I'm thinking about it, about the frozen beans in my fridge. I eat three per day, and savor the flavor of chocolate and the earthy espresso.
How long till August 22?
Dana says she doesn't understand my addictive personality. I tell her she must have a thyroid disorder.
Addictive personality: as though people could become addicted to my personality. Or I could be addicted to personality. What is "personality"?
Last night I wrote a mental letter to Rick, my teaching mentor, in my head. I argued against his idea of excellence, based on disability studies. That "excellence" is contingent upon an established norm, that we don't blame ordinary people for not being able to hit a baseball like Big Papi or sing like an opera diva. And yet Rick would have us believe that all who are not daily striving for such excellence are somehow slackers, lacking initiative.
I used to believe that wholeheartedly. I believed it straight through freshmen year, through most of that summer. I was high strung, emotional, nervous, anxious, continually tensing my shoulders in fear of relaxation. Stay alert or you'll miss something.
Maybe it was Dragonball Z. Maybe it was the yoga or t'ai chi. But I learned to shut down that drive sometime during sophomore year. A switch in my head that still wants to be in the on position. I can feel when it flips on; my breathing changes, my cheeks flush, my shoulders hunch, a guilty knot appears in my stomach, and something goes down my spine--adrenaline, probably. Cortisol. Fight or flight.
And it hurts like hell.
I know I have it in me to be like Dana: to be addicted to action, motion, hard work, responsibility. I also know what it does to me. And instead of becoming anxious, sick, tired, and tense, I choose to find peace by subordinating excellence to my own sanity. To my personality.
Which may not make me the best, most organized teacher in the world, but it does make me a good person. I wish I didn't have to choose between those, but those are the set of terms I've been given, and until someone comes up with a cure, I'll have to keep making that decision.
Of course, I'll never write that letter. It won't do anyone any good; if you haven't lived with it, you can't understand it.
That being said, I've decided that it's time to try last ditch measures for getting back to a baseline pain level. Walking, yoga, and a massive cut down on sugar. Full doses of Ultram. Whatever it takes. I have an addictive personality, and it's time I use that to my advantage.
Frak you, FMS.

"I've never been a man"

On May Day 2006
In Findlay Ohio, where the roads are uneven with dust. My cheeks are sore, but not from the sunburn flush my face.
I want to be able to be angry again.
Here your servant was sent out amongst them. The Separation from the Sword doesn't intend
Departure from the World. No, we are safe in our Bubble, in our troublesome days; the Orb does protect our way from all but Stones of compassion and trust.
The music in his ear is partly mine; I'm a drop of a note, a ceasura, over Ropp's pit infinite
in its Sunday night TV.
We are sure of our hope, on these gravel-topped roads, of Reasons, not scapegots, to unload the rites of Spring and Ribbons and uncovered sores. The Face meets the Face in noodle-based plates, and desire unsated to melt with the grass at last runs mimetically wild.
In Bluffton, Ohio, the music was played, the standard was raised to dance around...we sang of the new earth, new grounds, bearing us. The greetings were made, the skin's limit was breached--oh, the touch reached us deeply apart from the curse.
The reason it hurts is unexercised joy

A bag of mixed nuts

      Somewhere in here I should post about my teaching this week. The confidence I gain when planning activities is usually enough to sustain me through actually doing the activities. Usually. I'm much better at creating activities than seeing them through, though.
      I wasn't surprised when my plans for Tuesday were met with confusion and silence. At least I managed to do more whole-class activity and discussion; until now, it's been small groups. Talking in a large group always scared me as a freshman (okay, only the first semester), and I don't want to shut down conversation. However, it's getting harder for me to monitor several small groups at once; I must be losing my touch.
      Doc Henry taught us a lot in journalism class in high school...some of it was perhaps not quite ethical. Gather information however you can. It was in this way that I decided to learn to read upside down, to eavesdrop even better than what Mom taught me in all the endless doctors' offices, to put people at ease by allowing facial expressions to show through, even when those expressions were all an act. Whatever it takes.
      But I seem to be losing some of those "skills." It's probably for the best; I can't be a badger for life. It's probably better for the students--I think I seem less crazy when I'm not standing in the middle of the room with my eyes closed and a smirk on my face. Now I stand off to the side, head tilted puppy-like, and zero-in on one thing at a time.
      It could be that I'm just distracted as of late, by the mass of Burke. It's hard to think about hearing six things at once when Papa KB is echoing. I think I'm channeling a dead rhetorician.
      The cold weather reminds me of football season. This always makes me melancholy, puts me in the mood for Romanticism. Yes. You read that right. That sort of self-centered, makes-no-sense-to-anyone-else stylized and strategic response (damn you KB!) is appropriate for football season. When I think of all my dead bandmates.
      Dead or destroyed, what's the difference? I'm told a large chunk of the military-type went to Iraq. And came back someone else. Destroyed by Iraq, destroyed by Ashland--prisons of our own making. Etc. A bad Creed song goes here. Some are at the county jail. Poo Tee Wheet.
      I'd try to count, but the end number's possible height is too scary. It makes more sense to watch the Classmates.com page change as people die, or enlist, or try to find each other in some weird quarter life desperation.
      Oh, there are births and joys and marriages. I'm sure. But those don't go with football season. Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" does, and when I saw it written in front of Heavilon, I almost burst into tears for no good reason, except that it felt like fall and the best minds of my generation weren't being destroyed, but were destroying themselves.
      Act vs. Agent, Kenny says. The agent/act ratio is very important when we want social change. The right person with the right ability. What should I do about the Scene-Act ratio, Kenny? It's football season, and I keep remembering things I was sure I'd forgotten when I moved to Boston. Like how the Midwest makes me want to run to a new Scene. The Act required of the Scene is a change of Scenery.
      In Boston I never wanted to run. Boston is safe, even as the crowds swarm and people breathe down each other's shirts and the students party forever and ever.
      I'm distracted. And it's not just because my muscles seem to have minds of their own. It's the feel that something is missing--or too present. Absence and presence are the same, right Derrida? Can one be distracted by the fact that one is distracted?
      What goes with what? KB asks. Football and fall and cold air and missing best friends and losing hope and the need to run. They signify each other, so in the fall wind I can't help but feel distracted by things that aren't there now.
      In Boston, the fall was different. It was a New England fall, short and wet and windy, dark by 5 pm. The lack of twilight saved me.
      How do we fix things that are too pious? Papa KB says "perspective by incongruity." That damn confusing preposition in the middle. In Japanese, there are fewer prepositions, and the connections between modifiers and what they modify make more sense to me. I break the piety by symbolically mixing things that don't go together. I symbolically change the equation in hopes that as a symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal, the associations break accordingly.
      Football should be replaced in spring. Not symbolic death of the season, but life. And the missing best friends, I remind myself, happened in winter, too.
      Your connections are faulty. The binaries at the center don't refer to anything but other words. the centre falls apart; it cannot hold. Can a bad poem be a good symbolic action? Let's find out.

A symbolic of motives
"I love you"
when you are like this, I mean.
When the fall wind is in your hair
and there's nothing to worry about except
plumes and spats and the orange electrical tape
holding my hand together, I love it.
"Oh hold my hand
together" for at least the next nine minutes
and when it starts to bleed, just as they bleed
that we are bleeding together, letting out
the bad spirits making us sick of this town.
"Let's leave together"
To Florida or Hell, or your basement,
it doesn't really matter here at week nine
with Jeff's lips split six ways and my legs
betraying me to the camera.
"I'm never coming home"
Did you even hear me say it over
the victory songs that engulfed us so totally?
It's nice within the music, safe and warm
where we're all shouting together.

Millions of leaves

Millions of leaves of paper I have marked
since emerging from the walls of that dark city.

Tonight I went through my papers from Bluffton and Northeastern in an attempt to find my copy of Bruno Latour's essay on "immutable mobiles." I found, instead, the essay I wrote about the case of the immutable mobile known as a church bulletin. Interesting, but not helpful.

I also found some of my first work with critical theory. I realized, for a moment, that I was far less trusting of theorists back then, that I did not immediately latch onto every abstraction. That I had a far better grasp on application before I understood it so well.

What has happened? Some sort of reduction, I'd imagine. The only reduction I haven't quite made has been with Kenneth Burke. I think that's because I keep revisiting the original text. When reading Dave Blakesley's explanation of Burke, "Elements of Dramatism," I found myself becoming increasingly frustrated because I could see the gaps where he was reducing for the sake of clarification. At other points, when he filled in gaps for me, I wanted to return to the original, to make sure that I agreed, that Burke hadn't been coy and slipped in some other thing to trigger that rush.

That's why I love theory, and always have. It's that brain rush. When everything makes sense all at once and there are no words. No pictures. Pure intuition. It's in this way that I understand James Watson's memior of finding the double helix; he's cocky while at the same time unsure, but he relies completely on intuition (so he says) for most of his time there. Lucky Jim luckily is male and his intuition is seen as revolutionary, not weak and emotional.

Emotional? Me? No, not as Watson imagines.


Such claims to the end have an absolute duty. The revelation was written to fit the genre, so it plays absurd, a bad drama on screen. It uses some conventions, to revel in the reveal and promote unity. Time, plot, a used, ordered world, seems included in this eternity of absurdity in play. Mocking not the core of real prophecy, but those browning leaves about it, it rules the way they create an understanding world. The end is near. A harmless arm comes out to embrace us all, and still we duck away.

After driving past Katherine Ave, Ashland

Interpret this, Freud

Somewhere around 10 am, needing desperately to pee, I dreamed of people I'd rather forget--the boys who sang NOFX songs in high school, only in my dream, they weren't boys. Hunched in an attic of a blue house, filled with bunk beds, the class of 1999 was escorted slowly away, down the stairs, out the door to a road called 150. It was flooded, a river, and we drove my mom's blue Jeep down it, trying to get away from that blue house, where there were fires behind curtains and an old woman protecting an old man who tried to feed us poisoned rice.
Upon escape, a blonde girl who shall remain nameless for the sake of the mystery, trapped me and someone in a basement slowly filling with water. Slates of concrete threatened to flatten us before we ever had the chance to drown. I used the last of my cell phone to call someone that I can't remember--why can't I remember her now?--and the door broke down as the boys awoke from their blondie-induced stupor and saved us with black spray paint and magical white tee shirts from Wal-Mart.
We went to the flat lands, where the poor people lived, and I rode the #1 bus (Boston MBTA--it was yellow) up a big hill with a broken bicycle in tow; the rubber had come off the tires. I got off at a park, where there was Chinese food cooking, and a woman who danced with red felt fabric like it was a silk scarf. There was a girl child with me, and I told her to be careful here, and that we would ride to safety once I fixed the bike (I don't know how to fix a bike). A boy looking like Derek Hatt did it for me, and told me to go back to the flat lands, that there were fires and tsunamis to see.
I was there, then, on a side street, watching everything get swept into the sea--was I in Boston, or was it what Ashland would be if the icecaps melted?--when a geiser of fire erupted from the top of a tall apartment building. We were in fire and water, and were trapped in an alley with no government identification. "What can they do?" asked one old homeless man. "They have a five fold plan," said a homeless woman. She pulled out an old newspaper, which was somehow digital. "Containment, military assistance..." she trailed off. "And the Tall Places."
The Tall Places rose from the sea, frightening self-contained structures thousands of stories high. The people around me and the girl child complained about nature and the destruction of the planet. I said, "It's beautiful. I hate nature," and I climbed to the entrance, pushing my way through to see Him.
He called us to his office at the top, and we rode the elevators that made the blood rush to our feet. He saw into our minds, and knew that we were planning revolt. "It's Bob!" I said. But it wasn't Bob, who had his name on his shirt like a mechanic. In line, He saw us all, and saw the black paint still on my white tee shirt. I thought as He passed by me with some slick piece of technology, I want to go back home, and when He was past, I opened my eyes, back in the basement where we were to be killed by concrete slabs, the smell of spray paint waiting just outside the door.

Brain Freeze, Brain Fry

      Kate and I used to do this thing, when we thought the same thing at the same time. We'd touch index fingers and say "Brain freeze" then wiggle all of our fingers while making hissing noises, saying "Brain Fry."

That was before I called her Kate.

The night is only dim here
it's raw and constant
how the hours sllither in between the thoughts
that send much needed chills down my spine

      I drove Shuijuan past the bowling alley where we used to spend so much time, and no one asked questions. I could have sworn that it was less dingy then, but then of course, the awe of aging was robbed from me by my stupid brain, which immediately informed me that nostalgia and all forms of it are just different versions of some ideology meant to keep me from acting radically.

And thus the average epiphany was thwarted. I tried not to look at apartment 14, and instead remembered to be a good driver.

They ask me when the day is
it's when the silence isn't filled
when the harp stops pinging solidly
when the melancholy of the background music
fails to tingle in my gut

      I suppose there are worse things than missing out on epiphany. We talked about epiphany and Elizabeth Bishop in class, and I'm pretty sure we came to a conclusion that Bishop didn't believe in epiphanies, not as positive, life-directing moments. They can always cause you harm later, they can be merely constructs, they can make you move back to Boston.

      I got an email from Purdue on Friday, from a woman identifying herself as Jill. She told me my application was complete. She called me Amy, and signed it Jill. It was very warm, for a short, generic (of a genre) letter. I mean, email. I mean e-letter.

     Epiphanies are so rare these days, that I should appreciate the little ones. There is a woman in Indiana named Jill who wants to call me Amy.

The man said he saw Paul standing behind me
the heat waves off my thighs
in the middle of a phrase, the words shift
to something like mangoes, to cornucopias
to the science of fiction, the art of waiting
(It's not hard to master) to read the right line

      Sometimes I forget that those places still exist. Have I become the true New Englander, who can't see west beyond Foxboro? Can I live without public transportation? Even sucky public transportation like the T? Do I remember how to buy gas every week? What if everything outside of these eight blocks or so is actually just a bedtime story?

      Then again, stories matter, they always have. Or I wouldn't be doing this. It's not about Material Science. It's about Material Rhetoric, the stuff we live in.

Staring at black lines and platonic wisdom
Paul can stand behind me or beside me
when I turn out the lights and hate myself
for letting the sun come up so quietly
for not seeing the transition into dawn
When I crawl into my cave and shut my eyes
against the maddened crowd, against the material
of my wet washcloth that won't be dry by dusk.

Wired for the First Day

The pigeons have entered Snow Mode; winter has officially begun in Boston.
It's the kind of day that makes me want to learn the campus tunnel system. The Weather Channel predicted rain all week--they were wrong. What could have been rain, what I had been planning for as rain has turned into one of those Boston snows that is sticky and wet and easily accumulating on one's clothing as one walks. The pigeons hunker down in their own appointed spots, like the way people do in their unofficially designated pews at church, and they just sit there, letting it all pile up on them until all you can see are pigeon shaped lumps. They have already congregated around the cold steel sculpture in front of Whole Foods, and others sit atop the Avis parking garage in a semi-circle. They are tough, survivors, and will sit there until the snow stops or they get hungry. The smaller birds, like the sparrow-y items that hang out in front of the restaurants have a different philosophy; they are in constant motion, fluttering, flying, pecking at each other, beating their wings to hoover mid-air. They seem to know that they're so small that if they stop, they won't start again. Kind of like me.
I didn't realize how long my hair had gotten until I saw the snow gathering on it. It felt alien, like a wig, and I stopped long enough to stare at it, brush it off, and remove the snow that was numbing my foot (I wore clogs to teach in, expecting only rain). I am now sitting in bed, Gregg the Laptop warming my icy thighs, ready for a nap.
As first days go, I've had worse. My first class is really quite fun, a good group of kiddos. They're mostly PT majors (hmmm. Free advice?) and they are 12 in number. My second class was a little less enthusiastic. Civil engineering and Criminal Justice majors, like my group from Spring 2004, mostly large guys who seem like former high school football players. Either they have a strict sense of decorum in the classroom, or are bored and unengaged as of yet. I was doing the Amy the Instructor thing, jumping around, making sneaky, underhanded comments that usually wake up students one by one, slowly, but this time I got nothing. Most weren't even interested in eye contact. Neither class had bought the book yet, even. Sigh
PhD update: Screw mailing today. It's going to take an army to get me out of this apartment and into that mess again, even if the post office is a mere half block away. If I wake up from my soon-to-be nap before 4 and get a jones for half-off Au Bon Pain pastries, I may trip my way down there. More than likely, I'll do it tomorrow. I promise.
Quote of the day, from bumper sticker seen in parking lot at the New England Conservatory: Eat Betty's Mussels.
Right. Sure. Why not?