mercuryfern

pop musiclessness and pedagogy

Miracle of miracles, the radio in the cybercafe which has become my home in the premove phonelineless state has been turned off.  Hey, I *can* hear myself think.  Wow. 

I'm right on the generation x/y line, but my allegiances are certainly with the former.  My younger sibs use technology much differently than I do.  Admittedly, their computer usage patterns are more than a little influenced by their continued access to my parent's money and hence superior equipment.  Downloading music just isn't an option for me.  Still, they multitask like nobody's business: IMing, listening to music, talking on phone, writing a paper, perusing a coupla web pages.  My head spins just thinking about it.  I've got at most two tasks in me at once.  They really should be not so different, for instance clicking back and forth between a meandering email and a long winded paper.  Maybe if I'm feeling extra clever, some scrining.  No audio whatsoever if I'm producing something that requires thought.

It's a generation y thing, swimming confidently in a relentless all-medium onslaught.  What?  No, of course it's not that I'm a Luddite nerd.  No.

I'm not crazy about power point either.  I had a professor last year who was an excellent lecturer, funny, articulate, well informed.   She apologized all the time for not using power point, though.  At the end of the semester she did incorporate it into her lectures and her speaking immediately got crappier.  Unless the picture really is very insightful we probably don't actually need to see it.  If the text is so long that you don't have time to write it on the board before moving on, we likely don't have time to make sufficient note of it, either.

Of course, this is spoken as someone who is a pretty good auditory learner.  Okay, okay, I guess *everyone* should be able to access the information given.  *exasperated sigh*

Ode to Rickles: Overture

Thomas and I had been dating for maybe two weeks when he went home to watch his father die.  After forty years of near perpetual inebriation, the old man's liver had finally thrown into the towel.  He was released to the care of his wife, who was assisted by hospice in the grizzlier details of comforting him towards departure: diapers, sponge bathes, the whole deal.

And then he got better.  No one expected him to, after scraping by decades of near death obliviously: the car wrecks, the work injuries; but he stopped drinking and waddya know, the liver pepped right up.

A few years later, when Thomas and I were even more impoverished than we are now, we lived with his parents for 13 months.  In case there are any newlyweds listening: Living with your in laws is a Very Bad Idea.  Make friends with your credit card debt the way the rest of America has.

I always appreciated being asked if we would like any lasagna whenever we attempted spousal lovin.  Oh, and my mother in law lecturing me on the *correct* way to boil an egg- whats not to like about that?   How I enjoyed being reminded of her superior egg boiling techniques anytime anyone ate an egg in our presence.  See how easily he's peeling that?  I bet his wife does it just like me.  Remember how I showed you?

So, Rick would have been my favorite relative even if he didn't star in all the best stories.  Thomas and I are the only ones who see the humor in his sighing audibly during long funeral speeches, the ehem, impolite, asides that he falsely thinks no one else can hear.   Is it wrong that I think its hilarious when a grumpy old man offends or embarrasses everyone around him?

Rick is the sort of swing stater that that strategists across the spectrum salivate over: a cynical union member with a strong sense of class consciousness, a conflict wary patriotic veteran, an atheist gun lover.  He hates Bush and opposed the war before it started.  His opinion on our presence in Iraq is now quite nuanced; mostly he feels sorry for the kids who are there.  He thinks a lot about UFOs but thinks the space program should be eliminated.  And he's very worried about West Nile Virus.

Recently, he's been reborn as a vanguard of the revolution.  More on that later.  Right now, the important thing to know is that he was arrested for tree hugging this weekend.

Vocabulary

Some recent vignettes from my classes:

While pontificating on a Victorian short story depicting turn of the century poverty, I accuse the author of being didactic.  The word is written on the board, defined and discussed.  Everyone leans forwards to make note of it in his or her notebook.

Which I can only assume means they didn't know it before.  This puzzles me.  How can one go through one's entire adolescence without once saying:  Hey hey hey, don't get didactic with *me*, motherfucker!  I couldn't have.

While pontificating on an article (by Gould, whoohoo!) about some possible reasons for the extinction of dinosaurs, I have the opportunity to postulate that a poison consumed by plant eaters could kill a carnivore through bioaccumulation.  Once again, no one understands this word other than the professor.  Have I mentioned this class is a prereq for med students?  At least one future psychiatrist is in the audience.

Ignorance of not just the word, but the concept it describes, indicates, to me, a serious lack of scientific literacy.  How are you going to know why you shouldn't eat salmon five times a week if you don't understand why it is full of mercury?  Mercury is bad, people.  Seriously bad.  It will kill you in your head, just like if you were a nerdy humorist and it was a republican masquerading as an independent.

So yesterday in the latter mentioned class (Biological Anthropology, if you must know) I ask the professor about some poor word choice in a nature documentary about primate behavior.  It describes several apes as vegetarian.  What?  Are they wearing patchouli, too?  No, the word is herbivores, which is also inaccurate as they are omnivores, being primates, therefore generalists.  So I'm watching the movie, thinking, Huh, that's anthropomorphic.  I wonder if the filmmakers are sensationalists or dumbasses.  What I said afterwords was,  "describing the chimps as vegetarian rather than omnivores who's diet emphasizes plant foods struck me as...weird or something."

Weird or something.

Yes.

Let me be clear.  The word anthropomorphic was right there, jumping up and down, practically yelling:  I'm ready, coach, send me in!   

On the upside, no one behind me sighed angrily, whispered conspiratorially or otherwise demonstrated annoyance at the sound of my voice.

Llama Digest Revisited

The best thing about moving is that it forces you to confront the sentimental possessions you keep hidden away in boxes.  Confession time: I'm a packrat.  There are a few reasons, here's my favorite: I move a few hundred miles in one direction or another never less often than every two years.  We rebirth ourselves in a new environment, think of your freshman year in college.  That year happens over and over for me.  Everyone I've ever known is like your best friend from high school, slipping away despite the best of intentions.

So, I keep little pieces of of the people I've loved: a glass bottle from my grandmothers house, some paper cranes folded in a dorm room from fashion magazines.  The idea of going through all of this was that I might edit a bit.  Almost nothing was thrown away, though.  The best I could do was give some cheap and deteriorating jewelry to the neighbor girls to use as dress ups.

Under poorly fixed photos of the source of my first devastating heartbreak, I found a box that had been sealed by its own decoupage.  My husband insisted on opening this despite my wanting to pack it unopened.  It contained ancient crocus bulbs and beautiful point and shoot color photographs of the kids I took care of in West Philly, some desktop flotsam: tacks, paperclips.  Among these was a handwritten letter in old fashioned tight cursive falsely hinting at an elderly writer.  It begins: I was disgusted to read your article...

How I hated that newspaper, the entire three semesters I ran it.  The complainer may have been right: the article may have been worthy of only disgust.  I was never proud of anything I wrote there, and yet it occupied most of my time.  Such an awful feeling: to exhaust yourself making something inferior, to know that the public ridicule you are held to twice monthly is entirely deserved.  Knowing that I could not then muster anything good enough still makes me question my intelligence and competence.

During my small moments I don't care who is listening.  There are things I need to say for myself; my inner adolescent throws angst into the void.  When my stomach unties itself, I think that I'm practicing, that words will fall more gracefully as time passes.  In the meantime, I build calluses to silence and disgust.

Unbridled Girliness

The law against addressing romance in my own writing is not an effective one.  As a diary addicted teenager, I endeavored to write of my serial heartbreaks as little as I spoke of them.  Hormones respond to restraint by increasing in force, and so they tore the pen out of my hand with embarrassing frequency.  My exasperated mind had only time to scratch out apologies for the prattling she knew was coming before being pushed aside. 

The prohibition stands because too much has already been said on the subject.  There are a finite number of of ways to fall in love; they have all been explored by people with more skill than I possess.  The commercial radio I am being subjected to at this public computor is full of abominations born of overestimating the profundities that can be extracted from the artist's own little encounters.  ie: You love me but you don't know who I am.  Thank you for that, Virgin Atlantic EMI Epic, whoever.

I am reminded of all this reading Washington Square this weekend.  Okay, okay, I have no dowry, and twenty-two is now an eyebrow raising young age at which to marry rather than a near old-maidhood.  There are limits to it's timelessness.  Still, the emotional meat of the story sounded so familiar: the way a sweet talking man can fool you with the smallest of effort, the way you are left with only the knowledge that you have been played and everyone else saw it coming.

Sometimes great art makes me want to throw my voice into the milieu.  Other times it tells me that I should just shut up and go home.  In this case, James reminds me that anything I could say about love is so much pop music.

As long as I am indulging my neurotic femmie side, perhaps I should tell you that I've been feeling hideously ugly the last few weeks, that my thighs taunt me with newly noticed enormity wherever I go, whatever I wear.  In case you wonder how based in reality this new self hatred is, know that I am in the 28th percentile for that whole weight/height thing.  It is my job as an American woman to correlate my quality with my appearance and to find the latter perpetually lacking.  Why let some pesky feminist world view, let alone alone facts, keep me from fulfilling that duty?

Of Melons and Motorgraders

"That's not my lotion."

"What?"  Mike, my boss with only three years past my nineteen, had been talking about when he rode bulls in high school.  At first these stories interested me, as I am from one of the many states where rodeo is not a varsity sport.  Eventually I stopped listening, though, because it became obvious that it was all an attempt to compensate for his abundant wusiness.  The nervous lies only made the operators chafe at him more, and their attitude was beginning to rub off on me.  Bored, my eyes had wandered over to the frilly looking bottle of something sitting on the seat of the truck; they were just resting there, without my thinking at all about what I was seeing. 

"That cucumber melon stuff, that's not mine.  It's my wife's; she left it in here when we went to the, um, store last night."  He was lying.  I started to laugh when I realised this.  He picked up the lotion as if to hide it, finally putting it in the glove box.  Cucumber melon.  As if attempting to diminish one's scars and calluses were not a crime in and of itself, to do so with a product artificially scented as food, oh, it was too much.  His secret was safe with me, though, I would not tell.  I almost pitied him for the abuse he already suffered. 

Mike was supposed to be the foreman. He knew how to shoot grade, and he liked surveying, but manage the operators he could not.  They ate him for breakfast.  Earlier that day, Billy chewed him out for directing an end dump truck to the top of a pile of dirt to empty its bed.  The belly dumps have a hatch, sometimes two, which opens in the middle of the bed.  Everything inside slides neatly out while the truck keeps moving.  The end dumps, though, have a hatch that opens at the back, and the opposite end of the cab is lifted high into the air with hydraulic pumps.  The trucks are unstable when extended; sometimes they get stuck that way.  That's what happened this morning.  The belly dumps you can pour out onto a hill, but you are always supposed to keep the end dumps on flat ground.  Even I know that.

Billy had to use his motorgrader to push the truck down from the pile of dirt.  I'm not sure why it didn't just topple over, the bed thirty feet in the air like that. 

After awhile, the machines all start to look like they have faces.  The semis delivering fill look like great lumbering caterpillars, the dozers like friendly ogres.  The motorgrader had a snaky evil face.  I did not trust that machine.  It was thin and quick, not the biggest on site by any stretch, but its motor was the strongest and Billy ran it too fast.

"You should watch out for that Billy."

"Why's that?"  I was amused that this scrawny owner's kid would presume to offer me advice on how to negotiate the interpersonal dynamics of the Texas construction worker scene.  My techniques were working much better than his.

"Well... maybe your not supposed to know."  His voice got very quiet when he said this, as if he expected me to beg for his gossip. 

"Than you shouldn't tell me."  I looked away from him, out the window, wondering if it was going to stop raining so we could get to pumping out the site. 

"He killed a guy a year ago.  Ran over him with his machine."  Another lie.  Because Billy had made him look like an ass in front of everybody.  Just when I started to pity him, started to feel some solidarity as the other black sheep at the company.

"Mike, that's a shitty thing to say about anybody."  I stepped out of his cab then, just as Gus radioed in that we should just go home, it wasn't going to let up.

------------

The hierarchies of that job were an endless source of fascination to me.  Charisma had much more to do with it than any formal job title.  Billy was just an operator, and though acknowledged to be the best in four counties at running the most difficult machine, he was young, only thirty-five.  Mike was even younger, only twenty-two, the poor bastard, but all of the operators, older than either of them, deferred to Billy, not Mike.  Billy knew this and taunted Mike with it, telling us to do things he knew Mike hadn't thought of yet and then yelling at Mike for not being more on the ball.

All of the operators picked a laborer to mentor; that was another weird power dynamic.  Bear picked Jeff, from Midland-Odessa where the president summered as a child but poor as everyone who lives there year round.  Everybody called him Jeffro.  The two of them didn't like me much.  I'd told Bear wouldn't let him say the word nigger in front of me since I have five biracial cousins and no one says hateful things about my family in my presence, I'm sure he could understand.  Once I realised his southern chivalry would force him to grudgingly accept all manner of diatribes from me that would have gotten a man's jaw broken, I made it my duty to say what needed to be said.  Bear used Jeffro to try to make me look stupid and incompetent, teaching him to run the dozer so he would get more hours, telling me I wasn't strong enough to do this or that.

Billy figured this out and, loving a challenge, took me under his wing.   That and my work ethic impressed him.  I will pour my entire being into whatever is in front of me weather it be a freshman seminar paper on the continued influence of Oedipus Rex or moving a pile of dirt from here to there.  I made it my business to work faster and harder with a pickaxe than any of the other hands.

He put me on the roller and then had me directing trucks.  The two of us could dig and level a foundation in record time.  It got so he wouldn't work with anyone else.  We started talking more, he told me about his kids.  All the guys talked of almost nothing but their offspring.  Since this was in the months before Christmas, they compared notes on gifts.  The construction worker stereotype should be amended to include the lengthy and detailed bragging sessions on how many Rock Star Barbies one's daughter will receive under the tree.  I'd conned my way into this secret man's world and they would forget sometimes that I was in their treehouse.  I'd expected that moment to come- thought it would be a great ethnographic study, to see just which terms they used for the various pieces of women's anatomy.  Instead, they pulled wallets out to compare baby photos.  Not that tail didn't come up; it was just a distant second.

Billy got on really well with his daughter; he had a picture of his wife taped up on the inside of his cab.  He was a nice enough guy on balance, more than a little hot tempered and with no patience whatsoever for slack assedness. 

He tried to teach me to run the motorgrader.

"Billy, what do I need to run two machines for?"

"What?  You scared or something?  Look, it's like playing the piano, stand right there, I'll show you. See, I'm fixin to be foreman, but hey won't promote me unless they've got somebody to run the blade.  That's you, dar- ehem, Fern." 

"Uh huh. Cause Bear don't resent me enough already."  I'd shed some parts of my Yankee accent right away, but I couldn't keep from using those high minded words.

"So? Fuck him."

"Ah, no thanks.  He's starting to freak me out though.  I don't trust him, yknow?"

"He's an asshole."  Not a good enough reason.  His hard glare accused me of cowardice. 

"Okay, yes. I am scared to run it.  Those two and maybe more are waiting for me to fuck up; I don't think I should take any unnecessary risks."

There was a long silence; he looked rather dejected, like a kid whose fun plans for the day have been ruined.  That wasn't it.  No, obviously, he was disappointed to come up against the limits of my bravery, having imagined it boundless.  I see that look often enough to recognise it.  He turned away.

"They told you I killed that guy, didn't they?"

I was glad he avoided eye contact when he said this because I'm sure he could have read the disbelief in my eyes.  I kept silent, hoping he didn't actually want an answer.  An affirmative would have gotten Mike in more trouble than he would know what to do with, but I am a terrible liar.  Billy still wasn't looking at me when he started talking again.

"The things is, I didn't even feel the machine hit him, didn't even know... until the guy's head rolled out along the blade.  I thought it was just another dirt clump at first.  I got sick.  Sometimes I still do.  You never forget something like that."  I could hear in his voice why he wouldn't look at me.

"God, Billy, I'm so sorry."  Only this clumsy platitude fell from my mouth.  There should have been something better to say.

"I need to get off this thing." 

His Missing Books

You‘d think that in five hours I would have packed more than six boxes of books.  At least all the shelves in the bike room are empty now.  (So named for the six, yes six, bicycles hanging by hooks against one wall.  It might have sounded classier to call it the library, or at least the book room, after the wall perpendicular to the bikes, covered in now abandoned bookshelves.  Even the computer room would have sounded better.  I do most of my typing in here, after all.  I tried, but none of those stuck.  It is the bike room.)  The cookbooks and showoffy literary fiction still sit in the living room.  Those can’t fill more than two small boxes, though. 

When we moved here two years ago, I decided that since we had an extra bedroom, it would be a good time to bring every book I've ever owned from my mother’s house.  I have the entire Little House on the Prairie series, the Redwall series, my favorite I Can Read book called Mouse Soup, everything, right here, anchoring me.  It was pleasurable to sort through all of those today, I took my time, savoring the memories conjured by various covers. 

Somehow the books never quite got organized by subject on the shelves, but the classic fiction is nestled separately from the children’s books now.

I notice, now that I’m done, that I packed very few of my husbands books.  I’m wondering at this moment about specific titles that I know he once owned.  When we first got together he possessed complete collections of his favorite authors: O’Brian, Ford, Carver, Dostoevsky, Bukowski.  My own fiction collection is embarrassingly paltry, heavy on low class books I loved at nine, starring horses or girls wearing bonnets.  I married a working class man better read than myself, with hardcore taste in literature.  I aspire to one day catch up to him in classics read.

And now most of his wonderful books seem to be gone.

It’s possible, I guess, that he’s been packing these and taking them to store in his parents house two hours away when he visits them every few weeks.

I doubt it, though.

I think he’s been selling them.

We have a good used bookstore here that gives us a good rate in store credit for books we bring in.  They give much less in cash.

Our poverty has been chaffing at me lately.  Frugality used to feel like a fun game of outsmarting this consumerist culture.  Living simply was a rebellion against greed.  The last two years though, I’ve been sick of peanut butter and jelly, of thrift bought clothes that only ever almost fit me, of never going anywhere that has a cover charge.  I am hurt when I must get the bike computer that does not tell me my cadence so that we can save $10.  I’m tired of buying a new pair of shoes only once a year.  Next time I break my toe, I want to actually see a doctor.  A cell phone is a luxury I don‘t mind forgoing, but I wish we had long distance instead of having to use phone cards.  For a long time I didn’t mind always having someone else’s hand me down computer, but lately this one has been quirkier than usual, freezing up more often, frequently refusing to open any word processor documents or get online.  Even when the dialup works, there is no use in looking at anything other than text.  Photographs are indecipherable when they do make it across our slow connection.  It is less than pointless trying to access anything that moves or makes noise.

We think of ourselves as an egalitarian couple, in finances as in all things.  His parents are not feminists, though, and in the back of his mind he believes that it is his job to take care of me.  Though I try to hide it, Thomas can tell how weary I am of our perpetual lacking.  He blames himself, though he already makes more than I do. 

It is exhausting to love me.  I’ve always known that I am expensive emotionally, that I demand more attention than most women might.  This is not something I’m proud of.  I try to make up for this my being low maintenance financially.  Our wedding rings are silver, our furniture thrift.

But now I find out that Thomas has been whittling away at the books he’s had since college, the books that brought him out of his parent’s factory town.  He is diminishing his art so he can take me out to dinner.

I never meant to demand such a sacrifice of him.

Another Fall

All week I’ve been running my mind over the idea of friendship. More than just thinking about it, I’ve been writing in my head a beautiful (profound, even) essay on the many faces of human connection. Yesterday evening I had a final, so I’ve been looking forward to filling today with leisurely introspection and careful boxing up of much loved books.

As so often happens, the bipole gods had other plans.

It hard to talk about such things, panic reasserts itself upon examination. Let me reprint some letters I wrote yesterday and we’ll go from there, shall we?

Date: Jul 13, 2005 1:09 PM Subject: all is lost

I have a final in four hours and I don't understand the material. I'm
having trouble concentrating. I need a 100% on the test to get an 89.4
in the class. There is no hope now of getting the a that seemed so
secure mere weeks ago.

Date: Jul 13, 2005 1:48 PM Subject: Re: all is lost

well, if i dont get an a in this class i might not (prolly wont?) get
into the school i really really really want to go to and all the very
hard wirk ive been doign this summer (not to mention the money ove
spent on classes) will have been a complete waste.

Also, i think my brain is broken. I keep thinking i undrestand this
stuff, but i'm gettgin wrong answers. Im out of ideas fo rplaces to
look. I havent even started on the ph calcs- the hardest equasions.
There is no time to ask the teacher- he's at his day job untill
moments before the test.

Date: Jul 13, 2005 2:22 PM Subject: Re: all is lost

Well, no i dont have their phone numbers, but i couldnt ask any of
them for help anyway, due to events yesterday, described here:
"http://www.mercuryfern.typepad.com/"

Ive given up. Ive done all the problems in the book, i dont
understand why my answers were wrong, what else can i do? Stupid
fucking summer classes.

We've had new material every day this week, includign yesterday, and
only got back our most recent tests from which tostudy on monday. I
got a c on that test, which is why im freakign out now.

and i can't type.

fuck.

thanks for the brain waves, though.

Date: Jul 13, 2005 2:25 PM Subject: Re: all is lost

true. lets see how a bike ride feels. It can't make me worse than i am now.

-m

Date: Jul 13, 2005 2:36 PM Subject: Re: all is lost

no wait. cant muster the energy.
back to selfpity.

Date: Jul 13, 2005 6:41 PM Subject: bad to worse

so i took the test, in a maner of speaking
i took 3/4 of it, at which point my brain shut down.
I turned it in with a note that said, i am havign a panic attack and
am unable to finish the exam. I understand that this means i will
recieve a failing or near failing grade for the class.
This is classic mercuryfern territory, glorious potential followed by
miserable disapointment.
i hate my spyche so much right now.

Date: Jul 13, 2005 7:17 PM Subject: Re: bad to worse

THanks.
my heart hurts so much right now. Im sittign here at a public
computor at school, not even really doign anything, afraid to go home
because that will make everything real, it feel like i am inbetween
now, it doiesnt count yet, im not even reading or writing anything,
just sitting here, feelign liek everything is over, disapointed in the
world

intellectually i can see that that is inaccurate, but it feels real

Im havign troubel formign sentances, htough i know it woudl be useful to write

sorry about the typing, i dont have the energy to fix it

Date: Jul 13, 2005 8:26 PM Subject: Re: bad to worse

Thanks, i think ive stableized a bit. Im gonna go home and make
the boy comfort me. He's good at that. Knowing yall are out there
makes a big differance.

love,
-mercuryfern
still no energy to edit.
sorry.

------------

To those of you who don’t already know that I am illegible without a spell checker, my dirty little secret has been revealed. I am one of those apparent morons who will actually go about discussing my neighbour's favourite labouring colours if my checker is set to British. I dare not second-guess my word processor. Since I am writing this in MSWorks, I can see that the density of little red squiggly lines coincides neatly with my level of distress. Ah, yes, correlations and intriguing patterns. When in doubt, intellectualise.

I did mange to calm myself down before the test. I closed the books and walked away, listened to some good angry music on the drive to school and just let it all go. I learned to do this in school prior to Srock. Not caring about grades is a mental health issue for me. As an added bonus, when I don’t care about them, I get excellent grades. Armed with this knowledge, I actually walked into the classroom happy and calm. Frequently I know things that I don't know I know. It seemed likely that the formulas I’d been clumsily manipulating for the last two sleepless days had made their way in past my anger and would float to the surface once I got my emotional state in order.

There was an Olympic swimmer a few years back who received quiet a bit of attention for his unconventional training style. He didn’t practice. When he did laps, racing became boring and dispassionate, and he couldn’t muster the excitement to go fast during competetion.

I thought of him as I started the exam, thought of how I’ve done spectacularly well on tests I’ve been woefully underprepared for. When I took the SAT, I’d been, for two years, either a high school dropout or an omnivorous autodidact, depending on whether I felt like being pretentious or confrontational with whomever was asking. My mind was engaged, but certainly undisciplined, and I hadn’t taken any math whatsoever that entire time.

I knew I would score in the 99th percentile for reading, but I couldn’t have guessed that I would score nearly that high on the math section as well.

Taking the SAT is clear in my mind, even now. It was fun. I’d never encountered some of the concepts before, but I just sat and logiced them out, not caring if I was right, enjoying, actually enjoying, the process.  It sounds like very bad hippy parenting advice, but once there were no costs to failing, I succeeded. Walking from the parking lot, I made a similar peace. The chemistry test would be like so much geometry. For awhile, it was. I began writing in my head a jokey apologetic email to the list about how I had vastly underestimated myself and had likely aced the test. I asked the professor to clarify a question, a question I just wanted to confirm that I understood, and something about his tone just set me off. I was gone.

One of the differences between a full on panic attack and garden-variety anxiety is a total inability to understand the written word. I can read, sort of, but at the end of a sentence all comprehension evaporates. The four remaining problems ran across my vision over and over, but I could not extract any meaning from them. I sat there trying simultaneously not to cry or otherwise visibly spiral out from normal, but also to delve into the recesses of my mind and pull some buried knowledge out. These are opposing efforts. My intellect lost.

I wrote my note and headed to the computer lab.

For two hours it comforted me to sit in front of the screen, not typing much, not reading much, not thinking much.

I went home, fairly stable, almost happy. I should mention here that I must be pretty far along in my terror before any evidence of it is visible to the casual observer. In fact, now that I‘m trying to remember, I can’t think of a single time when a stranger would have been able to tell. I batten down the hatches; I plaster a saccerine smile on my face. It’s a relief to finally hit the bottom after building up to it for hours/days. I am at my most confidant in the eye of the storm.

So it was that when I walked in the front door, I was skipping and laughing. In a cheery voice, I announced to my husband what had happened.

The person I love more than anyone else put his face in his hands and cried.

He begged me to consider medication, to drop my remaining classes, said that he was afraid for me, doubted my ability to take care of myself, his ability to take care of me. I know that my eyes were wet and my voice tight when I told him I could not talk about it, that I had just pulled myself out of some horrible anguish and I needed to think about something else for awhile or I would implode again.

We went out to dinner and talked of logistics for the coming move and my bloging stats. I ate two entrées, suddenly aware that my anxiety had kept me from food for at least one full day.  He ate not at all.

I have things to think about today. The books and superfluous textiles still need to be packed and put into storage. The bike must be ridden; my sister must be chatted with. I can’t write yet about some of the questions I’m asking myself now. What if anything to say to the professor? How much of this sickness is physiological? Will it inevitably cripple me without pharmacology?

I know one thing: I am not dropping those classes. Things shatter in my grip.  I pick them up again.

I failed to use my husband’s truth telling lie.

The antagonist from this tale recommenced her mocking today. Her friend yelled across the room while we worked problems:  “Hey, what does that C stand for?”

“Sausage!” This elicited much self-satisfied giggling from both of them and sizeable portion of the class. Apparently that’s what the word Celsius sounds like coming from our lab assistant’s mouth.

I gave her my specialty 80% condescension 20% hatred glare. She was ready for it this time, and actually addressed me rather than titter with her friends.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Because I think it’s gross to make fun of somebody’s accent.”

“I’m not making fun of her, I think it’s cute.”

“Ah, cute. That’s not disrespectful.”

“I’m just joking around with her.” I’m not sure how do describe her tone here, except that she was getting a bit shrill and either nervous or indignant.

“No, actually, what you did was laugh *at* her while she was giving a presentation, and now again behind her back. That. Is fucking rude.”

“Ih! Whatever! I’m not even! Talking to you! You need to! Mind your own business!”

“Then don’t ask me to explain why I’m angry at your racist humor.”

“I am not a racist! Ih! Whatever! I don’t have to! Prove myself! To you anyway!” Upon which she returned to the clucking amongst her fellow hens that she finds so fortifying. I am enough of an admirer of the craft of debate to concede when someone raises a valid point against me. Yes, I have an unflattering haircut, and my socks, while in the same color family, do not match. Since it was very hot this afternoon, I may also smell bad. I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt on that one. None of these, however, detract from the fact that I do not have a festering cesspool of wilful ignorance as my sorry excuse for a soul.

I showed restraint: the rest of the petulant witticisms fighting for attention in my head were not allowed past my lips. I laughed instead. Not triumphantly, no, mine was a tense bemusement. It was either that or a sentence beginning with a sharp intake of breath and a squinting of the eyes: “People like you...”

Still No Time: Dusted off and Polished Up

Geographic Promiscuity

(Originally seen by a chosen few in the top secret weblog practice run, March 23, 2005)

The first place to own my heart was my fathers Pennsylvania hometown, where my family has been farming the same piece land of since the 1790's, and if you believe there really is a Susquahanock woman five generations back, well, then, my blood's been there even longer.

My grandmother raised twelve children in the house where we had Thanksgiving. The sprawling six-bedroom ranch was built when the family was briefly wealthy in the 1960's, though the money was long gone by the time I was born. The basement, finished in a once classy black lacquer and bright orange, was a many splendoured Ali Baba’s cave to we cousins. One closet door was adorned with a six-foot mural of the cat in the hat. Opening it revealed shelves lined with nothing but decades old cucumber pickles. They were particularly delicious with wormy apples. Below the stuffed jackolope, a child-sized cabinet begged you to explore the corroded chemistry sets and half-finished paint by numbers. Walking past the sparkly gold wet bar took you to another more inconspicuous closet. This was the home of skies and ice skates in every size, hastily packed boxes of comic books, baseball cards, and stamp collections. Next to the pool table was an eight-track player that hooked up to the house-wide intercom.

In the window wells and behind the untrimmed hedges countless kittens mewed in desperate need of medical care. I would dutifully provide it, wiping the puss from their eyes, stealing eggs and condensed milk from the busy kitchen to try to nurse them back to health. The inevitability of their tiny shaking deaths might have kept another girl from loving them with such abandon.

It was magic, that house, but the whole town too. My teenage aunts would walk me to the corner store and buy me cheap ice cream, layered with primary colored syrup in a clear cup. The owner knew my dad and my grandparents. I always looked like a different distant relative to him. Everyone knew me, it seemed. I was a celebrity; an heir to some throne, my formidable grandmother's oldest's oldest. I would come home to that place someday.

At fourteen I did come home, thinking I would find a lack of pretentiousness, discover my roots, commune with nature. But they hated me. I was an auslander. I befriended the only gay student at school two days before she came out. I would not renounce her, and I would not fuck my second cousin, so the assault began. The notes in my locker, the kicking under tables, the attempted tripping, throwing things at me in class. Then they killed one of the cats by putting a firecracker up its ass, blowing it up. They dug up my grandmother’s rosebushes. Told me about these things later. Threats, sure, but threatening what? I wasn't sure, but I was terrified.

One day I put my backpack down on a chair in the cafeteria, went to get some pizza. Came back and it's contents, three, four, years of journals and poetry, were sprawled across the floor. One of the girls who wrote me those evil notes was sitting in its place. She gave me a haughty look and her friends giggled. Fuming, I crawled around on the floor, picked up every precious scrap, filed them tenderly back in their correct spots. When I was done, I calmly tapped her on her shoulder so she would turn around to face me. The look on her face when I punched her temple was exquisite. My many threatening rings even drew blood in an impressive way. I mean, I'm a pacifist and everything, we should work out our problems through dialog, etc. But my god, she facilitated a cat murder/torture and then disrespected the sanctity of the written word. She needed to be clocked. Admit it.

Oh, that sick little town broke my heart. The small meanness of the kids, the apathy of the adults; even so, it was my first love. For awhile I was homesick everywhere, but now I love towns the way teenagers love sex, urgently and indiscriminately. I call a place home, and mean it, after I've been there a few weeks. Sometimes I look at my list of places lived as another might look at the memories of once lovers. My heart aches for them each acutely. I think of moving back to Philly, to Chicago, to Camden, Austin, Barrington. Pieces of me are scattered all over this country.

The part of me that lives here, in this tiny Ohio town, well, this place is special, the long term relationship that nearly tamed the most infamous high school slut. I've been here two years- a record for this decade. She doesn't know it yet, but I am leaving in August. I have the summer to say goodbye, and I miss her already, I do. I know all my neighbors pets names; the cashiers at the grocery store offer me change if I am short. Listen, if you care for the toddlers in a town of four thousand people, everyone knows and loves you. I wish I could tell you what it means when I ride my bike to work down these straight flat streets, through the passive solar assisted living apartment complex. This will be the third season for my perennials, the centurium and yarrow, the russian sage and lupines; this will be their most glorious summer, when they say good bye to me.

I am hopeful about what New England might bring me a second time. I miss the hills, the rough rocky soil, the skinny close together tall trees. I miss that clean pedigreed air, the brick buildings, the third generation leftists. I miss skinny dipping at night in the plentiful streams, plays and paintings and thesis projects all around. The food, I miss that, too. I miss being nourished by art.

Too many perfect places exist in the world. If I am here, I am not there, always missing something magic somewhere. It pains me to know that beauty lives and dies without my ever knowing it. I try to see as much as I can, to keep my eyes open, to keep moving. There are many profound joys in such a life. Another thought, though, pulls on my sleeve, whispers doubt in my ear, even as I try to push it away: You cannot really be home in a few weeks or months. I can spin myths for myself, I can fall in love with the street theater in Philly, with the glacial lakes in Maine, imagine myself living in those towns forever, having kids, getting old, weaving myself into the fabric of the place.

I always leave, though.

Ten years of that and now I am not from anywhere. There is a depth and breadth trade off in all things; in this I choose to know more places less deeply.