pronoia

New Year's Resolutions

Today is Samhain. Last night we celebrated with a large group ritual out in the woods, and I mourned an old grief I haven't yet gotten rid of and watched the moon rise over the mountains. Today Ms. P and I are nesting--having bruch at the coffee shop, getting a few groceries, reading the Times, starting a slow dinner while listening to NPR. We like to spend Sunday with as few people and as much horizontal as possible, and soon she'll come upstairs so we can finish watching Return of the King while knitting.

In my religion, today is the beginning of the new year, the time when we have the opportunity to both be in touch with our intuition and pay attention to the cyclical nature of everything. We're here again, on a mountaintop in the chilly breeze, and this year the moon rises at 8-something and the clouds obscured most of the stars. This year I'm making an effort to get rid of this old grief, this old regret at a relationship that lasted a fraction of the time I've taken to mourn it. This year I'm making an effort to actualize the writing plan, to really lean into my spirituality and figure out what it's all about.

Happy Samhain.

Blah, Blah, Blah

Today is one of those days where I feel like I can't possibly write because I'm the most boring person on the face of the earth and no one could possibly want to hear what I have to say. And I don't have anything to say anyway. So there.

Sometimes I'm six.

Yesterday involved far too many people for this introvert, and several of them were intensely emotional people who required my attention, and many of the rest were students whose desperation I understand and can't quite handle right now. Combine that emotional exhaustion with a poor night's sleep--the dogs got me up and I couldn't go back to sleep--and I'm a waste of skin today. If I could have gotten away with staying home today, puttering and cleaning up all of the torn paper the dogs have scattered about the place, I'd probably be doing better. But this is one of the downsides of academia's "flexible" schedule--I can't cancel classes without very good reason, and being tired and grouchy is too common a reason to count as good, especially when I'm trying to save up necessary cancels for health reasons.

Bah.

Today I'm going to push through my classes as quickly as possible, although my second one deserves to be kept the whole damn time for their lackluster efforts on Tuesday. Even if all I do is read blogs today and teach, that counts.

Like I said: boring.

9

I haven't been writing because I've been struggling with identity. I'm not sure who I want to be on this blog, which me wants to come out and play. In part I want it to be a way for me to engage the parts of myself that don't often get airtime elsewhere--being in a queer relationship, being part of a BDSM relationship, practicing some blend of Wicca and Buddhism with a little Judaism and Catholicism thrown in, writing and reading eclecticly, struggling to engage my own wants and needs and goals. But I also want this to be a space where I can process the parts of my life that are known, where I can complain about students or about a fight I had with Ms. P or the work I'm doing for my second degree initiation.

I worry that somehow, in some way, it will become not-anonymous, and then all of this very real me will be laid bare, laid honest, for everyone to read. It makes me very uncomfortable.

And so this morning I've been challenging myself with two things. The first is what Ms. P and the Tree call radical honesty. They had a conversation once where one of them said that no one wants full and complete honesty all the time, that it would destroy relationships. The other disagreed, and thus was born the Experiment: what happens if we are radically, completely honest all the time with one another? This doesn't mean saying true things in order to be mean, of course, but it does mean being straightforward and forthright about true things. I've been challenging myself, in my life and here, to participate again in the Experiment.

Second, I've been reengaging the Enneagram, my favorite personality indicator. It divides all personalities into 9 basic types, each of which have a whole range of levels of health with differing behavior as well as descriptions of how we are when we're integrating and disintegrating. I like it because it's not simplistic, because it's dynamic and accounts for change, because it has a spiritual dimension, and because it is a tool for self-examination and self-development more than a description.

In the Enneagram, I'm apparently a 9. We've had trouble typing me; for several years we thought I was a 6. But I'm a 9. And characteristic of a 9 is the tendency to disengage, to step away from the self and the self's needs in order to create or maintain harmony. So much of my reluctance to be truly present is constitutional and not really a rational evaluation of reality. Harmony is good; disengagement is not. So I'm challenging myself not to disengage.

I keep reminding myself of the story, which I've heard as both Catholic and Buddhist, where a head monk enters a kitchen and asks two monks what they are doing. One monk holds up his knife and says, "cutting carrots." The other monk smiles, keeps chopping, and says, "falling down and getting up again." I'm trying to be the second monk, always falling down and always getting up again.

In Memoriam

Jacques Derrida has died, of pancreatic cancer, at 74.

I am reminded suddenly of my ex-boyfriend. When we learned, at the beginning of a graduate seminar on Derrida, that Gilles Deleuze had killed himself, the ex put his head down on the seminar table and stayed like that until the break, an hour and a half later. He was inconsolable for days, until the obituary finally ran in the New York Times. He needed physical proof that it was real.

He won't be so easily consoled this time, I think. The obituaries I've seen are uniformly snide, quoting Cambridge philosophers saying Derrida's theories were absurd and useless and castigating a system that found his theories meaningful. "99% of the time we understand one another when we talk," my Derrida professor said. "Deconstruction is about what happens the other 1% of the time." (Michael Berube has a wonderful intro to Derridean thought on his blog.)

To Derrida, whereever he is: I hope you finally get to finish that entertaining argument with Foucault.

To my ex: Today of all days, I think of you fondly and with affection, and hope that you know all the good in the world.

I Don't Wanna Grow Up, I'm an Overalls Kid

Tuesday's I get the house to myself in the evenings. Ms. P drives away to Nearby City for choir practice and I get to putter along at home. Sometimes I go with her and sit at the coffee shop working. Most of the time I hang out here.

Am I the only one who can't do certain things in certain clothes? I'm not talking about not getting messy, because, well, I'm always absentminded and getting dirty. I mean not being able to think about doing anything like freelance work or housework or even reading with an equinimity--literally--because I'm in work clothes. I came home, read blogs, puttered around putting dinner together, and I kept listing in my head all the things I could and should be doing. Cleaning the house for the weekend guest. Finishing the laundry I've started. Calling old friends. Brainstorming freelancing topics. The very idea of them was fatiguing. Standing at the sink, washing potatos, I couldn't figure out how I was going to stay awake until dark, much less do things.

And then I changed my clothes.

I'm still tired, but suddenly I can imagine curling up in the chair with the laptop to type out some story and article ideas. Suddenly I can imagine getting the laundry done, even if I don't clean the kitchen. (Housekeeping might be a story for tomorrow.) Suddenly I can imagine my evening.

Part of the problem is that I hate grownup clothes. If I could live in overalls, I'd be such a happy girl. It's a small part of the freelancing dream: to be able to spend most of my days in overalls and floppy pants and tanktops and sweaters. I dress up just fine, and I frequently get compliments from my colleagues on my clothes. (The fact that I nearly always wear color instead of beige and black probably has something to do with it. Heaven spare me from the academic wardrobe pretensions!) Dressed up for work or adult consumption, I always feel like I'm in drag somehow. Like I'm putting on a show that isn't me at all. And this is when I wear Old Navy capri pants and a cute t-shirt. One of the benefits of academia is the distinct lack of Professional Dress.

It's one of the problems of growing up tropical: when shoes constitute dressing up, everything else feels like too much.

Ah well. I've got my real clothes on now, so I can go have my real life. It's about time.