pronoia

Community

I've long believed that if you want a certain community to exist, it's your responsibility to show up and participate, to do the things that help make and maintain that community. In our particular Pagan community, I've led ritual, I've cooked, I've cleaned up after people, I've babysat, I've listened, and I've tried to be attentive to what was needed.

The problem is, for the last year or so, I've felt like this is not a community I want to be part of any longer. It's not a bad community; it's simply a community that isn't feeding my spiritual needs. What I want, desperately, is spiritual connection, a space to lean into the spiritual, a context in which I can do the spiritual pushing I need to do.

What this community has is wonderful people, a great space, and a very ad hoc tradition that we've more or less made up ourselves out of the traces of something more substantial. This isn't to say it doesn't work or that it has no value. It's that I know, I know, that there's something more out there and I long for that something more. I long to learn from teachers who have themselves been taught. I long for a set of practices that let me open myself to the Divine.

So I'm pulling away from the community as community and trying to keep the friends I've made in that community. I'm not sure, however, that it's going to work.

I had a fight on Saturday with E, one of my faery godfathers and someone I respect deeply. He's a community-builder; networking and creating institution are in his bones. He was trying to get me to attend a birthday dinner tomorrow night for someone in the community, someone I don't much like. The birthday boy is young and unformed, and after two or three years of spending time with him I've still not experienced any kind of meaningful relationship with him. I don't much like him, and I don't want to go, especially since I'm feeling increasingly like my time is small and precious and I want to be choosy about how I use that time. E's argument is that I owe it to the community to be a role model, to show up to the birthday boy's development. I don't think he can grasp where I'm coming from: that I don't feel ties to that community and don't feel I owe it anything and besides, I have done my share of mentoring clueless younguns and I decided years ago to stop.

Our fight has more to it than a disagreement about the place of community. It's also about my feeling like E is bulldozing me here and in other contexts. It's about me trying to set boundaries and feeling illegitimate about it. It's about my being disappointed in the spiritual community we have and feeling tragic about my spiritual prospects. But it's also about who we are in the community and what we'd like that community to be.

And I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that I don't want public community, not in my spiritual life.

Power Games

Back when I started my first on-line diary, I lamented the difficulty I had finding a partner who would be present to all of me: the silly, queer, serious, kinky all of me. Ms. P went into mourning. She was already headed to the nuns, and while I doubt knowing I was kinky would have changed her trajectory, it was a confirmation she didn't need right about then.

I'm thinking about kink a lot right now. Ms. P and I have had some trouble lining up our respective kinks, being as we're both bottoms and we bottom really differently from one another. After a few abortive attempts early on, the whole subject went on hiatus for a while. Ms. P was having enough sexual recovery post-nuns pre-medication to deal with without adding kink to the mix, and then we had illness and moving and career changes and the whole nine yards.

For a while, Ms. P would say it didn't matter, that we didn't need to involve kink in our lives again. I disagreed. I know that, while I can lose myself in and enjoy vanilla sex, the long-term absence of kink is a hole, a mourning, something lost. My own experience with kink isn't very extensive (before Ms. P there was one incredibly ill-advised relationship with a man that was wonderfully kinky and horribly dysfunctional), but I know that I'm not willing to write it out of the picture. It allows me to go somewhere I don't otherwise get to go, turn off my brain in a way I can't do otherwise. And perhaps more importantly, I know how fundamental it is to my wife, to her experience of sex, to her experience of relationship.

While I suspect most people would defend an adult's expressed need for sex, there's not a lot of room to talk about kink. I'm lucky; I have a group of friends who tend to be kinky themselves and who jump at the chance to see a presentation on the history of kink (as we did recently). Bottoming in particular takes on problematic resonances because we're women, because it appears to align too neatly with the power dynamics we're trying, as feminists, to overturn. But power out there and power in here are two very different things, although I'm still articulating how.

Recently Ms. P and I (aided by reading Sensual Magic by Pat Califia with R) have returned to kink. I've had more time to think through ways to top her, and medication has made an enormous difference in her ability to talk about sex in ways that help me do that. We're still exploring, and we'll continue to.

I've been leery of talking about any of this here in some kink-version of the closet. I don't know what your experiences have been or what you think about kink, but I suspect there will be the odd post about it here and again, because it as at least as central to my life as my work and my dogs and my funny house.

It Only Sounds Funny

When we got home tonight after work and a quick dinner, we discovered that Gracie, aka Eldest Dog, had been sick in every room in the house. Except the kitchen and bathroom of course, but those would have been too easy to clean up.

Have I mentioned the carpet is beige?

Have I mentioned the carpet is new?

Have I mentioned we rent this place?

Have I mentioned my carpet shampooer doesn't suck up fur, so that if you can't vaccuum first (say, because there's a large pile of dog vomit in the way) you create damp, compacted fur balls while attempting to make the weirdly colored stain go away?

Have I mentioned that I entered the house all happy because we finally, finally broke down and bought new bolts to put the bed together (the old ones never having materialized) and found that, once again, there's a reason I have to sleep on the floor?

For the record? This sucks.

Why I Still Hate Conferences

I can't think of a bigger way to waste three days than a conference. Part of the problem is that conferences like this are much too big and much to broad, so that there's almost no possibility of having a concentration of information you actually need. I came because my school won a physical education grant, and I was required to come. They estimated in the opening plenary that one-quarter of the attendees were grant recipients. 500 people. Yet the sessions which actually talked about the grant (how people have implemented it, how they used technology, what evaluation procedures they put in place, lessons learned) held 40 people, and there were never more than three at any given time that might be even vaguely related to the grant.

Have I mentioned I hate crowds?

There's been way too much time at this conference where there was either nothing I wanted to see or I couldn't get in to the sessions I did want to see. This isn't much different from the humanities conferences I used to attend. The titles are always far more interesting than the talks, and I could never convince myself it was time well spent. And I don't really network.

The one difference is the mode of conversation. Humanities conferences tend to be full of detail, full of nuance, and full of caveats. One doesn't necessarily learn anything of note, but you get to see many pretty butterflies of ideas. Department of Education conferences, on the other hand, are all about "evidence-based practice" and statistics about the whole of the country's kids. Frankly, what works in Oklahoma probably isn't going to work in my urban, low-income, at-risk, African-American charter school, and they aren't telling me anything we don't already know about our kids. And they're so damn earnest. I adore sincerity and lack of cynicism, but I have a certain suspicion of earnestness in academic or business contexts, since in my experience it tends to correlate with not having thought through context. A little self-aware humor goes a long way in my book. Who knew I would so soon miss the ironic detachment of the humanities?

Later today is the actual meeting for new grantees. 5.5 hours of it. I have no idea what they're going to talk about for 5.5 hours, but I'm scared.

And I can't wait to get back to doing actual work that has an actual purpose.

Revenge of the Femme

I'm spending a few days at the National Conference of the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools in DC. It's in the same hotel in which the MLA was held the year I interviewed for jobs, so I'm having all kinds of sense-memory flashbacks, which are startling when everything else is about alcohol, gangs, and the need fo substantial physical activity.

This conference appears to be me and 2000 PE teachers. That's not entirely fair. It's me, 1000 PE teachers, 500 vendors, and 500 random administrators. I have the urge to wear inappropriate footwear out of pique. Today I'm wearing strappy heeled sandals. Strangely practical for a conference (I need the extra height to sit in those conference chairs like a grownup instead of cross-legged as I prefer), but not what everyone else is wearing.

I'll blog about the conference later if I have time. It's a strange thing to go to when you're used to academic humanities conferences.

Contrasts and the Ethics of City Living

At the freeway exit I use to get Ms. P after work, there is often a tall, bald, skinny Black man selling flowers, small pies, and newspapers. He wears a three-piece black suit, even in the heat of July and August, and he has big, round lenses in his glasses. He walks briskly between the stopped lanes of cars, offering his wares with brief lifts of one arm or the other, and returns to replenish his stores at two cardboard boxes stacked on a small luggage cart.

The other day, while returning to his stash, he stopped on the street side of the curb and hopped up with what looked like pleasure in his day.

It almost made me want to buy something.

*****************

Last night, after visiting with friends, we nearly ran out of gas. Between the city driving and blasting the a/c, we've been using more gas than usual, and Ms. P has a horror of running out of gas because we actually did run out of gas last year and a whole morning's-worth of saga ensued. Last night we did not run out of gas, but we had an encounter of a different sort.

We had passed a gas station while looking for parking, so I knew where one was, always a challenge in the city. We returned, and what had been a small and somewhat dirty station by day was distinctly sketchy by night--people presumably without cars sitting against the wall drinking, lights missing, you name it. It only took cash, and while I was inside proferring up a $20 bill I had only by the grace of paying for dinner on the credit card the night before and getting cash from R, a man jumped up from the sidewalk and began rubbing our car down with a rag. I returned and started pumping the gas, and he kept wending his way around the car, rubbing it and making it look smeary rather than the dirty it began. When I finished he was crowding me near the driver's side, and without knowing exactly what to do, I said excuse me. He moved, said, "thanks anyway," and walked away, looking disgusted. I got in and drove away, feeling manipulated and disappointed in myself at the same time.

How does one respond to such things ethically and compassionately without assuming that means opening my pocketbook to everyone hanging out on streetcorners?

Once Again, With Feeling

This morning I'm much better. Still stressed, still overwhelmed, still desperately needing alone time, but much less end-of-ropy than I was in the middle of the night.

And I WILL work on the house tonight, damnit!

In Which I Whinge and Complain a Whole Lot

Although I am prone to swearing, the frequency with which I am using the word "fucking" as an adjective lately is excessive.

I have had no real, functional time by myself since April. That's not exactly true. In early June I had about four hours alone, and that day I was sick I got some time to myself.

I am beginning to come up with excuses, valid ones still, to run home while we're spending the day with R. for just a little bit of time.

I am beginning to get irritated by everything, even things that normally wouldn't even catch my attention.

I am beginning to have to suppress the urge to tell everyone to leave me the hell alone.

Some of this, I know, is the change in my workplace. Academics spend a good deal of time alone, and even when they've got teaching and committees and craziness, there's always the option to nip out alone for coffee or a run to the library. There are always excuses. Now I'm spending 8 or 9 hours a day in a room with at least two and sometimes four other people.

Some of this is that we still have no routine. The only room that has had no progress at all is the ritual room, the one that has my meditation gear. I haven't done morning pages in weeks. There has been only one morning of exercize.

Some of this is that the house is still in pieces, although fewer pieces than it was (we now have curtains! for the first time since we moved in a MONTH ago!). Even if I wanted to take alone time, downtime, I feel like I both need to and want to keep plugging away on the house so it might be finished sometime this calendar year.

Some of this is that, between the stress of transition and a lack of regular meds (see lack of routine, above), Ms. P has been one anxious puppy, and when anxious isn't prone to wanting to do things without me.

Some of this is that I just spent two weeks not being able to talk to Best Friend while she was away running camp when I usually get to talk to her every single day. Sometimes twice. And that the first time I got to talk to her post-camp I found out I won't get to see her while she's in this neck of the woods. And that while I know lots and lots of people in Big City, I don't know any of them in a way that lends itself to my being able to pick up the phone and cry on their shoulders for a while. Rather, I know plenty of people who would be there for me, without question, but I don't have anyone I feel really safe opening up to right now.

Some of it is that I've been holding it together for three people--me, Ms. P, and R--for a while now and that's coming back to bite me.

And some of it is that when I've tried to talk to Ms. P about all of this, about feeling overwhelmed and stressed and anxious and generally transitiony, it's only made her either defensive or more anxious, and in either case I end up focusing outward again, toward her, toward our relationship.

Right now, I really want to be selfish. Profoundly selfish. I don't want to talk to anyone else, think about anyone else, worry about anyone else, or clean up after anyone else, including the animals. I don't want to be the good one, the responsible one, the stalwart one, the one people can count on. I don't want to share, I don't want to be nice, and I don't want to listen.

I'm torn between staying up to clean, staying up to read mindlessly, and crying myself to sleep.

I'm cranky because we ate pizza for dinner, because I found out I shouldn't eat any soy, because I can't turn on a lamp because we have no normal-sized lightbulbs, because we spent the evening on the phone with V and Sister-in-Law instead of unpacking as I had envisioned, because my office is overheated because there's one window unit a/c and three-to-five breathing humans, because the upstairs carpet is so covered in fur it's a completely different color, because the other day I had to dismantle the vaccuum to rid it of the packed-in fur that prevented it from sucking up anything, because I have no workbench in the basement and until I figure out where to put my tools I won't find the cordless drill which holds up putting up all kinds of helpful things like curtain rods and cup holders, because Maddie (aka Youngest Cat) is spending her nights throwing things onto the floor and scratching furniture, becase we still haven't found the bolts to the bed, because because because because.

There's a million things to be cranky about, and none of them are real. I'm cranky because I'm exhausted and depleted and empty and there's nothing on the horizon to fill me up again, and when I let go of the cranky, all I want to do is cry.