There’s a scene in Monty Python’s holy grail set amongst a plague. No great wonder, plagues swept through Europe like colds through a nursery school. Python’s twisted little riff on the plague years involves some old guy being drug out of his house and protesting “I’m not dead yet . . . I’m feeling much better . . . I think I’ll go for a walk . . .I feel Happy!!!”
Well, today, I feel happy.
Don’t know when it happened or why, but as uncool as it is to bitch that you’re having a hard time, it’s even uncooler to go about actually admitting to happiness. So I won’t beleaguer the point. Might have something to do with a) it’s not Monday, b)I got some sleep this weekend, not as much as I could have, but enough, c) I went to Thriller dance rehearsal yesterday. It’s like a scene out of “High School Musical,” corny as hell and great fun. Not to mention a great workout d) I’m running a 5K race tomorrow for breast cancer research and feel virtuous, and e) had a great week of getting things done and talking to friends, f) my students actually studied for their midterm and many of them aced it, and g) Dan and I had a couple of great talks and no-one wants to kill the other this week. It’s like things hit an equilibrium, or like I did. The weather finally cooled off a little, the mood in the house cooled off a little, the mood at the school cooled of a little and I chilled out a little. It’s hard to tell, but I think it’s that last one that’s most important.
When I was a kid, I couldn’t be bothered to care about or do anything that didn’t grab my attention. I’d just disappear behind a book and be gone. Somewhere in the last ten years, I found my inner twitch, though, and the bugger bloody makes me crazy. Everyone else too. I can guarantee that half the reason I’ve been grumpier than a treed cat in the rain is that I think there’s shit I ought to be doing and that I’m not doing it. Maybe its cause I got a lot of it done, but I’m chillin like a Martini this week. I don’t know how long it’ll last but I’m gonna roll with it for a while.
My mom often quotes some philosopher who says “let death be your advisor,” the idea being that you don’t stress or fuss about that which doesn’t matter. I’ve never really dealt much with death nor had any fears of it. Mocked it every Halloween I went costumed as a death thing. Matter of fact, a couple of years ago, I went as death for Halloween. I love Halloween. That year was tops, though. I was death, Dan was a Borg (complete with foam rubber costuming, tubes, wires and a shaved head) and we made a punchbowl of Bloody Mary’s and threw a great party. Then I got trumped when our 7-foot friend, Harley, showed up as dead and I had to cede that perhaps my version of death was like the “dia de los muertos” death – kinda little and impish. Because I was also studying 17th century poetry, we joked about my being the “little death” – a 17th century euphemism for orgasm.
That Halloween has yet to be topped til last year when, 5 months preggers, I did the Zombie dance and ended up at the local watering hole afterwards to drink soda water with lime and totter about in my zombie makeup amongst the elaborately costumed folk who’d either danced with me or come out to see it. Doing it again this year kinda reminds me of why I like Halloween. Grown adults get to put on costumes and go about doing things they wouldn’t otherwise. You get to play dead: not the real dead with the soul-wrenching, bone-grinding grief that we all know that death brings, but the mockery that we make of it to thumb our noses at it. It’s the same spirit that produced “Scary Movie,” Python’s “Holy Grail,” and every bad-B horror flick that camps up the dead. It’s like a Tarot deck where the Death card isn’t disaster, it’s just change, the end of something and the beginning of another. This week has been the end of something and the beginning of another, and I’ll gladly paint my face and get my ghoul on for the holidays.
It seems to be in the very air, too. The winds have changed and smell like rain and cool winds, old leaves and damp asphalt. I go visit houses that smell like good cheese and pumpkin, hot tea and cinnamon, with some baked goods just to remind you that the great winter feast holidays are just around the corner. The halls of the college are filled with activity and smell like coffee and the order of an academic semester underway, but without the frantic, desperate activity of the beginning and end, just the slow roll of time marching towards the holidays.
And that makes me happy.
Friday, October 19, 2007
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
The Thriller Dance
One of my favorite 80’s film noir Sci-Fi flicks is Bladerunner. Starring a painfully young Harrison Ford stars as the specially created police force agent Decker, and Sean Young as an achingly beautiful human-like robot. The tale is about the other robots who, designed for off-world labor, are not allowed on Earth. When they break the law and return home – usually violently -- Decker “retires” them. They don’t go willingly. One tries to strangle him to death with a pair of gorgeous thighs, another with a karate chop to the neck. And those are just the ladies. The men try to shoot him, throw him off buildings, break his fingers, and beat him to an inch of his life. Even Young’s character Rachael, gets a good shot in with a cannon of a handgun in perfect lipstick, a smashing 1940’s-era suit, and a coat with a huge fuzzy collar.
It seems that these creatures, while “more human than human,” nonetheless have a four-year life span. The most resplendent off these illegal, childlike denizens of mother earth, and their leader, is Roy, who grabs his creator by the head and intones “I want more life f_____” right before he squeezes him to death. The censors substitute the word “father.” Those of us who saw the director’s cut know that the substitution doesn’t necessarily mar the intent of the moment, but does subtly shift it into the Frankensteinian motif the film evokes. This being October and closing in on Halloween, it’s a good time to view such crazy cool stuff again.
So, being Halloween season, it’s time for rehearsals of Michael Jackson’s Thriller that this fair city’s young and interesting will perform in the streets of downtown again this year. I went and began learning it all over again. The rehearsals have all the excitement of the high school musical (I think they just put a film out of that, too), all breathless, a little sweaty and a mind to “getting the feet right.” Dan, bless his heart, took the baby with whom I was five months pregnant last year when I did this. It was a great kickoff to a great weekend that started Thursday night with a celebratory soda with friends, the dance rehearsals, a Friday Day at the Spa Dan gave me as a birthday present, a Friday night academic talk, a late, late Friday night on the porch talking about Deconstruction, the Saturday morning Farmer’s market, a great day at the legendary huge barbecue of a local millionaire, and Dan’s band’s gig at the old watering hole with 50 of my favorite people in attendance. Sunday, we had chicken dinner with friends (who had raised the chicken themselves and to whom I took a conciliatory plate of pesto pasta with fresh basil from the garden), then Sunday night with my favorite boys.
Props to Dan, Heidi, and our good friends Thad and Rebecca who made it all possible. After working for two weeks straight grading papers and trying to move mountains through the growing pains of our school’s IT problems, it was a welcome return to all the other good things in life. It was exhausting and I think I averaged 4 or 5 hours of sleep for a week, but I came out of the other end so refreshed and energized, it felt like I’d slept for a week.
It seems I want more life, f_______.
It also seems that I got it. No, not seems, did. Now by Saturday, I was really pathetically jonesing for some time with my baby boy. I missed him so badly Saturday night that I had to flip open my phone to see his picture a couple of times while out at the gig. It made Sunday all that much sweeter when from sunup to sundown, I got all day playtime and snuggling with Connor and Dan. It was a good day. They all were. A great weekend. A stellar weekend. The kind of weekend that puts soul and body back together and makes them ready to face the work coming down the pike again.
And I’m happy. Oh, I know that the papers are coming, that the students are starting to wear out and get cranky and blame me, that the school’s IT issues and my half-luddite attempts to get around them aren’t going away anytime soon, that I’m going to have more on my academic plate than I feel like I can handle, and that the editing of my manuscript will be torturous and needs to get done this week.
But for now, I’m just thrilled.
It seems that these creatures, while “more human than human,” nonetheless have a four-year life span. The most resplendent off these illegal, childlike denizens of mother earth, and their leader, is Roy, who grabs his creator by the head and intones “I want more life f_____” right before he squeezes him to death. The censors substitute the word “father.” Those of us who saw the director’s cut know that the substitution doesn’t necessarily mar the intent of the moment, but does subtly shift it into the Frankensteinian motif the film evokes. This being October and closing in on Halloween, it’s a good time to view such crazy cool stuff again.
So, being Halloween season, it’s time for rehearsals of Michael Jackson’s Thriller that this fair city’s young and interesting will perform in the streets of downtown again this year. I went and began learning it all over again. The rehearsals have all the excitement of the high school musical (I think they just put a film out of that, too), all breathless, a little sweaty and a mind to “getting the feet right.” Dan, bless his heart, took the baby with whom I was five months pregnant last year when I did this. It was a great kickoff to a great weekend that started Thursday night with a celebratory soda with friends, the dance rehearsals, a Friday Day at the Spa Dan gave me as a birthday present, a Friday night academic talk, a late, late Friday night on the porch talking about Deconstruction, the Saturday morning Farmer’s market, a great day at the legendary huge barbecue of a local millionaire, and Dan’s band’s gig at the old watering hole with 50 of my favorite people in attendance. Sunday, we had chicken dinner with friends (who had raised the chicken themselves and to whom I took a conciliatory plate of pesto pasta with fresh basil from the garden), then Sunday night with my favorite boys.
Props to Dan, Heidi, and our good friends Thad and Rebecca who made it all possible. After working for two weeks straight grading papers and trying to move mountains through the growing pains of our school’s IT problems, it was a welcome return to all the other good things in life. It was exhausting and I think I averaged 4 or 5 hours of sleep for a week, but I came out of the other end so refreshed and energized, it felt like I’d slept for a week.
It seems I want more life, f_______.
It also seems that I got it. No, not seems, did. Now by Saturday, I was really pathetically jonesing for some time with my baby boy. I missed him so badly Saturday night that I had to flip open my phone to see his picture a couple of times while out at the gig. It made Sunday all that much sweeter when from sunup to sundown, I got all day playtime and snuggling with Connor and Dan. It was a good day. They all were. A great weekend. A stellar weekend. The kind of weekend that puts soul and body back together and makes them ready to face the work coming down the pike again.
And I’m happy. Oh, I know that the papers are coming, that the students are starting to wear out and get cranky and blame me, that the school’s IT issues and my half-luddite attempts to get around them aren’t going away anytime soon, that I’m going to have more on my academic plate than I feel like I can handle, and that the editing of my manuscript will be torturous and needs to get done this week.
But for now, I’m just thrilled.
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Time Bandit
Tom Hank's character in Castaway says flippantly that "we live and die by time." This is of course, right before he gets thrown onto a desert island for years to contemplate the error of his ways and slow his act down. It's October already and I find myself awash in ungraded essays, unmarked homework assignments, unanswered letters and emails, unfinished projects and understanding people who nonetheless can't understand why I'm so freaked out by all the "un's" in that sentence.
When I began this blog it was to explore and translate an almost ineffable experience Рmotherhood Рinto an intellectual and critical space Рnot an academic one, but one that might be palatable and tolerable to those with no patience with sentimentality and no truck with too much literary or social theory. Great idea. I just haven't got bleeding time to do it, really. I'm stealing time right now from a combination of essay grading and class prep to bank out at least something to post, even if it's not of the multiply revised quality of my earlier work. More than that, I have denigrated to conversations about housekeeping, fights with spouses, shoe shopping and fussing about having no time as a working mother. Nothing could be more boring, pass̩, clich̩d, or so yesterday. Yes, there were those essays on Virginia Woolf, on Mary Wolstonecraft Shelley and her monsters, on properly appreciating men who do housework, but I'll be damned if I can say that they have been primary in my posts, or that I've done anything but piss off the husband who was lovingly doing my laundry and dishes.
I guess I could say that I'm frustrated a bit in my project and my other uses of time because I'm always going to be robbing Peter to pay Paul and having to explain why. It's not the robbing – I'm used to theft – it's all the bloody explanations. Thieves steal because they want stuff. It’s that simple, really. I steal time because I want stuff. I spent yesterday evening with my husband because I hadn't seen him in four days. But explain that to the students whose papers didn't get back to them and it seems a bit hollow. As far as caring how tough, cool, rock and roll, or hip me or my life is, well there will be time to care once I can find an evening baby sitter who isn't in our social crowd and doesn't want to go to all the same gigs we do. In that my engineer friend, Madame M, was right. Time pressures squeeze the silly and pretentious right out of you. More importantly, when you do have a moment to pause and enjoy how happy your baby son is at the moment, or how much you might love your husband or how cool you think his new idea about eating healthier, setting a dinnertime and eating at the table is, all you can feel is the slowly rising panic of having yet another thing to have to squeeze into a day and you invevitably say the wrong thing. Or at least I do.
But then the baby smiles and it’s like opening a door in your house to find out that there’s a whole other wing full of jewels, art and antiques.
He’s fun and he’s charming, like that Capuchin monkey you’ve always wanted, you know the one who throws poo in the house. But then you and the monkey get trained about the poo throwing and it starts being easier. Connor’s never thrown poo at me, but I did have a rather sizeable turd roll out of the diaper midday once and land half on my foot and half on the floor. With the shit-butted baby spinning around in my favorite chair and the turd on my toes, I had to call Dan in for backup baby holding and turd retrieval. Yeah, that was a good day. I felt competent that day.
And this is the easy stuff. I know where he’s sleeping at night, he’s too little to steal the phone, dial Nepal or order pizza, have a pot connection, drink, smoke, snort anything other than his bathwater or get addicted to anything more potent than Enfamil Lipil AR. I can still hold the cherished dream that he’ll make it to college and get through to choose a professional school; he has yet to tell me he’s dropping out of high school to tour Europe. A Mr. L, an older friend with two college age sons, took umbrage to my article on the gender gap in colleges and universities. “When its in your home,” he said, “ it ceases to be an abstract issue and becomes very personal.” I think about this while I review my perfect parent dreams of our baby going to law school. Of course, first there’s grade school and before that, getting the rest of his teeth.
Yes, yes, yes, I’d do it again in a heartbeat, but it teaches you humility and what sleepless really looks like after three months of cumulative effect. It teaches you that you might have been cool, but it’s hard to feel competent with spit-up on your shoulder or shit on your feet. It’s hard to feel cool, calm and collected when your to-do list is kind of like those bathroom towel rollers. As soon as I take something off, there’s something new on and some stuff just stays there til I pay a babysitter to sit with my cheeky little monkey so mom can finish her book manuscript. Today that seems like a good investment of time. Ask Peter, though, he’s the one I robbed to do it.
When I began this blog it was to explore and translate an almost ineffable experience Рmotherhood Рinto an intellectual and critical space Рnot an academic one, but one that might be palatable and tolerable to those with no patience with sentimentality and no truck with too much literary or social theory. Great idea. I just haven't got bleeding time to do it, really. I'm stealing time right now from a combination of essay grading and class prep to bank out at least something to post, even if it's not of the multiply revised quality of my earlier work. More than that, I have denigrated to conversations about housekeeping, fights with spouses, shoe shopping and fussing about having no time as a working mother. Nothing could be more boring, pass̩, clich̩d, or so yesterday. Yes, there were those essays on Virginia Woolf, on Mary Wolstonecraft Shelley and her monsters, on properly appreciating men who do housework, but I'll be damned if I can say that they have been primary in my posts, or that I've done anything but piss off the husband who was lovingly doing my laundry and dishes.
I guess I could say that I'm frustrated a bit in my project and my other uses of time because I'm always going to be robbing Peter to pay Paul and having to explain why. It's not the robbing – I'm used to theft – it's all the bloody explanations. Thieves steal because they want stuff. It’s that simple, really. I steal time because I want stuff. I spent yesterday evening with my husband because I hadn't seen him in four days. But explain that to the students whose papers didn't get back to them and it seems a bit hollow. As far as caring how tough, cool, rock and roll, or hip me or my life is, well there will be time to care once I can find an evening baby sitter who isn't in our social crowd and doesn't want to go to all the same gigs we do. In that my engineer friend, Madame M, was right. Time pressures squeeze the silly and pretentious right out of you. More importantly, when you do have a moment to pause and enjoy how happy your baby son is at the moment, or how much you might love your husband or how cool you think his new idea about eating healthier, setting a dinnertime and eating at the table is, all you can feel is the slowly rising panic of having yet another thing to have to squeeze into a day and you invevitably say the wrong thing. Or at least I do.
But then the baby smiles and it’s like opening a door in your house to find out that there’s a whole other wing full of jewels, art and antiques.
He’s fun and he’s charming, like that Capuchin monkey you’ve always wanted, you know the one who throws poo in the house. But then you and the monkey get trained about the poo throwing and it starts being easier. Connor’s never thrown poo at me, but I did have a rather sizeable turd roll out of the diaper midday once and land half on my foot and half on the floor. With the shit-butted baby spinning around in my favorite chair and the turd on my toes, I had to call Dan in for backup baby holding and turd retrieval. Yeah, that was a good day. I felt competent that day.
And this is the easy stuff. I know where he’s sleeping at night, he’s too little to steal the phone, dial Nepal or order pizza, have a pot connection, drink, smoke, snort anything other than his bathwater or get addicted to anything more potent than Enfamil Lipil AR. I can still hold the cherished dream that he’ll make it to college and get through to choose a professional school; he has yet to tell me he’s dropping out of high school to tour Europe. A Mr. L, an older friend with two college age sons, took umbrage to my article on the gender gap in colleges and universities. “When its in your home,” he said, “ it ceases to be an abstract issue and becomes very personal.” I think about this while I review my perfect parent dreams of our baby going to law school. Of course, first there’s grade school and before that, getting the rest of his teeth.
Yes, yes, yes, I’d do it again in a heartbeat, but it teaches you humility and what sleepless really looks like after three months of cumulative effect. It teaches you that you might have been cool, but it’s hard to feel competent with spit-up on your shoulder or shit on your feet. It’s hard to feel cool, calm and collected when your to-do list is kind of like those bathroom towel rollers. As soon as I take something off, there’s something new on and some stuff just stays there til I pay a babysitter to sit with my cheeky little monkey so mom can finish her book manuscript. Today that seems like a good investment of time. Ask Peter, though, he’s the one I robbed to do it.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)