When A Bad Dog Went Really Bad

Ceri - January, 2007 - March 5, 2012

Even though it happened over a week ago now, I still haven't found a way to talk about it.  It doesn't seem like it should hurt that much, but it really, really does.  So much, in fact, that I've adopted my I-can't-deal-with-this strategy: I stop thinking about it, shove it to the back of my mind-attic, and pile furniture and boxes and old clothes and roller skates and everything else I can think of on top of it, so that it doesn't emerge.

Last week - March 5th, to be precise - my Ceri-dog had to be put down.  My Bad Dog.  Doggie Face.  Monkey Dog.  But mostly my Bad Dog.

Ceri was a bad dog.  Just how bad was something which was continuously being revealed - even though I had her for four years - and the depths of her badness were sometimes pretty amazing.  But last Sunday, March 4th, she became too bad for this world, and on Monday, she had to be put down.

I found Ceri in a blizzard.  No exaggeration.  January 8th, 2008, I was driving home late from work - this was when I lived in Lake Arrowhead, CA, where blizzards actually happen - and was completely focused on just making it home without crashing/sliding/drifting/dying.  Somehow, though, I managed to see this little black speck, sitting patiently (something, I came to learn, which was extraordinary with Ceri), waiting.  I realized it was a dog, and wondered what the hell any living thing would be doing outside and not actively trying to find shelter in a blizzard.  I stopped the car, opened the door, and the dog took off.

I'm ashamed to admit that that was perhaps the one time in my life when I decided not to chase an animal which was clearly in need of help.  I put my own selfish considerations (I was dressed for the office, not animal-hunting in the snow) ahead of the dog's welfare, and continued on home, which was another quarter of a mile (so about 5 minutes in those conditions) away.  I arrived safely, went inside, and thought about the dog all night.

The next morning the snow had stopped, and wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, the plows had actually managed to get out and clear the roads by the time I needed to leave for work.  So I was driving to work, up the same street where I had seen the dog, and who should come trotting out in front of my car?

It was clearly a sign.  So I got out, whistled, and the dog trotted right up to the car, and hopped in, just like she knew who I was, had been waiting for me, and couldn't wait to get started.  (It was always a sure-fire method of capturing Ceri when she would escape, and take off for wondrous parts unknown.  Simply drive by her in the car, whistle or call to her, open the door, and she'd jump right in, dreams of freedom and escape forgotten.)  I took her home, put her in the spare bedroom/my office, gave her food and water, figured I'd deal with the potty damage when I got home, and left for the day.

We named her Cerberus, after the black, three-headed dog that guards the entrance to Hades.  It never really seemed that appropriate, although she was a fairly good guard dog.  So we called her Ceri for short (soft s, like sari).  But that didn't really matter, either.  She pretty rapidly became Bad Dog.  She even responded to it.

And holy hell, was she bad.  She destroyed over $1,000 worth of shoes, ate blinds, peed on everything, and couldn't hold a poo to save her life.  She jumped fences, killed small creatures if given half a chance, and tried impressions of a mountain goat on our fifty-foot-high back deck railing.  She ate poos straight from the litter box, scattering litter all over the floor, made noises like a horny monkey when excited (my brother still does the best impression I've ever heard), and was a true escape artist.

But, the thing was, she was the sweetest dog I've ever seen.  She would look at you, lick your face (often smelling like cat poo, which was delightful), pant, smile, and you'd forgive her.  She was bad, but it wasn't intentional.  She was just . . . Ceri.  She existed in her own Ceri world.  Which is not to say I didn't get mad at her.  I did.  But I forgave her.  Over and over and over.

When I moved to Virginia, I couldn't take Ceri.  I would be living in an apartment the size of a glorified shoebox (okay, slightly smaller), and didn't have a yard.  I'd be gone who-knew-how-many hours a day, and Ceri would go completely nuts for even a second in such a confined space.  So she stayed with my ex-boyfriend, who eventually took her with him to Arizona.

We thought she'd be happy in Arizona.  A nice big yard, people who loved her, and lots of outside time and attention.

I got a text from my ex the evening of March 4th.  Ceri had gotten out of the yard and killed a neighbor's cat.  Shock mingled with suspicion.  How had that happened?  Had it really been an accident, or was she let out on purpose?  I felt grief for the family, knowing full well what it feels like to lose a pet.  Shock was rapidly compounded by shock.  Ceri was running up and down the street, threatening other animals and people alike.

Ceri?  My Ceri?  My Bad Dog?  Ceri had never threatened another human in her dim little life, unless one counts being drooled on and panted at a threat.  What had happened?

I still don't know.  I don't know what circumstances caused Ceri to change.  Once my ex had caught up with her, and had subdued her, and I heard how she had been changing over the months since they had moved to Arizona, he had already made the decision to have her put down.  Attacking cats was one thing, but attacking people - it wasn't something which could be tolerated.  Even the vet was supportive - it would take months and months of behavior therapy to rehabilitate her, and even that wasn't guaranteed to work.  My ex was living with his girlfriend and her three small children.  It wasn't a risk he could take.

So the morning of March 5th, he took her to the vet.  She was put to sleep.  Just went to sleep.  For the last time.  And now there's a giant Ceri-shaped hole in my heart, and enough guilt to fill an ocean.  What if I had brought her with me?  Would she still have changed, have snapped?  What had happened?

There are some things you can forgive, and some things you can forget.  I'll never forgive myself for leaving Ceri behind, and I'll never forget my sweet doggie-faced Bad Dog.

Writer's Block

"The night was sultry."  And so begins - or ends - one of my all-time favorite movies.  That's right.  Throw Momma from the Train.  It's a fantastic movie, and if you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it.  It really is hilarious.  The premise behind that line is the whole notion of writer's block, and for the writer who finally manages to craft it, it's a struggle to come up with the perfect word to describe the night.  He's finally indebted to a woman he's been conscripted to kill by one of his writing students for the perfect word, and it's enough to get her thrown from the train.  I don't seem to have that kind of difficulty with my book.  No, my own problem is that I'm drowning in the middle, and can't seem to get beyond the first moments.

The other problem, one which I've recently discovered, is that I don't like how my book begins.  It starts off very slowly, and tries to explain entirely too much.  I think, and I'm not sure how I feel about this, because it literally means throwing away almost five years of work, but I think that what I really need to do is to start the book with a climactic moment, and then tell the rest of the story in flashback.  I can see so many dangers inherent in that, but I know that I'm not happy with how the book currently takes three chapters to build up momentum, that I'm willing to take the risk, and dive right in.  I remember having this conversation with a professor awhile ago, and he cited William Gibson's Neuromancer as a stellar example of a book which just plunks you down in the middle of a situation, and leaves you to figure it out.  That was, of course, just what I objected to in the book, and I consciously strove to avoid that kind of thing in my own book.  The downside of that conscious striving, though, is that despite the prologue's violence, and an interweave of similarly violent moments, the first three chapters proceed so slowly that I feel I'm dragging the entire book down into a morass of sludgy time.  There is an urgency which is lacking, and which is so necessary to the book's successful telling of the story, that I'm willing to attempt a Gibson-esque style.

Of course, a further, not inconsequential, problem with the book is that I've been writing it over the last five years, and that the original premise on which the book was based has shifted and changed substantially enough that I'm not sure I'm still writing the same story.  I began it as an undergrad, and my disgust with the systemization of education in a way I found problematic was the catalyst for a book where higher education as it now exists is destroyed (along with organized religion, yay!).  Since then, I've sort of drifted from that premise, and I began to think a few years ago (while I was out of higher education as a student) that the way in which education was systematized wasn't really that problematic.  It's ironic that now that I'm once again well indoctrinated into it ("it" being higher education) - as a grad student - I'm once again seeing the things that irritated, frustrated, and catalyzed me as an undergrad, and they are irritating, frustrating, and catalyzing me anew.  I think, though, that I'll be able to write a more balanced book, one which acknowledges the virtues (few as they are) of systemization, while still destroying education as it currently exists.  (Another benefit of writing the book from a middle-point is that I'll be able to avoid all those beginning moments where any resemblance to Harry Potter might potentially exist, simply because the book is about institutions of magical learning.  I'm not venerating or celebrating them, people, I'm fucking destroying them.  If I go into the story with a few of those institutions already destroyed, I'm fairly certain no one can accuse me of aping good old Harry Butthole Pussy Potter (thanks, Cartman).)

Writing has again become something I want, but in a much more focused and substantial way.  I've been thinking quite a bit recently about where my life is going, and what I'm doing with my time, and I realized that - for the first time in my entire life - I'm truly free.  Absolutely, completely, and thoroughly free.  And the words of a song by Powerman 5000 - "Free" - have been haunting me lately: "Living so free is a tragedy, when you can't be what you want to be."  I am free, in a way that I've never before been, and if I'm free, why am I still hanging on to an ideal of living to which I no longer truly subscribe?  More Powerman 5000: "All the time wasted, stolen back, innocent,/ You won't get a second more, so move it along."  Why not risk everything I have for what I truly want, when I have nothing to hold me back?  (Side note: if I were to ever get a tattoo with words (an idea which I've been against), then it would be either that line about living free, or a line from Seal's "Crazy": "We're never gonna survive, unless we get a little crazy."  (And another side note: while I do like the original, I prefer Mushroomhead's cover.)  But those are just side thoughts.)

The thing is, graduate school, professorship, the quintessentially safe route - it no longer really appeals to me.  While part of me still craves stability, and security, and all that other biologically-driven crap, I'm beginning to feel again.  Really feel.  Actually feel.  Of course, feeling for me can be a very dangerous thing - it has the potential to lead to very stupid decisions - and I have to question the impulses that feeling creates.  But at the same time, I have to wonder - now that I've intellectually validated myself (which, let's be honest, is in large part what grad school has been for me), what am I doing?  I won't argue that it might be a very stupid thing to throw away security on a risk so great that it has almost no redemptive value, but . . . well . . . why the hell not?

I'm 31.  I'm not getting younger.  I remember thinking that I'd definitely be published by now.  And not in some musty academic journal that will only be read by a handful of scholars, but published in proper books, sharing bookshelf space with Terry Pratchett and A. Lee Martinez and Raymond Feist.  And I'm not even close to being there.  All of my time is being spent on a pursuit which is becoming, daily, less palatable to me.  Do I really want to spend the rest of my life thinking about what might have been, or should I just chuck it all in, and really go for it?  Especially since, and this is incredibly important to me, no one can be hurt by this decision except me.  If I fail, then the only person that I take down is me.

Of course, I'm terrified.  The thought of chucking it all in, of getting rid of safety and security and a clear professional path with tiered levels of income and a degree of freedom and intellectual appeal, and of stepping off the path into the wilds, without a map or even a compass, is truly terrifying enough to send me scurrying back to the path gratefully and obsequiously, willing to lick the boots of even the most arrogant, god-complexed professor (don't get me started).  But then I look at what I'd accomplish on that path, and balance that against the possibility of fulfilling a dream in the wilds, and the path's accomplishments pale in comparison.  Just the knowledge that I'd be doing what I truly love, even if I'll never be as successful as I could be in academia, is enough to push me further into the wilds.

So now I'm balancing terror against safety, of a dream against what is my current reality, of only potential success against actual success.

Of course, all that potentiality depends on me getting past my sultry night.

What is real life?

So I was just watching an episode of Scrubs.  It's from the second season, and it's the one where they get Jill Tracy to do the cover of Colin Hay's "Waiting for My Real Life to Begin".  It's pretty amazing just how much that particular line - not even the entire song, just that one line - really epitomizes my attitude towards my life, and how, surprisingly, that hasn't changed, despite the fact that I am, by anyone's estimation, participating in what could absolutely be called "my real life".  I mean, I am walking a very specific path, towards a very specific professional destination, am in an actual (albeit new) relationship, and am doing all those things that generally qualify as "real life".  Yet, somehow, I'm still waiting.  I feel as though I'm just playing a part, and what I'm doing at the moment isn't really what I'm going to do, or - and this is the important part - what I want to do.

Apparently this "crisis of faith" (it doesn't deserve capitals) is a common thing in graduate school.  At least, so I've been told by the professor with whom I've discussed it briefly.  It's the whole why am I here, what am I doing, do I really want to do this thing?  I guess it typically comes later in the journey - third or fourth year, rarely first - but it isn't uncommon.  It does as much to weed out potential PhDs as the actual application process.  I don't know how other people deal with it, but since my first semester here - nay, since my first day in this state, I've been wondering if I haven't made a truly colossal mistake.

I don't know if you remember (and why would you?) but at the beginning of my first semester, I was asking these questions, but with a different bent, i.e., that I hadn't made a colossal mistake, but that the admissions committee had.  I began questioning my enjoyment of what I'm doing from the very start, but attributed it all to failings on my part - I wasn't smart enough, or motivated enough, or something-enough, and did not fundamentally belong in grad school.  But once I beat back those feelings - somewhere about mid-semester, after I got back my first paper, with an A and lots of solid commentary - and realized that the work itself wasn't hard, and that I could perform at the level required/imagined, I still had to find a way to cope with the feelings which hadn't disappeared, and which were, because of their non-disappearing state, very troubling.

Those feelings have plagued me from the end of last semester, and have worsened during this new semester.  They're terrifying, because they're not feelings with which I can reason (yes, I know, that's the whole point of feelings, but usually they're explicable in some fashion): boredom, frustration, irritation, disinterest, and general ennui.  I have absolutely no interest in what I'm doing.  And that is a serious problem.  It's not even that I'm not passionate about it, or that I don't love it - I actually don't like it.

It's hard to put a finger on exactly what it is that I don't like about it.  The reading is intellectually challenging, yes.  It raises interesting questions, yes.  It is thought-provoking, absolutely.  There are moments when I am genuinely interested in what I'm doing.

But seriously?  Most of the time, I would rather do anything else rather than read.  I mean anything.  Clean my apartment with a toothbrush and bucket.  Bathe my cat.  Count the resulting scratch marks from the cat bath.  Volunteer for electroshock therapy.  Get a lobotomy (and no, I haven't been reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest again).  Anything.  In fact, the amount of actual work I have put into this semester is shockingly low.  So low, in fact, that I don't think I have ever put this little effort into anything I've ever done (yes, there are lots of italics being thrown about.  It's necessary right now).

And here's the most terrifying part of it: I don't care.  I mean, aside from a certain degree of professional and personal pride, there is nothing else that keeps me going to class, and participating in a minimal amount of intellectual work.  I don't want to quit, because I don't have anything else at the moment.  But that's the only reason why I don't want to quit.  It isn't because I love what I'm doing.  It isn't because I'd trade my arm to be able to do it.  It isn't because it's satisfying, or challenging, or even interesting.  Perhaps, in a larger context, it is.  But in this specific context - as a graduate student in medieval English literature - it isn't.  Books which I may have picked up independently of any class are books I now boycott.  Today?  Instead of reading a book which might, by any account, be something I would normally enjoy, today I went and spent three hours playing pool.

So I have to ask myself: is not having another plan a good reason to be doing this?  Is not having something else that I'd rather be doing reason enough to spend the next six years in graduate school?  Is not having the testicular fortitude to pursue my true passion (writing) reason enough to settle for this path?  Is being 31, and scared to take a chance on something that really matters to me, because all those previous "chances" ended in fiery train wrecks and burning buildings, is that enough to keep me doing what is safe and respectable?

I don't know.  But if I still feel like I'm waiting for my real life to begin, then what happens six years from now, when I'm 37, and I'm still waiting?  I guess that's why this is a crisis of faith.  But this isn't about having faith in something or someone else.  This is about having faith in myself.  If I don't admit now that I'm not really doing what I want to do, and that what I want to do is very, very scary, and risky, and so without guarantees in any way, but that it's still what I should be doing, and I shouldn't continue to piss about and waste time doing something because it's the rational and sane thing to do - if I don't admit that now, then will I ever?  Or will I just steer blindly through graduate school, still waiting, and become a professor, and still be waiting, and then die, and never have started my real life?  Is it better to take the risks than to always wonder what could have been?

I really, really don't know.

My Life in Music

My life has a soundtrack.  This became abundantly clear to me the other day when I was thinking about the fact that although my musical taste has grown - evolved - since I was a kid (like a real kid, 10 or so, since  I'm quite old now), I still like much of what I did then, and that music has always had an incredibly evocative power.  It works both ways - I hear a song, and it immediately recalls an event, and an event immediately recalls the music I was listening to when the event eventuated.  Everything in my life, major or minor, has a song attached to it.

Because of its evocative power, music also has the ability to change my mood, and so, in a sense, has scripted my life.  The right song at any moment can literally flip my mood switch from insanely-up-and-happy to suicidally-depressed.  It's eerie.  And now that I've grown to appreciate greater diversity in my music (like, yes, I have to admit that I like Hollywood Undead.  Even though so much of me feels like I shouldn't, I do, and even though I know I should be fundamentally offended, I just can't be, and have to laugh at lines like "when I start drinking, my dick does all my thinking"), I have an even wider range of music to flip the mood switch.  And my moods dictate my actions and behavior, so . . . domino effect.

There isn't any music which is exempt from that soundtrack, either.  I grew up on the piano, and played the flute in junior high and high school (yes, for a while I was a band geek, but unfortunately don't have any cool band camp stories), so even "My Sharona" will make me think of my hideously-uncomfortable band uniform and the time I got in trouble at Magic Mountain, whence we had gone for a music competition, and a friend and I broke off from the rest of the group and almost missed the bus home because we were busy flirting with older boys we had met (we were 13 at the time, so had raging hormones).  Then there's all the classical music I learned at the berating hands of my piano teachers, or those show tunes that I'll still sing in the shower (I am totally a shower-singer, because I never sound as good anywhere else, so be thankful you don't live with me), or all the folk songs that my mom and dad used to sing to me when I was little, and which I can still break out for a four-hour car ride to pacify my nephew (and my sister).  I walked down the aisle to Pachelbel's "Canon in 'D'" because my parents did, and have tender memories of my dad sitting on my bed and belting out hilariously-off-key renditions of "Summertime", "Old Man River", and "House of the Rising Sun", with my mom finishing off with her beautiful "Loch Lomond" or "Today".

I can listen to music from my youth, like U2 or INXS or Spandau Ballet or Missing Persons - stuff I started listening to when I was about 10 or 11, because my dad listened to it when we would go off on climbing trips in Joshua Tree - and I can vividly recall what I was doing.  Like, the summer of my twelfth year.  That was a big year for me.  I got my first U2 CD (War) - officially mine, so that I would stop stealing my dad's - a new climbing harness, and a 15-year-old boyfriend who was friends with the guy who lived down the street.  He was an idiot, but he was 15, and cute, and that was exciting.  I remember that almost every night I would play U2 or INXS or Missing Persons quietly on the stereo in my room to muffle any noise that I might make as I slipped out the door, down the hall to the laundry room, through the door into the backyard, and then through the gate into the front yard to meet him.  Then we'd go off and behave like perfect delinquents, breaking into the yard of an empty house down the street to go night swimming, or steal cars, or make out.  The music was important, because my sister's bedroom was just down the hall from me, and she had ears like a bat, and a squeaky-clean conscience, and wouldn't hesitate to report my absences to my parents.

Or the summer between my freshman and sophomore years, when I had my first real boyfriend - Danny - who had an awesome CJ-7 Jeep, who taught me all about the proper way to off-road, make sandwiches, and kiss.  That was the summer that Live released their first album - Throwing Copper - and even now "Lightning Crashes" makes me think of those wild nights at Deep Creek, where we'd go night-swimming, and try not to drown under the hot summer sky.  Or "I Alone", and how we'd look into each others' eyes, grab each other by the arms, and then jump off the cliffs and scream all the way down into the cold, dark water.  Or the first time that we made love, listening to the entire album, song after song, lying there, holding each other, not wanting to get up and break the spell the music cast over us.

I remember the night that Danny broke up with me.  My dad and I were in Durango, on a climbing/rafting road trip for my fifteenth birthday.  We had just pulled into the hotel, and the strains of "Marvin, I Love You", from the Doctor Demento show that we had caught driving through the mountains, were running through my head when I called him.  I remember the rain pouring over my head and the words "Danny, I love you" drumming their way through my soul.

High school was awful, and I cannot listen to No Doubt's "I'm Just A Girl", Nine Inch Nail's "Perfect Drug", Metallica's "Unforgiven II", PJ Harvey's "Down by the Water" - my dad and I would make up new lyrics to it - or Joan Osborne's "Spider Web" without cringing in recollection of all the horrible things that happened between my freshman and senior-ish years.  These songs evoke so clearly the humiliation, rejection, anger, and frustration of those years, the lucidity of which not even time mercifully dims.  To hear them again is to relive the flustered misery of hanging on to the edges of all the "groups", desperately wanting to be myself, but also craving the security of inclusion.

The Specials, English Beat, Reel Big Fish - those bands are inextricably linked with the dancing, wicked blue-green eyes of Joe, the handsome, clever surfer boy from Anaheim, who was poor but ambitious, and made me love him in scandalous fashion.

Then there were the days in transition, when I met Brandon, who introduced me to Dave Matthews, the Playboy Mansion, and the Marine Corps.  The songs "Jump Right In" by The Urge and "Circles" by Soul Coughing elicit memories of the long drives from Lake Arrowhead to Camp Pendleton, the traffic in Orange County, the long ocean vistas off the 5, the MPs on base with their propensity for ticketing wildly, and the silhouettes of all the helicopters in the flight wing as the sun sank behind the hills, softening and blurring the dilapidation of the aging base.

Then came my husband, and with him an explosion of musical knowledge and experimentation.  Three-quarters of the music I now call my favorite is because of his delight in exploring new and old bands, and passing along his discoveries.  Not a memory of my time with him is without its musical equivalent.   Rob Zombie's Hellbilly Deluxe will always be perfectly matched with those early, heady days in San Clemente - the beach, rogue cigarettes with the smoke curling in the salty air, never-ending skies, 7-11 nachos, Snickers and Butterfingers, and running half-naked, laughing hysterically, from beach police.   Korn - that's the long, terrifying drive from California to Ohio, and never again will I be able to listen to "Falling Away from Me" or "Make Me Bad" without remembering Cal, the friendly Texan Penske rescue man who so desperately wanted us to abandon our 25-foot moving truck and come stay with him while we waited for his son, who was apparently the only person within a 50-mile radius who knew how to fix "them computer-chip trucks".

Ohio State days are laced with  Rammstein, Slipknot, Mudvayne, Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, Fear Factory, and  Nothingface.  Going to classes under the gray, gray skies, watching the bodies grow from tiny, blind balls of fluff to sleek, gorgeous, fascinating cat-beasts, playing "Icewind Dale II" and "Neverwinter Nights II" and "Fallout II" and "Civilization III" with freezing fingers, a new obsession with cross-stitching, college-football-Saturdays, and reading piles and piles of books - each moment is trapped within the crystalline structure of musical memory.

It was when we moved back to California that my husband started constructing his "HfN" series - "HfN" meaning "Hard for Nard" (Nard was my nickname then, and "hard" because, up until that point, I'd only liked music which dwelt on the edges of truly "hard").  He's up to HfN 33 now, and each album has become symbolic of where we were - where I was - when he created it.  HfN 5, that's a tough one to listen to now, because that one brings up those early days at Cal State, when I first learned of the band Deadsy, and fell in love with "Asura" and giggled at my husband's assertion that "She Likes Big Words" was really and truly my song, and hated every second of my job and masochistic boss, and wondered if we had made a terrible, terrible mistake moving back to California, and if we would ever be happy together.

When we first separated, that's when he sent me HfN 28, starting with Rise Against's "Savior".  It was like a fast-forward to the future, and even now can make me sob: "It kills me not to know this, but I've all but just forgotten, what the color of her eyes were, or her scars and how she got them. . . .  Seldom do these words ring true when I'm constantly failing you. . . .  So tell me now, if this ain't love, then how do we get out?  'Cause I don't know.  That's when she said, 'I don't hate you, boy, I just want to save you while there's still something left to save.'  That's when I told her, 'I love you, girl, but I'm not the answer to the questions that you still have.'"

When I left for Virginia, I left to the strains of Five Finger Death Punch's "Far From Home", from HfN 30 - "I can't seem to find my way home.  And it's almost like your heaven's trying everything, your heaven's trying everything to keep me out.  All the places I've been and things I've seen, a million stories that made up a million shattered dreams, the faces of people I'll never see again, and I can't seem to find my way home" - and Linkin Park's "Waiting for the End" from HfN 31 - "Waiting for the end to come, wishing I had strength to stand.  This is not what I had planned.  It's out of my control. . . .  It's hard to let you go.  I know what it takes to move on.  I know how it feels to lie.  All I wanna do is trade this life for something new, holding on to what I haven't got."  They were both songs from his soul, but they resonate within my soul, and I wonder at times if we're not still linked somewhere, in some broken version of our heaven, and if we'll eventually find a way to be happy there together.

I'll never forget a moment of my life, captured as each is by the delicate fingers of music, held in embryonic stasis, ready to be born again with fragments of an introduction, or the faint strains of a refrain, or even the echoes of a lyric, trapped and made mundane in some banal discussion of trivial life.  My memory of my existence will always be filtered through the music of that moment, which manages to lend a fragile beauty to even the ugliest remembrance, and, in that way, to redeem it.

I DO judge you when you use poor grammar.

Over the last few weeks, I have spent a fair amount of time engaged in arguments with a friend about language.  Specifically, proper vs. improper usage of punctuation, "adverbjatives" (that's his, not mine), prepositions, and all the other pitfalls and minefields of modern American language.

Now, before I go any further, those of you who are howling in the background, "But you're a PhD student in English!", shut up.  I know that.  I know that my expectations of "proper" language usage are probably much higher than the average American.  However, I also think this gives me the ability to discourse knowledgeably on why "proper" language usage is so important, much like a computer programmer can discourse knowledgeably on the difference between C++ and Python.  The difference between the computer programmer and the hapless student of language is found in the seemingly-esoteric nature of programming: how many people actually know enough about the differences between C++ and Python to even discuss them (C++?  Is that extra "+" an accident?  And Python?  You mean Monty Python?), and then further, to have opinions about them?  Not bloody many.  So when a computer programmer offers his opinion, the layperson accepts it.  Not so with the student of language.  The minute language becomes a subject for discussion, anyone and everyone feels competent to discuss it.  If I hear, "But language is always evolving!" one more time, my brain might literally explode.  However - and this is an important "however" - it is far, far easier to develop a valid opinion of programming languages than language usage.  Yes, dammit, I said valid.

Now, I do not pretend to be a paragon of perfect speech.  Frasier still has a few-up on me.  I break the rules - frequently.  I split infinitives so often that bits and pieces of them litter the floor near my desk.  I happily incorporate words unrecognized by the OED into my speech all the time.  And I swear.  Often.

Yet my spine twitches when someone says "ain't" in an un-ironic fashion.  The ending of sentences with prepositions makes me a little violent.  The flagrant disregard of "ly" on the ends of adverbs leaves me cold.  The colloquial speech patterns of the South make it difficult for me to remember that just because they sound like total, unrequited idiots does not mean that they are.

The thing is, just because you use language doesn't mean you're qualified to speak about it as though it's something you've given a great deal of thought, and something you understand intimately.  I use my microwave every day (that's an embarrassing admission, but there you go), yet I would never presume to speak about what actually happens when I push the buttons, because I really don't know ("You mean it isn't magic?  There aren't little people in there roasting my food over very hot fires?").  And that whole "language-is-evolving" argument has become the reason for each and every bloody-awful lazy spelling mistake, or punctuation abuse, or sloppy grammar usage.  Yes, the language is evolving.  Apparently, what it is now evolving into is a morass of muddy, incomprehensible, and thoroughly-confusing attempts at communication.

I guess people want to return to an age where "as long as you understand me" is good enough, and where the beautiful subtleties of the language, the exquisite confections of construction, the perfect pairing of thought and written expression, are utterly forgotten.  Where it is no longer possible to appreciate the incomparable elegance of Nabokov's Lolita, or the haunting spareness of Graham Greene, or the lush images of Milton.  icanhascheezburger rules the day, apparently, and being able to understand something - even if only at the crudest level - is all that matters.

I refuse to believe that the only purpose of language is communication of immediate and shallow thoughts.  I'm not making the categorical statement that just because something is easily understood means that it's not complex, or worthy of careful thought.  No, I'm categorically siding with Heidegger, and saying that language creates thought, and that it is an expression of yourself in the purest form.  If you do not have elegant and subtle linguistic abilities, then how can you possibly construct elegant and subtle thoughts?  If you do not have the linguistic ability to construct a complicated sentence, then how can you construct a complicated thought?  Philosophy, for example, relies heavily on an understanding - an intimate understanding - of the relationship between thought and language, and that is certainly why so much of it is devoted to the exploration of that relationship.  How we think is inescapably influenced by how we speak.

So I guess, then, my point is that by not understanding how language works, we're shorting ourselves on our ability not just to communicate at a level higher than Koko, but also on our ability to create, to imagine, and to fully realize ourselves as independent, living, thinking human beings.

So there.  I'll judge you when you use poor grammar, because I'll be wondering if you are too lazy, sloppy, or just out-and-out unintelligent to realize that you're expressing yourself in the crudest possible way, without giving any thought to how you sound, and how other people will perceive your expressions.  I'll judge you because I'll wonder if you're incapable of coming up with a clearer, more accurate way of expressing yourself.  And I'll judge you because I won't be able to help but wonder if you really are only capable of communicating on the level of icanhascheezburger.

NCAA vs. OSU - WTF?!

My last post was disgusting.  I mean, seriously, if I had come across that post on someone else's blog, I would have bitch-slapped the blogger.  It was pure self-pity and a morass of nastiness on all fronts (sorry for the mixed metaphor).  However, since I cannot quite bitch-slap myself, I'm offering up that particular pleasure to anyone who actually read that piece of total manure.  Takers?  Text me.

Anyway, this piece is not about me.  I won't be writing about myself again for a long, long time.  It's just an exercise in fatuous self-debasement.  No, this is about college football.

OSU received their NCAA sentence today.  Before I discuss the actual sentence, I would just like to say that ESPN's Mark Schlabach is a wanker.  He thinks he's clever, and he thinks he's objective, but mostly, he's just a pedantic wanker.  Typical Mark Schlabach: "To be honest, I'm surprised the NCAA hit the Buckeyes as hard as it did. I figured The Ohio State University was immune from the kind of punishment that might cripple a program in recruiting and severely sully its once-pristine reputation."

Piss off, Mark.  What is this vitriolic hatred that sports writers seem to have for Ohio State?  I've never understood why it's a program that draws such viciousness.  But it does; whether winning or losing, sports writers, from The Sporting News to AOL cannot seem to resist the urge to beat the hell out of everyone's favorite team to hate.  And why the hell is that?  What does OSU have that other major programs like Texas and Florida and USC don't have, that makes people just ache to pour the hot lead down OSU's throat?  Oh, right, it used to be that OSU was a school with integrity.  I forgot - people love to hate the good guy.  Wankers.  The lot of 'em.

Anyway.  So, despite the fact that OSU vacated all its wins for last season - effectively making it almost impossible for us to beat Michigan in wins in my lifetime, thank you so f***ing much - got rid of Jim Tressel, returned Bowl Game revenue, and eliminated five scholarships over the next three years, the NCAA still smacked OSU with a one-year postseason ban (which means no bowl games, no Big Ten Championship, no National Championship (not that that was a real possibility, anyway)) and the loss of three further scholarships.  Oh, and Jim Tressel?  Yeah, he won't be coaching college football ever again.  The NCAA also bitch-slapped him with a five-year show-cause penalty, which means that any school that wants to hire him would have to write a detailed report as to why they had to hire him, and what they're going to do to make sure he's a good boy.

Okay.  Seriously.  I have to ask: w. t. f.

Now, before you get all preachy on me, hear me out.  First of all, I have nothing but contempt for the players involved, disgust with Jim Tressel, and a general, all-out sadness and frustration with college football as a whole.  I mean, I watch college ball specifically because it isn't pro ball, because it isn't riddled with all that problematic Michael-Vick-should-be-banned-from-existence-dog-fighting crap.  I like to think that I'm watching a game that at least tries to use spit and polish when shining up their morals, that at least pretends to value sportsmanship and decency and good 'ol proper ball, and isn't a venue for moronic drama queens whose last good idea was before they took their first hit on the field, and had all sense and sanity knocked from them.

Honestly, ask anyone.  I was so pissed off about the whole thing that I refused to watch any football this year, didn't watch last year's Sugar Bowl, was appalled that OSU allowed the players who had done the deed to play, didn't completely kick them off the team, and do their own housecleaning.  I'm still bitter about it all.  I mean, what kind of totally unappreciative, fan-hating, spoiled bitch sells their Big Ten Championship ring for a f***ing tattoo?  Who does that?  The tattoo should read "F*** you, OSU fans!"  I would so love to hurt Terrelle Pryor in ways that have not yet been invented.  I would dearly love to shake Jim Tressel and ask him what the hell he was thinking.  I felt betrayed by the whole thing.  Not betrayed the way I did when we lost two consecutive national championships.  Not betrayed the way I did when we lost to Indiana - Indiana! - when we should have trampled them into little pieces down the field.  No, I felt - feel - betrayed because my faith in the entirety of college football has been seriously damaged.

However.  That being said, I still think that the NCAA is just being punitive.  Yeah, there should be penalties.  Hell, yes, Ohio State should undergo some kind of judgment.  This, however, is just more vitriol for a big program that finally managed to get caught doing something disgusting.

I don't want to hear comparisons to USC, either.  As far as I'm concerned, what went down there was far, far worse, and the fact that ass-head Pete Carroll got off scot-free, and is now coaching the Seahawks, is an abrogation of justice on a major scale.  USC got what they deserved.  OSU got far and away more than they deserved.

You know, it's this kind of thing that makes me really reconsider all those criticisms out there about keeping college ball in the hands of the NCAA and not privatizing.  I'm not saying that I'm up for privatization - I think that would be such a mistake, for so many reasons - but I do think that, to allow the NCAA to materially hurt the school this much for an infraction of this scale - essentially, the coach not reporting what he knew to the NCAA - is just ridiculous.  I mean, this is not the Third Reich.  It is not necessary to so destroy a school's reputation that they'll no longer be able to recruit efficiently, or keep any coach worth his salt away from the team (I'm not sure how I feel about a burned-out Urban Meyer returning to coach OSU, but it doesn't matter anymore now, does it?), or impact revenue which gets used, b-t-dubs, to fund stuff other than just football, like, oh, I don't know, academics.

The whole thing just makes me want to throw my head back and howl.

Abjection

I should be writing a paper right now.  Two, papers, actually, although one is really just an extension of the other, or, perhaps more accurately, the first is a condensed, more succinct version of the second.  Whatever.  I have approximately 35 pages of writing due Friday and Saturday.  I have, of course, not yet committed a single word to paper.  It's 5:30 AM on Thursday, the first paper is due sometime Friday (8-10 pages only), and nothing has managed to transmit itself from my brain to paper.  And yet . . . and yet, the panic, the stress, the sweat-inducing, stomach-cramping fear that should be there, isn't.  It's just . . . missing.

I would be puzzled that by that, were it not for the fact that this is something I have come to recognize in myself.  It's called "I'm-So-Unbelievably-Terrified-That-Nothing-Bothers-Me Syndrome".  I have, as Terry Pratchett so often puts it, gone through fear and out the other side.  It is behavior that has characterized my life so much recently that it's difficult for me to remember what it felt like to have actual emotions.  I don't have emotions anymore.  Everything is all shrink-wrapped and cotton-balled into stillness and muted distance, and I just skim through things without really feeling anything.  It is utterly bizarre, and if it weren't impossible, since it would require me to have feelings, I would say I'm getting a little bit tired of it.  I kinda miss those manic days, where one moment I was on top of the world, and the next dwelling somewhere on the ocean floor with scary-looking fish with light-bulbs on their head for company.  You know what I'm talking about.  The moments of sheer delight and exhilaration and joy, and their cousin-moments of despair and depression.  Yeah, those.  I don't remember what they're like.  Do you?  Would you mind reminding me?

I tried writing the other night.  Not what I was supposed to be writing - because that would require me to confront the fear and do something positive to extirpate it - but a piece of fiction I've been working on-and-off-and-on for the last, oh, like, six years or so.  It was shit.  I mean, pure and utter shit.  Here's a sample.  I should be too embarrassed to put this up, but see above re: emotions:

The cliffs were a dark, unbroken line against the icy blue sky.  Raging at their base, the waves unceasingly crashed into the black rocks, occasionally loosening a piece of the cliffs and tossing it about in an orgiastic delight of destruction.  It was only a matter of time before the cliffs were totally claimed by the sea, and as Azara stood atop them, she felt the ephemeral nature of her own existence.  Alternately squinting through the wind – a cold, bitter wind, that ate through her clothes and chapped her skin – at the sea below her, and the ship sailing out of the harbor, she ceased to be aware of personal time, and existed only in the time as it was told by the cliffs beneath her, the forest behind her, and the sky above her.  Her fur cloak whipped about her, occasionally catching her cheek with its stinging tail, and the grass snapped at her ankles, welting them with thin, red lines of gentle poison.

Are you embarrassed for me?  Thanks.  I was pretty disgusted when I re-read it in the cold light of day (I wrote it at something like 3:30 in the morning).  It's so emo-filled and adolescent-girl-reeking and all those other horrible things I hate about most fantasy writing.  It should be burned, if it didn't mean burning my laptop.  I would be indignant, too, but it makes sense, really.  I can't feel anything, so how could I possibly write?  I used to be a good writer.  I could wrap adjectives around nouns, adverbs around verbs, with the smoothness of caramel around tart green apples, combining phrases into sentences of beauty and pure pleasure.  Now?  Well, you see above you what I can - or can't - do.  It would be depressing beyond belief, were I not still shrink-wrapped into abstraction.

I think I know what's causing all the fear and loathing in Charlottesville.  The thing is, there isn't a damn thing I can do about it, and for the first time in my life, I can't run away.  I mean, really, I can't.  It would be an admission of failure on such a colossal scale that I may as well just end my life, and since that isn't something I'd ever do (since I truly believe it is the most selfish act one could possibly commit), I'm stuck.  I have to find a way to work through this.  All this malaise and fear and bizarre blankness isn't something I can escape; it's something I actually have to deal with.  That makes me a little grumpy, actually (yay! an emotion!), but aside from momentary grunts of grumpiness, I forget about it.

Every so often I remind myself how lucky I am, hoping to precipitate a reaction.  Nothing.  Then I'll remind myself how spoiled and selfish I am, and that catalyzes a brief guilt-and-shame reaction, but then I return to my normal state.  No excited electrons here.  Every time they manage to briefly get excited to a higher state, they fall back to a more stable, less-excited, totally-blank state.

I know that part of it is the loneliness.  My inability to really make friends is getting in my way.  But the thing is, relationships require so much, and I don't have anything to give.  I just don't.  Not as a friend, and certainly not as a girlfriend.  It would mean shifting the focus from me, and, well, that's scary.  I mean, that opens up new fields of rejection, and it means putting yourself out there, and having people judge you, and I get enough of that shit in grad school, thank you very much.  I mean, it's gotten to the point that I vacillate every time I put up a fucking post on Facebook.  So if I can't open myself up to rejection there, and if I don't want to be pulled into a needy, dominating, please-feel-sorry-for-me-and-help-me relationship (the only kind I seem to be able to have, fucking savior complex), I must remain alone.  But honestly.  Someone else's emotional baggage?  I don't even want to talk about mine, let alone yours.  But people get offended if you just want to have an occasional hang-out-and-chat-and-maybe-drink kind of relationship.  The thing is, if they got in my head, they'd stay there for three seconds, and then start looking around desperately for the flashing red exit sign.  See?  Rejection.

Okay, I'm tired of this.  I'm done talking about myself.  I'm going to go and work on a paper.  It's on abjection, funnily enough.  That might be what made me start thinking about all this.  I'm doing such a good job of abjecting myself, although, in my case, it isn't unconscious.  I know precisely what I'm doing.  Sorry if I've disgusted you, or depressed you, or caused you to feel any emotion other than joy.  It's the danger of reading these posts.

Are you enjoying grad school?

I realized this evening, while sitting in a contemporary lit criticism and theory class, and not paying attention to a word that was being said, that, aside from my last desperately-worded post (which has resulted in many kind responses, and I thank everyone sincerely for their empathy and concern), I haven't said a thing about grad school, and I've been here and fully participatory (although that last term might need some extra defining) for about six weeks now.  If you compare my last post with all my posts leading up to the start of classes, where enthusiasm and excitement and nervousness virtually leaked from every pixel, there's a stark disparity there, and I think that deserves some explanation.  I mean, not three months ago I was confidently singing the lyrics to Linkin Park's "Waiting for the End" - "I know what it takes to move on.  I know how it feels to lie.  All I wanna do is trade this life for something new, holding on to what I haven't got" - and now I'm wondering where I went wrong.

So far, grad school has been substantially different from what I had expected, and has caused me to spend a great deal of time re-evaluating my ambitions and intentions.  It hasn't been different in an I-don't-like-it way; it's been different in a way that I had thought I would be protected against by my healthy little hoard of self-confidence and sometimes-arrogance.  It's, um, it's hard.  And not in ways that I had expected.

That's the thing that gets me over and over.  It isn't quite what I had expected.  I didn't think I would be so cravenly terrified of speaking in class.  Me!  Afraid of speaking!  I'm the person who opened up any class discussion going.  Now I sit in silence, only occasionally venturing opinions, and I second-guess every last thing that comes out of my mouth.  I didn't think that I would be so anxious that I might say the wrong thing, or make a comment or observation that would be labeled or thought of as "undergraduate-like".  I didn't think that I would have forgotten how to read critically, and ask questions, and really think about what I was reading.  I mean, this is all stuff that has been second nature to me for as long as I can remember.  There were very, very few undergraduate papers that I ever got back - either at OSU or CSUSB - that didn't have something-like-an-A on them, and the first paper that I got back here had a B+.  I nearly fell apart.

I didn't think that I wouldn't get any real feedback from my professors on my performance, in some way or another (aside from that B+ paper, I have struggled to divine whether what I'm saying is good/bad/stupid/appropriate/not interesting enough/utterly dull/sparkling from my professor's faces, because it's all I have to go by), or that I would live and die in a comment they might tangentially make about something I said.  I never thought I would care so much about what another person thought of me, and that I would shrink into myself because of the possibility of their disapproval.

It has impacted my enjoyment of school to the point that I now hate reading.  Me.  The person who has always had at least three books by her bed, and prefers to spend her time reading than doing anything else.  I go to such lengths to avoid it now that it's ridiculous.  My apartment is immaculate (and yes, those of you who know me, you understand what that means).  I have memorized the dialogue to virtually every episode of Frasier.  I walk to and from school, 2.5 miles each way, every day, just to string out the time where I'm not working on something for class.  I hide in bed, terrified, when I should be reading.

Apparently, what I'm going through is not unique.  I guess there's this sort of thing (I hate to qualify it by calling it a "disorder") called "Impostor Syndrome".  It's where people who are in challenging (in many different ways) environments are continually afraid that someone will discover that they're a fraud, that they don't belong, and that they should vacate their position.  It's particularly prevalent in academia (big surprise) - I guess even faculty deal with it.  It helps to know that other people suffer through this, but it isn't making it any easier for me to get over it.  The thing is, these people really do have long lists of accomplishments and successes, not virtual train wrecks of academic and professional careers (like me).  They went to schools like William & Mary, Duke, Dartmouth, Yale, Cornell, Columbia, Berkeley, and on and on.  They didn't go to OSU.  (This was my first experience telling people I had gone to OSU, and getting a look that had nothing to do with their football team.)  I know that I absolutely have to break through this, or my career in academia will be over before it's really begun, but when I sit in class, and listen to what other people say, and watch how the professor responds to them, and then listen to the drivel that's coming out of my mouth, and see the look of polite puzzlement on their face . . . well, it's a little bit difficult to try and access that self-confidence and arrogance that used to be there.

The thing is, there is a deep, deep well of insecurity in me anyway, which is why I have the self-confidence/arrogance mask, since that's the only way for me to get successfully through life.  Just applying to grad school took an enormous amount of courage: I was putting myself "out there" in a substantial way, asking to be judged and accepted, which was something I had never really done.  Mostly, I've preferred to hide from that kind of exposure, and the fact that I was accepted was fantastic, but then just opened up a whole new Pandora's Box.  But for some reason, I feel completely destabilized by grad school, and putting the mask on every day, just to get through classes, is becoming increasingly more difficult.

So I guess that's why I haven't written much about grad school.  I keep wondering if I should be here.  The words that Dr. Braden said when I met with him in his office - "We accepted you because of your writing sample" - and the fact that I was a wait-list . . . these things keep going around and around in my head, and I just wonder if I really do belong here, or if it wasn't just a mammoth mistake on their part, and at any moment, they'll find me out, and ask me politely and as kindly as possible to just get the hell out, and clear up some space for someone who really deserves to be here.

But hey, aside from all that, it's pretty cool.

Loneliness (Warning: Self-Pity Contained Herein)

It's been a long time since I was lonely. Really alone lonely. The kind of loneliness that doesn't seem to have any edges, but expands until it dominates your entire emotional landscape. The kind of loneliness that I ran into the arms of my ex-husband to escape. The kind of loneliness that I did escape for 10 years, but which has now resumed its place in the center of my soul, opening its arms to gather every feature of my kingdom-soul into itself.

And this time around it's harder to avoid. Back then, when I was alone, I had hope. I knew that I was young (19), and that I had plenty of time to find just the right person to keep the loneliness at bay. Now? Well, let's just say that I'm not 19 anymore, and there are many, many things that are different, and not just the fact that I no longer cling to optimism like a bloody limpet.

I have to say that reading about love and infatuation and excruciatingly-drawn-out declarations of "fine amor" in medieval romances isn't helping. I realized just how terminal the loneliness had become last night when I was walking home, and found myself making up a song that was deeply pathetic. Here are a few lines, for entertainment:

I, I miss your arms at night.
And I, I miss all the talks we had.
But I, I don't miss all those nasty fights,
The way we hated each other at times.
I, I miss your laughing face,
And I, I miss your goofy pranks.

And so on, and so on, and so on. Now, a caveat. I do not typically make up pathetic songs like this. If I make up songs, they are typically stupid and slightly inclined to hysterical humor (not hysterical in a can't-stop-laughing sense, but hysterical in a so-desperate-to-not-let-the-(fill in the dark emotion here)-eat-me sense.) Nor are they long enough to accompany me over two miles.

It seems like it should have been obvious to me just how lonely I was, but despite a few phone calls with my mom where I told her I was lonely, it wasn't clear to me that I was deeply, achingly lonely, like I haven't been since I was so desperate for love that I would do incredibly stupid things (but that's a story for another life). But the realization brought some recent behaviors into focus. Like, it might explain why I've sometimes found myself lying awake at 3:30 in the morning, with tears rolling down my face, with no real clue as to why I'm crying. Or why, when I'm home, I keep movies or Scrubs or Kingdom or Dharma and Greg on almost continuously, to the point where there is a constant noise in my apartment, even if I'm in the other room, and not really paying attention. Or why I have very long conversations with my cat (although, to be fair, I've always done that . . . except that now I get upset when he doesn't answer me).

I know that I tend to cry easily, but even when I discovered that literally every episode of the sixth season of Doctor Who found me in tears, I didn't make the connection. I just wrote it off to hormones. I mean, yes, okay, it's sad that Rory almost died (again), but the goofy pirate episode really didn't deserve racking sobs. And even the frustration engendered by the simple expedient of identifying which button to push in the old-Amy episode wasn't enough to dampen my enthusiastic sob-laden response to Rory and Amy standing on either side of the door of the TARDIS. There is just no reason for me to have cried as hard as I did.

And let's not even get started on music. Merely listening to Limp Bizkit's version of "Behind Blue Eyes" is enough to get the tears rolling, and any version of "Wicked Game" is guaranteed to destroy my ability to approach the day with eyes that don't look like I'm completely stoned. (Oh, look at that. I got started anyway.) As for emotional-roller-coaster songs like Emilie Autumn's "Castle Down" or Rise Against's "Savior" or Linkin Park's "Waiting for the End" or Stone Sour's "Hesitate" - forget it. I can't even listen to them, because then going fetal under the covers is no longer a desire. It's a necessity.

It's why I spend so little time in my apartment. My search for the perfect apartment - for a space where I could be alone, and content, and comfortable - was truly a waste of time. I thought I'd be spending so much more time here than I have. I didn't realize, when I was running far, far away from California and the (second) mess of things I'd made there, that I would be so crushingly lonely that I would spend all day on campus just to avoid being home. I spent something like three hours in the grad lounge on Thursday, talking utter nonsense with anyone would listen (poor people), because I could feel the emptiness of my apartment waiting for me. All my books and pictures and knick-knacks and cat haven't been able to fill the emptiness.

The hardest part has been dealing with the quiet certainty that has lodged itself in the back of my mind, and won't leave, like all terrible lodgers. It's the certainty that I really will be alone for the rest of my life, that I'll never love like that again, that I'll be doomed to either a series of shallow relationships, with occasional moments of happiness to stave off suicide, or to just be alone, with my long-suffering cats, who will grow exponentially into a truly massive cat colony, until I go to work wearing clothes that I've knitted of cat hair. In the daylight, I know this irrational fear for what it is, and do my best to get the lodger evicted, but at night, when I'm vulnerable, he comes back, and settles down again, quietly waiting for me to give up. Parts of me know it's utterly ridiculous, but those parts always lose the fight. I think I need to arm them with something stronger than ephemeral hope, which becomes more and more ephemeral with each lonely night that passes.

This is just utterly depressing, so I'm going to stop now. At least I've realized what's happening, and why a friendly "hello" can be enough to make me cry with gratitude. Now I just need to get a grip on myself, dye my hair orange (because hope is stronger with orange hair), and do proper battle at night, instead of hiding behind trees and boulders.

For Better or For Worse

I do not typically tackle political or religious issues in a public forum, for many sound and unsound reasons, generally having to do with not offending people because you never know with whom you're going to need to get along, for business or social purposes, and it never hurts to not offend your friends, etc., etc., et cetera. We all know that I'm fairly argumentative, and definitely not afraid of confrontation, but until recently, I had firmly resolved to keep my opinions about political/religious/economic issues to myself, unless talking with family or engaged in civilized classroom debate. Since I have, however, decided that living in Charlottesville is a golden opportunity for me to stop pretending to be someone else, and just enjoy being myself, I have thrown my old resolve out the window, and am diving happily into my argumentative, confrontational self. That being said, and being spurred by a recent argument with my ex-husband about this particular topic (which was surprising, because I had thought we were on the same page on this topic), I'm going to briefly argue in favor of gay marriage.

As a caveat, let me make it quite clear that I will not discuss religion. Being somewhat areligious, I don't feel that I have a strong enough grasp on any religious doctrine to try and refute a ban on gay marriage within that doctrine. Furthermore, I believe that any religion which denies a human being the ability to live as a human being is not a religion worth considering (and I do say that categorically). I believe in God, big "G", but that's all I'm going to say about my beliefs at this juncture. They're inconsequential in this argument, to be honest, since my premise is that the right to marry is an inherent human right, and that the denial of it is a denial of one's humanity.

By-the-by, if you find yourself becoming offended by what I write here, let me know, and I'll be more than happy to have it out with you, albeit not publicly. We'll do it over coffee, or beer, or the phone, or Skype. And don't feel like you need to continue reading. I'm not standing over you, and won't be offended if you break off in the middle of this post (or indeed, right here).

One further caveat: I'm not gay, and have no current plans to be gay, despite a few conversations I've had with my sister about it being easier to pretend I am to stave off potential male relationships for my first few years of grad school (not altogether joking; no distractions need apply). I do not, however, need to be gay to believe that denying gay people the right to marry is just straight-up wrong.

So, as I said, the thesis of my argument is that it is a right of all human beings to marry, and that denying anyone the right to marry based on their sexual orientation is a violation of that right. Now, since I have about a half-million lawyers in my family, I am certain that someone, somewhere, will start happily constructing arguments defining exceptions to my categorical statement, all probably soundly based in current legal theory, and not one of which I find convincing or, in truth, relevant.

Humans have been getting married since, literally, the dawn of their existence. Marriage hasn't always looked like it does now, and has gone through so many permutations throughout the last several thousand years that I would find it difficult to accept any one definition of what marriage is. Even were someone to say, "Well, it's two people coming together in love to declare that love for each other publicly", I'd have to argue that, no, sorry, ever heard of arranged marriages? In fact, in the right (wrong) time and place, I'd even argue that a certain marriage would be a violation of an inherent human right (freedom), but that's a different argument for a different day. The point is that, no matter what definition you use for marriage, every human being has the right to marry. This doesn't mean they have to marry, nor does it mean that they should marry. It doesn't mean that, if it's forced on them, they have to accept marriage. It just means that, should they decide that it's something they want, then it's something they should be able to do. (And for the record, I do find the notion of needing a marriage license in order to get married repugnant.)

What makes it an inherent human right? It is inherent because it is a right with which everyone is born, regardless of class, race, nationality, sex, sexual orientation, etc., etc., and it is a right because it is bound up with that most integral and essential of all human rights: the right to direct the course of one's existence, otherwise known as freedom. If you accept that human beings have the right to be free (and if you don't accept that, then I do feel deeply, deeply sorry for you), and if you accept that gay people are human beings (and if you don't, then may I please direct you to my toilet, where other pieces of shit also float), then you must accept that gay people have the right to marry. Period. The end. No more discussion about the economic impact, the social impact, the religious impact. It is irrelevant. It doesn't matter whether you believe that one can "choose" to be gay, it doesn't matter whether you believe God sanctions it or not, it doesn't matter whether you believe that it will have a negative economic impact, or that we somehow have to "protect the children" (an argument which is over-used and under-important). None of these are reasons sufficient enough to change the fact that it is an inherent human right, for better or for worse, until death parts you from this world. You may kiss the bride . . . or groom. . . .

My Breaking Heart

There are times when there are no words to express the jumbled, confused disarray of emotions that come at you in a sleet-storm. When that happens, I tend to find refuge in the word "dude". So I will once again take recourse in my comfortable, familiar epithet. Dude.

I leave for Virginia one week from today. Next Saturday, July 30th, I will hop on a plane with my mom and hopefully drugged cat, and will arrive - after about seven hours in the air/airports (same thing; they're both like demilitarized no-man's lands) - in Virginia. We'll spend the night just outside Dulles International Airport, and then the next morning, will drive down to Charlottesville to take possession of my new apartment, new job, and new life.

Yesterday, I had two ReloCubes (they're like Pods) picked up, filled with all the detritus of my life. Some bookshelves, my desk, a few chairs and tables (along with a tiny doll dresser from the 1800s that I recently refinished, so proud, a post on that later), a bunch of boxes, some pictures, and that's it. It's what I'm taking to start a new life. It's overwhelming.

Of course, it would be anti-climactic if the only thing that happened over the last few days was the picking up of some Cubes. Yes, important, but God is not without a sense of drama. Thursday night, about 11:30, as I'm trying to pack up the last few boxes and find a way to stash them all in the Cubes without them falling on my head when I open the doors in Virginia, I get a call from my ex-husband. It was not a good call.

Back in 2003, the night before Easter, when all through the apartment, not a creature was stirring, except a tiny pregnant cat crying outside our sliding glass door leading out to a large grassy hill. Because it's me, the tiny pregnant cat came inside, and the next morning - Easter - presented us (my then-husband and I) with five baby kittens. I sat and watched them arrive, one by one, and the last one, whom we named "Bundle of Love", I literally pulled from his mother's womb, since she was too exhausted to push anymore. They were our babies, and while we were able to find a home for one of them - a little blonde baby girl named "Princess" - and eventually had to take the mother to the Humane Society (two things we regret), we kept the other four, along with my Nardabeast. We called them "the bodies" - I don't remember why or where it started - and they were the most precious, wonderful things in our lives. We loved them and adored them, and when my ex became my ex, he took them. It broke my heart, because they were my children, especially since I had long believed that I wouldn't ever have children. I'm learning to deal without their presence, and was doing fairly well, until my ex's phone call.

Apparently, Bun - our Bundle of Love - the sweetest and most endearing of all the cats, the shyest, most timid, most darling little gray cat beast, was lying on his side, crying plaintively, and breathing heavily, with his little pink tongue hanging out of the side of his mouth. My ex was wondering what he should do, and because I was distracted with packing, I advised him impatiently to find an emergency animal hospital, and take him in. Of course, nothing is that simple with my ex, but after several heated conversations, he finally got him in.

And called me 45 minutes later, crying, telling me that he thought that Bun might die.

The bottom dropped out of my world, and I ran out the door, thinking only that I might be too late to see my little Bun one last time. It was, of course, completely unexpected, as he's only 8, and should have many, many years of happy, pampered life left. But no. No, apparently, at this point, the best estimate that anyone can give us is 6-18 months.

My little Bun-creature, who has the sweetest heart of all my bodies, has cardiomyopathy. It's the kind of thing in humans that leads - immediately - to pacemakers or heart transplants. In cats, the options are limited to medications. Cardiomyopathy is where the heart - one giant muscle - becomes enlarged, and thus pumps blood less efficiently. Thursday night Bun was essentially having a heart attack.

Since then, we have also discovered ($4,500 later), that he is anemic, and the poor little guy has spent the last few days - and will spend the weekend - in a vet hospital. He received a full blood transfusion today, because apparently there was so little oxygen left in his blood that he was suffocating. And on Monday, my ex and I will meet with an internal specialist, who will tell us why/how Bun became anemic and cardiomyopathic. And then we'll have to make a decision. And it's a decision I did not imagine myself making anytime soon.

It breaks my heart, and makes all this Virginia stuff seem very, very far away. My little Bun-heart is dying.

Home, Sweet . . . What the Hell?

Oh, my God. You have got to be kidding! How is it that it is so difficult to actually find livable space in Charlottesville?! This is the first strike against my new home - the fact that, though I will be leaving in FIVE WEEKS, I do not yet actually have a home.

Wait, you ask. What about that place you scored when you were visiting in April?

Excellent question, I answer. Let me explain.

When I went out in April and scored my little apartment with its postage-stamp kitchen, I fully intended to live there, at the very least for a year. It wasn't paradise, no, but it seemed like it would be fine. Of course, since I knew nothing about the area, I was taking it all on faith, and I have since discovered that faith can really screw you over if you trust everything to it (pay attention, radical Muslims). While I'm there I'm in such a frantic panic that I secure the place without thinking, terribly afraid that someone else will get it if I dither. Once I get home, my brain switches on, and I think, hey! You know what? I bet there are probably reviews on the interweb about what it's like to live there.

There were. They were terrifying. Thank you, www.apartmentratings.com, for keeping me from being potentially murdered in my bed.

So, this apartment complex had marketed itself as a graduate-student-friendly housing solution to noisy party-hungry undergrads, which are what usually infest campus, or near-campus, housing. This marketing plan even included strict Nazi-like warnings about sound, such as, anything louder than 55 db (which is pretty freakin' quiet, let me tell you), will be punished by firing squad, and any "gatherings" larger than 5 people will be punished by lampshade-making. I thought, hey, all well and good, I'm in this place to study and learn and be a successful grad student, not party. I won't be in any danger of lampshades!

Well, they did a great job marketing, but apparently fell through on the follow-through. Reading through the reviews quickly assured me that if I did live there, I would fall prey to fallout from neighboring domestic fracas, drug deals, and the always-delightful case of mistaken-hooker-identity. Comments like "scary, gross . . . worst year ever", "dirty, noisy, and over-priced", or my favorite "run, run, run", were just a prelude to statements about how, well, dirty, noisy, scary, and gross it was, and how I should run, run, run away. So it seemed like the most prudent thing to do, despite the fact that I had signed a lease and given them a $450 security deposit, was to pay attention to the 15 (of 16) negative reviews, and run the hell away.

So I did.

In the process of relinquishing that lease, I found a charming post on my new English grad student listserv. Boasting a darling 1-bedroom apartment in a "geographic hot spot" (still not sure what the hell that means, actually), I started to talking to a fellow incoming English grad student who was full of promises and excitement, and thought, "Hey, this sounds like a good idea." So began two months of broken promises, confusion, and downright irritation and legal-inducing action. I will not bore you with the details, since they're not really that interesting; suffice it to say that apartment #2 is now no longer a home-sweet-home, and I am looking for apartment #3. (I will tell you, though, that the landlord wanted the rent 10 days before the first of the month. Yes. I'm serious.)

Third time's the charm, right? I certainly freakin' hope so!

So I've spent the morning desperately searching Charlottesville's few housing websites to find somewhere to live. It's a small town - 40,000 people, swelling to 60,000 when school's in - so there aren't a whole lotta options. So far I've found 4 potential places (all significantly more than I expected to spend ($150 more a month is significant when your estimated income is about $1,400/month)), none of which are really ideal. One of them requires an hour bus ride to get to school (no car, remember?), one is definitely closer, but isn't on the bus line, which means I'd be walking in the winter, and one of them is just tiny (400 square feet). The best - and closest - place is cute, reasonably affordable, and available now. So I've submitted my application, and it's all just a matter of waiting to see if they'll approve it, and then start that whole lease-signing-security-deposit thing again.

Call this a learning experience. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to have learned, but I'm sure I'll take something from it, if only an appreciation for how truly lyrical some people can be when describing housing horrors. If you're interested in some fun reading, here are the reviews for apartment #1.

Getting Ready to Say Good-Bye to California

I think it's time to start the good-bye process. That's the nice thing about having a few months before you leave somewhere for an extended period of time - you can do all those "last things" that will allow you to create a series of lovely memories to take out and handle when you're feeling lonely and homesick. This last weekend - Father's Day - I enjoyed what will probably be a last Father's Day for awhile with my family in Pasadena, starting at Louise's Trattoria with my mother, father, and brother, and then (when my parents had to go to a badly-timed baptism in LA), began an evening of drinking and poorly-played pool in a pleasant drunken haze with my brother, starting at Lucky Baldwin's in Pasadena, and ending with an impromptu dinner at Barney's Beanery (Irish-Style Omelette and Newcastle was a new - and delightful - combination for me) and the always-fun atheist-full conversation which inevitably accompanies beer and eggs.

Last weekend was my nephew's first birthday, which was wonderful, and beautifully orchestrated by my sister: a taco bar, monkey piñata, scores of friends and family, and a monkey-shaped cake which Lindsay and I were up late frosting with squishy pastry bags and tiny star tips, smoothing buttercream frosting with toothpicks and milk . . . oh, never again. I don't know when I'll be here for his birthday again, and it was very poignant, knowing that it was his first, and probably the last I'll see for awhile.

Next weekend is the Fourth of July weekend, which means the lake and sun and the boat and all sorts of enjoyable, hedonistic delights (probably including more beer). Then the weekend after that is a good-bye to Little Tokyo, with sushi and drinking and ramen, oh, my! And the weekend after that is the annual family jaunt to the spectacular gem of June Lake, nestled in the Sierra Nevadas, although I'm hoping sincerely that I won't miss it next summer, since it's something we've been doing for almost 30 years now, and is a sacred tradition. Then . . . after that . . . I have one more weekend, and then I'm gone. At 11:30 AM PST, July 30th, I'll be flying out of Ontario International Airport, and then at 9:10 PM EST, I'll be flying into Dulles International Airport, for the start of something new and wonderful and utterly exciting.

It's almost terrifying how few weekends there are left, and how much I'm going to miss everyone. But, to be perfectly honest, there's so much that I won't be missing. California is a great place, but despite the fact that I was "born and raised" here, and have even spent 5 years here as an adult, I've never really loved it the way some people do. There are parts of it that I like, but, well, I'm not in love with it. Aside from the fact that there are so many people, and I am not a crowded-city kind of person, there is so little of the natural beauty left in the populated areas. I miss the open, green spaces of Ohio, and when I was in Virginia, and saw it again, I got homesick for the green. I hate the traffic, and the fact that it takes ages to get anywhere. Life is so fast-paced, it's as though there's never any time to stop and think, as if you're not doing something at every minute of the day you're wasting your life. I could go on, but why? Mostly these are just things that I say when people ask me why I don't love California. I've never really loved it, and there's no easy way for me to explain why.

People do keep asking me when I'll be coming back, as though there were ever any question that I wouldn't. It's funny the assumptions they make - as though this time in Virginia was a brief period in exile, and that I can't wait to come back. Of course, when I moved to Ohio, that's how I felt, too. I had never lived anywhere other than California before then, and I really did view my time in Ohio as exile. I remember on a visit in 2004, in fact, 2 years before we moved back, we went to the beach, and I wrote in the sand, "I WILL come back." When a sure-thing job opened up in California, I didn't hesitate a minute, and ran back as fast as I could. And what did I find? That everything I had left California to escape was waiting right there for me, with open arms, to drag me back down into the muck and unhappiness I thought I had left behind for good.

It's one of those painful things you have to learn when you're "growing up". It's not that you can't go home again; it's that you shouldn't go home again. Well, maybe not you. But certainly me. Essentially, I won't be coming back to California. My family knows, too. Not in the obvious, let's-talk-about-it kind of way, but in the sad, quiet way you know things. They've all alluded to it a few times, and in a desire to be honest, I haven't contradicted their allusions. My father was very sad, actually, when he heard that I would be going to Virginia. When he heard how long it would be, it was quite cute how he said, "Well, that's too long. We'll have to talk about it." I think they all know that it means that once I leave, I won't be coming back except for visits.

On the train a few months ago, coming home late from work one night, I started talking with a German professor at one of the Claremont colleges. She's from Germany, but has been here for many years. I asked her if it was hard being away from family, and she said that when she was younger, it wasn't quite so hard, but now that she was older - and they were older - it was especially difficult. I also know that spending your life away from your family is difficult. My aunt has lived on the East Coast for all of my life, anyway, and I know that the isolation from her family - despite the fact that she's built a beautiful life for herself there - has been hard on her. She's very excited, in fact, that I'll be out there, and I'm actually pleased that she's so close. She's in Annapolis, which is only a few hours drive from Charlottesville (and which takes you through some of the prettiest country), so I envision many little trips back and forth.

I'm digressing. The point is that I know that it is difficult to be away from my family - I was away for 5 years! - but that at some point, I have to make a decision: to live my life for my family, or for myself. It's a difficult decision, but I know that, ultimately, I'll decide to live it for myself, and that I'll have to keep my relationship with my family strong through mediums other than frequent visits. I'm lucky that things like Skype and Facebook and email exist; they create ways to interact on a personal and intimate level with people, and while they certainly aren't the same as a face-to-face visit, they can't still be wonderful. Even the phone! My mother and I aren't 45 minutes away from each other now, and we can still spend 2 hours on the phone - easily - though we'll see each other the next weekend, or we saw each other a few days before. So I know everything will be okay; we'll get by.

Still, it isn't easy to say good-bye. I know that I'll shed many tears when it comes time to leave, and probably many before then. But at least I get time to say good-bye, and time to do a few "last things", so on those nights when I miss my family so much it hurts, I can think of them, and feel like I'm home with them, even though I'm 2,600 miles away.

A Visit to Virginia - Part I

The Rotunda of the University of Virginia. A statue of Homer is in the foreground.

Wow. Virginia is gorgeous. Absolutely gorgeous. I had forgotten how much I missed greenery, but it all came home the moment we left the cocoon-like embrace of Dulles. Even though it was 6:00 in the morning (3:00 AM in my real world, the west coast), and Lindsay and I hadn't slept since the night before (why do I always think red-eyes are a good idea, and then, after flying one, swear that I won't ever do it again?!), I was immediately entranced with and refreshed by the spring greenness of northern Virginia. It didn't hurt that it was a gorgeously cool, clear day, and I'm pretty certain that by the time we reached Charlottesville (about three-and-a-half hours later), my sister was thoroughly tired of my exclamations, "Oh, it's so beautiful! Look, isn't it gorgeous, Lindsay? Don't you think it's so pretty! It's so green! I've missed this so much! Oh, wow, Linz, look at those trees!" Yeah, see, admit it - you're already annoyed, and you didn't have to listen to it for three-plus hours. But seriously. When I moved to Ohio, it was the thing that first made me love it - the sheer plethora of vert - and the green was the first thing about Virginia that captured my heart. I felt at home, as though my soul had lived there since I left Ohio, waiting for me among the trees and meadows, and that these last five years in California I'd only had a loaner soul. I'm sure that in one of my past lives I was either a dryad or druid.

None of the pictures that I have of my trip -- which are mostly of people and places -- can even begin to do justice to the beauty of a Virginia spring, but a few of them can perhaps give a glimpse of it:

Looking down from the Rotunda towards the "Corner", a collection of shops, bars, and restaurants.

View from the steps of the Rotunda. The statue is Thomas Jefferson, who founded and built the university in 1819.

Looking up towards the Rotunda.

Those are just a few of the 600-some pictures I took while there. Of course, a disproportionate number of those were of my nephew (if you have an absolutely adorable subject like that, it's hard not to indulge yourself), and this is probably one of my all-time favorites:

My monkey-face in the bath.

I had such a great time trying to make Andrew laugh and then get the laugh on camera. But as soon as I put the camera up to my face, he would inevitably frown. So I have several series of pictures that are off-center smiles, with something important like the top of Andrew's head cut off, followed by perfectly-centered frowns. This was one of the few times he obliged me by laughing while the camera was up to my face. Anyway. I digress.

I am in love with Virginia, and cannot WAIT to begin school. The campus is beautiful, the people in the department friendly and downright awesome, I've got an apartment that is kinda sorta cute, near campus, the gym, and a dining hall (more on that in a minute or two), downtown is fantastic, the Corner fun, and the atmosphere, all-in-all, perfect for me. Of course, it'll be interesting to see how much time I actually have to sample the downtown culture, Corner, and other areas of Charlottesville (or C'ville, as they all call it, which I hate, since I think "Charlottesville" is very pretty, and "C'ville" downright ugly), since I know I'm going to be super-busy, but I love it, and am itching to move and get settled in! I even - briefly - considered moving early (my lease begins in July) and giving up our annual June Lake trip, but I came to my senses. I can't give up June Lake. That's heresy. My family would probably disown me.

So, anyway. Our trip was wonderful. It was lightening-fast (I could have stayed for several weeks), but I got the important thing taken care of: I found my apartment. As I said, it's kinda-sorta cute, but hey, for under $700, what do you expect? It's a 60s/70s-built brick building, so, square and uninteresting, but it's 650 square feet (that's right, Bill Gates! I know you're jealous!), which is actually perfect for me (I hate cleaning), and the main living room area is big enough for my desk, my bookcases, a couch, and a dining table. Since the noise ordinance for the area is Nazi-strict (seriously, 55 decibels or lower, and if you have 15 people or more at your apartment, it's grounds for immediate eviction), I don't anticipate the size of my apartment putting any serious kinks in my social life. The kitchen, though . . . wow. It's like a postage stamp. Look:

My postage-stamp kitchen.

That's it. There's no counter on the other wall. Just a couple inadequate shelves (which I will probably take out and put something useful like this in their place). That is the sum total of my kitchen. Look! No dishwasher! What's even more important is that I'm not sure my half-size baking sheets will fit in that oven. I may have to get some quarter-size sheets. This will put a serious crimp in my baking, which is unfortunate. There isn't even room on the counter for a microwave. I may have to ignore their strict "no modifications to the interior" rule and mount my microwave above the counter.

Anyway, it is because of this postage-stamp kitchen that I have decided that I will be eating on campus quite a bit. So much, in fact, that I'm probably going to get a dining plan. Yes! I have decided to accept with grace the fact that I absolutely hate to cook (cook, I said, not bake), and let other people cook for me. Plus, like I said, there's the Corner, and well, look at what I had for dinner at this place called Michael's Bistro and Taphouse one night:

Brie with honey, almonds, and fruit.

Portobello mushroom with spinach, roasted tomatoes, julienned russet potatoes, goat cheese, and a balsamic vinegar reduction.

Brown-ale cheesecake. This was so good that although Linz and I originally ordered one slice to share, we had to order another. It was that good.

The beer menu. Outstanding. I will definitely go back.

So, because of places like this and the postage-stamp, I will not be eating at home much. And if it means I only eat two meals a day, then so be it. I need to diet anyway.

The rest of the apartment is perfect, though. It'll be just me and my cat, Nard, and, of course, my books. I have decided that they'll be going with me, if nothing else does, since they're my only friends, and I may as well accept that with grace, along with my hating to cook (grace is going to be very important here). So they're all going, and will probably overrun my apartment (especially since I have no intentions of ceasing to purchase any more during the next six-ish years), but whatever. Better an apartment overrun with books than rats, right?

I realize I haven't posted many pictures of the campus. I'll do that next post. This one is already unforgivably long and meandering. But at least it has visual appeal.