Freaking Out

Someone tried to break into my apartment about an hour ago, while I was awake and the lights were all on. What kind of psycho tries to break into an apartment where someone is clearly home and awake!!?? What if that's the kind of psycho who comes back? The policeman who came to inspect things said I was "relatively" safe, but it's kind of hard to imagine going to sleep. My windows are at ground level; this neighborhood is not great; I'm totally alone and my sense of being invisible and anonymous, which always makes me feel safe, is obviously not accurate tonight. Shit. I'm trying not to be melodramatic, but I'm kind of freaked. The lights make it a fishbowl in here, but I don't want to turn them off. Why do these things always happen when no one is awake to call?

Okay, rationality says, freaking out accomplishes nothing. Going about as usual + panic is not any more useful than going about as usual without panic. Except . . . if I hadn't been awake and heard him and yelled at him, the burglar would have come in. He would have taken my stuff, but he probably wouldn't have hurt me. But still. It doesn't make me want to go to sleep. It would be so easy for someone to break the window right over my bed. It's at knee level--you could look through the blinds and see me lying there, and then you could just kick it in.

I'm freaking myself out. I will be very tired for the first day of my new pilates class.

Updates

Since it was so quiet, my co-tutor and I unilaterally decided to pack it in 20 minutes early. We got all bundled up (it's 30 degrees here, and feels like 23), and then about 10 feet outside of the building, a student passed us as she ran inside, clutching a single sheet of paper. There are lots of tutoring services in the building, but our students have a certain look. My co-tutor and I looked at each other and then, with incredible dedication, I took one for the team, turned around, and ended up staying late on the quietest night of the year.

The student turned out to be a Japanese ESL student writing a paper analyzing the way The Seven Samuri demonstrates various primate behaviors, such as bonding, dominance, and locomotion (we had a long discussion about the sentence "Needless to say, the humans were bipedal.")

By the way, the Thai chicken soup is delicious, and close to how it would taste in a resturant except I went easy on the coconut milk, not being a rabid fan of it. I've been further compromising the authenticity of the soup by adding frozen peas, just because I can't resist. I'm eating a bowl of it right now and I'm so happy.

Thanks to Dr. King, no one's writing seems to need improvement tonight

It's been the quietest night ever at the tutoring center where I work, and oddly, even though I'm getting paid to sit here and blog, and for most of the evening I was getting paid to sit here and IM with Equinoctial, I still wish the powers that be would close up early and send us home.

That's probably mostly because I'm hungry; I almost always go to the gym before my shift starts at 7, and I almost never leave enough time to get dinner. As usual, today I don't even have enough cash to use the vending machines; when leaving the gym four hours ago, I decadently bought an ice cream sandwich, but the little pusher-thing didn't advance far enough and I had to put in my last dollar to get the sandwich out. It was delicious, though . . . it had coffee ice cream and little almond shards in it.

Speaking of the gym, I have a sports injury! My right iliotibial band (the tendon that runs down the side of your leg between your hip and your knee) is wacked-out somehow and it's been hurting for months. Oddly, this makes me feel like I've really arrived as an athlete (even though the problem was probably caused by my poor running form).

The last student who came in said the number one thing a teacher likes to hear: "I like that you make me think." (And I thought, well, good, cause it looked like you weren't liking it at all.)

Let me just say this and get it over with:

Some freaky weather we're having this year in Seattle!

Since external surroundings are important to me, and I'm also not great at small talk and tend to go for the easy topics, I have had the conversation about the weather approximately ten thousand times now. I had it quite a bit over break ("How's Seattle?" "Oh, you know, rain of toads") and now I'm having it here, though I also sometimes spice things up by moving it into the meta conversation about how everyone is talking about nothing but the weather.

All that to say, it's snowing right now and I'm super cozy, making Thai chicken soup (without a recipe, so if it turns out well I'm inducting myself into the Improvisitory Cooks of America), doing a bit of my reading here and there, and puttering around my warm, delightful apartment.

I will be sad to leave it next year, though none of the possible scenarios involve keeping it (except the one where I win the lottery). If (and everyone I talked to over break knows this is a real if) I survive to fight another year in this program, one of the bright spots would be getting a house with a couple of other grad students. In the context of a discussion about finding a fourth roommate in sync with his values, one of the group told me about quitting his job at a golf course earlier this fall. On his last day, he said he was getting stressed about mowing perfectly, and then he realized just how he felt about the whole golf culture and started mowing unevenly, singing a little song that went "Class enemies, class enemies, class enemies!" I'm choosing to find this funny and endearing.

What did I learn in grad school?

I think the most important skill, the one I'm called upon to use most frequently and the one I struggle most with, is projecting interested neutrality while feeling so frustrated I'd like to beat the seminar table with my fists.

I dropped the one class I mentioned a few posts back, and found out today that the professor scornfully told the class that "someone dropped because she thought she already knew how to read poetry." This is insulting on so many levels . . . for instance, 1) That's far from what I said in my very carefully worded email, and 2) Why would it have been so bad for me to say I know how to read poetry? It's a lifelong process, and all that, but I don't see why you should have to pretend you're a beginner if you're not.

Meanwhile, I sat through class #2 today also wishing I could drop it. It has been consistently totally soporific. Someone would pose an interesting question, and then the professor would jump in and without even acknowledging the point lull us back to passivity by, for example, lecturing about primogeniture (which I distinctly remember learning about at about the same level of sophistication in 10th grade) for 15 minutes (that's 900 seconds, if you're counting each one).

I can't tell if I'm too hard to please or just unlucky this term.

Who dreams about pedagogy?

HenHen's tagging of me to share 5 "little-known facts" about myself has thrown me into a crisis. Maybe everything about me is little-known, even to myself! Or maybe I am completely transparent, unknowingly wearing all my secrets on my sleeve! Obviously, I think too much (but that's not a little-known fact).

Last night I had an odd nightmare. I was walking with my favorite professor from last quarter on the way for him to observe me teaching my class (though I don't actually have a class right now). He showed me how to whip my head around in a weird way, and then said, "Your class will think that's really funny."

I said, "I'm not the kind of teacher who does tricks."

He said, "Doesn't your class have any social interaction?"

I said, "The social interaction occurs in connection with learning. I have them do group work . . ."

He expressed extreme skepticism about this, and I felt very much not-among-friends. I have to say, though, that I'm kind of impressed with dream-me. She knew what to say and said it.

Extra Brainy

On the way to Day 1 of my second class today I realized I made a terrible mistake shortly after I woke up this morning: I took what I thought was a daytime decongestant for my cold, but it was actually Nyquil. Suddenly, my whole day made sense, but it was too late. I floated through class without incident on my medicine cloud, but if the cloud doesn't land soon, no pub for me.

Seminar most foul

I have never had such strong mixed feelings about the first day of a class; half the time I was thinking "I'm going to love this class!" and the other half "I have to drop this class!" I won't belabor the details, but three separate times, with three different people, minor or imagined disagreements about unimportant points led to angry confrontations with the professor. This dynamic makes a class both tense and boring, so I hope it won't continue. As often happens to me, I'm really excited about the books and may have trouble keeping my equanimity if we don't actually get to discuss them.

In a totally unexpected turn of events, I'm feeling excited again about books in general. I had a really nice break, but after two weeks of catching people up on my life, I am really sick of hearing myself talk. This state makes me eager to write (to try and say things better) and to shut the fuck up (a new family slogan!) entirely.

New Years Eve

So Josh was like, what are you doing for new years? And I was like, oh, probably just wandering around being cold and trying to avoid first night, because I hate new years. And he was like, why? And I was like, well, because I hate the passage of time. We'll never have 2006 back again, and you can never do anything special enough to make that feel okay. And he and Sarah looked very sad and were like, Pookie, don't cry, it will be all right.

Of course, what they said was actually more dignified. But I was exactly this much of a downer. The secret, though, is that even though I hate new years, I really like being in Boston with my old friends, and family friends, and I wouldn't trade it for almost anything.

"As On Dit, Merry Christmas"

My great-aunt sent everyone cards that say "Happy Holidays," which she amended in each case with a different reference to "Christmas." She must have been feeling particularly creative by the time she annotated mine in Franglais.

A Minnesota Christmas turns out to involve numerous "white elephant sales," where we tried to help my mom divest of her dancing hamster collection, and near-constant singing around the piano. I'm just not sure I'll be okay if I don't continue to get my daily fix of Good King Wenceslas.

Anyway, as on dit, Happy Holidays everyone.

Tundra

Tonight, Sisterkins and I flew in to the frozen plains of Minnesota (actually, the plains were 37 degrees, which some Minnesotans are complaining about. They are nuts).

Here is my holiday schedule:

Today-December 27: St. Paul
Dec 27-Dec 29: east coast family
Dec 29-Jan 2: Boston
Jan 2: back to Seattle


So if you will be in any of these places at any of these times and want to hang out, get in touch. (This is just an experiment. If you are expecting me to get in touch like a normal person, don't worry, I will.)

Miss You Pig Pig

Today I received as a housewarming gift a picture frame that says this. The frame contains a photo of Pig Pig, her sister, and her mother. Pig Pig loves it.

Speaking of which, in Portland, my sister and I ate the biggest pieces of sushi I've ever seen. Like, we each ate a whole eel. Earlier, HenHen and I hauled wood, which, to me, was very exciting. It involved a tractor.

My papers are finally done. On the way down to Portland, driving on the dark highway in a complete hour-of-sleep post-parade fog, I got mad at myself because I remembered that I used the word "examine" twice in one paragraph and never went back to fix it. In a far worse, but less obvious, transgression, I also made up a citation I didn't have time to look up. I mean, the information came from the book I cited, it just probably was not on page 49. But since I have the library's only copy of the book, I think I'm safe from fact-checking. I felt evil. It was satisfying.

I understand perfectly how you feel I often feel like that myself

"It was a very lovely spring day, Gertrude Stein had been going to the opera every night and also going to the opera in the afternoon and had been otherwise engrossed and it was the period of the final examinations, and there was the examination in William James' course. She sat down with the examination paper before her and she just could not. Dear Professor James, she wrote at the top of her paper. I am so sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy to-day, and left.

The next day she had a postal card from William James saying, Dear Miss Stein, I understand perfectly how you feel I often feel like that myself. And underneath it he gave her work the highest mark in his course."

Done done done!

So it's later than it was supposed to be, but paper #1 is handed in. Now I'm sitting in the student center, watching the torrential rain and wondering if I should go out in it to have ONE BEER ONLY and say goodbye for this term to everyone at grad pub before I go back to the library. I probably should, but it is so nice and warm and dry in here. So nice, too, that it no longer matters exactly how Wordsworth addressing his poem to Coleridge and writing scenes of Coleridge reading it, even after Coleridge is dead, relates to some larger element of Romantic thought. I think the part of me that loves this stuff, and the part of me that is analytical, are not the same part.

No, that's not exactly it. This relates to a little conversation I've been having with myself lately about why most writing about poetry is boring. I used to think it was just me, and then in a different part of my brain I also thought it was just Helen Vendler (who, in speech, is brilliant and fluid and amazing, but the writing, to me, is often both flat and less than totally convincing). Then I put those things together with a couple of other things and realized that it must be poetry. Part of it, I think, is that the mechanics of close reading are hard to perform in print. I even might say impossible, and I'm really not sure what to do about that: what in conversation is fascinating detail, on the page just seems painstaking and dry. And then also, the readings I'm most stimulated by are the most speculative, and trying to prove them with the rigor responsible scholarship requires--or even just to articulate a reading so that a reader can follow, step by step, without you there to have a dialogue or, I don't know, make instructive facial expressions or whathever it is that mitigates this problem when the discussion is verbal--is like . . . actually, this is the perfect simile: it's like Audobon's birds. You can make your representation of the thing, but in the process you kill it. I wonder if it made Audobon sad, painting corpses all day.

Wait, how . . .

. . . did I get on the internet again? I'm writing! Writing my paper!

I am kind of itching to post, even though I'm not doing anything except writing and not-writing, but I'm finally on a roll and have to go back to it. Quickly, the bad news: I'm still working on my first paper. It's almost done, and it's basically solid and not-embarrassing, and it's kind of a relief that the magical ability to somehow do this shit and see how the pieces need to go hasn't deserted me (I never really thought it had, but I didn't know where it was and it wouldn't come when I called)--BUT it is still the first paper and I have to research and write another one by Saturday. Between tonight and tomorrow I have to go from Wordsworth accidentally writing his masterwork while procrastinating on "writing his masterwork" (which is so awesome and I wish were not an oversimplification), to parades. Specifically, how they are the missing link between Walt Whitman and the KKK. (It's true.)

The writing center tutoring job is over for the quarter, thank god, but I got some nice feedback about it from the managers. Plus, I started getting requested (it's a walk-in center, but you can have a specific tutor if you're willing to wait), which kind of amazes me and makes me happy. Next quarter, I have been assigned more responsibility: the incredibly important task of drawing the "Below this line we may not be able to see you tonight" line, which is our savoir.

Report from Bed Central

I will say one thing for laptops: they have revolutionized the pursuit of coziness. Right now I am sitting in my bed listening to the rain, drinking mint tea, and writing about Wordsworth's struggles with distraction. I don't know if life is good or not, but I think maybe it is.

I am trying to work my paper around to including my favorite scene in The Prelude, which I like to call "Getting Drunk for Milton." In college, one of Wordsworth's Cambridge buddies gets assigned Milton's old room; sitting around in it, the young poet is inspired to start drinking toasts to its previous occupant, and, well . . . I guess you could say, based on the results, that he must not have been working on his MFA for very long at that point.

Wordsworth isn't funny very often, and, as with people like that generally, it's especially endearing when he is.

Sunday before finals week

It's probably the most studious morning of the year. And yet . . . the library is closed! How can the library be closed right now?

(There is another, crappier library open. It is dirty and has no outlets, but I am sitting in it in front of a narrow window that shows a stripe of Seattle containing some houseboats and the Space Needle. So that is kind of nice.)

Procrastination

I've always been very good at it.

I'm waiting for the right moment when I'm totally stuck on my paper and then get a burst of inspiration by typing some of it in this little blog box. (Then I might post it. Um, actually, no. It won't be that kind of paper, that kind being "good.")

I just kind of failed to get myself interested in this one. I am actually pretty interested in the problem, but not so much in how Wordsworth solves it, much as I like him and consider him unfairly maligned.

Well, I'll probably be back here in a few hours.

Very Tired

Today I left the house at 8:00 and didn't stop running around until I got back from work after midnight. That's too much day for me, and I still have to write a paper about parades.

I like my writing center tutoring job, but it's really intense . . . seven to midnight, and I usually don't take a break. I've worked this job three out of the past four nights and now I am ready to fall over and have barely any voice left.

So this is just an update, for information. I would write something witty--the writing center itself is a wellspring of hilarity, of course--but I'm saving myself for the parades.

die BierStube

Yesterday a few of us had planned to hang out and do "something cultural followed by something alcholic." I think this is a terrific formula, especially when the "something cultural" turns out to be talking about going to a Humphrey Bogart movie and then deciding to go straight to the bar instead. We all agreed we are getting enough solitary absorbtion of culture through our massive amounts of reading.

Once this plan was in place, the day suddenly fit my criteria for a perfect day. As I blogged about over the summer, a perfect day is one in which you work really hard and are productive, then exercise hard, and then go out drinking. The fact that you know you are going to have fun later motivates all the earlier efforts. Someday I would like to find a group of friends and see how long we could keep this up for. Harrison and Kizzle and I did it over the summer for about 5 days, and then people started getting sick. But I have hopes.

Anyway, we decided to do our drinking at die BierStube (which is so fun to say). I got there a bit late (because I am me) and, surprise, instead of my three friends I saw a huge table full of people from the department. I waved, but, being all bundled up, the person I waved to didn't recognize me, so I scurried back deeper into the bar to find the people I was supposed to meet. They were way in the back, huddled against a dart board.

Me: Did you guys know that there are a bunch of people we know here?

L: We know people?

I explained who they are and where they were sitting.

J: I was going to go have a cigarette, but now I think I will just hide back here. [And she did.]

Of course, we did eventually go and talk to them, but it is always nice when one finds one is not alone in ridiculous shyness.