Moojinorbit

Because Blog.com became dysfunctional overnight, I have relocated my blog to:

http://moojinorbit.wordpress.com/

And I have posted–finally.

Meet you there!

Nancy

AND it’s already the 15th of June, and my summer school version of Political Forgiveness begins this afternoon. So much for all that extra blogging I was going to pull off between the last entry and this. Instead it was a whirlwind of closing out classes, reading student papers, grading, finalizing journal articles, talking to book volume editors and other such minutiae. Oh, and wedding season back at the bar, tales of which hopefully I’ll have time to post soon. And, as I am wont, I am sneaking in a novel between teaching quarters: The History of Love. Absorbing on so many levels.

Happily, I’m coming off four work-free days spent running around with my mom, and they were wonderful. We dug up weeds rendered gratifyingly pliant from the 10-day series of crashing afternoon monsoons. We visited the gardener’s paradise that is Paulino’s and bought some roses for the corner of my front yard I’m converting into a decadent space of beauty. One of the roses, I discovered after purchase, is officially named the Billy Graham. Of course; because what would my life be without an evangelical tucked in every corner? Fitting. At least it wasn’t the Jerry Falwell.

So:

Rich dirt, fully of fat glossy worms.
New life taking root.
Water tables rising steadily.
Lightning and thunder.
Apocalyptic rainstorms, but only in 8 minute intervals. Then clear skies.
My mom, at 70, vibrant, contemplative, playful. In constant forward motion.
Brody, the Dog Stallion, and all his ways of gaping at, rolling in, fighting the world.
Katie, sweet girl, lives in a treehouse in her mind, where she keeps a bed and sneaks away for day dreaming. How well, and how little, we can know our partners.
Addie and Nolie, my nieces, growing so fast into their own separate personalities–Owl, Tiger Cub.
Days that slip away so fast.
Love. And Fear. And sadness. And dancing. And wonder.

I’m back, at least for a bit, and hopefully more consistently over the summer.

Spring classes are over and the papers are flooding my in box. I heard Becky Thompson, an inspiring professor and writer, speak Monday night, and she talked about her decision to discontinue all email communication with students. Makes them talk to her in person instead, so she can get to know them. The fantasy of rejecting email is appealing, but the thought of all those people showing up at my office door…How well do I want to get to know them? How much time do I not feel like I have?

I’ve committed to holding off grading until I revise and resubmit a journal article I need to get out the door. Momentum is key. Fruit languishing on the vine is psychologically enervating.

I am watching green things, many of them newly planted, grow all over my property. Paying close attention. A tiny third leaf of a columbine sprouted yesterday on my plate of seedlings, and I look forward to nestling it in with the other personalities in my corner planter.

The Andy Goldsworthy-inspired plant sculpture is coming along. I’ll post a good picture soon.

The first pink and white rose on my rosebush bloomed on Sunday and took my breath away. The first bloomer on the bush always strikes me as the most perfectly glorious.

I found a tiny bug on my hand towel in the bathroom Monday night. Couldn’t tell if it was a spider, but worried it was a tick, based on its deep red, bulbous abdomen. Couldn’t shake it off the towel, so put the whole thing on my front porch to give it a chance to escape. It rained all night. I didn’t have time to check in the morning. Last night I come home and the poor thing is still on the towel. Wave of compassion and sadness that it hasn’t eaten, seems stuck. I dislodge it with a postcard, it lands on the doormat. Go inside. Wave of fear that it will find Paco’s warm skin when he sits on the doormat. Wave of violence as I get a piece of toilet paper and smash the doomed thing. Wave of repulsion at human fear, which destroys so much that is elegant and divinely designed.

Later, I watch a long-legged spider carefully make her way across the ceiling of my living room while I sit with a book ten feet below. Having just killed the tic from small human fear, I discipline my body to sit still instead of scurry away to avoid her “dropping” on me. (We’re so self-absorbed.) The shadow cast from the light fixture doubled her size. Indomitable, sure footed, elegant. She can walk upside down. What can I do?

The Universe keeps leading me to academics who write passionate, connected, penetrating, out-of-the-box books–role models, clearly, of what can be done if you’re willing to swim against the current. Ruth Behar. Bob Jensen. And the aforementioned Becky Thompson who, it turns out, also did her undergrad at UC Santa Cruz (a fated experience for most of us). I see glimpses of a path I may be carving for my voice. I am writing differently. Trying to write this book in the voice that feels most true.

Trying, too, to live much more sustainably, less wastefully, less obliviously. And yet thinking, as I regularly do, about the glacial consciousness of the academy, and the vicious cancer of predatory global capitalism with its harem of nasty ideologies, I still feel strong periodic urges to pull out of the whole thing. Send me an invitation at the right moment and I’ll unplug from all this and join with the human pockets of resistance all over the globe to try and throw it off altogether and create new livable alternatives. I’m serious. I admire Barack Obama, but like Bob Jensen was saying last night when I heard him speak, and I know it to be true: the system is neither humane nor sustainable the way it is. And yet my little plot of private property is such a retreat. I ask my students this: can we call plots of earth our own private property and still find ways to take care of each other, to not exploit each other through the incentives that come with ownership and consumption?

Monday morning I went to the city administration building, office of licenses, to support my neighbors Kristen and Kenny Johnson, in their efforts to secure a license to serve beer and wine in their sweet and thriving neighborhood cafe. Eighteen neighbors showed up and spoke on their behalf. The Johnsons are Black; most of the supporters gathered were white. They testified about how much KJ’s Cafe had been bringing our neighborhood together, families with young children, couples, gay, straight, black, white, Latino. And it’s true. And this in a world where the great political scientist Robert Putnam finds that in the most racially diverse neighborhoods people know each other the least. So this little business, in a neighborhood with almost no such businesses, matters. And the showing up for the Johnsons matters. And it’s a pocket of resistance.

Amanda, the barista at my neighborhood coffee shop, keeps the flat screens on vintage movies in the mornings, because she hates tv. This morning there was an interview with Katherine Hepburn in 1973, and, waiting for my latte, I stood there entirely charmed, as she disarmed her male interviewer over and over with her fierce intelligence, wit, and intractability. She played with him like a cat with a bird, and he, too, came under her spell. Every assumption he asserted about her or acting or Hollywood she toppled, or at least challenged until she had answered it in her own words. Her unapologetic confidence was the essence of MOOJ. I can’t think of any actress today with that combination of enchanting and badass.

At one point, the interviewer asked her about how Hollywood had changed since her era and whether she would be comfortable in it “today.” “Say, for example,” he said, “you’re at a party and someone comes up to you and offers you a drink and a line of cocaine.”

“Oh,” she said, “I wouldn’t do it. I don’t need it, and, anyway, I’m not a bore. Cold sober, I find myself absolutely fascinating!” She busts out in a guffaw.

In the afterlife, I fully plan to hang out with Kate.

After various fits, starts, and trap doors on my zigzag walk of faith, I have come to believe that the Universe is indeed a creative force with which we partner, for positive or negative, better or worse. We are, in fact, married to The Force, and if we signal to The Force that we’re undeserving, lacking, victimized, or somehow in need, we will tend to see evidence of exactly those things (those beliefs) show up in our lives. Likewise, when when we come to see, and when we really know, that we are whole, complete, abundantly met, badass, attractive, and all that, The Force will bring it on. We create exactly what we believe. Yeah, it’s the Secret. I’ve also found it to be true.

Of course, there are paradoxes and limits to the philosophy, with which I often grapple (along the lines of, well, all the poor people in the world aren’t poor because they think they should be poor), and that’s fine. Spiritual systems are meant to be wrestled with. But what I know for sure is that in our individual lives, at least, and to a degree in our collective lives, we tend to attract what we put out. When you find the capacity inside you to believe, and know, the good stuff, and decide to live your life in sync with that knowing, stuff starts shifting (not sharting) all over the place. Or at least it has for everyone I know who’s seriously tried it. The trick is that you gotta leave it to the Universe to figure out exactly how it’s going to happen.

Which is why the UPS guy knocked on my front door an hour ago, shocking me out of a nap attempt, and delivered treats to my doorstep out of freaking “nowhere”.

Scotchmallow Eggs, from See’s Candies. My favorite chocolate-marshmallow-caramel treat in the Universe. Sent to me from Jules, my dear friend and former girlfriend. For no good reason except she knows I like them. And because she’s an angel, co-creating with God, hello.

How does she know?
Because last year I told her. I told her, in some casual conversation, I needed some Scotchmallows. (I’d gotten used to acknowledging my desires out loud, rather than stuffing them in dark places.) And a couple weeks later, when I’d forgotten about it, she mailed some to me. In abundance–enough to last many months.

And then she did it again this year. Cuz the Force never said that miracles won’t happen through people you know.

Oh, how I love her. How I love the two and a half years we went through together, and the lessons learned, and the years after that that we worked to stay in touch, to find a friendship, to remain in one another’s lives. She’s marrying her partner Lee in July, in Cape Cod, and we’re going to go! And all is good, and all is love, and there are more than enough Scotchmallows in the world. But we have to remember to ask, and to know the good is coming, out of nowhere, in ways we wouldn’t expect, in abundance.

And this is how I know I’m going to manifest solar panels for my house somehow. I’ve started putting it out there, like I did with my house, and my job, and my partner, and the Atlantis cruises, and both my cats, and all the incredible blessings the Force has let me co-manifest. And it’ll happen in some amazing way, laced with mystery and grace, like all of it.

10 minute freewrite on the blog, before my 40 minute freewrite on the book:

Dancing.
I’d forgotten about dancing in the middle of my slow-motion midlife crisis.
Hadn’t danced for too long; that was the problem. Harmful, unhealthy disconnection from the dance floor.

But yesterday I found my way back–even if the dance floor happened to be the hardwoods in my home, and there were no disco balls (though the light did look a little odd with the sleet coming down at about 4:30), and I was the only person at the dance party.

Yeah, pretty much: Solo 1-hour Dance Party at Home!
The cats were not amused, but I was.

I needed exercise, and it was after my allotted gym hours (I pay a reduced rate at school in exchange for reduced gym hours), and it was starting to sleet/snow so I wasn’t going outside. So first I turned on Channel 222, FitTV, and did some calisthenics with some guy named Gilaud and his pretty entourage on some fake lawn in Hawaii. But I did it with the TV sound muted and my own music blasting from the stereo. Did a bunch of squats and ab work and whatnot for a half-hour, and when that was over just started bouncing my ass all over the house. Total ridiculousness. I tried all kinds of moves and hip hop footwork to keep my heart rate up, and then worked out a super-slowmo number to “Shake Yer Tailfeather”. Caught a couple glimpses of myself in the mirror and saw a sweaty 41 year-old with silver hair and laughed. Stopped taking myself so seriously and just danced.

It made me remember where my joy was, and my heart, and my giggles. I remembered that my hips have some good moves and that it feels great just moving the air around with your arms.

Highly recommended. I think I want to take a Burlesque class.

What’s wrong?
Why the sad, resistant, moody feeling this morning?

My university gave us a snow day yesterday, which clean-slated my formerly insane Thursday. My whole body felt the relief. I made use of it, cooked up some hi-cal hot chocolate with fresh whipped cream, found my way back to at least the path to book revisions. Loved watching the yellow picnic table outside my office window pile up with glorious spring snow. Then, after reading a dense but helpful academic article, I cuddled up in front of a Spanish film and happily chewed on the Madrileño accents. Didn’t leave the house all day except to shovel the sidewalk when the blizzard briefly broke.

Katie and I get to go up to Frisco and tromp around in white bounty this weekend. It’s too early in the quarter to have to grade. My mind is stimulated by the challenge of reframing the book. So I have nothing to complain about. And yet there’s this mysterious ennui, just hanging there.

We’re so obnoxious, us humans. We work so hard for things we want and then when we have them we get restless and dissatisfied. I see it in me and all around me. Nothing’s ever enough, or enough for long. Luckily, now when I become conscious of it I start practicing gratitude, and that helps reorient me and get me to sleep. Helps me get up in the morning, and start in on the same thing, different day (which in itself, I know, sounds ungrateful).

It’s all good, it’s fine. But this week I’m troubled by a couple images that have been wrestling around in my brain. Archetypes, if you will, and seeming opposites. One is an expert mountain climber, a scaler of K2 and similarly devastating, not-meant-for-human-consumption peaks. This, because I watched a Discovery Channel documentary the other night about the K2 disaster, in which 11 members of an 18-person climbing party died. (These supposed respecters of nature, by the way, leave their dead bodies all over the mountain, permanently, and for that and other reasons the whole expedition strikes me as obnoxious and rude.) So on the one hand, there’s the climber, who we generally imagine as a noble dreamer, living at the edge of human limits, all for a glimpse of the top of the world.

The second image is from a Woody Allen essay in this week’s New Yorker. It’s about a couple of Madoff investment victims who die and return as lobsters, caught and tanked in a restaurant to which the evildoer himself arrives, allowing them to launch a revenge. This set-up paragraph caught me cold:

“The Lord works in strange ways,” Moe Silverman [now a lobster] explained. “Take Phil Pinchuck. The man keeled over with an aneurysm, he’s now a hamster. All day, running at the stupid wheel. For years he was a Yale professor. My point is he’s gotten to like the wheel. He pedals and pedals, running nowhere, but he smiles.”

I had to read it twice to absorb it. Pinchuck as the hamster is basically living his Yale life all over, pedaling and smiling on a wheel. Like the rest of us. Or at least most of us.

How different, I thought, are the mountain climber and the professor, as cultural archetypes. We think of the expert climber (and he seems to think of himself) as the unconventional one, he who breaks out of the ruts of ordinary paycheck-driven existence to see what he’s really capable of. The free man, the rugged individualist, the adventurer, living in adrenaline and risk, at the edge. The professor drudges on, quarter after quarter, year after year, running on the wheel of the calendar, conducting experiments, writing up research, grading papers, sitting in meetings, standing at podiums, speaking, smiling. I think of all the mildly depressed, alienated existentialist professors in movies–Flap in Terms of Endearment, The Visitor, The Mirror Has Two Faces. He (or she) who influences lives but is not quite alive anymore. And it’s often true; I know a lot of them personally. The professor is down there at the bottom of the mountain. The climber scales hanging glaciers from the dread of such a life.

But pull in closer to the climber, and pull back on the professor. The professor is climbing; he’s become an expert. Pinchuck, at Yale, scaled treacherous mountains for the reward of each step on the tenure & promotion ladder. He uses customized tools of the trade, even had to innovate some as he went. There were plenty of times he thought he wouldn’t make it. It almost killed him (or maybe it did; he had an aneurysm). It certainly wounded his family (I think of Augusten Borroughs’ father in Running with Scissors). Everyone sacrificed for him to pull it off. His partner often felt abandoned. It was no walk in the park. Sometimes the pace was glacial, sometimes there were avalanches, and a few moments of glory, only fully appreciated by a handful of people in the world.

Come near enough to the climber, though, that you can hear his breath. He doesn’t know anything else either. When he’s not in the tent talking shop, when he’s stumbling snowblind down a 90% incline in the dark, flash frozen bodies in his wake, it’s a pointless, desperate solitude. He makes Everest, and Kilimanjaro, and even K2, but what lives in between? His wheel is the next hit; he is an addict. He’ll sacrifice everything to live for days in his own primal center, to look out from 28,000 feet, briefly, fully alive. But how is he less of a hamster? He’s “going somewhere,” when he’s on an expedition, sure, but after surviving, and after losing 9 of his toes to frostbite (as one survivor on the K2 trek did), where, now, does he go?

Are they really that different, then, or are they the same? Both seem to be to live in their own redundant loops. But both set ambitious goals, and discover deep moments of reward, of satisfaction along the way.

And these guys are privileged. What of the postal worker, the call center operator, the road paver, the single parent on food stamps? Are they better, are they worse? What of the writer, the artist? David Foster Wallace’s novel, before he died, was about people finding transcendence in the dullest of occupations, IRS tax form processors. The writer–the free man, the resister of convention, the archetype of creativity–struggles to imagine the deepest drudgery and find grace in it. But David Foster Wallace suffered debilitating depression, and he hanged himself in his studio, leaving his wife and his readers to sort out the pieces.

Okay, so this isn’t a perky post, not so much. But I think maybe it’s okay to check in about what we’re doing this for, and how to make it matter. How to not be so focused on the climb that we’ve gotten tunnel vision, but also how to step off the wheel when it matters. Something like that.

Hi, kids.

I miss you too.

I’ve been…I don’t know. In mid-career, in middle-age, rat-racing. Feeling all of 41 some days, and only  maybe three-quarters of it other days. Joints getting stiff, weird morning creaks and limps and pains, all of which I’m sure would be significantly reduced if I could find more time to exercise when things get slammed. I feel so much better when I’m exercising regularly, but it’s hard to figure out how to make changing clothes, working out, showering, etc. happen (a good 90 minutes out of the day, all things considered) when I’m so pressed for time. The best option is bike commuting to work, which I’ve been managing in good weather, but it means all this complicated packing of bike bags and coordinating of errands I’d otherwise do in the car. Still, it’s totally worth it for the physical and psychic benefits.

Bitch, bitch. I’ve got no room to bitch, really. My job is secure at least for the next 2-3 years if I keep honing to a writing schedule–a relative security almost 1 in 10 Americans doesn’t have right now. I don’t have the exponentially added stress of kids (about which I feel alternately relieved and sad). Yeah, my body’s changing and that freaks me out, but I have my health, two legs to walk on, all my facilities that I take for granted, unlike the brave woman in this moving article. No one’s died, no one’s sick, my car seems to be working, cats are good, relationship’s good, and I’m caught up on my bills. I’ve had a lot worse times than this.

Still, it’s stressful, and sometimes I have a pit in my stomach on Monday mornings. I’m getting by fine, but that reality gives me the feeling of getting dug deeper in. I seem to have done well on my third-year review, but that leaves me tied more tightly into academia, and to a discipline I often feel doesn’t suit me. My teaching is solid, but with the mini-sabbatical over and no new grant money coming in, that means unless I can stack my classes I’m pretty much locked to teaching every quarter including summers for the next three years. It’s rewarding, but exhausting. It gives, but it also takes.

Sorry for the dark cloud moment. I’m guessing, though, that most of you have your parallels. There’s something about getting proficient at what it is you’ve been trying to do for most of your life that can make you wonder if it’s what you really want to do after all.

I miss the things I haven’t had time for: playing guitar, painting, quilting, photography. When I’m home, I need downtime, chilling, unwinding. Or, alternately, laundry, cleaning, ironing, paying bills, balancing the checkbook, dealing with the yard. And, necessary as it is, I get the suspicion that that’s how we become American zombies, glazed over in front of tvs and catalogs and magazines: so much work and not a lot of play.

Thank god for the roller skating costume party on Friday. Not sure I’ve ever quite needed one so much.

I probably have nothing bright, witty, or interesting to offer today, but I’m not ruling out the possibility. Mostly just wanted to tell y’all I’m still alive. Five more days until I turn in my third-year review packet, which is the thing junior academics do halfway to tenure to try and convince their department they’re worth the investment. It involves reviewing everything you’ve done, hoped to do, or failed to do over the last few years, writing up statements about it, stacking everything you’ve managed to produce in (hopefully) a big pile, and giving it to your senior colleagues, who then pass it up to a divisional committee that reviews it, even though next to none of them are from your discipline. With that hanging over my head it’s been hard to justify writing a couple more reams on the blog, but that’ll be over soon and I should be back in the game here.

I’m sitting this morning with my half-grapefruit, my yogurt, my sweatshirt-bundled, puffy-eyed, bedhead self, thinking about how hard almost everyone I know is working, how fast everything goes, and how kind of shitty it is that we all have so little time right now. All the academics, the lawyers, the organizers I know–no one can possibly get their jobs done in 40 hours a week, much less stay on top of all the rest of it, whether it be family or retaining some semblance of friendships or whatever, without feeling exhausted. I’ve been noticing that at the end of the day, if I can finally manage to turn everything off and stay off the phone, my ears ring. I don’t know if it’s full-blown tinnitis or just an effect of the constant noise. Thinking about this last night led me to fantasies of a really quiet job–a job with no students knocking on the door, no blings and buzzers going off, no one talking, no having to talk for the better part of four hours in classrooms. What would be a really quiet job, maybe knitting in Iceland?

I miss and I crave silence. I’ve started setting stronger boundaries on weekday evening activities in order to recoup some of that silence. But for a word person (and for a triple air sign, god help me), it’s easy to unconsciously slip into filling the “silence” with subtler kinds of noise: reading, thinking. I love slipping into a hot bath with a New Yorker or Oprah magazine; I think of that as relaxing. But it’s not silence; it’s more words and images and stuff. I love lounging on the couch with a soft blanket and a purring cat–but if I let my brain fill up with monkey thoughts, that’s not silence either. I mean, I understand there’s a time for musing and for flipping through magazines. But what I need is quiet. And it surprises me how hard that can be to achieve. Even in meditation practice. Painting or drawing is often a better route; I should do it more.

I wonder what a silent retreat would be like. Someone I used to know who just caught up with me on Facebook (a phenomenon I definitely want to post about) said she just returned from a 10-day (!) silent retreat. She described it as “a gift.” I bet it’s also harrowing. Not maybe so much the need to talk, but the potential anxiety of knowing you can’t. I’d like to try it, maybe a 3-day for starters. I bet once you get over whatever freakiness comes up, it must be a huge relief, like an ocean. Maybe you hear things you didn’t even know were there, inside or outside. Maybe you  hear your soul. Or maybe you just shut your mouth and give your ears a break.

Ok, I’m going to shoot for 15 minutes of real silence, and see if I can bring a little of it with me today.