This is the last day of our acquaintance

27 04 2009

The whole world ending is only an abstractly-sad prospect. A particular person’s world collapsing is acutely so.

Jon Katz at Bedlam Farm has been chronicling the last days of a dairy farm, noting that he had been hoping to persuade the farmer, Jon Clark, to allow himself to be photographed.

Go, look at the photo of Jon Clark, posted at 9:02pm, April 26, and the other shots of the barn and the cows and the emptiness which follows after a man’s life has been tugged away from him.

I grew up in a small town in a dairy farming area. When I was a little girl I wanted so much to live on a farm. I loved animals and the whole idea of haylofts and horses and running through rows of corn.  Then I got older, and my loves shifted to theatre and partying and, oh yes, sleep. Still, when my high school friend K. asked if I wanted to help her with the evening milking at her family’s farm, I said sure. Hey, it’s all automated now, isn’t it?

Ha. Yes, there are milking machines, but each one has to be hooked up to each cow, and each teat has to washed before or after (or maybe both—I don’t remember) to prevent mastistis. Anyway, once you’ve managed to slip the suction cones over each teat, you have to plug the tube running from the cones into the overhead pipe, where the milk is sent streaming down the length of the barn to the milk-collection room. Given my vertical disadvantage, this was a challenge.

Hell, given my clumsiness, the whole operation was a challenge. K.’s family had, I don’t know, a hundred? a few hundred? cows, and the twice-a-day milkings each took a couple of hours (even when they weren’t, um, helped by the likes of me). Then, of course, there was the moving of the cows out of the barn and into the pasture and back again. And checking the chickens and feeding the horses. And the mucking out of the stalls, and the hauling of the piss-and-shit-layered hay out of the barn and into I cannot remember where.

Wheelbarrows: They seem like such a simple technology. Really, what could be harder to push around? Well, add a hundred or so pounds of whatever, and you keep it on the straight and narrow. At one point I had K. in the barrow, and I managed to steer so well she ended up in the shit trough. (Yes, she got me back.)

Farming is incredibly hard work, and family farmers especially always have to be concerned with prices and credit and commodities markets. For those of us who like both to eat and to take care of the animals (or whose products) we consume, paying attention to where our food comes from is not just paying attention to the animals, but to the men and women, boys and girls, who tend to them.

Men like Jon Clark, who loaded his favorite cow Sable into a truck and sent her away.


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Walking in your footsteps

26 04 2009

REM’s It’s the end of the world as we know it or Lou Reed’s Fly into the sun (opening lyric: I would not run from the holocaust/I would not run from the bomb) are the more obvious titles to a meditation on the apocalypse, but what the hell, we here at AbsurdBeats like to mix it up once in awhile.

Where was I? Ah yes, little blue-green planet goes boom, death, devastation, et cetera, et cetera. It’s a great theme for books, and I have a particular weakness for B-grade movies about an imminently-imperiled or just-toasted Earth. I’ve also had my share of nuclear nightmares, and the movie 28 Days Later added zombies into the nighttime bad-dream rotation.

As a general matter, however, I don’t much worry about the end of the world. Oh, I’m not really joking when I tell my students that I’m glad I’ll likely be dead before the environment collapses, and I won’t be suprised (though I will of course be shocked) if a dirty bomb is lobbed into some urban center. And yes, I keep my eyes open to the damage microbes can do (thank you, Laurie Garrett, for that), and am not uninterested in reports of a nasty strain of swine flu flying around.

Still. If the world ends, it ends. It’s sad to think that we as a species would have blown our chance (and the chances of our fellow creatures) to have figured out how to join the universe, and that in ending ourselves we probably will have destroyed the evidence—the art, architecture, music, literature—that we were more than just violent and greedy idiots.

But this is a detached sadness: if we’re gone, there’ll be no one around to mourn or regret. Death is sad for survivors, not the dead themselves.

C. recently posted on her ‘go’ bag, a pack to which she’s been adding what she’d need to survive if she had to get the hell out of the city. It’s not a bad idea, and given my predilection for preparedness, I should probably put a pack together as well.

But, as I noted in a comment to her post, I have no desire to survive a truly world-ending event. To tramp down ash-laden roads, as do the father and son in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, in search of some place beyond the fire? Forget it. Or to wait around a few days or weeks or even months for my skin to fall off? Pass. Maybe one shouldn’t go gently into that good night, but when the world ends, so do the good nights.

What of disasters which simply alter, but don’t end, the world? Rod Dreher at Crunchy Con isn’t exactly waving a ‘The end is near!’ sign, but he’s mighty interested in those who do. Sharon Astyk (at Casaubon’s Book) similarly waives any claim to apocalyptic thinking, but she’s preparing, nonetheless. Gather ye rosebuds (and corn and whatnot) while ye may, because the times they are a-changin’.

I dunno. I tend to skim those pieces on how This Time! we’re gonna be thrown back to the farm, what with this modern way of life collapsing under its own decadent, alienated ways and all. Neither Dreher nor Astyk is a particular fan of modernity, and each seeks a return to a less individualistic, more communal way of life. It’s not that I’m accusing either of actively wishing for The Big One, but they do sense opportunity in a series of little earthquakes.

I’m more po-mo than pre-mo, and have had my own arguments with modern theorists and my own criticisms of modern life. But it’s also the milieu of my life, and that of my friends and family, and we have been shaped by this modern world. Yes, I think there’s got to be a better way to live—but until I come up with that better way, for all of the inhabitants of this little blue-green orb, I’m not about to cheer the end of this fucked-up, violent, compromised, weird old world.

And if things change drastically? Well, that happens, periodically. Unless we do manage to blow ourselves to smithereens, we’ll manage with what comes next.

That’s what we do.


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It’s an inconvenient time

22 04 2009

Fuck. Where did my week go?

Reading and papers and teaching and retailing and reading and papers and teaching and then more retailing retailing then more reading and papers and teaching. . . .

Fuck. Where is this month going?


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What next Big Sky?

19 04 2009

I don’t Believe much, although I believe all kinds of things. And I don’t Dismiss much, although I dismiss all kinds of things.

Yes, the caps signify one of the Big Issues: Is there anybody out there? Or in here, or laying about. . . somewhere? Anybody?

I mostly don’t believe, although it’s a congenial, changeable kind of unbelief, one which ambles in no particular direction and avoids no particular consequences. There’s a god? Okay. No god? Okay.

Either way. It’s not as if I have much to do with the existence of God or gods, or that gods have much to do with me. Maybe they look in on us every once in awhile, beer in hand, munching nachos and commenting on those crazy Grabowskis or McFees or Olapundes. And then they go back to doing whatever godlike things they do over beer and nachos.

Okay, so that’s a bit cute. And I’m also fudging on the notion that any god(s)’ existence is separate from us: What if they only exist because we believe they exist?

That’s the conceit which underlies Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, a thoroughly enjoyable shamble through the back alleys of American beliefs and folkways. Some—many—of the old deities are nasty, and require a ritual of violence which, for the most part, has been smoothed away from contemporary religion. They’re not nice, and the people who invoke them aren’t always nice, but you nonetheless feel, along with the main character, Shadow, that the loss of these gods would, in fact, constitute a real loss. To forget the tricksters and warriors and shape-shifters would be to forget ways of being in this world, to lose mysteries and secrets and fortuna herself. And, in Gaiman’s world, the gods themselves are bereft, abandoned and small, trying not to disappear.

Even though I’m a big fan of reason, I’m not particularly surprised by my tender reaction to American Gods. As a child with an, mm, active imagination, my default position was that everything—and I mean everything—could think and feel. It wasn’t that I felt this way at all times, but that, when I wanted to, I could conjure up a sympathy with my favorite tree (an elm behind the garage, with a low branch for easy access) or cows in a field or the old cannon standing guard over the lagoon.

In fact, I don’t know that this was so much about my imagination as it was about childhood in general. Kids believe all kinds of nonsense—this is one of the delights and terrors of childhood—and readily share their stories with one another. And they learn not to share too much with adults, who at best indulge them and at worst tear their stories away and shred them. Grow up, they’re told.

As a child who experience the full range of delight and terror, I don’t particularly care to romanticize childhood. I like reason and explanation and science and the whole notion of demonstrable cause-and-effect. And I’m quite taken with the notion of chance and physics combining to form canyons, camels, and the cosmos.

But chance isn’t the same as fortuna, and the indifferent universe can disappoint as well as exhilarate. Most of the time I think, Well, we’re here for 70 or 80 years, and that’s it. If your life is to have any meaning, it’s up to you to make it, and even then, you might fail. Don’t count on anything beyond this world to bail you out of your sorrows, or let anything beyond this world to get in the way of your joys. Anything you have, anything you feel, anything you become is all here, is all you have.

And yet. And yet I think What if? I close my eyes and summon that child-sense of Isn’t there something more? You can see that in my writings today, that semi-constant questionof Is there something more? Wasn’t there something more?

I can’t put that there into words beyond the more; it is in fact beyond me, around me, running ahead and pulling up behind me. I walk under ladders and step on cracks and wish that there were ghosts and spirits and hope that not everything can be explained.


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You can all just kiss off into the air

15 04 2009

Since the Femmes worked so well for me last night, why not again tonight?

The post title is offered in a kind of resigned cheer, a reminder to myself that for all my words about arguing and then eating pie, sometimes all one can do is argue. And then walk away. Perhaps waving a finger or two.

I’ve been teaching a democratic theory course, and have been using Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson’s Democracy and disagreement as my main text and whipping boy. They lay out an argument and a procedure for dealing with moral disagreement in politics. It appeals to my pie-eating sensibility, even as I distrust their bland, mm, blandishments on behalf of their version of democratic deliberation.

The distrust wins out. While the notion that morally serious people could find away around their disagreement appeals, it also repels: Let’s just all make nice, shall we? Or, to put it another way, I don’t think it works, and it conceals a fair amount of coercion, to boot.

The problem isn’t the coercion so much as it is the dishonesty regarding the coercion. There are winners and losers in politics, and pretending that the losers did not, in fact, lose—or forcing the losers to pretend that they didn’t lose—is to engender precisely the sort of dishonesty which leads to a repudiation of politics as such. Given that politics is one of the few ways we citizens have to disagree without killing each other, such alienation is dangerous.

No, don’t worry, I’m not about to head off into another rhapsody on the magical powers of politics. Rather, this is all a too-long preamble to a consideration of combox wars.

I’m a regular reader of and irregular contributor to the comments sections of a couple of conservative blogs, and even though I ought to know better, I am sometimes shocked—yes, shocked!—that reason and evidence do not always prevail.

Many issues, of course, do not turn on reason and evidence. You think the fetus is a person deserving of rights over and above those of the woman who carries it; I do not. You think that the alleged personhood of the fetus means it must prevail; I think that even if the fetus is a person, it does not automatically prevail.

I speak in terms of liberty and equality; you speak in terms of slaughter and dismemberment. And on it goes.

And when I suggest that we simply disagree, you call me and others like me murderers and Eichmanns and the worst this country has to offer. I decline to write (in the combox) what I think of you.

This isn’t a pity party for poor ol’ me, nor even a slam against the other side for their unreason, not least because my side (and, shockingly, I) have engaged in our/my share of unreason.

Nope. This is simply to note that reason has its limits, and passions its pleasures. Because as pissed as I can get at political opponents (see various rants), I also thoroughly enjoy ripping through the other side.

In addition to all my reasons, it’s also what makes me want to win, and to want to see you lose.

This, too, is politics: deep passion, surging forward, beaten back, never reconciled.

So, yes, let’s all make nice, shall we? And let’s be honest when we won’t.

*Post script

So y’all understand as I laugh about tea bagging and 2M4M and NOM, and hope as I rarely hope that the right somehow finds a way to make use of ‘tossing the salad’ and ‘watersports’.


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The planners get embarassed when the plans go wrong

14 04 2009

Do you remember the story ‘Harrison Bergeron’? A dystopian bit on an egalitarian future in which every, last, bit of life was planned and coordinated by, hm, I guess the government.

I think I read it for an undergrad pol sci class; I probably have the story stashed away somewhere in my files. (Yeah, I know: hanging on to undergrad files. Well, I did. Some of them. So fuck off.)

Twenty years, and that story stuck with me—perhaps because of the finale, in which our hero skittles a bucket of marbles across a crowded platform or sidewalk, disrupting what should have been an orderly commute.

At least that’s what I remember. Why bring it up now? Rod Dreher at Crunchy Con had a bit on ‘Nemesis Visions‘, i.e., a great anxiety about what could happen. He cribs from James Poulos (no, I dunno who he is), who states that To qualify for nemesis status, a vision must be coherent, compelling, and viable on a mass scale. Rod feared the rise of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (don’t ask, but if you want to know, check out Philip Rieff), and others worried over the loss of Absolute Truth or the triumph of Absolute Truth.

My Great Anxiety/Despair? I offered my worries over the closing of the society, that is, that unpredictability and uncertainty will fall to ever-greater administration and planning, and a sense of wonder or unfolding or just not knowing will be snuffed out.

As I noted, I’m not against planning for specific programs—hello, universal health care!—and I’m the kind of chica who, for example, created a list on tasks to finish before her spring break concludes. I like to be on time for appointments, carry a Swiss Army knife, and am the person who will always have band-aids, ibuprofen, acetominophen, and tampons on her, just in case.

Still, there’s a difference between trying to keep my shit together and, as I noted, a general ethic which requires that every aspect of life be managed. I try to keep my shit together precisely because I expect things to go to hell, and I want to be prepared. And while it’s annoying as hell to have one’s plans fly apart, it’s good to be reminded that just because one’s afternoon or whatever went off the rails, one’s life continues, unabated.

Or, to sum up all the wisdom that can be contained in a bumper sticker: Shit happens.

The general ethic of planning, however, is designed to forestall any kind of shit happening. In fact, a sense of moral wrongness attaches to not knowing exactly what is to happen next.

What are you going to do with your life/When are you going to get married/When will you settle down/What about a pension/What about kids/How are your kids spending the summer/What about building a resume/How will you ever get into college/What do you mean you don’t know/don’t care/it doesn’t matter. . . ?!!!!!

I hope you know that this will go down/on your permanent record/Oh yeah/Well don’t get so distressed/Did I happen to mention I’m unimpressed?

Yeah, I could have gone with a disquisition on Arendt, but I think the Violent Femmes struck exactly the right attitude.

There’s a longer post lurking within this one, on the melancholy proposition that, maybe, this long moment of openness, begun around the time of the Scientific Revolution, is coming to a close. And perhaps it is. But as long as there’s a world, there is possibility.

And marbles. Damn, I really should rifle my files for that story.


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Doesn’t anyone stay in one place, anymore (pt II)

9 04 2009

She grilled me for about 20 minutes, then requested—or was it offered?—to read my second novel.

I hesitated. She’s not sure if she buys the premise, namely, that of a young woman who leaves home and doesn’t look back, not once.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Really? She never gets in touch them?’

Nope.

‘I can’t believe that.’

At this point C. chimed up and said, Oh yeah, I could believe that. Who hasn’t dreamed about just walking away from everyone? (Besides this co-worker, apparently.)

Thus, part two of the whole social networking/past/new life gig. Only this time it’s about writing.

This second novel isn’t bad. My first novel wasn’t bad, but it has all the defects of a first novel, not least of which is too much explanation going on in the dialogue.

I’ve cut that back on this one, way back. I’m less interested in directing the reader in her interpretation of events; rather, I lay out a scene, let her eavesdrop, and then decide for herself what’s going on. There’s no ‘she retorted hotly’ or ‘he smiled in confidence at his abilities.’ Nope. ‘She responded.’ ‘He smiled.’ Plain text, with, perhaps, unplain meanings.

I’m still working out what I want to do in my novels, but the more I’ve written, the more adamant I’ve become in not poking into the characters’ minds and spilling it out on to the page. Yes, when a character is alone, the reader may have access to her thoughts, but I don’t, as the writer, tell you what she’s feeling. She has to decide for herself what she thinks and feels, and it’s up to the reader to decide if the character is right or is full of it or whatever. (And yeah, maybe you’re right or full of it or whatever, too.)

You, the reader, are the witness to the events, neither the confidant to a first-person narrator nor the one who apprehends her true self. The character is her own, and the only privilege granted to the reader is that of witnessing aspects of the story not always available to the other characters. That’s it.

But that’s not why I’m hesitant to show the novel to my co-worker; hell, either the style works or it doesn’t. I guess I’m protective as well of the undercurrent of the novel, which is that allegedly big things happen to ordinary people, and they deal with them.

A daughter leaves her family, and life goes on.

Someone has an abortion, and it’s not traumatic.

There’s a car accident, and marriage difficulties, and births and deaths, and none of it is epic. It’s all just. . . life, and the characters mourn and adjust and move on. That’s it: Here are these characters, and here are their lives.

The co-worker, at the mention of the abortion, reacted as if I’d outlined a ‘Lifetime Movie Event’ or set up some kind of schema of which buttons to push. As if abortions and car accidents and marriage difficulties never happened in real life.

I’m particularly touchy about this kind of reaction precisely because I don’t have any kind of outline for my stories. I set up a situation, and let it spin out. Did I know ahead of time that a character would have an abortion? Nope. Car accidents, marriage difficulties? Nope, nope. They come up, the characters deal with them.

Now, if the characters aren’t real to you, none of this will work. And that would bother me, but that would also seem like a legitimate criticism: I wanted to create real characters, and failed.

But the notion that if something big—out of the supposed ordinary—happens, then it’s not real, well, I disagree. Strongly.

Making all cuts clean and all memories unclouded, providing closure and wrapping everything up in a  nice psychologically-convenient bow—that’s what’s not real. Yes, there can be regrets and reconciliations, but the force of the regret can mutate and attempts at reconciliation can fail.

These characters have their own lives, their own integrity—at least, that’s what I want for them. And no, I don’t always understand what they do, either.

This is why I hesitate in sending my novel to my co-worker: There’s no agenda, and I don’t like the notion that there must be one, and that it must be ‘right’.

That’s the delight of the writing: Even as I lay down the words, they take off on their own.

And no, they don’t look back.


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Doesn’t anyone stay in one place, anymore (pt I)

6 04 2009

‘Not all social networking stuff is bad, you know.’

C. may have even raised her eyebrows as she said it.

‘I know,’ I mumbled. ‘Hey, I blog, don’t I?’

Still.

Two things lead me to this point. One was this post by Meghan O’Rourke at XX Factor, how those of us old enough to have a past can be thrown off by the jumbling of time when one is friended by a memory. Sometimes I find it reassuring; at other times, extremely destabilizing, a vortex forcing me to contemplate years gone by, loves lost, friends I let go of without fully intending to. Sure, there are class reunions and gossip through whatever thin vines are left connecting one back to the old days, but reunions are fixed in time, recognizable as the artifacts they are.

But a poke from the past? As cool as I find quantum mechanics (what I can understand of it, I mean), I am utterly turned-off by the wormhole aspect of Facebook. It’s not that I hate everyone, or even anyone, from my past; it is that I am content for the past to remain so.

Yes, I rootch around in it, and sometimes memories come, unbidden, but I am ever aware of that distance between then and now—and of the panoply of feelings around that distance. Sometimes I am sad, sometimes relieved, or confused, or embarassed, remorseful, and sometimes I feel nothing other than I am not who I was.

There can be a poignance to this recognition. I am mortal, and will lose and gain and change as I move through this life, until there is nothing left of me at all. I can’t gather all my life in, live simultaneously as the happy third-grader or shattered teenager or tentative new adult. There are people I knew then who I don’t know now; what would it be to have them here, with me, now?

It’s not that there must have been a Reason for us to have parted; time and physical distance are as good an explanation as anything. We simply lost touch with one another, that’s all.

So why not get back in touch? I am, after all, still friends with two women who I’ve known since kindergarten, some others from high school, college, grad school, post-grad. . . if I can hang on to these people, why not throw another knotted rope to the past, in hopes of enticing the others to grab on?

I don’t know, really, that I have a good answer to that; I think it’s a why/why not choice, that is, one made less through reason than a shrug.

Perhaps I can only justify my choice after-the-fact, to say that this is what seems appropriate to me, what works for me. I need to have a sense of time, and to remind myself of the inevitability of loss inherent in time. It’s not about despair—some of what was lost deserved to be shed, and I am the stronger and saner for it—but about understanding, making sense of the trajectory of my life.

Would friending someone I knew in, say, 10th grade foul up that sense? I do wonder about some people, about KB and CM and SP and how and who they are, today, and have even thought about trying to get in touch with them.

But then what? We were tight then, and now we’re not. I am curious, but do I miss them? I miss what we had, but would we have it again? I don’t think so.

So why not take the chance, track down the old running buddies and confidants to see if there is still something there?  Am I afraid?

Again, I don’t think so. It’s more that my life is here, today, in New York City in 2009, and I need to make my life stick here, today, in New York City in 2009. Time spent with those I’ve lost is time not spent with those I’ve hung on to (and who’ve hung on to me), and those I’ve found.

And the people here matter. I like them and getting to know them, and letting them getting to know me. We can’t take anything for granted, can’t call up a shared past or a ‘remember when’ as we huddle over our beers. I have that with some people, but with these new friends, there is the frisson of wondering what to reveal and what will be revealed, of risk and anxiety and the delight in discovering that, yes, there is more than mere proximity to our relationships, that we are, in fact, friends.

O’Rourke noted that Sometimes I have an almost physical need to touch the screen and get past the pixels. I understand that longing, I do. I also understand the necessity of bearing such longing, and remembering that not all can be reconciled.


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Ain’t no cure for the summertime blues

5 04 2009

Spring is here. Crap.

I have nothing against spring, save that it presages summer—and I don’t like summer.

Let me rephrase that: I hate summer.

Actually, many summer days are fine. Warm, sunny, blah blah. Inoffensive and manageable.

But then there are the days—and weeks—when weather turns vicious, the sun baleful and the air viscuous. I feel hunted by the sun and trapped by humidity, darting from one shadowed space to another, trying and always failing to avoid the heat rays from above.

Plus, I don’t like sticky.

And no, I don’t own an air conditioner, although every year I think, Hm, maybe this year. Now that I’m finally settled in to my own apartment, I think, Hm, maybe this year.

As much as I despair of the heat, I don’t like air conditioning. I appreciate AC, am grateful for it in the workplace, but I tend to think of it as wasteful for my home. And even though air conditioners today are much more energy efficient, and the units themselves fairly small, when I think of a box AC I think of the behemoths of old, rattling away as they suck electricity from the socket and money from my pocket.

When friends from the south would tell me they didn’t like indoor heat, I thought What?!!! How could you NOT like central heating? It’s what makes winter worthwhile: coming in from the cold, face chapped from the wind, and the reassuring hiss of the radiator letting me know I’m home.

I was less summer-phobic (and winter-philic) as a kid, but I like to remember a particular tradition from those winters: My parents’ house had forced-air heating, so in the mornings my sister and I would fight over who would fit her nightgown over the heat vents, the flannel billowing out with rush of warm air. Some mornings we’d rush my brother’s room and all three of us would crowd around his (more powerful) vent until the furnace had had enough.

And no, we did not have AC in the house.

Perhaps my southern friends had their own, fond, memories of coming in from the heat, faces red from the sun, and cooling themselves down in front of AC or vents. I remember comfort; they remember relief.

But as much as the weather can affect the temperature inside, it’s really an outdoors phenomenon. Crazy cold temps are tough to manage, but they are, in the end, manageable. Long underwear, heavy boots, heavy coats, scarves, hats, mittens—they’re the armor one wears to battle the cold, to move through the streets and one’s own life. (And winters in New York City rarely require heavy defense: a decent jacket, hat, and gloves will usually do. In fact, winters here are sufficiently mild that I kind of miss the intensity of the cold of Grad- and FelineCities, tho’ not its duration.)

How can one protect oneself against the heat? Sunglasses, sunscreen, but most hats will simply leave one sweatier than before. And while I can load up against the cold, there’s a limit to how far I can strip down. Naked in New York? No thank you.

I do like the sun. That’s why I hate the summer. In the fall, sun sneaks through the trees and leaves and dapples the ground; in the winter, it coaxes faces skyward, to catch a bit of warmth. But she turns mean in the summer, even sadistic. As much as I welcome her into my home during the other seasons, I avoid her June-August, cursing her relentlessness, her omnipresence.

Leave me alone! I have actually whimpered at the forecast of sunny summer days.

Trapped. Even if I do get AC this summer, saving myself from the oppression of humidity, I’ll still feel trapped, restricted to an oasis of cool.

Summer is my enemy. I dread its approach.


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Thinking like a mountain and wishing like the sea

22 03 2009

My t.v. sits there, mute and uncomplaining. Or mute and seething. If a t.v. could, you know, uncomplain or seethe.

Do I liberate it?

I’ve watched t.v. twice since I’ve moved in, and both times it was chore: I don’t have cable, so the reception was more snow than picture. I’ve thought about getting the Roku box and streaming movies through Netflix, but beyond my initial research, I’ve done nothing about it.

So do I sell or give away the t.v.?

It’s in decent shape, but it’s also a few years old, and the big ol’ console type—not a sleek, new flatscreen.

I dunno. If someone would offer me 25 bucks, I’d probably unload it.

A plant would fit nicely in its spot.

____

On my continuing inability to write that elegant piece on abortion, or to patch together anything coherent on Israel and Palestine: why oh why?

It’s not as if I don’t have well-formed ideas on either issue. On abortion, for example, I think that it’s a no-brainer that it remain legal, but that morally, it’s murky. And that it’s murky means that, for some people, it’s not a no-brainer that it remain legal. I think it’s silly to expect all women to feel guilt or shame or regret for terminating a pregnancy, and silly to expect that no woman would feel guilt or shame or regret for terminating a pregnancy.

But wait! There’s more! There’s freedom and equality and sex and contraception and men and motherhood and meaning and. . . all that.

So much to write.

Similarly with Israel and Palestine. Why should I take side other than that of peace and pluralism? Why would I support a two-state solution, one which implies—no, practically requires—a single-identity set of states, which in turns would necessarily involve some version of ‘transfer.’

As in ‘ethnic cleansing’. As in a crime against humanity.

Hannah Arendt (who was and is not beloved in Israel) made the argument in favor of a Jewish homeland—but not a Jewish state. Edward Said (who has his own unbeloveds) ended up supporting the goal of a single state as the most just solution.

The current situation is unjust. A two-state solution would simply reify this injustice, and in so doing, make such reification irresistible. In other words, the injustice involved in bringing reality to the two states would itself become an argument in favor of the process of states-making itself.

Perversity. The entire damned situation abounds in perversity. Again, so much to say.

Too much to say, perhaps. Perhaps that’s why I am unable to say it.

____

I am temporarily working three jobs again, but the third job will soon go away for the spring and probably the summer.

The second job (teaching) is secure through December, and probably the following spring.

Job1 is the current angst-generator. It’s a retail position, not difficult, but low-paying and irritating in the usual way of retail positions. It sucks up time, both on the job and in travel. And did I mention the customers?

But it has had one great benefit, however: benefits. Most part-time jobs do not offer health or other benefits, but this one does.

This has kept me working there even when I thought AAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHH! That, and the need to pay rent.

But I now qualify for health care through Job2, and am in the process of switching my coverage. Wrinkle one.

Wrinkle two: My store is in the midst of a shake-up, and not all of us currently employed will be offered jobs past June. I went through the process to keep my job, but I’m not at all sure that I do want to continue working there.

This is different from the AAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHHH reaction. I’m getting more courses, and while the pay for adjunct teaching is lousy compared to a tenure-track job, it’s great compared to retail. And there’s a good chance I’ll be able to continue working off-and-on at Job3—a job which also pays more than Job1, and is closer to home.

The big reason to leave, however, is that I have no damned time to write. I wrecked my life to leave academia, and wrecked my finances to move to New York to write—which I have, in my first two years here, managed to do. In the midst of my third year, however, I haven’t been able to grab those chunks of time necessary for writing.

Yeah, I have time to blog and to web-surf and to play spider solitaire, but none of these activities requires the particular kind of concentration I engage in while writing. These are filler activities, wind-downs—only now I’m winding down from my commute or course prep, not from cranking out a crucial scene.

And I have a new idea. I have characters and a rough sense of where I want to begin. I want to find out what happens. And I don’t have time to write to find out what happens.

The economy? Oh, yeah, that. How could I give up a job in this economy? Is wanting or needing to write enough? Yeah, the check’s small, but it’s not nothing; how could I give that up?

Perhaps I won’t make the cut, which means the decision is out of my hands. But this is my life, and it should be in my hands. I should have to figure out what to do.

Should. Not that I have, yet.


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