13 posts tagged “heart”

1. I got the email today. It's official: I passed my Master's exam.
2. In the house tonight, we had: 2 babies, 1 four year-old, and 9 adults, every single one of them, cherished.
3. All the other people we love.
4. The party's just ended, and all the dishes are done.
5. We get to have more parties.
6. I've gotten to be married to SLP for two years, last Wednesday.
7. A full teaching schedule for fall: 2 Argumentative Writing sections at The Community College; 2 Research-Writing sections at My Institutions.
8. A home large enough to hold all the people who were here tonight, plus most of the ones who couldn't make it.
9. LMH is home from basic training and sleeping in the guest room.
10. Everything else...
    

Video:  Show us the first music video you ever saw on TV.

My best friend when I was little was this little freckled, red-headed kid from across the street. Owen and I played years away together--building forts, throwing snowballs at cars, riding bikes, playing baseball/basketball/kickball... He and his family were one of the coolest, bestest parts of my childhood, hands-down.

Among their many excellent habits and toys, O's family had cable, and they'd pretty much let us watch it undisturbed. So when MTV opened for biz in 1980, the summer I turned 8 and he turned 7, we were right there, on the couch, waiting for history to make itself. It was pretty sweet.

O died a few years ago, in a miserably random car accident. We'd largely lost touch by then, but according to his wonderful mama, he grew up to be the fine human being he had always been. Through their friendship, he and his family brought some light and warmth into my reasonably durm und strang childhood. Now that I've finally stumbled my way through more than a decade of Wrong Guys, and am miraculously married to SLP, I can really see how the precedent for this remarkable husband in my life was set by that remarkable friend I had, some years ago.

And so, this one goes out to a brave, curly-headed little girl and a dear, sweet, red-headed little boy, lazing in front of the TV on an endless summer's day:

Which song needs to be remixed, and who should remix it?

Song: Take a Letter, Maria

Artist: Beck

I hate this song, but I love it, too. My X and his best buddy J-Star discovered this song years ago, in their endless quest for the next record/band that would dominate their stereos for a few months. Unfortunately, they simultaneously discovered that it just danced on my last nerve. They tortured me with that song for years. Any time it came on in the car, they'd turn it up to 11 and sing along. They'd hum it at odd moments, occasionally even breaking out into a rousing burst of the chorus, replete with mouth-trumpet versions of the horn arrangements. More than once, I just wanted to ring their scrawny little necks.

But, oh dear god, did I bust a gut laughing about it, too. Those two men drove me absolutely nuts in so many ways, but they also provided me with some of the richest fun I've ever had. So I think that Take a Letter, Maria should be remixed or covered by Beck. A song I hate mixed with an artist/imagination I love. Come to think about it, actually, that really comes close to capturing at least a big part of the essence of my X-marriage. Hmmmm...

Plus, X and J-Star just resented the hell out of Beck; it drove them mad that he was so good, so much younger than them, and just plain so not them. So that kinda gives the whole thing a nice sweet sprinkling of poetic justice. ;)

It seems like there's been a lot of blogging going on around my neighborhood lately about Frost-Belt Affective Disorder. At one point or another since the new year, almost all the people I read a lot have posted some report from the cold, gray front of the soul. In particular, one friend seems to be feeling the keener edge of winter nights.

And so, in hopes of warming things up, just a bit, I'd like to offer a quick cup of cheer to all. First a story, then a joke.

When I was a kid, I had bronchitis alllllll the time. I remember it being a reasonably miserable experience a lot of the time--weeks spent stuck in bed, or in front of some educational television program, sore-throaty, and having to take really awful, thick, pink medicine. It had its up sides, though. During the day, my mom ruled the house, which was wonderful, because my mother, for all she sometimes drives me mad, is a really, really, nice, happy person at her core, and she's really, really good at loving her sick kids.

Plus, of course, you didn't have to go to school, and technically, you did get to stay in bed and you didn't have to get out of your pajamas. I had to do my homework, but I mostly liked it and it was always easy. The best thing about staying home sick from school was that I got to read, allllllll day, uninterrupted, and anything I wanted to. That, ahhhh--now that was bliss. I read everything in the house. My library of children's literature. My dad's library of science fiction and fantasy. My mom's history books, and her literary faves. Magazines, my brother's comic books--everything.

My favorite two-week bronchitis read-a-thon, I spent reading The Encyclopedia of Jewish Humor. It was a beautiful old book I had bought at a garage sale. The size of a good dictionary, it had substantial, ivoried pages, and the most wonderfully rich, mellowed and worn, orange cloth cover you ever saw. It was filled with the love and pathos of my grandmother's generation of Jewish comedians. Immigrants playing to immigrants, all making do in very hard circumstances, coming together to sigh together over their shared troubles, and laugh together at their shared luck. The love I have felt as a Jewish child in a roomfull of Jewish grandparents, I also felt binding together the jokes in that book.

I love this one I've pasted below. Reminds me of my grandma, some.

I hope it makes you laugh
and remember you are a member
of a community
that sighs with you
and laughs with you

Miriam and Zelda, two 'senior' widows are talking.

Dorothy:
That nice Hymie Cohen has asked me out for a date. I know you went out with him last week, and I wanted to talk with you about him before I give him my answer.

Zelda:
Well I'll tell you. He shows up at my apartment punctually at 7pm, dressed like such a gentleman in a fine suit, and he brings me such beautiful flowers! Then he takes me downstairs, and what's there but a luxury car.... a limousine, uniformed chauffeur and all. Then he takes me out to dinner...a marvelous dinner...lobster,champagne,dessert, and after dinner drinks. Then we go to see a show. Let me tell you Dorothy, I enjoyed it so much I could have just died from pleasure!

So then we are coming back to my apartment and he turns into an ANIMAL. Completely crazy, he tears off my expensive new dress and has his way with me two times!!!

Dorothy:
Oy, my!!! So are you telling me I shouldn't go out with him?

Zelda:
No,no,no I'm just sayin',
wear a shmata!!

There aren't any Johnson Automotive dealerships around here, but if there were and I had the money to buy a new car, I'd surely spend it with them. Any dealership with anti-sexist ads is worth checking out in my book:

Via the good women at Feministing.

That's right, folks, I just got me a teaching gig in spring term at the community college here in town, and my beloved haircutter is out of jail and back at work and I'm gonna get this out of control mass on my head cut down to size on Thursday!

Oh, happy, happy day!!!!!!

Show us a photo of somewhere you want to go.

Oh, that's easy. "Not [to] a dry, bare, sandy hole, nor a damp, wet hole. But a hobbit-hole. And that [means] comfort."

The Shire

Via

I never quite get used to being married to SLP.

A couple weeks after our wedding, his godbrother tied the knot, also. SLP was best man, and my father-in-law, RP, co-officiated. I was exhausted, after all the madness (beautiful, lovely madness, to be sure) of being in the wedding spotlight myself, and it was so delightful to be just a guest, to sit in the back of the church with friends, not be at all important, and just celebrate someone else.

In his remarks, RP talked about the importance of meeting one's spouse anew, every day. He reminded us that it is essential in long-term relationships not to know your partner, but to always, always be coming to know him or her, never to relax or calcify into certainty about who s/he is, however comfortable such certainty can be. I listened from my seat in a back pew, like a child listening on the knee of a parent, like I was opening the most lovely wedding present.

As I listened, I knew RP's thinking to be right on. I was married before, to a remarkable person with remarkable problems, as a remarkable person, with remarkable problems. I became unmarried through a long, torturous process of unwillingness on both our parts to give up our certainty about who both of us were. Had we not clung to that certainty, we probably would have divorced anyway, but I wonder if we would have done so more quickly and less painfully.

I also knew it to be true because of my experience of the process of falling in love with SLP. Early on in that process, having thankfully realized I had stumbled on something very, very good, and very, very unknown to me, I was able to get that the best shot I could give this new love was intentionally reminding myself that every single day, conversation, touch, between SLP and I had never happened before. That certainty about how things would go between us would not only be very likely to be wrong, based as it would be on previous experiences I had had in relationships and not on paying close attention to the one I was actually in, but that it would also probably determine the course of this relationship. Given that unfortunately a looooooooot of that previous experience was painful and crappy, I also got that such certainty would force itself to become true--that I would self-fulfill any number of prophecies of doom.

For whatever reason, it has turned out that SLP really is unbelievably unlike my previous partners. This is not to say that many of them weren't very, very cool in many, many ways, or that they're not high-quality folks, most of them. In fact, for all I know, they're all way more like SLP than I know, because of that certainty I always lived in about love relationships not working out, about me not being deserving of love, about partners of mine not being kind, reliable, emotionally available, and so on... I don't know how real the difference is on some objective plane, and I don't really care, because in my personal subjective plane, the difference is very real, very rich, really just amazingly wonderful to come to know.

Against RP's advice, and my own reasonable amount of common sense, I have nonetheless developed some certainty about who SLP is. SLP is innately good, inherently kind, genetically sweet. He has the most generously, bravely loving nature of anyone I have ever known. He is tolerant; he is forgiving; he is extraordinarily willing to go along with all sorts of goofball lines of thinking, to try new flavors, perspectives, positions. ;) He not only has a job, but a work ethic like the Ant--no Grasshopper, he. He is a gracious lover, a loyal friend. He can certainly be an ass, and he will definitely call me on my shit, thank god, but, miracle of miracles, he is never, ever mean.

Last night, I was smoking a cigarette. (This is not that odd; I smoke way more than I should, because obviously, I shouldn't smoke at all. SLP and I have been cutting down lately, and there's a box of Nicorette on the kitchen counter, waiting for the day we're ready to try quitting again.) SLP was sitting at the other desk  in the office, working on something.

"Have you been coughing still, lately?" he asked.

"Not really. I mean I've got a bit of a smoker's cough in the mornings, which is gross, but other than that...." I trailed off, a bit defensive, "I haven't been smoking anywhere near as much."

"Ok, good," he said, "I wasn't picking on you; I just worry. You were really coughing a lot there for a while. It makes me worry. You know it's your job to live as long as you can." And he went off in search of another document he'd left in the living room.

I sat at the computer, becoming aware that I was coming to know him again. "SLP worries about me," I thought, "He worries about me." Another first, as far as I know. Honestly, I can't remember another lover who worried about me, about my health. I've always been the one who worried about them. How remarkable, how odd, how lovely, to have a partner who pays attention to my body, who keeps a job he doesn't overwhelmingly like at least in part to make sure that I have health insurance, who starts cutting down on smoking because I've been coughing lately, and he wants to make sure I don't get sick.

This morning, my luck runneth over.

I finished the last paper of the term today, around 2. It was an interesting experience. For the third time this term, I have had to put really complex, interdisciplinary arguments together within reasonably tight constraints--constraints of time, and of time and generic conventions, respectively. Oddly, because I have a serious problem with scope (toooooo big), I've actually knocked out very good work every time.

It kind of blows my mind a bit.

The first was my first real conference paper/presentation, the second was a research project that I used to develop another chapter/aspect of my thesis, and this last one was a short (8-12) practice conference paper for my Renaissance Lit course. This last one has turned out to be the most satisfying of the three.

I thought part of it through here, but it really grew into something deeper and richer by the end. I really want to write more about it here, but I haven't thought through entirely how it works in the blog genre yet.

Essentially, I got to write with Spenser's figuring of the body-in-paine (here, specifically the womanine body-in-paine), Judith Butler's Undoing Gender,  Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain, Katherine Eggert's "Spenser's Ravishment: Rape and Rapture in Spenser's The Faerie Queene," and a Mary Wroth poem. I worked with these texts to think about the painful ways power and sexuality/love get enmeshed in our modern erotics, and to suggest a way to work productively with that pain.

I made the connection by challenging the modern tendency to read the episode between Amoret and Busirane as a rape. I said that doing so effaces the suffering-subject in Amoret (major collaboration with Scarry, here)--that doing so reifies the victim of [sexual] violence as a forever-emblem. That reading this text this way arises from our tendency to read actual modern occurrences of sexual violence in the same way, and with serious consequences not only for the victim who gets fixed in this way, but for the community who fixes him/her as well.

I argued that this tendency arises from our allergy to pain, but that in fact Spenser--representing the canonical tradition that shapes our imagination--argues for the value of pain to the suffering-subject. I argue that our allergy to pain is making us sicker, rather than better, and that we need to revise this stance if we ever want to stop just regenerating the same injurious behavior patterns ad infinitum. We need to just wo/man up, face the music, enter the pain that does inhere in the erotersection of power and sex/love in our cultural imagination, and eventually reap the hard-won fruits of that process. After all, no birth comes without pain, but the results are worth it.

I wonder if I just made any sense. It would be perfectly reasonable if it didn't--I'm still actively developing these ideas while I type, which is really what I'm so excited about. This is stuff that is very, very close to my heart. It's really the base note that fills out the chord of the scholarly interests I've already written into my academic work: the Holocaust scholarship, the literary scholarship, student and teacher self-disclosure in reading and writing, the urgency of doing pedagogy and criticism that is fully accountable to the lived world, the work on textual pedagogy I'm developing with Muriel Rukeyser's poetics. Having broken this interest out into the public arena of my career (such as it is), I feel like I've finally put all the pieces of the foundation together--like I've mapped for myself the full context of whatever discreet projects I engage.

Phew. Sorry to go on so. Guess I should probably go get a Phd or something. ;)

GE's new girl-baby has arrived, and mother, new-person, and father are all well and happy--smiling, smiling, smiling, glee!