You are currently browsing the monthly archive for April, 2009.
Okay, April, I get the message. I cave. I submit. I cry “uncle.”
Please, just please, leave me some shred of my previous life.
Last night, at the end of a yoga class, my yoga teacher announced unexpectedly that she was leaving the studio and that this had been her last class. Everyone was stunned. Several of us burst into tears. Reasons aside, I am bereft by her departure from my life. I have seen her once or twice a week for three years. She has been a constant presence, an inspiration, a mentor. While I have been just one of her many students, she has been MY TEACHER. She has made a deep impression on my life and, while it may only be one-sided, I feel completely attached to her.
Of course, this does not mean I will stop practicing yoga, or that I won’t find a new teacher — but I think the next few weeks are going to be difficult. The day/time of the week that I have regularly driven to her class will roll around and I won’t know what to do with myself. Will I continue to go to the same studio? Will I have to find a new studio? Will I ever see the other students I’ve been practicing along side again?
Coming at the end of this upsetting month — a month in which so many things I have taken for granted now seem like fragile facades of normalcy over a seething pit of terror — I feel lost.
What’s up with April? Why does it seem to offer an endless litany of bad news and horrific revelations? It seems so counter-intuitive — April is a month of spring. Snows melt and flowers bloom. The dark winter is behind us and the promise of summer sun ahead. And yet, civilization seem to be bent upon destruction in new and ever more unbelievable ways.
April is, of course, the anniversary of Columbine and Virginia Tech — both of which have been receiving a great deal of (often quite creepy because so nostalgic) news coverage lately.
Historiann has been keeping track of one of the patterns of this month: husbands/fathers killing their families. She asks, quite trenchantly, “how many women and children (especially girl children …) have to die before someone notices?” The most recent incident, involving the U Georgia prof who shot his wife and two others, somehow manages to tie together the domestic violence trend with the university shooting trend. (News reports emphasize that the shootings occurred “near the campus.”)
Much closer to home, one of my friends was the victim of terrible violence by her husband, the father of her children — and only barely managed to escape being one of those women in a news article on husbands/fathers killing their families. I am not capable of saying more about this except to underscore how much it has contributed to my feeling that the world has turned topsy-turvey this month.
I saw a pack of dogs attack and probably kill a cat this weekend and this morning witnessed the flailing death throes of a squirrel after the car in front of mine drove directly over it.
And now there’s the swine flu.
Between the constant hovering threat of terrorism, the fear that the economy will collapse and we’ll find ourselves living in a Mad Max society, that the polar icecaps will melt and we’ll be swallowed up by an tsunami, that an irate student will burst into our classroom and open fire, the possibility that the people that we love the most — our family members, our lovers — may try to kill us, and now the fucking swine flu pandemic … the world seems entirely made up of dangers.
Meanwhile, the weather is so beautiful, my tomato plants are starting to bud, and classes are almost over. So, why can’t I shake the feeling of dread?
I’m holding my breath for May.
While the title of this post is taken from Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” I actually want to include my other favorite poem about the perils of April:
“Spring” by Edna St. Vincent Millay
To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
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Sometimes things happen in life that make blogging seem self-indulgent. For the past few days, I’ve been wanting to post but everything I think to write about is, seen in the light of the world’s ills, silly in the extreme.
Embracing the silliness of blogging — drawing it close and planting a sloppy kiss on its boring, low-brow, petty lips — I give you: the contents of the emergency drawer in my office desk (after Flavia).
tea bags
napkins stolen from Starbucks
a dried up bottle of honey
instant oatmeal
salt & pepper packets
plastic forks and knives
disposable chopsticks
lotion
deodorant
tampons/pads
floss
toothbrush & paste
toothpicks
microwave popcorn
pet hair roller x 2
extension cord
plastic door stop, still in packaging
tupperware of stale almonds
tupperware of leftover Easter chocolates (rapidly disappearing)
nail clippers
nail file
box of matches
eyeglasses cleaning wipes
kleenex
a horde of useless pennies
This list makes me feel very classy.
Updated: I originally composed the list from memory, while sitting in my kitchen, but today I’m in my office and I have discovered how many more miscellaneous items I have stashed away. I am clearly prepared for any emergency involving personal hygiene and pennies.
“Axiom 1: People are different from each other.
It is astonishing how few respectable conceptual tools we have for dealing with this self-evident fact. A tiny number of inconceivably coarse axes of categorization have been painstakeningly inscribed in current critical and political thought: gender, race, class, nationality, sexual orientation are pretty much the available distinctions. They, with the associated demonstrations of the mechanisms by which they are constructed and reproduced, are indispensable, and they many indeed override all or some other forms of difference and similarity. But the sister or brother, the best friend, the classmate, the parent, the child, the lover, the ex-: our families, loves, and enmities alike, not to mention the strange relations of our work, play, activism, prove that even people who share all or most of our own positionings along these crude axes may still be different enough from us, and from each other, to seem like all but different species.”
from Epistemology of the Closet (U California P, 1992), p. 22
Still brilliant, breathtaking, and urgent — after all of these years.
I haven’t laughed a lot lately — too much exhaustion, stress, and work has seemingly turned my funny bone into a lead thorn. It was lovely to spend a few minutes this morning laughing out loud, big belly guffaws. That’s a much better way to start the day than brooding over your to do list.
If you need a laugh, check out Lindy West’s article “The Different Kind of People that There Are” in the Seattle Stranger (which I found courtesy of Mean Something).
My favorite: the one about cats.
You’ll see …
Recently I opened up an academic book to the acknowledgements. Although I try to not read acknowledgements because they are generally self-indulgent and annoying, it is sometimes hard to avert my eyes.
This particular acknowledgements began something like this (paraphrased): “I always promised myself I would never be one of those academics who takes ten years to finish a book and scurries around in shame at their failure. I was able to write and publish my book in record time which demonstrates my prowess, intelligence, and superiority over everyone else.”
How much do I hate this guy? Okay, so I filled in the second half of the thought but he does begin by congratulating himself in producing a book in under ten years — and the implication is that this feat deserves celebration.
Frankly, I don’t know where he got the ten year marker — most academics MUST produce a book in under ten years so they can get tenure. In fact, the tenure clock forces most people to produce quickly, whether they are ready to or not. The only way you could even take ten years is 1) you don’t need a book for tenure (in which case, what difference would it make how long you took?) or 2) you left one job for another, extending your time towards tenure (in which case, you are likely publishing all along — otherwise you would never get job #2).
I am particularly angered by Less Than Ten Years Guy’s discourse because I am someone who has, in fact, taken almost ten years on my book. (I fit case #2 above.) My complaint is not the one that is often made about how the accelerating professionalism of young academics is resulting in less stellar scholarship — although I think there is some merit to that. Rather, my experience indicates that pulling this off in under ten years in unbelievably difficult due to the inherent slowness of the process.
Case in point: One year ago, in March, I sent my book manuscript to a university press. The press sent the ms. to readers and I received the reader’s reports six months later, in August. I spent two months utterly paralyzed by the staggering number of revisions I was asked to make but began working on them in November (thank you InDWriMo!). Another five months and I just finished the revisions and mailed the ms. back to the press this week — almost exactly a year later.
In other words, an entire year was eaten up by this submission, evaluation & revision process — and it is not even over. Who knows what this next round will bring, or how long it will take? This year comes after the many, many years spent conducting research and writing. It is true that, unlike other efficient academics, it took me a long time to get going — several years of struggling with the project, unable to see where it was going, making a number of false starts, etc. I wasted a lot of time before I figured out what I was doing. But, even if you manage to avoid the post dissertation/first job morass that I fell into, the whole book process takes time. Taking more time is not a measure of the quality of the project either — thank you very much! It’s just a logistical reality.
I’m trying to focus on the fact that I’ve leapt another hurdle in this exhausting race towards publication and, ultimately, towards tenure. I don’t want Ten Years Guy and other precocious academics to make me feel bad about the time it has taken me — but sometimes I hear his voice in my head and it sniggers and says, “heh heh, I finished my book faster than you.”
Seriously, how much to I hate this guy?
