Have to say this

I have to say that I'm disappointed in all of our former friends. I think the whole let's-not-tell-Sam-how-we-feel behavior is not just wrong-headed, it's hurtful. If you think that Sam's drinking too much or that he's mean when he's drunk, tell him directly, as a true friend would, instead of talking about him behind his back. It's group-think of insidious nature. It's the behavior of people without integrity. It's cold.

I also want to say that I'm put in a bad spot. I can't be friends with people who treat Sam with such disdain for his friendship. I can't believe that people who showed up for me at the hospital have cut me out, too.

I know I'm being a hypocrite for not saying this directly to the people I feel are responsible, but I'm afraid I can't do it without an anger that would be counter-productive. I'm being as direct as I can, in a space I feel safe enough to comment. And it's not like anyone's talking to me, either, anyway.

I'm deeply disappointed and, well, shocked that people I thought were friends could simply cut Sam and me out so cleanly and efficiently. It's upsetting, and it makes me feel isolated. So if that's the desired effect, consider it accomplished.

Weird

It's weird that I haven't posted since July. I bet these words are just floating around without any readers.

Anyway, it's late for reading other people's lousy essays about genre, so I thought I'd update a little before bed. Sam and I have been thinking about the upcoming holidays, and people in my group therapy have been talking about their plans with families. I have to say, it gets me down. If it weren't for my alienation from my parents and Sam's fissure with his brother, if it weren't for the fact that we have no money to travel, if I had the time to take a break in my work, maybe we'd get some plans together that don't involve just the two of us having dinner at home. Who will eat the two pies I make each year? We have such great memories of recent Thanksgivings, and the true sharing among families and friends. Although last Thanksgiving could have gone a little more smoothly, I admit. Maybe the two of us, the turkey and a couple of pies will warm our home just fine.

Also, Sam got this kick-ass tattoo. Maybe he'll show it to you.

Also, I'm working on Chapter 2. Maybe I'll get this damn thing done after all.

A little back patting

Today I was thinking about what I've done during the past three months since I've been out of the hospital. It's not a long list, and it's not in order of importance or date, but it means something to me, and I thought I'd share it with you. [I know that's totally a run-on sentence.]

• I found a psychiatrist and a psychologist. They make up my international mental health team.
• I renewed my commitment to Sam in front of our families and closest friends. It was awesome.
  
• I presented some of my work before an audience of my colleagues, and I got thoughtful questions that showed they were listening. I was (this part is important) able to answer them. So there.
• I made out the checks for my hospital stay, the ambulance, and another mental health bill. Get this: there's a Vanderbilt Medical Group and a Vanderbilt Medical Hospital, and they both billed us. And riding in an ambulance is not nearly as cool as one might think but it's also less expensive.
• I applied for and got student loans, a labyrinthine process.
• I gained a little weight, but it's not meds weight, so I'll be able to slowly take it off.
• I got a new tattoo. 
• I started working on the diss again. Although I sometimes panic about my topic and its scope, it's good to be seriously working again. It's especially good to be working in a healthy way, without mania.

So that's my list. I don't feel that productive, but looking at the things I've done makes me realize that my therapist is right: I am getting stronger.

Awkward

I'm so glad you all came to our renewal celebration. I'm sincerely grateful to have you as friends, and I love you all. Sometimes I feel awkward in expressing my emotions, but I'm working on that. It's a lot easier to use allusion as expression. I'm great at showing love through the words in other's works. 

So, a short poem by Thomas Lux. This one's for you, Sam:

I Love You, Sweatheart

A man risked his life to write the words.

A man hung upside down (an idiot friend

holding his legs?) with spray paint

to write the words on a girder fifty feet above

a highway. And his beloved,

the next morning driving to work. . . ?

His words are not (meant to be) so unique.

Does she recognize his handwriting?

Did he hint to her at her doorstep the night before

of "something special, darling, tomorrow"?

And did he call her at work

expecting her to faint with delight

at his celebration of her, his passion, his risk?

She will know I love her now,

the world will know my love for her!

A man risked his life to write the world.

Love is like this at the bone, we hope, love

is like this, Sweatheart, all sore and dumb

and dangerous, ignited, blessed—always,

regardless, no exceptions,

always in blazing matters like these: blessed.

 

Menu

I've been working on a loose menu for Saturday--hard to believe it's almost here--and we're having fish and pork, with a couple of dessert-type things that I'm getting at Marché. I know I've talked to some of you about bringing side dishes, and it would be great, fantastic, really, to get some contributions. We're going with a contemporary American style, so nothing especially fancy. Here's a list that might inspire you:

• Cheese and crackers, dip and crudités, or some other kind of appetizer thing
• Artichokes
• Asparagus
• Pasta for a potential pasta course
• Potatoes or rice
• Salad
• Spinach

These are just a few seasonal ideas I've hard, but I'm in no way committed to them. We're having 22 people, and it's my hope that we'll experience what I'm calling "the pot-luck phenomenon," in which people bring the amount they want to and we end up having more than enough.

 

Just let me know in the comments section here what you'd like to bring (if you're planning to bring something, which don't feel pressured to do so at all), and it'll be like a conversation instead of a blind groping for a plan. Finally, it would not be a tragedy to have more than one of any dish. 

Thank you, our friends.

Addendum: Many of you are already playing another role or bringing something else--please don't think of this plea as yet another thing you feel you should do. 

&

This week has been a little chaotic. So I have a few updates of varying interest:

• Dave is probably gone for good. Janer seems much happier--relaxed, affectionate, and less likely to attack the dog.
• I've called several of you in a panic recently. The calling is a good thing for me because it means I'm leaning a little on friends during a rough patch. Don't expect it to stop any time soon.
• I'm not sleeping at night and am having some racing and divided thoughts. Like having an intense conversation while contemplating a movie I watched recently and trying to figure out how one would go about replicating the table and chairs. It's not that I'm distracted, particularly, from conversations: I can contribute meaningfully and pay attention to the line of conversation. It's just that my mind seems to need more input to function adequately.
• My diagnosis has officially changed, by which I mean that the doctor I'm currently seeing as my primary doctor (not someone who has seen me a few times in the hospital) has changed my diagnosis to bipolar disorder I. I'm actually a little relieved by this change because 1) it's more in line with what I think the diagnosis should be; 2) in my opinion, it's not as bleak as bipolar II; and 3) I have a better sense of why my personal course of action should be. I've been counting deep breathes while visualizing each number: its size, color, and font type. Ones are small and yellow; fours are big, blue, and sans serif. The exercise actually is calming when I make myself focus only on the numbers. 
• Sam and I are struggling right now. We're at the beginning of a difficult, probably long process, but I'm trying to work, with Sam, on not allowing every argument to lead to catastrophe. Smaller, sober arguments are better than the loud, passionate, drunk arguments we often have.
  
• I still need to ask you, my friends, to help me with reality checks, an infelicitous phrase but I can't think of a better way to put it. To say it longer, though, I have trouble with distinguishing between my true feelings and my disordered feelings. It's like the difference between temperature and climate. If I am to be vigilant about my mood disorder, I have to know what's healthy first. I'm working on it in therapy, but you can do much to help me by letting me know what seems unreal or out of control.

That's the sum of it today. Sorry for the fragmented nature of the post, but there's a lot happening that must be expressed.

Kiss me, I'm shitfaced

I become more and more annoyed each year at St. Pat's day celebrations. Ooh, Irish for a day--what a great reason to get drunk and act like an asshat. After all, that's what being Irish is all about. People are planting bombs in Castlewellan, while the idiots here drink car bombs. 

Okay, that's not really why I'm irked. I could list all of the reasons why it doesn't make sense (e.g., these protestants should be wearing orange) or why it's offensive, but when it comes right down to it, I just resent these people drinking it up yesterday at the Edge. They remind me of those kids in grade school who used to call me "p'tato-head." 

Disappointment

So Katherine disappointed me. I'm going to call her, and we'll talk about her issues with mental illness and suicide. That's fine. It's just not what I want in a friend. 

I'm trying very hard to be open to other people and their friendship, but I'm such a bad judge of others. I trust too much or too little, and I don't know which is happening until it's too late. 

Aside from Katherine's and my conversation, the party was fun. I enjoyed it, and I think my guests enjoyed themselves. 

More journal entries

On February 7, I promised pieces of my journal entries for three reasons:

1. I want to remember how punishing my stay in the VITA unit was.
2. I want to remember the insights I had during my stay.
3. I want to convey to you what it was like in there.

During the long night of January 24, I had trouble sleeping in part because of a huge medication change. To pass the time, I started a short story, "The Designated Hitler." Here are the first few sentences: "She had a bulge, tender and hot, on the inside of right elbow. And she cried because she could cry because she was not dead. '"Am I the monster or the miracle?' she asked herself."

The next day, on the 25th, I wrote: "Having a really hard time." On the 26th, a doctor lent me a book by Kay Redfielf Jamison, called An Unquiet Mind. Jamison quoted someone named Hugo Woolf: 

 "To be sure, I appear at times merry and in good heart, talk, too, before others quite reasonably, and it looks as if I felt, too, God knows how, well within my skin. Yet the soul maintains its deathly sleep and the heart bleeds from a thousand wounds."

The quotation still reverberates for me because--and this one is funny--I want to avoid intellectualizing my feelings. It's easy to hold feelings back by thinking about them instead of experiencing them. I am a woman of extremes, we now all know, and trying to cry a little is scary to me still. I was afraid I would never stop crying, and I'm working really hard on realizing that I can stop when I let it out a little at a time, when I feel sad about something specific, rather than about my lot in life. You'll see me cry, which is also scary but I'm trying to work on letting people in. I'll write more about my hospital experiences, but also about my triumphs of heart and hand. Stay tuned to this station.

A dirty secret

One of the mental habits I'd like to break myself of: hating just a little bit people with great experiences, like loving a hometown, enjoying the memory of grade school, having great parents. Sam and I watched most of Dan in Real Life, a lovely movie with Steve Carrell playing Dan. Although the main character is tortured and morose, his family is extraordinary. I guess they have to be for the movie to work, but I found myself tearing up. Is this self-pity in action? Is it longing? Is it evil? Whatever it is, I need to figure out how I can stop feeling this way and realize some of my own good luck.

Thin-skinned

Sensitivity is a word that moves in contradictory ways. If Tim (to pluck a name from the air) is sensitive, he may be careful about his own feelings or about someone else's feelings. Tim cannot perform both tasks of attention. 

I have a private set of beliefs about how people should treat me. If a person (Melody, to pluck another name from the aether) breaks Rule 3--it hurts when two other people leave the table and leave me behind alone--I experience that broken rule as Melody's insensitivity. I give Melody the agency to hurt me in ways I secretly define as insensitive. I'm on the lookout for Melody's cruel intentions. This requires a second belief, that I can determine why Melody would leave me sitting alone. 

Through power of my tacit belief system, I managed to isolate myself in an attempt to keep other people from hurting me so much. My self-quarantine blinded me to the feelings of everyone else. And my ability to intellectualize everything rests on something even more fundamental: I patrol a border between what I think and what I feel, a dichotomy constructed very early in my life. 

I'm still the 5-year-old cryer standing by the swing set with sand on the front of her sailor dress, waiting for her turn. I still want that moment of a bird-like freedom when it feels like I just might swing into the clear blue sky. Instead, I will fall back, feet plowing furrows in the sand, dirty hands held out in anticipation of being pushed off the swing again.

Ground rules

Okay, here are some ground rules in the crazy-person hospital: no alcohol of any type, including that which is found in shampoo, toothpaste, and deodorant; no computers, which means no working; no cigarettes, no laces for shoes; no belts; no personal connections among patients. Some of these rules worked better than others. I mean, there's a reason why deodorant has alcohol in it.

Some ground rules for this blog: no pulling punches; no publishing all of my nut-case journal entries; no editing for length when content is more important (in other words, I can be much more wordy than I am here); no hiding from myself or from you, my friends.

I must ask you to abide one rule: please comment, even if only to indicate that you've read what I've written. Blogging can be a lonely pursuit. I imagine that someone reads any of this and finds meaning in it, but in my heart, conjecture rules. I imagine the worst, and silence can turn into anything, really. 

So, please comment, please. Even if only to tell me that you get the message. It doesn't have to be complex. Just let me know you're out there.

First, some categorization

In the first few posts, I'm going to try to convey what happened in VITA (Vanderbilt Institute for the Treatment of Addiction). I was in that ward because the other adult wards had no available beds. It was actually quite useful to be in the VITA ward. For once, I was the sane person in a room full of crazies. More on the ward itself later. First, some sense of the schedule.

• Vital signs: blood pressure, pulse, and temperature. They collected these "signs" three times a day: 6:00a, 9:50a, 3:15p
• Meals three times a day: 7:45a, 12:00p, 5:15p
• Groups: 9:00a, 11:00a, 1:00p, 4:00p, 6:30p, 8:00p. The last time I list here was devoted to AA meetings. 
• Sleep: lights out at 11:00p, with little dispensation.
• Other activities filled up the spaces in between. Here are the times that were unstructured: 8:15a–9:00a, 10:15a–11:00a, 12:30p–1:00p, 2:00p–4:00p, 6:30p–8:00p, 9:00p–11:00p. A total of just over 7 hours, dispersed through the day. Part-time time you might say.

In the coming days, I'll encapsulate material from my journal. Much of it is raw. Some of it may be crude reckoning of my faults, but I hope that by evaluating it, I'll remember how dangerous and terrible were the events that got me to this point in time. Finally, I may give additional commentary on those journal entries that are unfair or unreasonable.

Please know that I do this to help, not to indulge in self-pity, or punishment, or in any way boastful. I deeply regret what I did.

Hiatus broken

I tried to kill myself. It's a senseless act, and the only one responsible for it is me. Now that I've figured some things out, I'm going to spill them on this blog. 

The first (and most important) issue is horrifying to me and to my friends: If a person wants to kill herself and thinks about death constantly, she's not going to let on how awful she's feeling. Otherwise someone could stop her. So, please don't think that anyone's at fault except for me. I struggled with bipolar disorder, thought I was don't all the right things (therapy + meds), and I still felt miserable. I'll always struggle with my illness on some level. But I must never again fall for the illusion of suicide as an answer to the constant questions that plague me. I'm making my promise here: I will not do it again. I plan to learn how to come up with solutions and how not to dwell on death as though it were a sweet exit from an otherwise terrible life. 

The second insight: I should have called someone first and I should have been emotionally open enough so that I could figure out who I should have called. I isolated myself. It's no one's fault but my own. I tend to deflect my feelings by intellectualizing them, like researching the best ways to killing myself. (It's actually quite difficult to do, apparently.) Too often have I tried to keep up my emotions at bay, until it's too much to bear. So I need to let my guard down. It'll hurt but not nearly as much as I have hurt in the past.

Third, suicide leaves no notes. It silently embraces the abyss. The abject punctures the myth of self-knowledge. As Kristeva puts it (and yes, I'm doing this even here), "The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life." She believes that we trail our abjection through life, like the shadow one wants to flee but is always attached to us. 

Again, with a little less drama: each person carries her own corpse around, hurrying away from death as much as she fastens herself to it. I guess that is still a little too poetic, and I'll try to say it better next time. The long and the short of it is that my mistakes will dog me for life. My regret, my shame, my despair. 

S., I'm so sorry that I did this wrong to myself and to my friends and to you. I cannot say it enough. 

A reply to J-P's comment on the previous post

My response was getting so long that it made more sense to put it into a comment of its own. The Kindle (and devices like it) probably are boons to inveterate travelers. Books are heavy!

J-P, the questions you ask regarding paper books generally provoke tons of (let's say) vigorous discourse in my field. I could definitely imagine a future in which owning paper books becomes a luxury, a electronic books and their attendant devices drop in price. Just as it is now a luxury to own a horse for now good reason. (Also heavy.)

I believe that the codex (even if not made with paper) will and should endure, but that we'll use it differently, perhaps with more respect or shared ownership within a community. Codices resist change and censorship more easily than electronic documents do. The paper book signifies a drain to our environment, but how does that compare to the environmental impact of producing, distributing, and recycling electronic devices and the infrastructure that they require? (That might be an unanswerable question at this point.)

What I do know is that many codices are beautiful in themselves. As are those luxury horses. (But with less poop.)

---

And now a question regarding my own crappy paperback codices: Does anyone know how to get one's paperbacks re-covered to make them hardbacks? Most of our books are paperbacks, and I like to imagine them as cloth-covered hardbacks, in a range of colors. As a child, I lusted after the huge library of leather-bound books that belonged to one of my father's colleagues. They had a pleasing uniformity of size and color, with exotic names on their spines, like "Seneca" (an Indian chief?) and "Cato the Elder." Now I know I don't want any leather books or the authors in their canon. But it's really cool to think of a cloth-covered canon of our own. So if any of you people know where I could get this done, or anyone on Etsy who would do it, please let me know.

My diamond shoes are too tight

Okay. I recognize that none of you is probably going to read the post that proceeds this one. Thinking about it, though, I realized that I could use that nifty website link for a number of other questions. Like: Am I working right now?

So, yeah, I'm not, and not just because it's lunch time. When I start working again, I'll probably go until around 12-1 at night. Maybe longer if I'm on a roll. It's kind of like working a second shift. My two responsibilities (work-wise) are teaching a TTh class and working on dissertation stuff. The class lasts for an hour and fifteen minutes, and I determine how to distribute the rest of my time. It may sound great to someone bound  by routine, and it pretty much is. I won't lie. But it also means that this weekend, I'll be working (at minimum) 12-hour days, outside of grading and teaching preparation.

Which means that today is like tomorrow will be (except, I hope, I'll muster enough discipline to get started earlier). It's a weird kind of disjunction from everyone else's work week, especially when I wake up on non-class days thinking it's Sunday when really it's Wednesday. (Then I get excited because Wednesday is a great prime-time tv day.) Conversely, the only advantage to weekends is that everyone else plans to do fun things, and I can make time for those things in my work schedule.

Now I'm going to eat the last half of yesterday's sandwich (turkey, avocado, and bacon!) and watch The People's Court. A sandwich that Sam wrapped up for me because he makes sure I'm fed and have everything I need to be productive. I can't say it enough: he's wonderful, and I love him.

On a more serious note, I send my condolences to J-P and his family and wish both him and Melissa safe travels.

Wilde's amazing rocket

Okay. So I'm going to reframe this Clinton/Tubman thing a bit. Sam, as you know, I think you're right. I believe that Clinton appropriated Tubman's achievements to score political points for herself. At its very best, the analogy was hyperbolic and inappropriate. At its worst, the analogy fails on racial, sexual, and regional bases. Do we really want to raise the specter of slavery at a time when Democrats are trying to win southern states? Also, it strikes me as odd that many commenters have referred to Tubman as an African American. A lot of white people use "African American" when they mean "person of color" (or, more commonly, "black"). Tubman wasn't a citizen, and to call her an American strikes me as disrespectful. 

More important, Obama is not a slave who has to Keep Going, nor are the voters, nor is the DNP, nor is America. Obama is a Democrat I am going to vote for so that no McCain administration can dig the U.S. further into debt, war, and despair. 

As a Democrat, I recognize the importance of the narrative arc we've constructed. But Clinton's use of Tubman pains me.

It's not about Tubman as a role model. It's not about feeling part of the struggle for basic human rights. It's not even about using an analogy based on a common history of the fight against racism and sexism. The problem is that the senator used Tubman as a symbol that conveniently incorporates the categories of woman and negritude. (Here, I'm choosing Sartre's version of negritude, rather than Benjamin Rush's or Fanon's.) The Tubman symbol itself provided an image of unity, and it was a short step from there to find an opportune piece of rhetoric produced by the Tubman symbol.  

Unity by itself as a piece of rhetoric has tremendous political charge. Just ask President Wilson about his White House screening of the infamous D.W. Griffith film about post-Civil War unity. Cue the footage, accompanied by that Wagner tune.

If this part of this post seems a little too strong, consider its scale beside the scale of Senator Clinton's rhetoric. My invective doesn't even hold a taper.

**Another caveat: Only the next part of this post is directed specifically at another person.

-------

Ed: I've concluded that you no longer get to talk to me. You can spend your life believing that women are as good as men only to the extent that they resemble men, that you are always the smartest person in the room, that tucking your t-shirt into your pants is a good idea, and that Sam should step out on his crazy wife. But you will never spend another moment of your sad, silly life interacting with me. Another tip: if you want to commit passive suicide by yelling at men with guns, try a little harder. It's not rocket science.

Open the doors and see all the people

Last evening, our friend Stephen came over to drink our beers, eat our pizza, and smoke our cigarettes. Conversation was a broken-in shoe, and Sam patiently listened while Stephen and I talked about poetry for a while. Then the conversation turned to hating the Brewers, gossiping about people we know, and kicking around ideas about the future. 

It was thoughtful and raucous. 

It was a comfortable mixture of the big and the small. 

It was an impious communion.

Jumping into the pool

 Sam and I had a great time together. Mussels, Natty, crab cake, Resurrections, very fresh old-water oysters, some things coated in Old Bay. I meant to pick up a couple of growlers of local beer, but with the joy over finding one of my favorite table wines at Beltway liquors, I forgot. We bootlegged a lot of Natty and quite a bit of cheap, good French wine, which is difficult to find in Nashville, comparatively. (I will buy anything with the words "flinty" or "mineral" or "slate" in the wine guy's description. If I can find something inexpensive with "a barnyard bouquet" in the nose, that's also going in my cart.) Sam had to prod me out the door.

I'm going back during Vanderbilt's fall break to revive some old academic connections, and I expect to go to a few of the places we missed this past week. 

-----

Being polite's an easy social habit to pick up in the South, and it smoothes life among strangers. In contrast, people in Baltimore don't expect to like you and don't feel the need to be polite, unless you're paying them to do something. Consequently, if you find yourself drinking on the same side of the bar with a bartender you just met—getting bartender drink prices and a royal drunk on—you have made a friend. 

In Baltimore, an exception to the politeness complex occurs at the pool table. Being cordial helps everyone control any aggro; otherwise, it can get ugly fast.

Any given pool player may choose a couple of play-for-pay tables to frequent. He learns the lay of a table, the bounce of the rail, the speed of the felt, and which cue is best. Newcomers discover their disadvantage quickly. Even if you can control the ball and understand the lay, you can still lose miserably.  

After Jamie and Bill's wedding, in full fancy-dress get-up, I played a game at an unfamiliar table, seeing that the players knew the table and expecting to lose. After the break, I used a subtle stroke to sink a ball in the side, and my competitor, Derrick, remarked, "Oh, look now, she's a shark." Typical pool banter, trying to slow a run. I replied, "Just because I'm in a dress and heels don't mean I'm a shark." Then I banked a ball into the corner, and we all laughed.

I lost by two balls, and I suspect he was being nice to me by letting me lose with a little dignity. But I got a couple of shots in that I was proud of, and we shook hands at the end of the game.  

Party politics; or, soapboxing it

Standing on your principles can be pretty lonely.  I'm not going to the Londkes' party this afternoon. [long pedantic paragraphs grudgingly redacted. Short didactic paragraphs to follow]

It's simple: The Oxford American Dictionary defines prejudice on three levels: unfounded opinion, biased behavior, and the consequence (hurt or injury) of such behavior. 

Speaking is a behavior, for example.

I understand that a person's culture forms many of those irrational opinions and that no one can escape culture's force. But you must try to recognize your irrational opinions and personally work against them. Part of being an American, for example, is being chauvinist but condemning bigotry.

A person—even a friend or acquaintance—who chooses to embrace his or her bigotry rejects the possible benefit of your doubt. (Yes, T, even the benefits you wish to extend through doubt, although I know you mean to act through generosity and charity.) Taking a person at her word means acknowledging that she is responsible for her behavior. It's a way of honoring someone's human individuality, even if she rejects someone else's. 

As a consequence, I don't go to a person's house if he or she exhibits prejudice without reservation. Even when no one else chooses to act on principle. Even if my choice makes me lonely, unpopular, or sad. I refuse.