Blew

This was the week of Blowing Things Out of Proportion. Maybe last week, too. I won't say more about almost getting into a mishap with the lady at the airport or that woman at the Kroger. Instead, I'll tell you a story. Many of you have heard this story, but it stays with me and I like to tell it and it's my blog.

Lo, many years ago, there was the last boyfriend. A Greek, he was dramatic, an Achilles in his own mind, complete with the unattractive pouting. We lived in different cities. I lived in the Republic of Tacoma Park, outside of DC. He lived in Bay Ridge, under the Verrazano Bridge. We fought over the phone a lot. 

One night, after a particularly vicious fight, I needed to feel more clean, on the inside. I went to the Giant (at about 4 am) and bought lots of citrus-y stuff—tangerines, lemon cookies, lemon gelato, lemon icing, lemonade, and a Cosmo. 

The check-out lady took one look at my assembled goods and said, "Oh, honey. Man problem?"

 I usually keep a pretty good game face, but when she said that, I started to sob again. "Y-yes."

 "How long you been together?"

"About nine months." I tried to snort back the snot.

"Do you have any babies with him?"

"No." I could hear my voice hitch.

"Hon, you need to toss him out and get you someone good. I'll put the cookies and the ice cream aside. Don't want to get fat now."

I don't think I ever saw her again (she worked the third shift), and I don't remember her name. But sometimes I still hear her voice. "Oh, honey."

She saw what was happening and intervened. More than the advice, what made a difference was the fact that she noticed and took care of me. She was a friend, mentor, mother for just that moment. Even though it was a brief exchange, she changed my life. 

I did get me someone good after that: Sam. And I kept the gelato. 

Not a rhetorical question

A couple of weeks ago, I was having a conversation with Sam and two good friends over drinks after a nice dinner out. One of the topics that I keep thinking about is the way in which a blog's structure determines its content. Blog anonymously, and you can say whatever you like. Blog under your real name, and you have to think about whose feelings you might hurt or who might disapprove of your opinion or behavior. For example, I wouldn't complain about Sam. Not that there's anything to complain about. I love you, baby!

So that leads me to ask myself why I write these entries to begin with. My stated purpose is to construct a place for all of the jumbled ideas in my head that don't find exit in other ways. But when those ideas overlap with (for example) questions or problems with family or friends (my main audience), I find myself resorting to coded language. When you come across an entry that doesn't make much sense, it's probably evidence that I'm concealing something. I edit these entries (as much as it might seem otherwise), and sometimes I edit them out of comprehension.

That somewhat undercuts my purpose for doing this. Writing helps me work things out. But I need some kind of audience—implied or otherwise—to write to. So diary or journal writing isn't that appealing. Writing about some thought, idea, or situation using clear language helps me clarify my thoughts. Wanting to write about something but having to obfuscate the true subject may only muddle it more. I'm never really going to write something very raw on this blog, like a sonnet I'm working on, but I'd like to be more direct than I have been. 

How?

Dave the cat and Sam

I love Dave the cat. He snores and makes little dream sounds, and he often keeps me company in my study. He has a deep purr and isn't miserly with it. Dave's patient with Nora the dog (mostly), and sometimes even affectionate. His coat is soft and glossy. He shares a common delight with other cats, the desire to sleep in a box that is too small for him. Also, he likes to drink out of the bathroom faucet, licking the porcelain as the water drips onto his head and down his face. 

Unfortunately, Dave's paws are dirtier than his head, and when he gets out of the sink, he leaves prints on the bathroom counter. His meow is whiney. He also has the habit of pissing outside of the boxes (for which I feel partly responsible because we waited too long to get him fixed). So, in summary, Dave is not a fastidious cat.

If it seems like the endearing traits outweigh the traits that make you want to throw him out, you're not alone. Sam feels the same way. But because Sam loves me, and I love Dave, the cat stays. But I caution Dave, by paraphrasing Emerson (from "Prudence"): the trick to skating over thin ice is speed.

Flight

**Disclaimer: This post is not about anything that happens on an actual plane. If you're have any fears about the act of flying, read with impunity.

Sam and I went to Albuquerque this past weekend. It was lovely to see Rory and Kim, and I look forward to seeing them when they come to visit. Or if we drive out there. But I'm never flying again if I can possibly help it.

Everyone has a terrible airflight story to relate, mostly because it's an incredibly painful experience. But this one threw me into all kinds of mental directions. I'll give just a quick description of the very worst part and bore you with the wretched details later.

We went to the airport, got tickets, made it to security. I put my computer into a bin, as you're supposed to do. I went through the screener without problems. As I was reshoeing myself, I looked up just in time to see a woman knock my computer bin off the conveyor, with enough force that it landed upside down. The TSA did their best to intervene, and I didn't actually do anything unreasonable, even though the woman was not the least bit contrite when she acknowledged that she had, in fact, knocked my computer onto the floor. I cried the whole way to New Mexico.

Tomorrow at some point, the computer will be ready for me to pick up at Mac Authority, and then I'll send my receipt to TSA, and they'll eventually send me some small amount of money not equal to what this all actually cost. It's not the money, though. It's feeling out of control, out of touch, and away from work I've put hundreds of hours into. And I feel like a total ass for even talking about this because Rory and Kim's reception was beautiful and should be the focus, not my crazy-ass, yelling at strangers, crying in public, generally embarrassing self.

Sam was wonderful about the whole thing and continues to be supportive and caring. I'm using his computer right now. So although I don't seem like it today, baby, you are the turtles all the way down.

Serious language

I take language seriously. When Sam and I had lunch together this afternoon at B&F, we had a great conversation with Matt about writing, of all things, and I enjoyed hearing him talk about the writing he's doing. He's serious about it.

Being serious about language (and about literature) means that I can be a little intense, and it means that I read carefully, as I've been trained to do, as I've chosen to do. When it's rewarding, it's really rewarding. 

But taking language seriously can isolate a person or distance her from others. For example, no one's supposed to mention book club to me. I can deal with that. It hurts only a little to not have the option to say no. 

It gives the clarity to see when others are trying to use language to occlude an issue. It's not a seeing through the occlusion; it's a seeing because. 

I'm facing the salient fact that many of Sam's friends are not my friends. Maybe even most. I knew that before. (How could I not when I typically take a couple of Klonipin before going out?) And now that I'm feeling healthier, which makes me more me, I'd like to have my own friends, people I see outside of the context of the group. Going to brunch or a wine tasting with someone is a good start. I just don't want to waste even more time with people whose eyes glaze over when I begin to answer the question, "So how's your work going?" 

So, here's some Wallace Stevens, king of alienation:

Anecdote of the Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee

And round it was, upon a hill

It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around it, no longer wild.

The jar was round upon the ground

And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.

The jar was gray and bare.

It did not give of bird or bush,

Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Draft

I have one. I've read (or reread) about 90 books and articles, watched a number of silent slapstick comedies, which are so far still pretty funny to me, and most important: I've written about 20 good pages. Or maybe 17, after I realized that I was being kind of long-winded and started writing less for each subsequent section.

Which is why I've been awol mostly since the end of June.

It's late, and I'm a little addled. The cats are asleep around me, and stacks of books ring where I've been sitting during most of my recent waking hours. I may not be making very much sense.

But I have a draft.

I think I'm going to go to bed now. I can't believe I'm still typin

So, here's the deal

I think I might have a defensible thesis statement for my dissertation. Now I have some tasks in front of me. I need to:

• Define slapstick, modernity, modernism, and their relationship
• Discuss how people's bodies were affected by modernity
• Develop some ideas about slapstick and what it requires of the spectator
• Figure out how to incorporate new information into an existing theory of how we watch movies
• Determine how spectators can distance themselves enough from the screen action to laugh at violence
• Trace the ways that chance affects slapstick and its responses to technology, pace, immediacy, and gender
• Cobble this all together to make an overarching argument for a counter-history of slapstick, and thus call into question how film theorists think about film history
• Make a list of example films

I have about a year to a year and a half. It'll be fun, in its way. But I'd rather watch Chaplin's The Rink (1916) over and over.

Thank god I have Sam. Without him, it would be a year of eating only ice cream sandwiches and other ice cream-based foods, apples and peanut butter, and Sonic milkshakes, which I guess should count more as an ice cream-based food than its own special category. At any rate, hurrah for Sam!

Chemicals and chimera

I like them. They keep me alive, and they're actually quite useful. But I have to say reading about our food production practices is kinda gross. If you like being grossed, read Atwood's Oryx and Crake. It's excellent. And although we don't yet have plants that grow boneless, skinless chicken breasts (as in the novel), scientists are right now experimenting with creating meat from scratch. Thin, bloodless sheets of living flesh. They even can make the muscle tissue contract using electric pulses. At Tuoro University in New York, they've gotten even further with fish tissue, with the aim of creating food astronauts can grow on long space trips. They fried some up--the recipe they described actually sounds good--and presented it to colleagues who mistook it for fish fillets. No one ate it, they say, but it looked and smelled like fried fish.

Fascinating but disgusting. Worse than quorn, even.

These research projects and others like it will quickly raise questions that I don't think we're ready to answer, or to even approach. What will happen to vegetarianism when meat comes from plants or trays or petri dishes? For that matter, what will happen to meat eating? At some point soon, we'll start seeing products with uncertain origins in grocery stores. H.G. Wells's Dr. Moreau has nothing on us.

Taste has already been largely divorced from its origins, and if we had the cultural will to do it, we could start building factories for making Three-Course-Dinner gum right now. No glutens, cholesterol, or trans-fats. Omega-3 enriched. Addictive-free. Some assembly required.

Imagine, now, a clearing of the throat

I have nothing to say. That sentence is obviously not true and should signal to you that I'm going to whine now.

Everywhere I start to begin goes poorly. It's like trying to force your way into a scrum, or so I imagine. Three places to begin: the theory, the history, the (or a) film. I've already got my appropriate introductory quotation at least. (In critical writing, it's customary to put an interesting quotation at the beginning of an essay so that the reader can at least have a little fun.)

In any of the ten files I've created, after a page or so, the cursor just blinks. A blinking cursor may be the saddest thing in the world. Blink. Blink. k.

There was a little girl

I accidentally talked to my father last Wednesday. I had spent the week before contemplating whether to call my mother on her birthday. I decided I would. But she wasn't home, so for the fifth time in his life, my father answered the phone. It was the first time we've spoken in about 2 years. 

They're terrible parents. Not Victorian lock-you-in-the-attic bad parents. Not pimp-you-out-for-drugs bad parents. Not even beat-you-all-the-time bad parents. Just bad in a quiet, neglectful way. 

Imagine breaking your leg and calling out to someone nearby to help you. Imagine that person ignoring your call for help, just moving about as if you're not broken and yelling. You might do something extreme to get that person's attention. Something extremely good or something extremely bad.

A little Longfellow verse I often heard growing up:

There was a little girl

who had a little curl

right in the middle of her forehead.

And when she was good

she was very, very good

But when she was bad, she was horrid.

Funny, huh. Now I don't have to do extreme things to get their attention, because I'm an adult. I can say, "I have to go now, but tell Mom I called. Okay. Bye."