Not exactly freaking out, but . . .

I am ignoring a blown deadline (May 30) and a nearing one (June 30) in order to work on one of my summer projects, which I will call the Great Photo Mission. I am gathering all of my photos from boxes, old mildewed albums, and retired harddrives in order to organize them all into new archive-quality albums and to decorate the garret (part of other major summer project, which I will dub the Make Condo Look Like a Person Lives Here Already) with them. Going through all of the photographs along with the memorabilia I have also stashed has provided a kind of "This is your life, Dr. Medusa" experience for me, which is proving to be fascinating and funny and a little sad and terribly, terribly enlightening. I think I started this project not so much to get organized--my conscious purpose--but for some much-needed reflection. After this year's trauma and with a birthday getting closer and closer, I am in a sort of soul-searching mood.

I think I might post some of what I am finding and some of what I am learning. For example, I may or may not have tended to write a sort of stream-of-consciousness log of ideas and bits of conversations I had while I may or may not have been experimenting with what may or may not have been hallucinogenic drugs during (maybe) my college years. Perfect for a Friday poetry blogging entry? Perhaps.

I am having some trouble quashing a backlash of feelings brought on by being in the South and around my family. I am somewhat ashamed of this, but the inner monologue goes a bit like this: "What if I am not a progressive woman at all? What if I am a freak? What is I am really just a hopeless commitment phobe? What if I have not married and had children because I am terrified of intimacy? What if I have fooled myself into thinking I am happy and content and that I do not particularly want to get married and very possibly do not want children because I am some sort of pathetic failure? What if I am a monster?". I want to say that I KNOW IN MY BONES that the preceding is complete hogwash, but it is hard, people, HARD to defend yourself against a troop of Mimosa-swilling Southern wives and mothers. I mean nearly every conversation--even those involving my nieces who only are 11 and 16--included some contemplation of how to get me married and knocked up, DESPITE my continuous reminders that I would be and could be married with a whole brood of children if I wanted to be. After all, I have received more than one (five, to be exact) marriage proposals and I have been engaged more than once. BUT, you see, they use this as more evidence that I have some sort of problem. Yes, *I* have a problem and never the men, who are constantly described as the ones who got away. I see how, with the multiple engagements and all, it may seem like I do have a problem but the first time I was engaged I was just much much too young to be married and the second time we were both in graduate school and it just fell apart.

Anyway (catch breath) I am trying not to feel like a freak OR rather I am trying to embrace what might be perceived by others as freakishness. Expect more ranting, though . . . and perhaps a bit of late 80's acid-inspired poetics.