Well hello there

The tenure year turned out to be the year that I abandoned the blog completely. But I miss it! I am thinking of revamping the blog or perhaps starting a new one.

I am still most definitely Dr. Medusa, but this description--A single assistant professor with a tenure-track job in the humanities, a Southern family, a 900-square-foot garret perched atop a crowded American city, and a renegade gaze aimed at books, booze, bassists, movies, making out, style sweet style, teaching, tenure, writing, and all things narcissistic--needs some tweaking. While I am still happily perched in my Northern garret most of the time, The Someone and I are living a split Mason-Dixon existence between two crowded American cities. And I am no longer an assistant professor!!!! OMG. Tenure. Whoa. It still has not sunk in completely, but some things were just immediately different. In some ways, I didn't have to process the difference for a moment and I hit the tenure ground running.

My most important news to share: my father, who has been desperately ill, is doing much better and the prognosis is hopeful. I was able to spend an entire summer with him. It was a terribly difficult time but an amazing time and at moments just lovely and simple and joyful.

So I'm back and planning to be back, in some form, for a good long while.

To bail or not to bail?

So. The second part of my Deep Red trip involves going deeper into the Deep Red to my father's house. He always comes to my sister's home about 6 hours away from his when I come to visit--for all holidays and in the summer. My sister and father have long suggested that I go down to my father's house for the 4th, which my sister, her husband, and four kids always do. My sister has many high school friends in this tiny Southern town, so she enjoys going. My father lives close to a tennis club, so the kids play tennis and swim all day. I got the hell out of that town as fast as I could within days of graduating from high school. My mother left about a year later.

So. This trip has already been difficult on a number of levels. I've been here a week. I have not had much time to myself and have certainly not made even a dent in the huge amount of work I have needed to get done while here. There are . . . tensions between my mother and me. I also miss The Someone desperately. (No small part of this is about missing The Someone desperately. What I am realizing even more here is how completely fulfilling being with The Someone is. If I did not have the contrast of knowing an amazingly full and rich and bright and beautiful life with The Someone, I might not even fully understand the lunacy of what goes on here. I would note it, but I would note it as something necessary and to be endured until I figured out what flaw in me needed to be overcome to make it right.) Without going into too much detail, I will say that I feel that my very identity is being sucked down some cosmic drain and there is nothing I can do about it. I am disappearing.

So. This trip farther South to my father's house? It's going to be traumatic. Every time I have walked into that house since I left, or maybe since my mother left, I have pretty much burst into quiet tears that never quite go away until I do. It's also going to be chaotic. Seven people and three dogs in a three-bedroom house. Normally this would be fine and even fun, but I need some time and space for myself, even the tiniest bit, right now and that's just not going to happen. My mother is very upset that I am leaving here and spending the last week of my trip away from her. So that's the emotional toll. Then there's the psychic toll. I am fairly certain my father's house is farther down the cosmic drain.

So. I feel like a selfish bitch, but I am seriously considering changing my plane tickets, flying out of here early, skipping the journey farther south part of the trip entirely. I feel guilty at even the thought, so it probably will not happen. But why should I do something that is so clearly not good for me? So damaging? So traumatic? Is the point to walk through it and learn what I can learn or is the point to know when and how I need to take care of myself and to do it?

Chalupa update

The Chalupa is quite the calm traveller and she loved loved loved the Deep Red, the kids, her cousin dogs, ALL! THAT! GRASS!, and my mom's and sister's houses, which must have seemed positively ginormous in comparison to the garret. She was particularly fond of the nieces, a certain fuzzy zebra-print pillow in Katydid's room, carpeted stairs, balconies, and the neighbor cat.

What she did not like: hardly anything, just walking in the cemetery (she refused to walk over graves and there was lots of leash-tugging to get out of there as soon as possible) and the American Airlines flight attendant, Anne Marie, who caused a huge scene trying to make me make her stay in her carrier under the seat while we were trapped on a 90 degree tarmac with no air and the Chalupa was overheated and a crying and mortified (due to Anne Marie's yelling and scene making) was trying to give the very calm Chalupa in her lap some water. Anne Marie, you are a crab-faced, sour-souled, petty-minded asshat. Plus, you have seriously bad hair. I am sure that's why you hated me but that's no excuse to be mean to my dog.

City mirror, Country mirror

I am back home, trying to find my bearings. On the one hand, I need to find them. On the other, I am thinking my current bearings, or the bearings I left a few weeks ago, suck.

I really am a mirror of sorts, the kind that absorbs and reflects its environment. What a different environment--physically, psychically--the Deep Red is. First, there's this laid-back and lazy and misty and breezy and lush and decadent mood to the place. Next, there is the energy and joy and love and angst and silliness of four children. Finally, there is the serious stress and dissatisfaction and anger and anxiety of my mother, my sister, and my father--bad enough individually, volatile when mixed. I absorb it all, each and every bit. This is the "zen" of me. My flexibility is the tendency to empathize to the point of losing any sense of my own perspective, needs, or desires.

Now this chameleon mirror is struggling to adapt to the old city surfaces, a home that suddenly seems unfamiliar and thoroughly unsatisfactory. Is my life a shambles or am I? Is my perspective skewed or is my life here really the barely glued together broken thing I am seeing it as right now?

A lesson on their heritage, or Papa's definition of classy

Cast:
Medusa
Papa, father of Medusa; grandfather of Ozzy and Katydid
Katydid, 12-year-old niece of Medusa
Ozzy, 8-year-old nephew of Medusa

Scene: Papa's car, en route to lunch

Katydid: Ozzy, you need a haircut. You look like a truckdriver.
Ozzy: Nuh uh!
Papa: What's wrong with truckdrivers? What's a truckdriver supposed to look like?
Katydid: Well, I just mean his hair looks like too long and scruffy. Truckdrivers aren't very . . . classy.
Papa: Hmm. Did you know I drove a truck for a while? Your great-grandfather drove a truck sometimes. Five or six of my uncles drove trucks for a living.* In a way, you come from a family of truckdrivers. Truckdrivers are still some of the best people I know.
Katydid: Really?
Papa: Yep. Sometimes classy is about who you are and how you treat people, not about how much money you make or what you do. Plus, driving trucks is kind of cool.
Ozzy: [a huge smile spreading across his face] My hair is truckdriver cool!

(Now we know what I can do if I do not get tenure--follow in the family tradition. You think I'm kidding. Not even.)

*My father's father had 11 siblings and his mother had 10.

So long from the Deep Red

I will be leaving for home tomorrow morning. It's the first time in recent memory that I am not excited to get back home. Just too much there I do not want to face. At all.

But it's a bright new year, right? I can deal. I will deal.

Catch you on the flip side.

Stu-Stu-Studio

Some shots of Mama Bear's studio. . .





Artistic Niece at work . . .





Paintings by three generations of Medusa clan women. . .