Wishing everyone a beautiful and prosperous new year

I made it to the MLA about 31 hours and many a Heineken after setting out for San Francisco. It was well worth it. I am back in the Deep Red for too many days before I reunite with The Someone at home and get to work on a new semester and a new year.

I have made a few resolutions. Last year's comical and purposely simple promise to do some "light stretching" worked out really well. It turned out to be more of a prophetic understatement than a resolution, as my life expanded in amazing and wonderful ways. This year I resolve to:

1. Say sweet things to self, rather than mean and nasty and self-defeating things
2. Become catlike in ability to get as much sleep as necessary (nap at will)
3. Develop ballerina-like posture--head up, shoulders back, chest forward (pirouette when and where appropriate)

So basically I will be a sweet-talking feline ballerina in 2009. I like it.

Random Bullets of Chaos and Joy

• I hereby declare this the Summer of Chaos and Joy. I am also going to go ahead and admit to myself that this will probably be a summer of light blogging. Too much joy. Too much chaos. I should point out that both "too much" and "chaos" are as joyful as joy to me.
• I am hands down head over heels in love with The Someone. In. Love. Bigly.
• I have recently pissed off important people at work. Again.
• I have recently made friends with important people at work. Yay!
• I just spent an amazing few days with my favorite person in Favorite City. Bliss.
• I leave on Monday for two weeks in the Deep Red. Pretty much dreading this.
• Work projects languish. I would make a list here of everything I need to do before summer's end, but if I did the space-time continuum would spontaneously explode.
• The Someone is exquisite. You have no idea.
• I must work 2-3 hours a day while with family in the Deep Red. Please advise.
• If you drink many bottles of this wine, you will have a vicious vicious hangover. Trust me: it is The Brain Science (as explained by The Wine Guy at the local liquor store) that proves it. If you do it with a bunch of fun and fabulous people in New York, it will be worth it.
• This morning I realized that The Someone and I have been together in four states (states as in the United, not psychological, physical, spiritual--feel like we have been in many more than four of some of these together) in the past seven weeks. (By the way--Happy Anniversary, TS.) We are fabulous gypsies.

Mirror Geography

How to write about this experience? How to write about The Someone? As I navigate this new and intense and passionate and brilliant new relationship, I am struggling with the hows and ifs of putting it into narrative form, especially here.

I will say this. It is one of those rare things. You meet and . . . BOOM. That's it. You are done for this world without this person and this person is done for this world without you.

How do you blog about that which is deeply personal? Love affairs? Those you love? I usually only blog in hints and bits and pieces about relationships, until they are over or nearly over. (In fact, the death knell of a relationship is usually when I start to blog about it.) But I have not felt this way about a person since I began blogging. Hell, I have felt this way only a couple of times in my life. Or maybe never exactly like this.

There is another element of this, an element those of you who recognize the post title as part of a quotation will easily guess, that makes blogging about this relationship a particular challenge. I actually want to blog about this element for many reasons--personal, political, theoretical. Again, though, this is very personal and involves a person and a relationship I want to protect. What to do?

Music update (lame!), Falling madly in love (not lame!)

In lieu of a real post (I know, I suck), I am updating the music meme that I posted before my head exploded, my body turned inside out, the earth tilted on its axis, and my whole world was--in short--rocked.**

All lyrics are identified and a couple of links are thrown in for fun and for the pure joy of watching that sweet Welsh rocker boy, Kelly Jones, as well as the one and only JT.

1. There was a rapture, so I can never see you anymore. (The Twilight Singers, "Bonnie Brae")
2. You don't need your name in bright lights. (Jamiroquai, "High Times")
3. Breaking away to the other side, I want to make sense of why we live and die. (Cowboy Junkies, "I Don't Get It")
4. In my mother's house, there's a photograph of a day gone past. (Corinne Bailey Rae, "Butterfly")
5. She found a fifth-wheel trailer and a blueblood cat. (Cash Monies and the Jetsetter, "Blueblood Cat")
6. You say you want a revolution. (The Beatles, "Revolution")
7. G Gb F E D Gmi C7 Bmi . . . (John Coltrane, "Spiral")
8. Jesus, don't cry. (Wilco, "Jesus, etc.")
9. Got to get in on the scene, hon? (Stereophonics, "Pedalpusher")
10. It's going down, Tennessee. (Justin Timberlake, "Chop Me Up")
11. The festival was over and the boys were all planning for a fall. (Dylan, "Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts")
12. Well, Annie's pretty neat. (David Bowie, "John I'm Only Dancing")
13. We came down the rivers and the highways. (The Doors, "Names of the Kingdom")
14. By the way, you know that hope will make you strange. (Jack Johnson, "Fall Line")
15. Someone and someone were down by the pond looking for something to plant in the lawn. (Neil Young, "Words")
16. Like a mirror, I'm nothing. (Morphine, "Like a Mirror")
17. Hangman, hangman, hold it a little while. (Led Zeppelin, "Gallows Pole")
18. Mary, Mary, where you been? (Stereophonics, "Madame Helga")
19. Hand over hand on the lifeline, luckily the knots stay tight. (Morphine, "Rope on Fire")
20. Seen the arrow on the doorpost saying this land is condemned all the way from New Orleans to Jerusalem. (Dylan, "Blind Willie McTell")
21. I told you how I feel but you don't care. (Fiona Apple, "Sleep to Dream")
22. Have I a hope or half a chance to even ask if I could dance with you? (Hurricane Smith, "Oh Babe, What Would You Say?")
23. Driving in the South, the motor's on fire. (Yo La Tengo, "We're an American Band")
24. I'm walking out in a force ten gale. (Radiohead, "Scatterbrain")
25. Turn off that weak jam, man. (The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, "Mr. Happy")

**It doesn't sound pleasant at all when I put it this way, does it? It is very very pleasant. I am still thinking through the ins and outs of blogging about The Someone. Stay tuned.

Promises to myself, without apology or guilt, for the rest of the '08

--I will spend at least one Spring day and one Spring night in Favorite City.

--I will be awake, as in all night awake, to watch the sun come up at least once this summer.

--I will swim in Favorite Pond at least twice by year's end, once in daylight and once by moonlight.

--I will take a long walk and have a long talk with my mother.

--I will finish at least three projects (creative, academic, or otherwise) by December.

--I will sit on my roof and watch the dragonflies.

--I will keep Rule #2 (Do you want to tell it, Dr. Crazy? Or guess it, anyone else?) in mind at all times.

--I will drink whiskey and drink it well.

Hooray! Happy Dance!*

Spring Break in Professor House was a productive and successful one. I wore many hilarious and freaky outfits, wrote a conference paper, and got through more of the rest of my to dos than I thought I would. Wooo hooo hoooo!!



*I have to confess something. Lately, when I blast music and dance wildly around the garret, which happens quite regularly, I have been doing this thing . . . I dance badly on purpose, imitating famous bad dances such as the Elaine dance, the old man in the Six Flags commercial dance, the Finnish YMCA dance, and the spastic Charlie Brown kid dance. It is great fun, but I am concerned. There is a good possibility, I fear, that soon I will forget how to dance any other way and this will just be the way I dance. And that I will do it in public. (Click on the links when you have a minute. You will not be sorry.)

Poetry Friday, Richard Brautigan (again)

A Good-Talking Candle

I had a good-talking candle
last night in my bedroom.

I was very tired but I wanted
somebody to be with me,
so I lit a candle

and listened to its comfortable
voice of light until I was asleep.

I think I have declared it Brautigan month at Professional Mirror. His stuff is just fitting my mood lately. I have seen a few recent posts around my little blogland discussing loneliness, so this one seemed fitting. It addresses the lonely but with the lightest of touches and more than a hint of everything is going to be just fine.

My mood has dipped this week. It made me realize just how happy and upbeat I have been this Fall, so I am not inclined to let the dip dip any further. A few things have brought me down: that asshat in my comments telling me I am a loser for being alone or that I am alone because I am a loser or some such nonsense which is nevertheless rude and hurtful; an INSANE amount of work combined with that time in the semester when you begin to think it an attractive idea to hurl yourself off a very tall building (or two); a ridiculous chain of events that has me having to go into work two weekends in a row; and the stalling out of the re-thing with Narcissistic String Theory guy.

Anyway, yay to Brautigan and good-talking candles and Autumn and boo hiss to asshats and too much work and narcissistic foolishness.

Poetry Friday, four from Richard Brautigan

Star Hole

I sit here
on the perfect end
of a star,

watching light
pour itself toward
me.

The light pours
itself through
a small hole
in the sky.

I'm not very happy,
but I can see
how things are
faraway.

After a weekend in Favorite City with very little sleep but much reveling and adventure and laughter and (more) fun and then a week of good classes and bad classes and a thousand meetings and a trillion different people needing things from me, I am left feeling exhilarated and exhausted. I have Brautigan's "Star Hole" on my refrigerator. I stuck it there almost by accident soon after I moved into the garret, but I have kept it there. I read it everyday, simply because it is in my line of sight as I open and close the fridge door. It's come to act as kind of a gauge for how in or out my life I am feeling that day. Having been in two very different worlds this week, I am feeling like I am viewing everything from a distance. The difference is I am very happy. I like shaking up my perspective. I am thinking it's a very, very good thing for me right now. I am not taking anything too terribly seriously, which is saving me from the terrible seriousness of certain people 'round Foggy C.

Here's three more from Brautigan, who has one of my favorite senses of humor and who died today in 1984. R.I.P. funny profound genius man. Photos are those taken by me from my super secret locations(s) last weekend with More Fun and the rock-n-roll circus.


Karma Repair Kit: Items 1-4

1. Get enough food to eat,
and eat it.

2. Find a place to sleep where it is quiet,
and sleep there.

3. Reduce intellectual and emotional noise
until you arrive at the silence of yourself,
and listen to it.

4.



Boo, Forever

Spinning like a ghost
on the bottom of a
top,
I'm haunted by all
the space that I
will live without
you.

The Ferris Wheel


The world was opening and closing its insane asylums and churches like a forgetful old man buttoning up his pants instead of unbuttoning them.
Are you going to go to the toilet in your pants, old man?
The rain was a dark Ferris wheel bringing us closer to Baudelaire and General Motors.
We were famous and we kicked walnut leaves.

The re-entry

The busyness of the re-entry, combined with a visit from More Fun this week, has left me no time to blog. I am still here, feeling at turns shell-shocked, energized, annoyed, ecstatic. Here's some of what I have been doing during my absence:

1. Attending the heteronormative dinner. Married with Children Colleague Who Refuses to Bring Her Husband to Work Things or to Exist as Half of Coupled Unit attended sans husband. Yay MWCCWRTBHHTWTOTEAGHOCU! (Really going to have to work on a better pseudonym for MWCCWRTBHHTWTOTEAGHOCU.)

2. Dancing with a man with a peg leg and parasol

3. Being cornered in a tiny pub by and very briefly enduring the advances of a Muckity Muck Professor of Fancy Medicine at Terribly Prestigious University who tried to woo me with ridiculous babble about Lear, the "soul," and "human nature"

4. Attending a vast array of meetings, one of which devolved into weirdly heteronormative part-professional, part-personal individual reportage of summer activities, during which I wanted to say something like "Well, there was this one really intense week when the condom broke. Thank god I had some Plan B on hand! I just threw myself into work on the revisions for that article." I also have this impulse at holiday time when I get those family form letters. (Someday I will post a Year of Medusa fantasy version of the holiday family letter.)

5. Drinking a vast array of adult beverages

6. Hanging out with the rock-n-roll circus

7. With More Fun, deciding on names for our children: for a girl, Emmylou Harris Fun, and for a boy, Lionel Richie Fun

The busyness and the More Fun fun will continue into next week. Planning to join More Fun in Favorite City this weekend. Could NOT BE MORE EXCITED about this. Remember how I said September is going to be mine all mine? I am really trying to let myself let that happen.

Poetry Friday, a Medusa original

Joy Drop

I spent a soft night with you distilled
Into your simple rich sweetness
The stuff of you I imagine was the child you
The whisper shimmer joy of you
(Held so tight so close to you in waking life)
Made full, let go to laugh, to talk with me
In hushed conspiratorial tones
About joy joy joy scandalous joy
And the promising transparency of masks
Always wavering, allowing me to see you
Like this, even as day breaks.

8-10-07

This was inspired by a happy dream I had just before waking this morning. In it, I was hanging out with some friends and family in a gorgeous old seaside house, made all of mahogany inside but full of rich light. I went from room to room, talking with all of these people I love. All of them--my mother, a friend from college, More Fun, my sister--were as content and happy and bright and calm as I had every seen them. I had this incredible feeling that I was having a conversation with the most essential part of each person, the most basic and joyous and untouched by any troubling thing in this world.

In the last part of the dream, the part most specifically referenced in the poem, I was rolling around in bed (not like that) with my friend, Feste, giggling and chatting about nothing. I woke up missing him and all the people in the house but feeling very content and happy and lucky indeed.

Fevah (in which I objectify fire fighters)

What is sweeter (and I do mean "sweet" as in "sweet bike, dude . . .ever take it off any sweet jumps?") than seeing two firemen in their little fire-fighting pants with their suspenders and their tight t-shirts shopping for dinner ingredients in the produce section of the grocery store? Nothing. I actually had to psychically slap myself a few times to snap myself out of the pineapple in one hand, mouth open, staring, blinking pose I assumed for oh, I don't know, a good 45 seconds. One of them caught me though and did the half-smile nod. I believe they were from the firehouse I run by every day on my summer running route. Ahhh. . . .the boys of Engine 7.

Spring has sprung, my friends, and I do believe I have the fever. This totally makes up for hairy half-naked yoga guy.

Rock-n-roll miscellany (in which I link to myself in a frenzy of self-absorbed self-reflection)

While it seems as though I headed my last post with a poem from a fifth-grader on a class trip, it is in reality a matter of not knowing how to get the captions with the pictures I took in Conference City. I kind of like what the mistake has produced, though--my imaginary fifth-grade, budding-anarchist thoughts on the state of the nation in poetic form.

I am back home from what turned out to be a rocking and exhausting conference. All manner of good professional things that will keep me insanely busy for the foreseeable future happened, as well as some personal fun with old friends and some camaraderie bordering on creepiness with The Grand He. I am also pretty sure that the daughter of a famous critic (and a great critic in her own right, but I am being cryptic) called me a whore in an elevator, at least in a roundabout, rhetorical (perhaps fictional) way.

My illusion of coming back to much less work, having finished the conference paper and trying to balance writing and teaching, has proved to be just that, an illusion. TDC is ever toxic and positively rabid in her demands. Still I am somehow re-energized and reminded of why I am in this profession, something (mystification?) a conference always magically does for me.

In home news, the Chalupa did brilliantly at her vacation home with Milo and Kitty. Remember More Fun? It's almost time for him to roll back into town with the rock-n-roll circus. I returned home to a message from him, reporting that he and Feste and Demetrius (a.k.a. the Now Married One True Love) were hanging out all weekend in Best City in All of Texas, feeling nostalgic for their beloved Medusa. Must find a way to get my work done and enjoy this year's Season of More Fun.

Happyhappyhappyhappyhappy

I am done with the filthily stupidly theoretically dense paper and it really isn't that filthy or stupid at all. Needs some tweaky* but I am pretty happy with it, happy enough anyway to deliver it.

I am very close to getting out of here for a few days. This makes me ridiculously, deliriously happy.

Chalupa is going to be staying at her vacation home, the home of my friend Paloma and her dog, Milo. Milo, an Australian Ridgeback mix weighing in at about 125 lbs., is literally 15 times bigger than the Chalupa. She could not care less about him, even though he steals her toys and follows her around the yard, peeing immediately on any spot she has sniffed for more than two seconds. She is, however, insanely in love with "Kitty" (because that's what Paloma names all her cats), a Katrina rescue from New O.

I will try to blog from the road. Yay! The road!


*Okay, that's a typo but I like it, so it stays. What exactly is a "tweaky"? Whatever it is, I think we all might need a little.

Quite possibly the most exhausting and most definitely one of the best days of my life

The Big Deal Personal Suckage? Resolved! In the best possible way--a way I in my wildest dreams and hopes could not have imagined a couple of months ago. I wish I did not have to be so cryptic, but it really is unbloggable. Just know I am tremendously relieved and deliriously happy.

Chunk-o-Pup? Coming to live with me tomorrow and if all goes well, which I expect it will, forever more!

The pictures, they will be forthcoming.

The bed, it is calling.

A very very good night to all.