Leave-taking

I’m buzzed on cheap white wine and the heady smell of wood smoke drifting in from a bonfire two or three houses down. This is essential.

I am a person invested in ritual; in the deliberate gestures (both small and great) that allow us to make meaning for ourselves in the world. I considered carefully how I might mark the end of my time in this small city. I would be on my own, as I was when I arrived. This too, seems essential.

The first summer we were here, we were the only tenants in the building. We ran wild, charging up and down the stairs, sliding down the banisters, and wandering out to the parking lot to dance under the moon. Moody made origami sunflowers for me, and we walked along the river, pointing out muskrats and herons to one another. It was hot—like this summer has been—and we slept on the porch, searching for a breeze, trying to keep cool. In the two weeks I spent alone after moving in (before Moody arrived) I felt like an intruder, sleeping on the sofa when our bed felt too big for me alone. Together we were at home, and when I am old and grey, I will remember the first summer.

In many ways, this summer has been a strange echo of that one. Since Moody went ahead to Manhattan, I’ve wandered around like a ghost, spackling and sanding, packing and painting. Nothing is sufficient. So I sit on our sun porch, searching for a breeze in the hot night, watching the lights turn on and off in the cell-like rooms of the hotel across the way. They reflect in the slow black river, trembling gold and orange—the night’s only stars.

Somewhere (in rooms inside of rooms inside of rooms inside me) there is a 12-year-old girl, howling for another home left behind. This is the longest I’ve lived in one place since I was six years old, and that is something. Onward.

Winter Update

The research and discovery process for writing a dissertation in contemporary art history (and perhaps for other fields?) is akin to bailing water from a doomed little boat. There’s always more water surging into the vessel, and you’re either going to exhaust yourself bailing or concede to life under water. Every day I stumble upon new work and new theory that rocks the supports of the unsteady structure I’ve begun, as if in a dream. Did I write that? Was that my idea? It’s strange to simultaneously feel so entangled with and so disconnected from your work. I almost lost my mind over a passage in Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections the other day, convinced that it would brighten the dark corners of my project but completely flummoxed by its real meaning. For about 10 minutes I was resolved to recreate Jung’s miniature stone village in the hope of “discovering my own myth” and the vivid mute secrets of dwelling that are the foundation of my work. Then I made tea and went back to bailing water.

The past few months have been filled by many such ridiculous crises, and I have little else to report. Moody and I dressed up as Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix for Halloween, and were correctly identified by no one. We had a sweet little Christmas together and sailed into 2015 with tummies full of pizza.

Happy New Year!

The (End of) Summer Self

Everything and nothing happened this summer. I turned 25 and I taught a summer class at my university, but mostly I just struggled with my dissertation and felt guilty for every moment not spent struggling on it. Amanda Ann Klein said it best in her essay for Judgmental Observer: Academia conditions us to feel that when we’re not working, we don’t exist. It’s maddening and saddening, but perhaps the natural byproduct of a community of people driven enough to seek PhDs. My problem is that I’ve never been a particularly ambitious person. People who have known me a long time will probably laugh at this claim, but it’s the truth. I simply love learning (though less now than I used to).

Summer is a strange time for me. When the characters and rhythms of the university aren’t present, immediate, and ordering my life, I find it trickier to maintain the illusion that those characters and rhythms make sense in my life. They really don’t, but I have no plans to let that stop me.

I recently read a personal essay on The Hairpin (if you’ve never visited, you really ought to) that has stuck with me. In it, Taisia Kitaiskaia writes about the summer-self that withdraws from world, creating a kind of social vacuum where it may then grow large, swollen with its own intensity:

It’s like slipping outside of time—societal, human time. It’s in these slack summers that I feel most immortal, as unknown and useless as a god, unseen by any mortal eye and somehow full of a vain and hopeless majesty. I fill up more space in the room. Strange thoughts grow unimpeded.

Strange thoughts indeed. Here are some photos from this summer:

Summer Slowdown

Summer's End

It's unfortunate that I've come to measure the usefulness of time spent strictly by CFPs answered and syllabuses tweaked. This summer has been productive in so many other ways, as I must remind myself. I did my fair share of work, but there was also...(drum roll)...painting!  Running and novel-reading! Cooking and music! Largely fruitless dissertation plotting! Swimming in the sea! A birthday! It was much like last summer....and that's alright by me.

On my last day by the ocean, a pair of little girls was watching me draw mermaids and dinosaurs and planets and sunflowers in the sand. They were too shy to come up to me, but as soon as I went back down to the water, they started to draw; first copies of my own scribbles, and then their own fantastic creations. It was one of my favorite moments of the summer, not only because I got to watch somebody very small create something very great, but also because it's been a while since I've had the pure pleasure of creating something lovely, or useful, or something that makes me feel productive in a way having nothing at all to do with scholarly texts, or dissertation chapters, or the perfect flow of a good syllabus.

It's a feeling I forget too easily once fall creeps up again. It's my last semester of coursework, however, so hopefully (despite the looming dissertation), more such moments and good feelings lie ahead.

Running Wild

I’d like to believe that my mind never needs to pause, that there’s a constant stream of fascinating people and things and ideas in the world, and so my consideration of those things should, likewise, be constant. But my mind has been (more or less) OFF for the past two months and DAMN if it didn't feel good. I almost don’t even feel guilty about it. We get so tired, sometimes, that the gorgeous, glittering moments of search and understanding that make us love learning begin lose their luster. Sleep, I say! Sleep and run and swim in the sea and—when it strikes your fancy—read a book! A novel, even! Go positively wild.

And then you’ll be inspired again. KaBOOM!

"I wanted to kiss you hello."

This is truly inspiring. Here is the kind of love we should all be building:

Eleven Years Later

Last week Annie McClanahan came to the UofR to give her a talk based on her current book project, "Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First Century Culture”, which, according to her website, “explores how cultural texts have been compelled to account for the expansion and collapse of a financialized credit economy.” Analyzing foreclosure photos and horror films like Drag Me to Hell (2009) and Dream Home (2010)—both which center on the housing market--

Normally, deciding whether or not I want to hear a talk is simple, depending exclusively on my interest and availability. Other factors were at play for me with this particular talk, however. Having experienced foreclosure at twelve years old, it’s hard to imagine anyone explaining or intellectualizing that which, for me, will always be duly ineradicable and impossible. And mine.

McClanahan gave an excellent talk and, I think, an important one. But I’m full of anger when I think about photographs of my old home enlarged and projected for the scrutiny of graduate students and educators. There were moments in the talk when McClanahan quickly showed stills from Dream Home, apologizing for their gruesomeness before moving onto a more pleasant picture. But she lingered over the photographs of gutted and vandalized interior spaces, remarking during the question and answer session that those responsible for the damage must have been “incredibly angry” about their eviction to have acted so destructively.

For me, the foreclosure photographs were infinitely more traumatic than those film stills of spilled intestines and blood-spattered floors. In fact, they might be quite similar, showing, as they do, different forms of absolute carnage. I’m not sure someone who hasn’t experienced the incredible anger of foreclosure can experience its photographs as truly traumatic—and experience their anger again as a result.

It’s strange to be reminded of the ways in which my past will reappear and challenge me in my academic life.

THROW YOUR LIFE AWAY (Or Just The Parts You Don't Need Anymore)

There’s this steamer trunk I’ve had since middle school. It’s grey and crooked like an old elephant, and it’s covered in an unfortunate sticker hodgepodge representing various phases and causes and foreign countries I may or may not have visited. There are terrifying “meat is murder” PETA ones, a Harley Davidson flag, and a Scottish coat of arms. There’s a Beatles sticker I got in Liverpool, and a Berlin sticker I found in Poughkeepsie. The trunk lives in the back corner of my sun porch. One of the wheels broke off the last time I moved, so one end rests slightly higher than the other. If you set a round object on it, the object will roll. Cylinders, when placed on their sides, will also roll.

Periodically, I open this steamer trunk, and evaluate the contents. There are photos of my grandparents when they were young, my graduation caps from high school and college, concert tickets, museum pamphlets, valentines, and every beer bracelet I’ve ever gotten. Last summer, my boyfriend worked an early morning shift, and I’d wake up to a note or a drawing EVERY SINGLE DAY. They’re all in there. The corsage my best friend from high school (who turned out to be gay) gave me for our first dance is in there. The New York Times from the morning after Obama was elected. My hospital bracelet from the time I almost cut my finger off at Vassar. A headless, shapeless “Nefertiti Statue” I whittled out of clay when I was ten. Basically, it’s all in there.

Today I opened up the trunk for the first time in more than a year. It’s a strange thing to look at your life condensed and so selectively. Like, I hated high school, but it all looks very pleasant in material retrospect.

I’m happy to have most of what’s in my trunk, but during this particular evaluation, I was very much bothered by all of the shiny plastic trophies. We really need to stop rewarding kids for perfect attendance. I went to school with pneumonia more than once for the sake of those darn trophies. MORE THAN ONCE.

Flute trophies, math trophies, history trophies. SO MUCH PLASTIC. I was even “MOST IMPROVED” in my kiddie soccer league, because I learned where on the field I should be standing when I was playing “offence” versus when I was playing “defense”. Annnnnnnnnnnd there was a trophy for it.

So, basically, I am laden with plastic trophies I will never display, and probably (definitely) didn’t deserve. WHY DID I BRING THESE TO GRAD SCHOOL WITH ME? They might be made of plastic, but cumulatively, they are. So. Freaking. Heavy. I should apologize to my stepfather and brother-in-law for bringing these trophies with me to Rochester. They were carried up many stairs.

Picking through my trunk, I suddenly HAD to purge them. I have no idea why it hadn’t occurred to me sooner, but once I started throwing genie-lamp-shaped “BEST CURSIVE WRITER” trophies away, lots of other things fell into the trash bag vortex. Drawings I did of mermaids when I was eight, with their chests covered by mint green clam shells. GONE. An eye patch from the Pirates’ Cove mini golf course in Lake George. GONE. Dry, rotten carnation corsage. GONE (sorry Michael, it was gross). Picture-day pictures from the most awkward years of my life. GONE GONE GONE. Oh, and the beer bracelets.

Holy cannoli, it felt DAMN good to get rid of these things. Why do we hold on to so much STUFF? I’m not even talking about photos. I’m talking about stuff. The horrible little knickknack-y things we can’t stand to throw away but really really REALLY just need to throw away.

Throw that shit away. I highly recommend it.

But neon pink Vassar FannyPack, I AM KEEPING YOU.

One Year Down, Many More To Go

I’m finally at the end of my first year of PhD-ing, and here’s what I’ve discovered:

1.) Learning is like growing out your hair. You don’t see it getting any longer, until one day you look at an old photo of yourself and realize it’s down to your knees.

2.) Thirty and forty-year-old PhD students are really just gossip-loving, angst-ridden high schoolers. Who like to talk about mise en abyme and indexicality.

3.) It is no longer permissible to have “glitter” or “Jack Daniels” themed parties. Mad Men dress-up parties and cat birthdays are, however, acceptable.

4.) Sneaky undergrads will come to your office hours and attempt, under the guise of needing help with a paper, to have you write it for them.  At which point you may guiltlessly convince them to give up on their topic and write about phenomificulumpificusousness in Camera Lucida.

5.) There is, apparently, a point at which oversized flannel stops being appropriate class-wear. And it is so, so sad.

Five or six more years to go. Whoaaaa baby.

Update: I'm Getting Old

Yes, I know that 22 is actually quite young. I'm still not old enough to rent a car. Or be President. A little more than a year ago, my love of good whiskey was confined to lusty dorm parties, and I had a TERRIBLE  fake ID that I dared not use. So yes, I'm technically quite young.

But I'm getting old. Here's how I know.

The University of Rochester is a very different kind of school compared to Vassar, which is what I tend to use as my measure for what a school ought to be. Unfair, I know, but I've been spoiled. So when nine out of ten students in a class are blatantly texting on bedazzled iPhones in class (phones out on the table top, not even attempting to hide what they're doing under the table) and the professor just sighs and keeps teaching, I get mad. I get realllll mad.

It's not just because I have a five-year-old flip phone with a broken display and an unreliable "3". I love my phone. I'm a technophobe whose fears are generally reserved for complicated phones. So mine is just perfect for me. I'm not jealous of portable internet capability or functioning touch screen "3"s. That's not the issue.

I read a news tidbit a while ago about a Yale professor who took some heat for choosing a classroom without wi-fi/cell service for his art history survey course. AND I DECIDED HE WAS MY HERO.

I just can't stand in-class-texters. Maybe it's a respect thing. Maybe I'm a huge nerd, and I just genuinely like learning, and think everyone else should too. Or maybe I'm just getting old.

The Great Pumpkin: A Rochester Update

Now that my first semester as a graduate student his half way over, I’m realizing that this 5-year adventure is going to go a lot more quickly than I had imagined. It was almost five months ago that Moody and I were unpacking all of our stuff and hanging out in a bathtub full of cold water for hours at a time to escape the 106° summer heat. But it seems like no time has passed at all!

I feel like a little bit of a black sheep in my program, because I’m 5 years younger than the next-youngest person in it, with many of the other PhD-seekers well into their thirties and even forties. In some ways, it’s not as weird as you might think (I don’t know what’s in the water here in Rochester, but none of these 30-something-year-olds look like they could possibly be older than 25). But I think there’s a certain level of resolve needed to go after this degree, and it’s expected to come with age and experience. As a result, I’m not always taken seriously. If I were a dude, I’d grow a beard and look oh-so-distinguished. Problem solved. Moody’s been growing a prodigious beard, and, just yesterday, he bought a toasty grandpa cardigan from Banana Republic. When beard and cardigan join forces, I’d put him at about 65 years old. Lucky duck. Anyway, I've decided to embrace immaturity for just a bit longer. Abusing graduate privileges can be oodles of fun. For example, there are a number of lounges and study spaces on campus that are devoted to phd-seeking people, and it's great fun to go in there and eat an apple as loudly as possible. The physics and engineering phds, in particular, get super enraged. Cookies work as well.

Halloween is coming up! Sadly, I don’t think we’ll have an occasion for dressing up, but we had planned an excellent corny couple’s-costume: Moody was going to be the Doctor, and I was going to be the TARDIS. As it is, I think we’ll probably have a beer and candy-fueled double feature movie night. We keep buying big bags of candy to put away for the holiday itself, but can’t manage to leave them unopened for more than a day or two. I’ve been in a Sour Patch Kids-induced semi-comatose state for about a week now. And I’m ok with it.

We jumped the gun a little on buying our pumpkins. We picked one up two weeks ago on our weekly Wegmans trip, but, failing to remember that a pumpkin is a fruit and, like any other fruit, needs to be kept cold, woke up after a few days to find a big soupy pumpkin mess in the middle of our living room. In case you didn’t know, rotten pumpkins smell terrible. Now we’re biding our time and praying to the pumpkin gods that we’ll be able to find what we need a litttttttle closer to Halloween. Moody hasn’t ever carved a pumpkin before, which I consider a crime. Soon to be remedied.

A Rochester Update: Harry/Harriet Edition

 Posts have been few and far between for the past few days, and here is the reason! Moody and I have been busy saving the world. Actually, just one abandoned kitten. But stuff like this means the world to me, so there ya go.

Days ago we started hearing these pitiful meows coming from the parking lot and garage area out behind our building. Since I never ever miss an opportunity to run outside and cuddle other people's cats, I, of course, ran outside to go discover the cat and cuddle it. But there was no cat, so back inside I went.

This went on for days, and the weather was getting chillier. But no sign of a cat, until finally I spotted her, a teeeeeeny black kitten with green eyes, all holed up in our garage and clearly lacking a mama. The trouble was that since the munchkin had been born in the wild and, I assume, was abandoned, she was not at all used to people and was absolutely terrified of us. I started leaving food and water out for her, but we just couldn't get near enough to catch her, so off to Lowe's we went.

Sixty dollars poorer and the proud new owners of a "Havahart" trap, we headed home determined to capture the munchkin before dark. If you don't already know, Havahart traps are the best. Yes, they're expensive, but they help you catch strays without hurting them so you can find them good homes and eliminate world-suck. You can't put a price on that.

Moody and I aren't particularly adept at following instructions or putting contraption-y things together, but we managed to get the thing up and operational without taking any fingers off, and baited it with a stinky can of tuna. Less than an hour later, we heard it snap shut, and went outside to retrieve our bounty. I'm not gonna lie, it wasn't easy. We had one very rough night where she wouldn't come out of the trap, and basically made us feel terrible by looking up at us with the saddest pleading eyes I've ever seen. There also may have been some poorly-aimed kitten accidents. But she was safe from the cold and from Jeb (if you don't recall, the feisty raccoon who sometimes visits the yard and who could have easily finished this little dolly off), and we were very, very relieved about that.

Within a day, the kitten, who we were calling Harriet, was cuddling in my lap and eating like a champ. We were getting very, very attached, but knew we wouldn't be allowed to keep her, so we started looking for a nice family to give Harriet a home. Luckily, I have an amazing network of extremely kind graduate students at my disposal, and we managed to find her a wonderful elementary school principal, and his wife, who have since taken Harriet. And, surprise! She's a he. After a trip to the vet, Harriet must now be Harry in our memories. More seriously though, the vet told Harry's new owners that Harry had some nasty (but treatable!) parasites in his tummy, and that if we hadn't taken him in, he wouldn't have made it more than a few weeks. His new owners are naming him Butter Roll, which I really don't understand, but as long as they're loving him, that's good enough for me. I'm going to keep thinking of him as Harry.

So here's a lesson for you, thoroughly ingrained in me by my very good mum, and one you should have too. Never, ever look away from a stray animal. A lot of people suck, and if you don't do something to help, it's likely that nobody will. Even if you don't like cats, or dogs, or whatever beastie it happens to be, do the right thing. Moody, for example, isn't the biggest cat fan, but he does happen to be a really good person, and was completely on board with helping this little dude out. If nothing else, do it for the good karma.

In summary:  Havahart traps are wonderful, and worth the money. People name their animals very strange things, but it's alright. I love cats, but am really terrible at reading their gender.

Salad, or Dessert? A Rochester Update

Salad, or dessert? The choice says a lot about you.

I am making a mango upside-down cake. Why am I making a mango upside-down cake? Because my graduate program is throwing the new PhD firsties a BBQ, with instructions to bring significant others, children, and, of course, a contribution of either salad or dessert. I am bringing dessert. Salads are quite nice. I eat and enjoy them. But the whole apartment smells like warm brown sugar and sweet, juicy mangoes. Which is why I’m making dessert.

After a week of classes, and twice that of TAing, I still can’t say much about the fancy art of PhD-getting. I am a photocopying expert. I have staked out a comfy chair in the graduate lounge. I’m tired. But not nearly as tired as I was as an undergrad, which has, perhaps, more to do with drinking less whiskey than with having less work. Hi Mom.

One thing I can say for certain is that I have come to believe in the sort of weird and whimsical fate that could shuffle a dozen or more people into and out of my life and leave me with exactly the ones I needed, but didn’t know I needed. The past eight months have worked out, somehow, with each difficulty and change forming together a new starting space that I think I will grow to love. It’s a new mathematics where the qualitative measures of the negatives magically fill in any lack with something that’s sweeter than space. To sum it up: this is where everything gets good.

In other news:

1. We have added a raccoon named Jeb to our rotating schedule of woodland visitors. He likes to grab onto a branch that hangs close to the windows of our second-floor sun porch, and watch us play scrabble. He has yet to find a branch that will give him the vantage point to watch Doctor Who with us, but I believe that it may be his ultimate goal.
2.  I have perfected the Swiss cheese omelet. Which is important, if not vital.
3. Yesterday, I made note that my Christmas list consists of:

•  Bob Ross’s The Joy of Painting, the complete DVD collection
•  An electric hand mixer
•   Fuzzy socks

And I realized these tell you everything you will ever need to know about me. There is no more.

Notes From A Very Strange Place

After Vassar, 600 or so 21-year-olds sit, spread over thousands of miles, wondering what the fuck just happened. College is bizarre. The price of an education is a front for what it costs to step out of time, to freeze it, or maybe just to tweak the part of your brain that minds its passage. You look older, and so do I, but where did the time go, and why do I miss you?

I'm lucky, because my very favorite piece of Vassar packed up his stuff and came with me to Rochester. So there are two of us sitting in a room, wondering what the fuck just happened. I don't know who he's missing. But there's someone I used to eat lunch with at my desk in the art gallery every Tuesday. And there's someone who used to beg me to climb out and sit with him on this huge fallen tree limb over the gorge by his town house. There's the person who bought me my very first Starbucks coffee and the one who used to run around in a Gumby costume. And, hot damn, I miss them. You can call and email and type out pithy Facebook posts till the world ends, but it's an abstraction of what's over.

This is why I'm getting a PhD. More time-freezing. Sort of.