End of Year Meme

As seen at Hilaire's and Dr. Crazy's:


1. What did you do in 2008 that you’d never done before?
-Had a baby!
-Taught the SAT
-Taught at a community college
-Lived in a travel trailer at a campground for five months.

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I don't think I made any resolutions last year. For 2009, I'd like to keep up some daily or near-daily or at least regular progress (darling baby makes daily anything impossible) on my research/academic writing. I'd also like to get into writing essays, a long-promised goal.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
ME! In addition to me there were blogfriends, somewhat distant but very loving friends, and family of friends who all gave birth this year.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
My folks' family cat.

5. What countries did you visit?
Shockingly, none. But after 2007's adventures, staying in one place was enough.

6. What would you like to have in 2009 that you lacked in 2008?
Money. Much more regular income. And enough of it.

7. What dates from 2008 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
October 22: Absurdist Baby's birth!
October 10-11: his due date

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Is having a baby an achievement? Really just getting through the incredible stress of working so hard for so little was a huge achievement. Not getting more depressed than I got after my c-section was a huge achievement. Somehow managing to be on the market and teach two classes while pregnant and then in the first weeks with a baby -- I really don't know how I managed that.

9. What was your biggest failure?
Not being more gracious.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
I had a minor form of preeclampsia. I also had an unplanned C-section. I did have a terrible cold at one point that taught me that you can cough so much you throw up. I went in to check out a breast lump.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
I did not make any fabulous purchases this year.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
Absurdist Lover, at least in the five or so months. The world's: we received a lot of needed items like furniture through the whims of fate. One Tired Ema, whose mailed gift makes my continued working life possible. My sister, who has been fabulous.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
Judgmental and Rigid Former Friend. When a very good friend of mine told her about some of my life's developments, JRFF said some really hurtful and terrible things, the kinds of things that you don't say about a friend and call her a friend. These things inevitably got back to me (especially since I told my very good friend that I didn't feel I was a good enough friend to JRFF), but when she wrote to me, she was all kindness. Yet I know what she really thinks of me. I've thought often of addressing it, sending her an email telling her I know what she really thinks. But I haven't.

14. Where did most of your money go?
Rent and bills. Vitamins and supplements for pregnancy. Medical expenses.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Oh the baby, what else? And that I got four interviews at MLA. Christmas.

16. What song will always remind you of 2008?
Probably the MASH theme song, just because I watch that show virtually every day.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:a) happier or sadder? b) thinner or fatter? c) richer or poorer?
happier, I think, thinner, poorer

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
I wish I'd written more.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?
Worried.

20. How will you be spending Christmas?
I spent Christmas cutting fudge for presents, being with Absurdist Lover and Baby, and then went to my folks and ate Christmas dinner.

21. Did you fall in love in 2008?
Only with Absurdist Baby.

22. How many one-night stands?
Zero, thank you very much.

23. What was your favorite TV program?
MASH.

24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
Judgmental and Rigid Former Friend.

25. What was the best book you read?
I've read very few books this year. Early on in the pregnancy, I could only focus on mysteries -- so I reread Agatha Christie's and read an Elizabeth George. Then I started Middlemarch and was reading it for six months in tiny drips. But I listened to both Steve Martin's Born Standing Up and Barbara Kingsolver et al's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Kingsolver et al get my vote -- yes, even over Middlemarch. (I prefer nonfiction to fiction. I don't mean to. I wanted to be a novelist, for goodness sakes. But there it is.)

26. What was your greatest musical discovery?
I am totally behind the times and made no musical discoveries this year. In fact, I listened to classical music throughout the pregnancy.

27. What did you want and get?
A very healthy baby. Interviews.

28. What did you want and not get?
Financial stability, though with Absurdist Lover having gotten a full-time job recently, I think our financial position is changing.

29. What was your favorite film of this year?
Would you believe that even though Sex and the City and Mamma Mia came out this year, I have not seen either. The only movie I saw in the theater this year was The Dark Knight.

30. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
36 (gulp). I took care of the baby and then went out to dinner with the fam.

31. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Financial or romantic stability.

32. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2008?
As long as it covers me up, it's okay.

33. What kept you sane?
IMing Maude.

34. What celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
None.

35. What political issue stirred you the most?
Local farming/eating.

36. Who did you miss?
Maude. Jane D. All my friends in Grad City.

37. Who was the best new person you met?
My midwife. I also felt like I met my sister all over again.

38. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2008.
Nothing happens the way you want it to, but that's okay. Also, having a baby puts you more in touch with your own childhood and sense of wonder.

39. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.
No.

Belly Photo, Finally, and a Rundown of the Week

This photo is actually from a couple weeks ago now, when Similarly Neurotic Fabulous Friend (who really needs a better pseudonym) asked for pictures. Please ignore my giant fat arms.

Much is going on here -- both good and bad. Here's the good: my fabulous grandmother (the same one who has breast cancer and had a lumpectomy and lymph node removal in the last few months) fronted me the money for the birth center. So we're a little less freaked out over here at Chez Absurd about money. Of course, next week things may be very different -- but I'm totally pleased that we're going to be able to go to our midwife and birth center with no problems, especially since we've just started our birth class there (which seems to be more information and education than sitting around doing deep breathing exercises and singing kumbayah, which I'm sure would be good too -- my apologies to Bradley and Lamaze classes for characterizing them that way -- I could do with someone telling AL to massage my back even more). Other good: Absurdist Lover's job is officially set to launch on Monday. That is, the call center will be working and he's all scheduled on their list and hopefully they'll call him a lot and send him to fix computers a lot! Not only will this really help with money (assuming he gets a good amount of work), but equally important, he will feel more productive and happy with himself. He's not the type who sort of falls apart and gets depressed and hopeless when not employed, but working will really make him feel better and stronger. More good: Grandpa is getting better, though he is quite tired. Even more good, though strange: a state university has called me about coming in to interview for adjunct work. I don't know exactly where the u is and cannot make the interview times they mentioned on the message, so I'm not exactly thrilled yet, but it's nice to know my CV is still academically viable -- I'm so swiss-cheese brained that I feel like I'll never get hired again.

The big bad is that a professor I know was, I believe, found dead in Grad City early this week. The details are really unclear to me but it appears now that he killed himself. Or at least that's what the police have determined, which I think means that there was no note. He was a good man who cared a lot about grad student issues, and I had a good working relationship with him. I'll miss him, though of course it feels only vaguely real considering that Grad City is so far away. Every day I've looked for info and obits, but similar to last year when a friend of mine killed herself, the newspapers there are not very forthcoming in cases of suicide. (Can I just stop here to focus on me and say that I really don't like this particular pattern? Three people I've known in Grad City have killed themselves in as many summers. I don't like this, not one little bit.) The most pressing issue about all this is that Maude's defense is in a week or so -- and what do you do when your advisor checks out right before your defense? I want to call the department and make sure that it's going to happen, to beg my advisor to please sit in (though Peppy Advisor is in a totally different field and is not Maude's fave person) or something! Not that she can't do it herself, of course, but. . .I just want to do something.

In other news, I'm starting to research vaccinations, because Absurdist Lover is adamantly against them; my view in the past has been that I would really rather not have my child contract polio, but now that I see the sheer volume of vaccinations we're talking about -- it's just alarming how many times medical science advocates poking a child. A vaccination for chicken pox? Uh, I had the chicken pox as a kid, and I don't think there's any reason to take a shot for it. Having chicken pox is uncomfortable but that's not a good enough reason to potentially mess with the development of a baby-child when I swear we really don't know enough about child development to really say whether all these vaccinations are completely safe. Flu shots? Easy. They don't work anyway. I'm pretty skeptical of what the medical establishment thinks it "knows" about childbirth and child development -- I believe it's perfectly possible that the mercury in these shots may cause autism in mercury-sensitive children and the medical establishment just hasn't caught on yet. (Though avoiding fish -- I just can't do that, can't condone that. We ADDers NEED our fish oil omegas!) After all, the medical establishment hasn't caught on to the idea that important hormonal bonding happens between mother and child in the first hours after childbirth (which is why rooming-in is important) or that epidurals and pitocin are bad for the mother and baby (oxygen-deprivation risk to baby, not being in touch with your body during, arguably, the most important physical experience of your life, drugs passing to the baby) or that sugar metabolism, g-i tract problems, and one's reproductive cycle are related. So I'm trying to do somewhat balanced research, distrusting the extremist alarmist views (as is my wont) and evaluating the science, while of course taking into account the views of the granola set with whom I often agree. Sigh. Parenting has more contested issues in it than anything I think I've ever been a part of. (Circumcision, schooling, diapers, vaccinations, staying at home versus working -- as if I have the choice -- gah and double gah!) Oy vey.

Today I only go to the office, thank goodness, though I'm having a good time teaching as well. And this weekend Absurdist Lover will be at a meeting on Saturday and then going to see his children on Sunday, so I will get some time to myself and obsess and worry focus on other things -- me things, like maybe the academy and writing. I am not going to obsess and worry about AL. I simply refuse. Maybe I'll continue reading Middlemarch (the authorial commentary and intrusion annoys me so it's been slow going) or maybe I'll watch all the movies that I don't watch when AL is here and work on this cross-stitch project. Or maybe I'll just play WoW. Let's face it -- I'll probably blog. Woohooo!

RBOC

All I can manage right now is a bullet list. Here goes.

• I'm starting a college admissions and essay writing course in a summer program tomorrow. GAH!
• My grandfather is in the hospital, recovering from major abdominal surgery. The blockage he had in his small intestine looks like it's cancer.
  
• My mother had a seemingly serious g-i tract problem of her own, where she was telling me how alone and isolated she felt. (She lives in a faraway city without family, or, as far as I can tell, many friends.) She was totally going nuts, ending up in the hospital, but then even though there were no tests performed, no answers about her condition, she just decided that she wasn't going to take it very seriously. That is, she's not going to deal with it or get the tests that a few days before she believed were crucial. She had completely whipped me into a frenzy, getting me to rally the other kids into supporting her with phone calls. And then she decides she's just going to wait for her low-income city insurance to kick in rather than ask her mom for the money for a really good specialist. She should be able to have her test in one-four months. After me really taking a lot of time and energy out to support her, I am just not amused. She whips me into her drama, then when she decides that the drama should end, she wonders why I think she's being ditzy and irresponsible about her potentially-serious condition. We are not amused. I want those days back where I tired myself out worrying about her.
• I still don't have the whole birth center/insurance thing worked out. At least I can now ask my grandmother because I know she's not going to be tapped for an expensive specialist and tests by my ditzy mom.
• My intensive SAT class ends tomorrow.
• I have an editing job due Tuesday.
• I'm 26 weeks pregnant and getting big and uncomfortable, especially since I have still not been able to afford a new bra. (I tried to go and get a maternity bra, but apparently dumb stores like A Pea in the Pod think that all women start off as A- and B-cups, so we all have double Ds when our boobs have inflated like balloons. Uh, someone ought to explain that some of us girls have. . .well, big girls to begin with. Even online, the prospect of decent support for these pregnant super-boobs is not good. JC Penney's seems to have bras. But by the time I did all this research, the money ran out.)
• My laptop is screwy, just dying and overheating and turning off in the middle of working. It clearly needs to be fixed. But that requires. . .
• Money that we don't have. The money crunch over here at Absurdist Household continues. Even working two jobs. Even with Absurdist Lover having gotten hired last week -- at a start-up company that hasn't yet really started up. Oy.
• We got library cards. Woohoo!
  

I Should Change My Name

to Earnest Austen or Not-so-Earnest-or-Well-Read-but-Somehow-Got-through-Three-English-Degrees.

Found at Maude, in Progress.
The top 100 or so books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users.
Bold the books you have read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre (the first time was when I was 10!)
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace (We had to choose a classic when I was in 9th grade, so I chose this one, much to the amazement of my teacher. Yes I did get extra time to finish the doorstop.)
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner (I decided to teach this one in a class. That counts as school, no?)
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (One of many books I started but did not finish for school.)
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion is this (?)
There is Confusion (?)
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

Happier Update

I may just be the worst blogger ever, especially since so many of you left such sweet comments on my last mournful post. And this is going to be a shortie post (yeah right) because I'm already late getting myself going today. But I wanted to let you all know that things are looking up. I was starting to feel better and stronger (okay, partly with fantasies that Absurdist Lover would regret not being with me big time) and enlisted even more help from my family and started looking at apartments. This was not the week that just passed, but the week before. Of course right as I began to be able to imagine going on and getting an apartment and going on the market again in the fall, Absurdist Lover called and said he wanted me back. The following weekend we got back together, somewhat provisionally, because he's got to work on some things that will make it possible for us to move forward. We'll see how it goes.

The SAT class that started so poorly is now over; most of my students are likely even done with the official SAT, today being their test date. I hope they do okay, though many of them, in typical student fashion, did not do their homework.

Here's a teaser for my next post, which I promise will come in the next few days: so I get insurance where they have one birth center in my area. Did I think to call first to make sure they were still a birth center? No. I called on Wednesday: they are not a birth center anymore -- they only do prenatal care and then birth at the hospital. Dear lord in heaven! Why do I not want to have my baby in a hospital if I can possibly help it? Why am I starting to go crazy when people look at me as if I'm nuts when most people are born and give birth in hospitals? What's wrong with a place for treating sick people when giving birth, the most natural thing in the world? Well, for me (and only for me -- I'm not trying to foist these ideas on anyone else -- hell, I've done drugs for fun --I totally get why someone would want to have an epidural for childbirth!), the whole midwife versus doctor and at home or birth center versus hospital thing is really important -- and it's totally getting under my skin since I have to justify myself every five seconds when people ask incredulously: don't you want a doctor? So expect a "medical model rant" soon.

In other news, I'm listening to Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (my first payday I got paid by both the office and the SAT place, I finally retired Steve Martin's CD of Born Standing Up, which I still recommend, by the way) and if you've ever cared one whit about food and what's in it and where it comes from, consider going and reading/listening to it. It's frigging amazing.

Also, I'm seventeen weeks. I've been pregnant for just about ever and will go on being pregnant forever. It's hot. I need air conditioning. My carbon footprint is Big Foot sized, especially since i still live in the forest and am shlepping into the city. Also, in the morning, I can wear my pre-pregnancy jeans (though not pre-pregnancy tops since my boobs have inflated like hot-air balloons), but after I eat and by the end of the day, they are chronically unbuttoned, becoming the most uncomfortable clothes ever that basically have to be peeled off, seventies style when tight was all right. (Am I the only person who remembers that it was totally normal to lie on your bed to zip your Calvins or Jordache's up?) It's very odd. Because my nice clothes are bigger, since I've ballooned up and down between fat and almost slender (which is my version of hottie) in grad school, I can pretty much still wear those pants. When am I going to look pregnant?

Pensive Thursday Update

So I found out from my father last night that though it was the business partner's idea to bring me on, now he's very ambivalent. But their accounting is in a mess, so they need me to come and fix it so they can see how much money they are making. So they are bringing me on as an independent contractor until they get a sense of how much money there is. Dad thinks there is still a good shot of my getting hired and therefore getting insurance, but my optimism is receding fast. I start on Monday. My SAT course starts officially on Tuesday, though I'm proctoring an exam on Saturday morning, unfortunately not very near here on some high school campus I've never visited, but need to tomorrow so I don't freak out on Saturday. In both cases I need the money and can't afford to say no. But with our financial position in flux, I still have not been able to see a doctor. The two social services options include having to go and prove how much money I have way before I can see a doctor/midwife -- and I confess I was hoping to avoid the whole problem of having to have this baby without any options. But I'm almost thirteen weeks. It's making me nervous. And I'm trying not to be negative, because it really bothers Absurdist Lover (not to mention me), but I'm starting to feel desperate again. So I think I'm going to out and out ask my folks for the money to go see a midwife associated with a birthing center. What's not clear to me is whether a nurse-midwife can do all the tests that I'm going to need. Do I need a doctor and a nurse-midwife? I just don't know. I suppose I need to call a birthing center and find out how all this works.

What else? I borrowed money from my family before I came back here last Friday, but now I'm not sure how we're going to pay the rent. Absurdist Lover is talking to someone about selling one of his treasures, but now the guy is playing hard to get and AL's growing more desperate daily. He needs to go up and see his kids. I need him to go up and see his kids. It's actually a big piece of our game plan, so that he can see if and how he can make all this okay with himself.

My teenage brother's girlfriend came back from her spring break trip and broke up with my brother. He's crushed. He's really super-smart and verbal and quirky and is only interested in girls who are not spending all their time playing with clothes and going to the mall. My stepmom is already trying to tell him that he won't feel terrible forever, but it's too soon. So I guess things could be much much worse. There's other family drama, like my other brother, who I am too pissed at to even deal with. He's in his twenties and living at home, but refusing to deal with the problems he's created, not even coming out of his room and talking to the family. Oy. I can't even deal with any of that. When I think of him and his depression and narcissism and sense of entitlement, I think my problems aren't so bad.

I bought Hallowell and Ratey's Delivered from Distraction after reading most of their first book, Driven to Distraction, at Borders yesterday. It felt so good to sit in Borders and read! I know that lots of people with ADD have problems with reading, so maybe I don't have it -- but I'm a terrible inveterate procrastinator and the most ridiculously disorganized person in the world. When they start talking about how ADD people just stick their worlds in piles, I felt known. In fact, a lot of me started to make sense to me. Maybe the volatile mood that people have seen in me (and that moodiness I've certainly experienced in myself) has something to do with boredom and attention-wandering and serious frustration. On the other hand, maybe I'm seriously demented too. Without money or insurance, I could be very well barking up the wrong tree, but I figure if some of the structure and lifestyle changes can help those with ADD, well, then maybe they can help me too. I feel like I've got to do something to help me deal -- I'm having a baby and while there may be little I can do about s/he being born into poverty (though if the job and insurance doesn't work out, I'm going to have to try to get another one), I can at least not be a total space cadet who feels like I've wasted my life, never living up to my potential. A PhD and "not living up to one's potential." Oy. I know this imposter syndrome is endemic to the academy, but why is that super-cool research project gathering dust in the corner when I could be transcribing interviews and analyzing data? In fact, why am I not prepping on the SAT course that's starting next week? Oy! Procrastination. I swear I think I get bored of doing things at regular intervals, doing a little each day though I know that is the most productive way to get things done. I think I love the thrill of the panic and rushing to the deadline. Why else do I do it that way all the time? I hate to do things when I am "not in the mood." It's just slogging. If I'm in the mood, it's one big whoosh and whirl. It's fun. I like fun. Aren't I too old to be this. . .immature? My poor child doesn't have a chance.

But one thing that I know is true is that I need to steer clear of isolating myself, which will only lead to depression and negativity. I feel so much that I'm in a stupid, mostly-avoidable situation, both with Absurdist Lover and with being pregnant right now that I haven't been bursting with the news except to my most understanding and nonjudgmental friends, which includes the blogosphere, which is strange when you consider that I can't control how people react to my ridiculous life. But there it is. Lest y'all think I'm totally paranoid (I am, of course, but not totally), I have experienced people being totally judgmental and shitty to me, about me, and about my decisions. So with that kind of crap out there, it's not surprising that I would want to protect myself in a cocoon. But it's not healthy. It's not. This is a good time, I guess, to see who my friends are and stop spending energy thinking about people who are not friends. Not that a good friend doesn't occasionally tell you a hard truth about yourself, but I don't think a friend does it in a mean and judgmental way. (Remember that there was an unbloggable situation that had me thinking about what being a friend is? Well, I'm still obsessed with that question because I haven't dealt with the situation that started it! We can call it procrastination, or we can call it pregnant tired brain not wanting to deal with any crap that's not absolutely necessary. But I need to deal with it soon. This person and I don't really talk on the phone anymore -- and I frankly don't want to waste my phone minutes on this. An email is okay in addressing big gnarley issues, no? What say you?)

Hey! When is this blog going to go back to being funny, dammit! All this heavy shit all the time! Let's do something fun! Like start working on a campaign to get Sisyphus considered for UC President!

February Already?

I'm so sorry, lovelies, for my radio silence of late. Like many people across the blogoverse, I've had the most wretched cold -- as in, I can't remember being in so much pain and had many moments where I thought I'd reverted to childhood and was going to break down and begin to cry incessantly from a bad ear infection. Not cool. This morning was the first in a while that when I woke up I felt good. I'm still coughing, still have my little camper table aclutter with snot rags, still don't expect much from myself. Yesterday, I went stir crazy and decided I was going to go for a drive to Starbucks, which from Weird Mountain Town takes about twenty minutes. By the time I drove through the other weird mountain towns and to a normal sprawly city, my back really hurt. While I had thought I might read or whatever at Starbucks, I found myself exhausted and just wanted to go home. (Or maybe I just wanted to get back in the car to listen to my book-on-CD, Steve Martin's irrepressible and inspiring Born Standing Up. I recommend it.) By the time I got home, I had to lie down (bringing the CD book into the camper, of course.)

I have learned a few things from my delirium:

1. I have toxic sludge in my brain that tells me I can't do anything and am a total waste of space and an irredeemable fuckup. Fighting against this constantly with a mixture of busyness, kinder self-talk, disgust for such ridiculous self-indulgence, and a sense of humor takes considerable energy and fortitude.
   
2. Getting out of the house and seeing people and doing things are good things to help battle against the Toxic Sludge Monsters.
3. Toxic Sludge Monsters seem to feed on my physical pain. Or else, being in pain seems to travel to all my other deeper roots of (emotional) pain and then I'm one hysterical crazysickperson.
4. It is possible to cough so much you throw up.

A friend of mine, the delightful Jane D., has given me an assignment to write about camper-life. I am honor-bound to fulfill assignments (e.g., I've only ever been good at school and have fucked up everything else was an important refrain of the TSMs) so expect some description of my environment. I am also giving myself some space from the novel right now and am going back to finish a project that was and is very important to me that I had to put on hold to finish the dissertation.

But now I'm tired and have to go do something else -- like lie down.

Excitement Dissipates, Bringing Back Confusion

The impossible has occurred. It will now snow in Los Angeles and be fifty below in North Dakota. Oh yeah, both of those already happened. Which makes my news of finishing and turning in my article early fairly tepid news. Oh well.

So now I don't have an external deadline for writing except for those recommendation letters. These rec letters are a great irony to me -- who cares about my opinion about anything, much less the potential and perseverence of these particular students? Do you see where I am? I am living in a camper in a campground with no job. What do I do for letterhead? I guess just make up my own. Poor students.

The fact that I've actually been working on the article pretty regularly shouldn't impress anyone -- actually the article is one of the things that I feel pretty sure about. When worried about other things, it is wonderful to have a counterirritant. Other things are absurd and bumpy-lumpy in my world just now. After five years in graduate school fairly certain that I wanted to ride the tenure track, here I am, PhD'd and at a loss. I don't know where my life is going to go now. I can't tell you where I'll be living in six months, three months. . .Everything is up in the air.

Having life be eventful and uncertain means that there certainly is more to write about, but less self with which to write. Nora Ephron's parents used to remind her that everything was copy. I suppose that eventually I'll be seated at a desk somewhere writing about this. But where will that desk be and how will my life be constituted? Stephen King says that one of the secrets of his success is a happy and settled home life. Can I order that from Amazon? Special delivery?

Stephen King says three or four hours of writing and reading per day. Certainly I've only spent a couple hours fine-tuning the article. Reading would be good. Surely I should get to work on Project 2. Or find a job, an apartment, a life. Whichever comes first. I should send out some work. That might make me feel like I exist again in the literary world, at least.

Five Loved Books of 2007: A Meme

Jane D. over at Unnoted Unseen Unsung notes that the National Book Critic's Circle recommends five books per month. This list is derived from asking "What 2007 books have you read that you have truly loved?" to writers, critics, and book lovers. I am a writer and book lover. And most of you fit one of those descriptors. So it's our turn.

My 2007 is not everyone's 2007 -- the books I discovered in 2007 are not the same as books that came out in 2007. But these are books that I came to love this year. Here goes:

1. Possession by A.S. Byatt: I laughed, I smirked, I cried, I bawled.
2. Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver: Okay, so this is not The Poisonwood Bible. In fact, I started this book five different times since I bought it in hardcover when it came out and couldn't really get sucked in. Then finally, I got sucked in. I did find that there was a fair amount of environmental information in the book, which I found interesting but didn't need. I'm always interested in the balance of information/position-taking and story in a given novel, especially because I love novels that have political content. I don't know what I think of the balance here, but I definitely lived with this book for a good long time -- and even now remember the old man who got jealous of the scarecrow looking inappropriately at his neighbor's legs!
3. Traveling Mercies and Grace (Eventually) by Anne Lamott: I needed these books. I just needed them. My life is so strange and odd, it's nice to hear about someone who is totally as neurotic as I am trying to live a good life. I'm not a Christian, but I found that Lamott's Jesus was the good and generous within ourselves -- and you don't have to be a devout or born again Christian to want to live your life centered in the generous, good, divine part of ourselves.
4. On Writing by Stephen King: Lamott and King together gave me permission to write -- again. King has also given me this vision of being a poor near-starving writer typing like mad in a trailer, a vision I'm taking way too seriously about now. But there it is.
5. I can't think of a fifth! What's that about??? I've been reading, but this is about books I've loved. I'm screwing up my own meme. Nuts. I guess the closest right now would be Helen Fox's Listening to the World: Cultural Issues in Academic Writing. I did not finish the book, but I've referenced it in conversations something like 87 times. That may not be love, but it's certainly some form of mild worship.
   

I'm tapping five people for the Five Loved Books of 2007 Meme: Maude Lebowski, Jane D., Hilaire, Medieval Woman (because she needs something else to think about other than the obvious), and Sisyphus.