Lumpy-Bumpy

So I feel like I owe y'all an explanation for my bloggy silence. I know really maybe I don't, but maybe I owe myself the explanation or, alternatively, the time to write and order my universe. Because I haven't been doing much writing lately either. Which is not just bad for productivity, but probably means that I'm freaking out.

Which I guess I am.

For a short while, I had the drama of some editing to do, then I finished that. Then Project Lumpy went into full swing -- and frankly everything -- down to whether Absurdist Lover thinks I should cook on a given night or not -- became about my breast health. My mother went to a Breast Cancer Support Group (for her mom, since she has breast cancer, but that wouldn't stop her from worrying about me) and got me info, my stepmother gave me the number of her OB-GYN and told me to keep her updated, and Absurdist Lover was writing down the names of hospitals he passed during errands and giving them to me. Though I still was doing research and wanted some specific referrals to go on, I was basically cornered. I had to make a decision about which doctor to go to and make an appointment. Then I had to call everyone else back.

I was sitting in one of these funks where I found it impossible to get on with the next step. I finally got up the strength to make this seemingly impossible decision and make the appointment (which with the breast center I've chosen involves a number of phone calls and steps before you're finally allowed to schedule an appointment) last week. Then I lived in Project Lumpyville until yesterday when it all came to a head. I had my first appointment. Absurdist Lover came with me. When he asked me if I wanted him to come with me, I said I didn't know, but then when he said he was staying here to play games, I found myself getting angry and slamming something. In short, I was totally irrational and he probably figured when I started behaving like a five year old that I needed supervision. (One of the soap opera plots in my head is that he came back into my life now because I need him to take care of me on my death bed. Oy.)

At the breast center, I had to fill out many pieces of paper. Most of the people in the waiting room were couples. Partners go there, I guess, as a matter of course. I'm sure people are getting bad news as well as having checkups after medication. Perhaps people were also getting chemo there, though I don't know.

For myself, I got a doctor who, I think, used my first name while introducing herself as Dr. Breast Surgeon. Typical. We talked a little, she looked at my mammogram and explained that my breasts are full of glandular tissue, then she felt me up and proclaimed my breasts "lumpy-bumpy," though she did feel the exact lumps (mirror images of each other) that have already had their close-ups on ultrasound. But these are star lumps, you see, and must be ultrasounded again. So that's next week. And then, Dr. Breast Surgeon says, if she can't see what she wants to see on the ultrasound, an MRI. She thinks surgery is unlikely. Which means that cancer or something else really bad is likely not even really considered a possibility. Though I confess that it was this whirlwind discussion between long bouts of waiting (to get in to the doctor, to be able to pay), and I struggled to keep up. When she asked for questions, I was totally tongue-tied. I asked a few clarifying questions, but I think that I didn't take in what was going on because of the possibility of an MRI, which is so frigging expensive. Then there was the small problem that the bill was more than my grandmother had given me for the appointment. (Our other major problem around here is that we don't have any money. It's a huge stressor -- at least for me. It's getting to AL a bit too, though he is a bit less of an anxiety-ridden alarmist whose worst nightmares are about not having money -- also about becoming a burnt-out addict, but that is a discussion for another time.) Thank goodness I had a little money (it was for insurance, but now it's just about playin' the angles, baby) in my account.

So then it took me half of day to get myself to schedule the ultrasound. Instead I was, I guess, procrastinating, by trying to find some adjunct work at a local college. I know this is ridiculous and that time is ticking by and that soon I'll only be able to apply at places on the quarter system, but I'm so drained by everything, including the inevitable phone calls I had to make today in order to update everyone on everything, that I can't imagine handling a class. I can barely handle the telephone. I'm always surprised when my professional phone voice takes over.

Today, while updating my mother and again expressing surprise at how crazy my life is (Absurdist Lover! A camper! Find a job! I have no money! I have a PhD? Project Lumpy!), she said my life was bumpy-lumpy. I kid you not. So that is why lumpy-bumpy or bumpy-lumpy is the word of the day.

So here I am, not quite sane, not quite functional. I have an article due by the end of the month on my coolest research. Then I have two conference papers to write. I barely remember when I was that person. I know I saw some of you at MLA (and how much I wish I had spent more time with y'all) but I barely believe I am a person that anyone would ever hire for a tenure-track job. I mean, wouldn't they just know how crazy I am?

Anyway, so with all of this craziness and the knowledge that I should write about my recent adventures and then the the pressure to get a job, I really have just wanted to curl up fetus-style in my bed (which now has a super-cool and homey, but not too Mrs. Brady, quilt on it) and stay there. The fact that Absurdist Lover does not deserve me to just bottom out and leave him to be the one doing everything is the main reason I get up and out of bed and do things. I feel like I'm doing something when I cook him dinner.

But really I know I have three projects: Lumpy, Job, and Article. None of these is playing Susie Homemaker. Okay, let's just say I have four projects then. I have project Susie too. Lumpy's gotten a lot of play recently and is, I think, full up until next week. Job is moving right along today and just needs some more work tomorrow. Article has been sadly neglected. I need to focus. I feel as though I'm behind a thick fog.

So that's all that's going on in my world. I think Absurdist Lover is home.

Total Reversion to Sloth Complete

So here I am online at No-Longer-Snowy Duck Pond having a massive fit of procrastination. I have to say the camper looks very clean. I washed all the dishes including our new bowls and plates. I ate, but did not gorge unless you include a mere handful of triple ginger cookies I just finished with my get-down-to-business tea. I started writing a blogpost earlier about how much the new-PhD'd-me sucked and how maybe the campground was getting me down (which means me getting me down because I barely leave the camper, even for duck-visiting, because I really don't want to talk to anyone), when of course it is just that I do suck because I'm not working on the editing job that I said I would do. Why? Uh. No fancy reason like I feel like a fraud or anything, though I certainly could whip that into something if it would allow me to put off working on this job, but because basically I just don't feel like it. I've wasted a whole day when Absurdist Lover was working for his dad -- and now he will be here in any minute and I have done, well, nothing. Oy. I know better. I know the answer is to just sit down and do it, that being an adult means doing things you don't want to do, that I might even like it if I would just get on with it, but. why. is. it. so. freaking. hard. to. get. myself. started???

I have all these projects and time to actually do them. But am actually a sloth. Which means lots of accountablogging! Watch Earnest kick her own butt! Or kick herself when she's down!!

(Hark the herald! A new reason for procrastination: someone is playing the guitar! Like someone in the next camper! Is it time for a singalong? Can I come too?)

Online On Snowy Pond: Update

Hi everyone! It was only this weekend that we got internet in the Duck Pond Campground. And Absurdist Lover didn't have to work for his father this weekend so we decided to stay in and enjoy -- yes, you guessed it -- the snow. I lived in Urban Home City for twenty-three years and saw snow fall from the sky like twice. But we're out far enough that I guess it does snow. Crazy.

I've been back on the way outskirts of Urban Home City and away from Adventure U and living in an RV on Duck Pond for three weeks now (including that sojourn to Dreadful Conference for which I was still sufficiently jetlagged and whiplash-culture-clash-wearied to be boring at both the blogger meetup and my interview). I'm starting to get my shit together or at least I've come up for air long enough to realize that there is so much to do. I really don't want to do any of it, but it must be done. Because we're pretty much already at the point where we're running out of money. We needed a lot of start-up things, like pans and flatware and stuff. We may have twenty-four feet long of living space, but we use every bit of it. I've been cooking -- mostly breakfast. We now have a waffle iron (that my parents had promised me for about two years now, but finally CostCo had the exact kind again right before Christmas so I got it for Christmas) and have investigated Trader Joe's amazing Swedish pancakes and pretty much all things Trader Joe's as I had promised myself for the last five and a half years. (Absurdist Lover is also all about Trader Joe's, since its ready-made stuff totally subsidized his recent bachelorhood and is a big hit with both him and his dad.)

There are all these things going on right now. Probably the most significant is that at Adventure U I discovered a lump and had my first mammogram (a mammogram is basically about your breast being smooshed like a hamburger patty between cold plates) -- now I have to find "a breast surgeon" to read the film and ultrasound reports and recommend a course of action. Of course, normal people get referred to a doctor before their date with radiology. So I'm trying to find a breast center or whatever -- and the whole thing is very scary, of course. I also found out that my grandmother has breast cancer. (Okay, maybe I'm a totally terrible person to feel that my teeny-weeny lump is even worry-able compared to my grandmother being diagnosed with cancer, but I'm also trying to live in a camper, negotiate a brand-new relationship and living situation, and figure out my life. Basically I figure I must be in complete denial about my grandmother because I have really no big reaction to it at all. Just questions about treatment and decisions. I think I'm full up -- already totally overwhelmed. At the end of A.S. Byatt's Still Life, there is this discussion about people who seem strong as people who process things slowly. So in the moment, they seem like they are really holding themselves together -- being the strong ones. But they really just process things slowly and so take a really long time to really take in and experience something fully. Which means that it takes practically forever to get over something. This is actually much worse than those people who experience things fully and go to pieces and then reconstruct. I think I used to fall apart -- had the energy to put myself back together. But since my dad's mother died at the beginning of 2006, launching these two years of death and strangeness, I think I've become a slow processor. At some point, I'll blog about the two years of death, but not right now.) Also, there is the project of Figuring Out How Mr. Tabby Is Health-Wise. He has been to a veterinarian, and his re-evaluation of his medication is in progress. In order to keep up our high-eating camping lifestyle, I must very soon find work, either adjuncting or doing something else (but what?). I know I should be working more on writing and really want to write about some recent adventures, but am having a really hard time figuring out how to frame this stuff -- figuring out what I want to say exactly and who I want to say it to. (I plan to blog more on this rhetorical/craft problem.) And there is, of course, the novel, which is not progressing at an ideal rate, but still has a quite respectable 8,400 words. I'm editing a dissertation (in slow motion). I have an article due at the end of the month that I haven't officially begun yet (a revision for a slightly different audience of my dissertation and writing sample). I'm getting a car for which I have to get money for insurance. I'm borrowing money. I'm exhausted.

So with all this other stuff, I'm not getting very far in the plan to figure out my life. I read Maude's recent post about getting organized and know that I should also be spending this time wisely and getting publications out and stuff, but I can't even figure out where I'm going to be this time in the fall, much less figure out whether I'm going on the market again or what. Who knows. There are a number of community college positions opening up in not-too-far-away-from-here locations. Do I apply? Will Absurdist Lover and I figure out how to build a life together? Here? In a different part of the state? In a different state? Thinking about academic jobs immediately brings up all those questions. We don't have answers. The questions all aswirl make me want to have a glass of wine and go to bed.

So that's the update. Today we're getting the car -- which has been a whole tangle with my brother since it's originally his car though he is getting rid of it because he got my dad's old much-better car. But somehow that means that my brother who is eleven years younger than I am wants me to keep a fork in the glovebox as a memento of some stoned rice-sharing night. (I could almost do this as a gift of eccentricity from one to another, but he is way too much of a pain in the ass. He admits that he is a "button-pusher." But it doesn't compute to him that this is not "cute" or "funny." Nor does it compute to him that when you're basically a pain to be around, people don't want to do things for you. Generosity just runs dry.) The fact that my brother and his antics are irking me so much means I'm way too involved with my family already. I've seen them maybe three times, but it's already way too much. I need a life. A whole life. I need to work. Or something.

These update posts are so rarely coherent. In short: there's a lot of stuff to blog about (writing issues, mountain towns, sprawly nostalgia near Urban Home City, life questions, health scares, family challenges, and on and on), and I don't know where to begin! Help!

The Long Weekend

After having a couple year's worth of adventures in a semester, I am back at Absurdist Paradise. A new situation to be sure -- but very much absurdist. To sum up: An academic jumps off track to live with her lover and cat in a cozy RV by a duck pond on the way outskirts of Urban Home City. (I hear the pond is stocked with fish, so we won't starve.) I'm calling this period of my life The Long Weekend (yes, this is what the movie or TV show will be called), because the RV is called a Weekender. I'm sure it was never meant for full-time use. Tough luck. This is where we are for now.

Internet is spotty at Duck Pond Campground. There's some internet guru there, of course, but the range on his wireless pretty much sucks. We're likely going to buy him an antenna to boost the signal. If that fails, Absurdist Lover (aka Love and OPL) is preparing to lay hundreds of feet of ethernet cable -- all so I can keep YOU updated on our (mis)adventures. Okay, so he really wants to "show me" World of Warcraft. Uh-huh. Been there, done that. Have I told you about my game-addict ex-husband? Well, Absurdist Lover is not like that. (And if he is, then I'll have more time to blog! So there!)

So my goal for spring semester is to keep myself underemployed with adjunct or other part-time work (test prep centers? language schools?) while I figure out whether I want to jump onto the Casey Jones tenure track or find something else that will allow me to have more of a personal life or what. But more important, I'm going to write. In an RV. While I figure out what to do with my life. With the man I love. And a cat. Oy.

Because we don't have internet at Duck Pond, I'm currently at the Corporation. I worked on my comps in one of these big chairs, listening to the steaming of milk for overpriced over-delineated just-as-you-like-it coffees. I'm in a town on the outskirts of Urban Home City where there are Corporations at every strip mall. It's pretty scary. This place reminds me so much of the suburb where I grew up. Out the window from where I'm sitting, I can see the scrawny trees propped up with dowels in the center island of a wide street -- the tract house development on a slight rise on the other side. The kids have nowhere to go but down to the local pizza place to hang out. The people who can afford to be sitting here in Starbucks on a weekday afternoon, even right before a holiday, are not the ones who live in those houses. People who live in those houses don't have the freedom of independent wealth or the kinds of jobs that would allow them to work at home. Those people are tied to jobs they serve everyday -- and probably not in the academy. I don't want to be them, those people who spend more time in their cars and offices than at home. Of course, I have no idea how make the kind of life I would like to have. I would like to have a small house with a big garden someday, but I'm getting to an age where I better work toward "someday" soon, if I'm serious.

Right now, I've just gotten off a plane, unpacked my bags, and settled in to the RV. I haven't even seen my folks yet. Absurdist Lover and I haven't had any time to figure out what we're doing. Maybe after we get home from Dreadful Conference we'll be able to figure things out.

***Update 3:12pm, mere seconds after I pressed publish***

A guy just came up to me and started talking Mac. When he asked me whether I used it for work, I said yes -- of course I realized that I'm actually unemployed and had to explain that I was "between things" right now, but said I was a writer and professor. And he recommended this Guru seminar (the second person to recommend it), then I asked if he were a writer. He said he'd written like "15 books -- nonfiction. That's not writing -- those are just long term-papers. Fiction -- that's writing."

Even in Suburban Ticky-Tacky Houses, there are crazy writers. I stand corrected.

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.

Happy Blogoversary!

Happy anniversary, dear blog, dear Absurdist Paradise! It was a year ago today that I first decided that I needed a place to vent about and try to make sense of the absurdity, at that time of the job search process, then dissertating, then counting down to Adventure U. Then there's basically been this Absurdist Paradise radio silence, where I haven't felt like I could risk publicizing what was going on with me.

In that blogoversary spirit, I went back and read some of my earliest posts. It occurs to me how so much can happen in a year. I'm in a very different place (literally and figuratively) from where I was last year. If anything, I'm more, rather than less, conflicted about tenure-track academic life. I realize that this makes me a class-A ingrate, considering my incredible luck; on the other hand, I'm not sure that the luck I've had has led me to feeling useful and worthwhile in the world (which I figure is as close to happiness as I dare ask, work, or hope for). Moreover, the nature of my luck made me have to choose, as many academics do, between having a job and having a life. (I'm choosing life.) In looking back at the early posts, I see also that even back then I was intermittently thinking about some of my biggest concerns now -- no, not the job market, but who I was/am as an academic versus as a writer. I've gained a great deal in grad school, including a sense that I can write about certain topics that are important to me and that I may even have something important to say about the experiences that my education and interests have made it possible for me to have. But I'm also extremely grateful for this little academic train hiatus I've built for myself where I can choose to go forward or make a course correction. Most of all, I want to write. I've always wanted to write. And my birthday is coming up -- one of those big birthdays that seem portentous. The refrain in my head goes like this: I've known I wanted to write and wanted to be a writer for twenty-eight years now, since I found out from the bio on the back of a Judy Blume book that it was possible to be a writer and not be dead, with my manuscripts all neatly awaiting publication in my desk. I've wasted enough time. Enough already. Maspeek! Chalas!

So friends, I'm off to the do the impossible. I am yet again moving. This time, I'm moving to Urban Home City, off to a real adventure in being with the man I love, writing, and trying to figure out what to do (fit myself to the tenure track? academic administration? writing/editing? becoming a totally successful novelist/screenwriter almost overnight? being an underemployed overeducated "artiste" when I am entirely too old to do so?) that will support me in living a whole life I can blossom in and support the dreams and growth of my man. Academic or not, I'm sure the absurdity will continue.

By the way, what is up with the damn Wiki? Who would maliciously rip down a democratic and altruistic space that makes many of us feel like we have some control over our lives? Creeps. By the way, I have an interview at Dreadful Conference. My Man is coming with me. I don't know what he'll think of it all. I'm sure the madcap adventures will continue. I hope you'll come with me.

Seven, Seven, Seven into the Future

Though I've had this blog for a year and used to be an avid blogger, I have only for the first time been tagged for a meme! It is the ubiquitous Seven Random Things about Me meme -- and darling Maude Lebowski is the one who dun it.

Here are the rules:

The rules:

1. Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog. (I'm sorry, but shouldn't that be person "who" tagged you? Forgive me; I've been grading.)
2. Share 7 random and/or weird things about yourself.
3. Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs. (Come on! If I've been tagged, there is practically no one in the blogoverse who has not been tagged.)
4. Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog. On it. (Uh huh.)

So here are some weird facts about me:

1. Apropos of the title of this post, when I was a child in the '70s, I loved The Steve Miller Band's song "Fly Like an Eagle." (Also, The Kinks's "Lola," though my mother worried about me loving that song.) Maybe it was too much Sesame Street and "today was brought to you by the letters X and Z and by the number seven," but I was convinced that part of the song went: "Seven, seven, seven. . .into the future."
   
2. Connected to this is that my parents were very young when they had me. So I grew up with parents who were alternately Nichiren Shoshu Buddhists, avid bowling team bowlers with trophies all over the house (including the special joke one given to my mother when she bowled a season pregnant), and rally racers. After Urban Cowboy came out, I babysat my much-younger sister on the weekends when it was imperative that my parents had to go "ride the bull." This said, I still sometimes forget about all this and wonder why I don't fit in with the status quo. Then I remember.
3. Further connected to this is that recently my wonderful bashert, OPL told me that I'm one of those crazy people who don't know they're crazy. (Okay, so I asked him and he said: "a little." "Really? I'm one of those people?" I asked again. He said: "a little.") The really crazy thing is that this makes me feel better. When I was young, I feared being normal and average. I needn't have bothered. For the last couple years, I feel like I've been pouring lifeblood into the project of being "presentable" ("a vegetable," goes the next line in the super-fab "Logical Song" by Supertramp). It's exhausting. The seams of this "presentable" costume are so frayed, I must look like the Scarecrow without a Brain.
   
4. The strange thing isn't that I am divorced but that I was ever married. People who know me now (and didn't then) can never remember that I spent ten years with someone. That's how single I seem, I guess. And I no longer remember what it felt like to be married. Could it have been that my marriage was just like having a roommate around?
   
5. In the last three stressful work environments that I've been in (which is to say the last three work environments I've been in), part of my coping strategy has been imagining my work as a TV series with long, complex and totally over-the-top storylines. Grad school was simply called "English" and featured a homeless grad student who slept on a cot in his office and showered at the gym, a hapless new grad student who had terrible teaching nightmares and whose teaching scenes would be shot like acid trips, and the scheming social climber grad student who was alternately screwing professors and students in her office. In my previous work environment, the series starred Martian engineers, a drug-dealing cat who slapped his owner around, a boss who seemed incredibly competent to all and sundry but secretly freaked out and shot up under her desk, and the graphic artist who was turning into a fly who was the only one who could see the boss as she was: totally and completely freaking out all the time. Of course, all the characters were based on someone real. Right now I'm working on a movie. I'm keeping this one to myself for now. I still need its good healing mojo.
6. Contrary to my sarcastic and cheeky affect, I'm a total romantic, loving Jane Austen movies (and, of course, the novels, though really they are all about money and virtue, which I find satisfying for my heart and my head) and a sweet and much-beloved British comedy series called As Time Goes By, about two people who meet up again thirty-eight years after their romance abruptly ended. I also love old-fashioned things like needlepoint and cross-stitch. I'm sarcastic and self-effacing as a defense because I'm sort of embarrassed about my old-fashionedness. At the same time, I have totally liberal views about relationships and gender roles. In theory. In practice? I still think the man should be the one to smell the milk to see whether it's gone off.
   
7. For many, going to grad school and pursuing the life of the mind and the uncertain life of a grad student-turned-professor is a dream that requires a giant leap of faith. But I worry that it's a way for me to cop out and give myself an excuse to not try to live out my dreams. I've sought out structure and security in my life. What's more structured (if not secure) than the tenure track? Leaving that sure-step future is, I think, a bigger leap of faith for me. It's scary.