If I had a day job, I'd keep it.

I don't know why, but I've been having trouble writing lately. It doesn't matter if it's for my own private paper diary, this here blog, paid web-work or just a grocery list. I'm just blocked.

When I was a kid, I loved drawing. "It makes my brain feel good," I'd tell my mother. And it did -- like nothing else ever. Drawing was the only thing that made me feel fully engaged, fully present in the moment. It was good, and I was good at it, the best in my class, except for that one new kid in third grade who drew really good spaceships. But he vanished the following year, so no harm done.

I wonder sometimes if I should have pursued art, gone to school and learned illustration, or just kept drawing until I figured out where it might take me. I think that's why 'personality type' tests depress me -- there's this feeling of inevitability to being a type: I could never have turned out any differently. This is the best of all possible worlds.

The other day, my cousin Molly and I visited the Lucas Arts office complex here in San Francisco (one of Brian's ju-jitsu buddies was doing some freelance work there and generously offered to squire us around). It awakened an odd mix of feelings, mostly frustration. Why didn't I ever think to go in to special effects, I wondered. Why don't I write rip-roaring adventures, the kind that burrow into the popular imagination? What's wrong with me, that I can't seem to figure out what I want to be when I grow up, when I've been grown up for some time now. Where's my freakin' Yoda? And why do I waste my time thinking thoughts like that, when it's the doers that I envy? Wouldn't doing be the best antidote for this paralitic broody melancholy?

So I'm drawing when I can't write. Then, if I feel ready to write all of a sudden, I'm already sitting there, pen in hand.

Anyway. In the meantime here's a picture I drew of our visit. No cameras allowed at Lucas Arts!

Fasting

I'm tired of talking about myself. That's the hazard of freelancing: I sit around all day in my own company, then go out into the world armed with nothing but anecdotes about myself and my own little adventures. I am my own crazy co-worker, my own flaky boss. I find myself wondering: could I give up the first-person pronoun for a week, converse soley about other people's thoughts and the world of abstract ideas?

Would it be really annoying if I tried? Or would it be the best thing, ever?

Grr

Two days ago, I bought a hat. It was kind of a frivolous purchase, but I'd just been paid a few bucks for watching a neighbor's cat over Easter weekend, and I'd wanted this hat since I first saw it in the shop window last September. So when I walked by the store and noticed it was on sale, I figured what the heck -- if you want something for 7 months straight, it's obviously not an impulse buy, right? And knit hats can be worn year round in our chilly little city.

Anyway, cute hat, right?



That is, it was until I accidentally put it through the laundry:

Things I Don't Want to Do Today

The cat's still missing, and I really just don't feel like doing anything today, except sitting in the backyard, mournfully waiting. But time and tide, blah blah blah. Plus the whole NaBloPoMo thing. So, here goes:

1. Blog: I really don't like blogging just for the sake of blogging. And yet I sign up for every 'blog daily' challenge that comes my way. Hm.

2. Go to the zoo: This is how the American empire falls: soft, decadent middle-class white women living on unemployment, complaining about their leisure activities. Oh woe. What loathsome exertion will I be forced into next? Croquet?

3. Go to my writer's group: Yet again, what a whiny toad I am! Oh woe, I shall be forced to drink wine, eat soup, and talk shop. The indignity!

And I'm still on the Vicodin, so this may not be all that cogent

So. This past Tuesday, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges announced that it was terminating New College of California's accreditation. As most (if not all) of you are aware, New College is where I earned both my masters degrees, where I finished my bachelors, and where I taught as an adjunct from the fall trimester 2006 to fall 2007.

I'm not entirely sure how to feel about this. No, wait, scratch that; I have plenty of feelings on the subject -- they just don't sort out well.

A big part of me is just crushingy embarrassed. In this thoroughly modern age, when we all get our news of the internets and it's just as easy for people to make their opinions known in the comments section of the San Francisco Chronicle as it is on this lovely little blog o' mine, I can't help but be aware of how stupid we all look. And I can see how tempting a target it is: the hubris of it all! The stupid, willfully wide-eyed optimism of running a school as if ideals were all that mattered! As if all you needed were a building and a bunch of good intentions.

But the truth of the matter is, the ideals weren't what did the place in. Neither were the smart, starry-eyed utopians who were fool enough to learn and teach there over the years. It was just poorly run, poorly overseen, and didn't have the time or money to right itself before the end came.

One of the things I keep coming back to, though, is how happy I am with the education I got there. New College was the third school I attended full-time (the fifth I attended for any time at all), and, with its strong social justice angle, was the perfect top-off to my more previously literature-and-tweed-heavy academic career. I really did learn a lot there, as both a student and a teacher. And isn't that the true worth of my degrees? The effect upon my noggin?

Still, though, it's sad, and shaming, and just... yeah. Sad.

In other but not unrelated news, I ran an errand recently for an old poetry prof of mine (also recently cast adrift by New College). He gave me this poem as a thank-you.



Just in case you can't read it:

After Wang Wei


Chilling down by the water
stopped to watch clouds drift
clouds drift clouds drift
bumped into mr. green
talked laughed forgot
it was time to go

Strategy

What do you do when the cat manages to make himself bleed despite an ecollar, narcotics and constant supervision?

Join the Catster community

You join Catster, of course! And then you sit in the bedroom, frown at the cat, and gloom.

[Edited to add: Don't worry about Herr Katzendumbkopf-- it was just a little blood, and he seems fine now.]

My Day in a Nutshell II: Electric Bugamoo

I spent the morning running around like crazy, finding some lost files and not finding others, dreadging information from long-forgotten data systems and generally behaving like a headless chicken unleashed on an unforgiving, flickering florescent-lit world.

Finally, at 3:00, I took lunch. I ordered some mushroom soup from a nearby deli, ran a series of errands, and rushed back to the office to proofread transcripts in preperation for a big-deal deadline tomorrow.

As I absentmindedly slurped my soup, I noticed that it tasted kind of strange. Something strong and unfamiliar. I poked at one of the mushrooms. It didn't look like a mushroom. Was that a piece of meat? Could there be meat in the mushroom soup? But they always have a veggie option at Bi Rite, and the mushroom couldn't have had meat in it, because the only other soup today had been.... crap. Beef and freakin' Barley. Beef! And Barley!

I've been a vegetarian since I was eight. My stomach is so not happy right now. Never mind the poor cow.

Not Dead Yet!

As I assured my mother this morning, I am really not all that sick, despite my ongoing blog-winge. That's a hazard of NaBloPoMo -- previously unbloggable events (i.e., "I lay on the couch all day and did nothing") become newsworthy. Moods that would normally keep one far away from the computer for fear of alarming loved ones are chronicled in excrutiating detail. Hurrah November!

Speaking of which, I don't know why, but NaBloPoMo never really clicked for me this year (I've been experiencing that with a lot of things, actually). I don't know if it's because of how busy I've been, or our new living situation (where every night is hang-out-with-the-housemates night), or the turmoil at work, but I haven't felt so creatively engaged lately. Looking back at last November, with all my talk of poets and poetry (and all my unblogged memories of reading and such), I can't help but wonder where my mind is these days.

Anyway. I'm off to an opening at The Lab with Brian and Hope (I can't seem to link directly to the Post Postcard show we're going to see, but it's on the front page tonight). Our freinds David Faulk and Michael Johnstone are both involved in the show, and I'm hoping things'll be cheap enough for me to to some Xmas shopping!

Ugh

Is everyone sick? I slept the better part of the afternoon, but my legs ache like I've been doing deep knee bends.

My Day in a Nutshell

My phone gently expired at some point in the midst of Beowulf's gut blasting shenanagins the other day. I'd been getting this blue screen of death-type thing intermittently when the thing was low on batteries, but this time, it lasted a whole day, and no amount of plugging it in or turning it on and off seemed to help. So this morning, Brian and I took it down to the Radio Shack where I'd bought it to see what they could do.

We waited in line for about an hour. One guy, the Not Phone Guy, was helping other customers. The other guy, the Phone Guy, was assisting this one customer who spent an eon and a half filling out cell phone paperwork, and then decided he wanted an iPod nano (and grinned back at us, as if to say "Look at how charmingly impulsive I am! Wheee!").

Anyway. Finally, The Not Phone Guy came over to see if he could help us. I showed him my phone, and explained that I'd bought it there less than a month ago. "Oh, he said. We can't do anything with that. You need to take it to the Cingular store downtown. They can repair it there." And then we asked Phone Guy, and he turned it on and off a few times, and then took the batterey out, and then said "Yeah, we can't fix that here. You need to go downtown." And they gave me directions, and that was that.

Anyway. Then I went to work and had a crappy day.

Finally, at about 6:30, I left the office and got on BART so that I could head downtown to the Cingular store. Ten minutes later, I find the store and walk in. About two seconds later the guy told me "Yeah, I can't fix that. You'll need to return that to the store where you bought it."

And then it took me about an hour to get home. And I forgot my freakin' book at work.

Priorities

Lately I've been having trouble making it in to work on time. Even though it's just a thirty minute walk, even though I don't have to be there until ten. Lately I keep hitting the snooze button til 9:15, and then I lie in bed for another ten or fifteen minutes, stretching my fingers and toes and staring out the window, listening to the Writer's Almanac on NPR.

There are two busses I can take on these late-sleeper mornings: the J and the 22. The 22 drops me off in the heart of the Mission, 2 blocks up a busy, grouchy, pee-smelling street from where I work. Last week, I spent the entire 10-minute ride trying not to listen to the mind-numbingly vile coversation. I don't really like the 22 right now. The other bus, the J (really an above ground train) drops me three blocks away from work, four blocks if I opt for the scenic route, as I did this morning. It's worth the extra five minutes.


(photo taken on my new pink cell phone)

The train drops me in the upper corner of Dolores Park. Most mornings it and the city are encased in a mochi-skin of fog, and some days there's a great dane gallumphing around in the mist, looking for all the world like some mythic beastie.

It's been a rough month here at work. Our paychecks are a week late as of today, with no word on when we can expect them. Students are still waiting for their financial aid awards. Everyone is tense, pinched and anxious and fragile. And there's so much work to be done.

Anyway. It's my lunch break now. I'm off to sit in the park.

Ugh.

What a day. I probably shouldn't go into detail for fear of being dooced, but here I am, sitting at a desk awash with papers, wondering how it got to be 7:30 and what ever happened to that lunch break I meant to take.

Vegetal and Unfiltered

This has been one of those days where I keep having to stop and deconstruct my emotions. In a meeting, I'll find myself angry and defensive, only to find, when I try to put into words what I'm feeling, that there is no there there, that what ever I'm feeling has sprung into being independent of any external stimulus. I keep rolling my emotions around against my tongue as if I were tasting wine: an over-judgemental mouthfeel up front, with a tannic guilt-ridden open mindedness lingering on the palate.

But maybe it does spring from somewhere. There's such a tension on campus these days. In today's staff meeting a free-floating accusation that some people aren't pulling their weight hovered over the room alongside all our overstuffed workloads, pushing everyone's brows down until we all looked angry.


Plus my office smells funny.

Not Good at the Busy

Oh, I am just not good* at being busy. This semester I'm working full time in addition to teaching a class -- that's 43 hours out of the week that I have to be someplace and be working, never mind the unstructured class prep hours I need to work on top of that.

Now, technically, there are enough hours in the day to get everything done. But my brain just can't stay in work mode long enough to make it happen. I keep napping on Saturdays, or sinking into a novel for just a minute, only to look up and realize hours have passed.

This morning, walking to work, I kept looking longingly into coffee shops, at people sitting in the corner with a notebook and their coffee, at teachers reading stacks of papers and hipsters with their dork-glasses and laptops. O, for an unstructured day!



*I started this post a few minutes ago, was called away, and came back to an entry that said "Oh, I am just not god". What an awesome excuse for not getting stuff done. Thanks, id!

Un flambeau, Jeannette, Isabelle!

It's raining, I have a headache, and I've been listening to nothing but Chrismas music for hours. Is it any wonder I'm in an odd mood?

The last few days have just been dingey. Thursday night, I had a bunch of poet friends for a reading, which was just so much fun, but as soon as everyone was gone, or even before, I got into that funny way of thinking I have, wherin I think everyone's just humoring me, and they couldn't possibly like me, and oh, I should have worn a different shirt. Then Friday I started in with this head cold I'm sporting, and now I'm just sitting pathetically on the couch, worrying about insurance and medical stuff and wishing I'd done everything up til now differently and for God's sake, Nora, what else do you want out of life, that when everythings so nice you've got to sit around and mope about it?

Do you ever have images just pop into your head? I was just sitting here, staring at my desk (note to self: shouldn't that teetering pile of books find their way back to the bookshelf?), when suddenly I saw with three dimensional clarity the little beach near my family's summer place up in Vermont, that twilight wash of red rocks and cedar trees, and the murky depths of weedy water. Hm.

My iTunes Christmas shuffle just popped on "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing," and I misheard it as, "Come now, count thy every blessing." Perhaps it's time I did.

Anyway, before this post gets any more schizophrenic, I'm off to count every blessing. And do laundry.

Simple Gifts

Oh, I'm just so gloomy today. Hardly appropriate for thankgiving. So, in honor of the day, a list of things I'm thankful for:

1. My writing window looks out at ground level. This part of our apartment, towards the front of the house, is partially below ground, so I look out at the garden at the garden's own perspecive, flush with the clover and well beneath the roses. It reminds me of when I was a kid, and loved looking at things from underwater. The simplest change of persoective does so much sometimes.

2. Brian is a wonder. He's talented and educated and possesses a native intelligence about the workings of things that puts my absentminded movements through the world to shame. Plus, as my mother noted this past summer, "he's very good-looking" (and now my mother's blushing).

3. We got fresh herbs in our CSA box this week, and the kitchen smells like a holiday.

4. I have a wonderful mentor at school (the word 'mentor' seems bandied about a lot in buisiness contexts these days, but to me it'll always be the goddess Athena appearing in disguise to Telemachus). He's got me teaching Latin next semester, and is almost entirely responsible for the rest of my teaching career as well.

5. The cat is fat, and likes to lie next to me, snoring.

6. I've got more good books to read right now than I know what to do with. Some I can't mention because they're Christmas presents to be (I have to make sure they're good before I go giving them away after all), but they are, each one of them, so satisfying and fascinating in their own right that I'm having trouble deciding which one to pick up next, and so just keep handling each one in turn.

7. My family is far away, but I know they love me.


Seven seems a good number. Happy thanksgiving everyone!

Instructions for Being Sick

1. While reading, realize you have a headache.

2. Decide to rest your eyes for a moment, see if you feel better.

3. Sleep for five hours.

4. Wake up, feeling groggy and feverish.

5. Decide to read a bit, see how you feel.

6. Repeat step one.

And Saturday, too!

Isn't it frustrating how, when you're in a funk, it's completely impossible to remember what being happy feels like? I know I was happy just last week. Ecstatic, even. Poop.

Brian's off at his studio. I drove him away with my histronic discontentedness, what with the sighing and the moaning and the flying off the handle at things which are really fine most of the time. Maybe falling to the floor and demanding he find a sane girlfriend is not the best way to keep a man. Hm.

Monster cat is very much attached to me today. I can't sit or lie down without him curling up on top of me. Frustrating and comforting all at once.

I wish I were a lighthouse keeper (why? What would lighthouse keeping do for me that house keeping does not? I think I just want aloneness, wet rocks, a snug room, and the wild sea). Stupid automated lighthouses. Stupid sonar.