More time! I canna change the laws of physics!

I need more time. More time (a) to finish revising the three full chapters I have yet to revise for the defense, and to stitch them together, and (b) I need more time to grieve the loss of J. and to realize that, high as the stakes are and much as she may love me, I may never be with her again, and to let her breathe.

I also need faith, as Spock once told a Vulcan protegee, that the universe will unfold as it should.

Great galloping Yahweh, I'm a geek.

I'm very happy about this

I'm an indignant liberal, and I approved this message.

Steeeeeeerike!

Today and tomorrow my union is striking, so I spent some of the lunch hour banging a drum and walking in circles in a solidarified manner. I figured I was just going in circles this morning anyway, so I may as well do it on the picket line.

There's no "I" in "team," but, um...there is one in "union."

And in "fish."

Solidarity forever! Woohoo!

Oops

I have to renew my passport!

Has it really been ten years since 1994?

Happy birthday...

...to the stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius, and to my well-beloved ex.

Taking stock

I have been better. But get this: I'm not only better this week than last week, but I think in some ways, I'm stronger and better than I ever have been. I'm very very sad about J. But I'm single for the first time in my adult life (that's twelve years), and it feels very clean.

When I was in relationships, no matter how good they were--and my relationship with J. was wonderful, collaborative, loving, expansive, magical--I felt as though I needed to be single somehow. I was never able to communicate why to anyone, but I think I've worked it out. I started this long relationship trek without knowing fully who I was and what I want and need from a relationship. And that's hard to work out from inside a relationship. Now that I'm single, without any magnetic pulls on my emotional compass, as it were, I can work out which way is north and where I want to go.

So even if I'm miserable, it's a good feeling. I'm changing, and I'm going to know very soon what I want and need. I have a strong suspicion that it'll turn out to have been J. And that's okay. There might be a chance of us getting back together, or there may not. She may be quite happy with someone else. That hurts, but I'll find someone. That's what dating's for...figuring out what you want in a relationship and what you don't want. So maybe I'll date a little, and maybe eventually I'll find someone.

But at any rate, whether it's with J. or with someone I can't conceive of yet, I'm not dicking around with my next relationship. I'm changing/changed for the better. I'm going to do everything to make it work until one or both of us dies. And I'm not going to give up just because of the Atlantic Ocean.

Not such a big man now, am I?

I entered a racquetball tournament. Double elimination, so I was guaranteed at least four games. I played four games, in which I scored enough points to win one game. I believe I was the most pathetic player in my bracket. But it was fun. There was pizza, and I won a sun visor in a raffle.

I'm a big fat sissy. Sport is not my forte. But it's not for lack of trying. Yesterday I got smacked around a soccer field for a couple of hours, too.

Endorphines are good things. Getting exercise is good, because as I found out at a physical yesterday, I am getting not only fatter but shorter. How does that happen?

But the thing is, I have to get my first chapter done, read David Harvey, Edward Casey, Edward Soja, Henri Lefebvre, and lots of other theory-type crap. By a week from Tuesday. Oh, and revise the four chapters that I have done. Maybe I can afford to sit on my ass and type for another couple weeks.

Last push...over the top

I turned in my chapter and heaved a huge sigh of relief, and then another, and another, until I was heaving sighs of misery and despond again. Today is the third day in a row that I haven't done any writing. Monday, I bought running shoes, went for a run (for the endorphines), smoked a spliff (for the anxiolytic cannabinoids), and ate a tub of Ben and Jerry's (for the chocolate). This helped, but I keep waking up dreaming of J. and sobbing.

Fear not, I'm going to the shrink tomorrow, and working out whether I need Hegelian dialectics in my theory chapter.

I have one chapter left to draft and some hasty revisions before I turn in the dissertation to my committee. May the Fourth be with me.

Four down, one to go

I finished drafting my city comedy chapter today. It's pretty crappy, I fear, but it's done. That's 80% of the dissertation complete.

And now I can justify going to see Hellboy, and continue distracting myself from the emotional void. Huzzah!

Ventilation

Mother fucking twat farting god damned pusillanimous flatulent piece of mule shit! I want to hit things with bats. I want to scream until I can't make a noise. I want to run in one direction till I collapse. Lots of anger. With myself, with the world, with fate and circumstance and wyrd and whatever. I feel like Hamlet's father. Alone, empty, forgotten, tormented, and helpless to do anything but moan and rage.

Unless of course Hamlet's father was really a demon who wanted to damn him, in which case I'm not very much like that.

I'm so fucking stupid I could eat my own head.

23.5

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

"Go, th'art a mystical lecher." (Middleton and Dekker, The Roaring Girl)

Can I borrow $1.5 million?

It's for books. So it'll be tax deductible.

I knew it.

Which poem are you? Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll Oh, you're silly! People probably think you're a bit kooky, but those nuts just don't realize that you've got a language all your own. But hey, you always bring a smile to people's faces.

Click Here to Take This Quiz Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.

Mystery solved

I found out that the fabulous act that I saw and boogied the night away to last week at the Rock n Bowl was funky Hendrix-inspired Swede Theresa Andersson, whose new album is available on Basin Street records. See here for a review.

The bass player with whom I was stupidly smitten, it turns out, is a new addition to the band called Annie Clements. She's the one on the left.

Addendum

For the text of Bush's press conference you can go here. For Oscar Mayer, you're on your own.

Kiddie songs

I just watched the juxtaposition of Bush's press conference with a balogna commercial and a train of thought pulled out of the station.

My life has been full of music. I sing all the time. For a while I did it rather well and formally. Nowadays it's mostly in the shower. But the first songs I memorized, the songs that I was asked, nay pressed to sing for company as a four year old boy, were two ditties whose provenance was and is unknown to me.

The first: "Trust and Obey." Lyrics: "Trust and obey, / For there's no other way / To be happy in Jesus / Than to trust and obey."

The second: "My Bologna Has a First Name." Lyrics: "My bologna has a first name. / It's O-S-C-A-R. / My bologna has a second name. / It's M-A-Y-E-R. / I love to eat it every day / And if you ask me why, I'll say / 'Cause Oscar Mayer has a way / With B-O-L-O-G-N-A.'"

That's right. Unthinking obedience to a first-century near eastern Hellenistic religious radical, and fervent praise for processed sandwich meat were the twin pillars of value upon which my childhood was based, and I think that they are discernible in my psyche even today.

I wondered, however, watching the all-too-rare Bush press conference, and the ensuing advertisements, if perhaps my experience is less contained to my family than I had thought. The country seems to be pressed into a nightmarish amalgam of my two kiddie songs.

Trust and obey. No, there's no other way. Cause Bush and Cheney have a way with B-O-L-O-G-N-A.

It even rhymes.

The trudge

Writing once again on "The Devil is an Ass," a production poster for which I have above my desk for useful inspiration. I get, for the first time, to quote myself. "As I have argued elsewhere," is a nice turn of phrase. In addition to making me sound important, it'll save me a little time.

New stuff!

I figured out how to make the blog so any of you who want to comment or pass on news of your own may do so. And I'm still doing it on the cheap. Huzzah!

Nawlins

Just got back from the Shakespeare Association of America. Impressions and thoughts follow.

New Orleans is one of those proverbial nice places to visit where one wouldn't want to live. Old cemetaries, gaslit avenues, so much jazz and alcohol that bits of the French quarter are in danger of becoming parodies. But I loved it. I ate many fishes, mollusks, and crustaceans. I heard a lot of jazz. I eavesdropped shamelessly on tour groups gawking at Anne Rice's house in the Garden District. I, of course, did no personal gawking. That's for proles.

Professor Jonathan Bate gave a paper that answered the exact question I was writing on that day. And I was writing, especially during the papers that were more tedious than JB's. He is a really good guy, as well as a brilliant scholar, it turns out, with a charmingly geeky dance style and a self-mocking enthusiasm about anything he happens to be doing, from scholarship to drunken bowling.

I made a few new friends, caught up with some very good old ones, took copious and extremely useful notes, got some free books, drank a lot. One amusing phenomenon I noticed is the academic wannabe. Curtis Perry, a hot young rock star of Jacobean cultural studies, has spawned so many imitators of his look--shaved head, black-rimmed glasses, goatee, all black--that the conference was like a lookalike competition.

Also, there was much job market fallout: "Oh, she got the Greensboro job! Well, who did Louisville end up hiring?" Et cetera. I'm just happy to have a job at all, considering how strenuous everything was this year.

I came away from the conference with a renewed confidence in my ability and identity as a scholar, and I enjoyed the general sense of satisfaction and excitement among my generation of Shakespeareans that we're the next version of the coterie of people we've admired and been intimidated by for years. Good stuff.

Off to New Orleans

It's 6:30 am, which is early for me, and I'm waiting for the taxi to the airport. I'm starting to get excited about the conference finally. Seeing friends from around the world! Feeling like a professional! Huzzah! Hopefully it'll strike my depression a blow and give me the kick I need to finish the dissertation. I'll be back on Monday next.

Spoke too soon

Well, now Arsenal are out of the Champions League too. Crappy day all round. Unfortunate, since if I weren't so down everything would be smashing. It's nearly seventy degrees. The first of the year's well-and-truly beautiful days. People in less clothing sitting by the lake, demonstrating humanity's perennial forgetfulness of the seasons and basking in childlike wonderment at the sunshine, as if this didn't happen last year too.

It would all be delightful and encouraging if I weren't so bummed.

There's still a double available

One bit of sunshine is that Arsenal are still in the Champions League, even though they were defeated in a scrappy FA Cup semifinal against Manchester United at the weekend. I think I shall take a writing break and watch them play Chelsea in an hour or so. Second leg is at Highbury. They should go through. Please ignore this if you don't care. I apologize. Or I apologise, if you happen to be English.

Well, shit.

That's what I'm writing, and that's how I'm feeling. Shit. I know I can summarize critical definitions of city comedy in five pages or so, but I just can't get myself to do it, somehow. And I'm having one of those days when everything I look at or hear reminds me of my ex-girlfriend, who would BE HERE if we hadn't broken up. And I have to go to New Orleans, which I cannot afford, to present a paper that is further shit at a seminar that might be quite useful but will probably make me feel like the imposter I am.

It's all feeling very much like this, which is apparently (funnily enough) wombat poo:



Whew, man. Take your pills or something! It's a beautiful day, you're healthy and occasionally productive.

Okay, thank you. More later. Back to Brian fucking Gibbons.

Rrrrrgh

My director assures me that I am not an imposter, having read my Jonson chapter. She says it's not absolute crap. Huzzah. But then she always says that. "Strong in many ways, needs beefing up."

I am stressed, tired, lonely, and bleary-eyed. Not to mention broke and a computer-destroying schlemiel.

Okay, seriously.

I have to get me a puppydog. Otto is the most affectionate little canine man I've ever met.

I'm doing today what my dissertation director has been harping at me to do for ages: writing about Shakespeare. It's not a Shakespeare dissertation, so I've been avoiding writing on him. I love Shakespeare so much that I didn't want to spoil it by making him a cause of unendurable stress. But apparently I have to bite the bullet and do it.

Friday night I went to a birthday party with a theme. Catholic schoolgirls. I found the most adorable purple plaid pleated skirt, for three dollars, and I have to say, I looked pretty hot. Disturbingly, I found myself repeatedly grabbing my own butt. But that may not have been as weirdly autoerotic as it sounds; without pockets I don't know what to do with my hands. There may be pictures soon.

Cave canem

I'm dogsitting this weekend, at my friends A & W's technowonderland of a house. Which is why I'm blogging and not wringing my hands over my computer woes. They have a lovely mini Schnauser called Otto. It makes me want a dog. Maybe one of these. They're smart and don't shed and they're small enough to be inside dogs most of the time.

Which reminds me, I have dibs on a fantastic apartment that's being renovated now and will have brand new everything in June. Twelve-foot ceilings! Hardwood floors! Skylights! Three bedrooms and 1500 square feet! A deck in the back and maybe a garage. Lots of space, lots of light. $450 a month. There's at least one good reason to like upstate Wisconsin.

This will be my street, and maybe that corner building on the right will be my apartment.