Compartments

I've just had a really enjoyable weekend in Philadelphia at the Shakespeare Association of America, but a weekend that required a nearly heroic effort of mental and emotional compartmentalization. I could almost feel new tissues forming the separations in my brain. Said compartments, not in order of importance:

Compartment 1: professional and academic concentration

I had a fine conference, and the Ben Jonson seminar went even better than expected. At one point my fellow seminarians seemed to be excited about my theoretical issues and started writing my introduction for me. Looks like my book will have some kind of readership.

Compartment 2: personal and emotional anxiety

For the first time in over two years, indeed for the first time since we were together and I kissed her goodbye and put her on a plane back to England, I saw my ex. And her current partner (both of whom are Shakespeareans and thus unavoidable). We've been in touch, sort of, but only via very infrequent e-mails. I like to think that the year I was completely single and the year and a half I've spent with M have brought me to a place where I'm entirely over her. And that's mostly true, but there are, I learned, some areas of my hindbrain still really susceptible to pain and strong, visceral, evolutionarily primitive emotions. It was by no means as trying and awkward as we'd both feared it would be--I talked to both of them more than I expected to, and after all, it's the person I was closest to in my life and the person that's closest to her, so why wouldn't I get along with them? But it was still really difficult sometimes, and I'm glad I got it over with without shrieking inappropriately.

Compartment 3: personal and emotional joy (at a distance)

You'd think that would be enough to juggle in one weekend, but no! While this was going on, M was back in Wisconsin, at her parents' house, announcing our engagement officially. So I called and talked to several drunken joyful people, while very very incongruent things were on my mind besides, say, asking for my bride-to-be's hand from her father, something I find somewhat repugnant, but was coerced into doing nonetheless. More on slightly distastefuul wedding issues later. Also joyful wedding stuff, of course, but the distasteful stuff makes for more interesting reading.

So it was a really good, really useful weekend in lots of ways, but as you can probably tell by the fact that it took me two weeks to finish one sodding blog about it, it also took lots of processing. Good lord I sound American sometimes. "Processing." Jeepers.