Party Pooper

Strangest night. Surrounded by people and a party I just can't get into. What does it mean when you're more motivated, energized, and just downright interested in picking up trash and empty glasses at a party than talking to people?

It's hiding, but it feels so productive! So much more satisfying to make order out of chaos than to try to broker a connection with anyone while yelling and trying desperately to remember a name and/or where on earth you know this person from.

As much as I love community, I'm terrorized by interactions at this level. I hate answering questions -- even good ones because how are you really supposed to trust that this person cares what you do when they're one spotting away from leaving you to talk to someone more interesting or attractive? You can't. And so I duck and cover.

Behind me, a band with woman singer is warming up. In front of me, a techno beat keeps time in the next room, making only the ice cubes dance in their own little glass cages.

In these moments, I feel so unfit to be an adult. I assumed that having fun at parties was something you grow into -- like enjoying wine or learning about mortgages. I remember all the parties I witnessed as a kid and how fun it looked. My mom's rosy cheeks. The neighbors leaving in the wee hours, their kids crashed out in front of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in heaps.

Now? I think how good a book and cool bed would feel. How I enjoy conversation over coffee. How sometimes even a girl breakfast is too much. On the spectrum of introverted to extroverted, as strange as some of my friends might think this is, I'm actually an introvert. Being around people is ultimately draining, even though I can catch a buzz off it under the right circumstances. Right now I've got nothing to give people, and all I want is for no one to ask anything of me.

I see empty glasses; time to go.

Power and Place

My new pet topic.

I'm panicking because the University library has finally recovered from fire enough to know that I still have books checked out (even though they mailed me my diploma -- suckers!). Now real students are asking to check out the very same books! Oh the guilt! But I can't just turn them back in without sucking the marrow from their thin pages of bone! Oh the deeper guilt! To have had these books on my shelf for MONTHS without cracking a spine...

Here's a jewel from Edward Said, whom I'm ashamed to say I haven't read:

Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. – 1993

How great is that?

So if anyone has copies of the following to loan me (for a while!), please let me know:

• Places on the Margin
  
• Entanglements of Power
  
• Geographies of Resistance

Also helpful would be book reviews saying they're not so great and no sweat missing. Okay? Good.

Real life

Real job now. Fear of losing said job for blogging during work makes mjae a dull girl.

But this month only, I live the life I dream of.

I teach a creative writing class at a cultural center. All day long for a month with bright, interesting, talented teens. It's like taking adrenaline intravenously. Their juice juices me, and it takes all I have to stay a half-step ahead, just to ask the write questions, or at least the ones that will keep them thinking.

Today, we talked about culture, whether these days it means anything more than identity, stereotype, or skin color. They seemed shocked when I said that I think about culture as a way to posit and share values not valued by the capitalist monetary system. That historically, culture was like DNA for how to live, including how to communicate, interact, share symbols, trade, show respect, worship, etc. In some ways, I feel it is my gift to provide an opportunity to take back culture from its raggety, partial use for political gain and be able to define it in ways that makes it useful again for these up-and-coming artists who can teach us, again, how to live well and in peace and in beauty.

I have gathered some energy and precious little wisdom; tonight I gather the last of my calm that with luck can hold me through a month of teen energy surges.

May we all remember the horror of our youth and help build the bridges to connect us all, forward and back.

"The Dead Are Not" -- Patricia Traxler

from Slate.com

Click here to listen to Patricia Traxler read this poem.


The dead are not dead
yet. Always they take
their time, and we wait
politely, dreading
how real it will
have to be, sooner
or later, and at the
same time longing
to know that reality.

Nights, as we reach
to switch off our bed lamps
and close our eyes,
we dare it to take us
into its mouth
that smells of tar,
saltwater, sludge,
take us up then let us
tumble endlessly,
blameless again
and helpless as any new life
forced out for the first time
into the terrible light.

Hmmm... the Onion Got Me!

Heroic Computer Dies To Save World From Master's Thesis

May 17, 2006 | Issue 42•20

WALTHAM, MA—A courageous young notebook computer committed a fatal, self-inflicted execution error late Sunday night, selflessly giving its own life so that professors, academic advisors, classmates, and even future generations of college students would never have to read Jill Samoskevich's 227-page master's thesis, sources close to the Brandeis University English graduate student reported Monday.

Initial thoughts on a dissertation

I'm a planner, okay? I love dreaming of the future. Now that the thesis is done, I'm reading books on identity and place -- specifically multicultural spaces that support, enhance, and strenghten multiple ethnic and racial groups and the larger community that includes us all.

Today at lunch I was reading Geographical Identities of Ethnic America.

The following describes in tantalizing vagueness why this will be the subject of my next degree. I even thought of a title for my dissertation/book today: Leaving Room: A Politics of Freedom and Inclusion.

Sexy, huh?

Some quotes from this latest book to pique my interest:

4: “Underlying the theme that place and space and place are influential in the articulation of identity is our premise that identities are socially constructed. Constructed, as Manuel Castells (1997) points out, because identity is the source of people’s meaning and experience”

Think William James here. Race and ethnicity may not exist in any proveable way with definitions that even most of us would agree with. But the point is that people find them to be useful constructs to describe themselves, make meaning of their communities/lives, or organize for action and/or economic vitality. That’s powerful! So why don’t we understand better how identities are contested in space and how to harness the power of multiple identities to SHARE spaces. That’s where I come in.

Think about how amazing and revolutionary this idea would be – Palestine and Israel, Rio Rancho/ABQ/Bernalillo/Corrales/Santa Ana Pueblo, Barelas/Downtown, etc.

6: “two themes: 1) how space and place influence racial and ethnic identities and 2) how individuals and groups acting on their identities create spatial patterns and landscapes.”

Again, understanding how each of these processes work and being able to reverse them to be successful prescriptive – to create places that support, enhance, and strengthen multiple identies – is the real trick.

7: “collective patterns of identity can be imprinted on landscapes and places over time, transforming the landscape. Subsequent landscapes bear the imprint of the strength of the ethnic group to re-create the landscape with material and nonmaterial symbols and forms of social interaction. Language, religion, kinship patterns, settlement, agriculture, and labor patterns become visible on the cultural landscape of a region as global forces of migration become localized over time. The power of the local landscape lies in its ability to reinforce racial and ethnic identity of second and third-generation residents as well as new immigrants to the region.”

Geography takes a rather narrow and yet too specific view of this shit. There needs to be a way to bridge sociology, geography, community planning, and urban design.

12: “Geography is an important mechanism for reinforcing racial and ethnic identity and experience, and that geography is partially defined by race and ethnicity. What holds this group [of collected authors] together is an interest in raising awareness of the ties that bind North American racial and ethnic groups to their spaces and places. All the contributors also uphold a commitment to share their insights and information about a particular racial or ethnic group in the broader context of other group experiences.”

I agree with their premises and assumptions. I think it needs to go further. Geography tends to only be analytical; I would want to make it implementable and practical in a political and spatial sense. Easy enough, right?

But where? Which university? Which department? Cultural Studies? Urban Studies? Planning? Sociology? Geography?

Anyone have suggestions?

1977 (Poem) by Jeffrey McDaniel

from Alibi School

The family around the table and a silence
so compact no words can break it.

Not even a pigeon swirling through the window
can nudge mother's poorly taped grin.

Her face has the euphoric glow of a mathematician
whispering a formula into the whorl of a rose.

Her eyes are tiny stones testing the black
silk bags she lugs them in.

Since father banned television the sons stare
at the marriage dangling from the ceiling.

Each month it sinks another couple inches
until it's in their food.

No wonder they don't eat.

Facts about the Moon (Poem) by Dorianne Laux

from Facts about the Moon

The moon is backing away from us
an inch and a half each year. That means
if you’re like me and were born
around fifty years ago the moon
was a full six feet closer to the earth.
What’s a person supposed to do?
I feel the gray cloud of consternation
travel across my face. I begin thinking
about the moon-lit past, how if you go back
far enough you can imagine the breathtaking
hugeness of the moon, prehistoric
solar eclipses when the moon covered the sun
so completely there was no corona, only
a darkness we had no word for.
And future eclipses will look like this: the moon
a small black pupil in the eye of the sun.
But these are bald facts.
What bothers me most is that someday
the moon will spiral right out of orbit
and all land-based life will die.
The moon keeps the ocean from swallowing
the shores, keeps the electromagnetic fields
in check at the polar ends of the earth.
And please don’t tell me
what I already know, that it won’t happen
for a long time. I don’t care. I’m afraid
of what will happen to the moon.
Forget us. We don’t deserve the moon.
Maybe once we did but not now
after all we’ve done. These nights
I harbor a secret pity for the moon, rolling
around alone in space without
her milky planet, her only love, a mother
who’s lost a child, a bad child,
a greedy child or maybe a grown boy
who’s murdered and raped, a mother
can’t help it, she loves that boy
anyway, and in spite of herself
she misses him, and if you sit beside her
on the padded hospital bench
outside the door to his room you can’t not
take her hand, listen to her while she
weeps, telling you how sweet he was,
how blue his eyes, and you know she’s only
romanticizing, that she’s conveniently
forgotten the bruises and booze,
the stolen car, the day he ripped
the phones from the walls, and you want
to slap her back to sanity, remind her
of the truth: he was a leech, a fuckup,
a little shit, and you almost do
until she lifts her pale puffy face, her eyes
two craters, and then you can’t help it
either, you know love when you see it,
you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull.

China (Poem) by Dorianne Laux

from Awake

From behind he looks like a man
I once loved, that hangdog slouch
to his jeans, a sweater vest, his neck
thick-veined as a horse cock, a halo
of chopped curls.

He orders coffee and searches
his pockets, first in front, then
from behind, a long finger sliding
into the slitted denim the way that man
slipped his thumb into me one summer
as we lay after love, our freckled
bodies to pale starfish on the sheets.

Semen leaked and pooled in his palm
as he moved his thumb slowly, not
to excite me, just to affirm
he’d been there.

I have loved other men since, taken
them into my mouth like a warm vowel,
lain beneath them and watched their irises
float like small worlds in their open eyes.

But this man pressed his thumb
toward the tail of my spine
as if he were entering
China, or a ripe papaya,
so that now
when I think of love
I think of this.

Her First (Poem) by Dorianne Laux

from Facts about the Moon

Who remembers what she told me.
The year.  What actually happened.
Which hospital. My mother.  The man
who died in her arms.  Gone from memory.
Only that he was her first.  Only my mother
in her uniform, white, unblemished
or stippled with blood.  And his eyes.
The hand she held as he held on.
Long enough to say the wordless thing
that needed saying.  Her eyes answering,
then speaking aloud the only words
that could be said:  It’s alright, I’m here,
Okay.  Her telling me how she held on,
never looked away, ushered his soul
into the unknown with a handful
of words, a direct gaze, almost visible,
almost a color, a cone of warmer air
shimmering between them in the bleach-
scented room, a thin stream of Muzak
blushing through the speakers
in the hallway outside the open door,
the slick canted floor they would
gurney him down on tiny rubber wheels,
that oiled, spun freely, easily,
as they turned the corner
toward the morgue, the institutional
gray walls not, thank god, the last color
he would see but the sea-blue corona
of her eyes, irises spiked with amber,
flecked with green.  Fully open
and seeing him.  Whoever he was.
Whoever he had harmed or helped,
loved or failed to love, finally, mercifully,
of no importance now as she watched over
the last minutes of his anonymous life.
His large death fluttering down
under the soft black wings of his lashes
as he left this sweet, brief world
and entered into the next, hand
in hand with a godless woman
who would always remember him.
His rust-colored eyes saying
good-bye to her, to this life, in a time
I remember now.

What’s Terrible (Poem) by Dorianne Laux

from Facts about the Moon

It is terrible, but not very terrible – Ursula K. Le Guin

To leave your only child waiting at the airport
for an hour, lost in traffic, lost in thought,
is terrible, but not as terrible as kicking
your brother in the stomach, beating your sister
with the phone, forging your mother’s name,
spitting on your stepfather’s grave.
Though this is less terrible than moving away
to another state without saying good-bye,
just throwing the stereo in the trunk between
the quilts and pillows, strapping the baby
into the backseat and driving off, leaving them all
to their own intricate plots.  And though you know
it’s wrong to speak of their divorces and minor
car crashes, suicide attempts, evictions,
hospitalizations and Vicodin addictions, their self-
inflicted wounds—the bullet hole in the wall
puttied over with toothpaste—this is not
as terrible as living without them, a dim set
of archetypes in what’s left of your memory,
small figurines on the bottom shelf of your
daughter’s heart—you’ve kept her away from them
so she could grow up normal—now stranded
in an airport lounge after a summer with her
born-again father who in spite of you
she demands to see.  Terrible thing, the family.
But not so terrible as being abandoned
in a glass room with your suitcase and a bored-
off-her-ass stewardess, flipping the pages
of a book your mother gave you before you left,
your fractured, frazzled, mysterious mother
who’s not sure how to love you, the one
you’ve forgiven over and over, a book you finally,
in an act of desperation and fear, turn back
to the first torn page and begin, earnestly, to read.

Superglue (Poem) by Dorianne Laux

from Facts about the Moon

I’d forgotten how fast it happens, the blush of fear
and the feeling of helpless infantile stupidity, stooped
over the sink, warm water gushing into a soapy bowl,
my fingers plunged in, knuckles bumping the glass
like a stillborn pig in formaldehyde, my aging eyes
straining to read the warning label in minus-two type,
lifting the dripping deformed thing up every few seconds
to stare, unbelieving, at the seamless joining, the skin
truly bonded as they say happens immediately, thinking:
Truth in Labeling, thinking:  This is how I began inside
my mother’s belly, before I divided toe from toe, bloomed
into separation like a peach-colored rose, my eyes going slick
and opening, my mouth releasing itself from itself to make
lips, legs one thick fin of thrashing flesh wanting to be two,
unlocking from ankles to knees, cells releasing between
my thighs, not stopping there but wanting more double-ness,
up the crotch and into the crotch, needing the split
to go deeper, carve a core, a pit, a two-sided womb, with
or without me my body would perform this sideshow
trick and then like a crack in a sidewalk
stop.  And I’d carry that want for the rest of my life,
eyes peeled open, mouth agape, the world
piled around me with its visible seams:  cheap curtains,
cupboarch doors, cut bread on a plate, my husband
appearing in the kitchen on his two strong legs
to see what’s wrong, lifting my hand by the wrist
and I want to kiss him, to climb him,
to stuff him inside me and fill that space, poised
on the brink of opening opening opening
as my wrinkled fingers, pale and slippery,
remember themselves, and part.

Done is Done

And I'm done baby. Two of three final copies delivered.

I've got a stack of CDs to mail to friends who haven't heard from me in weeks, months, and sad to say, years. Let me know if you want one. I'm passing these out like free condoms! Insomnia? This thing's probably better than sleep aids.

But I'm proud. And I'm done.

And thank god. Free at last.

And you think...

You have it all under control. A little here, a little there. An hour here, an hour there. Many, many nightmares in between...

And then it's the last night. Everything goes swimmingly. You put in the hard work needed. You run the numbers. You run them again. You correct here and there and here.

You go to print with shaking fingers.

You haven't bought the right paper. You can't convert the thing to PDF.

You're fucked.

But cheerful because, well, shit. The hard part is over.

You Can't Have It All (Poem) by Barbara Ras

You Can't Have It All
by Barbara Ras
But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back. You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August, you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love, though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys until you realize foam's twin is blood. You can have the skin at the center between a man's legs, so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind, glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness, never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who'll tell you all roads narrow at the border. You can speak a foreign language, sometimes, and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave where your father wept openly. You can't bring back the dead, but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts, for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream, the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand. You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed, at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise. You can't count on grace to pick you out of a crowd but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump, how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards, until you learn about love, about sweet surrender, and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you, you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept. There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother's, it will always whisper, you can't have it all, but there is this.
From Bite Every Sorrow by Barbara Ras, published by Louisiana State University Press, 1998. Copyright © 1997 by Barbara Ras. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Success -- She's a Master!

I have to say, I'm really proud of myself.

I'm a perfectionist and an overachiever, so I don't say those words lightly or often.

I really accomplished something, and it feels damn good.

The thesis defense went off without a hitch. I had several old friends and schoolmates who were there to cheer me on, not to mention my mother and 92 year old grandfather (nose dripping and everything).

The committee asked hard questions, but I answered them all -- maybe not well or elegantly, but I at least had something to say to each. Their questions lasted for 45 minutes, and then the audience asked another 20 minutes worth. It was a lively discussion for sure.




























All in all, this degree has been in some sense 6 years in the making. 2 years in Chicago and 4 here in ABQ. When it came down to it, I was able to sustain the effort. Grueling and panic-inducing as it was.

So now? Stay tuned for what I dream up next. This weekend is for poetry -- writing a code of conduct for the poetry community -- no kidding -- and an introduction for an anthology of poems from Route Words, Albuquerque's version of Seattle's Poetry on the Bus program.

Thanks for playing, all you supporters!

This girl did you proud.

The Seventh Day

i.
cleaning up after boys
the folding
tucking

finding places again
for all that spilled
onto ticking sheets

this pile of words
fabrics washed fresh
bleached surfaces

so now I rest
easy
clean as the day

he made me
now I make me
beyond re-approach

ii.
Debussy
candles
plants watered

me thirsty
trying not to drink
the desert being safer

for solitary camels
in winter
not thinking of oasis

the coming sun
carrying loneliness
in two humps

the moon slipping romance
over sleeping volcanoes
to the east

tucking one more dream
beyond one more distant
horizon

Bitter

Today I'm bitter about love. Maybe I have time to think about it now.

There's this repeating image of the man who wants/respects/adores/admires me who just can't choose me, for whatever reason. I'm sick of it.

To indulge this little pity-party moment, a selection of past poems of love and bile:

Strength

Ice fault lines shift with starlight winds

you shivering with fear that is not cold

me stroking shed skin

realizing suddenly

I have always been alone.

What was it you saw in my face

peering down darkness

edged with dashboard lights?

Could you have taken the thread

to unhem my patched-up life

left the pattern

sewn up a future

like trousseau

in the folds of myself?

Strength is smiling into half-dead eyes

feeling the air rushing past

falling into unlined pit

knowing if I get there

no one will help me land

jumping in anyway

again and again and again and again.

Fall 2002

Resolve

She couldn’t see past the feel of disappointment

that heard her lying to herself

and rebelled.

He couldn’t smell the rotten parts

atrophying in the narrowed sites

of his once-straight desire.

In all the wrong ways

they were together

apart

the solution

to all the problems

their love began.

He croaked and she twittered

but the bird and the frog

both grounded

hunkered down and unfeeling

larger

smaller

wetter

than the rigid noose solution

of their falling-apart love.

June 2004

All Work and No Play Make Mikaela Spiritually Bereft

Time to return to the flock. Which one? See here.

The bestest ever reverend has blogs now! (She's on sabbatical.)
Check out: http://www.sabbaticalblogging.blogspot.com/
and http://www.doubterpsalms.blogspot.com/

And me? Who am I as a Unitarian Universalist?

My Unitarian Jihad Name is: The Machine Gun of Courteous Debate.
Get yours.

Birthings

Birthings and birth things.

Let's start with the time. Please note: 1:44 am.

Once again, I'm at work printing. Deep into the morning. Coffee cold and worn off.

But it's as done as it's going to be. For now.

364 pages later, and you know what I've learned? A thesis is like a black hole. The closer you get to it, the more energy it sucks. The more energy you give, the bigger and suckier it gets.

So now it sucks, trust me.

Six chapters. 93 Figures. 20 Tables. Well over 100 sources. Not sure how many footnotes. Around 50.

A long labor, to be sure.

Other announcements: an old and dear friend just became a father. It's complicated, but he sounds blissful, and it's good to hear him happy.

It's strange to me -- and not subtle -- that one of the only things I've ever been really clear about is wanting to have kids. And having kids or not having kids has been one reason propelling me out of relationships. Yet many of the men I've dated now how children. Hmmm... Try not to take that one personally! It does and it doesn't have anything to do with me. Like most things.

It's also strange to be at the end of such a long process with nothing but paper to show for it. Lots of paper. Lots of paper that takes fucking FOREVER to print.

I never really thought I would finish. Something about perfectionism made easier when you don't actually finish anything you might be able to judge imperfect.

But poking and prodding and cajoling and supporting by multiple friends has gotten me here: the other side.

Is it myself I've labored to pull through?

A new future come to light?

What light through yonder window breaks? It comes from the east. It has stories.

I'm listening.