A Hundred Indecisons

I've moved!

2006-07-04T14:42:00.000-04:00

Visit me at my LJ, http://miashell.livejournal.com/.

What REAL lesbian porn looks like...

2006-05-10T20:04:00.000-04:00

My girl and I were putting together furniture from IKEA this evening, and we stopped to shoot some pics, laughing that this is what real lesbian porn would look like...

Can you imagine the dialogue? "Oh hunny, watching you pound in those nails makes me want to bond with you in a long term partnership... Let's go make some tea and snuggle in bed with our cats while we sing folk songs!"

Downshifting

2006-03-09T14:43:00.000-05:00

Our latest experience with our cat's health emergency has caused Aimee and I to reflect on our economic habits, and to reevaluate the way we have been living our lives lately (and by lately, I mean since we moved in together 3 years ago). Before our marriage a year and 1/2 ago, Neither one of us ever carried a balance on our credit cards- now, that debt has risen to what, when I did the computations lately, is a staggering and debilitating amount. Both of us dreams of debt-free life, of a day when we don't owe anyone anything.

I've always been intrigued by the concept of voluntary simplicity, but my Taurean nesting nature and upper-middle class upbringing are but two aspects of my personality that have worked against the values that I hold. So Aimee and I are in the process of downshifting- adjusting our consumption habits, and other aspects of our lifestyle, to better reflect our values and goals. One recent, and major, decision was to eliminate our ridiculous digital cable- we were paying $100 a month for the works with a DVR. We've cut that down to $5 for basic cable, and I have to say I miss it much less that I anticipated. I've added links for anyone who might be interested in learning more.

Takin' care of business

2006-03-09T14:19:00.000-05:00

This morning, my wife and I woke up at 6:20 AM to go meet with our accountant about our taxes, and then went to get life insurance. At one point in the morning Aimee turned to me and said, "I feel like such a grown-up." I love these moments, when we realize we're not kids anymore- we have commitments and responsibilities that extend beyond whose turn it is to buy the beer.

Not for the squeamish

2006-03-07T23:28:00.000-05:00

I have been waiting for my cat to take a dump. For 6 days.

I have never known agony like inspecting the litter box several times a day, heart beating in anticipation, hoping, just hoping, for a stinky little present. Because Jasper had surgery last Thursday to remove a 3 inch bundle of fibers- his hair, our hair, the rug, string, yarn, you name it- from his stomach. And while he was recovering, he was constipated- they said it could be any number of factors, from dehydration to problems with the surgery, and so I have been paranoid. We've tried everything- I have to laugh about the idea that I've tried to get my cat to eat pumpkin the past few days!

But finally, on day 6, after a little kitty-workout chasing his favorite toy, after a little Petromalt, he finally went. He was in the box (a Booda dome) for over 10 minutes, as he had been for days. After he came out, I went over and lifted the lid. I saw it- a huge, 6 days worth bundle of stress-relief. I broke out into a huge smile, and then I burst into tears. My life laughed at me. I got angry and demanded to know what was so funny. Aimee was like, you just smiled, then cried, about a bowel movement. That's pretty funny.

And I guess it is. I'm just glad the little guy is ok.

This ain't no time of year to be alone

2006-02-26T01:32:00.000-05:00

It's 1:15 AM here in Springfield, and I am sitting in bed typing on Aimee's laptop as she sleeps curled up beside me, with our kitty Jasper curled up and snoring at her feet (he had kennel cough when we adopted him, and so he's prone to colds). I am exhausted from a long, wonderful weekend that included catching live performances from two of the performers that rank among my favorites- Melissa Ferrick and Mark Erelli. Both concerts were amazing in their own ways, both so different and fulfilling in completely different ways, as was Erin McKeown's performance last weekend at Club Helsinki. I hope to post about these experiences soon, but now I must rest so that I can grade yet another batch of student papers when I get up tomorrow.

But because she is resting now, I want to post here and thank my wife for showing me the joy that is live music. Before we starting dating, 6 years ago this coming Wednesday, I rarely experienced live music beyond the occasional symphony concert. Now, I can't imagine living without a regular dose of that energy, that passion, that sense of connection. For two introverts who need connection with others, but are often too shy to reach out, experiencing the communion of music with others is a vital component of our lives.

But at least they HAVE titles...

2006-02-19T13:45:00.000-05:00

I have to take a moment to thank the student who confused the definitions of "eunuch" and "eugenics" on the tests I just finished grading... made for an answer so amusing I almost snorted coffee out my nose. But a mistake like that I can understand. What I don't understand is the student who left the definition of feminism blank. I couldn't tell if that was an oversight or a comment on my class. It's not like we had two days worth of class talking about feminism and its relation to gender studies vs. women's studies or anything. Not like having a working definition of feminism might be important in an Introductory Women's Studies classroom that uses a text edited explicitly from a feminist perspective. Meh.

And so I move onto contemplations of the place of disability studies at the university, and its influence on the creation of a disabilities culture. The first half of the batch was promising; I love when I can truly respond to student papers as if we're having a conversation, rather than just thinking, where's the subject of this sentence? Or, didn't you just say that? 3 times?

Meh. The title of the essay on top? "Positive Outlook in Life." Under that? "The Impact of Society's Expectations." Followed by "Is Life Over with a Disability?" "Crafting an Identity" is followed by "The Devastation of Multiple Sclerosis on the Writing of Nancy Mairs" -- look! Indication that their essay is part of a larger textual conversation! Did he really mean the more complicated, and potentially sophisticated, "on," rather than in? I'm intrigued by "On Being a Woman, a Wife, a Mother, and a Cripple," but the fact that it's followed by "Identity of Crippled Woman" and "A Crippled Society" makes me less optimistic. And then my conversations will end with the troubling "Inspiration." Oy. I can only imagine what it might "inspire" me to!

There will be time...

2006-02-17T14:33:00.000-05:00

I am procrastinating today.

Not was, am, because I still am -- starting my eighth blog, or something like it. Because I am full of personalities, all asking for release, all carefully segmented and contained. Some of you will know all those aspects, some of you will never know. But all the fragments are out there, with perhaps only the girl, LegalQueer, as their sole observer; it is only fitting that my wife would be the one I would let in on all my secrets, those sides of myself I carefully tuck away.

Since I turned "The Overcoming of It" into the saga of my weight loss journey, I haven't had a space for the side I used to express there- the one that can't stop thinking, who turns her work into her life, and reads her life by her work. And so I begin, again.

Today I stumbled across the blog of an old acquaintance, someone who used to challenge me, who made me watch (and bade me love) Heathers and read Ayn Rand, who was always full of questions, who probably thought I never had answers. Someone who challenged me by making me feel insecure, who brought out the worst of my introversion. He was the type of guy I wanted to fuck because it might bring me closer to the way his mind works. I never did.

He's working on his Ph.D, too. I read the following post with a knotted stomach and bile rising in my throat...
From faith's Fuck the World:
"Time is out to get you.

Or, more properly, sloth. Wasting time. Losing time. Running low: can I borrow a cup of time?

I've been reading and writing, teaching, and lounging. I've been smoking and drinking, living and loving, careful and scattered, with a splash of inferiority complex; verging on crippling anxiety at--failing, wasting, or not having enough--time.

In other words: I'm writing a dissertation.

Maybe people won't like what I have to say, but I've got to write it before they hate it. And hate it they will . . . "

I, too, feel crippled by my anxiety- about time, yes, but about my existence and its point, moreso. While I see my academic struggles in his words, I know that my anxiety runs much deeper. Having it diagnosed, giving it fancy names, trying to placate it with pills and nutrition and exercise and meditation, all this doesn't change that it is a basic building block of my personality. I live with anxiety, but what I do with it is under my control.

Right now, working with my anxiety means putting aside the Women's Studies exams to be graded, the Freshman Comp essays to be responded to, the Faulkner I'm reading for my exams, the "to do" list for the graduate association I am secretary for, the article that I will never be done revising (as I assure my advisor it will) because it's just not good enough to be let out there with my name attached to it. Because the work I was doing this morning with my racing brain and sweaty palms and lump in my throat was going no where. My brain needs a mental health break.

It means taking this time to do things like hunt down exes and other figments of the past through Google, to read reviews of my high school girlfriend's latest play in Philadelphia newspapers, to see how high school friends have grown up by looking at their Myspace and Friendster accounts. Next year is my 5 year college reunion, and my 10 year high school reunion is also starting to be planned. I look at my old friends, my old exes, and try to reconstruct who I have been. I think part of this nostalgia for the past is brought on by anxiety about the fact that I have been with my wife for 6 years now, and I am forgetting what my life without her was like. Not entirely a bad thing, but still disconcerting.

Perhaps it's because I've spent half a week reading Faulkner's Light in August, contemplating the "Burden of History," the "Isolation of the Individual," the "Search for Identity." Because when I get into a text, I start to read myself by it. Am I Christmas? Am I on the search for who I am, looking at labels thrown at me, trying them on like black boots, feeling their stink rise up my legs? Christmas struggles to reconcile the knowledge of his "nigger" blood with the white face the world sees, and reads, as his identity. What am I struggling to reconcile? What is the "black abyss... bearing now upon [my] ankles the definite and ineradicable guage of its upward moving" which I seek to flee, or understand, or submit to?

Or maybe I'm just thinking of the fact that faith used to wear big black boots (and I'm sure still does), and I used to love nothing more than to see them lying between the big stacks of books and music in his college dorm room, as we lay on his bed arguing about something of no, or every, consequence. Because when he would take them off, it meant he was going to let me stay a while.

Whenever I read or see a textual reference to boots, I think of him.

Luckily it is the books I connect with in these odd and twisted ways that ultimately stay with me. All the better to write my exams with, my dear.

And now back to Faulkner...