Smothered

Forgive me for writing infrequently lately. And for writing graphically about food poisoning when I do. My excuse is that I do not use language well for events. I use language for description. (I'm the Virginia Woolf of bloggers.) (That creaking sound you just heard was Virginia Woolf and all the rest of Bloomsbury rolling over in their graves.) And aside from fantastically pink vomit, my life includes little these days that I feel compelled to describe. And even then, dang it, I have to hold back in deference to propriety.

Also, while I do a fair amount of self-analysis, I rarely feel comfortable putting it into writing. (If you like confessional blog posts, enjoy this one. This is about as good as it gets.) Oh, I voice my self-analysis. I talk to myself. To Eric. To the cats. To imaginary interviewers for magazines. (It's not crazy if you know it isn't real.) But it looks silly in print. I'm embarrassed to see my own stream of consciousness in black and white. (Guess I'm not Virginia Woolf after all.)

So I've felt best about this blog when I've been able to describe nature. And often those posts revealed something about me, too. I'm deeply affected by the weather and the grass and the trees and the light and the running of water. Seeing myself juxtaposed with and connected to the natural world gives me perspective. Gives me insight. Gives me inspiration. Gives me words.

I'm glad that we have lived in the city, and there are many things I enjoy here. But I've clearly lost something here. The mechanics of city life and nonfictional human interaction give me little to write about. They wear me out with their noise and their concrete and their close spaces, and narrow the space in my mind for creativity. Maybe--probably--I could find inspiration in the city with time. But I think I want my nature back. I think we may not stay here for much more of our lives.

Surfacing

I started teaching this week. And there are stories about that, stories those of you closest to me have already heard, involving American Sign Language interpretors and insubordination and serious language barriers. I understand why teaching this class has fallen to an adjunct instructor. I understand why none of the full-time faculty cared to take it on.

But today I'm less concerned about the innate challenges presented by the course than I am about the fact that I allowed myself to walk into that classroom on Monday, and again on Wednesday, shamefully unprepared. Practically until the moment the class started, I worked full-time at the bookstore, and that kept me from preparing properly, because I let it. Because I'm lazy these days. Because I've adjusted my worldview to permit laziness. I've decided that life without ample time to watch movies and read books and sit on the front porch with a beer is a life poorly lived.

And those things are important. I still believe that. I believe one of the problems with our culture is that so many of us refuse to rest. It's a culture of extremes and of competition, so we can never have enough money or enough friends, and if we know someone who spends more hours at work every week than we do, we aren't working hard enough. All of these contests we enter ourselves in leave us too little time for relationships with the people who mean the most to us, and far too little time to be alone.

But this year I've given myself down-time so excessively that I feel almost physically unbalanced. Almost physically unable to stay organized and keep up with daily tasks and errands, let alone be productive in meaningful ways. And when I'm productive, when I'm writing and teaching and I have a purpose beyond just getting through this next thing, is when I'm happiest, even if it is when I'm busiest. When I have so much on my plate that I can only choose to move through it systematically and laboriously, is when I feel the most organized and when the scattered little pieces of life find a place most easily.

Because I was intentionally keeping almost nothing on my plate when this teaching job fell onto it over a month ago, I couldn't find a place for it and kept just shoving it around, occasionally nibbling at it halfheartedly. When I could have been reading about theory and pedagogy and planning classes, I was thinking vaguely about what I would do the first couple of days of class, figuring that would be enough. With that, I would survive the first week.

Then I walked into class and it was exactly like the time when I was four years old and I walked into a dropoff in the lake. Instead of the surface of the water, I was suddenly looking at sand and seaweed and my own feet. And I couldn't breathe.

I discovered that I had been anticipating cardboard students who were less intelligent and intuitive than the three-dimensional people who sat down in the chairs on that first day. Almost immediately, I felt like a fraud, and I was pretty sure they knew all about it. I was relying on the textbook to direct my daily lessons, and I discovered that the textbook gives me next to nothing to work with. I can't spend six hours a week lecturing over four pages of text and doing interminable practice exercises. I discovered, suddenly, standing in front of ten strangers, that I had never actually been invested in this class. I was steeling myself to go through the motions, to somehow talk my way through eight weeks of class while doing a minimum of planning and self-education.

I should have been reading books about this for the past month. Now I have to throw my whole being into making up for the fact that I didn't. So today I'm going to take her thoughts about routine to heart, and go get a library card and some books. And maybe if I can do that, I can eventually get some writing done and clean the house and return Season One, Disc Two of Deadwood to Blockbuster.