And also...(pt. 2)

Grad school (particularly this paper requiring a long-winded refutation of  a critical analysis focussing on the god-forsaken British Romance Period, constructed from extensive research done by qualified scholars), go to hell.

lost and insecure [you found me]

I don't know what I'm hoping to get out of life, much less this blog.  Like others, I'm torn between living and recording the motions.  There's a time and place for sharing and sometimes life's momentum just gets to whirring and buzzing and humming all at once and you're swept along in the swiftness of it.  This has mostly been attributed to the end of the semester.  In a few words, grad school is a hell of a lot more than I ever expected.  It not only engulfed me in its currents, but it held me under turbulent waves for much of the latter half of 16 weeks.  There are a dozen other trials that have kept my stress levels at maximum capacity, but it's probably better not to air it all right now for reasons of op-sec and patience.  

Though the blog halted, life goes on.  I'm waiting on my grades and anticipating A's.  I surprised myself and a handful of professors.  I made a new family of fellow english grad students and made a homey little nest out of our one, lone conference room.  I know Louise Erdrich better than she may know herself.  I know the Cult of True Womanhood to degrees of nauseam.  I fell in love with the ideals of the Expressivist movement led by Elbow and Murray.  I wrote my first short story and again surprised myself.  I did a number of seemingly unconquerable tasks and crushed them beneath my tiny feet.  

I keep thinking about that Eleanor Roosevelt quote: "You must do the thing you think you cannot do."  I believe that idea alone sums up the year.  I finally graduated college.  I survived months and months of army induced separation and survived.  I somehow defied all notions of feasibility by getting into this masters program on such short notice, and beyond that, I have excelled.  Those are the hills that I've climbed, leaving the horizon speckled with far-off flags bearing my crest -- pink and flowery, for sure.  The mountains, however, await, standing rugged, impossibly tall and taunting. 

 Next year is coming all too strong and quickly, like a train whose force makes the earth tremble long before arriving.  This is my life now.  There is no turning back.  It's ironic how badly I want it and also how fiercely I dread it.  I have to keep looking back on the achievements, on the things I never thought I could actually pull off until I landed on the other side of Trying and the ride was over and I was still intact.  Love and wanting are tangled in some powerful magic, and perhaps I am a little stronger than I thought.  But I won't admit it often, for it isn't often that I feel it might be true.

if only a sigh were loud enough

My muscles pinch and crawl like intolerable little spiders up and down my back, up the length of my neck, around my middle.  I balance in between grabbing for the swimmy-head, stomach tickling anxiety pills and screaming and swinging and unbinding any sense of composure I have ever held myself together with.  

I don't understand why there are times when each single task erupts into odyssey after odyssey.  It's god-damn over-the-phone bill paying.  It is MADE to provide a convenient service!  Charge me ONCE, not twice OR not at all!  It's tracking down the apparently out-of-print book for 19th century lit. that LITERALLY is only housed at the smallest, out-of-the-way-est library known to mankind, and it only took 10 phone calls and an absurd conversation with the 85-year old uninformed campus librarian who could NOT explain to me why the online catalog listed the fucking book as both "available" and "checked-out" before I could lay my twitching, exhausted hands on its cover.  And it's the bionic fleas that refuse to surrender the sweet, tender flesh of my poor, suffering dog, and the vet money I don't have and every cure I've tried [as best as I could].

I meant to tackle backed-up homework, though the universe clearly had other plans.  I spent the day unpuzzling an unexpected Rubiks Tuesday.  A couple of times I considered erasing my notion of maps and to-do's and driving aimlessly forever, but I settled on cooking my woes into oblivion.  I checked-out the book, had treated the dog with prescriptions and unearthed an intricate grocery list from the bowels of my purse.  I wandered until I found myself parked in a grand Kroger lot.  With eco-friendly shopping bags and wallet in hand, I entered the automatic gates of Salvation.  Ripe palettes of produce, chirping lasers kissing barcodes, panes of frozen aisles, warm yeasty shelves of bread; I love this pocket of life better than the hilarity of the world at large.  With my blue bag brimming full of dairies and veggies and tubes of dough, I caught myself before making my way to the finish-line cash register.  Hard cider and less of a white-knuckled grip on each angry minute beyond the thick walls of food would feel nice.  Finished, I went to pay.

This is where I picked up [yesterday].  And rising today, full on sleep and drawn by sunshine I started collecting myself, directing myself, finding my Wednesday purpose.  All was well and free of anxious, crawling muscles until I dumped out my purse for re-organizing.  No wallet.  Of fucking course: no wallet.  Because how could a day be whole without the blinding frustration of something amiss!?  And again I want to drive away, uncoil my mind with a pill, fire up the oven or uncork a thick, glass bottle of freedom.  

It's still at Kroger, holding my place in the land of salvation, only I'm miles and miles away, stuck in the here and now.

hump-day musings

Time has become ever illusive. I mean, it never felt like a low cloud hovering aimlessly, but now, now it's a hurried wind. I keep meaning to come here, to rekindle a dedication to writing, though it seems that I'm only tapping on my keyboard when everything else feels so dire and fragile that I have no other choice than to relieve my mind [here].

I'm making a point this morning to be different.

I'm taking a break from Tracks [which absolutely HAS to be finished today] to write something more attached to sanity than the last post. That conflict has yet to be resolved, but at least we are searching for a direction. Both of us are pulling out our compasses and watching the dials spin over personal capabilities and the ecstasies and trials of love. Beyond my ungluing over love in the time of army-ness, school pushes me onward.

I turned in my first graduate paper yesterday and as I slid it under my pedagogy prof's door I was nearly trembling. I think this must be what it feels like to be a little fish. These papers aren't about business content anymore. Not only am I submitting them to the grammar sticklers but also to the English scholars, which I might remind you, I am most certainly not. I'm in Composition Theory and Pedagogy because once upon a time I started a MySpace blog that a couple of people gave a thumbs-up. I may never feel like I truly earned my spot at the conference table where our classes are held. So frankly, I may have a stroke writing the 10-page essay due on Wednesday. I can't recall ever feeling intimidated by a professor like I do in my 20th C. American Lit. course. I am accustomed to research papers, where a number of secondary sources are required. No question. And cited throughout. This particular assignment is to be 8-12 pages made up 75% of content I pull out of a pool of three novels. Ok, it looks easy. It even looks easy to me, just now, reading over the previous sentence. I'm just not sure how to summon my own opinion on some parallel that worms through all three books and then how to support it with only fictional text.

I'm thinking that something church inspired would be interesting and relatively easy. The symbolism in Erdrich's characters strikes me, a possible other direction. There is also the socio-cultural nature of Erdrich's white characters compared with her Native American Indians. The white characters are always weak and mad and petty. Pauline and Sita and Karl all lose their minds in various ways; Lynette is pretty well straight trash, and the nuns tend to be corrupted. I suppose an answer will come to me.

Back to the books.

...still she reigns

I've stolen away from the grip of retail obligations only long enough to announce my continuing existence. Readership has dwindled, my mind becoming limp with the absence of creative use, and I feel a little helpless in this mental drought. So I've sworn that tonight, after I've clocked out and gone home, had a glass of wine, and slipped into something a little more comfortable, I'll produce something. Anything more than this. Thank you for your continued support even when I haven't been much for giving back.

so close I can almost taste it...

I'm here, I'm still here!

[albeit frazzled and should-be-studying]

I feel neglectful and unresponsive, but school, these last, painfully long days of school, has called shotgun to the rest of living. 4 exams stand between me and that long sought after diploma, and so as tempting as these warm nights of spring can be to throw caution to the wind and...relax or blog or do anything other than pore over stacks of hand-crafted flashcards, I must power on through the jargonny fog.

Next week I'll be back and full of jubilation!

[hopefully...]

Pause and Proceed

I'm glad to report that I just weathered the most awkward and fumbling group presentation in which I may have ever participated. It was one of the last notoriously school o' business projects I will ever have to do, and for that I am eternally grateful. Having it now in the past will significantly reduce the recent tidal wave of stress I've been churning under.

[hooray!]

My role was to talk about the process of alternative implementation based on a detailed analysis of both a TOWS and SWOT matrix. An unspoken part of the requirement was also to speak with sophisticated use of business jargon, or at lease it was encouraged by certain other team members. So last night, in the midst of those who actually comprehend and care about corporate strategy, I was sure to pick up some intellectual catch-phrases. Several of our suggested alternatives fell beneath the umbrella of "Pause and Proceed with Caution," a formula that is pretty self-explanatory. It is defined as a sort of temporary time-out to regroup, where a company decides to stop promoting some particular aspect of operations just long enough to sit down with a task-force or some other savvy group of expertise to bat around solutions. After choosing some "best remedy," it is implemented and the process continues toward success [or so the company hopes].

I'm not sure that I've taken adequate time to truly bear my deep running hatred for corporate America and thus this stupid degree that I chose after a long and rambling stint of art-ful majors. Starving is not becoming on a princess so I sold out to the man...I did a number of dumb things around that period [we'll cover those another day, perhaps]. That to say that I spend most classroom hours distracting myself with daydreams or untimely gossip or internet surfing or...the list is long, friends. I don't pay attention because I don't care. In the rare occasion that some strategic concept enters and sticks in a pocket of long-term memory, the angels sing and rays of light part clouds to bask me in a celestial glow...or something of that nature.

I've had this pause and proceed with caution idea all over my mind through last night and into today. It seems so simple - acknowledge a potential problem, pause, problem solve, and proceed.

[I haven't clearly unearthed the entire story of inner discourse for several reasons, the largest being that I'm tired of looking at it and thinking about it and fighting it and writing about it. The task of spelling it out would be exhausting and redundant. Also, I know that sometimes [though not often] he takes the time to read a little blog post here and there. Some things are better "discussed" when eyes can connect through interaction, not technology.]

Seven minutes in 8 days is not much - I don't care if you are the Time Keeper, himself. It isn't. It is a long time not to communicate, and I'm tired of pretending that I've undergone some mystical shuffling of perception. X months versus XX months is also a long time. But hey, I am getting the swing of secrecy. Trust no one. Share nothing. We're all a bunch of ghosts, whispers of people...jesus.

I spend four-day blocks praying for my phone to startle me. On the days that it does I am unacquainted with the caller's voice. I know he's tired. I do think of him and how lucky I am to be able to sit down at the end of a long day to gain a moment's peace. I'm proud of him and empathetic to the lengthy lists of reasons I shouldn't think about myself. I AM. On the other hand, I AM also half of US and this us is feeling a little fucking hard to fuse.

We all have our baggage, God knows I've got trunk-fulls of my own worn and tacky luggage. Beyond what we bring to the table, it makes us into the people we are. I am an overly-expressive, needy, over-analytical, neurotic drama-queen. And he is a composition very different from myself. I'm privy to that notion, too, just in case anyone wants to remind me how conditioned/trained he is to be hard and frank and direct and reserved, how different his lifestyle is, how...

I know. I know! I KNOW!

I can't have another empty conversation. Pardon my moment of intense selfishness, but I can't. I can't sit through the unbearably unemotional minutes when I'm about to pull out my own fucking hair. It's my last semester and while it isn't a matter of life or death or national security or war, I just can't feel guilty about being stressed and needing a little love myself. And I hear that this is what the deployment's like. If a prolonged version of this looms on my futures of X or XX months apart...

[Pause.]

No calls. Not for a few days.

there is no love without compassion

Every now and then the world pauses, allowing a few sacred moments for me to reflect. Welcome to the first [in a long while] post that is not rushed by the bustle of my last-semester-almost-full-time-job-distracted-by-love life.

Still, not having had previous time to disperse these thoughts in increments, I fear that this will end up being a post full of color, but lacking cohesion.

[I'm sorry]

Again, on reading:

A few times I've mentioned this book that I am attempting to read, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. I am both intrigued and disgusted by the history I have avoided until now. Not only is my personal ignorance an intolerable realization, but also the testament that this book stands as. I feel so...let down by humanity.

Are we or are we not inherently good?

The Staff Sergeant will respond with an immediate and deliberate, "No." I dodge that answer in order to preserve my idealistic purpose, but I love that he challenges me to look at ideas from another side. Still, I can't help wanting to think that people are [usually] good by nature. All expectations aside, I have come to realize that not everyone aspires to make the world a better place.

[I should be hugging trees, right?]

I've only covered a small slice of the innumerable dilemmas now categorized as "genocide." One of the more inspiring/appalling situations to which I was enlightened was the Khmer Rouge regime that terrorized the Cambodian population throughout the mid-late 1970's. I just don't understand how this happens, how this is happening, elsewhere, right now, as I type, and we as Americans do little or nothing. A good portion of the populous doesn't even know what is happening in, say, Darfur. My mind lacks the ability to process so much apathy...

Backtracking to Cambodia: I was about half way through the chapter when, in one of those few seconds of free time, I happened across a blog post addressing the exact thing I was losing myself in every time I opened the book's pages. This Khmer Rouge phenomenon was severely disturbing to say the very least, so I dove into the depths of Micheal Yon's account, "No Darker Heart" with hopes of seeing yet another perspective. I devoured it, relished the words, fell in love with the articulation and lusted after his experience. I wanted to see the place where he stood, where the rain surfaced scraps of clothing, unearthed irrefutable truths. I wanted to be a voice like his, to be a bridge for those who don't know, to rid the world of naivety and preferrable darkness.

We can't close our eyes, lest the machine is perpetuated and grows more precise, more able, more hungry. If we don't talk about Darfur, the babies still starve, the innocent are still raped and tortured. The families are still displaced, still left with nothing but the memory of life before. We can't close our eyes, turn our gaze, cover our ears...we can't because it makes us an accomplice to unfathomable brutality and devastation. The sad reality is that most of us do, most generations have, and without knowledge, most will continue to.

On future plans:

My old roommate always acted as a great voice of reason. We think alike in many ways and work through our thoughts in similar methods. Coffee with her last night was extremely helpful in calming the currents of my over-active mind. I had constructed a shaky tower of what-if's on which to position my future direction. I really have no idea what I want to do with myself once I leave these hallowed halls of college, but I feel a pulling, a summoning that urges the core of myself toward some unknown place, some unclear purpose. Alas!, over hot tea, in a noisy, but familiar house of coffee, I was able to move from the maddening buzz of my inner thoughts to a place significantly less congested. I had a pseudo-epiphanic moment.

For once, I embraced patience.

[sweet relief.]

Institutionalized

"I've only got a minute," seems to start the majority of blogs these days. I'm sorry, it's just...well, it doesn't matter how busy I am, I only have a minute.

I'm getting ready to brave the rain and the early-morning, angry traffic for day number two of the last round of classes. [DING!] It's bizarre to think that this way of life will be over in four months. In four months I'll be finished. No more 8am classes that I cannot, for the life of me, make it to on time. No more last minute research papers on business culture and the hierarchy of corporations that I do not support or praise.

It's funny, that's all.

If I said that I wasn't looking forward to graduation day, I'd surely be lying. It's been a really long time coming. But every time I consider the day following graduation, I think of that scene with Morgan Freeman standing in the grocery store asking his manager if he can go to the restroom. The guy tells him several times that he doesn't have to ask, but prison has conditioned the ex-con. I'm afraid that I'll be the same, a student for all but four years of my entire life, suddenly set free. I'll be given my paper bag of belongings and a small envelope of cash, and maybe a bus ride into town, and the whole, uncharted world will just be sitting there, waiting, ready for me to seize. I worry that I won't know what to do without the regiment of coursework and strangely broken-up daily schedules. I lust after that freedom, yet it terrifies me, too. I think I begin to panic at the sheer size of "adulthood."

I have no idea what I want to do with a degree.

[the next chapter, I believe, will take us to grad school]

Thursday's child has far to go

The semester is officially concluded, and not a moment too soon. Finals Week was beginning to make me miss real clothes, contacts, and recently washed hair.

And order.

I will confess, that in this moment, my entire life rests in the boughs of absolute disarray. My room, unspeakable. The kitchen table...wait, does it still exist beneath the mounds of text books, junk mail, and Christmas paper?

Holy man...

Thursday marks a 12 hour lock-down. No one leaves the apartment until it is certain, beyond a possible doubt, that if the health department showed up for high tea, they wouldn't leave behind boarded windows and caution tape having marked the unit "condemned". [and by "no one," I mean me.]

Thursday I'll shake off the Domestic Goddess persona and put her back to work...the Student is on hiatus, I tell you. There's more cleaning to be done than can possibly be accomplished in a day, and Christmas cards to write and send, and apple butter to can for gifts, and laundry to complete. I'll do it all to the tune of old holiday hits, and the apartment will smell more like a home than a college pad. It will be a magnificent day...oh, except for that hour I promised for GRE studying at The Bucks. Well, the student is sort of on a break...