"I'm always pacing around and walking away"

Yoga is probably the only place where I can concentrate on a task for more than 30 minutes at a time. Mind you, I am not talking about 'reading about yoga' but doing yoga. I've never been very good at reading the philosophy.

I somehow manage to get all of my reading done in school. Granted, they are not the closest reads, but I do it. I don't know how though. Really. I feel like I can scarcely stay still for more than ten minutes at a time. It's a troubling tendency. I do, however, get engrossed in reading about the "horrors" of the modern world. Right now, my current fascination (and horror) is mountaintop removal and factory farming. These texts I can read for long stretches, especially when there are stories of people entangled in them. All this is to say I don't love theory as much as I love description. To take it a step further, I wonder how 'good' a sociologist I am as a result. I have a really hard time sitting on my ass reading this shit and I have to keep reminding myself that I am taking this time to do intense study and then, later, I can reengage in the "world" in a way I find meaningful. It's all I can do, though, not to take off and do the work, learn about the work by doing it rather than reading about it.

More than that, I feel like a total fraud. Who am I to say what's what if I don't get off my ass?

New Season

The past two weeks have been kind of whirlwindish. I took part in organizing a conference, attended a conference in New York, hosted several folks at my home, and, oh yeah, bought a house. Well, poor Chris is the one who has borne much of that responsibility, but still.

I'm not sure if it's spring or the promise of the end of coursework or the anticipation of tearing out drop ceilings and ripping out carpets but everything feels a little bit better and entirely more manageable. I am still struggling with sitting still - or at least coaxing my brain to stay still - for more than 10 minutes but I wonder if that's just who I am.

One thing that I've been feeling is a sense of possibility that I frankly haven't felt in a long time. This is in part because I have been feeling more connected lately. For Left Forum, I went to the obligatory environmental panels because I still believe that it's the most pressing and frightening issue I can think of. But I also went to "indulgence" panels. One such panel was entitled "Organizing in a Culture of Isolation", the other "Pun Rock: Cultural Space for Transformative Politics?". Both moved me in that I started thinking about the politics of space, place, and emotional connection. And the two speakers who moved me most were the least academic in their demeanor and presentation. In the Culture of Isolation panel, three of the (male) participants spouted off (useful) statistics and relevant reading materials. The last one to speak was an activist (female) who described the space in which she works and the function of food and comfort in good organizing. She was very smiley. Part of the reason I went to the punk rock panel was that there was a woman speaking on it who I knew from my post-riot grrrl feminist activism days. She was a key organizer for the Visions in Feminism conference. I didn't think she'd remember me at all. When I walked in, she immediately recognized me and her face lit up into this broad beautiful smile. And when it was her turn to speak, she started by saying that in coming to consciousness, she was comforted to realize that she wasn't crazy but just felt things really hard. She then went on to describe the culture in which we live as being like receiving a million little paper cuts (she borrowed this from someone) and discussed the transformative but tricky spaces of music and DIY as a way to reclaim the lost dignity of an oppressive and deadening culture.

Strangely, these panels informed how I think about my "work" as much as the panels on ecological destruction and the logic of "late" capitalism. It's all tied together. Isolation, internalized oppression, consumption, loneliness, lack of community, and the absence of vision that can paralyze people. I just remember how beautiful my feminist community was then. I take for granted all I learned in those days - I didn't forget it, I just take it for granted because, my g-d, how could my life be any other way?

chris did my bidding for me

Chris and I put in a bid on a house! It's 75k, in Hampden, a bit of a mess but a place where I think we could spend our lives. I had no idea how many X factors were involved in purchasing a home such as where one gets the loan (FHA has a little bit of a harder time), whether one wants inspections, and a bunch of other stuff I was too tired to understand when I heard we put in the bid.

I never thought I would wind up in Baltimore. I ran like crazy from what I thought was the suffocating smallness of it. I now see that smallness as conducive to community building. This is partially because I think the lefties in Baltimore are doing great things. Over the Christmas holiday, I sat down with a friend of mine who now lives in New York and I was telling him about all the great stuff that's happening in our former hometown and he was shocked. He recalled a time where it felt like 10 of us sitting at MICA and talking about Israel and Caterpillar bulldozers (a nod to Rachel Corrie here). Things have changed.

I also recently learned that someone very dear to me is expecting a baby. I really want to be around for these things. I cannot cannot wait for the summer.

stay tuned

Big things are in the works, I think. That means The Genealogy of Morals, both as Foucault imagined it and as Nietzsche wrote it, is on the backburner of my imagination. Instead, I see gardens, puppy dogs, Sunday morning walks, and many hellos. I pray for simplicity. I crave the provinciality that once sent me to another coast (yes, H. this was written as per our conversation). I hope for a place where my kind of curiosity, the naive kind, is welcomed, or at least tolerated, rather than hardened into acceptable language and researchable questions only.

All of this, is of course wrapped up in something that is tangible and it shouldn't be the only reason the other dreams should happen (this is a terrible sentence). But we don't choose our realities fully now do we?

new blog, new peace of mind?

My friend Kristen once told me that the best way to 1. warm up one's writing skills and 2. develop a modicum of sanity is to blog. I used to do it all the time on myspace. Facebook's "notes" don't really seem to cut it. So here I am. Blogging here.

If I were to describe to you the state of my brain, I envision its contents as a bunch of lego pieces that don't quite fit together and sit in a state of disarray at the base of my skull. They giggle a lot and make a lot of noise and as a result, the nothing fits, nothing works (Chris describes these as "bees in the brain"). I have had a harder time than usual concentrating and it occurs to me that there is so much going on in my life right now that I should forgive myself. But the rhythm of academic life doesn't stop and it's ohsoeasy to fall way behind. There is never a finished to-do list. Some people thrive on that whether they'll admit it or not. There are those people who feel a bit lost if they're not really busy. I might be one of those people. But, I also know the value of leisure. Yet, I think I've lost sight of what that looks like. Best I can manage is going to yoga.

I am leaving the above paragraph in-tact in all of its disarray because that's how my head feels right now. This blog will hopefully help me sort all this out systematically, one topic at a time - my feelings of intellectual inadequacy (this is common so no boo-hooing), the impending responsibility of buying a home, the pressure to finish comps so that I can live in said home with my husband who is leaving very soon, the knots in my shoulders and neck that never seem to dissolve, my inability to sit and stew with a task for more than 15 minutes (save this blog), my intense homesickness, my worries about my financial future, my incessant tendency to look for a way out of grad school. feeling overwhelmed and guilty every time I open my email account because . All of these are worthy topics so stay tuned. This is, of course, unless the blog then becomes another "burden". My hope is that it will help me sort through all of these burdened feelings rather than contribute to them.

No edits, just posting. Here it goes.