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.