new direction?

The primary reason I decided to go back to school was because I wanted to teach and make a living at it. For some reason, this year of teaching kicked my ass and I'm really looking forward to not teaching sociology next year. I don't know if it's the structure of the university, the increasing illiteracy of the students, my not wanting to be here, the lack of chemistry with my students, or whatever other reasons I can think of, but this year of teaching left me uninspired and utterly frustrated. This will inevitably sound cruel, but I got so little from my students. They were such lumps. Ordinarily, I get hugs from students at the end of the year. This year, I'll be lucky if I don't get punched in the face. They hate me and I kind of hate them. When I think of most of them individually, I don't really hate them. But there was no chemistry, no fun, no engagement in the classrooms this year. It was maddening.

It used to be that the political nature of my courses is made some students have a distaste for me. But this year, it's just us. We don't like one another very much. I am probably harder on them than I should be but, please - in university one should know the difference between their, they're, and there and that a lot is two words. One should be able to structure a coherent sentence and engage in more than basic regurgitation.

Yet, I can't help but wonder if I am punishing people who are forced to engage in a failed system. The more I teach, and the longer I teach, I'm noticing the decline of students' ability to translate the ideas in their heads to the page. I'm noticing their inability or unwillingness to move beyond description into analysis. I think this is a function of a failing school system and their performance has been determined well before I get ahold of them.

But I also think (and here's where I become the asshole who sounds old) that the internet is ruining the classroom experience. Nothing irritates me more than 25% of the class checking their email, texting, chatting, looking at pictures on facebook, and watching fucking TV while in the classroom. It's a new-ish phenomenon and it sucks. It sucks that I have to be the disciplinarian jerk telling other adults to knock it the fuck off. It sucks that their attention is so scattered that the most basic things that I said a gagillion times in class show up on their papers and tests in the form of omission or flagrant rule-breaking. I feel like a failure when I see it.

I co-TAed this term - splitting a set of tutorials with another TA. They love her and didn't really like me. My course director said, "***** has all the same complaints that you have. But you put it out there." I can't help it. I see this thing that was so important to me flushed further and down the toilet. I think I need to take a break, regroup, and think through if and how to be committed to teaching in this increasingly irritating context.

walls and walls and walls

Like it always does, life goes on. The sting of losing Gordon has subsided. I hate that it has because all the Gordon-ness is absent from my life. The sting at least made it feel like he was with me a little.

I am speeding up my reading progress, which is great. I know I can probably get away with doing a lot less than I am. I do want to make the process worthwhile. My biggest problem is concentrating. I'm struggling with staying on task. The internet, the cats, my toenails, the litter box, the laundry, grocery shopping, tooth brushing. Any and everything deserves my attention other than the task at hand. I'm sure I'm describing almost everyone's life here and saying nothing particularly special.

Part of the reason I feel like this is the floaty-ness of my current existence. My house is coming together. Chris is in Baltimore. I am homesick. Uprisings are happening everywhere. Here I am in a city I don't particularly care for reading somewhat obscure books theorizing the real things that are actually happening and struggling to write a document that three people will read. At least I am grading papers that nobody wanted to write and I certainly don't want to read. It all feels so useless and like a grand waste of time.

My angst is real but it's so boring, I swear to g-d. I read a study that Facebook makes people kind of depressed because it looks like other people are having a great time and here you are, lonely, in this virtual reality, looking at peoples' weddings and parties and fabulous vacations thinking, "my life is so boring." I feel like that nonetheless. I just want to go home. I know I am wrongly thinking of going home as a panacea and I fear I will always be waiting for my life to start. Shit, I'm probably half way through it (knock on wood), shouldn't I realize that this is it?

A lot of this rambly bullshit post is to say that I don't think I'll really ever feel comfortable in a world like this. I am coming to accept it. I have strongly internalized the pain of injustice and the magnitude of wrong-living. I don't think I'll be able to shake it off, especially if I've made it my job to hole myself in my house and read about it. I envy those that are conscious but still able to find the beauty and joy in the world. I am praying that my Baltimore community will do just that.

Crying

I think I've mentioned in another post somewhere that I am not a crier. I'll cry out of frustration on occasion and out of grief on occasion. My relationship to crying is really weird. Because it is a physical manifestation of emotion, or at least the most obvious one, I feel like it's what I should do to express the sadness I feel. So when I'm crying about Gordon, I feel like I'm doing the right thing, though I wish I could stop crying. When I'm not crying about Gordon, I feel like I'm not honoring him or that I'm somehow "getting over" him or that I'm once again learning how to obscure my emotions - putting the emptiness and grief wherever I put all the other sources of emptiness and grief so that I can get-on-with-my-life. Busy busy. There are things to be done, books to be read, forms to be filled, papers to be written, emails to be answered.

My dreams betray me. I think I've mentioned that in another blog post too. Last night I dreamt about Gordon. In the dream, he'd died, just as in life. But I kept seeing him in the dream and I kept saying in the dream, I still see him and I miss him and I was crying and crying. I didn't cry as much yesterday and lo and behold, my dreams did the crying for me. Of course, I woke up and cried and it felt terrible and wonderful. I know the grief will subside and that loss will go somewhere in my body, where all the other grief and loss lives. I will bury it so completely that I will only be able to access it in the depths of my subconscious where I will cry in the dream or scream in anger in the dream so that I can keep it together in the real-life.

The Love of a Cat

I have been crying and crying about the loss of my dear Gordon. A strange thought occurred to me - would he mourn my passing? But that's not why I'm writing. I'm writing to remember him and to think about what this grief is; this grief that feels unbearable. I have been given books that philosophically and theoretically expound on the human/animal connection. I've not wanted to read them. My relationship with animals is one that gets me out of my head. This is a great comfort for someone who is already in her head. But this love, this palpable, consuming love that I felt for him. He was such an entity in the most profound way possible to me.

Gordon, unlike my other cats, always felt precarious to me. He was the cat that escaped out the window weeks after getting him from the Humane Society. Still fresh from my grief over the cat that used to get out but I could count on coming home - until that cat came home with Feline Leukemia and got really sick - I worried about Gordon's not coming home or coming home sick. That night, I went to the Kinkos, made hundreds of Missing Cat posters procured for free given my wellspring of tears, and proceeded to plaster the neighborhood. Gordon came back that morning no worse for the wear.

He got out again a day or two before I was to turn in my master's thesis. He exploited a tiny crack in the window and slithered his way out. I again canvassed the neighborhood, hiring a little girl who lived across the alley, and stared out the window through my tears all day until his little head emerged from under the steps in a neighbor's back yard. I called to the little girl to grab him and we were once again reunited.

He almost got out once again when I lived in a basement apartment in Bolton Hill. I remember I was sleeping and I heard Tilly going mad jumping up to the window and down again - Tilly, unlike her brother, does NOT enjoy even having access to the outdoors, nervous as she is. I look up at the window over my bed, saw Gordon give me a double-take, and grabbed him back inside. Strangely, that's the day Pinkerton was the one who actually made the escape only to be found a couple doors down waiting to be let back into the wrong basement.

My last scare came in the house on, oddly enough, Gordon St. It was there he surely had his most harrowing escape. We had a series of break-ins at that house and had a new alarm system to remember to trip when going in and out of the house. My roommate Jeff, remembering to put the alarm on while halfway out the door, kept the door open while he was doing this and missed the little black cat escape. Again, I stayed up all night waiting for him, first with Neale and then with Mike. He returned about 3 am, shit stained and definitely frightened. He'd encountered something in the woods that surrounded our house though that really did not quench his thirst for escape.

All of this is to say that I've always worried about losing him somehow. I began to let him explore the outdoors when we lived in San Francisco. He would wander around the yard, eating grass and sniffing, and it was my job to make sure he didn't go under the house or slide through the cracks of the neighbors' fences. When we lived on Powers St., he would sit for hours on his leash and enjoy the backyard. I could never let him loose though. Too much traffic and too many feral cats.

But what I really remember about him, what I really held onto, was our bond. I swear that cat could see into my soul. I would call him into the bedroom to read with me and he'd perk up, make a little Gordon sound, and run into the bedroom. He'd trounce on my reading materials with that purr (that beautiful purr). After he'd settle down, he'd hold my hand - I swear to god - and we'd hang out. I would look into his face and there was nothing but perfection.

Gordon liked any excuse for an outing so we'd do laundry together and he, with his crooked little back legs and his meow that would squeak at the end (I wish I had that on tape), would run down the hall with me. Going back up the stairs, he'd dart to the landing and flop over and I'd rub his belly.

Gordon would sleep right on top of me at night. He wouldn't do this every night but he is the only of my cats that would sleep on me or sit on my lap. He wouldn't always do it and he wasn't an annoyingly clingy cat, but it was so wonderful to be around him. We felt like a team.

Gordon LOVED to steal my gloves, though he didn't do this later in his life. I would buy him his own gloves to play with but he liked the ones that were worn, the ones that smelled like his people. He also loved to chase earplugs. EARPLUGS. He remained active and playful until three weeks before he died. His demeanor was so goddam affable that it was only in his fainting and weight loss rather than in his energy levels and blood stream, that the disease could be found. In looking back, it took a long time for the cancer to take him, as he began showing symptoms in May. Nobody could figure out what was wrong with him. I knew he was dying and everyone told me I was paranoid. Not in a mean way but in a you-love-your-cat-too-much way.

Colon cancer is the said to be the worst nightmare of a pet owner as it is difficult to detect until it is too late. Further, his cancer was called adenocarcinoma, the most aggressive of the malignancies. Despite expensive and painful surgery, Gordon was gone less than 3 months after his diagnosis.

The thing about the relationship with a cat is in its dailiness, its in the momentness. That means it's not the memories I will miss. For me, this isn't a relationship with memories. Rather, it's a relationship that I cherished in its structure of feeling and pure joy. Gordon filled a house with Gordon-ness. There will never be a relationship like that particular relationship in my life again and that is a pain that is very difficult to endure, at least in its early sting.

Musings and Apologies

This blog was intended as a jump start to writing. But I'm not writing and I'm hardly thinking these days, so the blog remains dormant. When the mood's not there, it simply is not there. The saying that writing is 99% perspiration is entirely true. I just don't really have it in me right now.

This will come as no surprise to most but I'm feeling very ready to quit school. The comps are a strange creature. At first I felt pretty excited to read a lot of these books. The reason I chose York was so that I could tailor my curriculum and read and study what I want. I've bumped up against the canon, however, and I can't seem to find my way out of it. Boring white men saying the same thing over and over. Yet, I feel like I have nothing more to contribute than they. I think to myself - if this is me trying to make my life meaningful, I'm really off the mark.

This struggle is coupled with the feeling that reading alone in a room and grading mediocre papers and tests for students who kind of hate where they are and what they're forced to do is not how I want to spend the rest of my life. Even if it was a meaningful and important contribution to the world. A professor that I respect - one that guided me and encouraged me and eventually became a colleague - once told me that her friend, a long-time professor, walked into the chair's office one day, plunked down her pile of grading and said, "I can't grade one more paper. I'm done. I quit!" This sounds like an urban legend and I can attest that most teachers would find this story somewhat unbelievable. At the same time, most of us are on the brink of madness most of the time reading up to a thousand pages of redundant passive voice regurgitation. In those times, we can imagine such a moment. I write this as a pile of essays waits for me in the next room.

These feeling grow and their zenith (or nadir, depending on how one sees it) culminated in a g-chat I had last night with a friend who is currently hanging out in Chiapas. In the lead up to the part of the story he knew would drive me to the brink, he told me that Mexico is pretty much run by drug lords these days. The Zapatistas are a mere shell of what they once were. Subcomandante Marcos* applied for a job at SUNY Binghamton and WAS REJECTED. This story is telling in so many ways. Who knows if Marcos revealed his identity. I'm sure if he did, he would pack the lecture halls. My friend Hilton and I were imagining him trying to fashion his CV. In any case, Marcos can't get a job. Further, it's pretty clear that academia is where many radicals go when they retire from actually doing stuff (hence a lot of the post-68 post-structuralist writing). This is not always so and a gross generalization; my supervisor is pretty much superwoman and I can name other names. But Marcos's story fits the trend in the most radical and depressing way possible. I am a really lame Marcos. Who wants to be a really lame Marcos?

* For those who aren't familiar with Subcomandante Marcos, he is the spokesperson for the Zapatistas - one of the central groups that inspired the worldwide "anti-globalization" movement in the late 90s. Radical white kids flocked to Chiapas to understand how an autonomous, "anarchistic" community like them could be replicated. There is a lot of academic interest in them, as well as the MST (Brazilian Landless Workers Movement) and the Argentinian collectives that emerged after the collapse of their economy. But Marcos, he's the philosopher king of the global movement against neoliberalism.

How do detect my mood this past month

It's pretty easy these days to tell how I'm feeling. Is Gordon eating? Yes? I'm happy! Is Gordon not eating? I'm going to cry any minute.

Gordon, my cat, is one of my favorite living beings on the planet. I love that little guy so much my heart feels like it's all Gordon some days. So when he fainted started losing weight this summer, I couldn't get over my horrible feeling that something was terribly wrong even though the vet could not detect any discernible problem. When I got back from my two-month stint in Baltimore - which is the longest I've ever been separated from Gordon - he was scary skinny. I finally took him to the vet when there was blood in his poo. He was diagnosed with colon cancer. Luckily, the cancer hadn't spread which I still have a hard time believing given the amount of time the it went untreated. Therefore, we (we meaning Chris) spend an ungodly amount of money having the tumor removed. He seems to be doing well, all things considered. But he's a more picky eater these days and the cat food I've been feeding him is of inconsistent quality. So, some days he eats and I think he'll live another 2 years. Other days he doesn't, and I prepare for his imminent demise at any moment.

It's really hard to watch someone you love die. That Gordon can't tell me how he feels and that I can't tell him that one batch of food is different from the other so stop looking at me with those big eyes as if I've purposefully taken away all that is delicious in the world and that I can't know when the tumor is returning... all of these things absent the power of language to communicate with him means that I watch Gordon like a hawk in order to figure out which moment will be the one where I have to decide whether I should continue his life or not. Already, one must intuitively communicate with their pets meaning that the relationship is very deep - if you let it be.

Living with this new reality is really hard. One's relationship with their companion animal is an incredibly intimate and personal one. I have lived with Gordon for over 11 years. I can barely remember a time without him in my everyday existence. As the years have passed, our relationship has grown quite deep and we know each other well. I am so devastated by the fact that sooner, rather than later, this beautiful little creature will slip out of my life.

And so I focus on his eating habits. Gordon eating? Happy Heather. Gordon not eating? Crumpled grieving mess Heather.

academia is lonely

I am reading and reading and reading about mobilizations and lost times and communalism and here I am, all alone. I could have gone up the street and read with my friend Matt, but I didn't. I'm too sad. He's wonderful but I don't know him that well and I'm feeling really porous right now.

I'm finishing off the red wine that honors the 120 patriots who helped lead Chile to independence and wondering about the state and thinking, we want to figure out ways to organize ourselves outside the purview of the neoliberal nation-state and most people can't decide that a Wal-Mart is a bad thing to have in one's neighborhood. It makes me so sad.

Murray Bookchin, who I am reading now, is really sad about the single-issue activism that pervades leftist movements. Funny thing is, I would say that any other kind of organizing has made itself apparent to me outside of the last, well, couple of years or so. I never thought to think big to think that capitalism itself can be organized against. I guess summit protests were that kind of thinking big. I knew about it I guess, but it just seemed like such bygone era. And to some extent it is. But I'm so hopeful and disappointed at the same time.

Mostly I'm disappointed in myself. Like, I don't try hard enough. Nothing feels like enough. And maybe it shouldn't ever and that's precisely why the work continues. Radical and revolutionary social movement building, to me, seems so mired in ideology or guilt or meanness. I shouldn't say this. But I can't stop thinking about how movement building works and what kinds of methods folks want to employ to win folks over. What does it take not only to attract people but to KEEP them?

Maybe I am getting ahead of myself. If my students are any indication of the work that is to be done, it is first and foremost - oh, I don't know. Teaching them how to think or hold onto a thought for more than a minute? To act on those thoughts? To care in the first place? To be interested in being educated rather than perpetually entertained? I really don't fucking know.

Bookchin is so fucking obsessed with reason as the way forward. I don't totally agree with him. Something else drives revolutionary fervor and a sense of possibility. Katsiaficas calls it 'the eros effect.' I get it and I think there's something to it. But something more needs to actually keep people fighting and that's where I think Bookchin is useful. He wants to think through how do we actually take it a step further in those moments of eros? Richard Day thinks that the 'logic of affinity' means that the distinction between revolution and reform is no longer necessary. I don't agree with that either. I think there is a difference between actions that reform (or retreat) from the existing structure and those that can inform fundamental change. What is it? Is capitalism just so pervasive, so omnipresent in our material, psychological, and social lives that it's just impossible to think and act outside of it for more than a 'temporary autonomous' moment?