Academia as an Extreme Sport

I’m sitting on my bed right now, although a quick glance wouldn’t make that obvious. I’ve set aside that last paper I need to write, that take home exam I need to go over one more time before deciding that really is my final answer, and I’ve opened up the boxes of art supplies that have sat in my pantry, untouched for almost two years. A huge shift for me, for someone who incorporated art into classroom assignments (both those I gave as instructor, and turned in as student). But I’ve been feeling that clawing need to end up with hot glue on the tips of my fingers, paint ground into the very pores and lines of my skin, flecks of bronze leaf in my hair and ink or pastels smudged across my face.

So it was with amusement that I read this review, found originally at Jezebel, about the creative destructiveness of woman:

You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. If you don’t want to starve, a certain ruthlessness becomes necessary. You may not want to own the bloodiness involved in killing, plucking and drawing your own chicken, or butchering your own pig, but you’d probably be prepared to dice onions with a sharp knife and mince parsley. Similarly, if you had a garden or allotment, you’d dutifully hack and slash at weeds and brambles. This sanctioned destructiveness can give the mildest-seeming person great inner satisfaction. No need to come out publicly about one’s sadistic impulses if there is vegetable chopping or shrub pruning to be done. Magically, the angry feelings, channelled through practical technique, loving and attentive, may produce beauty.

That happy result depends, of course, on whether you’ve chosen your work or feel obliged to do it. Perhaps bad cooks and gardeners have too much anger rather than too little. The cook who reduces the vegetables to sludge may be venting her exasperation at having to produce daily meals whether she feels like it or not. The gardener who concretes over the wilderness may be fed up with doing most of the nurturing in the family. Burning the dinner may mean wanting to change the world. Feminists since Mary Wollstonecraft have known this.

The review goes on to say that the book author, Juliet Miller, ties in the idea of sanctioned forms of female creativity, such as motherhood, and the unsanctioned - anything with anger or violence. But the problem is, art is often angry, often violent, often the exploration of a rupture; if women don’t think of anger as feminine, but instead masculine and off limits, they can stifle themselves into silence.

It’s an interesting idea, that she extends into writing, research, and just about everything we do - art is creation, and creation can be found anywhere, from the lab to academic papers. And we stifle ourselves whenever we begin to think that we can’t get angry, we have to play nice, we have to fulfill certain roles and duties. Miller ties to whether or not we look to our ideal woman as being the sexless virgin mother Mary, or the passionately violent creator/destructor Kali. I’m not sure I so precisely buy that stringent a dichotomy, but I do find the idea (as I sit here in a sea of supplies) that we need art, that it is not a hobby, not a luxury, but a necessity.

I’m a big one for pendulums. Always have been - strongly drawn black and whites irritate me, and I will go overboard to see the world in shades of grey or glorious colour when faced with a binary option. It’s only gotten worse with education, and especially with CHID. It’s actually less stringent here and now, simply because that joke about two philosophers and three opinions? Is more painfully true than people who don’t live in philosophy departments are aware.

So it’s been with some bitterness that I’ve seen so much dichotomy in life the last few days, so much good coupled with so much bad, and the difficulty I’ve had in finding any part of a sliding scale rather than either/or. Sitting a death watch with a friend (as much as I’m allowed or welcomed, anyhow), spilling a mug of coffee on my Macbook before I’d finished writing (and backing up) my final ethics paper, that today is Mother’s Day and you can’t go anywhere without people trying to profit on it in all the Hallmarkian glory. But I’ve also had fun bantering Buffy around, the contented glow of companionship, continuing friendships forming, old ones hanging around and making life more enjoyable.

I don’t know. There have been highs and lows, and it’s hard to balance it all out, to find the middle ground and harmony that should be there, to not be overwhelmed on either side of things. I keep thinking I need to sit and read, but read what? Nothing is coming to mind - nothing that I have, anyhow (and I’m banned from spending money until I find one of those J O B things).

I had thought, today, I might lean on a friend for comfort and support, and instead find myself trying to be mentally primed to be the comforting and supporting. Which is in itself somewhat funny, since from our conversation last night, he’s doing the same - and I think the end result will be neither of us talking to or supporting the other, when it’s what we both want.

I’m not speaking in riddles, so much as I’m just speaking to myself, but have to get it down somewhere. More than anything, I think it just comes down to wishing I hadn’t gone out of the house today, wishing I could have just continued thinking it was only Sunday, wishing the multiple service-staff while out hadn’t continually shoved Happy Mother’s Day at me, in my face, trying to get me to buy things for Mom, a mother I no longer have in tangible form.

I finally snapped, on the way out, at the last person who was thrusting those Mother’s Day remarks at me, and told him my mother had died in November. And I’m not happy with myself for it, for the joy that drained out of his face as he realized his faux pas. But at the same time, the insensitivity in assumption just boiled me over.

I miss you, Mom. I wish you were here for me to send flowers to, silly animated cards, to laugh and fear what later this week would bring. To be giddy with you, and have the sorts of conversations that a girl can only have with her mother, and I will never have again. I miss you.

So I will walk through the fire, and make sure there’s no escape for Sean…

It’s always fun to spend weeks formulating an idea and reading, and days trying to construct it into some logical argument, only to realize at nearly 2am and less than two days before the paper is due that you’ve just been resituating actor-network theory into an epistemological framework.

…I suppose I should be grateful I apparently still remember all that stuff (and/or that Phillip really indoctrinated me well).

This to this:

I am not Eve,
slender and lithe, with straight bleached hair and blue eyes
(or curled brown and streaked with red, chocolate pools for irises; natural redhead or fiery fake).

I am not Eve,
older tho not wiser,
curving in all of the wrong places, too much in the right.
My hair is not the right colour, my eyes framed by crows laughing lines; I paint myself into nothing.

Lilith, the foil - bait to catch the jealous eye of Eve.
In the end, equal returning alone to her cave.

Still needs work.

- Snow Patrol Lyrics

…because the Lakewood, Wa police officer stopped traffic to let her (and her ducklings):

Carrell was off duty Monday and driving his patrol car back to the station. About 9 a.m., he noticed a car stopped on the westbound highway’s left lane near Interstate 5. Carrell saw a mama duck and about 10 ducklings near the median. The other car drove off, and Carrell positioned his vehicle to shield the ducks. Eventually, the family began its trek across three lanes of traffic.

One duckling veered from the group, so Carrell set off his air horn, which sounds a lot like a quack. It made all the ducks sit and got the little one back in line, he said. Carrell then got out of his car to escort them across the exit lane. With mama duck quacking at him, the group found its way safely into a ravine.

When it was done, Carrell dropped off his patrol car off and drove to Oregon with his wife and 7-month-old daughter to visit relatives. He didn’t know he would become a Web sensation. A state Department of Transportation camera captured his good deed, and the video is now on the Internet.
-The News Tribune

People have been calling the Lakewood police to express gratitude to Officer Dustin Carrell; if you’d like to add your voice to the chorus, you can contact the department here:
Lakewood Police Department
5504 112th St SW
Lakewood, WA 98499
(253) 830-5000

That light we see is burning in my hall.
How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

– The Merchant of Venice, Act V, Scene 1
by William Shakespeare [1564-1616]
by way of grrlscientist

This quote is going to be funny to, oh, about three of you reading this, but I expect the three of you to laugh as long and as hard as I did. It’s from EW’s Idol Top 5 roundup, but, well… yeah.

I know Idol’s trying to tell me something, but I’m not sure if it means it wants a booty call, to move in, or just be “friends” who sporadically play a game of online Scrabble.

Are you laughing? I sure am.

Kisses, dear.

Remember the Muppets? Remember the Muppets doing the Mahna Mahna song?

Well, now thanks to Michael, you can watch the live version!

I guess if I have to be woken up with the next door neighbors in the middle of a domestic violence spat bad enough that I actually called the cops (punching, throwing people into things, throwing swords at people, all loudly narrated and punctuated by screams - yeah, I’m calling the goddamned cops…), this will at least amuse me until I can get back to sleep. Sigh.

Last night, and for the first time, I talked about and cried about my mother to another person - well, to a friend. (I’m pretty sure the one off counselor I tried to see when I realized things weren’t going well doesn’t count.) And as expected, I’m feeling rather weirdly raw and vulnerable this morning (my morning after’s are so much less interesting than other people, aren’t they?), but… I don’t know if better is the right word, but maybe looser? A little less tight, a little more relaxed. A little more like there might be a safety net if I fall.

Sort of related, I’ve realized lately how much I miss feeling music - I’ve been listening to very bass/drum heavy goth and industrial music in the car of late, making sure to rest my leg on the speaker, or have a hand on the roof (which is great for transmitting acoustics). It just feels better to feel the music, to experience it in body total. I think it’s something primally wired within us, because it occurred to me last night that it’s very similar to feeling a voice talk as you rest on someone’s chest.

Does anyone else remember the science fiction show Alien Nation? I didn’t, until Michael reminded me of it tonight while we talked about the recent media attention on male pregnancy, and he sent me this clip of a male alien giving birth:

I think it’s almost a sad commentary that one of my first reactions was “aaw, what a touching scene - I’m surprised they showed that, given people’s inclination to insist that stereotypically “feminine” nurturing behaviour in men equals being gay.” The question, of course, is whether that’s a commentary on me, or on media/society.

I’ve been doing okay lately. Better. I’ve had help, help that I don’t think is really completely aware of being help, which is in and of itself sweet and gentle and I think what has been needed. Just being pulled out, by force, to interact with people and the world, rather than hide in my bedroom. Hiding now, it elicits a phone call. (And in random trivia, that means there are now two people who’re aware enough of me and my habits that if I break them, they call.)

But as I was grocery shopping today, I realized that the next few weeks are going to be hard. Not only it’s the end of the semester so I have papers to write, but because the Hallmark machine is ramping up to Mother’s Day. I guess I get to see just how onion-paper thin my skin is, and how settled and stable I am. My birthday is a few days after that, and I have plans for a small vacation right then, so… hopefully that will help.

Doesn’t change the fact that I expect the next couple of weeks to be rough. And once we’re out of Mother’s Day, we’re right into her birthday.

Last night I was driving to Kurver to get some soft serve - singing along to the David Cook CD I had playing at loud levels, windows down, nice evening breeze. And suddenly from nowhere there were fireworks all over the sky, and I ended up skipping Kurver to drive towards and around the fireworks, just enjoying and having that awe that always washes over me. The road I ended up on reminded me of this place outside of Great America, in San Jose, where we’d go every year on the Fourth of July. Dad’d park the Ford and we’d climb on top of the camper and lay out on the roof and watch the fireworks explode directly overhead, feel the vibrations reverberate through our bodies and the car - my first true memory of understanding how we can be connected by more forces than just touch - the music (Peter, Paul & Mary, Paul Revere and the Raiders), the traffic and not paying so much attention to that because we were sleepy by then, lulled safe and secure in the bed of the truck as Mom and Dad talked.

These things wash over and through me every time I see fireworks, memories that connect me to my family, past, and present.

I think last night was the first time I watched fireworks since Mom died. And in the middle of the awe, I found myself singing along to the music, and remembering, and bursting into tears.

And now I’m telling tales about weeble spaceships and find myself laughing and crying at the same time. I just have to remind myself that this? Is better than where I was before.

Intensity, that’s what I miss. I used to be driven by an inner sense of intensity, a purposefulness that I could draw on in times of need, that would spur me into doing what needed to be done. Now I don’t feel it and I don’t know how to draw on it. It has to be inside, somewhere. I have to still be able to pull out my passion, right? I almost feel like I’ve had a lobotomy, and so nothing stirs me to the depths of feeling I used to feel. I have to believe it’s still in there somewhere.

I don’t remember where I read this, but it so certainly and strongly rings true.

Do you ever stop and think about how your mind is organized? I do, I aways have - it fascinates me, the way we access memory and thought and storage, and even talk about it. Tonight I’ve been thinking about how my online/mental interactions with friends, via IM and Facebook and LiveJournal and email is structured. My social world is structured like a large house and surrounding grounds; people come and go all the time based on who I’m talking to. Right now the game room has a couple of people hanging out, and I wander through to get my ass handed to me once in a while. There are a few people in the kitchen; one’s baking birthday cakes, the other is working on an art project. Out back there are some goths under the gazebo (Goths Under Gazebos! new band name!), having tea and looking like they just stepped out of Victoriana. I’m in the living room, on the couch, reading a virtue ethics book and talking about communications issues, leaning against a friend working on Plato stuff. A few other people are sitting around working on papers or projects, a girl is watching AI but threatening to boycott over the loss of Michael Oz; people are wandering in and out as they pop up on the various communications systems.

It’s interesting; I can see it all in my mind, and the impression it leaves me with is definitely that of hanging out with friends, relaxing, having companionship even if not directly in front of me.

About the only truly sad thing about it is that a good number of the people I’ve constructed are within 15-30 minutes, and you do have to wonder about the focus on the digital when the meatspace is so close and possible.

Life is hard, and a lot of it is not about the mistakes you make, but the lessons you learn after - and how you react. Do you integrate and learn and modify, or do you stay in a rut? It’s tempting to stay in ruts - they’re worn out and comfortable and familiar. But you feel better if you learn and modify and grow. No one ever likes to be stagnant.

I’ve never been shy about what drives my pull, sometimes, to drop everything and turn course, to go into forensics, do something Extremely Stupid like join the FBI. It’s not really the work, it’s the depictions of camaraderie. It’s why the military always appealed, even though oh my god, can you imagine me in the military, or anyone trying to give me orders? Yeah - it just doesn’t end well in your mind, does it? But camaraderie. The group of people that gets together once a week around a table to have dinner. That calls each other up randomly to invite out, that talks late into the night about fears and dreams and hopes. Who shoulder the weight of each others burdens, because sharing makes the load lighter.

I have a habit of getting into load bearing situations, though, where I take and take, but rarely give. I loved so much of CHID because it was the first place I had found since probably my early (early) teens where everyone gave and took with equal free abandon, and I was so happy there. Paired with the few close friends I had made in the goth community, and I was just genuinely happy - I was beyond happy, really. I was eudaimonic, I was flourishing.

No one would accuse me of flourishing much these past two years. I might have started to, but then Mom got sick, and it slowly dawned on me that I was repeating my mistake/inclination to give without receipt in a situation I originally thought so vital to flourishing. I’ve really floundered about, and badly. (Where are the greek speaking geeks when I need them - what’s the opposite of eudaimonic?)

And now I’m in a situation where there’s a small group of active and social and happy people who seem to like me, and I so very much like them. We all seem to want the same thing - the people to hang out with casually, the closeness, that your family is who you make feeling of dinner and movies and casual familiarity; friendship and belonging. It’s been fun, it’s been exhilarating. And overwhelming and scary and hard to trust, hard to believe I might have found something that it always seems like other people but never me get to have. So I’m afraid I’m going to self destruct, shoot myself in the foot, test too had and continuously, push away.

I don’t know how to work through the caution without singularly giving in to abandon. Or, as a friend so eloquently stole from Nietzsche, I don’t know how to give a semblance of organization to the chaos of my passions - but I really ought to go about figuring it out. Before I self destruct. Again. And then have the added hell of knowing I was so close to reaching out and touching what I so very much want, but through my own actions was unable to receive.

There is an emptiness inside me - a void that will never be filled. No one in your life will ever love you as your mother does. There is no love as pure, unconditional, and strong as a mother’s love. And I will never be loved that way again.
from Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss by Hope Edelman