Life as an Extreme Sport

Category: life and living

Not so much the daily grind, as the things that fall outside the scope of academics.

every streetlamp seems to beat a fatalistic warning

...and everything else, Academics, blog as therapy, life and living

It’s 11:13pm. Thursday evening. I have a pile of work to the left of me, a pile of reading to the right, a large monster masquerading as a cat draped across my feet, and a slightly smaller cat convinced he’s a monster rather insistently trying to lay across my shoulders as I type.

I am, for lack of better phrase, in a mood. The timing is, of course, brilliant – I always hit these when I’m alone. I mean, genuinely alone, no one really around that I could just poke and chitchat with. Might not be a coincidence, then, that it’s when this mood hits.

Not, of course, that it’s any sort of consistent mood. Rather, just a mood. And tonight’s is, in large part, thanks to the most recent Torchwood episode (Adam), which has thrown me where I am. Without spoiling it for folks who won’t see it until next week, it was one of the best examples of why I like the show – it reminded me strongly of Buffy mixed with Doctor Who, this wonderful blend of high camp and sublime acting, looking at the dark elements and how we live with our lives, our selves, our memories.

And so I am stuck with memory, which has already been a running dialogue with myself. What does it mean to remember, and to forget? To remember again? I suppose it started, thinking about concerts and ones I’ve seen for some online trivia thing. But it’s hard to contain thoughts about memory, perception, seeing the world. We shape memory, something I’m so highly conscious of – we warp and rewrite our own narrative, to suit the story we tell ourselves and those around us. Subtly make ourselves look better, right, more or less victimized. Whatever our narrative is, we adjust the memory accordingly. Some people find this startling or weird to think about, but memory studies suggest this to be the case.

What memories have I rewritten? Can I say with any certainty that what I remember is what happened? Or is it just what I wished happened? Wanted to happen? It is, of course, the Rashomon problem in a nutshell. Do we just hope to reach a consensus on shared experience, or does experience become shared when we share the same memory? Is this why we don’t talk? Is this why we hide what we’re saying, thinking, feeling behind gestures and obscurity and opaque masques? I know I’m guilty of it, of not wanting to reveal, of preferring to leave a small thread of my own narrative, one that can be picked up if you see it and ignored otherwise.

Tonight, I just feel like there has been a lot of thread – and a lot of ignoring.

body has given up and decided it’s time to sleep – before I make any brilliant errors here.

Edited to add: hah, how timely… within 30 minutes, to receive an email that just emphasizes the whole thing. Some people just have exquisite timing. Someone remind me why I do this again? I loved this once, didn’t I? Sometimes I think it’s just being kicked out of me…

power & pain

blog as therapy, life and living

Sort of funny. In the middle of a nasty wind storm here, which means the temperatures have bottomed out, and once again I don’t have steady internet access – or power. (This makes the second time in a week I’ve lost ‘net access; really wish they’d do something about that on a level above “repair lines when they go crashboom”.) The loss of power was relatively short-termed; just long enough to do a bit of light cleaning/cat maintenance in the dusk.

The real pain has been literal – the cold has caused the CRPS to act up, and I can barely flex my left thumb/forefinger, and moving my right arm is, in general, A Very Bad Idea. Besides just general stiffness, there’s a lot of pain… MSNBC has a good article on pain up right now, and living with it – or struggling with it, anyhow. Certainly hits home a lot of how I feel – I think the one thing it missed was that the constant level of high pain is exhausting, and all I want to do when it gets this bad is sleep. Thankfully, laying under the electric blanket gives some measure of relief (although it’s not terribly practical for most of the things I’ve needed to get done); not so convenient or relieving without power, granted.

The most frustrating thing about it is the little voice in the back of my head that wants to laugh and say “see, you had two really good days – you had fun, felt connected to people, and were generally just enjoying life – now you have to pay the price for that”; as though there’s something wrong with me that I don’t deserve the fun, and if I have any, something bad has to happen in payment. Then again, looking at the last 18 months of my life, it might be understandable to see how I’ve been conditioned to think this. I don’t get to have nice things, apparently. At least, that’s how it feels – something good must always be balanced out by something bad, or worse.

Maybe “strong dissociation from logic” should be another culprit to chronic pain.

Power is flickering again – should probably post this and go find the lanterns so I can at least read and have some measure of productivity.

set the machine to scan for irony

blog as therapy, life and living, wisdom and folly

I was chitchatting with Michael earlier, and we had the following conversation. What he’s “I told you so”ing me about isn’t really important – just look at how nice the “I told you so” is! So creative, so supportive… no wonder I have the friends I do.

Michael: Well yes I could have told you you’d fail at that months ago.
Kelly: and yet you didn’t – nice of you 
Michael: … I think I did. I’d have to check
Kelly: LOL
Michael: Maybe I just thought it loudly.
Kelly: it would have been in December, when I was spitting mad
Michael: I think that was the time of, “Ok, go with Kelly’s mood and be the unconditionally supportive friend. Except if she’s being a total idiot.”

strange days of gratitude

Academics, life and living, University at Albany

I guess you know I’m tired when I sit down to the computer and start typing, and wake up 3 hours later, still sitting up at the computer. As far as I can tell, I hung up the phone with Dad and fell asleep almost immediately after that; it’s basically where my memory stops, anyhow. (Experience has taught me I was probably active a bit longer than that, since I tend to lose the last 15-20 minutes of memory when I fall asleep like that – zaps the internal p-ram or somesuch.)

It’s weird to do that, especially since I partly recognize it’s because I took my nightly medications closely together, rather than spaced out like I normally do. I try not to think hard, or much, about the medications I take, except to space taking them out a bit, because I could work myself into a major freakout quickly if I did, especially with Heath Ledger’s death earlier today and reports coming that it was likely a combination of medication for his pneumonia and sleeping problems that caused the death (rather than suicide or OD). Sleeping problems, pneumonia, and oh, then add in the pain management medications – yeah, I get nervous. Especially when I suddenly snap awake over a computer three hours later, with no memory of even being sleepy enough to fall immediately asleep (as opposed to “I’m getting tired I should get to bed”).

Anyhow. That’s not what I’d typed out prior to falling asleep, the below was.

~*~

Today was my first day back on campus since December, and since I was only there a day or two, it was really my first day back seeing everyone since October. I was a bit nervous walking into it, especially as I was there for a job candidate – and one of the people specifically focused on who should be there for the candidate, since the position the department it looking for centers around familiarity with ethics (preferably applied and bio). And as quickly became apparent, a good chunk of the graduate department turned out for the interview – we were joking that we’d never seen so many grad students together at the same time, even inside a classroom.

I was genuinely surprised at how welcoming and warm everyone was. Smiles, hugs, affection – and maybe more importantly, a lot of joking around and laughter. I laughed into coughing fits several times, and although it hurt, it was fun and energetic and just… how I was always hoping to feel there. Like a part of the group, like I belonged.

Small things really stand out – someone patting me affectionately and comfortingly on the back when I got choked up talking about Mom, just a simple gesture of support. Being asked if I knew any of the candidates by name, because I was the one who would – an acknowledgment of the knowledge I can bring to the table. Planning get-togethers, classes for upcoming semesters, coordinating things, lots of teasing of each other. Even a joke about action theory turned into a fun (if short) conversation about female action stars, and Summer Glau.

There was a lot of positive energy coming from everyone, and it culminated in dinner with the candidate and other department members, with conversation ranging from philosophy on television to in depth and pointed discussion on the candidate’s presentation on how we experience emotion.

Being around that positive energy, truly sinking in to a feeling of belonging, was a much needed experience. I spend so much time alone and isolated that I curl in on myself and can lose the spark that excites me – especially when I’m overwhelmed, as I have been for much of the past 18 months. I am such an introvert that it’s easy to forget how much I do need to be around people, especially those who share overlapping interests and passions.

It will be an interesting semester. While I lost one course I had been interested in taking, I have the minimum two already enrolled, and the classes start in the morning. I’ll be on campus daily this semester, for a minimum of 3 hours, which means I’ll have a chance to get into consistent habits that are good for me: waking up at a set time, showering, dressing, eating, getting out of the house. All things that can be difficult to enforce without outside factors.

~*~

Alright – I think what is happening is that lack of sleep from the last week, when the coughing and phlegm and needing to sleep upright in order to not drown in my own fluids, has caught up to me. I find myself starting to drift off again, even though I’ve only been awake 15 minutes or so. Which means I should take advantage of it now, and rest up prior to the start of what will hopefully be a very good semester.

the smaller things

Academics, life and living

It’s really the small things that make you realize how much you miss things, or people, or situations. For me, I’m almost always hit with homesickness or general missings of Seattle in two specific situations: when I’m terribly excited over some academic idea, and when I’m sick.

The first is simply because I’ve yet to really find anyone locally that I can happily babble academically to and with; no happy hours full of Deleuze here. (And yes, I realize that idea actually physically causes most people pain – I’ll just fall back on “weird undergrad” and leave it there, eh?) There’s no shorthand, either – no being able to run rapidly through the shared code of specific interdisciplinary study; I can’t just say “wonder” and have everyone know precisely what I mean. (Even having a teaching lecture wrapped around the subject doesn’t do me much good without the props, and most people don’t care enough to learn it, haven’t read Greenblatt, and etc and so forth.) I don’t know – I think so many people are accustomed to a shared basis of knowledge in their academic life that it’s hard to know what to do with someone who doesn’t have it; goes both ways, too, as I’m missing as much as I have.

The second is much more prosaic, and was something that sucked when I was first divorced, until I (slowly) learned to lean on and accept help from my close friends. But it’s terribly hard to live on your own and have a chronic, debilitating illness. When I was in Seattle, there were a host of people who’d come help me with tasks I simply cannot do, be it scrubbing dishes, carrying laundry up and down stairs, or lifting heavy items. My parents would come up every few weeks and bring me fresh, sliced, frozen veggies and grated cheeses and all sorts of things so that I could easily make healthy dinners without much work (chopping or cleaning), and I… I guess I just had a safety net of people who felt I offered enough in whatever to be willing to help me with things that I simply cannot do.

It’s funny, because it was such a difficult thing to accept, at first – and then just became a part of my life. And now I live in a place that hasn’t been truly clean since I’ve lived here, because it’s just something I am physically incapable of doing.

Of course, I think about it right now not because of any great angst about the piles of laundry on my floor, but because I’m sick. And being alone and having to still get up to cook and clean and do all the normal life things when you’re sick is just a miserable thing. (So yes, in other words, I am just wallowing and feeling sorry for myself because instead of being able to ask a spouse to fill the cat water fountain or a friend to make me a few days worth of mazto ball soup, I have to do it all myself, and my throat and ears hurt, I’m coughing and sneezing, and have a fever, and all I want to do is lay in bed and be miserable. Instead, however, I’ve to go take care of the monsters, so…)