Just as I predicted...

Well, just as I said I would, I am complaining.

I was adding some Tyson-recommended movies to my Netflix queue, when I noticed this on the screen:

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Local Favorites for Cumming, GA :
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe

Hoodwinked

Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story

Ron White: You Can't Fix Stupid

In Her Shoes
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Now, as many of you know, I am both a book and movie snob. So, I know that my taste in film is usually different from the mainstream. But THIS is themainstream in Cumming? Oh my.

Shocked and amazed...

Return

Back.

After thirty six years, I've learned a few things about myself. One of them is my drive to return again and again to the moment or place of injury, to peel away the scab, and then to wonder why I am covered in scars. It is something I'm learning to accept.

I'm slow to learn a lesson.

This was no less true of my weekend trip. I returned to my usual habit of letting family dictate my time. That meant I saw the least the people that I wanted to see the most (you know who you are you movie watching, french fry eating, soda drinking friends). My family has a way of saying "do what you want to do" that screams "please want to spend all of your time with me." On the other hand, I saw during this trip that I am closer to the scar than the scab.

For a few photos, go to Flickr.

So I return to my safe four walls. I return to the dissertation work. This task, like so many in my life, requires multiple lather, rinse, and repeats. Such is the expectation for many of life's requirements. More scars, I'm sure.

On the other hand: if "we can't go home again" maybe we should re-think what we call home. As much as I have (and will) complain about this house and this town, I'm glad to have returned here.

Note: Sometimes I foolishly type a blog directly into blogspot. Sometimes I don't save as I go. This was the case today. So I had to re-write this blog because somehow I lost it when I tried to spell check it. Return to the beginning. Start again. Yes, I am a slow learner. Or maybe I needed to write this one twice.

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A Bee in the Flower?

The funny thing about blogging is that even with a sitemeter, I don't really know who is reading this. Today I have things to say that maybe shouldn't be read by certain people who probably never read these anyway. But, I can't be sure.

As I head to the place of my birth for the holiday weekend, I am confronted with the selves (mine) that have lived before me. I am forced to look at the little girl with a gash in her knee as she walks her bicycle home alone. She had been warned to always ride with others. That same girl would grow up to find herself more than a mile from her in-law's home when she badly twisted her ankle during a morning run. Again, a long walk home with the knowledge of what I should have been doing: namely, not running alone.

But, those are endearing mistakes. What of the ones not so simple? What of those choices that, while making me exactly who I am today, were some of the most painful ones of my life? What of the nameless people who supported, even demanded those horrible choices? How do we forgive ourselves for those? And, more haunting, how do I forgive those other people?

Again, I'm thinly veiling these questions to protect, not only those parties that have offended, but to protect myself as I pack up my little hybrid for the long trip to face them. I've been taught how to control the panic that overtakes me in the stores there, how to breathe deeply in the very faces of those I'd like to slap. I will certainly spend an hour practicing yoga before I start the car. But inside me, like that bumble bee lurking in the wildly pink azalea, a stinger waits for skin to penetrate. Part of the panic, after all, is the fear that one day I'll lose control; I'll say all the things that have been bottled there for twenty years.

So while I love to listen to stories of homecomings, and while I have a strange connection to my past and my own pain, I must ask myself a few more serious questions:

• How do I learn to balance the responsibility of family with the yearning for healthy living?
• How can I enjoy the absolute beauty of my hometown when that beauty is covered with the pain of living there?
• What is the importance of place in my life? Or, more honestly, why is so all-encompassing?
• Why am I going there?
• What will I do with the questions when I have a daughter to protect?

I'm off. Safe travels to us all.

The long and winding thought

As for a common language, there is no such thing; or rather, there is no such thing any longer; the constitution of madness as a mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, affords the evidence of a broken dialogue, posits the separation as already effected, and thrusts into oblivion all those stammered, imperfect words without fixed syntax in which the exchange between madness and reason was made. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason about madness, has been established only on the basis of such a silence.

---Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization

Chapter three of my dissertation is about madness. It is winding around me and squeezing tightly. Must I be silent? My entire life has been a struggle to find words to express, to communicate, to break the silence. The dream of a common language is a lofty one. Is poetry, as I am trying to argue in this chapter, really a language of madness? Is it "those stammered, imperfect words without fixed syntax?"


Difference/Equivalence

Voices: Talk about God, your beloved children,
tell us only of enduring pain, of foregoing gains,
take out that line that wonders too much,
remove bravery, pleasure, assurance, lust
Talk about my God, my life, my children.

the beat of centuries; histories heat stories:
separation, incarceration, captive relaxation
drones in metallic tones
like oil colors on mud and toil churn
southern summer asphalt puddles
hands: boards, leather, demands
everything settles, separates, signifies

but what does the talk of fathers say
of my body of my talk of my words of my _____

what does the talk of mothers whisper

scratch of instrument on parchment creak of elbow
like the screech of metal-hinged shackles straining

the grating of two like elements

equivalence

in the tightening of time-circle in a whitening of faces
in our thinning, spinning, pressure mounting
_____ draws up lines like veins
needle weighs against skin giving way
outside goes in; inside comes out:

balance teeters in crooked feet
under resting sheets
over testing each and every moment: color

and i enter in that moment
fighting against and for, for and against
i consider myself woman: body
i can hold with my fingers when color blurs

difference

poetry = madness=woman=_____

Weekend Giddy or something

So, after Jeff and I have burned the flames of thinking all week, I'm tired. So here's a nice little picture and thought for a Friday afternoon.

This was taken _????___ years ago (I don't actually know, but I'm not sure that I want to know because it has to be more than 25 years).

Where have you moved since then?


Here's my list, feel free to add yours:

1) married much too young
2) divorced and moved to Auburn
3) summers in North Carolina
4) one glorious month in Japan
5) too much time waiting on tables
6) crazy years and near death experiences
7) 8 months in Daphne
8) finally met a good man
9) finished my first degree
10) Montgomery: terrible place
11) Amarillo: worse place
12) Irving: my first taste of traffic
12) Plano: finished my second degree
13) Tucson: the most beautiful place in the US
14) Auburn: ANOTHER DEGREE????
15) Cumming: Not sure yet what to say about this. It won't be the last, I know that.


Fun to think how long the list will be in another 25 years.

The Power of the Almighty Blog

I know that advertisements work. I sometimes buy a thing that I have no real use for because I saw it in a television commercial or magazine ad. I recently saw an ad for a clothes washer with a steam function that I now think I MUST have.

Jebbo has come cool ideas about how to begin shaping ads for us so that we don't have to endure the ones that make us CRAZY (zoom, zoom, anyone?). And I think he is onto something. But what do we do until then?

I have recently found that we are (inadvertently???) selling things to each other here on these blogs. I try to sell you Bright Eyes and Ani Difranco over and over again. That seems harmless, perhaps because it is intentional. But I after reading Jebbo's post, and I found myself rushing off to get a Wendy's Chicken sandwich. What is that about?

[[insert time for driving, eating, digestion]]

So, now that I am full of spicy chicken, I find myself thinking about this web of connections that we are building. I buy a new HP Photosmart 3310 all-in-one printer, and I tell you that the picture print quality is excellent, the scanner is really good (will scan slides and negatives as well), and it is Wi-Fi (my favorite feature of all). The next time you are considering a new printer, you might think of this and consider that model instead of the Epson that you wanted.

Or, I might tell you that I tried GNC's Potassium Plus (electrolytes), and I had headaches for three days. You might steer clear of those the next time you are considering your choices in electrolytes, and try Electrolyte Stamina pills instead.

The point is, blog is now what neighbors once were. I don't know my neighbors here. I have no idea what kind of toothpaste they would recommend. So, I learn about "things" online now. In short, American consumer culture has shifted. Not away from the market (of course), but toward new networks of markets and marketers: saps like me.

Long live the almighty dollar.

Falling

So then I fell like that girl from a balance beam.
A gymnasium of eyes were all holding on to me.
I lifted one foot to cross the
otherand I felt myself slipping.
It was a small mistake.
Sometimes that is all it takes.
---Bright Eyes, "From a Balance Beam" on Lifted...

In Western culture (and perhaps in others too), the metaphor of falling is central to our way of self-understanding. From Icarus to Rome, and from Adam (and certainly Eve) to Superman all of us are cast out of somewhere. MaryEtta told me, and some experts agree that there are two inborn human fears: fear of loud noises and fear of falling.

What is it with falling? Why do we “fall” into love? Why does Chicken Little’s sky fall? And if it is so terrifying, why do we build thousands of theme parks so that we can ride roller coasters and free falls? Why do we skydive?

In his article, "Why We Love Falling," Garrett Soden says:

Just the idea of falling has been a powerful negative metaphor for millenniums. Our culture is filled with stories that equate falling with failure: Icarus fell because he lacked humility; Lucifer fell from Christian heaven to become Satan; we say that leaders fall from power, that civilisations fall into barbarism, that sinners fall from grace.

In my dictionary, there are 72 definitions of the word fall, and dozens don't refer to the act of moving up or down in space. It seems that the only universal factor here is that falling is used in a general way to express things quickly going wrong: 'to fall to pieces', 'to fall out', 'to fall over oneself'.

Linguist Zoltan Kovecses has pointed out that metaphorically 'up' is good, 'down' is bad. So healthy is up; sick is down: Lazarus rose from the dead. He fell ill. Conscious is up; unconscious is down: Wake up. He sank into a coma. Happy is up; sad is down. I'm feeling up today. He's really low these days. Virtue is up; lack of virtue is down. She's an upstanding citizen. That was a low-down thing to do. This idea seems to be universal. Researchers have checked three unrelated languages - English, Hungarian, and Chinese - and found that all described happiness with 'up' metaphors.

Our falling marks our separation from perfection, from grace, and/or from innocence. This separation even happens in psychoanalytic theory where children are separated from their mother in the Real stage through the insertion of the Phallus or the Law of the Father. It seems that no matter what mythology I study, humans are described as once having had perfection and through their greed, need, or social environment, that perfection was lost through a fall.

From my heap, my crumpled body soaking in my "lack of virtue," I see the world I have created for myself. In this world, I must fight against gravity. I wonder if some worlds allow gravity to keep us from flying away.

Monster in the mirror

Mirrors are not nearly as simple as we pretend they are.

Or, at least, not for me.

I had the opportunity to spend some time with work folks recently, and in academics that is always an interesting experience. This was no different. A lot of talk about "what we are working on" which boils down to what we are writing about, what we have published lately, what classes we are desperately trying to finish. The group was a mix of students (in various stages of their graduate careers) and professors. And the "what are you working on" question served to keep us in our stratified places nicely: we are tenured (working on books), non-tenured (working on tenure), ABD (working on dissertations), or not finished with exams (working on classes).

Not only were we forced to go around the room and tell the quiet room our status, but then we began the ritual of who knows or met who, who is the better teacher, and who will, in the end, be the best scholar in the room. This is accomplished by story telling in a false-intellectual tone, interruption of another's story to insert one's own story, and a lot of feather strutting.As I left this "lunch," I found myself nauseous by what I had experienced, and found myself saying to a friend that "those people" make me sick.

Then dawn broke. I am an academic. Those people are me.

A Medusa stands in my mirror.

Lucky for me you can look at her in a mirror and not turn to stone.

desert blooms

One of the things I loved about the desert and living in that strange space not meant for human habitation was the surprise of a cactus flower. Here in the southeastern US, flowers spill from every green plant and exude odors so sweet they make stopping to smell them unnecessary. But in the desert, flowers look odd sprouting from thorny plants, and odors are faint if anything. Those blooms are both delicate and dangerous. I don't recall ever being tempted to lean over and smell the flowers on a barrel cactus, yet to see one stopped me in my tracks.

I feel an affinity with the desert that I've never felt in my home geography. I think I understand something about the life of a cactus. In Arizona, a root system is shallow and wide spreading so that the tiny amounts of water that falls can be gathered quickly. Skin is thick and waxy to protect the plant from the harsh sun and tempatures. And then, there are those famous spines: protection from those creatures that would have cactus for breakfast.

In thinking more about my "negativity," I begin to wonder if possibly the cactus is a better way to understand myself. The world is so arid, so brutal, so f*cking hot. And I only produce a small spray of flowers once each season.

happy blogging

I read a lot of blogs lately. Call it procrastination; call it boredom. I think it is some contorted combination of those two things, but I can’t be certain that there isn’t some level of cultural curiosity added into that mix. One thing that lots of people seem to agree about: we blog to complain, to vent, and to weep. I wonder why that is.

Why is it harder to respond to another person’s blog than to create one of my own? I added a counter down there at the bottom. See it? The rainbow-colored cube? [I am watching you.] I’m fascinated by how many people from so many places stop by and stay long enough to read, but don’t ever respond. Who are you?

Anyway, back to my point: blogging about misery. Why don’t we share our happy thoughts as readily as our frustrated ones? mmmm

Two blogs that I regularly read did happy blogs today (you know that if you followed the links above). I'm inspired to try my hand at it.

Nothing comes.

In fact, it is not only on blogs that I wallow in pain. I called a friend today to complain about my life and we had the longest and best conversation we’ve had in months.

What happens to the happy?

Well, let’s see, I have a friend coming to town next week to visit. I’m looking forward to that, but I hate that I live so far out… wait…wait... happy

Oh, I know, the sun was out today and the temperature topped out at 80 degrees. That is nice. Of course, I was indoors all day… see, there I go again.

I read lots of blogs, like I said earlier. I rarely comment. I figure no one cares what I have to say. Yet, I find that I check my own blog frequently to see if anyone responded. Like I’m out there with my nets cast, waiting to get a tug, just some sign that the world exists.

Does it? Is our town now so big that we will sit at keyboards, behind glowing screens, pouring our language out to the abyss, hoping for a ping?

And you see, this turns out not to be a happy blog after all. :)

A gnawing feeling...

Sometimes I just chew and chew and chew; it is like I have a compulsion to grind down my teeth and the thing itself through the process of perpetual friction. I think of the everlasting gobstopper: the perfect candy that just keeps on churning out the sugar. But, in this case, I am chewing on the tart stuff, the sour stuff, the leather bottoms of overly worn shoes.

What is it about my brain that latches on and holds in its grips the rotting mess that other people turn their backs on?

So what am I chewing on today? you ask. It may not be the things you would expect from me: the sexual exploitation of women across the world, the horrors of "getting the president you deserve," the ridiculously low wages we expect people to work for and then live on, or even the idiocy of dissertation writing and the education process. Today I am turning something else over and over in my mouth while my saliva dances around it.

Today I wonder: how to live with privilege. How do I recognize my own? How much can I avoid? Do I want to avoid it? How can we have a world without privileged people and instead have a world where rights are preserved for everyone? What happens when one is privileged by race or nationality but prohibited by sex or class? Or what of the other combinations? What happens when a family of privilege: white, American, wealthy adopts a child without: Asian, Chinese, poor. The child becomes both privileged (by family and some opportunities) and an outsider (by birth). That's a whole other road...

But my chewing today is more about me. I keep driving my spanking new hybrid car to my expensive yoga classes, during which I wear expensive Canadian yoga clothes, and I leave feeling like a Sunday 12:00 Baptist leaving church. I go home to my huge and underused home, cook organic and brand names foods for my overweight belly, watch premium channels on my oversized television nestled in a large hardwood armoire. I don't even use my gas fireplace surrounded by marble, and I eye the empty neighborhood playground every time I drive by it. But, even if I sell the house, denounce the yoga and the clothes, and eat vegetables grown in my own garden, I am still white and American.

What are the things that I don't even recognize as privilege because they have always been part of my existence? I know that the teenagers working at the ice-cream store are much nicer to me than to the brown gentleman buying four cones for his children. I know that when we applied for our first mortgage, the banker approved us before we signed anything. I know that when I am pulled over by a police officer, I am actually speeding. But there must be things that I don't know.

And even if I could root out all of the privilege, could I do anything about it? In the end, how do I live with myself? I chew, and I chew, and I chew...

Anyone out there? Any comments?

Thinking about my country

and what is done in the name of pennies...

"I love my country
By which, I mean..."

After watching last night's Daily Show, last week's Mind of Mencia , and reading Ji-in's post yesterday, I'm all stirred up as I think about my country...or the country that "my passport says I represent."

I mean, unless you are 100% Native American/American Indian, you (we) are ALL immigrants or descendents of immigrants. Why all this fuss about immigration? Has our government used yet another group of hardworking people as a diversion from their own corruption and misuse of people/funds/war machines? Don't get me wrong, I support protesting and the coming together of people to fight for their rights, but isn't this particular protest in response to legislation that suddenly became important when one after one the indictments came raining down?

No, I'm not a conspiracy alarmist, but I have to wonder sometimes.

Yes, we need immigration reform. Yes, we need workers willing to do the jobs most Americans don't want to do. Yes, those workers need rights and protections from the human tendency to break their backs for pennies. But who really cares if someone wants to sing a song in Spanish? I haven't heard it, but I imagine it is a pro-American song. Where's the beef?

Anyway. Thank you to those around me who keep me thinking.

"I think when you grow up surrounded by willful ignorance, you have to believe that mercy has its own country and that it is round and borderless." ---Ani Difranco, "Animal"

Looking for New Music?

Bright Eyes

Well, I know I already told Jebbo about him, but I thought I'd share the news here. Bright Eyes (the band of Conor Oberst) is my new obsession. At fourteen he helped start the record label that he now uses to produce his albums: Saddle Creek.

I found him through NPR who ranked his album

I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning the number two record of 2005. I bought it, and I am hooked.




I've since added two other albums to my collection: Digital Urn, Digital Ash



and Lifted or The Story Is In The Soil, Keep Your Ear To The Ground, and both are excellent.

Check out some recorded songs on NPR.org (all songs considered)
or hear an entire concert through NPR on New Folk Poets Concert Series


If you do itunes, and are looking for a few good songs, try:

Easy/Lucky/Free (Digital Ash) sample lyrics:
don't be a criminal in this police state
you better shop and eat and procreate
you got vacation days then you might escape
to a condo on the coast
i set my watch to the atomic clock
i hear the crowd count down 'til the bomb gets dropped
i always figured that there'd be time enough
i never let it get me down
but i can't help it now

Arc of Time (Digital Ash) sample lyrics:
I hear if you make friends
With Jesus Christ
You’ll get right up
From that chalk outline
And then you'll get dolled up
And you'll dress in white
All to take your place
In his chorus line

Lua (Wide Awake) sample lyrics:
You’re looking skinny like a model with your eyes all painted black
You just keep going to the bathroom always say you’ll be right back
Well it takes one to know one, kid, I think you’ve got it bad
But what’s so easy in the evening, by the morning is such a drag.

Road to Joy (Wide Awake) sample lyrics:
So when you’re asked to fight a war that’s over nothing
It’s best to join the side that’s gonna win
And no one’s sure how all of this got started
But we’re gonna make them goddam certain how its gonna end
Oh ya we will, oh ya we will!

Bowl of Oranges (Lifted) sample lyrics:
But if the world could remain within a frame like a painting on a wall.
Then I think we would see the beauty.
Then we would stand staring in awe at our still lives posed like a bowl of oranges,
like a story told by the fault lines and the soil.

Don't Know When But a Day's Gonna Come (Lifted) sample lyrics:
Is it true what I heard about the Son of God? Did he come to save? Did he come at all?
And if I dried his feet, with my dirty hair, would he make me clean again?

To get from A to B

we are required to take some kind of journey. In my attempt, I found word clouds (like a brain cloud? Yes, like Joe, I am a hypochondriac). This word cloud is one visual image of that journey from there to here. I'm sure that there are other, and possibly even better, ones. Still, it is an interesting little thing, isn't it?

What goes from here, we shall soon see. I imagine some poems, some photos, some senseless ramblings, and more of the same.

What to do when you create a monster...

Well, I guess you begin again.

What Comes from Cumming has been taken over with Miss, which I guess is a good thing. However, there may come times and events that want posting. So those will be here for now, until the beast has decided what it will do with me.

Hope you are all well.