resistant

All day today, I've been freaking out in that paralyzed way that makes me unable to start working on whatever is freaking me out and instead makes me want to take a really long nap. The kind of nap from which, by the time I would awake, all the deadlines or troubles facing me would have dissipated--that's my favorite fantasy of all time. Cause for freak-out: the prospect of having to read and prep to teach Aristotle's Poetics. Tomorrow. I think I may have read excerpts of it in college which, unsurprisingly, does not make me feel too prepared for this task. However, although it took me 2 hours to read 15 out of the 30 pages (meaning, I still have half of it left to go through), he's so methodical and lays things out so clearly, with an occasional spot of humor--as when he sums up the plot of the Odyssey in two sentences, then remarks, "there you have it,"--that reading it calmed me right up. After a day of dread and exhaustion and wanting to quit my career and join the circus, Aristotle has made everything seem more reasonable and doable.

As I was skittering home from Café Om, in between making mental notes to walk on streets that are better lit than DeLongpre, I turned my thoughts from the Poetics and to the thorny issue of care-giving and care-accepting. In general, when beloved friends note my fragility and try to protect me from my own mechanisms of self-damage, I brush aside their encouraging gestures with a snort of disinterest. And so it goes, now that it is my instict to want to take good care of Michael, whose work has been ravaging him of late. External circumstances, of course, make it impossible for anyone to "make it better," but an intellectual acknowledgement of helplessness doesn't eradicate the desire to pet his shoulders until the tension hardening them dissipates (or he yells at me to stop, you know, whichever comes first), and make soothing cooing sounds and ... generally make a nuisance of myself. Other things that happen when I try to console others is that I'll start making a speech that is supposed to end in an uplifting platitude, but it takes a wrong turn somewhere and ends up in a rumination on our generalized sisyphusian fates. So what to do with the linkage emerging here between my resistance to accepting proffered comfort and my awkwardness in giving it? Might the tactic be to try to accept care with grace first in the hopes that this will train my sympathies to be more sympathetic, or the other way around? I'm inclined to suggest, simply, that what is shitty, ultimately can't really be de-shittified and we all just need to live with that and stop pretending otherwise.

Therapy tomorrow. And not a minute too soon, evidently.

THE LISTS

to do class: Read Poetics. Write JM recommendation. Write Aristotle lecture.
done! halfway--so tomorrow is going to be looong and hectic. oof!

to do work: Write intro section of article.
done! Wrote two incredibly crappy paragraphs in the intro.

to do life: Clean the oil stain on my garage space. Pay down debt (currently $3,430). Procure dog. Get tix to reggaefest. Photocopy and return recalled library book.
done! That urban mythology that cola cuts through oil on garage floors: a complete lie! Unless you're supposed to clean it up right away. The cola was a disaster, so i poured more kitty litter over the morass of dirty water, cola, and oil. Layered in that order. I did, however, take care of the recalled book problem and my library account is back in business.

to do blitz: sarah, marilyn, giulia, irmary, mariana, marinn, katie