return to the business

I am home from the last thanksgiving with my family. My dad's family is really held together by my grandmother. She has a huge tumor in her innards. We've known for a while that she was ill, but it's the first time that I've seen her that she looks frail and slow and green. I don't know that I'll see her again since I'm not going home for Christmas. That is a very anxious feeling: I don't have anything particular to say to my grandmother, but it is very troubling and distracting that I will likely not have the opportunity to do so again. I have never enjoyed hanging out with my dad's family, but it's been part of my life for thirty years. And really, I think I will probably never do more than exchange emails with some of my cousins for the rest of my life--and given my track record, it will probably be less even than that. The trip up was hard, mostly because I thought I wouldn't feel much at all at this end of an era--if anything that I'd be relieved to be unburdened of this obligation--and instead I feel like it is an awkward sort of loss.

Now that I'm back, the november relaxation is fully over. It is now time to return to the business: the business of busting a move through a whole set of postdocs that I didn't really look at this whole month while I was out and about, enjoying the city. I have to finish the first by friday. However, there is no time in the week: the nights will be long and late, which will make the mornings shorter or more unbearable.

Meanwhile, rather than consider a new postdoc project and how to write a "letter of application," I am currently watching another unbearable Michael Henecke film, Code Unknown. It's really beautiful, even though it has a kind of pulp fiction/crashy set up: strangers whose lives intersect through a series of vignettes. Of course, since it's Henecke, it absolutely avoids the failure of those movies by making truly no attempt to turn the fragments into an overarching narrative with a meaning that is greater than the accumulation of fragments. Netflixed.

hiatus

My rash of good books and laughable movies continues: I saw The Prestige last night. It is in my netflix queue, but I picked it up from the library as I had no netflixies at home. So the movie is filled with puzzles and the narrative structure of gotchas is very pleasing: both competitive magicians are reading the "secret diary" of the other, which is actually meant for the readership of his opponent, as is revealed in the end, to the open-mouthed astonishment (Christian Bale) or clenched-mouthed frustration (Hugh Jackson) of the other. However, when the secret is revealed at the end, it's beyond annoyingly pathetically ridiculous: after all this palaver about how people want the mystery and the secret itself is very pedestrian, the movie recreates this pedestrian quality at the end. Why didn't they follow the script's advice and keep the secret, which SPOILER resorts to the identical twin scenario so beloved of out-of-ideas soap opera writers. Jeez Louise.

I have The Lives of Others coming to me though, so, if all reports are true, this should turn around my bad run of movies.

I finally ready Junot Díaz's novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and it is wonderful. It does feel, towards the end, like there are a few too many codas, but generally, the emotional pacing between laughter and pathos is really engaging. I'm looking forward to teaching it in the spring, I think it will be the last book we read as I think it will require the the course as foundational knowledge for making the most of it: it's very dense with references and although the footnotes provide a kind of running historical narrative to clarify and expand on the familial narrative, it will definitely benefit from cultural and historical background.

This morning, I finally turned my attention back to dissertating, after the long hiatus of app-writing and sending. I had thought my fourth chapter was going to need severe and extensive reworking--particularly in terms of my use of Agamben. I am having a small dispute with one of my committee members who thinks that I'm mishmashing the idea of the neighbor (with its concept of adjacency) and the actor (as substitute). I took up Agamben this morning to find that he refers to the neighbor as "radical substitutability." I feel relieved. Also somewhat amused to recognize that I don't exactly read Agamben, I more consult it the ways spiritualists turn to the Bible for guidance: close my eyes, let the book fall open and place my finger on the page then read what is there and consider its meaning.

In between sending off the last batch on Monday and this morning of work, these few days have felt like vacation: I get home early from school and after taking a walk in the canyon, lay in bed reading and watching movies and eating left-over stirfry. The breathing room of the open schedule makes me feel like a cowboy of time, riding freely wherever I may roam. Love it.

if you needed encouragement

to refill the birth control, the movie Private Property is just the thing.

the mistakes

So, when you have 15 chances, slim long-shots though they may be, how can you make a mistake? When you've heard the stories of search committees smirking in embarrassment for the wretched candidate who they tossed onto the reject pile for spelling errors in their cover letters, how, how can you send off a cover letter to a school you feel is really right for you, feel it in your body, as if you had a connection, a cover letter where each word vibrates with the desire to create this connection, including a sentence that you repeat. One right after the other. The same sentence. Vibrating ever more dimly in its repetition.

Michael says that mistakes happen and it's just a mistake, not a referendum on who I am as a person.

I, nonetheless, feel real bad right now. very despondent and very much wondering whether continuing on this quest is really worthwhile if I can't seem to get the things that need to be gotten right, right.

all at once

Well, there's nothing like logistical nightmares to drive out the angst.

The day after I posted my ruminations on feeling unfocused and as if my life purpose was potentially not a purpose and more of a severe craving for an ego-massage, I had a series of disasters which sent me scrambling.

Wednesday morning, I spent a solid and inspired six hours fixing my spanish writing sample. I was very much under the gun as I hoped to have my writing partners see it that evening. I was scooting around, getting ready for school, saving the doc to my jump drive, and when I came back to the computer expecting the computer to be ready for me to eject the jumpy and go on with my life, I noticed it was just sitting there, pretending to save the doc, with that little colorwheel whirling away. I restart the computer, and up pops a blue screen that won't let me login.

Dead hard drive.

I'm breathing, I'm checking online to see if there are maybe any quick fixes to this blue screen issue and sites entitled "The Blue Screen of Death" keep popping up. Still breathing but pretty scared, I pack it up and head into school where I had an adrenaline-fun 50 minutes with my students, despite my severe lack of preparation. After class, I called the dude at Mac Enthusiasts (on Pico and Manning) and when he informed me that data recovery was $400, I moved from scared to feeling helpless and hella angry. It was in this mode of bemoaning and raging against time-wasting logistics that I apparently blew right through a stop sign at LaGrange and Overland. How do I know? Because a block later after a siren went off, I realized that there was a cop trying to get me to pull over.

Moving violation.

After we all pull off in our separate directions, I start crying and not little tears trailing decorously down my adorably pink cheeks, no, but face-contorting wails ripping out of my throat. Loud. Snotty. Unhelpful.

I get to Mac Enthusiasts and wipe off my face and stump in there. Am totally uncommunicative with Matthew, front desk dude. He's pretty sure it's a hardware issue which will run me $350 to $500. We discuss the data recovery issue some more, I insist that there's nothing on this computer except one doc I really do want, he asks its name, just in case. I drive off and call babe, and while telling him that I'm going to go home, make a cup of tea and then try to reconstitute that morning's work, Matthew calls and tells me that he has my doc!

And he didn't charge me $400. Seriously, I think Matthew from Mac Enthusiasts is now one of my favoritest people of all time. If you problems with your mac, you should go there. They really are very sweet and efficient.

From there, although I had left semi-hysterical phone messages to my writing partners, one of whom I'm most certainly not close enough to justify dumping that level of incomprehensible ramblings on, I was able to meet with Neetu, have a good dinner, calm my ass down and have a productive night. But it was really too much emotional brouhaha for a single day.

Since then, it's been pretty day by day, trying to meet deadlines. I've already found some mistakes in things I've sent out. Pretty depressing. But there's really not enough time to wallow. Mental health days and nights have certainly happened, but mostly it's scoot scoot scoot scoot scoot.

Netflixed
Black Book
I thought only Hollywood movies were this obvious. Our heroine Ellis/Rachel is a creature of coincidences to the extent that I began to think of this as the Forrest Gump of Nazi/Holocaust movies. I'll back up: it's about Holland during WWII and follows one woman who loses her family because of a lawyer who was colluding with a Gestapo officer and how she survives and becomes part of the resistance, becoming a spy who falls in love with her Nazi mark who, after the Liberation, is executed according to Article 163 which allows the defeated German military to continue to enforce military law on their officers and a particularly reptilian Hauptofficer had hated her lover and wanted to personally issue the firing squad order. Meanwhile, she slowly realizes that the resistance had been infiltrated, which explains why the Nazis were always on the scene so fast but not the bumbling ragtaggery of the resistance members. Long story short (and I'm leaving out several subplots), the movie ends with her at a Kibbutz built with the loot salvaged from the Gestapo officer who had robbed the bodies of the Jews he had mowed down and bombs falling during the Six Days War.

Mostly Martha and now this. Apparently, my netflixing choices in the germanic realm are definitely not top notch. Suggestions for improvement welcome.

crisis of ugly consciousness

I'm auditing a German philosophy class focused on Wittgenstein and Heidegger: it is full of a) people--or rather one individual--who have no filter between brain and mouth and dominates the class and b) fabulous insights. Today, for example, we were discussing portions of Being and Time and spent a while on H's concept of the Entscheidung: that is, because our entire lives are spent honing in on death, the realization of our finitude forces us to make certain actively committed choices and to live out that commitment resolutely. (This, according to my professor has totalitarian overtones when the commitment is a social phenomenon, but for my purposes, that's a sidebar, hence the parenthetical.)

Although graduate school may not seem like a good use of time when considering death as impending, this does mark the thinking that led me to graduate school: I recognized that I couldn't dither forever and picked a career--one albeit that allowed to dither for almost a decade.

However, what the being on the job market insecurities have revealed to me are the mechanisms by which I made that choice. And it's not pretty.

Yes. I love my work.
But partially, I love my work because I'm good at it. And it feels good to be good at things.
How do I know I'm good? Cuz people tell me so. People I respect. Institutions give me further validation by picking me to receive their financial proof of confidence.
So, now that it's fully likely that I will not get a job for a goodly time, thus stripping from me the ego-boosting aspect of my initial choice, what am I left with? The work itself feels a little empty and difficult to motivate for when it is no longer guaranteed to transfer praise to me.

A fine thing to realize seven years into a degree: that seven years in therapy might have been a better investment.

fancy restaurant manners

When the solicitous waiter in a fancy special occasion restaurant where you are having the chef's menu no less asks you how your last course was, are you supposed to automatically chirp "great!" or are you supposed to weigh in with a foodie critique? If the former, then why the charade of interaction?

I remember someone telling me once that the most annoying thing about being a potsmoker was that part of the transaction of buying it was to smoke a bowl with your dealer, when you truly have no desire to create anything other than an economic relationship with this person.

I supposed that having the chef twirling around the dining room is part of the customer service by which fancy restaurants distinguish themselves from other types of dining establishments. It's not one that I value, mostly because I'm confused about what role I'm supposed to play in this particular scenario.

At Ortolan the other night, we mixed it up: for the most part, I did the requisite chirping and mr. babe remained silent rather than overly-honestly express his true feelings about the heirloom tomato five-ways. But what do you want from someone who hates tomatoes, on principle? In any case, I only expressed displeasure over the caviar and cream and runny egg cooked in the shell in ash which was interesting at the top with the thick sweetness of the cream and the sharp salty tang of the caviar, but by the end of the egg was too too salty, grossly so in the sense of fully unrefined and overwhelmingly salty.

However, when I said I loved various courses, I meant it. All the courses were small--thank god, because we were full and trying to strategize how to pace ourselves after three--and different and surprising. The trend seems to be a conjunction of two things: to derail the expectations of common ingredients and to put different tastes together. That is, few dishes did not have some combination of delicately sweet and slightly bitter, such as the duck which was paired with a slice of peach and a peach glaze with the verbena emulsion.

Here is the full chef's menu. http://ortolanrestaurant.com/showmenu.php?id=1

It was wonderful to have our anniversary there: the ambiance creates the feeling of luxuriating in comfort and thoughtfulness--a lovely reflection of what being with Michael is most often like.