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stressbunny

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Too tired to work, too wired to stop,—so I randomly make a percussive teacup song, using Audacity and the Zen alarm clock and two thin bone china cups from Harrod’s, that my mom bought for me on a business trip to London, and one has Soothing Caramel Bedtime and one has magic cherry magnesium drink. Making this .mp3 makes me miss my old self, the piano-playing songwriting girl I was. I want to run away to join the faeries.

So here you go. It’s called “stressbunny,” natürlisch.

This time, I think, with some amazement, it probably actually can’t all get done. Unless I really reconcile myself on some very deep level to writing B-minus or even C-plus papers and just become deeply okay with that.

I don’t know how to do this. I’m not saying it’s impossible. Just I honestly don’t know how. This is the point where what I know how to do is collapse, go to the hospital, get fired, get dumped, and/or drop out. I get supportive exhortation from different ones of y’all who really want me to stick this one out. I’m giving it everything I have, and I thank you for your fierce encouragement keeping me on my hustle, albeit with psychomotor retardation.

Sadly, what I most wanted to do this morning when I woke up was work on my third trauma-essay, and my new poem-drafts; instead I gritted my teeth and collected two dozen tiny text-document notes and links, and in the end came up with a 25-page double-spaced document on Trier, with detailed outline, partial bibliography/works cited, and a great many inflammatory quotations and revealing interview excerpts, and a very small amount of my own writing glueing it not quite together. I feel like one of my own students: How long does it have to be? How much am I allowed to quote? Then there is the matter of the excellent scholarly books which I feel I should read and incorporate etc. but there is just the tiny problem of I CAN’T READ. A friend inadvertently reminded me that we have to have something to say about Absalom on Tuesday, and this would be of course much easier had I actually read the book. And I can’t call in sick to that class, I already did once. And I am drizzled with caramel shame over never having finished Absalom, because I adore Quentin like he’s my own brother, like—

How do you turn an .mp3 into a video? Hm. I have no time to teach myself this. But how helpful it would be to make videos, finally to run a fully flipped classroom. Students listen to the lecture ahead of time and then classtime is reserved for drafting and revising and group interacting.

Looking back on my career at/through higher ed, I can see I’ve always found ways to cut corners, subtle ways to make sure there’s less on my plate than most other students, so I’d have time to a) write and b) be depressed. E.g. being a “mature student” at MHC, which meant 3 courses was a full-time load, because they assumed we had families and kids and jobs—and I had none of those, but gleefully took advantage of not having to take more than 9 hours a semester. Cambridge was perfect because there were no actual requirements until the end of the two years, and then it was sitting exams; and you sat them and they were over and that was it. I never graduated officially from Boston because I couldn’t juggle everything (I have 2 credits incomplete and owe them I think $4300) (and was only teaching one course). And then, at Arizona, Walt Whitman rigged it so in my second year I only had to teach 1/1 instead of 2/2, and those were lit/poetry classes; and then of course when I had to go back to 2/2 comp my third year, I wound up in the unit in December. And the two lit classes that were too challenging for me, he got me out of one of those, and we did one-on-one supervision—and I got a B for the other one, my only B. One professor gave me an A for an independent study even though I produced exactly zero pages for him that semester. We met 3-4 times, and he proofread two of my book mss, correcting all the punctuation etc. which I had deliberately skewed; we sat uncomfortably, I talked about what I would write, and then never finished anything to show him; and he gave me an A anyway. This kind of thing. I always get corners cut for me because I am “special” and “different”—like my advisors indulgently letting me write a poetry thesis when I was a philosophy major.

(My dad saying gruffly to me, angrily, once, during my twenties, “I certainly never got anything like an incomplete when I was a student!” It has only just occurred to me this moment that he never graduated; was a handful of credits away from his BS in physics when he just…quit going to school.)

Point being: now I am really up against the wall, e.g. the State of Texas, which is not going to budge; I honestly don’t know how to get done everything that has to get done, and there seems no way out of any of it. And if I keep on this way I will be checking myself in somewhere, probably in November, it’s usually November for me. Unless I—

I mean, I could of course learn how to do a shitty, B-minus job, with my OCD and mood disorder fighting me every step of the way.

But okay. When I’m like this I know what to do. First, here are ten wise(r) choices I made this weekend:

1. Washed every bit of laundry, dried, folded, put away.

2. Made shrimp/bok choy/red rice noodles tonight, with red chile paste and coconut oil, and ate this before BSG & a big snuggle with the neighbor.

3. Despite a great not-wanting-to, did work on my Trier paper for about 4 hours anyway, and have something, even if I have neglected all my current classes to do it.

4. Registered for AWP, so I don’t have to do any fake-name-tag shenanigans this year. Also, it’s in Boston! I plan to drink with Jill and Josie, if they let me, and wander around BU at some point with my beloved roomie V., laughing like witches at where we were and who the hell we are now. And who cares that I’m not on panels and have no book to promote—I can be the best representative for my magazine and my school that I possibly can be.

5. Took out the trash.

6. Listened over and over to this amazing Russian song I don’t know who it’s by—Mara? It’s the last one on the CD? It doesn’t sound like Regina but it must be Regina—

7. Emailed the yoga studio to tell them I’m ill and beg them for clemency with my $255 pass.

8. I wanted to try some of the (soma)tic poetry exercises by CAConrad (who has nail polish more fabulous than any of us ever could) so I started with a crystal meditation—found a quartz point I’ve had for a long time, that once did a magical thing, and purified it according to his directions and then some: it lay buried in salt under the night sky for three nights in a row, then I brought it inside and rinsed under cool running water. All cleansed! Then I promptly accidentally flung it directly into the toilet bowl. This was so obvious I couldn’t even laugh, just pulled it out and washed it scrupulously all over again and put it back on the altar where it’s been the last few years, nonplussed. I keep thinking of that irritated comment by Robert Winson, when he was living up at Crestone: “Why is it that Zen students who supposedly believe in the interpenetration of all things are so obsessed with cleanliness and purity?”

9. Amends are going slowly but are going. I may have even managed  to patch things up with an instructor from late year; another one said s/he hadn’t even noticed any bad attitude on my part; two more letters to write to past faculty/staff members, asking what I can do to make it right. Sneaking up on the big ones. Starting with my dysfunctional working/collegial relationships.

10. Tomorrow I am going for my cherry-popping, virginity-losing, first ever mani-pedi, because I finally figured out that no one will do this for me so I need to do it myself. I polled local femmy friends and one suggested a place next door to the Montrose Stbx, so I have set my alarm early and will go grab a matcha and take Faulkner and get my damn nails did. Either that L’Oreal sea blue or maybe my dear friend from last year, Orly Pink Chocolate.


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