they got cars big as bars

This one's for Vanessa. Because somehow we didn't drive around listening to this before we both shuffled off to our respective coasts this year. Happy Christmas.

papers making one crazy part ii

and then last night's diversion was reading some old notes I'd written high school (saved for me in a scrapbook by good ol' Tina P) with excerpts of terrible off-the-cuff teenage poetry:

"my pulse rocks to the beat
of the hum of a girl
who sits on the street corner
playing with her see-through panties
while Moses parts the water
flowing from her skin...
my car breaks down
outside your house...
your car is stopped
you say come inside
but i'm bleeding
and my blood clashes
with the upholstery..."

90's ephemera:
"I got a new Sassy today and it was good..."

and bad attempts at humorous wisdom:
"sometimes i think i have to cut myself in half to be whole again but then i realize that for god's sake i'm not playdough."

There were also some bits that gave me insights in retrospect. I realized for the first time how these sorts of notes really record something very precise about my experience as a high schooler, gen x-er, child of divorce, alternakid, whatever. It wasn't such a bad distraction, in the end.

when i start going crazy from writing papers and it's dangerous that i have a camera on my computer

I take ridiculous breaks. Here's this from the other night...

An excerpt of one of my crazy-making papers:
...In its depiction of a transatlantic circuit of transit and exchange, The Secret History complicates the binary between colonizer and colonized, white and black, center and periphery. It is for this reason, its Creole nature, that Elizabeth Dillon argues the book has “remained hidden in plain sight,” overlooked by contemporaneous readers and contemporary critics alike; to the extent that, as per Benedict Anderson, the novel participates in the project of building an imagined national community, Sansay’s community is based on the Creole, rather than the black/white dichotomy the United States ostensibly founded itself on...

Two excerpts of me being silly:

This one is entitled "Faces You Never See Yourself Making"









This one is entitled "Portrait of the Artist as Spunky 80's Lady Trucker"

second chance haircuts

This year my dear Vanessa triumphed in that she managed to successfully recreate the ideal haircut that, years ago, had resulted in the worst haircut of her life. Today I was able to accomplish the same feat. In Vanessa's case, the haircut was the infamous Winona Ryder Reality Bites haircut whose ease and, as they would say in the 18th c., artlessness, tempted so many of my own peers. Vanessa ended up with a mushroom, but this year she bravely cut her hair short again with gorgeous results. My bad haircut happened in 1986. I was going for some kind of sexy tousled long-layered deal (I know, I was too young to be thinking sexy, but what can I say). Instead, I got the closest haircut to a mullet I've ever had. She chopped the bangs way back into my head and feathered them, thinned out the hair radically and left the longest pieces at the nape of my neck, rather than cascading down my back. Anyway, I hadn't intended to go into today's haircut reclaiming my original vision, but I think that's what I got. And somehow I feel immensely gratified. It is as if, even though so many other things seem inordinately frustrating these days, the universe was able to right one tiny wrong, restoring a little bit of balance.

single girl, married girl

All this yoking of theory I'm doing - travel narratives, epistolary novel, creolization, national allegory - is making my head hurt. In two days it will all be over, though who knows whether what I'll have to show for the semester will be in any way worthwhile. I took a break and listened to some sad and rockin love songs last night, though, and that helped.

Sitting at a red light on the way home tonight, V and I observed a gaggle of girls taking pictures of the Christmas lights around Courthouse Square, all holding out their cell phones high in the air. They finished just in time to lose their walk signal, and sort of lingered, edging out into the road as the left turn arrow blazed. We winced in anticipation of the inevitable; they wandered across the street just as the light turned green for us to go. As V and I flung our hands around and cursed them out to each other (look, it's the end of the semester and our nerves are shot), I looked over at the one girl left on the sidewalk, the sole adherer to pedestrian regulations, and I realized it was one of my students. A good, earnest, student. So, of course, I waved.

Earlier that day I saw a murder of crows loudly congregating on the maples along one of the campus paths. Their squawking was a lot more palatable than these girls'.

how i know i live in a college town

The graffiti in the bathroom at the local coffee shop (ok, the writing on the chalkboard in the bathroom of the local coffee shop) says "for god's sake don't just spellcheck, proofread!" This is also how I know what time of year it is. Clearly, all the grad student hipsters are doing their grading grading grading. Not me. I'm still writing writing writing.