The saga continues

Brief update.

Day 1. relative success. Finished in just under the alotted three hours despite the egregious interruption and removal of self to another room half way through, and the obnoxious attitude of office manager. Poor woman, she knows not what she does.

17 pages. Few factual errors. I hope. And 9 hours of sleep to boot. Today, I thought, would be the easier day, as it more closely approximates my knowledge base. Now, not so sure. All of my committee specializes in this area too. Which means I am more likely to get slammed in my defense. Ah yes, the joys of nervous anticipation. Next week is next week.

I have been practicing dissociation. That is, each event as an individual, isolated and completely aleatory one. My stress level has been under control, taught class yesterday, will teach again today. Before. Didn't get nervous until 10 minutes before when my dear Cheyla fitted me with hair accessories, a honeysuckle hand cream massage for the writing hand to avoid cramping, a bottle of water, several juicy pens, and some cantaloupe lip gloss. She rocks my world.

So...18th-20th Centuries. It seems so backward that everything you know should be judged by your response to only a couple of books, but that is how it is. There is always the door, as we like to remind ourselves.

Letter soup

Names and dates swirl about my head in a sort of primordial stew.
Sleep will not come.

It is the worst, I think, the one thing that must happen doesn't just because we want it to, need it to.

Get a good night sleep before you take tests. That's what they say as if to cast a miserable, unyielding curse. I know it doesn't really matter, that what I know, I know, and what I don't... well, I am generally good at hiding that in a sea of circuitous locution. But sleep, sleep, how I long for it, and my prickly hot sunburned skin on the unpleasantly rough sheets (I will throw these out, I swear) is enough to keep me tossing. I am reworking one novel in my head, while writing the next chapter of the almost complete sequel? in my head, I am dancing across eras that do not include what will be examined tomorrow and drawing on cinematic anecdotes so far removed from the task at hand that it all makes me laugh, laughing in that crazed hysterical way, you know, that only happens in your head...

Ah, yes. So sleep, and years, and solitudes and labrynths and honor and honra and courtly love and secret marriages and babies in boats and predestination vs. free will and civilization vs. barbarie and bloody dictatorship and satirical letters and large noses and fantastic journeys and governors of islands and human detritus and social mobility and the inability to overcome one's circumstances and costumbrismo and disjuncture and treatises on opera aperta, endlessly splitting paths and protofemenisms and hombres necios that blame us for who we are and who they make us and palid princesses withering in tuberculoid flurries and count and palaces in decadence and caciques that steal the land from criollos who steal it from the indios who rise up in arms, and then turn into the same barbaric murderous revolutionaries for the sake of revolt and not evolution to a higher plane, and the lost and the disappeared and the guillotine that chops heads, violín...and the cries of green and blue and moons that bring death and moons that give life and the air, that lifts her skirt, and the boy who looks on, and a way to talk about it, how to talk about the impunity, how to stare it in the face, and why poetry and why sex, and why not? and it doesn't make sense, and it all makes some sense or no sense or nonsense, and Mallarmé struck the dice and unleashed a monster, ideogram, what's the big idea? no idea, break the swan's neck, between your fingers, snapped like a stick. Life on earth and a death in the sea, she walks, because you want her white and chaste and under her thumb, and a town will rise up in the face of a tyrant, all for one and one for all, but it doesn't happen anymore because art has been dehumanized, there is no more appealing to the masses, no more sweeping romantic idealization. Elitist snobbery for the elect. Select, lectores. An appalling display of mangey parrots and dogs and cities and boys that kill boys and military that will hide its dirty laundry and the unbearable levitation of beauty, to which there is no Remedy, but a shot to the heart in a circle of chalk or a glass of cianide water, or a walk straigh out into the ocean, because there are no paths but the ones we make and a populace that yawns, and opportunistic brothers that clamber and claw their way to the top, only to watch the baby sister die. There are snakes and oriental scenes, and little boy guides and frag-men-tation, exile, a while, novels that write themselves and breath fear into the hearts of their makers, and souls wandering in deep and penetrating gazes, and the dead that speak to the living dead, and entire generations decimated and the vision of the vanquished, and the walking on coals and the breaking of promises and the stealing of gold, the coopting of identities in the name of the lord, and the name of the King. There is mistic union and simple communion, burning passions and daft indifference, weary travellers that arrive too late, and people who convert but will never be pure. There are years of mysegination and yambambó yambambé songs that rumble over ages, through bodies that dance in frenzied circles. Floating down the river, dying of sun, slit throats for the chosen ones. There are plays inside plays inside plays before Pirandello and after. There are friendships that transcend the lines that are drawn in the sand, in the desert, you can rule a desert, alone. Where is that tragic sentiment when you need it, and why won't sleep come, sweet dreams, life is a dream, and dreams are merely nightmares in disguise. Goodnight and goodbye.

signs of wear

In a fit of procrastinational glory, the only kind I know, I was re-reading work done from 1998. Re-reading class notes (not purely useless, but close) and then hand written tests, then poetry. Damn, I was good. And not so. I read myself and I see the infantile, puerile inchoate language. There was no dominion. No ownership. Timidity mixed with a certain degree of hubris. Who was I? Terrible.

I realize now. Now, yes? now. That it will always be this way. A few years will pass and the words that shock even me, (did I write that?) will seem so foreign. The feelings, the lack. Lacan says that the unconscious is like a blinking light, that turns on and then off again.

There are moments, there are moments.

So much good advice to which I paid no heed. So much knowledge forgotten, erased, decayed, eroded. Sandstone blasted away by the wind.

I don't belong in this profession. Oh God, I don't belong in any profession. I shouldn't even be breathing.
And yet... I think I will for a little while longer, despite the fact that I annoy even myself.

I'll miss you

RIP my sweet boy Corleone. They were a good 15 years.

Final countdown

One week.

That's all that's left. One little week and then I am a free woman. Well, so to speak. I guess I'll never really be free, but...
at least I can take care of all the other marvelous shite that awaits. 8 days, 9... Tomorrow night I will go to a talk by an author whose book moved me. Diana Taylor's Disappearing Acts. She examined, in 1997, the modes by which the Argentine government essentially cast its population as an internal enemy and waged its dirty little war on subversion, liberal thought and free speech, to name a few. It sent shivers down my spine. Not because I was shocked and horrified by the terrorific displays of human cruelty (sadly by now, I am accustomed, perhaps even desensitized- no not that, not ever), but because I was smacked in the face with the infinitely similar situation into which this country that I like to call ours, without calling it Ours, with a capital "O", is slipping. Torture? Ah well, that is in another country. Civil liberties being curbed? That's just an immigrant issue, doesn't affect "us". Unlawful surveillance? Neighbors policing one another? That doesn't happen here. Only it does, or at least it is beginning to, and we are sitting complacently waiting for someone else to DO SOMETHING. But no one ever does.

I had to go in and check on her several times that night, make sure she was breathing, touch her face with my lips, breathe in her scent. Imbibe her humanity, her purity, her goodness. I wept for the mothers who were killed, whose babies were stolen, for the children who watched their parents be murdered, in broad daylight, by the Authority. She protects me from that abject truth, and yet, it is my duty to protect her. The road to a fascist, intolerant, torture hungry state is a slippery slope and when it begins, history tells us, civil society is obliterated. Let's not forget.

Caminito a la escuela

We braved the early morning fog today. It was good to leave the car behind. Walk her to breakfast, play a few silly games instead of grumpily chasing her to school. This, I promised us both, we will do more often. No more two minute car rides to school, we'll just have to get up a little earlier. Sure. I say this now, but as life invariably happens, I leave my work until the last minute and race around in a semi-crazed frenzy before class.

Not today. She awoke just before our alarm goes off, coughing herself out of sleep. I thought about getting myself up and running to her room. I closed my eyes for another second, willing the searing sinus pain to abate, and there she stood, wide-eyed in the doorway. "I was just going to see if you were ok," I apologized. "I'm ok Mommy." And she came over to hug me. "We can snuggle here," I suggest, in the quasi darkness of my newly curtained bedroom. "Or we could just come into my bedroom," she replies, demonstrating clear ownership of her space. Small victory. And we're off.

Gravel crunches underfoot, and I reach my hand out behind me to take hers. She runs three steps with her backpack flopping against her poncho. Takes my hand in hers, eyes me very seriously and asks, as per usual modus:
"Mama? Why do some people ask to take your hand in marriage?"
"Hmm. Uh."
-pause-
"When they really want to take your whole body?"
stifled giggle-snort...
"Excellent question."

She always gets me.

Blast from the past

I am constantly amazed by how infinitesimally small the world is, the oyster, in the palm of the hand, the universe encapsulated in the pearl that shines, in its home, rough and sandy, blanched and beautiful. Lost and found. There are stories to be told, soon, there will be more, stories to invent, to create to recast in a new light. As we all know, I have this strange tendency to serendipitous encounters on travels, like the time M., I. and I were in Puerto Rico, in el Yunque national forest, and at a random overlook I ran into a fellow friend and exchange student, from New Orleans who had been in Mexico with me. Or the time in Aruba, when we met, Leo, after I had lost your phone number (but I'll save this story and tell it for real after my exams are over, or maybe I'll just save it for us?).

I started writing my story of Divine Intervention, about when Jenny met me and K. serendipitously in Oaxaca...

Into the woods and out again

I. is back and she is bad!!!

Advances on many fronts: she now...

Sleeps in her own bed.

Loves vegetables. Especially broccoli.

Knows practically the entire score of Sondheim's Into the Woods

I should send her away more often! She seems so grown up. And while she did chop a chunk of her hair off the top of her head (adding to a punk-rocker sort of aura) she is being a fabulous helper and I am one happy mamita. Just in time for Mother's day. Happy day to Mexican moms tomorrow, and US ones on Sunday. CR I think it was several months back, n'est pas? Last night I. wanted to give me a present and I told her not yet, but she decided that because they don't have mother's day in Italy (do they? I would imagine they do, but she wouldn't take no for an answer) she would make it Italian mother's day and give me a present. Well, I don't see how that has to do with me, but I like presents, so I didn't complain.

Object of my affection

Object of my affection
Originally uploaded by lunita.

She's coming home! She's coming home! I missed her so much I couldn't even look at pictures. And I can't contain myself! I need to smother her with kisses. Now!!!!