Radioactive Promotion!

In promotional news: I am trying to get together a reading at our studio to coincide with Open Studio Tours and things are looking up. The plan is to invite writers to write in response to our (R and my) work, and have a reading on the evening of October 14th of the contributing pieces. Self indulgent? Egocentric? Yes. But, hey, it's our studio and we can do what we want. If you (dear, invisible reader) are interested drop me a hello. I updated my Flickr page a bit so if you are indeed curious, please stop by. It's a very rough showing, with lots of silly images interspersed, but it will give you an idea of what's going on this side of the city.

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As expected, the bone scan revealed a bright little spot of radioactive luminescence confirming the presence of a stress fracture. That's what I think anyways, we'll have to still wait for a professional opinion. But the more amazing, probably worrying, thing is that in the right leg there is also a bright spot visible, although it's not as defined and clear as it is in the left. I am thinking that the soleus pain I had a few months back was a stress fracture after all.

Work life hasn't been quite as miserable lately since I have been working on Western blots - a technique I haven't don in a while so it feel s kind of new. Although I can sense already that the newness will fade very fast - considering that in about a week and a half I have repeated it 4 times with a 0% success rate. Soon enough my simple, but deadly, mistake will come to bite me in the face. Until then, I have a little time to kill.

My second summer class started this week with a tedious round the circle discussion about whether the city, the country or the suburbs can provide safety, pleasure, virtue and so on. This was an insanely tiring exercise because the professor had us go one by one, topic by topic and state our preferences and why. This might have been more enlightening, but it seemed like there were no great points of contention: a lot more people favored the country for things like beauty and pleasure - even love - than I would have imagined. Of course, with every mention of the countryside as a preference, my position as an urban defender became more pronounced. The radioactive crap (technicium?) they injected with yesterday to do the bone scan has left me feeling tired and worn out, so I am not exactly in the mood to sit out 3 hours of very tepid conversation. Maybe it will get better.

My Bones

I walked into the doctor's office armed with an arsenal of information: daily descriptions of pain since April 25th, my old running shoes and x-rays.

I wasn't shocked by his insights, except for the revelation that my parents misdiagnosed a fracture. It turns out that the upward sloping line that appears on both my tibia and fibula is an artery pathway or something (totally normal) and not a fracture. This is great news - meaning it's not so serious.

Although, it probably is a stress fracture. Tomorrow I have an appointment for a bone scan to confirm.

It was also revealed that my shoes are a problem. I have always bought shoes with enhanced arch support because the notion that I have flattish feet has remained with me since I was prescribed with orthotics to correct for flat feet when I was eleven. No wonder I wear away the outer edge of my shoes so much - the damn things are pushing my feet outwards.
The best news is that I can actually start running again as long as I don't feel pain. I will wait for the bone scan, and then ease into it.
But the haze is clearing.

We were so proud of ourselves last week: we had made a plan to do something. (Relatively) in advance. Last Wednesday R and I decided that this weekend was the weekend to go to the shore - that it would be our last chance before the pressure of classes resumed, our last chance before we got sucked into the complex vacuum of family obligations. We set a date (Saturday) and we set a time to leave (9:30 am).

If you are reading from the mid-atlantic states you of course know that it rained all weekend.

The failure of our plan sent me into the weekend in a bit of a funk. I had been looking forward to starting our days off early, together, and spending some time driving around our old haunts. I didn't really care about going to the beach so much. It was the getting away part that I wanted.

Now that I think of it, we should have gone anyways. Damnit. Regrets.

Even though it's Monday, I am far less cranky than I was yesterday, Saturday even. Tommorrow, after months of waiting, I finally have an appontment to see the orthopedic surgeon. The x-rays I got last week revealed (to me and my parents anyway) that the pain in my shin was caused by a stress fracture. We also saw in the right leg a portion of the tibia which looks like it had scarred. Perhaps you remember awhile back I was complaining of pain in my right soleus muscle? Well that was probably a stress fracture, not muscle pain.

It has been 3 and a half weeks since I have run outdoors and atleast two that I have been pain free. I want the doctor to tell me that it is ok to start ruinning again. I want him to say that I should be fine as long as I take it slow.
I have a feeling though, that it hasn't been enough time and he will tell me other bad things - like the numbness in my toes the past couple of days is serious nerve damage, or that the loss of my period for 5 months last year really fucked up my bones. To be honest, I am scared. Even though I know it isn't so bad (stress fractures happen), I really fear the possbility that it could be, and that if it is, it is totally my own fault. I realize now that I pushed my body way too hard leading up to the marathon last November and after it. While it is making me nuts and miserable and probably intolerable to live with, this time off from running is forcing me to find balance. Because I can't just go for a 16 mile run to vent, I have to actually deal with things. I am learning (although I wish I didn't have to) that bodies are not invincible, atleast not mine. I hate that, and I never honestly believed it until these past few months.

All this time, I thought Clark Kent was my cousin.

What hasn't finished

I'm back after too long a break away, but alas, I have been busy. My first summer classes ended on a celebratory note - sitting around the trendy and bare English facuilty lounge eating pizza, drinking beer, rum telling some pretty good stories amid several moments of stilted awkwardness. As expected once the buzz set in, strangeness dissolved.

I am sad that this class has ended. In part because it was an excellent class - a great group of people who I will most likely not ever get to mingle with again - but also because I know that the material of my next few semesters will be less intuitive. This is fine, and actually am quite hungry for it. But I will miss the workshops, the excitement of knowing that a room full of people are reading your work, and not just one professor who, I often imagine, is only paying peripheral attention anyways.

Nothing is as motivating as having an audience.

Like a variation of this recurring nightmare that everyone has had: standing on a stage, asked to give a talk, or perform in a play, and you are totally unprepared. You don't know the lines - no one told you that you were going to be up there until the last minute! How could you be expected to pull it off? But you do, if not you just wake up. I always wake up just after I have started to mumble something on stage, totally incoherent with long gaps of silence between phrases and their responses. In the dreams, I try to make it work, to see if if miraculously I can improsive my lines seamlessly and dazzle the crowd. But I only get quiet back, and not long after that I wake up. I abandon my audition at being brilliant.

In the dream, I try to make itseem like there is nothing wrong with this situation; that I know exactly what I am doing. To admit, to your subconsious audience of thousands (sometimes it's less a hundred) that it has been a big mistake, that they booked the wrong person, that you were only there for the free crackers - would dissapoint them. They are there already, and they are watching. Dance monkey, dance.

This is why I can write here on atleast a semi-regular basis and not in an actual journal. My attrocious handwriting just sinks into the page and never emerges for even the most casual re-reading.

In other news:

Last week my great aunt died. This is my grandmother's younger sister Eugenia who I stayed with when I was in Argentina doing the Dirty War piece. I hadn't known that she was in a nursing home. No one told me, until my mom did the day after she died, that her sons had argued about how she sould be cared for. Roberto, the youngest and the romantic of the family, had wanted to have her live with him so they could take care of her and she could be back in the house that she raised her family in. They were dying to do this. The other two brothers are both politicians, the older of which felt that it was his responsibilty to take control of the situation of his mothers declining health and lucidity. He put her in a nursing home; there apparantly was no dissuading him.

My mother said that Eugenia had become completely emaciated in the home. They would take out her teeth, but forget to put them back in, so she couldn't eat. She told Roberto and his wife Nancy once that she was sorry for getting sick at the table one day. She said that all she had was a stomach ache and that's why she threw up, and she didn't understand why she was being punished for it. She asked him to take her home, but he couldn't.

When I heard of her death, I felt an incredible need to attend the funeral. But in Argentina, since they don't embalm the bodies, she was buried the very morning after she died. She had been buried for hours before I even knew she was gone.

Eugenia used to write poetry when her eyes were still good. She had a box of photographs of her wedding, her hnoey moon, of her sisters when they were all young.

I wonder what has happened to this things.

While Sharing Carrots
Eugenia died yesterday, my mother told me today
As we ate carrots in the cafeteria. She died yesterday
and was buried this morning, early, before we had even
gotten to work. Before I had coffee at my desk, they had
already sealed dry, rocky dirt around her, as my mother
explained – emaciated – body. She had starved, almost,
because no one could remember to put her teeth back in.
It’s possible to eat three pounds of carrots in one day. But
you have to have teeth, and you have to have the stomach
for looking frankly at your palms once they’ve turned orange.

Joan Jett

This refers to an article appearing yesterday:
I can't get over the picture of Joan Jett I saw in the New York Times today. It would be a lie to say that the reason I keep glancing it is not envy, but rather, something deeper, more significant, more in sync with her punkiness. But it's not: my glancing, my looking over her "toned and sinewy arms" as the Times put it, has to do with sheer female jealosu. Jealousy that I too, not so many months ago, in my own kind of prime too had her physical hardness. Not her hardness of character, I'm sure (not that I would know how "hard" she is) but her bodily steel.
I see in Joan Jett what she rails against. But then, she's asking for it isn't she? She's not fat and ugly. She's hot. So those of us committed forever to men, who do not lust after her, are left only wanting to look like her; not for our men but for ourselves. It's a circle. A femist rotunda.

Not only did I write my 4th poem as an adult today, but I picked up the booklets I had special services bind for my "workshop" today. Yes, this afternoon I am giving the next installment of the English for Professionals with Degrees Far More Advanced Than My Own series and am really quite excited. This afternoon's session is billed as a lesson in letter writing - proper and common phrasing, establishing a professional tone and so on. Over the past couple of weeks however I have been compiling all sorts of material related to the writing of letters, my favorite being Emily Post’s chapters on Notes, and Long Letters from the 1922 edition of Etiquette. Post's writings were one of the first things that came up in my search, and despite the severely elitist and out of tempo nature of her advice, she is still pretty right on about a lot of things. In Long Letters, she gives us a general discussion of what makes a good letter - a letter that the recipient looks forward to reading - and breaks apart some common tendencies into several accurate to life categories. Of course, I could really care less about what she is advising about, as I am sure most of in the 21st century don't feel pressed to use the proper envelope. But, she's a sharp writer and it was fun to think of ways to cite her as an example for a group of scientists who are less than hip to America's cultural legacy.
It came out to be about 50 pages of essays (some HL Mencken in there) and advice on style and form (Strunk, of course too). Selfish, yes, but I am still excited to get to lead a little, if weak, discussion on the joys of correspondence. I have also wedged in there a letter Einstein’s daddy wrote to Albert's professor pleading with the man to give his son a job. Some WWII letters also. I may have to bribe people to show up with cookies, but it will be worth it for the fun I am going to have playing teacher.

And on the 4th poem? Well, it feels like wearing something that's tailored wrong. Not that it doesn't fit, but more like the seams don't match up where they're supposed to. Something about the way I spaced the phrases seemed affected, but then without the spacing, the sound wasn't right. I had a particularly tough time with the word because in the beginning of two stanzas: I really want it to be read the way one uses the word as an explanation - the emphasis on the words around it and not the word because. But, I also wanted it to be at the beginning of the line, and not say, at the end of the previous line - a crude sense of rhythm even for me.

Pee and Poems

I have marveled at this before, but I will do it again: It is amazing how much work gets done when you sit down to do it, without interruption. Sunday night I realized that I had 129 pages of reading to do for class today, so of course, I panicked. I did no work this weekend - none. I read The Year of Magical Thinking and did no writing. I also slept a lot. A lot. Looking at the syllabus I also realized I had a fair bit of writing to do, so the only thing to be done was to spend all day Monday reading. To my amazement, it worked. I sat, I read, and got it done without procrastination or distraction. I am sure everyone around me knew I was not immersed in some scientific paper, but in my own reading, but I am beyond caring.
Speaking of beyond caring, I have not heard back from the job I applied for. It's been less than a week, so I am not giving up home, but I will soon. Oh well, I will persist elsewhere.
Also, this morning I wrote what I think will turn out to be revealed as some pretty bad poems. I haven't written poetry since I was in high school, and it definitely wasn't very good back then. Maybe I'll start to like it, but so far my experience this morning was somewhat trying. It is hard to not sound like you are being intentionally obscure. It seems like there should be a truth revealed in the poem that cannot be revealed otherwise, and I think it's this sensibility that I haven't been able to grasp. I get it with images, just not with words, yet.
For example: Several months ago someone posted in each of the stalls of the women's bathroom signs requesting that people not place paper towels in the toilet. They read:

PLEASE DISPOSE OF PAPER TOWELS In the TRASH CAN
PLEASE DO NOT DISPOSE OF PAPER TOWELS IN THE TOILET
THIS WILL PUT THE TOILET OUT OF SERVICE
THANK YOU!!!

I visit this bathroom several times a day, and it's the only bathroom on the floor so there is no alternative. I have had ample opportunity to contemplate this signage. Where can I begin? There is so much to say. Initially what struck me was how patronizing this is. All caps, shouting at you while you pee - a jarring message to face when all you want to do is relax for a couple of minutes while you take a leak. The shouter, clearly thinks we, the ladies of the fourth floor, are idiots. Maybe someone did wipe themselves with a paper towel once. It's possible that there was no toilet paper and paper towels were the only option that day. I am sure that whoever knew that this may clog the toilet, but I highly doubt they were willing to crumple up the soiled C-fold towel and walk it outside the stall and into the trash can by the sink. This would involve holding a pee-soaked paper towel in your hand while you pull up your pants, close you labcoat, and other wise adjust yourself. There's simply too many steps involved before even getting to the trash can.
Over time, the meaning of the sign has been obliterated. It is now a just a serious of phrases, sounds. The other day as I was getting up I read the third line as: IT WILL PULL THE INNOCENCE OUT OF THE TOILET.
Since then, I can't get the feeling of the words innocence and toilet out of my head.

PLEASE DISPOSE OF PAPER TOWELS IN THE TRASH CAN
Every day in the stalls of the women's bathroom:
Please don't put paper towels in the toilet.

It will pull the innocence
Out of the toilet.

Weekend Visit

It is wonderful how the things that piss you off, that really get you railing against something, often provide the perfect opportunity to clarify your thinking - often, thinking about yourself.
My cousin's came to our place this weekend, despite the total disgusting mess. I didn't stress about the dust caked over everything, about the food dried onto the keyboard, about the stains on the floor. I probably should have, because this particular cousin, the restorer of renaissance art and medieval cathedrals, is the most squeamishly meticulous of the family. I am sure she noticed. But they liked it. They really did.
They (she and her husband) also provided quite an elaborate and well developed ear full about how one, if an artist, must be practical: that one cannot make art unless one can eat. We R, the cousins and myself, discussed the possibility of going into business together, importing reproductions of 17th century European furniture. We discussed it very seriously in fact, to the point where we looked up import tariffs and the like.

Which is when the moment of confirmation rung: I couldn't give less of a rats ass about selling nauseatingly expensive hand made furniture to wealthy people. No big revelation, I know. But once this comforting idea set in, it became incredibly irritating to continue to elaborate the plan.
But I dealt with it. Because in all likeliness nothing will happen anyways, the issue will be forgotten.
In the car on the way to dinner at my parents house, the advice escalated. We could, she suggested, give private art classes. We could start the landscape architecture business that I had mentioned to her earlier. We could sell antiques. Well intended, yes. Everyone in the family knows that we are not a picture, not even a faded Polaroid, of fiscal stability. We definitely could use some economic security especially when it comes to doing it in the realm of our respective interests. But the implication that R and I were wasting our time was not lost on me. Only the thought of being a day care teacher or a nurse is more disturbing to me than the idea of giving a painting lesson to some make-up reeking old woman from the Main Line.
But to say so would be offensive, because it is through these types of women that my cousin makes her living. Her clientele are the uber rich, from old money. How can I convey that I would rather work at Pathmark than for these people?
I won't convey it, and that is how I'll get along until their visit is through.

It. (for Erin)

It's quite official that I have nothing to do this week. (At work that is) In continuation of yesterday, and the day before that, I have been quite happily writing away, only today it was guilt free, knowing that I am not blowing everything and everyone off, but really, there is nothing for me to accomplish until next week. It is amazing how much can get done between 8 and noon, if you really just sit down and do it. Even more could get done between noon and 5 if only it didn't get so damn hot in this lab. Or at home. Or anywhere that I need to be.

Erin called last night, and after far too many (could it be 9?) months of not hearing her voice I finally did. I, as I had replayed in my mind many times, tried to entice her into moving to Philadelphia. She had even thought about it, and looked at some job postings, but I guess nothing grabbed because after leaving San Francisco she went back to Chicago and not to us and our brothers of love. All I can say is that I really regret being such a schmuck about staying in touch, because if I had called more often, perhaps I could of actually served my function as a friend. Perhaps I could have provided some support, perhaps I could have lent some well worn advice on certain matters. Matters that shall go undiscussed here, as they go undiscussed in general. Matters that are perhaps defining moments, that perhaps have created permanent rifts in our characters, that inform everything we have and will do - yet they are not spoken of or about because even though we are implicated in these issues, they are not about us. They are not about Erin, not about me. And this is what I learned from the one and only Naranon meeting I went to: that as much as it sucks, and as helpless as you feel, you are alone, despite what they say. It's not about us. We are caught in the crossfire, we are the cells left in the margin.
It's not about us, but we still feel compelled to take the problem upon ourselves to solve, as if it were our own. But, I have also learned that there is no solution. It doesn't end, doesn't go away; it does not tie itself up into a package and get put in storage. It's a problem, but not one like the one's you (Erin) have stayed up all night trying to solve, but instead it's a problem like people are problems. No matter where they go or what they do, they fuck something up, and that's just how we are as a species.
Even today, after so many years, I have to remind myself of this.
Anyhow.