Tending the Garden

When Brock and I first met, what impressed him the most about me was that I ran every day. Often I'd be late to meet him at The Chimes where he'd be on his second Turbo Dog, and I'd be all sweaty and stinky, but he liked it because (besides his being slightly tipsy) it was all a part of taking care of myself. We started going to the gym together before we were even a couple, and somewhere along this path he grew to love me. And it's in no small part a credit to my two-a-days.

Not that Brock nor I are vain. As I type this I'm wearing very coarse pink flamingo pajama pants, topped by a long-sleeved white tee with a blue Snap Fitness shirt over it since it's a bit chilly upstairs in my room. Oh, and my hair has gone three days unwashed. Brock's no better--he's wearing his Saints cap backwards, his workout gear, and we both still smell like the gym. It's just that a part of all this--working on our bodies daily--is what Brock calls tending the garden. The analogy is not brilliant but it's apt: an overgrown garden loses all its beauty, and it's difficult to tell what the garden is supposed to be at all. Same goes for human body.

Brock introduced me to this analogy when we first started talking about getting engaged; he suggested to me very softly, eyes averted, that he hoped I'd continue to tend the garden after we were married.

It's difficult to explain this to others, especially women-others, without them immediately striking the extreme feminist pose (of which, I can tell you, I'm also very familiar with): wh-wh-what? Your man is supposed to love you no matter what you look like! You should be able to get big, or get a bad haircut, or look less than stellar all the time, because this is marriage! When women have children they have to get big! Fuck men for trying to take that away from us! Exclamation point!

(Incidentally, it's funny that I wrote that monologue in the voice of my feminist compatriots, because it's actually my own voice. When my old grad school friend J.M. was marrying D.K., it got around the department that D's only deal-breaker would be if J got fat. And, if you don't know J.M., she's blond and blue-eyed with a Cosmo body and face, so it was a true affront to hear he'd said those words. I may have said he's trying to compensate for what I'm sure is a small penis, but I can't quote myself for certain.)

Let me now not defend D.K., who I still contend to be a bit of a d-bag for other reasons, but Brock's idea that tending the garden is of utmost importance in any relationship. Thing is, not caring what you look like is an affront not just to yourself but to the person you purportedly love. It's easy to fall back on the "love me no matter what" trope. Even if I don't care about your perception of me? Even if I've lost all pride? If a relationship means daily work on our spiritual, emotional, psychological connections, why shouldn't it also involve the connection between our bodies? Let's not kid ourselves: wanting to fuck the person you purportedly love is an essential piece to the relationship puzzle.

This doesn't mean having to be perfect, or always looking and feeling beautiful...only that you daily try to be the best version of yourself, both inside and out. (Which is a good reminder today, when I'm ready to inhale the bread pudding Brock bought for dessert tonight. See? Not all perfection: there's effort and reward.)

I bring this up because of a problem I've too long ignored that prevents me from tending the garden as well as I'd like: and that is I have stinky feet. Part of the reason for this affliction is my perpetual attempts to tend the garden. I run about 25 miles per week, and on days I don't run I try to do something--anything--that's vaguely active. We recently purchased a jump rope from Wal-Mart and lemme tell ya it's no easy workout. This brings to mind that tending the garden is essentially a tight rope walk: yes, running is good and necessary and makes you feel like a thousand bucks, Brooke, but take care of that smell, too. And be loving and thoughtful. And expect the same in return, and don't be afraid to assert your need for the reciprocation. Meanwhile don't backslide on your family and job and dogs and world issues that help keep you worried and well-rounded.

Life sure is a lotta work, huh?

As I'm composing this my sister-in-law Jen is going through a breakup that's tearing up me and Brock probably more than it's hurting her. She's ended a long relationship for a lack of work (on both their parts) in this general area: tending the garden. Two people we love have for months and maybe longer forgotten to look at each other deeply, in both a physical and emotional way. Without getting into the details of their demise that must remain private, I can say that all I'm picturing now is the way she looks at a man she once loved--she won't, or can't, acknowledge him. When you've stopped loving someone, a process that takes a long time to complete but which you can often recognize in a moment, you are unable to truly see them anymore. It's like a kid on a field trip, looking at dead art on museum walls and wondering when lunchtime's coming. It's the emotional equivalent of whistling, hands in your pockets, kicking up dirt.

That first analogy might not be an apt one, but it came to mind because this summer when Brock and I visited Baltimore with Jen and Broc, we went to a museum and took pictures of ourselves. Broc and Brock dwarfed by Rodin's Thinker, Jen and I melting over the Cone collection holding the best of bright Matisse. I ache that love can begin because of admiration over workouts, a couple of poems, a look across a table in a writing workshop. And whatever the reason first caused Jen and Broc to avert their loving eyes. Tracking the ending is more difficult. What can a person do to make you unable to see him anymore? Can we count a beginning, middle, and ending of love-loss? Would we even want to if we could?

A decision: I will not allow my gross feet contribute to any grosser ending. Today and every day I plan to tend the garden, and not pine at wished-for love but make it. My feet will soak in sea salt. I'll tell Brock I love him, and insist that he sees me when he says it back.

Frenemies

A couple of months ago Ted Kennedy passed away, and though it was expected, and though he lived a relatively long, healthy life until he was diagnosed with brain cancer early in 2008, I spent the next week crying. Chris Matthews didn't help with his Kennedy Brothers documentary, which didn't say anything revealing or new, but showed clip after clip of the boys in their youths, a time when all they knew to lament was their brother Joe falling from a plane in a WWII sky. Always in the background was Teddy, always buggy, the boy who at fourteen stopped one or another of the Hyannis Port celebration to raise a toast for "the brother who can't be here." Even then he had duende, the intimation of mortality, the knowledge that death is close by and life is wondrous, that the only thing to do is make people love you. Which is what they did when he toasted his dead brother. Which is what the world did, so many times over, because he loved it right back.

The death tore me up. His fight for civil rights, women's rights, health care, the underpriviledged were over. I drank my coffee every day and dreamed of another hero.

He wasn't to be found on Facebook, but that's a source I turn to when I feel so overwhelmed and good-for-nothing all I'm capable of is spying on others and imagining their better, richer lives (this is probably a reason I post so many gloomy status updates). So flipping through friends on this site one day shortly after the death of the last Kennedy brother, I came across the friend I've known the longest, Danielle, weighing in at fifteen years.

First I should give you a background on Danielle. We became friends, basically, because we started having sex at about the same time in high school and trusted each other enough to pass notes back and forth in class ensuring each other that we weren't pregnant. Sex and boys were our mutual understanding and as this was our preoccupation for the next seven or so years, we never stopped to recognize our similarities ended there.

In short, she's a fucking Republican.

There was no way for either of us to know that she was conservative fifteen years ago, or that I was liberal. Clues always abound, but when one is young and a friend says something that just doesn't feel right, one ignores it. The only loser is a friendless loser. (I'm reminded of an anecdote I may have already included in Buggy Face, but which so compels me I have to tell it again: it's the story of my mom walking home from school with her friend in third grade, and they've been let out early because their president has just been assassinated. They walk in silence, as I can imagine an eight-year-old would have a difficult time expressing anything in the face of such a tragedy, but finally my mom's friend spoke up--"Serves that nigger-lover right." And I think of how my mom knew that was wrong, sort of, as she had never heard that word before and could only intuit it was something mean and awful, but how she also walked the rest of the way with her friend. What else was she to do?)

Danielle and I have broken up several time throughout the years, and my argument against her is always she doesn't know how to articulate who she is. (As proof of this, she's often characterized our relationship as one that is nearly perfect--in fifteen years she swears we've only gotten into one fight. And I have to tell her, we're always in a fight! Remember that year and a half we didn't talk? That was a fucking fight!) My downfall as a friend is that I'm constantly try to prod the Real Danielle out of her. About five or six years ago when I was campaigning against Bush more than I was for Kerry, I got drunk one night and sent Danielle an incendiary Myspace message. The subject read:

Why are you a Republican?

It is never a good idea to ask a friend why she is who she is, but there I was, supposedly open-minded, liberal (and certainly drunk) Brooke asking her who she thought she was. I went on to provide a litany of reasons why her conservatism didn't make sense. Her favorite musical artists were U2, Dave Matthews, Coldplay, John Mayer, and several other pansies I'm forgetting at the moment. Do you actually listen to their music? I asked. Do you know the lyrics you recite? I probed. They don't believe in war, they don't care about the free market, they work against everything you support, and you sing along to it. You don't know who you are! I insisted. And I don't think I like it!

Danielle's shorter and much more adult response was, "I don't know what your problem is, but I'm not answering your ridiculous questions."

I deleted her from my MySpace account.

If anything this is proof that we've definitely fought more than once.

Now, years later, after one of Danielle's terrible breakups brought us back together, and now that we've graduated to grownup Facebook accounts, I sat at my desk, post-Kennedy death, and wanted someone on the site to make me feel better, or maybe just make me feel jealous at their publication or something. Suddenly I remembered an old friend I hadn't talked to in awhile, someone who it had been weird with for some time after Obama won but who was still, after all, a friend.

Then I saw her Facebook status: "Oh, God. Am I going to have to hear about Ted Kennedy's death for the next whole month?! I'm going to keep it on conservative radio and Fox. Why don't I always do that?" A guy friend of hers Liked! the status, and said Kennedy's hero's burial at Arlington made him wanna puke, and Danielle agreed it made her wanna puke too.

Not one for leaving well enough alone, I scrolled down her page for evidence of other inhuman/racist/disgusting status updates and came up short, though she did post this insightful ditty:

"Saw the best bumper sticker today. It said: Obama: Jimmy Carter's Second Term."

A Facebook friend of hers agreed with that bumper sticker's wit, and said that day she saw an even better one:

One
Big
Ass
Mistake
America

Immediately I thought I'd delete her from my Facebook account, and then I recognized, no, Brooke, we don't go backwards in life. That won't solve anything. So instead I stomped down the stairs and as I told Brock what I'd read I burst into tears for the tenth time in a week, and I told him I didn't want to be Danielle's friend anymore.

For days I was inconsolable, and when my birthday came and went without a card or email from her, I posted a message on her wall about something funny my stepfather Kevin had done, and reminded her she missed my birthday, and suggested the reason for this was because I was too liberal for her. I was going for witty with a dash of acerbic. I wanted to be in words what a Lemonhead hard candy is in taste.

She sent me an email back apologizing profusely for being a bad friend and asked me how life was going, how Erica was doing with the pregnancy, whether or not Rosita was ready to tear her hair out, and basically all the questions about myself I would've loved to answer...if only I weren't answering to her.

A month later I still haven't responded back.

Now the question is, why? Danielle clearly felt bad for these last months of muddy friendship, but I just wasn't having it. If I did respond at all, I would have to be honest about how her Ted Kennedy comment made me want to tear her eyes out, and she'd get all defensive about her politics, and then I'd say it's not just politics, but about have a fucking heart, which of course would suggest that, indeed, she didn't have a heart. Basically I'm willing to let her be the bad guy for as long as I can.

Then, and I'm not sure how or when this happened, as I didn't label it on my yellow legal pad for taking blog notes, a revelation: I'm the asshole here, and likely always have been.

You see, I've always felt slightly superior to Danielle. I went away to college and she stayed at home, and then I went on to graduate school and met the really Smart People she'd never meet. Though I didn't know this at the time, this was my secret retribution for her having been friends with all the popular kids in high school who drove Mustangs and spoke terrible Westbank English (sadly, I never could make myself do this). She was friends in high school with the girls I can still see on Facebook through the twenty pounds they've gained since then, the ones who thought my abusive boyfriend was cute, but an asshole, and that I was slightly weird, or slightly sluttish (I cheated on said abusive boyfriend and the whole school found out), or most likely they didn't think about me at all. Resentment stemmed from her having been thought cooler all our lives; I couldn't help but concieve what an injustice that was, because of course I was cooler. My thoughts could be articulated and only because no one wanted to hear what I had to say, I rarely spoke.

So when we became grownups I quickly became a child in order to get back at her: I'm smarter than you are (sing-songy voice).

But now that I am speaking I'm remembering what a good friend, Courtney, said about Danielle recently, that she has real liberal tendencies. And she does: the music and caring and kindness and shit, just the fact that we've hung out a lot in life and actually gotten along.

Maybe that's what did it. In thinking about how Danielle can have aspects of her person that she certainly wouldn't check off on a box or questionnaire (I suspect the word liberal makes her gag), I began to consider how that might be reversed. How I revel in my liberalism (short litany in defense of my inherent qualities which I deem liberal: love of the underdog, obsession & crying & caring for everyone but especially those who are really sick and really far away and that I can't do anything about, the fact I was a rising star in the Greek community in college--Greek Woman of the Year, Phi Mu President, etc.--it was because no one else was a hippee and I was the closest thing, my hatred of any injustice, my hopes for the little guy whomever he may be, my aversion to looking good unless absolutely necessary which can be proven by the fact I did not shave my legs or wash my hair for almost two months one year in college). And how when it comes to being truly liberal and open-minded, I often fall short of it.

Some examples of my awful, fascist tendencies: I'm often jealous, and I don't like to share, and I want everything to be mine sometimes, and I want to be loved the most, and I don't listen in fights but play the victim like a champ, which means I don't argue well though I ironically usually ask for it, and am unyielding on a point even if it's for the greater good (utilitarianism: look it up, Danielle) if it's not good for me.

Also, there are a lot of Is in my writing (see previous, or any, paragraph). Which shows you where my interests lie.

Another example is this blog. I'm railing against the indecency of a person who has tried to reach out to me, and I can't be bothered to reach back. You see, I'm busy, Danielle. I'm a professor at a very important football university. Even though I'm not a professor I can say that because you don't know the difference. Thus, I am still smarter than you are.

Do you see how I just can't help but be a real fascist asshole sometimes?

Another problem with this argument is it's a fallacy to conflate liberalism with open-mindedness, because they aren't necessarily the same things. But don't tell Danielle that.

Because I'm still not calling her.

Ra, ra, sis-boom-ba! (Or, Comment, motherfuckers!)

Okay, one a.m. is approaching and I'm thinking maybe I've taken on a lot more than I can handle with writing a blog per day. I've got lots of ideas and they're all labeled nicely on my yellow legal pad, but I don't have the time to make them coherent, well-thought-out, articulate, beautiful. If you haven't noticed, I've struggled even with the simple grammar editing in the past few entries because I just can't! Other work calls and I feel sick about it, but it has to be done (I'm literally sick--I drank half a bottle of Pepto and still I churn).

In my last meta-blog I wrote about the importance of having comments and certain complimentary boxes checked when I signed in. I meant that! Yet I don't see any checks (besides the ones I've marked myself--I can't believe I admitted that by the way--looo-ser).

Also, I'm not asking for anything complex, any analytical probing of what I've written. Admittedly a lot of these ideas are half-baked because, as I've said, I'm currently scattered to the academic winds and must spend lots of time elsewhere (do you sense a running theme here?). (Though of course, if you have time to engage with me--ever--please go for it.) Thing is, I see this as a two-fold project: I want to force myself to write every day and at the end of the month maybe use about a fifth of what I have for...something bigger. At this point I can't even imagine what that will be.

The other fold is that this blog format is sort of incidental. I could type these wannabe essays into Word, but I just like the way this looks and feels. But I can't forget that it is a blog, and has a readership, and has for a week gone unresponded to.

An idea: maybe you all can just schedule your lives around me (I'll send out your email addresses--c'mon, you guys can do this). One of you comments (or box-checks) on one blog (which, by the way, you never actually have to read...if you comment on one paragraph or line I'll be none the wiser, yet oh-so mollified), and then you won't have to worry about reading a thing for at least a week. There are seven of you! I believe! Hope, Change, Dream! All that crap!

What I'm saying is I need a cheerleader. I need a hero. I'm reading 17th century texts and grading student profiles and grading Renaissance tests and losing my goddamn mind.

So if your finger is itching to write something, just do it. Ashley, Amy, Courtney, Emilie, Greg, Gloria, Rosita--one of you for fuck's sakes.

(In a complete reversal of tone, I have to say something to all of you: thank you endlessly for the comments you've made in the past, either through this venue and through email. It means just everything, and I'm truly lucky to have you, and I'll never be as good as you. But these next eighteen days are going to be hell for me, and this is just a reminder that I need you. Tiny, struggling smiley face.)

If you care about me at all, you'll check the Interesting! box. Both the box and I will be so grateful. We'll never be alone in the world again.

The Erudition of Texts

On any given weeknight, if you're driving Hwy 69 South past the brightly lit glass entrance of Snap Fitness, you can probably see me running on the treadmill watching The Family Guy on mute and, though you won't be able to tell from your car, I'll have my headphones in listening to Jay-Z. For almost two months now I've been concentrating on this Blueprint III record as if no other music exists. I'm a lot like my mom in that if I get a new CD I'll listen to it every day for about six months, and then on a whim purchase a new album. By the time I move on the the next one I'll know the lyrics to every song but will have forgotten the meaning. The songs have been set on AutoTune, a variation of elevator music for my brain in waking and in sleep. Or what's worse, I'll never have considered what some songs are telling me, why some of their lyrics cause a Rubik's cube of trouble for me that I spend lots of time trying to subconsciously ignore.

Thing is I listen to Jay-Z pretty much every day, and there are still some lyrics that I comprehend. What he's saying is clear--his articulation always is--but I don't get the meaning. Let me give you an example from the song "Run This Town" (featuring Rihanna):

"I'd get more in depth
If you boys really real enough
This is La Familia
I'll explain later
But for now let me
get back to this paper..."

So I've listened to this song about fifty times and I can tell you he never does explain the "La Familia" reference (or more accurately, why the La Familia reference needs explaining). The term represents the record label Jay-Z founded a few years ago, and all I know about it is Jay-Z is the only great artist signed to it. Is this a subtle reference to the creative freedom one has when working autonomously on one's own label? Like, because I'm with La Familia I have I can work at my own whim, and now I want to get back to this paper? Maybe I'm overanalyzing but I can say that I've listened to all this man's albums, and he is one of the few artists whose raps don't include arbitrary lyrics intended to fit some predetermined rhyme scheme that cause some analogies to be just nonsensical (I'm thinking now of Kanye: “The way Kathie Lee needed Regis, that’s the way I need Jesus.” Jay-Z means what he says. He's the best of all rappers because he's got sound and sense.

What's so funny is that even though I don't know what some of his lines mean, they are so beautiful and resonant to me that they become part of my lexicon. If I like the way something sounds but don't technically "get it," I'll find a way to make meaning. A few weeks ago when I visited New Orleans for my nephew Christian's birthday part, I spent every spare second I got updating Brock (my poor buggy, stuck in Tuscaloosa) through text. At one point when the little Hispanic kids and their poor obnoxious parents seemed to invade my mom's house all at once (and then proceeded to say and do things too appalling and intricate to describe within a text box, I sent Brock the line, "This is la familia, I'll explain later," which then carried over to him a double meaning. Yes, I was listening to Jay-Z on my four-mile runs while I was away, but there was a bigger point I was trying to encapsulate that moment: I'm with these unknown brown people, presumably new members of my family by way of my sister's criminal-no good-bastard boyfriend, these are my new people, but I can't talk about them now, Brock, so I'll explain later.

Still there are other lyrics that I can't possibly make my own, as they seem so bizarre and untouchable. For example, how do I account for these lines of Jay-Z's from "Empire State of Mind" (still my favorite song off the BP III):

"Me I gotta plug special and I got it made,
If Jesus paying LeBron, I’m paying Dwayne Wade..."

I'm assuming "plug special" is street slang, possibly drug-related, as the white-bred Google search yields no results. (Knowing Jay-Z as I do, I thought myself familiar with drug terminology, but if this is an example of it, then I'm not.) But it's the LeBron/Wade stuff that's really killing me. Jay-Z's referenced LeBron in songs before, called him his boy, his "young'n" (which I thought adorable). And this line clearly alludes to the NBA semifinals last year when Wade's Magic team kicked the Cavs' asses. Still, what is the line saying? That Jay-Z has become a turncoat because LeBron's team can't win? That Jesus is on LeBron's side (why? says who?), so therefore Jay-Z is on Wade's? But that interpretation doesn't make sense, because as far as I can tell Jay-Z's only weakness is that, like most other rappers, he's got a jones for Jesus.

One theory I've come up as to why so many texts confound me with is that any references to God or Jesus or religion just zoom right past my head. It's like I've got an invisible Jesus force-field around me: I don't get it, I don't want to hear it. Consciously this doesn't jibe with me, since I'm always telling myself I'm not an atheist, because atheists are closed-minded--I'm an agnostic because I can't figure out my own mind or it's place in the world (the supposition is I'm open to all possibilities--though it may actually mean I'm a coward).

That's the way I like to think of myself, but it's not the reality. I do think that Jesus people are freaks, thus I conflate any religious fervor with an inherent freakish nature. Therefore no Jesus people actually exist: only Jesus freaks ("out in the stree-eets, handin tickets out for Gaaa-wd..."). Rationale, Brooke-style.

This is problematic when considering my affinity for rap in general. God is everywhere, and god forbid a rap artist win some award, because he'll hear his name called again and again just before the litany of producers and assistants and record moguls. Oh God, you hang with a glorious crew.

The erudition of texts in my life extends far beyond rap lyrics, of course, and it doesn't always deal with my bafflement about God. Infinite times I have read a book or a poem and come across a line or phrase or passage that made me stop, go "Whoa," or "What," or usually, "Aw, hell." I'm stuck because I just don't get it. (If only life were like the movies, and I were the Tom Hanks character Josh Baskin from the movie Big, and when I said ad infinitum "I don't get it" at a business meeting in a roomful of my peers, they would marvel at my profundity, because yes, there are times when not getting it makes the most sense. If something is erudite bullshit and you call the erudite composer of the bullshit out on it, you're lauded as hero of all that is incomprehensible. But as I said, that's only in the movies. In life, it means you are stupid.)

I don't want to remain stuck in any text, ever, so I dog-ear the page or circle the line and move on. Problem is, I become engrossed in the narrative, or at least in the parts I do understand, so when I'm done with Bellow's Herzog (what a summer reading that was) or Paradise Lost or a Bly poem I think to myself, "Wow, that's enough thinking. Good work. On to the next one." And I'll become similarly eluded by a page (okay, pages) of Virginia Woolf or Proust or Marquez but trod on through because, in my mind, I'm always on to the next one.

This makes any current state of mind hard to live with.

As I'm typing this, I'm already on to the next blog. At this point in the semester I'm already knee-deep into the next. At my nephew's first birthday party as he smashed his hands in his cake, I saw him participating joyfully in kindergarten. I'm happiest right now with the person I haven't yet become.

Contributions to Humanity

Writers like to play games even more than poker players. I say this because I came to my desk a minute ago with the fierce urge to pee but said to myself, oh no buddy, you aren't peeing a drop until you get at least 1000 words. Years ago when I called myself a smoker I'd say in my head, you can have a cigarette only once you figure out what this poem is about, plus get one good line. Because I never figured out what either of those things meant--ever--I rarely smoked, which is great and I don't miss it. Look at my teeth smile, look at my face shine.

And I account for the veracity of this writing analogy because I spent the last hour watching the final table of the 2009 World Series of Poker, and most of those guys just seem to hate the game, or at least are totally bored by it. Phil Ivey, probably the best poker player in the world, ate an apple as he watched his all-in ace/king go down to a fucking ace/queen when a queen came on the river. Brock and I were sick watching such a bad beat, but Phil finished his apple, put the core in his pocket, and walked out of the tournament: just like that.

Writing is wearisome, but weary in the way that makes you feel guilty for not doing real work. Like, if you have the luxury of even saying you're weary while typing in a blog you've got no cause for complaints. Even as I'm writing I'm remembering the scene from the fantastic baseball movie Bull Durham in which the Tim Robbins character plays the guitar on the team bus traveling to their next out-of-town game. To prove how just sad and tired he is by the cold, cruel world of Triple A baseball, he begins to sing Otis Redding's "Try A Little Tenderness." Only instead of singing the opening lines about young girls getting weary, the Robbins character sings, "Young girls, they do get wooly..." The scene is funny because this character, the team pitcher, is probably the best in the league, only he doesn't have the common sense to know what to do with his talent, so he bemoans his fate in Triple A . Plus he gets everything in life besides pitching wrong: he doesn't eat right, drink right, love right, fuck right, and he doesn't even know the lyrics to "Tenderness." It's like by assuming he'll always get everything wrong, he wills himself to actually do so. Sad sap.

In life I feel a lot like the Robbins character (who is by the way lyrically named Nuke LaLoosh). At all times I have the simultaneous feeling of holding down deep some unsung talent for this art while also being good at absolutely nothing. Not just at writing, no. I mean I feel bad at driving and running and teaching and inspiring and leading and following. Fuck man, I mean I don't feel good at thinking most days. I'm reminded of my father, who had to get my mother to screw in lightbulbs. I feel unfit for shoe-tying.

Perhaps Nuke's line of women getting wooly is more than a glorious malapropism, perhaps it is beautiful and true. Tonight I feel not weary. I'm wooly. These words I'm typing are slow to come, get stuck in the cobwebs covered by my brow bone, plus the internet's on the fritz and after every fourth sentence I get the spinning blue circle telling me to hold up, wait a minute, can't type now (just got another one of those bastards). And so far I've lost four eyelashes to this blog.

The good thing about writing professionally (reminder to self and others: this is not just a hobby, this is not just a protracted email to myself, this is hopefully someday going somewhere) is rejection comes slow. If you submit at all, which I don't yet, you won't know for weeks or months if what you wrote was accepted by someone. And the prolonged submission time period means that maybe, just maybe, someone is considering your work seriously, so that when the inevitable rejection slip comes in the mail you still may have won: someone has read you and maybe likes you. Acceptance may have occurred in a foreign heart if not the page. (Another reminder: once I start submitting, I'm going to keep all this faux-wisdom in mind.)

The bad thing about writing a blog is that no comments equals bad, because it means no one has read or the words they did read didn't matter. I stupidly installed boxes marked Funny! Interesting! Cool! only to have them perpetually unchecked. I'll go ahead and admit I checked off an Interesting! box a few blogs ago because the brave unmarked little soldiers of boxes looked so lonely there, stalwart almost. This is what I've reduced myself to--marking myself off as Interesting! not because I mean it, but because no one else has. Because I feel sorry for empty boxes.

But there is a reason I'm writing in this format and it's time to figure out what that reason is. Yes, it's nice to know that my close friends read what I write and like it. What really compels me about this blog business though, is something so simple I'm almost embarrassed to admit it: I like the screen I'm typing in.

Let me make a comparative analysis by first saying that writing in Microsoft Word sucks. Maybe because I'm so used to that format: the white, perfectly-sized 8x11 page with the slick blue in the background. It's my modern-day version of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's yellow wallpaper--it drives me fucking batty. When I wrote pre-blog it would be usually in one of my hundred fancy notebooks, but more than likely a yellow legal pad my mom swiped from her office at work. First drafts there, then typed into the awful Word for even more awful revision time.

Now let me tell you about the beauty of writing in this new blog mode. First of all it's mostly white with a thin gray box around my words, surrounded by acres of snow white. Just logging into Buggy Face and clicking New Post gives me a little bit of the chills because I know the white will make me instantly awake and a real person on some mission, about to make some subtle contribution to humanity. But it's not really the white that gets me. It's all the splendid clutter on the page. Just above the Publish Post button are directions for how to make blog writing simpler by taking the following steps:

Shortcuts: press Ctrl with: B = Bold, I = Italic, P = Publish, S = Save, D = Draft.

Right above that is this gray box of words,

Labels for this post: e.g. scooters, vacation, fall.

Atop the blog box are a variety of buttons for installing videos, hyperlinks, images, text color. It feels like there's a lot going on here already before I've even logged in and now I'm just here to join the party.

The kicker, though, is that when I'm almost done writing a blog, I click the Publish Post button just to see what the words look like, and do you know what it looks like? An accomplishment. When you save a document in Word it doesn't go anywhere. It stays the same, white and blue. But my blog becomes something new and meaningful each time I publish. It's startling, really, to see my words go from the stark white to the neutral taupe/brown blog format of my own creation. That new page each time is like a big pillow telling me, hey, these are your words, they were waiting for you here all along, and you know what? They're so great I've etched them onto me. Now come rest your head. You are done today.

I guess writing within a blog is pretty fun. I cannot eat an apple while doing it. I'd get too nervous. When I'm writing I can't add anything to myself. All I can do is pull myself apart.

FYI: I've lost a total of eight eyelashes to this blog. It's a small loss. I'm using the fallen victims as dashes to demarcate my different ideas for the next blog entitled "The Erudition of Texts" (which unlike this blog, actually has a subject I've thought about, and might even include a thread of coherence). Now I've moved the eyelashes over to enclose the tentative title I've written as stand-ins for quotation marks. Those black flakes once a part of me now stand out vividly on the yellow legal pad. On the page I am dead. Or is it, I am dead on the page?

Ah, no matter. Eyelashes as punctuation--how can I go wrong?

Okay, time now to pee.

Oroonoko, or White Woman Saves a Nation of One

We've reached the Restoration in my British literature class, and instead of having my students read the long and inarticulate prose introducing the period, I've summed it up for them by saying it's a time in British history when the passing of crowns from one white man to another was even more of a clusterfuck than it had been previously. Catholics were scary, Protestants were militant, and here came the Parliament with its new play for power. Really is sort of interesting stuff, but the Longman introduction is so unreadable I couldn't force my students (my babies!) to read it. They prefer my profanity-laden summary anyway.

So I'm only about six pages into our first text, Oroonoko by Aphra Behn (the first woman to write and sell in English!), and I'm already a bit disgusted. The subtitle of the text is A Royal Slave, which is intended to just enchant you with its irony. The narrative takes place early 17th century at the height of the slave trade, and the gist is that the titular royal slave will do anything to save his beloved Imoinda (who is beautiful, we are told, despite her dark color), and must pay the slave's price for it.

Very romantic...and very racist.

Some people balk at throwing up the R word, even in terms of 17th century British literature (which, let's face it, couldn't help but be racist), because it's a conversation stopper. The assumption is that if one is racist, there nothing more to say on the matter. I think racism should be a conversation starter. Virtually all of us are bigotted in one way or another, and hopefully by identifying we were really are and what we really aren't, we'll self-actualize for the betterment of society and not just ourselves.

So Aphra Behn serves as the narrator of this text, and she goes on and on about how beautiful "these people" are (using the term in the exact way Bush did when referring to Katrina victims), despite their inauspicious beginnings. They are like Adam and Eve before the Fall, she says, so glorious in their ignorance that they don't care if their dicks and tits flop around everywhere. It's so cute, she says. Such a culture worth saving.

I know liberals like this and suspect sometimes that I am one of them. Oh, I want to teach disadvantaged youths! I want to door-knock in the poor black neighborhoods of Pensacola and drive them to the polling stations! We become enchanted with the poetry of underprivileged salvation but demur at the prose of going through with it. I knocked on poor black doors last fall, yes, but don't expect me to do anything about voting rights this year: I'm privileged and pooped. (Poor me, with essays to grade and a department to assist in running!)

When I say we, of course, I mean I.

Last year Brock and I were carjacked two weeks after we were married and two months before we moved to Tuscaloosa. Here's what I remember: I had a hellacious flu and didn't even want to be at our friend Ben's Cinco de Moustache party, but there we were. It was two in the morning and after having zero beers I'd passed out on the couch--Brock roused me then and said let's get outta here. Downstairs I got in the car and Brock talked just outside the passenger door to our friend Rich. Two black guys approached slowly in a green car.

What I remember thinking: I'm not afraid at all. People who are racist might be scared at the advance of two black guys in the middle of the night, but nope!, not me! My CD player was cranking Mos Def, and I thought about the Obama bumper sticker on the back of my black Toyota Echo, and congratulated myself on how natural and cool I felt about this entire situation. Just two black guys talking to my white husband, that's all. Even when I heard voices get a bit louder outside the car I forced myself to think, boy, I'm getting bored with waiting around and hope Brock gets in the car soon.

Brock didn't, but a black guy did, and told me to drive off, then changed his mind, then pulled me out, the other guy telling him to pop me (pop her man, just pop her!), the guy who pulled me looked me down and up, considering it, and all at once they pealed away in my Echo. Mos Def was still singing Umi said shine a light on the wo-oorld, and the last I saw of my car was my Obama sticker, peeling a little at the edges.

I wonder if my reaction somehow better than that of an acquaintance of mine who told me the story of his home invasion: two black guys with guns broke in during the night and threatened this acquaintance and his wife, talked of shooting him and raping her, and the guy managed to wrestle away the weapon and save his family. The kicker, though: he'd always suspected black people were up to no good, and this incident confirmed it.

When I asked how he'd feel about black people if the robbers had been white, he responded, "But they weren't."

Was my insistence that the black men weren't out to harm me as blindly prejudiced as the white guy who always suspected black men, and now feels he has good reason to remain as racist as his forebears?

I'm not sure--that's what I suppose I'll write a longer essay on someday--but I'll leave you (leave myself, really) with this last anecdote: when I was a little kid Lala fed me about half a box of cereal per day, either Cheerios or Cocoa Puffs. I was a spoiled fatty. This one morning I watched The Price is Right with my mixing bowl of cereal in my lap and was engrossed in both when I saw a shadow glide across the window.

I told Lala I thought I saw something, and she said not to be a scaredy-cat (I forget the Spanish version of this term). Then I heard something, knew I heard it, and insisted she check outside. Ahortia.

Totally frustrated, she peered out the window and then yelled "Negro maldito!" over and over again. Apparently the black guy trying to break in was now scared of her foreign words and crouched down under the window. Lala swatted a broom at him and you would've thought it was a .22. Bastard busted away from our house at warp speed and I never saw him again. Later Lala told me she'd hired him to cut the grass and that it was the worst five dollars she'd ever spent.

Aside from calling the guy a black bastard, she didn't utter any other racial epithets. The mantra for the rest of the day and weeks afterward was, "damn, some people," as if every member of the world has equal opportunities to be a total prick. This is an ideology I can stand by, and I thank Lala for allowing me to realize that.

A Cautionary Tale

One sign that a sitcom has gone terribly wrong is the turn toward the meta-, that obnoxiously self-referential "we've run out of subjects, so our new subject is ourselves" trope. I've got two divergent examples. The first is Growing Pains, late in the series after Leo's departure, when the camera literally goes backstage to find a room of producers who spin a wheel with all of the characters' names a piece of its circular pie to decide who the next episode will focus on. That was the whole episode: we have no ideas.

The other example is Seinfeld, which was usually great--meta- or not--and the episode I'm thinking of is the one in which George and Jerry pitch a series to NBC (lo and behold! the same network that aired Seinfeld!) that's called Jerry, and the premise is it's a show about nothing.

Okay, so not all meta- sitcoms go terribly wrong. That show about nothing stuff was pretty funny.

Point is I'm about to get super-meta about this blog and say that after just a week of this writing an entry per day promise to myself, I'm pretty sick of it. The whole idea behind the blog was that I would write about ideas I have in life, most of which I can use in my book, a sort of online diary which my friends could read if they wanted and in a forum that made me feel I really couldn't screw things up (other people can read this, Brooke!).

But not very surprisingly the blog is something entirely different and not so productive: it's avoidance behavior. I am supposed to be first and foremost a writer, and if the goal of writing is publication, even if I'm writing every day I'm not a writer. (This is completely counter to everything I tell my freshman comp students, but hopefully my hypocrisy is safe with you--I suspect they will not be reading this blog.)

A sad truth: I have not submitted one piece for publication for four years now. And the last time I submitted it was because my teacher made me do it, and it was a local publication, and I was published by default (my teacher made them publish me). So this blog is just my way of having a safe audience of a handful who necessarily love me and not my writing, and even though they may like my writing a lot cannot untangle my words and sentences from their feelings about me. What happens when one comments? What happens when one doesn't? It's impossible to deny the ego-tripping involved here, and I suspect the main reason I started the blog was just to be actually read for the first time in years.

Now that I've been read, I want more. I want to be published.

So I wonder if I'm accomplishing anything at all by this? I'm going to continue to write the blog through November and see how I feel, but the thing I need to be doing more than anything else is working on my book. These pages may be filled with interesting notes, and disparate thoughts that may find more profundity later, but a book these screens are not.

I'm the cautionary tale of the cow (girl) not being bought (not being loved) because it gives away the milk (sex) for free (to whoever'll take her). My mother never told me that tale, as she doesn't speak in parable, and doesn't really see a big deal in people giving away milk unless it leads to pregnancy.

Of course I'm hungover and nobody reads my blog ever or loves me, so this might also be a reason for my current unbugginess. I could really use some ice cream and a cheeseburger while soaking in my hot tub. Yeah, that oughtta do it.