summer over everything else pt. 2

a perfect roll of film full of love

Savannah for Ace’s 30th

Minnesota to fulfill my random dream of visiting and to see Reba

the swimming hole to celebrate Monica and the end of summer

melancholy sweetness

Michelle Zauner on writer’s block in the opening verse of Paprika, the first song off of the perfect album Jubilee:

Lucidity came slowly

I awoke from dreams of untying a great knot

It unraveled like a braid

Into what seemed were

Thousands of separate strands of fishing line

Attached to coarse behavior it flowed

A calm it urged, what else is here?

For the last couple years I have been tied up in a knot. Hands bound, I’ve been looking to other people to untangle me. Of course, that didn’t work and all my desperate reaching to them just made the knot the tighter. Like always, I’ll have to untangle myself slowly, methodically, gently. As the rope unwinds, I’ll ask for forgiveness for the time it took me to realize I was even bound up at all. Forgiveness from those who bared the bitter brunt of my restriction—those in the world who I love the most, the people who knew I was tied up before I knew myself.

The knot, which jumped around between my brain, the back of my throat and my heart, indeed made me bitter. Historically, thanks to the Herculean effort I typically put into a diligent self care regimen (the real kind), I’m not a bitter person, though I’ve never been particularly chipper, either. Instead, I fall on the upper bound of what lawyer-turned-author Susan Cain terms bittersweet. A bittersweet person finds sweetness in melancholy and listens to Mazzy Star—a band whose beautiful Spotify description written by Richie Unterberger was the source for the title of this post. In the introduction to the book Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, Cain pulls quotes from inspired figures of the past who embodied this sensation in their productions, like C.S. Lewis, who perfectly described joy as a “sharp, wonderful stab of longing.”

All of the people in the photograph above, whether they know it or not, also see life through a bittersweet lens. This is one of the reasons why we all just had the most perfect weekend together, even though some of them had just met for the first time. I’ve already made two music references here, and close with a third. Music brought at least five of the people pictured above closer, if not together entirely. It is nearly the sole thing that Anthony, Ashton, Emaline and Chaz’s friendship is based on, and the music I played during yoga classes, where Anthony was my student, piqued his interest in me. Then he saw me at a Slowdive show and here we are five and half years later. Music has meant so much to me over the course of my life—from the Avril Lavigne Let Go CD my mom gave to me first thing after school in the carpool pickup line, to pirating songs off LimeWire on my family’s desktop, to making meticulous “yoga playlists”. Music brings bittersweet people together so they don’t have to loosen their knots on their own.

In my bunched up state, when the knot couldn’t have gotten tighter, I even let music fall through my fingers. I was in a rut, slipping to my depths for so long I lost even that. It’s coming back, thanks to weekends like this past one, and a phone call to my mother. A few weeks ago, I called her for the closet I could get to an embrace from so far away. I was at my depths with my hands tied, sinking. I knew, if I just let her have a chance at it, she could untie my hands for me. She told me, “everything will work out as you’ve planned.” I believed her.

To close, a lyric from The Cranberries’ An Ode to My Family, a perfect song:

My mother, my mother

She’d hold me

She’d hold me when I was out there

 

the stifling culture of the academy

This blog, my artistic pursuits and sense of self more generally are among the myriad victims of the stifling, suffocating, give-me-everything-you-have culture of academia. Everyone who has ever gotten a PhD, though I’ve not met them all and certainly don’t care to after knowing many such people, felt this way in the waning days of their graduate education. While I’ve managed to hold on to hobbies that take me out of my mind and put me into my body, reading and writing for pleasure simply could not withstand the gale force winds of graduate school. I love writing and that has bode well for my degree. Now, though, writing is something I do for someone else, and I don’t hate it even then, but I just have no creative energy left to give to myself and my own interests. Until this current lapse in what has grown into a personal writing practice did I realize how much my identity was tied up in my musings. Part and parcel with tabling this blog, I’ve lost my internal footing a bit. Even with just one week away from academia I have started to wipe the dust from the window to let myself see how the academic vortex has taken nearly all of my magic for itself. Throughout the course of this summer, while I’m away from it all, I hope to claw some of that magic back for myself and reinforce the walls of my internal homestead to make it out of this next year in one piece.

It’s a bit embarrassing that I’m getting a PhD. Like, why? For a lot of people—those who contribute to the truly awful culture in the academy—that answer is almost entirely to soothe their ego, to distinguish themselves amongst the many (though they are far from exceptional) and forever lord it over their peers that they made something of their lives. Regardless of how apparent their misery is to everyone else, they still tell themselves they’ve won. For others, the ones who are in simple, humble pursuit of their own creativity and expression, their academic endeavors are inspiring. Thankfully my advisor is in the latter category, otherwise I would have been out long ago. My advisor and those like him are unfortunately the quiet ones in the room who let their work speak for itself, while the ego-feeding faculty members dictate the culture, belittling those around them any chance they get. Though there are many types of academics, these are the two archetypes in my view. Others of us, me included, fall somewhere in between. I enjoy research, learning from my advisor and advancing his work, but I would be lying if I said a part of it wasn’t just about putting my name on something. Overall, graduate school has been a good way for me to spend some time and delay the inevitable of working in industry or for another nonprofit that exploites my labor. Though grad school is not free of exploitation, it is a bit easier to stomach knowing I can cash in on its exploits in a few months.

Beyond sunk costs, I’ve stuck with the PhD as it may buy me some agility in my career and provide an open door for a pivot when I inevitably get bored with whatever I pursue next. I like the thought that I could teach in a design department one day and that I’ll be on level footing with subject matter experts when I work in industry. To get a PhD you really just need one good idea and thankfully I had such an insight, so I figure why not see it out.

 

empty morning

Below is a poem I apparently wrote on December 23, 2016, just after the Trump election. I must have had a brief but notable moment of peace. I remember the photos I took in that moment, as well.

a free morning

wake up alone

the simplicity of stillness and

concrete objects light builds before us.

the luxury, difficulty of embracing solitude.

the moment where only breath fills a room.

when we savor in the simplicity of a single moment.

alone with a star shining through a bedroom window

and a camera to help us remember

savoring a sip of air.


 

older

The kids that I may or not be granted in the years to come will think the coronavirus happened a really long time ago. That will be due in part to their thwarted concept of time—if you’ve only been on earth ten years, then thirty years sounds like eons. But, it will also be because of how inconceivable it is for a modern society to buckle. An analogy to how people in my generation might relate to this is the civil rights movement. It used to be, and frankly still is, mind boggling to me that the civil rights movement occurred only sixty years ago. When I was younger, not only did it seem like the 1960s were distant, but I couldn’t possibly conceive of a world wherein my own parents were contemporaries (though briefly) to Martin Luther King, Jr. and state sanctioned racism. Maybe my parents feel the same way about another event that happened just before they emerged Earth-side.

(As an aside, it helps to remind myself that the civil rights movement occurred only a couple generations ago, as I always think our society should be leaps and bounds beyond where it is now. But, change doesn’t come quickly to those who were steeped in something, no matter how backwards that something was or is.)

I’ve been taking iPhone pictures around our apartment as the days go by. I’m in here all the time and have more time to observe the space I live in. Some things I notice are nice looking and make me want to take a picture, so I do. My kitchen hasn’t been updated in maybe 50 years. I think all the cabinets and the linoleum on the floor are original. It looks old and dingy, but it is functional and has nice light. I was thinking about a photo I took if it the other day (above), and that if I were to show my kids a relic of self-isolation during the coronavirus pandemic, I might show them that picture of my kitchen. Since the kitchen is so dated, they’d likely attribute the coronavirus to a distant past, as opposed to a global landmark that helped shape the society they now live in.

When I went to therapy on my own for the first time, the therapist told me in therapist-speak that I think too much about the future. The train of thought I just described is probably an innocuous example of that.

This post is two-fold. One day the world will be older and current events will be but lines in a history textbook my kids read, but “one day” for me getting older is now. On Tuesday I turned twenty-eight. To me it sounds older than it is. Maybe because this is the age my mother was when I sprung into the world and helped her become a mom. Or, maybe it would feel older to me if I had kids of my own right now, or if I weren’t still in school. It is hard to feel old while you’re in school because people don’t always take you seriously.

Just as on birthdays past, I welcome adding one to my years. The state of the world does make it hard to reflect, as I normally would on a birthday. For now, I can only reflect on the heartache of the past few weeks. The heaviness that I have to fend off most of the time in order to get anything done catches up to me randomly as I try to go about something that looks like a normal life. The other day it was during my outside time, which I award myself each Saturday for extended periods. After moving through some yoga poses, I stopped and cried.

 

the year the world shattered

This is simple documentation. All of this—the entire blog. I want to remember my life the way I experienced it while it was happening. That’s why I take photos, that’s why I post on this blog that no one reads (though, I read through it myself quite frequently).

I can’t not write about the pandemic of the hour (century), COVID19. We are all at home now, all the time, trying to keep the spread of the virus to a minimum. Some of us are taking this more seriously than others, but slowly government leaders are realizing they need to be the ones to tell people what they can and can’t do because Americans are not great at self-regulating their activities (smells like entitlement). Today, about three weeks too late in my opinion, the Atlanta mayor shut down restaurants, bars, gyms, salons, etc. Her decision followed that of a few governors across the country, and I imagine many more are still to follow. The frustration I feel toward our nation’s president and the many governors (including Brian Kemp of GA) who refuse to acknowledge their role in stopping the economy in a timely manner to save lives is manifesting itself as severe anxiety. I can’t do anything to get them to listen to scientists. I can’t do anything to get them to address the public in the way a leader should. So, instead I just worry about it all the time. Hopefully this anxiety slows to a dull simmer now that Atlanta has effectively shut down its social spaces.

Not only is all of this going on, but we are all expected to work like we always have worked (assuming you didn’t get laid off), just now from home (assuming you can feasibly do your job remotely). And, I know people don’t fully expect productivity to not have tapered off, but there are just as many articles circulating about the threat of the virus as there are about the threat of not being productive while working from home. I am currently an instructor for a research methods lab course, and with three weeks left in the semester, my mentality is just to get through it, so as to not burden my students with added stress during this time. I am also slotted to teach my first lecture course this summer—it will be made even more challenging given the circumstances. But, at the end of the day, I have no concerns over not having health insurance or whether I will be able to pay my rent. My heart breaks for those who are concerned over these things in addition to their fears of the virus itself. If anything, this pandemic has shown American leaders (conservatives mostly, progressives have know this for a while) for the first time how insecure most Americans are day-to-day, not that they won’t put their greed before anything else after this is over anyway.

Since everything else is pure terrifying choas, I have been trying to turn my attention to the seemly superficial silver linings I’ve identified in the early days of self-isolation. First, I have been talking to my long-distance friends so much more than we normally do. Social distancing (which should be called physical distancing, but whatever) has taught me how to use the internet to really stay in touch with people, since that is all we have now. Group video chats aren’t the real thing, but they are close and a great escape from the inundation of news articles I can’t stop reading. Second, I’ve realized that when I don’t plan on seeing anyone (except Anthony) for an entire day, I dress more true to how I feel. I edit my instincts less, which means I get dressed in a short five minutes as opposed to trying on four outfits until it feels ‘right,’ and wear brighter colors and make my clothes speak louder. I think I will continue with this fashion mindset after this is all over with.

To close (because I could go on and on and on), the sooner we shut everything down the sooner this will be over. But nothing is happening with any urgency, except the spread of the virus.