Frustration

Why hasn't Obama's speech on trade received more media coverage?

Why isn't this the #1 most e-mailed story on the NY Times? Why isn't it the leading story in all media outlets, period?

Why is this world once in which Obama "has to prove to Americans that, despite his exotic background and multicultural looks, he shares or at least respects their values and understands why they would be upset about his associations with the Rev. Wright and an ex-Weatherman"?


Why did it snow today? Why is the house freezing cold? I made a list yesterday of all the things I am frustrated about, in an attempt to expell negative energy, but it turned out so long that I just gave up.

At reader's request more poetry (from same volume from previous entry, pg. 456, 150, 130, 112-113, 106-107):

Late Fragment
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
RAYMOND CARVER

The Cure
Not the laying-on of hands, healing bones and hearts.
Not flowers, protease inhibitors, pills for the pain.
Not a prayer for the dying, for you, for us, not crying, not yet.

Tonight only the clock, each concentrated second one tiny grain
in a thousand thousand parts
of rain
NICK DRAKE (the singer-songwriter? dunno)

And the Days Are Not Full Enough
And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass.
EZRA POUND

The Leaden-Eyed
Let not young souls be smothered out before
They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.
It is the world's one crime its babes grow dull,
Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed.

Not that they starve, but starve so dreamlessly,
Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap,
Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve,
Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.
VACHEL LINDSAY

Apologia
My life is too dull and too careful--
even I can see that:
the orderly bedside table,
the spoilt cat.

Surely I should have been bolder.
What could biographers say?
She got up, ate toast and went shopping
day after day?

Whiskey and gin are alarming,
Ecstasy makes you drop dead.
Toy boys make inroads on cash
and your half of the bed.

Emily Dickinson, help me.
Stevie, look up from your Aunt.
Some people can stand excitement,
some people can't.
CONNIE BENSLEY

Things
There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.
There are worse things than these minature betrayals,
committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things
than not being able to sleep for thinking about them.
It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in
and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse.
FLEUR ADCOCK (I'm especially feelin' this one right now)

The Waking
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
THEODORE ROETHKE [excerpt]

Thank god I checked my e-mail to see that my next thesis meeting is scheduled for TUESDAY at 9:30, as opposed to forty-five minutes from now. Thank god, thank god.

It's not that I need to work harder on my thesis; it's just that I need to work on it more. Probably faster would be more accurate. I am consistently underestimating the amount of time it takes me to complete sections.

My biggest accomplishment yesterday was making two CDs for my sister. One is a surprise, the other is Senior Year!-themed (it's called "I'm Going To Make It Through This Year If It Kills Me"). There's something about making themed CDs for people that makes me feel very accomplished. It's like trying to tell a story through songs. I know it would be faster and more efficent to just e-mail mp3s, but where's the beauty and and joy of creation in that?

It was also a very weird and sad day yesterday. I heard the news that a professor I had lost her baby. As with the case of the freshman heroin overdose death, I was more upset than I expected to be. Someone sent out an e-mail to the rest of the class, suggesting that we compile different pieces of paper, letters, drawings, poetry, and so on, and send it to her. Part of me thinks this is a great way to show how much we care about and are thinking of her; another part of me feels that anything we have to say could only be trite, or worse, upsetting. I feel like that's an inevitable consequence of the situation, that nothing anyone can say or do will provide significant comfort or respite from the terrible grief.

I flipped through my poetry anthologies, trying to find something that could possibly be comforting. I (re)found some poems I really liked, the kind that I've muttered under my breath and have quoted to friends without knowing I'm doing so. I'm not going to use them for this particular situation because I don't consider them appropriate, but I will post them here to share. Er, hopefully posting them here isn't a violation of copyright. I'll even cite my source (always incorrectly--never learned proper MLA format. Literature major what?): Staying Alive. ed. Neil Astley. Bloodaxe Books : New York, 2003. pg. 375, 382, 396.

'DEATH DOES NOT COME FROM OUTSIDE...'
Death does not come from outside. Death is within.
Born-grows together with us.
Goes with us to kindergarten and school.
Learns with us to read and count.
Goes sledging with us, and to the pictures.
Seeks with us the menaing of life.
Tries to make sense with us of Einstein and Wiener.
Makes with us our first sexual contacts.
Marries, bears children, quarrels, makes up.
Separates, or perhaps not, with us.
Goes to work, goes to the doctor, goes camping,
ot the convalescent home and the sanatorium. Grows old,
sees children married, retired,
looks after grandchildren, grows ill, dies
with us. Let us not fear, then. Our death
will not outlive us.
Jann Kaplinski
translated from the Estonian by Hildi Hawkins

DEATH'S SECRET
It is not true
that death begins after life.
When life stops
death also stops.
Gosta Agren
translated from the Finland Swedish by David McDuff

INSCRIPTION
When I die I will return to seek
The moments I did not live by the sea
Sophia de mello Breyner
translated from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith

Oh, so many good poems! I had to force myself to put the book down before I pulled a "Limited Inc" (oh snap, Derrida in-joke! LOL ACADEMIA).

A Sunny Saturday

(The photo above is of my girlfriends and I in Corey's garden plot by PSU, taken last weekend when we went downtown for the first farmer's market of the season)

What an interesting day. It's been a particularly long one, mainly because I haven't slept yet. What did I do instead? Well, I ate a vegan pizza with Corey after midnight. I wrote a review of Amy Hempel's Collected Stories for this blog, which I'm now refusing to post out of principle because I'm so disgusted with my exceedingly poor time management skills--imagine the shock I felt when I looked at the clock, saw that it was 4:30 AM, and realized that I'd just spent four hours on something that is DEFINITELY not my top priority right now. So to compensate I worked on revising a story I wrote about Tijuana in my non-fiction class last semester. I got overexcited by the whole idea of "yeah, after I graduate I'll totally have time to work on that novel" and got carried away with ridiculous plot and chapter outlines. Finally sometime around 8AM I started working on my thesis. Around noonish or one I took a break and helped Corey in the garden. We dug up a whole plot together yesterday, and today we did some planting. We planted sweet corn, beans (pulled randomly out of the commie cabinent, including lentils and chickpeas--I wonder if they'll grow? I don't really know what a lentil-plant looks like!) and lettuce. Corey then mowed the lawn with the man-powered lawnmower (don't ask me how he did it). We also dragged the garbage bin that's been sitting behind the house all year filled with dirt (don't ask me why or where it came from) and dumped it over the compost heap. I have never seen so many worms in my LIFE as there were in that compost heap-it was like a writhing, massive alien civilization. It's good to know our egg shells and orange peels will slowly but surely be eaten and pooped out by the worms and eventually turned into good soil (at least I think that's how it works).

Then Corey left to go on a hike with Ernie, who's his mushroom guru of sorts, a hilarious white-haired sweet old hippie man. While they hunted the oyster mushrooms and the elusive white mirelles, I sat on the couch for literally four straight hours, alternatively reading, typing up notes, staring blankly into space and surfing the Internet. I only moved when my battery was about to die. I called my mom and had a really good conversation with her about the future. I don't know if I would want to go so far as describing myself as "wanting" or "needing" my parents' "approval" when I discuss my convuluted future plans for my life with them... but yeah, I mean I definitely want them to feel proud of me (who wouldn't want that with their parents?).


What I ate today: 3-5 slices of vegan pizza, 2-3 Caribou Coffee granola bars, three sticks of celery, an orange I think, five extremely greasy and tremendously delicious eggrolls (a gift from Ernie's wife!), and many, many cups of espresso, complete with lots of lactose-free milk and rich brown sugar. There was probably more but I can't remember. I hate it when the kitchen is as dirty as it is now, as it makes me not want to cook and prepare porper meals for myself. I find it just too damn disgusting to deal with, so instead I just end up wandering in and out and scrounging for myself at random times throughout the day. Very unhealthy. If I were an anthropology major, I would want to write my thesis on the social impact of dishwashing in our private spheres... just think of all the couples that have broken up, or housemates that have moved out, because of a less than ideal dishwashing situation.

I feel like I've made some good progress this past week. I start teaching English classes for Mount Hood Community College spring term this Monday. It's only once a week for an hour and a half, so I really don't think it'll be too much of a strain (I hope!). There are nine students in my class, seven from Mexico, two from Vietnam, all refugees and immigrants. I'm ridiculously excited about getting to design lesson plans, and also mildly annoyed with myself for not remembering earlier in the schoolyear that teaching English is something that I've really enjoyed doing in the past. It's worth doing now despite all the pressure and nightmares caused by thesis, because I want preparation for taking a TEFL certificate course later in the year. I finally found a program that really appeals to me, in terms of location, affordability, quality and name recognition (SIT is actually one of the places I'm seriously considering as a potential grad school program, but that's still getting waaay ahead of myself. Like, to the point where I'm assuming that I actually KNOW what I want to do with my life!). Now, if only they'll reply to my e-mail requesting the application materials.

Really, everything feels like it's falling into place (not exactly with thesis, though. BOO ON ME!! HISS!! but that will come in time!). I'm so ridiculously excited for Ecuador this summer, I can't seem to stop thinking about it these days. Our departure date is officially set for June 23rd. Because the sun's been coming out and it's been 75-degrees these past two days, I think my body is sensing that summer is in the air and thus my itchy feet syndrome is starting to kick in. Part of me is sort of happy with the idea of having a whole month off between the time when I graduate in May (!!) and Corey graduating in June: I can sleep in, enjoy the sun, ride my bike, read lots of books (especially about Lago Agrio and mycoremediation), teach at Mt. Hood until the term ends June 15th, maybe get another volunteer teaching position, possibly with VOZ again. Another part of me is kind of like "yeah, I should really try to get a job," though it'll be hard. It's times like these when I wish I had experience babysitting. My current plan is to apply for a weekend position at an amusement park. When I told Corey today he laughed for about a whole minute, then stopped and said very seriously, "You're going to kill all those children." Probably. I really don't want the bloody maimed bodies of eight-year-olds flung from the Screaming Eagle Ride on my conscience. "Maybe you can be a ticket-taker!" Corey suggested enthusiastically. Hopefully.

Hard to believe that "the end" is near, but there are so many exciting things around the corner, it's like my brain can't really grasp the whole feeling-sad-and-weird-about-graduating thing yet (though I'm sure it'll come in time). For now my brain just seems to be whizzing with "what ifs" and "should I" and "we can". Still need to hear back from Kiva. Without the grant money I can't afford it, but I'm just not going to worry about it. If I get the position it'd be awesome to work for them in the fall, but it's just plain not realistic that I'm going to last that long without making some money! God, why is it that the interesting positions (or at least the ones I want) are all unpaid? Well, if they reject me, OK, I'll get a job as a teacher; if they accept me... I'll figure something out.

I also need to decide what I'm going to do about the current state of my Peace Corps application. I might as well just follow through with it, send in the fingerprints and medical stuff (god knows when I'm going to find the time, not until May, probably), and then wait to see where they send me. As I told Mom on the phone today, my post-graduation goal has always consisted of living and working somewhere internationally for at least a year or more. I always assumed it would just be through the Peace Corps, just because it seemed the most convenient. Basically, at this point I feel like the best thing the Peace Corps has to offer me is 1) money, 2) brand name recognition and 3) potential networking opportunites. I've found the whole application process a bit dubious and frustrating, especially the interview. I dunno. I know you're supposed to be open and flexible and blah blah blah... but I guess I find it a bit frustrating that I really have no idea what kind of project they're going to give me (assuming I even get an invitation, that is)-- teaching? Community development? I honestly have no idea. How do I even know when I've even officially been accepted? Should I just assume I'm going to be given an invitation if I made it as far as the interview? Because it would really suck to submit everything, wait 8-10 months and then get a rejection letter. It's all very mysterious. Also, I knew this was a mistake during the interview, but when I expressed South and Central America as my geographical preference, the interviewer spent a long time telling me that I would be much better off in Eastern Europe or Africa or Asia instead. I know you're not supposed to request specific countries or placements, but isn't stating which geographical area you'd prefer is how you answer the question of "geographical preference"? Also, my interviewer was definitely not happy about the whole boyfriend thing. Definitely not happy. At this point I'm just kind of doggedly going through with it: I've made it this far, so I might as well see where they assign me, right? Fortunately, there are many paths in life to take--and in the end, isn't it more about the process rather than the product?

Wow, I just got ridiculously sleepy. More coffee methinks. Promised self would finish this section today... doesn't seem likely at this point... I really like writing out my thoughts here. It probably makes for a highly self-indulgent, uninteresting read, but there's just something really great about getting the thoughts out of your head down on pa--um, screen. I SERIOUSLY just spent half an hour trying to figure out how to convert PDFs into JPEGS. El colmo, en serio.

Faces of Life and Death

“In the course of the nineteenth-century bourgeois society has, by means of hygienic and social, private and public institutions, realized a secondary effect which may have been its subconscious main purpose: to make it possible for people to avoid the sight of the dying. Dying was once a public process in the life of the individual and a most exemplary one… In the course of modern times dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living… Today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death, dry dwellers of eternity, and when their end approaches they are stowed away in a sanatoria or hospitals by their heirs.” (Benjamin)

I'm afraid of death. I don't think my brain can fully comprehend it. I have never had to fully confront or face it. There are people close to me who've had people close to them die. My grandfather died a few years ago and I saw the profound affect it had on my mother. The closest I've been to death, I guess, is when my nanny died of a heart attack at a bus station. It still upsets me to this day, thinking about that.

There seem to be two ways of understanding death: death as the simple end of life, in a biological return to nature; and death as a disappearance that is also a step towards of gaining something new. This latter concept of death can be seen in Christianity and many other religions, where the idea of death is seen as a step towards ‘direct contact’ with the truth, or death as a means to achieve a closer approximation to truth.

Even if we may not think about death every day, our whole existence is marked and characterized by our relation to death. This connection with death, therefore, determines the existence and the essence of knowledge. If we do not make sense of the time that is given to us as one limited by our own death, if we assume that we're immortal and that our actions have no meaning, then we are existing in a meaningless coming and going of day after day, where our life cannot form itself into one whole and meaningful existence.

According to Hegel (ooh, philsophy so exciting!) human beings are defined by their ability to make choices; it's what differs them from stones. ‘Being’ vs. ‘being able to’. Our choices for action always have something to do with knowledge. To choose to take action thus calls for an examination of your knowledge of your own life. And yet, I can never look at my life as a whole, since it has not yet come to an end, and is therefore still incomplete.

Therefore one can only ‘know’ the meaning of one’s life after death. It is a knowledge that remains completely unavailable and unattainable to me throughout my lifetime, since when it does become available, I will be dead. My life as a whole and its meaning will exist in the eyes of those that survive me. Only they will be able to judge whether my life has been truly worth living or not. Consequently, as long as I am alive, I cannot know myself, and when I am dead, I will not know myself either. Bummer. Instead, we have to settle for understanding our life from the viewpoint of others, and it is for this reason that we understand death as well as something that happens to others, which is to say to ‘everybody else, but not me.’ It is for this reason that we become habituated to mistake death for an abstract fact of life, rather than a concrete part of our existence. How often do you really think to yourself, "I could be dead right now. What if?"

In regards to using knowledge in order make choices which eventually lead to action: how does my life become something that I choose, rather than something that others choose for me? How do I live an authentic, individual life (and thus die an authentic, rather than mechanical, death?)? The whole of my life is still not a given; its meaning stretches out before me like an empty meadow. The way that this meadow will be filled is only in my control up to a certain point, because I have no way of knowing when and where and how I will die. Such thoughts brings all of us anguish and insecurity in us all (not just Woody Allen), the basic concept of not knowing what the future has in store. Ironically enough, only thing that any of us can know as a 100% given in our future, out of all the different possibilities and paths our lives may take, is that we will die. It sounds self-evident and kind of "duh" to say so… but in order to exist authentically, I must understand first that I am a temporal being. Easy say--hard do!! The meaning of my existence cannot be granted in terms of looking at it in terms of minutes, seconds, days, or years, but rather that the ‘meaning of my life’ can only be understood as a whole, as a concrete temporal span, as opposed to a series of moments.

If it were not for the presence of death, we would remain in the illusion that things could go on as they are and therefore we would not have to do anything about our lives. It is our knowledge of our deaths, then, that makes us make the choices to act. Death, while limiting the possibilities of what I can do with my life, is also simultaneously the source of all the possibilities of what I may or may not do with my life. It's a negative that is also a positive. Moreover, it is only in death that I am truly unique. In everything else that I am, I can be substituted by another—Reed student, Corey’s girlfriend, etc. (not for biological sister though...hmm).

Where does this leave me? I've never been able to live according to the creed "Live each day as though it were your last." Obviously if we all really lived by that creed, people would be rolling around in fields and jumping into oceans as opposed to going to class or work, I think the sentiment behind that expression is more in terms of "Make the most of your time each day, because it's limited; be constantly asking yourself, 'is my behavior right now truly getting me what I want?'"

I remember at my nanny's funeral, somebody in her family gave me the candy and hair barettes she'd been carrying in her pockets, little gifts she often got for me and my sister. I remember how my sister and I just looked at each other wordlessly: I wouldn't know how to explain in words even if I knew what it was, but we were definitely feeling the same thing. I also remember, at the wake, my mother asking me if I wanted to see the body in the coffin. I shook my 'no.' I remember feeling that very strongly, of emphatically not wanting to see the body (even typing "the body" feels strange... as though it wasn't Angela, my nanny, who was dead and in the coffin, but rather "it", the body, something separate, something different, a horrible mistake, a mix-up of the universe). I guess I felt like "it" would ruin my memories of HER as alive; I didn't want them stamped out by the face of a gray corpse instead. The funny thing though, is I still try to picture and imagine what she would have looked like, anyway. That's what I kept thinking about, looking at the link in the first sentence. The way everyone's lips are droopy, the way the skin of everyone's faces seems to be close to sliding off. I feel unnerved and disoriented right now, sitting in the living room with my computer warming my lap, a lukewarm espresso at my side. I don't really know what to do next.

"The words outlive me, because in a certain sense I am irrelevant to them." (Blanchot)

"just show me a moment that is mine, its beauty blinding and unsurpassed..."

"... that makes me forget every moment that went by that left me so half-hearted 'cause I felt is so half-assed." (Ani DiFranco's "Half-Assed", from her 2006 Reprieve album.)

I was fortunate enough to experience such a moment this morning, near the end of yet another grueling thesis meeting, which I showed up to with the usual pit of fear and terror in my stomach. I cannot express how both utterly draining and gratifying it is, having a professor you not only incredibly respect, but consider a good friend, go over your work, line by line by line, and not let you get away with anything. All those papers you wrote in the past, with the lazy throwaway sentences where you didn't exactly know what you were trying to say, but figured it sounded intelligent? You will get called on that, each and every single time. Nothing is allowed to slip; everything is up for scrutiny and criticism and questioning. "What did you mean by this? This sentence isn't clear. This word isn't well-chosen. What are you trying to argue? This isn't well-written. This doesn't make sense."

However, at the end of the hour and a half-long session, one that focused solely on the 10-pg introduction, he stands up and brushes his hands against his pants and murmurs in a wondrous tone of voice, "Si, nos va a quedar muy lindo esto."

And suddenly it all seems worth it and you feel like you're on top of the world again and as heart-breaking and soul-crushing and esteem-squishing and weepy state-inducing as the entire thesis writing process is, you can suddenly see the light at the end of the tunnel, because your adviser consents that your work is going to "quedar muy lindo." And you kind of understand what he meant during your conversation about the kid who died last night, in which he said that the only true pleasure from life is not from the exhibitionist escapism of drugs and politics and media, but the kind that results from the well-earned satisfaction that only comes from the knowledge of a job genuinely well done.

"Es bleibt wie etwas Unerforschliches und Geheimnisreiches in der Dunkelheit zurück"

A freshman at my school passed away last night, and everyone has been in a weird mood about it all day. I keep getting e-mails in my inbox from the president, dean of faculty, student body president. There are suggestions to have a book where people can write about their memories about the student in question or how they were affected by the experience. All throughout the day, I am disconcertingly and consistently thinking about how appropriately this all relates to the theme in my thesis about death as an appropriate moment to try to make "sense" of an experience, to find out the meaning of something, to make an effort to try to understand.

My entire thesis is essentially based on the implications of the final passage from Onetti's "Un Sueño Realizado" (A Dream Come True). The story is essentially a subtle retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairytale-- I'm too tired to explain why right now in a proper or coherent manner that does the story justice, but here's some bare bones plot summary, in order to provide some context for the final passage: a woman comes to a retired theatre director (the story's narrator) and asks him to stage a production a dream she once had. The dream is simple: a car goes by, a man crosses a street and drinks a beer poured by a girl with a pitcher, recrosses the street and pats the woman on the head, who has been lying on the sidewalk this entire time, as if she were a little girl. Her explanation for why she wants to stage the dream, as explained by Blanes (the actor) to the director, is not because the dream possesses some kind of deeper meaning for her, but simply "because while she was sleeping and dreaming about all of that, she was happy--but happy isn't the word, something else. So she wants to see it over again." The dream is reproduced onstage successfully; however, the moment in which Blanes pats the woman on the head is when they discover the woman is dead. Punched in the ribs by a raging Blanes, the director closes the story with the following 'realization':

"I was left by myself, doubled over by the blow, and while Blanes went back and forth on the stage, drunk, half-crazy, and the girl with the pitcher of beer and the man with the car bent over the dead woman, I understood what it was all about, what the woman had been searching for, what Blanes had drunkenly been trying to find out the night before on stage and seemed to be searching for even now, walking back and forth with the haste of a madman: I understood it all clearly, as if it were one of those things that one learns once and for all as a child, something that words can never explain."

That's my thesis, right there. Fairy tales. Stories. Death. Truth. Understanding. Ritual. Meaning. Knowledge. And at the end of it all, what Wilhelm Grimm called the Unerforschtes, the unexplorable that is at the origin and center of every story, significantly and emphatically different from the unexplored: "like something unexplored and mysterious that remained hidden in the darkness."