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the last few days

~ brixton ~ Leave a comment

things that have been goin’ on:

on monday i got in a loud argument over metadata with my 501 group (i hate group work). also my brother and his long-term girlfriend broke up.

on tuesday i found out that a boy i had a thing for/with over the summer is getting married. i promptly drank too much, and narrowly avoided lotsa trouble by maintaining my cool when pulled over on the way home. i will not be trying my luck for the rest of the year.

on wednesday i ran back to back nutty classes with nutty instructors who have nutty requests that make me nutty, especially when i’m already tired and hung over and hungry. i then ate greasy diner food and felt beter.

on thursday i gave a presentation at 11am, met with my 501 group (i hate group work) for two hours to talk about metadata, and am currently running a class with THE DEAN. after this i have to run another class, and then i might go see a movie.

this weekend will be work and pumpkins and chili and nanowrimo and more work and more work and more work. and so it goes.

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~ brixton ~ Leave a comment

last night, following a sensational dinner, carl and i laid on the hard wood of my kitchen floor smoking cigarettes and talking about music and pedagogy and watching the fan blades turn over head. when he left he kissed my mouth in a totally innocent fashion and for the first time in weeks, maybe longer, i felt genuinely happy with no need of qualification or definition. he thanked me for dinner again and again, but how does one thank someone for a simple gesture that lifted from your chest an unbearable weight?

a cross-posted list

~ brixton ~ Leave a comment

thinking about matt leaving for baghdad, and how fucked up i am over it. last night i wanted to call him back and keep him on the phone because if he was on the phone, he couldn’t be sent away from me and sarah and greg and his family and his wife and everyone else who loves him – because you can’t know him and not love him. and yet i know that this love is enough, that it will wrap layers of protection around him, and that it will bring him home to us.

thinking about assessment in online pedagogy, and how the things i’m reading point to a lack of research in this area. thinking that i have, once again, found myself at a crossing point where my reading and my interests and my various jobs are all meshing, and that maybe this is a direction that will really work. i spent an hour last night requesting books from the library, and will spend another hour or two tonight requesting articles. this is a good feeling, and borders on the excitement i’ve been so desperately looking for.

thinking about sex – ok, thinking about sex too much. it’s been a long time, and i find myself wondering if what i need is just some rockin’ sexual chemistry to knock me out of this ongoing neutral.

thinking about the turn of the season, the coming of fall, and sleeping warm between flannel sheets. thinking about pumpkin soup and hot chocolate and corn mazes and the crunch of leaves underfoot. thinking about football games on tv and mugs of hot cider and the way the light is golden this time of year.

thinking about chemistry. i spent most of yesterday baking challah for our (very early) rosh hashanah dinner. this particular recipe requires three rises – make the dough, rise an hour, knead the dough, rise an hour, braid the dough, rise an hour, and then into the oven it goes. the dough just would not rise – at least not to my expectations – and while i swam my laps yesterday the not-rising dough turned into this whole allegory for my relationships in the past year – y’know, bad chemistry, or not enough heat, or lopsided braiding, etc – and i had prepared this whole witty story in my head that i was going to present as i took the lopsided flat loaf out of my bag and set it on the table – and then it was perfect. perfect – and i’m sure there’s an allegory to go with that as well, but i haven’t figured it out yet.

thinking about talking like a pirate – it is, after all, talk like a pirate day, and it’s too silly of a thing not to be all about. i am wearing my pirate bandana and my super wench tee with pride.

rid of me

~ brixton ~ Leave a comment

It’s been nearly a year and yet there are still nights when I come home from work late and I expect to find him on the porch smoking a Marlboro and reading or writing on his laptop. All summer long this has happened to me – walking home from work or the bar sometime after midnight with music in my ears and my bag slung across my body, expecting him to be here, expecting to kiss him hello after I lock up my bike to his/my railing. I don’t really expect these things, but the shadows are there, shadows that dance around my body as I pack my things and empty my cupboards and prepare to leave this place – this home that is mine and that was his before. In the last year I have learned to let go of a lot of things that I once burned into my skin, and that letting go has made me more whole than I’ve been in a long time, if ever. And yet – I still miss him and suspect that will never change.

intonation

~ brixton ~ Leave a comment

at intonation yesterday somewhere between the sun and the dust and the decemberists and the way the crowd was perfectly still for andrew bird, i found myself looking for pieces of him – and i realized that every time my heart breaks open, it heals, scarred, with room for more love than i ever imagined.

my body as god’s temple

~ brixton ~ Leave a comment

right now there’s this hole inside of me and i feel like i’m trying everything to fill it – work, faith, friends, cooking, dancing, drinking, smoking, swimming, email, music, spending money, planning the future. but there’s still this hole.

i don’t need a relationship to be whole – and yet oh god i am so lonely. i have been alone for such a long time. my bed is empty, my heart is empty, and i feel like in every smile my need to be saved is incredibly evident. i want to take a lover just to remember what it is to be wanted again.

so many issues regarding faith have to do with my body. my body as god’s temple. it’s not a temple to me. it’s just a body. a body to inhabit, to use and enjoy before my organs start failing, one by one – before the cancers creep in, before old age and childbirth turn my skin and my flesh to something different. what’s the use of a body if it can’t be used to taste and dance and fuck and move and feel and experience? but if my body is a temple there is no fucking, no drinking, no excess, no hedonism, no pleasure.

but can there be a halfway between surrendering the spirit and retaining the body?

home-ish

~ brixton ~ Leave a comment

I will miss my porch when I move. I miss sitting on the glider on the weekends with Shawn, drinking coffee and reading. I miss lying on the steps in the middle of the hot autumn nights talking to Paul. I will miss just being there, watching life go by. I will miss walking around the corner of the house and seeing my things – my candelabra mounted on the wall, my wind chime, my pirate comic on the door – and knowing I’m home. I was worried when I moved here – especially after the break up – that this would never feel like my home, that it would always be his. There are still traces of him here – I lie in bed and watch the mobile and remember him fixing it for me when I thought it was ruined – I try to rearrange the furniture and remember stacking all his books on the floor the night we built the Babbitt’s bookcases – and so many more intimate things I don’t want to remember but sometimes flash in my head like a movie I can’t stop – but this is my home. Everything about it feels like mine, and while I’ve been so unhappy (for a variety of reasons) and cramped, I will miss it. But that’s a long ways off.

I’ve started to really like the idea of having a dog. I think it’s the weather that does it – the weather and my parents’ insanely ridiculous puppy. On a side note, she apparently is doing well in obedience school, though the blind and deaf dog did better at the “come” command today.

My small brother turned nine today. Nine. I can’t believe it. We had a conversation on the phone this afternoon. It’s so strange.