Dear Universe -
Are you a regular reader here? I like to think so. If so, you should know, there went my house. It's not mine anymore. It belongs to some nice people who seem to do a lot of good deeds and who work for non-profits. I don't know if they recycle, but they seem decent. And eager.
Universe, I am exhausted. I can haz sleep now? For a month or more?
It's only been 4 years and change in this house. Not much in the scheme of, well, you. But it's my daughter's whole life. We made her in China, in the most clinical sense, but she made who she is here. She learned to talk and to walk and to annoy the ever-living shit out of me, as well as to make me giggle like a preschooler. And we made another life-potential here, but that one got stuck in a fallopian tube. I wrote a mediocre dissertation here. I fought with my husband and my parents and my girlfriends here. I loved all those people here. I made my friends play Wii games on New Year's Eve. I made them lots of chili and made them root for the Steelers. I watched Andre Agassi's last match. I made a lot of promises. I made disastrous carrot muffins once. I also made some Thanksgiving dinners and woke up to Christmas morning. I spent a lot of hours burning my crotch with a laptop, making internet friends. I made a lot of syllabi. I made travel plans. I made decisions. I made some bad decisions, but I made everything I recognize as my adult life right here.
I made, I made, I made.
But not 'I am.' If, Universe, you have some free energy, help me remember over the next few weeks that it's not that I am this space. I just made it something. And I can make the next one something. And I can let the next one make us into something a little older, maybe a little fatter, but still recognizable.
Now: do I dare to take a nap? Or do I have to start braving boxes again?
Showing posts with label moving. Show all posts
Showing posts with label moving. Show all posts
Monday, June 29, 2009
Thursday, June 25, 2009
It's way more rambling than this inside my head
My co-Bitches have been doing such meaningful writing about foreign affairs, education, domestic politics, etc. As one would expect. I keep wanting to check in here with some updates about my own small life, which I actually have been trying to not think too much about, and then can't bring myself to bump a post on Iran. A few weeks ago, LeBlanc and I were talking about doing a series of 'Using up the Shit in our Pantries" recipe posts, and then the next time I look she's Christiane Amanpour. It's intimidating.
Anyway. Moving next week. Sold our house (2 contracts in under a month, in fact), about which we feel obviously fortunate and ambivalent. The 4 yrs we lived here is the longest I've lived anywhere and this is certainly the place where all the adult events of my life have been centered. But, as anyone who has moved knows, it's hard to even make space for the emotional challenges in the face of the logistical ones. I get swept up in emotion in off moments, when the packing tape roll runs out or some such. I've been trying to hold off packing any of the kid stuff so my daughter feels as little alienated as possible and, more importantly, so she has shit to play with while I ignore her all day long. A good idea, but at this point, it means her shit is pretty much the only non-boxed shit in the house which makes for a heinous adult living environment.
I know people for whom this is not the case, but for me and most of my close friends, graduate school was the period in which we undertook a series of canonically adult things - buying homes, getting married, having kids. My close friends and I have all been far from our families while at grad school, and I feel these friends as my family. It's very hard for me to believe that I am about to go and do something that is coded as the beginning of my adult career. I expect, in fact, the environment and challenges and responsibilities of this job at this school to be so widely different than the challenges and environment I dealt with in grad school, it feels more like a career change than anything else.
And that's to the extent that I even think about the job, which is rarely. Moving grown-up lives is so totalizing. It's that much more difficult to think about the realities of having this job when my closest friends are still interviewing for positions for the 2009-2010 year. Still. For mediocre jobs. That are temporary. The honesty and healthy cynicism with which they try reminds me not to be an asshole who dwells too much on imagining the philosophical challenges of her new role.
Still no job for Mr. V in the new town, so he'll be working in our current town M-Th every week. When I tell people about this arrangement, they all get a sort of awkward look on their faces, a mix of discomfort and pity. Im pretty sure they largely assume we are getting divorced - either that this is the initial stage of an acknowledged separation or that a scenario like this can only end in divorce. People seem sad for us. That response makes me sadder than the situation itself, which is hardly ideal but also not that heinous. I worry about it: I worry he will never find a job there, and that I will not like mine so much, and we'll end up bailing on the whole thing after a year. I worry that I don't have nearly the amount of patience required to take care of my daughter during the transition on my own for most of the week. I actually don't worry about divorce over this, and I'm not one of these people who has never thought about divorce. I've thought about it. But not about this. I don't see the physical distance as the kind of obstacle people seem to, whereas I think if Mr V had quit his job to go with, making our money really tight and making him antsy and restless and second-guessy, THAT, i think, in our particular marriage, could have been the death knell.
I have a funny story to tell about the woman working at my storage unit who, yesterday, after asking me how long I have been married, pitched me her book on spicing up the married sex life. I didn't look my best, obviously, as I was hauling things to and from a dusty storage unit, but I don't think I had my "I love the MIssionary Position" tshirt on. And yet. This storage unit professional is, as it turns out, an ex-lesbian. Having been "delivered from that sin by God," she now focuses her expertise and experience on saving and strengthening heterosexual marriage by providing tips about what women want. The premise seems to be that if you both have the equipment and have serviced similar equipment on another person, you are the most qualified to advise. I wanted to note that I feel like my own expertise about my own person seems like it should provide credibility enough for advising, but that was really the least of the problems.
Her credibility more exactly emerges from her former "specialty" as a lesbian (I love the way it was posited as a former career of sorts)" 'giving women 10 orgasms in an hour using penetration.' The penetration part seemed very important to her, as it demonstrated that hetero-sex was clearly the approved mode of engagement. Further, she noted that if men could last long enough, she could teach them to far exceed this benchmark. "The only reason," she told me, "I shot for an hour was because I couldn't stay up in there any longer"' This was cited as evidence that she was not, in her heart, a true lesbian. I wanted to ask her if she was into sucking cock for longer than an hour, but couldn't get the right break in conversation. As a person who has given both a good college try, my suspicion is that her problem was more the expectation about duration than the object in question. I mean, I would get tired of eating ice cream after an hour.
Anyway, she went on to explain that the book was "not at all vulgar." She cited as evidence the fact that many ministers have bought the book and shared with their wives (did I mention it is available on audio CD because "men don't like to read"?). In this way, my storage professional have saved many Godly marriages that might have otherwise caved to the temptation of the "dirty girls who come to church and sit in the front pew just to tempt the minister." With the help of this text, men the world over could teach their Madonnas to be whores in the bedroom (my language now), thus making the family the keystone of society and saving heterosexuality (her language).
She wanted to give me a free copy of the book/CD. So we could write a testimonial for her website. There were so many possible ways to respond really, but I was tired and hot and decided to just gently point out that people renting storage units and coming in to buy moving boxes are perhaps not the best test case for any instructional on hott sex. We wouldn't want to skew her results.
So that was the highlight of yesterday. That and the ice cream.
Anyway. Moving next week. Sold our house (2 contracts in under a month, in fact), about which we feel obviously fortunate and ambivalent. The 4 yrs we lived here is the longest I've lived anywhere and this is certainly the place where all the adult events of my life have been centered. But, as anyone who has moved knows, it's hard to even make space for the emotional challenges in the face of the logistical ones. I get swept up in emotion in off moments, when the packing tape roll runs out or some such. I've been trying to hold off packing any of the kid stuff so my daughter feels as little alienated as possible and, more importantly, so she has shit to play with while I ignore her all day long. A good idea, but at this point, it means her shit is pretty much the only non-boxed shit in the house which makes for a heinous adult living environment.
I know people for whom this is not the case, but for me and most of my close friends, graduate school was the period in which we undertook a series of canonically adult things - buying homes, getting married, having kids. My close friends and I have all been far from our families while at grad school, and I feel these friends as my family. It's very hard for me to believe that I am about to go and do something that is coded as the beginning of my adult career. I expect, in fact, the environment and challenges and responsibilities of this job at this school to be so widely different than the challenges and environment I dealt with in grad school, it feels more like a career change than anything else.
And that's to the extent that I even think about the job, which is rarely. Moving grown-up lives is so totalizing. It's that much more difficult to think about the realities of having this job when my closest friends are still interviewing for positions for the 2009-2010 year. Still. For mediocre jobs. That are temporary. The honesty and healthy cynicism with which they try reminds me not to be an asshole who dwells too much on imagining the philosophical challenges of her new role.
Still no job for Mr. V in the new town, so he'll be working in our current town M-Th every week. When I tell people about this arrangement, they all get a sort of awkward look on their faces, a mix of discomfort and pity. Im pretty sure they largely assume we are getting divorced - either that this is the initial stage of an acknowledged separation or that a scenario like this can only end in divorce. People seem sad for us. That response makes me sadder than the situation itself, which is hardly ideal but also not that heinous. I worry about it: I worry he will never find a job there, and that I will not like mine so much, and we'll end up bailing on the whole thing after a year. I worry that I don't have nearly the amount of patience required to take care of my daughter during the transition on my own for most of the week. I actually don't worry about divorce over this, and I'm not one of these people who has never thought about divorce. I've thought about it. But not about this. I don't see the physical distance as the kind of obstacle people seem to, whereas I think if Mr V had quit his job to go with, making our money really tight and making him antsy and restless and second-guessy, THAT, i think, in our particular marriage, could have been the death knell.
I have a funny story to tell about the woman working at my storage unit who, yesterday, after asking me how long I have been married, pitched me her book on spicing up the married sex life. I didn't look my best, obviously, as I was hauling things to and from a dusty storage unit, but I don't think I had my "I love the MIssionary Position" tshirt on. And yet. This storage unit professional is, as it turns out, an ex-lesbian. Having been "delivered from that sin by God," she now focuses her expertise and experience on saving and strengthening heterosexual marriage by providing tips about what women want. The premise seems to be that if you both have the equipment and have serviced similar equipment on another person, you are the most qualified to advise. I wanted to note that I feel like my own expertise about my own person seems like it should provide credibility enough for advising, but that was really the least of the problems.
Her credibility more exactly emerges from her former "specialty" as a lesbian (I love the way it was posited as a former career of sorts)" 'giving women 10 orgasms in an hour using penetration.' The penetration part seemed very important to her, as it demonstrated that hetero-sex was clearly the approved mode of engagement. Further, she noted that if men could last long enough, she could teach them to far exceed this benchmark. "The only reason," she told me, "I shot for an hour was because I couldn't stay up in there any longer"' This was cited as evidence that she was not, in her heart, a true lesbian. I wanted to ask her if she was into sucking cock for longer than an hour, but couldn't get the right break in conversation. As a person who has given both a good college try, my suspicion is that her problem was more the expectation about duration than the object in question. I mean, I would get tired of eating ice cream after an hour.
Anyway, she went on to explain that the book was "not at all vulgar." She cited as evidence the fact that many ministers have bought the book and shared with their wives (did I mention it is available on audio CD because "men don't like to read"?). In this way, my storage professional have saved many Godly marriages that might have otherwise caved to the temptation of the "dirty girls who come to church and sit in the front pew just to tempt the minister." With the help of this text, men the world over could teach their Madonnas to be whores in the bedroom (my language now), thus making the family the keystone of society and saving heterosexuality (her language).
She wanted to give me a free copy of the book/CD. So we could write a testimonial for her website. There were so many possible ways to respond really, but I was tired and hot and decided to just gently point out that people renting storage units and coming in to buy moving boxes are perhaps not the best test case for any instructional on hott sex. We wouldn't want to skew her results.
So that was the highlight of yesterday. That and the ice cream.
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