why the cold shoulder?

free at last. well, almost free. i have about 15-20 final exams left to grade, but that'll be easy. what's important, though, is that last night i turned in my last paper for a class. EVER. it's so cliché to say this, but i literally felt like there was a huge fucking dumbbell resting on my shoulders all semester... and it's finally gone.

agenda for the day (in no particular order):
-feed all the kittehs
-run
-watch movies and grade exams
-CLEAN

i'm fucking stoked.

fuck you, winter

remember that last post about kind of liking the snow? yeah, i take it all back. i fucking hate this shit.

my heart has some dangerous neighborhoods, so beware where you try to go

i'm starting to embrace the fact that, as much as i hate winter, i kind of love snow. not 2-week-old, dirty, slushy, frozen snow, of course. that shit's gross and it ruins my shoes. but fresh snow? falling snow? i kind of can't get enough of it. granted, if i had a magic autumn button i wouldn't hesitate to push it you know what? that's a lie. the more i think about it, the more i think i would hesitate to push the magic autumn button. at least right now. and then i'd kick myself in a couple of weeks when i realized that i only like winter and snow when it first happens, and for the remaining 4 or 5 or 20 months of it i wanna fucking kill myself every time i step outside. but. i kind of like it for the time being. (am i really saying this right now? i'm not sure i know how to process a me that actually kind of likes winter, even if it is only a temporary me....)

and the wind and snow and the rain that blows, none of those would matter much without you

i forgot how comforting built to spill is for me.

i don't know what i expected, but it wasn't that

"people keep saying that it gets better with time, but it's been a long fucking time and there's still just the wall."

holy fucking shit this hurts.

what is going on up here

i never know, man.

god i feel like a fucking broken record lately. what's wrong renée? oh i'm just tired. are you sure, cuz it looks like more than that. um, i'm really tired?

i really hope i didn't fail this last art history exam. one 12pg paper left for that class. and one more manga quiz. i can do this.

teaching, however, is a different story. at least i know now that having night shifts at the writing center the two nights before i teach is a bad idea. yet again, it's thursday, and i have no fucking clue what to do tomorrow. this would be fine except for the part where once i post this, i'mma be busy until about 8:30 tonight. i know that 8:30 seems early, but after a long day that comes toward the end of a long week, i literally have no fucking brain cells left by 8:30 on thursday. so then lesson planning invariably happens on friday morning. which also wouldn't normally be so much of a problem, except that somewhere between may and september, i lost the ability to give a shit, meaning that i no longer have that low-level teaching anxiety that used to naturally get me up at 6 on days i teach. meaning that now it's all i can do to get up in time for coffee and getting dressed, and even that's been a stretch some days. meaning that i painfully fumble my way through my sections and pray to fucking someone that i can find the time to do better next week.

and i haven't even started looking at their 2nd batch of papers.

you know i'm no good

i like how i thought i could do this whole blogging every day thing. oh well. it's not like this is the first time i've failed at something.

i thought i had something to say, but i'm coming up with nothing. maybe tomorrow.

mom genes

i made a lasagna last night.

it took, like, 2 hours (and that doesn't even count cooking time, since i'm not cooking it till tonight). granted, it turned out gorgeously and i'm pretty fucking excited to eat it, and i'm sure that if i cooked all the time i would become a bit more time-efficient, but holyfuckingshit i don't know how some women do that shit everyday. most days the thought of cooking an egg seems like it would take waaaaaay too much energy.

and this is how i end up eating cheese and triscuits for dinner more nights than i'd like to admit.

i'm nearly with you

i forgot to post yesterday. oops. (oh yeah, i also forgot to mention that i'm attempting to do that whole blogging each day for a month thing. hence the recent increase.)

anyway. i'm feeling a little less detached today. not really feeling like a real person yet, but not totally feeling like a zombie, either.

i need to write him back, but i don't quite know what to say. i'm also not looking forward to the fact that, if he even does decide to respond, it will probably not be for weeks or months, thus leaving me in a state of helpless waiting. at least now the ball's (sort of) in my court. and maybe there's still a part of me that thinks that if i just pretend long enough, eventually i'll forget about the fact that somewhere deep down this hurts really fucking bad. like, if i can avoid feeling anything for long enough, this void inside me will just go away (as opposed to getting bigger, which seems to be the reality).

it doesn't help that i also just don't have the time or energy to feel things right now. this is, like, for realz my busiest semester ever. i'm so exhausted all the time, and the semester's only just barely more than half over. it's weird, because the weeks feel like they fly by me (one minute it's monday and the next minute i'm scrambling to come up with a last-second lesson plan on friday morning on a text i didn't even have time to read), but the semester itself is moving excruciatingly slowly.

there's just nothing left

i have to have a lesson plan ready by 8:30 tomorrow on a play i haven't yet read. my eyes feel so heavy that the thought of moving from my desk to my bed seems excruciating.

i really hope i can wake up in the morning.

she cries, and i feel nothing.

i think i'm turning into a dude.

i make me only marginally easy to love

there are a lot of things i prefer over this.

i don't know what to put here either

i'm sorry.

i'm so fucking sorry.

i don't even feel things anymore. not love. not hate. not anything.

i just wish i knew what went wrong. what we did. what i did. what broke us.

i wish i knew how to go back to us. i wish i knew how to get back the me that was me when we were us.

i wish

history lesson

it's only a matter of time before i snap.

happy birthday to you

it's my dad's birthday today.

i always mean to write him something for his birthday, and i always forget until the day itself rolls around and then i'm like shit i meant to write. at any rate, it's probably better (for me, at least) that i didn't this time. i really don't want to initiate the conversation that he is inevitably going to want to have. the conversation we've had at least once a year for the last 10 years. the conversation that is suddenly so personal, not because i haven't known it was but because this is the first time that they have known, which makes their beliefs and opinions sting so much more than i thought possible. the conversation that, of all our conversations, is the most important to me, making it likewise the most devastating. because, of all our conversations, this is the only one that really matters. the conversation that reminds me (because sometimes i actually do forget) that this gulf between us is not just a hole or even a crater but a huge fucking chasm over which i could never even hope to find a bridge. because, even if they can learn to deal with it or even (begrudgingly) accept it, i know that they will never let a woman into our family or love her as an extension of me the way they loved him or would love any him for that matter as long as he were in fact a him. because, despite everything they've put me through and everything that keeps us apart, they are still my family, and i fucking love them. and i know that, in their fucked up way, they love me too, which makes all of this almost worse because i'll never really be able to share what is good about them with someone i love because they would never let her (any her) in.

but who knows. miracles happen sometimes, right? maybe if i just keep praying....

pussy-whipped

gah. somehow she managed to seamlessly segue from telling me that the bad parts of my exam were really bad ("it's like, where are you?!") to eliciting a commitment of 4 solid hours of proposal work each weekend ("and i mean real work, not like searching for and collecting books"). at least she agreed to be my main (wo)man.

so if you don't see me for the next few months, it's probably not cuz i'm dead. well, maybe dead inside, but not really dead.

and i thought this would be better than studying for prelims

this will probably be one of those posts in which i mostly just complain about shit, so consider yourself warned.

you know what's fun? seasonal motherfucking allergies. oh boy i love feeling like someone poured sand down my eyes and throat and injected my sinuses with a fresh batch of stuffed the fuck up. not to mention the overall feeling of having been hit by a train a couple of times. oh, and the sneezing. this shit is AWESOME. i can't believe i only get to experience this a couple of times a year.

you know what i just realized? there isn't a single month of the year in wisconsin that doesn't at least marginally suck in one way or another (or twenty). remind me why i live here? oh right. school. which also sucks at the moment, since i am busy as fuck right now but have approximately no motivation whatsoever to do the assloads of busywork that stand between me and the end of the semester. and somehow i don't think that my meeting with caroline on friday is going to go the way i want it to either (i.e. me telling her i'm too busy and mentally exhausted to start working on my proposal this semester and her saying oh yeah that's totally fine, take all the time you need).

okay i'm done complaining now. (but seriously. fuck allergies.)

you don't have to move on to let go

at least now my dreams involve him being with someone i'd want him to be with?

the piano just tumbled down a few steps this time

sometimes i just want it to hurt.

it's not fair

isn't sleep supposed to involve some level of repose? isn't it not supposed to make me wake up feeling more mentally and emotionally exhausted than i did before i fell asleep? fucking prozac.

rest stops and eucalyptus leaves

and kerns nectar. and swimming in november. and grapenuts in styrofoam bowls. and saltine crackers topped with canned tuna. and dried mangoes. and starting my period in a safeway bathroom. and wanting so badly to shave my legs. and bathing suits made for pregnant women. and 5.2 acres of fenced-in desert (but not with barbed wire, as they said). and scorpions and rattlesnakes and black widows. and don't speak i know just what you're thinking. and motorcycles that make him feel invincible. and rainbows that are supposed to mean something (but looked like regular rainbows to me). and cleaning up after her because she could never do it right. and adam carolla and dr. drew. and a blue license plate that didn't match. and wigs and $32 and a quick stop at jack-in-the-box. and cargo shorts and a denim vest.

but before that there was rollerblading and playing in the rain. and hot lava monster. and bus rides downtown. and dollar stores. and emergency trips to uwajimaya. and the toy aisle at bartell's. and boysenberry yogurt. and playing frisbee in ravenna park. and free cookies at albertson's. and blue canvas shoes. and riding down hills in the back of toy dump trucks. and bike rides on the burke-gilman to gasworks park. and writing poems. and crying every time he went somewhere. and basketball courts and knee braces. and futons and fold-out beds. and tree swings. and nancy drew. and costco-sized boxes of tropical mr. freeze. and a name change that foreshadowed too many changes.

i'm not embarrassed to admit it. okay maybe a little.

you know you listened to a little too much staind when you were 15 when "it's been a while" comes on the radio and you remember not only all the lyrics, but also every single vocal inflection and all your favorite harmonies.

oops.

sailors and submarines

you thought i'd gone forever, didn't you?

well at any rate i'm here now, so you should stop complaining. sadly for you, though, i feel almost as if i have less to say now than usual, despite the fact that so much life-changing shit has happened in the last few weeks.

but if you don't already know about things-that-have-happened-lately, i'm certainly not telling you here.

so all you can have right now are whatever inanities are floating around in my brain at the moment. like how fucking sick i am of humidity. seriously, who invented this shit? as someone i know put it recently, it's like breathing wet cotton. running in it has been awful. my pace yesterday was slower than it's been in i can't even remember how long. slower even than when i try to run with a brutal chest cold. not that i care about pace that much, but this humidity bullshit makes it almost unbearable just to get 5 miles done. forget about trying to do a long run.

and of course there's prelims. i am really starting to freak about the fact that i have less than a month before the take-home portion begins. (and by "freak" i mean "care just a tad more than not at all," cuz that's what prozac does to me. seriously, this shit is a very blunt double-edged sword. i still can't tell which is better--feeling so anxious that i want to rip off my skin, or feeling so apathetic that the fact that i'm on the verge of failing my running class is not nearly enough motivation to get me up in time most mornings?) but i'm still trudging along. slowly. and i have no intentions of postponing the exam. i feel like i can do it, and the worst that could happen is i fail and have to take it again in january, which i would have had to do anyway if i postponed. so i'm just going to try to suck it up for the next month and see what that gets me.

i am, though, really starting to feel like i'm honing in on stuff that really interests me. (like dirt. and poverty. and dirt-and-poverty.) this is kind of exciting, because for the first time i can actually envision myself writing a dissertation. not that writing a dissertation is exciting, but it's nice to finally be able to see myself in the next stage, and to feel like there might be things i can say that are both interesting to me and not (totally) redundant.

mojn

it occurs to me that i did recently do something fun that i can share with you here. there were several films at the film festival this year that i wanted to see, although i only made it to two. i think i chose correctly, though, cuz the two i went to were magnificent.

the first, whose greatness i think erstwhile and hyperbolic will also attest to, was a town called panic. this movie turned out to be everything i wanted it to be: ridiculous and whimsical. there's really no way to explain the movie other than to say that if the trailer makes you think "omigod i need to see that movie it looks AWESOME" then you will most definitely love it. if it doesn't, well, you probably lost track of your soul a long time ago and there's no use trying to get it back now.

[speaking of stop action animation, i also recently started watching creature comforts (via netflix instant streaming), and it is hilarious.]

the second movie, terribly happy, was also good, although in a completely different way. apparently denmark has a reputation for coen-y type dark comedies, and if this one is at all representative of that tradition, then i think i'll go ahead and jump on that bandwagon (you know, after prelims).

since i'm here and talking about film festival whatnot, i might as well mention another film that i saw years ago at the spokane film festival that has stuck with me and is still probably in my top ten favorite comedies: go for zucker. this trailer doesn't really do it justice, but believe me, this movie is hilarious with a capital z. (haha, get it?) anyway, you should totally watch it.

here it comes

i suck at blogging. or maybe i suck at life, since my lack of blogging is usually due to a lack of having anything interesting to say. or maybe i just talk too much--every time i think of something to blog about, i immediately remember that i've already told everyone i know, so what the fuck is the point of blogging about it? (i guess i could pretend like a have an unknown following on the internets. ha.) at any rate, i don't feel like reading right now, and i've exhausted all of my go-to internet procrastinatory sites, so i guess that means i should blog.

i'm both super excited for and kind of dreading the start of the summer. i really am looking forward to reading the stuff on my list (well, a lot of it at least), and i'm definitely ready to start shifting my energy toward developing ideas that actually interest me (rather than, say, writing on a 400-page poem about plants). i am dreading, however, the impending weariness that i know will begin building on or around the middle of may. i really, genuinely want to do well on this thing, but i also know that i am not the kind of person who can sustain a 40-60 hour a week reading schedule. and even if i could, i still wouldn't get everything done. i know, i know. no one gets everything read (well, no one who is sane, that is). but that doesn't really make my 159-item list seem any less overwhelming.

but whatever. i'm boring myself now, so i can only imagine that you've probably already stopped reading. and if you are still here, i'll just mention one more thing (which you probably already know, cuz i bitch about it all the time): i fucking hate having crazy shitty dreams all night long. they have at least started to involve a little bit less of me-doing-shitty-and-or-inappropriate-things, and more just general wtf-ery, but the whole business is still extemely annoying and it makes me feel like i'm not really getting good sleep in addition to feeling guilty/scared/bewildered/sad/etc. every morning.

but i'm feeling a lot less holyshitijustwannaripmyskinoff these days, so i guess that's good.

it's that time of the... year

i would like to just reach a point at which, love it or hate it, i at least knew for sure whether or not this shit is for me. i've had many ups and downs over the past 3 years (mostly downs, really), but i still have not reached a place of clarity about my current career path. the worst times have been when i feel the most like i am drowning, and right now is, admittedly, not one of those times. my schedule is fairly low-key, teaching is going alright, i'm running a lot (well, a lot for me at least), and i'm not close enough to prelims to really start feeling the fear. i even recently had the experience of reading derrida and enjoying it. (i know, right?) i was really starting to feel like maybe i'm not just a huge fucking idiot who got into grad school on a fluke and is going to be found out any minute now. like maybe i can do this. or, better yet, maybe i even kind of like it.

yeah, i know. silly me.

long story short, tk still thinks i'm retarded, and instead of doing better in her class than i did 3 years ago, i'm actually doing worse. as you probably know, i don't give a shit about grades, and i don't necessarily need professors to acknowledge me academically in order to feel validated (if that was the case i would have had to drop out a looooong time ago). but usually, i'm already aware of sucking long before i get the grade or the comments or whatever other medium by which i receive outside confirmation that yes, i do indeed suck. this time, though, i thought i was doing okay. good even. as far from sucking that i've perhaps ever been. which for me means just being mediocre, but i'm okay with that. i don't need to be brilliant. i don't even need to be smart. but shit, man. i really hate feeling stupid.

there are a lot of steps involved

the problem with a shower schedule that corresponds with my running schedule: on the one or two days of the week that i don't run, it is really hard to convince myself to still shower. and by "it is really hard to" i mean "i usually can't."

oh yes i love her like pussy, money, weed

the situation outside right now--cold morning air and fresh, unadulterated snow--is one of only two situations in which i kind of like the winter (the other being snowfall at night, particularly when yellow streetlamps are involved. cliché, i know.). it reminds me of the joy-grape in keats' "ode on melancholy"; this moment is so peaceful and beautiful precisely because i know that it will be gone shortly. the grey daylight will eventually set in, the sidewalks will eventually be shoveled, and the beautiful, untouched snow on the sidestreet facing my window will eventually turn into dirty, grimy slush. before that happens, though, i'm going to go enjoy this moment in the best way i know how. (do i really have to say it?)

because i have so much else i should be doing

oh man. it's been a while. but since i really only blog when i have no time for it, here i am. i don't really have anything "witty, startling, or otherwise useful" to share, but i thought i'd just check in and say what's up, and maybe discuss a few things that i am currently not in favor of:

-when students think that tracing their reactions to a text constitutes analysis: "i chose this poem because it really stuck out to me when i first read it. the imagery used by the author just really spoke to me and i felt like i could identify with it." really? cuz i was assuming that people generally write on texts that they totally hate and don't connect with at all. good to know.

-when graduate professors assign work that functions almost solely as busy work. actually, this is really just a one time experience, but it annoys me every time i think about it.

-when it's motherfucking holyshit fuckballs cold outside. yes, i am aware of the fact that i live in wisconsin. and no, i don't remember why i thought moving here was a good idea. but i'm pretty much going to complain about it until i move somewhere else.

-and speaking of moving. another thing that i really really hate. especially when i have to move 3 days before prelims.