Summer Theologica, Part I

Posted on July 15, 2012 | 1 comment

In an earlier version of the following poem, which I, ahem, can’t seem to find, there was a line that said, “Television, being neither action nor contemplation, must be sin.” I’ve been contemplating the notions of action and contemplation this week (not so much acting on either notion), so I thought of that now-homeless line.

There is a burning ban in Wisconsin now (I’m scared to use the barbecue grill even), and we haven’t had enough rain for a very long time (and not much rain in the forecast), so even if we still lived out in the country, which we don’t, we wouldn’t be burning trash. The images of cold and wet are comforting to me at the moment:

SUMMER THEOLOGICA

Burning trash is better on the other Solstice,

December, the colder the better,
And even wind is fine
With enough snow cover.
Deep dark. We pile in
Two months of cat food bags
And Pop Tart boxes, low APR deals
And wadded up rough drafts.

One big blue kitchen match or two
Scraped fast against the barrel,
Which once was painted bright blue,
And the flame touches,
Tickles, dances, overwhelms
The trash. The chemical residue
In the barrels sends up thick smoke, sky blue.

Transformed! Detritus of the modern life
Consumed by fire, condensed to steam
And ash. Another chance to start again,
Another slate scorched clean.

The fire keeps you warm.
On Christmas Eve once, I sang
“Away in a Manger” while burning trash,
cows actually lowing nearby.

Bits of paper rise in the night,
Against the starry sky it’s hard
To keep saying paper, fire, ash—
Orange lace makes more sense,
Flickering warm constellations
In a coldly growing universe.
Our dwindling friend, the past, is receding.
One gust and there’s a gray hole
Where the tiny fireworks had been.

But we keep up with trash better
Spring, fall, summer, letting it pile up
Only if there’s a burning ban, and this summer,
There’s way too much rain for that.

Loading the barrel raises a cloud
Of mosquitoes from the puddle inside.
Die, demons, die, I say,
Lighting it fast. But they’re so thick.
I want to wear a smudge pot
Round my neck, dip my clothes in Deet
And citronella oil, set myself on fire.
At least immolation wouldn’t itch.
At least not at first.

There is something holy about fire,
I think to myself, dancing on the squishy
Ground to dodge all the whiny
Little proboscises aimed at me.
All that was is less.
The volume visibly reduced.
Blue incense rising slowly toward heaven.
Here it is, God, what was, what we no longer want.

_________________

This poem is about so many things, and it used to be about so many more. (In that version I can’t find. I don’t think I burned it–I’m just not sure where it is.) There used to be a line in there from a friend who burned trash with me once and said, “I’m the worst person you know.”

There is redemption in burning trash. In getting caught up.

A couple of weeks ago there were three posts that people were sharing on Facebook, all related, I think, to burning trash—at least metaphorically.

First, there was this one, on the potential benefits of procrastination, called “Procrastination Rules.” The only point at which I disagreed was in the penultimate paragraph (most of which I did agree with), in which Frank Partnoy said, “If we aren’t working at all, we are being slothful. If we are working on something unimportant, we are showing bad judgment. But if we are working on something important, then does it really make sense to judge us negatively for not working on something less important? If we put off errands because we are trying to cure cancer, are we really procrastinating? And if that is the meaning of procrastination, why is it so bad?”

Terrific questions, but two other posts were flying around the same day that made it clear it’s not true that we’re being slothful “if we aren’t working at all.”

One was this one, “Why Killing Time Isn’t a Sin,” in which Leo Babauta says “Killing time isn’t a sin — it’s a misnomer. We’ve framed the question entirely wrong. It’s not a matter of “killing” time, but of enjoying it….Now we might spend this moment working if that work brings us joy. But we might also spend it relaxing, doing nothing, feeling the breeze on the nape of our neck, losing ourselves in conversation with a cherished friend, snuggling under the covers with a lover. This is life. A life of joy, of wonderfulness.”

What’s interesting to me is that this seems like neither action nor contemplation to me (I see contemplation as somewhat synonymous to meditation—something requiring focus and effort). This just seems like fun.

And fun, as an anti-dote, can be very powerful, as Tim Kreider points out in “The ‘Busy’ Trap.” I loved how forthrightly he said, “I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know.” But beyond his terrific voice (I’m really enjoying his book, We Learn Nothing), he has some really important points.

“Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.”

This is connected to what a lot of creativity researchers talk about in the steps, or stages of creativity (which I covered in my first blog, “Creativity: A Pumpkin Saga”):

“People who describe the stages or steps of creativity use some variation of the following list (much of which comes from an early researcher named Wallas, though he is rarely cited):
• Immersion (where you consider all the possibilities)
• Incubation (where you set your work aside and let your subconscious stew)
• Inspiration (when, like Archimedes, you have your “eureka!” moment—and bathrooms rank high statistically as places where we report getting inspired*, btw. But I shouldn’t say “we” because I would never report that, even if it were true, which of course it’s not)
• Verification (where someone whose judgment matters, for whatever reason, says, “Yes! Tastes great!” or “I’ll publish that!”).”

Procrastination gets you in trouble sometimes in relation to this list, because if you’re working with a deadline, and you spend too much time on the immersion stage, you might not have much time to leave for the incubation stage, and that might cut down on the likelihood of inspiration.

There’s a balance there–as in most things, as in the story of Mary and Martha (tune in tomorrow for that one), as in burning trash–you don’t want to put it off too long, because then you’ll have bags and bags of things to burn and it’ll take forever to get it done. But you don’t want to do it every day, because then you’ll have a tiny little boring fire that will be out before you have time to appreciate how wonderful the moment is, how beautiful the flames, how delicate the ashes are as they lift up and float away.

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Posted in Burnout, Creativity, God Stuff, Poetry, Procrastination, Uncategorized, Work Life

The Zennoyance of M. Bullock Dresser

Posted on July 14, 2012 | 4 comments

[Pardon me while I Prufrock a minute.]

“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai dietro una vettura lenta,
perché eravamo in un no sorpasso di corsia….”

“Whether it’s pain or pleasure, through lojong practice we come to have a sense of letting our experience be as it is without trying to manipulate it, push it away, or grasp it. The pleasurable aspects of being human as well as the painful ones become the key to awakening bodhichitta.” Pema Chodron Start Where You Are

Let us go then, you and I,
While the drought sucks all the rain out of the sky,
Like a baby nursing at its mama’s breast,
Let us go through several tiny towns,
The kind with no uptown or down,
And speed traps their biggest revenue stream,
The middle class mostly a dream,
One of those nightmares where you find a room
That leads you to numberless other rooms
You never knew you had–
Oh, stop. Don’t tell me about your day.
Let’s just hit the road.

On Highway 14 the woman drove too leisurely,
In a lime-green Mercedes named Martini.

The heat wave that sharpens its teeth on a wheel,
The heat swamp that buffs its nails on a wheel,
Licked its lips along the shoulder of the road,
Turned off the cruise control at some point,
Rolled down the window to watch something congeal,
Did a three-point turn, put the pedal to the floor,
And seeing no sheriff’s car anywhere in sight,
Broke the speed of sound, and drove out of sight. But

On Highway 14 the woman drove too leisurely,
In a lime-green Mercedes named Martini.

____________________________

I might work some more on that, being as I’m middle aged, and wondering what I am not (nor was meant to be) and wondering, A LOT lately, “Do I dare” and “Do I dare?”

In the meantime, let me talk about that Mercedes. My parents and Wendell and I had set off this morning about 10 for Rockford, to see my Aunt Margie, who’s in a nursing home there. Somewhere between Spring Green and Madison, we ended up behind a lovely lime-green Mercedes convertible with the license plate “MARTINIS.”

First of all, I’m not sure I’d want to advertise I LOVE ALCOHOL SO MUCH IT’S MY PERSONALIZED PLATE, just in case I ever got pulled over.

(Not that I get pulled over a lot. Mom and I talked today about traffic tickets we’d gotten–neither of us has gotten many. But I remember being very impressed when my Gran’mommy got a speeding ticket when she was in her seventies, for going something like 60 in a 40mph zone. My cousin Jodie and I used to freak out when we watched her drive because she was old-school—she would have her right foot on the gas and her left foot poised over the brake. I particularly like to think about her as a driver because it stood in marked contrast to her basic mode as a kindly and gentle and extremely ladylike Baptist.)

Second of all, WOW that Mercedes was going slow. About 45, and it’s actually a highway, where you can go pretty much 60 and not worry at all about getting pulled over. There was some slight lane meanderage on the Mercedes’ part as well.

At the stoplight in Black Earth, the woman who was driving was fixing her hair in her fetching visor-cap and YES, the light turned green, and she kept working on her hair for a count of 1-2-3.

We couldn’t pass–Highway 14 is two-lane most of the way, and a lot of no-passing zones (or, as I like to think of them, no sorpasso di corsias) and a fair amount of traffic. It was timed exactly wrong almost the whole way.

Third of all (or is it fifth of all?), it wasn’t really “MARTINIS.” It’s the name of a popular cocktail, though. I just don’t want to go listing license plates on my blog. Except, if you make your personalized plate really easy to remember and then drive in really annoying ways in front of people, you should kind of expect to show up in a blog.

In a very dramatic moment, the minivan behind us gunned it to pass them, and barely made it back over before the passing lane ended, with oncoming traffic approaching, too. The passenger in MARTINIS flipped off the minivan, which puzzled us, until my Dad pointed out that maybe someone in the minivan had flipped them off first.

“I’m pretty sure they’re just out for a cruise,” my son said.

Finally, we were able to pass them. I thought of them briefly as we drove through Janesville later and it was raining—were the Martinis o.k.? Did they get the top up in time?

If I’d been in a hurry, I’m sure I would have been mad. My friend & UW System colleague Ryan Martin explains why we get so mad when we’re driving in this great post, “All the Rage.”

But honestly, my annoyance didn’t shift into anger today. They were so annoying it ended up being hilarious. I asked on Facebook this evening if anyone knew them, and I now know who they are. They own a bar, actually, so I’m wondering if I can turn this into a free drink somehow.

Because this is a totally flattering portrait of them, right? And of me, right?

Here’s the thing, and the reason I quoted Pema Chodron—at some point, getting annoyed at someone who’s being annoying, and then expressing that annoyance, is all just annoying. Same with obnoxious behavior. It’s hard to respond to rudeness without also being rude.

Like last night, during the performance of Skylight (PHENOMENAL—everyone should go see this play), I paid good money for a great seat in the second row, but there were three people in front of me who thought sitting in the FRONT ROW of the Touchstone Theater, a small venue, during a terrific show–they thought that was a good time to talk. It wasn’t so much that I could hear them (I have hearing aids), but they were leaning over a lot, so it was visually distracting. There were some odd dynamics going on, too—I couldn’t tell if the woman in the middle was sick, and her husband and friend were concerned, or if they chose Skylight because they were currently in a ménage a trois. I wondered about the latter because there seemed to be a lot of meaningful shoulder-rubs and knee-strokings in all kinds of variations (him on her, him on other her, her on her, her on him, other her on him). Regardless–what I really wanted to do was thump each of them on the head.

(I did once kick the seat of a woman in front of me at Sundance theater once during a Clooney movie—she was texting on a smart phone and it was REALLY BRIGHT.)

But it’s rude to thump someone on the head, and I was worried that my thumping might be an even bigger distraction to the actors I was already worried were distracted (Clooney couldn’t see me kicking the seat of the woman in front of me), or make them talk MORE, or begin to rub the sore spots for each other where they’d been thumped.

I moved to a different seat at half-time, but the three lovers (or the married couple and friend, one of whom was sick) didn’t return. Which was a little disappointing, since I’d complained about them to numerous people while eating my much-anticipated brownie, which, frankly, was a little dry (the brownies are usually amazing there).

One moral of these stories is, I don’t mind being annoyed as long as I get a story out of it.

Another part of what it comes down to is I’m not sure I have the right to be angry (or even annoyed). My Gran’mommy wouldn’t let us say “darn” or “heck” when we were little, because they were just substitutes for “damn” and “hell.” I remember asking at some point what I was supposed to say when I got mad, and she essentially said, “Don’t get mad.”

I don’t think of myself as an angry person, but maybe these lines from Justified apply (I’d love it if they did–I’d love being an Elmore Leonard character):

At the end of the pilot, Raylan has broken into the home of his ex-wife and her new husband in the middle of the night, and is then chatting with her out on the deck.

“I just never thought of myself as an angry man,” he says, after explaining why he shot a man.

And Winona says, ”Oh. Raylan, well, you do a good job of hiding it—I suppose most folks don’t see it, but honestly? You’re the angriest man I have ever known.”

What I’m hoping for is some sort of Zen Baptist process by which I can feel annoyance (read: anger) and express it without making the world a worse place, without cancelling out the benefit of however many days of meditation and Bible reading I’ve managed to string together.

This won’t be easy. The Baptist part of me remembers this verse, Matthew 7:3, “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?” Most of the time I complain, I feel compelled to point out my own guilt. That’s not the worst habit in the world (I find it annoying when others don’t admit their own guilt, ever), but do I really have to list all the ways I’ve annoyed people who were driving behind me before I can say, “that Mercedes was really annoying,” before I can allow myself to be annoyed?

Is the height of Zen training really to get to the point where I drive behind a car going slower than I want to go and my actual response goes something like, “it is what it is,” and I use the slower pace to be mindful about my surroundings? How different is that, really, from trying never to get angry?

Just asking. I’ll stop now before I get carried away.

The pilot of Justified ends with Raylan processing Winona’s comment, goes to the credits, and we get to hear, once again, Tone Z with Gangsta Grass:

“On this lonely road,
trying to make it home
Doing it by my lonesome-pissed off, who wants some
I see them long hard times to come.”

If I were an Elmore Leonard show, I’d be done already. Since it’s me, I’ll just say that my new life goal is to mention Timothy Olyphant every other blog entry.

And also to get a free drink from restaurant owners who drive slowly enough, for long enough, that I think they owe me something. Unless that annoys them, in which case I apologize for being annoyed.

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Posted in Family, God Stuff, Poetry, Searching, Spring Green, Uncategorized

The Weather Rules: If It Doesn’t Rain, Tlaloc Just Isn’t That Into You

Posted on July 9, 2012 | 2 comments

Say what you will about nature being female—Mother Earth, Earth Mother, Mother Nature, Gaia, what have you—now that this heat-wave-drought-thing is stretching on and on here in the land of dried-out cheese, I’ve realized I recognize this feeling of abandonment and desertion the lack of rain leaves me with.

It’s just like waiting for a guy who said he’d call to call.

That moment of enlightenment reminded me immediately of The Rules, and that got me wondering if we could generate some weather rules.

(Disclaimer here—I did not use the book or website as any part of the mating ritual that led me into my wonderful marriage),

My basic opinion is that rules like The RULES work best for people who play games.

But this whole “20 Percent Chance of Rain” icon that shows up on the weather forecast online AND THEN VANISHES every couple of days, or even, “50 Percent Chance of Thunderstorms” (also vanishes) have left me feeling toyed with.

So I’m looking for a weather god to blame.

For nominees, I would say possibly one of the Thunder Brothers, who were part of the Penobscot tribes (I’m thinking of Major Houlihan’s husband here, actually), or Pamola the Moosehead, or even Tlaloc, who was Aztec, but things feel desertified here lately, so maybe he’s expanded his range. But really, I’m just thinking some kind of generic, Pan-Indian, vaguely Celtic (given my own genetic heritage) pissy guy with supernatural powers related to rain. I call him Mr. Rain God.

I’ve thought seriously about this for almost an hour now, and I really think if we all follow the following rules, Mr. Rain God will stop being so damn WITHHOLDING.

Rule #1 is “be a creature unlike any other.” In this case the creature is a state (actually just the southern part of the state) or a region, not so much a creature at all, so I would say the weather rule translation would have to be “show up on Google Street View in really freaky ways.” A number of us have been trying to fry eggs on pavement—I think if those of us in Wisconsin just add cheese, we’ll be a dry region like no other.

Rule #2 involves leaving your house. I’ll admit—this has been hard for me. We have the summertime equivalent of “cabin fever,” only it’s hotter outside than inside. So—all of us, ESPECIALLY those of us who’ve been camped out in our central-air-hidey-holes, let’s get out more. (Just not tonight probably, in my case.)

Rule #3 says “it’s a fantasy relationship unless a man asks you out.” I think the weather rule equivalent would be “a weather myth is just a myth UNLESS IT RAINS.”

#4 is about office romance. If you work at a weather-related job, this applies to you.

#5 is about long-distance relationships, and says “he must visit you at least three times before you visit him.” So that’s it. I’m not looking at another forecast, or up in the sky, or anything, until it rains. Three times.

#6 is about personal ads, and to be honest, this had not even occurred to me. But THE RULES says that a woman should place the ad and “let men respond to you.” So I’m interpreting this to mean that not only should we stop looking at forecasts online, we should instead, place one of those Craigslist “missed connections” ads—“Mr. Rain God—saw some dark clouds in the sky above my house, but when I looked again, you were gone.” And just see what he does.

#7 is, I think, the most famous of the rules: “If he does not call, he is not that interested. Period.” So yeah, that’s how I’m feeling these days about Mr. Rain God. He is just not that into me.

#8 says “buyer beware,” but really—what are my options for rain? I mean—Mr. Rain God is pissy and fickle and absolutely Mr. Wrong, but I feel like Peggy Lee here: “He’s a tramp, but I love him.”

#9 says “Close the deal. Rules women do not date men for more than two years.” Not a problem. If it doesn’t rain for another two years, I’ll have much more serious things on my mind.

I know, I know—some of you are saying Yahweh is in charge of the weather, what with the whole 40-days, 40-nights story, and this: from Leviticus 26: “If you follow my statutes and keep my commandments and observe them faithfully, I will give you your rains in their season….” But the problem there is that we had massive floods here in Southwest Wisconsin just four years ago, and I can’t imagine we’ve had a serious change in faithful observance in the last four years.

And then some of you will probably talk about climate change.

For the record, I tend to believe God could affect the weather but almost never does, and that we’ve screwed up the planet, pretty much irreparably. (I don’t know how those two thoughts are connected.)

But the hot, dry weather (dry, as in, no rain, but it’s still humid—how is that fair? Here’s my Rule #1: if you’re not going to send rain, you don’t get to make it humid) makes me crabby and when I’m crabby, I find magical thinking MUCH more satisfying than either logic or theology.

The horrible part is that for me, it’s just an inconvenience, just a matter of higher a.c. bills. It didn’t even increase my watering chores in the garden, because I didn’t quite get around to putting in a garden this year. And nath sure hasn’t had to mow. Also—I’ve been noticing the last few years that when it’s a really good year for corn, it’s a really good year for ragweed, so I’m hoping the converse is true.

But that corn is breaking my heart. “Inconvenient” isn’t even on the same planet as the adjectives that describe what a drought means to farmers. Except where the fields are irrigated, corn here in Wisconsin looks spiky, like pineapple fields, or just brown. I worry a lot about the farmers—some of them have crop insurance, but even so, a bumper crop would always be a better outcome. Farming’s hard enough, you know? A drought like this could send someone who’s close to going under financially ALL the way down (and farming is one of those businesses that is almost always a little precarious).

So—instead of simply being sad and worried for the farmers, and worried for people who don’t have air conditioning, and worried for people who have to work outside, and pissy about having a hot summer when this is usually when we get to brag on Facebook about living in Wisconsin—THIS is when we’re supposed to be saying, “Great sleeping weather!” and “Ah….this is why we put up with blizzards….” Instead of all that, I’m working THE WEATHER RULES.

Because, in a direct quote that is directly applicable, Rule #10 is “keep doing the rules even when things are slow.”

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Posted in God Stuff, Uncategorized

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Summer of my Relative Uselessness

Posted on July 5, 2012 | 2 comments

I’m somehow reminded of when the O.J. trial was on—I spent a lot of that summer on the couch, agreeing with whichever lawyer was speaking at the time. “It’s like they didn’t cancel LA Law after all,” I told my friends.

There’s no trial on this summer that I’m watching, and since we barely have broadcast TV, we’re not watching the lead-up to the Olympics and may not watch much of the Olympics. (Which I’m sure we can add to the list of ways I’m a horrible mother.) I’m also not watching soap operas, because the ones I loved the most are gone. I’ll admit it—I did get a little sad yesterday thinking I couldn’t turn on Guiding Light and find out if Jeffrey were going to make a surprise appearance at the Bauer barbecue and thus lead to yet another Josh and Reva breakup.

Regardless of how little TV I’m watching (other than all of Season 3 of Justified on my laptop through iTunes—just giggling a little here about the juxtaposition of Timothy Olyphant and lap)—regardless:

Between when the spring semester ended on May 24 and, well, any time now, I’ve been pretty useless.

I don’t want to say I’ve earned it, but I did have my gallbladder removed on May 29. Yes, they were able to do it laproscopically, and no, there weren’t any complications, but it took me every minute of three weeks to feel anything close to normal. So many people said they just “snapped right back” after gallbladder surgery. Apparently I’m not snappy. It took a solid month before my son pronounced me 99% recovered.

“Or maybe 98%,” he said. He made this observation after I’d apprehended a runaway grocery cart that was hurtling across the grocery store parking lot toward parked cars. The cart-herd had left it unattended while he moved some other carts back inside. My brain went kind of “phbbbbbbsplat” for a second or two, as I was thinking, “oh, that’s going to hit those cars,” and then, shifting into superhero mode, I scanned the parking lot, said to Wendell “let’s go!” and we ran with our cart after the runaway cart.

I grabbed it before it hit anything, and then pulled both carts back up to the store, where the clueless cart-herd was emerging. I started to say, “I just saved your ass,” but I stopped myself (Wendell tonight at dinner told nath and me that Callie, our kitten, was “pissed off because you’re not snuggling her enough.” I told him that’s another one of those words he shouldn’t use until he’s older, like when he gets his drivers license.)

“I just saved you,” I said to the cart-herd, and it seemed to dawn on him (or, as he’ll probably write in my composition class this fall, dong on him) what I’d saved him from. As we walked to our car, Wendell said, “That’s the first time I’ve seen you run since your operation.”

“I must be recovered,” I said.

“99% anyway,” he said. “Or maybe 98%.” He and nath have been watching Star Trek episodes & Spock is a big favorite.

It was a very dramatic moment.

And that’s pretty much it, in terms of what I’ve accomplished so far this summer.

O.k., not entirely true. I’ve read a lot. I found a lot of terrific apps for the iPad. I actually wrote a fair bit.

And just tonight, I finished transferring my TO DO list from paper to “Things,” which is both a web thingy and an app. It’s designed to work smoothly with David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” religion (I read that book during my recovery stretch). I’m relatively excited about the possibility that these two things will help me be more productive. I would personally be more excited if he called it “Getting Shit Done,” but probably that would not be as broadly appealing.

Other than my gallbladder surgery, I think my summer of relative uselessness can be attributed to ongoing issues with burnout. I’m hoping that taking it pretty easy for a month let some of that heal up, too.

I am very, very grateful to have a job where I can take a month to recover from what is, by all accounts, relatively minor surgery.

(You don’t need to tell me how many things I could complain about with my particular job in my particular state at this particular point in history—-trust me. I’m not one of those people who say, “Can’t complain,” because I know I always could. About anything. I’m creative AND I’m a worst-case-scenario thinker. I could complain. But I don’t, not always.)

It isn’t true that professors “get summers off.” But it is true (especially if we’re not teaching, which I’m not, this summer) we have a big chunk of time to get a big chunk of things done, with a proportionally big chunk of autonomy to figure out how, precisely, to go about Getting Shit Done.

So we’ll see—will this summer of my relative uselessness morph into an incredibly productive stretch of time? Or will I spend ever more time finding addictive word game apps and and then finding ways to get the iPad away from my husband and son?

Tune in tomorrow, soap fans. Or next week—or whenever it is I get another blog posted.

(Also—if the title of this post rang any bells, you’ll be happy to know that Kristy McNichol is alive and well.)

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Posted in Burnout, Creativity, Family, Procrastination, Teaching, Work Life

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Recuperator

Posted on June 4, 2012 | 1 comment

|riˈkoōpəˌrātər|
noun
a form of heat exchanger in which hot waste gases from a furnace are conducted continuously along a system of flues where they impart heat to incoming air or gaseous fuel.

How weirdly illness changes time and goals–
everything sticky slow and progress ant-sized–
that our bodies heal at all seems miraculous.

Like trying to watch Venus make its crawl
on the sun a day early or while lightning strikes,
how weirdly illness changes time. And goals

become ridiculous. The prayer for normal
bowel movements is such a blow to pride
that our bodies heal. Of all the miracles

I know, I think now of my father’s heart muscle,
its pace currently regulated by an appliance.
How weird. Illness changes time, and goals

conduct themselves along a flue, heating fuel
and air like machines, leaving us febrile,
but our bodies heal sometimes, which seems miraculous

to me now, given how much can go awry
in even this age of advancing medical science.
How weirdly illness changes time and goals
into the age of fucking miracles.

______

Tuesday is my one-week post-gallbladder-removal mark, and Wednesday is my father’s one-week post-tumor-removal mark. My surgery was planned; his was not. We both make slow progress back toward health and normalcy, though I’m closer to home than he is, since my gallbladder wasn’t as big a villain as his tumor, and my surgery nowhere near as violent as his.

I was so pleased with my surgical team–if you read my gallbladder post, you’ll be happy to know I awoke in recovery with four x’s on my right hand. I did question the wisdom of asking for them in permanent marker as they stayed there day after day (but they’re gone now). My parents are pleased with Dad’s surgeon (and I have to say my mother is at a very, very picky place right now when it comes to health care).

What I tried to convey in the villanelle is the weirdness of healing. I told my husband this evening I was officially tired of not feeling well, which I’m sure means I’m just about better.

But progress comes slowly sometimes. This is actually the first villanelle I’ve ever written without having to look up the form–and I’ve written a lot of villanelles. (And then I did look it up just to double-check.)

Looking up recuperation, I found recuperator and I’m really loving the idea of recuperation as a machine–the product of science and reason. But there’s part of me that will always, always, long for and believe in the age of fucking miracles.

(Can you tell I’ve spent time watching the third season of Deadwood as part of my recuperator time?)

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On the Lighting of Farts and the Reduction of Bile

Posted on May 24, 2012 | 4 comments

(NOTE: If you are part of my surgical team, feel free to skim until you get to the part that says THIS IS THE PART I FOR SURE WANT MY SURGICAL TEAM TO READ.)

Maybe having someone take out my gallbladder will also remove some of my perverseness.

For example, I am not in the least bit comforted by everyone’s intended-to-be-comforting stories about how smoothly their gallbladder surgery went. Percentage-wise, nationally anyway, there are complications in a certain number of gallbladder operations, so every time someone tells me how theirs was “a piece of cake,” I think that ratchets up my odds of having complications. (At least two people have actually used that phrase, “piece of cake,” which I find telling somehow, since cake tends to be high fat, which is what puffs up my gallbladder’s sense of itself and causes me the pain and discomfort I described so precisely to my surgeon that he said he felt confident my problems were caused by my low-functioning sac of bile.)

This concern about everyone’s happy endings meaning that I’ll have problems may not be particularly sound statistical or scientific reasoning, but it feels true, so I was comforted when one of my coworkers obliged me this morning by describing how her father had all kinds of complications, including an open, oozing wound.

For the record, I trust the overwhelming scientific evidence on things like evolution and climate change and even vaccinations. But I understand people who are skeptical. Magical thinking is so much fun and so much easier.

You know how you can light a fart on fire? I’ve never tried it, but a friend says she had to take her then-husband to the E.R. when he did it, without pants on, and caught his ass-hair on fire.

Pair that knowledge with the occasional situation in my own home when someone has farted. Happens very rarely, of course, and it’s almost never me. What do we do, on those rare, rare occasions? We light a match.

I thought, for years I thought this, that you lit a match to get rid of the fart smell because the trace amounts of methane then obliterated themselves.

My husband and my friend Joy, who has a Master’s degree in agricultural science, have finally almost pretty much convinced me that no, there’s no tiny methane explosion (so tiny you can’t see it); it’s just a matter of the sulfur covering up the smell.

I can’t tell you how little sense this makes to me. There are so many things that smell better than sulfur, and spritzing a little lavender would never catch your flannel pajamas on fire. (WHOOM! The flame was racing up my leg. I got those pjs off faster than you can say CH4.)

THIS IS THE PART I FOR SURE WANT MY SURGICAL TEAM TO READ:

I’m glad I’m not in charge of removing my own gallbladder. I’m glad it’s a surgeon who seems to have a good reputation (he’s removed the gallbladder of people I know, two of whom have said things like “piece of cake,” if not using that exact phrase). I also had my shit-detector highly tuned when I met with him last week, and it didn’t go off, not even once.

He was explaining to me what the percentages were, in terms of the likelihood that this operation would solve the problems I’m having. My precise description seemed to give him confidence that it was, in fact, my gallbladder, and I also had a scan two years ago during which a technician and I watched radioactive dye go through my digestive system, and also during which my gallbladder was kind of lackadaisical about pumping out the bile it had stored, which gave me the official diagnosis of, get this:

an equivocal gallbladder.

which seems like exactly the kind of gallbladder I’d have.

A friend’s preschooler learned all the words to the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” this week AT PRESCHOOL, and I can sort of picture my gallbladder rocking out to that song. But not quite on the beat, so—the answer to the question is now GO.

I liked how my surgeon talked about the percentages and then clarified that these were national averages, and his own numbers were much better.

This reminded me of Atul Gawande, who, in his article “Personal Best,” describes the frustration he felt when his own numbers kind of stalled out, after years of improving:

“As I went along, I compared my results against national data, and I began beating the averages. My rates of complications moved steadily lower and lower. And then, a couple of years ago, they didn’t. It started to seem that the only direction things could go from here was the wrong one.”

This particular article was recommended to me by my friend Kim Barnes, whose new novel, In the Kingdom of Men, is high on my post-surgery reading list. Kim prescribed the Gawande article after a conversation in which I described frustration at not meeting with the kind of success I wanted. “Maybe you need a coach,” she said, in a moment of absolute diagnostic aplomb. I haven’t decided yet if I need a coach, but I desperately needed to read this article.

What I love about Gawande, in addition to having Googled him to find out he’s pretty cute (if you like geeky-handsome, which I do), is his relentlessness: “Élite performers, researchers say, must engage in “deliberate practice”—sustained, mindful efforts to develop the full range of abilities that success requires. You have to work at what you’re not good at. In theory, people can do this themselves. But most people do not know where to start or how to proceed. Expertise, as the formula goes, requires going from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence and finally to unconscious competence.”

Everything he said I was applying to myself as a writer and a teacher, and only later realized that I wanted all my healthcare professionals to read him.

Particularly, I would want them to read his book The Checklist Manifesto, or at least have read the checklist itself, (also available as a pdf on the same webpage) which includes things the surgical team should check “before the induction of anaesthesia,” “before the skin incision,” and “before patient leaves operating room.” My favorite item on the checklist is “confirm all team members have introduced themselves by name and role,” because Gawande explains in the book how this ramps up the odds of them actually working well as a team.

I asked my surgeon if he would read my blog before he cut me open, and he said he would. I’m emailing the link, but I’ll bring a hard copy on Tuesday, just in case. I would be so happy, upon waking in recovery, to see on my hand or some other obvious place I’ll be able to see in recovery, a big checkmark in permanent marker, or better, the exact words from the last item on the checklist. I’ll know then, not only did my surgical team read my blog, they read Gawande, and I was, as I was trusting, in good hands.

Because in the end–although my magical thinking cap would prefer a surgeon who recently had a gallbladder operation go badly (thus ensuring my odds of mine going well)–my rational mind would prefer a surgeon who saw my cholecystectomy as one more chance to improve his percentage.

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The Merry Month of May

Posted on May 1, 2012 | 2 comments

The hum, the lull between deep snow and mosquitoes,
Before the tourists descend en freaking masse,
Right when goldfinches go from egg yolk yawn
To neon hello, is when I love my little town
The most. The caravan of architects
Is back from Arizona, and license plates
All over town proclaim a different state.
There are faces I don’t recognize
And starting this weekend, there will be faces
I do recognize, and gestures, and gaits—
The very air changes when the actors all come back.
I know I’ll love the shows but I really love the wait,
Love knowing magic’s on its way, love art
Rumbling like thunder for my winter-dried heart.

_____

There are so many things I love about living in Spring Green, and American Players Theatre is high, high on the list. Tech folks are back in town already and since rehearsals begin next week, the actors are arriving.

Several times over the years, I’ve first seen Brian Mani back in town on the very same day, or within a day, of seeing my first bright-yellow goldfinch of the year.

(We’re lucky to have a lot of APT folk who over-winter, but often they’re off doing other jobs, so even the year-round birds aren’t in town consistently until now.)

As a professor, my semester is still in the deepest swamp–lots to grade and no indication that anything I tried this semester actually worked.

But when I glimpse, out of the corner of my eye, a certain way of gesturing, or walking, and there’s some odd sense of recognition, I realize, “Oh. That’s someone I’ve seen on stage.” (It’s odd, but a lot of times it’s the body language that pricks my brain, not always the face.)

That’s when I know that winter is truly over, and my semester will soon be over, and within a month or two, I’ll be sitting & watching and being transported to what I call my “APT happy place,” where I forget, utterly, my regular life.

And the fact that, in my regular life, I can call many of these wonderful folks my friends, that, as a writer, I’ve had the thrill of hearing some of them say my words–I feel so lucky.

Those of us in Spring Green, we are lucky, boy.

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Posted in Poetry, Spring Green, Uncategorized

This Is Just to Say Whatever Comes to Mind

Posted on April 28, 2012 | 10 comments

Small-town newspapers, where they still exist, are a precious treat. In Spring Green, Wisconsin, we get The Home News, “the only newspaper in the whole, wide world that cares about the River Valley area” every Wednesday. Of course, The Voice of the River Valley, a free monthly, also implicitly cares (though that’s not on its masthead). This past month The Voice had poems (in honor of National Poetry Month) and has regularly carried poems in the past. One of the things I enjoyed about the Home News’ former editor, in addition to his progressive politics and weekly editorials featuring his dog, was his willingness to publish poetry on the editorial page. He was following a long tradition. According to Mike Chasar (whose blog I like and whose book I want),

“through most of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth…amateur poets hotly debated issues of abolition and women’s suffrage in verse form, writing their poems quickly in response not only to the day’s current events but also to the specific ideas and claims put forth in the previous day’s poems. As recently as the mid-1950s, in fact, the New York Times was in the habit of printing poems alongside letters to the editor on its opinion pages, making little or no distinction between the two.”

The fact that I am able to quote at length from Chasar’s article, entitled “Writing Good Bad Poetry,” which appeared in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers magazine in 2008, is the result of an argument I lost (am losing). “We do NOT need to keep all these,” I’ve insisted repeatedly to my husband over the years about the boxes and boxes of magazines. But my school library doesn’t subscribe to Poets & Writers, and there aren’t very many articles archived online, so when I remembered the article & looked it up in the database at school, I could have ordered a copy of the article on interlibrary loan. Or I could do what I did, come home and find it.

The willingness to wait a few more days
To get what I wanted from interlibrary loan
Would free up so much square footage in my home
That I could house a family of refugees.
But I’m married to a pack rat. I am one, too.
It’s just I used to purge more often. He won’t.
Or rather, he seldom does. We never do
Much of anything until we absolutely must.
In preparing for a visit from the appraiser this spring
We both set to work cleaning and organizing
And yes, purging. The appraiser was the amiable dad
Of a former student of mine. He and my husband had
A rambling talk. Appraised well, we locked in three percent.
We’re not an episode of “Hoarders.” At least not yet.

Chasar recounts writing poetry for Iowa City’s Press-Citizen in response to an editor’s request. The editor was wanting something “akin to what George Orwell called ‘good bad novels,’ which the author defined as fiction that doesn’t aspire to official literary greatness but that is nonetheless skillfully and admirably written for the purposes or entertainment or political effect.” He analyzes some of the poems that got printed there and discusses what they did and didn’t accomplish, what “good bad poetry” in the newspaper can and can’t accomplish in general, and concludes the article by pretty much bragging that if nothing else, publishing poems in the paper got him a free beer.

When I include poems in my blog, my pay scale is even lower than Chasar’s (he wrote them for free), because no one’s bought me a beer as yet.

(Consider this a bald plea for a Furthermore or Lake Louie.)

So why do it?

Some of it’s inexplicable: I don’t really know why I write. I don’t really know why I’m compelled to share what I write (although every other memoirist and confessional poet understands why I feel copacetic about sharing my life with strangers).

I do know why I love sonnets, through which I record the world and process the world fairly often. Bob Wrigley once called sonnets the most anal-retentive form in the English language. In one way, you might think sonnets are the anti-clutter form, since you’re limited to a certain number of beats and lines (Song of Myself or Howl being the ultimate hoarder poems). But I think of a sonnet more as a phenomenally well-designed closet. You can pack an awful lot in there. And given the existence of sonnet series, and crowns of sonnets, and George Meredith’s 15-line sonnets, it’s an ever-expandable closet.

I could say I like posting poems in blogs because they encapsulate and elevate my everyday existence.

And if that’s true, it also explains why I don’t mind that the poems I post there aren’t even trying to be my best poems. Not art, necessarily. To chronicle the everyday, I have to write every day. And post every day. (Or as close to it as I can get—can I substitute everyfewdays as a synonym? My everyfewdays existence?) Other than minor tinkering, there’s not a whole of revision that can happen in that scenario.

Ron Wallace published a terrific book with the best sonnets from his project of writing a sonnet a day for a year–but he revised a lot to get to the book, The Uses of Adversity.

In general, I think art takes revision.

This is not all merely to say that when I look back at “Metaphors: A Semester” I pretty much go “meh,” although that is pretty much what I go. I suppose in that sense the five stanzas were art imitating life because “meh” was how I was feeling about the semester at that point, but we don’t really want art imitating life in those moments, now do we.

This is just to say–wait! Where have I heard that before?

And thus the most compelling question I can think of at the moment (other than the whole “What’s cooler? Mod Squad or Starsky & Hutch?” conversation we had at supper) is this:

If all our favorite poets had blogged, what would they have posted?

For better or worse, I feel certain Robert Lowell would have posted EVERYTHING. With him in mind, let me just say that I hope some of my blog poems, eventually, could end up in my own Life Studies. Until then, you know where to find them.

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Metaphors: A Semester

Posted on April 27, 2012 | 2 comments

1
damp pile of limp balloons

2
multiple balloons, inflated to bursting
in January
let go on schedule until March
then all at once
sputtering
zip zoom
flail
hanging suspended in April
flop

3
you know how the house in Up floated away?
like that
but no passengers

4
some old-school blown-up balloons
along with helium mylar
and one miniature hot-air contraption
elaborately connected
mostly self-propelled
landing gently
grades turned in

5
damp pile of limp balloons

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Posted in Burnout, Poetry, Teaching, Uncategorized, Work Life

The Moan Tax

Posted on April 25, 2012 | 10 comments

I pay for every blessing—don’t think I don’t.
Sure I’ve got a good job, but I work too hard,
And I’m lucky in love, but marriage takes work.
Don’t believe me? Listen to me piss and moan
About the house I have to clean, the food
I have to cook, the garden I have to weed,
My beautiful, rural commute ruined this week
with a spread-manure-fresh-dead-skunk reek.

I might be spoiled but at least I’m not content.

God forbid I should relax or take a break
Or cut back somewhere or say no to anything
Or take the risk of being seen as slacking
Or just enjoy the son I thought I couldn’t conceive.
I fight off jinxes with my constant, low-voltage rant,
Lest all my precious miseries be stripped from me.

_____

This is and isn’t me speaking. Happy Hump Day, everyone!

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