I've been up cleaning my room - something I never do anymore at this time of night. Years ago, I sometimes had these bursts of energy that I used for cleaning and organizing my domestic space. But I've been eating no grains and in general, just not eating much, which - done right - gives me more energy.
And Matt and I have been arguing more lately, instead of just staying out of each other's ways. Yesterday there was one, then another today, then another tonight. It's like the bad old days. Not really, but these carry the echo of all the old ones forward, and I feel desperate again to finally solve this dilemma. I'm trying to figure out if I can solve it financially, and then figure out which parts aren't financial.
(Why is it that these different pieces of living are always written about so segregated from each other? Home care; food and health; personal relationships; our financial lives...)
I've returned to reading about adult education as I try to begin a book or even just a decent scholarly article that blends my experience as a non-traditional student with other stories, poetry, critical theory, feminist theory, and liberatory pedagogy (if any pedagogy can even be truly liberatory in an oppressive system). Yesterday, I was reading from Stephen Brookfield's The Power of Critical Theory: Liberating Adult Learning and Teaching.and this passage struck me, a passage that wouldn't be found in texts that focus solely on 'how to succeed as a nontraditional student!!' or policy guides for community college administrators, or how to run your class. :
Even the most private and traumatic tearings in the fabric of personal relationships, such as divorce, should be understood as social and political phenomena. The restlessness and unfulfilled desires that lie behind a divorce are manifestations of the receptive orientation that predispose people to want more and more with no prospect of achieving anything more than temporary satisfaction – the eternally expectant ones forever doomed to be the eternally disappointed ones, as Fromm put it. Alternatively, divorce, unhappiness, and isolation are the result of people needing to leave their home communities in search of work that will provide them with the financial means to satisfy their appetite for the commodities they feel are necessary to create the good life. (174)Reading it again now, I wonder how to make knowing this make a difference. How does this awareness translate into what I do in my life? This insight would have been especially useful about twenty years ago. But there must be a way to apply it now. How do I individually apply insight that by its nature is collective?
Lately I feel that I cannot take another statement which in one way or another tells me what is wrong with me or in some way conveys how irritating I am. Yesterday's flash of an argument began because Matt had put a package of uncooked chicken in the refrigerator three days before and I said it needed to be cooked right away. He said the package said it was good until May 30. I said the sell by date didn't mean it could sit in the refrigerator for eight days. I said this matter-of-factly - not yelling, but not in an overtly friendly tone, either. He argued the point and I then said I couldn't believe he wouldn't know this since he's cooked chicken for years. One of the kids asked how long it was good in the refrigerator and he said, "I guess about five minutes according to her." I said, "Why do you get mad at me for being the messenger from some part of reality?" He got madder and I said something like that again, but I was starting to cry so I walked out of there. Trying to transcribe it now, it seems trivial, and depressing in that very triviality, but that is how these arguments tend to be. In a different frame of mind, I'd be irritated but could roll with it. Not lately, though.
I've looked up the chicken info: ."Fresh or raw chicken should be selected just before checking out of the grocery store. It should feel cold to the touch when purchased. Put chicken packages in disposable plastic bags (if available) to contain any leaking juices which may cross-contaminate cooked foods or produce. Go right home after food shopping and immediately put the chicken in the refrigerator if you plan to use it within 1-2 days. If you won't be using the chicken by day 2, freeze it."
http://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/portal/fsis/topics/food-safety-education/get-answers/podcasts-archive/food-safety-at-home/CT_Index141
I will copy and paste the same information into an email to him (and to my kids who live here). I think he'll be irritated that 'I was right.' But I don't any of us want to get food-poisoning in order to prop up the ego he's invested in this issue. And I didn't want to be audited to preserve his ego or the fledgling relationship with a woman who "does accounting" (who he'd given our tax info to and who'd taken thousands of dollars in illegitimate write-offs before I ruined it all by saying the deductions were wrong).
At times over the years I've argued to Matt and others that these too are feminist issues - that the expectation that I should deliver any statements of that sort with lots of smiles and warmth is rooted in ideas about how women are supposed to communicate -with lots of deference and subservience - feminine forms of a sort of "Aw shucks" style. Matt, meanwhile, can communicate matter-of-factly or can keep raising his voice, and this is either just 'how he is' or something I've made him do.
I believe this is sexist, but then my confidence about it always bleeds out. What if I really do sound irritating? Why can't I deliver the information about how long uncooked chicken can safely be in the refrigerator in a likable way? How do I know that I'm not just using feminism to justify my side of things in these situations?
This too is a problem with oppressive social relations. They make us doubt ourselves - both the would-be oppressors and the would-be oppressed. We bounce around in limbo.
And so I am acting on what I can. This week I will finish and submit grades, thoroughly clean and organize my room (and other parts of the house), work in the garden, and stay off grains. My food is the same most days now. Salmon and green beans cooked in coconut oil for breakfast. Some coconut oil and then a grapefruit for lunch. A couple pieces of chicken with garlic and basil for dinner. When the greens growing outside get bigger, I'll eat some with the chicken. I'd prefer to be vegetarian or even vegan, but every time I try, I start to gain weight and feel lousy. And that's on basic organic food - not junk food. Also, I think I'm allergic to yeast, going by some intense reactions I've had (trouble swallowing or breathing, heart racing, dizziness).
And I already changed my light bulb in the lamp next to my bed back to an incandescent because I've had pressure in my head and shakiness for months, and in the search for a solution, I stumbled on some university studies showing that both LED light and fluorescent light can make some people have seizures. Who knows if this has anything to do with me? Who knows if it's only a placebo effect that it's gone away since I changed the bulb?
But if you talk about these things too much in the wrong circles, people think you're just a hypochondriac or narcissistic woman obsessed with herself. So I try to just unobtrusively do what I do and avoid what I feel sick on.
I'm going to look at apartment rentals for either me or Matt. Maybe it is time to just act in this as well.
9 am now, and I've been up for an hour. That late night room-cleaning and writing made me sleep till 8 instead of 6 or 7. But I want to wake up every morning by 5:30. It's overcast. My room has a door to the backyard, and it's almost always open from May through September. If we sell the house or if I move out, I will miss hearing so many birds every morning and sleeping with the door open. I'll miss hearing the water rush over the rocks in the small pond my friends Gloria and Martha (who are partners and are in every way that counts family to us) helped us dig in and set up when they visited in May 2007. I sometimes feel spoiled for having this pond where I can look at it while I sit on my bed writing (or having it anywhere in my yard). Who am I to have this pond, I think. I never grow so used to it that I don't see or hear it. I often look out at it. The birds come to it often. They take up positions on the rocks partway down the waterfall.
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