Mid-semester, Spring, Third Year Teaching College

I was tired and planned to get to sleep early tonight. But I started reading through many of my old blog posts. Now here I am, two hours later.

I always doubted the premises of this blog along with my own writing abilities. So I am a bit amazed now at the sheer volume of what I wrote, and at times, I think a particular piece or part of a piece is well done. But after I started writing for the union organizing website I created, I faded away here on this one. And then we lost, and I taught a four course semester, and somehow, the habit just faded away. Also, though, I began to wonder if I should emerge out from behind the curtain of anonymity. So I tried that, too, on another blog. Not much, though.

There is a certain honesty in using one's name, but there is an ability to be more honest at times when that full name can be left out - when you remain unsearchable online.

Maybe I will come back to this. I don't know if I'll continue the old promotions I used to - the shameless emails to friends with links to the newest posts. But how would they ever know to read this, otherwise?

How did I ever write so much? My brain feels so scrubbed out sometimes... I feel like there's not much left after I teach and do all the other work connected with that, and work through whatever pending personal finances I must, and all the various things that somehow take up my days. Also, I used to feel that I was writing to change the world. I felt such an urgency to send my words out there, to try to get them right. Now, I'm not sure. I want to believe my words can do something, even something small...

But I'll try for some basic facts for now.

Matt moved out in October 2014. Four of my kids and I live in the house, going in on expenses and work to the extent that we can.

This past fall, I taught two classes. I'm teaching just one class this semester, my class on American idealism in its various strains and incarnations, and I'm sitting in on a friend's graduate class in ethnography. I'm also taking two community education art classes with my youngest son - one in composition/drawing, the other in painting. I'm painting a picture of my best friend and me as teens.

My class is going well. The students in it seem to do the readings and they express themselves passionately, intelligently, and sometimes courageously.

I have to sleep now... I'll write more tomorrow...

Out of Silence - Into Community?

by Lucy S.

I'm a little amused by a title that suggests that I've been silent for most of this year, as if I'd been quietly meditating somewhere, hardly communicating anything to anyone. Not the case at all... It's more that I've become diffused somehow, pulled in a thousand directions, unsure of what I myself want to write anymore. Well, and then I let weeks and months slip by without writing, and soon I just lost the habit.

I'm still teaching college. I taught two classes last spring and am just finishing two for fall semester. I only have one class set for the upcoming spring semester. Living in this semester has felt good - a healthy balance of work and other parts of life. Next semester should be even easier and give me some time to try some new things.

(Granted, that means living with an income that's under $16,000 for this academic year, but I'm lucky that I can make that work. And I'm tired of thinking about my low pay for the volumes of work I do, so I'm just going to NOT think about it.)

I want to experiment with new ways to build local community. I'm going to take two community art classes with my youngest son - one is painting; one is drawing. I'm thinking about starting a very local ESL group or even a language sharing group. Whatever we do, I want a significant part of it to be here in the city and even neighborhood where we live, rather than almost always going to the bigger cities nearby, the ones we're supposed to only be suburbs of. If I resist being defined as an adjunct - an appendage - why should I keep treating the very real places we live in as appendages? I'm sick of anything that reeks of snobbery, 'coolness' in the worst sense - anything that devalues most of us living our ordinary - and really, not so ordinary, if by that we mean same old or boring - lives. Or maybe that doesn't matter, either. Whether it's cool or uncool is beside the point. What I want are deeper relationships with the people who live around me. I want to learn with them, share what I know, go to each other's homes, grow food with them, work on our own answers to various problems, create together, and find what emerges from all of that. I want to find out who I and we can become.

I'm going to try to write more regularly here again. Writing, for me, is a necessary element for continual birth, I think (the obvious metaphor invoked in this blogsite's title). And I find that I need to write for others as part of a dialogue, and at the same time, that there is a certain amount of necessary space in writing with some anonymity. It allows me to write truer. So here I am.

More than a Goodbye to a Friend

by Lucy S.

My good friend Amir is moving away. I'll see him tonight when he reads his poetry and I'll see him tomorrow when we go see a movie and eat a meal together afterward. Then we'll say goodbye until who knows when, and he'll fly away early Tuesday morning.

I can write that I hate these endings of times that will never come back - the definitive, more noticeable cut-offs that make us see what we otherwise miss when our days seem to go on as if all is staying the same when in reality, everything is always in flux - something always ending, something always beginning.  But I don't know if "hate" is the right word. I wish he could go and have all the new adventures that he will have and we could still somehow meet at least a couple times a month for our relaxed hangouts that have no purpose beyond the joy of talking and being there together.

I can say I don't hate endings because endings bring people into our lives who we'd never know otherwise.  Moving here was an ending to the life Amir had before. Going back to finish my bachelor's degree - which placed me in the class where I met Amir - was an end to the life I'd had before, even if that ending was not as stark and obvious as geographical moves are.  Still, something gets lost even as something new is gained.

I've tried to understand the truth about these endings. Marcuse wrote that "there are only islands of good where one can find refuge for a brief time" (47).  And: "Actually it is not a question of the happy end; what is decisive is the work as a whole. It preserves the remembrance of things past" (48). This is the best I can figure out right now.  In whatever ways are possible, I try to make the endings not be total - make them and what comes after them be part of "the work as a whole" - this laboring creation - this story - that is a relationship and a whole life and a whole humanity.



Marcuse, Herbert. The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward A Critique of Marxist Aesthetics. Boston: Beacon Press, 1978.

Ending a Third Semester

by Lucy S.

Last week of classes. Two days left. Then finals week - I don't give final exams, but I'll meet with students who are working on their papers and want feedback, and I'm giving them till the end of the week to turn in their papers. Then the grading begins, but I'm already grading because I'm still trying to grade essay 2 which I suppose I let them turn in far too late. Then again, it doesn't matter which ways I would have structured this semester. I'm teaching four classes at two institutions; I'm still a new teacher... and I can't do any of it well enough no matter which ways I might try.

I suppose I will try again to write here. I lost the habit somewhere; I guess I lost it when I was trying to organize a union and writing for THAT blog; and after that effort lost in the mid-summer, I couldn't find the motivation to resume this. And then the semester began. I'm overwhelmed.

I can't craft my words, and that's part of the reason I haven't bothered to write much of anything in months now, besides directions for assignments, if I even managed those. Emails, of course. The occasional minimal Facebook post.  My brain feels so scrubbed of anything beyond the mundane.

I'm teaching three combination literature / composition courses - two are the same; one is on prison literature - and I'm teaching one composition / research course at a community college. I feel like I'm doing a horrible job at the community college class. I didn't feel that for a while, but now I do. And it drains away many hopes I had about this work. And with that draining, I wonder what was the sense of any of these efforts that I made when I went back to school, and I wonder what I'm going to do at all.

So this is why I don't write much anymore lately. Our writing is supposed to be an act of communication, not a self-indulgent rant. But I don't know what to communicate and to whom. I used to feel that I had some wisdom, some skills maybe, something to contribute. And sometimes I feel that going back to school enhanced that. But sometimes I feel that going back to school drained away more than I gained in those areas. Or maybe it's just something you really must do early enough. Maybe it's not something to do past your 30s - not this kind of schooling at least.  Maybe learning to just do a specific job well would have been very different. Some medical skill.. .but I've never felt suited for anything like that. Maybe urban farming, permaculture... something I could share with many people from various walks of life.

This is the best I can do write now. Maybe I'll have something better tomorrow.

Grading

by Lucy S.

I will try to write here again. I assign my students writing, but I haven't tried to write an essay since spring of 2013. Well, I've written for the website I made to try to win a union where I teach, but that, too, has all died down for now. Maybe died is the wrong verb; I hope that's all just resting for now while I try to get through my third semester teaching college. I'm teaching four classes at two places. Today I canceled classes because last night, I couldn't get to sleep and was hit be waves of nausea, anxiety, weird-feeling heart rhythms, and was up till about 5 am. So I'm home today on my stolen day of freedom, but there are 20 papers to grade and return by Monday, and another stack of 20 to dive into after that.

I can't tell right now if I love teaching or what teaching even IS. If it's when I'm in the class with the students or meeting with them to talk about something or doing some class preparation, then yeah, I love teaching. But if it's mostly sitting alone with all these papers to grade, I hate it at times.  I don't feel remotely replenished by that work. I don't feel that I'm doing any kind of good when I do it. No matter what mood I'm in when I begin and how determined I am to just go through the papers matter-of-factly and calmly, I slip into one or another kind of despair and outrage at the way institutional education functions.

Those are the lows, and the classroom moments and various moments of humane communication are the highs. Continually moving between these makes me too be so down and up... Why am I doing any of this, anyway? That's the question I can't fend off.  And I don't know why I think that question, because I've mostly believed in throwing myself into whatever I wanted to do as long as I could figure out how to get to do it and not stopping to ask gloomy existential questions instead of just LIVING. But I have such a love / hate relationship with academia or at least my little place in and knowledge of it. This intensity seems in some ways akin to the intensity of addiction.

Addiction is on my mind in part because I'm reading Gabor Mate's book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. Writing about one of his patients on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, a brilliant but damaged, drug-addicted man, Mate says: "And in his heart he wants beauty no less than I --and, no less than I, needs love." He believes that "at the core of all addictions, there lies a spiritual void" (83). We long to bind to others, to be able to trust each other, to have others listen and care about us and the histories bound to us and yearnings we might share, and to listen well to others, to not disappoint them and ourselves by yet again failing to really connect. When we all fail one another, that void in us grows more hungry and we chase and consume what we can, not always as substitutes, but sometimes as real hope for human connection, and as Mate says, "a search for the eternal [that] extends far beyond formal religious concepts" -- that "immortal essence of existence that lives in us, through us, beyond us" (83).

I try to share at least some bit of humane communication with my students. If nothing else, I hope they leave the classes with far broader and deeper empathy and far more ability to question so much that is passed off as just how life is. I hope they resist believing that they should just accept their miseries because maybe theirs are less pronounced than someone else's, whose miseries they might likewise see only as foreign and unsolvable if they don't learn to question and think hard and connect who and what seems separate.

One day in the prison literature class, while we read about how common it is for women in prison to be raped by male guards, and how few of those guards are prosecuted when there is strong evidence for their guilt, and how of those who are found guilty, two thirds receive probation... we veered into talking about rape culture and addiction. I mentioned that a friend of mine was raped as a young child for five years by her adopted father and that she says the hardest thing is living all the rest of the years of your life with the aftermath. I said she's done well, that she's a writer and is trying to bring more attention to what too many kids and adults still suffer and the mentalities that let it go on. What are those mentalities? Seeing others as objects, as mere resources to use rather than full and equal human beings- having absolute power over others - and keeping it all quiet because it's just not a polite and positive topic?  What lets it still happen so much? I said she says she self-medicates with alcohol, and that for all I know, it's a decent coping mechanism compared to the serious drug addictions we'd read about for others carrying these traumas around. Another student said, yeah, and if marijuana was legal in all the U.S., maybe she'd be able to use that more -- something far safer than relying on alcohol for decades.  On those days, I hope that maybe the students will live as adults who remember these things and do their part to change our society.

I talk to all my students about my desire to make the class a space where we can be kind to each other. I tell them I hate grades. But then I still grade them, and maybe it hurts them even more after I say how much I hate grades -- at least those who want to write better than they do, and who see a C on the paper. Their course grades are higher because I build in many ways to get full points on other things they write or do for class. I hope to soothe their anxieties this way. But still, they face the grade on the paper and some feel hurt. One said on Wednesday when I gave back papers, "A C plus?! That's all?" I winced as I moved on.

Everything in grading feels like a lie to me. Giving them all A's would still participate in the lie. For those who really want to know what I think of their writing, the A would just patronize them. For those who only chase grades - as their schools have taught them to do, because that is what those schools really value - it would just make them bother even less with what we do, knowing that they have the A anyway. Grading a paper says that we can quantify and then commodify someone's written communication, communication that feels to them like it IS them. And isn't it part of them? If not, why do we care if they plagiarize? Why even connect their writing to them at all?

Our society is addicted to grades and other forms of assessing and adding up human beings. And now I am supposed to just accept that this is how things are and forget about any grand desires to change any of it because who am I, anyway? What do I know about teaching?  It's true -- I am unsure of myself in many ways. But then inside the humility or even pained insecurity, my anguish and anger and hope for something better still well up, and I don't quite know what to do with any of it. I can't handle it all alone.

And now I have to grade.

Early July: Unions

by Lucy S.

I never have time to write on this blog anymore. I am always working on winning a union for us now. I'm either writing for the website I started last April to help with our effort, or putting other people's posts up or - more often - emailing with people to answer their questions or get out new info or talking on the phone with people about this or meeting in person...  K (my tenured friend where I work who was my advisor on my final project for my master's there) has joked with me about all the unpaid labor I'm doing to try to earn more for my labor...

Somehow I went from emailing people one at a time in different departments asking if they'd meet me for coffee (last February and March) to us filing for our election in May and me receiving my ballot in the mail yesterday. I've never been the leader of anything before -- well, for a while I was the leader of our local homeschool group, but that was pretty minor -- not like this.  I try not to think about some aspects of that too much because I don't want to rev up my anxieties and/or let my ego get the best of me.  Mostly I try to just swim through the continual waves, responding to whatever newest communication the senior administration sends out to try to defeat our unionization efforts, answering people's questions, doing what needs to be done.  I'm always saying to one of my fellow adjuncts and organizers, "It's such an amazing experience! I've never experienced anything like this!"  I've used words like solidarity and I hopefully meant them, but this is the solidarity of really being "all in this together."  We feel bound to each other.  Our lives are permanently changed by this.

I don't know how I've managed to write posts that so many people read, including the senior administration of our university (they've referred to them when I've gone to their meetings and read their posts) - I don't know how I've done that without being overwhelmed by anxiety, as I often have been in the past. But I don't have much TIME to worry about it all.  There's always another thing to do. And how did I go on our local radio show and speak without forgetting how to speak clearly and to the point? But I got on there and found that I was more concerned with what I wanted to say than with thinking about my delivery.

The end of the semester was rough for various reasons, but I feel strong now and somehow, in the midst of all this continual transformation, I feel grounded. I'm working on what I want to be working on.

Other big changes loom this summer. My former partner is moving out at long last on August 8. He found an apartment he likes not too far from here. It even has an outdoor pool, and he said if we'd like to go over during the warm months of the year, we can (not just the kids, but even me with them). The spring was rough - after living together for so long separated, we'd both just reached a point where we could hardly stand it. Who knows why? Maybe it just started to feel as if nothing would ever change in that regard. But now this huge change is almost upon us.  And I think we'll end up as family - as we are - people who couldn't work well as partners but are linked through our lived years together and our kids. I think we'll figure out how to be friends. And maybe we needed the roughness of spring to finally propel us forward into this change.

Not to say I don't get scared about all these things at times. Now and then I think: what if the administration somehow finds a way to get rid of me? What if I can't manage all that I will have to manage in the next year? What if I can't find another class for spring? (We're only allowed to teach one in the spring where I am so I have to line up more.) What if in all this I say something really stupid or mean or full of myself? What if I already have and I don't even realize it?  Meanwhile, I try to think hard (but not so hard that it paralyzes me), keep trying, and say I'm sorry when I see that I was wrong about something. I'm always trying to gain more insight.

And I need to start focusing again on learning to be a better teacher for next year. I need to read more about ways to teach literature and ways to teach writing, and keep adjusting my syllabus. I need to figure out what I'm going to propose for next spring's class because I don't think I want to do the one I did last spring, so that means developing a new course.

And I need to start applying for work for spring at other nearby colleges. I wonder if my organizing will make them not want to hire me.  But - foolishly maybe - I mostly think I'll be fine.

And right now, it's early July. My parents arrive soon for their summer visit. The occasional hummingbird feeds on the blooming zinnias, and we're picking mulberries, raspberries, sugar snap peas, cilantro, and lettuce. Tomatoes are so slow this year with it being a cool late spring and early summer, but the garlic cloves we threw in when we planted them are keeping them healthy so far, I think. Monarch butterfly larvae rely in part on this milkweed growing here and there in the yard and bumblebees love the purple salvia spikes. I'm going to mark my "X" in the yes box and send it back to vote for the union. Life feels good, and so much seems possible in our unions.

Through the Lens of Writing Abandoned – One Re-Walk in Spring Semester

by Lucy S.

Early February. Writing True?: Chasms Between Me and My Writing

There is something about writing that sometimes gives us the idea, I think, that those words stuck down on the page reveal what their author REALLY thinks and who they REALLY are in far deeper ways than spoken conversation or observation of what a person does. Writing offers a window into a writer’s REAL psyche – into their ‘soul’ – or so we may believe.

Not true, I say – but writing ‘up against’ this idea makes things difficult for a person like me who tries to communicate via the written word, and who keeps in touch with some people in part through writing.

Mid-February. I think I know what I want to do. I was talking with my kids about it today. That conversation was the culmination of thoughts and conversations I had while in California on this last trip – and years of reading, going back to school in these recent years, other conversations, email correspondence, hands on experiences, relationships, dreams from my childhood… my whole life, really. I was surprised at the words coming out of my mouth as I sunk more deeply into the conversation. Not surprised to find that I believe these things, but surprised that I could finally articulate it all in a way that made sense to me and to them. I want to try to get it down in writing now, not to replicate it exactly, but just to explain it all again, hopefully as clearly as I was able to in that conversation.

Before I do that, I want to say one thing. When I went back to school in 2009, I used to tell Dan, my directed study professor (and friend now), that if I could only sit at a computer and type conversations back and forth with him or whoever else, I’d communicate more eloquently than I could in spoken conversation. I told him that I always felt such a chasm between my writing abilities and my speaking abilities. I’d begun to feel that it was insurmountable by then. I still struggle at times, but the last 4 ½ years in college / grad school and now this short time teaching have at least filled in some of the chasm.

I want to teach college classes (not more than two at a time, fall and spring semesters). I want to build a home, probably a straw bale home, as I’ve been wanting to for years. I want to get out of all debt if possible, or minimize it as much as I can. I want to grow so much food that it supplies us with almost all that we eat and gives us extra to share. I want to live in a way that makes us as healthy as possible, and cares for the ecosystems around us and even further away as well by living far more sustainably than we can in mainstream life right now in U.S. society. I want time for relationships. I want to put in a grey water system that filters our laundry and shower water through a series of holding ponds that progressively clean the water (using gravel, water hyacinth plants, and more), and then use that to water our gardens. I want time to write. I want a place where we can bring people we care about to visit and feel replenished and hopeful, a place where they can be healthier, more optimistic, and more willing to try so that they might decide to grow food where they are or build or paint, write, read, dance, take classes, walk more, try to make their lives more fulfilling. And not only that: start a union, or get more active in the one they’re in which may not be doing a good enough job; demand spaces to grow more food in urban areas; demand free education at all levels; demand better wages, less hours, paid vacation for all; make worker-run, worker-owned workplaces; change our energy sources to at least try to heal the massive damage done to the planet. And not only that: connect with others around the country, continent, and world to demand and create better.

These are utopian impulses. They’re utopian on multiple scales – personal, communal, regional, national, and global. They cannot all be fulfilled under a capitalist economic system.  And we have to try anyway. 

For one thing, sometimes we will succeed. When we do, we’ll have a far better quality of life than we would otherwise. We’ll help other living beings (human and otherwise) also have better lives, and they’ll help us, in that great back and forth enacted dialogue that reminds us of why we need each other so much.  These lives – our lives - matter. If they didn’t, no other lives would matter. Imagined lives in the future are just other particular lives, like each of our own. When we succeed, we provide a living example of what is possible. It’s an example other people can see and maybe experience in various ways. My old political science professor often told us about the phenomenon of rising expectations. When people in a particular group or society experience improved lives, they often keep demanding even more improvement. When this happens in a consumerist way by the already affluent, it devastates the planet and the living beings upon whose bodies these goods and services are supplied. But when it happens in more holistic ways, bound to others, grounded in an ethic of mutual care and stewardship, people’s rising expectations and demands might transform the whole system in marvelously positive ways.

There’s another reason to try. Trying can run us smack into the walls of the system’s inherent obstacles to full realization of these utopian dreams and efforts. Even when we achieve some of these goals, we or people we love can still be systemically harmed in too many ways. This is especially true if we seriously care about more than a few people. If many of those people aren’t part of the more privileged in this country or world, the odds for systemic harm go up even more. People we love may be to imprisoned; struggle with substance abuse issues; may lose their jobs and homes; work far too many hours at jobs they hate; graduate from college with massive student loan debt and no decent jobs; work for decades with no vacations, get sick from exposure to the toxins in our environment; ache to take classes or make art or help their community and be blocked by economic forces stealing their lives; be stuck in harmful relationships; suffer racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, and other prejudices or systemic attacks; be deported; suffer with depression because of their own losses or the emptiness of life under capitalist logic or the physiological effect of toxins on their own bodies and minds. 

What I’m saying is that we need the Utopian impulse (as Frederic Jameson calls it), not just as a never attempted imagined idea, but as something we try to enact. And at the same time, we need to confront the contradictions of capitalism. We need to confront the dystopia – the nightmares continually unfolding and worsening.

***

Late February.  On a personal as well as scholarly level, at times, I think I’ll never really belong in academia. Maybe I’ll never be deeply accepted by other professors there who can’t understand my experience and frame it inside their own. At times, I want to emphasize to them: I AM NOT YOU.  You haven’t lived my life. You haven’t raised five kids, homeschooled them, lived in the situations we lived in. And I haven’t lived your life.  But then I find myself wanting to insist: I AM YOU. I too love these studies, and I too feel the insecurities of what’s being done to higher education, and I too am a human being who wants friends, who wants some sense of abiding, genuine community in these endeavors. Regardless of to whatever extents ‘I am not them’ and ‘I am them,’ I can’t say I have it worse. I know that too many find themselves struggling on low incomes and/or in tenuous jobs, afraid that they can’t ever forge long-term partner relationships, buy homes, settle somewhere, or have kids if they want them. And even if I have it worse than some, what is there to be done with that? It’s not a basis for relationship. I don’t want pity; I want friendship. And with friendship comes compassion, trust, and some sense of equality. I go around in my head about these thoughts at times.

***

March 1. I don’t regret going back to school. Or sometimes I do, but that’s a passing feeling. I don’t regret it in any lasting sense.

But what I’ve done has been hard on me at times. I was one kind of person, and then I became a different kind of person. Not entirely; I always loved these endeavors. But so much in my life changed.

It’s hard to explain to people how you can be just throbbing with gratitude – overjoyed, excited and interested for each day – but sometimes also in pain because you feel so out of place, and you miss the life you had before – the people you don’t talk with often enough anymore, the small rituals, the open time.

***

Early March. I remember my mom first growing tomato plants in Lancaster, in the Mojave Desert, spraying onion juice (onions thrown in our blender) on them to repel big, voracious tomato worms that could devour a plant in no time. I remember her growing tomatoes, zucchini, and bell peppers in the backyard in Poway, near San Diego, after they moved there. It was only a small taste of what could be, but it made me realize that to do something, you have to jump in and do it. You learn as you go. I saw her tackle big project step by step, such as restuccoing the back of the house in Poway when it needed it. She’d mix up a small amount in empty yogurt container and go out every morning for 15 to 20 minutes, applying it, until she finally finished. When I was staying there, she’d say, “Come out and talk to me while I put this on.”  My mom taught me that people can take on many projects if they see themselves as capable, research how to do it, and work carefully at it. 

My mom taught me that we have choices, and my dad taught me that we don’t have nearly enough of the most important choices. Both lessons are vital.  They emerge from their differing realities and histories. 

***

Mid-March. I dread doing the taxes. Tax, taxes, taxed, taxing. taxiing

***

Late March. For these four and a half years since I went back to school, I’ve been asking myself what the significance is of my academic efforts. At times, I’ve so badly wanted someone else to provide that answer in such a convincing way that it’d work like a religious conversion on me. I’d walk forward mesmerized to the altar of Strong Personhood, washed clean of all doubt. The rest of my days would be a living testimony to why education for everyone matters. This probably sounds like self-absorption and delusions of grandeur, but that is in part because I’ve been battling the flip side of all that – the fear that it was too late, and I can never be the kind of college teacher (or scholar or writer) that I should be to do this work, and that on every front, it was a terrible decision. And although I’m not constitutionally all that prone to the ping-pong of mania and depression (okay, maybe a little, but never in a disabling way – and isn’t this just what it is to be alive?) – these extremes in connection with my academic experience manifest, I think, as something that sounds somewhat like manic-depression (or bi-polar – but honestly, I hate that term, and I’m deeply skeptical about the pathologizing of so much of human experience – all to be remedied with profitable pharmaceutical products).  Where was I?

(French feminist scholar Helene Cixious has said that this is how women talk – in a circular manner.  My mom would vehemently disagree, and my sons would say, “Who says it’s only women?” because they do that, too. I learned about Cixious my first semester back in college in 2009.)

***

Early April. I think the mix of fluctuating anguish, desperation, anxiety, resignation, awkwardness, self-pity, anger, humor, pain over real and perceived exclusions, resilience, somewhat euphoric ups (with all my new plans at various times) – I think all this comes from craving intellectual engagement, camaraderie, and challenge, and at the same time, from the deep connections I feel to the people I've been bound to during my life - and separations from both (the intellectual growth and participation as well as some of my relationships). Some of this makes me think of Virginia Woolf writing that if Shakespeare had had a sister with similar talents and aspirations, she'd have ended up killing herself. Woolf of course genderizes it - and it is grounded in gender, because of the ways even this society functions - but at the same time, it's not. I believe it has to do with people who yearn so badly to do something, to create, to engage with others who UNDERSTAND and feel similarly, but not in a way that leaves loved ones behind and leaves them with their own pain because of their stamped out yearnings and their own awareness of their intelligence. 

***

Mid-April. This morning I woke up thinking that Matt cannot even access most of me and I likewise cannot access most of him.  By this I mean that he cannot access the person I am in my interactions with all other people. I’m different ways with all of them, of course, but nonetheless, I cannot be almost any of those ways with him. And I cannot access who he is as he interacts with a multitude of people. When I say that we live in the same house but are permanently separated from each other, this is true on many levels.

Living like this for so long can make you dislike yourself, or at least what you sometimes fear as “the real you.” You cannot help blurring into the other person’s perspective at times – empathizing with it, imagining how that person experiences you – and figuring out or at least thinking that you know what is unlikeable in yourself.

We both experience that with each other. Knowing we have that effect – eating away at the other person’s sense of self-esteem – deepens the damage to each of our feelings about ourselves. We know that our effect on at least this other person is negative. This is a terrible thing to have in common. Maybe it is possible to become friends someday when we don’t live in the same house. We both forgive quite easily, and that is a better thing to have in common.

***

Late-Mid-April. I’m trying to help us adjuncts where I teach unionize. I’m continually emailing somebody back or initiating emails to one or several adjuncts, urging people to join us at the next meeting or begging people to tell us when they can make it so we can schedule a good time for the next one. For going on three months, I’ve been meeting other adjuncts individually, going out with the organizers to approach adjuncts after their classes, wracking my brain to think of ways to strengthen our chances. I figured out how to get a website up. I wanted the site so adjuncts could take courage from seeing people sign the solidarity page and from seeing posts, interviews, and resource lists gradually added. Many fear that if the administration decides we won’t back down, they’ll figure out some way to eliminate our positions, even if they aren’t legally allowed to retaliate for organizing.

I don’t know if we’re going to have enough cards signed by the end of the semester to initiate an election for fall, but we’re trying.

I want this union because it is the only way forward I can see for us as a group.  and for many of our academic disciplines to survive. And I want it because I’ve been waiting for over four years to fight effectively for this cause. At my undergraduate university, I came to understand the situation contingent faculty were in because I studied under several during those last three semesters after I went back to finish the B.A.  I can’t say that I went into teaching in order to fight for this cause, but I can’t quite disentangle that motivation from my others.

 ***

Late April. We all “believe” in capitalism because we all enact it. We live it. As Pascal says, kneel down, put your hands together and pray, and you will believe. Belief is a habit more than it is a disinterested act of reasoning. We believe what we DO. As long as we keeping DOING capitalism, we will believe in it. The problem is that we don’t know how to survive if we stop ‘doing’ it when we live in a society where everyone else is ‘doing’ it. How do we all stop believing at once and start doing something different? How do we get beyond its logic? Why is it that no matter what we say to critique it, our critique stops where our bank account and wallet begin? We talk about ‘boundaries’ and ‘needing our space’ as if this lingo from capitalist psychology would provide insight on how to proceed. What do WE who are so colonized by capitalist ideology know about healthy versus unhealthy boundaries? Why did we not put up boundaries to keep capitalism from infiltrating our relationships with each other? Weren’t those the ‘boundaries’ we REALLY needed? Which ‘spaces’ do we really need? How about space to create, to share with people, to grow food, to teach and learn, to drink clean water, to not have everything turned into a product to be sold to or by me? I need THAT space. Where is it? How about space where I don’t have to feel the precariousness of my own and other people’s situations all the time? Where is THAT kind of ‘safe space’? Space to LIVE while we’re alive. Why must we live with fear chewing at our edges or core so often? Or why is the only antidote to that fear a sick acquiescence in some way – many ways, really – with devastation of other lives and our own – and of our whole planet?  But the fear remains; we know that when we stop acquiescing, our precariousness instantly seeps back in through the brittle protective shell of that cracked and broken acquiescence.

end

noun:
1.the last part or extremity, lengthwise, of anything that is longer than it is 

wide or broad: the end of a street; the end of a rope.

2.a point, line, or limitation that indicates the full extent, degree, etc., of 

something; limit; bounds:kindness without end; to walk from end to end of a 

city.

3.a part or place at or adjacent to an extremity: at the end of the table; the west end of town.

4.the furthermost imaginable place or point: an island at the very end of the 

world.

5.termination; conclusion: The journey was coming to an end.

We are in the end of the semester. At fourteen weeks long, not counting spring break or finals week, it feels longer than it is wide or broad.

What is the connection between “end” as an edge, “end” as an aim or purpose, and “end” as a conclusion?

***

May 1. May Day (May Day, May Day?)

Mayday is an emergency code word used internationally as a distress signal invoice procedure radio communications. It derives from the French venez m'aider, meaning 'come help me' https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Mayday_(distress_signal).html

Seelonce Mayday or Seelonce Distress means that the channel may only be used by the vessel in distress and the coastguard (and any other vessels they ask for assistance in handling the emergency). The channel may not be used for normal working traffic until 'seelonce feenee' is broadcast. (Wikipedia)

Most Americans don't realize that May Day has its origins here in this country and is as "American" as baseball and apple pie, and stemmed from the pre-Christian holiday of Beltane, a celebration of rebirth and fertility.

In the late nineteenth century, the working class was in constant struggle to gain the 8-hour work day. Working conditions were severe and it was quite common to work 10 to 16 hour days in unsafe conditions. Death and injury were commonplace at many work places and inspired such books as Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and Jack London's The Iron Heel. As early as the 1860's, working people agitated to shorten the workday without a cut in pay, but it wasn't until the late 1880's that organized labor was able to garner enough strength to declare the 8-hour workday. This proclamation was without consent of employers, yet demanded by many of the working class. http://www.iww.org/history/library/misc/origins_of_mayday

Solid, singular May Day – once – a demand, a stand.

The repeating May Day, May Day, May Day – the call for help.

Just when you think things are getting better, they may suddenly take a turn for the worse.

 ***

Mid-May. I have almost made it through the second semester teaching. Friday we meet again for the last time – I may even bring food, since my class meets during lunch time – and then I meet with students individually to try to help them with papers – and then I grade and submit the final grades on May 31.

During this semester, I taught a course I designed for the first time, a literature / composition course in American Idealism. I worked to help get a union off the ground for those of us who are adjunct instructors. I and my family lost our dog who lived with us for 15 years. I think I also lost a friendship.

At 11:30 this morning after I’d finished meeting with a student

Second to the Last Week

Take Yourself Seriously

Word Failures

What can you do when you find that the more you say, the less you manage to convey? 

I think that my deepest religion has been language. My core faith has been in words.  Enough of the right (truest) words might change everything for the better. And the wrong (false) words can land you in purgatory or hell.

Talking back always got me into trouble. But the worst impulse – the one that went beyond defending myself (which I felt proud of) to using words to hurt another (which made me so ashamed) – that one always got me into trouble with myself.

 ***

Late May. There are people in our lives who play such key roles – our parents, grandparents, kids, a small number of close friends, our partner, siblings, and sometimes others. And of course to have a humane relationship, we must engage with them beyond the idea of a role; we want to relate as specific people to each other. Yet still, if something goes wrong in those relationships, it's devastating because whole parts of our lives and ourselves have fused to those people.

We filed for a union election. We made it this far at least.

***

End of May. I have to submit the grades. One of my favorite students – irritatingly self-centered at times, too sulky, lazy at times, but a brilliant writer – never sent her last essay. I kept emailing. She would not respond. Her points add up to a D. I think of everything I might have done differently in the past four weeks. I might have saved her. Or do we never save anyone? I think we save one another all the time, or we fall short of it. I hope she is okay. I don’t know if I will keep teaching after this. Everything is too much.

May 31. To share with my students next fall: Close-reading can be a profoundly ethical practice that changes how we interact with others beyond the text.

“The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.” Thich Nhat Hanh

We pay money to counselors just so they will sit and listen carefully to us and respond from that place of careful attention. What would happen if we brought that deep attention to more of our interactions with one another?