May 6, 2019 · 11:54 pm

Quick update and some shameless self-promotion

 

Yes, let’s start with the self-promotion: I am trying to make myself be a more self-promoting and proactive writer, so I now have a Medium page. So far it’s only old content (some of which some of you will have already seen!) but the plan is to write new stuff too. On various topics. Mostly classics. Probably also some ballet and some imposter syndrome stuff eventually. I think it’s all free right now, but I’m still learning to navigate Medium.

(Link a little farther down, towards the end of the post; no need to sell myself out for no work on your part…)

We are fine. The less said about everything professional the better, if I’m going to be linking this blog to my IRL identity… all my colleagues and schools and department chairs are perfect and ideal! Academia is awesome and not at all soul-killing! I am completely fulfilled and ego-satisfied with my current employment situation and deeply pleased with my scholarly output!

Well, I can honestly say this at least: my students continue to be amazing, creative, empathetic, talented, invested, genuine young people.

A brief personal update: we are still smarting deeply from the devastating loss of Our Oscar in November, but we have also welcomed a new cat, who is a delight. It was sooner than I was ready for, to be honest, but Stanley was becoming insufferable in his loneliness and ennui, so in February we brought home a little tuxedo cat. He was small and strange and sweet, and Stanley adored him, and he liked Stanley too, and I did not love him, because he was not Our Oscar.

Reader, I have come to love him, in spite of myself. He is terribly dear to us now, is our little kitty Ernesto.

Anyway, I’ve taken up enough of your time for someone who can’t be bothered to show up more than once every six months. My Medium page is here, and if you like what you see, please fan it, pass it on, share it around, whatever you’re moved to do – I expect the whole teaching situation to fall apart in the coming years because academe is falling apart, so I’m trying to prepare the way for coasting into old age on the written word.

LOL. I guess I’ll close on the old saw that everything is terrible ALL THE TIME, and that the Gin and Tacos 2018 shirt was NONE OF THIS IS OKAY, which is also true, and that G&T is not currently employed, because academe is fucked, and see above re: everything and terribleness.

Isn’t it fun to see cheerful old TDP again for a minute.

Also, we finally stopped having an all-white kitchen and went full on the other way and I love it so much:

lolol we’re never selling this house who the fuck would buy this gorgeous cacophony.

But in seriousness:

It’s hard out there, beloveds. Be kind.

 

6 Comments

Filed under goals, identity, job, musings, teaching, varia, writing

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

December 1, 2018 · 11:37 pm

Catharsis

I wasn’t going to do this post for reasons I’ll explain later, but I decided it might be cathartic and helpful for me, and I need some catharsis and help very much at this moment.

My friends, Our Oscar has died.

I started that Instagram [Oscargram] account because I thought it might help me grieve, remembering him in detail, and also because it was a way to go through all my Oscar pictures (I have over 2000, y’all – he was so fucking cute and perfect). I don’t know that it’s helping with the former, because I remain devastated and deeply offended, but it is at least doing the latter, and that will be useful when we sit down to make the memory book we are going to make of him, because we want a concrete record of his life with us.

He had hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which is a common heart condition in cats, and is like a time-bomb in their little bodies – at some point, probably suddenly, it *will* go off, and it is almost always fatal when it does. (And, incidentally, I am using posts from the Oscargram because I don’t have a premium account anymore so can’t upload new pictures – I’ve used all the free account space – and anyway it’s easier than sorting through all the ones I already have up.)

So on Sunday November 18, the husband came to get me around 9:30 saying that something was wrong with Oscar. As soon as I saw him it was obvious that it was extremely serious – he was gasping and heaving and not walking well, and simultaneously he was trying to run and hide in panic. While I was getting dressed he lost control of his bowels.

The emergency room vet was very kind but very clear. She showed us the x-rays and explained the situation: he had gone into heart failure, and lost most of the use of his right front leg due to an embolism. Her expectation was that there would be more cardiac events and embolisms in the very near future, and that his condition would worsen quickly. She suggested that we send him to the main hospital for cardiac evaluation, which we agreed to. And we left him there, and we went home without him, and we never had him at home again.

On Monday afternoon, the husband spoke to the cardiac doctor. Her assessment matched the original doctor’s pretty much exactly, and she clarified that she did not think he was stable enough to come home that day, and probably never would be. She said he had a very bad prognosis and was not in good shape. She said he had lost control of his right front leg entirely and was having small embolisms in his other legs, and she predicted he would lose control of them in the next day or two. She also thought he might have some nerve or brain damage from the several strokes he had had, and that he might have lost his vision.

We decided that euthanasia was the best option.

The drive to the hospital took about 45 minutes, and wasn’t as difficult as I expected. Which is to say: I managed to drive without sobbing, though I hated how it kept bringing us closer to his end. I was re-reading posts about Moose’s death earlier to see if it felt this bad (it did, but not for as long – I had prepared for that death for so many months, even years) and I had argued then that the anticipation of grief was worse than the grief itself. I am a hard disagree on that opinion now. The anticipation was bad, but the grief is relentless and brutal.

We expected him to be in pitiful shape, but actually he was so completely himself – he even did his little twisty roll when he saw us. He couldn’t walk well and wouldn’t submit to being held (typically he liked being held) but otherwise he seemed fine. He watched this German Shepherd with the familiar dog-watching face he always had when the neighbor’s dog came out. He purred and rolled and slow-blinked at us. I wanted so badly to take him home.

But yet another vet shared her opinion with us, and, while none of the vets recommended euthanasia (I don’t think it would be right to *recommend* it, really), all three of them were very clear that the remainder of his life would be very short and likely very painful.

They gave us some time with him in the exam room, and then the vet came and did her job, commenting several times on how handsome he was. He was so handsome. I told her that he was most beloved, because somehow it was important to me that she know how beloved he was. He was so sweet even in his death. His little prehensile tail was wrapped around my fingers like always until it went limp. The first injection puts them to sleep, the second stops their heart. His stupid, poisonous, murderous, perfectly pure heart.

So Our Oscar is dead. Has been dead two weeks now. I am not less sad or resentful or shocked or horrified for the passage of those two weeks. He was perfect in every way. I am biased, of course, but I have never met a more perfect cat. He had such imagination! Did I ever tell you how he loved to play hide and seek? How he luxuriated in being looked at? How he would roll over and kick his little chin when he wanted attention?

And poor dear old Stanley is, as the husband said last night, now a cat without a purpose. Our Mr. Stanley Bull Squinkles III is also beloved, of course, but he is not an imaginative cat, and he seems bored and inactive now.

IMG_2125

(The Oscargram is easier, but it’s also roughly chronological, so I only have old pictures up so far, and I wanted to see more recent ones, so went into the WP archives.)

IMG_9223

I loved the idea of there being some people in the world – you, dear readers – who still believed Oscar was in the world, wilding and rejoicing as he always did, but I’m not doing so well with holding this grief by myself. I mean, the husband is helping, obviously – he too is bereft, and he has never really lost a pet before, so it is a new and strange grief to him – but sometimes my sadness about Oscar’s absence is an ocean and I am drowning in it. So now you have this grief too, and you too honor his memory, the memory of my most dearly beloved sweet silly little dog. He was only 5.

IMG_0064

We got a Christmas tree today, and it felt bitter to be going on with ordinary life. But that is what we do: we go on with ordinary life in the face of every kind of terror, and the violence of little Oscar’s sudden death is a small violence in the grand scheme of things. But it is very bitter.

IMG_4837

I find I do not feel any better at all for having written this, but perhaps tomorrow I will feel a little better. There will be other cats of course – we are already in talks of looking for a bonded pair to adopt after the spring semester ends – but there will never be another Oscar. He was special. I adored my Moose, of course, but Oscar was on a whole different level.

img_4434

He was a joy, always. He enjoyed everything, always, and made everyone joyful. He was a joy.

8 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as

August 7, 2018 · 2:03 am

Well!

I wasn’t really planning to do a post tonight at all, but then I was trying to deal with this notification that I need to renew or cancel this WP plan soon, and I haven’t decided which one I’ll do, and they make it difficult to do anything that involves spending *less* money easily, so I just got frustrated and cancelled everything, starting the end of the month.

So, just in case I end up *really* canceling it and saying a permanent farewell to this site, here’s a thing:

de Anda is a TX immigration lawyer who will take your notes and drawings and cards and art supplies for the detained kids and their parents. Fucking do this, y’all. Let those brave migrants know we want them here. Show them what America is really about.

We are getting ready for the new term here, and holding steady in this new life, one-year-and-change in. This fall I will be teaching Greek, Latin, and race in antiquity at my two schools, for very little money, with no benefits (thank god for the ACA), with excellent colleagues, brilliant students, and magnificent rewards. Everything is compromise. The husband’s law practice is really taking hits, hard [sidebar: fucking fuck you to fucking hell, 45’s admin], but we’re hanging in.

(Seriously, fuck ICE and this whole current moment’s attitude to immigration, it’s a fucking nightmare.) #AsylumIsNotIllegal

Oh – and I have a piece accepted at a wholly respectable legit posh magazine! It’s on the legacy of white supremacy in classics. It’s due the end of the month, but they’ve already said they’ll pay me for it (not much – $100 – but that’s not bad for my first-ever pitch to a literary news type mag!) (It’s the LA Review of Books, you guys). I’m planning to send it to a few of you in my joy and pride, if/when it finally comes out, but you can always email me if you want to see it.

Also I have a handbag full of new rejections from other literary journals. So it goes.

This summer I have been to Texas, which was beautiful and terrible, and to Scotland, which was the same, with far more fascinating accents. They weren’t lying about Glaswegian being wildly incomprehensible and musical and gorgeous! The world is so rich and glorious and difficult.

And we did our annual performance. You can find the video of the piece I’m in (I only did pointe this year, not ballet) if you google ‘Philly dance fitness barre pointe’, but I don’t feel like linking it. Still, I am proud of us:

We did good.

Oh, darlings. It’s still such a dark and ugly moment. More painful than I think many outside of this context really grasp. Sadder.

Crushing, really.

But it’s what we’re fucking doing.

So, as always, we fucking do this.

7 Comments

Filed under ballet, culture, teaching, writing

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

July 6, 2018 · 12:50 am

Dispatch from occupied territory

Today was the first time in a long… long, long, long time that I have felt real optimism about the world.

Not hope, exactly, to be clear – I’m still fairly certain we’re going to lose to the oligarchs / White Men (TM) for a good while longer yet, and everything is going to get worse before it gets better, which it will again at some point, simply by the law of averages. So maybe some hope, but a very small amount. Like, truly minuscule, for the near term.

But today I felt joy for humanity.

This fucking fearless queen is 90% of the reason why:

https://twitter.com/papermagazine/status/1015055240092057601

(You’ll probably have to click through to the video, and I highly recommend that you do – Okoumou is just the best and bravest of us.)

Therese Okoumou, in case you haven’t heard yet, is an immigrant from the DRC who has been here ~25 years, and is 44 years old. So she came here as an adult, meaning she had to actively *learn* how to be American. And she clearly studied hard, because she nailed it.

I mean. I’m scared to talk to my next door neighbor, and this woman is all: you’re cracking down on brown immigrants? Okay, I’ll see you that and raise you one sit-in on the Statue of Fucking Liberty.

And she wore a ‘White Supremacy is Terrorism’ shirt to her televised press conference.

Therese Okoumou gave me life today, and I am truly not exaggerating. This woman is breathtakingly brave. We’re in a dark fucking time, and, as unbelievably cute as Oscar is…

This is not a great moment, is all I’m saying.

So all respect and glorification to Okoumou. To my knowledge, she was released after her hearing today, and is doing okay and going about her life like one of us ‘normal’ people.

Meanwhile, this admin has literally started a task force to hunt down naturalized immigrants and denaturalize them.

(The part of me that is married to an immigration lawyer feels obliged to say: this is not a new thing. This option has always been on the books. What IS new is the gleeful joy with which this option is pursued. Keep an eye on it. It’s unlikely to go anywhere good.)

Then there’s Pruitt’s resignation, of course. The whole Pruitt chapter has just been bizarre. I think we’re going to have to wait for the sequel to understand that one.

And no, the replacement is not going to be any better, but jfc he can’t possibly be worse.

(She says, and then instantly panics, because 2018.)

The baby jails are not a good look, and I was pleased at how many people turned out last weekend in response to that issue.

6/30 Saturday Families Belong Together rally/march/thing

But we’ve been having a very bad run. Kennedy’s retirement in particular is a gut-punch.

But fuck it. It’s not like shit has been great *with* Kennedy.

This isn’t ending sounding as positive as I hoped it would. We’re in a dark place, people. GOP controls everything. Dems literally cannot block a Supreme Court appointment right now. Dems still haven’t come close to matching R’s for emotional rhetoric and talking points.

I’m not going to link it, because fuck everything, but we’re now actively denaturalizing citizens, and decommissioning=deporting soldiers who signed up to fight for us in exchange for citizenship, and separating families as policy, and I’m not looking for links because fuck everything and you can look for links yourself if you doubt me, google is still free.

I saw a thing earlier about how Amnesty International is sponsoring letter-writing campaigns to the kids in baby jail. This is another big part of why I don’t hate everything today. I am looking into whether anyone can get letters to detained mothers who have had their children taken from them, since that’s now an awesome thing we’re doing.

No progress yet. I’ll absolutely post if I come across anything, I know many of you would sign up to write to those mothers.

Sidebar: postcardstovoters is a group that is really helping me right me. They give me something to do with my angst and anguish that isn’t all that expensive. I highly recommend them.

Everything is terrible all the time.

But holy fuck, some people are so fucking brave.

I went up there for an hour or so today, and sat and read and worked and avoided conversation, while the activists stood up to ICE and the Philly police and what-not and so forth.

I really just witness and record, and that only grudgingly.

But I make myself a body on what I think is the right side of history, sometimes, when I can. What I hope is the right side of history.

Fuck. We’re at a dark place.

 

 

2 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

January 23, 2018 · 11:32 pm

The future that liberals want

The husband was up in New York today for an asylum hearing with a client.

(Most immigration law doesn’t happen in front of a judge, never mind a jury – typically you’re just with a USCIS (US Customs and… Immigration Services, or something?) asylum officer, who may or may not know the law well and may or may not believe immigrants are valuable members of American society. It’s not great.)

The husband’s client is a Syrian Christian family: they came over to the US 3 years ago. Guy was a doctor in Syria and has two young children (5 and 7 or something, both girls – both of whom were asked, during the interview, if they’d ever seen or shot a gun, because that’s a reasonable and normal thing to ask a kid who was 2 last time she was in Syria and is PROBABLY A TERRORIST) and a wife. Since coming here, husband has worked at Rite Aid and for Uber, and – mysteriously! – sells things on Etsy.

(Lawyers can’t talk during the interview, they are just present, if the client wants, kind of for moral support and to make sure the asylum officer doesn’t do anything underhanded. The asylum officer didn’t ask about this man’s crafts, and the husband didn’t want to bring it up later, so we’ll never find out what this Syrian doctor’s particular craft might be, alas.)

Their case doesn’t look great, because they’re Christian, which means their claim to asylum kind of depended on ISIS, because those shitheads were killing Christians with something approaching a fervor. But now the government has largely taken back control of Syria, so it’s less clear that this guy and his family have personal, specific reasons to be afraid for their lives, and asylum law here means it has to be personal and specific. It’s not enough that your country is a… what shall we call it… shithole? (ugh) You have to be a target yourself for some reason. And being Christian only makes you that if ISIS is in charge, not under Assad. So it’s kind of a craps shoot, and basically depends on the asylum officer’s mood or whatever. Which, awesome.

from Eleanor Dickey’s newish (and predictably brilliant) Greek prose comp book, or: in which Dickey casually makes corrections to THE Greek grammar

(Side note: CHAIN MIGRATION IS NOT A THING. Please tell this to anyone you hear using the phrase. THERE IS NO SUCH THING. What there is is something called FAMILY REUNIFICATION, which means that family members who have status here can sponsor certain family members to come over (close ones, like parents, siblings, spouses, children and so on, and I think it’s a limited number, and it’s a long and complicated process full of SO MUCH red tape and bearocracy burocracy bureaucracy) (I really struggle with that word, every time) so that the family can BE TOGETHER again. I don’t know why the Democrats are so shit at messaging, why they’re not constantly screaming about how the party of ‘family values’ is against FAMILY REUNIFICATION, it’s such an easy and emotionally compelling talking point. But no one asked me.)

Anyway, all of that is neither here nor there. The point is, after the hearing, because the family lives in Phila (actually very near us, though the husband hasn’t told them that, obviously), they offered to take the husband to dinner in New Jersey and then drive him home. So apparently they had amazing Syrian food in Paterson (and the husband learned that, in this family’s opinion at least, there is no excellent Syrian food in Phila, alas). The husband is very (weirdly) (like, I’m legit jealous of it) good with kids, so he got the girls to relax around him at dinner, and they were gregarious and playful for the whole ride home.

They are native Arabic speakers, obviously, these girls, but came over here young enough that they are also essentially native English speakers. And, because they go to a Catholic school in South Phila, they also study Italian, so they were switching effortlessly between Arabic and English and singing songs and teasing each other in Italian.

So while that’s going on in the back seat, the husband and the former doctor are chatting, and the doctor is really curious about America, because he’s so beautifully eager to fit in and understand things here. He asked the husband to explain the difference between ‘diner’ and ‘restaurant’, for instance, which is surprisingly nuanced and complex.

And of course, since the Iggles just clinched the super bowl or something, they talked football. The doctor said he wanted to understand it, so he and his wife had researched some of the rules, and watched some games on TV, and they thought it was kind of interesting. The husband asked if they had gone out to Broad Street Sunday night to celebrate (this if Phila: obviously there were wild parties in the street all over the city after Sunday’s game – the cops literally greased street poles all over the city to attempt to limit pole climbing – note that I said limit, because it still happened, but less than would have happened otherwise).

They had! This Syrian family who doesn’t get football and doesn’t speak great English (the parents, anyway) went out to participate in a mass street party of drunk, overexcited Eagles fans, because they’re super committed to becoming American. And they fucking loved it.

And of course not everything is perfect – the doctor isn’t super into the Kurds, for instance (though he also doesn’t think they need to be slaughtered, which has been the theory put forward by many other groups in the last few centuries), but, yeah. That’s the future that liberals want: immigrants who both love their native culture and heritage and homeland and are thrilled at the idea of becoming American, are trying to learn the most minute and nuanced details of our culture so they can be part of this experiment. Trilingual kids who will – well, who might – grow up in America while firmly rooted in their Syrian heritage, while also learning about and absorbing the cultural legacies of other waves of immigrants.

That’s the dream. That, by my reading, is the whole fucking point. I’m beginning to think that not everyone agrees with me on that…

seen at Phila women’s march, 2018

Anyway, all is well. The class on ancient religion is fucking fun. They ask the greatest questions. They laugh at my dumb jokes. The woman I’m co-teaching with is hilarious  and very easy to work with. This department is super friendly and welcoming, and I’m going to make more of an effort to be social in my old department (the classics one, not the writing one, obviously) this term. My Latin class has 8, 3 from my previous class – the others are a little reticent, I think intimidated by the confidence my 3 show, though it’s mainly a result of being comfortable with me. My Greek class technically has 3, though only two have been there for the last two classes (I need to email the missing guy). Their Greek is fine, basically where it should be for 4th semester, but I’m very anxious about myself and doubting myself a lot, second-guessing myself on everything. I did that in Latin last semester too, and I can already feel everything coming back – recognizing forms, explaining points of grammar or morphology or whatever. Prepping for next Thursday’s class took about a third of the time it took to prep for last Thursday’s class, so I’m hopeful that I’ll feel as confident in Greek as I do in Latin with another week or two (or three – Greek is fucked and basically lawless and cares not at all for your ‘systems’) of classes.

Friends, I can’t tell you what fun it is to be giving my working life to a subject I love and find endlessly fascinating.

Also, did you hear that Mueller interviewed Sessions last week? Interesting. Sessions basically had two choices: say what he said to Congress, and thus lie to the FBI, which is a felony; or tell the truth to the FBI and thus ‘fess up to lying to Congress, which is, I believe, also a felony.

I mean, would be a felony if anything mattered, which it doesn’t, but I enjoy the idea of Sessions knowing what could  happen to him, and worrying that it might.

It’s the best I can get these days. I’ll take it.

Also, I wouldn’t mind seeing more trilingual and multicultural kids whose parents are super into learning how to be American around. Like, say, the Dreamers. Just as a for instance.

(The next vote is supposed to be February 8. Hold your people’s feet to the fire. Make them hold the line and step up for Dreamers, y’all.)

That is definitely the future that I want.

Oh: sidenote – my mentor and friend Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey has recently come out – the first translation by a woman (and I got to help her with the intro, and even get a little shout-out in the acknowledgements!). It is fuck off good. If you’ve never read the Odyssey or want to revisit it or want to introduce someone to it, this is the one to go to.

Here’s her proem:

Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
and where he went, and who he met, the pain
he suffered in the storms at sea, and how
he worked to save his life and bring his men
back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools,
they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god
kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus,
tell the old story for our modern times.
Find the beginning.

Holy Shit Yes.

celebrating the 42nd birthday with Russian stout and Greek grammar

9 Comments

Filed under ancient greece, around Phila, goals, identity, odyssey, pictures, politics, teaching

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

December 7, 2017 · 12:47 am

Mostly some pictures

Last night we were idly watching Colbert while also doing whatever, and Billy Bush was on, and they played THE TAPE again of that infamous moment, and I lost my shit a little bit. I started crying, and yell-talked at the husband about how I’ve been living with this impotent but all-consuming rage for over a year now, and it keeps getting worse because it keeps burning itself up without setting anything else on fire.

If I have to hear one more story about what was done to her —

I have been joking with the husband for a year now that I am the Hulk, because I look calm but my secret is that I am angry all the time.

I’m not kidding, of course. Which is the problem. Not my problem, you understand. The problem. My feelings have been boiling over for coming up on 400 days, and I am tired.

But next week is the last week of the semester, and in the spring I will teach Latin poetry, Greek prose, and a rather mysterious class (team-taught with a woman undergoing chemo, which I am very anxious about – I don’t work well with others under the best of circumstances, and this is not that) on sacred spaces in antiquity.

We’ll make it work.

I finished my sea quilt for my friend. The map in the middle is of the Cretto in Sicily; it’s abstract and imperfect, but I’m reasonably happy with it.

My Shakespeare in film classes have been brilliant. Terrible writers, to generalize… great ideas, not such a great grasp of complete sentences. But I have years of experience teaching writing, and I think I did a good job slipping writing instruction into this gen ed class.

(Perhaps one of my proudest moments as a teacher: last week, during peer review on their second paper, I overheard one student say to another: I like what you’re doing here, I think it’s a really interesting reading, and maybe you can do some New Historicist analysis to bring it all together.)

(Not because I give a shit that they can name New Historicism as a theory – I don’t even know if it’s still a theory that anyone uses by name – but because they were talking very comfortably and naturally about how theory shapes interpretation, which is so much more important than simply memorizing and cataloging various theories.)

My Latin class has been even brillianter, if that’s possible (and probably only because it’s tiny, and thus very intimate), and they did presentations today where each one got up and taught a couple of sentences of Livy, walking the class through and asking people to engage with new passages, and they were fucking game. I could see my teaching methods and habits in what they did, and felt good about it: they were more interested in curiosity and unconfident attempts than in being right or knowing everything. They supported each other and offered ideas and suggestions when the class got stuck on difficult grammar or syntax. They were, ultimately, comfortable with the fact that there isn’t always a clear-cut Right or Wrong answer. Life is nuance and complexity.

Is that what I’m supposed to be teaching them?

I kind of think so? Maybe?

Or anyway it isn’t a disservice?

the back of the quilt is standard, but I enjoy the convention of the sample strip

(I decided to add the border after I had finished everything else, which is why the sample strip doesn’t reach the edge, but everything is compromise, darlings.)

I can’t decide if I think we’re doing better or worse than I expected. As a nation, I mean. The husband, weirdly optimistic for once, sees the past year as a triumph of failure: the administration has gotten nothing substantial done. Nothing permanent. Nothing unchallenged. And four convictions ten month in is pretty fucking astonishing, and not a great look. It took even Reagan a few years before the perp walks started.

(Did you hear there’s talk of bringing Ollie North back in?! These people are literally reaching back to the last administration that was as explicitly and blatantly and shamelessly corrupt as they are, and not just taking lessons from them but literally borrowing their people. Breathtakingly brazen.)

Someone I follow on twitter posts every night:

And I like their approach.

So maybe I didn’t knock it out of the park today. I did my best. It wasn’t easy, always, but I did it, and I’ll do it again tomorrow.

There is some comfort in ritual.

I feel like I need to say something deep or important to justify this post, now that I hardly ever post, but fuck it. This is life. We do what we can, when we can, as best we can.

Thank you for taking a moment to share my journey, and I hope you will tell me about yours.

(I say that even though I’m still not following anyone’s blogs these days, so I have no idea what anyone is up to anymore. It’s hard to explain. I think I just needed that energy to be redirected for a while, and continue to need that. Better or worse, we’ll find out. I’m not sure yet.)

But of course everything is compromise, so fight on with your compromised selves, darlings. I, in my deeply imperfect ways, will be fighting on too.

11 Comments

Filed under around Phila, culture, education, identity, job, learning, teaching, varia

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

October 28, 2017 · 11:28 pm

Voids; and, Czeslaw Milosz, ‘A Song on the End of the World’

I assume no one is checking this anymore, since I never write anymore.

So I assume this is going out into the void, but that’s fine. I have been tired this week. So deeply tired. Tired in the marrow of my bones.

I don’t want to talk about thehashtagMeToo – the whole fucking point is that I don’t want to talk about it – that is, it’s a big part of why I’m so tired this week – but these comics slice it up true.

“I don’t remember what I wore to the rape, darling”

The husband keeps asking me if it isn’t gratifying to see so much attention being given to the matter, and so much weight.

Sure? I guess? But it turns out I had enjoyed forgetting that I lived in a monkey house, had enjoyed having forgotten how to smell the stink of it.

This is complicated by the fact that he’s kind of trying to defend Matt Taibbi a little, because he and Taibbi were young and in the former USSR at the same time (they didn’t know each other, but the husband did follow the Exile, Taibbi’s paper, like all ex-pats over there then).

(Sidenote: I thought tonight – not for the first time, but a little bit more deeply, in light of my current mood, and in light of the fact that my mom sad-liked the post of those comics on my FB – about how my mother must feel. She lives her life with the knowledge that both of her daughters were molested by her partner. By the man she chose to marry and live with for 18 years or whatever. And she didn’t notice, and so didn’t do anything about it. How the fuck do you live with that.

Not blaming her, you understand: just thinking about how one lives with one’s mistakes, and how some are harder than others. Literally one of the reasons I have never wanted kids is because I know it’s impossible to protect them from the world, and the world is brutal, and I don’t think I could live with the guilt of inflicting it on someone else. I don’t know how you get back up from ‘my husband raped our daughters.’ But she did.)

Myeshia Johnson is another reason this week has broken me a little. If you missed her interview, you really should go back and watch it. She is… a fucking superhero. Composed, tactful, circumspect, honest. In the wake of losing her husband and being insulted by her president. If you saw it in a movie you wouldn’t believe someone in her situation could be so poised and calm.

But that’s where we are, isn’t it: in an extremely badly written movie. And the writing keeps getting worse and worse.

I’m teaching King Lear right now.

(Backstory, because I forget if this news made it into TDP before I stopped writing: I was offered two ‘Shakespeare in Film’ classes at Temple this fall, and one Latin class at Penn. Both are delightfully fun. And I’ve been offered an ongoing, though part-time, gig at Temple in the classics department, so I’ll actually be teaching Greek there in the spring. Teaching Greek!! It’s a fucking dream. Temple classics, non-tenure-track, was literally my ideal job. I’m having some trouble making my peace with the title ‘adjunct’, but that’s a manageable problem, as it does seem like a relatively stable gig for the foreseeable future. I mean, until Temple decides to cut their classics program, but bridges and when you get to them and so forth. For now we have some breathing room for a minute.)

So I’m teaching King Lear. You know, the story about the narcissistic authoritarian king who lacks foresight and thoughtfulness to such a degree that nearly everyone around him ends up dead. The one who is going increasingly insane. The one whose children and children-in-law are sociopaths.

I really regret choosing this play.

Here are some choice quotes from last week:

“By day and night he wrongs me. Every hour
He flashes into one gross crime or other
That sets us all at odds.” (Lear 1.3.4-6)

“A hundred knights!
‘Tis politic and safe to let him keep
At point a hundred knights! Yes, that on every dream,
Each buzz, each fancy, each complaint, dislike,
He may enguard his dotage with their powers
And hold our lives mercy.” (Lear 1.4.340-7)

Monday I’m lecturing on Lear’s descent into madness. His fall, and the carnage that accompanies it.

Also Monday, as you may have heard, we can expect to see the first concrete and material outcomes of Bob Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s relations with Russia.

The timing is killing me. Not really in a good way.

So life is life. And it plays out like it always does, in fits and starts, with ups and downs, with calm moments and with tempests.

(Sidenote: thank god I put Tempest as our last play, and not Lear.)

(Sidenote to sidenote: these kids are fucking killing it, and doing awesome papers and presentations. And my Latin students are life-affirming. I remember why I loved teaching so much that the old job was an acceptable compromise. I’m not making any money, my health insurance situation is up in the air, I’m working fucking constantly, and I have no long-term stability to speak of… but that’s America, so I guess I’m doing fine in this context. thehashtagAmericaFuckYeah!)

I am extremely anxious about what will come of this week and these indictments. It won’t be good. No matter what happens, it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

Another quote from Lear:

“To be worst, / The lowest and most dejected thing of Fortune, / Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear. / The lamentable change is from the best; / The worst returns to laughter. … O gods, who is’t can say ‘ I am at the worst’? … And worse I may be yet. The worst is not / So long as we can say ‘This is the worst’.” (Lear 4.1)

This play is too dark, too bleak. Too on-the-nose. I wish I hadn’t chosen it.

I wish we didn’t have to do this thing we’re going to have to do, as a country. As a world.

I’m so tired.

Czeslaw Milosz, ‘A Song on the End of the World’ (Warsaw, 1944):

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits the rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.

12 Comments

Filed under identity, job, musings, poetry, politics, teaching, tragedy

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , ,

September 6, 2017 · 10:52 pm

In memoriam

This first, you’re going to need it:

Jenna Burleigh.

She was 22, a transfer student to Temple University, from just outside the city. She grew up here, and nurtured a love of theater and orchestra and musicals at the Kimmel Center and the Walnut Theatre. She was a film and media studies major and was so excited to be starting her new life.

How do I know this?

Because I had students do a free write on the first day of class. Here are some excerpts of hers:*

I’m really excited about this class & excited to learn in general! I’m a transfer student so I’m excited to be at temple in the city that I love. [anecdotes about seeing shows with her family as a kid] Now that I’m a film major I live for seeing [the plays etc] put up on the big screen & all the creative possibilities directors have. I started watching the new Romeo & Juliet tv show on ABC that takes place after they die which is an interesting perspective. [a bit on her checkered past with Shakespeare], but now I’m excited to try to fully understand [Shakespeare’s plays] better. Overall I’m just super excited to learn & for all my classes to start.

She was 22. Friends and family describe her as vivacious and deeply committed to justice – she was actively involved in LGBTQ+, racial, and feminist concerns, and had no time for bigotry or ignorance.

Thursday night, she went out to a bar, as college kids do.

She didn’t come home.

We got messages from the school that she was missing.

She wasn’t in class on Friday.

Her body was found on Sunday, and security footage helped police track down her killer, who confessed.

Last night, while I was putting today’s lecture together, I was thinking about how she should have been learning about Shakespeare’s language, and taking notes on what kinds of puns he favored, and the sorts of grammatical machinations he was especially fond of. She should have been studying for her astronomy and psychology classes. She should have been learning about film theory so she could more cogently read the movies that she loved.

Instead, she was being dead, because some asshole wasn’t satisfied with whatever she offered him, or refused him.

She went home with him Thursday night, for whatever reason, and he had defensive wounds the next day, so she didn’t go down without a fight.

The details are too awful. She reached out to friends for help, but it was the middle of the night, and the friends didn’t see her messages until Friday morning.

(God bless those friends, they must feel so guilty. It’s not their fault. Decidedly not their fault. It’s 100% the fucking goddamn MURDERER’s fault.)

She died of strangulation and blunt force trauma.

(I’m not linking to any articles, but you can google her name, there are plenty of articles out there, and more details than I know have come out since I last sought out information.)

There’s a memorial for her tomorrow, which I will attend,  and for which I will need to be able to keep my shit together, so I am writing this in the hopes of getting a bit of catharsis from it.

Those of you in college, those of you with people in college, those of you who teach people in college: studies have shown that the first six or eight weeks of college are the most dangerous for young women – it’s called ‘the red zone’, apparently. Look out for each other. Reach out for help – even to a stranger, to a random bartender, to a cab driver, to a passer-by – if you’re scared. Trust your gut. Take care of each other out there.

And, men? Y’all best come for your boys. Obviously thehashtagnotallmen and everything – I’m married to a blessedly good man, I’m aware there are plenty of them out there – but y’all got to step up the pushback against this kind of toxic masculine entitlement. We ladies can’t do it. The men who buy into it don’t listen to us.

requiescas in pace et in amore, discipula

And, because that’s all too much:

[Arthur] suddenly felt the intense sad loveliness of being as being, apart from right or wrong: that, indeed, the mere fact of being was the ultimate right. He began to love the land under him with a fierce longing, not because it was good or bad, but because it was: because of the shadows of the corn stooks on a golden evening, because the sheep’s tails would rattle when they ran, and the lambs, sucking, would revolve their tails in little eddies; because the clouds in daylight would surge it into light and shade; because the squadrons of green and golden plover, worming in pasture fields, would advance in short, unanimous charges, head to wind; because the spinsterish herons, who keep their hair up with fish bones according to David Garnett, would fall down in a faint if a boy could stalk them and shout before he was seen; because the smoke from homesteads was a blue beard straying into heaven; because there were puddles, and leaky gutters, and dung hills with poppies on them; because the salmon in the rivers suddenly leaped and fell; because the chestnut buds, in the balmy wind of spring, would jump out of their twigs like jacks-in-boxes, or like little spectres holding up green hands to scare him; because the jackdaws, building, would hang in the air with branches in their mouths, more beautiful than any ark-returning dove; because, in the moonlight there below, God’s greatest blessing to the world was stretched, the silver gift of sleep.

– T.H. White, ch.18, The Book of Merlyn [The Once and Future King]

________________

* Yes, I do have qualms about sharing her words with you, and I may change my mind and take them down. However, I also shared them with the school to be used at her memorial service, and in any case this blog isn’t indexed for google searches – and anyway no one reads it anymore now that I hardly ever write – so I think it is okay. More to the point, I think it paints a beautiful picture of how enthusiastic she was about the world and her place in it, and I intend it as a tribute. That said, if you have objections, I am happy to hear them in the comments.

4 Comments

Filed under around Phila, culture, tragedy

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , ,

August 28, 2017 · 11:04 pm

Joys and counterweights

Counterweight: we’re still doing this shit with the treason weasel and all that that entails.

Oh, also counterweight: the ancestral homeland is under twenty godblessed feet of water. Houston is a city designed to handle floods, but jesus, nothing could be designed for this. It’s heartbreaking.

Oh, but joys! I assume you saw the ‘Cajun Navy‘? (NB link opens to video.) They’re a volunteer force of Louisianans who hitched up their boats to their trucks and lined up on I-10 and went to Texas to rescue the stranded and struggling.

(whence)

People really are fundamentally good.

Joy: my Broadway friend came through Phila, and I got to spend a few hours with her. She was on a quick visit back to the States from her study in Scotland, where she is working on an MPhil in textile conservation. She spent the summer working at the Maritime Museum in London, and apparently it was wonderful.

Lord it was good to see her.

Counterweight: I have ignored an email from the rich friend. She sent it last week. I haven’t read it yet.

Joy: the semester started today! At my new school, at least – old school starts tomorrow, but I teach M-W there.

God it was glorious. I was super nervous. What if I can only teach at my old school?! What if I fall apart when confronted with a new student population?!

Of course I didn’t.

Two sections of a Shakespeare in film class, 40 students in each. Both are full. Mostly first and second years, a smattering of upperclassmen. I tried several new exercises today and they all went well. Instead of having them do a self-introduction, I had them pair up and learn about their neighbor, and then introduce each other. It was good.

Then quickly through the syllabus —

(Hamlet, Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead; Romeo and Juliet, Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story; King Lear, Brooks’ King Lear [Brando or Welles or someone is in it] [I can’t believe they’re letting me teach this class], Kurosawa’s Ran; Tempest, Taymor’s Tempest, Forbidden Planet)

(I’ve never seen most of them. It’ll be fine.)

— and a brief discussion of the experience of reading Shakespeare, and the various strengths and weaknesses of stage vs. cinema. They were game and eager, and nobody looked especially bored.

I mean, yes, first day and all, but still a good sign.

from Mallory Ortberg’s genius Texts from Jane Eyre

Then I ended class with a questionnaire and free-write. Questionnaire asked a little about them (where are you from, why did you choose this class, what do you hope to get out of it…), and then a few questions about the topic (when was Shakespeare active, have you read any… what are some elements of film criticism…) – all with the very explicit reassurance that it wouldn’t be graded, and I wouldn’t judge them, I just wanted to get a sense of where everyone was so I could shape the class for them. Then a five minute free-write. I was a little worried the prompt would flop – it’s difficult to write a good prompt! – but I was hopeful too:

This side [of the page] is for you. You can do whatever you like with it. You can ask me questions about the class or myself (I may or may not answer questions about myself!). You can speculate on what the class will be like. You can tell me what you like (or hate) about Shakespeare. You can draw. You can explain why you don’t want to do this assignment. There are only two rules: (1) keep your pen moving on the page for five minutes (you can get your phone out if you want to time yourself exactly), and (2) don’t do anything that would likely be read as disrespectful to me or any classmates.

Right? Pretty good.

And the responses were great. I learned so much about them, and they asked me the most adorable questions about myself. Three or four students asked about my ‘accent’ – partly that’s accent, partly that’s that I talk very fast, partly that’s because most of them are local, and many of them haven’t really travelled much, so haven’t really heard that many other accents. And mine is an odd mess of Texas remnants, New York echoes, Phila habit, and the tendency to affect pronunciations of particular words that people I like say in unusual ways. For instance, my ballet teacher – from Sou’Filly – pronounces tedious as tee-jus, and my diss chair says rather as rah-ther. I quite enjoy both of these, so I use them.

They were also charmed that it was my first year at the school too, and many of them talked about how excited they were about the class and about how we could figure out the new context together.

I was worried I wouldn’t use the whole class – I generally like to use the whole period, even on the first day – but it was timed perfectly, and a few students were still finishing their free-write up to the last minute.

God I fucking love teaching.

And jesus fucking christ it’s nice to teach something other than writing, and to be given the freedom to teach in a way that best suits me and my strengths.

Counterweight: the local liberal arts school that interviewed me for a writing position is interviewing for a classics tenure-track position this year (replacing the dude that died last year). I know I ought to want it, but I don’t want it. I want to work at the new school. I’ve wanted to work at the new school since I moved to Phila twelve years ago. But I have to apply, and it’s not out of the question that I’ll get an interview, and I really don’t want to do another interview like that. Those fucking suck. Plus, it would mean a new job talk, and who has time for that?!

Plus, they’ve already not-hired me for two positions this year, it feels like masochism at this point.

But diss chair’s best friend is there, and don’t turn down a job you haven’t been offered yet, and Phila, and so on, so I have to apply.

Potential joy: the woman (former colleague) who just got the full-time dream job at the new school that I wanted might get it! Then I could take over that job, which is part-Classics part-gen-ed, and not tenure-track, which is exactly what would suit me best just now. And on my fucking train line too.

Here’s hoping.

Joy: London wrote to me again – twice this summer, actually – I think I had already taken myself to my fainting couch and away from the blog before the first letter arrived, so I don’t think that made news here.

Counterweight: he didn’t get accepted to the program to teach English in Japan, and he confessed to me that he has an eating disorder, which fucking bums me out beyond the beyond. Ballet is no joke for growing young people, man. That shit has fucked up so many beautiful and talented people.

Joy: but he remains delightful and funny, and (at his request) I sent him a little collection of poetry, and he promised that he would read it and sit with it and live with it and lean up against it and look at it crosswise and maybe take it out to dinner and get back to me someday.

Joy: Wednesday, after I lecture on Elizabethan theater (ask me about Elizabethan theater!) I’m going to have my first Latin class in… fuck, like eleven fucking years. I’m so rusty, but it’s glorious revisiting all the old rules and basics. And there are only six or eight students in that class, and the undergrad chair has actually made a standardized syllabus (i.e., I don’t have to do any work making the class, just running it twice a week), so it should be easy enough.

Alley-oop and here we go! Into the froth, my life! Into the flames!

13 Comments

Filed under around Phila, education, goals, identity, job, learning, teaching

Tagged as , , , , ,

August 8, 2017 · 11:19 pm

Continuing absurdities

Huh, that’s the first post I’ve named ‘continuing absurdities’. That seems unlikely.

Here is one absurdity:

Now that I am unemployed, I’m tempest-toss’d into the health care Marketplace. Which I figured was fine: my income now is just unemployment, which is about $400 a week before taxes – until I hit $11,000 paid out, at which point we wrap that relationship up. So I called up my state Medicaid office, thinking my income was low enough to qualify.

Turns out?

Not low enough! A single childless woman making $1600/month before taxes isn’t poor enough. Which isn’t that absurd: I’ve lived on that before, and certainly could do it again, even in Phila (which, to be fair, is not one of the ‘classy’ expensive cities). But I might have to drop some ballet, which would be a bummer.

Anyway, non-starter, so, intrepid, into the Marketplace went I.

Funny story: turns out there’s a minimum income in order to qualify for subsidies with the ACA. In PA at least (I don’t know if it’s federal or not), that’s $16,000. Make at least $16,000/year? Great! Have some help buying health care, which is totally not a public good and definitely it’s completely normal for it to be governed by the Free Market and capitalism, what could possibly go wrong?!

So I make too much money for Medicaid, but too little money for tax subsidies. Right. That makes sense: I’m just the sweet spot of poor to be completely fucked.

Now, to be clear, I am not completely fucked: I have a little money in the bank, and I have a husband (well, ex-husband, technically) (which will only be funny to old friends) with resources, so I will be able to stay on my meds even if it means spending $380 a month on insurance in the unsubsidized Marketplace, which it does, for the cheapest plan that has decent pharma coverage.

But what the fuck is everyone else supposed to do. I asked the ACA woman on the phone, and she was silent for an uncomfortably long time, and then she said, I guess go to community health care clinics?

Wow.

This is not a complicated mathematical problem – the solution is to make the Medicaid ceiling be the same as the Marketplace floor – it’s just fucking political chess.

With people’s lives as the pawns.

So I’m pissed about that. I wrote a ‘thank you’ note to Bob Casey, our *good* senator, for fighting to save the ACA, and a rather more critical note to our *other* senator, Pat Toomey, who can’t seem to get far enough up Trump’s ass, or at least is so busy trying to get farther up that he can’t be bothered to hold a town hall.

(Google Tuesdays with Toomey if you want more on that.)

Anyway, ultimately the husband and I remembered that the subsidies are based on the annual 2017 income, and that I spent the first half of 2017 being employed, and earned some $22,000, and I ultimately qualified for a ~$200 credit. So I now have good health care for $198/month, which seems reasonable, given the absurd system within which we’re working.

view of Phila from Temple’s liberal arts college building

On the plus side, my old department asked me to pick up a Latin class this fall, so there’s that!

I mean, I haven’t gotten the actual contract yet, and it won’t be much money, but I don’t really need the money (I mean, more money always makes life easier, but I’m perfectly fine just now), and they’ve added me to the online site as a teacher, and my people are generally acting like it’s a done-deal – like, the email they sent to the woman responsible for approving me as a hire basically said, We signed off on her PhD, so she’s fucking qualified, so please just do the requisite formality paperwork ASAP. So that seems reasonably likely to come through.

And today I had a meeting/quasi-interview at Temple for an adjunct gig teaching writing and – get this – Shakespeare in cinema. The woman seemed more concerned about my competency to teach writing than to teach a cinema class on Shakespeare, which is bizarre, but whatever. She actually said something like, I mean, Shakespeare is all classics-based anyway. And I was like, Well, I mean… kind of? But sure. I’ve heard the phrase mise en scene before, and these kids are 19 years old: I know more than they do, and I’m a quick study, so bring it on.

This seems to be contingent on my former boss speaking well of me on the Reference Contact Call, but I imagine she will – if for no other reason than that it would reflect poorly on her to have employed a bad teacher for six years.

So all signs point to me having three classes this fall? One classics, one writing, one… cinema-Shakespeare?

Oh, also we might nuke North Korea, of course.

So everything seems fine and normal.

Which is to say: Everything is so fucking weird right now.

But also there are hints of normalcy and some hints of a non-disastrous, if not clearly promising, future (at least at the personal level, if not the global) which are helping me breathe a little easier.

I’ll take it.

‘normal’ is relative, y’all

5 Comments

Filed under around Phila, education, job, learning, politics, teaching

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , ,