What's this Blog About??? Oh right....balance.

So I began this blog just about six months ago in celebration of my 28th birthday. My goal was to use the blog as motivation/support/dialogue in my quest to find some balance in my life. My partner was about to move to Chicago to begin her own graduate program. I was in need to losing some weight. I was mid-stream in reading for my comprehensive exams (the things that "prove" I "know" enough to begin my own independent research for my PhD), hence making the weight-loss damn near impossible (I sit for a living, folks). But I think my purpose is a bit bigger than finding balance in my own life; for those maybe unfamiliar with the stereotype, in academia, we're kind of told that academics is everything. Like a lot of professions, if you want to be good, you have to give up your life. I think my purpose with this blog is about figuring out how to transform what we think of as valuable sorts of living. And how academics play into capitalist evaluations of lives.

Let me explain by way of an anecdote.

An old student of mine asked to meet with me to talk about graduate school so a few days ago, we met up for coffee. After a brief catching up (after my Women's Health class, she changed her major to Health Sciences with a minor in Women's Studies!) she asked me to explain the process of applying to graduate school. "My parents can't help me," she said, "and I gave up on applications this past fall when I realized how expensive it was to apply." So we talked. I told her about tuition fee waivers. I told her I thought it was totally fine to take a year or two to re-group between undergrad and grad school. I told her the Americorps application she started to fill out seemed like a great option for developing professional skills (I did two years myself and in the end, despite a few gripes, I think I did some good work). After a long discussion, she asked, "Do you ever, like, get frustrated by people that have so much? By people that don't have to worry when their car breaks down?"

"All the time." Then I paused. Took a breath. I tried to summon some of the wisdom I received from my own mentor in my Masters program. "But I try to remember that money isn't everything. That despite class, we can find things in common with people. But I think that anger is important. It's not fair. And graduate school will be harder for you."

We talked through things like financial aid and loan consolidation. I gave her some resources I have found helpful in my own life. I told her about the miracles of income-based repayment. "Don't apply to graduate school because your desperate and worried about paying off loans," I said, adding, "But don't not apply to graduate school because your desperate and worried about loans." She smiled. I asked her to put together a resume and email me in a few weeks. That we would work on this together. It was just a matter of getting started.

And here's a fact: Graduate School will be harder for her. It's difficult to work 12 hour days when you don't have someone rewarding you with a decompression spring break vacation (this is actually more common than you might think among graduate school colleagues I've met, both at my public university and the private one my partner attends). Its hard to focus on writing awesome term papers when, at the end of the term, you know you will be scrambling to find something--anything--that will help you pay a few months of rent before your teaching stipend is renewed. It feels like defeat when you have to turn down conference presentations because you couldn't come up with the credit cards to pay for the plane ticket (graduate programs don't fund conferences like they used to, now that it seems like every humanities department in every university is facing recession-era funding cuts). But this is why finding balance is important.

Because you can't put all of your energy into building your grad school resume. Because there will always be someone wealthier than you pushing themselves harder. And I'm finding out that's okay.

Because getting here and reading and creatively composing ideas is what life is about, right? And graduate school gives us the intense privilege to do just that. And I worry about universities being businesses. I worry about the legitimacy of ideas being based on the length of your c.v. (and idea I have subscribed to myself). I worry that students with good work and drive are being discouraged because of class politics. And here's how this relates to balance: defeating hierarchical class systems means not playing into twelve hour work days (would you want someone at a chemical plant to have to work 12 hours?), not buying the argument that the more you do, the better life you've lived.

So maybe this is a bit buddhist.

But I feel it's important to encourage more diversity in academia. And doing that means understanding that not everyone will produce a lengthy resume and c.v. (for socioeconomic reasons, for dis/ability reasons, for choosing-to-have-a-life reasons) but their ideas and politics and teaching are better for the balance.

Post Writing Sadness

Here's what they don't tell you about finishing your exams: the following night, after some sleep and a few celebratory meals with friends, you will sit down on your couch, stare at the blank television screen in front of you, and feel a pit open in the bottom of your torso. This will be the beginning of an immense sadness that will leave you unsettled for, perhaps, weeks.

I have two weeks until my oral defense. My body feels heavy--not in the way that it feels when it hasn't had enough sleep. I've slept. In fact, I had an amazing dream where my 14-year-old terrier was taking care of a baby wolf (interpretations welcome in comment section). But my body feels heavy in the way it feels after someone close has died. And time is passing in that same way, too-- a passing marked by meals and sunsets but not any feeling of change.

And I wonder, what is it that I'm mourning?

Exams: An Alaska Kind of Feeling

I think I got a gift last week, on the Monday before my exams were to begin. It came in the form of the flu.

So I cancelled my Tuesday class. Slept 19 hours straight (I woke up to talk with my partner for a half hour, then slept more). On Wednesday I went to the store for treat-t0-myself-Naked-juice-smoothies (I prefer the green), chicken noodle soup, and dayquil/nyquil. I began my regimen.

On Thursday I taught.

Friday morning, when my exams were to begin, I woke up, took the dayquil, made some tea, and told myself "You only have to work for three hours, then you can nap." And I did. Between naps, I wrote. It felt luxurious--nothing expected of me all weekend but writing.

When I passed my exams in Monday morning, I felt the whole thing went...well....anticlimactically. Smoothly even.

Now that my energy is back, the tail end of a cold working its way out of my body, my head clearing from the congestion-haze, I am in panic.

So I'm pulling an old trick out of the mental health toolbox. My therapist suggested that, when panic begins to make my palms clammy and my joints jittery, I remember a time when I felt both a little nervous and a lot excited. Because some nervousness is good. It keeps out senses heightened. It keeps our bodies in movement, fingers typing across keyboards. But panic to the point of paralysis is not helpful.

So I'm remembering the morning I boarded a plane to Alaska. I had just graduated college. I landed a job assistant directing a girl scout camp. I had four and a half months of employment ahead of me, two pairs of pants in my hiking backpack, and copy of Anne Sexton's collected poems in my carry-on (they had been my constant companion since I was twelve--explains a lot, probably). My bank account was depleted due to a traffic ticket I had gotten the week before while trying to impress a girl on a first date.

And yet, as my dad took me to the airport with a reluctant send-off (I still hadn't bought a return ticket home--for all I knew, I could stay in Alaska a year and ask my college roommate to send me my winter boots), handing me the twenty bucks that would become my only cash for three days as I was stranded in Anchorage, I felt light. I had butterflies in my stomach. I wasn't able to drink coffee that morning because the nausea was overwhelming. But my body, heart palpitations from eating disorder recovery and all, was in forward motion.

When I landed, there was no one to meet me. I called my new work office and there had been a mix up in my flight plan. Could I find housing for a couple days until they sent someone out to get me?

I paid cash for the cab to the hostel. I ate from vending machines. I slept a night and when I woke, I took in the vista and the sky scrapers and the overwhelming brightness of a sun that doesn't set and I thought, "Well, damn, I'm on my own."

This feeling, tonight, is what I'm going to get back.

This is What Anxiety Feels Like

It's familiar but not comfortable.

My body temperature has risen. My palms sweat and there's an emptiness behind my bottom rib. There's also the usual tightness behind my sternum, piece-y vision speckled by black dots, a feeling of warmth spread across my cheeks and behind my neck.

They say that panic attacks only last about 15 minutes. But I've spent whole days with my mind in a tunnel.

My first real panic attack happened when I began my Masters program. Before that, for my first few years in recovery, I would feel heart palpitations and shortness of breath. I thought I was always having a heart attack. I realize now, though, that this was also panic. And arrhythmia.

For some reason, grad school transformed my panic from something sitting just behind my chest to a full body state. These attacks started around the time my uncle passed away suddenly. And I was reading a lot of Foucault and other cultural theories about power. I began to have existential crisis, fears that my entire family was disappearing, fears that the only thing I'd ever have to look forward to in life was stifling hot subway rides and luke warm coffee, fears that everything was predetermined into mediocrity. Fears that my student loans would come due and I would be left unable to find work, living in a shelter, a person tossed away.

Yoga helped. Medication helped. Talk therapy helped. I began seeing a feminist therapist who believed, like I did, that diagnosis was an inappropriate operation of power. I cut caffeine. I adopted cats.

And there was something about an animal resting in the calm quiet of mid-morning, breathing in and out on my stomach, licking its paws, that became meditative.

I'm feeling anxiety now like I felt then. I worry that in a few weekends when I'm to sit my exams my mind will freeze up. Or my mind will work just fine but I'll discover that I have nothing new and interesting to say. My chest will tighten. My palms will sweat.

So in anticipation of that moment, my chest tightens now. My palms sweat. My neck flushes.

And I think there's no where to go but forward. Student loans in tow. Cat mouths to feed.

And it's very, very scary.

The New Year's Blog

The thing about the holidays when you're queer is that you spend all of this time navigating the heteronormative family constructions that are central to both the holiday marketing and the religious observation. So even when you spend time with your partner trying to create your own traditions--mediocre swedish meatballs, stockings and malbec with your closest friends, pet costumes--you still end up feeling empty. Like the holiday wasn't "real". This happened to Cat and I last year. Since we didn't have the money to travel and we weren't particularly welcomed as a couple in my family (my mother had said to me "Cat can come but you know, she's just your friend") we tried to embrace our own queer holiday.

This year, with my family inching slowly toward acceptance and both of us having the advantage of student loans to draw on, we decided to try our first as-couple family holidays. The previous blog captures how well that went for Thanksgiving on my end. The up side: Christmas with her folks was fine. Good even. Everyone was friendly. Her aunt bought me a box of chocolates and her parents bought us her brother's car. As my bestie Deems said last night "so there's nothing for your blog."

Deems, as usual, is kind of right. But this year I'm struggling with something different. A few days before Christmas in 2001, I began my first e.d. hospitalization. I went in because of a myriad of physical problems, a few good friends that had been privy to some recent ER visits, and a high school mentor who made a round of phone calls on my behalf "looking for beds." She was certain that by 2002, without treatment, I would be dead.

I ended up in the hospital the first time for three weeks, spending New Year's Eve learning rummi with soundless noise-makers and i.v.'s.

I have a few good friends who are sober, one of whom is celebrating her ten year anniversary, and there's a part of me that wants to crack the cranberry-seltzer bubbly with her, except that my treatment hasn't worked like sobriety. It hasn't been one wagon.

I spent two years in and out of treatment, two consecutive New Years Eves were spent in hospital. Ten years later, I can't say I've had even one purge-free year.

At the time I went into the hospital I had been sick for more than half of my life. At 28 and a half, my life is even thirds: pre-sick, sick, recovery. But the lines aren't neatly drawn. I thought they could be, beginning awareness, advocacy work, and public speaking when I wasn't even six months out of the hospital. I spent my first New Year's Eve out-of-hospital taking a January-term course in Germany. As I huddled with my friend Rhian in Berlin's wind, being pushed on either side by crowds at the Brandenburg Gate and dodging firecrackers flung aimlessly at our feet, I really thought I had entered a clear cut beginning. Neuenfang.

I've since realized that my illness is chronic. And that each new year is only an extension of the previous years. And so I don't really have much to blog about in terms of New Beginnings and resolutions. I just have the same one I've been working on for ten years. So on New Year's, I'll crack the cranberry seltzer bubbly, kiss my sweetheart, hang out with my queer grad family (a better support than any hospital team or blood relations) and plan the next trip.

Local Gin and Class Evals: Finding Balance at the End of a Dismal Week

So last week turned out to be one of those abysmally bad weeks where nothing goes terribly, life-shatteringly wrong, but the little bad things pile up so that I'm left wondering: what the hell kind of karma glitch am I dealing with? I meditate; I donate what little life-savings I have to the ASPCA and NPR; I buy gifts from local craftswomen; I buy bulk from the co-op; most of my clothes come from goodwill; I recycle my wine bottles. Is it possible that karma made a mistake?

Here's what sent me over the edge. A student decided that instead of submitting the assigned final paper, she would submit a critique of the class that read, in actuality, like a personal attack. What made the personal attack even more tough to swallow--it being stuck in the back of my throat, just out of tongues reach, like one of those canada mints swallowed hole, only dissolving under the pressure of scalding water-- was that this student is a major in my field which emphasizes social justice and what we call intersectional analysis (that everyone has many identities operating at one time, so a woman is never just a "woman" but also affected by things like race, class, sexuality, citizenship, and ability) and a senior. In other words, she is a few short quarters away from graduating.

And her critique stung. She wrote that my class was not a "good" representation of "U.S. Women Writers" and that we only read "insane" women and "lesbians" and she asked rhetorically, "What can I relate to here? And should we be reading the women who have done the real work of feminism?" I was grading papers with a friend at the local coffee shop when I got to this student's paper and I felt like someone kicked the wind out of me. I was breathless as I took a sip from my luke warm coffee. I read it out loud to make sure I was understanding that, in fact, this student was not doing the assignment but issuing an attack. Then I started crying.

Over the course of the evening, as I skyped with Cat, I became enraged and focused on proving my student's critique was inaccurate. In a ten week class, we spent three weeks on Harriet Jacobs. We spent another week on Sandra Cisneros. We spent a week with Hattie Gossett's poetry. All of whom are not insane and not lesbians. In fact, we read only one book by a lesbian. And we read two books where the point was to critique diagnostic models of patriarchal power--i.e. question this idea of insanity that has been cast upon women for centuries. In ten weeks, we sampled 160 years of women's writing. But Cat didn't need to hear all this. Cat knows my syllabus. Cat knows that a student critiquing like this doesn't have a problem with the course or with me but with some deep-seated homophobia combined with some fear of mental illness, maybe.

I didn't respond to the student until I met with my supervisor, who advised that I give the student a chance to rewrite. While I was happy to grade the student according to the rubric and fail her, I also felt like not giving her a chance to rewrite would be vindictive. She took the offer. Her final paper is due in January. Since then, my online reviews have come back as a mixed bag of strong reactions: "Not an easy A but the best class I've taken in college" and "The reading was too dense. Watching "Girl, Interrupted" was a waste of time. She's an arbitrary grader." "She's a fair and challenging grader." It seemed like for every negative critique (and I take grading really seriously--providing a lot of comments and a detailed rubric, so I take being accused of being arbitrary very personally) there was an opposite.

This is a blog about finding balance in my 28th year. As such, I'm not sure what to do about such vastly different reviews of my course. I'm glad I'm affecting students strongly but, of course, I want students to leave with a more open mind; with a complicated understanding of identity and power. So when I was done reading my evals, i did the only thing I could think of doing: I poured myself a strong gin and tonic and collapsed helplessly, wondering if I'm really suited for the next thirty years.

The gin itself if local, made of corn. Five dollars more expensive than what we would normally buy.

As I sip, I remember the student who came up to me after that last day of class, three students clustered around him as I was packing up my bag, who said, "I'm not trying to brown nose or anything. I just want to say that you are a bad-ass teacher and I mean that in a good way." The other students nodded in agreement. I smiled, thinking, "Four out of thirty-four--that ain't bad." The gin tastes sweeter in my next sip. Must be the corn. Or the karma.

The Perfect Protein: The Perfect Comfort Food

Today started out dismally. Downpours. Sick cat. Rejection from a competitive professional development opportunity on the heels of yesterday's article rejection from an academic journal. None of these things are life-altering and a week from now, when Cat is done with finals and here with me in Columbus, this morning will seem laughable.

But for now, it warrants comfort.

Enter: the egg.

Warning: if you are vegan, you will likely not appreciate the following blog. It involves runny yolks.

I grew up eating eggs scrambled. Not even that often. Breakfast time was cheerio time. When we went to diners, I ordered pancakes. Eggs were for flus and snow days. When I became a vegetarian at 12, my mother would tell me, when I turned up my nose in disgust at the dinner table offerings of over-cooked chicken and mashed potatoes, "You don't like it? Make yourself an egg." Which was fine by me. One egg and a spoonful of vegetables became a dinner staple when I was cutting myself to 300 calories/day.

In college, though, I learned that eggs can be hearty. That they come in a variety of disguises--my roommate's favorite being a sweet thai chili soft-boiled variety over english muffins. I've learned that there's something delicious about pressing a fork into the over-easy dome of a yellow yolk, hearing the delicate snap as the yellow spreads and softens the sweet potato hash underneath it. The sour dough toast dams the edges of the plate, making breakfast pool into a soggy, salty, delicious masterpiece.

This morning, opening the free-range egg carton--I spend entirely too much on eggs, almost 4 bucks a dozen from a local farm but the politics are worth it--I found two left. One whole wheat english muffin was buried underneath a carton of yogurt on the bottom shelf of my fridge. The amish butter from the fall farmer's market has a couple tablespoons left.

So I heat up my cast-iron. Watch as a lumpy square of local confection becomes a pool awaiting its swimmers. Two eggs, cracked,whitening immediately. Turn to gold brown. Flip over. Survey the crispy brown edges as the yolk gets a quick sizzle.

Flip over.

Plate waits.

English muffin takes the egg's place in the pan, soaking up the rest of the butter.

Salt.

Pepper.

Eggs meet english muffin meet plate.

This time, as I press my fork into the yolk, my eyes tear. My life, momentarily stalled.

I hope the first bite lightens my mood, as I approach 35 papers in need of compassionate grading. I hope, this morning, that eggs are enough.