taking it personally – Page 36

June 19, 2003

18jun03

My poor mother. She’s done this, alone, while working full-time and drastically undersleeping, for months.

I hold on to my own mental faculties as I watch my grandmother’s degrade.

Yesterday Mom lent me a book about Chernivtsi, the little Jewish village in the Ukraine where my father grew up. There’s a lot written in it about the Zafrin family, and about him too; I haven’t read much of it yet, but it got me thinking about history and continuity and family. Because, obvoiusly, I haven’t been thinking enough about family here in California, this world that seems so separate from the one in which I usually live and work.

It does not matter what you are doing now. No matter how physically and intellectually active you are, there is a chance that you’ll need taking care of too. I know most of us are dimly aware of this; but it needs to be viscerally felt at least once.

She used to be a teacher in secondary school, and then for years a history professor in university. Her ex-pupils visited her, I think, up until she left Moldova. My childhood’s most vivid image of her is bespectacled, reading the newspaper by the living room table. Or doing crosswords, she loved crosswords.

We played Battleship on paper. She loved cooking, loved it. Spent her life in the kitchen – when she wasn’t reading the paper or watching the evening news. Or reading literature; although my grandfather read more literature than she did, or perhaps I’m misremembering. Anyway, cooking. Yellow string beans fried up (“sautéed” doesn’t quite suit her kitchen) in butter. Perfectly clear beautiful broth. Open-face melty-cheese sandwiches made in the Miracle Oven as a special treat some suppers. Cheese wafers, we got to make them in her ultra-cool wafer maker that nobody else had. Tea, with lemon and jam, in the evenings. While watching the evening news.

She’d make compotes out of plums and rosehips and cherries. Do you call them compotes in English? Simmer the fruit with some sugar for a bit, then cool and refrigerate. Tasty summer drink.

She smoked a pack a day, out on the balcony when it was warm, on the stair landing when it wasn’t. She hasn’t smoked for something like seven years now, which really isn’t a lot, considering she’s 87. For whatever reason, I always tolerated her smoking more easily than I did my father’s.

She used to be nice and plump, when she got on in years: she’d never been particularly slim. You should see her portrait, gorgeous beret-ed eighteen-year-old with black black eyebrows and round face looking straight at the camera.

June 18, 2003

California ain’t N’awlins, I can tell you that.

Whatever time I take for myself, here in California, comes directly out of the time available for [academic] work, or for regrouping my forces and preparing for the next day. Nevertheless, distracting myself from family life with unrelated activities (such as writing) seems to ground me. I’ll try to write often. Every day. We all know how such intentions work out.

I tried to write chronologically, but there’s just too much. So I’ll post entries as things occur to me. Road trip interspersed in other.

For the record, I think every human before the age of, say, 35 should spend some time caring for an elderly person, or anyone unable to fully care for themselves. It really does provide a different perspective. In the last week, my thoughts have turned to: death and dying; mental degradation with age; why exactly it is that one’s sense of shame persists more strongly than other mental faculties; the importance of a living will (please, someone put me to sleep if I’m ever struck with irreversible illness); a [re]new[ed] appreciation for nurses…

Continue reading “California ain’t N’awlins, I can tell you that.”

May 5, 2003

Well.

Looks like I passed my prelims.

I’m now ABD – All But Dissertation.

Wicked!

May 3, 2003

Untitled.

This is a repeating cycle in my life: I make myself a one-person support network for others, regardless of whether they’d ever think of doing the same for me.

It’s partly a problem with my own expectations of the surrounding world, but really. I’ve got to stop putting energy into situations like this with people who, as a rule, show no interest in me on their own initiative.

Partly this is surely stress talking, but another part is this perception I’ve been trying to articulate for years. If it seems to me that I could do something to make others’ life easier, I do it, for the most part without thinking much about being inconvenienced. My innate assumption is that others think that way too, in general as well as specifically with regard to me; except they don’t. It’s not their fault, it just doesn’t occur to them, but it hurts me because I do not separate tasks from people. I keep putting myself in situations where I wait for someone to remember my existence, and one of two things happens: either they do remember and I am really, genuinely thankful (even if I did them a favor in the first place), or they never do remember and I feel somehow left out.

My god, I’d kick so much ass as an administrator. But I’m nobody’s administrator, even if I do act sometimes as though I were.

Here’s the thing that makes me most bitter: I wouldn’t mind being support girl. That’s what people do, right? Wrong: in my experience, this sort of attitude is not reciprocal.

(There are individual exceptions, of course. I’m talking in ranty generalities, here.)

Mm. I’ll get in trouble for this, but here goes: I perceive this… I don’t know, lack-of-thoughtfulness? oblivion? to be more prevalent in the U.S. than elsewhere I’ve lived. “Elsewhere” being USSR, Italy, Britain, so I feel that I’m not completely talking out of thin air here.

“Yeah, well, you’re in the States now, so deal.”

Yeah, well, I am not blaming anyone in particular, and will leave this country first chance I get anyway.

The easiest answer is, well, you owe nothing to people. Stop volunteering your energy. The fundamental flaw I see with that argument is that it is devolution. So, most likely, I’ll continue doing what feels good and right to me, and continue to be disappointed.

I’m so tired of being disappointed.

April 29, 2003

You are what you eat

If morning’s your time to do work (as it is, usually, mine), feed your brain accordingly. Oatmeal? Enh. Today’s breakfast: leftover cioppino from last night, with some pasta thrown in for carbohydrate goodness. Besides carbs, this takes care of protein (seafood) and vegetable matter (peppers, tomatoes, veg. broth). And caffeine but that’s from coffee, not the cioppino.

My brain had better appreciate this. I already feel more awake, and haven’t even had that much coffee. Must be the protein.

(San Francisco style, my nose. I believe this is a Roman dish; it’s certainly Italian.)

April 23, 2003

License plate

Seen on a station wagon today:

ABD

(y’think it was a hint?…)

April 15, 2003

Insomniac

And so we dance, only with our voices, filling the spaces in-between admission and action. The more insistently we attempt to fill them, the more starkly obvious these gaps become, beckoning.

Detached amusement is odd to observe in oneself.

April 14, 2003

Letter to a god.

(This is a sort-of response to something a friend wrote. It’s not critical to know the original piece.)

Janus,

Two-faced, you speak looking up, bury a box looking down. Green exhumed upright dead old man gazes straight ahead, holding your gaze up and away from the inside of his burying box. You never see him down looking up, unless you take the whole frame and turn it sideways.

Horizontality is decay. Unused muscles, skin, bones decay. Upright existence requires integrity of body, so isn’t frightening to look at. But this here is death made vertical: and so, since decay is not an option, apply color. Green, like a tree. Brown roots underground; above-ground—green. Trees with their double-liminal, ambiliminal existence remind you of the dead; this frightens you, so you teach schoolchildren of the life trees bring.

Lest we forget that green death is all around us, grass grows where trees don’t. Liminal death’s reminder, a low dense green fog toeing the line between above and below.

We’re frightened, so we reaffirm the line. Asphalt is hard fastening the gap between us and deathl; we look down and see no green. We are supported—but stifled, deprived of oxygen in our self-imposed separation from death. Soles become burned and numb and tough like leather.

Until an earthquake, or time, or tree roots, break the asphalt, and the dead surface. Subliminal roots revolt, become superliminal, obvious. Only part pokes out, tangling the spiderweb-thin sticky divide between now and never again. Once tangled, there’s no returning to order, never a full separation. Re-asphalting will only repeat the cycle. Roots like crooked fingers tear at the blockage of memory

and feed the green death’s reminder that makes poison into life for us.

April 11, 2003

Death dreaming.

People keep posting about personal things lately, and I’m wanting to record this dream.

I was in my homecity. I probably took a trolley bus. I remember where this set of buildings was in relation to where I used to live, in the Telecenter quarter.

I was delivering something, money? and books to someone I barely knew. Don’t remember why; this isn’t the important part anyway. The same set of buildings contained a morgue. I was in this woman’s apartment, leaving the delivery for her – there was nobody else there. Then, suddenly (or rather, I don’t remember the transition), my mother was there, and my brother too, and it was a morgue-cum-burial ground.

People were being exhumed. I didn’t want to look, but my grandfather insisted on speaking to me, kept talking until I looked at him. He looked familiar, almost exactly as I remember him – except that his hair was disheveled, he had a hyoooge belly and was completely green, everything the same shade of lightish green, clothes and all. He was wearing a plaid flannel shirt, the large checkers of which must’ve been other colors, but now they were different shades of green. (The shirt looked suspiciously like one I have that used to belong to my dad. Except this one is red.) He wasn’t frightening; we talked.

My dad was also there, but I do not remember him.

I remember being frightened, in general. Spooked. And here I am, wanting to believe that I am not afraid of death.

What I hate most is lack of knowledge of what happens after.

April 7, 2003

work ethic

Four weeks from today, prelim. If I pass it, I’ll be ABD. I should be nervous, twitchy, frantically studying, and I’m not.

There is a lot of work to do, but mostly it isn’t overwhelming. There are times, hours or days at a time, when I find myself unable to work, and put aside books and computer in favor of other activities. I’ve enough experience with my own work habits to know that if the time ahead doesn’t feel productive, it won’t be; so there’s no use in trying. So I read books, see my friends, then dive in again.

The question is always there in the back of my head: is this wrong? Am I overly cocksure, setting myself up for failure? Is this feeling of “there’s only so much I can learn in a given time period” an excuse to not push myself?

Perhaps it is unsettling that this research is not as difficult as the research I did in the Italian Studies track. Yet, I am learning more now. Perhaps it isn’t as difficult because I seem to have found my Subject. But there are no guidelines, except for what my committee and I have come up with. There is no trial by fire, no hated rite of passage, only work.

I push, when I need to. (It gets me in trouble sometimes, this toeing of the dead-line.) I sleep and work at odd hours. I navel-gaze in a public forum (this one) and then go back to work. The hard part is, work is never certain. There is little to compare it to, there are few standards. But then I shrug, and decide again and again that I am willing to make a fool of myself.