getting ready for Orthodox Easter

In Greece, everybody is eating because it is now 1 am, and they are probably either in church or they’ve wandered home to eat “magiritsa” a special and very tasty soup made of innards of the lamb with a tangy lemony flavor.  I am looking forward to eating some tonight.  The same guy the church where I grew up makes it every year and serves it to everybody.  Last year we told him we liked it and he gave us a whole paint bucket full of it to take home in the car. I froze it and took it on the plane as my carry on. You can’t have liquid, but nobody said you couldn’t have a solid block of frozen soup, magiritsa no less. I’m excited for the Easter celebrations. I’ve been having a beautiful and restful week with my family. My mom took me to Yiorgo, her Greek hair dresser who got all emotional about the holy week services and then decided I looked just like a Byzantine icon while he was cutting my hair and asked me if he could take many pictures of my face so that he could paint it later. I let him. What else was I gonna do? It was a weird feeling, since I hate getting my picture taken and I’ve always felt like I look weird, have weird features.  No, he said, you have a face that people have been painting for thousands of years, he said. Ancient, classic, features.  What a sweet man.  He said my mother must have looked at a byzantine icon when she was pregnant with me.

 I better go eat before sundown. Then it’s fasting, church, and the cooking olympics. Then I get back on the road tomorrow and head back up to San Francicsco.  What a beautiful week I’ve had. I saw a friend from my good old days when I wrote with the LA Poets and Writer’s Collective.  It was a pleasure to see him.  We had a really meaningful talk about how the writing world is full of phonies and to keep writing your truth in your best way. It’s really more complex than that, but, that was a tiny kernel of the mosaic of meaning.

I’ve caught up with old friends. My best Greek girl friend made me blue-berry pancakes and cafe at her house yesterday. I ate at the Urth Cafe in Beverly Hills with my friend who became a Pilate’s trainer to the rich and famous. Geez Beverly Hills is weird.  And, I went to Hermosa Beach for old times sake and had Happy hour with my best guy friend from high school. We are both worried about a friend of ours who lives in the Bay Area and we agonized about her and dished. 

I feel like I am awakening and unfolding in a new and interesting way.  I decided I am going to Greece this summer. I found a way to get there.

the tightest mandible she’s ever seen

Well, my birthday came and went. I’m sitting at my mom’s house in LA.  It’s nice to see her.  My TMJ is still hurting like hell.  I took a vicodin.  I kind of want another one, but I’m trying not to get addicted.  On Friday night, I threw a huge birthday bash at my house, and a surprising amount of people showed up considering it was also Good Friday and Passover. (Luckily for me–as a Greek, our Easter is a week later).  I got what I wanted.  A bunch of people in my house singing happy birthday to me like I was a two-year-old. A really ostentatious chocolate wedge cake from Falletti’s, and appreciative compliments to the chef by all the guests, telling me what a good cook I was.  I made the most delicious chicken souvlakia for everybody who wasn’t fasting, lentil soup for everybody who was, and I taught my husband and my best guy friend to make Spanikopita together, and they did alright.  I should have kept an eye on them, because they really convinced themselves not to use enough cheese, but it turned out pretty yummy anyway.  

I was wished happy birthday by the guy at the liquor store, this very nice Palestinian man who is also Greek Orthodox like us, and who always engages me into really intense conversations about spirituality when I go into his liquor store at 1 am to buy booze or munchies.  And I stand, right in front of the magazine display of pornos and stand to the side while people march in buying fifths of hard alcohol and cigarettes and six-packs of beer, before last call and we talk about God while random bums sneak in the back and stick spoons into ice cream containers in the back and gobble just outside the watchful eye of the surveillance camera, but who always piss off my friend, the liquor store owner later when he discovers the half-eated pints of Ben and Jerry’s rotting in the back.  It’s really strange to have this conversation. But really, why not?  His sister died a horrible death and he was never religious, but he had taken her to all these healers and monastics and they prayed for her and he developed a spiritual life after that. Then he got married. We joked because we had two priests at our wedding and he had FIVE at his. We got married the same summer.  Then, he couldn’t bring his wife (who was pregnant) into the states because of visa issues. She is waiting for him in Jordan with their now 3-year-old baby boy and he is always traveling back and forth, wondering if he should sell the store.  Anyway, this beautiful liquor store owner, who I haven’t talked to in about a year (because he is always in Jordan visiting his family, this altar boy in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, who was the first to recieve the “uncreated” light at midnight on Pascha, now owns a liquor store in a cruddy part of SF that the college kids nickname “Filthy’s” and sells six-packs and cigarettes and lotto tickets to the passer-by.  Anyway, he was down there working, and two of my neighbor’s went by to buy a bottle of wine, mentioned that they were going to my birthday party. He was so touched that he gave them a free bottle of wine to send up to me. What a sweetheart.  Then, the Chinese lady who owns the dry-cleaners saw me waiting for the bus eariler that day and came out and hugged me and told me that her sister was visiting from Hong Kong and we caught up on stories of her daughter who is a law student at UC Davis…all in her broken English.  Then a 21-year-old tutor who works for me in the writing lab followed my home like a puppy on BART, wanting to talk about literary analysis, and missing his stop.  I really felt the love.  My friends all came over and I had too much to drink at my own party and belly danced with my friend M.  Then, somehow, I ended up in the middle of the party undulating and doing backbends half-way to the floor in my skinny jeans that I can finally fit with everybody at the party clapping and hollering and cheering me on. It was the kind of birthday I really wanted to throw myself last year but held back on and then was upset that I had to go to a big birthday party for somebody else the next day.  Why wait until your 30 when 29 is the real year to celebrate?

On Saturday, I got up at 8 after going to sleep at 4 am and drove down to Santa Barbara on the 101.  

I went to see my special healer friend from the past who is a chiropractor and she let me drive to see her in Santa Barbara after 6 hours on the road. Then she let me stay at her house.  She performed the cranio-sacral technique on me and some big crackings of my neck.  I don’t know what they are officially called, but….they gave me some relief.  Then, she put her hands in my mouth and re-adjusted my jaw.  It was really intense and I screamed when she was doing it.  I didn’t think I would scream. In fact, I was pretty embarrassed about it.  What they do is put a hand inside your mouth and back and try to release the pressure in your actual mandible joints.  I am not in touch with my own body sometimes and have trouble perceiving it and have a high pain tolerance, so I was not sure why I yelped like a whipped puppy when she cracked my jaw like that. She told me, you’ve got the tightest mandible I’ve seen in years.  I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean…It seems kind of freaky.  I asked her, why do you think I made noises? She said, well, probably because it hurt like a bitch.  

Oh yeah, it hurt like a bitch, I repeated, somehow struck by the fact that I had to have somebody else narrate back to me my own pain sensation in order to feel it. Strange.  I was going to go stay in a hotel, because most of my Santa Barbara friends have moved or a few are just too creepy to stay with, and she said, oh, come on, stay with me. So I crashed at her house the night before her Easter.  The next day, I woke up and took a shower and washed my hair with her really nice shampoo (I always feel guilty about using somebody’s really nice shampoo while staying with them, but sometimes it’s just inevitable.)  That night we talked about life, we compared experiences of grad school.   We had a lot of the same experiences–though 21 years apart.  We are kindred souls.

She came into my life after not hearing from her for 3 years.  She broke up with her dream guy.  He was a real horrible fuck to her.  She was emotionally broken and wanted to die for two years. She threw herself into the waves at ocean beach on her surfboard in winter begging them to mangle her pretty body, but they would not.  She still has my poetry chapbook I made in college about a bad break-up called “Ex-girlfriend Extraordinaire” right there on her bookshelf.  (Which since I’ve written it has ended up used in all of these titles by other bloggers (WTF).

Then she referred me to a friend in the Bay Area who does the same technique as her.  She gave me all these positive affirmations to do before bed:

“My jaw is loose and relaxed.  My jaw is tension free. As I sleep through the night, my jaw is loose and relaxed.  When I wake in the morning my jaw is tension free.”

She told me I need to have more body work done and that she was sorry she couldn’t fix me.  You have some kind of emotion inside of you that you are not letting go.  I suspected this.  Your pain has an anchor in your back but we have to get to it over time. (I’ve known this for years).  I have never fully felt all of my emotional pain and it’s manifesting in the physical.  Yet, maybe the physical pain is making me feel very emotional.  

I don’t have a problem feeling pleasure. I can feel and perceive pleasure pretty easily. I love to eat sweets and to cook. I love to dance.  I love to cuddle. I can have an orgasm–I can have multiple orgasms if the wind blows the right way. But pain–I can’t do. My body won’t let me. I wonder why that is.

For now, at least I have my tiny page of affirmations that she wrote them on like a prescription.

I  am trying to say them instead of the words that keep popping up in my head which are “You have the tightest mandible she’s ever seen.”  Instead I am trying to say: I am loose and relaxed.  I am tension free. I will get to the bottom of this pain. I will become a strong person. I will step forward into the day and with two hands clapping, release everything and unfold into my own creativity.

Three little birds

So yesterday, I woke up at a decent hour and I started to feel better. I danced in the morning. Alwaysa good thing.  Then, I went to do all of this stuff around the house. It’s my birthday tomorrow. Something aboutwhenever it’s your birthday, it makes you question your existence more. It either makes people more depressed or really feel good about their lives. In my case, it’s actually making me happy. I feel like I am getting some good things done.  I have to blog about this really interesting lady I met last night at a strange cocktail hour for Mills College.  Think aging heiress diva art-collector, good old girl, Scottish woman with platinum blonde hair and gigantic (we’re talking crown-jewel-like) Indian ear-ringts.  Juxtapose that with this over-the top African-American woman in her fifties who used to be a prostitute on the South side of Chicago and wears a really fake-looking auburn wig, but is the only person in the creative writing class I’m teaching who I like. I’ll be back later to flesh this theme out.

the type of writer i am

Of course, I was feeling all better, then I woke up with allergies and a head cold. I am just a hypochondriachal mess.  Though, I think I still might have a rheumatic disease.

Now, I can’t fall asleep again. Oh well. I think my blog is kind of whiny lately. I stopped blogging for about a year. The main reason was: I got sick of it & I thought that I was putting too much negativity into the world.I also met and discovered all these readers of my blog from around the world, who were people who I didn’t actually know.  Now nobody reads my posts.  Do I like it this way? I’m not sure. A part of me is comforted that I will not be exposed.  

Since my MFA program, instead of debuting into the world, I decided instead to hide.  People left and right excluded me from their cliques.  I discovered that as a Greek-American, I would always be exotic to Anglos, yet I would never be accepted by the “women of color” militant writers, who draw their color-lines around being a tiny bit Lebonese. But if you’re Greek, you’re “the white oppressor.”  This put me in a sticky place, identity wise, which I never had to navigate before.  Also, as a woman. Also, being young. 

I know that it is not good for me to bury my art underground.  I have to work on BEING SEEN!

I decided now that no matter what happens to me on my Tuesday writing days, whether I sit in squalor of my appartment and sneeze my head off.  Whether I do a dish or fight back malaise. I am going to send out some of my writing SOMEWHERE. I have nearly 1000 unpublished poems 10 unfinished unpublished (goes without saying) short stories that I always seem to not be able to end and a novel that I’ve been writing for several years.  What, if not backlog of stuff, do I have? I am just sitting on all this stuff. I don’t want to end up like Emily Dickenson and wait until I am dead and have curled into a little ball and be taken out of my room, only for the world to discover my passionate, well-crafted poems. I want to at least have people read my stuff when I’m alive.  Because, why write it? For yourself? Am I that much of an egotist? Is this just me talking to me all this time?  Someday I won’t be so cowardly and I’ll post a blog under my actual name. I am seriously thinking of publishing my own poetry book. Or putting it up on the internet for free. I don’t think people really should pay to read poetry.  

So few peolple read anyway; why make it elitist? Elitist people wouldn’t like my work anyway and would constantly down it. I have discovered that I am writing for the great masses of every-day, non-elitists who walk around barefood in their kitchens at six in the morning and fumble for the alarm clock and make coffee, I am writing for the people who find the New Yorker boring.  I am writing for people who go to community college.  Who drink beer.  Who make art and perform in front of their friends, not in front of NPR. In a way, that makes me real. I don’t use little gimmicks to sell myself. I don’t have any gimmicks.  Maybe that means I’m boring?  And I am not a ducks in a row, William Trevor-y type writer.  I’m messy, bitchy, emotional, neurotic type of writer.  I write multiple genres.

I love writing so much, that I feel like I approach it so pathologically, so neurotically, so delicately, so fearfully, so sado-masochistically. I am always asking for permission, trying to get let in, needing or seeking approval.  Beating myself up in my mind.   This is really bullshit. I am a writer. I am legitimate and I have the ability to wield emotions and render moments and characters with my imagination and my typing hands.  Why am I so bent on getting “acceptance” ?  Why did I wait so long in the underground?  Did going to an MFA program or moving to the Bay Area around all the other people who are not from here but claim the Bay Area as their writerly territory frighten me?  Did it break my spirit? Did it make me question for the first time, if I had any fucking right to tell my stories? The answer is yes: a little.  This is fucked.  

Maybe in five years, if still not publishing my work, I should give up and upload everything I’ve ever written to the internet and take it out of my hands.  These are important questions for me to really face. If nobody else is reading: at least I am still thinking them.

healing…

  I’m feeling better all of a sudden. I think it’s because I have been reading up on TMJ and trying to place my symptoms in a context. The truth is–I could have arthritis or fibromialgia.  That really sucks. I have to get tested for it, I know. I have reumatoid arthritis running on both sides of my family.  But, I’m not going to let it get me down.   I went for two massages.  One last Wednesday and one the Wednesday before. I went to the chiropractor and had my back/neck realigned. I am researching TMJ dentists. I read up on all the things that could help treat the disorder and I did some of these things: Including taking vitamins, drinking anti-inflammatory herbal teas, creatively visualizing to relaxing my jaw. I found out that having a splint is actually something that doesn’t work for many, many patients. I even ordered a cd on hypnotherapy for not clenching your teeth at night. It has a warning on the cd not to listen to it while driving. I haven’t listened to it yet. I ordered a book on trigger point therapy in the body. I had a trigger point massage last week. I used to feel self-indulgent and kind of hoity toity by having massage, but since I’ve been sick, I think it’s a part of the treatment and I’ve accepted the cost.

I am going to see my old chiropractor in Santa Barbara on the way back to LA. She came back into my life after being out of touch for 3 years. She told me she’d fix me in an hour. I want to believe that she will, but in case my tmj pain is caused from something else, I want to try to do everything I can, and attack this thing from all angles. Last night I tried to go to bed and I felt my whole body tingling. I have been having an “outbreak” of TMJ for the past week and a half.  I have been kind of unable to get my regular stuff all the way done. I’ve been upset with myself because I felt like I’m so young, I shouldn’t be feeling like an old lady with all these aches and pains.  I should be free so I can jam pack more important things into my life. I’ve been feeling bad about myself.  Then I tried to force myself to go to sleep and the whole night my body tingled and I kind of twitched. I visualized myself in a blue cocoon of warmth and coolness. I kind of lay straight, full of energy in bed all night long and waited for it to get light out.  Then I got up and worked out, met with some very interesting writers who I hope liked me enough to let me hang around them momentarily, ate a soft-food lunch with them (on account of the TMJ) and went to work and taught two classes.

Somehow in the meantime I heard about two students’ rapes. (It came up in the writing, and then somebody wanted to confide in me), another two student’s medical traumas, gave one girl a doctor referral to my gynocologist, because she was diagnosed with cervical cancer, and I’ve had that scare once already and have a great gyno who if you can get past the fact he’s an old man telling you about how much he loves Phillip Roth’s writing while poking around up there, is a good doc.

Then, with 30 minutes before my second class, I spilled water all inside my bag ran into other students, got hungry, and got a migraine starting. Ordered a felafel and ran into Walgreens and told the security guard at the front I had a migraine coming on and had to teach in 30 minutes, and he kindly directed me to the on sale ibioprofin which was 1$ for a bottle. I bought it, another bottle of water and was on my way back to my class. I ran up to my office and scarfed the food, then taught my night class. The students presented and they did a good job.  Just as I wrote this, I hear my grandmother screaming from down below for me to come down and help her. I hope she didn’t fall out of bed. 

Of course, now that I’m feeling a little bit better, she’s got to stay awake all night long. But before I go downstairs and check on her and listen to her delusions about Greek soldiers who aren’t really there marching around, I just wanted to say:  It’s my birthday on Friday, and I think I got healed from my pain mostly for now and I think that if I continue on this course of positive thinking, I could be cured forever. I will have to pray that it doesn’t resurface.  

Oh yeah. I also read that TMJ could be your body somatizing your emotions.  I wonder if that’s something I’ve been doing unconsciously and if I can find a way to finally let it go? Maybe this is myself’s way of healing forever…so that I can move forward in life. Let’s hope at least.  

Unfortunately, I wasn’t blessed with a strong physical body. I’ve always been sickly and weak. I hate it, but I have to live with it, I guess. I want to get in shape and feel strong. I will go work out tomorrow morning and make good on my promises to myself. Reader, wish me luck!

letters of recomendation

I have to write a letter of recommendation for a student who begged me at the last minute. I PROMISED I would do it. The student and I are near the same age and he is applying to Stanford as a transfer.  He forgot that the letter was due and had to rush at the last minute.  Normally I would say no to a person in this case.  But this particular student is really sweet and I feel like I owe it to him. We bonded after class. He and another student in my class always come with me to the bus or BART after our class gets out late at night.  This one day, he had brought his car and parked it near school. it just so happened that day, that one drunk student showed up to class and started to grind his teeth and turn red and berate me in front of the class. It was kind of scary.  I thought he was going to hurt me or somebody else. The custodian who is on shift, this hip African American lady who wears large gold ear-rings and has cute tattoos and is around my age, also was scared. Now she always checks in on me at night and cleans around the door to my classroom, acting nonchalant but peeking in every once in a while to make sure I am okay. We were both freaked out by my drunk, raving student…the one who left class screaming that he was the Underground Man and the bug in Kafka’s metamorphosis. I swear, existentialist literature can sometimes make men freak out, scream at me and run out of the room.  

Why? There is no good reason, but it is so and has happened to me more than once. Maybe they can’t stand their own feelings and it freaks them out that a female has the power and is telling them what the literature means. Or maybe it’s mommy issues? Or maybe they beat their wife and want to beat the shit out of me? How the fuck should I know. But anyway, when seargant crazypants  started getting freaky, these other two male students got really protective of me and they INSISTED on driving me all the way home, which was REALLY in the opposite direction of their houses by a bridge or two.  I accepted because I was scared and thought, hell, why take a chance?  Seriously though, when the student got freaky and started yelling at me–it brought me to this other place–to another time–when I had a scenario with an abusive boyfriend-when I was 19 or 20.  It was the way he got, the look in his eye that matched the eye of my student. I had to remind myself that I was not a stupid 20-year-old girl. That I was not being held down and that I was not in physical danger, but it still brought me back to that place psychologically.  For that reason, I was so pissed when the college tried to say that this student had the right to come back to my class and I dragged my heals into the ground and did all the nasty lawsuit threats to keep him at bay.  And this particular other student (the one who drove me home) was understanding and helped me.  Should I mention that in the letter or will that make me sound nuts?  

This will be the third letter of recommendation I will have written for a student to get into Stanford.  It’s particularly difficult for me to write because I have been rejected from Stanford’s stegner fellowship about 4 times. I applied one time in 2004, again in 2006, again in 2007 and again this last year in Dec. 2008. In 2004 I also applied in poetry, but all the other years I applied in fiction.  I just got my most recent rejection. It’s not that I care.  I know I’m good enough for them.  But why do I keep getting rejected?  Maybe it’s just too many people. Maybe people don’t want to read about my novel because it’s not in style. Maybe I’m not “edgy enough” or maybe I didn’t sleep with the right writers.  (Hah! I didn’t sleep with any writers, except for one shitty screenwriter way back in the day and mostly just musicians, for what it’s worth.) Maybe the reader sneezed while looking at my application and dropped it into the pile without reading it, or maybe some readers fought bitterly for mine to be included, but at the last minute they decided against it, maybe there was a Turk on the commitee who didn’t want Greek writing in, or maybe another Greek–who didn’t want another Greek to get a leg up on them, or maybe they are waiting for me to mature and then some day…boom, I will get it.) 

The point is: I am mentoring all these students who are getting into Stanford (well one got in, I’m not sure about the other two yet), but the point is: why can’t I get in?  I know I know. About a bazillion people apply and only 5 get in. But why can’t I be one of the five so that I can feel better when recommending my own students? There is no good reason. I know.  Maybe I’m supposed to sweat it out a bit more. Maybe there is a reason for all of this.

Maybe there is no reason and life at its core is just random, meaningless. (*but somehow I know that’s a lie…yet it’s my greatest fear at the same time).

I have to stop psyching myself out about writing and just GO FOR IT! I have to karate kick my way through the glass ceiling and emerge full force like Athena, fully formed out of Zeus’s head.  Here I am. 

Oh, yeah…the letter. I better get cracking.

trapped underground but trying to sprout hope

I have been having really bad pain again lately.  It makes me feel like something isn’t right. Last night I jammed with the guys again at the theatre and I told them of my constant fear that I have cancer and they got mad at me and told me to stop thinking negatively.  I guess they are right. But having all this strange facial nerve pain is making me go a little nuts. I want to run away and leave my life sometimes and I don’t know why I want to do it.  I think I set too many high expectations for myself. I have had all these different doctor’s check-ups since the first of the year and basically nothing is wrong with me according to anybody. But my tmj still hurts, my teeth still feel weird. I’m going to get a second opinion soon from a second dentist. I feel like an old lady and not somebody who is 28 years old.  I feel like I’m getting old and things are not really fun anymore and I am not full of energy any more.  Every time I get by myself I feel physically drained and exhausted. Maybe staying up all night one night a week to rock and roll is killing me slowly.  Maybe it’s having 120 students. Maybe it’s the HUGE wait of having 2 unpublished poetry books, an unpublished novella, 10 unpublished short-stories and a novel that I have been researching, working and reworking and adding story threads to for the past 4 years and NO TIME TO WORK on it is sort of getting me down.  I feel like nobody cares. I feel exhausted the minute I wake up. My family doesn’t understand the kind of fear I feel and the physical pain I have been in is just getting to me.

A part of me feels–dare I say it–trapped.  But if I go anywhere else, where would I go?  My mother, who used to be grossly overweight, has just lost 75 pounds in the last year and a half. She is full of energy and 55.  I feel like I can barely get through the day.  Maybe I just need to put myself to sleep and to wake up and go to the gym, go to church, get back on the wagon of being healthy.  I don’t really know.

The good points–our band is getting a lot better.  I am getting more loose on the keys.  The piano is getting a more prominent place on stage during our jam sessions and I’m starting to remember a lot of the things I had forgotten about piano.  I love playing piano.

I just want to quit my job. I just want to have no responsibilities.  I just want to flit around all day long and dream, and be like a kid on summer vacation. Is this realistic? Hell no.  But it’s what I want in this very moment.  Maybe then, I can get to all my very important art projects that need more mental space then I’ve been able to devote to them. I need to lose about 10 pounds. Not lose them, but you know, tighten up. I want to look good in a bathing suit again. I want to go to somewhere with a beautiful beach and lay on it with a fruity drink in my hand and people fanning me and eat bougatsa with sugar sprinkled on top in the morning for breakfast with drip coffee.  Ahh–my happy place.  See why I need to lose 10 pounds, all my fantasies involve me laying around, getting fanned and eating sweets!

Today in the middle of these feelings, I finally picked up the tulip bulbs which have sprouted while they have been laying around on my back porch and I finally stuck them in the ground in my backyard in honor of the Spring equinox.  I had almost let them rot out there. I kept meaning to plant them and I kept getting lazy. Maybe I need to scrape myself out of the gutter and get back to being busy again. Go to church tomorrow morning.  Go to the gym.  It’s lent. What else could I expect but a struggle?

Cat was found–Joy!

So many people were so nice to me on the search for this cat. Finally, after I had given up hope, we found her, meowing on our doorstep. Actually, Ted doesn’t know yet. He’s still at work. But, boy is he going to be surprised. It’s in losing my cat and finding her again and the intensity of it all that made me do the following really awesome things:

 

a) stand up to an administrator at my job that was proposing unfair shit. That I take a student back into my class who had shown up drunk and threatened me two weeks ago because the admin. was afraid of liability. I advised him of my rights to a safe work enviornment and once again, invoked the name of the almighty Union. (It’s sad that it always has to get to this–maybe I’ll suffer for this later in job interviews for full-time positions, but really with the miniscule amount of full-time jobs, and the amount of unemployed people with their MFA’s/MA’s in English, I could still never get a tenured teaching job. I think publishing a book as greater odds. I’m not saying I won’t get one, but just that by the time I have to wait five more years for this to transpire, the revolving door of community college administrators will have probably turned and I won’t have to deal with this same guy again and why not in the mean time, work somewhere I feel safe?

b) I also decided to take a stand with a co-teacher and finally put a stop to our creative writing class’s agism and sexism toward me (I never thought creative writing would be such a pain in the ass to teach–but really, I think it is my most difficult class–and I am a writer and have my MFA.  The sad part is–the writers are REALLy clueless and bad.  I mean like beginner, beginner, beginner stuff. It’s just that some are so arrogant.

c) Loosing my cat caused me reach out to the people in my neighborhood, some of whom I have never spoken to before or didn’t know existed.

d) I fought a traffic ticket in Oakland tonight and plead ‘not guilty’ and get a trial date, which I will have to pray the cop doesn’t show up for.

e) I started actually praying for something good to happen and getting spiritual again

f) Even if the cat never returned, I started to appreciate my life–I never realized that I actually have a lot to be grateful for and thankful for. I don’t really care about not getting petty writing fellowships or trite political in-fighting of my teaching job which pays me less than I ever dreamed I would ever make with 8 years of school dedicated to the study of literature.

g) be one of the only people at my college to get a mini-grant to go to the 4C’s conference which happens to be in San Francisco, and actually get to experience passing out my business card that I finally broke down and had made because I felt like it was time to get one! h) Cook dinner for and be really extra special nice to my husband (Of course, I love him and we often cook meals together, but last night, I put extra love in the frozen trader joes chicken terriaki with rice and fresh steamed vegetables. Of course, going around with an open emotional wound is kind of intense. I almost lost my temper on the bus this afternoon when these snooty preppy USF girls wouldn’t freakin’ move their asses so I could step up on the bus. They actually told me to get off the platform. I wanted to really yell at them, and tell them that people in Oakland get death threats for such behavior. But I kept my cool and I’m glad I did. Somebody else yelled at them to move their backpacks….and it felt good to watch at least, and I got the double win of not actually losing my temper.

It’s time to bust out the “El Ganador” cheap red wine and call it an early night.

My cat is missing in San Francisco

I’m so sad.  I don’t know where she is. We are beside ourselves with grief. I loved that little cat.  Hopefully, she is just lost and will resurface.  I never knew I would feel so strongly for a lost pet, but I do. I’ve flyered the neighborhood.  I called her. I shook her food bag. I put a blanket that smelled like me outside.  I even when to the animal shelter and looked for her there, and looked through the “dead cat” folder and she was not in there.  I keep thinking I hear her little meows. But I think it’s just wishful thinking.

Here are the realities: either she got locked in a neighbor’s garage or alleyway. Either a raccoon got her.  Or she got hit by a car.  Or she went on a very long vision quest through Golden Gate Park. Or, somebody stole her and she is on her way to being a show-cat.  She is such a pretty cat. So much personality, that even when we go to the vet all the “nurses” would come out and ask if they could feed her special treats.  This cat, besides Ted  is my best friend.  We had, I never thought I would say this, a really special connection. My husband feels this way about the cat, too. It’s like our child, in a way.  

After I flyered the neighborhood, this lady who lives around the corner, who has another cat that always played with mine called and gave her condolences.  I thought that was sweet. All day I kept going around emotionally open, unbound and hurting.  I felt like a small child.  What if everybody went around all day long, talking to the world and really thinking of their little sweetheart pets or the things that loved them and that they loved?

Do you think we would ever have any wars?

Lilly, please come home…but if you don’t, I hope you are adopted by a really nice family, and sitting on a bunch of pillows, being fed treats somewhere in the NOPA.

sadness, and the wine-dark sea

 

Thessaloniki Harbor

I feel like I’ve spent the whole weekend spinning my wheels and getting nothing done.  It is now 2:00 in the morning, and I have not finished any of my weekend projects in their entirety, but I’ve logged time on a million projects, and checked facebook for up to the minute status developments on every single person I know.  Either I have too much work to do, or I am spending too much time on little bullshit nothings.  In honor of the crazy homeless poet I met, and in honor of getting rejected from my local campus’s literary magazine by this one bi-atch who calls herself my colleague, I decided to dust off the old poetry manuscript #2.  I went over six poems with a blue sharpie, while drinking fresh-squeezed greyhounds (which consist of ice, grapefruit juice organic, fresh squeezed, and whatever vodka is on hand).  I did this mercilessly, while listening to my husband and his friends practice their songs on guitar and bass in the next room.  Then, I worked on a short story that I have put down and am picking back up.  Then, I attempted to grade papers…several excrutiating papers on Notes from the Underground.  I read about the Venus de Milo as research for my novel.  I went to sleep.  I woke up, dreamed of pancakes.  Ate wonderful pancakes.  Then graded more papers, watched a movie, printed out my story-in-progress, tried to figure out something difficult online which related to grading my papers on line, which I realized in the end wasn’t worth it and a time suck, and here I am…on the other end of the weekend, staring Monday morning in the face.  Did I mention, that every spare moment I googled random marginalia and searched for the meaning of life?

 

Oh yeah, and on Friday night, I fished around at half-priced books and found several lovely (and cheap–25 bucks in all) books that add to the my research on my novel. (These are by no means the only books I’m using as research…I just got done reading about the Elgin Marbles. And I visited Kalavrita over the summer, got a book on Hitler’s Greece, and the Greek Civil War, Went traipsing through the snowy slopes on Mt. Olympus in January with a tape recorder a few years back to hear war stories told by my uncles, visited Eleusis years ago, went all over the Balkans on a train, drove from Thessaloniki to Kalamata in a geo metro this summer…But it still hasn’t come together. I feel I must still read these precious books I have just found:  1) Plutarch’s The Rise and Fall of Athens 2) a book about Byzantium 3) The Portland Vase, 4) Schlieman’s Treasure and Deceipt, 5)a book about pre-historic relics found on Crete whose name escapes me.

The one good thing about Friday night, was I got home, Ted had bought me this chilean wine called “Ganador” and said it was in honor of me…But don’t get your hopes up because Toby Wolf didn’t call and say you won the fellowship. Damn, but the “Ganador” or Winner wine, was a really funny, ironic, lip staining consolation prize.  Even though, for years I have dreamt of what it would be like to get that phone call, and to be chosen. *Sad, I know.* But true.  We danced around the house to too-loud music, wine-glasses tipping dangerously in our hands, in the back room, to BB-King’s, song “Nobody loves me but my mother,” and somehow it felt better.  I told him that I thought I was a synesthete, because every time I heard music, I taste it. Every time I see a color, I can hear a song. That was the highlight of my weekend. That–and sex.

I know. I’m cracked.  Tomorrow, I will have to wake up and pull this week all over again, except with a conference thrown in.  Geez.

I have to keep reminding myself–I am so lucky–to still have a job. Even if my job pays little and grinds my soul to a nub, at least we teachers, can count on something steady.  I am grateful not to be one of those people who was shot this weekend while attending church in Illinois, or one of those seniors who lives in a tent city on the edge of a swamp in Sacramento.  I’m young and able-bodied, though I could do a better job of spending time with my grandmother, cleaning my house, cooking, saving money, getting my work done, getting some exercise, etc.  But for the most part, I’m doin’ alright.

I am actually trying to have a quiet moment.  We’ll see if this will happen. It’s sad when you actually have to concentrate to find a peaceful moment.  All this self-maintence I have been engaged in since the first of the year just makes me feel guilty when I don’t have time to go to the gym.  Bleah.  I can’t figure out if I am really working hard, or if I am letting myself or my “self” become scattered.

When I figure out which one it is: I’ll let you know.