Day the first: an orientation.

It begins, the beginning of the academic year, in the middle of a week which already feels long. To wit:

• Sunday, when we drove home from Idaho. Does this count? Didn't we go to Idaho for the fun of it? Does driving home on a Sunday count, legitimately, as a part of a long week? I'm not saying I'm being a grownup about it, okay? I'm saying that driving home from a vacation, just like flying home across the Atlantic and practically a whole continent after spending a blissful nine days in Scotland, is the worst, and it categorically inaugurates everything that comes after it as 'long.' 
• Whew, so much whining after a vacation!
• Monday: meeting meeting meeting. Meeting! Even with friends: meeting x 4 = math, which is the worst.
• Tuesday: MEE E E E e e e ting. So much meeting.
• Wednesday: the first day. After which come Thursday and Friday, with their iffy qualities and also: more meetings.

allow me to illustrate.

Well, just so you know that my whining game is legit. Because it is LEGIT.

I had a good writing summer. June and July, I wrote a poem or revised a poem every day. Adding that to the poems I wrote in April (the cruelest month), I have about 90 poems happening. Add to that: my current manuscript was a finalist twice and a semifinalist once in national book competitions. And now summer is over, and said manuscript is done being a finalist, which, no matter how many pep talks you give yourself, or how many times you remind yourself of encouraging things that your writer friends have said, you have to pick yourself up from it, frankly. It feels a little bit like failure.

This helps.  To wit:

And indeed, when I came to the U.S. to become a poet, and when my first book was rejected by the first three publishers I sent it to – FC2, Coffee House, and Wesleyan University Press, as I recall – I was undaunted.  And when my third book took nine years, over 20 revisions and 4 cycles of rejections before it came out, I never thought that this was wrong. It’s not that I thought that my writing was so great and that all I needed was to keep putting it out there until I’d reach the occult threshold of the 76th attempt, but rather, that I came to believe in duration. How a narrative becomes itself in time. How cycles of dormancy and expression are weirdly nutritive. How failure itself becomes a site of possibility: an aperture for chance; for the conditions of the work to arrive in a different time to the one in which it was begun. I learned to continue, to keep moving forward, to keep writing, whether the outcome of that writing was visible – perceptible – or not. I learned how to re-write my work with as much passion and joy and curiosity as I had given to the writing of it. I even invented a chant: Re-writing is writing. Writing is re-writing.

Yep: "cycles of dormancy and expression are weirdly nutritive....failure itself becomes a site of possibility: an aperture for chance; for the conditions of the work to arrive in a different time to the one in which it was begun."

I hope you noticed that I linked to Bhanu Kapi's commencement address. I block-quoted from it. And then I quoted from the block quote. I'm trying to reorient myself. Not a bad thing for a person to do at the beginning of the semester.

In other news, there are practically no vegetables in my house. Not to mention not much of anything else, what with all our travel travel travel (and the subsequent meeting meeting meeting). So once I conclude this orientation session--orienting you to my new semester, since no students showed up for this actual orientation session IRL--I am going to work out, and then buy some broccoli.

It's going to be great. Everything--the writing, the nutritive failure, the semester, the workout, the broccoli. Maybe especially the broccoli though, which is itself super-nutritive.

What is the sound of summer ending?

Oh. My. God. the way a diminishment, evanescent summer waving goodbye, echoes so loudly I can't hear another thing. Also: I never thought it would happen, but I am practically speechless, or blogless, anyway, and when I'm not speechless, I am being a general whiner and pain in the ass.

Today, I had a day without meetings or classes, and I figure those aren't going to come around all that often as the semester, nay, the year progresses, so I stayed home to do my work, and as I just now whined to the historian, because the day was entirely mine to shape, and because I had an agenda of things to do, I felt like I could approach the work without too much stress, just proceed at a deliberate but not frantic pace: but as the end of the day drew near, and as I noted the progress I had made on each and every item, I felt even so not a lessening of anxiety but a burgeoning of it:

Lo! the anxiety flowered like a rude, fat dandelion going to seed, and now, look, a puff of wind! and each little piece of anxiety separated and lofted and eureka: ever so much more anxiety! with potential for growth!

I am going to have to figure out how to handle this better. Because I can't even stand myself. It's come to this: vacuuming dust bunnies and sorting shoes and reading the columns in the Oprah magazine. This is what I've retreated to. Luckily there was some bike riding and dog walking

And now, I am going to pick an outfit to wear to the Board of Trustees meeting.

O, Pioneer!

Yesterday sometime between 4 and 5 p.m., the power went out here in my little piece of the heaven we call the South Valley. Among the things this meant, because I don't think you can fathom this for yourself, my readers:

1. no wireless, and hence, no internet (because all wireless is, ultimately, wired, isn't it? well, it is at the megastore, anyway)
2. no lights
3. no electricity--obvious, I know, but from this point follows
4. no cooking
5. no heat
6. impeded reading, and worst of all,
7. no television

I would have been a horrible pioneer, it's clear. We went to the dog park in the rain (oh, yes, there was not only no power but there was also rain), came home to still no power. A little whining later took us out for Mexican food. When we came back, the neighborhood streetlights were on, but still . . . no power! So not only could I not kid myself about the grading I still needed (and, as it turns out, still need!) to do, I couldn't blur my conscience with back-to-back episodes of Law and Order: Criminal Intent, which almost always helps me ease from Sunday into Monday.

More whining ensued. We found piles of candles and lit them, which made it so we were less likely to stumble, but unable to do much else. I called my folks and had a nice conversation (another reason that a cell phone is good--you can call even when the power's out). The historian located a couple of flashlights. I got into my pajamas at 9:30 p.m., dear readers, which is like saying, "I gave up on life," climbed into bed with a flashlight and Foucault 2.0, and read for awhile. I fell asleep by 10, probably, and slept that kind of sleep where you're sort of between worlds--sleep is using you to think about your real life, in other words. I'm pretty sure I had good ideas about where to take our vacation, why so many people misread Foucault, what to cook for dinner if my stove ever worked again. Also, I had a nightmare about going to a conference but not being fully prepared with all the travel details (wait, I'm pretty sure I lived that nightmare once, but never mind).

The power finally came back on after midnight. The historian was extremely industrious during this darkness, organizing stuff, ignoring my intermittent whining, etc. The upside of this pioneering is that I got a massive amount of sleep yesterday. Also, the house has a lingering scent of candlewax.