arguchik | after jester

already my memories of jester are starting to fade. i remember what his voice sounded like, and i remember his mannerisms, but i don't find myself startled by his absence anymore. i no longer "expect" him to be there, except for two things: i still feel the urge to put whatever i'm carrying down at cat height when i open my apartment door (he liked to dart through open doors), and i still move my feet carefully in bed at night, as if i might accidentally knock him off the end of the bed.

i gave most of his stuff to my neighbor who has a cat (i'm very pragmatic--there's nothing wrong with the stuff, so somebody else should get some use out of it). i kept 4 things: his kitty fishing pole, which is propped in the same corner where i always kept it; his collar, which is tucked into my messenger bag with perry's collar (perry was my dog, who died 2 years ago); this little bag of catnip that has teeth marks and drool stains on it (kinda gross, i know); and his scratching post, which is still hanging on the doorknob of my apartment. i can't bring myself to take that down, for some reason. he loved it so much--it's all frayed from him clawing it. i'll get rid of it at some point, but not yet.

i have to give three cheers for therapy--once again, it is *really* helping me to sort out my shit! i can do some of that work on my own--i do, and always have--but it goes faster and more smoothly with therapy than without, in my experience (this is the second time i've been in therapy--the first time was before, during, and after my divorce). i go once a week right now, and every week i learn something, gain insight or perspective on some issue. i can feel it changing my brain--and my heart. it's helping me defuse my writer's block, too, which is *such* a relief! i actually feel excited about my dissertation project again, and i also feel capable of getting it written. now if i can just sustain that momentum.........

one thing that has helped: going back and re-reading all of the papers i've ever written while in graduate school, even the ones from back at UVM. this activity has reassured me that i really am smart enough to do this work--lol, i'm neither a fraud nor a complete slacker like i was beginning to fear (yeah...isn't it funny how we say really harsh things to ourselves that we would never dream of saying to a friend, or even thinking about them???). contemplating my earlier work--that is, reading my papers back to back, which i have never done before--has also helped me to see my progression as an academic, and more importantly has enabled me to see that there are common threads linking all of these papers together. these threads are nothing less than my core intellectual interests and values, including the larger political and social justice issues that i strive to engage in my work. i was surprised (and more happy than i can possibly communicate) to realize that these threads are remarkably consistent from paper to paper, even though the manifest content of my papers crosses an extremely wide range of topics (in no particular order): from aphra behn's long prose fictions in the context of the rise of the novel (that's my m.a. thesis), to james joyce's ulysses (the penelope chapter), to elizabeth barrett browning's aurora leigh, to margaret atwood's cat's eye, to margaret fuller's summer on the lakes in 1843, to milton's paradise lost, to ralph ellison's invisible man, to dean hamer's book about the search for "the gay gene," to ursula k. leguin's the left hand of darkness, to sherman alexie's indian killer, to indian-owned casinos in the context of american nationalism, to herman melville's benito cereno, to adrienne rich's poem "the desert as garden of paradise", to rabih alameddine's kool AIDS, to the two rhet comp theory papers i've had to write (one at UVM and one at UW--the same freaking class forced on me twice! mutter mutter...stupid academic requirements...). i think i'm missing a couple, but you get the idea. the work i'm doing now carries threads from each and every one of these papers, and i didn't see that before. so reassuring! it also helps me to be more clear about these ideas now, in my prospectus.

when i ran my first (so far only) marathon in 2000, with my friend tricia, i said to her at mile 14, "you know...we've already run really fucking far. even if we don't finish, we have nothing to be ashamed of." of course i was still absolutely determined to finish (and i did), but articulating that took some of the pressure off, and enabled me to kick back, mentally, and have fun with the rest of the race. tricia and i even sped up after that point, and finished the 'thon over 20 minutes faster than we had planned, during training. i think the same thing is happening to me right now, intellectually. i've already accomplished a fucking lot of work, and even if i don't end up cutting it as an academic, i have nothing to be ashamed of. (yeah, i still want to cut it, and will give it my all, but hopefully i can knock off the excessive and *harsh* self-criticism, and stop putting counterproductive pressure on myself.)