thevillagecharlatan

Do you go to conferences? I’m at a big one right now, the most important annual conference in my field. I have been ducking in and out of conferences like some looky-loo teenage asshole, taking catty notes and thinking about Important Matters. Having Important Conversations. Seeing friends. Laughing and having a good time in the halls with these friends to show what an erudite and socially integrated scholar I am. It’s all starting to wear on me, truth be told, and it was nice to get a break with a session called “Queering Craft”. I entered the conference room during the Q and A, having missed the presentations, and so I just listened to the funny jokes that everyone was telling about queerness. I’m not explicitly a queer theorist but enjoy hearing (and sometimes participating in) those conversations. Since my current project (my pregnancy panel is over so I’m over that research for the time being) involves masculinity, today I imagined that I was doing something queer by studying an overtly masculine, annoying, taciturn, and difficult artist who plays with clay and sews. That’s not how I frame him in my writing but I enjoyed thinking it today just the same. Maybe I should mention this to the Queer Queens running that session. One of them is in this computer room with me right now, possibly blogging about this same Queering Craft panel like me. 

Just now I thought about how absolutely impossible it is to gauge one’s own mental health. Sometimes it’s impossible for your therapist to do that as well. I had a conversation with S the other night about how I’m pretty unhappy with my current therapist and have been thinking about seeing someone else. But I’m having trouble determining the crux of the therapist problem: is it that he’s always late and often cancels, and waxes authoritative about Freud and The Pleasure Principle and tells me that, at my young age, it’s only natural that I should want to take up with other pleasure seeking beings, i.e. dykes? Or is it that I make such a valiant effort to conceal my ambivalence about the situation because he also sees my (soon-to-be-ex) husband and I just can’t stand to appear to be the person in The Most Torment, that it’s impeding the therapy process? I think I need a closed space in which to feel like a freak. Right now I don’t feel like I can do this with impunity.

This week is going to be hell. Can I tell you about the things to which I have been invited this week, at the risk of Sounding Like A Dick? One movie, two art openings, a fancy advertising awards event, one board game date, a Phillip Glass concert, a cookie-making birthday party, and one absolutely un-turn-downable “I am in town for 24 hours, come have drinks with me on 3 days’ notice” drinking thing. I also have the Gender Symposium pregnancy panel on Friday, a writing workshop Wednesday that I may cancel, and two days of museum interviews starting Sunday (I am an interviewer and not, unfortunately, the interviewee). It is really not good form to complain about how many social obligations you have, but Jesus, people. Jesus Mary and Joseph. I need to cool it. My advisor told me a lot of nice things during our meeting on Friday, however, and I am High on Encouragement. Apparently I am being smart by choosing to say yes to “happy-to-know-you”-ness. Yes to going out. Yes to being visible. Yes to upping my financial aid package. Yes to playing with other universities’ hearts. Perhaps this will end badly, but right now it appears to be making me rich.

Sometimes it’s difficult to decide what you’d like to work on for a semester project. Do you prefer dealing with many texts or do you like speculations cobbled from outlying sources? Are you the sort of person who worries about the potential of your project to lead to other projects? I’m faced with two seminars this semester that set out broad and narrow parameters, respectively, and I’m going to have to make a choice about them soon. I’m trying to spend a good deal of time thinking about these things because I prefer that school keep me distracted from a number of other things at the moment. Perhaps I will sublimate my anxieties by building projects that address those anxieties peripherally. That might be a challenge in this case. There’s a lot going on. So much going on

Sometimes it’s difficult to decide what you’d like to work on for a semester project. Do you prefer dealing with many texts or do you like speculations cobbled from outlying sources? Are you the sort of person who worries about the potential of your project to lead to other projects? I’m faced with two seminars this semester that set out broad and narrow parameters, respectively, and I’m going to have to make a choice about them soon. I’m trying to spend a good deal of time thinking about these things because I prefer that school keep me distracted from a number of other things at the moment. Perhaps I will sublimate my anxieties by building projects that address those anxieties peripherally. That might be a challenge in this case. There’s a lot going on. So much going on that I ate too much cheese today thinking that it might help things, but it did not.

I think I’m going to have my period soon. I just cried when a friend told me over Gchat that she is joining Weight Watchers. Several other non-upsetting things have been upsetting to me as well. Still other things that are objectively upsetting have been consuming my every waking minute. For instance, my dog has a strange growth on her upper hind leg. Tomorrow she will go to the vet and perhaps undergo some scary and expensive surgical procedure to get it removed. I hope that turns out to be all she needs. Additionally, my food is tasting all weird and some of my experiences are leaving little trauma-trails that follow me into subsequent days. 

My inattention to this blog bothers me. It’s because I don’t believe that I will really earn the promised $1 for every entry. What I need is a regular activity in which to engage every day, like going to mosque. Perhaps this will keep me from being the hyper-sensitive bitch that I’ve been to everyone in the last couple of days. I get like this when I put off my work in favor of other things, like Emotions. Hopefully this blog will be a buffer against Emotions. Well, the wrong emotions. When the semester began 2 weeks ago, I planned to have its theme be “love and romance”. Now it is more like “paranoia and menstruation”. This has to be stopped. It’s preventing better, longer blog entries about Other Interests. Also, I am nervous about the upcoming Gender Symposium meeting in which I am supposed to speak. At least I have a Byzantine pregnancy angle: in some regions, Mary was called the Platytera, a person wide enough to contain the universe. “Platytera: wider than the universe.” All of us are enveloped in Mother Mary’s birthing hips.