Confirmed

My knees are officially fucked.  Again.  As the doctor at the sports medicine clinic explained to me (and which I knew from rounds one and two of this over the past 15 years, but was conveniently ignoring), since this is a syndrome there is no cure, only management.  In the interim, there is only pain.
It turns out that going back to running four years ago was a good thing at the time – it did enough general muscle strengthening to placate the problem.  Now, though, it’s a hindrance – not running won’t make it better, but continuing to do so (or to do anything) without braces, orthotics, and physiotherapy (expensive, all of them) will make things worse. As if being confined to this one project, this one apartment wasn’t enough.  It feels like my body is conspiring against me, curtailing my few avenues of mental and physical escape.  Grrrr.

Distractions

I’ve been watching a lot of House lately – episode after episode after episode.  This is one of the ways I deal with funks, to immerse myself in a fictional world even less pleasant than my own.  Melrose Place works quite well for this, incidentally.  Part of House’s appeal for this particular kind of oblivion-viewing is its schadenfreude: sure, I’m miserable, but not as miserable as House; sure, my knee hurts like hell, but I’m not being repeatedly stuck in the spine with giant needles that test for horrible diseases with long, compound names.  Part of it is the mystery – I love a good mystery – but more than that, I think, is the formula.  Lupus is always ruled out at the start, there’s always a seizure, a series of stabs at diagnosis that are thwarted again and again until House strikes upon that last clue.  Always.  This comforts me.  Things get worse and worse and worse, and then better.  Next episode, things get worse and worse and worse, and then better.  Over and over as I slouch bra-less on the couch.  At some point the formula will get comforting enough that I’ll take it seriously: I’m not a locus of mysterious symptoms, I should shower and sit down with my notes and write. Because things get better.

Unmoored

The inevitable mid-winter sketchbaggery of grad student life has hit me.  No teaching, just the diss.  No money, no office, just the same four rooms.  Wind chills, cold rain, and now an inexplicably swollen and unbendable knee mean no running. Chapter four is hitting close to home – I’m simultaneously invested in and distancing myself from the material, which makes the act of writing frustrating and upsetting just as the process is becoming more isolating and alienating from that wide world I’m told is out there.  And during the past two weeks my landlords have been renovating the empty apartment below mine, prompting power and water outages, headachey fumes and wall-shaking demolitions that drive the dog and I to R’s house for quiet as well as basic amenities. Maintaining momentum, in either an apartment that feels more cloying each day or one that lacks my library and stacks of notes, is hard. Plus the spine of my trusty notebook has come unglued, so that pages of precious ideas disconnect and slide out.  How melodramatically metaphorical.

Preferences

I will gladly take our feet of snow, inches of freezing rain, slippery sidewalks, and nose-stiffening wind chills over a climate in which Proposition 8 seems logical.

Watch this.  Sniffle or cry, if you want to.  I did.  And I’m a hard-ass.

Cone of cold

When a similar cold spell hit before the holidays, CBC Radio’s weather folks kept referring to it as a “cone of cold.” Another such cone descended a few days ago, and apparently intends to stick around for another few.  And it’s really cold this time.  When trodden upon, the hard-packed snow sounds like styrofoam.  My left eye (the more watery of the two in the cold) has frozen shut twice, a mildly panic-inducing sensation. I actually put a coat on the dog when we go outside*.  Everyone walks with their head down, the parks are deserted all day, cars make dispirited death-rattles in the morning.  Most of my windows are frosted over, which is actually quite pretty if you don’t think too much about what’s causing it.

I watched an episode of the ridiculous Man vs. Wild last weekend in which our hero descended upon Siberia.  As he leapt from the plane, he warned the audience that temperatures were so cold that you could die within minutes: -20C.  Perhaps he should parachute onto the Main or Crescent Street this weekend and get some tips from the clubbers who want to wear their favourite cute shoes and not pay for coat check.  He could show them his secret of using a dead deer’s leg as a walking stick, and they could… well, buy him a drink at least.

And to clarify: this is not what I like about winter.

*I hate pets in clothes, but she has such short hair, nearly died from pneumonia before I adopted her, and is clearly struggling to breathe comfortably when it’s -36C in the morning.  I can’t get her to wear boots though, which it unfortunate as salty sidewalks dry out her feet to the point where they sometimes crack and bleed.  But she tears the boots off the minute I’m not looking, and I have limited patience for dog-dressing.

On confession

I have a habit of writing things through, particularly questions I’d rather not answer, or answered with the sensation that I left something dangling.  I’m a ruminator (oh how I wish that sounded ominous).  Ideas percolate while I’m on the metro, idly trolling through grocery store aisles, walking the dog.  This isn’t like that Seinfeld episode in which George only comes up with the perfect comeback days later – those are always at the ready.  But the meaningful responses to genuine questions have to actually be thought out, and usually away from the questioner.

I’ve gone so far as to create a separate file in which all of my ruminated and thought-out and scripted responses are kept.  They can be written, and revised, and edited, and re-written, so long as they get saved under the innocuous filename of “emails” (and thus, according to Speech Act Theory, making them emails). They rarely go anywhere, but I keep them because it’s good to know that at some (past the tipping) point I figured out the perfect thing to say, came up with a searing elucidation on what exactly it is that I mean.

I’m now ruminating upon this rumination – in working through Chapter Four I’m messing around with Foucault’s interpretations and uses of ‘confession.’ He talks about confession as a means of producing ‘truth’ (specifically in relation to sexuality; while central to my chapter, that’s not the part I’m interested in here).

…seeking the fundamental relation to the true, not simply in oneself – in some forgotten knowledge or in a certain primal trace – but in the self-examination that yields, through a multitude of fleeting impressions, the basic certainties of consciousness.  The obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different points is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us; on the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, ‘demands’ only to surface.

Foucault talks about how this act, this ritual, is bound up in and enacts arrangements of power; even if you are just dragging confessions out of yourself into unsent emails there is a virtual or presumed arbiter and a mechanism of forgiveness – an internalized sense not of social propriety so much as an injunction toward individualization (which is, however, bound up in and judged by external shoulds and oughts).  We cannot pinpoint something as a ‘sin’ worth recounting without a sense of what norms we have transgressed.  Confession is recognized not only by its degree of difficulty but also by its implicit potential for exacting change:

…a ritual in which the truth is corroborated by the obstacles and resistances it has had to surmount in order to be formulated . . . a ritual in which the expression alone, independently of its external consequences, produces intrinsic modification in the person who articulates it: it exonerates, redeems, and purifies him; it unburdens him of his wrongs, liberates him, and promises him salvation.

To a certain degree this is a matter of pattern recognition, that one of these things is not like the other.  What I confess, the truths of self I produce, are through the act of confession marked as different, through this process identified as somehow noteworthy, having bearing on how the ‘me’ they narrate fits – or doesn’t, or could, or needs to – into larger structures or forms of social control.  And along the way they’re ideally to tweak this ‘me,’ so that I become fitter, happier, more productive, not drinking too much…

Which isn’t to say I’m going to stop writing faux emails.  Or that I don’t believe something personally valuable can be gained through such reflection (which would invalidate this whole blogging thing).  Just another instance of life imitating theory, that’s all.

So. 2009.

I have resolutions this year, unlike last year.  Simple ones, like flossing and washing my face before going to bed, rather than just haphazardly swiping with toner.  “Completing the diss” isn’t a resolution, though, as that has to happen regardless, and if it comes to it, I’d prefer to look back and think “Yeah, I still didn’t floss.”  But since 2009 is now in full swing (i.e. I’ve already finished grading and gone back to writing), not much more needs to be said about the new year.  Or about the holidays for that matter – spent some time with R.’s family, he spent some with mine, everybody liked everyone, I ate a ton of shortbread in defiance of the gift certificate I received for The Running Room.

About the grading: my students’ take-home exam was to pitch their own Canadian film or television series, and to justify their creative decisions by referencing relevant class material.  This made things much more interesting for them, they said, and definitely more so for me.  My favourite line was from a pitch for a zombies-in-Montreal thriller, in which the student was discussing the use of hand-held cameras and linking it to Canadian film’s roots in the realist/documentary tradition: “In keeping with this realism, the zombies will be of the ’sprinter’ variety . . . “  Excellent.

It’s been snowing continuously all day, which pleases me more than others.  Each time I pop Alice out for a pee she spins herself in excited circles then dashes headlong into the nearest drift.  I’ve kept a pot of coffee warm for hours, decreasing in inverse proportion to the snow delicately building on my porch railing.  I think both are now nearly done, but as this is January in Montreal and as I’m writing my last major chapter, there will be more tomorrow.

New look

Yep, the only thing I’ve done with my blog in a month is change its look. I’ve been marking my students’ most excellent essays, and am about to turn around and grade their final exams.  I’ve been writing (seriously!) my fourth chapter and getting excited about it, I’ve been applying for jobs and post-docs – cross your fingers.  I’ve travelled for R.’s parents’ 40th anniversary weekend, played with Alice in the snow, and then the ice, and then the snow, and then the ice. The blog has sadly been an afterthought in all of this – a guilty afterthought, as pithy observations will occur and I’ll think “I should blog about that!” but obviously never do. I’m hoping that this winter, with my writing groove on, I’ll come back to this more often as an outlet for the thoughts that just don’t fit elsewhere.

Success of a sort

Excuse me while I geek out for a moment.  I did my first dungeon this evening in WoW. From my (limited) understanding, this is where a group of players band together, enter some sort of area with lots of bad guys, and try to make it to the end of the area.  Being still new to this, I don’t have the lingo or the strategy down and ended up being the subject of an irate discussion for not “AOE”-ing properly (which, apparently, means using spells I have that cover a big area rather than just targeting one guy – it means all the bad guys within the area get walloped at once).  I’ll spare the suspense and say we made it through regardless, though at the end the other characters asked if I was a “real babe” – I was playing a female character, and I assume they wanted to know if I was actually a woman, and not just playing at one (don’t get me started on gender performativity here).  Once I verified that I was indeed a “real babe” (after making a crack about sexism) they seemed much more impressed, and even made their characters dance for me.

A few random thoughts on this: I was initially miffed at the cracks about my character’s performance, which has more to do with pride than anything.  It’s one thing to run around with R.’s character, which outperforms mine every time.  He’s been playing for years and knows all the ins and outs.  But being in that kind of group situation and not being the best (alright, being the worst) bugged me.  A pride thing.  Secondly: I know this is a male-dominated game, in terms of the players, if not the avatars, but seeing firsthand the response to the presence of a “real babe” was interesting.  I think it increased the informal reputation of R.’s character more than mine, and I didn’t take well to having my lacklustre skills blamed on gender rather than experience. I have many more thoughts brewing about how these sorts of roles play out, but I’ll save those for later.

But all’s well that ends well, I suppose.  I managed to gain a level, got a neat staff to hit other bad guys with in the future, and R.’s character and mine retired to the nearest inn for the night to rest up:

The real life night is ending somewhat differently, in that I’ll be spooning a dog.  Just as adorable and comforting, and Alice will just shrug and go back to sleep when I get up in the morning to write.  She won’t bother putting on a pot of coffee, though.

Back

R. and the dog and I spent the weekend at a tiny cottage in Ste Agathe.  The constant rained trapped us inside, and, having agreed to go sans laptops and without a cell connection, we played a lot of gin rummy and watched a lot of movies and ate a lot of food.  And lots of not wearing pants.  I’m unpacking now, and I’m tired – not from the weekend, but from being back and realizing that real life starts again pretty much now.  Between his work and his school, and my school and my work, “quality time” is hard to come by and even harder to let go.  What I can’t shake, though, is just how after all that quality time I still want more.  Right now.  For the resolutely independent person that has generally grown frustrated with (the interpersonal demands of) a significant other fairly quickly in the past, this is a new sensation.  It’s not even rattling me.

That’ll have to sit with me for awhile.  Other updates that will be elaborated upon soon: the new laptop (better WoW graphics, whee!  Still not good enough to play Spore, boo.  Ah, well, all good things in time).  I’m working my way into chapter four.  Only four classes left in my course, and my students are still most excellent.  Before I get around to all this, though, I’m going to fall asleep pretending it’s not yet Monday.