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.