Saturday. Last night was OK fun. Liza, James and I at Schallers which is predictable but still a bit of fun. Liza and I have decided that once in a while vodka is medicinal, especially after a long work week and especially when you're holding pain at bay which we both are. Attentive readers will call me out on the vodka thing. I think I swore it off, but really I think that was a mistake, especially when your heart is laying in pieces at your feet. I think a lot of folks, in my heartbroken shoes, would be taking anti-depressants about now (coming up on my own mini version of 911 - 9/15 which will be three months since the breakup). Instead, I write, sing, talk, read, cook, and once or twice a week I go out with friends and drink vodka and make believe I am getting over him. It makes everyone relieved to see me laugh and smile. So like I said, vodka=medicine when you're nursing a broken heart.
Tonight a date with NewPatrick. I'm nervous because I think I like him. OK. Here's something either really obnoxious or incredibly adorable. He has been, for the last week or so, writing a paper that he will present to a panel of academics in Turkey next week. He finished the first draft yesterday and was feeling betwixt and between about it. So, I offered to edit/proof/comment on the paper, saying confidently, "I'm a good writer." What possessed me to offer to review a paper written by a professor, a person who spends considerable time correcting student papers!??? He must have been amused by the offer from a person who never even finished her undergrad! So yeah, either obnoxiously cocky or naively adorable - that's me. I read the paper and, oh dear, I fear discussing it with him tonight. In the first paragraph alone, there were a slew of words I had to look up like, locus, alterity, discursive, disjuncture, liminality. Then concepts of which I had not a clue: politics of translation, trans-mapping of cultural mythologies, translation of alterity, milieu of cultural production (what the heck is cultural production - anything produced by a culture?), phenomenology of dialogue, heterogeneous discursive space, locus of commonality and dislocation. I'm in trouble, right?
Ah...but he's meeting me on my turf, Katerina's where "everyone knows my name". We will see my friend and teacher Spider Saloff sing Gershwin and I will get her to sing NewPatrick's favorite song, "The Man I Love". We will then go to my other coach/teacher's gig at Myron and Phil's and there I will sing the same song for him. If he is really smooth, he will tell me he liked my version better even though he will be lying through his teeth.
I've been giving thought to 911 with the anniversary coming up and I am struck at how much I'm still affected by what happened ten years ago. I (along with everyone else) was thunderstruck by the event - it shook me to my very core - we all suffered a huge loss that day. I wonder if historians will point to that event as THE negative defining moment in American civilization. The optimist in me hates the thought that our standing in the world is in decline - it is easier to think that we are just experiencing a correction - that our country will come roaring back to where it was. But, what goes up, must come down and if you step back and look at the "painting" from a distance, our affluence and dominance is unsustainable. I kick myself for not buying something called a histogram from the Rand McNally store I saw years ago. It was a graphic depiction of the rise and fall of civilizations starting with the earliest cultures. Humbling to see how every civilization follows the same path of growth and decline. In NewPatrick's paper one sentence in particular struck me. "For our purposes, this disjuncture involves America, the fading center of the world, and Turkey, part of Europe, Middle East, and Eurasia and center of Byzantium, the reemergent center of the world." I didn't get that memo! First I'm reading that Turkey is the "reemergent center of the world"!!
911. It changed things for me. I decided I could no longer care that much about events outside my control. It was then I got rid of the TV - put my head in the sand out of self preservation. Last year when I worked with my daughter, Catherine, she was amazed and concerned by just how cut off I'd become. Example: I came back from the grocery store and asked her if something had happened in Haiti because there were little collection jars. She said, "Seriously, mother?" She was equally shocked when I lamented that a package I sent to a friend in Germany hadn't arrived, something about a volcano that I was unaware of. I know this has to change. It's been ten years and I think the statute of limitations on PTSD for a tragedy that didn't directly impact your life, has run out. I think I need to let a bit of the world back in. Here is a piece I wrote last year:
Peace and quiet - that's all she wanted these days. Almost imperceptibly, she'd shed the layers of anxiety producing stimuli. It started with 911 and the unbearable sadness. For months, she sobbed for no reason - anything could trigger it. If she was driving and a sad story came over the radio, she was forced to pull over to the side of the road. Head down on the steering wheel, she sobbed, grief vomiting out of her.
Finally she could take no more of other peoples' sadness. She cancelled the cable TV. It wasn't enough. Sadness still leaked in. Magazine subscriptions cancelled too. Next she got rid of the computer and put the TV in the alley with a note saying, "Please take me. I'm not broken." When there was an earthquake in Haiti she only learned of it a month later when she asked a colleague why there were collection jars at the grocery store. And only when an overseas shipment did not arrive on time did she learn of a volcano in Iceland.
Her home was purged - husband gone, kids gone, TV gone, computer gone, crap gone. It was finally a place of peace and solitude, a place to be where sadness was not allowed. She canned the harvest, quietly - flat after flat of perfect berries, suspended in syrup. Hour and hour, day after day, hundreds of jars, each perfect, and made in stillness....the only sound, the pop,pop,pop of the jars as they emerged from their sterilizing boiling water bath.
The challenge today for you could be thinking about the piece I wrote and your feelings about the upcoming 911 anniversary. My reaction to the over-stimulation of the news was extreme but it served the purpose of quieting my mind. I suspect we are overloaded with external anxiety, news that is stuffed into our heads and consciousness. We feel we must pay attention to it - our citizen duty to swallow a daily dose of doom and gloom. I worry that a steady diet of hand-wringing anxiety is physically and psychically bad for us. I know Sarah needs to get her head out of the sand - it's embarrassing and uneducated to be clueless of current events. But I'm going to be very careful what I let in. I will create a tiny aperture for world information. Not being a policy maker, if I don't learn about a coup for a week, no one is adversely affected by my ignorance. Thinking I'll renew my subscription to the Economist and read it, cover to cover each week - news without emotional affect. I think I can handle that.
Peace,
Sarah
Sarah - I suggest making a read of the news part of your daily routine. I like google news for well placed "headlines" and the Huffington Post. Another helpful thing I do is receive news headlines and breaking news from the NYT, Washington Post and the Tribune.
ReplyDelete9/11 was unspeakable. In my own family we lost who would have been the second grandchild, who was born on 9/11 and passed on 9/12. This part of history is one which remains hermetically compartmentalized. There is some grief which cannot be reconciled. There are moments, and that was one of them, where the only way out of it was to move on.