feather2pixels

I’m back from the teaching conference for engineers. No more pretending: now I am teaching for real.

I wish I could say it was going well, but it feels like everything else right now. You know, time and space collapsing into a tar-like substance that is virtually impossible to remove from cotton. Words come out of my mouth but I barely hear them. I certainly don’t control them. I am numb to everything going on around me.

I feel like I am losing my sensory perception. I can’t hear people on the phone, I misread words in magazines that I never needed glasses to read before, and my memory feels like the old butter knife you never use because it’s too dull, even for a butter knife.

Somehow, my students put up with it all. Some of them could even be described as bright eyed and eager and, in this way, they amaze me. I’m hoping their patience will outlast my derusting.

I can’t avoid this any longer.  It is August and I’m not quite sure what happened to July.  I hit a brick wall.  My life slowed to a halt.  Everything was suspended.  And now it’s time for that to be over.

But right now there are only two ways things can go.  And I need them to go forward.

Big postcard developments are happening. Get excited. I got a backing coat on a series of two hundred forty last night at silkscreening. I also got covered in blood red acrylic. My workshop-mate, Joanna who has a sloped pointy nose and a soft touch, was working on a valentine for her boyfriend. I really liked the way they came out and convinced her to donate one to feather2pixels. Apparently, her boy friend is really into pork. Do you see why I am so excited about silkscreening?
Anyways, it’s a symbol of the first of several predicted stupid, fucked-up situations that I will be torturing myself over in 2007: one valentine, two women. It’s not a simple situation and feather2pixels has been vague about details. In the hopes that I can finally shut the fuck up about it:

Morgan Jameson is bad bad bad news. It’s hard to imagine what good can come of my dealings with her.

“you want to be close to me and i have a problem with that. i
have a problem with anyone wanting to be close to me. i know
this. this doesn’t mean there’s anything i can do about it. you
seem to think this has something to do with you but it doesn’t.
at some later point i’ll feel better about life and i’ll feel better
about myself and i’ll feel more secure and optimistic, and then
i’ll be ready to open up to someone. but that’s just not right now.”

Hmm. You would think that would be the final word, but the fucked-up begets the fucked-up and she surely needs my attention (which, given the proper circumstances, is not effected by such secondary concerns as my job, life, and happiness) as much as I crave her breath on my shoulder. I am crazy about her.

Sarah is gentle, active, and stable. It’s hard to imagine someone with more positivity to offer.

The polarity of the situation was recently pointed out to me. I have all the power with one girl and none of it with the other. But relationships are not supposed to make you feel dreadful. It’s obvious that I am a classic control freak–it got me to California–but what precisely is the noxious relationship in the acids of my brain between power and love? Who will receive the pork valentine?

I am at work. It’s 5:44 and I get wistful here at night so sorry about this. I’m walking back to work after an on-campus dinner. Outside the mess deck, one of my favorite students, Baby Bluehawk, eying my load of manila folders offers to help me finish my grading while she is at work. She’s starting her shift at the library and will be there until ten. A group of five sweating students on an Indian run passes me on the left, chanting militant nonsense.  It’s getting dark and there is a light on in my office.  I hate to quote indie rock on my blog but this has stuck with me for weeks:

“we sailed away on a winter’s day
with fate as malleable as clay
but ships are fallible, i say,
and the nautical, like all things, fades.”

In the distance, a tugboat squeezes a barge out of the Carquinez Straight towards open water as the sunset casts the San Pablo Bay soft pink. I should know more about that–barges and things. But I am just floating through all of this. My energy is focused on things that will surely collapse. People who will surely fade. And I cannot stop myself.