Life as an Extreme Sport

Category: …and everything else

Mostly everything else in a brain-academic way.

ontological quadrivical questions

...and everything else

I haven’t really kept up on television since the return, post-strike. I could say it is because it can be a pain to track everything down online, not having an active cable/television setup right now, or because I’ve been busy. But I think the reality is, I’ve only watched the shows that have storylines that don’t hit too close to home, things that I can watch and enjoy and even become emotionally invested in without feeling like it’s treading too close to still-raw pain. So perhaps it’s not a surprise that I’ve not watched Grey’s Anatomy or House, Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who, none of it since they’ve returned to television. In fact, much like my attitude towards the end of Gaiman’s Sandman, I haven’t even watched the finale of Torchwood – if I don’t watch it, it doesn’t happen. Even if I know about it.

And I do know about all the storylines – I am keeping up via Television Without Pity and other sites. I’m reading recaps, tracking fan responses, and I know what’s going on. But there’s something about reading it through a computer screen rather than watching that allows a bit of a gap, a bit of distance – an ability to not feel, or at least not feel as strongly as I might otherwise. It’s a good thing, I think – except when I think that it’s a bad thing. Which is most of the time.

It’s hard not to note the amount of my interaction with the world that is mediated by the computer. The screen as a protective device; I can think about what I want to say, be eloquent, be removed. Interaction on my own terms, delayed live, rather than immediate. A slight disengagement. I can say things over that IM window that might never be said, admitted, in any sort of real time actual space place. And it worries me – shouldn’t I be forming more attachments out in that real time actual space world, rather than sinking further into the digital virtual?

I am most aware of how much my world has shrunk down on itself after experiencing it expand, and I can’t find the healthy balance between the two, between being so small that the world stops at the edge of bed and cats, and so large I can’t contain it all within my heart and hands.

Creative Destructiveness

...and everything else, a-musing

I’m sitting on my bed right now, although a quick glance wouldn’t make that obvious. I’ve set aside that last paper I need to write, that take home exam I need to go over one more time before deciding that really is my final answer, and I’ve opened up the boxes of art supplies that have sat in my pantry, untouched for almost two years. A huge shift for me, for someone who incorporated art into classroom assignments (both those I gave as instructor, and turned in as student). But I’ve been feeling that clawing need to end up with hot glue on the tips of my fingers, paint ground into the very pores and lines of my skin, flecks of bronze leaf in my hair and ink or pastels smudged across my face.

So it was with amusement that I read this review, found originally at Jezebel, about the creative destructiveness of woman:

You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. If you don’t want to starve, a certain ruthlessness becomes necessary. You may not want to own the bloodiness involved in killing, plucking and drawing your own chicken, or butchering your own pig, but you’d probably be prepared to dice onions with a sharp knife and mince parsley. Similarly, if you had a garden or allotment, you’d dutifully hack and slash at weeds and brambles. This sanctioned destructiveness can give the mildest-seeming person great inner satisfaction. No need to come out publicly about one’s sadistic impulses if there is vegetable chopping or shrub pruning to be done. Magically, the angry feelings, channelled through practical technique, loving and attentive, may produce beauty.

That happy result depends, of course, on whether you’ve chosen your work or feel obliged to do it. Perhaps bad cooks and gardeners have too much anger rather than too little. The cook who reduces the vegetables to sludge may be venting her exasperation at having to produce daily meals whether she feels like it or not. The gardener who concretes over the wilderness may be fed up with doing most of the nurturing in the family. Burning the dinner may mean wanting to change the world. Feminists since Mary Wollstonecraft have known this.

The review goes on to say that the book author, Juliet Miller, ties in the idea of sanctioned forms of female creativity, such as motherhood, and the unsanctioned – anything with anger or violence. But the problem is, art is often angry, often violent, often the exploration of a rupture; if women don’t think of anger as feminine, but instead masculine and off limits, they can stifle themselves into silence.

It’s an interesting idea, that she extends into writing, research, and just about everything we do – art is creation, and creation can be found anywhere, from the lab to academic papers. And we stifle ourselves whenever we begin to think that we can’t get angry, we have to play nice, we have to fulfill certain roles and duties. Miller ties to whether or not we look to our ideal woman as being the sexless virgin mother Mary, or the passionately violent creator/destructor Kali. I’m not sure I so precisely buy that stringent a dichotomy, but I do find the idea (as I sit here in a sea of supplies) that we need art, that it is not a hobby, not a luxury, but a necessity.

uneven keels

...and everything else

I’m a big one for pendulums. Always have been – strongly drawn black and whites irritate me, and I will go overboard to see the world in shades of grey or glorious colour when faced with a binary option. It’s only gotten worse with education, and especially with CHID. It’s actually less stringent here and now, simply because that joke about two philosophers and three opinions? Is more painfully true than people who don’t live in philosophy departments are aware.

So it’s been with some bitterness that I’ve seen so much dichotomy in life the last few days, so much good coupled with so much bad, and the difficulty I’ve had in finding any part of a sliding scale rather than either/or. Sitting a death watch with a friend (as much as I’m allowed or welcomed, anyhow), spilling a mug of coffee on my Macbook before I’d finished writing (and backing up) my final ethics paper, that today is Mother’s Day and you can’t go anywhere without people trying to profit on it in all the Hallmarkian glory. But I’ve also had fun bantering Buffy around, the contented glow of companionship, continuing friendships forming, old ones hanging around and making life more enjoyable.

I don’t know. There have been highs and lows, and it’s hard to balance it all out, to find the middle ground and harmony that should be there, to not be overwhelmed on either side of things. I keep thinking I need to sit and read, but read what? Nothing is coming to mind – nothing that I have, anyhow (and I’m banned from spending money until I find one of those J O B things).

I had thought, today, I might lean on a friend for comfort and support, and instead find myself trying to be mentally primed to be the comforting and supporting. Which is in itself somewhat funny, since from our conversation last night, he’s doing the same – and I think the end result will be neither of us talking to or supporting the other, when it’s what we both want.

I’m not speaking in riddles, so much as I’m just speaking to myself, but have to get it down somewhere. More than anything, I think it just comes down to wishing I hadn’t gone out of the house today, wishing I could have just continued thinking it was only Sunday, wishing the multiple service-staff while out hadn’t continually shoved Happy Mother’s Day at me, in my face, trying to get me to buy things for Mom, a mother I no longer have in tangible form.

I finally snapped, on the way out, at the last person who was thrusting those Mother’s Day remarks at me, and told him my mother had died in November. And I’m not happy with myself for it, for the joy that drained out of his face as he realized his faux pas. But at the same time, the insensitivity in assumption just boiled me over.

I miss you, Mom. I wish you were here for me to send flowers to, silly animated cards, to laugh and fear what later this week would bring. To be giddy with you, and have the sorts of conversations that a girl can only have with her mother, and I will never have again. I miss you.

I’m an ANT!

...and everything else, Academics

It’s always fun to spend weeks formulating an idea and reading, and days trying to construct it into some logical argument, only to realize at nearly 2am and less than two days before the paper is due that you’ve just been resituating actor-network theory into an epistemological framework.

…I suppose I should be grateful I apparently still remember all that stuff (and/or that Phillip really indoctrinated me well).