Happy Sunshine Blond Girl of Death

The conversation over at Nicholas Manning's blog is interesting. Lately all I've been doing in my notebook is recording things. I was going to type up an example of how I am just recording things, except now that I've looked, I'm not sure what I'm recording: "I don't want to tell you how I made it. Throw up. Am you solvent? You know, SOLVENT. Like that." Recently there are a lot of recorded vocabulary explanations that the ESL teacher in the next room gives his students. I listen to him when I'm giving my students exams. It feels like a cheap shot to use the explanations, though. I'd be a very different sort of person if I were a man in my mid-30s.

My students want me to come surfing with them and take them to bars. I said no. Obviously. They are men in their 20s so no one will speak to them when they go out. I'm really a jerk when it comes to giving advice about how to meet people.

I'm reminded of a Janet Song from, I don't know, maybe five years ago (back when I was still taking, ahem, hip hop dance classes on a regular basis), called "Someone to call my lover." Here's the chorus:

Maybe we'll meet at a bar
He'll drive a funky car
Maybe we'll meet at a club
And fall so deeply in love
He'll tell me I'm the one
And we'll have so much fun
I'll be the girl of his dreams
Maybe

These lyrics irk me in so many ways. I guess people do meet at clubs and bars and fall in love. I wonder where people in North County meet each other. At school, work, at bars, on the beach, in malls. "Maybe." Yeah, good luck with that. See, I told you, I'm a jerk about it.

I pained my nails then messed them up. Really, what is the point? I ride a bike every day. I type all day. I use my teeth and nails to open things--my parents might have told me not to use my teeth, but only half-heartedly.

I am debating about whether or not to send manuscripts to Fence and Futurepoem Books. Deadlines are tomorrow. I don't really think that either one of them will publish my work. Of course they won't if I don't send it. I don't want to not send work just to justify my own alienation.

I will send work to Futurepoem, which has no contest or reading fee. I actually don't have a real problem with reading and contest fees, but I don't have extra money now and didn't plan well, and Fence is even less likely to publish me more than Futurepoem.

I should write more love poems, or love poems that don't become gruesome, although I'm not sure I could. After my first reading in New York someone said to me, "you're a little sicko, aren't you?"

Love and hate are abstract, but what happens when you love and hate is not abstract.

Twice this week I've heard women talk about ex husbands / boyfriends / partners as having been "in control of the remote" or "the one controlling the channel changer." I was turning this metaphor over in my head during shavasana today. It implies that the men were in control of the relationship, but it also implies that the women think of themselves or their lives as being like television. Whoever controls the remote is more or less a person sitting on the sofa and this is supposed to symbolize agency? I understand the idea, but as a mechanism for conceptualizing agency and romantic relationships, I find it a bit disturbing. What would be a positive relationship, one where you each get to use the channel changer equally?

“When mutual recognition is not restored, when shared reality does not survive destruction, then complementary structures and ‘relating’ to the inner object predominate. Because this occurs commonly enough, the intrapsychic, subject-object concept of the mind actually conforms to the dominant mode of internal experience…The loved one is continually being destroyed, but its survival means that we can eat our reality and have it too” (Jessica Benjamin, Like Subjects, Love Objects, 43-45).