deja vu

I'm sorry to be so unposty lately. I hope to be back to my usual self before too long.

In the meantime, I have a couple of requests.

This thing with my job has taken an interesting turn, one that is calling for my being a bit more careful. I hope you can help.

Request 1: If you have a link to my blog on your blog (or anywhere), will you make sure that it doesn't list my last name? I'm particularly worried about my married name, as this is what I go by at work. If you could just keep me as Deja, that would be excellent.

Request 2: I hate to do it, because it makes me kind of sad when other people do it, but I need to go private for awhile. Please, PLEASE, leave me a comment if you'd like to still read. Sometimes when people go private I'm too sheepish to ask to be added. Please don't be sheepish. Leave your email address here or shoot me an email as soon as you can. I want to get this privatized in the next few days.

Thanks for your help. Maybe when I'm private I'll feel safe explaining a bit more.

Posted by Deja at 4:14 PM | 18 comments  

Thank you for all of your sweet, kind comments on that post. They made it seem okay.

And then, pretty much right after I wrote it, things got worse at work. Really bad. And since it's all I think/pray/talk about, it's hard to think of what to blog about. I don't want to say much.

This week, the fight was out of me. My fate seemed sealed, and I was ready to just quit before it could get any worse. Not fight, not defend myself, even though there was (is) this mountain of injustice. I just wanted to quit and move on. That's what I WANTED to do. That was the only thing it made SENSE to do.

And then I had this dream. It was an answer to prayer (it probably makes me weird that I dream my answers, but I love them.) and I don't want to forget it:

I'm in a kitchen, trying to make a salad, but the bag of lettuce explodes, and it's all over the counters and I'm frustrated. And then I notice there is an ENORMOUS spider on the counter, flipped on its back, its evil legs waggling wildly. It has bright green markings on its tummy. I scream and my mom and little brother, Gavin, come in to see what's wrong. And I am so upset. I'm stomping my feet and begging Gavin to kill it and thinking it's going to murder us all. Then the spider is rightside up, in a corner of the kitchen, the size of a little yappy dog, and Gavin says, "I think this is the kind of spider that likes water."

I dump a glass of water on the spider's head, and it makes the spider really angry. I can tell the spider hates me now, even though I was trying to give it what it wanted. Gavin comes up to it really slowly, and very gently puts his hand its enormous mouth. I am sure the spider is going to bite his hand off. He says, "I think ..." and rubs its tongue a little. I am horrified. "Yeah," says Gavin. "Its tongue is smooth. That means it's harmless." I am flabbergasted. Gavin says, "I think I'm going to keep it."

And then I wake up.

My mom says Gavin hates spiders with the white hot intensity of a thousand burning suns. He's allergic to them, so they can never be friends. And it seemed like, if he could put his hand in the spider's mouth, I could, too.

And I did. Pouting about it the whole way. But I fought.

I still don't think it will do any good.

But I did it.

I was at my office until 11 working on the fight, and when I came home, Sam I went out to rustle up some dinner. Waiting to turn off of our street, I saw a raccoon walking along a telephone wire. It was dainty and sure-footed. I turned, stopped in the street, and looked up at it. He looked down at me with his elegant black eye mask.

This seemed a good sign.

Posted by Deja at 12:40 PM | 10 comments  
Labels: being a grownup, creatures, sad, spirituality, teaching

I've been fighting off writing this, even though I knew as soon as it happened that I would. It's scary to write it, more personal than I would care to be. But I can't stop thinking I have something so say, and so I must say it.

I'm in Utah visiting my parents for 30 seconds or so (Saturday-Monday). While here, I usually hit up Ross, as there ain't no Ross in Boston.

So there I was on Saturday, at Ross, waiting in line to purchase several cozy, well-priced sweaters, when two little girls came up behind me, pointed at my butt, and said, "Big butt! Big butt!"

Oh, the things I wish I could/would have said.

I turned around, said, "That's very rude."

Her mother heard me say it, asked the kid what she had said, and a minute later a very embarrassed seven-year-old came up and told me, "I'm sorry."

I didn't know what to say there either, as my smart sister (Kira) has pointed out that telling kids "That's okay" when they apologize gives them the wrong impression: it's NOT okay. Pointing at my butt and calling it big was decidedly NOT okay.

So I just left off the "that's" and said, "Okay."

This has never happened to me before. This random insult from a child.

And I have all these thoughts about it, how weird it all is. I mean, I don't think she meant to hurt my feelings. It was almost like, for her and her friend, the butt wasn't attached to a person. It was just out there, big, and worthy of comment.

But that's perhaps the worst part, that it came without malice. It makes it feel more like the message came from the universe, somehow. Like the kid was this pure source, even though that's probably not true. I mean, truth be told, she was sort of chubby, and I think her mother's butt was bigger than mine, and so, aside from how much it bothered me, it also felt like the three of us--mother, daughter, me--were this bendy triangle of body anxiety. The insult got pointed at me, but it came out of all of our angst, even from the little girl, who is probably just figuring out her butt doesn't look the way it's "supposed" to look. And I was that little girl, so I know what that feels like.

I've been thinking about this kid for two days, wishing I could hate her. But I can't.

And it's weird to wish I could have explained to that little girl what she had done, how she had cut into a wound that's already gaping and raw. How much of my emotional/physical/intellectual energy I devote to worrying about that very butt's bigness. How many YEARS I've worried. How tired I am of worrying. How, in the last year, it's grown with abandon and without permission from me and despite every possible effort to counteract it. How many doctors have thrown up their hands in bafflement and blame. How NOTHING I've tried has helped--and I've tried everything I can think of. How people assume I'm lying when I say that, that I must have cheated or done it wrong or been half-baked about it, or it would have worked. How hunted and judged I feel by everyone in the world, like this is my fault; I can fix it; it's so simple and straightforward and healthy, so why not?

I cried on the way back to my parents' house, called Sam and sobbed. And the poor, sweet man, who is endlessly patient with all of this, just kept saying, "I'm sorry. I'm so so sorry."

Posted by Deja at 6:28 AM | 17 comments  
Labels: sad, sam, shopping, Utah, words

This morning, while trying to grade papers, I asked Sam, "What am I supposed to do with a paper on cheerleading?"

"Hmmm," he said. He was really thinking about it. "It's too bad we don't have a paper shredder because if we did you could shred it up and make two little pompoms and shake them."

This made me giggle uncontrollably for several minutes. Lately everything he says makes me giggle.

And it's a good thing someone is here making me happy, because my job is terrrrrible again. Not the students. I love the students. The teaching is fine.

But, to be vague, there's a bad guy in the department who is out to get me.

There are channels for me to fight back, which I'm doing. But the chair is his best buddy friend, so I'm probably out of luck. They'll make me miserable.

And I am miserable. Sad, and disappointed, and angry. It's different this year because I know they're wrong and I'm healthy enough to deal with it, but oh it's a bummer. A serious bummer.

Posted by Deja at 11:19 AM | 7 comments  
Labels: sad, teaching

I love Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis. Love it. If you're unfamiliar, the main character, Gregor Samsa, wakes up one morning as a giant human-sized bug.

I can't explain why this tugs on my heart so much, except to say that I think it's one of the most gorgeous, odd, true, terribly sad accounts of what happens when disease, mental illness, or addiction changes us beyond recognition. It's about what happens to families when someone is sick, how it breaks and remolds everyone involved. And I love it.

My students, on the other hand, do not.

They have in the past. I taught a class where they ate.it.up. and wrote about it in their papers and I could feel in what they wrote that it felt true to them, that Kafka struck something.

But not this semester.

"This story sucks," they said at the end of class today, after a week of talking about it. I wish that sentence didn't bother me so much. I wish it didn't make me feel like weeping, like a failure. You can't teach when you feel like a weeping failure. I mean, you can. I did. But it's not easy.

And the thing is, I learned all this stuff today. Based on evidence they collected, I realized new ways to read the text. I learned that in a way, Gregor's demise can be seen as the first time he allows himself to be selfish, to demand what he needs and wants. I learned that the sister is an incredibly intuitive character who understands her family and what it needs and, perhaps, saves herself and her parents from a fate similar to Gregor's. I learned and I learned, and I told them all about it, asking them questions, showing them how to use their evidence to prove surprising arguments, and all but jumping up and down in front of the room with the pure joy of seeing something new in a text that I really love.

This story sucked. That was their response. I say "they," but I suppose I mean a few of them. One or two. But still, when I was dying to know how universal the negativity was, and I asked them to raise their hands if they even remotely liked it, only half of them did. Half. And most were tentative hands. And the week feels wasted. And I worry I'm making them hate reading instead of love it. And I think, for the hundredth thousandth time, about finding a new career.

But I don't want a new career. I like this job, more and more. And when I'm not standing in front of a class of rude (because it is rude, is it not?) students, it feels like what I was always meant to do. Pushing aside all the annoying business, I'm beyond blessed to have this job. And sometimes they love stuff, don't they? Doesn't it work sometimes? Today, I can't remember.

Kafka said this thing about literature that maybe you've heard: "A book should serve as the axe for the frozen sea within us."

So maybe they're all just frozen seas. Little frozen seas sitting in chairs.

Posted by Deja at 9:27 AM | 7 comments  
Labels: books, teaching

It's been awhile since I poked my head up and said hello. We moved and it was hard. The semester started and it was busy. We went whale watching (!), and that will be another post.

It's late. I taught the third week of my night class tonight, during which this grown up accountant man said, "This class is like going to therapy!" I think that was a good thing, but I can't be sure. We were talking about childhood and identity and innocence and experience.

And out of all the things I could pluck out of the hours of my life to tell you, it seems most important to say this: I am, finally, happy. Really happy. Pleased as a peach to be in my life, not really longing for anyone elses'.

I can't explain this, really. I was depressed last year, and sick. And all of that seems so clear now: that I simply wasn't okay. Depression makes every moment into a brick; they weigh so much and take so long to stack up and once they're stacked you feel trapped and very tired. And anxiety makes you feel hunted, like everything you do must be wrong and everyone knows it and how does anyone manage to get out of bed anyway? My co-workers and students and the other drivers on the road and my family and my friends and men walking down the street and my husband and people at church and editors and God, everyone was filling up their days with watching me, waiting for my next mistake, and I was making so damn many of them. That felt absolutely true, like I couldn't remember when it wasn't true, like there simply was no room for error.

And now, I'm healthy. And I'm beginning to trust that feeling of health, which is a strange feeling. Suddenly, I can make plans with people and commitments to do things because I trust I'll have the energy to do it. I'm beginning to really love my job, to adore my students and their sweet insightful brains, the way it feels to stand in front of them and smile and nod and say yes-yes, the way I get paid to talk about this thing that's so important to me, this thing I really love. And the department's not perfect, but I don't care anymore. No one's hunting me or posed to fire me. I just do my thing and do my thing and do a little of their thing and then my thing again.

I had to teach for an observer today, someone who was assigned to watch me as they do all new teachers, to make sure I'm not a total flop. I was terrified about it because I had a big deadline yesterday and after I met it I locked myself out of my house and apartment for five hours, and I was so so tired this morning and the class to be observed was (is) the toughest teaching crowd I've ever had. But I prayed, and prayed hard. And God answered me. I didn't have a word written down before class, no lesson plan to speak of, but when it was time to talk, I knew what to say, and my students talked. It was as if He whispered in our ears. I don't know what the observer will think, but when I finished I felt wonderful. I felt like could do anything, and God liked me.

I didn't deserve this. There's nothing about me that particularly obliges God or anyone to help me. He could have left me sick and sad indefinitely. But I think, for whatever reason, He's decided to give me respite. I'm so keenly aware of it as an undeserved blessing right now. So grateful.

Posted by Deja at 8:05 PM | 14 comments  
Labels: happy, sickness and health, spirituality, teaching, things that cause life to be good

Moving in Boston is very strange business. Word on the street is that 1/3 of the state moves on Sept 1st, and judging by what it's been like the last few days, another third moved over the weekend. Think narrow streets clogged with moving trucks, sweaty college students hauling boxes and lamps and sometimes chairs and bookcases and couches (!) across busy intersections, and mounds of castoffs lining the sidewalks.

Tonight I was introduced to another piece of moving culture when I noticed women pushing carts and strollers down the sidewalks, digging through the mounds of garbage and claiming what looked good. It's like grown up trick or treating.

While I was moving the last load out to the car, a little girl in a stroller kept shouting "bangBANGbang" and shooting me with a toy gun her mother plucked out for her. When I saw them a little later, she had big hulk gloves on--you know the ones I mean? So I guess it's sort of kids trick or treating, too.

But that's not why I'm posting; It's not why I've paused the mad dash to get out of this place (shhh--don't tell sam) and type out a few paragraphs. The real reason is the woman I met just now, who was driving by in her motorized wheelchair. As I struggled to put a big box in the front seat, she said, "This your trash?"

"Yeah."

"You know what this is?" She holds up a plastic grocery sack that could only be the hefty bag of cat litter I'd just collected.

"Um."

"It feels too heavy to be trash."

"Um, well. I think it might be cat litter."

She drops it. "Well, did the cats get on any of these linens?"

"I don't think so. Just with their fur."

Struggle struggle strruuuuggle. I begin to think the box is too big.

She pulls out a thing to cushion your lap when you use a laptop with a flat surface to rest it, and asks me what it is. I explain and she decides to take that, too. She says her sister has a computer. She's so excited about that. I feel awkward with my car full of framed prints and my ironing board and my books, but she doesn't seem phased at all. She asks me if there's anythinge else she might like in another box, and I think for a moment, tell her there's a scale in there.

She says, "Oh no, honey. I'm a big lady. I ain't got no use for a scale."

For some reason this is making me feel really bad, like I wish I had more for her. I pick up a plunger that's fallen out of a box. It's a big blue plastic one that we found in the basement. Sam said he wanted to toss it, wanted to get a new one he'd feel comfortable licking if he had to.

I say, "How about a plunger?"

Her eyes light up. "I don't even have a plunger!"

"Well, here you are then." And I hand it to her over the boxes.

"And my bathroom's blue!" She says.

I go inside to get my figs out of the fridge. I feel like I've done a good deed. A very strange, good deed.

Posted by Deja at 5:25 PM | 9 comments  
Labels: boston, moving, people