I’m absolutely terrified of having oral surgery tomorrow morning, but it must be done. It is a stern reminder of the gross disparity between mental and physical pain. When you have physical pain, you’re suddenly and sometimes unexpectedly reminded that you’re a human being.
I won’t be available this week, anyhow, so my apologies to followers. xo
Today in the course of discussion, my composition class stumbled across the question of addiction. The question itself was posed as: “What makes someone an addict?”
Many students had similar ideas and/or parameters of what an addict seems like or looks like, or even what it means, but when I asked them to talk about addiction in terms of identity, there was a heavy pause. For those of you who haven’t taught before, that pause can often mean that they’ve drowned in your ravings, but sometimes (as was the case this afternoon), it’s a good thing. After about 20 seconds — 2 years in classroom time —, one student raised their hand and said the following:
“An addict is someone who doesn’t exist as an individual without the thing that they are addicted to.”
Addicts fail to exist, then? Interesting response. It forced me to think about addiction as a spectrum, which is of course where our conversation went. How, for instance, can there be sub-classifications of addicts? After all, there seem to be clear distinctions between functioning and nonfunctioning alcoholics. Where does one draw the line, or place a value on “function”? This assumes that there are nonfunctioning Facebook addicts. Are they any better or worse?
Oxford defines addiction as “the state of being physically and mentally dependent on a substance or thing.” This assumes that one must be committed to a thing in mind AND body, not just one or the other. And by being committed, according to the student who spoke up, you don’t exist.
In terms of rehabilitation, addicts not only have to change their identity (going with the above idea that they ONLY exist with the substance or thing they are addicted to) in order to recover, but they have to detach from the reality that they have formed. This includes detachment from friend circles, from environments, and sometimes from jobs and children. Movies like Requiem for a Dream and Losing Isaiah play around with the pathos involved in familial loss, and perhaps even romanticize it — but the fact of the matter is that to ever recover, to rehabilitate, addicts have to create an entirely new identity.
As I walked past the smoking booths on campus today, I looked at the cigarette participants and thought to myself, “I used to do that.” As in, I used to be one of them. We can’t help but classify ourselves and others into groups. As J once said to me, humans are pack animals. Addicts, it would seem, are individually alone. I also couldn’t help but self-examine. What have I given up in order to be free from certain addictions? Was my quitting smoking any less laudable than someone quitting tweets, or, is it a minor feat compared to beating alcohol dependence? I don’t have the answer, and although there are definite values placed on various addictions, the fact remains that we are searching for something, and it’s elusive.
However, it’s also natural, in my experience. For myself, I’m addicted to worrying. Anyone who knows me well knows this is true. Whether it’s hereditary or not (my parents were big worriers) doesn’t matter — I deal with it on a daily basis. So, I’ll pose this question to myself: Without something to worry about, what would I think about? I’ve become so accustomed to engaging in minor anxieties that on days off, I find myself going absolutely insane.
Regardless of what you’re going through or have already been through, it is too easy to get wrapped up in the concerns of the past or future than those of the present. For myself, I am going to make a concentrated effort this week to be here, now, in the present — both physically and mentally. I encourage others to try it out, too.
Every so often I get funny looks.
Specifically, this often happens when I’m knitting or crocheting in a public place. A good friend of mine refers to this type of activity as the “yarn arts” in a rather sardonic way, but let’s go ahead and stick with that moniker for now. The Yarn Arts are one of the first things I ever learned to do that kept me busy as a child, along with coloring, reading, and taking the heads off of my Barbies. Being in graduate school has significantly decreased the amount of time/effort I can put into it, but since I was young I’ve been fascinated with the idea of making things. Better yet, I’ve always been particularly interested in making things you can use.
Sites like Ravelry, Craftster and now Pinterest encourage the DIY approach to everything from gloves to rugs to sweaters for your border collie. I know that I’ve personally gotten more hits on my Etsy shop from “pinning” my products lately than from purchasing space in the etsy featured seller categories, though that may just be due to the fact that Pinterest still seems to be somewhat of a novelty. (For those of you who just clicked through and were disappointed by the lack of inventory, most of the items have been deactivated due to time constraints.).
Whatever the reason, I think that people want the satisfaction of knowing that what they buy is unique in some way, and this holds especially true for textiles. Knitting socks takes a lot of time*, but it is also rewarding to have a pair of socks that lasts for 10 years and are ALWAYS WARM, because they were handmade. Handmade then, doesn’t just indicate DIY-ness or some nerdy hipsterism, but it’s actually more practical. I can’t tell you how many socks, mittens, hats, etc. I’ve purchased over the last five years that have either worn through or come apart soon after obtaining them. I also can speak for the blankets, afghans, scarves, etc. that myself or someone else has crafted by knitting or crocheting each strand — essentially tying knots, in different ways — and that have lasted for years, some of them since I was a baby.
That said, it may look like a waste of time, but the personal reward is comparable to cooking a meal, programming software or learning a difficult guitar riff — whatever it is that you do that produces an effect, be it entertainment, practical, or decorative. All of it results in some kind of catharsis.
At the end of the work day, or the weekend, the small things that are created are at once tangible evidence of ability and craft.
*By time, I mean weeks, months, sometimes years if you procrastinate enough.
#10. “It will be okay.”
You have no idea if that’s true! It’s logically equivalent to “You’ll own a mansion this week,” or “Your hair will be green when you wake up in the morning.” Just not a true statement, in my opinion, or really that much of an honest one. Advice for someone trying to comfort another: just be honest. If you care, state that you care. Tell them that you feel badly, or sorry, for what they’re going through — but only if you honestly do. If it’s a serious, personal issue, don’t beg for additional details, and don’t ‘one-up’ them with a situation you had that was similar. If someone in your life is venting to you, or feels like it is okay to share a hard thing with you, clearly it’s not “okay,” and you don’t know that it will ever be “okay.”
Okay?
This hasn’t happened to me personally in the recent past, but was something I overheard last night while waiting on a table. Had to speak up.
There has been a serious lack of blogging lately, and for those devoted four or five readers, I am sorry. I know that you wake up each morning eager to digest my textual indigestions. I’ll try to improve in my consistency. I won’t even make excuses, because really, there aren’t any. I’ve been lazy about writing.
Let’s be honest, though. Consistency is a big deal to most people, and it’s something that I have real trouble with. My ideas, at least the ones that I consider valuable, don’t happen every day, at a certain time. They are sporadic, they come from the ether. Or Muses. Or the wrenching of painful progress. What they don’t do is adhere to time or socioeconomic expectations. Then how do freelance writers do it? The query letters, the contract negotiations with dot.com sites and the hours invested in editing pipe-dreaming peddled manuscripts?
The answer: dedication. Complete dedication, not the “dedication” that you learn in school (you smart kids know what I mean). My composition students are often a case in point; they have gotten by so far in life without having to actually care, and this false sense of giving-a-damn has never held them back from succeeding. Not only do they succeed, but they do so in all of the ways that they are taught to hold dear: economically, socially, academically, and etc. Part of my pedagogy is avoiding this kind of lazy learning, because while they may pass the class, they won’t have really done or learned anything that can be carried on into the real world. And, if you’ve looked at the kinds of jobs available in the Toledo-Detroit metro area, they generally require you to get your head out of your ass and look at the real world. The real world is the “grind,” the literal grinding of gritty reality onto your skin. And to get anywhere, you have to ask for that kind of pain, that rejection. Any good writer, any good anybody only got good from asking for the pain of that grind.
I also believe that this is one of the attractions, for many people, of organized religion. It infers a goal that requires practice, whether it’s in prayer or education. It requires absolute dedication to a thing with ascribed value. The same holds true for our school systems, I think, but that’s a topic for another time.
So, this encouragement is for myself, but I also extend it to my (dedicated!) readers. To be a better writer, I need to be more consistent. To do anything and be good at it, you have to seek the grind. Hit the pavement. Hit the books. Scale a wall. Do whatever it is you need to do in order to get where you want to be. If you do it today, do it tomorrow. Do it after that. Make it a hobby, then a habit, then a need.
Title from a recently received paper. Couldn’t resist.
ALSO…I can’t resist linking you to this, because it’s what I’m listening to. Is there a way to coordinate a large, orchestrated dance party?
I spent the weekend in PA, the last two in the city of Pittsburgh. I forgot how much I love it. Pictures and explanations to come, but for now, feel free to enjoy some Melvins:
Today, the answer to that question is food poisoning — specifically from egg salad at Barry’s Bagels. That will show ME not to eat egg salad from someone else! Probably wasn’t the best of choices, but I just wanted it. I’ll never want it again.
In other news, I’ve been writing and finishing up both my MA paper and my Critical History, as I plan to try and turn in my portfolio tomorrow. It’s a hefty task; I really should not have waited this long to put finishing touches on either, but there was also the issue of my apartment being broken into, and me losing more than a year of source-work and writing. They took a lot of my poetry, too, which is more of a loss to me. At any rate, I’ve been proving myself that I can really do a LOT in one day, as far as writing is concerned…and in order to ever get any better, I really need to start writing every day. Not here, not on my dinky blog, but my real stuff. I have tons of ideas for short stories that I think would be great, if done correctly, and I have poems inside of me that need to be written. It’s not necessarily just a matter of discipline, but it also entails a desire to get better.
It’s a problem I see in a lot of people who are close to me: this frustration over lack of progression in their life, be it their job, their schoolwork, their whatever – but they are frozen in not doing anything about it. And I wonder where this lack of action comes from. I don’t think that it’s necessarily a lack of PASSION, but maybe a lack of self-acknowledgement. There isn’t a lot in our social environments that encourages belief in ones’ self to get things done….real things….things that can propel and change. That needs to be helped. One thing that I really enjoy about being a teacher is that you are in the position to propel change, to motivate, to reinstill (or instill for the first time) a sense of self in another person. That’s a priceless gift.
I’d completely forgotten about this, but it will motivate me to complete more reviews as soon as I have the time.
It can also be found on my Goodreads account, for those of you who follow. If you don’t, please request!
[Charles Bukowski, The Continual Condition (2009)]
Bukowski’s newest collection is one that dwells in the mind of an aging man, even though the poems span his career. While the bitter genius that lends itself to the poet’s reputation is still very much present in The Continual Condition, as a set of poems, it also speaks to Bukowski’s ability to provide deep philosophical musing in just a few words — whether about his own particular bad habits, or of those around him. The longer poems, such as “This Flag Not Fondly Waving,” and the reflective and simplistic “as Buddha smiles” reveal that one of poetry’s most beloved dirty old men was, at the same time, a man of deep thought and observation. <br/> With a cover featuring Bukowski’s sparse depictions of himself (drinking and smoking, as luck would have it), a devoted reader might be put off at the prospect of repetition in The Continual Condition, as some of the poems have been previously printed in other collections (namely, War All the Time and Bone Palace Ballet, to name a few). That is an issue where, in my humble opinion, the Black Sparrow editions of his work tend to fare much better than the Harper Collins, which came later and tend to give the feeling that Bukowski’s name is being thrown onto new volumes for money-making, and not for the sake of a reader’s admiration. <br/> Overall, the collection can not be called better or worse than the earlier, thicker volumes, although as a longtime reader of his poetry, it *feels* at times like a good mixture of poems composed when Bukowski was younger, and also when he was aging. The themes of women and drinking, sex and dirtiness are ever-present, but the larger theme seems to be one of death – an approaching, smiling face, perhaps “the continual condition” itself. The abrupt, chopped-off-but-somehow-complete style of writing that is definitively his lends itself to this feeling, a foresight of mortality that has a biting clarity to it. For readers coming to his work for the first time, it would be a wonderful introduction, but it might disappoint Bukowski fans or collectors of his work for the simple fact that it reprints many poems that were already published.<br/> Overall, The Continual Condition stands up nicely next to his other posthumous collections, including much thicker volumes like The People Look Like Flowers at Last (2008). However slim it might be, it resonates in its bitter kind of love for the ordinary grime of life and gets away with it, as Bukowski usually does, with the everyman language that helps him to remain one of the best American poets of the 20th century. I’ll end with my personal favorite line, as an example of his genius regarding the future he (somehow) already knew about: “3-year-olds will have computers/and everybody will know everything/about everybody else/long before they meet them/and so they won’t want to meet them” (“This Flag Not Fondly Waving”). This is an unlikely but welcome prophet of our century speaking, to be sure.
