Hauling and bawling.

The thing is done.

On Sunday morning, I bawled my ever-lovin' eyes out as I watched the stocky Athens skyline disappear in my rearview mirror. I was, very appropriately, listening to a Modern Skirts album (plug: for they are the BEST local band that still PLAYS locally on a regular basis). And it wasn't the kind of farewell that you let completely shake you to the bones, because Lord knows I'll be back for visits. My dissertation will require such. But it was the realization that it won't be quite the same anymore. I don't live there now. I won't be driving back headed home anymore.

None of my friends allowed me to get too emotional about them, thank goodness. They're smart folks, who touched my shoulders and reminded me that I'll see them soon, talk to them often. So that became my motto, stolen from a Stephen Kellogg song I blogged about a couple of weeks ago: "See you later, see you soon." I wish I could have let go a little more with them, though; no one wanted me to, but alone on my porch...I did. While packing as well. The crying might have been heightened by the amount of pollen in the air, but as I threw my suitcase and shoeboxes in the car, I randomly bent over in a near-convulsion. I needed a catharsis, and so I took it however I could. I can only hope that those people who mean the most to me know it. I think they do. I will miss everyone. And there are a couple of people who I will miss so much that it may ache. Just because I'm so used to seeing them in my life, each day, so easily.

Leaves? I had to turn you over.

I woke up this morning, though, feeling rather renewed. All of my belongings are streamlined, organized. How often does that happen? Score! I'm in Shreveport temporarily as I transition, and within a day of arriving, I made a new friend and heard from some old ones I love. I've started writing, both on my dissertation and on some fun new stuff. On Mother's Day, I'll be with BOTH of my sisters (and both are brand new mothers). My Italian adventure is two weeks away. And on the other side of that...a new chapter. Life as a Texan. So blogging will probably go on hiatus until June. And this page might even get a facelift (I hate that metaphor...why did I just use it?). Is Texas the South? Is Austin a bunch of mini-Athens strung together? I don't know yet, but I think I'm gonna find out.

Self-fulfilling processes.

Twelve pages into this book I found myself wondering what the hell its title meant.

So before I went any further, I looked it up. (Paraphrasing, much of this is courtesy Wikipedia) The title is actually an isolated reference to W. Somerset Maugham's retelling of a fable of sorts. Here's how it goes: A merchant in Baghdad sends his servant to the marketplace. The servant comes right back home, frightened, and tells the merchant that in the marketplace he was terrified by a woman, whom he recognized as Death, and that she made a threatening gesture towards him. Borrowing the merchant's horse, the servant then escapes to Samarra (miles away), where he believes Death will not be able to find him. The merchant goes to the marketplace and finds Death, inquring as to what happened. She says, "That was not a threatening gesture, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra."

And hell if I didn't still have a hard time understanding the reference. More on that in a minute.

But first, I have too admit that reading this book was like paying a metaphorical debt. A dear friend handed it over almost two years ago, insisting I read it because of its literary parallels to Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road (one of my favorite books). Though written in 1935, roughly twenty years prior, Appointment is, like Road, a biting send-up of suburban life in America. For some reason, I never made it to the first page back then. A recent search of my car revealed the aging paperback, under a seat, untouched and suddenly goading me like a cranky crying child. I owed it to my friend, and to myself, to fulfill the recommendation process, if you will.

And, as per always, the universe had a way of plopping the right words in front of me at precisely the right time. This book may not be super well-known, but hopefully it's a thing of cult knowledge; perhaps it's wisely pulled from musty university shelves once in awhile. O'Hara's characterizations of middle-class anxiety, human lust, and the day-to-day finaglings of relationships are more pitch-perfect than anything I've read recently. It's like the Great Depression-era version of Slate Magazine's "Dear Prudence" column; it's all the dirty little things we think and (these days) sometimes say. Back then, I don't think a lot of middle-class folk actually spoke frankly about things like condoms, masturbation, drinking problems, or mob activity in public. But O'Hara goes inside the heads of several twenty- and thirty-something couples to uncover the narrative that's there, even if the words aren't being spoken. Plus, the great thing is that one of his couples DOES speak these things, at least to each other.

They're the main show in this Philly suburb--Julian English, a ladder-climbing car man (Cadillacs), and his lovely, hyper-sexual wife, Caroline. It's Julian's downfall that O'Hara pieces together. The scary thing is that I didn't realize it until the end; in the meantime, the characters that dance around them are so colorful, so full of life, so multi-faceted that the reader may even muse that this very dark piece of work might have a happy ending. There's no real plot, just a series of ambling scenes that at times reminded me of parts of James Joyce's Dubliners. In other words, it's just like life--no linear plot, just the plotting along punctuated by successes and failures.

There's a young boxer named Al Grecco, but that's not his real name. He also delivers boxes of liquor and knows everyone's secrets--who's cheating on who, who's been at the roadhouse outside of town, and who owes who money. There are college girls who dance brazenly at the country club, and the men who've bagged them but no one knows. No one is virginal here, but everyone's trying to keep up appearances. The characters who grow are the ones who realize that the scary, secret thoughts are actually okay (and they learn to be honest about them).

Julian and Caroline navigate their neighborhood, their families, their social status...all with a booze-y wit that eventually catches up with them. Peeks into Julian's psyche reveal that their relationship is largely based on sex, and after an unfortunate situation at the country club's Christmas party, Ju (as she calls him) is forced to confront the breakdown of all of his veneers--his marriage, his friendships, even his smile.

O'Hara weaves Julian's history (and Caroline's) in with almost everyone else's along the way. Their observations of the crew are everyone's observations. Random thoughts pop up fluidly in the text, perfectly: Those two people slept together once, and it didn't go over well, so that's why they're awkward around each other now. That man's wife is cold, prudish, so he has to cheat. That girl isn't very attractive, but she "goes all the way" for ya, guaranteed! In other words, O'Hara writes all the stuff we float through our social situations thinking, or at least wondering about. (Not to say that these are observations we should run around verbalizing, but it sure is nice to live in a world in which the people around us acknowledge a mutual humanity!)

What Julian has to realize is that the easiest and most human emotion is often negativity; navigating away from that, to very purposefully love yourself and someone else, well that's the answer.

Here's the crux of the thing, and the tie-in with a servant at Samarra: Julian English starts to doubt himself. Bigtime. He wonders if he loves his wife at all. He wonders if he loves anyone, really. Like a little boy searching out trouble in a cookie jar, he goes on a bad-decision binge. Caroline is not innocent, but she is confused. Instead of speaking frankly, Julian moves to sacrifice his marriage very purposefully. In many ways, this is because he fears that recognizing the legitimacy of it will lead to heartache. There are so many baited moments in this book, breathless windows, within which these characters have the damn chance to speak the truths. To say, for example: hey, I don't know what's going on, but I'm worried, confused...help me, love me, let me know you. But those moments are missed. Just as a lot of us miss those moments everyday; the smartest among us take as many of the chances as we can, or when we miss them try to make them up later.

The servant headed to Samarra because he was scared out of his mind. Instead of seeking counsel within himself or with others, he ran for the hills. And in doing so, he sabotaged himself like a self-fulfilling prophecy. I called this post "self-fulfilling processes" because I think we're all trying to learn how NOT to be that guy hanging out in Samarra.

Huge moral here? Sometimes you have to forget the crazy, negative thoughts that swim around you. Sometimes people just need people. If you worry too much, or push yourself too far into your own mind...you might just create a prison of your own damn design. Sometimes it's the moment that matters, and you've got to seize it up.

I LOVED this book. I've already let that aforementioned friend know. I'm sure there are copies of this on Amazon for like five dollars; you should order one. It's a quick read, but it's so honest and refreshing as to leave a real impression.

[Cheers to all on a lovely, warm Sunday. I'm full of food and champagne. I've gotz to get back to packin' up! Oh, and I do promise that the next book reviewed will be more upbeat. I've read quite a few satires lately...need to shake this up and diversify!]

Just call me Miss Blue Sky.

[Enough of the somber, ennui-laced posts. Obviously I'm entering a transitional phase in mah life, but I doubt you folks want to keep reading about that. A dear friend of mine said to me just a few days ago: "You know, you can't look back at all, you can only look forward. So look forward." Simple, but I love it.]

Back to some literary postin' and some book recommendin'--

Until I read Sarah Vowell's The Partly-Cloudy Patriot, I was embarrassed to admit the REAL reason why I love to play tourist at even the most cliched of American places. I study history, so I just always let anyone and everyone assume that I visited places like Gettysburg or Salem, Mass., or the Alamo out of scholarly reverance. The truth is that I love the grisly stories, the ones that make your skin bump all up. I don't necessarily believe in ghosts, but I adore the places that are "haunted"--because whether they're haunted with injustices or actual spirits, their stories can scare the hell out of us all, and make us run for the metaphorical hills. (Usually we find our way back, though, and all the while becoming educated and informed.) Vowell is a woman after my own heart, I've known this since I began reading her work a few years ago, and in this set of essays she full-on freaked me out...with historical revelations eerily similar to those I've thought up but been ashamed to discuss. In this book, she asks us all if history is really a series of trainwrecks that none of us can stop watching. It is. Take the Civil War. Not only are some folks still fighting it (and NOT because it was about states' right--it wasn't--but for other gross reasons), but the tourism associated with it makes more money than all the other historic sites in this country combined! Talk about a time when America was most on the brink--of both physical destruction and permanent psychological disunion. I think that's the American story in many ways. Reverance comes from realizing not only what was lost but also what more could have been lost. It also comes from thanskgiving. Take Salem. I drug my friend Brian (who grew up there, so it's all old news by now) around on the "haunted tour" of the town just so I could feel some goosebumps and also feel really thankful that I live in an era in which Americans don't often hang from gallows for their religious beliefs...and often live past the age of 30. Enough said.

It's okay to love the scary stuff, to enjoy the fear, if you're also made more human by it. Vowell writes about this too. She's most touched by the smallest of details--the placement of a tree that shades many graves at a battle site, or the pothole on a street that revolutionaries may have stumbled over. When confronted with the physical sites of tragedy, or of hope for that matter, our minds start to really believe that places are worth fighting for, or that people really can be heroes with their might or with their words. Vowell is so liberal that I doubt any American could stand to the left of her, but she concedes that American democracy is like a religion to her; she may be vocal about her politics, but she's proud to be able to choose them.

Her books are quick airplane reads--witty, frenetic at times even. In this collection, her best essay is about putting a "geek" in the White House. Forget these lame-o politicians who claim to be "of" the people (when we all know they're wearing designer duds and eating caviar, so why the front anyway) and dumb themselves down to complete the picture. We need leaders who are voracious readers, she says; we need memorizers, dorks, men and women with so much passion that yes, we might call them "nerds" in everyday life. I couldn't agree more!

I've certainly been cynical about the idea of an "America." I guess for a long time all I saw were strip malls and Hummers and Pottery Barn-freaks. I feel a lot more hopeful these days. Thanks to Vowell for writing about the experiences that unite us all--in fear, in joy, in whatever. The more we all talk, the more we all learn.

Singular kind of moment.

It is with great joy that I admit something about myself: I'm kind of obsessed with music right now.

I haven't always been this way; for most of my youth I listened to the radio and feverishly recorded Top 40 hits unto mix tapes. In college, I opened my ears to some of the greats--Dylan, Cash, a lot of Joni Mitchell. But it wasn't until a couple of years ago that I realized I could be my OWN music filter. It takes a certain development of personal taste, and the building of a mental database, to figure out what you like and why you like it. The soundtrack of my life became less predictable; I wanted it to be more dynamic--a unique mental mix tape, if you will. So I admitted my ignorance to my music-guru friends, and they started me with baby steps in the form of CDs and itunes playlists. Now I feel like a kid off training wheels. I really NEVER thought I'd be the person scouring Paste Magazine reviews every Sunday for something new to obsess about, the one up until 4am attempting to perfect my understanding of an album. But, hey, here I am.

My roommate Brian introduced me to this dude yesterday--Stephen Kellogg, backed by a band he calls The Sixers. He's from Boston, and that's odd because his voice is more gravelly, homegrown, and country-husky than some of the most-lauded southern alt-country acts out there. This song sums up the way I feel about life probably more than any words I'd be able to cobble together in this space. Makes me think about my time in Athens, how much I love these bundles of memories here, and what's to come.

That's all I got today. I'm sippin' iced soy lattes, organizing photographs into cloth bins, and trying to stay really hopeful.

Everything running over.

I guess I should practice writing and saying this: I'm gonna travel, then become a Texan, and all while writing this dissertation of mine.

I'd really come to expect that my last few weeks in Athens would be largely uneventful. Lord knows I'll be back quite a bit to check in with my committee, which is why I tried to keep this whole "moving away" thing as unceremonious as possible. The universe seemed to have conceded to winding down my time here quietly and gracefully--afternoon beers, the sun on my face, organizing boxes of pictures and old notes (and oh! so many memories) while I shouted Carly Simon lyrics at the top of my lungs or watched the midnight feature on TCM. I've had a lot of boisterous here; the calm felt nice.

The calm was leading to something though--not necessarily a storm, but an emotional peak of sorts, most parts of which I had absolutely no control over.

And isn't that how life usually changes--on a random Thursday afternoon, while you're having the day's third coffee and ruminating on some tiny inconsequential thing that you'll never recall again? From my experience, yes. It happened to our family last week--a sudden loss, shocking the collective breath from us. My sister's inlaws were involved in a car accident while visiting Joan and Jason in Texas. Becky is okay, suffering relatively minor physical injuries, but we lost Mack. Two days before, he'd been bouncing my niece Eleanor on his knee, fresh from a swim. He loved morning swims in a warm-water pool. Mack had become, in a very short period of time, a beloved member of our far-reaching, multi-faceted family--a family that finally found some cohesion and peace on the occasion of Joan and Jason's beautiful wedding last May. He was a retired professor, a southern gentlemen, a healthy man who seemed to love being outdoors; the last time I saw him, this past Christmas season, he was wearing a funny-looking safari hat he'd just bought at Target. He loved hugging everyone. He's just not someone who should be gone yet, and certainly not in this way.

I was incredibly frustrated to be so far away, unable to help. The same day that Mack left us, my oldest sister Olivia brought my nephew Aldin into the world (in a Hong Kong birthing center). The cycle of life and death became so palpable, and in a single day. I wish that I could have been with my sisters during these life-changing moments. But what being AWAY taught me is this: the love that radiates from genuine care and support is tangible. My family congregated over phone lines; it was all we could do, and it was something. Over the course of three days, I spoke with every member of my family--even those that, unfortunately, I'd lost some amount of touch with. It formed a new map in my head, permanent now.

The emotion of these events also exposed something in me here. Everything's flooding out now. I have so much to say. I have so much to do. I'm so thankful for the opportunities I have, for the people that I know, and for the hope we should all cling to. Hell, I don't know how I thought that moving on would be simple, or easy.

Memories are funny little living, breathing creatures. They lie down and hibernate for periods of time, sometimes long ones. And then they wake up growling. They sneak into the circuits of your body, getting made and re-made as you make and re-make your relationships with the people around you. They're pieces of paper you find in boxes, and the scrawl of a handwriting you could recognize anywhere. Or how you can close your eyes and remember exactly how a moment felt, right down to the whip of the wind. They're photos that are always hiding in the back of your brain, snapshots of the way you WANT life to be. These snapshots I have of my friends are epic, iconic. The people I have loved and love are complex, and etched into my heart. I wish I could make my life into a mosaic.

[Next day addendum!

Turn and face the strrrange ch-cha-changes!

Today I've been trying to provoke some mini-catharses. Brian and I ran around Bishop Park three times, then he made me do odd training moves--like running sideways with my ass out and jogging backwards down a hill. I cleaned out three boxes. The dust made me sneeze sixteen times (yes, I counted). Catherine has requested that I work on an ultimate playlist for the trip to Italy in May...I mean, that's a rather massive undertaking. I welcome suggestions.

But most importantly, I decided to have a "take my stuff party." Have no clue what that is? Check this out: http://likethedew.com/2010/04/03/take-my-stuff-please/ Sidenote: The website, "Like the Dew" is an Atlanta-based online magazine, mostly southern-themed. Lots ofodd political snippets next to music reviews and odes to fried chicken. It's worth a look!

This afternoon, while sneezing sixteen times and sifting through a box of Athens memories, I imagined that I would drive away in a few weeks, car packed up, with Natalie Merchant's "Kind and Generous" blasting. And everyone would think I was idiot. All the while, I'd be serious.]

Generational.

Life's been a bit hectic the past couple of weeks. Doesn't that sound so cliche?

Re: the post below this one, I'm finally making headway on the BIGGEST writing project in my life. What else? Well, my friend Catherine and I are digging through online travelogues and our own frenetic minds to figure out the best itinerary for Italy Adventure 2010. I'm still workin' my little arse off serving espresso by morning and dealing with history students by afternoon-light. The sun is back, and the temperature is finally regularly hovering above 60 degrees. Oh, and I've had some enlightening conversations (and debates) with various fine folks about health-care reform. I've been conceptualizing it as a long-overdue revolution. Every generation needs one, or more even, and this is one of ours. The thing is, none of this should HAVE to be a revolution. Health care (and health-ful-ness more generally) is a fundamental right and a very human struggle within which we all apparently need a hand--whether to heal a sickness or sprout some compassion. I refuse to get too negative about the reform package's backlash, in fear of letting negativity "win," but the conservative middle and upper-middle class response to all this really got me thinking...

Right now I'm reading Phillip Roth's American Pastoral--to note, the NYTimes Book Review's runner-up for the best work of American fiction in the last 25 years. Three-fourths of it is a novel within a novel, a re-creation of the life of a Jewish-American businessmen (and former storied high school athlete) by his little brother's old chum from the their school days in Newark, New Jersey. The premise is that Nate Zuckerman (Roth's alter ego) remained near-obsessed with Seymour "Swede" Levov for most of his life, mesmerized by Swede's athletic grace and generally positive (and seemingly simplistic) outlook on life. Though he only spoke with Swede a handful of times, Zuckerman takes up the task of painting the man's life into a narrative struggle. Swede's brother brought this on, by revealing to Nate at their 45th high-school reunion not only that Swede has died but also that his life was a lot less perfect than anyone thought. Most notably, that his first daughter (who Nate never knew existed) went into hiding in 1968 after setting off a bomb in protest of the Vietnam War, killing a by-stander and irrevocably altering her father's ideas of an "ideal" life.

The best part of Roth's work here is his constant attention to the conceptualization of generations and the transitions between them. In short, Americans have been conditioned to work hard, work honest, and work for the "hope" of the generation that will come after them. Make life better for your children, we've all been told, so that things will be easier and they won't have to struggle quite so much. The Swede's father quite literally sweated his way out of poverty as a new immigrant and built a comfortable middle-class existence for his sons. Nate the writer reminds us that this was what everyone was supposed to do. Because every generation gets better, right? Smarter, luckier, has more opportunities laid before them. Nate believes that Swede had chosen his life-plan carefully, following all the rules according to his post as the head of the "next generation"--college, training in the family business, and then a beautiful wife and a too-big, over-decorated house in the trendiest suburb. He followed the rules, in other words, and yet his daughter didn't. She rebeled outright--dressed herself down, put on weight, taunted her parents, and then set off a bomb. She ruined the pattern, right?

Roth writes that this pattern is expected, lauded, but thin as paper. Swede's daughter proves that. At his 45th high school reunion, Nate looks around at all the wrinkled face and saggin bodies and wonders where the great hope and promise they'd all once felt had gone. They'd been told they were the GREATEST generation, after all, in the wake of World War II and the rise of the consumer's republic. Had they followed all the rules only to be laughed at by those younger than them? Or are they all just survivors--proof that life never works out the way you planned, but it can still be good?

All this brings me to a point about the recent health-care situation. Like Roth points out in some poignant passages, the American middle-class often gets way too comfortable. The soccer moms who speak of "being blessed" with abundant happiness and an abundance of things. The businessmen who work like dogs and then blow all their money on five-star dining and trips to the Caribbean for Lord knows what. Or even the college kids who sit in large classrooms with books in front of them because they've been told they deserve to be there, that they should be there. Middle class life is comfortable, it's repetitive, these days it's Pottery Barn and Prozac and Priuses. But what happens when life busts open that paper-thin bubble, dudes?

That's Roth's point. That life is unpredictable, sometimes horrific, even for the best and most hard-working among us. Which is WHY we need health-care reform in this country. The wealthier folk who are protesting all of this...I just don't understand how they don't see how close we all are from the fall. Don't we all want a cushion? A helping hand in our darkest hours? Some reassurance on the scariest days?

Yes.

Papermen

"William Bartram walked through the Georgia woods in April of 1773, shattered timber skeletons already underfoot in a place that the Georgia Trustees told their settlers was pristine, like a garden waiting to be planted."

And with that, my dissertation has become a real animal, an entity, with function and form. I've avoided posting anything here about my academic work in large part because I feared giving it metaphorical bones and blood. I've spent four years dancing around this document, talking about its fabled conception in conference rooms, over beers, on countless porches. Coursework and comps (and even the proposal process) have allowed me, until now, to feel still a bit disconnected from its execution.

It seems to me that you can tell a lot about a person these days in relation to the organization of their digital documents. It's too easy to give anything a label now; I have calendars in five digital places, but even the one staring me in the face on my Blackberry screen stays haphazard. I feel accomplished when I plug something in, give an event or a task a name, but the execution, again, is a completely different matter. I spent four hours this morning cleaning up my digital life--streamlining calendars, condensing Word documents, erasing fanciful folders that held nothing but miniature pipe dreams. I suppose in the digital age, I can have a digital catharsis.

The second important step was pulling all the wayward diss passages into a single document. Right now the sentence above is the first of the introduction. That might change, but my feelings won't. I won't call myself a revelator. This needed to happen for quite sometime. But I do feel like I'm finally moving forward again. The title is "Papermen," but the project is no longer a straw-man.

It's in the seventies today here in Athens--sunny, perhaps even more hot that warm (and particularly after this unusually frigid winter), busy with the noises of joggers and strollers and beer clanking, not so much restless as on the cusp. I just signed on for a trip to Italy in May (again with the digital life--funny how an email confirmation can rock your socks off). And now here I sit, on the back porch with iced coffee and an increased heart rate, finally ready to committ to this research-baby I've been fostering for five years.

It was a day not so much unlike this one, five years ago, when I stood in a field full of pine skeletons, a camera in one hand and a file folder in another. Inside it were the names of the paper mill workers who would change my perspective on everything about work. The slowness of life in the piney woods of North Louisiana felt oppressive, but I was just about to discover that a place can look bland but be vibrant, and that the folks that history almost forgot to remember have the most beautiful stories.

So...cheers to the real work, and to writing a dissertation that both honors those that have helped and changed me AND speaks relevantly to the struggles of workers and the land they labor on.