is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Leaving to go somewhere I�ve left.
At about this time every year for the past five years I�ve been faced with a bit of a freak-out. It started small: leaving Amherst was no big deal. I had only been there nine months, and the whole time I was there I was living in someone else�s strangely furnished apartment and most of the friends I had near me in Amherst were deeply depressed people, and so on. Leaving was difficult in the way that leaving just is, but San Francisco was still my home and that�s where I was headed. I put Hans Blix (TCNTUNWI) in his fancy large-cat carrying case and flew the shit out of dodge (with a detour through �do you think you and I would ever date� �no,� �ugh, if you recall).
Leaving to go somewhere I�ve left.
Leaving Haverford the first year wasn�t much of a stretch either. I hadn�t really developed any life-sustaining friendships (friends, yes, but they all had their own lives to live, with not much time to add me to those lives), and my main aim was to get myself back to San Francisco. But even without real attachments, leaving Haverford was a bit stressy because all my stuff was there�books, notes, files, library access�and I always have a lot of work to do over the summer.
It�s true. ACADEMIC PEOPLE WORK ALL SUMMER. Sure, we get to travel and not teach and all that. But teaching is hard work, and so are all the meetings and committee things we have to do during the teaching year. So if any of us are going to accomplish any of the research, thinking, and writing that we must do not only because we probably went into this line of work out of love of that stuff, but also because we�ll never get tenure without it, we must work all summer. Someone I know, let�s call him Mr. X, is funny because every time he calls me during the summer and asks what I�m doing and I say I�m working, he says, �oh, where are you working?� Every time. And then, because it is impossible not to feel defensive at such a moment, I get that punched-stomach feeling and say, defensively, I AM TRYING TO WRITE.
So, the minor freak-out that happens annually at this time has to do with something like WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING LEAVING MY HOUSE WITHOUT ALL MY BOOKS AND FILES AND NOTES WHEN I NEED TO BE GETTING WORK DONE.
But then there�s the other side. It pains me in a fairly constant way that the role I play in the lives of my San Francisco friends has diminished. I�m not saying they don�t love me anymore or anything! It doesn�t mean we aren�t good friends, or that I�m not important to them, or they�re not important to me. It just means that I miss out on so much because I�m not there. I don�t live there. And when I show up for my few weeks or months of the year here and there, December, January, July, August, they have busy adult lives full of resonances and references to things that happened when I was somewhere else. It is impossible not to feel that as a loss, at times.
It�s funny how blogs and twitters help me keep in touch while simultaneously reminding me of what I�m missing. It�s a way of keeping connected that also reveals an underlying a dis-connection. Technology!
But it�s also just how time and space work. When you leave, other people�s lives keep happening. (I once had a boyfriend who traveled a lot but could not accept this. Recipe for disaster.)
So, on the one hand, that�s what the hell I�m doing leaving my house without all my books and files and notes when I need to be getting work done�doing my best to keep alive something that is important to me. Going to a place and a group of people.
The sadness of realizing what I�ve lost comes and goes throughout the year, no matter where I am. The WHAT AM I DOING freak-out happens when I am packing to leave the place where my stuff is. Once I leave, things are fine. Books can be found in libraries. Thoughts can be had without looking at old notes. And, who knows why what happens next happens�could be the pressure of necessity, or the good done by a change of scene, or the practice of focusing on what books and files and notes I�ll need to bring, or the happiness of being in SF. But what happens next is I actually get a bunch of work done. Without all my books and notes and files. The end.
Except that now, when I�m gone, I also miss Gus. And I miss out on things that my New York friends will be doing. Circular structures like this describe my life better than a linear series of events.
I haven�t found anything like an adequate stand-in for what I had in San Francisco. I probably never will. The luck of my falling into knowing all those people at all is so tremendous that my optimistic side clings to bare fact of that. At least it did happen to me.
Of course: I�ve got good, interesting friends in New York, some of them good, old friends from college and way-back. But man, are they busy. Some of them I haven�t even seen since I moved to New York! Plus I live part-time in Philadelphia, and I�ve left part of my heart in San Francisco. So lots of my friends here either forget that I now live in New York and I find out about parties and outings after they happen, or else they invite me to things that happen when I�m not in town.
Thems the breaks. Do not fear that I have forgotten how tremendously fortunate I�ve been these last few years, with a new job in a great location, a good apartment in a city rife with crappy dwellings, the best cutest funniest handsomest smartest BF ever, the impending full year of fellowship time (wow!), and so on, to the point some might call an embarrassment of riches. This writing has been an attempt to describe a strange liminal space I seem to occupy, as if every time I move, I just move to a new between. In other words, this writing is an attempt at description, and perhaps it hazards some wistfulness or melancholy, but it is not meant to sound as any form of complaint.
10:14 a.m. - July 24, 2008
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