November 20, 2012

  • I made myself a cup of tea this afternoon, put it down and then promptly forgot it.

    When I did remember that I made myself tea I couldn’t find where I’d put it. I went upstairs twice meaning to get something, picked up something else and came back downstairs, only to realize I still didn’t have what I went looking for. I texted my sister, frustrated about my hair because I can’t get it to look like I want it to, and it’s time consuming and irritating. Everything is irritating.

    My sister texted back and said “It’s not your hair.” There was a pause, and before she said anything else I knew what she meant. “Something else is bothering you and you’re transferring it to your hair.” A few texts later and she added “You’re leaving the country for six months. That’s understandably nerve wracking.” Yes. Yes it is, even if its to move back to the place where I was born and spent 12 years of my life. Even if I’ll be staying with family members who genuinely care about me and will make sure I’m safe and fed. Even if it’s the Caribbean, where it doesn’t snow and even when it rains its somehow poetic, just like the frog sounds at night and the parang music at Christmas and the mountains in the distance. Even then. Moving is stressful.

    I’m checking and rechecking my suitcases, hoping they’re not too heavy and hoping I don’t forget anything I need because I don’t want to pine for home (where is home exactly? I can’t answer that question easily.) and for the things I’ve forgotten and the people I’ve left behind all at once. Better not to forget things.

    Moving is stressful. And I forgot to tell myself that.

November 9, 2012

  • On leaving

    When I lived in Tobago with my grandmother from the ages of 7 through 12, my aunts and uncles and cousins who lived in Trinidad would occasionally come up to visit my grandmother and to see me and my siblings. Sometimes they’d come for Christmas or during the months when we had no school (called summer there now, although it’s warm there all year).

    I loved living in Tobago, but loved it even more when family came to visit. I particularly loved it when my favorite aunt came to visit because although I couldn’t identify why, she reminded me of my mother who I missed all the time even when I didn’t realize it. We still had access to my mother who was living and working in America at the time. She would call and my brother, sister and I would tell her about school and what happened while playing and occasionally rat each other out for something or other we did. But it wasn’t enough. It was never enough for any of us, especially when we’d see our cousins and other children hugging and talking to their mothers. So when my favorite aunt came to visit I transferred all of my desires on to her. And it was great while it lasted. She was caring and kind and loving and attentive just like any mother would be, though we were her sister’s children.But it didn’t last.

    Ultimately, she would have to leave to go to work and back to her life in Trinidad. And it devastated me. People kept leaving. I cried so much on one occasion that she decided to leave a blouse of hers so that I could have it and remember her. It smelled like her perfume, I remember, and I don’t know if she sprayed a little extra on for me before she left but it smelled that way for a long time. I put it on a pillow and hugged it like it was her. Like it was my mother.

    I’ve had to leave several times in my life. When we finally left Tobago for America it was overwhelming and underwhelming at the same time, because at the age of 12 I didn’t realize what leaving my grandmother and my home would mean. I couldn’t. Nothing is ever the same, and you can’t ever go home again. Once in America I’d move several times again, with family and eventually when I left for college. I didn’t stay in the same place for more than a year (being an RA didn’t help). By the time I left for my M.A. degree I had gotten used to leaving places and people. Leaving was the one thing I became used to.

    I just left Indiana again a few days ago, and leaving it this time didn’t feel quite as normal. I’m leaving again soon, to go back to Trinidad to live there for six months while doing background research for my dissertation. There is muted excitement there because I’m hesitant to leave, yet again. I’m leaving people and places I’ve grown to adore, and I’m finally beginning to tire just a little of leaving. Just a little. It’s not entirely comfortable anymore and I need, at the very least, to acknowledge that.

October 26, 2012

  • The Return

    Something tells me I’ll be visiting and writing here much more often than I have in the past 3-5 years. I’ve just passed my PhD qualifying exam, which opens up a whole new life for me. I’m also dating someone…which is still a bit surreal for me really because my romantic history has been, well…colorful. I’m heading to Trinidad in the Caribbean next month to live there for 6 months while doing background research for my dissertation, and everything just feels new and good and scary and I am most certainly going to need to write it all down.

    And what better place than the place I’ve been writing it all down since I was a wee lass? happy

June 13, 2012

  • It’s been far too long, dear Xanga.

    Writing here is like coming home. It’s a bit like going through an old picture album and alternately grinning and cringing at your younger selves. At all ages. Much of my young adulthood is recorded here. Seems I can’t forever quit this place. Home indeed.

June 6, 2011

  • Contemplating life while eating a Julie mango over the sink

    There’s too much to consider. Peel with a knife or my teeth? How to avoid the juice running down my arm or into my shirt? How to minimize the little mango thread that gets stuck in my teeth? Throw the seed and skin in a trashcan or out the window?

    This is partly what I wonder as I eat.

    But then there’s a point where all you do is eat. Radio silence in the brain. The Julie mango says shut up and eat me.

    I’ve been in Trinidad for almost three weeks now and on multiple occasions I’ve come to realize that I don’t think about much when I’m here. Of course there’s always a thought. Like, “I wonder what sorts of animals live on that mountain in the background, and do people live all the way up there?” or “I remember that fruit tree, based on what the leaves look like.” And yes I’ve thought about my life and, vaguely, some of the things I want to do. But it’s like being here prevents any hemming and hawing about the future, any wringing of hands about the direction of my life. I suppose though, a vacation is not much like one’s every day life.

    I’ll be living here next year for a year while doing ethnographic research for my dissertation. There’s a lot to consider, a lot to worry and hem and haw and wring my hands about. And I probably will.

    It’s just…right now I’ve forgotten to care. Right now, it’s mango season.

     

May 21, 2011

  • To say

    There’s so much inside of me, so many things I want to say, to write all the time. There was a time when I did, and then a long time when I didn’t. There was always much to say, which is to say there was always things I was feeling, things I was noticing, life I was living. But I didn’t always know the ways to say it. Sometimes what I had to say was too painful. Life hurt a little. And sometimes a lot. Often I didn’t want to hear what I had to say.

    But ultimately, I’m always drawn to writing. Or maybe writing is drawn to me. In any case when I don’t do it I think about it. Or I write in my head, which is sometimes effective but never long lasting. I need to do it for myself. I need to do it for moments like now, as I’m sitting in the dark writing on a bed in my aunt’s house in Trinidad, ceiling fan and frogs and late night bar music all in a symphony. I need to do it when I feel like this, strangely magical, oddly powerful. I think writing chose me, and I’m not doing it’s choice any justice.

    Frankly, I’ve got so much to say.

     

     

     

April 9, 2011

  • I do what I want.

    I had grand plans for Saturday. Unfortunately, I got a late start to the day because I took a friend to an airport shuttle at 5am. Needless to say I didn’t do a thing before noon. And then barely at that. I headed to the library intent on doing…something. I suppose I should have specified, because the ‘somethings’ I did were all non-academic related. As soon as I realized it I got frustrated, and I also started getting an attitude because I hadn’t eaten at all all day so I packed up and left. With nothing done.

    But it was a beautiful day so I went to a store just to take the drive and bumped music loudly from my open windows smiling as undergrads wandered into the streets. Nice weather makes people mill about like fire flies at night. I got some ice cream. I had grand plans for Saturday. I was going to cook a meal like my granny used to make, I was going to do laundry (and fold them all the same day), I was going to wash my hair and do my nails and sit under a dryer and read articles for a final paper due in about three weeks. Yeah. Instead I tried on a few tiny dresses, some old some new, and wished absently for more opportunity to wear said small dresses somewhere in Bloomington. I danced around to a soca song (“Dance and dingolay”) on repeat. Now I intend on watching two movies on my couch, hair unwashed, toes unpainted, articles unread.

    I do what I want.

March 30, 2011

  • A Lengthy Rambling Discussion of Cultural Studies classes and Bad Decisions

    I have a Cultural Studies class every Wednesday morning from 9am to noon.

    This semester it’s my only morning class, and although I have both been a student in, as well as taught, earlier classes, this class is a constant struggle for me. It’s not necessarily the morning thing, although more often than not I sit in that class half sleepy and wishing to be anywhere…everywhere else. No, I just dislike that class. I dislike my Cultural Studies class because it (I am humanizing the class which, really, you should take to mean the professors and other students in it) is pretentious and ivory tower-ish and, for lack of a better term, academic. This wasn’t meant to be my major reason for writing, but it’s related so bear with me. I am, ostensibly, a part of academia. I’m what many would call a life long student (though I have no intention of being a student for more time than it takes to conduct a year of research and write a dissertation in a reasonable amount of time). I am increasingly annoyed and put off by the arenas of academia that purposely appropriate and manipulate language, and selectively cultivate a culture of exclusivity. Intense dislike. But, it is what it is. All aspects of human life is permeated by categorization, and until we evolve and are able to compute life in a less hierarchical, organizational way, such is life.

    But that gets to the real reason I’m here writing. Writing, after all, is a means of expression and escape, and what I need to escape right now is academia. Today in class our ‘theme’ was everyday life. That sounds a bit misleading, maybe. But we talked about everyday life in relation to academic things, like the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (other mentions of the day include Plato and Descartes). Purely academic. But all I could think about, in my drowsy I-hate-this-class haze was about everyday life. I am tempted to say real life but that’s a misrepresentation. What is real is, decidedly, relative (pardon my academic face showing). What I mean is that I was thinking about life outside of a classroom of people talking about everyday life. I do not intend to romanticize everyday life. Someone somewhere is perhaps dreaming of a life of tuition remission and free meal plans and a cozy cube like dormitory space which one can make one’s own and not to worry about the utility bill because the university foots the bill. I think what I’m talking about, thinking about, is my life outside of academia. Another kind of everyday life.

    This is increasingly on my mind.When I was an undergraduate I used to say things like “real life is creeping in.” I’d realize that despite my little bubble of friends and campus activity, a large part of my life was what was going on in the world with my family and personal life. That was everyday life. That was real. Now as I’m older, I realize that for me, that is, more often than not, the only thing that is real to me. I can make that distinction because the personal aspects of my life are often the parts that affect everything else. I cannot be distracted from my personal, everyday life. The truth is my personal has always, and will probably always distract from whatever else I’m doing. And that ‘whatever else I’m doing’ never quite feels like my everyday life. This is problematic, because as it stands most of what I’m engaged in lately is school. For all intents and purposes that is my everyday life. But that explains why I can easily spend more time on the phone with my mother or my sister or a potential mate, than do important things like…reading five articles for my cultural studies class. It can, in some ways, all be boiled down to prioritization and decision making skills and all that. A smart student, a graduate student no less, knows how and when to do the important graduate student like things in order to succeed. Any decisions to the contrary are bad decisions, misplaced prioritizations etc.

    The truth is, many (maybe all) the mistakes I’ve made in life I’ve known fully that I was making them. The impetus for making them, usually, was the conscious decision to say “eff it” to whichever overarching hierarchy or controlling figure in my life at the time. I may have regretted the outcome, the ill-timed-ness, the people who were hurt as a result, the resulting effects on future opportunities or what have you. But at the end of the day, a decision is often made as a result of a specific sort of prioritization in mind. But I digress.

    Everyday life, the personal, is increasingly on my mind because it is the one thing, of all the things I’ve done in life, that I haven’t really ever devoted myself fully to. Not really. Not ever. It’s been thought about, adjusted marginally as I’ve gone along. I’ve dated. I’ve lived with siblings. I’ve mediated conflicts. Been involved in conflicts. But as much as I inspect my inner self, I have not really ever lived an everyday life consistently conscious of my personal interactions. I guess it’s a bit difficult to do that, seeing as how other things that are important come up. Making a living, for instance. But ‘living’ is important there. I want to do what that means. Holistically. And honestly, to bring it back to my increasing dislike of academia, I think at the stage of life I’m in school is preventing me from living a fulfilling everyday life.

    Now, it could be my drowsy haze. It could be my ridiculous semester of four classes and two jobs and a not so recent failed relationship (and other menfolk lingering and sniffing and prodding and entreating and generally being confusing) that has me rambling on so. Maybe. Either way, summer time can’t come soon enough.

     

March 8, 2011

  • Written Months Ago…(and doesn’t actually reflect the way I feel now)

    There is something equally comforting and disturbing about the fact that getting over someone, that heavy, sometimes piercing pain, isn’t a singular emotion. It’s the stuff poems are made of. It’s ages and ages old. And both people you know and people you will never ever meet have felt it, and will feel it someday. It feels like it should belong solely to you, this pain. After all it is intensely personal. It requires so much of your thoughts and time, and it may even hamper your day. It’s your pain, your burden. And yet it’s not at all. This pain has not inflicted you first. This pain does not even remember your name, because it has been here and done this before, and what, you think you’re special? Nope. This pain gets around.

     

    Now you need to figure out how they all heal.

February 13, 2011

  • Sick

    There’s nothing worse than standing in front of the communal mirror brushing your teeth and having to acknowledge one of your undergraduate residents while you’re attempting to smile and simultaneously smooth your hair down on one side with your free hand because in your my-nose-has-been-blown-more-times-today-than-I-can-remember state of mind you forgot to try to look decent in front of other human beings. Well I’m sure there are worse things, but it doesn’t feel like it right now.

    Right now I feel like I look. Neither is pleasant. I tried doing my laundry last night (was that last night? must have been…) and only managed two loads (one is sitting unfolded in the laundry bag and the other is still sitting downstairs in the laundry room somewhere…). I ordered pizza and had it delivered for the first time in months…maybe years. I sat on my couch and caught the last bits of several movies, and wondered vaguely why I was in love with crazy Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon but totally creeped out by crazy Brad Pitt in Fight Club. I walk around with a tissue box and a bottle of Afrin. And I’m obsessively checking my phone.

    These classy Saturday nights have to end soon (it is Saturday night already??).