Two-Parter

Part One

I secretly love figure skating. A lot. I don't know anything about it technically and I can barely keep my own balance on ice, but I love watching it almost as much as I love watching Fred & Ginger dance. I haven't been watching the Winter Olympics live (ain't nobody got time for that), but I have been watching highlights on YouTube. Someone posted a video of the gold medalists in pairs skating, Germans, Aliona Savchenko and Bruno Massot. Here is that video.

In case NBC takes it down before you get the chance to read this, they give an astonishingly beautiful program, and then, at the very end, this happens.

The way they both collapse bears no kinship to the beauty and strength they displayed for the prior four minutes. Thank goodness she's smiling when she turns over, because in watching this loop again and again, he really does kinda drop her. But I understand why. The feat they've just performed is astonishing and they need a moment to not be using muscles. It all just runs out of them.

I love this loop, made a gif out of it, because you almost never see Olympic-level athletes surrender like this. It's wonderful. It's relief and triumph and and joy and exhaustion all wrapped into fifteen seconds.

I thought of three things simultaneously when I saw this clip. One, Annie Dillard, from The Writing Life:

I asked [a joyful painter I knew] how he came to be a painter. He said, "I liked the smell of the paint." 

Two, Cheryl Strayed, from a 2010 Dear Sugar column:

To be down low. To be of the earth. To be on the ground. That’s where I went when I wrote the last word of my first book. Straight onto the cool tile floor to weep. I sobbed and I wailed and I laughed through my tears. I didn’t get up for half an hour. I was too happy and grateful to stand. 

Three, The Cutting Edge (look, shut up, it was a beloved film of my adolescence), a conversation somewhere in the middle of the film. Kate, a wealthy and driven figure skater, finds a picture of Doug, a middle-class ice hockey player, smelling the ice after the rink has been zambonied. She asks him about it, and he says he loves the smell of the ice. She says she never really thought about it.

In the same paragraph as the paint-smell thing, Dillard retells a story which I'm sure I've related on this blog, the thrust of which is that if you want to be a writer, you should probably like sentences. Which I do. Sometimes you have to take a moment to smell the ice. Let it all run out of you and lie down breathing.

I want to perform a feat before I collapse like that, but the feat might be getting through Februrary of 2018.

Part Two

Talk is easy. To-do lists are great. Time is unforgiving. From a forthcoming book, Maps Are Lines We Draw, by Allison Coffelt:

Beginnings, middles, ends: this is the stuff of stories we tell. We write our personal and political histories with order in mind, choosing what goes where. Meanwhile, the sections bleed into each other. And time makes everything into a past that informs the present. 

I don't know what to say other than that. I have a fever and I have applied for two residencies and a grant just this month and have seven deadlines yet to fulfill before the end of February and my throat hurts so bad but I'm not sick enough to be flat out on the couch with the TV on, so I'm procrastinating writing the weird thing and the awesome thing and the chore things, reading the exciting thing to do the other exciting thing, and cleaning up the damn apartment, which is beginning to resemble the verb form "strewn".

Forgive me. The tarot told me this would be a month of celebration, but I'm not feeling it - not really. My best friend is getting married at the end of the month, so maybe I should just write off the idea that it's me who gets to be celebrated. Should just be as happy as I truly am for him. Mostly I am sad, that kind of sad where you want someone to comfort you right up until you want them to go away. I honestly think I am sick now instead of in December, when everyone else was, because now I am sad and my body is like, no, this we can't weather.

Count your blessings, Kat. Only thing to report about being in the world is a bit of a doozy: a review of Tim Kreider's essay collection I Wrote This Book Because I Love You, because I love him, in Another Chicago Magazine. The editor worked so hard on this piece with me and I am grateful to her.

A handful of bylines are set to drop in the next couple of weeks, which means I really need to update my website. Not that that's making me sadder, because yay for me! bylines!, but the subsequent need to update sure is a bummer.

Cut-Up

Something I will miss about school is the press of deadlines on my back. On Sunday I wrote 2,700 words because I had to turn it on Monday. I'd've liked another couple of days to work on the result, and then another week or two to let it ferment, before others saw it. But I'd waited too long to start, so I had to roll with what came out on Sunday.

The cool thing about this, and about the associated deadline, is that the thing got written. The not-so-cool thing about this is the feeling that I rushed it, that I didn't say everything I wanted to say, and that I got tangled up in my ideas and made a mess. Of course, those are problems that come out and get fixed in subsequent drafts. The professor said he wanted shitty first drafts, not perfection. But still. I don't like showing unfinished work to others unless I really trust them, and this feels unfinished. 

The gradual evolution of my writing process has left me with early drafts that are closer to finished than they used to be. By this I do not mean that everything I write is perfect. I've come to a writing process that includes such a long time chewing over the topic that when I'm finally ready to write, after the better part of a year, the work comes out like a late draft instead of an early one. All that time I was writing drafts in my head. If I'm not given that time, I come up with garbage, but if I don't have a deadline, I might go on thinking for much longer than I should. 

For my capstone class I'm working on a long, experimental memoir project. It is scary and hard, so I might have set it aside indefinitely if not encouraged by mean, heartless professors to write it now. It's a mess and a half at present, but I turned a corner of some kind on it in the past two weeks. The word count is building. I've figured out a) that I need an organizational strategy and b) what that strategy is going to be. Implementing it will take hard work of the kind that I've been wanting to do this semester, and was finally pressed to do on Sunday, rather than putting in a half hour here and an hour there. 

Life seems all cut into pieces lately. I give too many of them away. I want them for myself. I want to spend a whole day with my notebook, tea, the Brandenburg Concertos and a container of hummus. Not worrying about laundry, exercise, application deadlines, meals, money, nagging health issues, keeping up with friends' triumphs and tragedies, etc etc. Much of this stuff is worth my time, but I want, selfishly, to be neglectful of everything except the work. Is that asking a lot? 

Yes, of course it is. Yoga and meditation are more significant accomplishments when performed out here in the world, rather than in a cave in the middle of nowhere. My friend who wrote a novel 200 words at a time? I admire her a hell of a lot more than me, offering benign neglect to my husband for three months while I write in a trance every day. On Sunday night a dog barking at great length outside my window while I worked was too much and I yelled "Shut up!", which doesn't harm anyone (I was inside with closed windows), but it's not at all like me. I never lose my temper at annoyances like that. When working, I'm a different person - snappish, territorial, egocentric. 

It follows, I think, that I'd be a better human if I found a way to work in the world without overdosing. But I have tried that way and it does not work. I can't do 200 words a day. It makes me wretched. A cut-up life is doing something similar, but unlike with the memoir, I can't come up with an organizational strategy that fixes anything. 

Pneumonia, or Something Like It

This story starts in my adolescence, but we haven't got all day. It starts again during my college years, but there's nothing uncommon about that part of it. Waste of words. For our purposes, it really starts in March, which, as I told you before, was a month flattened out and made pallid by inertia.

Things did not get better after that. They got worse. It took most of the spring, but eventually I had to admit that my symptoms aligned, like eclipsing planets, with those of depression.

Melencholia, Albrecht Durer, 1514

Depression is not a sexy illness. It's not rare. It's got a spectrum so wide that the noun has less meaning than it should. It's also hard to explain (to justify?) as an actual illness, but that was how it came to me this year: as a virus that would not go away, that deteriorated from a cold to the flu to pneumonia. Walking pneumonia, really. I functioned at the required levels, but something was eating me alive on the inside.

By mid-May I could not read anymore. My concentration was too spotty to be able to follow a book from chapter to chapter. I couldn't even read short stories, because I'd reach the end without understanding what had happened. I'd read a page, and then read it again, with no memory of any of the prose. Reading has been the best part of my life since I was three years old, and it was suddenly gone.

There were other things, too.

The most painful symptom was an inability to write. I don't like the term "writer's block" (that post is for another day) and anyway this did not feel like that. This was fear and uncertainty and paralysis and despair and anxiety so big and buzzing it was like trying to imagine writing while pelting headlong through a beehive. The inability to write fed the depression and vice versa. And it seemed like more people than usual (well-meaning, often beloved people) were asking me what I was working on, and it was horrible to try and form an answer to that question that wasn't just shouting "I'm sick, I've been sick, you don't want to know about it, just tell me about your life instead."

Finally, last month, I went to the doctor, and I started clearing out the accumulated bacteria. That process is slow, and ongoing. But my progress of late is so encouraging that I cannot help but share it with you, which is why this post is happening at all. I'm functioning again, and not just at the required levels; I've reclaimed my interest in the world, in art, in ideas. I've gulped half a dozen novels in the last three weeks. Music has gotten its color back.

Best of all, I wrote some prose yesterday. I hadn't written anything since the end of February, and had built terrifying structures born of illness around the process of writing. It wasn't much, just 250 words or thereabouts. And it came largely out of boredom rather than inspiration (though, hey, boredom is a long-endorsed wellspring of creativity). And I don't know that it will be of use for the project to which it belongs. Except that it already has been of use, because it was the first prose I'd written in over four months. I wanted to pop open champagne.

I hope it's okay that I posted this, out of nowhere, and that there may be more radio silence for the near future. I've missed this space and I wanted to explain, even if it's oversharing. I want to resume commentary here on a regular basis, but I'm wary of doing too much too soon. I'm still recovering from pneumonia, after all.

My Life in the Sand

Did you know my first declared major in college was politics? My husband didn't, either, until the other night. I was telling him how infuriated I was about various issues of the day, and told him that I was reminded of the sensation I had in college, which was the last time I actually paid attention to what was going on in the world.

I learned not long after Matt started being at home all the time that his habit was to watch the previous evening's broadcast of The Daily Show every day on the internet; presumably he did this at his job while on break, and now that he's at home, he does it at home. It mutated to DVRing it rather than watching it with obnoxiously repetitive commercials on the internet, and then I started watching with him. It's a show I've always liked, but I am not in the habit of watching first-run television at all.

I strongly believe that Stewart provides the least biased journalism in America. He makes jokes, no doubt, but he makes jokes about everybody. And I sincerely believe that he's not beholden to any other interests than his own. Of course we've been watching The Colbert Report after Stewart's finished, and I'm torn about which one is more effective. I think Stewart has the harder task, but I also believe Colbert has done more actual activism, more to attempt change.

Both of them attest to being comedians, not commentators. Even though they are more than aware of the environment effected by the 24-hour news cycle (because they would not be capable of their jobs without that environment and a high level of awareness about it), I think they are not quite cognizant of its extent. I trust no television journalists at all except Stewart (and dead ones like Cronkite and Murrow), and I think he would be surprised to hear that. The reason is simple: the "real" ones are more farcical than either of them, and appear too dead-eyed and well-coiffed for my taste. Col-bear may be a character that Col-birt is playing, but he is absolutely no more ridiculous than certain commentators.

Case in point: this. I find myself speechless at this story. Like, I can't even construct an argument in this space to talk about why this story makes me so angry that I'm dizzy and my heartbeat is irregular. I thought, well, surely Limbaugh isn't going to be taken seriously on this. And then I scrolled down and read the first dozen or two dozen comments, and my mouth got dry from hanging open. Who are these aliens, who fail to understand what paying for prescriptions entails? Who have no conception of hormonal medicine? Who...gaaaaaah.

This is just one of the stories bouncing around our national political scene in the last several months that has gotten me riled and furious about What's Going On, as Marvin Gaye had it. Women's reproductive health is obviously the biggie for me, but everywhere I look I seem to see corruption and greed, about which I feel horribly impotent. I can laugh, at Stewart and at Colbert, but laughing doesn't fix it.

This is how I feel about it:

And it was how I felt about it back in the early 2000s when I was in college. I was inspired by an incredible professor to become a politics major, but I lasted less than a year. I was depressed, horribly clinically depressed. Due to other factors as well, but partly due to the ugly discovery that the political cycle hadn't changed at all, across the world, throughout organized history, and that in all likelihood it never, ever would. Politicians would continue to be corrupt, the media would continue to be partly a freedom but mostly an accomplice and a palliative, and the system would churn forward with very little actual change.

During my sophomore year I took a 101-level class in film studies, and to my surprise I kept getting As on the papers without really trying (I have never been a natural A student). I discovered not only that I was really good at film studies, but that I really liked film studies; it was more interesting to me than pretty much any subject matter I'd ever studied, and it got me excited about learning in a way politics no longer did without my inspiring professor. So I switched majors, and I stopped paying attention to the news and to current events, and for many years my life was happy. I stayed absorbed in fictional media and left entirely alone the media related to politics.

And now Stewart and Colbert and their exceptional wit have brought me back to being angry and depressed 9 hours a day. Because once you start paying attention to the stuff that satirists draw your attention to, it's pretty hard to stop. You stumble across Monsanto, you read some of the egregious things that our government has passively endorsed, you see the balsa-wood structure behind it all. You start to really think about courageous bozos vs. well-intentioned cowards and who's likely to come out on top and whether it even matters and why the job of the politician, to represent us, has gotten pressed and reprinted as greenbacks and styled and gelled as TV-ready hair.

And you get really, severely depressed.

Matt was amazed I used to be a politics major. His exact words were "You were? Really?", and we agreed that it was for the best that I changed to film. I'm presently trying to decide whether I should bury my head back in the sand. The world didn't end in 2002 and it's likely not going to end in 2012, and it didn't hurt me to be politically ignorant for all that time. In its individual-level way, it helped me, in fact. The question of whether it's better to be willfully ignorant and happy with your little life, or to get informed and be fucking miserable, is one that I've been struggling with on and off since my sophomore year in college, but never at such a dramatic peak as I am right now.

And the thing is, Colbert is really really funny. He leaves me with a residue of joy, even when I'm angry. I was waiting for someone to make the perfect joke about the contraception flap, and he did it:

The Colbert Report
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But I don't know. My life in the sand was untroubled. Quiet. Filled with art and music. This way, I either channel my rage into a non-profit and never say die, or I sit in my house screaming at my clenched fist until I can move to Canada (if Canada ever gets warm enough for me to move to). Neither is a Middle Way as satisfying as ignoring it all.

Of course, following the Oscars isn't too satisfying, either.