bird by bird

Just watch.

The first semester of grad school that I also taught Composition 101 to college freshmen, I reached an unprecedented level of stress and anxiety. Not only was I having to BS in courses like my Medieval Lit Seminar and schmooze with professors in campus hallways, but I also had to pretend I knew what the EFF I was doing as an instructor. "Use you resources" was the phrase I used with 90% of my students' questions, hoping that I would not be their resource of choice. Then after 12-14 hours of class, office hours, studying, and lecturing, I would go back to my shared rental home, drag myself up the steep stairs, and turn on the shower to as hot as it would go. I would press play on my iPod and for the next nine minutes and 58 seconds, the length of Neil Young's song "Natural Beauty ," I would, for the first time all day, relax. All of the pretending and pretentiousness would vanish. The grammar rules and literary theory, analysis and academia would slough off o...

Some days are Sundays when I'm a hermit in leggings and an over-sized sweatshirt. Various cups of half drank tea are scattered throughout my bedroom. Thick socks, too. I nap and laze and think and write and watch episodes of any television drama in between. At 9:00 at night I realize that the only verbal communication I had all day was with the check-out lady at Target. I said to her, "Thank you." This Sunday was one of those days. I smell like Vicks and have no regrets. Today was perfect.

..and it makes me miss jorts.

"Your experiences change you, your personality, your expectations, your beliefs, your desires. This is self-evident, but not at the moment when you're working late at a job you should have outgrown years ago, or crying unexpectedly in public, or listening to your ex-boyfriend say he's marrying someone else. At that moment you're just wondering what happened to the person who used to have your name and how you can be that person, how to get back that freedom, or innocence, or whatever significance that old body contained for you. She's gone for good, that girl, the girl who could give herself completely to a person or an idea, who believed she could handle anything and plunged forward into the unknown as easily and thoughtlessly as she tied her shoes." From the book: Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York