Just started a livejournal site (don't ask me why). I still don't know the difference between this blog and my livejournal, although I suspect that I will likely reserve this site for extended essays on what's on my mind, and use livejournal as the low-pressure writing space--aka an actual journal. We'll see whether I can manage to think of any writing as "low pressure" without perfectionism slipping in and rendering me wordless.

So here it is, my livejournal site:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/miriam_heddy/

miriam heddy's Journal

On the Oscars

When I asked a fellow instructor what she thought of the Oscar award winners, she said, "They went for beauty all around this year."

I had been thinking, this morning, of the way race--normally the invisible (or unspoken) marker at the awards--had become the thing to talk about. Yet really, when I thought about the winner's list as compared to those of the past, I was stunned by another absence--that of the theatrically disabled. Normally--and I use that word with all due irony--the winner goes to the white actor feigning the best ability (or to the white actor best feigning the worst disability).

But here were perfect people playing characters with moral flaws--but that was all.

So I wonder... has race become the disability of the year? Is blackness this year's rewarded imperfection--that which the best male, best female, and man of the year had, at last, overcome?

Yesterday, I had lunch with a fellow English Ed doctoral student who, as it turns out, is into gaming and fantasy/sci fi television shows. We discussed the finer points of why some shows seem to be written so very badly, and compared con prices and feelings about celebrity appearances. Meanwhile, our third lunchmate (also a doctoral student in English Ed) looked on in wonder at our odd subculture-talk.

Sometimes, I wonder what it would have been like to be in the educated class fifty, or even a hundred years ago. It seems absurdly cliched to say that, even among graduate students, it's television that brings us together.

I guess the ironic moment in this for me is that, for every instance I can think of where fandom has brought me closer to someone, I can also think of a dozen places where fandom's seemed pretty damned dysfunctional, and where the relationships it engenders feel like oddly fragile things.

Perhaps friendship is always like that--defined by a sort of tension between what brings us together and what keeps us apart. The balance, it seems to me, is a tenuous one--and I wonder whether fandom itself acts as a haven for people with boundary issues. Before the 'net, fandom relationships were sustained by periodic meetings that were set apart from the everyday life of most fans (especially true for those in slash fandom). And now, with the 'net, communciation comes faster, but many fans today never even meet their fellow fans "in the flesh." And when they do--in those odd, rare instance when you know a person both online and in RL--do you, in fact, know two (or more) people? And are you the same friend to them both?

I wonder... does the long-distance, mediated nature of the relationships in fandom give fans a false sense that they can fully control the limits of their involvement--that they are emotionally (not to say physically) safe behind a pseudonym, or a persona, or even their writing?

A lot of talk lately (since the 'net) has turned on the issue of how safe we are from legal prosecution, or insane fan persecution. But what about the ordinary threat of fannish friendships--those strange, partially hidden things that, like trees, hide their roots even as they stretch skyward?

I have discovered that I am afraid of wholes. I need a new word for writing that is apart--a part of nothing, but complete in and of itself.

I need to write less more often, I think.

I am an imagist at heart--and PWP down to my soul.

This week, I spent two whole days wandering alone through Soho. Without a toddler in tow, the world seemed considerably less fragile--and my arms seemed oddly empty, save for the packages I accumulated as I walked. In the coffee shop, I sipped my drink far too fast, then found myself with nothing to do. I am used, now, to beginning things and leaving them half-done--used to the inevitable need to move on--used to not getting too comfortable in one place. I have lost the knack for lingering, I'm afraid.

Friday, I made a list of all the things I needed to do this weekend. It helped to put it on paper--almost as if that alone were enough. Now, three days later, I've done a third of the necessary things, and there's hardly time to really accomplish the rest. But today, I went to the park with my husband and child, and watched Nigel chase the Canada geese, and helped him down the slide, and showed him the soft moss that grows under the trees there. I could have been home, ticking off list items as if they meant something. But I couldn't convince myself that anything I might do was worth more than this: an 18 month old picking up an acorn, a stick, a dried leaf, then discarding them all. He has his own agenda.

Tomorrow, I am my students' teacher, another person entirely, and I may regret feeling unprepared. But I'm starting to value the surprise that comes with being at a loss--without direction. One day, I might be able to enter the classroom with a fixed plan and then abandon it without anxiety. But for now, I need my hands free of a lesson plan, and my ears free of my own teacher-talk, if I have any hope of hearing where my students are, and seeing what they've brought to the classroom, to me, and to each other.

Teaching and mothering both seem more and more to depend on setting things aside, on being empty-handed, and on letting go.

One half-written DS story on my computer, and I'm getting sucked into reading Smallville slash, because, well, it was inevitable, I suppose.

But I can't hear their voices in my head, so I'm not writing, although I have the urge to be completely exterior--to paint a picture, of Clark's dark, feathered hair brushing across Lex's bare, hairless thighs....

That's it. It's all sex, and Lex, and vaguely smutty thoughts about purple speedos and Lex's water-slick body sliding over Clark's....

and idle speculation about why in the world Clark would need a telescope to be a voyeur, and why he would spend any time at all looking at Lana when there are still stars in the sky above him, and Lex in his castle, sitting so alone.

The difficult thing about blogs is that I've got to convince myself to open this up even when I don't know what I might say. The difficult thing about inspiration is that it too often happens when I'm on the floor playing Play-doh with my toddler, who doesn't appreciate it if I suddenly rush downstairs to the computer because I've suddenly thought of something worth writing down. But he's asleep now, and so I can write and hope I have something to say.

Today, I'm wearing a sweater that I bought years ago from one of those Eddie Bauer outlet sales in Columbus. The sweater's got an autumn leaf pattern stitched into it--very pretty, but somehow, not exactly me. I tend to pass it by as I'm reaching into the drawer, up until I run out of things I like. And then, when I've got it on, I think, "How warm. Why don't I like this? What isn't there to like?" and all I'm left with is the notion that it's just not *me*, as I see myself (or as I want others to see me). It's decidedly unhip (not that I'm all that hip normally, but...). If anything, it's who I was when I bought it, eight or so years ago, when I was a different person--still a Midwesterner, still childless, still wondering what I was going to be when I grew up.

Now I wonder less, and I'm a grown-up more, and, while I still shop at outlet stores, I'm looking for a good deal on toddler overalls. So somehow, putting on this sweater this morning is like putting on an old me, the sweater and jeans and flannel shirts me that I was between my black on black undergrad days and my black on black grad school pre-baby days. And I think I'm continually surprised when I still recognize myself in it now.

George Kelly, a psychologist, argued that people are nothing more or less than the sum of their constructs of the world. He argued that we sort the world as we see it, into an ever-shifting set of binaries that we are always resolving into new shapes and patterns (even as they may seem permanent, fixed, comfortable). In some ways, my closet is a map of my old constructs--a strange history in mostly cotton, of who I was and who I am now and who I want to be and what I value.

Kelly proposed a treatment in which his clients chose a new self--a very specific new self--and went out into the world for a day or week, experimenting, making decisions based on this hypothetical self. Psychology as method acting, I suppose. Kelly stressed that the goal was not for the client to necessarily adopt this new persona, or even parts of it. But doing the experiment (and he saw all people as experimenters and scientists, constantly testing out their hypotheses in the world), the client was given permission to see potential possibilities, new and different relationships and choices... a new and different life that would give them some perspective on their own, as they usually lived it.

Sometimes, I think about going shopping and buying a new me--a new wardrobe for someone I don't yet believe I am. I did that, a few weeks ago, buying a pair of lowriding, made-to-be-skin-tight, flared-bottom Old Navy jeans that skim my wide hips and sit below my not-flat belly. Wearing them reminds me of my childhood, when I had a pair of light-tan, hip-hugging ribbed corduroy pants that I was always trying to pull up higher than they could possibly go.

When I wear these jeans, they get looser and more comfortable as the day goes on. By the end of the weekend, they are starting to slide off, just as I'm starting to feel comfortable with the odd sight of my own pale skin and belly button peeking out from between my shirt and jeans as I reach for something just out of reach. On Monday, I can't yet bring myself to wear them. I'm a teacher on Mondays, and I haven't resolved the feel of low-riding underwear and my more proper (if every so slightly) teacherly self.

The jeans remind me of summer vacation, when I tend to feel most free to wear the least amount of clothing I can. The balance then is a precarious one, as I want to feel the sun on my skin but to do so I risk the inevitable sunburn. So the compromise I make is to expose a swath of skin *here* and cover up *there*. My pale hairy legs are exposed but I wear a wide-brimmed hat that protects the tip of my nose. My shoulders look naked but there's a thin sheen of sunscreen between me and the world.

I guess that I'm not ready for nakedness--for a radical departure from myself as I now live it (and perhaps that's a good thing, as there's much I like about my current life, and closet). But, more and more, I'm starting to think that my life is like my wardrobe--filled with too many old things that don't fit my body or my personality or my lifestyle (part teacher, part Mama, part wife, part grad student, part fan, and all me) today.

But, still, knowing that doesn't mean I need to (or want to) throw out all my old pieces. Some of them still seem to fit even when I think they won't. And to replace everything I've ever known with something new would be too risky and too cautious, at once. Would I buy for the woman I am, or the woman I'd like to be?

I prefer a more gradual change, piece by piece, even if it means that sometimes, I have to struggle to find a way to pull all the pieces together into a whole, together, *me*.