dreamyskies

Amy and I had a brief spat this morning. I was in a crummy mood: overtired and hypercritical from adrenalin, testosterone and exercise; it could happen to any mid-distance runner still losing mass after winter indulgence. Exercise-induced brown study, that's me.

Anyhow, the short of it is my feeling the time of this spring quarter racing without easily measurable gains in my rewriting the second chapter of “Recombinant Media.” I'm also starting to feel put upon by grad student exams and essays, departmental meetings, and a very oddly-shaped personal life. Regarding this last, it seems to be comprised mostly of email correspondence with friends past, frequent but not particularly fulfilling phone conversations with my girlfriend, and widely scattered contact with colleague friends. I also understand that the lack of time I spend with my girlfriend and my colleagues stems directly from my need to be alone not because I am writing but because I am not writing enough.

When I'm writing, I focus all the energy of my not writing into a desperate need to be alone. This works for my writing but erodes the personal contact I have with others. Friendships with distant people (blog-watchers and email buddies) don't suffer because they have little to zero chance of occupying my time in way that distracts me from writing. People closer to me, however, have a legitimate claim to my attention and time, and these claims (which translates to desire on my part) both compel and repulse me. This is a very long way to saying that when I'm writing I'm very ambivalent about close emotional relationships.

That feels like a load off my mind. When I'm writing, close emotional relationships feel threatening to me. This, however, is the direct result of my not spending enough time writing and researching.

Posted by dreamer at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I'm here because sometimes one just needs to unplug, disconnect from the system for a second in order to get one's bearings. So, I come here. What does that oxymoron mean, that I'm trying to “unplug” and so I come to my (networked) journal space? How private is this place? It can't be too private as the writer for a national news outlet found a linked site of mine and left a comment, at least, if I'm to believe the professed authorship of a comment to one of my posts which I do because of the issues raised by the author of that post. But what does it mean to want to “unplug” in the meditative space of (semi-public) writing? I mean, I know this is not going into my offline journal. It's going to dreamyskies.

The title of this piece is something I remember hearing my brother say in the late 80s. The nearest I can come to its meaning in a single word is “decamp.” Its spirit places it in semantic kinship with “blow this joint,” though that phrase fails to capture the speaker's contempt for the current milieu and suggest the excitement | fulfillment | fun promised by the alternate location. I needed to de-woot from intermittent interconnection that surfing allows and spend time thinking about myself and my writing, which is a large part of what triggered the snark in me when I wrote “The Virtues of a Second Blog.”

But here I am, at the end of another day, no deeper into my research than I was when the day began, too tired, even, to document my breakfast with Amy, the colloquium regarding race and community, any of the substantive (or insubstantial) ideas that occupied me today.

Posted by dreamer at 11:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sarah devoted an entire post to her missing me.

In addition to my comment, I sent her an email:

Dear beautiful Sarah,

Thank you for the post telling everyone (and me) you're thinking of me. I'm thinking about you and missing you tons over here. Athens is a nice town, but it's also a big ol' piece of empty without you nearby. And, yeah, I'm kinda regretting not more actively cherishing (i.e. pursuing) spending time with you when it was easier. My penance is to make sure to commit small acts of writing near and around you.

As ever, I'm struggling with academic writing (a conversation for another time) but right now I'm driven to carve out a writing space that is personal and frequent. You seem to have hit upon a massive sweet spot over there in Washington, so you are my hero and model, just as you always have been.

With love,

Johnnie

Though she's not here, I remember her presence, vitality, and beauty so intensely I almost feel that she is here, that remote as we are from each other, she is palpable to me now.

Posted by dreamer at 11:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Part of the problem with blogs is that I know what I'm writing is going to the world. It's a problem of address. I could take some comfort knowing that no one, really, is reading this. But the place where the writing ago affects its shape. I find myself struggling to find out what it is I want to say, what I want to write. I know only I have writing desire.

Yesterday, for the first time in weeks, I didn't have something hanging over my head that needed to get done. I'd finished out the blog redesign, I'd filed my taxes, paid my bills, written letters of recommendation. Really, I was home free to spend my time researching. But I woke up late. I was too tired to focus on research. There were some pieces of the blog that needed tweaking.

I had played Halo from 10:30 pm to about 1:44 am, from the time I got off the phone with Amy until I saw the digital clock on the lefty's center monitor. This isn't what I want to talk about either. It's getting late and I feel I want to say or do something, but I don't know what that is. The desire feels diffuse, uncertain.

I'm tired of each day disappearing into the ether.

Another day confused.

Frittered.

Posted by dreamer at 1:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the things I want to be careful to do is meander privately. Like now.

I don't have a whole lot to say, but I do know that I want to produce words, to put letters to page. I'll reserve mistersquid for moments when I'm feeling topical, when I have an idea. This is just a tentacle.

I also have dreamyskies which is about more personal things. I'll have to wait for the occasion where I feel I might want to tell people something. It could be, too, that everything is too scattered, too fragmented, that I've created all these categories and I'll spend more energy worrying what kind of category I'm writing in instead of writing. That is typical Johnnie style. But any kind of writing is good.

Today, I read, oh, maybe all of 1,000 words of printed material. What's wrong with me? My attention span can't be that shot. Maybe I'm exaggerating, but seriously read maybe 10 full pages of material: the second half of Ralph Ellison's review of Gunnar Myrdal's 1994 An American Dilemma, his “Working Notes for Invisible Man,” his “Special Message to Subscribers” where he discusses the transition from a “prison camp novel” to the first line of invisible Man, and maybe five pages of Ginger Strand's “The Ecology of Empire: What Can an Oil-crazed America Learn From Virgil's Obsession With Trees?” OK, so that was probably more than 1,000 words. I also did some reading of Slashdot.

Kevin Uhalde emailed me, his colleague, his web admin, and me because aaup-ou.org was resolving to one of Go-daddy's parked domain pages. I could understand his panic and so I spent twenty minutes looking for the email which contained the hosting information for the domain. That email was sent to me in early April of 2005, so it took me some time to figure out where I'd archived it. Then I spent some time explaining my role regarding the domain at present and then had some back-and-forth with Kevin Mattson.

In the end, the web admin fixed things and I wasted time responding to the panic of someone I consider a friendly acquaintance, but I did have to send an email to put the kibosh on future panic alerts.

I went swimming and so smelled like chlorine all day.

Oh, and the HB 16 grant Catherine and I were awarded took over my life at three distinct times today. If we get our preferred order, the English Department at Ohio University will have some sweet digital video editing workstations.

Posted by dreamer at 12:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)