I'm headed our way: WEST!

Yes, I know you were being ironic and I think I was, too, though I also was addressing how love of food (as you have these past few months) can be influenced by regionality, nationality, and politics: funnel cake, beef-on-a-stick, and calamari. That's how I feel about tofu, which in many ways is the "perfect" food: textureless but by artifce, itself flavorless, yet pregnant with the flavors in which it stews.

Tofu is Zen.

Plus, Imagine feeling xenonationalism and Asian pride at the culinary and horticultural triumph of the mass cultivation of tofu. Is tofu production environment-friendly?

So, revelations and self-indexing, but not serious.

Today, I spent all day working on a letter of recommendation and an half. How is that possible?

Let's talk when my travel's done.

Much love,

Johnnie

I remember walking through the streets of Washington, D.C. with LuAnne. That night I ate Bi Bim Bop.

I’m lucky to live on Hoth since it’s what I always wanted. It’s nice and icy cold.

Today we had our first department meeting of the Fall term. In the early winter and mid-spring, a storm will hit. We’ll know better the size and force of that disturbance once we are notifed of the size of the coming budget cut we were able to delay for one year and one year only. My gut tells me something there is that does not like our most vulnerable employees.

After, some of us were headed to the local eatery/drink joint. I had an hour and fifteen to kill and wanted to get something done, doable if I forestalled conviviality for half an hour more. When I got home, into my comfy shorts, and sad mac tee, I was headed directly toward tomorrow morning’s run. I would clear from my perception the haze accumulated from the scant four hours I’d slept and no nap. I feel like Thomas Jefferson.

After dinner and thinking carefully about why I love writing and being alone, I didn’t feel so bad for not being where I’m not.

I’m the hunter.

This time, it happened because I’ve orchestrated my isolation. I tried to achieve it at the start of the Spring quarter but couldn't follow through.

When we first broke up, she understood I have an extraordinary tendency to isolate myself, that I was pulling away from her and that doing so was not necessarily healthy. I knew enough to listen and endeavored to stay close. We got back together and what I realize now is that I learned how to bury myself while still in the relationship. Last night sitting on her porch and wondering why she was so furtively glancing around, refusing to look me in the eye, I observed my detachment and wondered what had happened to my joy, my passion.

My present anger—I’ve been voicing how “furious” I am—probably stems from my realization that she was unhappy enough to end it. The anger is wounded pride which I know is psychological poison.

I no longer wanted to be in the relationship, I know. There are specific reasons that I could spin into sour grapes but I think what happened after we broke up the first time is that I disguised my dissatisfaction by being sweet and dissimulating availability. In reality, I avoided spending significant amounts of time with her.

On one level, her (endless) criticisms were probably a sign of her dissatisfaction with my aloofness. Her criticisms did not make me want to be closer, and so we had a vicious cycle lovely enough to break us up.

Considering everything together, I’m precisely where I’ve been wishing to be: by myself. Our relationship became something I avoided. I often would find myself irritated when she called, but would answer sweetly, patiently, though I really wanted nothing more than simply to be left alone. She even had a dream about it the other night. I know, that by recounting this I'm reassuring myself that I did want out, but I would be wise to think about my hypocrisy and that being honest with the people I’m connected to might lead to something better.

Amy deserved more than I gave her in the last two months of our relationship and, I think, she finally came to (at least unconscious) terms with how dissatisfying being in a relationship with someone so distant was.

For that, she cannot be blamed.

By going home I avoided a night full of anxiety and disaffection, yielding instead the sequence of a nap at my girlfriend's, a trip back home to fix my wanky mail server, and a day of fulfilling work. Except for a really terrible phone conversation (and some dissatisfaction with the script of the new X-men movie), today was a perfect day to be a professor.

I had pancakes for breakfast. And potatoes.

Who of us continues to love truly when it comes time to let go?

Earlier this afternoon, Amy phoned to tell me that she was at Casa Nueva with Sarah J., Jenny D., and Steve L., and that she would go to the Literary Festival readings after and did I want to join? I was thick into my research and told it would be better if I stuck with it. I'm feeling better about the time I have to conduct research, though I am worried about my time getting fragmented. Lots of bellyaching.

Chris R. IMed me and after chatting for a few minutes it became clear to me that my IM dexterity was impaired from disuse. Jason G. is getting married early June (I must send my acceptance by tomorrow) and Chris let drop that Athens is midway between Charlottesville and Indianapolis. How easily road trips come together. I hope my little home will be enough room for the three of us.

I've lately been considering my emotional life from the perspective of the future, which is to say that I've been remembering my past emotional intensities. I'm content and mostly productive, everything even keel. There's much to be said for stability, though something seems to be missing. I think I'm mainly dissatisfied with the state and character of my academic research and my engagement with art. I want more, but it seems that I never have enough time to explore deeply any single intellectual line of thinking. Clearly, this is not situational but symptomatic of a personality that is consistently distracted.

Maybe I don't really love what I do? Perhaps what I do is the “nearest fit” for something I had been deeply passionate about when I was a young man.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.