happy winter!

happy solstice, chanukah, xmas, and all that stuff!

i hope it's happy for you, but what follows is kind of sad-ish, so bear with me

i haven't been online because this has been the hardest academic quarter i have had since i was a graduate student. the services and support at ucr are down to nothing, and i worked like a dog just to do the basics for my students in comp lit 17a (87 of em), and german 121 (8 of em). i read someone's dissertation, tried to help people get jobs, go to graduate school, get mfa's, and tried to keep my sanity. it was bad. i wrote hardly at all, and i was beginning to feel that i didn' have anything left to say.

then my stomach stopped working. my stomach hurt all the time, and i went to see a great nutritionist named eve who said "girl you are really messed up!"

i now am eating an almost entirely vegan diet, and i finally wrote a little story called SENIORS AT WAR which I like and makes me happy to think about.

it's weird not to be drugged by coffee or chocolate or wine. it's scary sort of. it's sad alot of the time, because i see what a mess this country is in, and how everyone is dragging the "big september thing" around with them as lilly tomlin says in I heart Huckabees.

two days ago i waited for my daughter to come back from oakland with her new bass guiatar. while i was standing at southwest arrivals i saw the boys coming through in their fatiques and carrying duffel bags. i cried when i saw them. the scalp shining through the stubble of their hair. the awkwardness of the people who came to greet them. pretending to be happy, but just relieved thee boys weren't dead and scared they WOULD be dead next time. but they couldn't say that. so they just things like "ok" and "good" alot. and they made stiff little gestures about getting the bags.

i keep thinking of a rumi poem i memorized because i asked my comp lit students to memorize one, and so i had to do it too. to show them it's like totally possible.

this is how it goes (from memory)

Listen, if you can stand to:
Being with the Friend means not being who you've been,
Being instead silence: a place, a view
Where language is inside seeing.

i have been in the process of not being who i've been for a while now. For 10 years or so, i've been trying to become someone else -- an artist, first of all, but after that, a decent person, an honest person, and a kind person. my wish for this coming year is that i can continue to not be who i've been, and be with silence in order fo find new words to say the things i want to say.

for all of us, i wish peace. and the ability to speak and do what we believe in. and, if we've got it in us, the ability to love despite disappointment. despite the fact that things aren't usually what we hope for, or even what they seem. because the truth is somehow much deeper and stranger than either the disappointment or the appearance. if i could grok and accept that i think i'd be a happier less lonely feeling person.

in a place where language is inside seeing.

here's to getting to that place -- the space of insight and outsight -- in 2006.

love
stephanie