As you may have noticed I haven't posted anything since May of this year, and generally I haven't much felt like writing in this space. Not even thinking of it actually, which is kind of interesting, the one day when it slipped my mind, and not thinking of it gradually became a habit. I wonder, are my blogging days over? Will I ever feel like writing an email to the invisible ear in the sky again? I don't know but whatever. You'll see my intentions in other forms on the internet and in analog, if not here again.

In the mean time the only place I've been posting on-line is to my soundcloud page, and the music I've been making with Eric and Cory. This, academicing, teaching, writing, and swimming. Later tonight I'll see a movie, and tomorrow I'll swim and do some work.

Thank you for reading. See you around,

Update, etc. I've been busy with academic tasks, and as this blog has been inching towards, just not that into writing about things out there in the world. Instead I've been writing for classes and projects and the tiny audience of people that I work with here. On Friday, tomorrow, I defend my prospectus, and assuming it will go well (I think it will go well) I will move into the territory of ABD: "all done but the dissertation." For some reason I find this acronym glamorous and cool. ABD, for me, means that I have two years of funding to do a dissertation and find a job. This semester has been an unusual semester in that I was only taking one class, "Contemporary English" where I was basically learning a kind of system for describing English. Not exactly grammar, but something like it, "descriptive" in the sense that it's a way to describe how sentences or phrases or words work together. This is opposed to "prescriptive" in that it's not a system for generating correct language. Regardless, one thing I was doing for this class was piloting a little research study about the influence of writing workshops on a poet's poems, and was using this approach to describing language along with something called corpus stylistics to measure and discuss how a writing workshop impacts the linguistics features of poetry. The other day I was talking with a friend who writes fiction, and we were talking about losing one's ability to write, and I told here that I truly believe that the work I am doing destroys my ability to write poetry.

So, academicing and teaching, the ESL class for international teaching assistants as I had taught in the Fall plus as well as a class at the Tippecanoe Arts Federation about podcasting that I put together to keep in touch with my composition chops. It was fun teaching high school age kids. I had no idea! Academicing, teaching, and then researching and preparing to write my prospectus, which I wrote in a big rush last week so that I could get it defended before the summer starts (the prospectus is the document necessary for committee approval, a kind of plan for the dissertation / first chapter of the dissertation, before official work on the dissertation can start). Why the rush? Well, because I need to get started laying the logistic ground work, including Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval, to start gathering data in the fall. And because I want to finish the story that I started writing a couple years ago and need some time to do so. And I try to detox over the summer in terms of academic work. And because next Wednesday I'm going away to meditate for ten days which also means that I will come back really happy, slightly brainwashed, and clear of the kind of energy that propels people to write long arguments. That is to say, I wanted to get the prospectus done so that I can work on other things, including my mental and physical health. Oh, and I also need to teach this summer semester which starts on Monday.

Yeah. Indiana. It's nice out. It's quiet and I'm sitting in my bedroom where I've recently moved my desk. Kamal has been staying in my office for the last week or so for reasons too complicated and boring to explain here but it's been nice to have another person around to chat with. Now I'm going to get on with preparing a very short presentation for tomorrow, look into plane tickets to California, and perform some other errand like tasks including fixing the sweet little orientalish lamp whose switch has broken. Before I go however, here are some old Anne Carson poems from the book Short Talks. I hope you are well. Oh, and also, if you happen to think of me during the next couple weeks when I'm away sitting in a dimly lit room for hours and hours on end, trust that I am also thinking of you.

Short Talk On Disappointments In Music

Prokofiev was ill and could not attend the performance of his First Piano Sonata played by somebody else. He listened to it on the telephone.

**

Short Talk On Orchids

We live by tunneling for we are people buried alive. To me, the tunnels you make will seem strangely aimless, uprooted orchids. But the fragrance is undying. A Little Boy has run away from Amherst a few Days ago, writes Emily Dickinson in a letter of 1883, and when asked where he was going replied, Vermont or Asia.

**

Short Talk On Where To Travel

I went traveling to a wreck of a place. There were three gates standing ajar and a fence that broke off. It was not the wreck of anything else in particular. A place came there and crashed. After that it remained the wreck of a place. Light fell on it.

Two months ago I got a bad cold or an average flu. The other day I was visiting a friend in the hospital and the presiding doctor said that he thought he had a "street virus," meaning a common virus. I like the term "street virus." The doctor was from India. Two months ago I got a bad cold or an average flu. It laid me out for a couple weeks, but I still managed to get most of my work done. I didn't miss any teaching responsibilities, though I did cancel some conferences with students, and missed one class where I was a student. It made life unpleasant for a couple weeks, but it wasn't the worst, as I've been sicker for longer periods of time. Rest, eat, drink, and eventually get better. Always though when I get sick I have to stop smoking and the complications of not smoking, at least for my system, means not being able to sleep at night. I'm not sure why this happens, but my theory is that whatever the gizmo is that wants a cigarette keeps pestering me, such that there's a little alarm going off somewhere in the mind/body conglomerate called call "Tyler" that keeps me from sleeping. After about three nights the ringing quiets down and the physical addition of cigarettes more or less passes. The psychological addiction however is still very much in play, and eventually when health returns I find my way back into the habit via this reason or that.

Psychological is not really the right word for it though, as addiction is so much more than a dark little module that some folks, usually the poor and the weak, are unfortunate enough to pick up. "Psychological" suggests that addictions are something ugly added on to the perfect glowing spheres that are the selves at the center of our god given soul. Less sarcastically however, addiction is as much social as it is a personal choice, made up of the company we keep and the life we live. On Friday nights I usually play music with friends. One of these friends is a smoker, one is a smoker when there's cigarettes around, and one is me. The conditions of playing music are conditions for smoking, and vice versa. Neither activity would be the same without the other. Or those pictures of writers in the middle of the twentieth century sitting in front of their typewriters with cigarettes in hand: smoking genuinely helps the work of a particular kind of writing in that nicotine is a stimulant as well as an efficient way to take a break. Examples aside, my main point here is not just that addiction is a social phenomena, which I assume is a statement that most people could find a way to agree with, but that addiction is intricately tied to one's sense of identity, and that an identity in and of itself is a kind of addiction, one that is much deeper and difficult to "overcome."

If an addiction is a kind of preference, I want this or that, I want this instead of that, I only want this, only this could make me happy; or more simply, I want to feel like this instead of how I feel right now, then these every day preferences for how hot we want the water temperature to be or what time we eat dinner are also kinds of addictions. More broadly, addictions to how we want to feel are tied to who we consider ourselves to be, and the everyday highs and lows, for example, of the university instructor are a different set of highs and lows than the house painter. Just like everything else, we get used to a particular way of doing things, and given the choice, most of us will keep doing things the way we've done things. So when the AA folks talk about having to get a new set of friends, or what it means to "escape" the cycle of poverty, we're not just talking about working harder and making better choices, but we're also talking about a deeply imbedded and complex ecosystem of structurally induced identities that unless one has the resources to up and move and start over, bind us to our selves, whether we like them or not. Or to put it another way, one way to see ourselves are as a habitually formed set of preferences that luckily for us, and for practical and mysterious reasons, is aware of its own existence.

These days I'm not smoking. Not smoking cigarettes or anything else. Not because I want to be "better," a disembodied and vain attempt to achieve an imaginary ideal, but because smoking doesn't really fit into the day to day of how I've been living here in Indiana. The last three months, or year, or last three years really have been all new all the time, but in particular this semester has been the first that I haven't had ten million things to do. Surprisingly, when I have more time to relax I spend less time engaging in scientifically proven unhealthy behaviors. I guess I assumed it would be different, that if I had more time the devil would flow through me, which has been what has happened in the past. I think part of this change is that simply I've grown a little bored with all the distractions that used to occupy me, and more importantly, I'd rather work on a particular writing project or read a book or go swimming or go to bed early. Maybe this is just getting older, transitioning into middle age, but it's also motivated from the sense that I haven't really accomplished anything, and that if I want to leave something behind, since it's not going to be children anytime soon, I may as well get to work. Not that I haven't been working, but in the past it's always seemed like there was time. For some reason it doesn't feel like that anymore.

This shift has something to do with being here in Indiana, getting trained in ideas and habits that will help me create capital for The Man via research or indirectly, by teaching students. But it also has to do with the lack of identities, socially constructed (see above), to hold me. I'm no longer responsible for taking care of animals, for keeping my ambiguously alive father in mind, or for being a boyfriend. Because my friends and siblings are now grown up with kids of their own, I'm also freed of the responsibilities of being a friend or a brother who is constantly in touch or a son (not that I'm not, or can't be any of those things but it's not as big of a responsibility these days for various and complex reasons). Imagined or real, the world keeps moving, and these days it feels a little empty, especially in Indiana. But the upshot is that all this means I can get on with the work, of writing and of developing an academic identity (and discovering all the little ugly habits that come with it). But back to smoking, on and off over the last five years I've dabbled with quitting. In the Fall I quit for close to two months. Two Januaries ago I quit for a month and half. Before that I had quit periodically after being sick or attending a long meditation course. If I actually stay quit this time it wouldn't surprise me, but if I don't I will try not to get mad at myself. I mean, I love smoking, and I certainly will miss it, and do miss it, but I also miss my cat and my dad, and recently I've begun to miss the endless possibilities of being young. Onward,

Briefly about Indiana, generally I like living here. It's cheap and relatively peaceful, and is a good place to study and write. The landscape around where I live is relatively flat, but there are some hills and valleys to hike through, and the Wabash is constantly changing throughout the year. Sometimes the river is high and flooding, sometimes low and calm, and sometimes frozen and full of geometric chunks of ice on their way down river. The food here isn't so great, but I've come to appreciate the biscuits and gravy, and the  fresh apples, and the rich and meaty bar food. I'm not much of a cook these days anyway, but the eggs are good quality and the milk doesn't taste bad. Around where I live the community is surprisingly diverse, and generally I've had positive interactions with most of the people I come into contact with, both at school and around where I live. Politically however, Indiana is different than anyplace I've ever lived, and though the cost of living is cheap (and one of the cheapest places in the country to buy a house), as is the price of food, the recent law passed by Governor Pence that allows businesses to refuse service to same sex couples is kind of gross, and more than a little backwards. It's embarrassing to live in a state that passes laws like this, and makes me want to leave as soon as I possibly can.

When I was in college, my favorite professor, Professor Peterson in the sociology department, one time remarked in class that all of the news was just entertainment, including the front page. He argued that asides from the business section, everything in the paper, from politics to sports, was reportage after the fact. That if you wanted to know what was going to happen in the future, reading the business section was the only way way to do so. Dutifully I've tried to look at the business section over the years since, reading what I can and applying my limited understanding of economics to what this or that merger means. Naturally I don't get very far on my own, and rely on the commentators to think for me about what's going to happen in the future. 

Last night while making dinner I was listening to the Diane Rehm show. They were talking about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement between twelve countries, including the United States. I'm not going to get into the details, the pros and cons (it's said to be bad for labor, but good for stabilizing the dollar, and other economic abstractions), but one thing struck me about the still in progress agreement: the people involved have been working on this since 2005. That's ten years of negotiation, which is a long time to work on anything. Ten years of work requires a tremendous amount of stability and financial investment, and a huge number of people and communicators and economists and analysts and regulators and lawyers and business interests and politicians. That is to say, because of the amount of money at stake for something like this, a lot of long term planning goes into it. 

Here is my point: work on this scale, the ten or twenty year scale, is different than the scale that most of us work on, i.e. planning by the month, or if we're lucky, the year. The price of wool from Peru imported into the United States, as decided by trade agreements such as these, impacts what kind of clothes people will wear, and in turn, the trends and cultural commentary that follow from these trends. Much of the time we talk about cultural shifts, i.e. shifts in attitudes, but I wonder how much our attitudes are influenced by the materials we have access to. All this a kind of "determinist" view (i.e. there's nothing we can do about it on a large scale), but I think this is essentially what Professor Peterson was talking about. More generally, I don't think people think much about the future, beyond our narrow interests. And in terms of the material constraints of time and money, we don't often have the resources to imagine and enact the other ways that things could be. I'm not alone in noticing this trend. At any rate, I need to go to work. See you.

Jinx keeps looking at his water bowl. Yesterday he went into the bathroom and peed on the bathmat, which, in contrast to Kitty Girl's decimation of my bedroom rug during her final weeks, is considerate. In my mind I imagine he observed me giving her a hard time about peeing next to my bed, and thus does his best to avoid upsetting me. I'm not sure, but I think the reason he's in the bathroom in the first place, never one of his regular destinations, is that he's trying to drink from the toilet. On occasion in the past he could maneuver himself onto the toilet seat and lower his head into the bowl for a fresh taste of water. Eric told me that cats like their water to not be next to their food, and so for his cats, he places water bowls throughout the apartment. It makes me think of lions on the plains of Africa on TV, the muddy little puddles where all the animals congregate. I imagine the half-eaten corpse of an antelope rotting and tainting the water, and in my mind I assemble the logic of time worn cat habits passing down from generation to generation.

Right now he's drinking from the little white bowl by the back leg of the chair. I'm sitting here with him, above him on the same chair, in front of the heater while he sits on the edge of the pile of blankets and towels set between the radiator and the space heater. When I take a drink of water from my clear plastic water bottle, he looks up at the water in the bottle, and then looks at me. He looks back to his water bowl. I take another drink and the same sequence occurs. So I take him into the kitchen and pump saline into him. It's his last night on earth unless he starts eating. Two nights ago, after resisting for a long time, I finally force fed him, watering down some beef paté and sucking it into a wide nozzled syringe. I put the syringe into the corner of his mouth, forcing it open though Jinx resists little, and shoot the 10ml of brackish liquid towards the back of this throat. I do this four times, making it through about a quarter of a small can of cat food. About three hours later, in the middle of the night, he throws it all up into a puddle on the hardwood floor.

He must be so thirsty. I can't imagine what that's like, but I imagine that when he looks to me, he's telling me he's thirsty, and asking me to do something about it. "Please take care of me." But there's little I can do. And I hope he understands that. It's these moments of alertness, when he looks at me with a question in his eyes, that trick me into thinking there is more to do. That I should do, and I remind myself that I am his caretaker, and of what needs to happen. A year and some months earlier, taking care of Kitty Girl in her last days was a learning process; and though I did my best, I probably let her go on a little bit longer than I should of. The night before I put her down I asked Stacy, my neighbor who is a vet, to come up and take a look. Stacy picked her up and put her skinny body on my dining room table, performing a quick veterinary exam. Pushing her fingers into KG's body, her belly and undercarriage, looking at her teeth and into her mouth. KG smelled and her fur was unclean, and there was little piece of cat litter stuck to her nose. “I think it's time,” said Stacy, telling me what I needed to hear.

**

I took Jinx to the vet today to be put to sleep. In the morning we stayed in bed and when he got up, I got up. I brushed and flossed and came back to find him standing by the heater. Most days in the past, when I got up he would stand by the bathroom door, or sit on the bathmat, waiting for me to finish and go into the kitchen and feed him. It was our routine, and I think we both enjoyed it. Today, as it's been since he stopped eating, he went and sat by the heater. It was off. I looked at him and he looked at me. I turned it on, and went off to complete tasks. I called the vet to make an appointment, ate breakfast and wrote a few emails. Ola texted and said she wanted to see Jinx and give him a pet before he went off to the vet, and I spent the next hour before she got there sitting with my back against the radiator next to Jinx, petting him with my left hand and scrolling and typing with the right. This is the thing that Jinx and I did together most often, though usually this occurred on the couch with the computer on my lap, reading and writing while he sat next to me.

He purred as I pet him. I tried and failed to remove the bit of dried food or vomit that had been stuck to the corner of his mouth for the last four days, too old and dry to untangle itself from the white fur on his lower jaw. At this point it didn't seem to matter. He was always better at grooming himself than I was. But he seemed happy which was impressive considering that he hadn't eaten for sometime and was breathtakingly skinny. We sat in the heat and enjoyed the morning by the big window in the dining room. It was a sunny day, and though the light didn't touch us, it fell on the table and the entry way to the kitchen and it was warm and comfortable and not unlike the many mornings that had come before. I didn't cry, and Jinx didn't do anything but occasionally lift his head up to direct my hand to a more pleasurable zone, or stand up and slowly reposition himself next to me and the space heater.

Ola came by and we sat for twenty minutes, chatted, talked about Jinx, his condition as I understood it. She'd heard it before, that he wasn't eating, was severely dehydrated and unable to absorb water due to the advanced state of his kidney disease, had hyperthyrodism and a urinary track infection; all of which were being treated by different drugs and saline injections. None of which I administered the previous day asides from the saline. After consulting with his vet, our friend and neighbor Alfonso, I decided that Monday would be the day, and there was no point in smearing cream on his ears and shooting antibiotics into his mouth anymore. He refused food to the point of walking out of the kitchen as soon as I opened a can of cat food. The only thing he seemed to want was water, and his body was done absorbing it. Jinx is a tough cat, so part of him doesn't notice, so focused as he is on having an excellent day. But he was making decisions about not eating, was dehydrated, and it was only going to get worse. “It's the humane thing,” said Alfonso.

**

I went out and started my car to warm it up. I went back inside, and got out the big cat box that Jinx flew in when he came here from California. On top of the box are labels, still affixed from KG and Jinx's travels across the country. One of them is written in Dara's handwriting; our addresses, an official declaration of the boxes' contents, using words like “consignee,” and other statements of pet health in airport legalese. Dara wrote two hearts, one on each side of my name, and every time I look at it I feel a small jolt of warm nostalgia. There is another label however, which I think Amy made, judging by the unabashed personification of cat voice, that makes me happy and sad, simultaneously:

 

Buried in the living room closet under a pile of empty cardboard boxes is Kitty Girl's box, which is a little bit smaller and of a different color. Her label reads, “My name is Kitty Girl, please take care of me. I'm with Jinx.” Happy because it's true, and is still true in a way. They were together and symbiotic most of their lives. Sad because. Sad because I don't know, and I don't have the words to describe it. I grabbed one of the new towels that my sister had given me for Christmas, tags still attached, and put it into the box. I put on my coat, zipped it up, and picked up Jinx. I kissed him, cried a little, hugged him, and put him into the box.

On the car ride over I opened the boxes' cage door and he came out. Stood on my lap and looked out the window, his shaky legs searching for stability amongst the constant jostling of the road. After a few minutes he got back in the box. When we got to the vet they took us into one of their examination rooms, two wooden chairs, a metal table jutting out from the wall, a counter top with a sink against one wall, and some cabinets above. There were two books on the counter top, big colorful children's books, one about about dog heaven and the other about cat heaven. I let Jinx out on the floor and he roamed, inspecting the room. After about five minutes Alfonso came in and explained how the procedure was going to work: first there would be an injection of a sedative which would render Jinx incontinent, and then about five minutes after the sedative had completely taken effect, another shot would be administered, straight into his heart, and it would be fatal. Alfonso asked if I wanted more time with Jinx before the first shot, and I said yes, and he said that he'd be back in about ten minutes. At this point Jinx was on the metal examination table, sitting and looking around. He was slightly agitated but continued to sit. As Alfonso put it later, he didn't seem to have any idea about what was going to happen.

I petted Jinx, spoke quietly in his ear, told him that I loved and admired him, thanked him for being such a good friend, and for taking care of me, especially over the last couple of years in Indiana. He purred, and for the last time I got that little dopamine rush of love from him that had become an everyday part of my life. I leaned over from the chair I was in, buried my face into the white fur on his chest, and hugged him and cried. I sat up, and for the first time since Kitty Girl died, I said her name out loud: “Kitty Girl. We're going to go see Kitty Girl,” and his ears perked up, and he looked around the room, checking the corners and the door. For the last year I never once said her name in his presence, not wanting to prolong any hope that she was still around. The only time I ever saw Jinx despondent was that first month after she died, slouched and constantly yowling and searching the apartment. There was a sad question that hung in his eyes during that time, and I was saving the act of saying her name aloud until I could provide an answer. There is an idea in Buddhism that the quality of one's last thought before death is the quality one carries with them into the next life. I imagined the river we all return to, and the thought of Kitty Girl acting like a beacon in the formless rush of death.

**

Alfonso came in along with an assistant to administer the first shot. They injected the sedative into his back leg, and left me alone with him. I picked him up and held him as the sedative took over. He kept smacking his mouth, as if all of his saliva had dried up and he was trying to jump start its production. He was still alive, but there's no telling where his mind had gone. His eyes were wide and fearful. After some struggle, his body relaxed and became limp. “Jinx and Kitty Girl, Sweet Jinx, Jinky...” I said as he drifted into incontinence. Soon Alfonso and the assistant came back, they took him from my arms, laid him onto the table, and administered the second shot. I took some comfort in believing that he wasn't able to fully feel the needle sliding into his heart. They left again, and at this point Jinx was on his way out. I sat with my hands on Jinx's still warm body. Five minutes later, Alfonso came back and with a stethoscope listened to Jinx's heart, still barely beating. His system had been running for so long, and predictably, for Jinx, always a fighter, it took some time to wind down. After a couple more minutes it was done. Alfonso scooped Jinx's body up in the towel that Jinx had been laying on, and took him out of the room. Before they left I arranged with Alfonso to have the vet send me the bill, and I walked straight out of the office, got into my car, went home to my apartment and started writing this story.

The first couple weeks I was constantly reminded that he wasn't here. Not when I ascend the stairs with my bike over my shoulder, sleeping on my bed or by the radiator or on the couch. Not in the kitchen waiting for me to feed him, or walking into my office with his crooked body, head tilted to maintain the balance he lost after his stroke four years ago, coming to see me and what I'm up to in my office. Not on the couch sitting between Cory and Eric when we're playing music, or intensely staring at me from across the room for reasons I can't imagine. When I walk through my apartment I open my mouth to speak, to say something to him, something just to say, or say his name, or do a little song and dance, and I'm reminded that he's not there to bear witness, and I fall silent. My audience for casual speech, the everyday and thoughtless blabber perpetually emanating from the brain, always talking and in love with itself and its talking, is no longer here. The constant interaction him and I shared is an absence I can feel. If one thinks of endorphins, the little biological pleasures one gets from touch, from being touched and talked to, the physiological structures of our identity, the sudden disappearance of these pleasures is akin to withdrawal from any kind of addiction. It's tempting to seek a quick fix. Like Methadone in place of Heroin, people ask me if I'm going to get another cat. “No, I don't think so. I'd like to see what life is like without one for a while.”

Jink, Jinky, Jinxman...I'd say all three in row directly into his ear in succession, my hand simultaneously scratching his chin and his other ear from the other side. I wanted to remind him of who he was to me, to build associations of pleasure with the words I used to call him. Like a lover calling out the others name as they ascend together, the work of imbuing language with meaning, every word a potential storehouse of limitless memory and feeling. He would call me too, a particular yowl when he wanted me to come over and pet him, and four out of five times I would comply, happy to be wanted. Say my name, say my name, and it's not like any of this was premeditated, but these were the habits we fell into. To be wanted, and the repetition of this want carving out a path in not just in the heart or the brain, but in the body of the everyday. I speak, or think to speak out of habit, and stop myself from doing so. The thousands of times I turned my head as I rounded the corner to see if he was sitting on the couch. The anticipation of pleasure as I look up from my morning sit to see him sleeping in the warm depression of where my body had been. It is not these thoughts or habits in and of themselves that are painful, but the minute and constant stifling of my impulse to connect. Writing is one way to rewrite these impulses, and thus, I write,

 R.I.P    -Jinx-    1993-2015

Hi. Happy New Year. Let's have one okay? Okay. Now that that's out of the way, to continue with the discourse on Jinx, I guess what I'm trying to say, and kind of have been getting at without explicitly saying so, and pardon the slightly unfocused writing that maybe is a result of a) not investing as much time as I have been in writing in this blog and being out of practice when it comes to writing essayistic narrative, and b) not totally knowing how to get at this vague sense of what it is that I'm trying to say, and maybe a way to read the previous two posts are as drafts that helped lay the ground for my main point, which is: I've been dreading taking Jinx to the vet and beginning a regimen of care, such as injections, mixing medicines with his food, rubbing solvent on his ears (something to do with hyperthyrodism), and squirting anti-biotic into his mouth because I don't want our relationship to change. This is selfish, I know, but to take care of another being like a doctor  requires a certain kind of relationship, and I don't want Jinx to think that when I pick him up, I'm going to do something unpleasant to him. I think of KG sitting on my lap, as it was, seemingly, her preferred cat/human interaction zone, and how when I initially started injecting her with saline it was on my lap. Pretty soon she stopped sitting on my lap.

More generally, change is difficult, especially when it comes to important relationships. The last semester was, for me, a kind of shift into accepting and imagining my future as an academic. I'm not sure where or when this happened, and obviously it's been a gradual process, but something has changed, where now instead of fantasizing about creative projects I find myself fantasizing about research questions. My preference is to pick up an academic text rather than a book of poetry or a novel. When it comes to writing, some of my fears have come true in that I find that I'm thinking more about arguments, ideas, and scholarship than I am about the "liminal spaces" (a trendy word in poetry from ten years ago) from which to start making the poetic, and mercifully indeterminate connections between things that much of my writing on this blog has started from. CD said to me once, twelve somethings years ago, that I wrote in a remarkably "unpredatory" way (I was always proud of the characterization). I wonder if she would say the same thing now. It seems my academic identity, after two and a half years, has grown to the point where it's becoming my primary identity.

The reasons for this shift are, I believe, a combination of unpredictable life events and the disciplining of the PhD program. In the last year and a half I've experienced a number of losses, including a cat, a father, and a lover, i.e. a shift in important everyday relationships. In the last six months or so, I've also noticed that I've stopped "making phone calls" to people in "California," and invest the majority of my social energy into people who live in Lafayette. Thus, through a combination of bonds that have fallen away, and new ones that have come to take their place, my day to day consists of different kinds of conversations and interactions than the ones I was having. At the same time after two and a half years of intensive classes, intensive academic writing and now, getting into research, I've been learning the specifics of academic work. I think the big shift came over the summer, after studying and taking and passing prelims, somehow, I began to think of the work I was doing not as the necessary work of graduate school, but as my work. I came here thinking that I just needed to get through, get out, and then go back to teaching and writing with health insurance and a steady gig. Now I'm beginning to imagine another kind of future, and it's one I never could have predicted.

Not to say that I'm not going to write in this blog anymore, or stop working on non-academic writing and music, or that I'm going to let Jinx die because I don't want to be his doctor. I'll continue to do all of it, continue to work towards pulling all these threads together, and continue to balance the strain of what I don't want to do with my own agenda. More later on what that agenda consists of but right now I'm going to go eat dinner with mi familia. Here is a poem for the old year by the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska, translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanag. I'll let you know when I find one for the new year:

Cat in an Empty Apartment

Die—you can’t do that to a cat.
Since what can a cat do
in an empty apartment?
Climb the walls?
Rub up against the furniture?
Nothing seems different here
but nothing is the same.
Nothing’s been moved
but there’s more space.
And at nighttime no lamps are lit.

Footsteps on the staircase,
but they’re new ones.
The hand that puts fish on the saucer
has changed, too.

Something doesn’t start
at its usual time.
Something doesn’t happen
as it should.
Someone was always, always here,
then suddenly disappeared
and stubbornly stays disappeared.

Every closet’s been examined.
Every shelf has been explored.
Excavations under the carpet turned up nothing.
A commandment was even broken:
papers scattered everywhere.
What remains to be done.
Just sleep and wait.

Just wait till he turns up,
just let him show his face.
Will he ever get a lesson
on what not to do to a cat.
Sidle toward him
as if unwilling
and ever so slow
on visibly offended paws,
and no leaps or squeals at least to start.