I wonder if she knows there ar pills in her cheese

I took my dog to the vet this weekend for what I assumed was a routine check-up/rabies re-vaccination. As it turns out, she may have Lyme disease. I say may because it's possible that the positive test just indicates that she has been exposed to it (been bitten) but did not contract the full disease (requires that the tick stay attached to the dog for around 48 hours.)Rather than wait for a quantitative test to show how much exposure she's had, I elected to have her immediately put on an aggressive round of antibiotics. If it is Lyme disease, we can make it a chronic condition that won't do serious renal damage resulting in kidney failure. If she was only briefly exposed, we can get rid of it all together. After a fair amount of googling, everything my doctor explained makes sense. I just hope she doesn't have the for real kind of Lyme disease.

Perhaps I am making entirely too much of this but it's my dog. No, I did not seek her out. Yes, I actively tried to get rid of her (or rather, find her owners.)But she's my dog. All complaining about the early morning walks aside, she's my buddy. She happened along when I really needed her (for reasons I can't possibly elaborate if for no other reason than I cannot fully articulate what was going on at the time and how she factors into it. Suffice to say, she does.) And now, I've failed her on a very basic level. I could have put her on a monthly flea repellent but elected to just give her baths because I never saw fleas or ticks on her, forgetting just how small ticks can be. She's come a very long way from when I found her. If she gets legitimately sick, it's entirely my fault.

Did I miss the point?

I feel woefully unprepared for class most of the time. I can't/don't devote the amount of time (I think is) required and it bugs me because I will attempt to answer the professor's question but, even in the midst of articulating a response, fall short. I'm torn between wanting to participate and not having the proper tools to do so thoughtfully. Maybe I feel at a scholastic disadvantage because this is only my first semester and the rest of the class has been at this for a minute or two longer. That should make me work harder, no? Instead, I'm letting it swallow me. I'm forgetting about the elephant. I can't forget the elephant. It's buckle down time.

In looking at the reader-response articles for class, I remembered my first "experience" with reader-response criticism. My 12th grade English teacher, Mr. Rosinski, was actively pursuing a graduate degree in the field. He liked to give us what amounted to literary sound bites and ask us to respond to them in no more than a double-spaced page as a means of teaching us how to get right into a problem (they were always problems, these quotes.) One class he brought up Roland Barthes, authors of "Death of the Author" and asked us to respond to the follow line from the essay, "text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination." We had no training in literary criticism, certainly nothing to put the quote into context but we were plucky AP students and assigning this was easier for him because it allowed him to use the pretense of teaching us as a means of going over his class notes. A real win-win. Anyhow, this it what I wrote (I'm not sure why I kept it, I have a lot of things I wrote in high school):

A teacher of mine once told me what I wrote reflected what I’d read. I was talented because I had good taste. He thought this was a compliment but that statement has haunted me since because it forces me to ask a question I don’t necessarily want an answer to— Could I ever write anything that is truly original or will it always be merely the product of a lifetime spent reading? In preparing a response I am immediately tempted to quote a novel I read years ago, “ Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I have ever known.” So I suppose the answer is no.

This is a troubling thought mostly because I find myself at an impasse. A relentless curricular emphasis on originality of ideas over voice has stifled my ability to simply write. As a result, it feels, stylistically, like an abstraction of my bookshelves. A literary bricolage. But maybe this is not a personal flaw. Roland Barthes stated in his essay “The Death of the Author”, "The writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings [...] in such a way as never to rest on any one of them.” If this declaration holds true, this predicament is the inevitable result of being simultaneously a reader and writer. Barthes goes on to say that a writer cannot assert ultimate authority over a work because, in many ways, they did not write it. “A text is made of multiple writings…this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.”

I got a B. I always got Bs in his class. Apparently I took the quote out of context. Funny because the only context I had was my own response to the abbreviated reading. It seems I took myself out of context. I don't mind the grade. Really, I didn't then. This is the beginning of a response at best. I don't even really explain the last quote I use. It feels thrown in because I don't really know how to articulate my point. I remember struggling to write this and feeling woefully incapable of doing so. Maybe that's why I bring it up now. Again, I had/have tools, and with enough time (or a better application of the time available to me, then and now) could probably have come up with something better. But I didn't and again feel like I don't.

The context comment bugged the hell out of me though.

What's the opposite of 'he's just not that into you'?

I told Mousetrap that it probably isn't a good idea, us going to a show together on Thursday night. He's probably a lot more interested in me than I am in him and I can't muster sustained enthusiasm for new people right now (see: the grad student I should have given a nickname but instead called Jason.)

Zoe suggested that I might be a closer to mustered (mustard?) were it not for my initial assumption that Mousetrap had a British accent. This was perhaps brought on by the loud background (ok, foreground) noises and Mousetrap's tight black jeans. Those jeans should only be worn by gay men and Europeans (who may or may not be gay.) It's just trickery on anyone else. I wasn't even wearing a push-up bra that night so I can't be accused of the same sartorial deception thus negating my indignation.

I also realize I've been pretty quick with the veto lately: too-tight pants, propositions via facebook, using the word tinkle (twice, mind you), being ever so slightly shorter than me, being ever so slightly two decades older than me, working in a shoe store, and quoting My Fair Lady (last two sins were committed by the same person. I'm hoping this newfound discretion does not turn into desperation down the road when men invariably stop asking me out and I wind up latching on to the first one to glance my way in months. I hope I'm learning that not having someone isn't the end of the world. Plenty of people would notice if I went missing and would make every attempt to find me before the I was eaten by Alsatians. As an added bonus, I get to keep the entire bed to myself. This is a double bonus on nights that I get to warm on one side of the bed as I can easily move to the cool half. Bagel is not terrible difficult to shuffle from corner to corner.

This weekend I bought the annotations to a book I have not read (yet) and a double bell alarm clock that is, for all intents and purposes, a paperweight as it cannot keep time and I am not entirely sure how to wind it. Men, even Oscar Wilde, would not understand my desire to purchase an ostensibly useful thing in order only to admire it intensely.

I was reading an article on reader-response criticism earlier today and was reminded what bothers me about that particular school of thought. I actually like the idea that a text is the coming together of author and reader, Barthes suggestion that the destination of a text lies with the reader and not the writer, etc. My problem is this--isn't every reading, every analysis, on some level a reader's response? Is it really possible to separate what's going on in a text from our rendering of it? Even the new critics brought the understanding of the world to each reading. Do you mean to tell me that their fundamental understanding of language did not shape/inform their analysis? No one is that objective. I'll get back to this later. It's late and I don't have to the battery power (in my laptop or my brain) to dig deeper right now.

Instead of the things I should be doing, this is what I did.

Word clouds I made at Wordle when I should have been researching (i.e., taking notes while reading his blog) Dr. Sample's theory and criticism coursework for my interview with him on Wednesday. In a manner of speaking, this applies. It's a reflection of my low cultural output. blah, blah, blah, simulation. blah, blah, blah, Baudrillard. blah, blah, blah, hyperreality. blah, blah, blah, signs.

My blog (or at least the most recent postings).

My Nan Lacy Entry from Senior Year.

My Senior Thesis.

My editorials from high school journalism (possibly my favorite of the bunch).


...and one not by me, Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself"

do I dare disturb the universe?

The conversation I was planning on having with Jason at dinner on Friday about what it is that we are and where we may or may not be headed did not turn out as I had previously anticipated. Firstly, I expected to be the one to bring up a relationship. And I did not think I would be the one to suggest that one would be impossible.

Earlier in the day, after I mentioned having been invited to see Modest Mouse that night (by a fellow with ambiguous intentions), he asked if I felt free to go out with said other guy. I told him the thought hadn't really crossed my mind. He asked if I thought he was trying to make me his girlfriend. That thought had occurred to me but so did all the others wherein he mentioned the impossibility of it all and told me about all of his previous dysfunctional relationships without the requisite detached self-depreciation required in that kind of admission. It never quite sounded like he was over a single one of them.

I was, as it happens, not prepared for our conversation to go like this at all (apart from the proposal bit and the somewhat dated attire, this is not an entirely inaccurate rendering):


I guess, I got tired of waiting for me to tell me what he'd figured out. I knew he felt something because he told me as much. When I asked for words, I received exactly that. Words. A series of signifiers that managed, with very few exceptions and really only when he was using someone else's vocabulary, to signify nothing at all. Unfortunately, as much as I do like him, I just don't have the patience for someone else who can't ever really manage to explain himself. Maybe I put my guard up because I wasn't sure what would happen. And when something finally did, I was too guarded to let go again. It's entirely possible that I did this to myself, again. Be that as it may, it's done. And like he said last night after our hours-long conversation in his hotel room, I'll go back about my day. I will. I hate to say that because I feel like I should be more upset, more bent over all of this. I'm not especially. I liked him yes, but not enough to put up with all that. When it came down to it, I thought I'd found Walt Whitman. But again, I would up with Prufrock. Too many coffee spoons. Not enough Yawp.

Eventually, I will find a man who behaves like one. And when I do, I'll be done.

That is of course, not the whole of the story. After we established that this was not going in the direction that we had previously anticipated, I might have casually mention that it would do no one any good to let the moment (or the hotel room) go to waste. That we shouldn't pay attention to the syntax of things and that kisses are a far better fate than wisdom. I might have suggested that we should be absolved from previous ties and conventions and that in naming the thing we'd only subjugate it. We'd kill it doing that.

Did I use e.e. cummings, Walt Whitman, and Michel Foucault to get a man into bed after telling him I could not be his girlfriend? Yes, yes, I did. And while I should probably be deeply ashamed of the intellectual manipulation, I am inclined to think that in that moment my education paid for itself. We'll add this to the list of reasons why I am a terrible person and call it a day.

For future reference...

You don't read this (well, whoever you are reading this right now, you clearly do. The specific you to whom (who?) I am referring, does not), so I can say this:

When you're trying to explain how you feel about me, in admittedly stunted phrases (This seems to be the only time you're at a loss for words) don't sum it up with, "if I didn't care about you, I wouldn't be spending the money to come visit." You can just say, " I care about you." In fact, I'd prefer it. The other way isn't sweet. It's guilt-inducing.

I'm just saying, think of the leaves.