Andrea Gibson, "Photograph"

I signed up for Andrea Gibson's email newsletter because she is a fucking goddess, and writes sentences that make me want to chop off my hands for ever thinking of trying. I was looking at her website tonight, of course very prettily rendered, hoping to find news that she will be in NC soon and instead found some of her poems written out and accompanied by audio readings and reveled. Here is the first section of a poem called "Photograph" that kind of gut punches you and makes you love sick for someone or maybe a version of yourself you may never have actually been.

"I wish I was a photograph
tucked into the corners of your wallet
I wish I was a photograph
you carried like a future in your back pocket
I wish I was that face you show to strangers
when they ask you where you come from
I wish I was that someone that you come from
every time you get there
and when you get there
I wish I was that someone who got phone calls
and postcards saying
wish you were here
I wish you were here
autumn is the hardest season
the leaves are all falling
and they're falling like they're falling in love with the ground
and the trees are naked and lonely
I keep trying to tell them
new leaves will come around in the spring
but you can't tell trees those things
they're like me they just stand there
and don't listen"

yes, please, more like this.

"Ir's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers"

The Bagel and I used to have a neighbor with a bumper sticker on his car that read:
"Ask Me About Gourds".

I so so so so want to go back and find him and make him read this excellent piece in McSweeney's. If you like things that are funny, or gourds, or the lucky convergence of the two then you must read this.

It reminds me of the classic first edition of "Sedaratives" in The Believer in which a reader asked how to cook the perfect egg and Amy Sedaris rightly told hum to "just poach the motherfuckers".

If that doesn't do it for you watch this altered Paula Dean video. All I have to say is "We're ... gonna be ... arrested."
(tigernoise)

10 Lesbian and Bisexual poets that you shoud read

Anyone who knows me is aware that I'm an A in the LGBTQIA community and that I dig on some poetry so when I saw this post on Jezebel republished from the awesome Lesbian siteAutostraddle who admonish us to read a fucking book already, they had me at Adrienne Rich.( As a sociologist in queer theory, Rich pioneered the concept of compulsory heterosexuality which makes her a total rock star.)
Some commenters complained on Jezebel that there should be some representation for the gays too. I think it is perfectly appropriate that a lesbian site focused solely on women, and hopefully this way, someone else can publish an article about 10 gay and bisexual poets you should be reading.

Also featured are the redoubtable Eileen Myles, spoken word poets Kirya Traber, Alix Olson and Andrea Gibson. Gibson's poem "Ashes" is one of the most personal and important pieces of poetry I have ever witnessed, so if you do nothing else, watch this video.

They also feature personal favorite Audre Lorde who is a damn fine sociologist. She "pioneered the concept that racism, sexism and homophobia were linked in that they stemmed from people’s inability to recognize or tolerate difference." (from the write up on Autostraddle)

From Lorde's “Who Said It Was Simple”:

But I who am bound by my mirror
as well as my bed
see causes in color
as well as sex

and sit here wondering
which me will survive
all these liberations.

So do yourself a favor and check out the original article on Autostraddle, you just might end up reading a fucking book.

UPDATE:
A very nice commenter pointed me to a video of Tristan Silverman, a Chicago poet who makes a nice addition here. Check out her performance of the poem "Because I was Asked"

love, and patience and madness

I am drowning under a sea of final papers and self pity but I am ruminating on my next post too.
here is a little taste.

Ode to Joy: Frank O' Hara

Frank O' Hara calls to something deeply teenaged and romantic in me that I reserve nearly exclusively for good writing. At the same time he is speaking to many of the disparate thoughts swirling in my noggin these days: the construction of symbols, the meaning of distractions, the strange and bawdy terror of love and death.
His images, meanwhile, resonate and encapsulate beautifully the mundane beauties and uglyness of everyday life, like paper dioramas of Blake-ian die cuts.
If you like music with your poetry and would rather listen, try this and gaze at his handsome mug.
Or simply read below.

"You are the beautiful half/ Of a golden hurt."- Gwendolyn Brooks, Badass.

If you have never read her, do so, now. Probably most famous for her "We Real Cool" a study in colloquial rhythms and social constraints, replete with bravado and place names like "The Golden Shovel".

She says, beautifully, about the structure:

"The WEs in "We Real Cool" are tiny, wispy, weakly argumentative "Kilroy-is-here" announcements. The boys have no accented sense of themselves, yet they are aware of a semi-defined personal importance. Say the "We" softly."

She is also very well known for the wrenching poem "The Mother" which I will forewarn you is like a kick to the stomach. When I read those last lines, I am seized with terror and sadness, as they hit too close to home, too close to what I am most afraid of. It strokes the heart to fiercely, leaves indentations.

But I love her most for her portraits of urban life, especially that of women. Though some might see her as belonging to the Womanist school, I feel that boils down her complexity and fails to see her interactionist framework.

My Dreams, My Works, Must Wait Till After Hell

I hold my honey and I store my bread
In little jars and cabinets of my will.
I label clearly, and each latch and lid
I bid, Be firm till I return from hell.
I am very hungry. I am incomplete.
And none can give me any word but Wait,
The puny light. I keep my eyes pointed in;
Hoping that, when the devil days of my hurt
Drag out to their last dregs and I resume
On such legs as are left me, in such heart
As I can manage, remember to go home,
My taste will not have turned insensitive
To honey and bread old purity could love

My favorite comment about the Oscars

Noel Murray of the AV Club
"I want to tread lightly here, but from the red carpet onward, I grew increasingly irritated by the way people talked to or about Gabourey Sidibe: always pointing out how “beautiful” and “inspiring” she was, and suchlike. Even Sandra Bullock in her otherwise well-calibrated Best Actress acceptance speech lingered on Gabby in her kudos to the losing nominees. Sidibe is a good actress. Her performance in Precious stands alone, and is even more remarkable when contrasted with the bubbly personality she’s shown in interviews over the past year. I don’t know that she’ll ever be an Oscar nominee again, but I’ve no doubt that Sidibe will be able to find steady acting work for the near future, whether or not red-carpet hostesses think she’s “amazing.” In short: she doesn’t need their overcompensation. She’s not mentally handicapped; she’s obese. They can talk to her like an actress, not like the subject of a human-interest story."

full article here

what I'm reading and what's next

people have been asking:

P= pleasure, S= school
Native Son Richard Wright (s)
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life Erving Goffman (p)
The Second Shift- Arlie R. Hochschild (p)
Two Girls, Fat and Thin- Mary Gaitskill (p)
Too Much Happiness- Alice Munro (p)
The Children's Hospital- Chris Adrian (p)
Changing My Mind- Zadie Smith (p)
My Life In France- Julia Child (p)
The past three issues of the Believer (p, duh)
Complications- Atul Gawande (s)
The Managed Heart- Arlie R. Hochschild (s and p)
The Pursuit of Attention- Charles Derber (s)
The ABC's of the Economic Crisis- Fred Magdoff and Michael D. Yates (s)
The New Media Monopoly- Ben Bagdikian (s)
Independent People- Haldor Laxness (p)
Up in The Air- Walter Kirn (p)
Under the Dome- Stepehn King (p)

Please get together and work out my intervention.

Are you Lonesome Tonight? Alienation and collective identity at work

Cue your speakers! This is a musical entry

As I was working this evening I took a little break to nerd out on The AV Club and ran across this interview with Joshua Ferris, author of the tremendous Then We Came to the End, a dark and funny and deeply resonating novel about office politics and the formation of identity around work, especially that of collective selves.

I just finished an amazing book by Peter Callero called The Myth of Individualism. Callero’s definition of individualism illustrates that individualism is a particular ideology with tensions between the personal and the social, the private and the public. It also assumes that values of independence and the like are “natural”; a rational worldview with people as free agents making choices with direct outcomes that impact their lives (17). Callero notes that this definition is not inherently a bad thing on its surface, but rather the unintended consequences and ramifications that create negative outcomes. In short, there are limits to the good that individualism can bring an individual and a society.(This would be a great introduction to some of the basic premises of Symbolic Interactionism, the kind of sociology that I heart if anyone is interested. On the micro-level he cites work by Sheryl Kleinman, Arlie Hochschild and Stephen Lyng to name a few.) Specifically he is talking about how the narrative we tell ourselves about how we become who we are is detrimental to us in the end because we fail to realize the power of the larger social forces that shape us. Callero uses great contemporary examples like the Unabomber (attempting to “make sense” of Ted Kaczynski from a sociological standpoint and ultimately seeing him as a “radical individualist” or an “extreme American” (16- 18)) , the mythology surrounding the supposedly singular accomplishment of some famous Americans, and the participation of disparate lliberal-union groups in so-called "battle in Seattle". In short, the myth of individualism was created, perpetuated and institutionalized by those who achieved success in order to 1) prevent people from understanding their own agency and the power of collective action 2) create a kind of flip logic in addition where failures and constraints are seen through the lens of personal responsibility and failure 3) obscure the collective action that allows elites to remain in power 4) avoid examining larger social issues in such a way that the powerful are not criticized. Mills talked about this in The Power Elite and Marx did to, as well as many conflcit theorists, but Callero pointely looks at the way the narrative of the American Dream is scripted for the continued disenfranchisement of those who will be least likely to achieve it. That is, as fewer and fewer people are able to reach success, the more they believe they could do so with lots of hard work and determination.
Callero is NOT saying that individuals are not ambitious and motivated by singular forces sometimes, but what he is saying is that many Americans buy into a dream they can never achieve and the power of that dream prevents them from seeking alternative routes to agency.

So what does this have to do with Joshua Ferris?

Well, Callero also talks about how work is a particularly strong force in how we define who we are and how we construct identities. This is especially important to understand as right now, a new generation of “downwardly mobile” Americans find themselves wondering where they went wrong, measuring their failures by the brutal yardstick of the American Dream and coming up short. When work becomes difficult to obtain, maintain and make meaningful in these contexts it affects our relationships to others and to ourselves. Our personal narratives no longer make sense as they get interrupted again and again. This is a symptom of new capitalism or neoliberalism Callero draws a map from the new capitalism to larger social currents and problems. Issues like crime, education, poverty, divorce, and social isolation cannot be treated as incidents of individual motivation (or lack thereof) that only quantify “individual limitations or personal weakness” (123).

But another limitation, one that also resonates with themes of alienation is how when we do work power separates us. As Ferris says in his interview:

When you’re a member of management, you’re usually not one of the group. Sometimes you have to make decisions that necessarily exclude the collective. It’s more difficult to be a friend—even though they know each other and they treat each other like friends, it’s more of a challenge for them. It’s just institutional fact; the two characters that are the most aloof are the ones who have the most responsibility. If someone were plucked from the group and given those responsibilities, they might find themselves growing more aloof, just by virtue of that promotion. Suddenly the group culture excludes you. I saw this in my own working life, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence—I sensed a kind of loneliness in middle managers especially. The people at the very top could fall by and grace you with their presence and give you a little largesse, and you’d be “Oh, I’m so beloved.” In a way, it was kind of like flattery. The middle managers didn’t quite have that cachet, but at the same time, they had to seem like they were of that caliber. So there’s a little bit of loneliness at the heart of those with a little bit of power.

Wow.

This statement is so true that is makes my teeth hurt, and it undesrcores the fact that those with power can become disconnected from those without it, even when they don't want to be. Being a manager is a special kind of hell in that you get to observe others forming bonds and creating strong collective identities, but you don't really get to participate. It's a lonely way to form a work identity in that you are usually doing it on your own, surrounded by those with more power than you (and similarly isolated) and those with less power than you (who are socialized not to see you as part of the group). You are from but not of. As Marx would say my "species being" is not being fully realized to my detriment. And I think Callero would say that this is a particularly American kind of loneliness at work.


To quote Bette Middler in Beaches, "Ok, enough about me, what do you think about me?

“So You Want A Social Life, With Friends,”

Some of you know that I am a great advocate for and defender of modern poetry.Below is an example of why.
It comes from the poet Kenneth Koch a modern American poet who embraced the exuberance of (some) post modernists while refusing to mire his work in ridiculous navel-gaze-y self-aggrandizing experimentation. It is, however, lovely and melancholy and brilliantly observant of human behavior. I truly love the plethora of poetry on YouTube,everyone should take the time to check a few out.

This, by the way, is a portrait of Koch by the wonderful artist Alex Katz.

The Craziest Thing I Have Ever Read

So I peruse the Onion AV Club when I am not drowning in Marx, and today while reading the comments on the latest Mad Men episode write up in the TV Club portion I ran across this little beauty and I had to share:

The dark undertones of this episode brought me back to a dark time in my life

uoufriot

7 Sept. 2009 | 12:13 AM CDT

As a teenager I suffered from severe depression and formed a strong bond with the character Garfield and his outlook. Its sad but reading garfield anthologies obsessively was the only thing that made me feel normal and it eventually took on something of an erotic fixation.

To avoid feeling like a sicko I drew pictures of garfield with a womans(Think Pamela anderson circa 1991) body and garfields head, so that I was assured

that my fixation wasn't with animals or repressed homosexuality. This garfield/pam hybrid still had the same biting wit and acerbic outlook and tended to cut herself in self loathing while wolfing down a lasagna to fill the void after sleeping with drawings of a much more handsome and muscular version of myself. These drawings eventually evolved into erotic fanfiction starring garfield and myself (In my head Garfield still has a womans body but someone reading the stories would think Im having sex with regular Garfield.) I killed off Jon in a jealous rage, I didn't touch Odie, I enjoy his companionship and don't mind if he watches.

The stories are your pretty basic wish fulfillment stuff, balanced with self loathing rants. I've been doing this near daily for years and I have a substantial amount of writing in a folder I keep buried in 8 different folders.

Jesus Christ Bananas. I am speechless
It also gives this panel a seriously creepy vibe:

For those uninitiated, be sure to check out the melancholy world of Garfield's Jon, in a life of panels sans Garfield at http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/
Surreal, funny and heartbreaking. Unlike the previous joker who is just a freak.

Week four round up and some thoughts on writing

pounds lost: at least 13 but I forgot to weigh yesterday
Dinners in: six
Gym visits: at least three but I think four

I am feeling pretty good as the weight loss continues and I am noticing a difference in my clothes and my general health. I feel better than I did a month ago, and I'm not losing my mind with hunger. I just hope that as I I get further in to the school year I can keep up the routine. I gear up from 3/4 of a mile to a full mile every time I swim starting this week, so I'm curious to see how tired I'm going to be. My son of a bitching shoulder is still wonky as all hell so I think I'm going to have to go to the PT again, which is both a hassle and expensive. Also I need to go to the dentist, so someone should start harassing me about that until I go.

Ah, school. It is a difficult as I feared it would be but immensely worth it as it is already so much more rewarding than previous semesters. Thank God for no more 200 level classes or group projects or core classes or bullshit as I don't think I could take it anymore. Graduation hovers like a benevolent angel in a not-so-distant future and it is, as I imagine all angels would be, both terrifying and glorious. There is also something a little sci-fi about that simile and the idea of actually graduating, FINALLY, as Mamala would say. Lawd help me, Jeeezuhhss!!!

I had an amazing class tonight that served as a great reminder for why one of my majors is English. As much as I love love love reading, it is often such an isolated pastime that it can make me feel a little disconnected from people. I don't know how many times I have wanted to share the special brilliance of a passage or prescience of a viewpoint with no one to talk to about it, and ultimately feeling creepy as I laugh out loud and corner the cats with newly minted bon mots. I love talking about writing as much as I enjoy reading it but you can't make people love what you are reading from an anecdote and trying will just make me weep and pull my hair out. Glory glory the writing workshop. I am taking a creative nonfiction workshop, a class that meets just once a week but for three hours. It's not fiction, and it's not journalism but it borrows from both. It's often memoir but it doesn't have to be. I hope to steer clear of the all-memoir-all-the-time bent as there is PLENTY of navel-gazing being done right here, on this here old blog. Anyway anyway, we basically write and then critique one other which is good and makes you a better writer but the REAL JOY (for me) is making a group of people read a great and moving piece of writing (essays and excerpts from established writers) and then putting them in the same room and forcing them to FUCKING TALK ABOUT IT!!! Yes Lawd! Woot! This is like my dream come true! No more cats that are afraid of me!
OK, so tonight we had another professor sub for the regular professor who is in Nova Scotia or some nearly imaginary place. The sub was none other than the famous and universally beloved Dr. John Kessel, whose classes I have been trying to take, literally, for 10 years. He was, seriously, a-MAZ-ing. We talked about this extremely effective essay by Scott Sanders called "Under the Influence". What is so damn good about this piece is that is easily could have fallen into cliche, as it is about Sanders' memories of his drunken father, but he adroitly avoids sentiment and cliche. A man writing about his drunk father is like the masculine version of Mommy Dearest but at no time does Sanders evoke the "poor me" vibe of say, a Pat Conroy novel (whom I love but you know, I know what my weaknesses are). Instead, Sanders brings you under the emotional affect of the ten year old boy he was, and it's easy to empathize and sympathize with the child he was, avoiding the prat fall of a grown-up whining about how shitty his parents were. In fact, he only refers to the man he has become selectively, and just briefly, so the glimpses are powerful. In addition, he creates scenes that could be found in the best fiction: descriptive, pungent, visual words that pummel you. Emotional wording is limited, but the reader has no trouble realizing the emotional impact of witnessing your father drink himself to death. The power, as it so often is, resides in the details. In the end, his father is not demonized, but instead a study in dichotomy ; sometimes a monster, but often a weak, frail, and deeply sick human being. He also provides portraits of others: his mother, his neighbors, the adult children of other alcoholics. These portraits provide a resonance and a thoughtfulness that is lacking in most memoir nonfiction by going beyond personal experiences. The most interesting structure of the piece is composed of how the narrative unfolds. Sanders tells us in the first paragraph of the essay that his father died, "body cooling and forsaken on the linoleum of my brother's trailer". What in fiction would be the denouement, he gives to the reader within 50 words of starting the essay. The spectre of his father thus hangs over the reader, a menacing version of the ghostly grandfather from The Family Circus. Additionally, the real drama is in the integral suspense of of the progression of time, and his father's surprising but doomed 15 year dry spell. Like Hitchcock says, suspense is more interesting than surprise. His father's sober period is like a bomb on a bus that only you know about, and which explodes just like you knew it would. The piece reminds me of a eulogy, one that you might want to deliver, but never would. Funerals are for the survivors, after all, and so often is memoir.

There is no self-created replacement for being genuinely loved.

I've been thinking a lot about living in a fantasy world lately, both as thought experiment and while watching some people in my life trudge through ones of their own making.

This, in turn, got me to thinking about how much I want to see Where the Wild Things Are. That book teaches us that the fantasy worlds we create to escape the problems of our lives can't hold a candle to the genuine article, and in the end, it's best to accept our messy, problem filled lives and return to reality, where one can hope to find hot supper waiting for us.

These worlds, however, still live inside all of us, and we remain the kings of our own self-designed kingdoms, that's the beauty part.

I hope I get to watch this with my own kid someday, after having read the book a million times.

This is the new trailer, and man, it makes me cry like crazy.

Love, Love Will Tear Us Apart.

Today has been a shit day.
I did have one bright spot, though. My terrific friend Julie, aka, The Beauty Whisperer, owns a great business,Beauty Ethics,that offers services such as haircuts, color and style, brows, waxing, facials, etc. Anyway, the BW is helping me get my skin in line after it has freaked out over being submerged in chlorine three times a week for 45 minutes. Hopefully things will improve with my new skin care routine.
Outside of that I have cried on the phone twice and in altogether separate incidents I have been disappointed by two people I love.
I have issues opening up to people, I'll be the first to admit that. But it doesn't help when people you care about consistently treat you as an afterthought. It also doesn't help when you ask someone to be there for you and they have their head so far up their ass they turn what you need into something all about themselves. This is not about the Bagel, btw as he is nearly a saint and a lovely person all the way around who always puts me first. Except when he drinks too much bourbon, but that's for another time.

I think I'll be glad when school starts again, as being busy prevents me from investing in other people.

Anyway, my giraffe necklaces from ETSY is shipping from Canada so it's going to be awhile. Something to look forward to.

So I've been thinking a lot about the school of Sociology that I went nuts for, Symbolic Interactionism (SI) lately, as my life has changed pretty drastically in the last three weeks, all because of what I am now defining as success and as my goals. Basically the dude who coined the term SI, Herbert Blumer, defined the basic premises as the following:

1) We act a certain way toward things or with things (including people) because of the meaning that has been assigned to them, i.e we do not brush our hair with a fork but rather eat with it because we learned that's what we do from other folks. Unlike Ariel.

2) The meaning that is ascribed those things we interact with derives from interaction in the greater world, or people in society. That is, meaning is not inherent, it is ascribed and that is not done by individuals but collectively.

3) Each of us then takes those ascribed meanings and interprets them through a process that has also been shaped by interaction in the greater world. That is, no man is an island, we depend on others to help us define the world, even when we are privately interpreting something.

All that to say, I really really really believe in this process, and I know that when I interpret the actions of others I try to use this paradigm as it seems to me that it makes what people do a little less deliberate.

So I started reading the textbook for my Gender class last night (yes that is the sound of glasses being pushed up my nose) and read a really interesting article called "Beyond Pink and Blue" in which the precedent of the medicalization of intersexuality was examined and debated. (Intersexed, btw, means those who, as the author Sharon E. Preves says, "...inhabit bodies whose very anatomy does not afford them an easy choice between the gender lines". The article's focus is on contemporary gender studies and how my man Erving Goffman and his theory of stigma or spoiled identity, wherein "Stigma is a process by which the reaction of others spoils normal identity" applies to the development of identity by the intersexed. Needless to say, I love this shit and find it endlessly fascinating. It also reminds me of how we all develop our identities and how we all manage at times with a spoiled identity and what we must do to overcome it.

I am definitely mad at some people right now, and more than that, hurt, but at least they didn't cut off my clitoris when I was a baby for no real reason or make me grow up as a girl when I was in fact a boy. Pat Conroy says "In families there are no crimes beyond forgiveness", but seriously, I am not so sure. Also, he's an alcoholic.

My scale is a piece of shit btw, and I did lose weight last week, three more pounds. From now on I'm only using the scale at the gym and the doctor's office.

I need something to read

Before the semester starts and I have no time for true pleasure reading, I need one more book that will totally wow me. Any suggestions? I like long, complex, character driven stuff of the Contemporary American stripe. Right now I am reading some Kurt Vonnegut non fction and I just started Jane Smiley's Good Faith.

I bought a totally kick ass giraffe necklace from ETSY today, can't wait to get it.

I started a new ab work out yesterday, and I'm going to ramp it up again this afternoon. I'm taking the day off from swimming and I'm just going to do some strength training.

Made delicious pita sandwiches last night with balsamic marinated grilled chicken, arugala and a sun dried tomato vinnagrette. Delish! It didn't hurt that we had the best sesame pita bread from Neomonde as well as cous-cous salad. I've tried making my own but it doesn't even come close. I love this little piece by Kurt Vonnegut becuase I like to think we both were goofing around in Indiana at the same time.

Fantastic, indeed

This is a trailer for the new Wes Anderson movie, an adaptation of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox. I love it when there is convergence between two things I love.

So. The Wait Begins

Deep breath, shallow exhale, pale shaking hands, heart beating in my throat: I'm really doing this? I mean we're really doing this? We're going to try to get pregnant?

Well, it's not that simple. That's why I'm doing this, writing this blog. The truth is I'm more scared of not getting pregnant than getting pregnant. But honestly, getting pregnant is pretty terrifying too. I mean, you spend your whole sexual life trying not to get pregnant, then you suddenly throw all that worry out the window? It's hard to retool one's hard wiring if you know what I mean. This is a pic of me and my husband Jeff taken a few weeks ago. He is very happy that we are retooling the wiring.

So.

What do you need to know?I'm 31 years old, I'm on my last year of school for two undergraduate degrees in English and Sociology, I've been married for less than a year, I most likely have PCOS , a leading cause of infertility. This could be exacerbated or caused by the fact that I am overweight and have struggled with my weight for years. I recently changed OBGYN's because the one I kind of went to for the last 15 years was a total jerk and it took three months to get an appointment with her. If I had any kind of female

emergency I always had to go to Planned Parenthood. I love Planned Parenthood and I support them in all the good work they do but I once saw a doctor there who couldn't find my cervix. I'm not kidding.

I have a lot against me at the outset of this adventure. I have never had regular periods and this led to a diagnosis by the jerky former OBGYN of at least one faulty ovary.

She also told me my uterus is tilted , just like Verona in Away We Go. Mine, however, is not a secret.

I'm now seeing a very nice and very optimistic Nurse Practitioner. Our plan for the next three months is to get me ovulating again, and to lose 15-20 lbs. The plan is thus thrice pronged, a Neptune's trident of a plan, if you will: I will go on a low fat diet; I will return to the gym; and I start taking Medroxyprogesterone, for which the Wikipedia page I just linked to scares me a little bit.

So. Why this blog?

At the beginning of Seamus Heaney's gorgeous and sui generis translation of Beowulf, (Beowulf, who also battles three antagonists by the by), Heaney begins this unbelievable epic poem with a simple word that changes the entire telling: he begins it "So." A deep breath, shallow exhale, pale shaking hands, heart beating in your throat kind of beginning, the kind reserved for the greatest adventures, the most frightening journeys, the most rewarding outcomes.

This blog will be the narrative of my adventure, this post is like my "So".

What can you expect? Well, outside the fact that I have NO IDEA

what this will be like, I think I'll be telling you about trying to lose weight, and trying to eat well, and whether my periods start coming back and if my ovaries work or not. I will be telling you what the Doctors say, what my husband says, what my family says, and what I feel. I think I'll be telling you what the wait is like, to find out if I can have a baby, and if I can have a baby, what the wait for him/ her to be born will be like. It's about the weight, and the wait, and the next wait, and then hopefully it will be about baby weight.

EB White said in Charlotte's Web that "Life is always a rich and steady time when you are waiting for something to happen or to hatch". I think this is true, and I hope to take some of the magic and anxiety that accompanies what's happening next and spend it here. I hope you come wait with me.