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.
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