Sunday Night: A Visual

I made this list for myself a little while ago of what I still need to do tonight (and tomorrow, during my lunch break at my main job) before I teach tomorrow night. Not too likely that all of it will get done. I am also trying to write a paper that needs to be ready for a conference I am leaving for on Thursday. I did write about a page--nine more to go.

My brain hurts.

Oh, and the injunction to myself not to take a nap was supposed to go under the "tonight" column, not the "tomorrow" column. So far I have been successful. Partly thanks to you all being out there to read this (so that I can amuse myself by writing it and get myself past that dangerous 5 - 6 p.m. Sunday period, when the call of the nap is almost irresistible).

So, thank you. And feel free to take a nap if you'd like.

Not Enough Hours . . .

This weekend is hurtling to a close and I should be grading papers but I can't dredge up the energy. I love my life, but sometimes it seems like there are too many moving parts. Friday I left work early to go see the periodontist, well, really, I spend more time with the hygienist who cleans my teeth. They are both very amusing and jolly--if they weren't, I don't know how I could stand the torture they inflict on me. I told the hygienist, a grandmotherly Russian woman, that I was going out to dinner not long after the appointment so she should go easy on the topical anaesthetic. She asked me where I was going--I told her the name of the restaurant and then she asked me what I was going to have to eat. I said I wasn't sure, and she told me I had to make sure to write down everything I had and tell her the next time I came. The periodontist came in at one point to say hello while she was working on me and she informed him, with the air of divulging important news, "We have to get her out in a hurry. She is going to Josephine." "Huh?" he asked. I pulled the suction thing out of my mouth and said, "Josephina, the restaurant." "Oh, okay," he said.

E., the hygienist, likes to talk to me while she is working away in my mouth--about her children and her grandchildren, mostly. Then she started talking, complaining, really, about one of the other patients who had just been in, saying she comes in only once in awhile and then doesn't follow up. Well, she understands that she's old and it's hard for her to get here and all that. Feeling a need to keep up my end of the conversation, I asked, "Ow oh?" "Oh, she must be at least 78," E. said.

When E. was done, the doctor came back in to take a look. He is a big, effusive guy, kind of suave, likes to talk to me about jazz and restaurants while he is working in my mouth. I thought the torture was over for the day, but he found some spots to pick and scrape at. I made a growling sound. He laughed and said, "Yeah, I know, good to see you Dr. F., now get out of my mouth!"

Eventually they were both done with me, I got my little goodie bag with the dental supplies, and went to pay my bill. I looked in the mirror at my teeth and complained to E., who happened to be standing there near the reception desk, "How am I going to go out like this? There's blood." (Sorry, I know this is gross, but there's a payoff.) She took a look and said, "It was the doctor. I'd never leave you like that." Then she said, "Don't worry, I'm going to clean it for you." I wasn't done complaining: "I mean, I'm supposed to be going out on a date, how can I go out looking like this?" She chuckled wickedly and said, "It's good to show him your true nature." The receptionist burst out laughing but I was still working out what E. was saying. "He'll think I'm a vampire," I protested. "We all are, baby, we all are," said E., the 60-something grandmotherly hygienist, cackling to herself as she disappeared into the back.

Like I said, they're pretty amusing at Dr. F.'s.

Really, that was almost enough for one Friday evening, but I still had my dinner-and-movie-and-then-a-drink-after-the-movie date, which was fun, but by the time I got home to Brooklyn from the Upper West Side it was after midnight and I was so exhausted I couldn't even see straight. I had had thoughts about going to yoga Saturday morning but I needed to sleep, sleep, sleep. When I finally got up, I went to spend the afternoon with my father, who is 88 and lives alone. He gets around with a walker but not that easily. I helped him write things into his checkbook (which is a little bit like wandering in a strange labyrinth), had something to eat with him (a few of his Meals on Wheels dinners that we combined into a smorgasbord--he tends to stockpile them because he doesn't rely on them totally for his meals) and listened to lot of stories from his long life. Today, Sunday, I spent with my brother, who, as longtime readers know, is wheelchair-bound because of a stroke six years ago. He also can't talk, can only gesture and make some wordlike sounds. I hadn't been to see him in awhile, and he was so happy when I showed up. We sat in a restaurant together, and he looked so expressive, like he wanted to say something. I kept saying, "What?" and he would shrug, and then I thought, oh, this is love, this is my brother telling me he loves me. At the nursing home where he lives, we ran into a couple of people I had not met before, a nurse and then another patient, a woman in a wheelchair sitting outside smoking. Each time, he would make a sound, nodding toward that person. I would say, "He wants me to tell you I'm his sister," and introduce myself.

I wouldn't usually be doing this both days of the weekend, seeing my father and then my brother, but my sister, who does the lion's share of the caretaking (she lives closer to both of them and also is semiretired), has been away for a couple of weeks, so I have been doing a little more than usual. It feels good to do it, and I love them both, of course, but it's tiring, both physically and emotionally.

So, now it's Sunday night and the papers aren't graded and tomorrow the whole thing starts up again, work and teaching, but I guess the papers will get graded at some point and it will all be fine.

That's all I have.

Quick Update

In case anyone is wondering, yes, I'll still out there. Or, as the Jeff Bridges character says in Crazy Heart, which I watched on Netflix recently, "out there in it."

I loved that moment in the film. Bad Blake is making a call from a phone booth (!) by the side of the road in the middle of the desert, nothing but dry land and fierce yellow sunlight all around him, oh, and of course that 1978 Chevy truck that he drives, his totem, parked crazily askew while he spells out for the directory-assistance operator the name of the woman he is courting . (Blake is a bare-bones kind of guy, and barely hanging on--he would not own a cell phone.) When the character played by Maggie Gyllenhall, Jean, answers the telephone and hears his voice, she is silent at first, and you think, what's going on. Then you hear her voice, and it's all there--delight and disbelief and relief and longing. She didn't think she'd ever hear from him again, and now here he is, calling, and he's not a good kind of guy to be with, but she wants to be with him anyway. They talk for a bit, and he tells her he wants to come see her, and then she says, stalling, "Where are you?" He answers with overelaborate casualness, evasive, distancing but also truthful, "Oh, out there in it." Of course, she can't see where he literally is, but the movie viewer can, so there's a bit of visual humor there: he's out there in it, all right, but "it" is a whole big stretch of emptiness. But then there's that other meaning, which slips into place for the viewer a second later, he's out there trying to make a living, trying to keep going, putting one foot in front of the other. "En la lucha," as they say in Spanish.

I liked the movie, but found it very sad. Other people, from the reviews I read, found it comic, or uplifting, or about redemption, but I was left with more of a feeling of loss about what gets sacrificed to alcoholism. I won't say anything more (like, about the ending) in case anyone reading this has not seen it yet and wants to. I do recommend it.

What else? Despite starting out this blog post by identifying with an over-the-hill has-been country singer addicted to cigarettes and alcohol, I would say things are going okay. I was in Toronto for a conference for five days and had a great time connecting with my Latin American and Puerto Rican friends (it was a conference on Latin American studies) and being immersed in Spanish for awhile. Now I am back and working at my various jobs (well, two of them) and helping take care of my father--went with him for a doctor's visit Tuesday, which was something of a saga. I am also working on a writing project, a paper that I will present at a conference in my actual field next month--I am pleased to be doing that. And trying to get some sleep here and there . . . .

You know, in it.

No Regrets

Today was a day I meant to get chores and grading done . . . but I cannot resist the lure of volleyball. We played despite the occasionally chilly wind whipping across the park. It was so windy in fact that as we set up the net all the guys were making sailing jokes, saying things like, "Hard about to starboard . . . " or "Let's see, we should be there in about 45 minutes. . ." (holding up a finger to the wind) as the net puffed out like a checkerboard sail.

We had a good turnout, enough to play six on six for most of the afternoon. Some of the people come with their kids, who play together on the sidelines, watched over by whatever adults are not playing volleyball at that moment. As it got colder, the kids were piling on outlandishly oversized extra layers, whatever the adults had left lying around. K., a feisty and beautiful seven-year-old, was outfitted in a man's huge black sweatshirt, which came to below her knees, running around with her arms out. When her dad grabbed her up and picked her up, I said, "Look, [K.'s dad] is hugging a bat!" Then I remembered how I used to write about K. on this blog when she was only three (I'm too lazy to link but if you scroll back about four years you'll find her chasing after bubbles and warning me not to scare them). That made me think about how this volleyball group has been a kind of family for me and how there are now more and more kids (K. has a three-year-old sister, for one) and it's fun to watch them grow up and to be all together. So I was happy to be out today with my friends in the early fall, one more volleyball day before the cold weather closes in.