I'm Me.

I looked at myself in the mirror at the video store tonight and thought that I looked like someone who looked like me.

When I was young I was equally intrigued with three ideas that spoke to a single, young, and budding existential dilemma. I would look in the mirror trying to imagine whatever it is that was before the universe, and later (presumably) human beings. I couldn't get over the fact that in trying to imagine nothing - a void, a vacuum - I was in fact imagining something, and that it was impossible to imagine anything prior to the time when there was something. When I got bored with that I would - still looking in the mirror - repeat my name out loud over and over again, until I attained this acute sense of 1) what an utterly bizarre sound the sound of my name was and 2) how it failed miserably in even coming close to representing anything that might signify who I was as an individual. I was always aware of the fact that the association between myself and my name was arbitrary (which is, apparently, one of my top ten favorite words according to Rachel). Similarly, there was this cartoon on Sesame Street that I remember. It consisted of two spice-drop looking characters, one large and blue, and the other small and red. The large one would hop onto the screen and bellow: "I'm BIG... I'm BIG. I'M BIG" or something to that effect. Troubled, the little red fellow would fidget about for a bit before finally mustering up that courage to utter the words "I'm... I'm ...I'm... ME. I'm ME! I'm ME! I'M ME!" Obviously it was one of those propaganda clips meant to inculcate kids with a sense of worth regardless of size or color, but for me it represented a different dilemma. Later, looking in the mirror, I would have a hard time reconciling the truth of the statement "I'm Me" with the truth itself. If I was first of all someTHING - did indeed exist - was second of all not my name, nor merely an amalgam of my physical characteristcs (red, blue, big, little), than what was I?

let alone this semester

I've been giving it some thought and hitting a brick wall fairly early each time, so I've decided to go ahead and begin my list of "to-dos" for the Winter Break. Though the day after tomorrow will dawn upon a new, recently done with the semester me, I still can't see the light at the end of the tunnel, that is: I can't really conceptualized a me that is done with anything, let alone this semester. Already my English Literature class is done, my Deans Scholars seminar is over, my Arabic work is done - leaving me only my COMS and Algebra finals, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, respectively. But enough of that: what do I do next? There are quite a few events, including parties and Christmas family and Church get-togethers, traveling to Oklahoma, working, planning for next semester. By a list of things to do I mean things I want to do/ need done. We'll start with want to do.

Reading list: read a book. Fiction. Which one? I've been wanting to read a modern notable like Michael Chabon or David Foster Wallace, but it seems as if both libraries are all checked out of the books I want. I've also been reading Dante's Divine Comedy, but for some reason I'm thinking something... "lighter?" I don't know. Dante is pretty cool. I've also checked out a collection of H.P Lovecraft short stories. I'm a bit obsessed with Cthuhlu lately. I also need to finish Naguib Mafouz's "Children of Gebelawi," but that, too, seems a bit heavy for my needs right now. I have needs, and I'm going to feed them, and then sic them on somebody. Also there is my mentor's book "Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics," that I need to read, and Leela Gandhi's "Postcolonial Theory" that I also need to read, but I'm thinking about having a non-academic rule concerning what I read over the break. That would mean that "Graduate Study for the 21st Century," which is also on my list/ stack, is also out of the question. God willing, my mother has purchased St. Ephraim the Syrian's "Spiritual Psalter," which will give me some substantial spiritual food, but still, I want some fiction. I am also almost done with the final Darwish compilation, which is fabulous.

Sigh.

My lists are really lacking these days.

Take two: Things to do over break:

1. Read a book.

It's a start. Here is a poem I wrote and posted at
la revista de la estrella blanca:

I want a suit
a grey suit, like
a real poet
serious but informal
tieless with the memory
of a tie having purposefully
been there earlier

like poets can wear suits
now like businessmen wore
suits but a poet might get
a state burial or a statue
but not me, I'll just be
a nobody in a suit

children or no

I spend a great deal of time walking around in circles in my children's room in the dark. Well, not really a great deal of time, but it seems like alot, and I probably do spend more time walking around in circles in a dark room than most of my friends, children or no. My son has is turning out to be quite the little gremlin. He's built like a lumberjack, and enjoys romper-rooming about like a Wild Thing. This translates into many a spill and subsequent markings, but he doesn't mind much so neither do we. I don't let myself get angry when I feel as though I've got a lot to do and I've got to take the time getting him to sleep. It isn't easy. I'm often on the verge, but besides him not being able to help his crankiness (age, teeth coming in), and him being beautiful beyond belief, it is good to stop and think, focus on the details of the dark room, my creaky body, my aching sinuses, my mind in browning motions. I watch the digits on my daughters clock tic, tic, tic, gauging when it will be safe to put him in his sleeper. I feel the weight of his head sink deeper into my arm, his breaths spread out, his limbs dangle. Then I put him down, and get back to work.

you and the parentheses (parenthesi?)

We measure our lives in teaspoons and our semesters in breaths. At the end of my life I'll let out one long, hopefully non-verbalized (uuuuuuuuuuunnnnnnghhhh) breath; at the end of the semester I'll remember TO breath. Maybe I should work on my last breath. Perhaps I can make it a strawberry ("bpthbpthbpthbpthbpthbpth"), and hang my teaspoon on my nose. For some reason that reminds me of the dying hero-monk character in the Russian film "Octpob" (Oh-strove, approximately - not "Okt-pawb"), who, as he lays himself down in his coffin ready to give up the ghost, is pestered by his well-meaning and repentant brother monk. When asked what the monk should do with his life - his final thoughts, as it were - he breaths, exasperated, something to the effect of "Just try not to sin too much."

"I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled." (T.S.E.)

What is spirituality?

It is sighing every time I speak, or write. It is the sigh that comes directly following an instance where I have spoken, or written.

It is keeping my house clean, my dishes washed, my email in-box cleaned out.

It is hanging on to the Gospel with my mind and my heart underneath my body that does otherwise. A mouth that says other things, eyes that divert, senses that meander exponentially every direction. It is knowing the delineation of peace and repentance, that tension between what is and what isn't, ideal and actual, potential and spent energy.

It is a profound personal reality, a reclusivity in the face of the throng, it is the mirror through which my body is seen in its context, a puppet, a dancing fool.

It is the wide chasm between myself and those with whom I interact daily. It is what binds me to them and elucidates the vast distances between us.

It is a millstone, broken glass in my boots, barbed wire around my ribs, eyes blinded by lye, a spider of contrition on my brow. It is the race from nothingness to somethingness, it is the inversion of language, the lessening of the thing in order for it to be made more.

It is what is hidden and what reason must obey but can't reconcile. It is what one uses to privately sever any desire to justify oneself in the sunlight to the world.

It is being vague and concise, it is acknowledging certain binaries as existing for certain reasons, and understanding the primal urge to smash them, but seeks to move through nothingness into the aforementioned primal somethingness.

It is what begins to understand the profundity and sophistication of the Christ on the Cross, the center of the cosmos, of time, or reality.

Language is a rolling colored-water wave machine on a desk in an administrator's office, it lolls back and forth over The Fulcrum, balancing and redistributing the equation again and again, waiting for the eschaton.

monday

I awoke this morning with a dull headache and low-level nausea - nothing I can't normally handle. But after rounding up the kids, seeing them and their mother out the door, drinking 1/2 a cup of coffee, eating two heels of toast with strawberry jelly, and thinking it over for a bit, I think I'm going to stay home. Also included in this decision-making process was my very real reticence to go to school in the first place, primarily due to my general malaise, which very well might be a type of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Across the street there are fellows putting new gutters on a house. It's a small house, with no overhang. It looks as though the fascia board beneath the old gutters is going to need replaced. Our neighbor is going to be all set for the winter soon. She's already had new shingles put on and a rickety old tree that was too close to her house cut down. Soon it will be time to hunker down, turn on some lights, and listen to the wind whistle around the house.

Bring us some figgy pudding.

We gave our pumpkins to the squirrels for a Thanksgiving meal. The one with the face carved into it (pumpkin not squirrel) is rotting, making its face cave in and look like its lost its dentures. What's more: the squirrels are constantly crawling in and out eating what's left of his brains.