Everyone says they hate the “top ten lists” that pop up this
time of year. But here's the thing: everyone is a liar. According to the analytics
of #’s, G+, searches and everything else, y’all love love LOVE that shit. You
can’t get enough. Please sir, you want some more, you want some more!
2014’s year in review is about digging into the dirt I didn’t
know if I wanted anyone to see:
This year, I present to you my Top Ten Formative Moments in
2015. Chronologically. Kinda. These are also things I'm not necessarily excited to share.
1) January: I spent my first New Year’s Eve ever with friends,
rather than Significant Other/Family. It was what I wanted to do. I was with a
tribe of women than understood the things I vented because they have the same
chimneys.
2) May: I lose my feelings. After a number of triggering events
(having my tires slashed, then my car vandalized in my driveway, continuing to
unravel the trail of identity theft that follows me, personal losses of those
close to me), I stopped feeling things.
I am told that, medically, this is my brain kicking into overdrive
with serotonin. It is a numbing helmet for my feelings so that I can function
without collapse. I donate 11 inches my hair to locks for love. I watch Annie
Hall for the first time. I reread Hyperbole and a Half. My experience is
different from hers.
3) I travel to Vancouver. I see, with my eyes, where the 100
mile diet started. I see a baby male orca whale, 59 miles away from land. He is
deformed and has been abandoned by his pod.
I learn that hormones in oral contraceptives stay in urine, go
sewage plants, and remain in full chemical chains, in the ocean. The pill was hell
on my system. I am unable to fathom the larger, oceanic impact. I cry about
this at night. It is the first feeling I get back.
4) June: I work with one of my Dad’s former PhD students to
finish a paper on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
It was a pet project of his, but I was too young to get it. In Sep. it’s
accepted for publication. A colleague tells me, ‘it’s beautiful proof of the
many ways in which a life is a collaboration.’ My feelings are back.
5) July: I join a book club at the Library. We read: Lila (M. Robinson), The Sense of an Ending (J. Barnes), Station Eleven (E. St. John Mandel), Her: a Memoir (C. Parravani), and Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour
Bookstore (R. Sloan). After
the age of 30, It is momentous to make non-work friends. But I do.
6) September: The
100 Dirty Books Party. So much fun and love that the seams of my house stretch
to accommodate. Drunken readings of Ginsberg that were filmed and will never be
posted. A celebration of all our stories since the previous year’s party.
Celebrating making it through another year.
8) October Part 1:
I wake to an unjust raid by a SWAT team at 5 am. They were looking for a man
next door. My dog was kicked, furniture flipped, I’ve made complaints and someone
will get back to me in 4-6 weeks.
Vet said my dog
will be smelling the pheromones of the US Marshalls for who knows how long. He’s
on Xanax. He gets better drugs than I do. His experience with this acute
experience of fright is something I will never comprehend. I can make a
narrative of it. He can’t, I don’t think.
9) October Part 2:
My dad was living in England when he died. Of the few things his cold
girlfriend allowed me, I got the blanket he began crocheting for when I was 13
(and the hook he carved). I also got his Absinthe spoon (which she for some deluded reason thought was his baby spoon. Have since made it into jewelry).
I couldn't touch the blanket until the day after my
house got SWATed. This is the day I start working on it again.
7) November: Drive
4 hours, take a 90 minute train and a half hour cab to celebrate my friend’s memoir,
Hook. It is the most important trip I’ve
taken this year. It is the most important book I’ve read all year. Buy it at
the link below.
10) December: I see my name
in print, in a book, for the first time. A chapter called, “Beowulf and Aesthetic Nervousness: A
Multidimensional Pedagogy.“
From sending the abstract to holding the book, it was 18 months. I want to
learn how to respond to others’ writing with the generosity, kindness and belief
that my editor showed.
Zora Neale
Hurston said that there are years that ask questions and years that answer.
The
questions and answers in the bounds of this year have given me hope, confusion,
total apathy and total love. It has been full of life, both grotesque and
beautiful, simple and as complex as Atari used to be, sweet and sour.
Read n Greet Book Club:
Dirty Books Party:
Hook. Buy it or I hate you. I'm not kidding:
The Book My Chapter is in, Lessons in Disability. If you can only buy one book, buy Hook, and then tell your library to buy Lessons in Disability:
