Back to School.

I started school again yesterday. I still associate summer school with remedial classes because that's what it was when I was in elementary school. Though it's not exactly remedial, the math class I'm taking has a little of that feeling because it's math for liberal arts majors. For most of the people in the class, it's the only math class they'll take (only one is required) and they're terrified of it. Like me.

The teacher is great. Very sweet-tempered and reassuring.

My other class is Applied Human Anatomy. It's in the kinesiology department, not biology, which I'm hoping will make it a little easier. Kinesiology is (I think) for students who want to get into fields like sports management and fitness. We'll be cutting up human cadavers in the lab part of the class. I wouldn't have taken a class where we had to dissect animals, but human bodies I think will be fascinating. At any rate, I will have a new experience.

These are my only two classes for now. The summer session is divided into two periods, with one or two classes each period. A whole semester's worth of material is crammed into five weeks, so the pace is frenetic. It sounds hard, but I think I'll like the more concentrated study. During the regular semester I have usually felt like my focus is too diffuse because I have 4 or 5 very different subjects to keep track of.

Faith.

I hate when I let so much time pass between posts! Last week was finals -- I didn't have anything too terribly challenging, but still I had to study. For some reason this past semester, though the coursework was not heavy, I had a hard time buckling down. Senioritis, I guess. I've been checking all day to see if my grades are posted yet. The only one that's up is for Science and the Modern World, which is an A. It was a class in the history and philosophy of science.

I grew to hate this class. The lectures were dry summaries of the reading (some of which was great: we read a bit of Dawkins and Dennison on evolution, but we also read a book called Worldviews by someone named DeWitt, which was awful, deadly tedious, shallow, and repetitive), and the discussion sessions with the T.A. were more or less an hour of him showing off his ability to pontificate. But I think my irritation was mostly a reaction to how philosophy is approached in academia. Everything's an argument. And it annoys me that most academics seem to have so little knowledge of or understanding of Asian philosophical traditions. It seems to me that even a rudimentary understanding of Buddhism turns 95% of the body of European philosophical thought into a lot of masturbatory nonsense. But that's just me.

Anyway, that's the only grade I was concerned about (concerned that I might get a B) so I'm pretty sure now I got straight A's this semester.

My reaction to that class and then reading about Obama's speech at Notre Dame has me thinking about faith the last few days, because it seems to me it takes a lot more faith to be agnostic, or atheist. The word faith has, in Christian circles, come to substitute for belief, which I think is a very different thing. Belief is closer to certainty -- when most people say "I have faith in God" they mean "I am certain that God exists" -- whereas faith doesn't make any sense without uncertainty. If you really believe that any sort of ultimate higher purpose is either nonexistent or unknowable, what else gets you up in the morning but faith? Faith that this day and what it contains is enough.

But Then Again, Aren't We All.

A music journalist in New York who was a great fan and booster of Y'all once wrote something to the effect that Y'all deserved all the attention that Hedwig and the Angry Inch was getting. At the time, it felt great to read that because Hedwig was certainly getting a lot of attention. It wasn't like a rivalry or anything -- we were just usually too busy with our own career to notice much of the other great stuff that was happening in New York.

When people described Hedwig to me, it always sounded stupid, so I never got too interested. (That cracks me up to read what I just wrote -- how many times did people say that exact same thing about Y'all?) My mistake.

When I was in San Francisco doing the final edit of Life in a Box, I rented the movie, and I must have watched it about 20 times. Literally 20 times. I couldn't stop. I think there are a couple missteps in the film, but all in all it's probably my favorite movie from the last several years. I love anything that makes me laugh and cry hard, usually at the same time. John Cameron Mitchell's performance blows me away every time. I think this is my favorite scene:

DILF.

I don't know what I've got goin' on lately, but I like it. First there was the beautiful young man I met recently. And, yesterday, a guy at the UT gym was totally coming on to me. This hot muscle boy was following me around, saying stuff like "nice ink, man," not in a guys hanging out in the weight room punching each other in the shoulder way, but in a looking at my crotch and licking his lips way. I'm gonna be 50 in two years. I can live with this.

Neko Case.

#1 in a series about artists I have resisted but now find myself wondering why. This is inspired by one of those Living Social things on facebook, called The 5 Most Overrated something or other, I can't remember exactly what it was called. I was thinking about who would be on my list, and at the top was Neko Case. I started to wonder why? and I went back and listened to a few songs and they were beautiful and I felt ridiculous for holding a strong opinion about something for decades when I really didn't know what the hell I was talking about.

Thursday.

For years I've read a blog called One City, which is the blog of the Interdependence Project in New York, a meditation community that J was part of when he was living there most recently. I think it started as a small meditation group or school in the East Village, but they've grown into a non-profit organization with a small staff, lots of classes, and activities having to do with activism, the arts, and Buddhist meditation. They're good folks, very committed and hard-working. This week they moved their blog to beliefnet, which is a very irritating sort of pseudo-religion web site, including astrology and new age stuff along with ads for teeth whiteners, etc.

I guess you would say I'm a lapsed meditator. I haven't sat more than a handful of times since I went back to school almost 2 years ago -- before that I sat almost every day for years. But I still consider myself a Buddhist. My outlook, my attitude, my worldview is Buddhist, as I understand it. I've never belonged to a sangha (Buddhist community), mainly now because I don't have a car, but, even if I did, I probably wouldn't. The few encounters I've had with Buddhist groups here and in San Francisco have left me annoyed more than anything else. I have this theory that so many Buddhists are huge narcissists because Buddhism promises some relief from the incessant nagging chorus of Me Me Me in their heads. (That's what attracted me to it, if I'm totally honest.)

So I enjoyed this blog because it gave me a connection to a Buddhist community and I liked that it was New York based because I just like keeping connected to New York, but after a couple days of the beliefnet nonsense flashing at me at 6:30 in the morning when I read my blogs, I left a comment saying basically, "Y'all have changed. This is not for me anymore. Goodbye." Ads for teeth whiteners are so exactly opposed to what I consider to be the basic values of Buddhist philosophy. Being told every morning that my teeth aren't white enough makes it hard to cultivate contentment.

What else?

I've been nursing a crush since Saturday. I met this young man, spent one beautiful night with him, and he moved to San Francisco yesterday. Since he is 24 (exactly half my age), I've been contemplating time and aging along with love and erotic obsession and the usual stuff. There's a paradox I can't solve. The feeling that I'm smarter now that I am older and have experienced a lot of things gives me great pleasure. And relief, because I know there are things I know now and will not have to learn again. Painful experiences I don't have to repeat because I've learned the lessons they have for me. So that's good.

Now, I know, even though I have playfully talked about following him, there doesn't seem to be an ounce of me that really believes I would do that. I don't even feel anything I might call a desire to do that, even though at times in the last few days I've felt a pain in my gut that would be relieved by his presence near me. (Just to put this scenario in a light that shows me at least a hair closer to sane, though I did just meet him in person Saturday we've been chatting on and off online for a couple years -- does that mitigate things at all?) Twenty years ago, I might have followed him there. I might have at least thought about it. Now, what that adds up to in my mind is the shutting down of possibilities, which is how most people describe aging. The shutting down of possibilities. Most people, but not me!

Every time I learn something, a door shuts behind me?

Sleep Apnea.

Several friends have told me that it sounds like I have sleep apnea. I wondered about that when this first started happening, and I poked around on a few web sites, but I couldn't find a good description of what it's supposed to feel like, so I wasn't sure. Now that I really think about it though, I'm pretty sure that's what this is. At any rate, unless I run across a sliding-scale sleep disorder clinic in Austin, I don't know what I can do about it. It's not exactly an emergency, even though it sure feels like one for a few seconds in the middle of the night. Sleeping on your side is advised, and that seemed to work last night anyway.

One thing I found interesting in my research is that memory problems and sleepiness are always listed among the symptoms of sleep apnea. I've had difficulty waking up ever since I can remember, I have almost always my whole life been sleepy during the day, and my memory is notoriously unreliable. I've never really been able to retain information for very long. Maybe I've had sleep apnea all my life, and I'm not actually dumb and lazy (to use the lexicon of my family). It's very satisfying to have a medical excuse.

Stuff Today.

I was on my way from Spanish class to the gym this morning when it started raining and I slipped on the wet pavement and bloodied my knee. A minute later I was folding up my umbrella inside the gym and I sliced my finger on some sharp part of the umbrella. (I asked for a Bandaid at the front desk, and I had to fill out an injury report. "Cut finger on umbrella.") Now I'm home and even though I got soaked from the knees down waiting in the driving rain at my shelterless bus stop, it's cool and dark outside, I just made a cup of strong tea with milk and sugar, and I feel cozy and content.

What else? It's possible -- not possible like I would ever do it but possible in the sense that so many things are possible but never happen -- that I could have a whopping midlife crisis, fall in love with a man half my age, drop everything, and follow him to California. Well, maybe it's not possible because I think I already had my midlife crisis 8 years ago. Are midlife crises like chicken pox, you only get them once?

One more thing: I'm a little -- actually more than a little, now -- concerned about this thing that's been happening to me in my sleep. I wake up suddenly, usually very soon after I've gone to sleep, gasping for air. It happens and is over so quickly that I haven't been able to put my finger on just what it is or what it feels like, except that for a moment I feel like I'm suffocating, I take a deep breath, and then I'm fine. Freaked out, but fine.

But last night it was more intense. When I woke up it took a moment before I could start breathing again. Not more than a few seconds, but long enough for it to register that, more than before, it felt like my throat was closed or maybe it's more accurate to say that it felt like the muscles I use to take in air were not responding. Whatever it was it was much scarier this time and must have been noisier because J came running into my room. When I tried to go back to sleep, each time I would drift off a bit I felt like I couldn't breath and that sensation would wake me back up.

The Bus.

I love my bus ride. All kinds of little interesting things happen every day, and some of them over time have started to congeal into bigger stories or something like that.

Something about prison, I can't figure it out yet, but at least 5 or 6 times guys, all of them gentle and sweet in some way, have mentioned being in prison or asked me if I've been in prison.

There is a dialysis clinic on the route, a one-story block building on a gray stretch of Manor Road. I assume it's for Medicaid patients. The people who get on and off the bus there, it's usually older men I notice, grey-faced, thin, holding bandages to their arms -- can you imagine being in dialysis all day and then having to make your way home on the bus by yourself? I ponder my own old age. These are the kinds of health care facilities I will likely be using.

Yesterday a young woman got on the bus with a little red-headed boy, maybe 4, and a baby. She gamely folded up the stroller and carried it along with the baby in one arm while she held the boy's hand and lurched onto the bus and into the seat next to me. She got on at one of the campus stops, and she had the look of an academic or maybe an academic's wife, strawberry blond hair going gray, L.L. Bean jumper dress. The boy had a bit of a black eye, and I started projecting all kinds of stories into his mother's head about how the kid had maybe fallen and smacked his eye on the coffee table but now every time she was out in public with him she was self-conscious and sure that people were wondering whether she was hitting the kid.

When this little family was getting off the bus, the boy stood up first and then the woman pushed herself up out of her seat. She shifted her weight to hitch the baby up onto her hip and her purse higher on her shoulder. The big wooden handle of the purse swung around and popped the boy in the head. He said, "Ow!" but otherwise didn't react, didn't start crying or anything, just followed her off the bus. It was very funny, the sort of 1 2 3 choreography of a Three Stooges bit, and I laughed. It made the woman laugh too. She blurted out, "I'm so sorry honey! I really smacked you, didn't I?" but she was as amused as I was.

Fame.

One of the keys to my state of relative happiness or at least contentment in the last several years is that I gave up my lifelong dream of becoming famous. Yes, that's an oversimplification, but it's pretty much true. I didn't just realize that; it's been a mostly conscious process. Well, I guess I should say that it was conscious once it started, but it was instigated by events I had no, or little, control over. Which is to say, failure.

There's some kind of equation I'm sure to calculate the tipping point, where that dream stops being a sustaining, energizing force in one's life and turns into more of a frantic, unreasonable need. I reached that point around the age of 40. And, though it sounds very sad when I state it like this and yes it is very sad in some meaningful way, it's a paradoxical sadness because I have been happier by far in the last eight years than I was before that. Not that I didn't have some incredible highs, but they were, in hindsight, too costly.

But ... I've been thinking recently about my feelings regarding this revival of Lizzie Borden and realizing, to my consternation, that I have not completely let go of that dream of fame. In fact, I must be honest and admit that a great part of my excitement about this new production is that it means, for me, that there is still a chance for a big hit. Of course, I'm also just thrilled to have a chance to do the work. There's always that, and I don't mean to minimize how important that is to me. It's huge, and, in any practical sense, it's really all. I feel lucky beyond measure that I've had the chance to do good work in my life. But there's still that itching need for recognition.

(Maybe that need is never satisfied. After all, I did have a certain level of reknown with Y'all, and with Life in a Box, and even, looking back, with all the downtown theater I did in New York in the eighties and nineties.)

When I think about it, when I'm honest with myself, that little bit of surviving dream is also key to my contentment. So, giving it up and holding on to it are both necessary. There's a puzzler.

More Animal Abuse, er ... Science.

I am not an animal rights fanatic. Because of our species' unique type of awareness and the way we manipulate our environment, I don't believe there is any kind of pure relationship with other animals that humans can aspire to. There is no "state of nature" any more when humans are calling all the shots and have been for thousands of years.

I believe the domestication of many animals is probably on the whole a very good thing, for us and them. I don't believe it is necessarily immoral to use animals in scientific experiments, or to eat animals, or to compel animals to perform for us, as long as those relationships are entered into thoughtfully, with respect, and with mindfulness of the extreme risk that comes with such a radical power imbalance.

But this is obscene.

And some day the mice will come home to roost.