Oh God,
let me write not out of dread
not with tears and headaches,
and midnight allergic reactions,
for deadlines
and for people i fear.
But with joy
because i love words,
and how this novel
imagines creation,
and how my own work
helps me imagine You.
Showing posts with label journal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label journal. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Monday, January 22, 2007
Discipline
This is my plan to get me through the next semester. Because of a new departmental funding rule that seems to have been created over the break, if one recieves four years of funding (counting fellowships coming from the outside) then one will not recieve any more funding from the department(ie. TA-ships) after the fourth year. I am in my fourth year. Although, I have only actually recieved TA-ships from the department for one of those years, I have recieved other forms of fellowship funding for the other three years. Therefore, I have determined to be extremely serious about finishing not only my thesis this semester, but also my minor coursework, my French-for-reading-knowledge exam, and my preliminary exams by the end of the summer. I have also applied for another grant for next year, but if I don't get it, I will not return to Nigeria this summer as I had been planning but will study for and hopefully pass my prelims by August, then return to Nigeria in October or so.
That means that I need to finish my thesis revisions by the end of January and prepare to defend, complete grant applications at the beginning of February (and a conference paper for a conference I [probably foolishly] submitted to last semester), keep up with four classes, form a dissertation committee and a prelims reading list, and begin a French for reading knowledge class near the end of the semester.
I did not make New Years resolutions this year because I never keep them anyway, but these are my new semester resolutions. 1) be in bed by midnight, 2) get up in the morning by at latest 8am, turn on the computer and begin to work, 3) no internet or email until an hour before I have to leave for my class. (This means weaning myself from excessive blog-reading.) If I am expecting an urgent email, then I will check in the morning but will give myself a 10 minute deadline. 4) Return home immediately after class (depending on when class gets out) and write until 7pm. 5) After 7pm, read for class and do any homework. (Hopefully, I'll just have final papers and not a lot of midterm stuff.) 6) On my days off (Friday and Saturday), I will pretend like I have a 9-5pm job in revision of the thesis, with a one hour lunch break. (That worked well for me this weekend). 7) Somewhere in there, I need to fit in duties like cooking. With God's help it will all get done.
Unlike last semester, where I felt traumatized from the very beginning, I am looking forward to this semester. I'm enjoying my revisions. I'm looking forward to all of my classes. I will refuse to get obsessed and upset about things I have no power over (like departmental politics) and those things that I do have power over (roommate politics; excessive blog debating.) I will focus on doing what I have to do to get done.
This morning, I found that I was holding my breath as I wrote. I have to remind myself to breathe.
That means that I need to finish my thesis revisions by the end of January and prepare to defend, complete grant applications at the beginning of February (and a conference paper for a conference I [probably foolishly] submitted to last semester), keep up with four classes, form a dissertation committee and a prelims reading list, and begin a French for reading knowledge class near the end of the semester.
I did not make New Years resolutions this year because I never keep them anyway, but these are my new semester resolutions. 1) be in bed by midnight, 2) get up in the morning by at latest 8am, turn on the computer and begin to work, 3) no internet or email until an hour before I have to leave for my class. (This means weaning myself from excessive blog-reading.) If I am expecting an urgent email, then I will check in the morning but will give myself a 10 minute deadline. 4) Return home immediately after class (depending on when class gets out) and write until 7pm. 5) After 7pm, read for class and do any homework. (Hopefully, I'll just have final papers and not a lot of midterm stuff.) 6) On my days off (Friday and Saturday), I will pretend like I have a 9-5pm job in revision of the thesis, with a one hour lunch break. (That worked well for me this weekend). 7) Somewhere in there, I need to fit in duties like cooking. With God's help it will all get done.
Unlike last semester, where I felt traumatized from the very beginning, I am looking forward to this semester. I'm enjoying my revisions. I'm looking forward to all of my classes. I will refuse to get obsessed and upset about things I have no power over (like departmental politics) and those things that I do have power over (roommate politics; excessive blog debating.) I will focus on doing what I have to do to get done.
This morning, I found that I was holding my breath as I wrote. I have to remind myself to breathe.
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Minor Surgeries
5pm, 28 January 2007
The surgeon was a beautiful young woman, with thick black hair caught back in a bun at the nape of her neck, large green-brown eyes with long mascara coated eyelashes, full rosy cheeks. Bent over me, she looked like one of Renoir’s young mothers. When I went in for the first examination in December, her hands on me were like those of a masseuse, strong, capable, and empathetic.
It was an in-office procedure, and she did not put me to sleep—only numbed the area in the lower right breast where she would make the incision. “This is going to really hurt,” she warned me, inserting the needle. That was the only time that my body tensed up, my hand balling into a fist. But it wasn’t bad. No worse than a yellow fever injection—where you feel the medicine coming in once, then twice, an echo of fire. After that, I relaxed, my eyes lightly closed. I halfway wanted to open them, see what instrument made that electrical sound that sounded almost like a constantly zapping electric fly catcher. After a few minutes, she said, “Say something, so that we know you are still with us.” She asked me about my program—what I was studying. I responded, but I felt like being quiet. About respecting this parting of my skin, this opening up of my body under a stranger’s hands. And they seemed to understand why my replies were so brief, why I was silent. The nurse asked the surgeon if she had been out sledding with her little boy in all this snow. The surgeon said, no, that she had been up until 5am with another surgery, but had gotten a little sleep before coming into work this morning.
“Oh,” I thought. “She’s cutting me open with only a few hours of sleep.” I guess doctors know how to do that sort of thing. Underneath their voices were the other sensations, the stiffness on my right side where they had placed the long tough sticker (after it was all done and I was peeling it off, the surgeon told me was a “grounding pad” so I wouldn’t “be electrocuted”), the pushings and proddings, brief pressures on my numbed flesh, the constant electric sound, skkk--skkkk-skkk.
“Is it a laser?” I asked, eyes closed. That’s just the “cutter,” I thought she said. Later when I talked to my mother (back in the States for a few weeks) on the phone about my grandmother’s surgery yesterday to remove skin cancer, I realized that she had been saying “cauter.” I felt a brief electric shock twice and she gave me more numbing medication.
“It’s a fibrous tumour—what we thought from the ultrasound,” she said as she worked to remove it. “Can I see it when you are done?” I asked. “Sure,” she said. And in what seemed like no time, I opened my eyes, and she was holding it up with some tweezers. A large smooth white oblong mass. “Oh!” I said. “It’s so big!” I had been feeling it for about five months. I knew that it was bigger than a “marble,” but it hadn’t felt quite that big. When they had said “fibrous” to describe the growth, I had imagined a tough mass of fibers, something like a rough light brown ball of hemp or a hairball, that they’d have to wash the blood off of. This was white and smooth, like a slug, or a piece of fat, with only one streak of blood across it. “No,” she responded, “this is fat” and held up a smaller piece of floppy white tissue. That’s the only time I felt vaguely nauseous. I would have liked to have just spent some time examining the lump—this foreign mass that grew in my body; but, then, I suppose it’s good that they are sending it off somewhere. I tend to get a little too obsessed by things like that. When I was ten, I took to pulling out my eyelashes and my hair because I liked to inspect the roots.
And then, she was sewing up the incision with a tiny curved needle that she held with tweezers, pulling so tightly that I could feel my numbed skin rising up with the thread. I looked down and saw the not-quite-straight cut about an inch long. It was longer and rougher than I had imagined. And that is when I started shaking. After putting on a clear waterproof bandage that she told me to keep on for two days, the nurse dropped the tumour into a bottle of formaldehyde to be sent for testing. (They are 98% sure it is benign; I just wanted to have it taken care of while I still had insurance.) And that was that. I put back on the roomy sweatshirt I had worn for the occasion, and went out to my roommate who had waited for about an hour. “It was bigger than I thought,” I said. When I held out my fingers to show her the approximate size, they were shaking so badly that I’m not sure she could see what I meant. Once we were in the parking garage, my teeth began chattering. “Are you cold?” she asked. “No,” I said. “I’m just shaking.”
Once back home, the shaking stopped. I called my mother and took a long nap. It still hasn’t started hurting, and I really have no excuse not to be working on my thesis. Let me get back to it.
Last night, I dreamed that a new edition of Waiting for an Angel came out, with new stories added so that my analysis in my thesis did not work, and I had to start over, surgically removing that which no longer belonged and adding in new analysis. I’m certain that I’ve had this dream before.
The surgeon was a beautiful young woman, with thick black hair caught back in a bun at the nape of her neck, large green-brown eyes with long mascara coated eyelashes, full rosy cheeks. Bent over me, she looked like one of Renoir’s young mothers. When I went in for the first examination in December, her hands on me were like those of a masseuse, strong, capable, and empathetic.
It was an in-office procedure, and she did not put me to sleep—only numbed the area in the lower right breast where she would make the incision. “This is going to really hurt,” she warned me, inserting the needle. That was the only time that my body tensed up, my hand balling into a fist. But it wasn’t bad. No worse than a yellow fever injection—where you feel the medicine coming in once, then twice, an echo of fire. After that, I relaxed, my eyes lightly closed. I halfway wanted to open them, see what instrument made that electrical sound that sounded almost like a constantly zapping electric fly catcher. After a few minutes, she said, “Say something, so that we know you are still with us.” She asked me about my program—what I was studying. I responded, but I felt like being quiet. About respecting this parting of my skin, this opening up of my body under a stranger’s hands. And they seemed to understand why my replies were so brief, why I was silent. The nurse asked the surgeon if she had been out sledding with her little boy in all this snow. The surgeon said, no, that she had been up until 5am with another surgery, but had gotten a little sleep before coming into work this morning.
“Oh,” I thought. “She’s cutting me open with only a few hours of sleep.” I guess doctors know how to do that sort of thing. Underneath their voices were the other sensations, the stiffness on my right side where they had placed the long tough sticker (after it was all done and I was peeling it off, the surgeon told me was a “grounding pad” so I wouldn’t “be electrocuted”), the pushings and proddings, brief pressures on my numbed flesh, the constant electric sound, skkk--skkkk-skkk.
“Is it a laser?” I asked, eyes closed. That’s just the “cutter,” I thought she said. Later when I talked to my mother (back in the States for a few weeks) on the phone about my grandmother’s surgery yesterday to remove skin cancer, I realized that she had been saying “cauter.” I felt a brief electric shock twice and she gave me more numbing medication.
“It’s a fibrous tumour—what we thought from the ultrasound,” she said as she worked to remove it. “Can I see it when you are done?” I asked. “Sure,” she said. And in what seemed like no time, I opened my eyes, and she was holding it up with some tweezers. A large smooth white oblong mass. “Oh!” I said. “It’s so big!” I had been feeling it for about five months. I knew that it was bigger than a “marble,” but it hadn’t felt quite that big. When they had said “fibrous” to describe the growth, I had imagined a tough mass of fibers, something like a rough light brown ball of hemp or a hairball, that they’d have to wash the blood off of. This was white and smooth, like a slug, or a piece of fat, with only one streak of blood across it. “No,” she responded, “this is fat” and held up a smaller piece of floppy white tissue. That’s the only time I felt vaguely nauseous. I would have liked to have just spent some time examining the lump—this foreign mass that grew in my body; but, then, I suppose it’s good that they are sending it off somewhere. I tend to get a little too obsessed by things like that. When I was ten, I took to pulling out my eyelashes and my hair because I liked to inspect the roots.
And then, she was sewing up the incision with a tiny curved needle that she held with tweezers, pulling so tightly that I could feel my numbed skin rising up with the thread. I looked down and saw the not-quite-straight cut about an inch long. It was longer and rougher than I had imagined. And that is when I started shaking. After putting on a clear waterproof bandage that she told me to keep on for two days, the nurse dropped the tumour into a bottle of formaldehyde to be sent for testing. (They are 98% sure it is benign; I just wanted to have it taken care of while I still had insurance.) And that was that. I put back on the roomy sweatshirt I had worn for the occasion, and went out to my roommate who had waited for about an hour. “It was bigger than I thought,” I said. When I held out my fingers to show her the approximate size, they were shaking so badly that I’m not sure she could see what I meant. Once we were in the parking garage, my teeth began chattering. “Are you cold?” she asked. “No,” I said. “I’m just shaking.”
Once back home, the shaking stopped. I called my mother and took a long nap. It still hasn’t started hurting, and I really have no excuse not to be working on my thesis. Let me get back to it.
Last night, I dreamed that a new edition of Waiting for an Angel came out, with new stories added so that my analysis in my thesis did not work, and I had to start over, surgically removing that which no longer belonged and adding in new analysis. I’m certain that I’ve had this dream before.
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