Author Archives: Christene

I Tried

Last week I wrote this post (Circadian Rhythms). I said I wanted to feel like that again. I knew what I meant, but I had not properly expressed it, even to myself.  I knew what I wanted to achieve, but had not realized the implications.

When it became public knowledge that I was getting a divorce, a man I knew called and asked me to dinner. I declined because there was another man I could not stop thinking about. Earlier this week I called him back and accepted his dinner invitation. We went out tonight.
First dates are generally pretty awkward to begin with, almost unnatural. But tonight just felt wrong. I was initially excited at the prospect of moving on with things. I got all dressed up, bounced around, had coffee with Tanya earlier and couldn’t stop talking about it. But less than an hour through dinner and I didn’t want to be there. This isn’t what I wanted.
I wasn’t trying to move on with things, I was trying to recreate. I wanted to get dressed up, and go out, and have a good time, and talk and laugh, but not with this man. And I didn’t want to play pretend. It wouldn’t be fair to anyone.
He was a very nice man, and under different circumstances, if I wasn’t stuck in a loop thinking about someone else, I would have probably had a very good time. He tried to create a lovely evening for me. He didn’t deserve to be nothing more than a placeholder for my imagination. And doing so would probably not be very good for me either.
We finished out the evening early. I thought about everything and I think this is the first time I actually came to terms with what happened with the one before. No, I don’t mean I am delusional and and can’t grasp reality. I just think this is the first time I actually allowed myself to think about him.  I was afraid to cry, to really feel the hurt. I tried to bury it in distractions (that generally work well for me), without thinking about why I felt the way I did.
The simple explanation was that I loved him, and missed him. Well, yes. But I can’t stop thinking about him because I trusted him. He was the first man in many years that I opened up to and trusted. He never judged me (I can’t attest to what he was thinking, but he never openly chided or scorned me). He never made me feel like there was something wrong with me. He never tried changing me. So I trusted him.
We knew what the other was like, and when we would spend hours looking into each other, there was the delightful and also the unpleasant, but neither of us seemed to care. So I trusted him. I opened up and let him see. I showed him the inner workings of my mind, and let him watch me tinker. I showed him the part of my humor that others disdain. I began opening up to him physically. He never judged me for any of that.
And when I looked into him I saw many things, some of which he may have liked to keep well hidden, but I didn’t care.
It was those moments that I missed, and then repressed. Those were the moments I wanted to recreate, but can’t.  I was comfortable and happy.
Tonight I realized that the void I am trying to fill cannot at this time be filled. He never meant to hurt me, even in the end. I don’t think he would have ever done anything to to purposely hurt me.  No one can ever change the way they feel, and he simply acted on his feelings. I cannot blame him for that, nor did I stop trusting him because of it. When he left I thought that maybe, even though he didn’t try to change me, there was something so horrid about me, or something I did, or said, that drove him away. I finally realized that, well, maybe there was, maybe I did do or say something, but maybe not. Sometimes you just stop wanting someone. Sometimes circumstances get in the way. Maybe I am trying to make myself feel better.
But my problem isn’t so much that I miss him, but something outside of him completely. I have no desire to trust another. Tonight I did not have the slightest wont to open up.
I sat there, waiting until a decent amount of time passed and I could go home. To be fair, it was not a bad evening. Conversation was good, the venue was very ambient, and the man treated me kindly. It could have been better, but that is my problem, not his.
Obviously I have no intention of doing this again soon, but to make matters worse, a little over an hour after I got home he called to let me know he had a great time and would like to see me again. He hadn’t actually expected me to answer my phone and he was going to leave a voicemail. When I picked up he got frazzled and it made the whole thing more awkward. I should not have answered. Seriously, can I do anything right? I politely declined, told him how I misjudged things, and it is too soon after the decision to divorce, and my kids would be too confused, and, and, and…. And now I feel like a total bitch *and* a liar… and he didn’t deserve either.

New Toy

Two days ago I got a new Macbook Pro. I have been fiddling with it, trying to figure out how everything works. I have mastered word processing and email. I still don’t know what anything else does. I would like to think that in the next few weeks I will have it all down. But I have had my car for almost six years and I still don’t know what half the controls do, so chances are that is not going to happen.Every once in a while I press a button on my dashboard, stuff happens, and I feel like I am playing charades with the car. I lose every time.

Today I downloaded Open Office onto the new laptop. At first it did not allow me to download anything from a source other than the Mac Store. So… I just paid a small fortune for this thing… I think I should be allowed to do whatever I want to it. It took me a while to figure it out, but I did manage to get those ridiculous settings suspended.

Then, after I downloaded the application, it put things on my desktop. I am very selective about the things I put on my desktop, and unlike my old laptop, this one is not easily customized. It put the icon on my desktop and there was no moving it. The laptop decided it will be totally neurotic about placement. Unfortunately I too am rather stubborn about such things. It seems this machine is very controlling about what I can and cannot do to it.

This is a screen shot of my desktop. One icon. Do you see it? Very annoying.

(top right hand corner)

Clearly this will be a battle of wills.

 

Syllabus 2

The second syllabus was a lot easier to create. The first took some time as I had too many ideas. But then I realized I am teaching multiple classes, so I can spread this out. You can read the first syllabus here if you like. Thank you to those who emailed me with suggestions as to how best to teach those works. I hope you do so again (especially with the Coleridge!)

This is my reading list for the second class. This time I actually included links where to find the books. Even though I plan on ordering them through the bookstore on campus, there are currently some paperwork issues that hopefully get resolved in the next month. The links are really for my own reference, so feel free to ignore them.

Beyond Good and Evil by Fredrich Nietzsche
Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Faust  by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Prometheus Unbound by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
Orpheus and Eurydice by Gregory Orr

I want to start with the Nietzsche since it pretty much sets the tone for the remaining works, and understanding his points will help to decipher the overarching theme I am building.

As I go into Rime of the Ancient Mariner I want to analyze the almost neurotic obsession the mariner has with repentance. Despite his seemingly pathological urge to retell his story doing so does not give him reprieve. Arguably he relives it each time he tells it, making matters worse. What are the forces driving his obsession?

After the Mariner learns his lesson on morality, I want to explore Faust, evincing that that the dichotomy between good and bad isn’t actually very clear at all. There is more to life than a pure delineation of what should be done, and even though we are told to believe there are consequences in transgression, and there may well be, even said consequences and outcomes aren’t immediately identifiable as will be gleaned from the ending of the work.

The supernatural aspect which mystifies all humans is apparent in all of these works, and the underlying theme is its tie to power. In Prometheus Unbound this power takes on yet another form, nature. Much like the Mariner seemingly conquers the albatross, and Faust yearns for supernatural knowledge, Prometheus attempts to harness nature.

While the Mariner’s act of killing the albatross is almost pathetic, Faust magnificently, albeit unnaturally, obtains a series of desires, and Prometheus perfects the process as he further strives to harness natural power, but simultaneously selfishly and altruistically, and thus lending him the most success. Being selfish in itself is not bad, which is a fixed way of interpreting everything. I want to explore the different shades of overreaching, of wanting more, and how they can be read differently than in basic polarized terms.

What all this boils down to is personal motivation as each character seeks that which he feels will render the most satisfaction, whether it be repentance, knowledge, or power. Camus, in the Myth of Sisyphus, grapples with the opposite question: what if life is meaningless? What if there is nothing else? Wanting what you can’t have simply leads to constant disappointment, so why want? Well, Sisyphus didn’t jump off the mountain, he just kept rolling his rock. Life is what you make of it.

I want to end the term with Orpheus and Eurydice, but looking at it from a different perspective than the work I have done with it thus far. I want to look at Eurydice in terms of personal growth. While this work keeps in line with the supernatural theme I seem to have inadvertently developed, that will not be the focus here. Despite her surroundings, I will focus on her quest for more in traditional sense. I also want to look at the difference between static and dynamic characters. How does Eurydice betray such an analysis? How is she dynamic in a circular sense, and how does the idea of repetition through time change her in increments?

I feel like I should add something else. Like there is a work missing.

As for the papers, I am a little more sure this time about what I want to do. A short 3-4 page paper on Nietzsche. A 5-6 page paper on either Faust and Nietzsche, or Faust and Prometheus. A 7-8 page research paper on any other work that they haven’t written on already.

Now I just need to work out the calendar piece of things. I am trying not to front load or back load too much, but I also don’t want to crush them during midterms week. Thankfully, unlike the previous course this is a Wednesday night class, so I don’t have to worry too much about holidays messing up my schedule. For the Monday night class I realized, after having devised the calendar, that I will be missing several weeks due to holidays.

I will get it right one of these times.