M-Words

I thought I'd do the exercise that Susannah started over at Ink on My Fingers. I asked her to email me a letter since it seemed genuinely random that way, and sure enough, she sent me "M," a letter I never would have chosen. I can think of nothing wrong with M, in fact there are many proper names I love that start with M. But regular old words, or grand words, they don't tend to start with M for me, which may be why I kept coming up with French ones. I also seemed to pick words for their musical qualities over their substantive meaning. It was nice to spend some time with M.

Mouth. I love this, as noun and verb, because you have to say it with your mouth, and mouth it at the same time, which makes me laugh. I've seen the verb spelled "mouthe" before, which looked right to me, but I don't think it is.

Mange. Not like mange in a dog (yuck) but the French word for eat, as in "mange tout," or "eat all," as in the sugar snap peas growing on my kitchen table. Just pronouncing this word is so sensual and decadent that it makes me hungry.

Manqué. Again with the French. Such a funny, great word, encompassing what might have been. As I leave behind career after career, I worry that my life's work is to be a manqué, but the word sounds so lovely that it makes it o-qué.

Méconnaissance. Yes, I know this is getting ridiculous, but even though I typically write at my emotional (teen) level, I am a grad student. I love this Lacanian word that basically means misrecognition, and he uses it a lot in speaking about the formation of self that comes with looking in the mirror for the first time. It's all very deep, but it has to do with the relationship between outer reflections and subjectivity. I'm sure that this is playing out in some way in the Unravelling class.

Magpie. I don't know anything about these birds. I'm not sure I've ever even seen one. But the combination of syllables and sounds is the most charming thing. There isn't a better word anywhere, I'm sure of it.

Marigold. Who doesn't love these prolific little flowers that try so hard protect tomatoes? And they are edible!

Midge. A fly so small as to be invisible. Have you ever seen a midge? But we know they're there. And it rhymes with smidge, smidgen. Also Barbie's freckled friend. I remember swiping my sister's Midge doll when I was little.

Madrigal. Brings up visions of gorgeous gowns and gay dances in period films. I also love the order and repetition.

Meshuganah. Just so darn fun to say. And we all know some.

Mayfly. I want to cry just thinking of the mayfly. What else could be so poignant?

I also thought about mistress, mademoiselle, maple, mettle, moxie, and my trusty, long-term companions, melancholy and malaise. Can you think of any others?

sneaking around in the kitchen again late at night

I've been having a hard time with the Unravelling course, finding a lot of resistance to thinking of the past or looking at myself. The weekend's assignment was to write our lives as a fairy tales, and it took me a few days to attempt that. Then this afternoon, I braved this week's assignment, looking at our reflections. It turned out to be so wonderful. How inward-looking I've been, when the world is so full of amazing things. The rest of the set is here. I'm surprised how this course is working to create a picture of self, just like it was supposed to.

Write Club

I am still sitting here trying to recover from today's writing. Since I had nothing after an hour and a half, I started cutting and pasting interviews, emails, and fieldnotes into my outline. I do have a very rough outline, and this seemed like a fairly non-threatening task. I ended up with about fifty more pages of stuff this way, which seems good since this is material I'll need to rework and use. I'm so depressed though now that my usual phrase "sticking head in oven" comes to mind. I think part of this is low blood sugar - I need to remember to eat.

I am going to try something new, again. A possibility has opened up for experimenting with writing, Marta's Write Club that just started today. I'm thinking that since two hours has stretched into five, and that it's resulting in black moods that infect the entire day, night and week, I'm going to cut it back to 15-30 minutes daily. I'm going to try to reframe this as writing instead of dissertating. I can play with my structure or form during additional hours if I am able, but I will try to write my own stuff in short spurts and see if I can save this project or if it will get the best of me after all.

Snap Peas, Week 1

House Rabbit Society

I was wondering about the House Rabbit Society. I have a book of theirs here that I got years ago when I had a lop. A vet recommended it after giving me attitude about my bunny living outside in a hutch. I haven't thought about it much since, but now this whole house rabbit question is occupying me quite a lot. My bunnies are currently in a sort of outdoor room, a laundry room to be exact. It's mostly enclosed, but has screened-in windows. I like having them there because they are so easy to hang out with, bring inside, and generally observe. But soon, I'll probably build rabbit housing outside. My thought was to rotate them in and out, but I've also heard that they are not crazy about their housing being disrupted, so I still have plenty to learn and consider.

I am crossing my fingers that Cosset is not bred right now. I've learned that although her baby that she was living with might be able to breed, it's not super likely. Whew!

I see on Ravelry groups and elsewhere the divide between rabbit rescuers and hobby breeders. Angora experts who would be happy to help out shelters are denied rabbits to foster because they do outdoor housing. This just seems whack to me, but I'm interested because I'm so used to this debate occurring with dogs. But rabbits? I'd really like to leave behind my visceral response and consider all sides of this debate equally for the time being. I have lots of thoughts about all this, one of which is whether it would be in the best interests of chickens to live inside too. With the explosion in popularity of urban chickens, is there a parallel movement in chicken rescue?

Back to the House Rabbit Society. Here is part of their stated philosophy:

Domestic rabbits are not the product of natural selection, but rather of human interference by means of breeding programs, and the product is a human-dependent animal who needs protection. It is therefore a human responsibility that these animals be cared for in a manner appropriate to their needs.

Ok, that I totally get, as with any domesticated species. But then they go on:

It is in the best interest of domestic rabbits to be neutered/spayed, to live in human housing where supervision and protection are provided, and to be treated for illnesses by veterinarians.

By "human housing," I assume they mean indoors since that seems to be their MO. But even if they granted that most of these conditions could be met outdoors, their spay/neuter mandate still precludes raising rabbits. Why exactly is it better for rabbits to live in the house? And why exactly is rabbit farming (for wool, let's just stick with that for now) necessarily bad for rabbits?

I hope people will comment and shed light on this for me!

Word Count

Well, this was kind of a crappy day of writing, but some of the concepts might turn out to be helpful. I'm finding that freewriting produces bulk but it doesn't let me organize my thoughts at all. I guess that comes later. Today's total: 2049 unusable words or just over 8 pages.

Good morning, Sunday

Just getting started with writing for today.

Flea marketing

Progress

Ok, so it's 3:02 pm, and in a little under two hours I've written 3701 words, which is just shy of 15 pages. Damn! Of course, most of it is crap, but it just poured out. I worked on my original plan, and described one particular incident and got it all down. It's not well-written by any means. But some of the stuff I remembered seemed important. I had thought I wouldn't have such visual memories, that I'd have trouble with details, but it wasn't the case at all. I remembered all kinds of things. I need to work on refining my voice, how to tell the story in first person. How to do dialogue when it's hard to remember exactly what people said. Mostly though, it just wrote itself. Which is really heartening and may mean that I can stay with the plan I presented in my prospectus.

Except that I'm emotionally shredded. My heart was racing and I cried a few times as I wrote. I'm not entirely sure why it's affecting me so badly now, when I held up well throughout the research itself. I'm also not sure how I'll be able do this every day for the next many months. Well, the book says to write six days a week. At least for today, I've done a ton of writing and have the whole day stretched out ahead of me, and the fun art walk tonight. Maybe I can just focus on the feeling of progress and enjoy the day. I also had a glimpse last night of how telling this story could be empowering. Giving myself a voice has to be a way of dealing with grief, and at least in my own small way, I can call bullshit on all of it. Right now though, I feel like going back to bed and weeping a lost river.

late-nite snak

The bunnies are settling in pretty well. I'm starting to get to know them, little by little. I have most of her coat off, but Cosset still has terrible matts underneath. The underside of her neck is a huge muff of matts, and she really, really doesn't like me touching under there. Worse still is under her back legs. I'm just terrified of cutting her, since there doesn't seem to be a way of getting up under the matts. Poor girl has some bare pink spots on her back of scar tissue, I assume where she's been cut in the past. My fingers are all swollen from working on her with my now-dull grooming scissors, so I went and bought some Fiskars as recommended by rabbit experts. Butch, on the other hand, (with his luscious coat to protect) is using his litter box almost without fail. And Junior, he's just all over the place.

This site was recommended over on Ravelry for understanding rabbit language, and it's fascinating. It even compares learning to communicate with rabbits to human cultural studies. I love the comparison of another species to another culture, since it is. With the signals of respect and affection that are described on the site though, I am stumped as how I'm to accomplish all the necessary tasks - clipping, taking them out of their cages, etc. etc., without offending them. Judging from our interactions tonight, Cosset is still insulted from our clipping sessions. I tried to apologize in rabbitspeak again and again, and she was having none of it.

dissgruntled

I have to figure out a way to structure my days. I find myself so lonely and alienated some days, and pulling my hair out at the very thought of my dissertation. It must be broken down into smaller chunks, and it must get some attention! I end up doing everything but my writing, and that's because truly, I don't want to write. The days I try, I end up in a black hole of depression, reliving a lot of icky memories from my days of doing fieldwork. It seems to take hours, days, and potentially a lot of rabbits to climb back out. So where does that leave me?

One huge problem is my lack of commitment to the academic path as a career. The crapulent job market for humanities Ph.D's doesn't help one bit in trying to come up with the gargantuan effort required to write a dissertation. When I started this program, I very much wanted to be an academic, and I was so into it. And now, well, part of me just doesn't see it. I may just be burnt, and maybe in time I'll get turned back on to it. And I could just be lazy. I am kinda close to having a doctorate, and I might could actually have a nice career with it, so what is my glitch?

Another issue is feeling so drawn to having a life as a farmer and crafter. That's the life that feels right (or at least the idea of it) and I keep coming back to it. But then, I keep returning to academia too! I also need to make a living, and currently my lifestyle feels a bit off the grid, and not in a good way. I need to get out and be part of the world. I'm not sure a home-based business will suit me longterm. I've thought about working on all this and maybe just teaching here and there at a community college, if they'll have me, but that probably still entails finishing my diss at some point.

Since my current ethnographic approach is causing me distress, I've tried to brainstorm about some other ideas that will get words on paper without me having to relive everything or be so engaged. I've thought about switching to a more historically-based method, kind of ethno-history. A nice thing about this is that I could more easily encompass photos, film and other visual texts. It could start to feel like a collage, and selecting and arranging these artefacts could be very creative. Then later, I could get down my own experiences, once I have some more distance and am in a better routine. That's my provisional plan, I think.

I also need to remember that it's quite luxurious to be able to write full-time; it's a new situation for me, and it won't last forever. I have a lot of guilt at complaining about this lifestyle, since it seems that I have it easy. My difficulty with this glorious freedom is that I work best under pressure, and have done years of deadline-driven fenzied writing. That's got to work against me with a long project such as this. I cannot spend years dithering and guilting myself over not-writing only to slam out a diss in a few months. It actually wouldn't be so bad if I could enjoy those years, but then there's my advisors expecting me to produce something periodically.

What could work for a daily schedule? I'm thinking that this time, it might be best to work with my nocturnal rhythms rather than trying to fight them, because that's when my brain is working. I think six hours a day is quite a lot, more than enough, and maybe even realistic. Here's a proposal, which I may monkey with later:

noon get up, make coffee, check on critters
12:30 check emails, flickr, etc.
1pm begin writing
3pm shower, eat, clean house, hang with rabbits and dogs
5pm run errands or walk or garden, maybe start dinner
7pm dinner
8pm back to writing artsy projects!
midnight reward: spin, read, relax
3am bedtime yoga
4am sleep

This sounds potentially doable except that the writing part makes me nauseous.

OR, I could work it in a completely different direction. Commit to working on the diss 2-3 hours a day. That would surely mean progress, sooner or later. And spending the rest of the time working on farm and art projects. That sounds so much more appealing.

Aha! I just checked and the diss bible says most people can't write for more than two hours a day anyway! He recommends going by page number goals - three to six per day - rather than hours, although he says if you're freewriting for two hours, that's about what you'll get. So conceivably, I could just use that 1pm-3pm block of time to write, and then be done with the damn thing for the day. I'd have that whole 8-12pm block to do anything and everything else. That sounds pretty reasonable, even for someone so unwilling. I haven't read this book in ages, but there also look to be some strategies for coping with ambivalence and block, and I'll have to take in all that tomorrow.

and Junior

Butch

Cosset

.

The Unravelling e-course has started, and it's already proving to be great fun. This week, we are taking pics of our feet. More are over at Flickr. It's so interesting how looking at my feet is prompting me to look at so many other things, like other feet. And things laying around in the grass. And daily routines. I feel so hopeful about this course and the world that is opening up around and inside me.

I did it

Here's me and my wookie, I mean bunny. It was such a day! I was euphoric at finding rabbits straight out of my dreams. They are the embodiment of "warm and fuzzy." I held them close and felt so perfectly satisfied.

I brought home this doe who is almost three, her baby buck who was born last October, and the father, who is also around three. Daddie was not part of the plan, but he is so magnificent, and the owner was short on cage space, so I took advantage of her desperation! These rabbits make my heart skip to look at them.

Then the euphoria shifted a little bit to fear, because the doe is just terribly matted. It will take me the better part of a day, or maybe five, to get her clipped. I've got no skill at clipping rabbits, and was hoping to learn under less dire conditions. I'm freaked out at how bad her little behind is, matted all to hell and covered in poo. It's not ideal, but much better than not finding her, or have her be culled (the other option, I learned). Is it that hard to find homes for bunnies? The other two have just a little bit of matting, but nothing like her.

I've learned already that the bedding they sell at the pet supply stores is no good for angoras. The little bits get stuck in their wool and it looks disastrous after just a few minutes. From what I see so far, I'm also very skeptical of this house-rabbit, litter-box training prospect. I've got them provisionally set up in these kinds of things. I put down scrap bits of linoleum to cover the wood floor. I'm pretty sure that they are going to have to be outdoors and elevated, and soon!

Tonight I'm cold, tired and my eyelashes are full of fuzz (do contact lens or mascara wearers ever have trouble with angoras?) The bunnies are active, and they seem happy. I feel anxious with getting them set up and taken care of. I'll make proper introductions tomorrow.

Starting seeds

I joined the Cold Antler Farm Snap Pea Challenge, where brave souls are starting seeds together and will chart their progress weekly. I have been an admirer of CAF and Jenna Woginrich since stumbling on her book, Made From Scratch. Her writing is beautiful and her blog is addictive.

So even though I'm still waiting for my bundles of seeds from Seed Savers and some other online seed purveyor, tonight I started with 145 or so humble snap peas on the kitchen table. The light isn't great tonight.

The day after Valentine's is even better