COMMOTIO CORDIS

150 push-ups yesterday. frank is murderous. i came in & he said (smiling) "you're going to do 300 push-ups today." i started laughing kind of nervously & said "um. no i'm not. i can't."
yes you can.
no, i can't.
well, you're going to try.

jesus. sometimes i hate this. in sets of 20. between each set he made me do some lower-body busy work. leg lifts. abs. then 20 more push-ups. over & over again. i got to the point where i was barely able to lower my body more than a few inches, at which point he would holler "LOWER." every time i leave his studio i catalogue my pain. no. i catalogue and then savor the pain. jesus. i love the pain of physical exertion. not just any pain- it's very specific to muscles and lungs and the anaerobic threshold. it's perverse and self-involved, i know. my love affair with lactic acid. i would make a terrible xian ascetic; i have never bemoaned that i am in an inescapable body.

i didn't make it to 300. i could only do 150. in the last 10 i knew i was about to give up and pulled some crazy screaming energy out of i don't know where & blew through them till my arms almost fell off. he said "don't worry. you'll get there."

is it just the case that people don't blog as much when the weather is so pretty? and, maybe, by "people" i mean "me". 

love her elation? i wouldn't normally post pics of other people here, but i couldn't resist her thesis dance.

read this.

 frank is the guy who kicks my ass. sure, sure, i can do tricep dips. but frank makes me do them with one foot up on a crate & the other leg extended straight out, held up in the air. then switch legs & do it again. crunches? i'll do some of those. but frank makes me do them with a medicine ball, twisting back & forth as i go up & down. on a steeply slanted bench. for every movement which might be likely to strengthen the human body, frank adds his own little twist that turns the pedestrian painful into the excruciating. and he smiles at my pain. tells me don't even think of giving up. fifteen more. i wince, truly wince, and mutter fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck and frank laughs. you're being a baby today, he says. who knew there were about ten ways to do push-ups? ten miserable, endless, muscle-wrenching ways to lift my torso from the ground, body like a plank, and back down again. every day of the week i feel pain now. delicious, aching pain in a part of me that hasn't hurt in a long long time. i never knew i had three muscles in my deltoids. frank found them all and destroyed them. i could barely lift my arms above my head, in the shower. i teach five spin classes a week, and i don't remember the last time my quads hurt, until frank. wow. i found someone who will push me harder than i will push myself.

but pain is always a sweet luxury when you've chosen it, instead of it choosing you. the romantic suffering of willfull poverty vs true poverty. the delight of ascetic training vs inescapable, low-wage manual labor. i can appreciate and idealize this pain because i can always opt out of it. it's the opting in that makes it whatever it is.

i made the mistake of telling r that frank wants me doing push-ups as soon as i get out of bed. so, she shoved me out of bed onto the floor. she lay there, beautiful and sexy and naked in my blankets, counting with languor as i cranked them out. the only thing missing was her box of bon-bons and toy poodle. i had fantasies of being her buff pool boy or green-thumbed landscaper. till then i'll let her count my push-ups.

when i was seven (2nd grade) i had a really bad crush on the cutest third-grade girl named dawn (such a seventies name), who wore one of those ornamental hair comb thingies on one side of her head. dawn was the prettiest thing i had ever seen in my seven years, but she did not know i existed. literally- she did not know me or anyone who did know me. well, except for the boy across the street, b/c she was his cousin. i asked once & he told me her name. that name floated endlessly through my head, a long delicate banner pulled through the air by a barnstormer: ...d-a-w-n-d-a-w-n-  -d-a-w-n-d-a-w-n-d-a-w-n... dawn was dreamy, with shoulder-length brown hair that had streaks of blond in it. her shirts were usually button-down, with lacy collars. some days she wore glasses and every day she had a gap in her front teeth. she and her friends staked their recess hangout spot over by the stairs of the parking lot, alongside the school. just beyond the lot's curb was a sidewalk and then a patch of grass, running long and thin next to the building, and always green. i wanted so badly to impress her. other girls might offer her barbie dolls and gossip. but i could offer her strength and speed. prowess. i wore zips because i knew they made me run faster and jump higher. the long "Z" on the side of the shoes was evidence enough. and if there was one thing i wanted as a little girl, it was to run faster and jump higher. i practiced my running and jumping almost every day. one of these days, i knew, my fast running and high jumping would blow.her.away. so i combined them into mating-ritual long-jumping. whenever her friends made their way over to that staircase, i would quit the soccer game or jump down from the monkey bars, head across the parking lot playground, and commence my series of fantastic, running leaps. up up up, over the curb, sailing through the air, clearing the whole sidewalk, and into the grass. careful not to hit the building. back to the blacktop, runrunrunrunrun.....take flight and sail through the air again. man, those zips did wonders. i was fleet-footed apollo. mercury with wings at my ankles. if only she would take notice! at the time i thought she was certain to steal a glance here or there...look at me obliquely so her friends wouldn't notice her interest. certainly she would see how hard i was working for her, even though i acted as if she didn't exist. i was too cool to acknowledge her, and so precociously swift. faster than all the other ones. certainly my clean sweat and grass stains would make her eight year-old heart swoon. but she never did. not that i could tell. if anything, she & her friends may have wondered what the deal was with the little 2nd-grade freak wearing cowboy shirts and toughskins. the one who does the long jump all the time for no apparent reason. anyway, she certainly never looked at me with stars in her eyes. in fact, i don't even remember her ever looking at me at all.

isn't it funny the things we need to be noticed for?

i sure cuss a lot.

there is a girl out there who (on myspace) presents my gf as being her gf (or, mabye, just someone very close to her?). isn't it weird that my girlfriend doesn't say anything to the girl about this? isn't it weird that my gf is her #1 myspacester, even though they've never met, and the girl has plenty of other friends & a partner of 10yrs (oh wait- they broke up right after she started emailing my gf)? ok, maybe it's none of my business, but it creeps me out a bit & makes me think the girl has some kind of stalking problem (or, at least, a priority problem). sends her things in the mail. texts her when my gf says they shouldn't have contact for a while. like i said, they have never even met...the girl lives on the other side of the country. on the non-monogamy front i've made it clear that i don't care if they have/resume some kind of thing, but i am now reconsidering my feelings about it (not that it's my decision to make.. it's totally hers). i don't really want to be involved with some bullshit triangle where a third party becomes obsessed with my girlfriend. then again, my gf can handle her own shit...maybe it wouldn't affect me (or us) at all. it affected us last time, though. well, it affected me: it made me totally paranoid & i brought the paranoia to the relationship all the time. people get obsessed with her fairly often; maybe i should just get used to it? i have weird apprehensions that this girl's like the totally crazy character on damages, who stalks whatshername's fiance. get your own girlfriend, dude. prioritize the people you actually have in your life.

so, if you aren't currently in touch, if you've never met, and my gf is still remarkably significant to you...it means you're waiting for or expecting something. what, exactly, are you expecting?

and yet again. this one also emphasizes his lack of anger. i'm not criticizing him for making some kind of peace with his tragedy, but i don't understand why it's a pertinent part of the article. is his peace supposed to exculpate the people who put him behind bars? i really think white people should be banned from jury duty in cases where blacks are being tried. i'm not kidding. white people cannot be trusted to think clearly. i'll be curious to see what happens to the detective who perjured himself, and the other ones who covered up the evidence. perhaps they should just switch places with mr. chapman? and where's the goddamn fanfare & media coverage that tim master's got?

    

     

as i went through security in tampa today, i was alerted to the international APB for these 12 swarthy men (sorry the pics suck...i was in a hurry). immediately i was struck with a profound sense of fear, and eyed my fellow travelers with deep suspicion. i think everyone was doing the same. "is s/he a terrorist in disguise?" i say in disguise, because we all know what terrorists look like when they aren't in disguise. they look like ones on the airport's laminated most wanted poster:

       

as the dept of homeland security and the FAA were busy trying to freak everyone out and distract us from our real problems, *i* was busy carrying this very sharp knife through security. for the second time. i carried it in my bag on the way down to tampa (an honest accident), and on my return (a curious test). i also had my razor with me. ha. no one said a word, i collected my bags and went to the gate. i guess what DHS means is that you can't be a swarthy guy and carry a sharp knife. but armed white dykes are a-ok.

i swear, we just can't win. we put the boat in--just got it back from the shop. *so* eager to catch fish and see sharks and watch the porpoises play. i am watching seagulls dive-bomb from 50 feet away on the dock. i know there are fish. if we can only get to them. and then the engine overheats. and then the cable breaks. we are stuck in reverse. back to the dock...back to the shop. so, tomorrow we will go to myakka river state park, rent a canoe, and go freshwater fishing. but considering our luck, i can tell you what i think will happen: one of us will get eaten by an alligator.

to give you a snippet of the randomness of our conversations:
(messing with fishing lines...)
dad: (completely out of nowhere) hey, there's this thing and it's long and tube-like. it's kind of beige and papery looking. but it's kind of hard or rough....what's that called?
puzzled me: um....are you talking about a loofah? it's called a loofah.
d: a what? well, i wanna get one of those.
pm: (laughing) um, ok...why? i mean, it's for exfoliation. are you needing to--
d: it's for ex- what?
pm: exfoliate?
pm: exfoliation. (and, of course, i quickly run through the latin etymology in my mind) it's when you sort of scrape off your topmost layer of skin.
d: oh, is that what that means? yeah, i wanna scrape off the dead skin.
pm: ok. you can get one at that health food store. (laughing. confused.)
(then we resume disentangling our fishing lines & milling about the boat.)


maybe i'll rent a single speed cruiser & go on a bike ride along the beach.

        

23,000 ft. somewhere between pvd and atl. hot and bright and electric and consuming everything in our path. intractable, horrific, and exquisite, this spilling.

this was a little blurb on today's cnn.com. it will disappear by this afternoon, i don't doubt. i love how the picture has him standing in front of a bunch of happy white people, and the article is clear to tell the readers that he's not mad at anyone. in fact, he's thankful. god, i bet the justice system loves that. and so do the white people reading it. the last thing they want is a black man who spent 25 years of his life in prison for no fucking reason to come out and be pissed as hell. as one of the four significant bullet-points at the top of the article, we are told  "Green says he doesn't hold a grudge against anybody." oh...sorry, sorry... our mistake. here's your freedom back. it's all good now. why did the journalist include his lack of rage as a pertinent aspect of this story? i also love how the article points out that he earned his college degree while at san quentin. i guess those 25 years in hell weren't a total loss. i feel like i'm reading invisible ink, and here's what the real story says: "poor, troublemaking black guy with no future plucked unwittingly from public housing environment and sent to state-sponsored education program says he's relieved to have finally graduated with BA after 25 years. graduation ceremony coincides with christian holy day."

i am always torn between feeling mildly charmed by you, and feeling embarrassed for you. you bill yourself as a renaissance town, even though forbes magazine voted you one of the 10 most miserable cities to live in. thank you, forbes, for making me feel less crazy. this morning what caught my attention was the mere emptiness of your space: you are so sadly unpopulated, but so ready. all the parking spots are taken, but where are your people? nobody comes out to play. maybe that's because it's cold and there's nowhere to go? for the millionth time my brunch date expounded on providence feeling like the set for a movie. all the buildings are there, and they're really attractive (you do have architecture going for you), but the actors haven't yet arrived. you are the empty-city feeling on a bank holiday. a perpetual 3-day weekend when everyone has gone to the beach. or to the movies. somewhere inside, or somewhere else altogether. maybe the writers of i am legend got their deserted-city idea from sweeping through providence in the middle of the day. has something terrible happened here? are these "people" really zombies? the lights turn green, but the cars don't move. the lights turn red but the cars don't stop. you don't have traffic laws- you have local customs. is everyone stoned? disoriented? dissociated? am i the only one not in on the joke?

the other thing that struck me today was the falling short of your eating establishments in weird ways. for example, bravo has a salad nicoise that i am totally addicted to. it.is.so.good. and its decor is sorta wannabe chi-chi. it's across the street from the theater & all the small-town theater-goers make reservations for their pre-and post- show dining. everyone is dressed up (and annoying, but that's beside the point). it won't break the bank, but it's not what i would describe as "cheap." let's put it this way: bravo thinks of itself as a fine dining establishment. but bravo's napkins are... paper? now, i'm no critic of the paper napkin. if i used any napkin at all, my sleeves would generally be cleaner & my gf would kiss me more. but that bravo uses silly paper napkins on its dark polished tables gives the feel that someone is "playing restaurant" without any expertise. aren't you forgetting something? isn't this town the home of johnson & wales?! providence, you are always sort of winging it.

one of the few practical benefits of having studied greek & latin for so many years is that you become a fun resource for all your friends in academia , who read articles written by other academics who don't study greek & latin, but want to use greek & latin phrases in their work to be smartypantses. "hey j- what is a topos?"  "doesn't logos just mean 'word,' as in 'logos to your mutha...'?" (but let's be honest....i usually force etymology on my loved ones. it's like a fun game for me).  today, my most frequent latin-asker called for the 10th time, to ask what mutatis mutandis meant. i started to explain the gerundive & ablative absolute & then told her fgia. but then we started talking about radical athenian democracy & athenian ideas of citizenship vs spartan ones. she likes the spartans, she confessed, b/c her middle school was "the spartans" (as was my public high school, post-catholic school expulsion). we got to thinking- why do so many schools choose the LOSERS as a mascot? the spartans were completely massacred at thermoplyae. not a man left standing. plus they were communists. and the trojans?! why would any high schooler want to be a trojan?! paris was a total pansy who sat in his room polishing armor as the city was besieged. and his brother hektor didn't even bother to kick his ass for it! and then they lost. that final scene with andromache and astyanax is heart-wrenching. (for that matter, why would *romans* want to be trojans?! vergil.. you're weird.) i think these mascots were originally chosen by skinny classicists playing a joke on the uber-masculine football players who never opened their history books to discover the implied insult. then again, nobody's team is called "the athenians." that would be worse. can you imagine a modern football game against the trojans and athenians? what a clash that would be: on the order of what's found in the book of armageddon. why not just call it "the battle of the armor polishers against the pederasts who enjoy public debate." how thunderous it would be. i'm in the tackiest gay coffeehouse on the planet right now & when i laughed out the word "pederast" to my latin-asker on the phone, everyone turned & looked at me. settle down, boys.

was better than my green bean & pea surprise from last week. ricotta, prosciutto, mozzarella, basil, cherry tomatoes, spices:



for the record, alain badiou is annoying me this day.

ps: 16 mos. thank you. for the hot sex. the challenge. the surprise.

        

  

what do you say when your gf's best pal says to a room full of people that he was talking with a friend & they both concluded that they wish she (your gf) would be in a relationship with someone as creative and eccentric as she is (and by that, maybe he meant crazy)? i had my back to him & had to pretend i didn't hear. because what kind of response could there be? a rattling off of all the creative things i've ever done that he doesn't know about, because he doesn't actually know anything about me? retelling the stories of how my friends used to take those goofy personality tests for me because my behavior constantly baffled them (apparently my own answers to those tests didn't explain me sufficiently to them)?

what he especially doesn't know is that he hit a very raw nerve. i have been thinking recently about how little creativity & internal adventure i have been channeling. i don't remember the last time i spent all night in the darkroom. the last time i played my banjo & couldn't put it down. or made a book by hand. or even threw together a weird, complicated dinner just for the sheer joy of cooking. or hopped on my bike at 4:30am, to ride around alone through the city streets, looking for cool (and disquieting) photos to shoot? graduate school & moving away from all my peeps in sf dramatically altered my lifestyle & i don't think i have really managed to carve out a life i like, here in rhode island.

fortunately i'm more interested in doing those creative things than in feeling their absence.
god, i can't wait for spring.

it's important that she has friends who care about her enough to take great concern for who she lets into her life. my friends have done the same: they have occasionally thought a gf is too old, young, controlling, bossy, flaky, insane, untrustworthy, uninspiring. and to have friends who give a shit is a fortunate thing. but you can't make people like you, & i wouldn't be interested in trying. and you can't convince them that you're an appropriate partner for their friend(s). i guess you always just have to trust that the person you're with is with you purposefully and certainly, despite the opinions of her friends.

sure makes me miss my friends, though. the writers and bike messengers and photographers and frame builders and freaks and musicians and glass blowers and junk collectors. the people who love me.

my best friend (and ex gf of many yrs) is getting a phd in public policy at Cal. one of the things she has done is develop a model state policy of compensation for the wrongfully convicted. at present, there is no standardized way that states compensate people whose lives are ruined by years in prison (that's true, actually, whether you were wrongfully convicted or not) . in fact, there have been cases where the prison release hinges on the exonerated person promising not to sue the state. anyway, through my friend's work,  i started paying closer attention to the whole issue of wrongful conviction, and i always send her the news links when i see a new case. so....after a couple of years of doing this, i can't really tell you about each state's policy, but i can tell you exactly how the media treat the issue: the online news sources provide a small headline which you can click on & read the little sad story, and the print media will have an article somewhere on page 3. or 5. or 7. and it's sad, sure, but there's so much more news to read! until tim masters.

tim masters stopped the presses. i'm not going to recount the details of his case, but lemme say that it's no more or less tragic than any other horrifying case in our totally fucked up "justice system." oh, do i need to point that tim masters is white? more precisely, tim masters is the only white man i have ever seen on these news outlets who has been freed from prison because his dna overturned the conviction. i'm not saying it hasn't happened before, but it's rare that a white man is sent to prison wrongfully (and if so...he was most certainly poor), and out of the stories that the media deem newsworthy, he is the only white one. and boy is he newsworthy: look how many articles (and video clips!) cnn.com has devoted to tim masters. i want to get specific, though, about how the online media treat these cases. in *every* case i have encountered, the news link to the exoneration story exists for one day (maybe two). and it's is always just a small link couched among several news links. very rarely is it a major headline, and even rarer still does the story capture the photo spot on the news homepage (in fact, i can't think of a single instance, but i can't swear to it). small link, one day: that's how it works. with tim masters, the online media (here, i am referring specifically to cnn.com & msnbc.com, the two most-visited outlets) provided the major headline and the sole photo spot for two or three days in a row! the story would.not.go.away. even ofter he lost his #1 headline rank, the sources continued to feature all the video clips about him. and people in masters' hometown have rallied around him, supported him, started a fundraising campaign to get him back on his feet, etc.

interjection:

(10 black guys wrongfully convicted.)
holy shit! a white guy wrongfully convicted!!! justice system fails! a white guy wrongfully convicted!!! a white guy wrongfully convicted!!! justice system fails!!!(7 latino guys wrongfully convicted.)holy shit! a white guy wrongfully convicted!!! justice system fails! a white guy wrongfully convicted!!! white guy wrongfully convicted!!! justice system fails!!!(23 black guys wrongfully convicted.) holy shit! one white guy wrongfully convicted!!!  justice system fails! white guy wrongfully convicted!!! a white guy wrongfully convicted!!! justice system fails!!!

i don't need to be a specialist in any area to be able to see that my life is worth more to more people because i am white. and i don't at all mean to make light of it when i throw in this observation: we are actually worse than the hittites. in fact, i bring that up as a legitimate point of comparison: we think of our justice system, our legal codes, our culture, our declaration of independence & constitution... as innovative, unprecedented, sacred, modern, and civilized. rooted in a commitment to equity. but the way evaluate and estimate the worth of others' lives is comparatively the same, if not worse for how insidious and delusory our legal self-understanding is (also, i guess i'm pulling in this law code from 1600BCE Asia Minor because i don't actually know very much about any modern law codes besides our own). hittite law, written in stone (well, clay, actually) valued specific people in exact ways. period. for example, slaves were valued at precisely half the worth of freepersons. based on the social worth of the victims & perpetrators, the crime was punished accordingly. actually, this doesn't apply to hittites alone, but all kinds of ancient law codes, i guess. true for babylonians, romans, greeks, etc. we do precisely the same thing, but muddle the waters sufficiently so as to obscure what we really believe and value and enact. our rhetoric does not match our practice in any way.

the radical disjunction between what we say we believe and what we do is appalling. why the fuck should white tim masters get days and days as the MOST IMPORTANT STORY, while every other person whose life has been ruined by 5 or 18 years in prison, gets buried in the back pages? not only is it horrible that such judicial failures occur all the time (*especially* in the neanderthal state of texas with its joke of a houston crime lab), but the way we publicly assess this failure once we have acknowledged it is likewise appalling. by that, i don't mean to appear pissed off and disgusted by the media alone-- the judicial system is the problem. well, racism is the problem. the rights inherent in class is the problem. but the media's treatment of this problem is, i think, an accurate gauge of where the problem lies: in how we assess the value of others' lives, how we assess the (in)significance of destroying someone's life, how we decide what qualities constitute a "full person," how we project concepts such as "guilt" and "innocence" onto skin and then read that skin for the evidence of what we have already projected onto it, how we assess the amount of energy should be spent addressing this problem based on who is affected by it, and who is this "we," anyway? it appears that the judicial system won't be considered a "failure" until a critical mass of white people (the implied "real" people) have been failed by it.

we are all assholes.

yea...for real. this was my dinner tonight. eli & goran would be horrified.  this is what happens when you're incredibly busy, your culinary dynamo gf is also incredibly busy (or at her house in another town), and you have taken a shine to cryogenics. you want the recipe? ok: sautee some garlic in olive oil. dump in a bunch of frozen peas and green beans. cook them up w/salt & pepper. then toss in a few frozen fake sausage links. once everything is all heated, crack two eggs & throw in whatever form of cheese you have. then put it all over the rest of the rice you made a few days ago, which you haven't even bothered to warm up.

here, have a closer look:


i think it's a dinner actually hostile to r: she hates eggs & peas, isn't nutty over fake sausages, and presumably doesn't like cold rice. the weird thing is that it tasted pretty good. garlic will do that for a mess. the apatheia with which i approached my gastronomy this evening would be highly valorized by the stoics i am reading & thinking about.