lagged

Jet lag is making me unbearably, almost voluptuously sad, and slow. On Wednesday I was en route from Bergen, Norway to Durham for 27 straight hours. I endured. I have been learning endurance. Tonight I leave to go to Los Angeles for the weekend, to attend my sister's shower, to see Kate Durbin. I wish I had more time to rest. I do not. Today I am attempting to keep still, to not move. To exist.

Scandinavia was - exhausting, rigorous, illuminating, beautiful, foreign, familiar. Blonde - oh so so blonde. I felt swarthy and squat amidst cool and lean and impossibly glamorous shopgirls (as I was abroad I began to receive news that review copies of Green Girl had been received, this felt appropriate, as it is my ode to alienation and the blonde shopgirl). Our travel was switched so many times. The bus to the wrong airport, ending us in southern Sweden. The fire at the train station which upended our Norway plans. We spent time searching out warm meals and finding places to rest. As I wrote in a postcard to Rebecca L, I began to recall again, to revisit, the self that is the traveling self, that somehow lies dormant all the rest of the time.

When I was away I received an email from Chris reminding me that the mss. is due at the end of August. Upon the return of my seemingly month-long travels I will have two months to completely rewrite. I was able to spend time journaling on the book, to have distance from it, and now I feel it is possible I can make it something great.

I spent a lot of time thinking about this blog. Because John was at a conference on electronic literature and I was tagging along, the wife-figure. But still having lunchtime conversations about blogs and livejournals and I filed it all away. But I realize too I have felt unsafe lately in this online space, in so many ways. I have felt way too alert to how my identity is composed online, in public. Noticing when I am not noticed. Noticing when I am noticed. All this can make you paranoid. Maybe this is because I'm rereading Unica Zurn's The Man of Jasmine. Maybe this is because I know people have received Green Girl, and are reading it, and I feel this is so immensely personal, so intimate, and it scares me. I feel I am presenting myself to be loved, in this ritualistic and extraordinarily public way, and I am beginning to fold down, bodily, after all the little tremors of rejection. I think I need to end it. Of course in a way I cannot, as the novel is coming out, so I feel a pressure to continue. It's become a burden. I do not like who I have become anymore. Someone sent me an email with the subject hed: If you want to communicate, you need to learn how to write. And then  the body of the email said: If you keep a blog, you should learn how to write. This bothered me terribly. I have no idea if it was spam, or what. Sometimes I think I am too exquisitively sensitive for publicness.