Tuesday afternoon procrastination

I should be working on a revision of my dissertation material, and I will. But I always find starting back into it is difficult after being forced to set it aside, and writing anything, anything at all, jump-starts the process.



I've been thinking a lot about seminal events in my life -- those experiences which have changed me and helped to shape me. Since they're on my mind so much lately, this is where I'll exercise my demons (and angels).



For no identifiable reason at all, I googled an old friend of mine. She had a unique name, although it wasn't really HER name, and found about a dozen short audio recordings she has made in the last year. Hearing her voice again after 20 years of not having her around... I can't describe it. When I last knew her well, we were both in our mid-20s. Decades of chain smoking, alcohol, and hard living have altered her voice, and it's as smoky and smooth as the bottom of a bottle of bourbon now. In these recordings, she ruminates on her childhood, lost friends, and experiences both minute and momentous. In some ways, I recognize the essential core of my old friend, but we've both changed so much.



We met back in '85. She was 17, I was 21. We had friends in common but, more importantly, a common need -- a place to live. She had been kicked out of her parent's house for drug abuse and had been living on or near the street for a few months. The weather had turned bitter, and curling up in all night laundromats was no longer a reasonable option, given the preponderance of randy bums who claimed those spots. I had been living in a room in a house, but after the managers of the property tried to charge all tenants for a full month's water use at a time when the house had been largely vacant, I decided to stop paying rent. It didn't help that a window in my bedroom had been stuck open for months. Before they could evict me, I looked for somewhere else.



The somewhere else was another rental property, another room in a communal house, a block away from my old home. I couldn't afford the full rent alone, and Simone -- the new roomate -- couldn't afford much of anything. Neither of us had what you'd call a "real" job; I modeled for the art department, she peddled dime joints to high school kids. But there we were.



That December started one hell of a strange journey for me, and one I still try to parse out, from time to time. I've tried to explain my decisions to my husband, other friends, and even to myself, but nothing I've said ever really comes close to explaining who I was, who she was, the nature of our relationship, and the life we led together, for less than a year. It was what it was, but what was is still difficult.



Don't think this will be a confession about buried lesbian desire. Simone and I weren't lovers. We weren't chaste either, and we both had sexual partners, some shared, but we never did experiment with each other in that way. If we had, I would be more able to explain our relationship; it could be categorized and filed away as "post-adolescent sexual experimentation" and that would be the end of it. But sex with Simone was never interesting to me, although I later did dip my toes in that water, but with other women. Simone was, I guess, a kind of pied piper, who came into my life at a time when I was still reeling from a radical departure from my own ideas of who I was and what my goals would be. To the question, "Who are you?", Simone answered, "Who cares? Let's do something." And I did. A lot.



The amazing part is, I still remember a lot of it.



Enough for now.

Me, my goals, my purposes

I am late to blogging, and given the cacophony of blogged voices out there on the internet, a positive symphony of monologers, I don't expect this one will gain any following or receive much attention. It's the way I want it. I suppose this is a semi-public place to air my secrets, a forum to express my thoughts, and an audience might be more counterproductive than useful.

What do I tell my invisible and non-existant audience about myself? I'm not particularly special. I can write, and express myself well, though many people think my written style is formal, distant, stuffy, even stuck up. I've been accused of elitism because I write correct grammar, though doing so has become more of an ingrained habit than an attempt to impress.

I am also, as the title of the blog indicates, an academic. A lifelong academic. Christ, I've been in school forever, constantly training for that long-postponed day when I'll stand before the assembly and receive my hood. I'm not there yet. I work in the least popular, least understood, and for many, the least interesting area of European history -- the Medieval period. That great expanse of 1000 years, the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, the period between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance when, as priests and professors have told me, nothing of any particular interest happened.

Of course, it did. A lot of it. And I study part of it. I work on French 14th century history -- the specifics can wait for another post -- and research means I have to find ways to travel to Paris and work in the archives. I do. I have. It's a perk of working in this field, although money is always an issue.

But as I get older, I look back on my life and wonder how I got here. My 20 year old self would laugh and sneer at the 40 something me, that is if she could focus on me through the haze of alcohol and pot, if not other substances. Nostalgia isn't my thing, but maybe this blog is what I need to go back and think about where I've been so I can see where I want to be.

When I grow up.