Slothdom, and What Seems Lost Sometimes Isn't

Trying to banish slothdom by sending out my CV and so forth to UCSC. I'm applying for lecturer jobs--San Jose State's English department has sent me a letter which states that they might not be able to hire me back next year, at least not for Fall 2005. My former students are literally begging me to come back and teach 1B, but I am starting to see that it might not be in the cards. Sometimes the tiny devil sitting on my left shoulder (ok, I KNOW there isn't one; it's a metaphor) tells me to resent and be jealous of the other TAs who got hired back last Fall, a couple of whom got creative writing courses to teach. "Nobody wants you!" sez the Old Scratchling. But I brush the little devil aside--jealousy and resentment get boring after awhile (and slothdom doesn't? No, it's entirely more creative to find different ways to be lazy).

I don't know about UCSC's budget and hiring these days, so it looks like I might not be able to work at a formal teaching job for at least the Fall semester. My beloved, whom I'll call simply Mr. Strega, being the soul of optimism, has told me this state of unemployment is a silver lining, that I now have months to get the book out to agents, revise it, etc. Yet slothdom really is a problem with me, until I get downstairs and try to start writing. I do have a room of my own (known as The Office)--about the size of a large walk-in closet, with one high, small window and, my collection of masks on the wall (I really love masks--I have everything from porcelain masks to feathered masks, and a personal favorite that only cost me a dollar at Palace Arts' post-Halloween sale, a silver paper mask shaped like a crescent moon). At the moment, The Office is something like a shrine to my childhood--my mother, being ill in both mind and body, took up with a creepy drunk many years ago. Together, they drank and partied until her home was lost (this was one of those really neat ranch-style homes in the San Fernando Valley, on a street with old pepper trees and established gardens, a home she once told me she was happy to have bought so that all her children could come home to her--a sad wish, as the man she was with became very destructive--one of those charming folks who gets wasted and all fired up, and who routinely called at 3 a.m. vowing to come to one's home and do some damage--and sometimes he really did, to people down in Southern California).

Anyhow, when Mom lost her home, she put her possessions and everyone's childhood things in storage, didn't pay the storage bill, and everything was lost. I was so lost from myself for many years that I didn't much care whether I had anything from childhood or not, or thought I didn't. Yet, when I went to grad school and began The Strega's Story, I realized I needed to have things from the childhood about which I was writing--that some of these objects were not just a bottle of the perfume my grandmother, the Avon lady, bought me when I was six, or a book of cat stories my grandmother (henceforth known as Nonni) read to me, but were also talismans, things that could open up memories for me. I have had to work on this book using no pictures from my family of origin (except for my slightly famous grandfather, John Indrisano), but, through the miracle of eBay, I have managed to replace a few childhood things, including my grandmother's perfume, Avon's Hawaiian White Ginger.

I discovered that smell opened the floodgates of memory for me, so I have several bottles of perfume on my desk in The Office; I also have childhood books (I was a great reader of ghost stories, with a bit of a Gothic sensibility even then); I also have a couple of dolls, a Raggedy Ann and an Italian doll from Naples. I search every couple of days on eBay for a replacement of the Italian doll I had as a child, a woman with a basket on her head full of cloth tomatoes, with dark purple violets tucked in among them. No luck so far.
My siblings and I have talked about going to the storage space where my mother had stored things, to try and find out the names of people who might have gotten our things. I would give anything for one photograph of my grandmother, though if I try hard enough, I can conjure her face, her hands, the crooked index finger on her left hand from a broken bone which was not set properly. I think writing this book, more than anything, was a conjuring-trick to bring back the image of her face to me, so that it would never be lost.

Enough for the day--down to The Office to get some work done.

Coda: My computer (one of those triangular UFO Imacs, in translucent alien grey) is SO FREAKING DISORGANIZED! Mr. Strega is all left-brain, and puts numbers on the files instead of names in an effort to try and sort out the cyber-mess. He has tried--dear God, the poor man has tried--to help me become more organized. He did, after all, go to a certain school in Pasadena and writes, all day, pages of computer language which look like a cross between math class and Vulcanspeak to me. Yet even his efforts do not help--my computer disorganization is chronic and terminal, so I just picked through folder after folder, trying to find my resume and publication history so I can GET A GOSHDARNED JOB. Finally I made a folder on the desktop, with "Job Hunting" as the title, and put my resume and publication history inside it, after spending an hour looking for them. The heck with tiny, strangely coded numbers--there's a reason I was an English major, Mr. Strega! Still, I would never go back to being single. One of the first things I said to Mr. Strega, after our first romantic month, was "Thank you so much for saving me from dating." Amen.