Heavy Eyes

I turned the light off at midnight, but it didn't work. I am still awake. But I'm too tired to read. And I'm too tired to (hand)write in my journal. So here I am.

I was almost killed today. Jason (landlord) had come over the other day to put in an air conditioner. He brought a big piece of wood with him (a 2x4, I believe) to secure the unit in place. The unit ended up being unsuccessful but that's not a story I want to get into right now. The 2x4, which is about maybe three feet long, but quite heavy nonetheless, was leaning up against the desk that is just inside the sliding-glass door. It was also touching my desk chair. I was lying on my back on the step that leads outside. I had my hand on the arm of the chair.

Well, I moved my hand and simultaneously picked up my head (the important part) to look outside to suggest to Paige we sit out there once the sun goes away. But before I could get the sentence out, I heard a loud crash right behind me. It seems when I removed my hand from the chair, I jarred loose the wood from its not-so-secure position against the desk. By the time it hit the floor, it had gathered quite a bit of momentum. My life was absolutely spared. I shudder to think what could have happened had I not moved my head and only my hand. Would my glasses have broken in half, thus releasing shards of glass into my brain via my eyes?Would I have had to have been rushed to the emergency room after suffering a major concussion, which would then cause me to go into a coma from which I would not awake for 25 years? Or worse, would my head simply have cracked open, causing me to bleed to death? I shudder to think.

I finished my story. Paige and I discussed power after she read a couple of my papers. She said Foucault is really going to help me. Good, I say, because someone needs to. She bled all over my conference paper, which is fine, because I know I need to develop that further. But what was cool was that she didn't mark on my Jean Amery paper from last fall (it's over there on your left). She said it was really good. It's interesting because I remember the passion that went into that. I was so fascinated by his essays in At the Mind's Limits. It's only a three-page paper but she said it could easily be expanded into a 15-pager. I want to get the book someday.

I checked it out of the library last fall, which is something I should have thought about at the beginning of the semester. Oh well. One lives, one learns. Unless one actually gets clocked in the head by a 2x4. You know what?

I'm more awake now than I was when I began writing. This is not a good thing. Guess I need to keep going. I have my first writing group tomorrow night. Finally. It will be with Helen, Renata, and Marcela. I was planning on having some writing done about Freud but that hasn't happened just yet. I still intend to get to it, though. Actually -- and I'm apprehensive about discussing this because I'm afraid it will taint it or something, but what the hell -- I do have something, a project, that I'm going to present tomorrow night.

There is an anthology that is requesting short stories on the mixed-race experience in the United States. They want unpublished fiction. I wonder where I'll get my material from. If it's accepted, I'd get $200. I want to do it just to do it. I'll try to get in, but I have never written fiction before. Do I use a first-person narrator or an omniscient one? Do I look in the past or live in the present with it? I think I've decided to use a first-person narrator. I'm not sure exactly of the benefits of doing so, but I feel as though I can have more control over the story.

As a result of this decision, I think I'm going to have the story occur in the past. I'm still unsure of this, as well. Today was the first time I had put any thought into it. And after thinking about it for a little bit, I was trying to think how I would present the main character to the readers. Then I thought of this essay by Toni Morrison called "Recitatif," which I read in a sociology class in Sac called Minorities in America.

There are two main characters in it whose race is never explicitly revealed in the text. That popped into my head after thinking about the main character's sexuality and gender. Then I thought to myself, "well, the main character [Reece at this point] will be struggling with identifying his/her race and this will be very frustrating. If it's a first-person narrator, then I don't have to reveal Reece's sexuality or gender. The reader may become frustrated. Just as Reece is frustrated." I have to think a little more about it. It's either too complicated or just plain stupid.

After this thought, I promptly laid down and then, of course, experienced my subsequent brush with death. So Bob Hope didn't die. But Buddy Hackett did. Bob Hope. Buddy Hackett. B. H. The mind is a powerful thing....stop the madness. Who said that? "Stop the madness!" Was it that crazy blonde woman who lost a lot of weight and yelled a lot? Ok, I'm talking nonsense now. My eyes are falling. Please let me go to sleep. I have to be up in five hours.