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Cooking as Stress Management

Cooking as Stress Management

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I’m not a wonderful cook. Because the rituals of cooking don’t interest me very much, I haven’t learned how to make the things that I love to eat. I may have to reconsider. I’ve been making a monster lasagna today, and I discovered something. Cooking, all of a sudden, seems to relax me.

I’ve had a strange couple of weeks, involving much more emotional turmoil than I can easily handle. I’ve been feeling fragile, tired, angry, sad. I’m not yet back to myself. The one good thing about it all is that I seem to have gotten some excellent crying done. I’m such a stoic that it tends to build up. I’m good to go for at least another year.

It was a manifold crisis – a miscommunication in my family (well, it was more than that) was the breaking point. But it had been building.

I’ve gotten a bit disheartened about the difficulty of securing a professional position. There aren’t any university jobs. I’m now refocusing on finding a job as a discourse analyst or rhetorical strategist – maybe at a PR firm or something like that. That may be better than pursuing some sort of IT or Project Management position. It would be more targeted to my talents. I don’t have the certifications that would make me an attractive candidate in some of these other fields anyway. And, as a former Jehovah’s Witness, I’m not comfortable with sales (grin). I’m good at it, just not comfortable with it.

Anxiety about my future is compounded by student loan debt and the feeling that I might have wasted my time and money getting the Ph.D. It seems bizarre, but the degree seems to work against me more often than for me.

All of this hit me at once, or perhaps it was a relay, a cascade, a feedback loop. I had the it’s-not-fairs. I was swamped, smashed, splintered into bits.

I can’t, and don’t, stay in that horrible psychological space for long. Life keeps moving on, after all. Fortunately, I also appreciate small comforts and pleasures, and there are all sorts of ways to lick your wounds (so to speak).

Today I discovered that as I was chopping, and mixing, and layering the lasagna, I went into a state of serenity. It was almost hypnotic. Very relaxing. I started to breathe more easily again, like I do when I meditate. I took the pace way down (I tend to move quickly).

The lasagna smells great. I’ll have to remember the cooking method of stress management. I shouldn’t resist it simply because of the “traditional gender role” aspect of the thing.

Today is the five-year anniversary of the day I very nearly died. I can’t help thinking that the pregnancy I lost that day (a ruptured ectopic) might have been a little girl or little boy now. I can’t help mourning the fact that I will never have another baby. Knowing this day was approaching made the family problems worse, as related things tend to do.

Any little comfort helps. And I can’t complain, really. I’ve been surrounded by love and caring as I struggled through this difficult terrain.

Snowbird Guardian Totem Feb 3 2002

And now my little boy comes in to this tiny office of mine and gives me a hug. It’s not such a bad day after all. He’s such a gift of the cosmos, and I am grateful.

Done

Done

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Well, it’s done. I got “hooded” for my PhD today. It was a long day and it started early – but it was worth every minute. I had some wonderful conversations with other graduating PhDs and a few of the faculty as well. John was there clapping madly for me, and I didn’t even trip when I stepped up to pick up my large empty folder (the diploma has been on my wall since last September). I was even able to say brief hellos to a few of my colleagues – Steve, Julie, Jay, James – and to give a big hug to VA (a kind of faery godmother who told me that the dissertation was done – when it wasn’t – and made me believe that I would finish – and I did). Even the weather cooperated. The only thing I regret was that I didn’t actually see my director, who was busy handing out undergraduate diplomas. My other local committee member was very nice, and didn’t even topple the cap as he put the hood over my head (I am always amazed when things like that don’t happen at public events).

I highly recommend the experience.

Everywhere I looked, people were smiling at me. I haven’t felt like that in a long long time – it was a liberating sensation. On the way home, we stopped at the post office so that I could mail off my mom’s birthday package. Still in full regalia, I made a bit of a picture. The three postal workers all stopped for a moment and spontaneously grinned at me and started clapping. I have rarely felt such warmth in this city. Then we stopped at a gourmet-food-to-go place that I favor – partly because I have become friends with Mary, who seems always to be working there during the times I drop by. She grinned too.

I hadn’t slept much last night. For some reason I was really keyed up. My relationship with the university has had a few ups and downs, and I suppose I was a little bit ambivalent. But this is one thing that universities do well, and I wanted the ceremony and the closure and the sense of acceptance. We had to get up astoundingly early for someone of my somewhat nocturnal habits – especially since I had only slept for an hour or two and that intermittently. By the time we returned home at about 3:30 – I was dropping from exhaustion. I could have hunted up some friends and gone out to celebrate I suppose, but all I really wanted to do was drop.

So now it’s done. At last. All in all, a lovely day.

Got the PhD today!

Got the PhD today!

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I’m a Phd today! Woo-hoo!!!!! Here’s the abstract.

Imagining the Virus: A Discourse Analysis of Contemporary Fiction

This study seeks to apply the insights of discourse analysis to the epidemic of signification surrounding the virus, marking out the traits and terrain of an emerging discourse. The confluence of biological and technological viral language interacts with articulations of health and sickness, literal or metaphorical, already active in other discourses. The virus has rhetorically metastasized across referential domains. The study takes as its starting point concrete examples of viral figuration, and is structured around contemporary novels concerning HIV/AIDS, vampires, the villains and plots of suspense thrillers, and science-fictional transformations of the human.

Imagining the Virus traces the terrain of the virus along two basic strands: the virus as a figure of the other and the virus as a postmodern placeholder for ambiguity. A comparison of their relative weight and functioning attempts to discern the kinds of relationships that occur between these two strands as they play out in different fictions. An examination along such lines unearths dominant cultural tropes and their attendant anxieties. Particular kinds of metaphors influence our attitudes and judgments by selectively focusing on certain aspects of a concept while suppressing other aspects. This study finds examples of reframings of the virus that resist the more destructive of these, either by refusing to be complicit with them, or simply as a function of imagining new constructions and possibilities. As a mutating viral terminology circulates through a diverse American culture, it draws models of horizontal structures and networks, maps clusters of referential associations, and speculates on newly-emergent adaptations and ecologies.