This is the twelfth day of Christmas and the feast of the Kings. I am buying a fishing license and going fishing. It may do me good. I am plagued with nightmares about the coming semester which wake me each hour, so that I do not sleep. This has been going on for six days. In hopes of sleeping I have been working out with heavier weights, and all my muscles are working very well. I still do not sleep, however, and I am now brain dead.
“Jobs are just something you have to support your family,” said my father the other day, and I realized in a flash how unfamiliar the world he inhabits is to me. I learned that to support a family you had to get married. Jobs provided means to live other than doing domestic work for a man. The first step toward getting one was not to have a family. Employers did not take women with families seriously or pay them enough to support one.
Update: Fishing was excellent and transformative. I caught my limit! Now they are filets but they were more beautiful as fish.
These are Louisiana redfish. I only caught half of them. We caught a few crabs, too, and many of my bait shrimp were eaten by these crustaceans.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Good for you about the fishing. Wage labour sux.
Gracias Jennifer! So true. And check us out – we have ten fish!
it is good to hear you found something relaxing. 😀 I used to have nightmares last year about going back to work too and I found the only thing that worked was cutting down stimulants and increasing relaxants in my diet and talking. I had a lot of nightmares/daymares these past 2 months that were work related and I discovered that what worked even better was to publicly forgive the wrongs – and part of that was not naming names or deeds which would have been vindicative, but to actually let it go. I’ve never slept so well or been so optimistic since I did that.
Gracias, profbw! My mantra is: fight internalization!
Meanwhile I am inspired by redfish cooking. I think it would make a great ceviche. One might catch shrimp and redfish the same day, and make the ceviche with one’s own onions, peppers, and limes…!
Now I have it simmering. When it finishes simmering I will add spinach leaves, scallions, and pimiento, I think. How I made what I am simmering it in:
Sauteed in olive oil very finely sliced onion, garlic, potato, brown mushrooms, chopped walnuts, grated ginger, and carrot cut the long way, a glass of good white wine and the juice of a lime, a few sprigs of fresh thyme, some salt. We’ll see how it works out.
This is the wine:
http://www.patrimonio-gastronomico.com/vinos_c.shtml?idboletin=120&idseccion=318
yummy
It was pretty good although mellower than I’d expected. The ginger was the most pungent part. I think next time it needs less ginger and more garlic, and hot peppers instead of the pimientos. Redfish is a river fish and it’s very good but ocean fish are my favorite.
Meanwhiel, Momo has posted a Taj Mahal song on fishing and it’s great! (And I had forgotten how good looking he is.) Check it out:
http://joannao.blogspot.com/2008/01/taj-mahal-fishin-blues.html
Wish my dialup would allow me to see the videos. I like that cooking style. I think your ideas about pepping up the cheviche are good.
So your DSL problem isn’t resolved – I’m sorry! Now I’ve found all sorts of really good sounding redfish recipes. Stuffed with shrimp, in court-bouillon, baked in foil:
http://www.fooddownunder.com/cgi-bin/recipe.cgi?r=212477
and many more. [Anything but ‘blackened redfish’.]
Back to an earlier topic in the thread: detoxifying academia. Profbw says forgive but this doesn’t really speak to my issues except insofar as more self forgiveness might help.
What always does help is to remember to name the actual problems.
1. Academia became, to some extent because I allowed it, a space of pain. I am agoraphobic about it because I believe for good reason it is a torture chamber, an s/m dungeon, or just in general a place where one is hurt and I do not want to go or be there. Ever.
1.a. I do have some power to reverse #1, and I should use it.
2. The people who say that having my job is the same as having a job one likes, or where one is not miserable, are simply wrong – they know not whereof they speak and are just reproducing the ideology that keeps people in their places. Not trying to tell myself, or convince myself, that it is all right and I am happy and should be grateful and so on, really helps. Naming what I dislike and like instead of trying to tell myself it is all all right makes it a lot easier to empower myself.
3. One of the things I most dislike about my experience in academia is not having the chance to really study a subject or get heavily into a long term research project. It always seems to be about pumping out superficial research products. But I think it is in my power to resist this also.
4. I should write a post about my planned exit in the early to mid 1990s. It was planned almost well enough to work. It was a good idea. I was convinced by others that I should stay in academia for the sake of what academia *could* be and on the theory that it was my identity, that I was leaving myself behind if I left.
These ideas were wrong, of course. Knowing what one wants and seeing that it is not available isn’t wrong.
5. “Jobs are just how you support your family.” Supposing you have one and are not in a desperate, Dust Bowl type of situation and are thus living somewhere you feel at home. I guess in that scenario one can just suck it up and then go home and drink and rant … that is, after all, what my father, who said that about jobs, did … but *many* people say that work should be in some way meaningful, interesting, empowering, and so on and this is what I think … otherwise, as we were saying the other night, we might as well just go and work in retail … !
Yeah, that “blackened” stuff must be one of those guy things. No finesse there.
“Blackened” was invented fairly recently, by some restaurant for tourists, if I’m not mistaken. I don’t know anyone here who actually makes blackened fish at home.
On the other topic:
A. One must also remember that my father, Mr. “jobs are just to support your family,” also claims he was never interested in any kind of career and only had one because he had a family. Otherwise he’d have been a minimum wage worker and dreamed of writing, or so he says. So this does not apply to anyone who is actually interested in doing something. [Hmmm … to hear them tell it neither of my parents were career oriented … this then would perhaps explain why they never understood about being interested in *particular* jobs or careers; thought that if I didn’t like this it was because I didn’t like working … hmmm …]
B. Key to solving pain are two things from Lakota Woman: 1. the old Crow Dog, who wore a baseball cap (subjection to US government) with an eagle feather (they will not really win in the end), and 2. the way Mary C.D. ‘died’ in that peyote ritual – the way the suffering self died (or something like this) and she herself survived. …
Surfer Jay – You used to be California lifeguard that spent all his time on the beach checking out the chicks with your binoculars, saving lives, sporting a yearlong tan, and surfing.
N. Ed. Daddy74 — I wish! –Z
In my next life perhaps I will be a tall, tanned surfer called Jay.
And — funny how this thread came up again after almost two years.
Susurro: “part of that was not naming names or deeds which would have been vindicative, but to actually let it go” yes, that is key to forgiveness.
But I think I see what I meant about forgiveness not being key — it’s not a solution if the behavior is still going on.