Lonely

Ok, this afternoon, I'm really lonely. And I know that this sounds kinda dumb, seeing that I teach at a college and all, but I sometimes feel like I'm languishing intellectually. You'd think that being a professor (ha, ha) and all, my work day would be filled with all kinds of smart, intellectual interaction, but really most of my day is filled with kinda mundane activity. And what I really want is someone to talk with about women's writing and women's experience and feminist theory. And there's sorta, kinda no one I feel like I can talk with. And T., my usual go-to-guy for this sort of thing, is busy. And Carina is far away, and maybe I'm just missing her. So I'm thinking about this Women Writers course that I'm scheduled to teach this fall, and I'm all obsessing about the possibility of a true women's discourse, you know? So here I am, getting all "Laugh of the Medusa," and it seems like there's no one around who can relate, you know? And then, I miss J. at times like these, because although he wouldn't be all into feminist theory and although I've had to explain second- and third-wave over and over to him, still he'd listen and ask the right questions to get me thinking about it. But how do you corner someone new and say, "So I'm reading Irigray lately. What do you think?" Or, "I'm interested in how the question of embodiment, especially the experience of the grotesque body, affects one's sense of identity." Or on a different note, "I'm convinced that Eco and Rushdie are speaking to one another in some important ways, but I can't figure out how they might be connected." I mean, I want these ongoing (possibly slightly tipsy) conversations about literature and feminism and postmodernism and medievalism and the self, and it's just not happening in my life. And my students are great. And they are attentive and responsive, but it's just not the kind of exchange that I'm craving. I don't even know where I'm going with this whole post. Maybe it's just that I'm missing friends and the life that I had (or maybe just some idealized version of it) in Riverside/cide.