Agnes: Not a Homecoming

I am on the train to New Haven right now thinking about that place and about my awful graduation and how I haven't finished writing the speech that I intended to write as a riposte. I have been thinking quite a bit about how writing fits into my practice and into my life, and I haven't come up with any easy answers except, I suppose, that it is a part of both. A rather jagged part. The function of this writing continues to elude me, however. Maybe because I haven't smoked now for almost two months. It does get easier as time goes on until eventually it seems like it isn't an issue at all. That I am a non-smoker. And I'm not until I am again.

Madeleine and I both just read A Portrait of the Addict as a Young Man. It does seem a little hubristic for a literary agent to name his drug memoir after the classic James Joyce novel. Maybe it's a joke? I'm not sure as (to Madeleine's abject jar on the floor horror I have not read the latter.) I think she liked it rather more than I did, though I did read almost the entire book (the last chapter had to be skipped by me, unfortunately, as it was experimental or something with irritating babies imagery out of Anne Geddis photographs. I think. It wasn't that bad and I bring it up only because it's an addiction memoir. It's not like you don't know what's going to happen. And I feel a little like that about this blog. At least my part about it (NOT that I'm saying it's not inevitable that M will finish her stories which it IS.) There are some things to which the narrative arc is irrelevant: eating, sex, having babies (or so I'm told), these are things that we do regardless of their banality. This is really a first-world problem, isn't it? At least I can be safe in the knowledge that although there have been times when I have smoked and drunk quite heavily, I have never gone through $70,000 over the course of two months to feed my habit. Huzzah. Is this kind of navel-gazing really that productive? As skeptical of the talking cure as I am, I have gotten something from it once or twice in the past. If this could actually be like that it might help, though the point of therapy/analysis is the neo-parental relationship one develops with one's therapist. Even if I could be totally honest here the idea of a “public”, however small, playing the parental role seems really problematic (which is why I am not the kind of girl who aspires to Lindsey Lohan/Jennifer Aniston -type famousness). Then there's the fact that one pays one's therapist and that they are, after all, one's employee.

I have done away with the data collection projects. It was too much bloody work. Also, it brought out the worst in me. I have a tendency to be a bit extreme. And obsessive. So I think the secret is to do whatever it is that I can to ensure that the changes I need to make (not smoking, eating better, exercising, the usual) are something that I can sustain rather than being very, very good and then horrid.

I will tell you all how New Haven went.