A Writer’s Diary Entries From Mid-April, 2002
Thursday, April 11, 2002
6 PM. I’m having terrible gas and sort of diarrhea. Actually, and this is truly disgusting, little bits of feces ended up on the bathroom floor after I farted. I assume it’s a combination of taking the Prevacid (gas and diarrhea are listed as the main side effects) and anxiety.
I probably shouldn’t have had that Amy’s burrito for dinner. Well, hopefully this will pass, and the Triavil 4/25 I took will calm me down. I think maybe I need to stop taking all the meds for my sciatica.
After work, I went to Dr. Davis because I thought I needed an adjustment, and he said I did. Okay, of course, what’s a chiropractor going to say? But I’ve had practically no pain since then, just pins and needles.
My sciatica is gradually getting better, although it may flare up again. What I need to do is manage my anxiety.
I could feel my heartburn growing worse this morning as a problem arose with my hiring of an ARP teaching assistant for Professor Henderson. I asked Liza and Tim to do it, but Tim said that Liza is unprofessional. The professor didn’t feel that way, so I hired Liza to do the ARP by herself. Maybe I’m making a mistake, but I’ll rely on my instinct and hope for the best.
After the Anthony Lewis luncheon – he actually was kind of boring and rambling, showing that good writers don’t necessarily make good speakers – we had a meeting between Pat, Linda Leahy and people from Student Services and Steve Friedland.
Steve has so many plans for orientation, and he expects me to do them all with him. He always makes me feel overwhelmed. Overwhelmed: I’ve used that word so much in the past four months. I hope Dr. Koncsol can help me get a grip on my anxiety.
Last year at this time, I started to get better. It may have been from starting to take Triavil, but it was also going to New York for the Nassau Community College job interview and knowing that the academic year at Arizona State and Mesa Community College was coming to an end.
However, this summer I’ll have no rest because right after I take the bar exam, I’ll have to get right into orientation and the fall semester.
I don’t know when I’ll be able to take any vacation time at all. Jane expects me to go to the Law School Admission Council meeting in Seattle in June, and that will make me miss BarBri sessions and take away from my studying for the bar exam.
Of course, I’m also scared about taking the trip even though it will be good for me to get away.
Aunt Sydelle is going to D.C. tomorrow, but today she had a bad experience: after driving to the beauty parlor, she suddenly felt very weak and dizzy and had to be helped onto a chair. S told me she never felt so sick before.
Perhaps it was her blood sugar, or maybe it was anxiety. She said, “I almost hope it’s something serious because maybe I’d like my life to be over.” But she’s terrified of getting a stroke.
She’s still going to the bat mitzvah, so I hope she feels better in Washington. (That’s why I segued into talking about Sydelle: the connection with Seattle was feeling better on a trip.)
When I learned I got the job at Nova Law last November, I was so happy. Back in September, after the phone interview, I described the position to my then-new friend Vincent as my “dream job,” but I didn’t know everything that would be involved, and this job sort of became a nightmare.
I guess I thought my coping skills would be better now or that the job would be easier or less stressful. I didn’t think everything out. Teresa once said that my moving to Arizona was “a big, expensive mistake,” and now I wonder if I made another mistake. On paper, of course, I haven’t.
Saturday, April 13, 2002
4 PM. My sciatica and my GERD have flared up again.
With the sciatica, I’ve been told it’s to be expected, that it will wax and wane and ultimately go away until the next bout.
As for GERD, I’m starting to think it was more than just NSAIDs or prednisone that caused the condition. I’ve eaten a lot of spicy foods, like ketchup and kimchi, and I often lay down right after eating, and the Triavil also could make the esophageal sphincter looser. And of course then there’s the stress I’ve been under. I guess I didn’t realize how lucky I was when I “only” had the sciatica.
Last night I watched a good movie I got through the library: High Fidelity, with a great performance by John Cusack, on whom I’ve developed an enormous crush over the years. It took me a while to fall asleep; I kept listening to the tape of The Worrywart’s Companion and falling back asleep to it.
This morning I felt anxious. Dr. Koncsol said it’s probably because I’ve used up a lot of serotonin in the sleeping process. That might explain why until recently I felt calmer at the end of the day: my body made serotonin as the day wore on.
I was glad to have therapy today. Dr. K is more of a professor than anyone I’ve been in therapy with, explaining Freud’s theory of anxiety (unconscious wishes are getting too close to the surface) and Pavlov’s experiments with dogs and approach/avoidance. He said my anxiety is like that old movie, Sorry, Wrong Number, where Barbara Stanwyck is an invalid terrorized by phone calls.
“Your phone calls are coming from inside the house,” he said, meaning I am controlling whether I feel anxiety or not. “You don’t have to eliminate the anxiety. You just have to tone it down to where it’s not so uncomfortable.”
Easier said than done, of course. But as Dr. K said, it’s an evolutionary adaptation: I’ve got the 3.7-million-year-old “flight-or-fight” response.
In the past, performance anxiety has helped me, and it will probably help me with the bar exam provided it’s at a lower level.
When I told Dr. K that I feel I should have adjusted to my job after four months, I knew what he would say about the shoulds.
Next week, he says, he wants me to get into the subject of “why anxiety is easier if you have someone to share it with.” I did answer an ad on PlanetOut today, but I feel like old damaged goods. Obviously, a relationship has not been my priority since I came to South Florida. It’s never really been a priority for me.
Dr. K also said that he used to have terrible anxiety about his undergraduate exams until May 1970, when he was so active in the Cambodia/Kent State unrest that he didn’t study – and then, not getting anxious about his exams, he got all A’s and learned that all that vomiting he did before exams was totally unnecessary. Are all psychologists anxious?
Dr. K said that anxiety is highly correlated with intelligence: “You don’t see retarded people having panic attacks.” Unintelligent people, like Frank, never suffer from anxiety; as Aunt Sydelle said, Frank would just go to sleep rather than get upset.
I have another 9 AM appointment with Dr. K next Saturday.
After leaving his office, I went to get a massage from the woman who did the last two massages. She said my piriformis muscle was very tight, but she massaged my lower and upper back as well.
I tried eating my beloved onions and ketchup today, and at Barnes & Noble I had bottled lemon ginger iced tea. I need to see what foods I can eat. “Everything in moderation,” Dr. K says.
Why have I made myself my own worst enemy? If only I could treat myself the way that I treat everyone else.
Today is Ronna’s 49th birthday; I haven’t heard from her in a while.
Thursday, April 16, 2002
8:30 PM. Last night I slept extraordinarily well, from about this time to about 6 AM. I had nice dreams and a good rest. Although I still don’t feel right with my stomach, I was able to sleep pretty well the past four nights.
Still, I ordered a wedge pillow to sleep on. At least it may allow me to lie down sooner than three hours before I eat.
With a special pillow, that thing I’ve been sitting on from the Relax the Back store, it’s as if I’m accommodating myself to being sick and elderly.
I hope I feel differently in a few months, assuming the sciatica and GERD go away, of course.
At work today, I went to see Eleanor and learned how to do the forms for the LSAC Academic Assistance Training Workshop in Seattle in June. I got Pat to sign the form when I finally found her free in the afternoon.
Pat said that tomorrow’s faculty meeting is going to be a horror, with all the various contentious issues of our orientation and curriculum.
Pat felt bad for Steve on Monday when Elena and others kept criticizing his proposals. Sometimes I see faculty acting like kids.
I also read the 40 or so faculty paragraphs that were appended to Donna Litman’s report on curriculum changes, and it was obvious that some of the law professors are poor writers, with grammatical, spelling, and syntactical errors.
I think I’ll try to go in a little later tomorrow because I’m sure I’ll be staying late. But at least it’s the last faculty meeting of the academic year, and I don’t have to go to another one for four months.
One of Professor Flynn’s chosen teaching assistants came to see me today, and she seems very nice.
The teaching assistant roster for the fall term will be in place once Donoho, Dobson, and Joseph tell me who they’ve selected.
I emailed Mark, Tom, Sat Darshan and Ronna today.
Ron from The Stonewall Library emailed me, telling me to get in touch with a reporter for The EastSider, and the reporter, Todd, called me back this evening.
Todd is a journalism student at FIU who writes a gay-themed column for the Fort Lauderdale weekly supplement to the News/Sun-Sentinel. He said he’d come to my office to interview me on Thursday at 2:30 PM.
Vincent’s latest issue of his webzine is up. It again convinces me how talented and creative he is. I find it a little artsy, but Vincent’s friends all come from that world. In some ways, I wish I could be there too, along with Eileen Myles or Kevin Killian or Bard Cole, all of whom seem so relentlessly clever and hip or whatever the word is now. Compared to them I’m an establishment stuffed shirt.
Sometimes I don’t even know why Vincent bothers with me. Maybe twenty years ago I was like him and his friends? Nah. I was just a stand-up comic, very mainstream, certainly not as knowing as these people, whether they are artists or writers.
I see that Vincent did put up that interview with “Unknown Author” in the webzine. That’s his satire about JT Leroy. I wonder what reaction Vincent will get to that. The design of the webzine was amazing; Vincent took the site from a 1970s Sears catalog.
In some way, I feel hurt that he didn’t ask me to contribute something again, since he’s even got one from Dennis Cooper. But I could never come up with anything as clever as the others did.
However, I know I have some strengths that Vincent’s friends can’t match. I don’t see any of them writing serious op-ed pieces or having my knowledge of politics or education or journalism.
I read today’s U.S. Supreme Court opinion striking down the 1996 Child Pornography Prevention Act, which outlawed computer-generated virtual children and young-looking adult actors engaging in what appears to be sexual acts. Kennedy’s opinion was well-reasoned, and I just love reading First Amendment law.
After coming home at 5 PM, I exercised to Body Electric, modifying the routine to avoid leg exercises. In the morning I feel too empty to exercise before eating, and I can’t exercise the way I used to, just an hour after eating.
Avoiding night snacks is hard.
I got two books on diet and acid reflux that I ordered from Amazon, and I posted them to Yahoo’s Alt-GERD group, asking what foods we really need to avoid. For example, I’ve seen sites that say I need to avoid exactly what I eat for breakfast: oatmeal, a banana, and skim milk.
When I didn’t call Aunt Sydelle, she phoned me. It looks as if she expects us to talk daily. Sometimes she can be so annoying. Scott told her to get rid of the car, but she says she needs to keep it to go to Publix and nearby places. On Wednesday she’s taking a cab to the dermatologist in Hallandale.
I also spoke to Marc, who said he’s had acid reflux for years, but his HMO would no longer pay for the more expensive Prevacid after two months. He does not avoid any particular foods, he said.
Mom and I talked for a while. She thinks China’s problem is not senility but a “third eyelid,” a condition a Lhasa Apso can develop that clouds their vision.
Today the Davie post office was evacuated after a postal worker got dizzy and nauseated opening a letter. So far they haven’t found any anthrax or other problems with the mail there, but the story went national, and Mom heard it on CNN.
Will my life ever settle down? I hope so.
Thursday, April 18, 2002
9 PM. I’m doing okay, I guess. If I didn’t have the acid reflux problem, I’d be doing really well, but on the other hand, perhaps it gives me something to focus on besides my anxiety.
Maybe giving up caffeine is helpful because I’ve rarely had diaphoresis over the past few days. Or maybe I’m just settling down.
When I left work at 5 PM, I went to the chiropractor. My ass was hurting, and I didn’t know if I needed an adjustment or what.
When I think about how much being ill has cost me in terms of money . . . well, I don’t let myself think about it.
For dinner I had Weight Watchers lemon herb chicken, soy milk, and cranberry juice, and afterwards I went to the Davie Shopping Center. Wanting a haircut allowed me to skim today’s paper. I see there’s a lot of gray or silver hairs being cut and falling now. Two years ago when I decided to leave Florida for Arizona, I felt like a relatively young guy of 50 or 51, but now I feel so old.
I got some PlanetOut replies from guys in their thirties and forties. In my profile I did ask for guys over 40, but I’m not really attracted to guys my own age as much as I would like to be. (I heard a “should” there in the background, but I’m going to ignore it.)
Todd Moore came to my office at 2:30 PM to interview me for The EastSider. His column focuses on gay life, so most of his questions dealt with that side of my work and my life.
I don’t know what he’ll write about, but I gave him the Dictionary of Literary Biography article and some other stuff. He took a photo of me outside the library.
Being gay has affected Todd’s life a lot more by being gay has mine. He left home at 15 and worked doing lighting at gay clubs in Atlanta. It wasn’t until he was 35 that he realized he could go to college with his GED. Now he’s finishing up at FIU as a journalism major and history minor, and he’s thinking about getting a master’s in education. Of his three brothers, two are gay, and he’s closer to his Southern Baptist parents in North Carolina than his siblings are.
Anyway, The EastSider comes out on Thursdays, and the article about me should be in the next issue. The Stonewall Library will be glad for the publicity.
Pat asked me to sit in when she talked with Rashid, the losing Student Bar Association vice presidential candidate who is accused of various honor code and election rules violations.
But Rashid – who supposedly bragged about beating a rape charge in Tallahassee – did not show up for the 10 AM meeting nor for the noon meeting that Pat changed it to, so she herself is going to bring charges against him.
Judge Jane Fishman stopped by on her way to do a bar exam workshop with Steve Friedland. I showed her the February bar exam results, and she was appalled. Jane seems to lean toward supporting Joe’s proposal and also says we need more bar exam-related courses.
It will be interesting, I think, to have the bar exam experience myself. Even if I fail, I’ll have learned how the students go through it. Looking at it that way, I can’t really “fail” if I learn something that helps me do my job.
I guess my concerns about stigma among students if Joe’s remedial track plan is followed are misguided. Jane said that a worse stigma would be on the whole law school, and then our students would stop getting the non-federal student loans because lenders would view them as poor risks.
At the University of Florida, my classmates and I felt we could pass the bar exam without taking courses that were tested on it; we assumed that we were good enough students to learn the material on our own.
As Jane pointed out, medical schools haven’t increased, as physicians have kept the number joining the program to a minimum – so med schools still get top-notch students.
But that’s not true in law schools; witness the growing number of them (six in Florida a decade ago, and now, with the two new state law schools, there will be ten).
Top-notch law students can survive bad teaching, but today’s Nova students are generally not good at being students even though they may have gotten all A’s and B’s as undergraduates – but then who doesn’t get all A’s and B’s these days?
When I called Aunt Sydelle, she was in bad shape. The infection on her finger calls for antibiotics, the dermatologist told her. She had thought that he could just cut it away, but he wouldn’t touch it. She started crying.
I see that everything is getting hard for Sydelle, and she cried. She really needs some help from a psychologist or social service worker.
I don’t know what’s going to happen with her. It’s as if she’s suddenly become an old lady since Frank left her.
Saturday, April 20, 2002
9 PM. Another day in the life.
Last night I couldn’t sleep on that prop-up pillow I paid like $150 for. Maybe I’ll use it in the future, but when I did fall asleep on my regular pillows at 11:30 PM, I slept solidly for seven hours, having pleasant dreams about Gainesville.
Russ was in one of the dreams. I never thought I’d say this, but I miss Russ a lot. He used to infuriate me with his Christian Coalition/Federal Society/Anglophilic attitudes, but you know, apart from Liz, he may have been my closest friend in Gainesville.
In recent years, I’ve sort of put those almost six years I lived in Gainesville out of my memory, but they were a great time in my life – before I got terrible anxiety, before sciatica, before GERD.
Dr. Koncsol thinks I’m somatizing with the GERD. Oh, the gut is the logical place for the anxiety to go, and it’s no coincidence that it reared up when the sciatica abated.
In Arizona, I may have had pure anxiety symptoms, but now I’m somatizing. Dr. K did his Viennese Freud accent to explain it.
Of course, the acid reflux is as real as the nausea I got every day as a teenager suffering panic attacks.
“Distract yourself” was the last thing Dr. K told me when he walked me to the outer office, where I gave the receptionist my $10 co-payment.
Earlier he said that I should see Norbert, the guy who called me yesterday – “especially, not despite” the fact that I’m not attracted to him.
I told Dr. K about Gianni and how all the guys I’ve been close to had other boyfriends, and his reaction wasn’t what I expected. Instead, he said, “Why should you try to replicate an outdated monogamous paradigm, especially when you’re gay?”
Although we talked a lot about my anxiety about my job, Dr. K said that my job doesn’t have to be the whole focus of my life here. Then he added, “You shouldn’t be alone the entire weekend.”
He told me – though earlier he mentioned his wife feeding him tasteless but virtuous Kashi cereal – that he often thought the ideal relationship was something like . . . well, like what Alice and Peter have. Alice emailed me yesterday.
Today I sent a lot of people an email I got from the Stonewall Library announcing, “An Evening with Richard Grayson.”
Wes Lin and Timmy Gibson, my young friends at Ohio State and Middle Tennessee State, wondered where the Stonewall Library was, and Richard Kostelanetz asked if it was in New York City.
Mark Savage said he hoped my reading meant that I was doing better and told me that he and Janet are still getting along fabulously.
Kevin said he’s still at Warner Bros. Records, but he’s so happy now, being the boyfriend of this guy Larry and living in a much healthier atmosphere at the beach in Santa Monica. He’s rehearsing two plays, bought a bike and planted a flower garden.
Teresa had a rough flight due to the thunderstorms that ended the record heatwave. Her email today, which I received when I briefly went to the office, was titled “Hi from Dreary Street,” so she obviously still hasn’t reconciled herself to the new house. Teresa loved London, “but no amount of travel can take me home” – meaning her old house.
She said that Camille takes a pill twice a day for her acid reflux and eats everything inside.
After making an appointment for 1 PM (9 AM was booked), I went to the massage place where I again saw Angela, who’s been doing me regularly lately. I signed up for another series of five massages with this one as the free half-hour.
From the massage place, I drove to Barnes & Noble, where I read today’s Times – or part of it – while munching on a plain bagel and drinking ice water that I put NutraSweet in.
Dr. K says he hasn’t read any studies that aspartame causes anxiety, and I like the sweetness of the water, which is almost as good as iced tea.
During my brief visit to the office, I read my email and printed out the lead story in tomorrow’s New York Times Magazine: “Florida: America in Extremis.”
This seems to be the place where everything happens first, including bizarre events like the 2000 election, Elian Gonzalez, and anthrax in Boca.
I guess I am glad to be back here. While I miss my family, maybe I can build a life in South Florida again.
After lunch, I took myself to the Fox Sunrise, where amid the crowd of elderly Jews, I went to the 3 PM showing of Kissing Jessica Stein, which had great scenes of New York – Upper Broadway, Zabar’s, H&H Bagels, Fairway – and a terrific story about two women having their first lesbian relationship.
Because the movie was so Jewish – with Shabbos dinners and Yom Kippur services and Scarsdale – or because old Jewish people are basically liberal, none of the old people seems shocked at the lesbian sex.
It made me feel good, the movie, especially because it’s the first movie I’ve seen in two months, ever since the sciatica and back trouble began.
And after a Weight Watchers dinner and a burrito, I went out walking and I got all the way to Pine Island Drive and Nova Drive and back, probably over two miles. My ass hurt when I got back, and on the way I had lots of flatulence and one “vomit burp,” a sign of regurgitated food.
But it was still good to get out. As I walked, I listened to a BarBri tape.
To help with the pain, I put the icepack through my shorts as I sat down and wrote out checks for credit card payments for the many card accounts I have, up to the 10th of May or so. It looks as if I have enough money to make minimum payments and pay my student loans without resorting to more cash advances.
I finished watching He Got Game, the Spike Lee movie I started watching last night. It had a great performance by Denzel Washington, who won the Oscar a few weeks ago for Training Day. Scenes of beautiful, sleazy Coney Island made me nostalgic for home and had me thinking of the day Mark Savage and I spent at Coney Island in July.
I’ve been letting the caffeine-free diet cola stand out so it gets flat and I can taste cola again.
Last year at this time, I’d just returned to Arizona from New York, and I had only a couple more weeks to teach at ASU and Mesa Community College, so I began feeling relaxed.
Maybe this year’s summer won’t be so bad. I can see myself starting to get into studying for the bar exam. At work, I do CALI exercises in Property, Torts and Contracts, and while I do terribly when I answer the questions, I am relearning the first-year curriculum.
Tomorrow will probably be a day when I don’t feel so good, but today has been a fine Saturday, and nobody can take that away from me. Yes, I had GERD problems and I had sweaty palms this morning and again in the evening (not now), but I can get used to it. I feel I’m doing some positive things in my life: therapy, massage, walking, going to a movie.
I did tell Dr. K that I don’t really feel like meeting people now when I’m sick and messed up, but of course he didn’t have to tell me what I already know: that going out and doing it precedes feeling better about myself.
I told him about Vincent and how he and I clicked and how he served as a distraction last fall.
I liked it in Kissing Jessica Stein when the two women ended up as friends after breaking up.
Hey, it’s still possible that I may fall in love again. My anxiety will probably lessen even though it may never completely go away.
Tonight I am okay.