grad school

Some things about grad school are disturbing, and they have to do with the teachers, I think. I was just searching for some poems by them online, found a couple I didn't really care for. I loved having three years with relative freedom and ease. Three years to just write and be happy. I made good friends and found my husband there. But I never had the connection with my teachers that I wanted. I think it's a big error to have two men in the poetry department. I think it was overly-masculine there. Of course, with only two, who's to say a lone woman would be good--I mean, maybe there'd be bad luck, and I wouldn't get along with the woman either. But I always like to love and be loved by a good teacher, and it didn't happen, and I was terribly shy, but it always happened every other place I went, didn't it?

I did have a small crush on the superior, but he yelled at me in his office early on, which spooked me, and when I did try to reach out to him again, someone else was there, his primary fan, and it didn't work out. We did have moments of intimacy--I remember putting my arm around his waist one day, and he put his arm around mine. Or when he touched my arm to get me to repeat what I'd just said, louder. Or when I took him outside and asked him what type of tree it was growing by the building. Oh, I did love him, but it was all over in the blink of an eye.

The inferior one was quite mean, sometimes, and I didn't really respect him, and he liked the poems I wrote as a child more than the poems I'd written recently, and he can go to hell, really. And said such mean things on my thesis. I think he had something against me, and I don't understand it, but I don't care to. I haven't spoken a word with him since leaving. I remember the day he was supposed to take me out to lunch, and I didn't let him pay. Even when he said it was supposed to be paid for my the department. Maybe we had some kind of misunderstanding between us.

But I remember one day in workshop he didn't like what everyone else was saying about a poem I loved, so he called on me, hoping I would agree with his minority opinion, but I loved the poem we were reading, and I think he was very wrong much of the time, and that just isn't good when you have such a big impact on someone's writing, and bad advice, what if it ruined someone's career. I thought much of the time that he was incorrect. Maybe he could sense that.

What does all of this have to do with sex, you could ask, but all of grad school had to do with sex, of me and my husband falling in love, of what's forbidden and unallowed which happens anyway, or what's spoken and what's unspoken about the past and present. And two boys being the boss, and gender trouble. Moving along.

Yesterday the new sex toys came in the mail. The blue vibrator is very nice and works well! I could pretend it was my dear, with effort. The other one is strange--maybe I'll post a picture some other day--and either it doesn't work with my particular anatomy or I just don't get it yet.

We fucked madly on the bed, with him behind me, as we are wont to do, and it went on and on, until it feels like a delusion or ecstatic dream full of expansiveness and light. Until he couldn't hold it any longer and came inside me in a set of jagged, moaning thrusts which comprise the moment I live for, or one of the two moments I live for, the other being my own.