Top Ten Recurrent Topics From My Notebook In 2016 That Should Probably Become Real Essays In 2017

by Laura Citino

1. This year I worked at a convent. Technically convents are where nuns live cloistered. These nuns were Cool Nuns who wore plain clothes and taught school and traveled to Japan, so the place they lived was called a motherhouse. But I call it a convent so you can understand where I worked. Kinship was tenuous but to measure myself against the rules of their lifestyle was seductive. How were we the same? How were we different? I called them Sister though many of them had masculine names like Bernie, Marty, Frankie. They wore no makeup but there was a beauty parlor in the basement that smelled like the green room of my high school theater, all caked-on hairspray and curlers. Shoes flat, jewelry plain, nylons perfectly smooth. Childless by choice, check. Activist agenda and a nice anti-authoritarian streak, check. Rumors of queerness, whispered among the lay staff who winked when the nuns would stroll by in pairs. People who I met through work often asked me if I was a nun. I would say, Absolutely not, and we’d all laugh.
2. The myth that hard work will save you. Last year I quit my teaching job in Indiana. I couldn’t hack it — the course load, the rural town, the students and the muck of their own lives that threatened to suck me under, my own as yet unmasked struggles with panic and depression. I fought for footholds. I slipped. This summer I quit the convent mostly because I could. I felt weird quitting another job in the space of a year and am now Underpaid Adjunct #27842. I am busy with all these things I love that I don’t get paid for. I feel guilty about wanting more, the privilege of not having to work, the luxury of so much time left to my own devices. I overcompensate by cooking everything in the house. I remember I’ve never had a wife.
3. Teaching is so hard and so rewarding and so hard and so rewarding.
4. Notes upon notes upon notes that feel like nervous teenage diary entries about sexual exploration, victory, boundary-pushing. This document unfinished called “submission.” This one called “cruelty / touch.” This one, “wanting / taking.” Every few months I think, aha, I have found the angle. Of course, I haven’t yet.
5. Years of dreaming, pining, thinking, panting about a man named K. K is both real and not real, a composite and a plaything. I name him for Kafka, for labyrinthine boundaries and a split brain that says right is left, left is right. He is K for the hard sound, the click of a shut door, the unmistakeable spit of a Yes or a No. K as man and character has been unfathomably cruel to me and I have been as raw and red in kind. The gift of K: TBD.
6. Stink bugs crawl under the cracks in our door and through the split wood of our siding, creep into the hollows where birds nest in the summertime. They amble across my lampshade. We name the bugs Howard, coo to the ten or twelve Howards in our apartment at any given time. At the same time, a bushy calico suns himself on the picnic table in the backyard. A cardinal trembles in our bushes. There is life everywhere. We are not alone in this house, no matter how hard we try.
7. The stink bugs make me think of zebra mussels which make me think of Dutch Elm Disease which makes me think about invasive species and how they are mostly our fault. We can fly without wings and swim ceaselessly without fins or gills, such power in our sudden absence or presence. Mountains can’t stop us. Invasive is a word of war. I still don’t know exactly what I mean when I say I’m interested in taxonomy.
8. I’m hungry all the time, so, food.
9. Judit Polgár, of the famous Polgár sisters. Chess champions plucked from the clay by their father, who wanted to prove that girls could be just as good as boys. I’ve known smart women my whole life who maybe weren’t beautiful or kind, and I try to remember if what words I was taught to describe them. Interviewers describe Judit Polgár as “strangely normal,” i.e. normal as compared to other male chess champions, the ones who twitch, fidget, exemplify the myth of absent-minded yet ruthless genius. Mr. Polgár cleared his daughters’ schedules. They buckled down. All chess all the time = champions. It sounds like my fantasy, to only think about one thing. But who picked up the chess pieces from the floor after skirmishes, cooked dinner, brushed the girls’ hair into neat braids so they could focus, eyes clear, on the little battles at their fingertips?
10. Flânerie: one of my favorite words. “The detached observer.” One who walks, who watches. One of my words for 2017. I reread Joseph Roth’s What I Saw: Notes from Berlin and Im Bistro Nach Mitternacht. I think about untethered days. I think about men who can sit alone and unmolested, who can smoke and no one cares, who drink and gesture and bystanders part like the sea in front of them.

Related: I take out books about the Rustbelt and return them, overdue and unfinished. History in facts is never as interesting as the people I meet, the signs I see, the words we use to talk about the river. What it means to be taught grit, wit, and hustle before you learn the names of the trees.

Related: The Centralia Mine Fire has been burning since 1978. It burns still. I’ve never figured out why.

About the author

Laura is the author of the Big Truths piece, Ghost Cells, and is the Managing Editor of the always scorching Sundog Lit. And it probably goes without saying, but we get the feeling that Laura works much, much harder than we do. And we think we work kinda hard. But now we feel lazy. Thanks, Laura.

Originally published at littlefiction.com.