Part I
Oh God, Not This Again.
This afternoon I am extremely hungover, hunched backed, scraping my stiff, overflowing, hamper across the kitchen into the laundry room/pantry/shoe dump/ cat bathroom. The early afternoon light is screaming through the closed blinds. I’m fluctuating between searing head pains and nausea and Ella is still asleep. Opening the washing machine, (making sure to check for cats before I dump, of course) my fingers are tangled under the pressure of this really heavy hamper. I think to myself, didn’t I just do this.
God, it never ends.
Doing the laundry is typically a task for my girlfriend, Ella. But since she is sleepy, warm, and mushy in our bed, I remember that the key to a happy relationship is doing the chores. So, I rolled out of bed, banging and knocking into various furniture with this godforsaken hamper, hangover hunched, and headed towards the laundry room. Since reading the Book of Delights, I have really been trying to get into the whole spirit of embracing mundane tasks, but holy God, I hate doing laundry hungover.
Somewhere between the moments of dumping the clothes in the machine resentfully, and balancing the hamper on my knee while reaching for a Tide Pod, I was flung into the realization that a full week had passed. It’s funny how doing the laundry is my marker that seven days, each day different with its own story, have been violently torn from an imaginary book in my mind and I’m watching the pages fly away in the wind as I try to grab for them. Anyway, here I am, cranking these knobs to “regular cycle,” annoyed that I have to choose between “normal” and “regular” cycle (because it seems like there would be absolutely no difference, right?).
Part II Billy Collins “The Present”
My name is Brooke DiMarzio and since I’ve gotten to college, I’ve struggled with living in the present. There are so many times throughout the day when I catch myself thinking about how I should be spending my time. Am I enjoying these years to the fullest? Have I missed out on opportunities because I didn’t join a sorority? Should I be living with my girlfriend in college? Should I see my family more? Why do I have three cats at 21 years old?
I suffer from obsessive compulsive comparing my life to other people’s disorder. I hate how these thoughts sometimes torment the beautiful reality I live. I think it’s fairly common though– to believe the grass is greener on the other side.
In a world where we are microscopically viewing the lives of others through pictures and videos, how could you not?
“The Present” by Billy Collins
"Much has been said about being in the present. It’s the place to be, according to the gurus, like the latest club on the downtown scene, but no one, it seems, is able to give you directions. It doesn’t seem desirable or even possible to wake up every morning and begin leaping from one second into the next until you fall exhausted back into bed. Plus, there’d be no past with so many scenes to savor and regret, and no future, the place you will die but not before flying around with a jet pack. The trouble with the present is that its always in a state of vanishing. Take the second it takes to end this sentence with a period—already gone. What about the moment that exists between banging your thumb with a hammer and realizing you are in a whole lot of pain? What about the one that occurs after you hear the punch line but before you get the joke? Is that where the wise men want us to live in that intervening tick, the tiny slot that occurs after you have spent hours searching downtown for that new club and just before you give up and head back home?" Billy Collins
[music: “My Little Brown Book” John Coltrane and Duke Ellington]
Cozy in bed at 9:40 on a Sunday night, lying next to my partner, Ella, this poem literally made me laugh out loud. The first time I read this poem at 14 years old, it went right over my head. Billy Collins was a little too sophisticated for me as a sophomore in high school.
After needing to find a poem to string together some sort of response to this assignment, I fished through my bookshelf and caught Billy Collins’ The Rain in Portugal.
What a delight it was to connect with this work again, seven years later and just a few months away from a degree in English.
In “The Present,” Collins grapples with the idea of living in the moment. In many ways, he challenges the way living in the present is pushed upon us. It seems like Collins wants us to, from time to time, exist in the past and future—live in our memories and fantasies.
I thought it was really clever– the way he freezes us in that moment of time where we experience moments before the uninhibited forces of life. I love how he has these two contrasting physiological responses to demonstrate the present—physical pain and physical laughter. It’s great how he barely uses imagery, but the jarring feeling of hitting your finger with a hammer causes you to flinch while reading.
I get a sense that Collins is struggling with the feeling that life is happening to him. As someone who sometimes feels like I have no real control over my life, I caught onto these suggestions throughout the poem.
Is the speaker of this poem suggesting that life just happens to us, before we can even process what is actually happening?
I think that there is something so humorous about this poem that makes me feel recognized in many ways. Maybe it’s the idea that we do not always have control over the moments that make up our lives and sometimes life just happens to us.
Hey Brooke, fantastic post.
Your delight was so real and I think you really captured Gay’s voice while infusing your own. I actually had the exact same feeling about laundry two days ago. I wanted to hear more!
Regarding your podcast transcript, I love the poem you chose to analyze. I’m big into meditation and mindfulness, and I think about the idea of being present a lot. What’s really that great about it? I feel like I’m stuck in the past a lot, and there are benefits to that as well. Maybe one day we’ll get it.
Great post overall, Brooke.
I love the photo of the laundry room, Brooke. It seems to scream every bit of exactly what you’re saying here in this so-called “delight.” (My cat just this moment settled onto my desk right where my keyboard is, so I’m having to type from way at the corner of my desk, far from the monitor I’m now forced to peer at.) You do sound quite a lot like Gay here. The adjectives, the asides, the italics, the complaint wrapped up as a delight, as gratitude, suits the mode perfectly–along with the concluding pondering over a simple language question that suggests much more. (Remember to keep an eye on verb tense, during editing; I wanted that present tense to continue, but you slid into past tense.) Though you don’t say so directly at the start of your podcast transcript, you are there describing exactly what you just demonstrated, about your feeling that the days are just flying away from you, the present barely even discernible. I do love the extended question at the end of Collins’ poem. I enjoyed your question in your second-to-last paragraph, and the fact that your own experiences of Collins’ poetry, 7 years ago and now, ties in so nicely to your topic (and to our class, for that matter).
I really enjoyed your delight. I found that I was always taught to do laundry on a Sunday. I had not thought that it could be a marker for a whole new week; it is just so integrated in my brain that I don’t think of any other days to do my laundry. I found your poem profound, and you brought up some interesting topics in your analysis. I feel sometimes that there is nothing that I do more than compare myself to other people, so I connected to your analysis a lot. It was great how you had an answer to the questions that the poem brought up, giving the readers a type of closure. Great post!
Hi Brooke! I love how you highlighted a mundane task for your personal delight, since that’s one of the ways Ross Gay taught us to recognize delight in our day-to-day lives. It’s funny how something so simple as tossing laundry into the wash can irritate us during some of our “not so great” moments. But it IS a delight to serve others, especially our partners. I also really like that you mention delight in the analysis of the poem you chose by Billy Collins, I also did this in mine! And it’s especially interesting since the poem you chose doesn’t really focus on delight itself, but is a bit more critical of life in the present. Despite his criticism of the present, I think there is delight that can be found in the seconds comprising our unique perspectives of the present, but there’s very much so an anxiety there. I wonder if it’s our anxiety that’s the delight because it reminds us of being present?