An Archive of Feelings

I would have called Dad today.

He would have answered, "Hi, Missy!"

I would have complained about how much trouble I'm having with the end of the semester.  About how I can't figure out how to get myself interested in the paper I have to write on Middlemarch.  He would have been interested in the reasons I was struggling.  He would have been sympathetic when I explained that the professor seems to want me to go about writing the paper using a different method than my own.  He would not have been interested in allowing me to indulge in a pity party, so I would have said something like "Well, at least I still have one more week of being able to say I never submitted a paper in grad school that I wasn't proud of."

I think the weather's nice in Portland today, so maybe he would have told me about the round of golf he got in this morning.  Or about how Connor and Caleb's baseball seasons are going.  Or he would have told me something about the A's.  Or maybe all of those things.

(An Archive of Feelings is a really smart book by Anne Cvetkovich.  I read it earlier this semester for class, and then I saw her give a lecture on campus about some archives of feeling she's been studying recently.  In the book she talks about various types of everyday trauma and the importance of looking at the archives left behind by those who experience that type of trauma.)