The Marvelous Misadventures of Ingrid Winter

Being well read is the foundation of culture.” I

Tired of being afraid of feeling all right in the event that not feeling so all right might be what created the magical shield that would protect me from things really going downhill, in which case doing fine would sadly open me up to all kinds of horrible and awful occurrences and experiences that the universe could decide to fling at me. “MOTHERFUCKING

Because I was scared. Scared of the past, of the future, of the other people, that love would end, that I would be alone, that death was something dreadful, and that I would never, ever, ever have a home. That

If only I could find my authentic self, make myself a moveable home that could let me exist.

Wisdom is better than folly, the way the light is better than the darkness.

Plus Bjørnar seemed to increasingly regard me more like an annoying lab partner than a life partner. It was like he was Bobby Simone and I was Andy Sipowicz in NYPD Blue. Before they became good friends. Or after Sipowicz became an unpleasant alcoholic again. And before Simone found out that Sipowicz had been making out with Russians. My

You are a sparrow,” he said. “You use up your energy from one moment to the next. On folly. On fear. On people who don’t mean anything. What are you looking for?” I cried even harder, but at the same time I began to feel irritated. He didn’t even know me, for Pete’s sake. And if I was going to be compared to a bird, it certainly

Partially because right at this moment, in this brief instant in the infinitely long time span of the universe, I didn’t feel scared, but angry. Which in turn scared me even more since I remembered the end of Star Wars Episode VI and knew that anger is a step toward the dark side, which made me even angrier. Because I was also tired of movies scaring me. Tired of worrying that someday I would wake up in a Matrix pod. Tired of remaining vigilant, on the lookout for men who might be walking around wanting to make a woman suit out of my skin. Tired of being afraid of suddenly realizing that for years I’d been repressing the murder of my family. Tired

We were standing in front of Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son, and I stared at it blankly. Looking at a father who believed he had lost his child forever. At a son, who finally found himself, in a space where he could raise his arms and stretch them into the air and feel free. We all make the world. My eyes filled with tears, until I could no longer see the son hugging his father tightly or the father receiving the son and saying that everything was OK. Now you know who you are. Now you have a center. “I

Associate Professor Winter, are you perhaps an amateur? (Again.)   To be completely honest, all this was nothing compared to the main thrust of my paper, the subject I had spent countless years writing my dissertation on: Tehom. “The Great Deep,” which can also mean “abyss, sea” or “to agitate, destroy, confuse.” It comes up right at the beginning of the Bible, as early as verse two. When the earth is a wasteland and a void, and darkness lies over the deep, over Tehom. Because the Spirit of God may have moved over the formless earth, a void. But there was something that wasn’t empty. Something that was already there. Something that either comes ex nihilo or that is ex nihilo per se. Which rests there as itself, in complete darkness. Which has always rested there, and which is resting there still. Which slumbers. Waiting. Waiting for chaos or nothingness to take over again. There is no time in Tehom. No order. No sense of good or evil. There is only Tehom. And it is the scariest thing in the whole world. I

examining the inherently gendered nature of epistemology and deconstructing and reconceptualizing the materiality of sexual difference.

Though the conference I’d received a grant to attend was still a few months off, it was already starting to bug me. The plane could crash. I could be raped and murdered. I could get stress cancer from excessive dread beforehand. To put it succinctly, my life could be torn asunder. All in the attempt to score a few idiotic career advancement points with my department chair and a colleague who hardly knew what my name was and certainly had no idea what my research interests were.

I read books and try to think clever thoughts,

In the days leading up to the weekend, my suspicion was confirmed: the house we were living in now wasn’t a proper home. We

spats usually started as statements and accusations but quickly descended into a kind of barking. Variations of sounds that grated on the bone structures in my cranium, continually weakening it and rendering it less impervious to diseases and madness. The