~::Ongoing Thoughts::~

I have received some "good rejections" lately. Meaning, the editors have admitted that although they are not accepting my work right now, they like it overall. Most of them have named one or two poems which came real close. And and... all of them have asked me to submit more work. I am happy. This acknowledgement, however small it might be, makes me feel that I am not writing/reading in a vacuum. I am trying to keep the work-pace going. But this work of a writer is not easy.

For example, this week I am working on revising my "Portraits" poem. And it wasn't until the fifth revision/draft that the poem began to look like something presentable. Even then I know I might come back to it a couple of months later, and think "ehhh, is this all I could manage!" In other words, there is something very intangible, very ephemeral in the process of art production. The same can be argued for knowledge production. I can spend a year trying to perfect an article only to find that I need to do some more archival work to get a better sense of my foundational argument. To use a cliche, the work is never done.

On the other hand, when I am cooking, cleaning, taking care of the housework, running errands, there is a very finite quality to these chores. I take care of them one by one. I feel done. Accomplished. It is very easy to distract oneself with housework and some such shit when I am confronting that ephemeral non-doneness in my more creative/critical work. I have heard a lot of women talk about how they use housework as a form of pro-castination. Being someone who isn't too drawn to housework beyond the imperatives of hygiene, I could never really understand that mentality until very recently. But it also makes me think ,if a lot of it has to do with internalizing the gendered norms/dominant philosophies of the world around us. The tradition "women's work" have always been more tangible, finite in nature.On the other hand, boys and men are socialized to gravitate towards work which require more abstraction of mind. This, to me, seems like one of the foundational philosophies of the gendered division of labor. Interestingly, even when women moved out of their homes into the public world of commodified production, the kinds of work in which they concentrated were/are the ones which are relatively finite and tangible in nature. Which make use of the skills they would pick up while learning to run a home swiftly. Like that of a secretary. That's why, women's participation in knowledge and art production, even today, brings up so many different kinds of anxieties, both in women themselves and those around them.