Grasping at straws in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

I've just been reading very different texts about and by oceans: an article about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and a novel by Ocean Vuong. The Garbage Patch article will help me revise a scholarly article for publication, dealing with the way identity and narrative can be assembled from random flotsam circulating in unseen currents, while Ocean Vuong's novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous tackles a similar issue in fictional form. The novel is getting a lot of attention and raving reviews, but my response was mixed: I loved individual sentences, paragraphs, and chapters, along with the description of the parent/child relationship and the narrator's first experience of the world of work; however, I found the  totality underwhelming. It's possible, though, to enjoy individual waves without embracing the entire Ocean.

This, I think, is how my summer is going: waves of delightful moments interspersed with long periods of dullness. I might moan about mowing, but at least the task provides a shape to my days and offers measurable signs of progress. A week like this one, though, when the sun never comes out long enough to dry the grass and make it mowable, leaves me treading water in confusing currents. I do a little of this and a little of that, read an article, write some notes, catch up on e-mails, clean the bathroom, maybe read another article, circling and circling in the widening gyre surrounded by the flotsam and jetsam of a disordered existence with no immediate goal and no unobstructed route toward more distant goals.

Today I'm hanging desperately to the buoy of my Writing Wednesday group, which, unusually, is made up this week entirely of people within my own discipline. We're all working on something, all keeping our heads above water by keeping our fingers on the keyboard, and all offering occasional encouragement in the midst of the morass of academic publishing. Sometimes I need to finish something small just to gain a sense of progress before I'm swamped by the next wave of deadlines and distractions, and if all I can do is write a three-paragraph blog post, then at least that's something. But when this is done I'll be back to work on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, trying to grasp handfuls of passing flotsam and make some sense of the floating detritus.