Harder Days

I remember pretty clearly the smell of kindergarten. And the feel of it too. How that time period felt inside of me and me inside of it.

I remember the newness of my life, how I felt that I was at the beginning of something long and hard. There was a lot of anxiety for me over anything unfamiliar. I remember that being with all of those other stranger-kids, lining up to go to the big cafeteria that smelled of french fries and dinner rolls, was uncomfortable.

I remember always being bored in class. My legs and arms would get itchy and prickly from being still for too long. The only parts I could lose myself in involved counting or writing.

I remember how much I hated to get up in the morning when it was still dark and cold. How it felt like stealing away in the night and how it frightened me.

And today I realized: nothing has changed.

 

[both paintings by Tom French, via] 

Two years ago today I wrote:

Had a dream I was in the wilderness, cut down the middle with an ice-river, searching for my lost tribe. Found trinkets in the water left like clues. Knelt down to pray, my heart shining like a badge.

Today, this year, I read about a Japanese artist, born in 1929. When she was small, she was abused by her mother and began hallucinating patterns on everything she saw. This grew into a huge body of artistic work, and she is now considered the greatest artist of Japan. She now lives, by choice, in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo. Hm.

Today is my last day of work 'til I'm off for ten days. Monday: camping for three nights. Friday: the coast for my cousin's wedding for two nights. Yeah!

Fuckin' I can't find a nice image to accompany my entries lately. WTF.

Mondays are stupid.

Sometimes my general confidence in life plummets.


[Via.]

I haven't smoked a cigarette in a long time! Longest ever, in fact! Good for me.

I don't notice any difference, really, like they all said I would, except I can climb stairs without getting as winded and I think my sense of smell is better but it's too hard to tell. I smoked my first cigarette at the tender age of 11 (sorry, Mom!) and quit at 29. Gosh now! That is too long. I hope my lungs can forgive me.

I had another dream again about her dying. I wonder when I will not dream of this anymore. She probably doesn't know and she probably doesn't care or deserve to.

She died and we had to go looking through her things, clean out her house, all of us sort-of relieved because this meant the worry was over. All of us also dead, a little bit, from grief. Hearts painfully dipping low low low. Revisiting memories of blonde-headed happiness, so many many many years ago, because finally we could think of her that way again.

Sometimes in the morning, I shake the low-hearted feeling by breakfast. Sometimes it sticks around all day, a lazy pallbearer late on taking the casket away.

Flirting with 30

On Tuesday I turn 30! Seems to me that this means I'm officially a grown-up now with grown-up expectations. Eep! I think I'll take this opportunity to get more serious about the things I need to get more serious about.

Like...making great tacos and learning how to swim well and hemming my own pants instead of paying a nice lady $13 a pair to do it.

Yes sir, 30 is going to be a good year.

Kurt Vonnegut said this, about writing, and I really like it:

The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was Conrad's third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench. In some of the more remote hollows of Appalachia, children still grow up hearing songs and locutions of Elizabethan times. Yes, and many Americans grow up hearing a language other than English, or an English dialect a majority of Americans cannot understand. All these varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varieties of butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens to not be standard English, and if it shows itself when your write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue. [Via]

 Aw, gosh, ain't he right! I, myself, have a written voice stuck firmly in rurally northwestern America, brewed by the patrons of my parents' restaurant.

"Workers become autonomous, self-realized human beings, but are directed and diverted into goals and activities dictated by the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production in order to extract from workers the maximal amount of surplus value possible within the current state of competition between industrialists." (Via)

Allllllright! We're ten weeks away from vacation-week, everybody! The Dear Boy and I booked a yurt for three nights and, oh boy, I am so excited! The yurt is in the lovely Valley of the Rogue State Park (sounds adventurous, doesn't it?) in southern Oregon. It's on the Rogue River and I see many happy swimmin'-time memories being made. Other than that, I will close out vacation-week with my cousin's wedding on the coast. Yippy skippy! Getting closer and closer.

Also on the agenda, this weekend is a three-day weekend and mine and the Dear Boy's two year anniversary! My goodness. Many good things to look forward to.

Over the weekend I watched Howl, that biographical movie about Allen Ginsberg. I discovered Ginsberg in high school and liked his poems very much. They seemed easy for me to relate to, and written plainly. I never knew about the court case aimed to determine whether his book Howl was obscene. The movie was done very well, James Franco did a stand-up job and the animation sequences were very creative.

It got me thinking about the beatniks and the hipsters of the 50s. It was a time when many, many more young people wrote. Much more than now, I think. Now, everyone is in a band. I guess I should feel okay about writing becoming less popular because, you know, small pond, but it is a bit too bad. It might be nice to have a circle of friends that are all plugging away at the same restless hobby as I am. Maybe because it is my hobby, I imagine round tables at quiet coffee shops, inspiration taken away from people I admire and know quite well. Better than gazing at author photos, maybe. More productive, certainly.

What I've Learned, Part 4.5

It was said to me, at the beginning of this journey, that recovery is a long road and it never ends. That remains true, except it's not "recovery" I focus on anymore (like riding a bike, I do it now without thinking), it's more a thing like self-improvement. Financial responsibility, productivity, follow-through, you know. Being nice. Being good.

As always, for lessons successfully learned the hard way, I have very many to thank:

-Difficult situations help you learn.
-Time will help a fresh hurt.
-Nothing is permanent and everything changes.

Happy four and a half years to me!

Kindle Tinder

So I did something exciting today! I put ten of my short stories together (these ones, actually: pdxcreate.com/storiesforhumans) to make an e-book for sale on Amazon's Kindle Store for $4.99! I made a cover and everything!

Very exciting but I know I will have to tweak many things (price and description, probably, to start) before I've got the handle of this e-book self-publishing business. I tried to match the price of other short-story books but I read today that many different factors play into what people will pay for a Kindle title.

Yeah! Productivity! It'll be ready for purchase in 24 hours, y'all, get them credit cards ready.

And, yes, in other writing news, I am still working on the novella. Over halfway done now. Re-working the outline, as needed. Waiting patiently for breezes of inspiration.

Yes please. Via.

Via.

I'm sorry but your clothing line was not inspired by "stars, navigating bodies of water, and studying geometric shapes found in shadows." Stop being so shallow.

Days with lots of reminders of how different I feel from other humans are hard. Maybe it's this way for everyone. I'm not sure. Someone told me today that I learned how to be alone pretty early on because I learned that most people will eventually irritate/disappoint me. I also learned today that I have pretty good patience sometimes for people who are too stupid to listen to what I'm saying.

Seems sad, don't it? Sho nuff do.

Talent and Writing

THIRTEEN weeks 'til vacation week. Hoooooo...

Last night I had a dream in which I was wandering alone around a large tract of land.

Thirteen weeks will go by lickety-split, right? Thirteen, twelve, eleven, ten, nine...



I've been thinking lately about talent. It's interesting to me that some people get into things, like ballet, when they are very small and are able to maintain the drive and focus it takes to be very good at it as an adult. Drawing portraits, writing poetry, playing the flute, ice-skating. I wonder if it takes a lot of pushing from other people. I wonder what it takes.

My own interests have waned and waxed during my life. I think that writing has been my most solid area, though. It's not that I have a noticeable drive to be successful at it, I just do it all the time like a compulsion. Phrases and words float around my mind for days until I put them into a paragraph. I look up nearly every word that I am unsure of when I come across a new one while reading. My brain systematically spells out longer words when I hear them in speech. I re-phrase what people say.



I have also been thinking about talent without audience. The link between being a writer and being a famous writer seems to be muddled in things like marketing and being in the right place at the right time. One can no longer gauge their work's success by receipt. It doesn't matter how much you write or what you write about. That's fine, I guess. I am happy to use what I know for naught. It keeps me in pleasure just to write it down.

Of course, everyone imagines what it would be like if their name held heavy weight. Luminaries, all of us! But you have to ask yourself, is admiration where value lies?



Probably not. As much of a misanthrope as I am, probably not. And aren't most writers, anyway? It's how we silently catalog the experience of being human. How we put intangible emotions into words. We can't relate so we write.

(All photos by Stephen A. Scheer, who said, "It is our deficiency if we cannot explain something that we can see." Via.)

Okay, you guys, the time has come. I knew it would but I didn't want to believe it. Skinny jeans are on their way out. Flared (!) pants are back. I know. I know! It's awful. It goes against everything my eyes perceive to be good.

Haha, just kidding, y'all. Hell on that. Small problems. But! I've been seeing really great 70s-inspired, high-waisted, flared jeans on very stylish ladies for a while now and decided to order some of my own. They'll get here Wednesday. We shall see.

I am excited. I am even more excited about this three-day-weekend coming up, though. I'm gonna eat lots of yummy home-cooked food and play board games and hike my little legs off. Love!


Via.

Today I love Jane Fonda in Cat Ballou.


Via.

Disrespect. It's a crummy feeling, isn't it? I just bashed into someone while getting up from my desk because he was standing very closely behind my chair while talking to someone else. I said, "Oh! Sorry!" He didn't say a word or move an inch so I had to squeeeeeeeeze out of my chair. It's like I do not exist at all. Hmmph. Monday.

By: Marta Antelo, via.