Scarf

The other day a package arrived in the mail--a scarf from my friend Penny in Australia. Penny taught me how to knit (you may remember this largely fictionalized account). The real story is this:

When I lived in Perth, Dan (then boyfriend) and I lived next to a perpetually drunk, very hairy guy named James. Late one night James and his friends got into a fight outside his door. Dan called the cops, who would take forever to show up, and he wanted to get me out of there because it was clearly getting dangerous—multiple drunk men in a total brawl. Dan had his big-bouncer friend to come over. It was especially scary because we had to cross James’ door to get down the stairs. When the coast was clear, I ran out and down the steps to Penny’s car and Bouncer-Friend ran up to stay with Dan.

Dan and Tiny waited inside for the cops to come. I went to Penny’s and worried about them, and Penny didn’t know what the hell to do with me, so she gave me a couple drinks and tried to teach me to knit.

It was calming in a way that only a woman-bond can be in times of trouble. I’ve struggled with some women-friendships lately, but when it comes down to it, nothing on Earth comes close to female-female friendship. Maybe talking the bond sounds cliché, but… there’s something about it that is insanely powerful, beyond words and vital to all humanity. We get each other on some intangible wavelength. We piss one another off. We forgive. We have fun. As crazy (crazy-good and crazy-bad) women can be, there’s something esoteric and healing going on.

There’s also something to knitting—the ritual of it—that is healing. Mind you, I don’t like knitting at all. I suck at it, I have no patience and have no interest in reigning in my fire-y distain for needle-crafts long enough to get a cool sweater out of the deal. But I get why people do it. There’s something really important about repetitive action, especially combined with creativity, that gives it merit. It’s unfortunate that I have no patience for detail and always end up chucking the whole yarny mess out the window.

In my creative process class, we learned that the mind does its best work when the part of the brain that manages tasks is occupied. This is exactly why we have our best ideas when we’re showering, when we wash dishes, when we’re walking. This is why Einstein came up with E=MC2 when he was shaving. This is why you think of Olivia Newton John’s name when you’re brushing your teeth instead of when you’re on the spot during a heated game of Trivial Pursuit. (Totally happened.)

Back to the story: The cops came and hauled off the neighbor and his belligerent friends. Dan and his friend were unharmed and came to pick me up the next morning. Penny and I became even better friends after that.

Penny finished knitting the scarf she started that night and then she mailed it to me…. in winter of 2003. It arrived four and a half years after she mailed it.

Things with a couple troubled friendships are going well--good conversations are happening and it’ll be fine. In the middle of the difficulty, though, out of nowhere, Penny’s scarf arrived in my mailbox. If that’s not the Universe sending me a big reminder about how worth it it is to work things out, well, I don’t know what is.

Narrow stairways. Crowds of strangers.

My sweetheart and I had a hot date last night. We dressed up all squeaky clean and I wore my smokin’ red heels and a dress—‘tis the season to wear a dress without freezing. And my darling: oh, he’s such a handsome devil. We ate a fancy dinner and went to see Merchant of Venice at the Guthrie. In the middle of the first act, bright lights started flashing like camera bulbs. It was the part where Portia’s first suitor opens the golden casket and is told he has to get out, so we thought it was some weird part of the play—like the flashing lights was Portia’s security system or something? I’m not sure what we thought—the actors got all weird and then a nice lady told us that there was a fire and we all had to leave.

Let me tell you—all eight million audience members had plenty of time on the slow saunter down five stories of narrow stairway to absorb the reality that life can, indeed, change in a matter of moments. A few fire trucks showed up a while later and firemen dashed inside as they do and a while later the staff waved us all back inside. I don’t know if it was a grease fire or a bomb threat or a malfunction of the alarm system or what—but I can tell you, if it would’ve been real, things would’ve been ugly.

What I found interesting was eavesdropping on other people's conversations. Some of them went like this "Well, we're going to get out of here so late now. What and inconvenience. Do you think they'll refund our tickets? Our night has just taken a turn for the worse, blah blah blah." And other conversations went something like this: "I'm so thankful that it was a false alarm. Wow--they're getting things back on track quickly. Thank God the sprinkler system didn't go off--this could've been a lot worse." I don't know--it just puts things in perspective. We expect things to go predictably, and sometimes they don't. And when they don't, do I want to be one of the "This sucks!" people or one of the "At least we're not dead." people.

Baseball and Champagne

Garrison Keillor said when you’re feeling crappy because you sent your work out into the world and it was rejected, you ought to think about writing like baseball: Playing is way more satisfying than the outcome, and to play is to accept that sometimes you’ll lose the game.

A totally cliché analogy that won’t make anyone feel better, but true. Luckily, my motivation to write is my love for writing and my desire to get better. To me, that's payoff enough to continue, day-to-day, and getting a book published is definitely cause champagne and hoopla. I volunteered at Tin House for a while, and I’ve seen the stacks of unsolicited manuscripts. The acceptance rate for this industry is unfortunate, but rather out of my hands.

There’s something really important, though, about sending work out the door regardless if its likely fate. I agree with a writing prof who said that when you give the proverbial carrier pigeon your envelope, now it’s the pigeon’s problem. I have permission to let it go.

My struggle isn’t so much with outside response as internal urges to keep changing my work. I’ll make myself nuts if I don’t just stop sometimes. Declaring something finished and getting it out into the world feels really healthy, as though I accept any imperfections it may still have. Releasing it frees me up somehow--there’s a sense of flow, as if sending one thing away clears my space for a new work to start to grow. And… I know I can always go back later and change it if I can’t resist.

Swans are ghosts on jade black water

I’m handing in 25 poems tonight for workshop. Because I’m so intimate with them (and have gotten so little feedback), I have no clue how they look from an outside perspective. Some of them are experiments and just weird. Some of them I’ve revised, overwritten, underwritten, chopped and re-arranged so many times that I don’t even know if they make sense anymore. Some of them feel done, but you never know.

Now they’ll go into the hands of 13 peers to scribble all over and critique next week in class while I sit there silent. This makes most people nervous. It doesn’t make me nervous.

My school deserves credit for having no tolerance for assholes who speak disrespectfully or get aggressive during critique. For those of your in MFA programs that get off on stomping on the heads of others to climb to the top of the Big-Cool-Writer-Ego-Ladder, God help you. Creativity and ego are intimately tangled, and workshop is not a place for power struggles.

Maybe it would’ve been scary at an earlier time in my life. I’m glad I waited to go to grad school until I was grounded enough in my work (but not inflexible at all) to know what criticism to take and what to leave. If someone can justify a critical comment, especially if they can offer suggestions, awesome. I accept.

I’m mature enough to sniff out a remark intended to squash an ego for the sake of overpowering. And when someone has something constructive to say about my work, it’s not an insult. I am new at writing. I have a lot to learn. If it’s going to make me better, then good. But, I’m also decent at this. After several years of working my ass off at it, I get to say that. I know some of what I’m doing (but still have a ton to learn), so if you tell me to use passive voice or more adverbs, or of you swoon over a poem of mine that has no backbone or sloppy lines, I’m not going to listen to you.

I wrote a poem that my instructor hates. She thinks I need to give more character development, more detail and more explanation. (Over explained poems are the worst.) She said she didn’t understand what I was trying to do. But she doesn’t have to understand what I’m trying to do.

I think she’s wrong. It’s all there if the reader does a little work for it, and I made deliberate choices that I can defend. The poem is done: literally and intuitively. I told her disagree and I wouldn’t be changing it. She said what any good writer would: Okay, it’s your poem, you explained your choices. I respect that.

I showed the same piece to my thesis advisor and my friend, L. and without mentioning my instructor’s comments about it, both of them loved it. Had everyone I showed it to had a similar difficulty with it, I’d have to reconsider revising it. Because that wasn’t the case, I’m not gonna. I love that poem. No one else has to. But some of them do, and one of them doesn’t. No only am I okay with not pleasing everyone, even the published ones, I’m happy that I’m able to disagree and stick by what feels right to me.

You know what's awesome?

I'll tell you what's awesome: When people at work go to a four-hour long meeting and leave their cell phone on their desk without having bothered to turn off the ringer, so that when their kids call from school it plays "Since you've been gone" by Kelly Clarkston (woo-hoo American Idol!) really loudly, then when no one answers, they call again from their own cell phone and it rings again right away, only now it's Shania Twain (woo-hoo country!). And you know what else is awesome? The new Verizon phones that beep and beep and beep every time someone calls until the phone's cleared. Not that IIII've ever done this (a little ACDC anyone?), or yelled at the femur guy (remember the femur guy?) for having programmed every chick in his little black book to ring "She's my cherry pie" and vibrate at the same time (nice). Apparently he's very popular.

On the bright side, at least we're not stuck in here with, like, mimeographs and typewriters and one single rotary phone for the whole building. Man, that would suck.

The solution? Muskets.

The constitution says we should all be able to own arms. Lots and lots of people don’t want to change that. Now that we have semi-automatics, and automatics, and handguns, and modern hunting gear (The deer population! We can’t let the deer population get out of control! Newsflash: School shootings are out of control), some people feel that changing the constitutional right to bear arms will threaten their freedom.

Okay then.

I’ll refrain from the strong urge to launch into a tirade about how the issue is so much more complex than gun control—it’s that our culture is SICK, and until we get our heads straight and stop sensationalizing violence and being nasty aggressive bullies, and until we stop allowing our politicians and media to control us with terrorized fear, we don’t have a screaming chance in hell of getting better.

I digress: Since the guys who wrote the constitution meant that people had the right to carry muskets and big-old gunpowdery-takes-a-half-hour-to-load-one-bullet guns, to generally be used for such things like slaying dinner or killing an occasional rabid bear in one’s yard, lets stick with that. Guns can be legal—as long as they’re all guns from 1776.

For my feminist friend who swears Italy is the center of the Universe:

Once I was in Love in Italy

We walked five villages.

In Riomaggiore we ate ice cream sweetened
with fruit from a cactus.

In Manarola our bed was
a large yellow rose.

In Corniglia I said come here,
and kiss me like this.

In Vernazza we found a crumbling church
on a sea cliff. We thought of the future
though we would not last
the journey home.

In Monterosso al Mare, you picked a red fruit
from a cactus with yellow flowers.

How sweet.
How tender.
How swollen with seeds.

On the train back to Rome I tweezed prickles
from your lips and tongue.
You plucked the same from mine.

So hair-like

So soft

So nothing to taste.

How sharp they were,
how impossible to remove, the needles.

Diagnosis: Batty

Description:
The preparation of a pre-thesis poetry manuscript under a tight deadline may result in patients presenting with increased symptomatic anxiety during the last month of the semester. Subjects should be further assessed by psychological examination. Indications for medical intervention include a permanent glazed over look of the eyeballs, incessant bitching about how much “crap” one has to do, signs of sleep deprivation such as giant, dark sandbags under eyes, and marked irritability toward uninvolved subjects (dry cleaner, boyfriend, imaginary characters on television, etc.).



Complications and Adverse Effects:
Untreated subjects may be highly susceptible to the following behaviors and outcomes:

• Blurting obscenities at inappropriate times (followed by uncontrollable sobbing)
  
• Eating Folgers Crystals directly out of the can while smoking a pack of cigarettes
  
• Sneaking away in the night to live in a cabin deep in the hills of West Virginia
  
• Bursting into flame
  
• Exclamations that one should’ve just married the rich ex-boyfriend and skipped grad school altogether even though he’s a goon
  
• Persistent requests for a partial lobotomy of the frontal lobe, with the desired result of not caring about deep or intellectual endeavors, one’s calling to the writer’s life, coupled with an expressed desire to be content with a career as a plumber.
  
• Plans to conspire to plagiarize poems from various obscure and brilliant writers from rural Uganda, justified by terse remarks such as “No one will ever know. You won’t tell, [pauses, glares, blows cigarette smoke in your face] will you?”

Treatment Options
The patient should be informed of involved risks upon declination of treatment, such as failing out of grad school or being thrown in the slammer for plagiarism. Patients who have taken up smoking, eating coffee grounds or have re-united with Mr. Goon should be strongly urged to immediately discontinue behavior, as these events significantly decrease success rates. Upon assessment of the patient’s condition, a support network for the patient should be contacted immediately.

Proposed treatment options should be completed in conjunction with the patient’s assigned support team, and include the following (based on the results of the medical professional’s assessment):

• Re-arrange patient’s schedule so he or she gets more than 4 hours of sleep per night.
  
• Remove caffeinated beverages and tobacco products from the patient’s living environment.
  
• Reassure the patient that while it does not pay to procrastinate, there is plenty of time to generate enough creative energy to come up with material that doesn’t “totally suck.”
  
• Encourage the patient to ambulate as tolerated; fresh air and exercise will help regulate breathing and decrease the desire to scream.
  
• Make a massage appointment for the patient.

Warnings:
Instability may persist, degenerating remaining motivation. If this occurs, take him or her to readings of other fabulous, admirable poets to remind her that she will be really good someday and that she can watch all the TV and do all the mindless activities she wants over the summer. Especially severe cases may require an intervention involving Red Wine Treatment. Tell her her poetry is amazing and that she will find success with her work. If she refutes, citing the insanely low statistical support for this claim, feed her more wine until she agrees with you.

Follow-up

I’ve been charting everything that I consume for a week now. My diet and exercise is pretty decent over the work week when life’s structured and such. The weekends: I’m screwed. I was all right on track with the math of what I burn vs. what I eat until we went to happy hour Friday night (hello, nacho cheese dip!).

I’ve been trying to be careful and smart, but I’m still eating lots—just more high-quality deliciousness. Let me pause to say I wasn’t really that bad to begin with—I joke about the beer and fries, but I’m a fairly healthy eater from a high-metabolism/nutritionally conscious family and moderately atheletic. I'm doing all this because I'm curious about my habits and want to be even healthier.

My company’s notorious for using Dilly Bars to lure us into meetings so we’ll sit there and listen to them talk about strategic forecasting. Done with that. I’ve chopped my fatty/calorie intake by a ton. The two surprising things are that a) If its not around, I won’t eat it. If it is around, I probably will. And b) I was never hungry and I didn’t crave anything thing. Before now, I'll occasionally have days where I feel like I’ve got a tape worm or something—like munching on something all day, never totally satiated and just want something more. That’s not happening so far, knock on wood. I think I feel more full than before because nothing I eat is just filler.

So yesterday, I felt like a couple bites of dessert, so I had a little left-over afore-mentioned tiramisu, and woah, people. Holy knee-melting ecstasy. Because I’m not eating much refined sugar, it took almost nothing to feel like more than enough.

Otherwise, my energy levels have been lowering around 10 PM instead of 11 PM. It could be my body adjusting, but it could also be my life right now. Yesterday went something like this: Work 4 hours, Jog 3 miles, Work 4 hours, Eat dinner, Do 4 hours of homework, crash. Probably has something more to do with that.

After tonight I have three required classes left for the rest of my natural life. If I ever come back and whine about how much I miss class, remind me how totally unbelievably freaking happy I am to be DONE with that. I’m so ready.

And on a lighter note:

SA and I went to my new place to check it out, and I'm all jazzed to decorate. I want to paint, but I want to keep it light so it doesn't make the rooms look smaller. I also don't want it to look too girly. I'm really into light, sky blue right now. Here are the ideas I have for the bedroom, with white being dominant (think sky: white with light blue with accents of the other stuff).

I'm not so sure about the dark brown for the wood--I might want to get all white furniture. I dunno.


Next: Kitchen--I'm thinking a really, really light peach/tangerine tinted paint with green-apple accents. It a rebellion against the overdone yellow kitchen. However, I'm also thinking about painting the kitchen RED. Check out these:

Finally, b/c there's a big archway between living room and kitchen, I think I'll go with dark wood furniture, lots of bookshelves, a cool funky rug and a straw colored couch, with the following color theme.

Bathroom: White walls with giant bright green fern leaf stencils, perhaps accented with a dark plum.


I went to the Galleria today to look for ideas. They had many cool things--lots of really unique patterned stuff and some beautiful antique couches. (Although I wouldn't buy an antique couch because they look really uncomfortabale and couches are meant to be super-duper-uber-comfy.) I'm most certainly not going to buy one of the cool $250 pillows I saw there, rather, I'm going to take the ideas to a knock-off place and get fabric and paint and stuff and make my own. Aren't I crafty? Maybe I can sew curtains and stain shelving and paint dressers and make my own custom wine rack and a really funky shower curtain!


Eh, screw it. Maybe I'll just paint and decorate the whole thing this color:

This Is Our Job

These are the times we live in. Wherever you are (literally, and figuratively, as in, you are the only one with your perspective) is your Place.

Our global relationships with one another—not so healthy. When people on our planet are starving or killing one another: it is our problem. Every human being on earth regardless of tribe or location—participates in global transactions and the global psyche. I believe some serious shifts must to happen before healing can take place. It isn’t a matter of taking away guns or dropping off food or anything simple whatsoever—it’s a complete shift in functionality and belief systems that is what will change choices and actions. Away from division and toward unity, away from blame and into responsibility, away from greed and toward the common good, to totally over simplify.

We all participate in global activity and can all do something. So: What can we do? What are you going to do?

I’m going to write. I’m in my life with my perspective and having something to offer that is unique because of that. I’m an American female, and Americans are engaged in a war supposedly to protect us from terror, and we’re murdering each other.

I won’t go on and on (and on) about the terror or global deprivation America causes, and the deep festering psychological wounds that fuel it. You can all read newspapers and think things through and form your own opinions on both the good and bad impact of our country on the rest of the world and on ourselves. My point here is that I (we) have a choice to either ignore it and go about my daily life, because literally, it’s unaffected by 32 people being randomly murdered, or I can think of how I can use my calling to leave an imprint on history that hopefully—hopefully!—the souls of the future can learn from.

We pay a price for having asked nothing of history except its disappearance.

In the present, we can think, How can I honor this so that I ask more of it than its disappearance?

I know I have war poems inside, and I have something to say about domestic abuse, and I have something to say about extreme violence. I know that I’m not interested in giving romanticized fame and attention to tragedy or to terrorists. I know I also have something to say about those of us who work to for positive change and non-violent resolution.

My job as a contemporary writer is how to say that—knowing what to say and how to say it in a way that makes the appropriate impact. There are a lot of war poems out there, and few of them are successful. As for media writing, most of it undermines any movement we make toward a healthy mentality and positive change.

I believe withholding and withdrawing is a form of neglect, denial, punishment and control. To run one's life solely for his or her own benefit is withholding and withdrawing resources, and contributing to the problem.

Letting horrors of the world overrule the positive in one’s life is also wrong (and disempowering). I’ll honor and love the good. But I’m also going to make sure that I use my empowerment to do something other than enjoy my level of comfort, even though that’s not the easiest and most comfortable thing to do. That is the job of every person who has enough food and shelter and an education, I believe.

What do you have to say that no one else does? What are you going to contribute?

*img: Edge of the Orion Nebula

Anger: a strong feeling of displeasure and belligerence aroused by a wrong; wrath; ire.

Man, I’m turning into an angry little person. You know those grumpy old assholes who deliberately cut people off or bark at waitresses or glare at small children for doing nothing more than acting like children, and everyone else in the room thinks “Daaaaamn, what the hell turned you into a bitter old bastard.” Right now, that’s me.

For some reason, over the course of the last couple months several of my otherwise rational, mature, lovely chick friends have regressed to the sixth grade. Because the friends are from totally unrelated circles, I’m beginning to think Invasion of the Body Snatchers was possibly a brilliant work of futuristic foreshadowing from which we all should’ve all taken heed, and that the aliens are slowly making their way from New York (with a nice long rest in Minnesota) to California beginning by kidnapping 30-year-old women and locking them in a hidden spacecraft while a new, identical alien version of them grows into maturity inside a big pea-pod. And when they hatch from the pea-pod, the alien-them begins their mission to take over the world by acting cliquey, manipulative and just like someone’s passive-aggressive mother-in-law.

I’m not sure if I should scream What the Fuck is Your Fucking Problem at the top of my lungs, or if I should go get a massage and drink too much wine to get myself to chill out or if I should do some Zenny meditations identify and address the root-cause of the negative energy circulating in my life right now or if I should be frantically searching underground passages for a hidden space vessel in which my friends are trapped, moments from being shipped to Neptune.

Anyway: I assume they’ll get over it enough to have a mature heart-to-heart and that I’ll get over it enough not to want to throw plates at the wall (ohhhhh that would be so satisfying) and it’ll all work out, but right now, I should be wearing a cape and mask and a leotard that has “Agro Girl” printed across the front.

It’s not just that, it’s also taxes. I shouldn’t bitch because I’m getting a refund—enough for a new couch and all the stuff I need to paint my new place. Yeah! But I loathe such paperwork. It frustrates me beyond comprehension. This year I did some freelance work and had 3 jobs and was doing fairly well with the paperwork until the end: there was still one box that needed some code in it, and I had no code. I didn’t know what it wanted. I called my awesome Dad and he didn’t know, and after digging and digging through books and help-menus online and all that insanity, I found what might be the correct code, but I’m not sure. Holy Christ—what a pain in the ass.

Let’s begin my half-hearted attempt at calming myself down by listing things that do not suck right now:

Tax Refunds
My most patient and handsome and freakin’ hilarious significant other
Getting breakfast at French Meadow with the awesome Voix
The totally awesome crowd of friends I went to the Twins game with this weekend, where the Twins kicked some serious ass
Bike rides around Lake of the Isles
My tax-expert papa
All the prolific writing I’ve done and the many books I’m reading
Having a super cool new apartment and the resources to paint it up and buy groovy furniture
All the awesome friends who offered to help me paint, shop and lug boxes
Lastly, and I must say that my hair has been quite cooperative lately.

There. How’s that for a positive attitude?
(PHHHHT.)

Clearing the Deck

So, I’m lying in bed last night thinking about pre-sleep stuff. When I go to bed I often do a mental exercise I call Clearing the Deck. I imagine I’m lying on the deck of a boat surrounded by all the the stuff going on in my life—conflicts, tasks, work, plans, happy stuff, events, to-do lists, dramas, successes, all the stuff that runs through your mind before sleep.

I mentally review things that need attention and examine them. Then, I imagine the Big Sweep. I picture a giant broom sweeping it all overboard so for now, I can free of it. Then I picture myself all clear and unburdened and open and light and I make a conscious intention to be receptive to new thoughts that float up.

Last night when I was at this place, I felt a strong presence of my Uncle Dick who died when I was in college, like he was there saying that he’s around. It felt like he’s wanted me to know he's proud of me for my writing and poetry and wanted me to know. I haven’t felt him around in a long time. It felt warming.

Uncle Dick was a wandering, free spirit and totally exotic to me growing up. He brought hummus to our house, which was, well, not meatloaf—WOW hummus!—and drank gin and told jokes so dirty I didn’t get them. He sometimes exclaimed in German he remembered from the war and he let me wear his sailor's hat. Later, when I'd get home from dates way too late, he'd wait up for me to ask all about it and give me a hug before bed. When I was in college we wrote letters and his handwriting was big and pointy like it’d been written with the tip of a conductor’s wand. Then he died.

When I lived in Oregon, my mother sent me a big folder of his poems and letters. I had no idea that he even wrote poetry--I think he kept it all private. It was informal; I remember a love poem he wrote on a scrap of paper while waiting for a lover at the airport.

I suppose I’d made the connection before between Uncle Dick and my poetry—that these are some of the genes that fuel my fire. I’m one of the only ones in my family who doesn’t live within a 10 mile radius of our hometown, who is rather fearless, certainly the only writer. Now I see where I may have gotten these genes. I haven’t thought of his presence in a while, there once I cleared the deck and opened myself up, Uncle Dick floated in to let me know that, as I work on this collection and dive into my work and try to let myself be a channel to a greater thing, he’s around.

Slurp.

So, I’m trying to morph into a healthier person. I’m not terribly unhealthy now—and while I wouldn’t mind fitting into the teeny black pants I bought in Paris in college, this isn’t really an effort to lose weight. I want to be fit. Rowing season is around the corner and if I don’t get my shit together it’s going to kick my ass.

Did I mention that the other day I out with my friend L and we had beer and French fries for dinner? It’s true. Beer. And fries. Okay, fine, and two vodka tonics but it was happy hour so shut up.*

I’ve decided to keep track of everything I eat so I can see where I need to make modifications. I need to get back into my routine of working out, of course, which will be easier now that it’s not SNOWING outside. And, this is a big one, I have to stop eating late at night. I doesn’t seem like the time the calories enter your body should matter, but having a light dinner early feels so much better in the morning.

I signed up for a website with a food journal, fitness log, a nutrition calculator and a water-consumption tracker. You just make a profile, you can set a goal if you want (gain, lose, maintain, whatever), and then you put in what you eat and it makes up a cool little chart telling you how much more or less of stuff you need (how many grams of protein you’ve had so far that day and how many more you should eat before the end of the day), taking workouts into account.

I’ve heard food diaries are smart—they make you conscious of what you eat and do, which can be enough to help you realize what you need more of or need to cut back on. We’ll see how it goes.

Meanwhile, since I started my profile yesterday after lunch, I’d already had about 8 million grams of fat for the day and needed to eat a really light dinner. In class, of course, people brought in chocolates and chips, and I did not cave. They passed around bon bons. I didn't cave. All three painful hours of class trapped next to chips and french onion dip, I did not cave. At last, I got to go home, away from the magnetic pull of the chocolates Then SA came over with a giant pan of creamy, choclatey tiramisu made by his awesome-cook mother and handed me a fork. Evil, evil little man.




*And the amount of Easter candy I've eaten in the past week is obscene.

The writer's life. Ain't it swank?

After my lovely day off yesterday, I'm reluctant to return to the cube. I crave the life that involves both good, interesting work and no formal office. Part of me wants to work from coffee shops and libraries and classrooms. It felt good just to write and revise and read and create my own day and get my creative stuff done. But… as nice as that kind of life is, sometimes it isn’t nice. I’ve had that life before, and I was afraid to change it, but I'm glad I did. It was often isolating. It’s hard to create and stick to my own daily structure. It was tough to make enough money. It just... was too much time for it.

I get way more writing done now that I have a full-time job. That seems backward, but it’s true. When I wasn’t working full-time, I was worried about money, which did me no favors, and there wasn’t the same kind of pressure to get the work done, so it was easier to procrastinate. There’s this idea of what the writer’s life should be--and if a person isn’t able to be in a situation where they have loads of time to write (the U of Iowa says 3+ hours daily), they’re not really dedicated.

I don’t think I’d ever, ever want a life (again) where my Main Job is to be a writer (or student-writer). There’s only so much creative energy a person can spend on that kind of work a week, and once it's drained, forcing yourself to keep being creative is self-destruction. My writing is best when its balanced out with non-creative-writing work. When I wrote too much, it soon felt just like going to the office minus the money. Kind of like Christmas every day—it loses its beauty and after a while, chocolate Santas aren’t awesome anymore.

My friends, the myth that “real” writers prove they are real by being so devoted to their craft and their path to success that they reject stuff like jobs, mediocre or otherwise, in the name of art, is a load of crap. There are allll kinds of valid, different ways to do life. It’s a very individual thing.

I guess, if I had my ideal situation (Universe? Hey, Universe! Are you listening?) I’d have some of both. Part of the time there’d be some structured career with responsibilities and someone to hold me accountable that includes a place to go to interact with folks and be involved in projects that are interesting but not the same things I work on in my creative life. Then there would be the creative life part, where I have flexibility and independence and get to follow whatever my intuition (or editor) says to work on.

I’m getting there. I actually like my office job (for once) and it’s a little bit flexible. I have days off (I’ll get paid for yesterday’s skip-day), I can work out of the office sometimes, I can go for walks or work out during the work day or come in from 10-6 one day and 7-4 the next. Still… there’s a career work/creative-work life balance that isn’t totally worked out there, and I’m not sure what to do to get it there.

Garden Level

I called in sick today. Yeah, sick of work! It’s fabulous: I’m in Nina’s Coffee Shop in St. Paul reading the amazingly helpful comments DK wrote on my most recent stack of poetry. She is not to be confused with my current professor, whose actual job it is to give me comments this semester. DK is my future thesis advisor, and is totally going above and beyond. Instead of giving her her own tiara and delivering fresh flowers to her house daily, which she deserves, I’ve given a donation to poets.org in her honor.

Next issue: I’m moving. My landlord’s a total kook and I’m totally sick of having no kitchen. I found a big cool place in a neighborhood that’s wedged in between 3 lakes, close enough to walk or bike to groovy urban stuff, but not in the heart of trend-o-rama hipsterville. However: It’s a garden-level apartment. Which means one could, if the curtains are up, walk straight up to the windows and look right in, or hell, swing one open and dive straight into my living room.

I just finished a book by a former professor on her rape and recovery. The rape happened, I learned, in a neighborhood very near to the one I’ll be in. The stats are there: A woman has more chance of being raped than she does of having her tonsils out. One in four women. One every six minutes. I’m generally conscious of this kind of thing, but the book (excellent book) renewed my bug-eyed scared-shitlessness and awakened (awoke?) my dormant rage against violence.

I want this apartment. It’s big and cute and there are nice neighbors and I’m within a stone’s throw of two little lake beaches. I won’t let fear drive me away from it, but you can bet your ass I’m going to get the landlord to install multiple window safety locks if she hasn’t already. Even so—the most disturbing thing is that there’s only so much a person can do—attacks happen on their way to the car at 7 a.m. They happen while boyfriends and children are home. Good locks get picked. All we can do is be as smart as we can and hope it isn’t us. Scary to relaize, yes, but also permission to surrender to the limits of what we can do.

I’m glad apartment hunting is done, anyway. The first few places I looked at smelled like cat pee.

It’s snowing in Saint Paul. It’s April—and this is weird even for us. But it’s beautiful. Big white flakes. It’ll be gone soon enough.

Some of DK’s comments on my work:

cool. fabulous. more than enough.
you could risk a couple moments
of smart, imaginistic self-portrait.
yes. yes. i see it like this.
be tough, abrupt, honest.
i love it as it is.
stanza could be a bit more fabulous.
maybe the “i” imagines what the lover is doing?
build to the finale.
this is done.
i think this is the end.
the end.

Why not

So, yeah. This week has been much less saturated with literary/poetry/writing/homework than last week was because I’ve been totally burnt out on that schtuff. We didn’t have class, and I actually got my prof to meet up with me to go over my work. Praise the Freakin’ Lord Almighty—I’ve been trying to get some attention from this woman all semester and she has no office hours. She keeps our work for weeks (And weeks! I still haven’t seen four of my poems I handed in forever ago. I’m beginning to think they’ve been sacrificed to the “junk in her car” gods.) and half the time when we get it back she either hasn’t looked at it or she just writes question marks on it. Hello, writing professor: Of all people, you should know how utterly useless it is for you to write a big “?” next to a poem.

The odd thing is, other times she’s right on. She’ll give helpful, solid feedback that we can actually use to revise and turn our stuff into a shining, moving piece of art. Then … with no warning, the helpful-professor-side goes back into hiding, and she returns to the confused, overwhelmed, incoherent self. Anyway: I didn’t mean for this to turn into a bitch-about-the-prof session. She’s… complicated, and going through some stuff that leads me to believe this is more likely about something being up with her, not mere incompetence. Anyway: I got feedback, I asked questions, she answered them, I had her explain some of her (non) comments, and it was the most worthwhile hour of my whole damn semester.

Eureeka. Moving on.

I’m still having weird dreams. This week’s winner is the one where I was on some Mexican island at an outdoor Mass with my two sisters, and Kirk Cameron (total Growing Pains era) was doling out the Eucharist while smoking a cigarette… which I desperately wanted a drag of, instead of the Eucharist. Ah, yes—dissect that one, friends!

A Call to Arms

Do Not be Silent

In the Epic of Gilgamesh,
Gilgamesh becomes a shadow of himself
because he is dead.
It’s an old story. It’s one of the first poems
of the first writings ever discovered.

King Hammurabi—
according cuneiform clay tablets
excavated from Mesopotamia—
declared that the gods charged him, as king,
with defending the poor and defenseless.

The greatest irony of
ancient tablets burned, crushed, looted
in the war with Iraq
(the oldest known evidence of human writing,
stories, poems, biographies,
lives, mathematics, economics, everything
ancient civilizations knew, cared about)
the oldest writings were laws
beginning with punishment for those
who brought false accusations.

The only weapons of mass destruction
destroyed in Iraq
were words.
Voices have been silenced.
Learn from them.

To my schoolmate who critiqued one of my poems and wrote “WHO?” next to my reference to Blake: THIS is Blake. He’s kind of famous.

I tried to go to the Jane Goodall movie at omnimax but it was sold out. I sort of went to church. It was empty, does that count? I went to the Institute of Arts instead, which is free (brilliant) and has William Blake’s etchings of the Book of Job up. Holy shit—they’re amazing. They’re as detailed as all the little lines on the dollar bill, and as tiny. And unlike drawing, you have to scratch out everything except the picture you want left when you ink it and stamp it, so you have to think kind of backwards while you’re doing it. They were so complex and totally cool (profound art review, here, I know).

Ah, Blake. I first met him in the good old 30 pound Norton Anthology in college. I had a huge crush on my professor because he could speak old English. And because he was hot. I failed an exam on The Dream of the Rood because I couldn’t understand all the freaking footnotes and had a hard time staying awake on account of my tall, willowy college freshman roommate (a ballet major) coming home totally trashed every night at 4 a.m. and banging around pots and pans to make macaroni and cheese.

I loved Blake then—and not just because the Doors named their band after one of his poem where he says something like (I’m paraphrasing from memory from 12 years ago, so…) “If only the doors of perception were cleansed, then would we see things as they truly are: eternal.” Also because he writes about tigers, he combines visual art with poetry. I realized on this museum visit that Blake isn’t as old as I thought—he died in something like 1830, which, as far as old stuff goes, wasn’t that long ago. When I read him in college I kinda lumped him together with Chaucer. Keep in mind that I was 19, when anyone over 30 still seemed geezerly, so I anyone dead before 1950 may as well have been before the dawn of time.

I busted out my pen and notebook when the museum guard wasn’t looking (you know, the scary smack-down of museum security) and scribbled this down: “…Blake’s etchings of the Book of Job are intended as a challenge to the belief that misfortunes are punishment for sin. The Book of Job was for Blake the apotheosis of lyric expression, a metaphysical commentary in the form of symbolic narrative. Job’s journey parceled his own creative struggles and spiritual awareness—it’s not to be read literally, but spiritually discerned…”

Then, there’s his commentary on the creative process, which is so RIGHT ON:

Five states of Experience:

Innocence
Experience
Revolution
The Dark Night
The New Life.

If Blake were alive today and looked anything like my college Literature professor, I think I’d have a huge crush on him too. Symbolism! Philosophy! Narration! Spiritual awareness! Dark night of the soul! Swoon. Amazing poet. Amazing artist.