Scrabble Scrabbled Words

I miss blog writing. And you know, I think it's an important writing exercise--it keeps me honest, so to speak. Helps me remember how important it is to invest time in finding the truest words.

Sistern, if you're reading this, I want to let you know I haven't forgotten about you. I'll call you tomorrow. I think about you every day.

Lately Laura and I have been going to Good Brews (local coffee shop) on Friday nights to have tea and play scrabble. It's glorious. Tonight, Gabe, an amazing photographer and writer, joined us. We never got around to scrabble, but we had wonderful conversations and saw some of Gabe's amazing photos.

Those pictures inspire me to take more myself, especially now that I have an amazing camera (compliments of my dear brother Tom). I think photography and writing are very similar. And I've always felt that I lacked the skill and perspective to take good pictures... but I don't think that's true. And even if it is, I have plenty of capacity to learn.

I want to try to write blog posts once a week. We'll see.

For now, I hope you are well and are loving life as much as it loves you.

Things I Love

I'm getting into the idea of lists. This is a short one of what I can think of at the moment, in no particular order:

-people (you know who you are. I think I'll make a separate list later dedicated solely to people)
-personified and anthropomorphized birds (especially crows, ravens, and magpies)
-shiny things (broken glass, marbles, bits of metal, etc.)
-graffiti
-imprints in the cement of sidewalks (names, feet, hands, leaves, etc.)
-swings
-music--ukulele, accordion, bagpipes
-cats
-dogs
-clouds
-scraps of paper
-books
-notes in margins & other people's notes in margins
-mashed potatoes
-the color blue
-dictionaries
-fiction
-socks
-pillows
-hot chocolate, tea, coffee
-SPOONS!! (especially tiny tea spoons)
-vague, passionate lyrics
-watercolors
-spiders (especially jumping spiders)

-You---thank you for reading this. <3 

Battling the Evils of Makeup

Someday I want to dye my hair blue, cut it spiky short, and wear a really short skirt with black tights that only go to my knees. Maybe with a shirt/jacket with slits in the shoulders and elbows. I want to dress up for fun and use flashy blue eye shadow.

The only makeup I've ever worn is stage makeup, and that was to make me look old. All the girls did their own makeup for One Act Play except me--I didn't know how. When they tried to teach me I just ended up poking myself in the eye and crying like the guys did.

I think I grew up thinking it was bad to be a girl. It was only okay if I acted like I wasn't a girl--hated the color pink, played with bugs, wore plain clothing, didn't wear makeup or want to, didn't talk about boys...

No, that isn't it. Being female doesn't mean liking the color pink and wearing makeup. Those things have nothing to do with being a girl. Maybe it's bad to be... "that kind of girl"?

This all sounds silly. Still, this is what I grew up thinking:

-Girls who wear lots of makeup and flashy clothing grow up to be slutty women.

-Being a slutty woman is almost the same as being a desirable woman.  

-Men make women happy, and men only like desirable women 

-Only pretty girls are allowed to be pretty, and therefore only pretty girls are allowed to grow up to be desirable women, and therefore only pretty girls can really be happy. 

-I wasn't pretty and I couldn't be pretty. 

Obviously those things aren't true. It's silly that I even grew up thinking that--this is the 21st century, and women are more respected than ever. It's true that there are still plenty of negative stereotypes floating around, but... I don't know. I just don't want to sound melodramatic.

Sometimes I want to draw attention to myself. When I was in One Act Play in high school, I secretly wanted to play lead. In Celtic ensemble, I wanted to sing lead on a song. The one time I did it ended pretty disastrously. I guess I haven't reached a sufficient confidence level yet. I guess these things take time.

You know... being a woman is a wonderful thing, and I hope someday soon I can really feel that way myself.

Stickin' it to the Man

I feel sad and angry. I feel poor--a very specific kind of poor... white middle-class poor. Not quite "white trash," but that kind of poor where you have a really nice laptop and health insurance but you wear tattered clothes that don't fit and your family fights about money all the time. Where you can afford to take medication for a "rich people's disease" but you put off buying new shoes until the ones you're wearing break every tenth step. It's not really a lack of money. It's a disjointed, irrational mindset.

I'm listening to "Dance Music" by The Mountain Goats and thinking about that song that starts "If she wants to dance and drink all night, no one's gonna stop her," and the years I spent riding in a big white van, old and beat-up, but still good, with an amazing friend. I should call her.

I'm tired of hearing "We'll talk about it when you get home." We don't communicate any better in person. The only difference is that I'm more intimidated by them in person, and they have the option to physically stop me from doing things. I've never been openly rebellious before. I'm not even trying to do that now, and I don't want to sound like an angsty teenager. But I'm being smothered and there's not even a good reason for it.

I'm not going to bow to the king anymore. I need to get the hell out of this messed up kingdom before I can keep trying to help the queen who is really a servant. I'm no bloody pawn-shaped princess.

Another Up-too-Late

"I grow old, I grow old
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled."

Such a silly line in such a somber poem (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by T.S. Eliot). I love getting lines of poetry stuck in my head.

This summer I'm going to write lyrical narrative poetry about my adventures with a close friend in an old van, my experiences with dog fights, the people who have taught me music, about suicide, talking to curtains, Jules and Sarah, and that awful boyfriend from high school (it's so stupid, but he still occasionally haunts my dreams, telling me how inadequate I am, transforming me back into that self-hating martyr), about my sister and our language and singing and sidewalk lunch and driving in circles to watch the lights and lying in the grass. Snailing. I could write a poem 30 sections long about her. I want to put mundane things side by side with dark and light philosophical things.

I want to write children's stories about monsters and my friend the cebolla (onion) who plays violin. Children's stories about visiting a goblin market and how to thank house brownies without sending them away. Children's stories that teach science and magic at the same time. I want to write children's stories that do not try to hide the darkness in life. Children's stories that know monsters really do exist and people hurt each other, even the people who are supposed to protect you, and that awful things can happen to children even though they shouldn't. I want to tell them "I know. Come with me, and I'll walk you through it until you can find your own way."

I want to write young adult fiction and work on all this story dough sitting around my kitchen.

Do you know how amazing you are? How many incredible things, beautiful and dark, painful and liberating, that you constantly absorb and change, preserve, remember, and give back to the world? How valuable you are as a creature, as matter, as energy, as a human being?

Work your dough, your paint, your clay, your crinkling pages of crunched numbers.

"Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves" -Mary Oliver, Wild Geese 

Remember and believe that you are a child of the stars.