Re-Development

Write, type to feel connected
Clip nails, closer to hands
to touch and feel connected

Calmed down and safe in
home with life on couches

Read pages...hours,

nothing underneath but

thin spindle of a family

thing

approximation.

hOtNeSs

Big exam tomorrow (you know, the one that determines whether or not I am able to be licensed as a counselor in Maryland). Can't sleep. And now I will show pictures of the actors I think are attractive. Yes, that's all I've got right now.

Chris O'Dowd. Did you see him in Bridesmaids? Friggin adorable.

Did you know Jay Sean is Punjabi Sikh? Baby, I'm down down down.

Adam Sandler. Fair on the cuteness, but a great personality.

Jesse Eisenberg. He did such an amazing job in The Social Network - extra hotness points for that.
(Special note:  If he and Michael Cera were both hitting on me in a bar I'd give my number to Michael because of the charisma and humor)

Irfan Khan. Despite his playing a bad guy in Slum Dog Millionaire, I saw past
his evil ways to his beautiful face.

Paul Rudd. Eh, I just threw him on here to round things off...he's almost too pretty. We liked him back when he was in Clueless, young bucks!

It would appear I like me some dark haired, beautiful eyed, Irish or otherwise Eastern looking dudes overall. 

Proper Chuckles

The tone of comedy we choose says something about what attitudes we connect with or the kind of balance our darker side needs. A little deep for fart jokes? Maybe.

The other night I went looking for a kind of comedy that would vibrate at the exact emotional frequency I needed at the moment, and it took a while before I came across what felt right. The exploration took place in my house mate's fanboy man cave, a beautiful lair with colorful toys and comics, an Xbox hooked up to Netflix and a large flat screen TV. My first try was Mitch Hedberg (may he rest in peace), and I chose his stand-up because so many of my friends over the years have quoted him and I always found those excerpts funny. It had been years since I'd seen his routines on Comedy Central, so I wondered if I would experience the Saved By The Bell Effect (endlessly entertaining then, god awful now).

Mitch Hedberg - Donuts                                                                                                                              

His bits are really clever, but his delivery is so affected...especially in the later stuff where he's maybe more nervous about the pressure and further into drugs. If I had been drinking a few beers at the time I may not have minded the disconnect, but I needed something that felt more emotionally honest. So on to a Brit com called The IT Crowd.

The IT Crowd

Oh, silly campy disoriented Brit coms. Cute and all (particularly the curly haired white guy) but in my sullen state, they were insulting my oh so deep deepness. So I finally gave in and turned to the previously proven piece of beauty that is Louis CK's first season of his self-named show.

Louis - Episode 3 with Ricky Gervais

There was actually a clip of the episode I watched (and there aren't many good clips) but that bit was too nasty to post on here. In any case: sarcastic, subversive, defeatist, depressive, offensive, hilarious. Bam. Winner.
I ♥ U Louis CK.

Arousal and Attention (and sky diving!)

Today, I went sky diving.




When I watch this video I see me in a sleepy and not especially happy state. It hadn't been a good night for sleep, nor emotions. And it was so strange to enter into an activity like this with no excitement, hardly any nervousness and no real connection with the reality of what was about to happen until that plane door flew open and my dad's step-niece was shoved out. Pulling my legs around to the opening was exciting, but when we began to free-fall an unfortunate thing happened: I panicked.

All the talk I'd heard about this sport was the usual "thrill of a life time", "intense experience" sort of thing, but no one really made clear the idea that you are plummeting to the earth with nothing to grab onto, the exact scenario that would occur if you were falling to your death. I couldn't handle it. I closed my eyes, breathed deeply, and dissociated until the parachute was pulled.

The floating we did at that point was...pretty. But I was still shaken and also disappointed in myself. I felt like I wasted the experience or that I wasn't hardcore enough to enjoy it, despite the pride I'd gained from being a front seat of the roller coaster kind of girl.

My jump-mate actually cried this morning thinking too much about the realness of parachutes not opening, etc (she really enjoyed it none the less). Should I have forced myself to indulge in more of that kind of thinking so the shock of it wasn't so brutal? And what about the disconnecting I did while in the air? I'm very good at disconnecting, in general, because I'm so frequently and firmly dedicated to the feeling of being at peace. Maybe this dedication, and the strong distaste for anxiety that fuels it, goes too far sometimes.

I know, jumping out of a plane is fucking crazy and I shouldn't measure my appropriate arousal levels by it, but it's something to think about. I mean it's been a while; I don't even know if I like roller coasters anymore.

Still, I'm glad I did it and have the video. I think my favorite part was actually the act of being ejected from the plane...just before I realized I don't like what comes after being ejected from a plane.

DeeDeeDog

I have since established that this human body part chewing is an, erm, undesirable practice according to Dee Dee's owner. Good times while they lasted though.

5-7-5...?

Part of the concept of this blog (if I can say there’s a coherent concept) is brevity. I was always intimidated and fatigued by having to work through longer creative pieces. So with this in mind I wanted to explore haiku and how it’s meant to be written. Well, I found out that there is a truly “classic” form of haiku, but it’s difficult to adhere to if you’re not writing in Japanese. In the haiku history timeline, once haikus go English they start running all over the place…forms are altered, devices are modified. It’s to the point now where (alongside some traditionalist criticism of course) every new rule that’s offered is followed by a “but you can do it differently if you want” sort of phrase.

So now, attacking these three-line works has become an act of research and decision making akin to writing a short story. Not that I’m giving up the idea, but I need to sit with these potent little things for a while. In the meantime, I spent entirely too much time online gathering a handful that I really appreciated…

With his 1988 publication, Selected Haiku, Nick Virgilio introduced a form of haiku that became known as “lily and bass”. These are the two poems that chiefly introduced that concept.

lily

out of the water

out of itself

bass

picking bugs

off the moon

And another of his that I was attracted to.

my dead brother...
hearing his laugh
in my laughter

These two are from a woman named Stella Pierid who writes a haiku every single day and posts it on her blog. She’s good. : )

Moving house -
a snail and the same old
me

Just because
the sky is navigable -
thistledown

The Irish Haiku Society’s International Haiku Competition produced the following entries. Interesting how they reflect the times. (the last won the grand prize)

where the maple stood
a shroud
of sunlight

the things
we never did
undertow

recession
more tree
less leaf

memorial flowers
tied to the ash in full leaf
bowing and sighing

forty seven
and no pension
all the starry heavens

chill wind
the windowsill tomato
still warm

There are those who like to write “minimalist” haiku, and I find most of that to be crap (whilst feeling guilty for shitting on people’s art), but this one from Angie Werren works for me somehow.

snow
black crow
tea.

Juxtapositions and contrasts all over the place in that tiny thing.

And last, I was really impressed with a form of haiku developed by John Carley. Actually I’ll just paste in the description given by a dedicated and prolific haiku blogger, Melissa Allen (http://haikuproject.wordpress.com):

"At some point around the turn of the millennium John got fed up with all the squabbling about what constitutes an English-language haiku and decided to invent his own form of haiku that would be unique to English and capitalize on its special properties. You can read his essay about this yourself, but basically he got all scientific about it and crunched numbers with translations and did a little rummaging around in the basement of linguistics and ended up with this 15-syllable poem, divided into two parts, that he called a zip haiku”.

A light search revealed these two:

orange and tan | tan orange and tan
the butterflies | beat on

buoyed up | on the rising tide
a fleet of head boards | bang the wall

Love!

With regard to the classic form, I think what tends to be maintained throughout most haiku is that element of a switch or a turn-around. This “cutting”, the stimulating juxtaposition of two images or ideas, is haiku’s essence.

And with that, I leave you with this vital piece:

Haikus are easy
but sometimes they don’t make sense
refrigerator

Petty Damages

Back in August I had the privilege of traveling to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota as a chaperone for ten high school students on a community service trip. It was wondrous, spiritual and transforming.

But this blog is about some asshole I ran into at the airport on the way back.

This morning I get a call from an insurance agent telling me that the man whose van I backed into when pulling up to the Rapid City airport for departure was filing a medical claim. He was behind his vehicle when I carelessly rammed into the front of it, and the rear bumper collided with his leg. This guy was pretty easy going. Favored his leg but didn't make a huge deal out of it at the time.

The douche-baggery to which I'm currently referring was from a Sturgis leftover heading home on an airplane instead of his bike like a pansy. The alarming crack-thud that resulted from my inattention brought me shakily out of the SUV and toward the other driver. As I walked to the rear of my vehicle, this cocky white-boy voice came from my left: "Hey, you know you almost just ran that guy over". The interjection carried not a tone of worried concern, but a smirking, accusatory emphasis that waited to see my reaction. At that point I had no information on what had occurred behind me, so I think I just gave him a brief glance, mouth agape, and continued on.

So here's one of those internal dialogues people generate as a fanciful redress of a missed opportunity. Always wanted to put one of these in writing.

"Oh thank god you were here! I never would have found out what happened and nothing would have been solved! And since I'm mentally impaired, even if I had gotten the story from someone I would have no real sense of its meaning or severity. I mean, you can't be sure that someone driving a car full of young adults that are under her care would feel like total shit when she backs into a poor, unsuspecting man, right? So you gotta make sure she feels like total shit! Like I said man, I don't know what would have happened if you hadn't been walking by. Thank you so much."

What a dick.

Lugubrious Is a Great Word

Having lost most of the people with whom I was at one point or another intimately connected, I become more melancholy than I’m proud to say. Sometimes it can be difficult to descry the margins that separate valid and wistful. But frequently, both are the halters that pull me back inside myself.

Tonight I thought about a story – or really a whispered report – that a girl named Darian gave back when we were friends. She was in a counseling graduate program at the time, as I am now, and went to see a psychologist because it’s “good practice” to do so. Without hearing much at all, she said, the psychologist knew about her inappropriate spending sprees, her excessive sleeping. She felt found out, but I knew she also felt a little special…heard.

Before this summer, when the warming memory of one of our good interactions would bubble, the thought was always accompanied by the idea that Darian and I might talk again. I questioned whether we would still look into one another and see the same things, but I missed what I used to see. I saw another version of me.

It was July when I found out Darian died from a blood infection that would have been treatable if they’d known. And the scenes of our connection still come, still followed by a hope; the more deeply I become engaged in a good memory, the more achy that brief jolt to the chest feels when I remember that she’s gone. It’s selfish, really. The thought is, “What girl will see my universe now? What friend will know me?” And the irrational fear that follows is, maybe no one.

With love to Darian. She was self-indulgent, too.

Dear Blank, Please Blank

Hand selected for your pleasure...

Dear Titanic,

OM NOM NOM.

Sincerely, Iceberg
_______________

Dear (360) 553-0049,

This should teach you to prank call me at 3am.

Sincerely, have fun with that
_______________

Dear Amish,

You shouldn't be reading this.

Sincerely, Anonymous
_______________

Dear Internet,

Please stop with the talking ads that start on their own.

Sincerely, I just had a heart attack
_______________

Dear Kids,

There is no Santa. Those presents are from your parents.

Sincerely, Wikileaks
_______________

Dear Asian people,

Can you at least wear name tags or something?

Sincerely, the rest of the world

PocketfulOfNameCards

I started talking to her at a small farmer’s market. My age or a little older with pale skin and freckles – long, curly black hair. She spoke without filter, describing the process of how she made kimchi and of how a “problem tenant” situation was solved only by way of alerting the civic association (because people want to “protect their investments”). I said I’d come to visit her stand, and patronize it, at HamdenFest.

So I found her there near the end of the avenue, black dress and a red cowboy hat under triangle streamers. Took a picture while she coyly smiled. Kimchi Girl offered free samples, gave signs of openness, and said she sees herself as kind of a yente, excited about introducing me to the town. I threw up my hands and said, “Yes, I need that!”

We exchanged information and I texted her a few days later to ask about finding Hot Sauce Guy who'd been selling beside her. Receiving no response led me to her FaceBook page where I appropriately wrote "Hello!", smiley face, referenced the phone attempt.

She deleted the comment and also a post from her personal profile that was just below it. I never heard from Kimchi Girl, and I still think that’s strange. Probably the best kimchi I’ve ever eaten.