A father passes by slowly on the street outside. He is teaching his young daughter how to ride a bike. No, a trike. She is very young. She is a chubby little sprite with dark hair and dark eyes. The kind of child thing that always makes me think of me as myself when I was a baby. I have a picture of myself as a baby on my fridge. I'm not sure why. It was the one put in my high school senior yearbook next to my "grownup" photo, and I just kept it.

I wonder if I need to remind myself sometimes that I was a baby. My mother said I was a good baby. That she would come into my room in the middle of the night over and over to check my windows and make sure they were locked because I was such a beautiful baby that she was sure someone would come in and steal me. I have seen prettier babies but I am too much like my mother not to understand her and to know that I would check my baby's windows over and over again.

The father and his daughter are stopped in my driveway. She has fallen again. I have seen them pass by  for the past three days, and always she has fallen in my driveway. I wonder if it is dangerous. She does not cry, but it takes her a while to pick herself back up. He smiles at her. I think. She smiles back too, I think. I guess at this because I have taken off my glasses. The world is painted in watercolor and vision strain.

They continue on. I wonder if they will be back tomorrow. I pretend they will, even though I will not be there to see them. She will fall again. She will not cry, and he will help her back up. They will continue on. I try not to think of myself as a baby, myself with a baby. A baby with dark hair who is very serious and does not cry often. A baby who pretends to read to herself.

I have half a dozen tabs on my browser open dedicated to freelance writing. I try not to think of those either. They are reminders of what I have and have not gotten done today. I am not sure anymore what falls into either category. The world blurs. I had gone into my office and opened the window to sit at my typewriter and smoke furiously on my last cigarette. I sat with my fingers at the stanza of a half finished poem and did not type anything. I realized that  with the window open the sound of frantic keys bashing would be loud. Too loud for the neighborhood street at late afternoon, when the leafblowers have finally been laid to rest. I do not want to scare the little girl on her tricycle.

I decide instead that the poem is finished, that I am finished for today. Instead I turn back to my computer, the life of the endless screen. I open up another tab. I start typing again.

It's like pedaling on a stationary bike that has one too many loose bolts. A hesitation, an uncertainty, the drive to move even though I'm not sure where I'm headed. Probably nowhere. Maybe to a sudden halt, or the ground. Maybe unexpectedly forward. I don't have a pitch or a cover letter or even a short bio to attach to today. Or yesterday, or the day before. Perhaps tomorrow, but not likely. Tomorrow is back to the long day with marked hours, the day filled with people and determined small talk and cash and credit changing hands.

There is laughter now, echoing from somewhere down the street. Maybe the little girl. Maybe another family come out to play. They are everywhere and nowhere, leading lives on the other side of my window, in their houses and mortgages. Leading lives on channels I'm not tuned into. I don't even own a TV.

There's another blank page lying in wait just ahead, and I don't know what's at the end of it. I don't even know if there is an end of it. I live in the age of endless scrolling, of infinite browser tabs. Hyperlinks and media, always on to the next best thing. Or at least the next thing. I open up another browser tab. Split the difference between two blank pages.

I check the driveway before I close the front window. Empty. But everywhere everything is superimposed. A trike tumped over. A baby that hasn't existed for twenty odd years. Tomorrow's time card. And again.

I lock the window. I go back and check it again, just in case someone is trying to steal me. No one is.

The Calm of Cleaning // The False Coin of Domesticity

When I must be by myself but I cannot stand to be with myself. An attempt to subdue, to tame my surroundings, as if polishing into line could make them feel more right, more like mine. Slowly I edge things into their rightful places, and try not to think about what rightful place might mean.

I let my mind run feral. I have tried to soothe it, to sink it into mindful dishwashing or sculpting a poem with thought-words. But it growls. It snaps. It threatens to run me over with chaos. So I let the leash go. I cannot make myself consider what this means, to witness almost helplessly the constant fluctuation between tidy and shambles. To be wiping the coffee stains off the counter for the 1,058th time. Two days from now it will be the 1,059th and there's nothing wrong with that.

But I can't shake that for a substantial handful of reasons my time to make this place a home has passed, that I'm just biding it here now. And as this liminal occupation of space stretches bigger and bigger, it mounts into more of a frustration, feels more and more like a waste. Even though I can't remember, or don't know, what it feels like to be on either side of the threshold, I've been sitting here for so long.

I fold another shirt. Put another book back on the shelf, Creative Mythology by Joseph Campbell. What does it mean to want a home. Dishes go in the cabinet. It is everything about the space and nothing. Take also into consideration sharing it with another human being, one who has an entirely different set of feelings and non-feelings for this same place, and the potentiality of a new one. Empty the dustpan.

Cleaning makes me feel better, and also worse. Like I am tricking myself, it's all a big lullaby. One day mabye I will tame my taming, turn procrastination into zen. That day is not today.

I implode a space. Construct. The only thing living inside this space is myself. The human fallacy. Arrogance of environment mutation. A roof, then walls, then airtight gaskets. Perfection. We breed our own bacteria in a closed environment. I exhale my own shit. My taste buds have adapted to attune finely to denial. My tongue still thinks air is empty space. I hold my breath for as long as I can and do not correct it.  Skin is falling apart every second. It's a habit. Not to be wasted, we decant it like fine wine. We plate  it and spear the flakes on the tiniest of toothpicks. I compare the vintages of myself. None is better. I have an infinite supply. You walk around like you invented circles to pace in. I try not to think of the bottom of your shoe. You hoard my skin there.  I have decided to forgive. My heart still thinks forgiveness is empty space. I hold my breath for as long as I can and do not correct it.  Silence. Another human fallacy. I touch my skin with my skin. Can we remember it.

Why We Write

You know, I enjoy browsing the community of creative writers. Well, you know, some parts. I like to hear the stories and worries and successes of writers I like, and even writers I don't, or don't know. Then occasionally I'll read something like this article in the Huffington Post by J.J. Colagrande, "The Agony of Creative Writing". And I just can't help but roll my eyes.

Because it's not that it's not true. A writer's life is more than nine times out of ten not the most profitable one in the world. And yes it can be incredibly difficult to find your audience. But... duh? I feel like I've read this exact article dozens of times before. There are more readers! There are more (way more) writers! But the readers read short easy to consume things!  But I'm confused on the whys and wherefores of this transmission of information.

To what audience is this article directed? Other writers? Because I feel like anyone that's dipped so much as a toe into the field is well aware of any to all of these points. And those who have gone to school for Creative Writing have definitely encountered the blankly enthusiastic / enthusiastically blank stares in response to their answer to "So what do you do? "followed by "Oh so you're going to teach?" possibly having to endure the sniping of more "practical" minded family members about how are they ever going to support themselves writing pah. So they know.

Is it directed at readers, alerting them to the plight of the intrepid yet piteous writer? But are their attention spans even long enough to get through the whole article, much less inspire them to pick up and consume some literary work of several thousand plus words-- not even mentioning things like (gasp) metaphor.

I support bringing attention to the plight of writers, I guess, I'm just not entirely convinced that there is a plight? Am I aiming my writing towards the "masses" or the "choir" of other writers? Maybe I don't know, and is that a problem? (For every article I've seen that's exactly like Colagrande's, though, I've seen at least one and a half more lashing out at how insular and incestuous the writing community is, so I guess it can be considered a problem, at lease in some eyes. Everything can be considered a problem though if you're trying hard enough. So there's that.

"But writers knew this, no? Creative writers [hopefully] understood that they were entering into a life of constant rejection and stiff competition; no money for a really long time; an arduous and lonely process of creation and revision that never gets easy; a lifestyle where no one cares if they ever write again; a world where everything gets in the way of writing, including those who love and support them the most; plus, the wackiest business on the planet -- publishing -- gutted by the digital age, where networking appears more important than creating, where writers exhaust themselves promoting work, if lucky enough to find a publisher and agent. Writers understand a minute fraction of adults who read are tuned into the literary arts, yet they carry on. They've learned firsthand that "luck" and "who you know" often trump talent and effort, but they carry on. And they comprehend that the literary arts are drawing the small stick in the reading revolution, yet so what. Like Charlton Heston with a shotgun, you can yank the keyboard from their cold, dead hands."

Ah, do I detect a hint of snark there, Colagrande?

I just am really not sure what this guy is trying to tell me, or what he's trying to tell other people about what my life is like, or if he's trying to tell me about what my life is like?

Do I appreciate this support? Even if it feels a little underminey? If I'm being mocked, either he's doing it wrong or I'm doing it wrong.

I don't really mourn the fact that people, my peers, who were never going to voluntarily pick up a book anyway are gluttonizing Twitter and various newsfeeds. Yes, it bogs down my own consumption of the wider text-based world sometimes, but I'm not writing for them. I was never writing for them, and I will never aim to. Nor, on the other hand, will I force their faces into my writing as it is, for all of our sakes. My writing, hopefully, does not differ for my audience or lack thereof-- my explanation (if there is one) very well might, but I try to keep original generation as an entirely separate thing. I, for one, am reading other creative writers, some kind of on the far-out end of the branch. They can write for me if they feel like it, or if they don't, or if they don't care. That's fine. I'll be here to read it. And that in turn inspires what I write. Which they may read. Etc. I am absolutely okay with all of this cycle for some reason.

Point is, this really isn't the kind of article about the struggles of the creative writer or what have you that I want to read. I just want more, especially if the writer is a supporter of creative production and consumption. There's no real life being pointed to here but  lack of reception, no personality or vivacity to the so-determined soul of the writer. Except I suppose for the mental image of Charlton Heston with a shotgun. And maybe that then is his buried point? We can fight to stay read or even be relevant, but what do we lose by persisting through such desolate adverse circumstances? Character, face, spirit? Feh.

Or maybe I'm looking an honest if bland kudos too far in the mouth.

No compromise! Viva le genreless symbol of ennui!

Non-Redaction

And, hilariously, I find myself immediately wanting to delete my last post. For shame. For disgust at how manufactured an plodding it feels. At my vulgarity for posting it on the Facebooks.

But I'm not!

For the sake of honesty. Of laziness, perhaps. To keep it up as a reminded of the progress of standing still. If I write about anxiety enough, I will become more eloquent at it, no?

Scribspo

I've been giving a lot of thought (and therefore, of course, a lot of anxiety) to shaping the place where my writing comes from. Not necessarily what I write about, though that could very well end up being part of that, but what drives me to write. Or, to be more specific slash meta about it, what drives me to diving me to write. And also the fear of the lack of said driving.

A podcast I listen to, "Stuff Mom Never Told You", recently did an episode "Is fitspo unhealthy for women?" Fitspo consisting mainly those pictures on Pinterest etc of all of those beautifully lit uber-scuplted lady abdominals dripping in sweat, exhorting you to go workout NOW and push yourself HARDER. Often they're overlaid with some kind of text to this effect. Some of it is pretty regular motivational poster stuff, like the quotation from T. Roosevelt, "Nothing worth having was ever achieved without effort" (Now picturing Teddy ogling some sweaty girls) or "Be Active Get Sweat Feel Great Repeat" mild exercise propaganda. Fine. But then you get into the territory [oh dear god I just accidentally closed my browser window and thought I lost all of this, thank the gods for automatic saves] that's questionable and creepy, the compulsive imagecentric-- "so... you'd rather have a bag of chips than look like this?" "Suck it up now so you don't have to suck it in later" "Would you rather be covered in sweat now or covered in clothes at the beach?"    Um.

Basically this trend fad whatever covers motivations on the spectrum from "Well, I guess I would like my body to feel better and work better and this is something that I overall would like to do and is good for me" to "If you TOUCH that potato chip and also do not do 2,483 crunches every day you are a horrible person and no one will ever love or desire you because you are fat and ugly."  Again, um.  Looking at the Pinterest page for Fitspo is starting to make me anxious and depress me ("Fitspiration" is definitely less than inspiring to this particular gal") so I'm going to close it now.

It's this acute shame end of the spectrum I'm interested in, though. Because it's this kind of psychology, the humiliating personal trainer/drill sergeant manufactured voice inside the head, that I feel is uncomfortably similar to how I goad myself into writing. And that's not ok, for basically all the same reasons I feel squicked out looking at the fitspo pictures. It's the wrong reason, the wrong drive to compulsion. (Is there a right drive to compulsion?) Maybe all of these (predominantly) girls just want to do the right thing by themselves and be healthy, but a lot of it smacks of control and self-image issues and a distortion of the idea of who they are and what they could be.

For me, for my writing (I feel just incredibly self-conscious, by the way, talking so much about "my writing", as if it were a thing of cohesion, a fact) this is how it should be: It's not about the results. Well, okay, it is about the results, but it's not exclusively about the results. If the process isn't done "right" (or "rightish" or "in the realm of rightability"), the results are never, ever going to matter, They are never going to be good enough And yes. Ambition and the drive to succeed and to always be better are good things in their own way; I'm sure everyone can agree on that. Teachers and parents etc nod their heads. But this kind of "Do it Do it better and if you are not doing it right now nothing will ever be okay" leads to a screeching negative feedback loop. If I stop writing, the self-shaming doesn't stop, it just gets stronger. Which, of course, instead of encouraging me to pick the pen/keyboard back up, makes me even more reluctant to do so. And so the shaming gets more intense. And on and on.

This isn't how I want to write.

I want to write because I have something to say, or because I want something good to come out of it. Not because not-writing is hell, and writing is crap but slightly less personally foul. I know it's never going to be vomiting sunshine and rainbows (that sounds awful, actually), but I want it to be an overall positive process in my life.

I know that plenty of "successful" and "good" writers have had horribly unhealthy and negative relationships with their writing and their writing process and it's all compulsion etc. I've seen Naked Lunch too. But that's not me, and I have to accept that. As much as I would love to play the Tortured Writer who just burns to pick up a pen with every breath and can't stop no matter how brutal, that's not my role. If I want to keep writing. I'm going to have to be the one that pushes myself to do that, not some mythical inner fire.

So let's just hope I can get away from this culture of shame I have immersed myself in and find some way to do that without causing some kind of neurotic break.

It never seemed so strange

Hello today! It is the first of the month, which is always a nice time to make a grand and symbolic(ish) gesture. My specialty is to-do/goal lists, so here is the one I've been dreaming about so far today:

July!

• Participate in the 750words One Month Challenge. Also, successfully complete it. This basically means I have to write 750 words a day, every day, all month. And hopefully forever, but let's stick to this month for now.
• Read 2+ poems a day. New poems. Reading Canticle by Yusef Komunyakaa over and over again doesn't count. Doesn't matter where they come from, but probably from one of the online lit journal in my bookmarks.
• Write a blog post a week. That's at least four blog posts, and "Oh I'm so awful at updating again" isn't going to cut it. Maybe a well thought out essay... or maybe another list. Lists (and listicles, which I don't even like pronouncing in my head) are still hip these days I hear.
• Go Running. I mean, at least 3 times. Ever. Hey, it's July in Louisiana; I have to set the bar realistically.

Yeah, so nothing earthshattering or anything on the list (though next month will probably look drastically different-- spoilers!). Not going to set a specific goal for writing a certain number of poems per day / week / month, because I'm honestly not sure which of the occasional scribbles in my notebook count as poems anymore, and I'd hate to cheat my count. Am (mildly) determined to get back in that swing. Even the dead can write again.

UPDATE: One day down, 30 to go.

What I have been doing though:

Playing in the neighborhood (and with new cameraphone filters)

  

Being artsy-fartsy with wine and Mordred

Drinking-- and writing about it for DIG Magazine

And nifty cafes are also within my job description

And checking out some bars for them, too

Finally going on vacation and building my wine bottle bookshelf. Also, laundry.

That's life, for now. One word at a time, one day at a time.

I am existentially nauseated. Nauseous. Both. This is not failure, though failure is better than suffocating with your lips sewn shut. This is practice. Practice is breathing with all your ribs broken.

Congratulations to everyone graduating and/or getting into their Master's programs. I have these passing pains of nostalgia and/or jealously I think that are immediately followed by an overwhelming wave of ohthankgodthatsnotme. The latter is so intense that either my defense mechanisms are way too securely in place for my own good, or that really isn't where I need to be right now. Probably both. Still, I get so dizzy when I think about all the people living all their lives. Facebook &c splays out are their details before me in full color and I am just as uncomfortable in their presence as if I would be breathing their same air and knowing. My news feed is a constant plucking at my personal masochism of voyeurism. Ouch.

I need a vacation. I need to have long enough where I don't have to turn profit in the face of the nattering world, long enough to withdraw so far into myself I come out on the other side. I want to quite my job so I can lay around without work or school. I will eventually start missing something. Whichever I miss first/harder is what I'm supposed to be doing. Flawless plan.

Fighting the impulse for a lyric title as well

So mostly, I want to write, but every time I sit down it seems like all I want to do is type up Bright Eyes and Decemberists lyrics. I guess to set up an AIM away message? Because the inside of my heart is still shaped like it was when I was 15 and no amount of taxes paid or resumes refined or vegetables eaten can seem to convince it to budge. And seems worrisome at times. I'll run circles fretting about the relationship between past- and future-me. But thinking about the scenery in my life I realize that at 15 everything was about falling in love and writing crummy poems and doing my everyday job through a clenched-teeth grin, and at 22 everything is about falling in love and writing slightly better poems and doing my everyday job through a clenched-teeth grin until 11 at night.  So really in a way I'm just sticking to my values. Only now I know what phonemes are and who Ariana Reines is and how to make an Old-Fashioned. So... progress. Funnily enough, my stress level regarding sonnets has remained approximately the same over this span of time, though those particular stress vectors have changed somewhat.

I am now resisting the urge to post blocks of Bright Eyes and/or Decemberists lyrics. Such things run rampant on the corpses of old online journals, and something about repeating the past &c.

A self-deprecating couplet on my work this month:

o how the banality of viscerality marries
unhappily the distract of abstraction

Between a box and a right place

Um. So. Took an impromptu two month hiatus from this blog for the various and usual reasons-- demotivations, existential grumbles, etc. These issues have not been resolved, but have been integrated into my life to the point that I can either deal with them or deal around them. I think I'll continue to do both and see how that works out.

Anyway. Have hit a couple of mildly strange points in the last few weeks which make me stop and think. Right now, for instance, I seem to be in this oddly specific transitional phase of "I'm going to be losing half of my furniture in the imminent future but still have it in the house". I imagine I am not the only one who has gone though this; I can think of several occasions where it may arise. Well, at least one (moving). I, however, am not moving-- just losing a lot of key pieces in my living area, cutting down by an obnoxious amount the surfaces on which I can place things.

The grating part of the situation comes in when I realize I want to keep most of the Things that lived on or in the furniture I will no longer have (but still at this moment do). In preparation for the furniture evacuation, I have removed the Things from the Furniture. I am the kind of person that believes moderately to strongly in the adage "A place for everything and everything in it's place." So having the Things be not in their Place but just sitting next to their place in big exposed piles is getting to me. I want to tuck everything away in the drawers and on shelves, but I just can't. It would defeat the purpose. So whole big chunks of my (material) life are just kind of laying around on the floor, moping around like naked looking shabby and disorganized. Shambles. Is it an instinct to streamline or an instinct to hide that drives me to irritation around this? Can't it be both at once?

Maybe I should buy boxes, some of those big plastic storage containers just begging to be filled with Things and then never looked at again. And that puts me a step up the ladder to being Grown Up-- having some sort of actual storage apparatus useful for moving instead of just humping around stuff in crumply boxes from the most convenient restaurant back dock. But then when the boxes are not filled and the Things are living in their Places will I get just as mad at them for loitering around? Guess I may just have to find out the hard way. Alternately, Leave books, notepads, pens, headphones, etc. scattered around in the open like a foul bachelorette frog and just build up tolerance until I find a good deal on a coffee table on craigslist. Life decisions.


ALSO April is National Poetry Month and I would like to make some attempt to celebrate (is that the right word? I think so) it. So maybe I'm writing some poems, but mostly I'm just writing sonorous scribbles in my notebook. In the interest of full disclosure, I was going to post some of those scraps here daily(ish) for the rest of the month, but promptly got too embarrassed by them to put them even on fringes of a public sphere. Sorry scribbles, you shame me even in my public/private space.

So. Now that I'm back in the blogosphere (or whatever the cool kids are calling it these days), some things I'd like the cover: more about my shame/poetry relationship I guess, how I feel about being a Poetry Whore, how much I hate writing cover letters but it's even worse when you forget to attach them to your submission, something about grad school.

In which I stakeout again the I

No I have shackled me through censoring the senses and senseless stumbling through smithereens as synthesis I wonder of etymologies and subject myself and grope a myself subjectively a molesting unhindered by deprivation of experience of excitability. A stoicism I cut my hair some he guesses at a masculinity a declaration semblance of identity is a loss a surrender of anonymity. One fears nothing except being named  too truly a hiding of nomenclature though a necessity must be admitted but is there necessarily a consent. You are wrong identity as product is neither polish nor vomit. From whence a redundancy how neccessary then a discovery a conquering. When does the egosection begin a someone I would like to buy please a ticket.

Body & Space, Co-Conspirators

Am sick today. Again. Another day off tinted by cold meds and mucus. My "big project" for this much anticipated two days off in a row was supposed to be rearranging my house because I just can't stand it anymore, the shape and the memories and the neglect of the space. But my arms are so heavy, and there is this gaping viscous disconnect between my face and my head that is temptingly insurmountable. I have enough in me, I think, to take all of the books down from the bookshelves and make a lot of precarious stacks teetering all over the house, but not go much further than that. So today it is not just my body or my space conspiring against me, but both. Both of these big, abstract/concrete concept-things, Body & Space, somehow separate from Me but inseparable from my identity, whatever that is. Subjects of many aborted blog posts and poemprojects and anguish, targets of change. Today is the day they team up to make everything seems just so damn daunting. Do I fight against that? Does that make Body&Space my enemy? Do I give in, and does that make Body&Space my master(s)? Neither of these options are much different from how I view these concept-things everyday, I suppose. I just feel so helpless against the grog of the sick and the weight of the bookshelves looming over me. This may just be a catch up on reading day. Does that mean I win or lose?

Wasting Words

I think I may need to start Writing some Really Bad Prose. Just vomiting it out, watching it slosh everywhere, letting it dribble down the drains. Pour enough out of me until it starts to filter into Mediocre Prose. Because while I think I will never be a Prose Writer, I feel like there is some kind of vague connection between the relative quality (as I perceive it) of prose I do produce (i.e. almost exclusively this blog at this time) and how I relate to / project / reflect on myself. Not completely clear on how this relation is laid out, and not saying I produce my best in times of self-contentment and worst in times of self-loathing,  but there's something, hiding between correlation and cause and effect. I have the creeping fear that my ability to express myself is degrading, and degrading quite quickly.
I used to keep a traditional journal/diary, writing about my day thoughts experiences etc, but that has dissolved into scribbled diaryesque "poems"--not because the medium of poesy is better for expressing my life (though it is) but because that is the only shape my grasping, fragmented and sprawling, inarticulate attempts to describe can mimic. The amount of question marks in these poems has been growing. I flip back through the pages and their numbers make me anxious, an assault force of doubt assembling.
I flail about with words trying to recreate whatever is echoing in my head, and generally it's a pretty frustrating process. When I do this for sentences and paragraphs and at the end there is nothing insightful or revealing or even charming and witty to show for it, it just makes me... sad. And very impotent. Talk may be cheap, but I believe there is absolutely such thing as a waste of words. I also believe I do it all the time. And if I am going to claim words as the tools of my trade, it seems disrespectful, wrong, to go on wasting them without acknowledgment. So here's to slaughtering words relentlessly and hoping their corpses pile up enough to support something more beautiful.

..

I get headaches (or perhaps singular, a headache) every evening now. Internal pressure expanding with no definite point of origin or concentration, just an amorphous distraction of pain. I figure it's  a) a godlet making ready to emerge from my head   b) my body telling me I need to give some serious consideration to my life w/r/t waiting tables  or   c) I need to get my sinuses Roto-Rootered . Today, the buildup has started early. Guess that means I'm getting a headstart on the day. Ha. Guess I'll see where it takes me.

Today I wrote a problem. I mean a poem.

Ok and this minute I fell again
in love with Frank O'Hara
and his gabbling of the gables of the day.
I don't care how hairy his face is
or what gritty sidewalk he strode
the year in.
Today again I remembered to fall again
in love with oil in my throat
and rain in my hair
I hated
when the eaves drip cold wet into my roots
I keep trying the lock anyway.

Untranslatable

Finally have circled around to another day off. Still haven't decided how to use it, but the rain is (again) sending out "nap!" signals I'm going to have to continually resist. There goes my intention for a run, I suppose. I believe I'm experiencing what is in Estonian "viistima: the feeling of slightly laziness, can't be bother by anything. Don't want to work nor going anywhere. (sic)"

Identified this useful emotional descriptor after reading a Salon article on a cross-lingual map of human emotions put together by Pei-Ying Lin that includes labels for some of those titchy, unidentifiable or in-between feelings for which we don't always have words in English. It's part of his Unspeakableness project, "An intervention of language evolution and human communication." It's a delightful find really-- a kind of moulding/picking throuhg of launguages to more accurately depict human...ness. Particularly like Part 4 of the project, "Personalised Language." He's filmed multilinguals doing monologues in kind of an extreme cross-lingual idiolect, where they translate a piece (dealing with a particular emotion) using all of their available languages, jumping around word by word. I'm kind of in love with/identify strongly with the Icelandic girl (Robyn Peters, though her real name sounds unspellable for me) who does the first monologue, on love...the sound of it all is unspeakably (ha) gorgeous, and her explanation for why she translated the way she did resonates with my own translation organ and makes me want to give her a big ol' hug.

Maybe then I'll do some translation work as my next project. Huh, it's very strange though. After having no ideas for anything to do, I suddenly just had a lot--to the point of a mental log jam. Words are hard to sort and select right now, and I have the beginnings of a headache. Unfortunate.

Maybe I'll go snack on some of the fancy cheese on which I spent an obscene amount of money yesterday. What's the emotional offshoot of decadence? Something related to gluttony, evelry, and pleasure I'm sure. With a twinge of incompleteness to make sure the spires keep climbing.

2013: Well, we're still here I guess

There is no such thing as a fresh start.

I've mused before on the myth of the tabla rasa at the New Year, but it is always true. Nothing is clean or easy to end or then to begin.There are always jacket edges holdovers, sticky bits. I would say I wouldn't have it any other way but that would be so false. I've been holding out so long for just such a new beginning, a clean starting line. Letting the old life decay around me, living on scraps and rust while I try to convince myself  that I'm just revving up for the Next Thing, where it all will be Shiny and New and Me.

But I'm not strong enough to scorch the earth behind me and just restart, so  I have to act like a citizen of the real world. I'm young enough, but realizing I'm reaching the point where there will always be baggage. Forever and ever amen. Deal with it. I already used my "fresh start", 17 and wide eyed and no idea what I was building. I wouldn't say I wasted it. I think of things I might have done differently, but I don't have regret or bitterness weighing down my tongue. It's nice to realize that. I'll start from there, instead of the kind of emptiness/novelty is bliss attitude I feel like I was building up to attempting.Our past defines us, et cetera et cetera. Weighs us down and/or teaches us. But we all know (maybe?) that it's really the now-us really doing that. We choose how to strap on our baggage, whether it's going to supply us or be an unendurable burden.

Such a philosophy is easier to know than to apply, of course. Time is muddled, and I get incredibly messy as I try to slog through it. Then the world opens up, and I realize I have to deal not only with my incredibly unorganized issues, but also everyone else's. Friends, lovers, enemies. All regurgitating pastpresentfuture all over me. Just the thought of it is exhausting. And also amazing.

All of this is unfortunately insipid and vague. A necessary hashing out of issues surrounding personal realities of mine. A text rehearsal of mental application.  Whatever. I'm going to start buying new things for an old house, literally and figuratively. Confront some intersection of control and aesthetics and the feeling of home.
Confront some issue. Confront anything.

2013, prepare to be refurbished.