(Post-) Christmas Hate-ish

So, "Things I Hate" really was supposed to be a serial type deal, because gods know I have enough grievances to make a quasi-infinite list. However, all of my hate-things have been eclipsed these past few days by this really awesome cold. I guess I could have complained some more about that (my boyfriend is certainly tired of hearing about it), but for a while there my typing abilities were reduced to a delirious flail. Any attempt at doing something productive ended in smears of snot and shame. Tried to get some Skyrim time in, but mostly just kept running into walls and setting myself on fire; by the time the talking dog showed up I was pretty much done. Even sleeping was a tough business; the whole breathing things was a tough go, and I kept feeling dehydrated because all of my moisture was seeping in various ways out of my face-holes. It was less pleasant than it sounds.

Oh look, I got some complaining in after all!

Anyways, belated Happy Christmas--


I myself had a fairly lovely Christmas, all snot aside. Did the usual family rigamarole--Boy's Dad's house for breakfast (deer sausage, though-yum!), Boy's Mom's/Grandparents' for lunch, my Mom's for dinner. Went to his other set of grandparents' for Christmas Eve. Got a nice stack of giftcards all around, plus the impression that Boy's Mom's family now thinks I'm a wino? From them, some wineglasses, wine, and electric wine opener. Not that I'm complaining about that. I also really love my Mom's consistently practical-yet-somehow-bizarre choice of stocking stuffer. Last year it was a lint-shaver (sounds dirty, but it's a thing to get those little fuzzies off sweaters); this year it's a can of windshield de-icer, complete with scraper on the end. Keep in mind that this is Louisiana, where we wear tank tops on Christmas Eve. Still, my mom will be damned if her girls aren't prepared for any possible preventable mishaps. That is why I love her.

Now, off to eat some chicken soup (scavenged by wonderful boyfriend from nearby drugstore), and then... maybe something crafty?

Christmas Hate, Part I

In honor of the week of Christmas, which I hate*, I will Grinch-tastically put forth a post (series of posts?) in the spirit of grumbliness...

THINGS I HATE*.

1.) Starting Christmas Way Too Flipping Early.

Since it is now in fact appropriate to celebrate Christmas, I thought I'd start with this now-belated gripe. We've all noticed that Christmas is creeping up ever earlier each year. Thanksgiving has long since been tinseled into oblivion in the frenzy to begin inflating your Santa and playing "Sleigh Ride" as soon as humanly possible. But a countdown to your Christmas countdown is really getting a bit much (I'm looking at you, ABC Family)--and now the sinister jingling of Santa's minions can be heard all the way back in October. Now, buying Christmas tree-shaped candy to hand out to trick-or-treaters is one thing. Natchitoches, Louisiana, takes this holiday territory infringement to a whole 'nother level.

Personal story. I thoroughly enjoy celebrating Halloween. I like spooky things, excessive amounts of candy, fog machines, and slutty costumes as much as the next person. In fact, having been an employee of the 13th Gate Haunted House for several years running, one could make the argument that I enjoyed these things significantly more than the next person. Now, this Halloween was the the first Halloween in four years that I had off (due to aforementioned haunted house), and for boy-friend related reasons, I spent this Weekend of Halloween Freedom in... Natchitoches. I'm the first person to admit that Baton Rouge is lacking in some respects, but it does know how to throw a helluva block party on Halloween. Even if you choose to avoid the boobs-and-vomit allure of Carlotta St., chances are you have some friends in the city somewhere dressed up for drinking and generally a pagan-eqse good time.

This sort of thing is conspicuously missing in Natchitoches.  Approximately two houses in the whole town (a pretty decent percentage, I'll admit) made any attempt at Halloween decoration. There were a few (decidedly uncarved) pumpkins lying around public areas. But overall, Halloween is swept under the rug, probably because Natchitochieans fear immediate possession of the entire town by evil spirits. To avoid such a problem, they skip straight to Christmas. When I arrived the weekend of October 29 - 31, the damn lights were already decking the quaint tableaux of Front Street. Look, I know how exciting Christmas must be for the "City of Lights". But at least throw some plastic skeletons out there for a weekend.



Halloween in Baton Rouge

Approximation of Halloween in Natchitoches. Notice the lack of rave.

2.) Really Aggressive Acorns

This isn't so much of a nationwide issue as the Christmas/Halloween thing above, but it is definitely a more constant source of annoyance in my life. 

Apparently, there are oak or oak-ish trees on the property where I (and several other victims) live. These trees are generally benign. They provide us shade and some contribution of oxygen and a nice earth-toned balance to the horrific salmon-color paint of our house. In return, we do not generally mess with them or pay them much attention at all, really.This relationship holds well for about 3/4 of the year, but then somewhere around what would be considered autumn in states that actually have season, these trees get unaccountably angry and initiate a sort of guerrilla warfare with our roofs and our sanity. At random intervals, they pelt our houses (and cars, and cats) with tiny, high-speed missiles--any time, anywhere. 

"But," one might say, "those are just acorns, which naturally drop from trees at that time of year." Yes, I hear that does happen. But "drop" is not really a verb that can explain the explosive landing force of these death-nuts. "Hurl" or "sling" or "launch"  comes closer, but really, gravity alone will not account for these suckers. I'm not sure if the squirrels have launched some crazed campaign against us, or if the acorns themselves have gained vindictive sentience, but they are relentless. 

Imagine: You're spending a relaxing evening alone and vulnerable in your house, maybe just about to doze off, when

RAT A TAT BAM BAM

sounds not unlike gunfire erupt somewhere very close to your head. Oh no! Is it burglar-rapists? Increasingly negative negotiations spilling over from the nearby ghetto? The Krampus, finally come with punishment in full? Nope, it's just the freaking acorns, propelling themselves full-force at your roof, or walls (somehow?) or, even better, the acoustic amplifier that is your air-conditioner. You finally manage to convince your adrenaline rush to release its grip and begin to doze off again, when

KAPOW CRACKA BOOM

repeat...



Well, that's all the impotent ranting I can muster up for now but there are oh so many things on this list. Updates on hate-worthy things throughout the week, until Christmas finally comes with presents to assuage my awful rage.



*Yes, I know that "hate" is a strong word, and no, I don't hate Christmas or the items discussed above. The feeling is more akin to a disgruntled-frustration-and-annoyance (to varying degrees). I just really didn't want to type that out every time.

Survived another semester, my second to last. This was accomplished, I think, mainly by my becoming more self-dependent/others-avoidant. I have more or less withdrawn into my own little fuzzy stress-bubble of a world, especially in the last few weeks of class, with only a dribble of mutters as my line of communication with the outside world. Honestly, except for the whole stress thing, it was great.

But now that everyone is switching into winter break mode (or winter intersession mode, for my masochistic friends), I am getting dragged out of my shell, out to lunches and hang-outs and bars where I buy drinks I really can't afford. And now that the Boy is back from quaint BFE, I am torn between spending constant nights in with him and fulfilling both my and his social obligations in the outside world. Again, not that bad of a situation, except now I'm spending way too much going-out money when I am now more or less on a fixed income (i.e., no income).

Also on the pro-side and the con-side of my current situation: I have so. much. time. So much. Big, amorphous blobs of time, floating about, smacking me in the face with their gratuitous presence. Yay, I mean, this is what I quit my job for, right? Unfortunately, me being what I am, I mostly just plaster these hours and hours of time with excessive (and I do mean excessive) amounts of sleep. As in, not-wake-up-until-the-sun-is-going-down sleep. It's getting to be kind of a grotesque situation.  I broke out of the rut today by waking up "early" (before noon) to go have lunch with a friend... then came home and went back to sleep. Ok, it's a problem.

So with one month left of the winter holiday, I am going to do something. Preferably several things. No list of goals this time around, at least not yet. But thanks to my new buddy Pintrest, I can give some vague idea of, well, ideas that I like. (See also tasty things that I like, most of which I think are within my realm of ability.) So basically I intend to root around in crafty things, make some motion towards working out, and devour on the cheap some tasty, tasty things. There are worse plans, right?

Thankful Time!

I guess it's about time to be thankful for things.

I am thankful that the weather today was unbelievably beautiful, and that I was forced to spend a good prat of the day outside on a well-decorated patio.

I am thankful to have a Cajun family that sends large amounts of tasty leftovers home with me. Always.

I am thankful that I do not have children.

I am thankful to have left my serving job that was becoming a huge drain on my soul. That is, I am thankful to have the resources to be able to do this sort of thing and continue my education while maintaining my current standard of living.

With that being said, I am thankful that I also have a potential copy-editing type job on the horizon.

I am thankful that there are only a couple of weeks left in the semester, and I am (almost, pretty much) caught up with all my work.

Also thankful I only have one semester left after this.

I am thankful that my loving, handsome, wonderful boyfriend is home for the week, and that when I fall asleep at night and wake up in the morning, he is there next to me--as things should be.

And of course, I am so thankful to have friends and family who not only love me, but who take genuine interest in my well-being and who are generally awesome, fun-to-be-around, intelligent, caring people!

So....Thanks!

More Pros than Cons, really

Up before noon on a day I don't have to be, so yay... but this required my sleeping through most of yesterday evening. What is wrong with me? Surely people should be able to get by without 14 hours of sleep, even on their day off?

Went to the coffee shop, and the woman behind me enthused wondrously about my hair for a few minutes. "Freaking awesome," she says. And me not having showered in two days and not a brush to my name at the moment. So either an esteem boost on my part or a poor judgement call on hers. Possibly both. A nice moment anyway.

In other, geekier personal news, I really really really want to play Skyrim.

Unfortunately, my desktop computer (past its prime but still theoretically able to run Skyrim) is down for the count-- either the video card is fried (boo) or the motherboard (double boo!). It's been out for a while, and I was going to wait until the winter break to get it fixed, so I didn't have a high-resolution, totally immersive monkey on my back for the last few weeks of the semester. But now everyone is gabbling constantly about it and I am practically vomiting with envy. Want. Okay, /geekout.

Time to go try to be productive in the few hours I actually have before work (only three shifts left--so excited!) And to go shower, no matter what that lady said about my hair.

Home is where the... what, exactly?

So I've been spending this week at my mother's house. They say you can never go back home, but if your mom lives in town, you can sure as hell go to her house for a home-cooked meal and some TLC. It's actually a pretty inconvenient place to stay, considering it's about half an hour farther away from campus and my job than my actual residence is. (But that's a big reason why I don't actually live here.) However, there is always coffee made for me in the morning, breakfast usually, and tasty dinner-- which is way more than I can say for my place right now. I guess living solely on my own for the first time is really getting to me-- not to mention severe senioritis and  the onset of, if not an existential crisis exactly, then at least severe life apathy. The semblance of family life, even the most hectic and dysfunctional, kind of brings me back into things, I guess.  Even if this house has never really been home for me, it has been a sanctuary in times of crises (over-dramatic term, that... I really mean loneliness.) So I'm thankful for that.

More Life Goals (Short-Term)

So, I have recently decided on two small but non-trivial life changes I will be making in the near future (i.e. within the next month).

1. I am going to QUIT MY JOB on/around the first week of December!

This is pretty big for me; this has been my only off-campus job my entire college career. I've been there for 2 1/2  years, and I was expecting to stay there until I graduated. Or until I moved. Or maybe died from server doldrums. But after weeks of daydreaming about quitting (working 8 hour shifts until midnight or two in the morning on school nights is less than optimal), I started to seriously run the numbers, and between what I save this semester, my scholarships and student loans, and the pittance from my student job, I (think that I) can actually pull it off-- and not have to work my last semester of school! Excite! The only downside it that I won't really have money saved up before I graduate, which means I'll probably have to spend some more time working here over the summer or beyond before I can move to a Real City.

That's the bigger change, and now that I only have T-minus 5 weeks, I am really chomping at the bit to get out of there.

2. I am going to start buying one (two?) books of newly(ish) published poetry a month.

Less dramatic, but still an important resolution. More words need to go in my brain, and those words should be new and fresh and innovative and all those other buzzwords. Not that Anne Sexton and T.S. Eliot are losing their places on my bookshelf, but One Must Be Current.


Well, more class now. More procrastination later.

Retrospective Italy Update, Part III

Allora! Been promising this one for a while, and finally grabbed a handful of pictures to represent the last--but not least! part of my trip-- a Roma!

Well, we didn't actually stay in Rome, but in a beautiful little hill town called Frascati, about 20 minutes away by train. Lovely place, with about a dozen family-owned butcher shops per square kilometer-- porchetta (freshly roasted suckling pig) every night, and locally produced, tasty wine! Bit of a strain on the thighs, though, as every walk from the train station to the hotel required going up about 142 stairs. (Literally, we counted.)

Anyway, what follows is mostly pictures of ruins, as that was by far my favorite part of Rome. The stuff with living people populating it mostly just stressed me out (though the Metro was, for the most part, extremely convenient).

Arch of Septimus Severus in the Roman Forum

Trevi Fountain (Yes, I threw a coin in over my shoulder)

Requisite Colosseum photo!

And inside the Colosseum-- it's kind of gone downhill since its glory days.

Arch of Septimus Severus and Temple of Saturn (which is really really big up close!)

Inside of the Pantheon

Some violent sculptures from the Vatican Museum (the tour of which was actually one of my least favorite parts of the trip-- all that beautiful art stuffed together in one hot, crowded, anxiety-inducing place where I can't properly enjoy it. Still remarkable through.)

Oh, but it was worth it for the Raphael Room! Got to see the School of Athens in person. (The Sistine Chapel too. Don't have any decent pictures of that, though, and it's a bit of a strain on the neck after a while.)

Long view of the Roman forum-- this is one of my favorite pictures I took in the city. Can you tell I spent the most time here? Well over three hours (including the Palatine Hill). Shadow being cast is from the Temple of Saturn.

The Tiber River at night, with St. Peter's in the background. The teachers took us on a dinner cruise for our last night-- it was a great way to go out.

Well, that was my trip to Italy, in a greatly condensed and abbreviated nutshell! I intend to go back as soon as possible, and for as long as I can. So until next time!

Ciao ciao!

We have let

in our spirit friends.

We say go forth

and remember

everything I have to do today.

They come back

emptyhanded

and with me burrow

heads under pillowcases.

Tomorrow,

they whisper,

might be another day.

Though I had my doubts, but I know it now

So, with much shamefacedness, I must slink back without a substantive update... but in my defense, immediately after I posted last, the internet in my house died and has yet to be resurrected. This of course does not necessarily prevent me from going to some place like, say a coffee shop to participate in the World Wide Web, but my time management skills, as one might easily notice, are less than stellar. Plus the temptation to continuously consume $5 lattes for the duration of my stay would inevitably prove to be overwhelming. Anyway, the lack of internet has more or less kept me away from my laptop completely, so the promised last round of pictures hasn't even been sorted through yet. (On the plus side, my house is pretty damn clean and I've read probably a dozen books in the past month... gotta find something to do to procrastinate)

However, as expected, my schedule is gradually working itself out and firming up... now all I have to do is find four-plus extra hours a week or so to do the stuff I want to do.

I really need to take less naps.

Anyway, for a window into my life, my TO-DO list for this evening (post-3:30 PM):
-go to bank
-buy running/work-out shoes (current pair has literally been worn through, possibly on all sides)
-translate Psalms 5 & 6 from Old English to Today English
-make tasty breakfast hashbrown mini-casseroles (we'll see how this goes...)
-visit cousin-friend (and get a blender!)
-write a verse of poetry


If I can get 3+ of these things done, I am doing pretty well. Aim high, right?


OH, almost forgot to mention that I saw Bright Eyes in concert last night. Amazing. I have seen Conor Oberst before, touring on his solo stuff (also fantastic), but this was Bright Eyes itself, reaching al the way back to Fevers and Mirrors, aka into the most formative years of my life. Still incredibly moving for me. Incredibly glad for the chance to see them (though no touching of Conor Oberst this time...damn), as this might be the last time they tour as a band. I just wished indie kids danced more... people in that crowd (the amount of black plastic-framed glasses, my god) clearly felt very strongly about Conor/Bright Eyes, but the most they did was bob their heads and shuffle their feet, maybe throw up a hand once in a while. Oh well. Conor Oberst had enough energy for all of them, twirling like a madman and vigorously chucking "his iPhone" to the ground and stomping it into oblivion. The exhaustion I'm feeling today after getting in post-2AM and waking up at 7is absolutely worth it, and will be every time.

Yet Another Short, Apologetic Update

So I thought I was doing well with updating on Italy, etc., but then the full force of summer hit me--and not the "fun" summer force. This one was more a combination of obligatory seasonal mood downswing, boyfriend moving away to BFE, silly but essential paper due the first day of school (ridiculous and frustrating, by the way. Worst thing I ever churned out) all glued together with the overwhelming, stifling heat of a particularly nasty Louisiana summer. It has all the charm of living in an overenthusiastic armpit.

Anyway, these things have significantly dampened my drive to... well, do anything. But now that school's back in session (yay?) I'll hopefully have the drive and (pray god) the free time to actually get stuff done. Me-stuff, like this blog, as well as icky school papers.

This ramp of excuses is, of course, leading up to yet another promise: will update soon, and yes, with pictures.

Retrospective Italy Update, Part II

Went on several more excursions, especially while we were based in Bologna. Some of the more notable ones (i.e. the ones from which I have pictures) are these:

Ravenna. A smaller town, with a weird hodgepodge of really, really old stuff and ugly industrial stuff. Was seat of the Western Roman Empire for a

while, no big deal. Lots of super old churches like this one: San Francesco, built 4th c. renovated 10th c. Where Dante had his funeral and was buried.

Speaking of which, saw his tomb as well. There was something moving about it; I was standing in the presence of Dante's final resting place, just as I was reading his (albeit hypothetical) account of the afterlife. It would have been a really great experience, if there hadn't been a line of 50 people behind me, all waiting to also have their solemn bonding moment with Dante's remains. All the same, a worthwhile pilgrimage.

Ravenna is also famous for its mosaics, especially these in San Vitale. They are pretty damn intricate and appropriately Byzantine, considering they were commissioned under the rule of the Byzantine emperor Justinian. Poor Ravenna's been reconquered about as many times as Poland, but these and others like them in the city have luckily stayed in pretty good shape, encouraging tourists from all over the world to take frustratingly blurry pictures of tiny patterned tiles.

Then: Florence!

View of Florence and the Duomo from its belltower

The Fountain of Neptune in front of the Palazzo Vecchip

View from the Ponte Vecchio

Love locks along the Ponte Vecchio

Duomo and the Baptistry

Facade of S. Maria del Fiore (aka the Duomo)

Florence was, of course, beyond beautiful--and incredibly exhausting. I didn't stay long enough to get museum fatigue this time (in fact, I didn't even get to see all the museums I wanted to go to!) but the sheer amount of bumbling tourists, street vendors, and other assorted annoying people made me want to lock myself in the hotel room and watch the Fairly Odd-Parents in Italian (apparently the show is much-beloved over there; it came on three different channels every night). And I didn't even run into the cast of Jersey Shore (though quite a few of my classmates did, the lucky dogs). When I return to Italy, it will definitely be in the winter--less heat, less tourists.

Finally, went to Siena to visit my friend Jade

Siena is a beautiful (and incredibly steep) little hill town with tasty food and a crazy annual medieval horse race in the main piazza. Unfortunately, I missed the Palio by just a few days, and I only got to spend an afternoon in the city. Ah, well, something for me to hit up on my next trip!

Up next: Rome

Retrospective Italy Update, Part I

So, it turns out I have been studying in Italy for five weeks! Unlike some people, I am not capable of keeping an up-to-date travel blog, so let me just do a quick overview:

It was beyond awesome!

(But next time I return to Italy, I will do so in the winter)

Maybe more details later, but my schedule is incredibly chock-full of being lazy for the next two months or so, so we'll see. In the meantime, some pictures:

Here's Bologna, the first town we stayed in (and my favorite by far). It's pretty awesome-- a university town, but it's university is the oldest in the world. So it's full of hip ragazzi (young people) but also assorted neat old stuff. And the best part of it is that it's in Italy, so you can pretty much walk to everything. And if not, there is legitimate (mostly) functioning public transport.

Here's some of that neat old stuff:

Ridiculously detailed Madonna mosaic

Former Merchant's Guild, now home to Bologna Chamber of Commerce

Statue of Neptune in the Piazza del Nettuno

Some delicious products produced in the nearby Emilia-Romagna region. Our first week we visited a Parmesan cheese factory (they actually call the real stuff parmigiano-reggiano, but who has time for that when there is cheese to be eaten?) and a balsamic vinegar place. There was many a delicious sample consumed.

Also: Wine is pretty popular in Italy. Each region kind of does its own thing, but everybody has a local wine. This one is made by the balsamic vinegar place in Parma-- a frizzy white, quite refreshing! The typical hang-out thing (especially when we were in Bologna) is to grab a bottle of wine and socialize on the steps of some historic building. It's a really nice way to pass an evening, actually. Oh, did I mention that wine is also incredibly cheap there?

Went to Venice our first weekend:

Honestly, didn't expect to like this city... but I did. Everything, including and especially the architecture, is ridiculously decadent. Our obligatory gondola ride just before sunset was pleasant and charming, despite a distinct lack of singing from our gondolier, and the dinner we ate at a restaurant over the Grand Canal was lovely. Don't think I could live there (it's way too touristy) but I would love to have a rich people house there!

Alright, selecting pictures to post is actually kind of an exhausting process (I took literally thousands), which I'm guessing is why I haven't done it so far. So this update will be broken into parts. Up next: Ravenna and Florence!

Stomping Grounds

So my neighborhood is a pretty cool place. It has got a pretty nice population mix, lots of neat and aesthetically pleasing houses, and is a great place to bike and/or run and/or take a walk. I quite like it, and it is a big reason I'm staying in my current digs instead of moving to some slightly more convenient and economical place on State Street or thereabouts. Also, it has its own character, some little spice of self that is distinctly missing from places like the behemoth Suburbia of Shenandoah. Recently in my strolls through my nice little slice of the city, I have noticed a couple of things:

1. It seems to be a trend around the neighborhood to hang windows outside in mid-air where there are no walls (Also, doors, but these are rarer but usually not hanging). This is especially prevalent in the yards of the clearly "quirky" houses, which are generously sprinkled about. Having windows where there are no walls, e.g, just suspended from a tree branch, is somehow slightly disturbing to me, but at the same time it looks kind of neat. Is this a thing? Should I start scavaging for orphaned windows?

2. The cheerily aggressive children selling lemonade streetside are legion. As mentioned previously, I walk around the neighborhood quite frequently, and will go well out of my way to avoid these manic little entrepreneurs--but they are always there. There seems to be an unusually high population on my street especially, which has on multiple occasions kept me inside when I was about to set out for a run. I just can't handle dealing with their smiling, gaptoothed, money-hungry little faces (It is worth noting that I usually range from awkward to mediocre in dealing with salespeople and children, but when you combine these traits I am useless). I understand that this is apparently a common thing throughout Suburbia, but I grew up in a rural-ish area with a dearth of passerby-as-potential-customers, and thus my entrepreneurial spirit was crushed; the ways and manners of these tiny merchants are foreign to me. I tend to deal with them the same way I deal with panhandling bums: awkward smile, sorry, no, um, I only have my card?

Just a couple of observations. Less than a week until I leave for Italy! (Still not ready, I think.)

Ubi est Roma?

Leaving for Italy in less than two weeks, and I am excited but definitely not ready. I still have a giant list of things to attend to and buy, and for some reason my mind cannot wrap itself around the concept of five weeks--"How long is that? Wait, how much...how much stuff do I need for that? That's kind of longish time?"

Not to mention that my grasp on Italian has weakened substantially. I swore up and down that (having finished my language sequence in the Fall) I would keep up with it this semester, watch Fellini movies, read Italian news sites, etc. Surprise--didn't happen. So now I'm struggling to remember how to form the past tense and ask where the bathroom is. (Ok, bit of an exaggeration there, but I really couldn't remember how to say "bathroom").

I've managed to stage off the inevitable freak-out so far, but oh, it's looming. I hate travel. I mean, I love being in other places, especially Italy, but I can't stand actually getting there; it brings out my neuroses like nothing else. Maybe I'll take up meditation real quick?

I CAN HAZ THESIS STATEMENT?

Since I am now officially done beating my brain into a pulpy mush to extract papers, etc. (at least for this semester) and griping about it, I can now get back on an ivory-soap box and talk about why it is important to be able to construct coherent sentences from your brain-mush.

Even if you are not a giant geek like I am, flying into giddy fits over discovering the shared etymological root of punch (the drink) and punch (the flying fist)*, it is pretty obvious that yes, words are important. You use them every day to convey important (or trivial) ideas, and you need to organize them properly in order to convince your professor (and friends, and later on your boss, coworkers, lover, parole officer, etc) that you are not a flaming numbskull. You take advantage of this skill (or lack thereof) every time you open your mouth. Fortunately or unfortunately, we cannot aways rely on the Gift of Gab (and all the relevant "like"s and "y'know"s that tend to fill conversational/logistic gaps) to help us out. Your words at some point have to take the form of squiggly little letter on a page (or screen). They are there for longer than are soundwaves in the air, and give your audience time to reread, process and criticize what you have put forth. Opportunities for judgment are increased exponentially. So please at least attempt to make yourself sound like a functioning human being (but don't try too hard--overwriting is pretty damn agonizing to read as well).

This article on Salon by Kim Brooks does a pretty good job of expressing the frustration I often feel when I encounter the writing of my peers. And, as I will almost inevitably be teaching a chunk of composition classes at some point in my life, the same article is incredibly depressing to me. I have over the course of my education been blessed with some fantastic English teachers, both in high school and in college. And, were I ever (*shudder*) to end up in the same position, I can only hope I live up to the standards they set. More likely, I think, I would be driven to drink. Because I have also had my share of shoddy English teachers, But, looking around at my classmates, I couldn't always blame them for their apathy or their rote, heads-down approach to the curriculum. Teaching is hella hard. But even so, I'm going to hope that some attempt is being made to wedge Critical Thinking and the Production of Ideas and Discourse into this/my generations head. Because even the small slice I've personally witnessed is...well, unacceptable.

Okay, I'm stepping down of my "elitist" soapbox. But goddammit, I'm not asking everyone to go out there and write the Great American Novel, or even develop an appreciation for the Mediocre American Novel(s). JUST MAKE YOUR WORDS WORK.

*[In case you're interested, by the way, the etymology is from the Indo-European root penk(w)e-, which is where we get the word "five" (cf. Greek pent-)-- punch traditionally had five ingredients, a punch is made from the five fingers of a fist. Ta Da!]

More Procrastination via BritLit Villains

It's a struggle to bring myself to start my final essay/project for BritLit, even though my professor basically told me that no matter what I turn in, I'm getting an A in the class. Despite this and her insistence that I needn't stress over this at all, I've fixated on the idea of each character being written in an imitation of the style of their original work. This is possibly a mistake. I can probably pull off some old-school alliteration for Grendel, but am I really going to take it upon myself to imitate Shakespeare? And Milton, in all the glory of his squirrley syntax in twenty line sentences?

Yeah, I guess so.

Basic outline (major paraphrasing):

[Grendel, Iago, Mephistopheles, and Satan are iin Heaven, with yellow VISITOR passes looped around their necks]

Grendel: RAR! GORE AND VIOLENCE THROUGH THE FRONT DOOR FTW!

Satan: Maybe that's not the best way to do things.

Iago: Yeah, I remember somebody who tried to straight-up bring an army to bear on his Almighty creator, and if I recall correctly that didn't work out so well. Should have gone my route with some servile subterfuge.

Meph: Hush your mouth, Iago.

Satan: You were just following the path I laid out when I successfully employed deception to bring about a little thing known as, I don't know, The Fall of Mankind.

Meph: Laid out so successfully that millennia later I could use the same lure of knowledge and flattery to damn Faustus, a son of Adam who by all rights should have learned from his parents' Fall. (Sucker.)

Satan: Thank you, my good fiend. And we, already bent as demons, had to worm our way into the domain of our victims, we did not have the luxury of being cozily ensconced in their nest, as you were.

Iago: Yeah, I set myself up pretty sweet on the inside, didn't I? And I probably earned a pretty good place in your little kingdom of sinners along the way, huh? But you have to hand it to me-- I set up my lies completely from scratch, unfounded--- I had no demonic side-show tricks or magic fruit to follow through with--and that "valiant" Moor still killed himself and his little lady while his domain went to pot around him.

Satan: You indeed have a deep spot in my legions. A traitor's place is always guaranteed.

Grendel: YEAH, BETRAYAL IS PRETTY INTENSE. CAIN THE FIRST KIN-SLAYER WAS MY GREATGREATGREATGREAT GRANDDADDY SO I'M A MONSTER. ALSO FROM HELL I WATCHED HROTHGAR'S CLAN TURN ON EACH OTHER AND HIS SUPER-FANCY GOLD HALL BURNED UP. I WAS LIKE HAHAHA.

Satan: And surely we can agree on the effectiveness of the "divide and conquer" strategy? Simple Eve was won when Adam's guiding "manly grace" was elsewhere distracted.

Meph: Faustus as well was taken in solitude, no matter how scholarly; he himself had walled off his well-intentioned friends

Iago: I convinced Othello to abhor and discard his nearest and dearest (excluding, of course, yours truly) by implying my poisons in opportune moments when, just the two of us, the reason of others would not stand in my way.

Grendel: I SURE DO LIKE TO MUNCH ON A HEAP OF THANES BUT IT WAS BEST WHEN THEY SCATTERED AND HID IN THEIR OUTHOUSES AND I KNEW I WAS RULING THE ROOST

Satan: Pitiful humans just can't keep their wits about them, can they?

St. Peter: Well, I think you've sufficiently demonstrated to the junior hosts the nature(s) of the threat they face. Off you go back to hell then!

[Scene]

Well, that was helpful. Time to go actually write the thing, I suppose.

Two more days and I'm free.

Marginalia on Procrastination

Wrote two poems today (kind of. mostly.), and I am absurdly proud of myself for this. I guess I'll take what I can get, inch by inch.

While celebrating this, I am trying desperately not to think about the looming monstrosity of my Chaucer paper, which is due in less than a week now and on which I have barely started. (By "trying not to think about" I of course mean "procrastinating by blogging about" Funny, that.) Well, I reread the tales I'm critiquing (Miller's Tale, Reeve's Tale) and wrote some comments in the margins, but I doubt that noting things like "Oh, snap!" and "stealing babies!!!" in the margins is really going to help me come time to actually hammer out this thing. But who knows. Also, turns out the sources I spent hours picking out are probably going to be little to no help at all, but I lugged six hardcover books home from the library and damned if I'm not going to cite the things. I give not a fig for fastidious scholarship (obviously)!

Positively Anti-Motivated

The final project/essay in my British Literature class is to write a "quadrilogue" -- that is, a conversation between four voices about a certain theme and how it's treated in the different works we've discussed. These voices can be characters from the works, or authors, or modern intellectuals/critics. Since the latter two option are hella boring, I'm thinking--

Grendel (Beowulf), Mephistopheles (Dr. Faustus), Iago (Othello), and Satan (Paradise Lost) discussing... oh, I dunno... the nature of the threat to the community?

Picking four main villains (quoteunquote) seems a little obvious, I know, but it just seems like it would be so much fun. You know, for a paper at least. Considering how anti-excited I am for my other final papers (and oh, they are legion), this is pretty positive. Would Meph acknowledge this version of Satan as his over(under?)lord? Would Iago and Satan be involved in snarky one-upmanship? (Hint: Yes.)

Anyway, just typing out this thought bubble to avoid reading some John Donne and critical essays on Chaucer. Procrastination is the name of the game this evening, and, I suspect, for the remaining two weeks of the semester. Pip pip!

Blogadise Lost

So I've been reading Paradise Lost-- partly because I've been meaning to read it, but also because it's necessary for my Brit Lit class and, well, we know how that goes. Anyway, apparently Milton has a lot of interesting things to say about the sign and the representation of the thing vs. the thing itself, and deifying the representation over the thing (at least according to David Hawkes, who did the introduction and notes for the Barnes & Noble Classics edition), which may or may not have some uncomfortable implications for my view of language. I'll have to read more of it, though, before I can pass judgement. Anyway, before I got in to all that, there was a quotation at the beginning of the introduction which caught my eye:

Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them as to be as active as that sole whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a violl the purest effcacie and extraction of the living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.

-Milton, Areopagitica (1644)

And it reminded me that, oh yeah, books aren't just assignments to be analysed and extracted and turned in for points in class. They are inspiration. They are why I'm on the path I'm on, wherever that's going. And that is living, that is important--and it's good to be reminded of that every once in a while, even by a kind of pompous, long dead guy. So thanks, books. You're awesome.

[Side note: While writing this post, I spent a good ten to fifteen minutes distracted by looking up the word "paradise" on the Oxford English Dictionary Online. And two things-- One, I'm letting my geek flag fly and celebrating because LSU resubscribed to the OED. It is maybe something a flagship university should have, I think. Two, the Old English word for Paradise, before we borrowed "Paradisium" from Latin, was "neorxnawanga". Which is way cooler. I'm bringing it back.]

A place for everything, and everything...goes to hell.

Ugh. I thought trying to be organized was going to make my life better, or easier, or something, but the attempt has been taking over my life like a malevolent creeping spider vine type thing, generally making my weeks into one long borderline anxiety attack. I am even less fun than I normally am. It is like being a hamster running on a wheel in an inhumanely small cage. Except the wheel is sticky. And also has spikes.

It's funny, because when I look at my workload for the day, or week, or whatever, I always think, "Oh, that's not so bad. I can totally do this before (insert applicable deadline here)." Then I actually sit down to do whatever the work is, and everything goes to hell. Whatever part of my brain is in charge of my time-management is apparently run by a psychotic ADD ringmaster, or something equally unproductive.

Also, it doesn't help that we lost a damn hour last night. Always so unfair.

Nor does it help that I'm posting this instead of working on translating Old Irish, but such is life.

Well, while I'm working on getting my priorities straight, I'm going to bake a nice batch of blueberry muffins. Surely that will cheer me up!

If I read or type the word(s) poetry/poems one more time in the next hour, I'm revoking my own literacy privledges

Just finished reading Chelsey Minnis's Poemland. I had been somewhat avoiding picking it up for a few weeks because both the back and front covers are printed with a close up of annoyingly pink fur and some confusing barcode type things (these, of course, are painfully relevant to the themes of the book. Go figure.).

Anyway, still not 100% on whether or not I like this book (certainly it did not ignite such distaste in me as Tao Lin's did), but at least now I feel significantly better about my struggle with writing poetry and the nature of poetry. This (along with money, and various shiny things) is what Minnis deals with in Poemland. Her way of grappling with this question is apparently by publishing a book with a lot of bizarre similes and more ellipses than, well, it is a lot of ellipses also. [I was going to put in some witty turn of phrase here but I cracked under the pressure of producing one. So there.] Not quite sure what my own way of dealing with my relationship with (to? no, with) poetry is, but to see someone else slopping around in their own poetic mud eases my mind just a smidge.

Mind, I don't feel particularly better about any future of my quoteunquote writing career (end result: probably hermitude), but its nice to have some breathing space away from the panic-weight for a while.

Of course, Chelsey Minnis lives in Boulder, Colorado. Obviously she can make money from publishing a book of lines fretting over said lines. That's what they do there in utopia.

So what, a lot of people sleep with writers

This is the anxiety like a binder clamp on the end of my esophagus as the mountains of digital accolades pile down on notme, all compiled of notme. These are the split ends and the bitten nails quietly cataloging the creeping triumph of notme. These are the ghosts of mistaken praises whose insubstantial feet I have seen dissolve.

Do not say failure, do not think failure, there will be enough of that from other sides. Do not look at other sides. There is a gold star on my calender for each day I write.

Do not put down that pen.
For God's sake,
Do not

this is what i think about tao lin and i might as well post it in the style of a tao lin imitation because i have to do one later and i need practice

tao lin is a pretentious douchbag

i would say he is a smarmy git because that also seems about right but he is so far immersed in the new york hipster scene that he is like a drowned rat in its sewers and i just don't think british slang is in right now

and it just seems wrong to me to judge his poems

as poems

because mostly they are just insufferable clumps

of snarky word-lines

coated in 20something writer stream of consciousness

but the thing about pretentious douchebags is

i kind of have a soft spot for them

like the guy everybody wants to set on fire

because he gave this 34 minute lecture on the moral necessity of evil

(or maybe it was the plot of a video game)

but i chuckle a little and say

"well but he's kind of funny sometimes"

so i keep them around

and i chuckle sometimes but mostly

i just want to throw them out the window onto a busy street

or maybe a strip club

and i'm like

jesus

this guy's published

a lot

By the way: It's cold.

I find it amusing and a little sad how Louisianians are completely unable to function once the thermometer drops below about, say, sixty degrees. That's when the "It's/I'm too cold!" sets in. People wear oversized jackets and sprint to their cars, shivering uncontrollably. (I admit I am a victim of the same phenomenon, but I try not to show it as much lest God bring back the hellheat to spite me.) Then when it gets to this point, about 35 and windy during the day, people literally walk around literally unable to say or think anything but "Cold. Cold. Cold."

Probably 80-90% of my conversations (as well as the ones I overheard) today went like this, pretty much verbatim:

1:"Jesus, it's cold."

2:"Yeah, it's freakin' cold!"

1:"No I mean like it's really cold."

LSU had to send out an email last night basically boiling down to "It's cold, but we're not cancelling classes." They sent out another one tonight saying, "Nevermind, it's way too cold. We're totally cancelling classes." Which means I get an actual day off tomorrow. Yay! Whew, I was tired of pretending I had outfits equipped to deal with this weather.

Don't get me wrong. I like the cold. For me, today way actually a lovely day in its own special, wintry way. I am of the opinion, you see, that winter is actually supposed to be cold. I am much more horrified by the days of summer when the sweat would boil off my skin if it could, but the air is already at 105% humidity (Which is hypocritical, I suppose summer is supposed to be hot as well but it really just gets gross.) Anyway, yay chilly weather, but since we only get about five days of that a year, I am woefully unprepared to dress for it and shiver my way through days like today in stacks of light sweaters.

Anyway, even though our "snow day" will be pitifully lacking in snow, I'm planning to enjoy it. Stay safe, everyone. Down here we barely know how to drive in the best of circumstances.

delta days

Semester progressing acceptably. Still trying to wrangle the details of advanced time management, but hey, it goes.

Finally finished culling the poems for delta journal. A surprisingly civil, (mostly) yelling-free process. Haven't seen the fiction, but it looks like we're going to have a pretty fine journal on our hands when all is said and done-and printed!

(Though I have to say, it kind of sucks when you're the only one in the room i.e. on staff who doesn't get published in your own print.)

In Fear of Old Irish

So in this coming semester (two days and counting--ergh) I signed up for a class of Old Irish. Why? Unsure. It is almost as related to modern Irish as Old English is to modern English. And I had no plans at all to learn/use Irish anyway (though its status as an endangered language is sad). But, hell, they're offering it, and when else am I going to get to learn Old Irish?

The professor (who, in addition to being the linguistics undergraduate advisor and the only linguistics professor currently teaching classes, has quickly become my favorite person at the university) is offering the class as an independent study for one of her grad students who needs it for her concentration, but is allowing some others to take the class too. End result: My being intimidated and/or amused by five super-smart graduate students and an undergrad senior. Professor advertised this class as one of the hardest languages she's ever learned, taught, or studied. But extremely linguistically interesting. Which intrigued me to the point of enrolling, perhaps foolishly.

Anyway, took a look at the book. I feel like I could learn the crazy arbitrary rules for orthography (spelling), if I could figure out how to pronounce half the consonants. I don't know how to palatalize l or n or f or really any other letters besides s and maybe g. Too bad! All of the consonants are sometimes palatalized and/or lentited! Or some combination thereof. Nor do I know how to make a voiced bilabial nasal fricative (m with slightly open lips? no idea.). My book even has cartoons of sheep being "amusing" put there specifically to try to ease the stress of learning this language. I find myself actively yearning for the simpler days of my advanced Latin textbooks.

This is swiftly becoming a matter of pride/stubbornness. My arrogance got my into this class and. by the gods, it's going to get my through it . Languages and the process of learning them and how they work has always been fun for me, or at the very least pleasurably interesting. Dammit, I will learn the basic grammatical structure of this language. And I will enjoy it.

One good thing: no graded work. So if I just look really earnest and eager and try really hard, I should be fine. Right?

Amateur poetry marathon!

Running the first leg of the literary marathon that is reading/judging the poetry submissions for delta, LSU's undergraduate literary journal. All 240 pages of them. I'm on page 97 of the first go round, and honestly just thinking of finishing this pile is a little exhausting. Doing the preliminary read-through now, then I'll go back and attempt to read them again and actually judge them in a day or two, but knowing my wishy-washy tendencies, it'll probably take at least one more read-through after that to get it nailed down.

That being said, I've been pleasantly surprised by the quality of the submissions--it's a completely open process, anybody can submit, so I was kind of expecting more angsty love poetry written in couplets, honestly. Good job LSU's writing community, I suppose. (Though, selfishly, I could wish for the submissions to be less impressive, so that mine would stand out more. But as a writer with integrity and respect for talent, of course I won't do that.)

This upcoming issue will be awesome, once we grind this all out. Back to it!

Sauntering Vaguely Improvement-wards

So if I wanted to be really ambitious this new year, I could make the following goals:

-Make a budget. This would require having a rough estimate of combined household income, which is a slippery fish indeed. Both Boy and I wait tables, and while I have heard tell that it is possible to budget in this line of work, I strongly doubt our capacity to do it, at least while our finances are structured as they are.

-Donate and/or volunteer. I've already put a little money into Kiva micro-lending but I could really afford to put a little more, I guess. Ideally I'd volunteer with Habitat for Humanity, and actually gain useful construction skills. Anyone with me?

-Cook more. This is both for the sake of food and for the sake of money. It's hard sometimes, though, considering how picky of an eater I am and how un-creative I can be in the kitchen. However, currently cooking a big ol' pot of red beans and rice, made with only a few glances at the recipe. My Cajun family would be proud.

-Write more. I don't even need to talk about this one.

-Oh, also read more. Ideally at least 12 books this year, one per month, hopefully off my "To Read" list.

I'll be keeping these in the very back of my mind this year, because if I think about them or actively plan too much, they will absolutely not get done. Things like this have to lurk in the corner of my mental vision to be truly effective. So here's hoping! If you have any recommendations (recipes, good books, local volunteer opportunities) to help me inch along this path, do let me know.

Should we believe in NaNoWriMo?

AkddJust finished reading this article on one of my frequented news sites by one of their book reviewers on why one shouldn't participate in National Novel Writing Month (which, this year, I didn't). Somehow I missed this when it was first published in November, but it's still reasonably relevant, so what the hey.

I speak from personal experience. I have never "won" NaNoWriMo (i.e. successfully submitted 50,000 words before December 1), but each time I have participated, the raw outpouring of words, sentences, paragraphs it generated from me have set the right (write? Ha.) gears a-churnin', and when I closed the MS Word document full of the rambling I was hammering out for the contest, I set upon some other work that had bloomed within me, and produced some damn fine lines, some of which I'm still proud of and want to continue working with. These were dislodged, possibly generated, by the flood of NaNoWriMo forced through my otherwise (at least at the time) barren mind. The same is not true for all writers; some are just frustrated, bored, or exhausted by the processes of NaNoWriMo. In which case, it's not your thing, fine. But I do encourage most of my friend who write to try it.

In the article, Laura Miller paints the competition as solely for writers, which, okay, is mostly true. But there is always a pretty generous handful of people who participate who aren't. Maybe they've always dreamed of (or at least vaguely thought about) writing something, or maybe they just needed a quantifiable goal. Either way, a lot of them reach the end, which is more than I can say for myself. Then, ta-da, they end up with a goal achieved, and some sort of product at the end. And sometimes we all need to have that. So what's the harm in encouraging it? Yes, perhaps some participants think a little too highly of their final submission, and/or underestimate the necessity of the long, hard road of revision. That still doesn't detract from the benefit they and others might get from participating. Live and let live?

Instead of participating in NaNoWriMo, she argues, people should be reading-- that the proportion of readers to writers is disgraceful. Which, of course, is true. Dammit, people do need to read more.I need to read more, and I chew through more books in a year than most people I know. But she sees NaNoWriMo, and similar practices of do-it-yourself noveling as harmful to the culture of reading. She writes of seeing a NaNoWriMo event in a bookstore:

It was yet another depressing sign that the cultural spaces once dedicated to the selfless art of reading are being taken over by the narcissistic commerce of writing.

I say "commerce" because far more money can be made out of people who want to write novels than out of people who want to read them. And an astonishing number of individuals who want to do the former will confess to never doing the latter. "People would come up to me at parties," author Ann Bauer recently told me, "and say, 'I've been thinking of writing a book. Tell me what you think of this ...' And I'd (eventually) divert the conversation by asking what they read ... Now, the 'What do you read?' question is inevitably answered, 'Oh, I don't have time to read. I'm just concentrating on my writing.'"

Alright. I'll admit that that response is just as offensive to me. But I'm willing to bet a whole lot that these people were unbearably pretentious and arrogant anyway, and that this condition didn't suddenly come about just when they affected to be "writers". Reading and writing are not mutually exclusive occupations; just the opposite. Writers should be the most voracious readers of all. I'm sure Miller is aware of this widely held belief. And yes, arrogant fledgling writers who overrate their own ability are incredibly annoying, but that doesn't mean that this yearly event which allows people to have fun and eke out a creation is useless/harmful.

If National Novel Writing Month isn't your bag, don't participate in it. Don't read any of the resulting works. When people gush about the experience, politely nod and smile and change the subject, just as you do when they spout on about their new baby, or World of Warcraft. Miller suggests that people participate in reading challenges instead of writing challenges. (Incidentally, she posted an article on reading challenges today, I suggest checking out the links.) I intend to take at least one of those challenges this year. I will also be participating in NaNoWriMo.

Cake is doubly delicious when you have it and eat it too. I imagine books are as well. (See, if you take the cake metaphor, and writing is... oh, forget it.)