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.