Ficket Pences

H'lo from Dan's place

2007-05-20T14:22:00.000-04:00

I just realized that walnuts look like lungs to me. I absolutely had to blog this.

Tonight is my first cab ride ever!

Just saying

2007-05-17T21:28:00.000-04:00

In the campus dining hall, there are some ice cream flavors I will avoid until the day I die. I avoid them because I do not know what the hell they are supposed to be.

For example, there is a deep pink flavor with lots of tiny peanut-colored balls in it. I can only imagine that this is cherry-peanutpaste ice cream, and you just can't expect people to eat that crap.

O, solo Clio

2007-05-15T17:10:00.000-04:00

The 2007 Clio Awards were announced last Friday and Saturday in Miami Beach. I'm the moron who once told a film professor that I prefer commercials to movies, so of course I will be happily poring over the winners for days to come.

Right now, though, I'm stuck on the grand Clio winner for print advertising. It's a campaign for 42 Below vodka that tells stories of drunken debauchery with clever pictography.

The campaign is funny for two primary reasons, the first being the quality of the pictograms. They have a sanitized retro style, which would seem flat and "done" if the admakers hadn't rejected slick uniformity in favor of slight variations in detail from image to image. A pictogram of a train rendered in near-photographic detail shares a page with a highly simplified tissue box, reinforcing the illusion that these illustrations were pulled from diverse source materials. (The introduction of "newer" graphics like a television manages this as well.)

Once you reinforce the sense of the pictograms' authenticity, you've built a sound foundation for the most important function of their style: to create humor by contrasting images from sexually repressed and sanitized media with raunchy content. This has been done so many times in the past decade that it's almost impossible to execute successfully (we've learned to read "retro" portraits on merchandise not only as fakes, but as boring and trendy), and you can't expect this device to carry your whole campaign, but these ads create just enough believability to milk the gag a bit. It's important mostly because poorly executed retro pictograms would have been passe and stupid. It was a gamble on the admakers' part, and they won.

The campaign's second big strength is the narrative's lack of immediate accessibility. I can't quite believe I'm saying that, but there it is. Confusing advertisements are usually suited only to "new" names that want to generate brand recognition through weirdness factor (think early Quizno's commercials), but the 42 Below stories are a different kind of confusing. They force your passive/receiving mind to be a bit active and engage in completing the story. You have to interpret symbols (Did a kitten just show up? Oh wait—) and fill in the relationships between different pictures. I'm not saying it's difficult to do— most people will figure out that a woman's face + panties = undressing in less than a second— but that fraction of a second where you aren't being spoonfed the narrative is important. You're visualizing the parts of the story they didn't give you. Even though it's relatively light work for your brain, the admakers have gotten you to devote extra time and extra attention to their page. That's important.

Of course, there are more traditional factors working in favor of the campaign— visually, it's simple and very distinctive. The product logo is repeated several times throughout the page, and it's usually the only writing in the story (which means that readers easily accept it and move on— not quite subliminal, but not too far off— and "non-readers" turning the page still catch the product name). The stories themselves are sort of funny, in a lame sitcom way. But what really drives the whole thing home is the sense that there's something to "get," and you get it. The pictograms give it a punchline.

(By the way, those stupid Skittles ads pulled in a gold Clio. Eyeroll.)

Q&A #9

2007-05-14T15:53:00.000-04:00

What's the haps?

There must be haps.

Weekly Win/Lose, May 6-12

2007-05-14T15:25:00.000-04:00

Win

Nice guy at The Spot: Poking through the sushi selection at 2 a.m., I sent a tray of California rolls tumbling to the floor, where they made a real mess. He helped me stuff everything back into the tray, which he then presented to the clerk with a story about how "we" accidentally spilled it.
Karen: Stopped in Bmore to hang out on her way home from JMU. Tolerated my unbearably slow sandwich-eating pace.
MTA Driver, 9:20 p.m. in Arbutus on Tuesday: I know you probably weren't heading to UMBC, and I know you probably should have charged me. Thank you.

Lose

Me: I cancelled on Dave. I suck.
Thunderstorms: You were two days late. Unacceptable.
My upstairs neighbors: Seriously, guys, I'm glad you have a healthy sexual relationship, I just don't want to hear the proof.
UMBC Transit: THAT SECOND BUS NEVER CAME, MISTER.

Temp'rary notice

2007-04-24T17:17:00.000-04:00

I forgot I was working on this, so it's going to look like I mashed some buttons for a while. Although I hid almost all of the old entries, I did keep the poetry, Q&A, and Google Image Searches, which means I have to resize some of those things to make them fit the new post width.

I'm also probably going to change the colors and title background, once I've found something that works better. Right now you are looking at part of a photograph by Stu, and while I love the photograph, the colors I've picked to go with it are totally gross. Honestly, I miss the old layout, but Blogger forced me to update my template and I haven't been able to figure out how to get the old one back yet.

So, that's where we are.

Oh, and my body thinks it's getting mono AGAIN, which is impossible, although I appreciate its ambition.

Blech

2007-04-12T23:12:00.000-04:00

niltse: i think i'm going to bring back my blog and make it really dirty and gross looking.
brian775: oh, sweet
niltse: it'll be like, "oh god, this looks like it's been sitting on a rainy city street for four days"
brian775: I can't wait

So this is it. Looks like I need to nudge some things right and left.

I'll probably give in and make it all bright and pretty again, once I've worked out the other issues.

Title of the Post

2007-03-08T19:22:00.000-05:00

Hi, pals and superpals. I'm thinking about bringing the blog back.

Give me a few days to decide whether I have anything to say.

Favorite spam subject lines of the semester:

2005-12-11T22:05:00.000-05:00

Noblewoman
Daybreak pharmacy
Passionate spook
Ever thought about it?
Prudery
Pusher
Quadroon Armor
Enrique's Shocking Story
Feat Improvidence
Howard: Time to Know

You could put together a tight little album or chapbook or something using those suckers as titles. I bet someone's already done it.

Remember when spammers were using Ashbery poems as message text?

Dear Boys on Campus,

2005-12-06T19:43:00.000-05:00

I'm going to get one of those ugly pom-pom hats with earflaps and wear it like I think I'm cool, too. What do you say to THAT?

Your pal,
Kate

The way things work

2005-11-28T21:02:00.000-05:00

I am hopelessly disoriented this semester. I can't keep track of when my assignments are due, how many classes I've missed, what day of the week it is, whether I've slept a full night, and so on.

It's not as if I'm working myself to death. I just spent fifteen minutes examining a can opener and trying to figure out whether I open cans "correctly" or with a backwards lefty technique. (Scissors I can imagine switching hands, but this thing... I see only one way to work it.)

I've done no Christmas shopping, you know. And I lost my alarm clock. Plus I have two papers due tomorrow, and one is already very late.

If the semester had ended three weeks ago, I would've been homefree. School always drags on just long enough for me to screw myself over. This must be how they calculate our exam dates.

Wordplay makes me so damned happy.

2005-11-14T19:17:00.000-05:00

"I-695: Not all bad."

Festive? Yes.

2005-10-31T15:10:00.000-05:00

Just in time for Halloween, the inimitable Jonny Bradshaw explains pumpkins:

"King Pump ruled over the icy mountain kingdom of Portugal ruthlessly between 1543 and 1584. Not only was his name 'Pump', he was also King of the Pumps, the notoriously unscrupulous portugeuse mountain dwarves who ate nothing but asparagus and jam. As a result, their economy collapsed on an almost daily basis; and it wasn't until 1567 that King Pump invented the pumpkin to stabilise the economy. King Pump had wanted to call his creation the 'pumpking', after himself, but the letter 'g' had been made obsolete in the infamous alphabet soup riots of two years earlier, and so he had to settle for 'pumpkin', which was 12% shorter despite the fact that, indeed, it takes just as long to say. The famous 'pumpkin standard' became, of course, the predecessor of the gold standard shortly after the reformation when a band of protestant reformers discovered just exactly how pretty and shiny gold was, to 14 decimal places, as clearly described in Mark's Gospel chapter 5 or maybe 7, and as a consequence invented globalisation. Pumpkins today are a natural source of scary faces and contribute consistently to transatlantic bewilderment. Pumpkin pie contains neither asparagus nor jam and as a result, the pumpkingites of the 16th century have been largely ignored outside of urine sample analysis laboratories east of Madrid."

Thank you, Jonny.

Google Image Search

2005-10-27T21:18:00.000-04:00

"Listless"

Christmas in October

2005-10-18T13:27:00.000-04:00

You won't typically find link-laden entries here, but if this doesn't merit special status, I don't know what does: M. Zole is doing two straight weeks of daily freestyling in DTE.

Oh jeez. I wasn't built to withstand this much cool.

(If you'd like to read them in order, they begin here.)

201 (from The Dream Songs by John Berryman)

2005-10-16T18:49:00.000-04:00

Hung by a thread more moments instant Henry's mind
super-subtle, which he knew blunt & empty & incurious
but when he compared it with his fellows'
finding it keen & full, he didn't know what to think
apart from typewriters & print & ink.
On the philosophical side

plus religious, he lay at a loss.
Mostly he knew the ones he would not follow
into their burning systems
or polar systems, Wittgenstein being boss,
Augustine general manager. A universal hollow
most of the other seems;

so Henry in twilight is on his own:
marrying, childing, slogging, shelling taxes,
pondering, making.
It's rained all day. His wife has been away
with genuine difficulty he fought madness
whose breast came close to breaking.

Three strikes, you're a turkey.

2005-10-15T01:14:00.000-04:00

This fall I knocked off my first P.E. credit with a bowling class that ran for the first month or two of the semester. I was lousy, which left me feeling sort of cheated. I mean, my mother and father were big-time Serious Bowlers back in the day; you'd think I would have inherited some sort of aptitude for it. Anyway, my initial scores were so abysmal that even the minimal progress I made over the course of the class was enough to produce an ongoing interest.

Today I began to search for my very own bowling ball. I have a feeling that we will know each other on sight, like two lonely, misunderstood kids in a John Hughes movie.

Q&A #8

2005-10-10T16:24:00.000-04:00

Q: Why the hell do I have so many purple t-shirts?

This is not rhetorical. I deserve answers.

The Death of Francis Bacon

2005-09-23T23:27:00.000-04:00

There are right ways and wrong ways of determining whether leftover Chinese has gone bad.

I'm willing to fudge a bit, though.
For the sake of science.

Oh gawrsh.

2005-09-21T20:42:00.000-04:00

I think this blog and I would be better buddies if I had my own digital camera. Fall 2005 is made of rooster mugs and mutant lilies and yellow curtains and WWI aircraft, not revelatory moments or snappy little poems. My collection of Important Things to Write on the Internet is small. Itty-bitty. Properly sized for expression, literally, in a nutshell.

What I want to know, I guess, is what you want to know. I sure don't have a clue.

Here is a song, though. Beep beepity beep bwarrr-a-bwarrr.

Poem (by Alan Dugan)

2005-07-19T10:54:00.000-04:00

What was once an island with birds,
palms, snakes, and goats in flowers
is now a sand-bar bearing sea clams.
A storm at sea washed over it and it
drowned. There is no food but what
the surf throws up to it and no sweet
water but what the sky throws down.
You are cast away one storm too late
to know the previous ecology,
so may you leave it soon, or fertilize
the sand-bar for another kind of life:
you can do nothing except your part
unless you want a short survival badly.
So what if you act like a storm against
sweet water, other castaways, and clams?
They will give out!, as you will, soon:
no more interrelational elegance
will burgeon on this desert in the sea,
and no prayers make it bear analogies.

Here I am.

2005-07-16T12:48:00.000-04:00

Boy, have I ever let the blog go. Maybe this is a consequence of having Commitments, capital C. What Commitments? For one thing, I am a "teacher" at SLCC this summer, and the job is exhausting. I'm working with nine and ten year-olds (with a smattering of eights and elevens for flavor), and it's damn near impossible to get them all interested in the same thing at once, which means at least 25% of my students are squabbling amongst themselves at any given time. And that's when we're organized. My kids haven't actually had it out yet, but one of the seven year-olds in Nancy's class did break another boy's nose and claw up his neck before tipping a chalkboard onto him. Uf.

Those of you who haven't been in charge of twenty whining, pinching, shoving, shouting, hopping, throwing, and cartwheeling pre-pre-adolescents may not know that, as a teacher, you NEVER SIT DOWN. Not ever. Not once. Not if you know what's good for you. There is an ancient childcare curse which immediately visits destruction and backtalk on any teacher or guardian foolish enough to relax for even a second. If I sit at the table and drink a cup of apple juice now, I will pay dearly in two and a half minutes when Austin, Matt, and James all descend upon me shouting and crying and accusing each other of cheating at Yu-Gi-Oh and ultimately claiming that Austin grabbed Ryan by the shoulders and pushed him headfirst into the sign-up board. Then, still engulfed in a flock of shouting and outraged boys, I will have to travel across the room (stopping every two feet to remind someone that all four chair legs stay on the floor or that we do not steal and hide other people's toys) to the corner where Ryan is sitting with his head bent between his knees. I will try to interview him-- with every single boy cutting him off and shouting at each other-- while at least one girl asks me if she can use the bathroom for the third time in two hours and another student asks me if she can sign up to use the computer because so-and-so allegedly erased her name without telling her and by the way she is pretty sure that Meghan and Viola are saying mean things behind her back. Ten minutes later, when I've dealt with roughly half of the issues that need my attention and I finally have a spare minute to write Austin up in the blue book for hurting Ryan, he will happily declare, "Oh yeah! A new record!" and brag about how goshdarned badass he is.

Actually, imagine five and a half straight hours of that and you'll have a pretty accurate idea of what my days are like. I look after two aspiring alpha males, one sidekick, two class clowns, a monkey, a hyena, three queen bees, a Silent Bob, two hypochondriacs, a mama's boy, one especially loud dirtbiker, a tattle-tale, an anarchist, and assorted other characters. People who are bad multitaskers should not teach.

I'll let you in on a secret, though-- when they aren't trying to destroy each other, the kids are pretty great.

Well, it's time to prepare craft activities. I didn't spend eight dollars on fifty washable super-tip markers for nothing.

Australian barmaid or outdoor grill?

2005-06-18T22:25:00.000-04:00

My sister now works in a deli with someone named Barbie Joe.

I am delighted.

Against Eloquence (by Jorie Graham)

2005-05-18T11:41:00.000-04:00

Then there was the sense of a vectored landing—very fast.
We decided it was speed after all that could carry us.
We decided to decide. The drowse lifted. Something resembling
air
glinted. Elsewhere a violin—alone—just done warming up,
the lovely sequence beginning, stillness decomposing
where the notes rise up into it. And in the alcove two people in black
kissing a long time. And the frontier where the notes pulse, fringe,

then fray
the very same stillness we place our outlines
in, the very same one we have to breathe, and flare our tiny

nets of words
into (who's there?)(what do you hear?)(what hear?)(still
there?)—the very same—we listen in there—
the zero glistens—the comma holds—
flames behind where the siren goes off,
where someone is killed but only by accident so you are free to

cross the street now—
I watch the lovers a long time—
they kiss as if trying to massacre difference—
the alcove around them swarms its complex mechanism made to

resemble emptiness—
the shoppers go by; some vacuum hums;
something unseen, under-used, tarnishes; the daffodils
endowed by the widow x flourish—the lovers gnaw—the lovers
want to extinguish something—
something I know how to kill with a word, a single word—
the violin roils across the square—
they fracture emptiness to tiny masks—put them each on—
here's smile—here's clenched—
here's fear—here's more—emptiness doesn't take notice—
downpour of architectural void doesn't disturb—
moderation of accumulative time,
vague fabric tossed over the fire
as if to squelch it, ripples in the heat—
daffodils enter the decomposition known as yellow—
edges of the patio pulse—
violin notes float, wrinkling, unwrinkling—no—
they are not wrinkled—the message not delivered—nothing
at the address now—notes rinsing nothing—
nothing bleached by their acid—
nothing illuminated by the ten thousand red tulips—
by the caustic justice of such gleaming beds

deployed by a city
to force a plaza. . . .
April. . . .
Now the lovers are burying their arsenal.
Now with their stillness they navigate as usual.
Don't you know it's upstream? Don't you know you are supposed

to look?
Right at the place their mouths mark, the place their mouths

puncture—
What is the void once it has crossed through fire?

Decision

2005-05-16T08:26:00.000-04:00

I like people who are crunchy on the outside and creamy in the middle.

About Infinity, and the Lenesdorf Pools (by Norman Dubie)

2005-05-10T16:38:00.000-04:00

There are stone breakers in straw hats
Drinking from jars under a shade tree.
You are dressed all in white like the clematis
And look down into a meadow where your father
Is working on a watercolor of two silver trees.
The two trees are parallel.
He looks back at you:
You are wishing he hadn't died making with
His chest a sound like cows running in a stream.

Cows eat the flowers, they eat off the trees;
And the seed packets of the milk-white clematis
Have no turnings: they sit, almost purple,
In steady needles that are all vertical, North
And South, repeating abstractly
That such parallel things must meet
Somewhere in a limitless glut of peace.

There are men in straw hats drinking from clear
Jars of water.
There are two silver trees whose pink roots
Will meet, not abstractly, but under the meadow
Where for minerals and the water
They mean to kill one another. There are cows

Running in a running stream.

It seems like people are always in such a hurry to pick things up

2005-05-10T13:11:00.000-04:00

One of my many talents is not picking things up.

The floor is not going anywhere, kids.

Google Image Search

2005-05-03T18:21:00.000-04:00

"Altruism"

Spoons with Realistic Dead Flies on Them (by Charles Simic)

2005-04-25T16:48:00.000-04:00

I cause a great many worries to my mother.
My body will run with the weeds some day.
My head will be carried by slaughterhouse ants,
The carnivorous, bloody-aproned ants.

That was never in any of your legends, O saints!
The years she spent working in a novelty store:
Joy buzzers, false beards, and dead flies
To talk to between the infrequent customers.

A room rented from a minor demon.
An empty bird cage and a coffee mill for company.
A hand-operated one for her secret guardian angel
To take a turn grinding the slow hours.

Though I'm not a believer--
Neither is she, and that's why she worries,
Looks both ways crossing the street
At two gusts of nothing and nothing.

Danza in the Dark

2005-04-15T15:35:00.000-04:00

Last week I dreamed that Tony Danza and I were in love.

The Store Windows Glitter (by Laurie Scheck)

2005-04-14T22:50:00.000-04:00

Even the mannequins change
as the headlights pass over them, swathing them
in strangeness. A face briefly lit, magnetized by
street light. Or an arm vibrating, as if to touch the shocked
surfaces, cracked sidewalks and neon-scald of walls,
while the other arm, unlit, sleeps on, apart from the whirring
interventions, shut doorways stung by light,
zig-zagging shadows, grown animate with each anxious
and precise erasure, advancing like hostile take-overs
onto the newly minted glass.
I feel the unstable atoms in my skin, nerve-paths roughened
by the smallest detonations.

There's quietness a moment, then the mannequins
are lit again, and wake, each face a sentry's raw, uncluttered mind
buffeted by night-sounds, currents thickening and knotting in the leafy
air, where listening is a kiss slowly changing in another's
open mouth.

If there be abundant sand left (there is not)
If there be certainty and stillness (there is not)
If there be stalled brilliances and volatile undoings
If there be fraught silence
trackless night--

More Enterprise (by our favorite, James Merrill)

2005-04-14T22:40:00.000-04:00

A sideways flicker, half headshake of doubt--
Meaning, confusingly, assent-- fills out
The scant wardrobe of gesture I still use.
It clings by habit now. The old strait swank
I came in struts the town on local heirs.
Koula's nephew has the suit she shrank,
Andreas coveted my Roman shoes . . .
Into the grave I'll wear that Yes of theirs.

Q&A #7

2005-04-11T10:07:00.000-04:00

Q: The cDNA fragment that includes the ricin gene is 5.7 kilobases. If the entire fragment codes for the ricin polypeptide, the approximate number of amino acids in the polypeptide would be:

(A) 17,100
(B) 5,700
(C) 2,500
(D) 1,900
(E) 570

Yachts passing in broad daylight

2005-04-07T23:23:00.000-04:00

Before leaving for the dining hall this afternoon, I propped open our blinds with two fingers and peered out at the courtyard. The cloud cover was thick and the ground was speckled with rain, but I couldn't see anything falling between my wing and the brick wall a few hundred feet away. Umbrella? No umbrella? I stood there for some time, trying to reach a conclusion about the weather, before my eyes wandered and I spotted another Harbor resident talking on his cellular phone at a third-floor stairwell window. He had stopped smack dab in the center of the frame, facing our wing with his head cocked to the side. He started to wave.

He waved for maybe four seconds before I registered the fact that he might actually be waving at me and reflexively jerked my hand back from the blinds. No, that's stupid. I'd be too difficult to see all the way over here... and through a two-inch gap.... I lifted a section of the blinds again. There he was, facing our wing expectantly. He waved.

As I pulled away this time, the blinds twisted and held my peephole open. I sat at my desk next to the window and drummed my fingers on my knees. Disbelief. I didn't recognize this person. He had to be gesturing at someone in a different room. But when I leaned to my left and peeked through the gap, he beamed and waved excitedly once more. I did this maybe four times, always with the same results-- My eyes would appear at the window and his arm would swing into action.

Eventually, I went to the wall and turned off the lights. He waited on the landing for roughly twenty seconds before continuing down the stairs.

As I left the building several minutes later, I passed two students who had kicked off their sneakers. They were padding around the rain-soaked cement of the courtyard completely barefoot, arms extended slightly as if they were wading in surf and would need the extra balance at any moment.

People.

Just the highlights

2005-04-07T14:04:00.000-04:00

Moving out of spiral notebooks and into 4x6 index cards has made my semester.

Solving the Riddle (by Charles Simic)

2005-04-06T16:52:00.000-04:00

The cloud's a clue. The breeze.
Two elm trees looking suspicious.

Whose clues. My clues,
All my crafty clues,
All my strings of omens,
It's time we solve this riddle.

Clue sits. Omen flaps its wings.
They make one hand unearn
What the other earns.

*

I have a feud with my lifeline.
I take note of its crossroads and ditches.
I travel crucified.

I go solving with my ears.
The ears hear what's not there.
I go solving with my eyes.
The eyes see what everybody else sees.

*

Round, round
So that it rolls easily away,
Rolls laughing,
Shedding its skins, its doll's dresses.

White, so that it hides
Cleverly in all this snow,
And I believe it is lost,
I believe it never was.

Heavy, so that I feel
Its weight on my shoulders,
My back that bends,
My foot that hesitates.

*

What is it that was under my nose
And is no more?
Did it go home?
Did it meet its old sweetheart?

I hear the emptiness where it went.
I've seen its bird-tracks
Inside my hand. I feel its absence.
Without it, I barely want to live.

It will be here tomorrow,
Disguised, hard to recognize.
I keep its bone.
I keep its chipped bowl.

*

We say good-by
My most precious clue and I.
Two question marks.
Two asses' ears.

Around a riddle
Which yields no answer
We made our nest
Of straw and matches.

The night fell quickly.

Inside my empty bottle
I was constructing a lighthouse
While all the others
Were making ships.

How to win friends and influence people

2005-03-30T15:54:00.000-05:00

From now on, people I meet must complete a test

This is the test:

1. Define Nadir.

Sforzando on the PET scan

2005-03-30T15:11:00.000-05:00

The best twelve seconds of my day were wedged between reading the song title "Cookie Oh Jesus" and actually listening to it.

Q&A #6

2005-03-15T16:14:00.000-05:00

Q: So Annie, are you okay? Are you okay, Annie?

I'd like to play with them, but I left them at home.

2005-03-15T13:29:00.000-05:00

I bought three wonderful dictionaries this weekend. One is from 1952, one is newer and in two volumes (unabridged!) and the third is a little paperback number roughly the size of my trusty thesaurus. For a long time, I thought I didn't need a physical dictionary. I mean, there are plenty of dictionaries available online, and I am [somewhat] web savvy. The problem is that online dictionaries are structured to respond to user queries. If you are looking for a word that begins with "con-", you can probably find it. If you would like to know what "allotrope" means, you can look it up. But if you just want a word, any word-- if you want to wander-- electronic dictionaries are painful. There are times when I need to pick up the book, slap it down, flip it open, and let my finger spiral blindly across the page. The OED online won't let me do that.

Good old days

2005-03-13T23:07:00.000-05:00

"Then later there was this thing that hit hipsters. People were just stopping in their tracks frozen. At first, people thought it was another virus [. . .] but it turned out that it was something called Nostalgia Feedback. People had been getting nostalgia for fashions that were closer and closer to their own time, until finally people became nostalgic for the moment they were actually living in, and the feedback completely froze them. It happened to Calista and Loga. We were real worried about them for a day or so. We knew they'd be all right, but still, you know."

M. T. Anderson

Q&A #5

2005-03-09T09:36:00.000-05:00

Q: Does anyone consistently squeeze toothpaste from bottom to top?

Sometimes I think people like this must exist, and sometimes I think "Hell no, brah."

Too loud to hear

2005-03-06T21:51:00.000-05:00

So I have this childhood memory. It's not so personal that someone else couldn't have experienced it, but I've always considered it unusual.

I saw it in a friend's journal today. It was written as her memory. I'm wondering now if it was ever mine.

Stupid things make me feel like my gut is imploding, like I'm going to cave into myself and blink out and the air will sort of gulp when it fills the vacuum, like it is swallowing me, and that will be all. I never really think about leaving a body when I die. I'm not even sure I think about dying. I just have this fuzzy concept of ending, this idea of what my bedroom might feel like if the things in it bore no relationship to me. I don't imagine the waste products and residues, the mourning or the funeral or the chalky dust that was my bones. I don't imagine my kidneys nestled inside someone else's wet abdomen or my heart packed in ice. I don't imagine the stone.

Sometimes I try to take everything in at once and then I can't stop the rush of information. Each stimulus slips through me and trips the right wires, but it's just a nerve firing, a chemical reaction I can’t hold outside the moment of perception. That's when I'm closest, when I'm too aware to filter, when I feel my brain running but I can't form a thought, when I am saturated-- when every piece of me is snapping with "this is soft, this is cold, this is red, this burns," points of light so fleeting they seem outside duration. That's when I anticipate ending.

It happens in cafeterias, in gardens, in passenger seats of cars. It's not transcendence, really-- more like a flirtation with unbeing. I think it's what I'm living for.

Narrative entry about doctors and social niceties

2005-03-03T09:21:00.000-05:00

I don't like doctors, I don't like schedules, and I'm rarely sick, so it may not surprise you that yesterday was the first time I made and kept my own non-routine doctor's appointment.

Through some lucky twist of fate, UHS was able to see me twenty minutes after I called, and even though I had to lean into the wind on the walk over, I arrived on time. The woman in the window nodded at my name and requested my insurance card. It was all so easy. Then I was handed the clipboard of doom and the situation seemed considerably less rosy.

After twenty-five painful minutes of first-visit paperwork (Are my uncles pigeontoed? Did I have pneumonia in elementary school? What is my father's policy number?) and ten even more painful minutes of Judging Amy on TNT, I followed a nurse to triage, where she took my temperature and checked my blood pressure. She communicated primarily through hand gestures and prepositonal phrases, most of which were directed at the wall.

Eventually, she led me to an examination room and ordered me to sit on a table I couldn't reach without a chair. My joints yodeled and beat me with cricket bats as I complied. Then it was back to waiting.

I shivered and ached on the butcher paper, which was covered with sailboats, for a good ten minutes before the doctor poked his head into the room.

Oh, thank Jesus.
"Hi there, Kathleen, how are you doing?"
HORRIBLY.
"Fine, thanks."
What?
"Great! I'll be back in a few minutes."
No!
"Sure thing."
But... No!
The doorway was empty.

I am going to die.
I folded my hands awkwardly.
I am going to die here with my sick and swollen face pressed against these teal sailboats.

I will choke on my own virus-filled saliva.

I whistled "Caress Me Down."

So I thought I'd descend four flights of stairs unaided by corrective lenses.

2005-02-23T18:36:00.000-05:00

It was not a good idea.

The Guardian Angel of the Little Utopia (by Jorie Graham)

2005-02-23T18:19:00.000-05:00

Shall I move the flowers again?
Shall I put them further to the left
into the light?
Will that fix it, will that arrange the
thing?
Yellow sky.
Faint cricket in the dried-out bush.
As I approach, my footfall in the leaves
drowns out the cricket-chirping I was
coming close to hear . . .
Yellow sky with black leaves rearranging it.
Wind rearranging the black leaves in it.
But anyway I am indoors, of course, and this is a pane, here,
and I have arranged the flowers for you
again. Have taken the dead cordless ones, the yellow bits past apogee,
the faded cloth, the pollen-free abandoned marriage-hymn
back out, leaving the few crisp blooms to swagger, winglets, limpid
debris. . . .

Shall I arrange these few remaining flowers?
Shall I arrange these gossamer efficiencies?
Please don't touch me with your skin.
Please let the thing evaporate.
Please tell me clearly what it is.
The party is so loud downstairs, bristling with souvenirs.
It's a philosophy of life, of course,
drinks fluorescent, whips of syntax in the air
above the heads-- how small they seem from here,
the bobbing universal heads, stuffing the void with eloquence,
and also tiny merciless darts
of truth. It's pulled on tight, the air they breathe and rip.
It's like a prize the way it's stretched on tight
over the voices, keeping them intermingling, forcing the breaths to
marry, marry,
cunning little hermeneutic cupola,
dome of occasion in which the thoughts re-
group, the footprints stall and gnaw in tiny ruts,
the napkins wave, are waved, the honeycombing
thoughts are felt to dialogue, a form of self-
congratulation, no?, or is it suffering? I'm a bit
dizzy up here rearranging things,
they will come up here soon, and need a setting for their fears,
and loves, an architecture for their evolutionary
morphic needs-- what will they need if I don't make the place?--
what will they know to miss?, what cry out for, what feel the bitter
restless irritations
for? A bit dizzy from the altitude of everlastingness,
the tireless altitudes of the created place,
in which to make a life-- a liberty-- the hollow, fetishized, and starry
place,
a bit gossamer with dream, a vortex of evaporations,
oh little dream, invisible city, invisible hill
I make here on the upper floors for you--
down there, where you are entertained, where you are passing
time, there's glass and moss on air,
there's the feeling of being numerous, mouths submitting to air, lips
to protocol,
and dreams of sense, tongues, hinges, forceps clicking
in anticipation of . . . as if the moment, freeze-burned by accuracies-of
could be thawed open into life again
by gladnesses, by rectitude-- no, no-- by the sinewy efforts at
sincerity-- can't you feel it gliding round you,
mutating, yielding the effort-filled phrases of your talk to air,
compounding, stemming them, honeying-open the sheerest
innuendoes till
the rightness seems to root, in the air, in the compact indoor sky,
and the rest, all round, feels like desert, falls away,
and you have the sensation of muscular timeliness,
and you feel the calligraphic in you reach out like a soul
into the midst of others, in conversation,
gloved by desire, into the tiny carnage
of opinions. . . . So dizzy. Life buzzing beneath me
though my feeling says the hive is gone, queen gone,
the continuum continuing beneath, busy, earnest, in con-
versation. Shall I prepare. Shall I put this further
to the left, shall I move the light, the point-of-view, the shades are
drawn, to cast a glow resembling disappearance, slightly red,
will that fix it, will that make clear the task, the trellised ongoingness
and all these tiny purposes, these parables, this marketplace
of tightening truths?
Oh knit me that am crumpled dust,
the heap is all dispersed. Knit me that am. Say therefore. Say
philosophy and mean by that the pane.
Let us look out again. The yellow sky.
With black leaves rearranging it. . . .

The next eighteen hours:

2005-02-21T17:31:00.000-05:00

Dear World: Thank you for your excellent advice.

2005-02-16T08:45:00.000-05:00

Hold your horses there, kiddo-- haste makes waste. Let's chew the cud for a minute.

Here's a pearl of wisdom for you: All good things come to those who wait, but nothing is free, and nothing is certain but death and taxes. There are plenty of fish in the sea, though. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. I mean, it's an honor just to be nominated. Even if the well's run dry, you've got to stand on your own two feet and try & try again (because idle hands are the Devil's workshop).

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Fool some of the people some of the time if you want to, and fool all of the people some of the time if you dare, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time, unless you have the patience of Job. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, anyway. It's what's on the inside that counts, even if you're ugly as sin. Yeah, you win some and you lose some; the important thing is that you tried. Not that any good deed goes unpunished, but you can cry all the way to the bank, you know?

You look as nervous as a longtailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, and believe me, I know there's no rest for the weary... But this is just another door opening somewhere. You can do whatever you put your mind to, kid. You're back to square one right now, but you've got to take the rough with the smooth. Think of this as the calm before the storm. Soon you'll be as busy as a one-armed paper hanger and they'll eat humble pie. Every dog has his day.

Don't rest on your laurels, though. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, put your foot down, and go to town. Wouldn't want to be left in the lurch, right? After all, time is of the essence, and life's not so bad when you consider the alternative. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry can talk your ear off six ways from Sunday, but you just keep on trucking. Silence is golden and still waters run deep. Now, move like a bat out of hell, and don't let the doorknob hit ya where the good lord split ya.

I'm glad we had this talk.

lub-dub

2005-02-14T15:27:00.000-05:00

Human Nature

2005-02-09T11:18:00.000-05:00

In a decade or two, once some of the fuss has died down, I am going to write a collection of poems about Michael Jackson.

People don't seem to understand that I am very serious about this.

From "In Nine Sleep Valley" (by James Merrill)

2005-02-07T15:29:00.000-05:00

9

Master of the ruined watercolor,
Citizen no less of the botched country
Where shots attain the eagle, and the grizzly
Dies for pressing people to his heart,

Truster, like me, of who (invoked by neither)
Hovered near the final evening's taper,
Held his breath to read his flickering nature
By our light, then left us in the dark,

Take these verses, call them today's flower,
Cluster a rained-in pupil might have scissored.
They too have suffered in the realm of hazard.
Sorry things all. Accepting them's the art.

Q&A #4

2005-02-06T09:41:00.000-05:00

Pre-release anxiety gets the better of me

2005-02-05T16:27:00.000-05:00

I couldn't wait until Tuesday for the new Andrew Bird. Impending releases from favorite artists always make me nervous, and this one was a doozy-- Daydreams about some disastrous, uninspired flop had been setting up colorful little merchant camps in the front of my brain. I so badly wanted it to be good. So yes, I caved and downloaded the leak.

At first listen, The Mysterious Production of Eggs is not as stylistically dynamic as Bird's other recent work; however, his lyrics are strong, and through them he is getting what he often refers to as his "conceptual shit" together. I mean, thematically, he's knocked me flat on my back. Bird establishes this breathtaking tension between the cut and dry mechanics that make our lives "go" ("you're what happens when two substances collide") and the mythologies that give them value and color ("monsters will walk the earth"). He's sweeping it all together, calling it all into question, outing our new gods as hollow or impotent and sometimes downright damaging (as in "Measuring Cups," a playful and bitter critique of our attitudes toward children's education). Bird also nods at the way our lifestyle creates detachment; in "The Naming of Things" he searchingly states "you remind me of you," and in "Banking on a Myth," he dissects an industry where "the words we use have lost their bite" and the successful businessman "deals in commodities of the abstract sort."

Now, don't get me wrong-- this is not a doom-and-gloom record, and Bird never sinks into despondency (though he occasionally flirts with it, as we all do). Several larger questions of Eggs surface in the sweetly benevolent "Masterfade" and its world of numbers (which is much more comptine than Matrix): "If we're all matter, what's the matter? Does it matter if we're matter when we're done?" These lines in particular highlight Bird's struggle with not only meaning, but our emotional responses to the possibility of its absence. In challenging the hopeless Why bother? with a lighthearted Why not?, Bird paints nihilism as a flimsy excuse for lifelessness, and he continues to drive at the stance he won't truly declare until track thirteen.

And Eggs does come together in its thirteenth track. "Tables and Chairs" swings into motion with the plea, "Just don't let the human factor fail to be a factor at all." The song prophesies a rapture of sorts, one in which we discard countries, currencies, and impersonal relationships in favor of congregating in the "crumbled financial institutions of this land," where there will be "pony rides and dancing bears" and, as he reminds us three times, snacks. Bird has spent the first twelve tracks of this album cultivating his listeners for an exhilarating release, circling closer and closer to what he now delivers directly-- but the sensation of triumph is fleeting. Utopian vision collapses into the quiet, plucked intro of "Happy Birthday Song," in which our one-time prophet wakes, pours some coffee, and unenthusiastically reads the newspaper. Part of what made Bird's last effort, Weather Systems, so enthralling was his acute sense of when to hold back, and it serves him well here. Even as the strings swell and the drums rally, his voice is restrained:

Sing me happy birthday,
sing it like it's going to be the last day, like it's hallelujah....
Sing me happy birthday,
Only 'cause hell, what's it all about anyway?

We're back to truck drivers sprawled on tarmac, lukewarm liquid diets, girls with knee socks pulled over their bruises, sanitized fables by "the Brothers Grimm and Gorey"-- and according to Bird, we're still trying to find our way. It's not despair, but it's not really hope, either.

I'm going to be straight with you: I am infatuated. The ideas are beautiful and scathing and thoughtful, and if you'd like a properly enthusiastic rant, you can certainly call me or corner me face-to-face.

This an exciting album.

Have a nice day.

You put your whole self in, you put your whole self out

2005-02-04T09:50:00.000-05:00

I worry about going crazy. As someone who worries about going crazy, I would like to think this concern is the mark of a sane and moderately self-aware person.

I can climb entirely into my social persona; I just can't hop back and forth all day. It's the transit that exhausts me.

And that's what it's all about.

Dear flavorless yellow chunk in my veggie wrap:

2005-02-01T13:04:00.000-05:00

Oh, how I've missed you. Being with you like this... well, it almost makes me forget the fact that I just twisted my ankle and fell down in the middle of a crosswalk. (Did you know that I am not an acrobat? Now I do, too.)

I once tried to keep a log of my public stumbles and falls, but I lost sight of my purpose and threw in the towel. That's something we'll always have in common, I guess-- There is no place among the stars for a wordy klutz and a common chunk of vegetable matter. We'll fight our obligatory battles with the children and the bills and be content to pass away without notable accomplishment or success. You and I, chunk, we are no champions.

Anyway, I've got to go scrub down my bloody knee with industrial-strength antiseptic. Remember I'm thinking about you, flavorless yellow chunk, and take care.

Love,
Kate

Pickles

2005-01-15T03:32:00.000-05:00

I've been pretty discouraged recently-- In general, I mean. Only yesterday I was locked in perilous struggle with pickles. The nation of pickles. All pickles and pickle manufacturers and nieces of receptionists of pickle moguls everywhere. If you are male (and thanks to the inexplicable uterus-repelling [thought: new twist on rock climbing?] particles emitted by my blog, you probably are), you may not fully grasp how hideously inadequate one feels when failing to open a 16 oz. jar of bread and butter Vlasic sandwich stackers. Or maybe you were the runt of the litter and you understand perfectly. Either way, please set a spell and share my shame.

I came on too heavy in my initial assault on the jar, so fifteen seconds into what unfolded as a five minute ordeal, I was already curling my non-dominant (now "good") arm around my left hand (now "claw"). I didn't want to admit to myself that I had pulled something, so I shook my hand vigorously until the sensation of knives-for-blood faded to unhappy-bees-for-blood, and then I had at it again. Unfortunately, my wounds had already weakened me to a point at which there was slim hope of my opening the jar unaided. This time I was doubled over in pain for a full minute before I attacked yet again, abusing what was quickly becoming a tense and crippled ball of torn whosits and strained whatsits and very sad crying baby Jesus fingers.

Lock the neighbor's dog in a room with an electrified porkchop and you might begin to understand how this played out.

Eventually, I did resort to the hot-water-on-the-lid method, perhaps in part because the scalding water allowed me to temporarily forget what was surely ligament damage and internal bleeding. I turned off the hot water, gave a twist, yowled in pain. Back to the sink. Hot water, twist, unearthly shriek. By now the cats of the household had gathered in the doorway to watch me as I alternately hopped around the room cradling my forearm and violently rammed the lid of the pickle jar against the counter. In the foulest language possible, I described doing things to this pickle jar that would make Joan Rivers blush, if she still could. I reflected on alternatives and was not pleased by my options.

Ah, the ugly truth-- staring me down from its smug perch on the counter, tilting its head inquiringly in the kitchen doorway, shouting from every nerve in my wrist: If I want to continue enjoying pickles, I may have to marry. Oh, the sacrifices I make for condiments.

Ain't no woman like the one I've got.

2005-01-10T20:05:00.000-05:00

Thus saith the Four Tops.

Don't rush me; I'm waiting for certain doom.

2005-01-08T21:00:00.000-05:00

I've been awfully good at disappointing people this winter. Where are your sketches and poems? They are not done. Where are my updates? They aren't being written. Where are the 7DS? They aren't being posted. Where are my photos of Harford county? They have not been taken (although, to be fair, the weather had some say in this).

What have you missed? Well, I've discovered that I'm MacGyver, and I've also discovered that the tip of my nose is abnormally cold. I received silver elephant earrings for Christmas and a rather fancy (and unexpected) electronic device for my birthday. I bought myself a verybright melt-your-retinas green sweater. I've obtained mp3s of sex education vinyls from the 1950s. I'm not watching as much Jeopardy as I'd like to be, and I've had "I Am a Scientist" stuck in my head for three days. I sleep with the fire poker in my room because I am back to battling anxieties about break-ins and home invasions. I am the last person on the planet to develop a crush on Cate Blanchett, but better late than never. (The Life Aquatic is very messy, by the way. It's like watching a secondary OM project that got tremendously out of hand. And The Aviator is about OCD, more or less, which I don't think is made apparent by the few previews I've seen.)

Being twenty one isn't anything special, as far as I can tell. There's something a bit strange about removing bars from the taboo section of my brain (looking at one now makes me feel like I am expecting floor where there is actually another step down), but I still haven't touched beer, wine, etc. I am, however, considering purchasing a pack of cigarettes and offering them to friends who ride in my car. I like the smell of cigarettes at night. It makes me feel like I'm seventeen again. Not that I've ever smoked. I am champion at amateur nunnery. At any rate, I'm not forcing you to smoke at gunpoint and I'll be dying just as quickly as you, so I refuse to feel guilty. Light up, kids.

Is it possible to love the Pet Shop Boys too much?
I didn't think so.

Poor lighting

2005-01-05T13:41:00.000-05:00

Last night I dreamt I was a little girl with long, thick hair held back by a thick black headband. I had black mary janes on my feet. I was explaining string theory to a hatted man in an elevator.

Drink of choice: V8

2005-01-03T00:25:00.000-05:00

Today is my 21^st birthday, which means I get to demand things from you.

Write a snippet from my future biography.

I am MacGyver

2004-12-31T10:45:00.000-05:00

I am, as we all know, a nightowl, so when I oozed out of bed a bit after 11 on Wednesday, I couldn't help but reflect on how ridiculously early it was. If you want me up a few hours before dawn, I can do it, but once that menacing daystar is hanging all loud and brash in the air, forget it. I ate a bowl of tomato soup before starting a shower. I like to make the water uncomfortably hot and just stand there with my palms facing up and the droplets drilling to them. It's not quite as satisfying at home because using a private well means we have very little water pressure, but it's a lot more like rain, which is at least nice in the summer.

The human mind is a lovely slimy messy place, and I'm already off track.

No sooner had I pulled on some clothes post-shower than the doorbell rang. I glanced out the window and spotted two tall male figures on the front porch. I decided I'd be better off not answering. Then the phone rang.

"Hello?"
"Katie, open the door."

This is the stuff hack suspense stories and urban legends are made of. It would be, anyway, if that hadn't been Patrick's voice.

My sister's boyfriend and his pal Brian had been hoping to make it another five miles to the Shell station at the junction. Instead, Pat's big old green car had run completely out of gas and died some 500 feet north of my road. I blow-dried my wet hair while the boys watched some gospel television show, then we piled into Yoko and pulled into a driveway across the road from where Pat's car had stopped. He skittered across the lanes (Froggerwhat) in order to retrieve his gas can, which had a big pretty silver bow on it and should have come with them on the walk to my house, in my opinion.

At the Shell, Pat purchased four dollars' worth of gas. We headed back to Belleguard and I waited behind the wheel as Pat and Brian approached the Cornet, fumbling with the nozzle and cap of the gas can. After the ninth or tenth time they'd passed it back and forth, pulling at it confusedly, I put Yoko in park and walked back to have a look. We puzzled out how the gas can was supposed to function, but the Cornet is an historic vehicle and, unfortunately, not compatible with the innovative gas can technology of 2004. So, it was back to the house in search of a funnel.

I took every mixing bowl, measuring cup, pitcher and sandwich saver out of our plastics cabinet. My family does not own a single funnel. The three of us shifted from foot to foot amidst the mess, leaning on the cluttered countertop and weighing options.

Eventually, I emptied a liter bottle of white grape flavored sparkling water and cut the base off with a pair of scissors, which I then dropped into the bottle so that their handles were in the body and the blades protruded from its neck. If we were lucky, the bottle's neck would be small enough to make it a viable funnel and the scissors blades would prop open the metal flap inside the tank.

Once again, we piled into Yoko (interior now reeking of gasoline) and headed out to the main road. I borrowed a driveway yet again, wondering if anyone was in the house and whether they might be concerned about the hooligans who seemed to be [commandeering] their private property.

The funnel, we disovered, would work-- But only if someone kept his or her hand inside the bottle and held the scissors in place, and only if the gasoline was poured in very slowly. Pat bravely volunteered his hand for sacrifice to the fume gods. Brian poured. I stood and glanced worriedly up the road, wondering if someone might sneeze or have a seizure or simply look away long enough to veer three feet to the right and maul us. The scissors and bottle would sail through the air. Crime scene investigators would be baffled.

I studied my shoes for a moment and glanced up again. A large blue van had pulled onto the shoulder a few dozen feet behind us. When I brought this to Pat and Brian's attention, they snapped the heads around instantaneously (the epitome of subtlety, these boys are). The van's driver side door open. "It's Tom!" Brian marveled.

Brian's twin brother walked over as if everything were right and well in the world. He stood beside me and watched the clear gasoline trickle through the bottle's mouth and over the scissors, into the tank.

"What're you guys doing?"
"Filling my gas tank with sparkling white grape water," Patrick said flatly.

Tom stood by a few minutes longer, making small talk, then said goodbye and turned toward his vehicle.

At that moment, a silver car pulled onto the shoulder a yard or two behind us in a feat of speed and agility unmatched outside of racing movies. Mrs. Bonnie Hummer climbed out, earthtone earrings swinging merrily.

"Well, hello!"
A chorus of "Hi, Miss Bonnie."
"I just saw you guys and I thought I'd stop and say hi." A pause. "Did you run out of gas?"
"Yeah, I was trying to get to the gas station."
"Well, that's where I'm going right now."
Akward silence as the gasoline continued its slow progress over Patrick's fingers and the scissor blades.
"So Katie, how are you?"
"Fine, thanks."
More silence as a piece of farm equipment came slowly up the road. The standard dozen cars and frustrated drivers were following it closely, and every one of them got a good look at our motley crew as they crept by. By now Patrick had the hood up and was pouring the last bit of gasoline into the fuel lines or something like that. Brian was behind the wheel, giving it gas when Pat told him to. Bonnie Hummer spoke up again.
"Well, I'm heading up to that gas station now. If you guys are still here when I come back, I'll lend you a hand."
"Yeah, I'm going to get moving too," Tom said.
Goodbyes were exchanged. Bonnie and Tom drove off in opposite directions. Pat and Brian coaxed the Cornet for two or three more minutes, and eventually it began to run.

Realizing you've missed the house sounds

2004-12-24T17:59:00.000-05:00

I came home to a two page letter from Rafe detailing his experiences on the road. It was a lovely letter because it wasn't trying to be anything. He has a knack for finding homogenity in the grand scale of things, I think. Sameness in variety.

I, on the other hand, am learning to enjoy my hometown, which is a crucial and not entirely unpleasant step on my path to successful spinsterhood. The water is better here, and so is the sky. I like the backroads and the cornfields, the churches and the gas stations. If I wanted to make money around here, I'd get to work selling petroleum or Jesus.

When a problem comes along, you must Swiffer. Swiffer good.

What is the plural of ouroboros? Ouroboroses? I hope so.

2004-12-24T09:01:00.000-05:00

I came home to a two page letter from Rafe detailing his experiences on the road. It was a lovely letter because it wasn't trying to be anything.

Karen and Jamie will not be in town on my birthday.
My mother is in the next room regretting everything she's never done and doing it loudly.

I know sometimes I tell you I'm sad or ecstatic or angry but it's never entirely true. I'm just different degrees of stuck, different kinds of wanting to yell.
I could fall into the cracks of things for centuries, I think. They don't stop opening. I could pick things to pieces until I was clear down to the subatomic particles, and then I would cut into an electron and bloom in ribs around my spine like a motherfucking onion blossom.

Eat at Joe's.

Stamen/stamina

2004-12-19T14:44:00.000-05:00

A really great botany joke just waiting to be written

Boom

2004-12-17T07:25:00.000-05:00

Sigh.

"Erosion" by Jorie Graham

2004-12-13T14:36:00.000-05:00

I would not want, I think, a higher intelligence, one
simultaneous, cut clean
of sequence. No,
it is our slowness I love, growing slower,
tapping the paintbrush against the visible,
tapping the mind.
We are, ourselves, a mannerism now,
having fallen
out of the chain
of evolution.
So we grow fat with unqualified life.
Today, on this beach
I am history to these fine
pebbles. I run them
through my fingers. Each time
some molecules rub off
evolving into
the invisible. Always
I am trying to feel
the erosion--my grandfather, stiffening
on his bed, learning
to float on time, his mind like bait presented
to the stream ongoing, or you, by my side,
sleep rinsing you always a little less
clean, or daily
the erosion
of the right word, what it shuts,
or the plants coming forth as planned out my window, row
after row, sealed
into here. . . .
I've lined all our wineglasses up on the sill,
a keyboard, a garden. Flowers of the poles.
I'm gifting each with a little less water.
You can tap them
for music.
Outside the window it's starting to snow.
It's going to get colder.
The less full the glass, the truer
the sound.
This is my song
for the North
coming toward us.

Small

2004-12-10T13:14:00.000-05:00

"So that it seemed in the end as though all the sciences I studied at the university existed only to prove and make evident to me as I went more deeply into them that I was ridiculous."
-Dostoevsky

Sometimes at night I hear people in the courtyard playing music. We have our blinds closed at all times and we never open our window. The sound is muffled, and most of what we get is percussion, or sounds like percussion. Sometimes there is a shout. I never hear singing. The first few nights this happened I pried apart a section of the blinds and stared into the unlit corner immediately outside our window, and the space out there felt pressing and stuck, no people, no lights, no shadows. It's physically impossible to see the places where people congregate. I don't look anymore. It feels sort of wild, even with the lights on, the fragments of a thing made publicly, socially, with the words and the intervals cut out, just the thumps and grumbles running under it and the shrieks and yelps from the conversations and the childish grabbing. I know they stand in a circle.

Shantay didn't come back last night, and at eight o'clock this morning her alarm went off. It's some fancy thing that gets louder and louder as it beeps and she keeps it on top of her bookshelf. I felt like a child. I stood on a chair, fumbling with this ugly thing and all its buttons, none of which meant anything to me because I had forgotten to put on my glasses and there was nothing intuitive about their placement. I was afraid to touch them. I smothered it with my pillow and leaned so close my nose was practically touching the thing. I found a button that said "on/off" and eventually gave up and pushed it. I half expected the whole thing to go dark, which would have been nice but it also would have required an explanation.

I woke up again at eleven and went back to sleep at noon.
I got up again at two.
I didn't leave the room until 7 pm. Really.

Shoes not snakes

2004-12-09T21:08:00.000-05:00

I am declaring war on moccasins.

Q&A #3

2004-12-08T12:38:00.000-05:00

Q: What is the best way to lose your job as...

A waiter?
A police officer?
Inspector #47 at the pants factory?
A plumber?
An elected official?
A baker?
A veterinarian?

Pick and choose.

You should know:

2004-12-01T22:31:00.000-05:00

Coleridge and Wordsworth had the same wedding anniversary.

The bumblebee is the only type of bee that can sting multiple times.

The guy who sits next to me in Spanish had a goldfish when he was five or six years old. He tucked it into bed because he thought it looked cold. It died.

Expecting the Barbarians (by Constantine Cavafy, translated by Rae Dalven)

2004-12-01T00:17:00.000-05:00

What are we waiting for, assembled in the public square?

The barbarians are to arrive today.

Why such inaction in the Senate?
Why do the Senators sit and pass no laws?

Because the barbarians are to arrive today.
What further laws can the Senators pass?
When the barbarians come they will make the laws.

Why did our emperor wake up so early,
and sits at the principal gate of the city,
on the throne, in state, wearing his crown?

Because the barbarians are to arrive today.
And the emperor waits to receive
their chief. Indeed he has prepared
to give him a scroll. Therein he engraved
many titles and names of honor.

Why have our two consuls and the praetors come out
today in their red, embroidered togas;
why do they wear amethyst-studded bracelets,
and rings with brilliant glittering emeralds;
why are they carrying costly canes today,
superbly carved with silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are to arrive today,
and such things dazzle the barbarians.

Why don't the worthy orators come as usual
to make their speeches, to have their say?

Because the barbarians are to arrive today;
and they get bored with eloquence and orations.

Why this sudden unrest and confusion?
(How solemn their faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares clearing quickly,
and all return to their homes, so deep in thought?

Because night is here but the barbarians have not come.
Some people arrived from the frontiers,
and they said there are no longer any barbarians.

And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.

Towns Along the River (by Charlie Smith)

2004-11-29T11:18:00.000-05:00

Day frightened me,
daylight did sometimes, the way it vaulted

precisely into place among the dogwoods. You get so
you can't tell anymore what's going on

so you store it in a special chamber
and think about bungalows,

toolsheds and dusty ransacked houses overlooking the
river. Just address them one by one - that's what

Father said. And the days
took on number, and coloration, and malediction,

some small derelictous manner in the way we spoke
to strangers, the way the fire truck sat outside the station for months

untended, rusting in the rain. And the farmers
lost everything that year, sure,

while we listed to the new music on the radio
and Mother grew dependent on her medicine.

Time will tell, the principal said
and crossed her heart with the left panel

Of her robe, spilling flowers down the front of her
looking at me as if I might, if I was quick, get what was going on.

Very little to offer

2004-11-29T10:57:00.000-05:00

"We are now going to witness a most weirdly monotonous series of events."
-Nabokov

The giant sweeping mass of black & white Adams prints I stuck on my wall is coming down, and I have no one but myself to blame-- I shouldn't have layered them that way or expected them to support each other. When one of the prints fell in the dark last night, five more followed in rapid succession, and I still hadn't realized that it was my wall making the ruckus; I thought good ol' Bob was getting huffy and throwing himself at Shantay's desk again. But that damnable light of morning, which reveals all truth and makes liars cry like little babies, had a different story to tell. The story was about a gaping hole in my wall layout. It wasn't especially uplifting.

In other news, I think we are approaching the end of family Christmases. With my sister away at college, there is no longer a clearly defined parent/child dynamic in our family, and we're just a bunch of weary adults with lots of other things to do. The fact that we share a roof during the Christmas season is the only thing holding the holiday together right now. Sometimes I think the strangest moments of our lives are the ones in which we come upon gaps and vacuums unexpectedly, the moments when we're under pressure to fill the void where some bit of structure once existed. (That sentence sounds terrible, but I can't seem to fix it. Believe me, I tried.)

My field placement begins tomorrow. Very late, no? They may assume I am a ruffian and turn me away. Really. I am so badly in need of a haircut, childrens. I am looking less like a gum commercial girl and more like a drummer every day.

Going pro

2004-11-28T11:03:00.000-05:00

Today I am practicing intensively for my future career, which is spinster.

Q&A #2

2004-11-26T01:25:00.000-05:00

Q: What are some of your favorite words? Why?

Provide translations where necessary/relevant.

El pavo. Increíble.

2004-11-26T00:53:00.000-05:00

The Wolz/Henning/Webber clan had a "traditional" Thanksgiving this year. There was not a chili in sight.

Aside from the shock of seeing an actual bird carcass on the table, the evening produced little in the way of drama. The dessert course featured a cake (in addition to purportedly traditional pies) because my grandparents' two hundredth anniversary was last Monday and tacky photo sheetcakes are all the rage with my mother and aunt right now. My grandparents themselves didn't seem particularly enthused. I watched as my grandmother slowly ate the head off her young body and then shakily removed another section of the icing image. She shoveled it onto my grandfather's plate, and he stared at it vacantly for some time before she stated in a flat voice, "I ate my head. You eat yours."

And he did.

The end.

Obligatory late-semester post about personal nonsense, served with a heaping helping of sleepiness

2004-11-22T22:42:00.000-05:00

Today I felt insecure. I think.
No, that's wrong. Today I was plagued by doubt.

I wish life were as simple as setting goals and meeting them. Am I smart enough for A? Have I done what's necessary in order to have B and C? I can maintain my sanity when dealing with these questions. What drives me nuts is the point at which I wonder, "Why do I want A? Do I want A? Should I want A? What do I mean by 'should?' Do I actually want D? Well, why do I want D? Is A achievable? Is D? Will A or D matter? If so, how do I know? If not, why choose one? And if I don't choose one, do I pursue both? Neither?"

I am bad at expressing these things. Bear with me.

I avoid problems by oversimplifying them through stupid self-imposed myopia. I worry over whether Robert This or Nathan That considers me intelligent, well-read, articulate, etc., and when considering a relationship or the possibility of one, I have trouble thinking beyond academic compatibility. Why are these the things with which I am concerned, and why are they the things I want people to value in me? Perhaps because they keep my mind, as Johnson wrote, "in a state of action, but not of labor." Collecting trivia, amassing names and titles, locations and connections.... it keeps me busy, but how am I benefited by this constant activity? Has it given me anything that holds value outside of those first few dazzle-each-other-with-silly-crap conversations?

This is not intelligence; it is concern with the idea of being smart, and all too often it prevents any sort of real development from moving beyond its preparatory stages. I am avoiding something more difficult. I can't see myself abandoning these little compulsions and crutches, though. I like them. They save me from the possibility of failure, after all. Har har.

There is no good way to close a disjointed post like this one.

Q&A

2004-11-22T10:27:00.000-05:00

Q: Don't you wish you were this guy?

That's not what they mean by "romance language."

2004-11-19T14:01:00.000-05:00

In my Spanish class, we are assigned bi-weekly online chats with a partner selected by the professor. These chats are archived to Blackboard, which means the professor can (and does) log in to check our progress, verify time stamps, etc.

I do not know my partner well. We have never had a personal conversation, and we've never made small talk beyond what is required by chat prompts. He does not speak in class.

The following is excerpted from our Wednesday chat, in which we discussed the relationship between physical and mental health:

Partner's Name: Yo nunca tenia pastillas porque es acuesto mas dinero
Partner's Name: tambien me he masturbado y eso me alivia
Partner's Name: pero tambien, esto no funciona para todos
[LONGEST AWKWARD PAUSE IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD]
Kathleen Henning: ...Si

Good glory, WHY? Why would you type that? I know I am a prude and terrified of life, but greatgoshjeez, that strikes me as a tad inappropriate for conversation with a near-stranger, especially when said conversation will be graded by our professor. It's not as if we can go back and edit this; the chat is archived as we type. I am baffled.

I am also baffled by the fact that my largely German family traditionally eats Mexican food on Thanksgiving. Is this even baffle-worthy? No?

From "Eight Bits" by James Merill

2004-11-19T01:27:00.000-05:00

4. Anagram/Anagramme

Here Pasolini lies, decorum's foil,
Writhing in PAIN and crumbling into SOIL.
Ci-gît Pasolini, après de longs effrois,
Son corps devenant PAIN, ses cris devenus LOIS.

From "Eight Bits" (by James Merrill)

2004-11-18T23:08:00.000-05:00

1. Laser Majesty

Light show at the Planetarium.
Schlock music. Seven colors put through drum
Majorette paces. "We saw God tonight,"
Breathes Wendy. Yes, and He was chewing gum.

----------

Correction: ALL of my library books are overdue.

I would like to apologize to every poor sweet Merrill-starved UMBC student anxiously awaiting the return of Water Street, Late Settings, etc.

I'd also like to advise you to act quickly, as I will be back Sunday evening checking out the same damned books.

Fat stars boomed. Fields ruptured. Storm doors rattled in their greasy frames.

2004-11-16T23:07:00.000-05:00

They watched the lake burble unhappily and retreat into the ground where the soil had split like Uncle Roy's trousers. She picked at her thumbnail, then turned to him--

"I'm glad Manitoba writes songs like 'Jacknuggeted.'"
"And calls them things like 'Jacknuggeted.'"
"Yeah."

My new hobby is imagining entire inhabited planets collapsing into molten crap, a la movies in middle school geology, while listening to Up in Flames. The big glass buildings go during "Crayon."

Consulting the blogosphere

2004-11-15T20:52:00.000-05:00

Which is the more effective tactic for spicing up one's lifestyle--
Steamy love triangles* or daring knife fights?**

*Things to consider: Additional vertices, neighborhood gossip, lack of proper lingerie
**Things to consider: Death

There are far too many people in the world who are not making it their business to adore me.

2004-11-11T19:20:00.000-05:00

Seeing Jackie and her friends last night reminded me of how openly affectionate they are in comparison to most (I said "MOST"-- put away those scowls) of the people to whom I have been drawn, recently. I mean, anyone who knows me understands that I appreciate awkward eccentric introverts; I've focused on them almost exclusively, this year... But hell if I don't need a fearless sloppy bear hug once in a while. It's satisfying in a different way, two-bowls-of-Trix-satisfying v. one-really-spectacular-piece-of-toast-satisfying. I'm too guarded to make those leaps myself.

All of this makes me wonder: Am I pursuing the wrong qualities? When did I start seeking out people who were so very much like me?

Tedium

2004-11-10T10:59:00.000-05:00

As I sat in this chair on Friday, I noticed that the upper right corner of a drawing by one of the kids I work with at SLCC had come loose from the wall. I was busy with other things (like packing for a day or two at home), and I wasn't in much of a hurry to get out the putty and secure the paper. In fact, if I remember correctly, I didn't fix it at all. Here is the mystery: I'm looking at the drawing right now, and all four corners are firmly in place.

I see two potential explanations, and sorry, neither involves gremlins.

I might have pressed the loose corner back at the wall so quickly and distractedly that it did not make a lasting impression in my memory banks.
My roommate might have secured the drawing at some point on Saturday while I was back in Jarrettsville.

Why do we care? Well. A few weeks ago, a corner of my roommate's Marley poster came loose. I eyed it every time I entered the room, but ultimately, I didn't touch it. She fixed it herself. Now, I felt that it wasn't any of my business to be touching her wall decorations, but if she fixed mine, I suppose she thinks differently, which MAY mean that she lies over there in her bed at night contemplating how wicked I was not to fix Bob, how unpleasant I am, whether I was raised by wolves, etc.

I am morally bankrupt. Woe.

Aisle of Dogs (by Chase Twichell)

2004-11-08T13:33:00.000-05:00

In the first cage
a hunk of raw flesh.
No, it was alive, but skinned.

Or its back was skinned.
The knobs of the spine

poked through the bluish meat.

It was a pit bull, held by the shelter
for evidence until the case
could come to trial,

then they'd put him down. The dog,
not the human whose cruelty

lived on in the brindled body,
unmoving except for enemy eyes.

Not for adoption, said the sign.

All the other cages held adoptable pets,
the manic yappers, sad matted mongrels,
the dumb slobbering abandoned ones,

the sick, the shaved, the scratching,
the wounded and terrified, the lost,

one to a cage, their water dishes
overturned, their shit tracked around,

on both sides of a long echoey
concrete aisle--clank of chain mesh gates,
the attendant hosing down the gutters

with his headphones on, half-dancing
to the song in his head.

I'd come for kittens. There were none.
So I stood in front of the pit bull's
quivering carcass, its longdrawn breath,

its untouched food, its incurable hatred
of my species, until the man with the hose
touched my arm and steered me away,

shaking his head in a way that said
Don't look. Leave him alone.
I don't know why, either.

Dear Everyone:

2004-11-07T21:39:00.000-05:00

Shut the hell up about ninjas.

Kate

"The heavy hot rains and the sonic boom"

2004-11-01T10:40:00.000-05:00

Many people regard the time they spent in middle school as the most awkward, idiotic, unnecessarily dramatic three years of their lives (and unless my social skills take a significant turn for the worse sometime soon, you won't hear me disagreeing). This is why I am both eagerly anticipating and dreading my Edu310 field assignment, which will be at Bates Middle in Annapolis. Think back on the hormones, the misery, the ecstasy, the rage... would you want to be the 5' college junior struggling to persuade these borderline forces of nature to sit still and take a biology quiz? I'll probably have to hold a chair in front of me like a lion tamer (or climb under the table like a kid in an earthquake drill).

Anyway, here comes the middle school anecdote: When I was in the sixth grade, my three closest friends were Sarah, Sara and Jenny, and the four of us somehow established a rivalry with the four smartest guys in our class. Drills, bonus questions, average test grades... It wasn't friendly competition; it was thrilling overdone war, and I'm sure we took it much more seriously than the boys did. At any rate, we once passed them a note at lunch after they'd outperformed us on a Social Studies drill. I don't remember exactly what the note said, but you can be sure it was some sort of weak challenge. We giggled like hyenas for a little while, craning our necks to see their facial expressions. A few minutes later, the note came back. Scrawled over our threat was "Homie don't play that game." The boys nodded gravely from their lunch table. This is one of my favorite memories.

People don't seem to be all that enthused by this blog.

2004-10-29T01:10:00.000-04:00

You jerks have better taste than I thought.

I nearly stepped on the head of a dead bird yesterday.

2004-10-19T19:40:00.000-04:00

Accidentally, I mean.

Babble like a Brooke Shields

2004-10-17T15:23:00.000-04:00

Five or six years ago, I was rummaging through the used books our local library was selling (dirt cheap-- library sales are tops), when I noticed a low shelf filled with National Geographic magazines. These were older issues, with dates ranging from the 1950s through the early 1980s. After a few minutes of page flipping and deliberation, I pulled out the doubles (but missed two or three, as I discovered later), and purchased roughly thirty of them for something like a dime a piece.

Of everything I've purchased in my lifetime, I think these magazines have been the most useful and fulfilling for me. I read them cover to cover, and when I finished that, I started cutting them apart to make artwork, CD packaging, wall arrangements, and more. They are still handily positioned on my bookshelf, ready when I need a diagram of a nuclear reactor or when I can't remember where a particular Chihuly piece is installed. My National Geographics are a buffalo, if you know what I mean. But it rarely works that way.

These days, I'm something of a compulsive spender, especially when I'm on an upswing. I buy things I'll never need or use (primarily clothing-- 21st first century womanhood is an interesting disease), and I grapple with my guilt later in the privacy of my bedroom. Occasionally, common sense wins and I'm back at the store in a few days making a return. Usually, though, these unnecessaries are hoarded away in a closet or a box or any of a thousand other places I put the things I can't use, don't love, and won't throw away.

Habitual buying seems like a stupid thing to write up in a public journal, I know. It's not particularly funny. It's not "deep." The simple fact that it's rooted largely in how I relate to my material possessions qualifies it as trivial, for some. But I feel like I've underestimated it in the past. We'd like to think the important parts of ourselves are safe and dry, high above this raging sparkling current of consumerism, and maybe a few of you folks have managed that. I certainly haven't. I go through rings and scarves and sweaters the way some women choose to go through beaux. I purchase things for a quick lift when I'm down or to keep myself aloft when I'm high, but there's rarely an enduring effect, and my life is becoming (being reduced to?) a chain of tiny immediate gratifications.

I am afraid of writing, people, academics, love, anything that may constitute risk... I've retreated into my shrine of junk and kitten heels. I am surrounded by a forest of possessions so dense I almost feel protected. I've convinced myself that strangers will judge me by my earrings and not by my character, and I feel more secure operating under this assumption.

I don't know about you, but I am terrified by all of this. My internal siren's wailing and I can't seem to act.

Charles on Fire (by James Merrill)

2004-10-17T14:18:00.000-04:00

Another evening we sprawled about discussing
Appearances. And it was the consensus
That while uncommon physical good looks
Continued to launch one, as before, in life
(Among its vaporous eddies and false calms),
Still, as one of us said into his beard,
"Without your intellectual and spiritual
Values, man, you are sunk." No one but squared
The shoulders of his own unloveliness.
Long-suffering Charles, having cooked and served the meal,
Now brought out little tumblers finely etched
He filled with amber liquor and then passed.
"Say," said the same young man, "in Paris, France,
They do it this way"--bounding to his feet
And touching a lit match to our host's full glass.
A blue flame, gentle, beautiful, came, went
Above the surface. In a hush that fell
We heard the vessel crack. The contents drained
As who should step down from a crystal coach.
Steward of spirits, Charles's glistening hand
All at once gloved itself in eeriness.
The moment passed. He made two quick sweeps and
Was flesh again. "It couldn't matter less,"
He said, but with a shocked, unconscious glance
Into the mirror. Finding nothing changed,
He filled a fresh glass and sank down among us.

Dream Song 265 (by John Berryman)

2004-10-09T18:36:00.000-04:00

I don't know one damned butterfly from another
my ignorance of the stars is formidable,
also of dogs & ferns
except that around my house one destroys the other
When I reckon up my real ignorance, pal,
I mumble 'many returns'--

next time it will be nature & Thoreau
this time is Baudelaire if one had the skill
and even those problems O
At the mysterious urging of the body or Poe
reeled I with chance, insubordinate & a killer
O formal & elaborate I choose you

but I love too the spare, the hit-or-miss,
the mad, I sometimes can't always tell them apart
As we fall apart, will you let me hear?
That would be good, that would be halfway to bliss
You said will you answer back? I cross my heart
& hope to die but not this year.