July roundup

Posts that should be on this blog right now but aren't:

• Love song to my summer CSA: a refrigerator bursting with green things, the dramatic fight against time as I try to use everything before it goes bad, and the inherent feast/famine cycle of receiving one large crate of perishables every two weeks.
• A list of the changes in store mid-August, when everyone in town changes households, and whole configurations of couplehood either conjoin further or pull apart or more people leave for grad school. It looks like Willy St. and the North side are the places to be in 2012. I'll stay squatting on my shelf by the Arboretum, a little solitary, with no where I can walk to except one lovely little beer hole and the Trader Joe's I've forsworn in favor of a co-op, but still within biking distance of most other desirable things.
• I got a new job. It will completely reconfigure how my time and energy are spent. Back to more reporter-like tasks (though I won't go so far as to say it's journalism). Science writing of a sort. I'm excited.
• Some failures in my non-job life. Some are the usual failures. Some are new. What have we learned about ourselves and what we owe the world, et cetera.
• Pictures of spiders, boats, bicycles, clothes flapping housewifeish on the laundry line, and this t-shirt I turned into a tank top. A view of the street at 6 a.m. A view out a window that you hope no one looks up into. The particular trickles of sweat inside your elbow when you talk on the phone in Wisconsin in July. And so on.
  

After the job switch, I plan to focus a bit more on longform nonfictional writing of various types. This blog is second on the list of venues to benefit from that kind of attention.

May is almost done already

I finally bought that bed I've been wanting since October. My next act will be to paint constellations onto my new black sheets and sew rockets on my pillowcases. I have a solar system quilt, and the cat has so much space that she no longer wraps herself around my head and makes me sneeze. I am learning how to sprawl when I sleep instead of furl into myself like a snail. Not that a twin bed is so small, but the queen is defeating my instinct for smallness.

This morning I woke up in the predawn glow and fell in love with my apartment. Herbs growing on the porch, bed with aesthetically pleasant frame, windows filled with orange light and one filled with Algerian ivy. And then I felt uneasy at the sense of settling into a rut. A pleasant, white-collar rut.

A friend is loaning me a really nice camera for a few days, so I'll probably post all kinds of smarmy photos at some point soon.

I'm about to start grad school applications, which panics me. I just was starting to figure out how to have time for everything except poetry, which I miss badly.

Replaced

At the newspaper, the features editor would hang above his desk a different staff member quote each week. Usually it was an innocent thing taken out of context in true "that's what she said" fashion. Our readers weren't allowed in that part of the office, thank goodness. I still get these in e-mail form every week.

This week was rather touchingly prefaced like so:

"I had feared the departure of Christie "Ears Always Open" Taylor, a diligent reporter of unintentionally inappropriate comments, would hurt the flow of quotes. But then along came , who has no filter and speaks before he thinks. He's a Quote Board dream."

I'm glad they're not hurting without me.

Errors in the pre-flight stage

Hello blog.

My poems are condensing into thin, tight little clumps of words.

I blame technical writing.

Also feelings of spareness and economy that the world seems to encourage. The fat, rolling lyrics of Richard Siken seem like a relic of the 90s.

Note that this generalization is based on one example.

At work today I found a poem:



Everything is going so well for the personal lives of people I know. It's hard to believe, some days when the peepers chirp chirp in the wetlands, that the political landscape is so fraught, that there is so much misery in the public discourse.

Then I stumble back onto the news and my eyes are full of laserbeams.

Oh, spring.

No fooling.

Just in time for poem-a-day month, Praxilla has published a couple of mine. The table of contents can't find me, though, so here is a link. My poem is holding hands with David Lehman, which causes this odd squiggle of famethrill.

Finding a home for this poem took more than 4 years, so I'm happy it is in such a lovely place.

But also, I regret conflating eating meat with good sex, because that is such a cliche.

I know, poems shouldn't have disclaimers.

C-c-c-cauliflower

I wish I had a lengthy life update full of concrete points of interest. On your left, the blogger hangs a plant in her living room. Up ahead, the blogger survives another ulcerous workweek but has yet to repair a thing that is broken.

I opened this window and sneezed. Blogspot, you are all dusty.

I made some killer tomato/pepper sautee last night. I cooked all the food I'll need until Saturday. A seriously ulcerous workweek, blog. Chickpeas and kale.

Notice the differences in the capitals of columns. Each has a particular meaning.

Spring planting update: one little lettuce sprout unfurls in the germination machine.

Right here: a steady, cyclical, tired but undramatic existence, somewhat obsessed with plants and recaulking the bathtub.

Also I shouldn't watch Dollhouse before bed

It is a time of strange dreams. Like: I kill my cat and someone I love and worry most of the time that I can't hide the evidence. only when I wake do I realize the void I've created in the act of murder. Like: I move back to South Africa and my fatherly-but-aloof editor hugs me when I submit my job application and says "Christina" like he already has an assignment for me. Like: an endless barrage of the #wiunion hashtag. I wake at 2:30 a.m. and can't stand to hear anything, not the cat purring, not my breath, not the water rushing through the pipes downstairs.

We wear our trousers rolled.

I got a letter from my first internet friend yesterday. This is the girl I met on Dragonriders of Pern RPGs, who happens to share my last name (no relation), to whom I would write long letters about my teenage angst and put them in envelopes I'd painted the same vibrant pink as her then-dyed hair. I'd yell at my parents for accusing me of having "no real friends," because I spent so much time on the internet. But she was a real friend, in an era slightly before people accepted the internet as a real form of communication and connection. I visited her the summer before I started college, and it was my first solo cross-country trip. We hiked near Mt. Rainier and picked berries and rode the bus.

We managed to intersect a few more times. I visited her in Indiana. She came to Madison. I visited her in Michigan. And yet, it has somehow been four years since we saw each other or really communicated about our lives.

She gave me a list of her major life events, sorted by year, since 2007. The heartaches. The jobs. Somehow her mother has had cancer and a year of treatment/remission in that time.

I started my reply with a similar format, and quickly ran out of room on the card I was using.

It is so strange to me how time can slip away like that. I guess that is how these 20-something years go.

dispatches

1. I have listened to Beethoven's 9th approximately 30 times since Christmas Day. The drive to work takes exactly the length of the choral movement, which makes me inappropriately glad to be on the way to work.
2. I have decided that if I limit my blogging I might do better at poems and other obligations that require me to stare at a computer and write. Blog posts are a pointless use of the same kind of energy. I don't think I have anything unique to say here, so why squander it on updates about my life?
   
3. Update about my life: decomP is running one of my detective poems in March. Thank you decomP!
   
4. A lot of things have stopped feeling particularly important. But I am reading some great things that I keep wanting to review before I finish them.
   
5. If you cannot have a standing desk at your workplace, take hourly breaks. Yes, this was a New Year's resolution. Also drink tea if water bores you and it's too late for coffee.
   
6. I am using my body to do things again. I mean, yes this means at its most literal "exercise," but I don't really care how my butt might look as a result. I'm fine with my butt as it is. I just like the sudden usefulness of muscle. I being more than just a machine of sensations. Feed the body. Rest the body. Give the body joy. Hey, body, let's accomplish this hard thing and watch it gradually become easier. Doesn't that sound like fun? This is why I like yoga. This is why I started up with roller skates. The body is suddenly this friend who helps you do things. I hope I don't break it in the process.
   

I think I might have some friends in common with this Madison woman who blogs at Your Ill-Fitting Overcoat, whose blog I don't remember how I found, but which I love.

Her latest post had me going yes, yes, and I wanted to hug it/her.

I don't own real furniture. I don't put paint on the walls. I've been saying this for years and for years, but every time I think to change, something in my gut says no. I have this sense, all the time and all the time, that this is not my Real Life. I am living an Intermission Life, a Pre-Life before the main event. And at any moment, my train could arrive, you know? The one that takes me there from here. And if I get the chance to go, I don't want a thousand-dollar couch weighing me down.

This strikes me as a strange way to live.

Sometimes she posts things just as I'm thinking them. Right now I want a real bed, but I've been saying that for months and doing nothing about it except making do. With similar hesitations. But I'm not waiting for a train - I think I know which train I want and when it's coming. I just need to get myself to the station at the appointed hour. Platform 9 3/4? Maybe this metaphor has gone too far. & everything in the meantime is still Life. I just don't know if it's bed-buying Life.

Dear blog, my life is tiny butterflies with sharp teeth. How are you?

Bears, beets, Battlestar Galactica

Everything that has died in large numbers recently starts with B: birds, bees, bats, bastardfish.

I finished a TV show I've been watching since August. Getting through all four seasons this fast required (though no one really required) that I have at least several undignified evenings of solo TV: TV while washing dishes, TV while doing yoga, TV while putting plastic on the windows. I feel like someone I love has gotten married and moved far away and taken several good friends along with.

I cried a few times in those last scenes. There were things I didn't like, too, but part of love, even TV love, is agreeing to it. And I agreed months ago I was going to see this through to the end.

Now I am covering my TV with a blanket. I want to put together a chapbook manuscript this year.

Mysterious dull pain stewing in my "LLQ." That is the lower left quadrant, in medical abdominal pain speak.

I like speculating about what organs, exactly, are in that zone of tenderness. Perhaps my liver is protesting, belatedly, the holiday decadence. Perhaps I have been invaded by a thousand dead birds or two dozen fretful mice, or every political sadness felt in the state of Wisconsin this afternoon.

Thanks to my job, I know it's not my appendix (that's RLQ), and since it's not terrible, just weird, I can leave it for tomorrow. In my head, I am already signing in as a fake nurse and documenting the duration and intensity and characteristics (dull? sharp? throbbing? mostly not) of the sensation. If I remember right, there about two dozen adjectives we allow for describing the shape of a pain. The rest is location and intensity. It seems inadequate.

New poem, new endeavors

My Brahe/Kepler poem is up on For Every Year today. Thanks to Crispin Best!

Also I'm doing recreational level roller derby starting next weekend until I either break my legs or run out of steam/time. I will learn how to fall on my ass without fear. This is good, because I will fall on my ass a lot.

2010 overview

This year: I started freelancing in earnest; moved back to the city I was born in; got a new job I like less but, for now, want more; lost a cat; nearly lost one of my closest friends; gained but then at least temporarily lost another friend; got poems in 3 publications and another 2 upcoming; wrote a lot of unpublished poetry; became a co-producer of a local literary/theatrical group and wrote several press releases; had great ideas that actually bore fruit; cemented a sort of plan for the eventual future involving grad school not in Wisconsin; cut my hair repeatedly and gleefully even after deciding my face looks better when it's long; got a tattoo; went to Japan and Korea; fell out of touch with pretty much everyone who isn't in the same city as me and many who are, and decided that in 2011 I would get better about that.

Still, it seems like a period of few permanent gains. I realized I sometimes measure my life like it's a level-based RPG. Problematic. But let's say that I gained lots of experience points, but my armor is still pretty shitty and my spell proficiency is still only 62%.

Hello train, goodbye train.

Old/Young

Robins, both of them, found a white hair on my head. I found it too, later. It's three inches long and sticks straight out. I will probably hunt for it in the mirror out of odd vanity, the way I do the one white hair I discovered on my wristbone last summer.

I alternate between feeling very old and very young. My sister expressed a similar sentiment at Christmas. She's teaching high school in rural Mississippi, speaks jadedly of feeling lucky when one student understands her lesson and follows directions, agrees when I wonder whether it feels like pulling "whatever you can save" from a burning building.

In retrospect, fire metaphors are not good for her - she lost a house in Minneapolis that way three Decembers ago. Then, she saved her roommates and a pair of boots.

Anyway, later we both have a little much wine at dinner, and traipse mercilessly onto topics that are not necessarily appropriate for Christmas. Young young young.

I only said one terribly awkward thing in front of family this year, so I am calling this Christmas a success. I also called my sister "fast and easy," but I was talking about her birth as described by my mother, so I don't feel awkward about that. I was "fast but not easy." I like this phrase.

We cleaned my mom's house today and played the Beatles really loud, a holiday tradition as of 2009, and after re-discovering a high-quality record player, the 9 symphonies of Beethoven and the War of the Worlds on vinyl, and a lot of sentimental old books that date back to at least my mom's childhood (I wish I'd brought my camera), my dust allergy is apparently worse than I thought. I am about to take a Benadryl and go to sleep, no doubt snoring wetly all night.

Things I can change at any time but won't get around to until 2011

I think one reason so many people do New Year's resolutions is because they're too busy to effect change in their lives in November & December. So all of that resolve piles up until the holiday season is finished and you fall with relief into the new pattern you've been plotting for months and wish to really, actually enact in the hope of making it permanent.

Like, I want to get back into going to yoga regularly for mental and physical health, but all of my good after-work times are filled with Christmas shopping and dealing with my job and my not-jobs and seeing friends who are dipping into town from far-off places for the holidays. I am left cycling through lazy sun salutations for 20 minutes before bed. Paying someone to tell me which poses to do for how long is a good investment, even only once a week. I leave ready to take on the whole world.

Mostly I can't blame the holidays for lapses, though.

Like, I also want to start eating breakfast again, instead of junk food over my keyboard at work, and wake up earlier after fewer alarm clock reminders and really, seriously, I mean it, regularly take the bus to and from work, even if it means walking many blocks or driving to the transfer point.

And I want to respond to those little e-mails people send me for nice reasons that I let languish because I'm too busy at the moment and never get back to. And be better a friend in general.

And as always, I want to write more, better, usefully.

I have all my best ideas somewhere between the 4th and the 5th alarm.

Hat collector

Multiple corners of my life have been strange, strained. But I swear, I've been having fun. And the first major winter has hit us, the bonesaw-cold, the icy roads, the scarves hiding everyone's identities. When I said December is clearheaded, it is definitely not clear-eyed. So much of winter, really, is a problem of vision. Darkness, snow, water stuck to and clouding our various glass. I've got the plastic on the windows, after waiting a little too long so I could slap another coat of polyurethane on my astronomy-plastered kitchen table. I am almost done with Battlestar Galactica and there are good books lying all over my apartment, waiting. I got myself back to yoga class and remembered how lovely it is to surrender to that kind of discomfort. To sweat, but slowly, to watch a drop of it plunge off my fingertips while the rest of me holds still as an easel.

Also I've learned that I really like The Killers. They give me shivers. The way I discover music now as a young adult, after spending my NPR-only teenagerhood having driveway moments with Beethoven and Prairie Home Companion, I tend to be way too excited about something that everyone else I know has already loved to the point of cliche.

But other songs come on and the whole room gets electric because everyone in it feels the exact same way. When Wolf Parade cries out, "I'll believe in anything." And that old difficult word "duende" shivers down from eyebrow to heel.

Love Train

Oh Wisconsin. I love you so much. It's the kind of love where I want you to be even better than you are because it will be good for you, not because it will be good for me. For what it's worth, Wisconsin, I think a train would have been really, really good for you. Especially a train that went from Chicago to Minneapolis and stopped in Madison. Think of that glittering modern future, laid out on tracks. The movement of people is the movement of ideas, and the movement of ideas is a good way to stimulate a knowledge-based economy. Not to mention ship goods efficiently in an age when oil is increasingly dear (money-wise and environmental-cost-wise). You know, no one outside America really knows Wisconsin? We are a wasteland. North of Chicago, south of Canada. I want everyone to know how lovely you are, how good and caring your people are. Even when sometimes your people are actually a lot like people everywhere - dumb, easily mislead, and yes, sometimes actually selfish and not at all caring.

My 5-year plan, not so much a plan as a "Eureka!' scribbled on a a napkin, includes grad school. Even though I believe firmly in sticking to a thing you love even when it's cranky and run by idiots and not so fun to be around, I've now, today, this minute, decided I am not going to bother applying to Madison. Not even as a "might as well give it a try." I have lived here so long. I am curious about other places. The near future is as good a time as any to seek them out. That's still at least 2012, anyway. Maybe the world will have ended by then, like they say it will.

We live in interesting times, friends.