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.

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.

Fragments, fractals, relevance

I write a lot of things that I don't know what to "do" with. Homeless fragments stacked up in Word documents with names like "drivel written on the bus" and "ongoing drivel" that pile up in my "needs work" folder without ever really "going anywhere." (The scare quotes are because I question still what "doing" something with a piece of writing means, and what it means to "go somewhere" beyond the obsessive stringing together of images and words. I question what "finished art" really is. I am often confused when I think about writing in the big picture.)

I'm considering that either 2011 should be a year to try earnestly to publish more, or to take a break from "trying to make it" and just burrow into deciding what I want from my writing. But does this need to be decided? Resolve, unresolve. Pace. I feel like I am wearing circles in the worddirt.

M. and I were talking about "relevance" and the thirst to be "relevant," and where it takes us. This is an idea for more thought.

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.

book arts

The Minneapolis Center for Book Arts is right by the Megabus stop. I am waiting in a coffee shop facing a glass cabinet full of slim volumes that their authors all, one exciting day, received in the mail as proof that they had indeed published a book.

I am suspicious of most books that have pictures of attractive women on their covers. Unless it is Divisadero, because the image is made interesting in its mirroring.

Like so:

When are you allowed to call yourself a writer? I think I am because all of my jobs since 2008 have been for stringing words together. But if I were not so lucky?

My dystopian impulse assumes that one day, all books will be locked behind glass.

What is a book.

I have a large backpack and a cumbersome laptop bag, so I am afraid to wander too much in this building. I could knock things over and cause trouble.

This was my favorite moment in Dead Man, even though it didn't really contribute much to the overall story. I think I liked and am still chewing on what the movie was trying to do: I don't think it quite made it. It was something like, but less than, Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead, how you stumble across something bizarre in a voyage and just pick it up and take it with you. Or shoot it. But too many long shots of people traversing the wilderness. Too much obvious elegy.

examples of the crap I write these days

One thing I do a lot lately, writing-wise, is write poems that are really letters. My lines grow long and sloppy. The more I write, the more I realize I need 40 years in a hole writing to get anywhere close to the people I want to write like.

Tycho Brahe to Johannes Kepler:

I do not miss the smell of autumn ambling toward me. I do not miss my father or the enfolding shorelines of that first observatory. When I die, let the shadow of the moon wheel along my face slow enough to measure.

Yes, we will falter in our orbits. Retrace our footsteps. Err predictably.

Calypso to Penelope:

I had a pet bird for a few years. She sang Wagner and the hymns of extinct peoples. But then a storm blew up and Zeus sent her away. She spent forty days and nights searching for land for some jerks in an Ark. Her heart gave out when she finally succeeded, and she died in my palm, warbling que sera sera.

Have you ever been alone on an island? I mean really alone.

Humphrey Bogart to Philip Marlowe:

Thanks again for the invite to your office Christmas party. Enjoyed meeting your assortment of solitudes, the whiskey, the slant trajectory between sorrow and a point unknown. Found it awkward to be the only actual guest, chewed noisily on ice cubes and made small talk with the venetian blinds whenever you wandered off to paw at a question.

Seasonal synesthesia

Even the word "December" is airy and light. Cold, but clear-headed. If somber, than musingly so. A seriousness in which you discover things the snow (snow!) has buried.

November is over, and with it poem-a-day month. Usually I like to print all the rough drafts I write (26, in this case), but I'll give up that satisfying stack to save paper until I can decide exactly what merits pen-and-paper editing/scribbling. I've yet to develop a real strategy for revising things, anyway, and sometimes it seems type works best. And sometimes not.

I'm pretty happy with all the new Word files in my "needs work" folder, though.

As a writer, I want us to have a gender-neutral pronoun to stand in for "generic human being." My only solution is to write in the second person when I want to dodge all the assumptions people make about gender. It's true - I don't trust readers to not make these assumptions. Perhaps one day I will. Meanwhile, "you" has a nice genderless intimacy about it, true. But what about when I want to pull my voice back, be deliberately distant, speak less to you and more about you?

You see what I mean.

I also want this pronoun for political reasons, but that's for someone else to argue more eloquently.

Dear friends. Let's build a lighthouse in Montana, and wait for the sea to find us there.

You do not have to be good.

Mary visits and we speculate that Mary Oliver is, perhaps, like your mother. Full of sage truisms that you embrace in your early years, reject as you learn more about the world and then return to, at last, weary (poetry says "weary" but no one else does), accepting.

She was the first contemporary poet I read, 10th grade maybe? Wild Geese was the first poem another person had written that got me truly excited about poetry as a still-relevant form of writing. She plugs in well to a teenager's unremarkable catastrophes, with her, "You do not have to be good," and "What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

Now, I've been rebelling against such elegant simplicities for years, but thinking more and more about them anyway. My internal monologue is along the lines of: "Fine. I won't walk on my knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. Fine. Whatever."

Then we intersect with Carrie and fume about the reduction of Kurt Vonnegut to a "so it goes" tattoo on your wrist.

And so.

With a big "I am an atheist" disclaimer

So! U.S. Rep John Shimkus, who is vying to lead the House Energy and Commerce Committee next term, is a bible-thumping climate change denier of the first order.

Look! A link to a video! I apologize for the expletives in the subtitles. If you are too lazy, basically he reads a passage or two about the Flood, to the gist of, "After the Flood, God promised there would be no other catastrophes," and says that some religious theorists think the earth is actually carbon-starved, there is no surfeit of carbon.

I don't understand religious people who think that if God has promised them something, it means we as human beings have to do nothing to fulfill that promise.

I realize there is a lot about faith that I was never exposed to. But I also have read enough to know that there are plenty of people who think that even if they've been promised something, they have to WORK for it. And that shall-we-say-God might not say verbatim what will happen, but rather the gist of what will happen. Riddles might be involved. Nothing looks like what it turns out to be. Etc.

And if shall-we-say-God has assured there will be no world-destroying events, perhaps really what shall-we-say-God has said is that human beings are going to pull through with the skin of their teeth because they worked their asses off to keep climate change from getting as terrible as we have heard, over and over again, it has a high likelihood of getting. It seems ridiculous, even if you live in a universe with a conscious, benevolant Creator, to assume that if they have promised you safe passage, you should just go ahead and keep punching holes in your rowboat.

Also, in the passages Shimkus quotes in that video, there's really nothing that says, "Global warming won't seriously screw with the human race." Instead - "Man will not destroy this earth." The big worry about climate change is that we will change the earth so much that it destroys us, and other life. The earth itself will be fine, honeybee.

This week has been like a dream, crawling from one bizarre task to the next. Today I am in a strange city with no time to really explore it, after a long night wandering a hospital, befriending nurses, breathing in time with the beeping of a thousand different machines, trying not to gawk at the neurosurgical patients with wires and tubes streaming from their skulls like futuristic hair.

I want more than anything else to be home in Wisconsin, stirring up the strange brew that our politics have become. I am trying not to be scared about the future, but I am feeling particularly fiercely in love with/loyal to the concept of "a Wisconsin" now that its fate is in the hands of people whose values are not mine. This is probably normal for political losers. I just feel like there's more to hash out, and I feel personally responsible for fixing it all, somehow. This is narcissism, truely, but I'm not alone.

November is poem-a-day month for the Sweatshoppe. I am excited. In the meantime I am trying to revise old poems and send them off to journal submission purgatory so they're not in my way. Kind of like sending kids to college, I guess. They will all return to me and hassle me again, but first I'll have some time for knitting a sweater and restoring a classic car and a few trips to Hawaii.

poems, bones

New (old) poem up in the fall Wisconsin People & Ideas.

As usual, my style has changed since I wrote this and it is odd to look at this thing with my name attached and realize it came from me. I see things the writer-I-am-now would change. Then you ask, does publication mean it's frozen and immutable? Butterfly-pinned? I don't think so, but it does mean I'm likely to put "fixing" this one at the bottom of the stack.

Still unsure, too, about names in general. I hate "Christina," so I don't use it. I do like "Chris" as a formal, public, publishing name, but I don't see myself introducing myself "in real life" as such anytime soon. So it's become, by accident, a kind of pen name.
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Scientists are getting closer to finding out how the blue whales (and other baleen species) lost their teeth. It sounds like a folk tale.

Also, I really "need" a camera. The September cornfields are staggering at sunrise.

yes

Crockpots are magical creatures. Take heap of browning apple slices, handful of water, plenty of cinnamon, and one long, amnesiac day later you come home to a nice surprise. Better than the housewife with the martini. Hi honey, would you like a quiet bowl of September before bed? Yes.

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I have been reading the end of Ulysses repeatedly this week, Molly Bloom's cascade of "yes" et cetera. Aloud. This is difficult because there is no punctuation, and sometimes the stream-of-consciousness diverts midsentence. But a rhythm emerges slowly from the mess and the "yes" pulls you through it to the end. Yes, I should own this book, yes I will Yes.

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Last night I dreamed about a plane crash. I think there were many loops, because at the end I knew it was going to happen, and I looked out my window in time to see the whole nose tilting down. Somehow I survived and there was no falling or dream dying to wake me up. I woke up thinking more about Lost than today's anniversary, though. And I think it was fed by a friend telling me about an airplane dream. That plane landed safely on State Street. I don't like planes much lately because they require a specific destination. I hate choosing and I hate sitting on my ass in a cold tin can.

when I was 12 I wrote "dear diary" and asked how my diary's day had been

Hey blog, did you hear about the latest oil tanker exploding in the Gulf of Mexico? I am worried we're going to get used to it. I have serious doubts about the future of Us, blog, as in the human race. I don't think we're going to achieve that Star Trek egalitarianism any day soon. I am thinking about a trial separation.

It was my birthday yesterday, and I've been referring to myself as "Ms. Quarter-Life-Crisis" for a while now, but I guess it's official now and I'm supposed to consider joining the Peace Corps. Someone pointed out teeny smile wrinkles on my eyes a few days ago. But I was smiling at the time. Anyway, I am kind of excited to have such things.

I am behind on everything, blog, but it's mostly okay that I am.

emergency intubation, anticoagulants, CBC panel stat.

I've been weirdly anxious about the new job. All the training is putting me through means a lottttt of staring at their software, creating fake children with fake pneumonia and then running them through a hospital stay. Every now and then I take a test or have a "graded" assignment that is necessary for me to eventually begin doing full-fledged writing-about-it work.

The anxiety never crops up at work itself. Instead my sleep is bad several nights a week, and I halfawake dream about my class schedule conflicting with my meeting schedule, or long involved processes of building orders for urinalysis. I'm actually really enjoying learning how to build things in the system (user security privileges, as one really oddly fun example), but the text-based screens and infinite keystrokes of that process are also working their way into some of the strangest nonsleep.

But I was watching TV the other night and a doctor rattled off a complex chain of orders in an emergency situation and I completely understood what he was saying, so that's pretty great.