Events of the Year

Graduating from College & Getting Married


Grocery shopping with Blondie. December 30, 2010.

Also, the 10 Crème de la Crème films I saw in 2K10:

The Graduate
Rachel Getting Married
Little Dorrit
In a Day
A Thousand Clowns
Happy Accidents
Youth in Revolt
Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist
Food Inc.
Bright Star

Thank you so much for thinking of me at this special time.

Paying bills is satisfying–the way cleaning is satisfying. I want to organize and demolish the balances and loans.

My room is not clean, and it is driving me bonkers, and IT’S NOT MY FAULT. I mean, I would just clean the darn room if I hadn’t arranged this deal for myself in October:
When I got back from the honeymoon, I carried the happily-ever-after gifts up to my teeny bedroom and promised myself that I would only remove each gift from the pile once it had been properly acknowledged in a thank you note.
I want to do a good job on these notes. (I don’t want them to contain phrases like the one at the top of this post.)
This is a good system. For one, there is no way I will overlook one gift and forget to send a thank you for it. For two, I like having the gift in front of me when I’m writing.


Blondie on my computer. December 29, 2010.

"Just finish cleanin' up your room
Let's see that dust fly with that broom
Get all that garbage out of sight
Or you don't go out Friday night
Yakety yak (don't talk back)."

Oy! Enough apologies!

The first Saturday we were roommates,
Ripe walked into the room and
I was in a V
in downward dog,
my butt pointing towards the door.
“Sorry. I was almost
finished,” I tittered,
standing up.
Ripe screamed that I must continue. How preposterous for me to stop my yoga routine for her. It was crucial
for us to be completely free in our space.


Court and Ripe in a Stratford inn

"I'm an MC. This is how I'm supposed to be."

Power

In September of 2008, when we England Abroaders studied at the Globe Theatre, we took a movement course with Glynn MacDonald. She asked us to write statements about what makes us puke.

I asked her what makes her puke. “It’s bullshit. Bullshit makes me puke.”


Bird in the Science Center at Prin. November, 2009

You'll still find your love
outside the public library.

There are things I gotta say alone

Something I miss about Prin:
CONVERSATIONS.
I can still have conversations, but I have to do a lot more work to make them happen–text, write, call. I miss floating around campus and getting swept up in billions of conversations a day.
The conversations I have at work
AREN’T REAL CONVERSATIONS.



Wry and Notes getting ready in the dressing room for our performance of William Inge's Summer Brave. November, 2009

I don’t recall
ever graduating at all.
Sometimes I feel
I’m just a disappointment to y’all.
Every day I just lay around, then I can’t be found.

Available

For me, this blog is about giving. I mean, the greatest gift I ever receive in life is other people’s art: their texts, their pieces. I am always so thankful that they had the guts and generosity to bring the work to its completion and make it available. I figure, “Shouldn’t I be giving in return, even if it takes a little more work than just goggling with gratitude at what they’ve produced?”


Prin Dorm. Wreckage of my Creative Writing Capstone Project. April, 2010


The Creative Writers + One English Lady, churning out Capstones, May, 2010

I was heading up north
To a place that I know
Eating well, sleeping well
But still I was way, way out of line
Amsterdam was stuck in my mind

Conceptually-loaded Gourds

Dough once pointed out that she and I add symbolic significance to everything. For instance, the postcards she uses to decorate her walls each stand for something in her mind. Maybe we think this way because, as English majors, we've spent a lot of time studying literature.

Blondie and I keep throwing the white pumpkins into the lake, and we give each pumpkin conceptual import as we throw it. We called the first one, the one I wrote about in the last post, “the marriage pumpkin.” On our second outing to the dock, we chucked the jealousy pumpkin. The third was the parental pumpkin, which my dad helped us throw.
We are not necessarily trying to discard these things from our life. I guess we are focusing on them for a few moments.


Beginning of the England Abroad, exploring Oxford by myself, August 2008

You were always brilliant in the morning /
Smoking your cigarettes, talking over coffee /
Your philosophies on art, Baroque moved you, /
You loved Mozart and you'd speak of your loved ones /
As I clumsily strummed my guitar /
You'd teach me of honest things /
Things that were daring, things that were clean /
Things that knew what an honest dollar did mean /
So I hid my soiled hands behind my back /

Pigs and swine

When I hear the verse, “Don’t cast your pearls before swine,” I sometimes think, “Awww. The pigs. Why not? Just throw 'em some pearls.”

You should be honest around everyone.

After dinner, I went to the lake with Blondie and walked to the end of a dock, carrying one of the pumpkins from our wedding. We swung it in our arms to a chant of “one, two, three, THROW” and threw it hard and screamed, “We’re married.”


It was the one at the end that you can barely see.

They were sitting in the strawberry swing.

Employment (Part I)

Blondie is enthusiastic about employment & being a chef is not a temporary passion. He loves it.

Right now, he works at Applebee’s.

As we created our bridal registry, he was attracted to the items he's accustomed to using in restaurant kitchens, like santoku knives for chopping. Our first package–in a long stream of packages–came in the mail on September 9. I made him participate in a photo shoot with the gift, a J.A. Henckels knife set.





Black clothes are only worn when praying for the deceased.

Are you keeping dry?

Just someone
talk about something
other than
the weather,
the basic heat,
wet–so what.
No matter how exciting it is to you,
it is not exciting to me.
Mr. Patterson,
you’re eighty and
I don’t mean to insult you but aren’t you sick
of talking
about the weather.



Principia in the rain

& I told you to be patient
& I told you to be fine
& I told you to be balanced
& I told you to be kind
& In the morning I’ll be with you
But it will be a different “kind”
& I’ll be holding all the tickets
& And you’ll be owning all the fines

Feed me, Seymour, feed me.

I married Blondie one month ago in an art gallery in downtown Richmond, Virginia. The other day I was chilling in the kitchen with my parents and the new boy, and I acted out telling my co-workers: “Yeah, my parents still feed me sometimes because, you know, I get in these moods where I just don’t feel like lifting silverware to my face, and you know, it’s not really a problem for them, so it really works out well for all of us.”

My dad goofing around in my childhood room. Summer 2010

You know the kinda eats,
The kinda red hot treats
The kinda sticky licky sweets
I crave

Obsessed

I just watched My Dinner with Andre for the second time this week. The movie is perfect for me. It is one long, open, intimate conversation between two people, Wally Shawn and Andre Gregory, about life and art. Wally and Andre based the screenplay on conversations they’d actually had with each other. I originally saw the movie in a Critical Theory course I took at Principia College, and tonight, I watched it with my mom.

Two themes I saw in it tonight are:

* DO (as in productive DO) vs. BE
with Wally on the side of doing and Andre on the side of being

* Art is not more accessible in one place than in another. You don’t have to be on Mount Everest to have an epiphany.


My mom at a gas station on our drive home from my graduation, June 2010

There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
And August the most peaceful month.

Be Brave

I just want to say one thing in my opening post: I will be borrowing my blog format from my friend Dough. I mean, my blog could evolve and everything. But for now, I love her format so much that I can’t help but use it. Her blog [http://aliceoutofcontext.blogspot.com/] is my favorite reading material.

Ideas I will appropriate:
(1) Making up code names for people I write about in order to protect their privacy
(2) Including a photo in every post
(3) Featuring quotes from others at the bottom of the blog

I'll make the author of the quote the label of the post.



Dough and I as roomies in Winter Quarter ’10...I promise she likes me.

When you love something,




you just love it.
You don’t want to change it.

"I’d assemble all the sand that covers wedding beaches
To build a castle so your mom would have a place to stay
Behind the water slide and down the hill where heaven reaches
Land and time is left to float away."