In Transition

It's going to harder and harder now to stay inside, to pretend to be an adult making money, pulling my economic weight. I am blaming solely the close sunshine, the air laden with the odor of blooming dogwoods and the yellow pollen. The cool, green grass subtracts years off my age back to about twelve, when I was still rolling around in it and clothing myself in it and in the meantime discovering womanhood.

The dogwoods remind me of it especially. They smell like menstration when fully bloomed, just like I did. I wore white jean shorts that day. Some boys I didn't know pointed at my crotch and cackled at me when I walked to my mom's car after school let out. But I only found out when I got home and went to the toilet. I told my mom I had chocolate in my underwear, but when I showed her she gave me the ultimatum.

"That's your period," she said, after deliberating then smiling like she'd discovered a lost secret, "You're becoming a woman."

The words tugged at my chest, as if someone was taking something away from me against my will.

"I don't want to be a woman," I said, and I cried for an hour, burying myself in the blankets on my mother's bed.

Later I walked out the front door into the summer heat of the South that can't accurately be called air. Down the road lived a horse named Lobo, whose owner had told me I could come brush it and pet it whenever I wanted. My size 5 Nikes took me straight to Lobo's gate, and I cried for awhile longer, explaining my newfound crisis to him and wiping my face on his mane.

When I saw in his silver-dollar brown eyes that he understood, I patted him and walked to the old Civil War graveyard overrun with ivy and anthills across the street. It was the only place in the neighborhood - the only place in town, I was certain - where you could get a cool breeze on a 92 degree day. In the summer, the atmosphere of the graveyard was damp and mossy, calming and reticent. It was only in autumn, nearing Halloween, that the neighborhood kids payed any attention to it and it became somehow ominous and creepy.

Of that day it's all I can recall. I'm sure I walked back home, ate supper with my family, returned to business as usual, as much as a little girl can with blood leaking from her vagina for the first time in her life.

The dogwoods, the tiny white flowers clustered, turning pink with bleeding edges as they age, will fall off and lay their backs on the hard brown earth in a few weeks. Spring seems to be the most short lived of the seasons, the adolescent season of transition. But it's the most florid and langourous, when things rise with new life and shed a bittersweet husk.

Part Irish, Part Cherokee, Part Elf

I figure I'd better go ahead and blog now or it might not happen today. The reason is because, if I know what I'm going to write about, I tend to think and think and build the idea until it's much too big for a blog and then because something of an opinion essay and potentally a dissertation. That just can't be.

Woke up this morning, went to the toilet with the song "Indian Outlaw" playing in my head for some reason. It's this Tim McGraw country song from like 1994, and I haven't heard it in years, let alone ever cared to hear it anyway. I suppose I know the tune by default because the side of my family I grew up around is a bunch of southern mountain folk, with a few hicks and a couple rednecks (there is a difference). This is not a bit of fact I am neither proud or ashamed of. It's where I come from. So, back to the song. As I was washing my face and brushing my face and humming "...half Cherokee and Choctaw...", I recalled that there was some controversy over "Indian Outlaw" within the American Indian tribes in the US. Being descendant more than one Cherokee ancestor, I kind of felt guilty for having looping in my head.

So I looked it up when I got to work and found that the controversy was over the stereotypical language about American Indians used in the song. I read the lyrics and yeah, they're dumb.

I'd like to know what percentage of Cherokee heritage I have. I guess it doesn't really matter, I'm just curious. I've been on a good many Native American websites and forums for different purposes, and the general consensus I've noticed is one of exclusivity, that if you're not full-blooded and part of a tribe those who are think you're sort of silly for trying to figure out your Indian roots. I know I've got to be less than half Cherokee, but it'd be nice to be able to place myself genes-wise. I'm dark-haired, dark-eyed and yellowish-tanned, with a round face and high prominent cheekbones. Kids in school used to always ask if I was Chinese/Hispanic/Italian/whatever else. In college it was sort of a joke and my friends just started calling me "ethnic". I know my looks come from my Indian genes, I just wish they were closer to my generation so I could claim them more easily.

So here's to being American, Southern Appalachian, a hodge-podge of Irish, Scottish, Cherokee and who knows what else.

Now, let's think about what's been good about today so far:

1. I didn't get any speeding tickets today. I was soo cautious on my way to work this morning. In fact, they should have pulled me over and given me a pardon for yesterday's offense for such defensive and apologetic driving.
2. My boss is out sick. Hence why I am blogging so early in the day. I may be getting too comfortable though, because I'm on my second cup of tea for the day and I still feel like I haven't quite woken up yet.
3. A lovely new writer I'm currenty enjoying. Her name is Theodora Goss and she writes these strange fantastical short stories. I'm reading her collection entitled In the Forest of Forgetting. I will definitely be writing more about her in a later post. For now I'm getting to know her stories better.

I wish work was like class and you didn't have to call in if you wanted to skip. I just want to go outside and play.

Actually I'd like to be making my way into this enchanted forest:




Yes, I think I'd much rather do that. Maybe I can find the Elves and they can tell me my heritage. Maybe Theodora Goss lives there somewhere.

Off-Days and Silly Finds

It feels like way too long since I've been here. I didn't mean for it to be; I always look forward to my next post. But, incidentally, I had to actually do work at work last week a good bit, so I didn't get time to write at my office desk. And we don't have the internet in our apartment, which my husband has been talking about rectifying. Hopefully we'll have it soon. Still, things have happened over the last few days I haven't written, though some are more pleasant than others. Let me start with the unpleasant to get them out and done with.

Not-So-Great Things:

1. I was in a sad mood last night and tried to blame it on Daniel for not being exactly what I needed when I needed it. Thing is, he does an amazing job of that pretty much all the time. We just missed a bit yesterday, that's all. You have those off-days. Yesterday was one of them.

2. I got pulled over for speeding on the way to work this morning. As you probably can imagine, no matter how much I try to think about positive things, this fact is like a nasty rusted anvil dropped in the bottom of my day. If I have a certain allowance of happies alloted to me at the start of each day, being pulled and ticketed subracted at least half of them. This is on top of the ones I woke up without due to this sort of hangover I had from being sad and upset last night.

3.....this sucks, I'm not doing this anymore!

I'm supposed to be focusing on good things here. Enough. Enough head-hanging and venting. I have things to be happy about.

Things-to-Live-For:

1. And this is number one every day. My husband loves me and cares about me more than anything in the world. Even if I act like a bitch sometimes, he's still beside me trying to help me work through it.

2. A great find I had last week. The company I work for owned Ray-Ban eyewear back through the 1980's and 90's up until a few years ago, and they'd sell sunglasses and other things to employees from this closet-type-room-turned-store. I was in there last week opening boxes for a company product giveaway for employees to celebrate the launch of a new product. I came across a few relics that have obviously been holed up in the store-room for some time. This is the best one:




I tried to tell my boss they might make a few bucks if they put this obviously awesome Wayfarer mirror from the 80's on ebay. I was serious, but I'm pretty sure he didn't take it that way. 80's styles are currently vogue again, if only he knew.

Here's another time capsule for you.




Let's play "Guess That Decade".....the 90's! That's right. I'm pretty sure if Topanga from "Boy Meets World" met this sexy Ray-Ban model in a coffeeshop after a DMB concert, she'd drop Corey in a second.

3. I haven't blogged about this at all yet, but now it's official: I'm going to Ireland in June! Daniel and I put down the deposit and got our airline tickets this weekend. We'll be gone about 3 weeks, touring Southern Ireland. I have always wanted to go, so this is a lifetime wish coming true. I'll definitely blog a bit while we're on the road there.

Ok, I suppose I'll get back to work now. At least spring is here to stay for a bit.

Being Awake

I am, at the moment, secretly and illegally (I'm sure) typing this blog at my desk at the slow end of the work day. The process is made slower each time I hear commotion in my boss's office like he's getting ready to come to my desk and tell me something and I have to minimize the Blogger window and pretend like I'm working. It's a very, very tedious and nerve-racking enterprise, writing for myself at work. I shouldn't do it I suppose, but it gives me a little extra rush of adrenaline that makes blog-writing seem tantalizingly forbidden.

My boss just walked by. I have to finish this sentence by the time he starts back from the copier.

Speaking of the copier...my old friend. I spent the rest of the time after lunch yesterday and the whole morning today at the copier printing 200 copies of a 48 slide Powerpoint presentation. Now, it wasn't that bad, at least I had something definite to be doing on which no one could question the utilization of my time. It is obvious in our office why I have to stand at the copier the entire copying session - the damn thing jams all the time and you have to open it up and pull out the crumpled, masticated papers - culprits of the copier sabotage. At least I had my iPhone with me and played Epic Pet Wars until I couldn't level up anymore. Then I started getting really bored and began looking up game ideas for my sister's bridal shower I'm throwing her this Sunday. If you know me, you know this is a dangerous sign of severe boredom.

I wanted to write yesterday about the small adventure my husband and I had this past weekend (I was prevented from doing this by being chained to the copier). As I am now somewhat comfortably seated and somewhat unbothered at my desk, I can properly tell the tale.

Friday morning we lazed in bed, dozing in warmed folds of blankets and each others arms while the room colored to the sunlight. We didn't turn on the TV, but dressed and drove to Cracker Barrel for a late breakfast of French toast and jellied biscuits. That first meal, like the waking, was free to do as it wished, meandering and taking its time. Despite this, we were packed and leaving the apartment by noon, leaving a key over the doorframe for my mom to feed the dog.

I didn't know where we were going, and I suspect Daniel didn't know either at first, but we headed towards the mountains, always a good start. Daniel used the maps application on his iPhone. He doesn't like to type in a starting point and destination, rather he enjoys spreading the map with his fingers and finding a route manually, even accidentally.

"Am I allowed to know yet?" I asked, trying not to act too curious.

"Thought we'd check out Saluda."

His parents had talked about Saluda, a small mountain town where they sometimes went to visit a favorite restaurant. I'd wanted to visit Saluda when I heard about it. I wanted to feel the smalltown-ness, walk through the antique stores and hear the quiet between the foothills.

We stopped in Saluda and lingered aside the sloped main street, making our way from the tiny elementary school building, past the eateries and shops, towards a forlorn playground and small skatepark blown through with debris. We thought perhaps a storm with strong winds had visited the town a few days before.

As we closed our car doors and crossed Saluda's railroad tracks, relics or technology we could not tell, I didn't have to ask him before he gave up the answer like a hidden bouquet.

"We'll drive through Landrum, then to Tryon," Daniel's mouth was stitched up at the corners, he was giddy with the opportunity to please and lavish upon me.

Sometimes we go to a restaurant in the private-feeling town of Landrum, the Hare and Hound. We passed through, stopping for fishing licenses at a hardware store across the street from the restaurant. Daniel's never been fishing, and seeing as how my Dad took me every year from a very young age, I plan on teaching him this Spring.

Tryon, to me, means horses. I rode when I was a kid, going to shows in Tryon. Daniel, being the serendipitous navigator, sniffed out a horse show going on at a park. We parked to tresspass and onlook at the show, where riders were mounted on tall, muscular mares and geldings. Mostly the sun had incubated the different smells into a singular, langourous odor of horse hide and shit, which wafted down to the wide creek where we sat on rocks in the shade and watched a little girl try to catch tadpoles. I leaned on Daniel's shoulder and stared at our shadows on the water below us wavering, a single shadow lump instead of two separate figures. You couldn't tell we were two different beings by looking at the shadow. You couldn't even tell we were human.

I took pictures with my phone since I had forgotten my camera, and we packed ourselves back into the car where it sat, its leather baking in the raw spring sun.

On to Columbia, where we always knew we'd end up. We arrived a few hours before Dave Bazan would climb onto an already-humid tavern stage, and walked the streets of Five Points below USC Columbia. Later, we met Daniel's older brother and some of their friends to eat a bite at a Mexican restaurant and watch them get blasted on Dos Equis.

After the show - which was too long - Daniel and I got a room at a Holiday Inn Express outside Columbia. It was 1:30AM now, but we made love until we fell asleep like we awoke that morning, holding each other.


Few pictures I took with my phone:


This is the girl at the creek. She kept asking her mom, "How do people catch tadpoles?"


Daniel inside the hardware store in Landrum where we got our fishing licenses. He looks like he is brooding over the tiny hats below his face (which are really normal-sized hats on a wall beyond him). PS - An old lady won $8 from the lottery when we were in the store waiting for our licenses. She couldn't stop bragging.



This is a horse at the horse show in Tryon. A girl was letting it graze a bit away from the riding rings and I asked her if I could take a picture. I'm sure she thought I was a little creepy.

Getting a chance to breathe

It seriously feels like Friday to me. Maybe because I am not going to work tomorrow! A couple of weeks ago when I was feeling rather upset about generally everything, my sweet and loving husband suggested we both take a day off and just go driving somewhere. Tomorrow is that day, and we may even stay overnight somewhere.

Thing is, I haven't been allowed to know what we're doing. At first I was all, well how can I plan accurately for us being gone when I don't even know where we are going and how long we'll be there? But then I started to realize how nice it would be if I just left all the details to Daniel and he just surprised me. I can tend to try to control, in some way, just about everything in my life, if I am left to it. This is why the day off with no agenda will be good for me, and my husband knows it.

The only thing I know about the trip is that we are going to end up in Columbia tomorrow night to see Dave Bazan at New Brookland Tavern. Daniel is a big fan, and I got him the new album, Curse Your Branches, for Christmas this past year. We went to see Bazan in Asheville a while back, which was the first time I had heard him really. I enjoy his music, and I really like his newest album. Though, he is really depressing (God knows I don't need any pushes in that direction) to listen to sometimes because his music and lyrics are quite melancholy. I'm looking forward to the show, where I'm sure I'll be out of place among the scenesters who still think they're ahead of the fashion world while it passed them by a few seasons back.

I can't wait until work ends today so I can start my weekend! The only (and I mean only) downside to this is that I won't get to blog for the next couple of days, unless I bring my laptop and find somewhere to sit and blog for a bit on the road. Even if not, I'll take plenty of notes and pictures and share our small journey when we return.

Tonight is the only high school soccer game Daniel has to coach this week, so it'll be a late night. Don't mattuh, ahm sleepin' in tomorrow (he better let me).

P.S- I need advice....keep growing hair or cut it all off? What do you think? Here's my hair now, with waaayy too many layers growing out from my last super-short cut last September:


It's clearly overtaking my face. Should I go Natalie Portman-short or keep growing it and get a trim? My inclination is to leave it alone because I hate having to think about it at all. But today is a particularly irritating bad hair day, so that's why I'm considering this.

Weird Spirits

I'm in a strange state of mind today. Daniel and I both woke up late this morning and I never really blinked all the sleep away until about 10:15AM. I'm still barely holding on to cognizance, with little enthusiasm for much of anything. I just want to get my work done and get the day over with. At least the new season of Ghost Hunters comes on tonight.

I know, I'm a dork for watching Ghost Hunters. And not in a cool, I'm-a-hipster-dork sort of way. More like the same kind of dork I am for knowing Celine Dion did a cover of Cyndi Lauper's "I Drove All Night", let alone knowing any Celine Dion song at all. That kind of knowledge, random as it is, will not get you the title of Random Info Coolster, it'll get you something more like Knows Stuff Nobody Cares About.

I'm still watching Ghost Hunters anyway.

Speaking of ghosts and dorkiness, I have this app on my iPhone that allows you to take photos then insert images of ghosts somewhere in the picture. These are highly amusing to me, and I've victimized most of my family, and quite a few of my friends with the application, who aparently have some haunting spirits hanging around. My husband has more than a few.


My husband let our ghost out of the closet



I think ol' Civil War Sam wants a bite of my Dad's casserole



We think that Sam, by reappearing in different places is trying to bring us some message. Once, he appeared in the living room behind Daniel from a gray smoke long enough to psychokenetically tell us that the South will rise again. We told him to go to hell but he says he's been there, and they don't got separate sections for blacks and whites so he decided keep hanging around in Limbo.



Do I have a creepy little girl floating behind me? I feel as though I do.



Civil War Sam is relentless, following me and my sister to Cracker Barrel one morning. Give it a rest Sammy....I mean seriously give it a rest.

Ok, back to work now. Blogging at work is a bad idea.

But pictures of my family with ghosts in the background...that makes me smile.

Airing out

First order of this post: Note to all, do not drink hot English Breakfast tea and then eat anything chocolatey, or vice versa. It is a a very nasty tasting thing, with a fish-like earthy taste when the two are blended. I was eating a chocolate chip granola bar when I took the first sip of my morning tea and almost gagged. Also, doesn't the concept of a chocolate chip granola bar cancel itself out in the health department? Whatever, it tastes good.

Now I've gotten that very important alert out of the way...I'm playing soccer tonight, a coed practice at a YMCA downtown. My coed team began our new spring season and had a game last night (for which I was sorely ill-dressed as it was ass-cold and windy), and the winter season ended with us in the playoffs which took place Sunday. Needless to say, after two months of relative physical inactivity, I am really sore.

I got up to running several miles three or four days a week last fall, and had to stop because of a bursitis flare-up in both my hips. Basically, I put on too many miles too fast and ruined the buffers called bursa between my hip bones. So when I'd run it felt like I had stones rubbing together for hips. I've had to stop running and rest to recooperate. Me playing soccer is quite a less energetic picture than one last year around September because my endurance isn't near what it used to be.

So, finally, after a long rest period and a couple weeks of just stretching and lifting weights off and on, my hips aren't giving me hell when I run anymore. Now, running around at soccer games feels so amazingly freeing. I never realize how much physical activity really helps me keep even keel until I'm not doing any. My old counselor told me - in one of our talks a couple of years ago when I was on Lexapro - that being athletic is one of the best things a depressed person can do. If nothing else (i.e. the fresh air, the flora and fauna, the vitamin D) doesn't boost your mood a bit, your endorphins are sure to give it a nice lift.

That's not just for people in serious depression; anyone having a bad day, or bad set of days in my case recently, can benefit from a lively jaunt outdoors or a good jog around the block. It'll air you out in all the right places, giving your mind a chance - along with your body - to let go and just drift along. Other times, you might choose to push your mind and body more, seeing what they're capable of. Physical activiy is, after all, a task that involves the mind as equally as the body. Even if my body posseses the endurance and capabilities to perform, my mind will always keep my body tied up if I let it. And everytime I decide to let go of misgivings or emotions, I always surprise myself with what I can be capable of.

I knew I was going to do a physical activity post when I started this blog, and it just seems natural for me to talk about it right now, at this sort of new beginning I feel I'm having with being active.

I'll end with a challenge: Now that it's spring and getting nicer outside, seriously try to get out there at least three times a week for thirty minutes. Ride your bike, go for a run, get in a pickup game with some kids, go LET GO. Trust me, it'll do you some good in a few different ways.

A jot about grammar

Even though we made the Daylight Saving* time switch yesterday, I was early to work this morning. That hardly ever happens, and it was nice being only the second one to claim my desk this morning just before 8AM. *When I was younger - well, until about two years ago - I thought it was Daylight Saving(s) time. Even when I found out, I never really knew what difference it really made in the end.

Which brings me to an interesting thing: grammar. Grammar and correctness. Having been an English Lit. snob even before I entered college, I was very concerned that people do not use what I thought of and had been taught as "correct" English when they spoke. I felt it my moral (if you like) duty as a grammar-ly enlightened person to show the way to those who proved themselves ignorant to the structural rules of the language. It makes me warm in the cheeks to remember now how pretentious I probably came off back then. Then gradually, after I'd had a few Linguistics courses the college had just started offering, I realized a few things.

First, I lean towards a linguist's view of language now instead of a grammarian's. The real difference is that linguistics takes a more pragmatic approach to communication. You could say, a "git 'r done" approach. Also, I began to comprehend more how speech and language is inextricably connected to psychology and biology, and that every human being, regardless if he lives in South Carolina or Zimbabwe, is born with the same linguistic potential (unless barred by some disorder) to create a gigantic list of sounds. But as he learns his mother tongue, he will begin to keep only the necessary set of sounds and throw out those that his mother language does not require.

On my first day of my Intro to Linguistics class when I was, I think, a sophomore in college, my professor was explaining these things. He spoke of how, in our early teens, we stop being able to learn to make new sounds with our vocal organs. After he finished talking, I raised my hand to tell him something that, with this new knowlegde, I thought very strange: During high school I took Spanish classes and (due to my dark hair, eyes and skin) hung out with the Hispanic kids in my underclassman years. I was frustrated in Spanish class a lot because I could not "roll my r's" to make the sounds in words like "carre" and "roja". So I practiced. It became almost a habit to put my toungue on the roof of my mouth and push air over it. One day, I was doing my homework alone in the kitchen, got up to get a snack, and had been practicing those motions in my mouth. All of a sudden, it happened. My toungue vibrated softly under my hard palate, and I was rolling my r's.

My professor was astounded when I told him. He thought it was strange but he was very interested. I don't think he'd ever heard of someone actually learning a new sound after puberty, which is generally the cutoff time. Still, I could tell he was seriously passionate about the study of language because he acted like he had just unearthed a new discovery. (Dr. Prieto, if you ever read this - thanks for the inspiration you are to students like me.)

Language is a beautiful thing. I enjoy the creativity that can be expressed through it, and I appreciate its many, many forms, even within one tongue. Now, I appreciate different dialects, especially my native southern dialect. Even though we make a mistake to believe there is only one correct way to speak English, it is an equal, if not more transgressive mistake to base people's intelligence upon their dialects.

I know quite a few brilliant Southerners and I've come across about the same amount of Yankee rednecks. And vice versa.

The complexity and beauty of language continues to amaze and intrique me. I'm sure now, having eased back into a bit of my southern roots with speech, I've pulled up grammatical lids for the sake of both practicality and ease. And I appreciate culture itself, of which language is a part.

Call me lazy, call me apathetic, but know that if my pronoun doesn't agree with it's antecendent, it's because I've come to realize I don't give a damn if it does.

Into the steamy water

Last night I took a bath, like I said I would. I have a few ingrown hairs in my nether regions, and I read that taking a hot bath would open up the pores down there and help the folliculitis to heal up. I really hope that wasn't TMI, but I felt like I had to say it at least once here because it's caused me so much discomfort and inconvenience for the whole week. I haven't even been able to have sex with my husband. On this seriously awkward note will I change the paragraph and the subject.

I am becoming what the poet Sparrow calls a "bath mystic." The bath is a place for shedding things, and not just dead skin cells and dirt. Sparrow explains all of this his essay "Bathifying". It's a journal-like chronicle, with each thought separated off under specific dates - the days he probably took these baths and encountered these concepts in the act. I enjoy it because it's like baths a whole lot - no serious structure or aim to speak of, very free but very thoughtful at the same time. I think baths are conducive for lots of things, except work, stress and fear. Those things do not accompany me into the steamy water.

Right now we live in a one-room one-bathroom apartment, which does posess a shower/bathtub of meager proportion. It's alright for now, and I clean it before I use it each time. But I like to daydream about the bathtub I'll have one day when we get a house. Actually, the bathtubs at the top of my list are ones I'd probably only get to lie in by the time I'm too old to really enjoy them. But, I can dream.



K, so now I know I'm really dreaming here. This is the Dream Suite master bath at Disneyland. The stained glass is obviously exquisite, and I really like bathtubs that are nestled in against walls, at least on one side. That is, unless it's one of these:



Clawfoot tubs are classic and so romantic, and I particularly like the ones that have luxurious curves to their rims. Very nice.

Small light, only candles, but not so dark that it's seancesque. And music. I'm an Enya bather, but not as a rule. I've listened to peppier tunes like The Ditty Bops or Norah Jones. I don't think I like listening to male vocals while in the tub. Not sure exactly why, except that girls singing usually tends to have more of a lighter, airier, bath-ish feeling sound.

Bathification makes me excessively happy.

Washing

Today has been a step up, well, a whole staircase up from past days. I was at home during my lunch break for a bit, and took the dog out to pee while my leftover Indian food warmed in the microwave, and I thought, as I walked without a jacket or an umbrella, it's the first light spring rain. It didn't wash me, only made my hair stick together and nose wet, but I was glad to feel it.

Last night I cried, bending my head into my husband's chest. I cried about so much, and I don't know what. He stroked my hair and didn't get angry or impatient, just listened, and talked a bit too. See, when I feel like I am not that great at things and I see him being wonderful at everything (it seems), I get jealous. This doesn't do wonders for our relationship if you can imagine. But even though I can't pinpoint why I get so jealous, I know it's all in the perspective of things. I can change my view to believe I am good at something just as easily as I can believe I'm not good at it. The distance between the two worlds - because they are truly separate - is so, so small, like just stepping over a line. But when you are on either side of the line, you think it so difficult to make that step. Sometimes you don't even know you can.

I stepped back over the line last night on the couch when I cried, and he forgave me for my jealousy. That does seem to have washed me, absolved me.

I'm going to take a hot bath before I go to bed tonight and not worry about anything while I'm in there. And I'm going to read a new book I got at the library. Interestingly, when I went to the library yesterday looking for specific books but I came out with one I'd never even heard of before. I think it picked me. We're going to get to know each other later.

Minutes

I started this blog when I was feeling on top of things, less threatened that I could really, truly be sad again. I thought, good project, I can think of at least one thing that makes me feel a tinge of happiness every day. Not so hard, right? Well, I'm not sure if it's PMS or if I'm having a bad stretch of days or what, but I have rarely had a glowing thought of true happiness, confident happiness, in a little while.
Maybe I need Saturday morning pancakes. Maybe I need drugs. Maybe I just need to get over myself. I'm just human. That's what I started this whole thing for anyway, to revel in humanity. Well, first of all, humanity's not that great sometimes. Second, it's human to hurt and feel emotional pain.
I listened to Writer's Amanac at 11am, but today it just made me feel unproductive. I stalked the Three Minute Fiction page on NPR.com, and didn't see my little story on their favorites-so-far list. My lack of soccer skills exibited at our coed game on Sunday still reverberates down to my ego on Tuesday, and I feel like there's nothing I'm good at.
My name is not in peoples mouths, on their minds, like my mommy promised it would be at my bedside at night. It will always be in her mouth, on her mind. That is nice, but somehow not a consolation prize for annonymity in my mid-twenties - in my prime.

Sorry, this is not Three Minute Fiction. More like Three Minute Autobiography, if that's all the time we get.

Books make me happy

I want to read a really phenomenal, really absorbing, can't-put-down book. I need it right now, I think, to adventure a bit. And I want to sort of prove to myself that I'm just as good at and into reading as I was when I was a kid. It sounds silly, but growing up and becoming more experienced in life, I wonder if some of the - well - wonder will have gone out of the story world for me. Don't misunderstand, I still read. But I haven't had that pulled-down-into feeling with much I've recently read. Maybe I've just gotten really picky.

I've got a couple of leads on some really tasty reads, though. I've been recommended Cassandra Clare's City of Bones series by more than a couple of people. And I read a really alluring review of one called Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason.

I was the girl at my middle school who walked in the back of the lines to the lunchroom and DARE assemblies with my spriggy ponytail-head aimed down at a paperback. It was usually something like The Saddle Club , books by Beverly Cleary or any kind of mystery stories. Anything about horses for sure. Later in 8th grade I started getting into doctor's office waiting room lit like John Grisham and Nicholas Sparks. I thought they were things adults read, and I wanted to be seen as ahead for my age. Sorry, no Farenheit 451 for me yet. I did like a lot of the classics, but I was definitely never into reading things because I needed them "under my belt." I have a hard time thinking about reading or writing in a purely academic vein (even though I was an English major). Why take the fun out of everything?

You gain knowledge through reading, but that knowledge puts down its strongest roots when the reader really connects with the material.

There's my English major two-cents.

Small-town rant

So, apparently a lot of high-traffic blogs are kept by people who either live in major US cities like NYC, LA - okay, mainly NYC and LA. What is with that? So what, I live in Nowheresville, USA (aka Greenville, South Carolina)! We've got things other places don't have, we've got news too. Like....like...like: it's snowing! Yes...that's news. It doesn't happen here very often.

My husband's a highschool teacher and he got to come home early from work because school let out. I have a corporate job and they don't give us snow days. As an employee, I could take that in a few different ways:

1. Corporate America, like everyone else in the world, get's their orders from some headquarters in a major city like, hmm, NYC or LA. And they say, "Suck it up you southern east-coasters. You call that snow?!"

2. Some people wanted to let us go home early, some people didn't, and because there were too many people with opinions, they never got anywhere...or...

3. The company doesn't care if its employees have a major car accident on the way home from work because of inclement weather - because, "We're corporate America, we can just replace you with another humanoid."

Maybe I shouldn't be such a downer on them, but really, that's what it feels like sometimes.

The positive side to all this: My husband is home before I am, so maybe he'll be super relaxed from his extra downtime and want to get cuddly tonight.

A Word's Worth

It was the first time this year I walked into work from lunchtime not wearing my coat. Come on Spring, just a little faster now!

I actually got to listen to Writer's Almanac this morning, I was so happy. Recently I haven't been able to because either someone comes to my desk to talk to me or the NPR application on my iPhone won't cooperate. Today, I narrowly escaped a lady who was headed towards my desk to talk to me for - and only for - the five minutes that Writer's Almanac is on. Since a bad incident on Thursday of last week when my boss decided to come to my desk and explain something to me right when I heard the piano intro to the Almanac on my earphones, I have decided to take my phone to the bathroom to listen. Nobody's ever dared bother me when I'm sitting on the toilet. My husband jokes that I need my daily dose of Garrison Keillor's voice. I think that's about right. But I really enjoy the different poems too.

Usually Garrison reads a poem on the segment from a current or contemporary writer, but today he read a literary classic and one of my favorites - an excerpt from "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" by William Wordsworth. Actually, I found it interesting to come across this poem again today, because I've recently been contemplating the exact feeling that Wordsworth describes with his verse. See, I always wondered - until I really sunk my teeth into Wordsworth's poetry - if I was the only one that felt like some brightness and crispness in the scenery was somehow lost with innocence and childhood. It sounds silly, but I remember that colors and dimensions looked somehow fuller and more defined at one point in my life. Now, I still see beauty in things like the poet says "The rainbow comes and goes,/ And lovely is the rose;", but without the same sort of halo of hope they all had when I was younger and less experienced in the world.



"The Voyage of Life, Youth" by Thomas Cole

I do miss this view of the universe I seem to have lost. But, I would not be able to identify so closely with Wordsworth's words if I had not known this loss. And the understanding of poetry is something I wouldn't give up for anything.

Thanks, Garrison Keillor, for making good poetry more accessible to us all.