Happy Holidays!

we must have cut them down in our sleep

Outside everything is so bark & snow that it looks like a black & white film. I haven't been able to get a picture of it.

You would think being snowed in your house for 9 days would make you incredibly productive, but I've written nearly nothing this past week-n-some. I'm not even sure what to blame it on -- we haven't even turned on the tv, which is the usual writing-killer/time waster for me.

The things I have done: baked a lot of sweets, read a bunch of The Journey (a friend at Random House's project; amazingly poetic, with all these shifting metaphors & surreal images & vagarities), watched two Scenes from a Marriage (the third one crapped out right where it was getting interesting & we couldn't find it on youtube with English subtitles) & Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (woah po-mo), eaten through the music on my friend's external hard-drive (with special emphasis on Arthur Russell, Fleet Foxes & Fleetwood Mac), organized my overstuffed & poorly planned closet, taken some wintry Polaroids & looked at hundreds of Polaroids on Flickr.

So maybe it's ok that I'm not writing all that much? I'm gonna rectify tonight.

I’m just an animal/looking for a home &

The word on my fridge right now is love. It’s not like I haven’t been thinking about it endlessly these last few months, but I’d like it to become something I can consider as purely as possible. Something I can approach again with as little of my preconceptions & baggage as possible. Maybe that’s impossible, but I’m at least trying to find/acknowledge those preconceptions & baggage.

Also on my fridge is a death metal letterpress xmas card from an ex: a holiday themed demonstration of how much we “get” each other. It makes me so happy & it makes me so sad. I really believed that was love: being known: not missing a single meaningful detail, knowing where a person was from & living in that place yourself. That’s what I was looking for, what I thought I could to stop at. I always wondered why he didn’t add it up, why it wasn’t enough for him. Maybe the reason is because it’s not enough. Maybe love has more stuffs to it than just feeling like you’re home, though home is, granted, a lovely place to start.

Or maybe, as I’m learning about my actual home, an unnecessary comfort.

Outside/keeps coming in.

Pursuing Moratorium

At Por Que No the other night, two friends & I were listening to a group of three older women talk (ok, my friends were talking while I do that thing where I listen to both conversations & at some point go “Did you hear that?” & no one knows what I’m talking about, but still). One was reminiscing about the cute art professor she & all the other girls had a crush on. After a year & a half he asked her out to drinks & she thought they were going to discuss school work, not realizing that he actually liked her. She said it was long after we were married that they passed a law making it illegal to date your students. This lady blithely stumbled through a year & a half of a man’s crush & ended up marrying him.

It was lovely & bewildering to hear. My friend & I looked at each other & said we want to be pursued! I think that part of being pursued is, perhaps, being in a place where you’re not pursuing. So we entered into a non-pursuit agreement: for the whole month of Dec we’re not going to engage men in any way, not to flirt, not even to make the eye.

It’s definitely a shift in my everyday interactions – I’m a pretty massive flirt (so I’ve been told). It’s been hard (meaning I’ve had to be vigilant) but it’s also been amazingly relieving. I think I’ve always used the attention/attraction of men to gauge how attractive I was. It’s not healthy. It’s not accurate. And it’s a drain.

But this month, I’m free of it.

Demonstrating

This morning I was listening to a woman on NPR talk about how the Greek people could get back their faith in politicians after this latest corruption & she said there should be a revolution of some kind, but it should start in the people, that they often talk about change but don't try to enact it in their own homes. She said they should be kind, fair, etc & that she was always trying to be that way & so always demonstrating.

I'd never thought about my positive choices or right actions as a demonstration. But they could be. Or they are. It's certainly more hopeful & more uplifting than just thinking everyone has their own standards, their own amount of what wrong they can stand in themselves that will never change.

I'm so real right now!

Lately I’ve been taking myself more seriously as an artist. I’ve started saying I’m a poet when people ask me what I do/am. I’m not sure why I never was able to define myself that way before. Maybe I didn’t feel like I’d earned it. But I feel that way now.

I’m writing SO MUCH, like, the most much I’ve ever written. Ever. I just don’t even know where it’s coming from.

I’m sending out for pretty much the first time ever. This is working out for me: my poems are up on glitterpony right now & some lovely lady has tagged my poem as her fave of the bunch!

I’m participating in the fellowship/chapbook scramble because I’ve finally realized that’s just what you do, even if you don’t think you’re going to get anything out of it. (Did it really take me that long to figure out? Yes, it did!)

Moreover, I’m totally sold on my project: it resonates. And not just for me. I’m finding ways to widen it out of its own confines by creating a more positive tone in some of the poems, which is something I’ve talked about needing for myself as well as my work.

I’m learning to shrink the distance between my life & my work--it’s not just that I’m writing so close to where I’m living, but that I’m letting my life decisions blend into my work decisions & letting the writing habits spill over into my actual life.

I’ve also been spending more time with other artists, which is really generative & I’ve been taking on invitations to participate in social-practice based art. Instead of feeling diluted by this, I’m finding that I depend on/am involved in my writing more than ever.

It’s thrilling. Like D says: we’ve got it made.

Love is taking my weight away.

“The way we see things is the way we look at things. Like, if you look with pleasure, you will see beauty.”

The other day I stopped at a light in front of a bus stop. Right at the edge of the sidewalk were two kids (early 20s-ish) making out. I'm not huge on PDA, so I already had a little eye-roll going, but their body language was making me furious. Dude couldn't have been less open -- he had his hands in his pockets, his shoulders squared & was immobile except for two neck muscles & his mouth. The girl, on the other hand, was tip-toed & both arms desperately rounded his neck. She looked so clingy & he looked like such an asshole. Didn't either of them get where the other one was in this process?

But I'm tired of being angry at what I have no control over. I'm tired of being a person who's bitter over meaningless stuff. So I watched them as they continued their awkward but endless makeout & made myself support them. I thought how great it was to have someone to kiss, how nice that they want to kiss you so publicly (they want to own up to loving you!), how wonderful it must be to be in the same place as the person you're attracted to (both physically & socially -- the same age & taking the bus), & I thought maybe they have a connection that's real but their expectations are different from mine so it's really me who can't understand where they are in that process.

And I felt better. Just like with the birthday thing, making myself feel positive about them resulted in me actually feeling pretty positive & carrying that feeling away with me.

This isn't exactly new -- whenever I was bummed on love before I just repeated the phrase "I love love!" until it kind of felt true (and occasionally forced friends to do the same). But it's not just words now -- I'm changing the emotional responses I have to sadness or dissatisfaction. Every time I'm down on love, feeling hurt or hopeless about it, I just start to fully support it & recall the joys that come with it.

So when love makes me want to gnaw through my own wrist, I'm going to use it to save me. Instead of pointing out that love is eating me up & making me lose weight in these sleepless panicky shut-down days, I'm going to say that love is taking my weight away, meaning both what is true right now & what will be true: it uplifts me.