We made up rules to follow for good, no wonder we're fucked up;

Writers, books, musicians, movies and people who have changed my life for the better:

Dream Work by Mary Oliver
Neko Case
Various poems by Rumi
The Weakerthans and Propagandhi
A Testament of Hope by Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Sun magazine
I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning by Bright Eyes
True Love by Thich Nhat Hahn
Poems by Robert Hass
A Language Older Than Words and Listening to the Land by Derrick Jensen
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Utah Phillips
Kimya Dawson (Hidden Vagenda and Remember That I Love You)
Succulent Wild Woman by SARK
Me And You And Everyone We Know (directed by Miranda July)
Hello Cruel World by Kate Bornstein
Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
Chaim Potok
The Mountain Goats and John Darnielle
Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin
Leonard Cohen, Songs of Leonard Cohen
The Smiths
M. Ward
Our Bodies, Ourselves by the Boston Women's Health Collective
Cunt by Inga Muscio
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Joanna Newsom
Hello To All That by John Falk
Paul Baribeau
Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin
Karen Dalton
Poems by Sandra Cisneros
O, Pioneers! by Willa Cather
Into the Forest by Jean Hegland
The Replacements and Paul Westerberg
Al Green
Poems by Margaret Atwood
Simon and Garfunkel
Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
The Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller
Feist
This American Life radio program
A Summer Life and Living Up The Street by Gary Soto
Hearing Voices radio program
Hairstyles of the Damned by Joe Meno
John Denver
Living Fully With Shyness and Social Anxiety by Erika B. Hilliard
Cindy Crabb, author of Doris zine
Peggy McIntosh's discussion of white privilege
Prodigal Summer and The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
Cat Power
Marge Piercy's poem "To Be Of Use"

It should be a peaceful and quiet night tonight. I have three big piles of laundry to wash, feminist theory to read, and a room to pick up (P.S. my feminist theory professor is a big Adrienne Rich and Cherrie Moraga fan/disciple). I wish laundry weren't so annoying and chore-ish -- I have no problem putting clothes in the washer but it takes a bit more motivation to see that they also get dried, and then folded and put away. I guess it's one of those life patterns. You are beholden to the clothes you wear, like you are to the health of your teeth, the shine of your hair, the life of your relationships. You see to it that you maintain them, whatever that might mean.

Yesterday Jon came over and I guess one of the cooler aspects of that was that he introduced me to The Mighty Boosh, a British comedy radio show. It made me laugh a lot. One of those things I will put on my ginormous Amazon wishlist and pretend to save for.

Nostalgia makes me cry -- yesterday I picked up a pale lavender t-shirt from the top of my laundry basket and smelled it to see if it was still wear-able. Instead of the immediate smell-response of either 1) yeah, it's still clean or 2) no, it's stanky, what happened was something entirely different and more potent. It was Florida in 2000 (sun, salt, sweat, child- joy) woven into the cotton fabric. One smell and my youth came back. No specific memories. Only the feeling-impression-memory of being being being, reveling, laughing, doing, seeing, joking, being held......  gumbo restaurants, sting-rays, bikinis crusted over with sea salt, messages in the sand, red snapper, Michigan State's National Championship title, men fishing off of overpasses, walking on the beach every morning to collect seashells with Dad, key lime pie. Tennis. Bike rides to the mangrove forest wildlife refuge........

Friendship is powerful -
Sisterhood is powerful-
Love is powerful-
Work is powerful-
Empathy is powerful-
Hope is powerful-

This is what my feminist theory prof and my two lit profs have been hammering into our heads this semester. What wonderful company to be initiated into.

Did you know that there is an actual printing process/method that is called "rasterbating"?

I am not making this up.

Poems of experience - moving from a state of not-knowing, not-understanding, not-caring, to a state of more knowledge, understanding, feeling, caring.

Poems about moments ("stills") - these aren't usually as powerful as poems of experience, because moments are by definition transitory. But when they're written by someone who has lived a lot, who has learned a lot, who is in a position of offering legitimate hope and support, then they can be as strong as poems of experience.

Poems about poems - for those of us who are a little bit in love with the things that a poem can say/do/mean, these poems can be food for thought.

Political poems - probably fall under the broader category of "poems of experience," 

Right now I can't think of other poem categories off the top of my head, but if you can, comment.

And more of it to follow this post..... ooooh. Exciting, isn't it?

One way I can tell that life is moving too fast, that I'm keeping too many things in my head, is when my coat pockets and computer desk start to accumulate junk paper (receipts, index cards, business cards, fliers, packs of gum) and when I don't change my sheets even though they could really use a change. Especially when they're my least favorite sheets and I still don't feel I have the time to do a decent job of putting clean ones on.

Here is an email that I sent to a professor yesterday, half heads up, half request for help:

Hello Prof. _______,

This is Beth ______, from English 315. I wanted to let you know before we get too much more into the semester about something that may affect how I do in your class. I have moderate to intense social anxiety (and have been diagnosed with depression), which is a kind of amplified shyness and reticence around people. It does not stop me from doing the assigned reading or writing the required papers, but it does make group work difficult:  I sometimes feel embarrassed and anxious about expressing opinions or thoughts, especially if they differ from those of the people around me. Sometimes this anxiety ends up looking like gruffness, shortness or arrogance.... it's not.

I definitely want to think of this class, with all the group work, as an opportunity to prove to myself that I can overcome a little of that fear. However I thought that by giving you a heads up on this you might be able to understand where I'm coming from and hopefully not judge me or take my behavior the wrong way.

Take care.

Beth

And here's his reply:

Hi, Bethany,

Thanks for your candid e-mail. I appreciate and understand your situation, as I suffer from the same. You're welcome to stop by and talk about it if you care to. I'm not sure if your symptoms have emerged in the group work you've participated in thus far, but if they have, we can talk about how to negotiate them.

In any event, I hope you do find that the class activities productive for your working through your anxiety.

Take good care,
VRM

NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me	5
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?
Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,	10
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

--Gerard Manly Hopkins

I miss Jon, and I miss the friends I don't see very much anymore, even old high school friends like Joanna and Rachel. I inexplicably miss the summers I spent at my aunt Jeanne's house when to wake up was to wake up as a favorite niece, a hiking partner, a loved person, a fun older cousin. Of course, that is still true; but sometimes it just hits you, the length of time that you can go with relatively meager amounts of love, or love from only two or three people. If there's one flaw in my life as I see it, it is that I haven't given quite enough love, or perhaps loving attention, to the people that I do love.

It's so intimidating and hard to get into a habit of loving enough.....

And what is enough love? What does that look like? What does it sound like? How does it feel?

Is there anything as still as sleeping horses?

The all seeing, all knowing eye is dog-tired and just wants to see the colts.

I am sifting through ideas for presents for Jon for Christmas and his birthday. This is fun.

Really. Fuck chemistry. I hate wasting my time on this stuff.

Latin phrase of the day:


Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem - In the good old days, children like you were left to perish on windswept crags.

This thought has occurred to me several times before but it's never seemed that important. But I think that it's worth remembering or putting down "on paper".

To write and to read is to preserve. When I was a little, little kid my parents read to me before bed. Some books I remember reading with them are parts of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Red Pony by John Steinbeck, White Fang and The Call of the Wild by Jack London, Ferdinand the Bull and some of the Goosebumps books, which terrified me, by the way. We probably read a lot more than that, but those are all the titles I can remember right now. There were a lot of books about horses and cats in there, too.

I began to associate the idea of home with reading. My mom took me out to the closest Barnes and Noble or the public library, where we would both spend time browsing books. Afterward I could usually get her to take me to the cafe and get a chocolate mocha or some other good treat. Even though my parents generally didn't indulge me in really expensive toys and things (for a long time I begged them to buy me a horse.... no dice there) they would always buy me books. Books definitely became a refuge for me and I kept up the habit of reading as I got older. I especially liked really whimsical or silly or fantastical stories about strange characters and parallel lives. I also loved books about living in the wilderness by writers like Gary Paulsen. Those especially resonated with me, for whatever reason.

So at this point one way I can explain my affinity for the written word is that, no matter what text I'm reading, I can take comfort in the unconscious awareness that I have done this very personal and intimate and imaginative thing over and over and over since I was a child. Words preserve memories, and not in a boring way either. They are memories, memory is language. Language is an ancient, publicly shared and modified cache or deposit of collective memories. The words themselves are powerful. Writing is a way to hold life down for a second before it gets all blurred and indeterminate and ambiguous, before it gets junked by people who don't care about whether or not a record is kept of what happened when they were here.

The "Chicken-Fucking" Newscaster (and FYI there's no actual bestiality or animal abuse involved. Watch for the expression on the female newscaster's face... ):

http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/tv/ernie-anastos-apologizes-for-on-air-chicken-remark-1.1458191

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdnXYWSa56w

Writers and a musician that I'm excited about --

Peaches
Michelle Tea
Tao Lin

Sea Lion Woman

See Line Woman


That is good music. Both versions. I don't think that it was a Nina Simone original, but I know for sure that Feist is covering it.

Love them both, Nina and Feist.