nothing changes on New Years Day

This morning I got up, fixed myself a mimosa, and got in the shower. Sitting there on the floor of the shower, naked and soaking wet, drinking cheap champagne, I considered the new year before me as well as the one past. 2011 was a terrible year in a lot of ways that are hard to articulate. It wasn't awful the way 2009 was,with huge traumatic life event stuff, but more situations of perpetual helplessness and stress, a strange feeling that the year itself had it out for me, that I had no sooner a chance to start something than I was thwarted by it.

Still, things weren't so truly terrible. There were a lot of really great things this summer, and despite my career angsts, much of this fall was very sweet to me. I can only think of one thing this year I would legitimately undo, most everything else I'd just do harder. Even now, I feel strangely and suddenly in control of my destiny, even if that is just sort of accepting and embracing utter uncertainty.

Other deep stuff I thought about on the floor of the shower?

I should wear garters like all the time.
Pearls + Mjoilnir = fashion? Probably.
What sort of resolutions should I make for my dragon?

I must return to my spaghetti but

Today I drove out toward Mt. Doom with an unmitigated manic wildness that had nothing to do with the fact that now, several hours before the contest closes, I have no poems to submit to Meridian's stupid poetry editor's prize. Sometimes I feel like UVA in all of its incarnations exists only to offer me various glimpses of things I might like, only then snatch them away after deeming me worthy of consideration, but ultimately too mediocre. They didn't care for my shit too much when they nominated me last year and had D.A. Powell on hand to scrutinize and dismiss my poems, so I doubt my chances are much better now. But you know, I had the occasion to read one of Mr. Powell's poems in the October edition of Poetry and I didn't care for it. Actually, I didn't care for it very much at all. So there you are.

At any rate, tearing around the backwoods, I found a little park at Augusta Springs. I wanted to go for real hiking, but the hunter's access trails were all occupied by...you know, hunters. Anyway, it's a wetlands trail over what used to be an old turn of the century hotel built on these great springs. I don't know what kind of eccentric millionaire builds a resort out past Buffalo Gap, but its crumbling remains in the woods were sort of cool to pick over. That, and the bluebirds were apparently migrating through there. I saw about fifteen of them.

Christmas Stats

By the Numbers
Cups of Coffee: 17
Times I had to Explain Why I was Quitting my Job: 6
Pairs of Socks Received: 7
Pairs of Socks Required: still not enough
Christmas Lights on my Side of the Car on the Drive Home: 54
Chairs Now: 7
Fox Whiskers in My Pocket: a pinch
Times the Dogs Visited the E.R.: 2
Bits of Fanfic Written: 1
Bits of Poems Written: 0
Potential Volvo Expenses: $600 +
Student Loan First Payments: $382
Current Checking Account Amount: $130.82
Feathered Accessories Received: 3
Pelts: 3
Mother-in-laws: 1

Depressing Quotes:

Jess: ...And am I a good robot or a bad robot?
Child Cousin 1: A bad robot!
Child Cousin 2: You're evil on the inside.
Child Cousin 1: But funny and cool on the outside.

Telling Pictures:



It was for her.


Christmas morning goonface!




Me with that deer.


Now, I feel strangely. Sad, a bit weird, wistful. It's hard to be around a million people who are super genetically similar to me, with all my flaws, loudness, meanness, good things, and general affinity and then suddenly leave and go back to the icehaus. Now I'm back to pacing and sweeping and cooking. But mostly pacing.

and to all a good night

at a word: gluey

I am writing this from the floor of my kitchen, where I am supervising my 10pm batch of muffins. This disturbing portrait characterizes how today I was as a machine of productivity. I put on some hooker lipstick and stomped everything on my list to death. Tomorrow: more--harder--faster!



Filled up that birdfeeder with stupid fancy seed.


I toured the winter devastation of my garden. It was sad to see things I'd cared a lot about and tended dutifully in the warmer months either dead or dying, in the case of these beloved rare black pansies, just knocked over by that bitchy cat that sometimes comes up and tries to start drama with B-money through the window.



Some things were still good. Yarrow; Knightswounds. Very perennial. Very handsome.




Some things were better than good. This little parsley sprouted off an herb basket I had hanging up in my townhouse my last year of college. I don't know how it happened, considering parsley isn't one of those herbs to come back in this climate, and it'd been a dead basket of dirt for about three years. Hey, lesser miracles.


All this was done with severe battlewounds from trying to help Josh change his flat Saturday... hungover, and in a skirt. It doesn't look like much, but I got it caught in the jack and split that mofo open. Also aforementioned hooker lipstick. Who is a badass? Who is a badass? (It'sme.)

pretty on fire, pretty high-wired

Whenever I go into a new situation, new school, new job, I have this person that I pretend to be for a while. I have the dark need to impress people my own age and I do it via a very specific persona that is nearly as transparent as it is deeply pathetic. Anyway, even so, she is still very cool to me and I like her a lot.

I really wanted this blog to be for her: a funny ironic thing that I could link to on my public facebook and post picture upon picture of my fashionable interests. But I'm really such an instinctively stupid idiot goon. A light example to further illustrate the point: recently, one of my cooler ex-coworkers came in to work. I tried and failed to make clever, witty conversation with her, and she in turn told me about a dream she'd had about me. In the dream, I had been featured drinking a huge pitcher of red wine and desperately claiming it was dragon blood. My other coworkers listening in laughed and laughed, commending her on her deeply accurate dream portrait. This is, somehow, the story of my life.

So this is the part where I abandon all semblance of trying to make this "a thing" and default to chattering about my dumb feelings.

This is stupid, but this evening I had the occasion to get super angry. It wasn't one thing, or even something big, and nothing really happened. But since I locked myself away in my room, I had the chance to kind of think about it without employing my usual shut-it-down methods of distraction-forgetting. And it occurred to me that I really have no ability to handle any sustained degree of legitimate anger like an adult.

A friend recently asked me what my angry music was, and I surprised myself (and surely disappointed him, a great connoisseur of metal) by not really having any. I thought about all the times I have been the most angry in my life and how I felt and how I dealt with it. I suppose I saw some themes: feeling helpless or frustrated or trapped. I get mad sideways. I very rarely lash out. I'd like to say I'm just not an angry enough person to have rage-out music, but I think the real deal is I don't really allow myself to express or even really feel anger.

Anyway so tonight I got mad about nothing, and then enjoyed it for about 5 minutes. Oh how I lurched and stormed around my cluttered room like a Gothic hero! (That's a nice thing about our house, in spite of the possums in the shower curtains and no heat, it is really a great place to lurk about--lots of vantage points for moody staring. Sometimes I like to get up from what I'm doing, pace around the dining room and then glower out the cold window into the grim backyard, contemplating gloomily.)I used the energy to fuel a frenzy of destructive organization and cleaning in which I hurled old worn out shoes and bras at my poor trashcan like a nutjob. Then I started to cool off. I felt a little sick, poisoned. I drank a lot of shitty bubble water. I put on my blue dragon pants. Eventually, I crawled into bed, the most defeated girl.

I don't really know where I'm going with all this. I guess like I said: it is pretty stupid.

I was advised to work on my writing today, so I made one line of one dumb poem that doesn't exist yet. I suppose it is something of an angry line. It goes like this:

I strip the tired rosemary

and is about when I mangled my rosemary plant for use in dinner tonight. Oh, yes, quite bad, even for just being a line. But, but, hey. It's been like 6 months. I looked up a weird brainstorming session I did this summer about "my second book" and it was way worse. Oh lolololol summer Jess.

In case anyone wanted to read any real poetry, here is a link to some. Please don't read into the fact that it's about a dead girl named Jess. A man stopped me and read it to me randomly at AWP last year, (I told him after he read it that my name was actually Jess, and he looked at me like I was lying, but fuck, whatever, he's the dupe reading poetry to strangers, don't judge me motherfuker.) and I have liked it ever since, as well as the book it is from too, Sharks in the Rivers. We're all in a little trouble, aren't we?

I don't got this

Oh guys. Tonight was so, so bitterly stupid.

So instead of talking about it, here are some of my feelings about Indiana Jones.

Aw yeah.

I'm watching the original trilogy for the first time this week, which seems impossible given my related interests of archeology and Harrison Ford-playing-roguish-sexist-heroes. A theme of the past few months has been amending some flaws in my early education. First I corrected the gaps in my knowledge of basic science. Now: Indiana Jones. (Next maybe I'll finally see Sleeping Beauty or have math!) I really like it, obviously, but also it makes me sad for how much more and purely I would have loved it back when I was 13. I wonder how different my development and inclinations and interests and fetishes would be if I had seen those movies, instead of Star Wars, on the brink of puberty and spent the resulting decade obsessively re-watching them. Still, as an adult, they've given me a lot to think about.

• I forgot how Harrison Ford is the finest man ever to exist.
  
  
• I want to touch his face; I bet it would hurt, like touching a scalding, rugged diamond of handsomeness.
  
  
• Look at those goddamn glasses.
  
  
• In Temple of Doom, he drags an escaping girl to him with his whip for sexy makeouts. Whaatt?
  
  
• In beloved Star Wars EU Clusterfuck The Courtship of Princess Leia, I'm pretty sure they rip off that "where does it hurt for kisses?" scene from Raiders tic for tac. And by tic I mean that book is about Han Solo kidnapping Princess Leia and forcing her into an arranged marriage. Also Dathomirian witches.
  
  
• This only confirms and stabilizes my pre-existing delusions about the sexiness of archeology.
  

those who live and die for astronomy

Well, we faced down the eclipse. Astrologically, (bunk-wise) I haven't drawn a conclusion. I feel as Louise Gluck wrote in her Triumph of Achilles:

but the lesson that was needed
was another lesson.

That is, I guess, I feel incoherent and vaguely didactic.

To Do:

1. Figure out Student Loan Bullshit
2. Ongoing Search for Gainful employment
3. Repair House Post-Weekend
4. Laundry Mrrrgh
5. Submit dumb poem to dumb poem contest.
6. All the Christmas shopping. I need to go to C-ville where any shopping lives.

That, coupled with my insane work schedule, should make for an interesting week.

just another new world night here on the ex-frontier

Here is a picture of my little house. I have been decorating and cleaning for two days straight to get it ready for these wretched holidays, and I am pretty pleased with the everything. Just look at all that fine blue light.



Here is a picture of my cool brother whom I miss. He graduated this year and lives as a Fellow in an arboretum in PA. Right now he is working on establishing a moss garden there.

Here is a picture of two galaxies sucking face. Space is something I'm super into right now and I think it is moreimportant than most other things. Today, for instance, I learned that all the comets that are ever going to pass by the Earth have already been made--soon, there won't be any more left to come. I love this about it. All that limitless eternal wonder bullshit just feels a bit like rubbing it in my mortal face. I like the idea of dying stars and collapsing galaxies. Somehow, the explosive finiteness of the cosmos makes me feel better about the recurring theme of finite in my own very mundane life. We've very small and all trending toward destruction, but that's the natural state of things. There's a sort of beauty to it.



Here is a picture of the deer my parents have illegally raised. She has gotten to be quite pretty.


Here is a picture of me with my friend Chris and some birthday cake. I love my people.

In Which: Nothing Matters Sluts

I'm doing this really 100 dollar idea where I'm planning to quit my job in two weeks even though I have no other job lined up and my shiny new graduate degree from a Good School has proved about as useful and applicable in today's tough economic climate as an N.E.W.T in Herbology.

There are a lot of reasons why I chose to do this and most of them are "stupid." Admittedly my career as a coffeeslave was not particularly edifying, and my barely-over-minimum-wage paycheck hardly stuffed anything at all into the gibbering maw of my post-graduate poverty. But honestly, as stressful and degrading as my job was on occasion, I really liked a lot of things about it. Here's another thing: I am--was---good at it. Today, for example, I made a mocha entirely with my left hand while I steamed milk for a latte with my right. That doesn't sound as impressive in type as it was in real life, but you should have heard the compliments my coworker and bro Frankie heaped on me.

(....No, I'm serious, that's super hard! It's a big deal that I know how to do it! Can you pour steamed milk into latte art one-handed at all, let alone when you're balancing a pitcher of 140 degree milk into a wand blasting hot steam with the other?)

At any rate, my full-immersion approach to the job search is necessary because of my crippling mental problems. I don't perform well unless I'm backed into a corner like a feral, desperate animal. I'm a last minute kind of goon. If I didn't force myself into a situation where I had to find something else, I would work at that coffeeshop forever, because it's easy, and part of me likes it, and eventually you don't feel cold anymore, you just fall asleep.


Something I realized tonight as I began to sob-laugh embarrassingly in front of my husband was that I've had a job since I was 17. Other than a period of weeks for a winterbreak, I've never been unemployed in my adult life. For long periods in college, I even worked two jobs and went to school full time (and still had time to fit Star Wars fanfiction into my life!) I love chugging on, making it work. I get crazy and depressed when I'm just sitting around. But something's wrong now. I need to push forward into something else; I've hit some kind of minimum-wage settling threshold.

So excelsior! I guess. Nothing bad can happen.


In this picture I am posed with Elfvis, a weird guy, and Renn, my wonderful coworker . Look at how my eyes are closed: deliriously.

First posts are for the birds

5:49- I return home and begin an ambitious evening. Bleach kitchen floor, dishes, extensive homemade chicken noodle soup cooking process, roughly chopping onions and carrots to boil with the carcass, feeling like a pro.

6:08- 1 glass of wine.

6:15- “I should clean the whole house tonight.”

6:19-Sweeping; crazy eyes.

6:22- Chopping raw chicken to supplement chicken soup-set to the side to marinate.

6:35- “I should update those wonderful pictures from today to the facebook.”

6:36- “I look stupid; I should stop dyeing my hair. I should dye it back to my natural color. No, I should dye it black. I should get a haircut. I should pixie my hair and then dye it pink.”

6:40-Lean-slouch in the doorway of the pantry, spacing out.

6:45- “God, I am really starting to miss my dragon. Tonight’s the night I should get back into dragons.”

7:04- Standing in front of the open refrigerator door shamelessly eating the undercooked center out of a day-old cranberry orange scone, crumbs falling from my open mouth.

7:05-“No, no! I should start! A blog! Again!”

I have a terrible secret.

The terrible secret is that I’m the kind of person who will willingly spend nearly ten dollars on fancy birdseed. The bad part about that is everything. It’s all one big slippery slope. Having birds is a problem—I can’t handle many seemingly simple tasks related to life and happiness. What makes me think I'm able to feed something as small and complicated as wild birds in any steady, regular and dependable way? What if come mid-winter I die, or quit my day job and can no longer afford the trail-mixy nut-heavy admittedly-delicious-looking standard my cardinals have come to expect? Ten dollars is a lot. Ten dollars is more than I'm willing to spend on wine. What are those little feathered flying fake-out reptiles coming to represent for me? (Dragons?) Will they be okay? Will I be okay? I don't know. I don't know, guys.