“The larger world never gives girls that message that their bodies are valuable simply because they are inside them.” ~Naomi Wolf

read this and was genuinely ashamed and saddened realizing i have never thought of  this before, at least not clearly enough to understand WHY everything i am thinking about body-image (a term that for some reason seems like absolute bullshit to me, probably because it seems so wrong to me to have any image of a body as anything besides what it is, a body) seems to be somehow completely and insidiously missing the mark.

thankfulness

just realized my scheduled thanksgiving-thankfulness-appreciation-post never got posted. however, right now i am sick and feeling thoroughly miserable, so the thing in the world i am most thankful right now for is a little sister who was kind enough to make me a bottle of warm water with fresh ginger soaking in it, and i can’t really think about anything else. it is my new favorite cure for a sore throat. thank you, mercy. i love you <3

the last song that i write/while still in love with you

“Before I wrote books I used to work as a chaplain at a children’s hospital, and when I was there my supervisor always used to tell me, “John, don’t just do something. Stand there.” We all want to do something to mitigate the pain of loss or to turn grief into something positive, to find a silver lining in the cloud, but I believe there is real value in just standing there, being still, being sad.” ~John Green

i’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, especially this evening. this is probably the advice i’ve wanted the least in my entire life. so often it feels wrong to me, more wrong than anything, just standing there and doing nothing. there’s such a strong instinct against doing so. against thinking, against realizing the depth of things that have happened and the consequences of grief. it feels like there are only two options, either to throw yourself into doing something, anything, the most trivial and pointless thing you can focus your attention on completely, or to break completely, to fall apart. every time the ugliness in the world makes an appearance, when you become faced with something it’s impossible to ever have not-seen again, when it becomes impossible to forget, there is always, always the question of how you keep going on, and i wonder sometimes if there is, ultimately, an answer to that question.

stand there. it’s written in ink on my wrist, and i still don’t know how to do it. how do you lose a piece of your heart and stand there and think about it and accept it? if you don’t allow yourself to try to turn grief into something positive, or just something different, whether it be anger, or hate, or numbness, what can you do with it? how can you feel it so acutely and not completely despair of hope? grief has never been anything to me besides full recognition of the brokenness, the fucked-upness of humanity. watching good people lose themselves along the way, turn into different people, watching the ones who stay strong take the punishment. i don’t understand what recovery from that is like, and yet i’m whispering to myself, be still, be still. only feel. only breathe. only stand there and only be.

fossil mollusks/gone speechless

what happened to when poetry was blood,
the nights when i could grow an exoskeleton made of words,
sentences becoming tooth and nail?

and now, the moments when one person can so thoroughly
ruin another. am i an
eternal being, or is there sense to be made of
this sensation that
there will be no end to vanity,
the moments when
our mortality
becomes infinite?

whispers, it will be okay when you don’t
want to breathe anymore,
when that damned truck comes by,
its song batting at your head, ironic cheerfulness
alongside pre-apocalyptic buildings.

you asked how involuntary
it may be to bleed,
when there is no equality in love,
and all that i knew was
only-a-person-not-an-angel,

all ending/all beginning
you love him/he wants her,
ancient shades of darkness/evolution
untouched in my bones.

not the kind of thing i usually blog… but… it’s hank green being right. so yeah.

hunger games trailer

i am so freaking excited about this movie (which is saying something because i don’t think i’ve ever been genuinely excited about a movie except for maybe deathly hallows 1 and 2,) mostly because jennifer lawrence was incredible in winter’s bone and she is almost-perfect for katniss.

mostly though i can’t get over cinna and haymitch and effie. first of all, they just plain got cinna all wrong, but i’m also a little biased because the guy who works at the payless a few miles from my house looks exactly like i always envisioned him and i have had this vague hope that someone will see him and somehow manage to get him in the movie (because of course everyone goes to cheap shoe stores to find the ideal actor.) and haymitch is… like… cute and rugged and young? i’m sorry, WHAT? (and am i the only one who thought effie was supposed to be a bit of a dumpy blithering idiot?) i also hate peeta. a lot. at least gale is okayish.

so i have very mixed feelings, but really the way the characters look isn’t a big deal (okay, yes it is) compared to if they actually get the plot right. they just better knock my socks off.

(and that’s gonna take a lot. my socks have shrunk enough recently that getting them off is quite an ordeal.)

somedays aren’t yours at all

i was sitting at my typewriter this evening, because sometimes i have nothing to write but i want desperately to type and the computer just ain’t cutting it. so, as is my usual method, i just began to type.
(i am never able to really explain my writing process well to other people. i say, i just write, and they say, oh, you mean whatever comes to mind? no, that’s not what i mean. i mean i sit down. and i start typing and i don’t think about what i’m typing, it just comes and i just write, and then i just stop, and read over what i’ve written, and usually i have no idea where it came from but it tends to be my more truthful stuff. there is no thinking involved, at least not in the sense that i generally think. i feel like this is the exact opposite of talent, since it is largely plotless nonsense, but i love doing it anyway.)
so tonight, i noticed i was typing up things i wanted to do someday. they were all utterly trivial and not life changing in the slightest, but there you go.

~~~

someday i will have a room or shed or tree house that is devoted entirely to splatter painting. i feel like this is one of those few things that are totally, wholly good & pure.

someday i will spend an entire day thinking about the world. nothing in particular. just things. clothespins & space & being & turtles & existence & whatever else, just because i feel like i under-appreciate things. maybe i will make national universe day a thing. a day centered around just thought about how the world is great, even though i tend to believe it isn’t (I AM WRONG.)

someday i will freeze an entire jar of marshmallow fluff, batter it, and deep fry it. i will not eat it because i will also be vegetarian, but i will give it to some person who will think is it effing brilliant, just like i do.

someday i will have a plant. i will not kill it. maybe i will read to it, like in that book a wind in the door, where calvin says he had his very own corner in his library where he read books to a plant. i don’t know if my desire to do this is so much a nurturing love of greenery or just the deeply rooted adoration i have had for calvin o’keefe since i was eight years old.

someday i will master the art of reading aloud well. to me this sounds even more difficult than learning how to sing, which is something i’m not even going to bother to put on this list.

someday i will remember to celebrate towel day.

someday i will learn how to make excellent cheesecake.

~~~

what are you going to do, someday?

(also- i found this page on wikipedia and for some reason it struck me as MASSIVELY funny that there is this entire gigantic universe, and in it there’s a planet called earth, with a country called america, with a city called chandler, with a house with a me in it, and at this moment i get to experience this bizarre phenomenon called life, and what am i doing with it? i’m sitting at a computer reading an extensive article on towels and their role in popular culture.)

“if you often smile, but often don’t smile”

it seems almost wrong to me, that it’s already mid-november. it seemed like summer lasted forever, but all of a sudden everything’s subtly, nearly imperceptibly shifted, started to drift into something new so gently that it took me weeks to notice it. slow changes; first my skin doesn’t burn into spectacular shades of red each time i step outside, & then once in a while a cool breeze finds its way into my back yard. i walk outside & the water left on the grass (brighter green then before- why does grey illuminate the way it does?) is cold.

you know the way air almost has a taste, a certain edge to it? i wait all summer for the day i go down to the mailbox & feel that edge disappear. sometimes it’s still so hot the pavement almost radiates with heat, but you can tell in the air around you that things are different, waking up almost from the stupor that becomes unavoidable after months of the heavy sun weighing everything down.

now this. the cleanness of this weather is something i could breathe in forever. this song in my head all day long; melancholy, yes, but beautiful too, although aren’t most things?

this is the part of the year when i notice how things change; i doubt it has much to do with leaf metaphors, since we don’t really have trees here, at least not ones that change color. i just remember things better. my head is clearer; i start to miss things. my ears start itching to hear my dad read lord of the rings out loud, my sister and i wrapped in quilts on the couch of his office, windows wide open. this is where we should be listening to nickel creek, when i want to open my mom’s cedar chest and pull out my old clothes, from when autumns were as ideal as i wish they were now. i dig up old pictures, videos of my sister & me, four and two years old, in piles of leaves at my grandmother’s farm, my grandfather raking them into a pile.

i don’t know where all of those people have gone, what changed in between there and here. sometimes i try to figure it all out, & things are bad and days feel too stretched and lugubrious, & there are long periods of not-understanding that only depress and make things into a different shade of grey that does not illuminate. the hard thing is in learning to try & eliminate those days, to read the books yourself and make mental piles of the good things to try and remember every morning. does it always work, no. will a name change, a mug of tea, new people, gentler weather ultimately change it all? i don’t think it will, but they’re the links in between the things that will, & for now that’s enough.

dust-spun

thumbs on my
hips, belly, ribs;
i graze my body without
drawing blood
this time, exploring the
flesh-and-bone self of me,
searching for that being
part of me
(my heart flickers,
transparency of skin,
solidity of flesh under my fingers,)
searching for
the part where my soul
lies neatly caged.