Yessir, I can actually right this very second post a link to my poetry, because I've been published at an online journal that I'm pretty sure has actualfax promise (at least I'd better damn well HOPE it does):


GO HERE UNTIL NEXT TUESDAY

THEN AFTER THAT GO HERE INSTEAD



That's all. Hooray verse!

Why Hello There

Hi, smallish group of internet denizens. Apparently when Amanda gives me orders, you know, TWICE in the same comment, I'll go ahead and follow them. So here's an entry.

Shoot, I guess a lot has been going on since I was last here. Since giant paragraphs are scary (nevermind that that's NEVER stopped me in the past, hooooeee), let's make an enormous list of Crap What Kim's Been Up To:

1. Went to Austin, Texas, wherein a ton of incredible food was consumed, along with as much or more alcohol, bats were seen, a story was told regarding seeing Tupac alive in Cuba in 2003, and it still wasn't nearly as hot as that one day up in Bulacan last summer.

2. Riding the rejection wave. At least more of them are personal now. I'm moving up in the world.

3. Had an incredible Adam's-bday-also-Fourth-of-July weekend wherein silly hats abounded, and during which apparently I decided very late at night that sprawling out in the middle of the street on the way home would be a good idea, or at least something that would work, upon which decision almost-but-clearly-not-quite-as-intoxicated-Daniel had to stand over me and tell me "Kim, this is not going to work. Mostly because there is a car coming."

4. Had an equally incredible, but maybe for different reasons, realization that in fact my summer has consisted of about forty bajillion incredible evenings with incredible people (omg Anna/Adam/Geffrey/Daniel/Patrick/Kimmel/Lynne and many more) that I love incredibly dearly. In all states of mind.

5. (Related to both 3 and 4) Doubled the number of pictures of my sorry mug up on Facebook (made significantly less sorry by the singularly dedicated nishmael, whose camera is usually kind of forgiving of my ridiculousness).

6. Begun poking around for, and subsequently panicking about, materials for my next manuscript which, despite my best intentions, will probably have something to do with Bethlehem Steel.

7. Still trying to break the love poem into a million pieces. I'm not that good.

8. Played Mario Kart for the first time in a longish time. Also cooperative Pac Man. Also am up to finally watching the entirety of the last two episodes of Deadwood (what, four years later? I'm slow.) Also saw Harry Potter at midnight. Also Citizen Kane and Sin City for the first time. No Country for Old Men for the second time.
8.5 DISNEY SINGALONG PARTIES. Aladdin, followed by Lion King. Yes.

9. Played a whole lot of ultimate frisbee, to the detriment of my hips and my left ankle. Probably not to the detriment of my cardiovascular system, though.

10. Strolled ArtsFest for the fifth time or so. This time, however, I actually saw music. Said music was fantastic, especially THESE PEOPLE. I have one of the most severe fan-crushes on Ty that I have had in a while. I'm sure she probably gets that a lot, even from completely straight people.

11. Potentially published another bullshitty piece about creative writing pedagogy - this time with a coauthor who makes a lot more sense than I do, so it's REALLY obvious. Am in the process of redoing two syllabi from the ground up in order to practice what I preach.

12. Have become intimately reacquainted with the effects of tequila.

13. DAAAAAANCED!

14. Celebrated pigs' 2nd birthday. They still look like potatoes. They are now officially adult potatoes. D'awww.

15. Traded "have-you-seen-this-internet-thing"...uh...things...with Daniel for hours and hours. Reference to the subject of this post goes here, about which Daniel made the comment "I realize that he is supposed to be, like, emerging from the earth or something, but really he just kind of looks like a crazy zombie that's just toppled over a cross-shaped headstone. ARRRRGHHHHH."

16. Read Deleuze and Guattari's What Is Philosophy? and might have actually understood it BETTER than Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer, which I totally thought would be easier. Starting Barthes' The Pleasure of the Text soonish. Also in the process of tackling some fiction, because I don't usually do that, and because I'm insane, the work of fiction I'm tackling is Infinite Jest. I'm a few hundred pages in, I'm actually reading the footnotes, and I'm enjoying it IMMENSELY.

17. Living entirely, deliriously, ecstatically, and probably stupidly, in the present.


What have YOU all been doing?

...because Fall Out Boy comes up with better titles that I can, apparently.

I couldn't bring myself to call

I'm trying to do too many things at once here. I keep typing sentences into this box and erasing them, and then I keep working my way through the reading that I'm going to have my class tackle tomorrow, and then I get dismayed because not only am I not getting a journal entry done, I am realizing that my class had trouble handling the philosophical implications of Sim City, and that this essay deals in some depth with dialectical materialism. We're all totally fucked.

Not that class has been bad. It hasn't. But as usual, you run up against a handful of minds so tightly closed that it makes your head spin just a little, and so you go through this hopeless phase, because you are an idealistic young instructor, where you bemoan the state of the whole planet because your students are unwilling to try and wrap their brains around things. That was a convoluted sentence. Shit, so was the second sentence of this entry. Do as I say, not as I do. Apparently.

Actually, now that I think about it, I should actually be doing blogs along with my students right now. That was probably a bad move on my part, the whole "hey I'll keep up with YOU GUYS" thing, because I forget that I really have too much other crap to do to also take my own class.

I don't even know what I'm saying anymore. I'm actually pretty glad that I gave up the 365 blog thing; I had this moment of my life where I was convinced that the internet was going to be my ticket out of oppressed academic-dom, but it's not, and I'm not oppressed, and I think the more time I spend away from the internet, the better. I am such a pendulum.

Except to call it quits

So, yes. Not a whole lot else is going on, except that Daniel is back in town and Geffrey, damn him, is leaving, but I get to trade one best friend for another, and now nishmaelkimble will not have a hetero-life-partner in town and so maybe we'll hang out more. (Yes, Adam? YES. In fact I think I'm going to see you tonight. This is exciting.)

Regular poetry meetings, I think, will resume in their independent summer form at some point next week. Also terribly exciting. Because I am going to need to carry that through the whole year next year, if I can rope people into doing extra-workshop work. I think being outside of workshop is going to be about the best thing, but also harrowing, in that I am going to have to make up and KEEP my own schedule. I am bad at this, because I am, apparently, still in high school when it comes to temporal regulation. I need someone else to do it for me in neat little blocks. Alas.

Back to friends, however: am looking very much forward now that I am not traveling ANY MORE THANK YOU this summer, to really get back down to the business of hanging out regularly, kind of like the end of the semester when I was just about the happiest person alive because I could feel all these good communities solidifying around me - back at that, thank you very much.

GUESS WHAT

Two things, really.

ONE: I managed to earn a degree. I have a sheet of paper now, that I obtained on Sunday, while wearing a ridiculous wizard robe with a hood, that verifies that I am, in fact, a complete lunatic and have earned that title in the form of a Master's of Fine Arts. I am a MASTER. OF ART. Art art art *seal clap*

TWO: The department, unless one of my colleagues turns out to be a convicted felon, or some other horrible thing happens (I'm not ruling it out; I mean, the first time I thought I was good to go the dept head called me and was all "NEVERMIND!"), gave me back my 2-2 job. That schedule I posted is now, more or less, back on track.

HEY THAT'S PRETTY COOL, ME.

So I'm pretty deliriously happy, for these things and for other reasons. I have a whopper of a headache right now, though (note to self: SELF, bring water to class or you will get dehydrated from running your mouth), so I'll cut myself short (the audience: "yaaaayyyyy").

Here's to the next thing.

Good LORD, slow day. Thursday's drag like...like something that drags. A drag show? No, the opposite of that. Anyway.

The Internet Is Also Boring

I can always tell when I should probably be doing something else when I have thoroughly exhausted all my usual internet options. We all have this, right? The 4 or so sites that you immediately open up when you open FF or whatever other program buoys you along the sea of the tubes, and while I *could* actually read the news, or caption animal pictures, I don't really want to, and so then I just get IMPOSSIBLY BORED with the entire world wide web.

I ALSO *could* be doing a couple of, like, real things, like finishing up my revision portfolio for shop, but really that's like 99.9% done. So!

Let Me Fill You In

Or rather, let me dump a whole bunch of shit here that's really only for my purposes. Scroll on by, now.

So it looks like I'm loved around here and I get what I want because of it - the department gave me a reduced teaching load (with less money, but the hysterical thing is that when you do the math, they're actually paying me 25% MORE given the amount of work they're asking from me. Working the system? I CAN HAS.) and on top of it, I will get to teach more poetry and possibly a course of my own making. This is all terribly exciting.

I got honorably mentioned for RHINO's Editor's Prize, which is cool, comes with dinner money, and means that HEY that publication is finally coming out. BUY IT. We need all the help we can get.

Next year is lookin' a little like the following:

SUMMER
Teach comp
Complete Teaching w/ Technology certification
Redo Ashbery article
Figure out this whole PhD application business (DISSERTATION IDEAS I NEED THEM)
Start work on Developing Ecological Consciousness, 2nd ed (? I hope)
Go canoeing!
Travel: New York, Lehigh Valley, Colorado (in that order, I think)
Submit poems
Submit manuscript
Compile Bethlehem Steel chapbook (yikes, that's like 15 more poems)
Begin drafting ideas for next book


FALL
Teach comp and poetry
Apply for PhD programs (WTF)
Finish Ashbery article, send off
Begin redoing one of three articles: Williams, wikis, or David Mitchell
Send off Bethlehem Steel chapbook
Begin work on second manuscript
Continue work on DEC

SPRING
Teach comp and POSSIBLY food ecology course
Finish whichever article I've tackled, send off
Send off poems
Continue work on second manuscript
Finish work on DEC


Man. I have my work cut out for me, I guess I do. That's probably a good thing. Beats having shit-all to do but wait tables. After spring? Oh, I have my ideas if the PhD thing doesn't work out. But if it does, I suppose, RINSE. REPEAT. x4. Ho-lee-crap.

I'm so tired I am going to make tea and then watch Deadwood until I pass out

So guess what.

I just handed in my thesis.

I've given my reading, I've gotten my signatures, I've handed it in. Oh, you know, and I wrote the poems, too. And my grad regalia is hanging from my closet door.


...DO NOT WANT.


I mean, I do. This is a momentous thing. But I don't think that the word "bittersweet" has ever been more appropriate in any context in my life, ever. People keep congratulating me, and I just keep being...sad. But not quite sad because really, I am happy! I am also large and contain multitudes. Et cetera.

I have to go RIGHT THIS SECOND because upon arriving home, I have to go to the grocery store (again, argh) and pick up some kind of dessert-thing for a going-away party tonight for one of our fiction writers. He's going to Canada. Oh, Canada.

Anyway more later. That mortarboard, man. I hate it.

Atchoo. And not because I have allergies, no, I appear to have contracted a literal case of spring fever.

Oh well. There are certainly worse things.

Oh, Knots

Tie me up in them, because it's the end of the term and oh, oh, oh.

Tomorrow I'm headed off to the printer's to get my thesis plunked out (I need something like 6 copies for various people! That is a lot of trees! For shame). Then, a million other things, but THEN, summer! Which for all practical and meteorological intents and purposes, appears to already be here. My shoulders are mad sunburned from spending the day outside yesterday. Wouldn't trade THAT for the world, however. For many reasons.

Hmmm. What else. Nothing, I suppose. In all these ways that I typically write about, my life is regular. This is patently untrue, but you know, there are some things.

Hey I'm still happy! If sniffly. And confused. But happy. In my skin.

...has SLAYED me. But in a good way. Can you be slain in a good way? Oh, killing me softly.

Chumble Spuzz

So, now that my thesis is ready for the printer and will go off on Monday, I'm a little concerned. Mostly because I have all this other crap that's been brewing all semester that I've just put off, due to, you know, thesis. But now no thesis! So I no longer have this singular, huge, monstrous THING to pour all my energy into.

This is momentous and sad. Mostly sad! I think?

I am clearly unsure of how I feel about all this. What I am PATENTLY sure of is that I feel GREAT about this frigging weather. I bought a frisbee golf disc today - my first one - and Daniel and I went out and just processed some vitamin D for an hour or so. This was in lieu of him cleaning, and me figuring out what the hell all these projects were that I have to get done in the next week or so. Because honestly, my poetry has been so all-consuming as of late that I'm not even sure WHAT all I have to do. I just know it's a lot.

There are worse places to be.

The downside to all this reading/finishing/celebrating/friendship-having is that for some reason I've managed to find myself getting into, like, 6 hour conversations with friends of mine until bizarre hours in the morning, and as a result, I have this throat thing going on where it's all swollen and sore, even though I'm not sick. This does not make me happy. But it will probably make other people happy, as I will now have to shut up for the next few days in order to get over it.

What Else

Indian food tonight with the editor of The Indiana Review. This probably won't go as well as the LAST time I met an editor of a major publication, because last time, I landed in it. (This is actually recent. I'm going to be in the next issue of West Branch! So much joy!) This time, it'll probably just be some good food and wine. As with the rest of my life, there are way worse things.

It's blue and white weekend. This just means "hey let's put a fall football weekend SMACK AT THE END OF THE SPRING SEMESTER." One of my neighbors has a bull horn. I'll leave it at that. *headdesk*

Tomorrow it's going to be even warmer and sunnier than it was today. I am not sure how in the world I am going to accomplish anything. I probably won't. That's probably all right.

Oh My Goodness.

I'm full to bursting with gratitude right now.

I've also maybe had a glass or two of wine, so bear with me. Apologies in advance.

So, as I'm sure I've blubbered on about already, my thesis reading was this afternoon. This event is, for all intents and purposes, graduation for PSU's MFA candidates - they give us full introductions and 30-45 minutes to read. It is, in other words, a big deal.

And today, Lesley and I packed the house (small house, granted, but still) with friends and colleagues who actually wanted to hear us read from our first books. I cannot tell you how incredibly wonderful it was to read in front of a group of my dearest friends and most respected teachers - and although I'm not quite sure how good a job I did (there is always a lot of stammering during these sort of things; personally my hands were shaking so badly that I'm surprised I didn't spill water all over myself every time I went to take a drink), the simple fact of being surrounded by so many loved ones and so much love makes the actuality of the *poems* that I read kind of fade into the background.

(Don't make me think about the poems, btw. I have to cut over 20 pages tomorrow, which is fine, but right now I want to BELIEVE that I'm kind of done. Blehhhh)

So I feel like just about the most thankful person on earth right now. I'm truly blessed, and dude, it kicks ass. I've now got a backlog of the kindest, most wonderful notes/emails/various-social-networking-messages to read and respond to. I can't ask for anything better than this.

So Okay. Home Stretch, Mental State, Et Cetera

Oh, I'm totally crazy. So what else is new.

My new obsession - blatantly suggestive songs! I think that that kind of raw, slightly-taboo energy is currently the pushing me through the days way better than I could do on my own. Is it an energy that leaves me VERY frustrated most of the time? MAYBE. But hey! It's energy. I'll take what I can get.

(This has led me to do some interesting, next-poetry-project drafting, btw. Now *there's* a bad idea.)

Next Friday the semester ends, and then I get to draft a short essay for a book on pedagogy, graduate, go to my sister's graduation, come back and edit/edit/submit/edit/submit/figure out the rest of my life. That latter one is only partially true; I need to figure out my shit for PhD applications, which may actually dictate the rest of my life. Good times.

Meantime, however, I'm going to float around on this little cloud that excellent people have placed beneath me, and continue to listen to bad-idea music. Onward!

Hm. I appear to be at one of those points in my life where I feel like I need a forum in which to post a whole series of devastating song lyrics.

I'll refrain. I just wanted to see you jump back from your chair.

This is Genius

I was skeptical of the Genius feature on iTunes - by all accounts, "playlists-based-on-this-one-song" programs have historically been pretty awful - but so far it's produced decent playlists for me. The only reason I'm doing this right now is so that I don't end up listening to the same song all day for want of a particular key and time signature. Cavashawn's 4-song EP can only get me so far, really.

The mildly alarming side-effect of the program, however, is that since it riffles through your whole library, it can (and does) come up with stuff that you forgot entirely that you had, and that consequently brings a whole bunch of nostalgia rushing right up behind your eyeballs like the world's most emo tidal wave.

I am unsure whether or not this is a good or bad thing.

SEE?! Like right now it just started playing "Banquet." And now, in my head, I'm doing all sorts of crazy things right before going to graduate school, when it seemed like I probably needed to get a lot of crazy things out of the way (I think I mostly mean stupid here. Stupid things).

Anyway it's kind of terrible and kind of awesome. (The sublime? Hardy har har harrrrr)

I Guess My Life Is Less Messy Now, Or Something

So the department all but guaranteed me a position next year. This is exciting! BUT. (Sweet tapdancing Christ, WHY must there always be a "but?")

They're unsure if they'll be able to give me a reduced teaching load. This is kind of hysterical, as we went from "you're out on your ass" to "we might have to pay you more than you wanted, and you'll have to do way more work for us." Yay, economic pendulum-swinging. I don't honestly think I can handle a full adjunct load; not with the projects that I have lined up for the next calendar year. But they're not sure if they're going to have enough interested people to be able to offer me the "postdoc fellowship" deal, which is less money but more free time, and at this point in my life I value time INFINITELY more than I value money. Okay maybe not infinitely. A girl's gotta eat. But you know what I mean.

Anyway so that's...interesting. But I have teaching!

(Side note: I just had a Twitter-conversation with the author of House of Leaves. He told me to go put on some socks, and reassured me that I'd probably be okay for my reading tomorrow. Most of the time I kind of hate the internet, but this time right now is NOT ONE OF THEM. Fangirl glee!)

So I didn't sign a lease for nothing. There's that.

On Feeling Like You've Just Been Beer-Tapped

Have you ever done that to someone? You walk up to them, because you're a giant jackass, and clink your beer on the top of their beer bottle, which causes it to foam crazily and them to drink quickly, lest they end up with booze on the shoes. It's a good game.

Anyway I kind of feel like my life lately just did that to my brain/body, because life is a giant jackass (even though I love it so), and so now I'm trying desperately not to overflow. With all KINDS of feelings! Foamy feelings. That might be gross.

In a hyperactive, hyperventilating, hyperbodily way, it's great - in the same kind of terrifying, brink-y way that being on too many stimulants is great. Everything is tinged with just a *little* bit of nervousness, but other than that, you feel like you might just be floating a few inches above your chair. I'll gladly take this pop-art state of mind over crushing depression any day. Hopefully the inevitable comedown will be gentle with me.

Happy holidays for you that celebrate. I'm listening to reggae and craving chocolate in your honor.

Boy, that was a stupid post last night. Huuurrrrrr, SORRY.

Anyway. Boy It's Nice Out!

I am stuck in the office, but that's actually okay because my window is thrown open and I'm surrounded by my friends. Literally. Their cubes are all on this side of the office. Glee!

Tonight's the variety show reading, at which I am not reading anything because I am not funny. This is okay though, because other people ARE funny and will be reading such things as Poems Made Entirely From the Book Titles of Penn State Faculty Members. Good times. Beers. Et cetera.

Meantime, I'm trying desperately to finish up a revision of an ode I wrote, which makes me type out the fact that I've written an ode, and the ode is to a letter of the alphabet, and APPARENTLY MY MANUSCRIPT IS ACTUALLY JUST TRANSCRIBED FROM SESAME STREET. Oh well. After ode revision: FROLF! This kind of makes me think of gp, which is kind of sad, but not really.

Guess What?

I'm going to lose two toenails!

Say it with me now: "WHY DID YOU JUST SAY THAT"

Because I wanted you all to share in my violet-hued pain. If I hadn't inherited my damn father's feet (second toes longer than first ftl), I think they'd still be intact. Oh well. I have yet another story for the No Really Kim Is SO HARDCORE Files.

(That will make three toenails total that go into that file. The toenail I lost after opening a door onto my foot went into the Kim Is A Total Moron file.)

The End

No really. I'm stopping at 11:45 even if I'm in the middle of a damn sentence.

Today was beautiful. I had mood swings accordingly.

I received an award for a poem, and the undergraduates who also received awards at the ceremony, um, a few of them had poems that were far and away better than mine. I am both happy for them and sad for myself. I'm not envious though. This is improvement!

Bad idea: coming home late at night and then putting on Iron & Wine. Do not recommend unless you want to blubber into your cup of tea.

I got a summer teaching appointment. Moolah. Problem, though - now I have to make up a syllabus, and the book that I was all psyched to use is actually kind of crappy (Norton! Why must you betray me so!). So now I have to figure out - develop a new syllabus, or just use the old summer one I have lying around? I am bored of my 15 syllabus, but I am not sure if I am bored enough of it yet to redo it. I am unsure actually if this is non-boredom or just laziness. Probably both.

If I get to stay here next year in the department, I may well get to teach another poetry workshop. This makes me do this: !!!!!! and also this ARRRRGH because I know for SURE that I'm going to have to redo that syllabus to make the course suck way less. Intro poetry workshop is a hard fucking class to teach well, y'all.

Ooop. Five minutes are up. Off to go freak out about something else for a while (sleeping? Hooody harrrdy harr hooo)

...I think, since I've done some good old fashioned writing anxiety blogging!

Ohhhhh yeah.

Never Do This

So I have not been the most diligent of thesis-workers as of late, which is both problematic and ass-backwards, seeing as how the thing needs to go off to the printer in TEN FARGING DAYS and I have about a million things yet to do with it. It's okay. These things are not perfect even when they earn you a degree.

That said, however, tonight I made the incredibly dim-witted decision to read Poetry magazine after I'd just completed a draft of the final poem in the book.

WHOPPER OF A BAD IDEA, THAT.

I think that I get inspiration from reading books of poetry before/during/after my own writing process because books don't seem like a thing that's within my grasp at this point (yes I know I just finished one. SHHHHH). Reading journals in that same capacity, however, just makes me feel like a giant load of poetic shit, because journal pubs *do* seem accessible to me (I've even got a couple under the ol' verse-belt), but so incredibly remotely that I just slump over in my chair like I've been hit with a "this poetry is WAY BETTER THAN YOURS" tranquilizer dart.

No good!

Now all my poetry seems normative, egocentric, and slightly petty and/or myopic.

Nnnnnrrrrrrggghhhhhhh

Let me elaborate?

The "I"

...is my main problem. All the poems that are in my collection that I really remember (fondly, anyway; not like that stupid accentual-alliterative thing hanging out in there somewhere that I remember but only because it makes me go "ARRRRGH WHY") are the ones where I'm not just nattering on about myself.

Okay, that's a lie - I mean the ones in which I AM nattering on about myself, but I don't let on about it because I use "I" sparingly or not at all. I'll direct the poem towards a "you" or "we," but the minute I start sprinkling "I"s all over the damn place, I'm finding that I'm looking at it and trying to picture it in a journal somewhere and FAILING because it's just so damn "me me me me MY LIFE me me me" - there's no transference, no ability for the poem to move off the page from my personal life to the reader's.

I am not entirely sure how to get over this, considering the fact that exactly 100% of this book is about my parents. Not YOUR parents, my parents. Not theories of language, nor the deadly ramifications of _______ <--insert noun here, nor bizarre stories involving "he"s and "she"s. My parents.

PERHAPS THIS WAS A BAD CHOICE IN SUBJECT.

But I couldn't help it. I could have tried, probably, to write about 1341 other books, and this would have been the one that would have come out anyway. And now I have to deal with that fact.

But it's hard! Waaaah! Sad trombone!

I.e. it's going to be really hard to place these poems and, by consequence, the whole manuscript. I am determined to see this thing through to print, but I can say that blithely right now while not actually, intellectually, grasping the concept that it may not be at all printable.

GUYS. Don't ever let me read lit mags after writing ever again! Christ on toast!

I suspect it is time to write a poem. At like 9:30 we'll give it a go.

Here's a list of shit:

1) Today I looked at no fewer than 7 apartments.
2) Of course, I picked the most expensive one. But I have a place to live next year! Even if I cannot afford it and have to beg my mom for money. Hardy har har.
3) I have also developed a whopper of a sore throat, in what might be the onset of the first real cold I've had in over a year.
4) RIGHT IN TIME for my hiking trip. Fughwghads.
5) My house is kind of a mess.
6) But I don't have time to clean it right now because I have to write a poem.
7) After this weekend, I will have two weeks to finish my thesis.
8)....
8)....
8)....

WAAAAAT

I also just now developed some fun new anxiety over my existence next year, if this all works out. How the hell am I going to stay friends with people? I mean, half the interaction I have with my colleagues is, you know, in a collegiate setting. If I'm never in the building (which now, depending on what I'm teaching/where my office may or may not end up, is a possibility), how do I avoid descending into bitter, isolated townie-dom? YOU GUYS I DO NOT KNOW. Mostly I will just have to make sure that I end up at social events. Yeehaw.

So that's the update. Still don't know if I'm sticking around, but if I am, I'm not out on my ear. Baby steps, because NO, I am NOT an adult STOP TREATING ME LIKE ONE

Ugh, when you go out to the bar before 7, you come home and you feel like it's 2AM, but it's not, it's 10PM and you could theoretically still get stuff done, but you've been at the BAR, and so you stare at your desk for a while and eat chocolate.

Isn't this what everyone does? It probably is.

I Forgot

...about the Michael Collier reading! It went very well. He kept telling me how nice my intro was, which he was doing probably because he's just one of the nicest guys I've had the privilege of meeting in a long time. There weren't as many people at his reading as I thought there were going to be; while I don't think that I had any illusions that this was going to be another Li-Young Lee reading, I thought that maybe we'd fill the library's mini-auditorium, but it wasn't the case. Alas, but also probably okay, as if it had been packed I might have done something untoward, like passed out.

(This is the problem with me flying along here without any medication. Sometimes the reason I was on meds in the first place wells up and threatens to black me out, which is NO GOOD.)

The better part of the night, really, was sitting out on the back deck of the Nittany Lion Inn and having martinis and beers with Collier and the MFA gang; it wasn't at all awkward and we had a very good time. See, uh, THIS IS WHY I DO NOT WANT TO LEAVE. Because if I can finagle it right, someone might actually keep paying me to have these kinds of experiences.

I was outside enjoying the INCREDIBLE weather earlier this afternoon, and some prospective master's student was complaining loudly on his cell that while he *could* do this whole doctorate thing, he'd be in school until he was 35 and he wouldn't even get to have a real job until he was, like, middle aged, dude.

I muttered there are so many worse things under my breath and kept reading.

Because seriously. Having a real job is probably the worst thing in the whole world. Even thinking about it makes me a little bit suicidal. If you're smart enough to not have a real job, WHY WOULD YOU?

On My Way to Becoming a Morning Person (?1?!?!-Edition)

So here's an incredible fact: I've been up and at them by 9 or BEFORE for the past two weeks.

You guys, I used to be practically nocturnal. Getting up at noon when I didn't have somewhere to be was a good day.

This is delightful! And I have no idea where it came from, but today I got my ass out of bed and got a whole grocery shopping trip done before I had to be on campus, a little before noon. This is a splendid thing because it does a good job of convincing me that I'm NOT in fact depressed about this whole horrific-transitional-stage that I'm in, and that I might managed to scrape through it with at least a few of my neurons firing adequately.

The sad thing about all this is that even though I'm jubilant about this whole waking-up business, I realize fully that most of my colleagues hold normal hours in which they are up by 8 or 9 every day. I am still not a "morning person." I don't ever think I will be. But this is improvement! Maybe I'll go for being up around 8 next week, and then I'll get to feel even better about myself. Because I really like daylight. It is good shit.

Produce Wrangling

I got stymied in the middle of guinea-pig-lettuce-prep by the basketball game. I guess, since it's NOT EVEN ELEVEN, that I can probably finish that up before going to bed. And since I am actually capable of rising more than 10 minutes before I have to be somewhere, APPARENTLY, I can let other stuff (like, uh, bathing) wait until morning.

Right now, two heads of green leaf lettuce have an appointment with my GIANT KNIFE

So here is another book recommendation. Actually, probably several book recommendations, but I am going to start with this one here because it is patently awesome.

Christian Hawkey's The Book of Funnels

BUY IT HERE, NO SERIOUSLY DO IT

This book is utterly remarkable. It's difficult without being obtuse, dreamy without being sentimental, strange without being gimmicky, and colloquial without being trite. I am insanely jealous of it, because it is everything I have ever wanted to be able to do in poetry. It's not quite Ashbery, but it nudges in that direction - talky and philosophical. I'm not entirely sure yet what the middle section, after which the book is named, is doing with its form, but I'll figure it out eventually. I raced through it the first time, leaping from one "holy crap that's a good line" to the next, and now I'm working my way through it slowly, though I have to force myself not to leap through it again in good-poetry-induced glee. It's that good.

And that's all I have to say about that!

Other Good Books

I just read K.A. Hays' Dear Apocalypse as well, and it's also quite good. Religious, but it doesn't beat you over the head with it, which is difficult to do. I get to be in class with her next week! Exciting.

What else. Oh, Paula Closson Buck's The Acquiescent Villa. Also strange and wonderful.

I also read Erin Batykefer's Allegheny, Monongahela, actually at pretty much the same time as Dear Apocalypse. If you're into verrrry clear poetry, she's the author for you. Her poems are so tightly controlled that not even a stray syllable leaks out anywhere, but I think they're a little too pat for me. They're EXCELLENTLY crafted, but I didn't do a dance like I think I might have literally done about Hawkey. But you know. To each their own.

So That's That

So go read some poetry! It's good shit!

In other news, I've got about a 50% chance of staying here next year, and a 50% chance of being out on my ear. Awesome. And then this summer, REGARDLESS of what I end up doing (with the exception of one or two possible amazing-dream-job opportunities, hardy har), I have to start thinking super hard about the fall, in which I will be applying for doctoral programs because y'all, as much as I rag on English departments, even the thought of leaving one makes me nauseated with homesickness. I just have to figure out what the hell I want to write books and articles on for four solid years. Eughghghghhhh.

Enough of that. I am getting the hell out of this office, because I am hungry and my eyeballs are about to fall out.

Book Review Time! (Caveat: I am bad at book reviews)

Wow, so, in an uncharacteristic move, I might have found a book of poetry that is a little too weird even for me.

(This is not to say that I write weird poetry. Unfortunately, as awesome as being an MFA is, it also beats the weird out of you a little bit. BUT ONLY A LITTLE FOR ME. I SWEAR TO GOD.)

Anyway, book is called the true keeps calm biding its story (yessss), and it's by Rusty Morrison, who is female. (I say that because I swore up and down it was a male author until I'd muddled through enough of the book to discern femininity.) It won a book award from the AAP, which is why I have it (yaaaay for winning prizes that culminate not only in money, but also in free award-winning books). And it's tough as shit. Maybe too tough.

But you should buy it ANYWAY!

And here is why:

I am slogging through the thing painfully slowly. It's a series of poems whose titles are all "please advise stop," (though the titles in the TOC are all the first couple of words of the first lines; I can't figure out whether this was a good idea or whether it would have been better to just go whole hog and have a whole TOC full of nothing but "please advise stop" and page numbers) and they are all right-justified, and they all have lines that end in either "stop," "please," or "advise." Read: this is a series of telegrams. Gimmicky? Or brilliant? I tend to give gimmicks the benefit of the doubt at first, especially when they seem like they're SO ridiculous that the author HAS to justify them at some point, or the thing would never have ended up in print (I'll probably eat those words later in life, somehow).

Anyway, the poems are extremely difficult not only because the line endings literally make you stop at the end, but because the lines themselves really don't want to cohere. She makes these utterly enormous leaps from image to image, and you find yourself reading lines four or five times just to get them to come together syntactically.

This, my friends, would go over poorly in workshop.

About That

The workshop-bombing thing is probably why I am not only giving the true keeps calm the benefit of the doubt, but going on and saying that everyone who does poetry should own a copy of a book that's this obtuse. Because even if you have NO INCLINATION to write a series of obscure telegraphs (and you probably shouldn't, because now it's been done), owning and reading and absorbing books like this one is tantamount, in my opinion, to keeping your imagination alive and fed.

As I think more and more about what will ever become of my writing, I think more and more about how we all distinguish ourselves as writers with a voice, a temperament, and an aesthetic inclination - and while I realize that there aren't exactly infinite aesthetics, I'd go so far as to say that there are probably infinite combinations of the three. (Spell check keeps telling me that "combinations" is not a word. Really? You can't have more than one combination? Or is it like deer? Why am I admitting this?) And as I think about the ways in which conventional schooling and the workshop model produce writing, the more I think that reading weird books is essential. Because the MFA does nothing to keep us weird. In fact, just the opposite (don't get me started). Books like the truth keeps calm, on the other hand, even if they may not MAKE us weirder (though maybe they should), are a persistent reminder that weirdness exists, and is good, and is possible. And wins things.

Because truly, we're in desperate need of more bravery.

The caveat: NOT WEIRDNESS FOR WEIRDNESS'S SAKE. This is the fine line; it's the same fine line on the other end of the spectrum between a pat aphorism at the end of a pretty pastoral and an ending that actually means something. I'm still trying to figure out where I stand on weird for weird vis a vis Morrison's book. I'm thinking it's purposeful and good. But I haven't fully digested it yet. Thus, I am still burping up thoughts. END METAPHOR

So anyway. Thus ends my bad book review. Go get the book. And TOMORROW, I'll tell you to buy another book, this one being hands-down the best first book of contemporary poetry that I have ever read, ever. Impressive! Hold on to your seats!

*pant pant pant pant*

So, I've been in the office for abouuuuut 4 hours now, and I'm about to go batshit insane, and I *would* leave if it weren't for the prospect of Daniel coming to get me in a minute and then going to drink many beers. (It's a sports bar. I guess I'll drink beer. Fughwghagds.)

Why The Desire for Descending Into Drunkenness? Also, Alliteration?

BECAUUUUSE this might have been the slowest week of my life. I think that my perception of time must slow down in proportion to how fast my mind is racing around in stupid little circles in my head; since my brain appears to be going for the world record in every possible sprint this week, I thought it was Friday on, like TUESDAY. Suck!

So now it really IS almost Friday, and by almost I mean it's Thursday, and by Friday I mean it is going to take me about 371231 hours to get through Friday because I am going to have the jitters all day about introducing Collier. Good times.

Oh, also, other things, which will probably get exacerbated by tonight's outing to the watering hole, but WHATEVER.

OH BUT WAIT

I managed to be a professional writer today! This means that someone paid me dollars for poetry!

I won the department's (and the Academy of American Poets) Steinberg Award for the second time today, which was pretty awesome as it both pays me and gives me a line on my CV. And I won it for a first draft of a poem! (I probably shouldn't be telling people that.)

So that's a cool twofer I just got in there. V. exciting.

So what I should be doing right now instead of updating this stupid thing is writing a profoundly thankful note to the donor who thinks that it's a good idea to pay rent for poets. BLESS HER.

So, as the title suggests, I have to go actually write a poem in 20 minutes (I'm giving myself until 10, because I'm obsessive about starting tasks on a round clock-time. Don't ask). I would use a revision from my thesis, but this week we got a fun assignment, which I will have to use if I ever get to teach poetry ever again.

Basically, Julia asked us to jot down terms from our own work onto note cards. These could either be themes, or literally words that we use a lot. I picked generic stuff like "birds" and "water" because I tend to write a lot about generic things like birds and water. Also fruit. Anyways, so we did that, and then she's all "okay, now hand that card to the person on your left," and so we did that, and then she goes "that's your assignment for next week."

I happened to be sitting next to John, a great friend of mine but also a kid that tends to write about Southern religious fury.

Har har!

So I got stuff like Jesus and wrath, which is fine, actually, because it occurs to me that I have no written one SINGLE poem that directly addresses the Catholicism of the Philippines. I feel the Jesus-in-a-prom-gown story coming on. IN VERSE. Oh help.

Not Ready Not Ready Not Ready Not Ready

Funny thing about my life: the older I get, the less I want to have anything to do with getting older.

This is not a revelation. This is a Hallmark Card. Boooo. But it *is* rather true, and it's more true for me now every day.

I am freaking out about the prospect of not being able to hang out EVER AGAIN with all the awesome people that I've met here. (This is not to say that I hung out with people all that often. It's grad school, and I think about 2 people every class manage to keep up the whole out-all-the-time thing past their first year or so. But still.) I am freaking out about not having a social network that comes together seamlessly because you have something very fundamental in common that actually involves MORE than working in the same office (though that helps).

In other words, the prospect of me going into the "real world" (??) is like trying to take a cat for a walk. You can try to drag me out the door, but goddammit, I AM TAKING HALF THE CARPET AND ALL OF YOUR COATS WITH ME.

*gnash gnash*

This is a stereotypical feeling, I am sure, but what makes it extra-special on my end is that it's patently the opposite of what happened at the end of my undergraduate career. Like, exactly one hundred and eighty degrees of opposite. I was so fed up at Hopkins, I was in a bad place emotionally, and I fucked it all up.

This, I could do forever. And ever and ever! And be perfectly okay.


NoooOOOOoooooOoOoOoooooo don't take me out for a walk *claw claw claw claw*

...you know, it would be interesting to see the number of posts I have that are titled "graack" or something similar. It's probably about half. That's useful.

Not Enough Shape

Several things: I am not in shape, my time does not have enough shape, the poems I wrote today have no shape. It's a bad day for geometry over here!

Grumble. Other than that, today was okay. Got to bitch about life to one of my professors for a while, which is always cathartic and he is a good listener, so bonus; got interviewed by the student paper about Michael Collier, which was amusing as I haven't read him at all lately but have to INTRODUCE HIM on Friday. Yike! Read his latest book last night and it was wonderful; I think I'll read another before I got to bed tonight.

(As the 1.5 veteran readers of this might know, I've encountered the guy before, he just doesn't know that he was an integral part of the best day of my undergraduate career. Ready, set, FAANNNNGIRRRLLLLLL)

Then I came back here and was all set to wash the pigs' blankets but then discovered that I have exactly $3 in quarters, total. So no laundromat. GEE DARN. Problem was, the only other things I had to do were read an article, which I accomplished in about half an hour, and then about 14 other tasks that I reeeaaalllly did not want to do. And whose deadlines, predictably, are either uncertain or far-ish away.

So I took a nap.

I am bad at this! (Doing stuff, not taking naps. Actually, come to think of it, I'm not real good at naps either. I always turn them into outright sleeps. This is poor form.)

So I woke up later than I wanted, and did some housecleaning and then made adobo for myself. (Note: family recipies are ludicrous. To make this for a pound of chicken, I had to TENTH the recipe. HARDY HAR)

So now I've got chicken, some work to do, and fed/cleaned/idiotic pigs, and I'm bored out of my skull. I blame the internet.