books are like bacteria

You can tell that you are a person who reads herself to sleep when most of what you clean off of your bedside table is a stack of books tall enough that you have to take it down the ladder in two bunches.

That sentence has been sitting in my draft folder for two weeks, and have I removed the aforementioned stack of books? No. No I have not. They are just spreading back out across the top of the table (ie, my dresser). Once books have colonized your furniture, it can be hard to extract them. I have no idea what I am going to do with all of my library when I move three times this summer. It’s just so…heavy. So full of weighty tomes.

This is going to be a discombobulated post. I have been watching a lot of Planet Earth while I do work lately. Right now, we have on the deserts episode and a snake is burying itself in the sand to get away from the wind and sandstorm. Now they are explaining how dunes get piled up and shaped into those weird sharp spirals. What I SHOULD be doing, instead of writing you some strange babblings about sand, is working on my long poem for 292, my workshop this quarter. It’s at this awkward place where it’s officially Long, and getting too dense for its own narrative. I need to break it up somehow, but I’m not sure how I’m going to do that without making it lame in the process. I’ve been writing little pieces that can go into it, sort of as separate poems, to see if I can come up with some bits I really like to solve this problem.

Actually, I should really go back to that. Here’s hoping it doesn’t ruin what I’ve got already down. :-)

Playlist Ephemera

If you check out the playlist section in the sidebar, you’ll see that I’m up to date with the track listings from my monthly playlists. My notes and links are only done through say, September of 2007 or so, but I’m working to catch up on them. That’s the part that takes forever, so hold your horses, but go check out the lists if you’re interested. :-)

There’s also a new mixtape up, if you haven’t already checked that out.

these are a few of my…things

So, it’s been a turbulent couple of weeks around here. I’m not going to go into it, the internet being a public forum and all, but no worries, I’m finding my feet again. However, I’m still pretty much operating at minimum functional capacity. I’m getting the vital stuff done, but everything on the list below “maintain basic life and schoolwork” has fallen by the wayside in favor of…other stuff. This week, the goal is playing catchup on my errands and doing as much of the long-term work that’s waiting for me as possible, while cutting way back on my therapeutic TV watching and video game playing.

On the plus side, I’ve gotten really good at Mario Kart, and my smack-cabulary has improved dramatically. It’s hard to talk smack when you also suck, but once you have yourself some skills, LOOK OUT MOSES. (I do not know where that expression came from, it just sprang fully formed from my mind, not unlike the goddess Athena. OOOOH, CHECK MY CLASSICAL ALLUSIONS, SUCKERS! Nothing like a couple of years of Latin Via Ovid (affectionately known as “old orangey”) to really drill you on your mythology, so you can bust out Athena and her homies whenever you like.)

In other good news, after three weeks, my back pain is FINALLY going away. I’m down to a couple of sore hours in the morning and at night, with a nice long pain-free stretch in the middle, and I’ll take that happily. I’m riding the happy train in general, and we’re headed right out to….veryhappyland. That metaphor lost some steam after its initial inception.

You know what I love? Catching minor actors in their most minor roles–the post office clerk from one movie cast as the janitor in another, the awkward background friend moonlighting as somebody’s little sister. There’s a hide and seek pleasure to it. This paragraph has no relation to the others, don’t worry, you didn’t miss anything.

It annoys me when that woman from 30 Rock messes up the split screen in her “the more you know” ad on hulu, and you end up missing parts of her elbows as she crosses the invisible lines between frames.

I’m really into yellow these days.

BLINK! goes Kristof

I’ve been drafted to blog on the admit website in honor of the upcoming admit weekend here, which reminded me that I should really blog here also. The advantages of having your own site are many and myriad. For example, I am not required to keep my thoughts to a short list of ProFro appropriate subjects. Also, if I got way wasted and danced on a trashcan, I could tell  you that too.

(Sorry, I didn’t get even a little wasted, and there were no trashcans.)

This weekend has been full of me saying things like “I really need to get cracking on all this reading,” reading three poems, and then taking a nap. I think this is emblematic of a Spring quarter senior. I have decided that one of my favorite parts of the day is when I get to crawl all exhausted into bed and go to sleep. It’s such a feeling of satisfaction! Also, I have this (bad?) habit of listening to a podcast while I fall asleep, and I’m really very attached to my virtual ear-mumblers. Most of the time, I end up sleeping through the last half, but hey, it’s ok. You absorb information in your sleep, right? RIGHT?

I almost went to Cafe Night (a party with wine and cheese and live music that the french house here throws) last night, but then I got terminally sleepy and had to go home to bed instead. This is what it’s like in the senior retirement home we have going here. Everyone is in bed by 12 or 1, and then we complain in the morning about how tiiiirred we are. Little do we remember the sleep deprived days of our freshman year, when we were all busy trying to be the last one up, lest we miss anything good.

I have been spending tonight alternately reading Elizabeth Bishop’s North and South and Robert Lowell’s Lord Weary’s Castle and watching Chris B. play WOW. I do not understand WOW, but I like to do dramatic readings of the little notices that pop up on the screen.

Kristof gains Kristof’s fishing.
Kristof’s fishing fades from Kristof.
Kristof gains Kristof’s fishing.
Kristof’s fishing fades from Kristof.
Kristof gains Kristof’s fishing.
Kristof’s fishing fades from Kristof.

You can see how this would be amusing.

BLINK! goes Kristof. BLINK!

Nerd games are so funny.

OK. Now. It is time for my favorite part of the day. BED.

I heart bed big time.

I went to New York with the intention of taking lots of interesting pictures. Instead, I took one picture. This picture:

photo

Not exactly inspiring, is it?

Yeah.

The trip was totally awesome, though. You just can’t see photographic evidence.

Shining Examples

In an effort to maybe someday be able to do a respectable number of “big kid” pushups, I’ve been undertaking an exercise program with a couple of my suitemates. It’s about 30 minutes long, including warm-up and cool-down and is structured in circuits. 3 minutes of strength training, two minutes of cardio, and a minute of abs, for three circuits. This sounds easy, but let me assure you that it REALLY is not. The first day, I was totally tomato red panting and sweating. I am slightly less embarrassingly sweaty now. The thing is, around day 6 or so, once the muscle soreness in my arms and legs abated, I noticed a grating little pain in my knees. It was particularly uncomfortable when climbing down stairs. In the last couple of days, it’s accellerated, and now I’m pretty sore. The obvious explanation is that the cardio, which is pretty much all jump-related, in combination with lunges and squats and things, has done something uncool.

So tonight, I was poking around my health center’s “Virtual Wellness Library” online, looking to see if they have any helpful helpful advice beyond what I’ve figured out (ie, cut out the jumping, take an asprin, and maybe consider some ice or something), when I stumbled upon their article about weight. I braced myself for the usual onslaught about calories and diets and GAH, but was rewarded instead with one of the most reasonable and non-fat-hating articles I have ever seen come out of an institutional medical facility. (To be clear: my pediatrician (what, you don’t still go to the pediatrician when you’re home?) has never been anything other than perfectly resonable, supportive, and non-awful, but I’ve heard a lot of horror stories about doctors’ advice on weight.)

Vaden says the following (from here):

Women’s Issues: Little girls are raised with Barbie dolls as role models. Her shape pushes thinness to an extreme (if Barbie were a real person, she’d have to walk on all fours to support her proportions.) And although womens’ fashion portray stick-thin models as the ideal, 99% of women could never look like that due to their genetic make-up.

Men’s Issues: Men are coming under increasing pressure to sculpt the perfect Calvin Klein slim-line body. Male models have well-defined muscles and no body fat. And although these well-buffed models are the male ideal, 99% of men could never achieve this look because of their genes.

Restrictive Diets

Many students diet to achieve an impossible weight goal. But dieting is not the solution. It is, in fact, counter-productive. Restrictive diets:

  • Don’t ultimately work. Your weight is genetically programmed. When you eat less, your metabolism (the speed and efficiency which the body burns calories for fuel) becomes sluggish. Your system fights to keep every pound as if fighting off starvation: the
    harder you diet the more your body resists losing weight. Ninety percent of all “successful” dieters soon revert to their old weight.
  • Are unhealthy. You deprive yourself of essential nutrients which are almost impossible to get on vacuous diet foods. Also, people who “yo-yo diet” (alternatively gain and lose weight) are at greater risk for health problems.
  • Are potentially dangerous. Dieting disturbs your relationship to food. It can make you afraid of eating normally. This can lead to disorders such as anorexia, bulimia, binging, and compulsive over-exercising.
  • Are boring, and can make you boring. When you restrict your eating you also restrict your interests, and obsess about food and weight until that’s all you think and talk about. Are emotionally draining. They substitute an external, unattainable image of beauty for genuine self-esteem. (Emphasis added.)

Dude. Vaden. Right on, my brothers and sisters.

Valentine’s Day, the Exhaustive Review Edition

For Valentine’s Day, we headed into San Francisco for a charming event called Writers With Drinks. The basic premise is that you put a variety of writers (and an amusing MC) on stage in a bar, give them free drinks, and see what comes out. There’s a five dollar cover, and there are very few seats, so if you go, go early. It’s held once a month in the Makeout Room, which is a strange little bar in the mission. It’s cash only, and decorated entirely in shiny things.

Now, as a person who once did a science project on whether my friend’s bird preferred shiny objects or food, I can tell you that the shiny things are indeed fascinating, in an inter-species kind of way. There’s tinsel hanging from the ceiling, silver mylar balloons, a disco ball, and several large (I think plastic) deer heads that have been bedazzled with costume jewelry and cast-off bras. (I always wonder how that works–do you come to the bar equipped with extra underwear, planning to leave it on the wall? Do you go bra-less after you deposit your undergarment? Wouldn’t this by necessity limit the decoration to smaller sizes? (Not just in terms of societal and physical comfort, but let me tell you that those suckers are PRICEY.) I wonder what the size distribution of bras removed and left in public is…)

The evening was MCed by the charming and hilarious Josh Kornbluth, who was hands down the most entertaining performer of the evening. Check out his website, buy his book. He made me laugh.

The readers themselves varied pretty wildly. We kicked off the evening with a passage from Anna Furtado, the author of the Briarcrest Chronicles. The Briarcrest Chronicles are a series of vaguely medieval lesbian romances generally (I believe) set in a sort of a nunnery environment. The Briarcrest Chronicles are….how do I say this?…not good. It was like Star Trek meets Redwall with lesbians, only not as cool as that makes it sound. There is a lot of worrying about the whereabouts and sexual preferences of women with elaborate and flowery names, and planning to administer herbs of various kinds to cure their various ills. Despite a little light discussion of breasts, I wouldn’t qualify them as particularly…romantic.

Shanthi Sekaran read from The Prayer Room, a novel consisting primarily (it appears) of a lightly veiled account of her own love life. She was charming and occasionally funny, although not particularly world-shaking.

This was followed by an extremely mixed bag of fairly universally depressing poems by Laurie Glover who has a real affinity for adjectives and word like “rowed” used to mean “lined up in a row.” Also, she likes rocks. A lot.

Then there was intermission, during which I defended our seats and the seats of the nice people we were sharing the table with from marauders, and Chris obtained me a charming drink called a Zephyr. It contained unfiltered sake, lemon vodka, and grapefruit juice, and it was AWESOME. Go and have one immediately. It will fulfill all of your secret citrusey desires. Our New Friend Liza (as in Eliza), with whom we shared our booth, went to buy burritos, and Our New Friend Andrew went to get drinks and look at books. ONFE eventually returned with burritos for her and ONFA, and chips for all.

Then Lorelei Lee (a porn performer and grad student in creative writing) read a story she’d written, which was really very very good, and therefore unmockable.

The final act was a long, long, many times too long short story by Ann Cummins about a weird hypnotist who stole this woman’s belly button and then went on and on and on and ON about it. SNORE.

In retrospect, this post has made it sound really horribly boring, which is totally untrue, mostly because Josh Kornblush was so awesome. It was a really fun, casual, weird night, which was capped off by our COLD, weird, awesome experience at the Millbrae caltrain station where we discovered that the next train wasn’t coming for two hours. We eventually managed (with one barely working cell phone) to find a bus that was going where we wanted in only ONE hour, which we spent hiding in the warm greasy respite of In ‘n Out.

And then the bus smelled like pee and there were sleeping homeless ladies strapped in the wheelchair harness spots, and it stopped loudly every three inches and Chris fell asleep anyhow, and there were a lot of Mancini’s Sleepworlds on the route, the end.

A Post from the Stats

Every once in a while (as you who have been reading me faithfully for-boring-ever will remember) I like to take a look at the search engine referrals for this site. For the uninitiated, (get ready to be reminded how very very not private the internet is) basically, every website’s host stores a lot of information about the people who go there. No, don’t worry, not your name or anything, but it registers all of the IP addresses, so I can see generally where people’s internet providers are, and most interestingly, I can see the key words typed into a search engine that led someone to click over from say, google. These phrases are often hilarious.

This time, in honor of the upcoming holiday, I have decided to tackle one of these search topics, just in case this person ever returns. Ready? Here goes:

hoping to bump into crush

Ah yes , Young Love. It is very common to find yourself hoping to bump into your crush. Unfortunately, this hope will inevitably make you very awkward. Everything you say will come out in Idiot, you’ll catch yourself tripping on microscopic pebbles, and suddenly, your appearance will completely refuse to comply with your wishes.

The good news is that this reaction you are about to experience is completely normal. The best thing you can do here is to enlist help. Figure out which of your friends is least likely to mock you for your new crush, and get them to help you engineer some meetings. The key is to make it seem like you’re more comfortable than you are. If you can arrange to meet this person in some situation where you have something else to be doing, that’s ideal. Don’t make it a performance, or anything requiring a lot of concentration that you might easily mess up. Think facepaint, not brain surgery.

And then go for it. Happy Valentine’s day, my dear anonymous searcher. Also, way to be persistent, cause I’m pretty sure that cupcake nation comes up really really far down the list of results for “hoping to bump into crush.”

Workshop

This quarter I have the first creative writing workshop of my Stanford career that is led by someone OTHER than my first poetry teacher, whom I seem to have minorly stalked through all of his course offerings over the past year. This quarter, class is led by Mark Doty, who is charming and wonderful in every way, but it’s also about twice the size I’m accustomed to, and for some reason (perhaps the size, perhaps the different set of students) it’s felt a lot more uncomfortable to me.

I think part of the problem is that I keep bringing work that I already like into workshop, and things that I see as being pretty close to done, which means that I’ve set myself up already to reject whatever (usually contradictory) advice I am given. Class goes like this, with the italicized bits happening only in my head:

Student 1: I think you should make these stanzas narrower, more blocklike.

Yeah, right. I think you shouldn’t put an eagle in your fridge poem, but did you listen to me? NOOOooo.

Student 2: I agree. This looks not-so-nice on the page.

Yeah? YEAH??? YOUR NOSE LOOKS NOT SO NICE ON YOUR FACE, PUNK.

Student 3: I don’t know. I don’t really underSTAND what the poet MEANS here. I mean, this SENTENCE isn’t GRAMMATICAL.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

This makes it sound like I don’t like the class or my classmates, which really isn’t true. As a whole, the class has been great, I just find myself really frustrated by workshop, especially when I set it up against the Levinthal tutorial I’m also doing this quarter, which is basically two hours a week about how awesome I am. (I kid, but no seriously. It rocks.)

I feel like poems (by me and by other people) I genuinely really like get a lot of criticism on minor points in class and the few (very few) poems I strongly dislike get praise. I don’t know if this is due to differences in taste, or if everyone is just uncomfortable criticizing work too much and therefore compensates by complimenting weak writing rather than really digging into what’s wrong with it…I just don’t know. This quarter has been a really strange balance between feeling like I’ve found my feet and I’m writing things I genuinely am proud of and wondering if that feeling is just because I have someone who’s dedicated to helping me and only me.

My new plan is to only bring things I’m sure aren’t done into workshop. No more of this trying to impress the famous writer business. I don’t feel like giving my finished work plastic surgery, and maybe I’ll enjoy workshop more if I’m really ready to change the things I bring in. It’s a strange line to walk between trying to portray your best writer self to a room full of people you respect and a major poet you admire, and trying to actually get something out of the group experience.

I don’t think this post has an end, and since none of you (I think) are grading me on it, I’m just not going to end it, so THERE, LITERARY CRITICISM. SO THERE.