Archive for the 'it is a mystery' Category

SHIPS THAT PASS

Published on April 14, 2011 in it is a mystery, Lindsay Hunter and magic spine. Closed

I know more than a few people who have expressed their love for the missed connections section of the local Craigslist, and for all of you I will share the project Ships That Pass, “A collection of fake, imagined, and literary missed connections posted to Craigslist and then re-posted here with real responses.” If you’ve ever made extended eye contact at an LCD Soundsystem show, this is the site for you.

I’m driving down to my alma mater today to see George Saunders read and answer questions. (Let me know if you have any Qs that require As.) After that, back up to Austin to see my girl Lindsay read with Dan Boehl. Lots of good readings in town this week. See the Five Things page for more info on each.

My body is angry with me whether I am good or bad to it. It makes me wonder what is goodness, what is badness.

GREAT, OUTDOORS

Published on March 22, 2011 in how do I, it is a mystery and team discovery. 5 Comments

MAJOR DEVELOPMENTS around here.

A dove made her nest under my kitchen window and has begun to protect her eggs.
The large cat has found that she greatly enjoys carrying around tabs from milk cartons. (They taste like milk at first, and then they are fun to chew and chase, and then they must be deposited in a shoe.)
There are small buds on the trees and it is blustery. Screens rattle. Some asshole has purchased a windchime.
An animal has taken up residence under the neighbor’s car. (Raccoon?)

Has anyone been camping? I believe it is a myth.

LOSER

Published on February 25, 2011 in geeking out, ghosts and it is a mystery. 6 Comments

My review of Corey Mesler’s LISTEN: twenty-nine short conversations is out at American Book Review. There’s a snip at Project MUSE.

Yesterday I went to this dance/yoga/pilates fusion deal called PiYo. It was stupid. Imagine moving from plié squats to Warrior 3 with a Justin Bieber soundtrack. Between this and the quackery I’m enjoying three times a week on my spinal column, I’m living out on a limb. I think next I’m going to seek out some banh mi, which I’ve somehow managed to never have despite the fact that it looks incredible. It’s fun to be new at stuff.

I’m missing old friends today.

My girl Sarah is having a baby in California sometime in August and I feel this strong need to be there. It seems much more important than the garbage I’m rolling around in out here. I’ve never felt this way about a lady or a baby before. I’m sure I’d be underfoot. Sarah’s going to be such a good mom. They’re already printing out the certificates for mom-related awards.

I’ve got a small handful of lady friends who are going to be moms pretty soon. I guess it is that time in life. FOR ME TO FEEL WEIRD.

CAPS LOCK YEAR

Published on January 2, 2011 in it is a mystery. 2 Comments

I’m late to note it, but Museum of the Weird got some kind year-end nods from Kyle Minor, Matt Bell, Amber Sparks and Dennis Cooper, for which I am honored and thankful. Online at Corium Magazine, you will find “Sisters,” a story I wrote with Lindsay Hunter.

It feels good to spend the first day of 2011 napping and navel-gazing about the past year. Winter’s the time for us to all have more or less thematically similar experiences and sit around and talk about those experiences with the same dumb reverence that we use to talk about our own dreams.

Earlier, I stood on this bed to dust the ceiling fan. I’m trying to keep my bedroom from turning into a storage site, but there are two piles that need to go to Goodwill and two for Buffalo Exchange and one for an ex-boyfriend, plus a number of unorganized socks, and ultimately this room is kind of depressing, even though I bought new curtain rods.

I’m fine with being unpaired. At first, I only wanted to bake and talk about baking and say rosy stupid things like “I am taking myself on a date tonight” and whatever. Now it seems just fine, like being lost in a city when you have nowhere you need to be. I’ve done this plenty of times before. Anyway, I’m too busy to go on any dates and I don’t want to.

(Look at me, stamping my little foot.)

I’ve started tracking macronutrients again. I haven’t done this since I was writing AM/PM. Paying such close attention to the grams of protein in an uncured turkey dog is kind of unsettling. I recognize this.

A friend is 39 weeks pregnant, so I’ve been hearing things about bone-softening hormones and mucus plugs and rings of fire. I like to know about the strange things that not only can happen to a body, but are natural and even necessary if we want to keep traffic on the highway. I dunno if I want to have a child, or if I want to want to have a child, or if I want to have built a home, or if I want to have an experience of building a home, or if I want to want to, etc.

I went to a party for New Year’s. The crowd was strongly skewed towards Communications graduate students. Everyone was easy to talk to. I was asked to do a better job posing for pictures, which is something I am not good at doing while I am tracking my macronutrients. Still, it was a good party. Friends kissed friends when the ball dropped on 2011, and even though Susan Q declared that she had given everyone her chest cold, it seemed worth it then and still.

I feel content at the day-to-day. Mornings are easy. There is so much work to be done. And so time passes.

Muggin back

Published on July 18, 2010 in it is a mystery and the zuckerberg kid. 8 Comments

Today I saw the trailer for that movie about Facebook. I think the producer that greenlit that project made a huge mistake in assuming that the Zuckerberg kid is not going to do something crazy down the line that will render this movie utterly obsolete. It is like making a movie about O.J. Simpson’s successful college football tenure at the University of Southern California.

Thanks to the telephone game that is the internet, the XX Factor called me a poetess. This is what I get for making fun of W.S. Merwin last week, the man who can only accept the laureate position if he can escape a pineapple plantation built atop a dormant volcano. We broke all manner of hit count records around here. The blog went platinum and Mark Zuckerberg sent me a check with an ascii middle finger in the PAY TO THE ORDER OF section. There was some excitement but now things are quieting down. I’m emptying out the ashtrays. For the record, I am not a poetess.

Oh, and I saw Inception after the Facebook trailer, the trailer for the movie about Facebook. Good plot weaving and fun overall, but anyone who thinks the writing is presenting some seriously new ideas has not read much, or seen The Matrix. I said “Look at that handsome Shia Labeouf” multiple times and later had to be told his name is pronounced “Shy-ah” and also it was Joseph Gordon-Levitt. I am my own grandmother.

Wishing I knew 300 people who wanted to come over and play the baba yaga with me tonight. My downstairs neighbors would flip.

Tucson

Published on June 21, 2010 in it is a mystery. 3 Comments

I flew over a forest fire to get here. Mom puts four bottles of hot sauce on the table with every meal. A yoga instructor told us to imagine we were chocolate bars melting under the sun. Dad helped me repair my busted “A” key so I could type my name again. Temps are supposed to get up to 108°F on Wednesday. I’m sharing the guest bed with a pile of straw. The wind feels like a flat stone pressed against my face and the water tastes like home. I’m growing a new skin.

Woman talking to dog under my window

Published on May 21, 2010 in it is a mystery and real talk. 4 Comments

Bad dog. We do not do that. No ma’am. Look at me. Look at me. Sit. Sit. We do not go anywhere until you sit. Sit. Sit. Look at me. We do not do that. Bad. That was bad. Sit. Lie down. Sit. Sit. Now you stop doing that. No, come here. Lie down. Lie down, lie down? Lie down. No, sit, no. No. No. Lie down down. Sit. Lie down. No, sit. Sit. Lie down. Sit. Sit. Lie down. Uh-uh. Lie down. uh-uh Lie down. Uh, lie down. Lie down. Down. No, lie down. We’re not going, uh-uh lie down. Sit. Sit. Lie down. Down. Down. Down. Down? Lie down. No? Lie down. Nope! Sit! Lie down. Lie down. Lie down. Hey, lie down. Sit, down. Lie down. Uh-uh. We’re staying until you calm down. No, no. Nah.

The American West

Published on December 22, 2009 in Cool, it is a mystery, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Teaching. 5 Comments

Yesterday morning I went outside with La Medusa and I sat on the porch and read. It was sunny and seventy degrees. I am in Tucson. The bit I read contained a paragraph that nearly made me cry with its simplicity. Vanessa Place is so cool. She writes for sound extremely well but I’m most attracted to the simple aching stuff. I knew I was going to like this book when I read the first page and a scene featuring a man eating a gas station cherry pie stuck itself in my head for a week.

Another thing is stuck but I can’t remember who said it. Something about how if you don’t read a novel in x amount of days you’re not truly experiencing it. Maybe DeLillo or Saul Bellow said it. Maybe it was my dad. Can’t remember.

Today was a good day for predators (hawks, bobcats) in my parents’ front yard. A dove flew into the glass door in front of the dining room table and a bobcat cold ate it off the welcome mat. My dad keeps saying “they’re getting their Christmas shopping done early.”

A couple weeks ago I said that writing is just the studious avoidance of cliché. I was talking words to see what they sounded like at the time but the more I think about it the truer it gets. Trouble is there’s cliché in words, phrases, sounds of words, ideas, plot maps, melodies, harmonies. Plus we’ve got our own individual clichés in the ideas we keep returning to over and over again because we can’t figure them. The best writing finds the unfamiliar in the familiar and the rest is some insidious cliché.

I thought you knew

There’s a clock in this house that has chimed every fifteen minutes for my entire life and I don’t hear it anymore. It is the extrinsic intrinsic, the cliché. When I was explaining this idea to my students a few months ago, I said that I was just as vulnerable to the commonplace as they were. They looked at me as if they gave absolutely no fuck.

Now I’m watching Star Trek: The Next Generation with my dad. It’s the episode where Riker is eating a lot of food and Picard is getting all judgy.

Memories

Published on December 6, 2009 in Cool, it is a mystery and Quotes. 2 Comments

“When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty; I think only about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” — Buckminster Fuller

I’ve been sitting three feet away from a total stranger in a silent office for the past hour and a half. I just realized that and the realization has kind of freaked me out. Now I’m trying to silently eat salad.

Laura Owen’s got me feeling all manner of sentimental for old times. She’s a spitfire with stories in the latest issues of American Short Fiction and Annalemma but back in the day we used to sneak Hornsby’s from her parents’ fridge. I had a weird set of high school years, spending the first half playing the violin four hours a day in a performing arts magnet in Charlotte and the second half failing math and being the new kid at an academically rigorous and lily-white public school in Tucson. Laura was one who helped me make the transition to new school/life. I feel a kinship even though we only run into each other once every couple of years.

Hi Laura! I’ve always thought you are funny too, and much sharper than I am. You should come to Austin sometime. It is usually not very cold!

Helicopter cat

Published on November 29, 2009 in AM/PM, it is a mystery and Kim Jong-Il. 2 Comments

Thanksgiving was fun. There was a brine emergency but then everything was solved and the turkey turned out fine and everyone brought a delicious dish. I’m on day three of leftovers and sad to see them go. I do also sort of want a taco.

Now I’m trying to win an award for laziest house-cleaning. If I go an hour between mopping each individual room, I’ll advance to the semifinals. I was thinking just now while I was mopping that most every adult in the world has spent some time in his or her life cleaning in some small or large way. Even your worst enemy (if you’re into that sort of thing) has likely put some hours into mopping or at least washing dishes.

Has Kim Jong-Il ever cleaned? It is a mystery

Patrick Wensink, author of the funny book Sex Dungeon For Sale, is holding a coloring contest. The winner receives a copy of AM/PM plus Fool (Christopher Moore), Help! A Bear is Eating Me! (Mykle Hansen), and Tales Designed to Thrizzle (Michael Kupperman). Looks fun and the pictures are neat. Check it out.

My cat and I invented a game called “helicopter cat” where I tie her favorite toy to a string and you know what, this story isn’t even worth finishing