hey look! a new post!

while you take a minute to pick your jaw up off the floor and dust off your memories about who i am and why you liked to listen to me ramble (through your eyeballs...), let me catch you up on what i've been doing since the last time i checked in here.

[one] i am still dragging my feet on this whole phd thing. (surprise surprise.) but i changed my topic for, hopefully, the last time, and as long as i can manage to carve out some me time to work on this, i should actually be able to finish this stupid thing. fingers crossed.

[two] i am pregnant again! yup, in a few months cricket will have a brand new sibling, ducky. we still don't know the sex. we still can't settle on any girl names. i have complete confidence that cricket will be an amazing older brother.

[three] i tried this recipe for pumpkin banana bread and i was so excited for it and it was such a disappointment. like, i don't think i've been that disappointed in food in such a long time.

[four] i actually did manage to finish that poetry chapbook a couple months back (all the surprise from before with none of the sarcasm) and submitted it to a couple of contests. (that's a lie. i submitted it to one contest. my dream poetry publishing place, which i will likely not win, but i didn't want to risk any slight change chance i had by simultaneous submissions and by some miracle getting picked up by somewhere that is not my dream. so.) when i lose this one contest then there are a few edits i want to make to the collection before sending it out to other places (which are already carefully chosen). if (read:when) i don't get it in anywhere from the list then i have a mass list compiled of places that i should just start sending it to to cover all my bases.

[five] the past few months have been straight out of a sitcom/movie where the main theme is "what ELSE could go wrong?" the answer: everything. i have so much stress overwhelming me these days that i don't even know what to do with myself. except to keep moving. i must keep moving, or else i will be buried.

so i'm sitting at mason, just like the good old days that never freaking ended and turned into the good lord what am i still doing here days, and i was meaning to write this fabulous amazing blog post (because i should be reading a technical article but my brain has given up on life), and just as i started the floor i'm on got SO. LOUD. like, i'm not sure what happened, but i would really like these dudes to shut up. they are disturbing my peace. and my day was super long (and included being drenched in the rain walking around DC for over an hour) so the steam that i had coming into this thing has completely fizzled. so instead of a fabulous amazing post, this pathetic catch up post will have to suffice.

but i have mason days where i need to work, so i think i may be hanging around here a bit more than i have been. gotta say, i've missed it. i always do. 

there's a burning in my pride, a nervous bleeding in my brain

so the other day i was flipping through the internet and came upon this on tumblr. i thought it was pretty perfect, so i decided to share.

what it is like to live with an anxiety disorder

1.
no one ever congratulates you
for doing the really difficult things
like driving on the freeway or getting out of bed or
staying alive

2.
every friendship you make is a countdown
to the moment
when they finally can’t deal
with the missed calls and canceled hangouts
every friendship is on a timer
every friendship expires sooner,
not later

3.
you hear phrases like “bootstraps”
over and over
until you wish you had some to hang
yourself with

4.
you have to learn to simultaneously
relax your muscles
and move them with determination
you have to be in control
and you have to let go
at the same time
it’s enough to drive you into
a blubbering mess

5.
music is a conduit
crying is a conduit
your dad calling is a conduit
everything becomes a conduit
for either having or not having another panic attack

6.
you learn to stop making plans
because you’ll either disappoint yourself
or someone you care about or both

7.
you accept all of it

8.
you hope someday everyone else can
accept it too

~blankslate

*Hate Me - Blue October

i just don't see why i should even care

everyday i check my gmail, open my blog, read whoever's posted anything new, and then click on create new post. and then... nothing. i will leave the page open and go look at random stuff online. i might check facebook or watch random youtube videos. i may read articles or movie reviews or recipes. but the blogger page is always open, always waiting for me to write something in it. it stays that way until i close chrome and get off the computer. i'll occasionally go back and stare at the page where not even a cursor blinks yet, but i don't write a single word. there are not even any drafts of half-finished thoughts piling up. i think the only explanation is that i'm in love with the possibility of something great filling the page and overwhelmed with the fear of not making that a reality. either that, or i'm just too lazy to think and my life has been really uninspiring lately.

one of our neighbors just got a puppy. or, i think it's a puppy from the high pitched barking. and i think it's new because the barking just started a couple of days ago. and it does not. shut. up. ever. like, ever ever. i don't even think it breathes because i've yet to hear it pause for a breath. it just barks and barks and barks and barks. and i can't even muster the energy to get annoyed by it because i'm just really apathetic at the moment. but if i was a dog, i'd get tired of nonstop barking after two days.

i just read the house by the side of the road by sam walter foss and am newly obsessed with the lines:

There are hermit souls 

that live withdrawn

In the peace of their 

self-content. 

There are souls like stars,

that dwell apart

In a fellowless firmament;

there are twenty-one days until nanowrimo starts up again. i think i may have a story idea that combines computer forensics with growing up as a saudi-american in america because i am uncreative and am deciding to just write what i know. either that, or i'll write out a mermaid war. my brother is lobbying for the mermaids. 

*Not Dark Yet - Bob Dylan

i don't think it's fair

with seven million and twelve different channels on tv, you know what one should put on? a competition for writers. i mean, they have competitions for every other career/interest/hobby: cooks, pastry chefs, interior designers, artists (painters/sculpturs/etc), car designers, singers, pretty people, smart people, dogs, etc. you know how chopped makes cooks create meals with mystery ingredients? they should do the same thing with mystery characters and plot points. like, the group should have to write a short story in twenty minutes that includes a one-legged man, an old bridge, and an alien invasion. and the one with the worst story is eliminated. but you could do different forms of writing for different rounds (like poetry/prose and different genres) and then the winner gets ten thousand dollars. i would totally watch that.

i guess the closest thing that i ever saw was this show that my younger sister was obsessed with. my sister used to be really into slam poetry. she really wanted to be a slam poet? poetry slammer? but a combination of culture, religion, and parents made the trips it required impossible, thereby making the whole endeavor impossible. but anyway, we used to watch this slam poetry competition on tv and it was awesome, but i think it got cancelled, and i don't know why because it was awesome. now that i mention it, though, it really isn't very close at all. but it was still a really good show. they should restart it. or you know, do something.

*Low Fidelity - The Spill Canvas

i think that i can't do this

the first time i really remember studying poetry in school was in sixth grade. my teacher's husband was a "real" poet and i think that may have been one of the reasons that she took it so seriously. (although, really, she took all writing seriously. i owe her a lot.) anyway, she had us do a bunch of different exercises and experiment with a bunch of different kinds of poetry. for example, one time, she had us eavesdrop on a conversation of strangers, take a line they said, and center a poem around it. instead, i went to my sister's poetry, chose a poem, and changed it a bit to make it sound like a line could have been taken from a casual conversation. it was pretty bad. poetry has never really been my strong suit in writing. another time she gave us a poem that she had taken all of the line breaks out of. basically it looked like a giant paragraph, and we had to put it back into poem form. i'm still not sure exactly why, but i guess seeing where we thought the lines should break off told more about us than i could see.

one of my friends broke the poem up exactly like the poet had. i remember my teacher being fascinated, especially when she found out that my friend had never read or even heard of the poem before. i, on the other hand, was far less successful. my "poem" had lines so long that the only reason they didn't wrap around was because my handwriting was so tiny. (i once had to rewrite an entire paper because my teacher said the writing was too small, and he couldn't read it.) they were far too long to be considered a traditional poem. looking at the page, you might probably still confuse it with prose. looking back, i guess that's when my prosetry kind of started. my inability to break up the lines then led to my unwillingness to break up the lines now.

over the years, i took poetry a few more times in school, i went in and out of poetry phases out of school, but i am still pretty much unable to write poems. i think. which leads me to my main question: is there a difference between a poem and prose with line breaks? i recently took a piece i had written a couple of years ago and tried to make it into a traditional poem. i broke up most of it without a problem, but when i came to the last part, i just couldn't see where it could be broken. i ended up with a poem consisting of three stanzas followed by three lines of prose. but should that even be considered a poem? if i broke up the last part would it be a poem? does it matter where you put line breaks? does the writing have to be different?

i mean, i know the technical answers already because, like i said, i've studied poetry quite a few times. but i think there's something about it that i'm just missing, because my poems all scream out fake to me, and trying too hard. and the words that seemed fine in prose form look cheap and cliched in shorter lines. and my work only has rhythm when its lines can wrap around the page. and i may never be able to write a moving traditional poem, but i really want to know what i'm doing wrong. and why hitting enter a few times can completely change the mood/tone/effect of the piece.

*More Than Useless - Relient K

look at this stuff, isn't it neat?

last week i came across this which led me to this which introduced me to book spine poetry. back in undergrad i took a course that had us trying out things like writing flarf, spoetry, and black out poems. it was one of my absolute favorite courses i have ever taken, and when i first heard of book spine poetry i felt like it was something that we would have covered in that class if we had the time. anyway, instead of procrastinating on ebay today, i decided to save my money for the smart phone i'm thinking about maybe possibly buying (though i probably won't) and tried my hand at book spine poetry with some of my books (which showed me that i need books with titles more suitable for making poems). here are some of the ones i came up with (and yes i do realize that some are completely awful. it was a lot of fun anyway):

Pride and prejudice never let me go outside the ordinary world.

The world according to Garp: stardust, darkness, a swiftly tilting planet.

Dear John,
By the time you read this, the stuff that never happened [will be] gone with the wind.
Love, Stargirl

Paper towns catching fire fade into the wild: a great and terrible beauty.

Suspicious characters looking for Alaska fear no evil, brave, new world.

Wake the book thief, prep the last tycoon. The mists of Avalon fade. 

The fault in our stars eclipse[s] the long fall home to Woefield.

An abundance of Katherines speak atonement, and only to deceive. 

Go ask Alice the perks of being a wallflower far from the madding crowd. 

The fault in our stars eclipse[s] the history of love. 

The stranger, the watcher, monster. You don't know me. 

as i said, it was a lot of fun. and since we're still in national poetry month, i think all of you should give it a try and link/write the poems you make in the comments. i would love to see them.

*Part of Your World - The Little Mermaid

pay my respects to grace and virtue, send my condolences to good

because writing anything seems like the hardest thing in the world to do these days, here's a poem that i read a few days ago in an anthology i recently bought. i liked it. maybe you will too.

The Poet Has Come Back

by Margaret Arwood

The poet has come back to being a poet

after decades of being virtuous instead.

Can't you be both?

No. Not in public.

You could, once,

back when God was still thundering vengeance

and liked the scent of blood,

and hadn't got around to slippery forgiveness.

Then you could scatter incense and praise,

and wear your snake necklace,

and hymn the crushed skulls of your enemies

to a pious chorus.

No deferential smiling, no baking of cookies,

no I'm a nice person really.

Welcome back, my dear.

Time to resume our vigil,

time to unlock the cellar door,

time to remind ourselves

that the god of poets has two hands:

the dextrous, the sinister.

*Human - The Killers

one of my favorite poems ever:

If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

~Rudyard Kipling

somebody tell me why i'm on my own, if there's a soulmate for everyone

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents,
through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?

Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?

-John Ashbery, "At North Farm"

i fell in love with the first stanza.

*Soulmate - Natasha Bedingfield

why do i tire of counting sheep?

i’m tired
of you, and
i’m tired of
Miss Irony;

i’m tired of OCD,
i’m tired of poetry,
i’m tired of counting
and miscounting sheep,

i’m tired of losing my mind
to cosmetic con artists who make
more money than banks,
who make more sense
than a vending machine;
who make their mind up,
down,
not minding their dirty,
shady business.

oh, how i envy those poisoned Disney Princesses

i’m tired of blitzkrieg alarm clocks that snooze louder than me,
and
i’m tired of vinyl pinups (un)dressing up my hypnophobic lids
and
i’m tired of the poltergeist who keeps fucking up cushion clouds
and
i’m tired of my revolving eyelash nightmares opening too soon;

and i’m most certainly tired of the technicolor monsters
living six feet under my bed–
the ones that scream me caffeinated lullabies,
beneath bedlam bedbugs, to scare me awake,
so i can daydream of dormancy
the next morning.

the crows have risen,
and the roosters snore
until i wake up from
midnight reveries to
old Spanish castles.

i’m tired
of sleeping.
i’m tired
of insomnia.
i’m tired
of lethargy.
i’m tired
of tiring.

i’m tired.

*CholoroformBoy

*Fireflies - Owl City

get it all down on paper

have any of you ever heard of flarf or spoetry?? we did a bunch of it in this class i took. you may have seen some of it and reactions about it in my HNRS 353 blog before i took it down. if you did, then i am extremely sorry that you live such a boring life that you feel the need to read my school work in what i'm sure was a failed attempt to amuse yourself. really, truly sorry for you. anyways, just to make sure we're all in the same book (we found it impossible to all get on the same page when it concerned flarf in class), flarf and spoetry are kind of the modern art of the poetry world. flarf is google based poetry. you google really random search terms and then take what comes up in the results and make a poem. some of them are funny, some stupid, and some really, really disturbing. youtube it. my teacher was like a professional flarfist or whatever they're called and would perform her poetry at big places where flarf is performed. spoetry, in case you're a tad slow this morning, is spam poetry and basically the same as flarf except instead of google results you use the subject line of spam emails. both are actually pretty fun to do, and i suggest everyone try them at least once. it's surprising what you come up with.

so enough of that, yesterday i was dead bored and joe was off. gasp, i know. joe is never off during the day. so anyways i was going through my ipod and made an iPoem (songs were on shuffle and for each song i skipped to a random part and wrote down the first lyric that i heard). it doesnt really make sense, and it's not really worth reading. so why am i posting it?? i need something to do. i am waiting for 10:30 and staring at the clock seemed to make it go slower. so, what i'm trying to say is, you can stop reading now and just leave this post a bit more knowledgable about modern poetry methods. that being said, you can always continue:

Late at night I'm still wide awake

Put up your hands, say 'I don't want to be in love.'

No one can possible listen to this,

my tongue still misbehaves, and it keeps digging my own grave.

Somehow, I know I'll be strong.

Come on now this is screaming

now I'm sick of thinking anything at all.

Driving slow on Sunday morning and I never want to leave.

I feel so cheap, so used, unfaithful

For how long?

There's a reason why no one knows her name.

My heart, my pain won't cover up. You left me

after school walking home

I will always love you,

and I know that you're a sucker

hanging above as the conyon comes between.

And from your lips she drew the broken halleluja.

I get the strangest feeling you belong

I know this hurts, it was meant to

before loneliness will cause my heart to break.

She's beautiful as usual

I just can't look, it's killing me.

A story of losing a lover

See what you've gone and done

Ringing bells, it's red alert

well, a 33 year old grandma...

and that's all I get to know.

And that's about the time she walked away from me.

Well, I never pray, but tonight I'm on my knees,

let me take you on the ride of your life.

No one like you.

It was easy, no one ever said it would be this hard

Our breath rose in the cold

Everyone you know, someday, will die.

If only I could get through this

tonight, I could be your hero, baby.

it seems longer typed :/

*Breathe - Anna Nalick

dance, dance, and these are the lives you'd love to lead

i have refallen in love with dance dance revolution, or step step dance as the one my cousins have is called (the exact same game). best game ever. well, almost best. it does give you a workout though, and being a professional lazy bum, that starts to be a problem eventually. especially when i'm playing with kids that just have so much more energy than me.

anyways, here's a poem i found online. i liked it the first time i read it. didnt like it the second time. so the verdict is still out on this one,

I'm lost
Like a TV show that doesn't make sense
Unless you watch it from the beginning

I'm lost…
But I'm always gonna try
And I have no need to lie
Being who I am Is something that I can't deny

I look up to the sky
And sometimes I wonder why
But I know I have to make
A better past before I die

Sometimes I say too much
Sometimes I don't make sense
If I get too drunk and rowdy
Then I might get too intense

I see the path
But through a blur
And sometimes I don't feel sure I can shake it off for now

But how much more can I endure
I do the best I can
I try to do the right thing

I'm a poet,
I'm a writer
And I wish that I could sing

Sometimes I'm found
Sometimes turn it around
But beat myself into the ground
If I can't make the right sound

You look to be specific
And measure bullshit by the pound
If you don't try to be prolific
Then you might end up profound…

i was scrolling down my blog this morning, not really reading anything but eyes sort of skimming, and i realized that i overuse the word anyways. seriously, it jumped off the page more than any other word i wrote. i have filled my anyways quota, and yet i cant seem to stop using it. i didnt even realize i used it this much. thing is, i dont use it in spoken conversation... at least i dont think i do. :/

*Dance, Dance - Fall Out Boy

that's the difference between you and me

One Interpretation of Your Silence
By Bob Hicok

Probably I hurt your aesthetic feelings.
How I said a thing, how I held a lamp
to the night. These should walk without us--
words, the dark--is perhaps your view
of existence. I can't know,

you provide no puppet theater,
no tumbling routine for me to engage
in spirited discourse. That a face
comes with every body, and a body
with every name, makes it seem

like we're the same species,
when a cursory kissing shows how multiform
any one puckerer is. I'm sorry
I'm not the Wednesday or club sandwich
you expected, imagine my surprise

that you're not the world piece
I really do want, it's not just a thing
I say to the judges inspecting my cleavage.
If you'll try again I'll try again,
however trying we are. "To the puppies" is a phrase

I carry around in search of the context
in which shouting it will change everything.
If you have no such rip-chord, we really
shouldn't be seen together in public,
for you are the matter for which I

am the anti-matter, and as "Lost in Space"
showed us if it showed us nothing else,
it's not good for life when they meet,
and I want to do what is good for life,
because I want life to return the favor.

*What's the Difference - The Holloways

the world will never ever be the same and you're to blame

so today, in case any of you didn't know, is shakespeare's birthday. if he was alive he'd be turning something like 445. i forgot the exact age but it's around there. if any of you have not read up on shakespeare's life, you should. he was a really interesting guy. while he was alive, his play were considered the SPAM of literature. amazing how much can change once you die. now he's like the epitome of a perfect playwright. his plays are awesome too. some people complain they can't understand the language, but i dont think it's that different.

anyway, aside from writing a whole bunch of plays that are still read, studied, acted, and plagiarized today, he also invented a whole bunch of words - words that we use everyday. that might have something to do with the reason no one liked his plays back then. how seriously do you take someone if he makes up every other word he writes?? how hard would it be to make a play of made up words?? ok still pretty hard, but whatever. here's a list of some of the words shakespeare made up off the top of his head. he invented over 1700:

Accused - Addiction - Advertising - Amazement - Arouse - Assassination - Bandit - Bedroom - Blanket - Bump - Champion - Countless - Epileptic - Fixture - Flawed - Generous - Hint - Lonely - Mimic - Negotiate - Obscene - Premeditated - Rant - Summit - Torture - Varied - Worthless - Zany

some phrases he started are:

All that glitters is not gold (The Merchant of Venice)
All's well that ends well (title)
As good luck would have it (The Merry Wives of Windsor)
Be-all and the end-all (Macbeth)
Break the ice (The Taming of the Shrew)
Breathed his last (3 Henry VI)
Refuse to budge an inch (Measure for Measure / Taming of the Shrew)
Come what come may ("come what may") (Macbeth)
Devil incarnate (Titus Andronicus / Henry V)
Eaten me out of house and home (2 Henry IV)
Elbow room (King John; first attested 1540 according to Merriam-Webster)
Farewell to all my greatness (Henry VIII)
Faint hearted (I Henry VI)

you can read more here.

his stories are still being adapted to this day. lion king and lion king 2 are basically hamlet and romeo and juliet. lion king 1 1/2 is the story of the two guards from hamlet. i forget their names anddont feel like googling them. rosencratz and something else. she's the man is 12th night. 10 things i hate about you is taming the shrew. and this is not taking into account all the modern remakes of his plays like romeo and juliet with leonardo di caprio, hamlet with ethan hawke, o with julia stiles (remake of othello).

anyway, here's my favorite of his sonnets:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments.
Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

*Hey There Delilah - Plain White T's

you give until there's nothing to give

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone.
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.

Sing, and the hills will answer;
Sigh, it is lost on the air.
The echoes bound to a joyful sound,
But shrink form voicing care.

Rejoice, and men will seek you;
Grieve, and they turn and go.
They want full measure of all your pleasure,
But they do not need your woe.

Be glad, and your friends are many;
Be sad, and you lose them all.
There are none to decline your nectared wine,
But alone you must drink life's gall.

Feast, and your halls are crowded;
Fast, and the world goes by.
Succeed and give, and it helps you live,
But no man can help you die.

There is room in the halls of pleasure
For a long and lordly train,
But one by one we must all file on
Through the narrow aisles of pain.

~Ella Wheeler Wilcox

*Fall For Anything - The Script