happy birthday to me

can't blog now

Why? Why can't I blog now? Simple. I have a short list of very important tasks to complete by tomorrow morning.

First important task: Watch the Hawks beat Wisconsin on abc PrimeTime Football. Go Hawks.
Second important task: Finish creating my ADORABLE Grammar Guide newsletter for my Comp students. This issue (Vol. 1, Issue 1) is all about the comma. The title of my ADORABLE newsletter is ComPost...get it? Comp as in Composition and Post as in The Washington Post put together creates ComPost as in shit.
Next important task: Wash my sheets. And not because of sex. Just because it's time for a wash.
Fourth important task: Clean up my quasi-adorable apartment for Emily, Dan & Chad who are coming to visit me tomorrow! Yay! I'm so excited to see people who are normal and whom I love!

Yes, it's Saturday night and I'm not at Boomtown or the What's Up? Lounge "getting my party on." This is partly to do with the important task list, but mostly to do with how I spent my day today. I left quasi-adorable apartment around 9:40. I sat outside at the fountain until the library opened up at 10:00, spent the next eight hours downstairs at a work station, then left the library when the librarian kicked me out because the library closes at 6:00 on Saturdays and I was so engrossed in my ComPost that I had lost all track of time.

These are the reasons I'm not blogging now.

riddle me this

Are we really taking this guy seriously?


Cheers, lovey...I'm going to take my meticulously trimmed scruffy-beard and *rock out to my **hit song 1973.

*more like "sway aggressively"
**more like "pansy-ass ditty"

***

And now, from the guys that bring you Toothpaste For Dinner...

the balance of the universe (as it applies to my life in southern minnesota)

I'm sad today for various reasons, some that are frivolous and some that are legitimate (and although the legitimate reasons put the frivolous reasons into perspective, I'm still going to expound upon--nay, celebrate!--my frivilousness).

Ani DiFranco is in Iowa City tonight. I am not. Nuf said.
Ani DiFranco will smell the air on the banks of the Iowa River, dense with Midwestern field-must. I will not.
Iowa City will have their acoustic/rock/punk/freak Joneses rocked. I will not.
To re-iterate: Ani DiFranco--Hancher Auditorium in front of a beaming, tattooed, gyrating, and ardorous crowd. Me--Armstrong Hall room 210 in front of a Dell with a smudged-with-greasy-vending-machine-food finger-printed screen.

And according to RBR, tickets are still available. It's enough to put a person over the edge.

End of Pity Party; Population of 1; ME.
The universe has been re-balanced with the following news:

Tracy Kidder is coming to St. Peter on September 27. Words escape me...you wish! What a spectacular fucking way to spend my birthday weekend, hob-knobbing with (read: stalking) one of the pioneers of literary journalism! (I hate how cheesey exclamation points are...they turn just about any sentence into a corny declaration.)
Kidder will be discussing his new book at Gustavus Adolphus. I'll be toting my battered, jacketless, yellow-paged hardcover copy of Among Schoolchildren that I picked up on the third floor of Armstrong Hall in my first year in the program when the office of the School of Education was cleaning off their bookshelves and stacked a pile of books under a sign that read "Free."

This is like attending a John McPhee or Joan Didion reading. (With the exception of the small issue of shit in my pants. I would undoubtedly shit in my pants if Didion came to St. Peter.) I'll be taking my camera and my most glassy-eyed swoon for when I get my first glimpse of him at the podium.

Cut My Hair

Cut my hair, I say to Dad as I scoop it up then let it unfold down my back, and he says, But it’s so beautiful. He pumps the chair and swivels me around to face the mirror, scissors, clips and razors lined up below it and shining like a surgeon’s spread under fluorescent lights.

His nose whistles like it always does when he’s concentrating, holding a breath that finds an escape, visualizing a style and the strokes it would take. His eyes narrow and his shoulders hunch like they always do, but this time he doesn’t tie the beautician’s cape around me. He collects my hair between his palms – like praying but inverted – releases it slowly in a narrow curtain and says, But it’s so thick.

I’ve had my hair in a bowl cut above my ears, all straight and severe against baby-fat cheeks; I’ve had it chin-length and permed into penny-sized curls; I’ve had it bobbed, weaved with extensions for senior prom, layered, shagged, pixied, cotton-candy pink, and now, for the second time, it’s nearing my ass. It reached my waistline last year because I hadn’t seen Dad in awhile. When he finally came to visit, he cut it in the hotel room and ten inches was all either of us was ready to lose. Ten inches tied with a rubber band at one end. Ten inches which is now snake-coiled into a one-gallon Ziploc, dated, and stashed in his drawer of my ponytails, each a different length, each with a different date. (Instead of lines on a doorframe, my childhood is recorded in haircuts.)

But my hair has grown back and is too long and I tell myself, I’ll go short, a bob with a slope, more like a wedge, but I’m having trouble committing so when I tell him to cut my hair and he sighs what a shame, I change my mind because he’ll miss it.

I’ll miss it. I’ll miss hearing that it’s beautiful, my only feature said to be beautiful. My distinguishing feature. People say, She’s the one with the long, coppery hair. Men twist it to turn me on. They weave it into their hands, break it apart between fingers and thread it over their palms in a long, gentle pull and if I cut it I could lose the chill that remains, the tingle left like expectant breath on the top of my spine.

My unrequited-love-with-benefits from the summer of freshman year in college said, I love girls with long hair. He loved to run his fingers through it.

We were on his parents’ porch when he said it, his t-shirt hugging his body in the humid air – Atlas shoulders and chest – heavy air that seemed to make us swell in our clothes. Moths hurled themselves into the light above his head as moths tend to do, made an audible plink in the silence between us, ricocheted backward into the dark and flung themselves again into the flame, as moths tend to do.

My hair was short then. Parted down the middle and wrapped in two tiny buns on the top of my head. So tight I could feel the pull at my roots.

We talked about us. He’d be going back to Ames, me to Iowa City when school started up again. What he didn’t say was, You’re not enough for a long-distance thing for me. What I didn’t say was, You are.

I saw him last summer, ­­­­five summers after what could have been our summer, my hair ending somewhere between my eleventh and twelfth ribs.

It’s great to see you, he said and it felt genuine. Wow, your hair is so long, he said.

I smiled and wrapped it up, afraid he’d think it was for him. Afraid he’d want to run his fingers through it. I could only hurl myself into that flame so many times.

Not that long, I said.

***

It looks healthy, Dad says. What have you been using?
I don’t know, I say. Something organic.
It grows so fast, he says.
I know, I say. Will you cut my hair now?

Find a picture of what you want, he says. But I don’t think I’m quite ready yet because he gathers my hair into a ponytail and I feel the pressure on my scalp, the long, gentle pull, the tingle.

alternate definitions for life

writher
verb/adverb hybrid; informal, slang
1) a combination of the roots writhe (to twist, as in pain, struggle, or embarassment) and rather (in a measure, to a certain extent, somewhat)
2) a fairly painful and/or awkward-looking contortion of the body in which it's apparent that the performer is not fully committed to its execution

Watching Britney Spears writher through her big comeback perfomance at the MTV Awards was an ironic fall from grace.

what i'm digging

feist and nina simone

The Ecstasy of St. Theresa by Bernini and stove top stuffing

What I'm NOT digging:

When you happen across some really awesome music from some really obscure source and you spend a few months bonding with the music and basking in the exclusivity of it all and then you begin hearing the music on iPod commercials that run at least twice every half hour on cable and the more you hear the song the less special it feels. I hate that.

metaphor mongering

The poet Beth Ann Fennelly visited MSU yesterday as part of our Good Thunder series. At her Craft Talk at 3:00, she discussed metaphors, in great detail, and asked us to complete the following: death is____________.

The proverbial ball has been rolling ever since.

death is like a metaphor; nobody can agree on what it means
death is like teaching comp; you know it's coming but are never quite prepared
death is like waiting for coffee; it takes a long time to brew then just tastes like shit anyway
death is a school picture; evidence of your existence

i'll save you the carnage i wish someone had saved me

So, I wake up in the morning from a peaceful night's rest (a night that included a put-a-smile-on-your-face dream about T in Kato cleaning my apartment with me), and I go about my morning routine practically whistling and ready to embrace the day ahead. I make some pomegranate tea, plug in to my ear buds, and begin the walk to campus whispering along with Nina Simone, feeling a little funky and like I got a bit of soul.

I get to the crosswalk at Stadium and Warren and approach an oldish man passing out pamphlets. The man is grey and weathered. He's wearing jeans that sag around his waist but are tight from thigh to ankle. The flannel jacket and feed hat propped high on his head give him away. He's a farmer. When I get close enough I can see the deep lines in his face, and it's only at this intimate distance that I feel a little sorry for him. A good ole country boy, conservative, maybe a little ignorant, but empassioned enough to be here. In an instant I wonder if he is sacrificing a day in the field or postponing a shipment of milk to be standing at the edge of campus distributing whatever it is that he feels is so important to distribute.

I take the pamphlet from him and actually say, "Thank you" as though I'm grateful for his service. As though whatever he's selling I'm interested in buying. Then I open the god damned, tri-fold leaflet. Fetuses, brown and mangled. Aborted babies in full, sharp color. An infuriatingly veiled title at the top. Threats of hell-fire and damnation at the bottom. Needless to say, this put a mother fucking wrench in my swell day. I take little solace in the fact that when I throw my pamphlet away, a mere twelve steps or so from where I acquired it, I throw it on top of at least fifty others. Fifty other people who weren't buying what that guy was selling. Propaganda.

I will save you the carnage. Although the pictures of fetuses have been flashing through my mind at random and usually inappropriate times throughout the day, I will not post a picture to this blog. Although a group of pro-lifers are stationed in the center of the campus mall with six-foot posters of bloody, underdeveloped babies in a shock-and-awe campaign, I will not post the photos that would instantly convey my frustration and outrage here.

light my fire

For reasons unknown even to myself, I find this man

















irresistable. He's got that visceral, intangible, carnal, I am man quality that gives me pause--lilting pause. Pure science; not attraction but reaction. Something about him makes something in me respond in some kind of way that's all impulse, no rationale. I have no control--which of course just lends itself to that I want to be taken tone of the romantic narrative--and no want for it.

Let's take a closer look. His eyelashes are white, which usually gives me the creeps. His hair, red, should be an automatic turn-off, for I don't want pale, freckle-filled, carrot-topped chillen running around. He's a musician which is always a concern what with the late nights, groupies, and heavy drinking and/or drug abuse. He's not particularly attractive, per se.

But.
He's dark













and that's hot. He's also light
















Fucking A.

And check out the bulge:










the fidelity:



















the axe:











In short, I long for this man (one Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age), this unattainable Zeus of metal thunderclouds, mainly, I think, because he makes me react as woman.
It seems that's all I need.

ask yourself

I played the song What? by Tribe Called Quest for my students and asked them to come up with their own what lists. Here are some of mine.

what’s a white girl like me who happens to like the Tribe?
what’s the point of music if you neglect the vibe?
what's a Tribe album without a funky beat?
what's the fun in dancing if their aren't four feet?
what is the tango without the sex?
what's the chance you'll have it if you don't learn the steps?
Q: what's bill clinton without hillary?
A: what's the definition of: reciprocity.
what is a bong if it hasn't got the water?
what is a writer if she hasn't got the fodder?
every woman alive is another woman's daughter
What's Today without Matt Lauer?
what's Sarah Silverman without a little raunch?
what is the seashell if not the conch?
what's a fat man without a double-chin?
what's Tom Collins without the gin?
what's Maroon 5 without Adam Levine?
what's The Color Purple without the final scene?
(you know, when the family finally reunites)
what is Alice Walker without a pen to write?
what's SNL without Lorne Michaels?
what's RAGBRAI without bicycles?
what's Los Angeles without film sets?
(not to mention big money, big houses, big breasts)
what is the x-files without conspiracy?
what's sexual tension without Duchoveny?
what happens to Charlotte if you take her web away?
what’s the first amendment if we don’t have equal say?
what good is a story if it doesn’t have an ending?
why break a rule when there’s room for bending?
what is a smoothie without the blender blades?
what’s a BLT without the mayonnaise?
what’s an education without putting in the work?
what’s a grocery store without a clerk?
what’s a PhD without a plaque on the wall?
what’s a base jump without a free-fall?
what is a what if you don't care to know?
the quest for knowledge should reside in the soul.

Atomic Alarm Clock Blues

(Dear reader: impose your own sweet steel guitar lick to the following lyrics and add your best bluesy melody)

got me a fancy alarm clock
that til now's been workin fine
if I had a place to be
you know I'd be there on time

never adjusted for daylight savings
cuz it set itself every night
the box called it atomic
I called it outta sight

but on a dewey sunday mornin
when the world was on un-wind
my clock had lost an hour
and I nearly lost my mind

you know I'm an on-time type of gal
I like pun-tu-al-i-ty
so now I'm stuck with the blues
of un-re-li-a-bil-i-ty

I got the
a - tom - ic
alarm clock blues
--baby, baby---
the
a - tom - ic
alarm clock blues