Kevin and I should get coffee sometime. His line of thinking when he’s on a plane….well. I have been there. A lot. Maybe I shouldn’t proselytize against Mormonism, but I guess until Mormonism stops proselytizing and funding ad campaigns…it’s really only fair.
http://www.iamanexmormon.com/2011/07/my-name-is-kevin-millet-and-im-an-ex-mormon/
October 27, 2011
Categories: I sweat the small stuff, Only The Half of It.
February 17, 2011
It’s important to remember that nobody really gives a fuck about anyone but themselves. And joy is fleeting though life is not.
Categories: I sweat the small stuff, Only The Half of It.
February 3, 2011
Originally posted on the other ‘that which must not be named’ site, July 2010:
I search for the cheapest ‘school supplies,’ textbooks, online and sweat (’cause it finally turned summer in Pullman). That’s how and summer and school prep now. Here’s how it went, or rather, ‘whint’ 18 years ago.
July 29, 1992
Today at siwwmy lesons we jump in the five feet
agen and I just love it.
And allso to day I play whith a frend and then I whint to town.
And I got a beauty and the beast Book pag
and a beauty and the Beast luch box and some
pensels and pensel sharpener and some
reraser to go on the end of my pensels.
Oh and I got a new Book its called Karen’s little whitch.
Page 9 – end of entry
I can’t wait to see when I learn that not every ‘w’ word has an ‘h’ to go along with it. Looks like I was pretty impressed by the discovery though. Who whouldn’t be?
I remember learning to dive, it was pretty awesome. So was Beauty and the Beast. I watched it daily for a while, or, at least any time I got to choose a movie that’s what it was. (I don’t think my Mom would’ve let me watch a movie every day) As I recall, I also get a Beauty and the Beast shirt, pink with Belle on it in her yellow/gold ballgown, and wear it the first day of second grade.
It’s weird to realize, I don’t even go to the first day of class these days.
Categories: I sweat the small stuff, Old Journal Entries.
February 3, 2011
Why do you write?
The first time I was asked this, I was simultaneously given an assignment to make a sort of mini art project out of it. Nothing elaborate, but something to make our answer more physical. I used fancy picturesque watercolor paper, glue, glitter, fake mini daisies and a pen with green glittery ink.
With the glue I wrote in cursive, “E—-”. This is the signature-symbol-initials that I’d created after finding out artists did that and after many, many journals and notebooks and poems, I was getting tired of writing out @!@#$%&*&%$#@!. Seriously, writing checks is a pain. It takes a long time and barely fits in the designated line.
With the green glittery ink I wrote, “When you’re alone/ writing is the friend that is always/ there.” I was a morose kid.
I was fifteen. (Whoa, ten years ago now.) I didn’t know it then but the depression that had been brewing and growing would stab its presence in my life within the year that I have still not gotten rid of. (Whoa, ten years now.) I didn’t try any stabbing on myself until February 2007. I didn’t know then that the people and teammates especially, that seemed like they could be my friends, really were, and some still are. It took graduating, years apart and becoming even more of a misfit strictly speaking, to realize these friendships. I just couldn’t believe that anyone would like me.
I still wrestle with that too, and as I’ve just made abundantly clear, it’s quite juvenile of me. We’ll blame MDD, not lack of maturity in the immediate moment. Ha. Mental bartering, awesome.
I often wonder, in my studies and battles, if my depression was a combination of learned behavior and social structures telling me how weird I was, that I was to be ashamed of a lot of the things I did intuitively, naturally, side note women as second class citizens, plus good ole fashioned puberty hormones berserk, added up past stress to distress that lasted so long that my neurons forgot how, or became unable to maintain the right levels of dopamine and sometimes serotonin too.
Because to say depression is entirely environmental is incorrect—or if it is correct, this society is way too fucked up to ever be fixed enough to take me off my medication—but to say depression is entirely biological is also, incorrect. If you misuse and overuse your back, or knees, they break and will never work right again and will only operate to functioning with medical assistance. From the clusterfuck smattering of information I’ve accrued, compiled, and subjectively deciphered over the last 8-ish years it would appear the human psyche is no different.
So in the beginning, I wrote. My psyche needed a break, a safe place. I had to find a place where I could be completely me, or as much me as I was capable of articulating, and writing was it. And when I was alone, I didn’t have to be alone, because I was in my head with stories, beautiful images and arrangement of words, and worlds somehow resolved with all that I was supposed to and wanted to be, with who I insuppressibly was. No matter how hard we tried to suppress it. And we tried.
I think why I write now is a fluid thing. It sounds like a cop-out to my own assignment, but as I think of all the other times I was asked why I write, formal assignments, class discussions, and in informal situations; there are a lot of evolving answers. For example, I’d forgotten to remember how in love with poetry I had been for so many years until I wrote my Writer Biography assignment for English 352, a poetry writing class. And I remember thinking as I finished writing it, and for most of the semester, ‘How the hell could I have forgotten that?’ This was Spring Semester 2009.
So maybe now I write to remember. I write to process. I write because I love, love, love, stories, in all their forms. One of my best friends noted that when I talked about Liverpool, it wasn’t a straightforward narrative of this happened, then this. It was interlocking stories that focused on people,
“One day we went to the International Slavery Museum and right next to it is the Tate Museum and there is also one in London. My new friend Frisbee is minoring in art and knew all about it so I went with her and loved it.
That’s why I went to the Tate museum in London and stayed in there so long, I just missed getting to see a Shakespeare play in the Globe. I was SO disappointed. I was drinking in the Globe Bar when Chip and Samba came out from the play and we spent the next couple of hours indulging on fine food and booze.
I was drinking Guinness of course. It is so good that it is hard for me to enjoy it here back in the states. But this guy I met from Northern Ireland said it was crap compared to it on the original island. He is into theater and there was this performing art show one evening at the Tate in Liverpool…”
And on, and on I could go.
Currently, I am demonstrating another reason I write, to understand myself. I also enjoy writing. I love the sound of typing. I love the physical feel of the pen in hand, pressure on my middle finger that’s created a bulge of a callous on it. My favorite pens are judged on how they feel gliding along the paper. I especially like scratchy ones, they make me think sexy. It is why the metal tip quill pen I got from the Globe Theatre gift shop is SO awesome…
I write because I can’t help myself. I ask the question not because teachers and professors did, but because I have to cultivate love, no matter how strong or loyal, because it will die. It cannot exist on its own, not any kind of love. Also because love is not necessarily logical and it rarely pays the bills, yet if all our bills are paid and we have no love, what good is that?
I write because when I’m
alone,
writing is the friend that is always
there.
And my love keeps me alive.
In honor of my first annual entry on why I write, (so at least once a year I’ll stop and think about it, remember, and know) I am sharing one of my very old poems. It asks a similar question, why do I run?
Warning: just because a person writes or wrote a lot of poetry, does not make it good poetry. Enjoy!
Why I Run
You run, and you run far
run, run, run
Somewhere in the middle you think, “Hey I like this!
This is fun.”
You overcome your body
Saying, “Quit, quit, quit.”
To those thoughts, you won’t admit
Knowing you beat it
knowing you won
is what makes the fun
So whether you come in first or twentieth place
it’s the strength and the freedom,
of finishing the race.
Written September 1, 1999
*Originally posted May 18, 2010
Categories: Uncategorized.
February 3, 2011
Because the first one wasn’t long enough.
Actually it’s because I broke the most important rule of good writing that I tell the students I tutor over, and over again. The most important part is answering the assignment. A perfectly written paper that does not answer or fulfill the assignment will not get a good grade.
Well, I misplaced my own writing prompt and just jumped ‘write’ in! I quite thoroughly covered the history that makes the current ‘why’ answer, but I forgot to address who I’m writing to/for. Audience is the same as assignment. Shame on this tutor!
Anyway.
I don’t want to write for academics, though I appreciate their existence, and feel they are necessary regardless of ridiculously elitist they’ve become. I want to reach the more everyday person, matter to the general populous. I want to write something I would’ve read as a highschooler, coach, full time retail or factory worker. I want to write something that more than just other English majors/grad students/professors would enjoy and connect to while reading.
My progression as a writer has been to just write, then to write well and matter, then I realized that if it didn’t matter to me than it probably wouldn’t be good. So I write first for myself in the hopes that it will be something that connects with other people. If it only works for a select few, it’s okay, still a success. But if I can create something that would make my working 21-year-old self feel more alive, then I’ve become great.
The trouble is, who is reading anymore? I’ve been a rare, loves to read person, so I sought it out. I’d check books out from the library and sometimes even buy them. The general populous doesn’t do that so much. What does seem to get read/accessed is the Internet. Blogs, sites, news, shorts, all look at from day to day between Facebook or Myspace or something of the like.
So here I am. Writing. We’ll see how it goes.
*Originally Posted May 20, 2010
Categories: Uncategorized.
February 3, 2011
Originally for the ‘other’ website, published June 2010:
I recently posted Resume of Life, and when I got a spammer comment that was promoting the Dental Hygenist profession, I approved it. I found it perfectly, happy, ironic–given the content.
Most spammers are obvious; no I don’t want a bigger, longer penis with porn to match from your paragraph of web links and Russian username. But some actually try. Some try copying and pasted a comment already posted by someone you have already given the okay-to-go to.
The ones that win me over though, are the carefully phrased like the signing of a yearbook–but not just any yearbook. They sound like what you write when you joined a circle of people passing yearbooks around to sign that you did actually know, but along the way get handed two or three individuals’ yearbooks that you don’t actually know, but don’t want to be rude.
“Have a great summer!” <3 / Jenni
“See you next year!” -Joe
Stay cool this summer -Miranda
Have a rockin’ summer! Peace, Drew
etc
etc
etc
But just like when you know they barely know you, or don’t even know you at all, you still pretty awesome with lots of signatures. You feel important. So on the occasion that the ‘have a great summer’ of the blog/site comment spammers, actually kind of match up to the posting (and are not body-part enhancers/women power through porn in origin) I shall continue to approve them.
So thanks federal grants, “It’s posts like this that keep me coming back and checking this site regularly, thanks for the info!”
Loraine, “Arrg, my mouse got jammed. What I was about to say, was that this is a terrific post. Very insightful and informative at the same time.”
and of course, dental hygienist “nice post. thanks.”
I’m delighted you are regular and informed now. Sorry to hear about your probably dead mouse, but glad you got to get a word in anyways. And to Dental Hygienists everywhere, somehow that post was for just for you–especially if you are one of the ones that puts chapstick on the patient’s lips while they are mid-bracket change and stuck in the ‘smile-maker’.
It is nice. And your welcome.
Categories: I sweat the small stuff.
February 3, 2011
This word was explained as derogatory and perpetuating inequality, by a man who is quite possibly incapable of treating anyone with equality, let alone me, let alone a significant other, let alone women in general.
So fuck that shit. Half the time people don’t know what you mean at first when you say server.
I am very much a believer in the power and significance of words; I’m a poet. But the words were created to symbolize and stand for something. I am learning that it is much more often a pretentious thing to focus on saying everything PC, a way to say, “I’m better than you,” rather than do any good in the world.
One particular pretentious aspiring professor proved (and at least one other one too, come to think of it) that it is possible to annihilate all that the words are suppose to mean.
Which is good, in a way. For a while there, I let a person make me think that calling it waitressing made it seem unimportant, a ‘non-real’ job, if you will. But I’ve stolen the meaning back. Now waitressing retains its glamorous in its earthy day to day existence. I remember being somewhere between 17 and 19-years-old when I first thought it would be fun. And it is.
Categories: I sweat the small stuff.
February 3, 2011
If Rosalynn Carter can keep fighting for 39 years, then I think I can too. That means I’ll live to at least 64 unless taken by some other health issue. And this is the second move I’ve seen for fighting the stigma. Thank you Ms. Carter! Also, she’s right, here’s at least one of Jon’s viewer that is mentally ill and currently I am recovered.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-may-4-2010/rosalynn-carter
Categories: Only The Half of It.