mystic_savage

...and fortunately, I didn't. Our first meeting was inconsequential. He did show some interest in my career -- I wish I could say it was flagging, but it had never gotten far enough up the pole to even wave a little bit at that point. He gave me audition tips that I never used: tap dance when you're doing the Joan of Arc speech, Virginia...it'll get their attention. And: never be afraid to show up for a Dove commercial tryout wearing whiteface. I don't know if he'd ever done those things or if he was just working me; he was a gentle man but had a great sense of humor, very wry. Not obvious at all really.

That first meeting, I was star-struck and clumsy and never made it out of that cursed red chair. Which was good, because my knees were so unsteady I'd just have fallen right back down again. In subsequent meetings, I got to know him well enough at Syndi's -- apparently she was a god-daughter or something like that. Apparently he'd just show up at her window and bring her lollipops. Dick Van Dyke. That was the only celebrity I ever got to know well enough to have an actual conversation with about something other than their work or show business. We talked about religion a bit, avoided politics. He despised it that I didn't vote. I told him I had voted twice, once for Mondale and once for Dukakis, and it hadn't worked. Not voting seemed to work better because then I didn't have to care.

I always think of him at this time of year because the second time he came to Syndi's it was December 13th and he had two poppyseed muffins in hand, which magically became three 2/3rds poppyseed muffins when he saw that I was over. He stuck a candle in one and sang happy birthday to us, and we said it wasn't our birthday. It was his though. And he made a wish and blew out the candle. I don't know if his wish ever came true, but I did kiss him that night, and he seemed to like it. It's mid-December again now and he'd be...gosh, I guess he'd be in his late 70's or early 80's now. Wow. Hope he's still doing well wherever he is. Love you Dick.

I am a blind hamster on a creaky wheel.
I am the weight at the bottom of a sack of drowning kittens.
I am your overdue taxes with thirteen attachments and nine different forms.

My life is mud.
It is a paradise for sickly toads and preying swampthings.
I slog through it like, I dunno, like a nine hundred pound woman climbing a flight of stairs.

What do I want?

Everything.

Ocean sounds echoing off the walls of my sanctuary.
Soft cushions topping heaps of treasure.
Hot tea in a rainstorm.
Lovers from here to Mazatlan.
Seven angelic children singing like bells at Christmas.

I want to stay young.
I want to be young, younger than I've ever been --

I want straight shoulders
and hairless skin
and white teeth
and perfect eyesight.

The grace of a dancer.
The vision of a priest.
The life of someone starting over,
wisdom remembered, energy building,
all in love with skylines and jet trails.

Mostly, I want your eyes
meeting mine
and telling me
I'm not alone in this.

Notice me -- and show me what joy is.

Love me, as much as I love you.

I just did my 10 minute creative exercise for the day, which gave me this.

Warning:  lots of the f word.  Also warning:  you can hear the twang.

( One last f-- )

In yesterday's writing marathon we did a chain writing exercise, wherein the last word of one sentence becomes the first word of the following sentence.  I think we did this one for 30 minutes.  Here's the result.

Writing is the last word.

Word to your mother.  Mother picks up a lighter and fumbles in her purse for a cigarette.  Cigarettes aren't good for you, she's said, and on the commercial people sing "we mind very much if you smoke".  Smoke curls up from her hand in a lazy ribbon around her face.  Face it:  you want to smoke too.  To try smoking just once.  

Once you went behind the haybales behind the archery practice field and thought you might try a cigarette with Shelley Beers.  Beer cans littered the area behind the hay bales--someone had been there before you.  You waited with a quickening heart, but before she could pass you the cig a hand fell on your shoulder.  "Shoulder you the responsibility" you heard in your mind.  "Mind your step" said the counselor who caught you and her voice was disappointed.  Disappointed was the teme for the day---from your counselor, your parents, evenyour brother.

"Brother, don't smoke that," you hear from a different time in your past.  Past that voice is a grey street climbing out of a fog bank.  Banking left your memory veers from  cigarettest o pot now, a green plant someone has taught you to call "kind".  Kind of a joke that, an obvious one.  One day you are hacking on rough smoke and the net you find the world far to harsh without it. It becomes how you breathe, how you see, how you touch people, kindly, gently, through a cloud, all rough edges blurred.  Blurred, too, are the expectations.  Expectations are too sharp, take up too much room here.  Here you are soft-voiced, velvet-footed, present -- you are without pain.  Panes filter the light into an amber benevolence and sound mutes itself into soft music.  Music means so much more than it used to, every word significant.  Significant is the fact that you have no one to speak to.  Two of your friends have confronted you, come and gone, and you have barely heard them.  "Them" is a construct you examine, like "us" -- but as the amber afternoons glide by, more and more join "them" and "us" dwindles to almost nothing.  Nothing is worth this, you think and you stop using and try to rejoin the world.  World-weary in a day, or if not a day a week, you stumble into whatever is next.  Next stop, Wonderland.  Wonderland without Alice, or the white rabbit, or the simple escape of saying "you're just a dream".  Dream on, little princess, and put your crown aside and tiptoe away.  A way to find yourself somewhere else, on a path, with or without other people.  People are a mixed bag.  Bag those rabbits and toss them into the root celler with all theother rejected throughts.  Thoughts cross your brain every now and then, but you're not arrogant enough to call that thinking.  Thinking is for other people, like your brother, who is in law school.  School is over for you and you still don't know where to be.  Be here, whispers something inside of you.  You listen.  Listen harder.  Harder than a baby bid pecking is way through a shell you listen.  Listen to the voice that says:  be here, be now.

(sigh)

A three-day weekend. Did I write? Barely. Did I go out? Once. For coffee. And a walk. Did I read any good books? No. See any good movies? One. So what *did* I do? Other than lay around and cough up phlegm and moan a lot?

Computer games, people. Lots and lots and lots of computer games. Dumb, repetitive ones. I wasn't even having fun, but at the end of the game it says "Play Again" and you click. Must have popped a zillion bubbles. Again: loser.

(sigh)

The kids got up early today -- Sar woke up at 5:30 & we lounged in bed for an hour before Penny woke up. I asked him to get me a tissue and he pointed his hand across the room and said "I'm using the Force." "Good," I said. "If that doesn't work, will you get out of bed and just go get the tissue?" He pointed both hands at the box and said "I'm using two Forces." Eventually, I got my own tissue.

Penny has been super cuddly today and has demonstrated the kind of grace not often found in kids. She and Sar got into an argument and Sar kicked her. I was putting Sar in time out until he apologized, and he swore he'd never apologize. I told him that it was going to be a tough day then, because I wouldn't let it go until he did. And Penny said, "Mom, I'm ready to let it go." Once Penny was over it, Sar had no problem apologizing.

So: it's not yet 9 and we've been up for three hours. Karen takes the kids at 9 and Kevin at 2, so I have the day to myself until dinner. I started the rewrite of Dear Cruel World this weekend. Have found a voice that works and am gaining some ground on the second draft. (Need a better title of course. But there's time for that later.) Am going to shower, head out for coffee & do some free writing, then come back and work on it today.

Still feeling antisocial, but am going to meet someone after work for an hour to do freewriting. It's been too long since I've written in a spiral notebook, longhand, whatever the hell I want to write.

Just got back from a three hour marathon writing session at Duwamish.  All free-writing, 10, 15 and 20 minute sessions.  Wrote nothing worth re-posting, but still had a good time.  What it brought up for me:  how long it's been since I've done any creative writing (other than updating my status on Facebook), why I started writing in the first place, the history of moving from dreaming of writing for a living to writing as loving, and then the abandonment of even that, lately, for other things.  Yes, my ideal life still includes time to write every day, to dream in words and images and have someone read them.  But my real life doesn't have time for that.  In my real life, watching Torchwood supercedes creating my own stories, and when I think about what I want to say to the world, about adding to what is out there, I have to admit that I can't think of anything I can say that isn't already being said, better, more essentially, more skillfully by someone else.  Why would I want to clutter up the world with my mediocre stuff?

And yet:  it's not all mediocre.  I think "Everything I Know About Math" was a wonderful story & I'm glad it got published.  I think there may be potential for DCW, yes, even now, even with all its schmaltz.  Hell, there may even be hope for Absurdities if I ever finish and polish it.  My writing itself -- some of those children deserve to see daylight, even if they're scrawny and underfed.  I'm so used to killing things at birth.  What if I actually nurtured them?

October 15 is Blog Action Day. The topic is poverty.

Click on the image to get more info:



Let me know if you register. I'd like to read what y'all might write about...

V.

Dimby is a 46 year old rogue gnome with +4 powers of burlesque.  She is a stripper/seductress/thief with a very short attention span.  Anything shiny attracts her attention and she is always cheerful.  "Sad" for Dimby is a 20 second flash (as far as anyone knows).  She's crafty but not terribly intelligent. 

The Demise of Poetry 

Today I learned of a magazine
whose editor decided that poetry
“takes up too much space.”  
Does poetry take too much space
in our world? If so,
let’s do away with art and apple trees,
delete the delight of seasons,
expunge eagles and elephants,
sounds of trumpets and thunder,
taste of ripe strawberries and raw sex
on the tongue. Let’s roll back the oceans,
eliminate the clean beauty
of mathematics or a well-run factory,
erase the moon, take back the galaxy,
bow out of the entire universe
and start over without mouths,
without eyes, ears, stomachs or hearts,
minus minds or the ability to speak.
We’ll have space everywhere
and nowhere to go. Never mind.
Poetry has always crept into the corners
of the world, captured silence itself,
waiting until the world tires
of making sounds without meaning.

Another poem I love.  By Mom, aka Maril Crabtree:

I'm going to be recording more old poems here as a way of preserving them (again).  I'll stick them back a few days so you don't have your friends page flooded with them, but if you want to read them, click on the poetry tag.

This poem was written by my mom, Maril Crabtree.  I love it and want to share it.  She owns the copyright but I doubt she'll sue me. 

( The poem )
Her poetry has won first place in contests sponsored both in Kansas and Missouri. 

And this is me, here: (through gritted teeth) totally. not. jealous.

omnifarious asked this question & I found it so history-provoking that I wanted to share my answer on this journal:


That was the beginning, followed by every possible opportunity in school to substitute a creative story for an essay when doing homework, the first attempt to write a novel (7th grade), involvement in my school newsletter (8th grade) and high school literary magazine (9th - 12th), a summer of writing 4 hours a day (age 19), working on my college newspaper and yearbook (ages 19-21), reading Writing Down the Bones when I was 22 and etc. 

How about you?  When did you start writing?  How?  What does it mean to you?

The Big Fish interview -- kind of a flop.  (get the fish pun did you?)

They went with a couple of other candidates for this position, but I knew they would as soon as I'd left the building.  Nothing specific was a tip-off, but as the interview went on I could tell the position and I wouldn't be such a great match.  The job title:  receptionist.  The job duties:  admin assist level work.  They needed "a mind-reader" who had "a sense of urgency".  This is code for the fact that whoever's in this position will be working with someone difficult and demanding. 

I like this job well enough -- the job I have here at Harborview.  It's a bit of a backwater job.  There are six or seven things I do that matter to anyone and beyond that, not a lot of stuff to keep me busy.  I really like Pete, the guy who was a Secretary Senior for three weeks and is now acting as Manager of the department.  Today I'm a bit busier than usual because there is a faculty candidate to show around and a lunch being delivered.  I'll do another mail run in the afternoon and take some lab coats down to the laundry.  If Pete finishes the on call schedule early enough in the day I'll enter it online, being super careful not to make any mistakes, and I'll post it downstairs in the OR.  And at some point I'll check and see if there are evaluations of the residents that I can enter on a spreadsheet.  But honestly, this job is about 4-5 hours of work on any given day and the rest of the time is spent "organizing" (eg, cleaning out the supply closet; shredding stuff; etc).  I'm trying not to be depressed to find myself yet again rudderless in the work world.  (sigh).  I just have no ambition.  Zero.

I'll be moving in with Karen and James in August or September -- as soon as they get a wall built in the downstairs area to make a room.  I'll be a block away from the kids and Kevin, and Karen is our primary childcare provider after school, so it's very convenient.  Karen and James have two kids now--Sam, age 5, and Tera, who just turned 1.  They also have step-daughters who visit for long weekends--Natalie is 11 or 12 and Naomi is 8 or 9.  So there's a lot going on there all the time.  But if there is a wall, and a door that closes, I can make it my own.    I'm half dreading/half anticipating the move.

Writing -- haven't done a lot of it lately, but have been feeling the pull to.  Soon. 

Soon.

I've authored a gadget on iGoogle called Pen and Notebook.  It's a writing prompt, updated daily. Link to it here.

  

I talk to my Dad on the phone and I say, "happiness is an illusion."  He says that depression is an illusion too.
"Choose your illusion," he says.  I tell him it should be the title of his next book.

Andrew visited this weekend.  He watches me roll up all the windows and turn on the air conditioner.  "Why don't you just send half of your money straight to Iraq?" he says.  I tell him I'm hypersensitive to noise.  That I need the windows rolled up because I can't concentrate on driving when I'm distracted by the outside.

He says I should practice zen.  I try to tell him I'm post-buddhist, but there is no "been there, done that" in zen.

I'm fighting with myself again, erupting all the time, yelling at my kids, baring my teeth.  Everything irritates me. 

I've gotten in touch with an old high school friend through Facebook.  She's in recovery for cocaine addiction and alcoholism. She's been through treatment for schizophrenia. Now, she works as a trainer for the Red Cross.  She volunteers on burn victim units. She's Christian--has been saved by God.

Sometimes your illusions choose you.

Hi all,

One year ago Dua Khalil was stoned to death in an honor killing in Iraq.  When the video of the stoning made its way around the internet, producer/writer Joss Whedon had a strong response, the full text of which is here.  In his text, he called for action:

"... it's no longer enough to be a decent person. It's no longer enough to shake our heads and make concerned grimaces at the news. True enlightened activism is the only thing that can save humanity from itself. I've always had a bent towards apocalyptic fiction, and I'm beginning to understand why. I look and I see the earth in flames. Her face was nothing but red."

Nothing But Red, out today on lulu.com, is one response to that call.  It's an anthology of pieces written in response to the killing of Dua Khalil and addressing some of the issues brought to light in the piece by Joss Whedon.  I have a story in that anthology, and I'm writing today in the hope that you will buy a copy or two.  All proceeds go to Equality Now, a group that works to alleviate violence against women all over the world.

You can find out more about the project and read contributor biographies here: http://nothingbutred.wordpress.com/

You can download or order a trade paperback version of the book here:  http://stores.lulu.com/nothingbutred

Please spread the word widely.

the Times ended up going another direction -- hired an internal candidate for this position, which speaks well of them I think.  Not that they didn't hire me, but that they did advance someone internally.

But I'm still kind of bummed about it.

So:  I went ahead and set up an interview for the customer service job at Big Fish.  Which I could get really excited about if it paid more than 13.50 an hour.  Aw what the heck -- maybe I'll get excited about it anyway.

On an unambivalently positive note, I got the page proofs for my Nothing But Red story & they  look great.  Or no...I guess that's not unambivalently positive either, given that the anthology is inspired by the deah of D'ua Khalil.

Haven't felt terribly much like freedom yet, but I'm really looking forward to the trip to Vancouver on Wednesday.  Been hanging out at the house, mostly, reading mallie_kite's awesome story-in-progress.  It's the kind of novel I always feel a little guilty reading because it's a good story in English with traditional punctuation, but I'd probably buy it new on impulse and then be unable to put it down until I finished.  Hoping to get time to rewrite DCW this month.  May post a few chapters under the nanowrimo filter, so opt in if you'd like (or out).  Just be aware that the book deals with "adult" themes and uses "adult" language and is fairly violent in places.  Have been very, very sleepy and had a little baby bit of a cold this weekend, so have slept as much as possible and had strange dreams.  In between dreams, have been up and folding (9 loads) of laundry, doing dishes, working out more divorce details with Kevin.  (Note how I didn't even write "sigh" in parentheses after that last sentence although I really, really wanted to). 

Tomorrow and Tuesday, I have my kids all day; Tara (8 months) and Sam (4 years) will be joining us for a total of five hours tomorrow.  This will bring our childcare costs down to about half this week.  Will need to start getting serious about signing up with temp agencies if I don't get the job I interviewed for last week.  Any recommendations of good temp agencies by my seattle homies?  I have solid clerical skills...nothing fancy, but the standard computer competence and quick & accurate keyboarding.

Thanks all...

VL

I'm a mess of emotions today -- it feels like everything is sliding into place--like I can actually watch continents drifting together and locking at the borders.  Today is my last day at Women Studies -- and I'm tearful and happy and worried and looking forward and so close to freedom... and sad and missing people already and getting gifts and cards and hugs and avowals of worth.

And today I just heard from the editors at Nothing But Red, and they've accepted my piece "Everything I Know About Math".  That's hugely affirming in just the right way for the last day at work and reminds me about my mission as a writer.  And I'm all "YAY!!!!" but then I went back to the website and read about the stoning death of Du’a Khalil Aswad last April (which inspired the project).  And then I'm all tearful again.

The link, if you want to read about the project, is here:  http://nothingbutred.wordpress.com/nbr-press-room/

Virginia