broken

i honest to god hate myself sometimes. i hate my stupid cowardice, and how much i drink, of how afraid i am of losing people and things, of my filth and my casual way of standing, i hate how smart i am, but how FUCKING STUPID i am, how lost i feel, how i forget what i am doing or why i am doing it, or where i am.

upswing

yes. give me plans, and then things pull back together rapidly.

Masters - enrolled in, paper work done, ready to post

Paperwork to get funding for ALIA2010 - submitted to work

Projects i was doing - Finished and ready to go to a different area on monday

Amazing conference - planning stages, time to submit two proposals

teen lesbian novels - collecting the missing ones


offfff and running. yes. intellectual stimulation fires something in my brain and makes me feel human again. i can dig my teeth into STUFF again. i have something there, in my mouth, to taste and hold. it is sweet.

care to?

afternoon heat, post work, sitting on my bed with my shoes still on. i'm feeling slightly too full after eating too much at a work afternoon tea.

the last few days have been eaten. i find the internet eats my time all too much - i just sit here and all of a sudden it's been absorbed like pouring water into a bucket of milk. i can't see it anymore. i can't see my face. and i am hungry.


and i am edgy at the moment - starting to feel itchy under the fingers again, it's sliding under my flesh and under my breath and under my time, feeling this need to move, to do, to go, to find, to ... dig holes in things just so they leak. it's an uncomfortable feeling, ants in the brain? ants on my mind. little black crawling dots moving very fast, purposefully, but i don't know where or why. i just know, i need to move. but i don't know what to do. it's frustration; this odd static feeling that grows in this repulsive town and spreads out under me and i lie on it and galllommmphf it takes me up and down.

i guess if i read, it might slow things down. it might give me something resembling discipline. i'm waiting for my enrollment kit from csu; i'm finishing my masters in order to make myself employable in a Real City, like melbourne. somewhere that, when i wonder what to do on a thursday night, i run through the one cinema, the few generic houses i could be in, and flat screens where i watch other people do things. and i'm tired of that. i don't like the screens.

right now, i'm drawing bunnies. i don't care if my 'art practice' (and that's an inaccurate description, i feel, it's giving it too much credit) consists of drawing bunnies. it's something. i'm drawing, at least. kind of.

honour

Some honoured me by giving me
the secret of their works
[32]

sappho



a friend sent me a text message that was a poem. it made me profoundly happy. it just said:

condense the space tomorrow nigh/ for face & orbit do silence defy
i'll interpret this as 'call me tomorrow.'

this month, i am trying to drink less. this is because drinking is all i can think about come afternoon. and yet, it doesn't make me happy.

i guess it's systemic, booze, in everyone i know. we are bored. we are just wanting to push our minds out a little and make them wobble. but i'd rather wobble less.

you were made for poetry

i just binged something ugly. three books. on top of the four on saturday. on top of the four i ordered last month. on top of the fact i now want Tao Lin's back catalogue, because now i am sitting with Shoplifting, it's digging a bigger hole/whole in me, and i want more. not because i could ever, or would ever, want to write like that. but simply because i don't. and i like that distance.


two volumes of poetry. Anne Carson, and Carol Ann Duffy. and a penguin classic. i feel i should have read more of them. i've read a significant number, but really, not that many. it needs work.



Magazines I Like

lip - a canberra based teen magazine for girls, with lots of feminism and no bullshit thinking for them. it's about travel, and history, books, logic, fashion. it's not a simple, dumb magazine, but a wonderful, rich, and interesting magazine that talks to girls, and WOMEN, on their level.

frankie - australian magazine with beautiful layout, occasionally wonderful but consistently quite good and funny articles, and interesting drawings. and craft. lots of stunning craft. there is one regular writer who is painfully fatist, and it makes me angry though. i think i might write and tell them that.

bitch - a feminist view of pop culture. that really says it all. i subscribed for years, and recently, when the dollar was up, re-subscribed. now i need to go and fill in the back issues i am missing. it's a glorious magazine to read, and re-read.

the lifted brow - more a journal than a magazine, it is a collection of literary fiction, non-fiction, poetry, journalism and comics, based out of brisbane and melbourne, with a CD of fantastic music you should listen to.

this year, i am subscribing to mcsweenies, i think, and picking up a few back issues.


Reading Teen Novels in Borders

this is one of my hobbies. i go in for a few hours, curl up on their comfortable couches and read teen novels. i read one today, "Outside In" which was a wonderful novella about a group of teenagers. it was humble and undramatic, which is something i enjoy in teen novels, and the writing rarely overbalanced into melodrama. the movement between the characters is what made it strong. i feel glad i looked at that cover and picked it up. it was a good random choice.

light

Shoplifting from American Apparel by Tao Lin, book three for the year...

i didn't find it depressing, nor bleak in that ugly sort of way that grunge novels are. it was touching - detached but not unemotional - it was that disconnected replaying of events in a small, moment by moment, and spacious sort of way. i like Tao Lin's poetry a little bit more, and his shorter, surreal stories more too... they are gentler still and rougher edged. this was slow, and boring, but in a wonderful way. in a strangely joyous way. i don't know if that was intended. i found it hopeful. it wasn't that the characters were unpleasant, or unemotional - the writing was distant, but not without being touching. it was that lack of assurance of how anyone is supposed to feel, or how you are supposed to manage your feelings or understand your feelings or move within your feelings.

i liked it a lot.

it was especially interesting given that i'd just read Slaughterhouse Five. it was a strange feeling to be placing something as monumental as war next to the monumental ennui of that quiet despair of inner city suburban apathy, where you are everywhere and going nowhere all at once. you see madness and strength and vivid colours in Slaughterhouse Five, while Shoplifting fades from one space to another, like sap down a tree.

if i could marry the guardian, i would.

for serious. how AWESOME is this?

The Romantic Poets

they are publishing a series of pamphlets on the Romantics. i want them desperately and am trying to find someone who'll send them to me from the UK. lamentably, this is not as easy as one would hope. we'll see. hopefully.

LITTLE PAMPHLETS!

i like pamphlets. in other news, i am still having metadata issues at work. i am dizzy. i am more than a little cranky. and i am tired. and i want to read the stuff on the guardian's website.

small press publishers

this is a new interest of mine - looking into intriguing small press publishers, and small literary magazines around the world.

see, i want to write again. i don't know where to start - that's mainly why i am using the blog a lot. i don't tag it enough, nor do i have a lot of readers at the moment - no publicity, not that actively involved online, all those sorts of things... but where it comes to writing and publishing, i don't know where to start. i don't know what to say, or how to say it, or who to say it to. and sadly, i am fairly reluctant to publicise my blog too much, due to the presence of an angry, unhinged ex boyfriend from six years ago who's emailed me about offhanded comments i've made in it. that bothers me deeply, and i don't want to encourage that sort of madness.
i guess i just need to Do It. you know. play with words. read. be alone. sit. exist. think. do. not so much apathy, and letting things happen. i need words like this, i need words and i need to be in them. i need my time with them. and unfortunately, it's practice and time and repetition that improves. and feedback and audience. blogs/diaries are good because they get you used to communicating in written words, and get you used to your own rhythms of writing and the way to pull the words together. but i need more than that, i need to write stories, and poetry, and .. and things.

i need to push my reading too - into MORE and Different. what i'm thinking of is investing in McSweeney's for the year, as well as a few choice back issues, and Wave Books yearly subscription - all their published material for a year, for $75.

and i need to write.


Today's Lizard Photo -- Dr Cuddles and Splodgy spooning. adorable.

flesh

specifically cooking, stinking, charred, heavy scented flesh.

i am a terrible vegetarian. i struggle at it endlessly, fighting between morality and my desire to eat it. i have no moral reason to eat meat, and plenty of moral reasons not to eat meat. whenever i think about it, i feel ill to the bone at what happens - the violence perpetrated against non-human animals, the body of suffering by creatures that, were i to know on an individual level, i would like. it's not about Eating Meat Being Natural. it's about - is it moral? is it right? is it something i am comfortable doing? and it is not. though it's a lot harder when you are surrounded by people eating meat.

on a brighter note, i went to Bowral today. this is a town in the southern highlands of NSW full of bookstores. and some cute little cafes, and pretty things, and trees and hills and soft grass. and bookstores. i restrained myself, considerably, and walked away, buying only four books. that's quite amazing for me. one was an early 20th century collection of shelley's pamphlets which looks lovely - beautiful soft binding.... and other things i've been after for awhile...

excitingly, my copy of the wonderful Sexy Bodies - The Strange Carnalities of Feminism

edited by the wonderful Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn - had included in the back a magazine clipping of a recipe for gingerbread cookies, and icing, and ideas for a family Easter. pretty brilliant.

it's re-ignited the desire for academia, looking at my collection of divine books on gender and culture and semiotics. i feel hungry for study, i feel hungry for writing and learning. this year, if it is the only thing i achieve, i am going to resolve the gutwrenching anxiety university study makes me feel, so i can go on, and write and write and study and say what i need to say. however i need to say it.

in other news, Librarything now has all these extra awesome features. this is not good. all i want to do tonight is go through, editing it and tiding records, scanning covers and doing those sorts of fun things with my saturday night. Because. I. Am. Awesome. i sadly am... wary of linking from there to here, just due to the fact that my librarything has proximity to others.

The Archive or the Trace: Cultural Permanence and the Fugitive Text

The Archive or the Trace: Cultural Permanence and the Fugitive Text

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screen

i am watching Stephen Fry's documentary on bipolar at the moment.
it is wonderful, but actually quite confronting. the symptoms with me onset around... 22, 23? before that, i had pretty much, simple, uni-polar depression. i'd have less depressed times, times of elevated mood, but never anything vaguely manic. but, the older i've gotten the more pronounced it has become. not so much so that i run off rails, or have delusions of grandeur - the psychosis tends to be flickering around the edges of my mind rather than all consuming. but it's there.

seeing it being talked about so openly, by so many people, in such a compassionate way, is enlightening. i recommend it to anyone who is, or who has a loved one with bipolar.

my blogs are the best evidence of my disordered thinking. if you follow them through from 2006 or so, you can see the mood moving up and down, here and back again, in a rough, curious cycle. sometimes stress pushes it forward - either the depressive or the manic. but it's clear. when i was first diagnosed by a psychiatrist after a few days of feeling so suicidal i could not move then jittery and excitable the next week, during a time of extreme stress, i told my best friend. he said 'oh god, now you say it, it is SO obvious.' and it is. anyone who has known me for large periods of time can see it - anyone who has been very close to me, or lived with me, knows exactly how it looks and how it gives and takes from me.

and i can manage it largely, and i know when i cannot. i can watch the line, and if i cross it, draw back. as one of the men say, basically (paraphrased) 'it's all worth it, when you have walked with angels'... and mania is more vivid and beautiful and rich and delicious than any drug i've taken.

it floods you and you suck it in, deeper and deeper, like every colour is swimming out of you. but there is not the detachment that comes with acid. it's so real, it is so inside of you, pouring out and in. it is more alert and organised than amphetamines. it is more loving and tactile than ecstasy and it is so much more wild than alcohol. it is more embracing and softer than mushrooms, it is harder than cocaine rush. it is like nothing else i have felt or been through or been to, and i would not wish away those moments, where the sky parts and the world is so real. so breathtakingly, exquisitely real, that you cannot force enough into you.

i lapse back though, into the normality. the depression is a lot easier to manage with mindfulness based therapy - it slows it from descending out of reach. i guess the pills might take the edge of it, but honestly, i don't think they do a thing anymore. they sure as hell don't stop the depression coming, thief in the night, taking everything it can fit in a big black sack.

i can rest it back, and calm it down now. i try not to let it take me completely, against my better desire, because i know if it does, there is no return. i'd like to have it take me, the ocean out to sea, out to sea we go.... the moods can hit sharp and fast, or last for a week or so. it's not really clear what it is, or what happens with me. i sure as hell don't get it.

but i just need to read, and write, and paint, and work and eat, and breathe my way through it and i keep walking

it's my fault, in the sense that i end up convinced that i am being a total idiot for caring about shit and that i should harden the fuck up and not make such a big deal about little things until i get really upset and really sad and really mental because rather than just saying something i ended up all neurotic and demented and stupid and convinced that if i say something i'm going to upset them uselessly for something i should have worked out because it was my own damn issue in the first fucking place.

i just get tied up and not sure if it does matter or if it doesn't matter or if it's something i can fix without asking the other party to change or if it's something that can be changed or if i am being a dickhead or if i am going to hurt someone or if i should shut up or if i should just give up on trying to relate with people at all on any level and run off to japan and join a fucking nunnery or something. i hate my brain. this is what comes of NOT having relationships as a teenager because i swear to god that is where people work shit out.

simple

why is it that something so simple seems to allude me so completely?

there are not a lot of things in life that i really, really want. it's very simple, really. i want a job that i enjoy. i want friends that i love. i want little animals around me. i want to be able to live with myself. i want a partner who loves me, who i love, who wants me, and who i want. i want to sleep well at night, and be awake in the day. i want, one day, to share a house with someone who loves me, and who i love, someone who wants me, and who i want. i want some plants that i don't kill, music i like, words that i can make into sentences, and books i can read. i want someone who wants to talk about books with me, whose eyes light up just knowing i am alive.

i want to not feel so frightened and insecure and lost and a l o n e. i want to not feel like all i do is fuck up and fuck up the one thing that really, is more important to me than anything else. why the fuck am i such a pathetic, useless failure at this? why does it have to hurt so much, so very much of the time? why can i not just get my fucking shit together? why am i such an unattractive, undesirable creature? why does it feel like years since someone's wanted to rip my clothes off with desire and passion and love and ... that sense of wanting someone else?


what am i fucking missing? what am i doing so very, very wrong? i am so tired. really. of not having this. and it hurts. i see the monster who snapped me into countless pieces - promised me the world and then essentially told me i was not enough for him anymore, i see he has all this, and i am jealous beyond comprehension. not of his new partner - i do not want to be with him - but of HIM. i am jealous that he, this ... this... beast who made me feel like nothing, who drove my sense of worth into the ground, now he has a partner, a house, a baby - someone who wants to sleep with them every night, and build a life with them. and i? i feel sometimes like the person i am seeing is happy to not see me for a week or two, or more. that once or twice a week, a few hours, watching tv, not saying a word, is all he wants of me, and i am just not enough at all. not pretty or nice or sweet or good enough at all. i feel like nothing. i feel too big and too small and too smart and too dumb and too ... too... arghtghghg.

in months, he's stayed at my house once. once. i do not know why this hurts so much, but it does. i am crying myself to sleep again. it's been a long time. but it's hurting so much, and i feel so ugly and small and like i have nothing to say of interest anymore, and nothing beautiful, and nothing magical, and nothing hidden, and nothing nothing nothing and i am disappearing and it doesn't even Matter now.

and i don't know what i am supposed to do.

rain

... storm rain, coming in my window. just a spray of it.

i quote the effie dee here, when i say 'something in me broke last night' though for me, it was different. it was past a place of sadness and monsters in the dark, and shadows under the bed. treading water lightly next to me, just under the surface, they lurk. and then they swoop the second i am quiet. it covers me, and it is dark and i am broken.

but i was not scared.

i can't say how amazing that is. i feel broken. the sticky gum is falling. i am not depressed though, i am not terrified, and i am not alone. i just feel fractured and broken and very very fragile. i walk softly and gently, and carefully over the glass i've left behind. there is nothing solid about me. there is nothing solid around me. it is all made of shadows and smoke and mirrors and it can, with a gust of wind, reform into new shapes at any moment in time.

i don't know if i can fix this, or how i could, or if i even will. i don't know if it needs to be fixed. there is something wholly broken about me though. it doesn't mean i cannot function, it doesn't mean i am useless. it just means something doesn't quite work right.

the air smells soft now. not like anything i can put into words, or analogize or mock into phrases. it smells good, and wet and sharp. it smells very different from brisbane rain. canberra winter, the smell out in the open, in winter time, is one of the most beautiful things i've ever experienced.

i need to sleep more. i need my room, and my walls, and my nest, and my bunnies.

PICK THE SCAB~

why do i do it? why do i? why dig up corpses and then act all shocked when they are rotting and filled with maggots and make you gag and feel ill?


i can't help it. i cannot help it. it's some pathetic compulsion, watching the blood gather the tides under my skin after i pull off a half healed chunk of tissue. it's itching, god! that's because it's healing, i know, but FUCK IT, i want to just.. get, owch! get it off, oh fuck, it's bleeding again....

why do i want it? it's the same as wanting to model naked.

though my flesh exposes me so much less than my handwriting. that, to me, is a greater intimacy than my body, because it comes from somewhere deeper than my breasts. it's stronger than that, and much more terrifying. if i ever give you something i made with my hands, marked with my writing, or my drawings, or some sort of intimacy, that is so much more real to me than nudity or sex. it is then that i trust you. it is then that i love you. the last time i did that, it was origami.

i haven't done origami since then. the site of the paper, well, it's buried in a drawer, and i pretend it isn't there. oh, no. i did a mental health training course and spent the whole time shaking, making tiny tiny paper cranes out of the sheet of note paper, and the back end of the name tag the gave us, the glossy side of a sticker. i divided it up as small as i could, to make as many tiny birds as possible. i made a tiny chinese vase, and i was going to make a box to hold them all, but i could not make my fingers form it.

i threw them all out at the end of the day because they, like my handwriting and folded sheets of paper, mean nothing all that important anymore.

i read a teen novel

and it left me feeling miserable.

it's this nostalgia i have for an idea of adolescence that does not exist, and this idea of 'life' that you hold when you are 16 and your life is ahead of you, and your teenage years are behind, and these Experiences you are supposed to have had, well they didn't happen like that. and then you keep going, you walk forward, one day at a time, breathing slowly and deeply to stave off the anxiety. you walk and you walk, and you get older, and slowly, things do happen, your life happens around you, and all of a sudden, you realise the life that you see, and you read, and you dreamed of, well, it never did happen and it never could have.


i read these books, about teenagers who have boyfriends or girlfriends and their lives are swept up in the majesty of the drama. it is breathtaking, how much stronger things feel then, or how we remember them as feeling so much stronger than they really were, or how we lack the capacity to put things in context. then all of a sudden, you are there. you're older now, and you're a clever swine, and those dreams, they are the only things that ever stood by you.

and it never did happen like that. you end up looking back at the two marriages you destroyed before your 25 birthday. you look back, and there's no person there now whose eyes light up just knowing you exist - you'd had that, oh yes, but always fucked it up, time and time and time again, and time is against you now. because you are slipping away. it's only 25, but the clock is ticking, and old men love you for some reason, and you can sense that it's growing, whatever draws them in like a moth to a flame, you know you aren't there yet, but it'll ebb and flow and you'll fade away, like everything dead in bad poetry and songs. it's all going behind you. not the best part of life, or the worst. just time.

there's no little cottage. there's no one dying to fall asleep beside you every night, no one who would die for you, no one who wants nothing more than to have a little person with you, no one who just wants to cook dinner and curl up on the couch, backs resting against each other, as you both read yourselves to sleep. that's a stupid dream, elizabeth. it'll never happen, you overinflated intellectual intimidator. every lover you've had in years is scared of your room, and your space, and your scent, and your very being. you are too much. be less. be less. subside. take it back until you are small enough to fit where you belong because you just scare them, and it leaves you with nothing.

and god, i am trying. i am whispering so softly i cannot hear what i am saying. i'm trying to be good, i'm trying to be as small as my body. i'm not even singing along to the smiths now.


but still.

there's more to life than books you know, but not much more.
there's more to life than books, you know, but not much more.


it's on my thigh. it bled when i got the tattoo done, little beads of blood forming as the needle dug in, higher and higher, me cringing more as it rose up. it is a part of me now, and no one will take that away. no one will take my words away, even when i am left with nothing, sitting on dirty red sheets, up to my elbows in tattered half-read books of poetry, unable to sleep again.

summer

it's very warm at the moment. not steaming, it is dry, like the heat when you first open an oven and stand in front of it. it's pushing all around you, touching in every part, until your hair hangs lank on your neck, damp from sweat, and you wake again, near sleepless nights.

i'm not sleeping at the moment. by which i mean, i asleep for a relatively normal 7,8 hours a night. i'm both working on doing this, intentionally, and finding myself less tired. i am trying to push past ten thirty every night - cooking helps, writing does too, reading, talking to people on the phone... moving pictures on the screen just make me doze. television makes me limp inside - i mean, yeah, one or two episodes of something, once a week, i am fine with. but any more tv than that saps out my will to move, or live, or create. it makes me feel so old inside, and slow and dull.


my kitten called, purring at a book exchange at me. we're planning a possible meeting in a tiny country town filled with books. i am going to try and bully the kitten into going to alice springs with me. there will be bouncing.

i finished 'the brief wonderous life of oscar wao', which was... i don't know. i felt no emotions for the characters more than a bit of a slight sympathetic touch. not a poignant twist when things happened to destroy or enlighten them, just.. well, a detachment. the writing, also, was nothing new, or spectacular, or anything old and particularly grand. it was fun, don't get me wrong, and i finished it - i don't bother finishing books that i get nothing from - but i don't feel like i'm taking anything deep from it. not that it's easy to say, i'll need to give it time. reflection is proving that it created the atmosphere wonderfully - there were moments of real evocation where you could smell it. but the detachment was there, when i felt it needed intimacy. still.

strangely, 'the sea, the sea,' despite the fact it was boring me, has dug in quite deep, and my mind reflects in that iris scented ocean often.

i'll go back there, soon, i think.

and now, for more order and organisation, and places. my brain fascinates me, this ebb and flow and desire for sense that floods me, from time to time.

This Year's books

bThis list is just fiction and non-fiction novels. i don't include poets that i am reading in here because i do not read poetry anthologies beginning to end. when i feel i've become intimate with a book of poetry, or the work of a poet, i'll include it in here under a separate heading

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Junot Diaz 10/01/10

Slaughterhouse Five Kurt Vonnegut 24/01/10

Shoplifting from American Apparel Tao Lin 25/01/10

Outside In Chrissie Keighery 26/01/10

Shiver Maggie Stiefvater 7/02/10

The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter Peter Singer, Jim Mason 24/2/10

Ash  Malinda Lo 28/02/10

The Easter Parade: A Novel Richard Yates 5/03/10

Hello Groin Beth Goobie  9/03/10

Crush (Orca Soundings)  Carrie Mac 11/03/10

Gravity (Young Adult Novels)  Leanne Lieberman 13/03/10

The Road Cormac McCarthy 23/03/10

The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis (Little House on the Bowery)  Mark Gluth 8/4/10

Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? (SB-The French List)  Jean Baudrillard 20/5/10

 About a girl  Joanne Horniman 28/5/10

 The Family Law Benjamin Law 30/5/10

Bed  Tao Lin 3/6/10

Saint Morrissey: A Portrait of This Charming Man by an Alarming Fan  Mark Simpson 10/7/10

Hotel Iris: A Novel  Yoko Ogawa  16/7/10

Liar Justine Larbalestier 19/7/10

Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories (Modern Library)Truman Capote 8/8/10

furious oysters

smiths related acquisition was merely $30. ftw!

in other news, remind me world, not to pick scabs. because sleepwalkers and insomniacs alike know what this looks like. and it's ugly and old and just breaks me. so go. just. go.

doing better than expected

at Goals, already. savings going well. less conspicuous consumption, this is helped enormously by cooking, which i'm aiming to do every night, with a maximum of two nights Purchased food, but aiming for one or less... only one brunch, two coffee's per day, treats from home, lunch from home. so far...? so good.

i went swimming with dogs yesterday. a pudgy, lovable staffy pup crawled into my lap and licked my face enthusiastically. he had been paddling, all wet and soft, all paws and little nose, and he curled up on my lap like it was an island. a little girl was dragging him around lovingly, playing like two little creatures with nothing else but water and sand.

my skin is brisk, red, sore. my heart is brisk, red, sore, but for other reasons.

i'm not used to any sort of space where the time spent apart seems to be .. the preference to seeing me or touching me or having me around. i feel ugly and unwanted and over the top and dumb. and i don't think i am being needy. i just want to feel wanted, which shouldn't be too much to ask, but is a very difficult thing to ask when you don't have it.

i am starting to take pleasure in cooking, and fantasising about homewares and bookshelves for when i get My Little House. my little animals make me so happy, the way the lizards cut triangles into bananas, the way the bunnies just look at me, and snuggle in my lap sometimes, or leap around, aerobatic and slightly lopsided, and altogether silly. such joy. i cannot imagine life without animals. well, no, i can. i grew up without them, with the exception of a slow little budgy named buttercup, and my mnemeth, a lizard i had for two years in my teens. they punctuate that time with love. mnemey and i would watch tv - he'd sit on my arm beside me, little lizard snuggles, or curl up on a magazine rack. he lived in my room until he outgrew the tank in there, moving into a large glass tank out the back. he died after not eating for a long time, fussiness or sickness, it's hard to say. it hurts.

Little Words

this year, it will be different. not a resolution, just a simple statement of fact. i am trying to form better habits - eating habits, sleeping habits, behavioural habits, exercise habits - and general wellness.

Yoga & pole dancing. book journal. money journal for saving. cooking MOST of the time. having healthy, quick dinner options available (cous-cous, anyone?). taking lunch to work. this is what i am working on. these small changes will actually start making a big difference.

BUDGET. BUDGET.

that's also important.

less drinking is a huge one. i'm going back to buying one beer when i want a drink, on the way home from work, rather than six packs. there is far too much booze going through this little body, and it needs to calm down.

i want to get my craft back on. when it's cooled down a little, i'm going back to finishing work on my spinning wheel. and then KNITTING come winter. the heat here just makes it too hard to knit, too sweaty on the palms.

Reading Goals for the Year

Novels

Midnight's Children Salman Rushdie (own)
100 Years of Solitude G G Marquez (own)
A Void Georges Perec (own)
Life - A User's Manual Georges Perec (own)
The Sea, The Sea Iris Murdoch (own) (started)
The Old Capital Yasunari Kawabata (own)
UFO in her eyes Xiaolu Guo (own)
Collected Fictions Jorge Luis Borges (own)
Death At Intervals Jose Saramago (own)
The Double Jose Saramago (own)
Iceland's Bell Halldor Laxness (own)
Paradise Reclaimed Halldor Laxness (own)
The Tin Drum Gunter Grass (own)
Philosophers of Nothingness James Heisig (own)
The Mind of God Paul Davies (own)
Travels in Hyperreality Umberto Eco (own)

The Infinity of Lists Umberto Eco (don't own)

Authors i want to read more works of, but don't know what yet

Carol Shields

Poetry

Byron (re-read)
Shelley (re-read)
Keats (try again...)
Coleridge (try again)
Anne Sexton
Carol Ann Duffy
Adrienne Rich
Anne Carson
Philip Larkin

Professional Development books

Revolting Librarians (own)(started)
Revolting Librarians Redux (own)(started)
The Library At Night (own)

constructive

turned non-constructive : idiotic argument with Mother over something trivial. frustrating. unfortunately, we both struggle to listen to each other, because we've said the same things over and over again. i am sure there is more to it than that, but it is head butting rams, over and over again.

today: rabbits and guinea pigs in petstore. we named them and watched them play. housecleaning. smell of orange. dinner. hair. bunnies. sleeping, always sleeping.

marking time. waiting for something to happen. reading. bitsy reading, nothing really grabbing me right now, unfortunately. the sea, the sea is leaving me dry.

fabulous short stories in 'the lifted brow, 5'

etc. etc. one of those weekends that is productive but leaves me feel that sort of waiting moments.

i thought about the things i've gained from each lover. it's something i try and focus on - the things that they gave me, or enriched in me:

1. shelley & byron. opened the library in my heart. Kawabata, and japanese literature. experimental thought- feminism/marxism. fucking. kafka. baudelaire.

2. the world. art. bourges, artaud, so much music i cannot start listing, more books, more things.... a lot of what we read, we took on together. it was an exchange. so the items matter less than the way of learning. removing a lot of what i had built up. the world.

3. opening another way of seeing. beirut. sufjan stevens.

4. holding my hand as i looked into an abyss. rich, juicy conversation. bauldrillard, zen buddhism, as viewed, as interrogated in different eyes. Perec. bachelard, camus. and on. and on. the ability to say when someone's behaviour is shit. the ability to accept difference, accept what isn't and appreciate what is, for what it is. growing with someone, watching them grow from up close, and afar. depth. time. space. it's hard to articulate the vantage with this in words, though i could, possibly, through interpretative dance.

5. comics. potato balls. larkin and auden. contemporary poetry. resilience from being shat on.


it's best to only look through them retrospectively. it's not exhaustive, in fact, it's barely more than tiny fragments of what i have from these people. it's a start though, gratitude for what i gained from each of these five individuals, more so than what the first and the last took away.

moments

from time to time, instances seem to capture me as though i am seeing my own life for the first time. these are vague, disconnected feelings, that slip out of nowhere. i liken them to the buddhist description of enlightenment - being as though, for a moment you see past the clouds and glimpse the sky.

this one, i was at my lover's house. he was elsewhere, off getting ingredients to make soup for dinner. i was on the couch, reading a magazine; his housemates sat in front of the large screen television playing donkey kong. i am lying back, resting awkwardly as i try and read, the stuff i have bought with me is under the couch. it is hot, post new year, lazy - none of us have anywhere to go, and none of us are going anywhere, really. i am older than the rest of them by a couple of years, as least- between 2 and 5. i don't feel wiser. i am reading poetry.

the vision pans out, and i see it. i see it, these moments, this touch, my mind softly but firmly pushing past, and i feel it. i feel it wonderously, that boring simplicity of new years day, sitting on the couch, that ennui for once relatively comforting, that existence of slowness, of normal things like television and video games and soup for dinner and reading a magazine, and languorous afternoon heat, and the crab apples in the slightly abandoned looking front yard, and their housemates lovingly kept plants, and my lover's collection of guitars, of the bitemarks on my body, on the memory of sex, of the chocolate i am eating, of everything, just becomes so clear.

there's no way to properly articulate it, because it is simple. it is a slow pan around a room in a movie, monumentally basic, only punctuated with appropriate music, and made monumental by size. all of our quiet, insignificant lives, we are acting them out, we are taking photos of our day to day movement, we are updating our facebooks, we are sneaking upstairs for quick shags, we are dozing on the couch, we are moving, we are moving. there are few plans, quiet dreams, little disappointments, little earthquakes, and we keep going. and by god, it is beautiful.

i fall in love with the world in these moments. a part of me needs to break to become bigger, to fit all this feeling inside of it. oh yes, it breaks. oh yes, it grows. and yet, nothing is really happening.

because, really, nothing really happens.