A Mind, Lively and at Ease

If it wasn’t for writing, I think I’d be a professional worrier. My matriarchal role models taught me well. Which means watching a show about children with psychotic disorders starts to get personal. What would I do if my kid was schizophrenic? What if I develop schizophrenia? What if one day my kid runs in front of a car while I’m not watching? Would I be able to live with myself, knowing I could have prevented them from getting hurt?

But that’s just the beginning, because I’m so concerned for these children even by association, I start worrying about a person I have no connection to beyond this prerecorded television screening. 

Usually I can let things go with a little self-awareness, but then there are the times I want to be worrying—about humanity, my family, and situations in which I’d need every moment to count. Here’s when I can’t understand other people completely unconcerned. I don’t get scared by bugs; I’m scared of losing anything that remotely matters. 

I started this out to make fun of myself for being so ridiculously affected by a television program, by my inability to cut away from the edited representations of life and deal more realistically with what’s actually around me. I couldn’t find the humor in this, though. 

Sometimes I wonder if Jon Stewart or any satirical comedian just really sits around in their normal life, frustrated and humorless at the endless accumulation of wrongs within human society. 

Then, I’m sure, somebody falls down and slapstick saves the day with a laugh. 

I’m going to switch my calendars to April already. Psh, yeah there’s about two more days left of March, so what? 

Also, is it sacrilegious to get mad at Jesus for occasionally treading on my birthday turf? DUDE, like I know you saved all of our sins, but you don’t have to be a dick about it.  

(Oh man, if I had a more religious family I’d be disowned. I find talking to Jesus like a bro way too funny. Bro-sus.)

Summation:

Sometimes I want to write out the silly noises, words, phrases, and sing-song lilts my mom and I tend to make in the kitchen. That’s where you’ll find it the most. Otherwise, these strange utterances follow us through chores around the house. In my case, the particular arrival of this chirping, tittering, mockingbird-like behavior occurs when I drag my laundry basket to the washer. 

Fuck laundry. I try to cheer it up a bit with a song or two, talk to my cat or dogs over my shoulder, just really do anything to take away from the fact that I’m processing my own filth to be sludged about in a thudding machine, which, by the way, I’ll have to remember to check within the hour.

I don’t. One thing is certain: if this girl isn’t wearing her ADHD patch, the laundry might just take weeks instead of whatever is reasonable—I have no sense of comparison because, no matter what, I tend to get so absorbed in life outside of a washer and dryer that I neglect the simplest duty to make sure that the washer no longer makes seriously loud noises throughout the apartment. How I manage to ignore this no one exactly knows.

So, in the case of mother, she does little melodies and dances in the kitchen. One day I’ll film her, and I’ll get the sense of satisfaction that I have from a picture I took once of my dad staring off into space: satisfied to have a real representation of this unique character. My walls have pictures of family members caught in odd poses—dancing, laughing, and, on occasion, eating. My sister and I watch television on the top level of my bookshelf. We feed pigeons next to my weekly dry-erase board. Mom hugs me after I graduated high school over the closet light switch. 

If my room were alive to tell these stories, it wouldn’t include laundry. Fuck laundry. 

As much as I love the character Katniss, she pisses me the fuck off, for various reasons. 

This is me, wishing you luck!

Thank you! By the way, I thought I had been following you for a long time and that you just weren’t posting anything recently. That has been remedied, haha! 

So now I have a rough manuscript to work on, and an amazing lack of time to take care of it all. Lovely. Also, even though I like them more, they all need a serious amount of revising, peer revising, editing, and proofreading. 

Due to this, I can’t promise new works anytime soon. 

To make up for it, here’s Colin Firth in a bathtub:

You’re welcome.

Putting together the best I have to submit to Write Bloody. Not surprisingly, the ones I most prefer are some that I haven’t posted here. (Not that I’m holding out on you guys, but there are still things I have to push myself to even admit to let alone make public, and somehow they are more eloquent as well)

Hopefully, even if I don’t get any good news from their end, this will get me out of a funk I’ve been simmering in for a while now. At least the beautiful weather helps to even out the edges. HAMMOCK WEATHER AWWWW YEAH.

Wish me luck! 

I’m so tired of the nostalgia, the escapism of bad habits, and the things that are supposedly emotionally provoking, and they’re all saying the same thing, they’re all avoiding the same thing, we’re all screaming those futile words drowned by everyone else’s yells:

We are growing older, 

and what we once thought

never was, 

and I feel completely

out of control

and out of depth 

because even as a child

we were crying 

straight from the womb.

But then we tell each other, 

“Deal with it,” 

as we all dance slowly, yet in predetermined

haste, decomposing to dust. 

Since Christmas break I’ve been planning on looking further into travel writing. It’s been an internal battle, because I know it’s not something I would want to pursue as a lifetime career. Still, it’s an option within the writing world. Therefore, I’ve started a tumblr dedicated to travel in all of its forms, to keep myself inspired and share what this world has to offer for all of us. So far it’s been a lot of photography and a few articles and whatnot. I have no clue what it will turn into, because, like always, I detest limiting myself. 

Feel free to check it out and see if you like it:

Let Me Get My Dress

I’m most partial to five a.m.

I’ve given up by then, and allowed tomorrow to become today. I let whatever dreams that have built up beyond their faulty levees break loose to a decisive and cut-throat emergence of the day. Five a.m. is not for wimps.

It’s when the hard-workers start their cars in the frost, and heavy drinkers sleep fitfully in dark depths of un-memories. College students wake up from an hour nap, if they had one at all, to mold scraps into passes and words into grades, red-eyed and slobbery. At five a.m., it may be reasonable to text a friend for help or get back into the library for “last call” before the stapled and printed mud-pie of sentences arrives at his or her desk. Five a.m. is ruthless. 

I could have gone to sleep at four, and then it could be considered reasonable. Four a.m. still has possibility, like trying to scrape the last little bit of peanut butter from a mostly empty jar. At four, you can leave your work with dignity, or save part of yourself or some of your money all for yourself. An hour later, it’s too late. 

Five has no options. Five makes your decisions for you. At five, there’s no returning. You’re stuck with this new day, forced to reexamine it all to restart anew.

At five a.m., you are rebooting for updates. 

So, understandably, most people despise this hour. To them, it’s no good. The newly turned hourglass frightens them with anticipation. “This is not morning! This is a travesty against my personal livelihood!”

But, all things considered, I don’t mind five a.m. so much… because at five, my cat—drowsy eyed, exhausted from chasing shadows around the edges of the bathtub, and lazily purring from a day well-used—decides she really quite likes having me around by laying herself across my chest, pressing her head against my cheek a few times, and, after putting her cold little nose against mine in a gentle thrum of an engine running, licks the straight bridge of my nose in affectionate afterthought. 

Even though it’s dark, without even the slightest hint of day, I sit bemused thinking about how I’ve beat the sunrise by a couple of hours in early spring…

because in this delirious state of mind, I’m too exhausted to see the flaws of such logic. 

I find it really funny when people see our bookshelf in the living room, and tell me, “Oh, so that’s a lot of books there to show off.”

I just laugh, pretty derisively.

Do you think I chose being an English major because it fucking sounds or looks good?

Oh you poor thing. 

It’s like when my roommates were surprised that I finished The Hunger Games trilogy within the school week, when it’s written at an 8th grade level. They asked, “Did you not go to class?”