From Soho To Silo

New Blog

2011-01-17T07:54:00.001-06:00

I've moved! Please follow me at my new address: http://www.beccamyers.blogspot.com

A Whole New Old World

2010-10-18T10:31:00.130-05:00

Dan spent all weekend writing a research paper on Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project which, disappointingly enough, isn't about one man's attempt to play every coin-operated Ms. Pac-Man in America in the span of a year, but rather 19th century covered passageways in Paris.

Although I'm learning a lot about historical materialism by proofreading Dan's work, I'm also really grateful that I'm no longer in grad school and thus free to watch a Gilmore Girls marathon while eating brownie bites. I do still make an effort to flex my poetry muscle on a daily basis. I can't help but think metaphorically about booking Carnival cruises and enjoy coming up with slant rhymes for Air Tran. (Oh Air Tran/now under Southwest reign.)

From Oct 23-30, I'll be at Disney World researching the parks and blogging daily on everything from my American Idol audition experience at Hollywood Studios (I'm singing "Black Velvet") to the fish and chips portion size at Epcot's Rose and Crown Pub. I hope to explore the Disney zeitgeist and our polemical engagement with materialism that inevitably capitulates under the subconscious weight of magical abandon. Um, and ride Space Mountain like twenty times.

While Dan has been tying cultural criticism to the current trend of disjunction in poetry, I've been relating it to Disney. We both just read poet Tony Hoagland's essay entitled "Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment," which contrasts novelty (an obsession of Benjamin's) and experience. Hoagland opens with the assertion that embedded in newness is the seed of obsolescence. Nothing can stay new forever, despite the poet's attempt at innovative form or style. Convention is ineluctably "conventionally tired." But Mickey Mouse never seems tired, even prototype Steamboat Willie Mickey Mouse, who was pretty much either always at the ship's wheel or peeling potatoes.

I think what makes Disney so compellingly mythic is its ability to reinvent itself while maintaining a firm foothold in the old. Disney is neither dated nor slickly modern. The parks age, yet somehow they don't. It's no coincidence that you won't find a newspaper inside the Magic Kingdom.

I grew up with a Fisher Price Record Player and oodles of vinyl-- Mousercize and Disco Duck and the soundtrack to the animated Robin Hood featuring the twangy vocal stylings of Roger Miller. I used to cart my equipment down to the lake and DJ for the neighborhood boys who fished for brim, spinning hits like "Feed the Birds" and "Never Smile at a Crocodile." Can you believe my first date wasn't until college? I can.

The point is, my relationship with Disney runs deep. I think each one of us has a private history with the parks that refuses to be supplanted by any amount of revamping. We create emotional memories rooted in the unchanging aspects of Disney. It's the big picture -- mouse ears, Cinderella castle, music -- that emerges from the fog of childhood. The past is a record on repeat. (Is it unfortunate when this record is Mary Poppins? Maybe.)

Birnbaum's Official Guide to Walt Disney World touches on the seemingly reductive and inauthentic nature of Epcot's World Showcase: "You won't find the real Germany here -- rather, the country's essence, much as a traveler returning from a visit might remember what he or she saw." The countries at World Showcase, then, aren't reductive at all. They're meant to represent what we as travelers remember once we're home again. It's the "essence" of recollection.

At 33, what I love about Walt Disney World is its vague fluttery core, a heart-warming abstraction that has the effect of intensifying feelings of attachment.

(panel from Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics)

Aren't You Superfluous, or What?

2010-10-03T13:13:00.081-05:00

Inevitably, the first question I get asked at parties when I tell people I'm a travel consultant is: "Didn't the internet put you guys out of business?" and then: "Wait -- is that the same thing as a travel agent?"

1988 was the year I became an entrepreneur. I founded two companies. The first was a knock-off Purina Puppy Chow outfit. I'd won a year's supply of dog food at the North Carolina State Fairgrounds by filling out an entry form and dropping it in a fish bowl when my parents weren't looking. Because an adult terrier can only eat so much puppy chow in one day (five bowls with a pine cone garnish), I decided to repackage the food in brown paper lunch bags and sell it door-to-door. I made Print Shop labels with a clip art dog barking "Ciao." I thought it sounded exotic, the way gelato sounds more exotic than ice cream. I tried to pick the most Italian looking clip art dog. The best I could find was a black and white Golden Retriever in a bandanna.

I took Ciao to the streets, biking in a Springdale sales radius of about 800 yards. When someone opened the door I'd say "Ciao!" in a cloying Punky Brewster voice and produce dog food from behind my back. Very seldom was I treated like a Chinatown handbag salesman. No one asked about protein content or synthetic additives. This was the late 80's. Moms used Aqua Net and let their babies teeth on lawn darts, you know?

After I made about $20 on Ciao, I grew bored. Dry dog food just wasn't galvanizing anymore. I decided to be the neighborhood travel agent. Because we didn't have one.

As a go-getter, another favorite pastime was phoning 1-800 numbers and requesting brochures. I always made sure to call in late May to guarantee I received a lot of mail at summer camp: catalogs from JC Penny and the Graceland souvenir store, marketing kits from Jamaica. I pored over the Newport News fall line of bolero jackets when I should have been learning how to tack a Sunfish.

My travel agency business plan was really simple: I'd order a crap ton of brochures from various tour vendors and tourism boards, smack a label on them with my name and phone number, and then distribute them in mailboxes. Neighbors would flip through the marketing materials and forfeit self-sufficiency in favor of the expertise of an eleven year old who had only really been to Myrtle Beach and gave vacation counsel out of a tool shed. I stored extra mailers in my father's Craftsman chest.

I only ever got one phone call -- a woman who had received my Club Med brochure and wanted more information -- and in a moment of panic (was Club Med a sandwich?) said I was in sixth grade and hung up.

Now, at age 33, when I'm asked at parties about the viability of travel agents in the age of internet autonomy, I explain the difference between an agent and a consultant. An agent is no better than a kid collecting brochures next to power drills. An agent merely regurgitates pat copy, pedals a product second-hand. If you're looking for an agent, then might I interest you in this here dog food?

A travel consultant offers invaluable knowledge rooted in first-hand familiarity. I develop personal relationships with my clients that counter the uncaring anonymity of an online booking engine. I've actually been to the places I recommend. I've read the guidebooks. Travel consultants are successful in spite of this tired economy because they know how to focus on what the internet can't possibly deliver. We're real people with valid passports, physical store fronts.

In a recent issue of Travel Weekly, columnist Richard Turen noted that "One hotel chain, years ago, was actually using prisoners on work release to handle phone reservations." Aside from the occasional traffic ticket (one, embarrassingly enough, issued by a cop on a horse), I don't have a history of run-ins with the law. My list of excursions doesn't include being bused out for road-side beautification. Wouldn't you rather speak with someone reputable, someone you can meet in person?

You can trust a consultant. You can save time with a consultant. Maybe you've made an Excel spreadsheet of all the times of all the fireworks shows at Disney World, and graphed that data against the height requirements of Dumbo the Flying Elephant, and placed that graph alongside a Venn Diagram of value meals, but can you stomach staying on hold with the Bibbidy Bobbidy Boutique, listening to the Country Bear Jamboree? And what if I told you've I've already drawn that Venn Diagram and paired it with a resort pool chart? How much is your time worth?

Poet John Keats was onto something when he wrote about the importance of a living hand: "See here it is—/I hold it towards you."

All Aboard

2010-10-01T06:00:00.013-05:00

Once, I sang "Midnight Train to Georgia" at Pieces' drag queen karaoke and a 60-something black man tucked a twenty in my pocket as thanks. As I was thinking today about how I could render the last two months, how best to take up blogging again, it occurred to me that I am both parties in the song. That basically, I've ridden that train twice. I'm the one who left to find the world I left behind (I lived in Athens for two years) and the one who followed because I'd rather live with the man in his world (Dan is currently a PhD candidate at UGA). This revelation felt metaphorically satisfying until I caught myself explaining to Dan that the man's midnight train ticket was cheaper because he qualified for an advanced purchase fare, whereas Gladys Knight, deciding to go last minute, probably just bought a ticket same day at the station.

After years away from the travel industry, I'm working again as a consultant for a local family-owned agency. Not only did I return to Georgia, but I returned to an industry I couldn't wait to leave. I'm doubling back, not to be confused with conceding. At first I wasn't so sure. I had to reaffirm that spendthrift intermediary time -- that lacuna of years I took out student loans and rode in cabs and occasionally wore a sparkly black lamé pantsuit. How could I have just ended up back where I started? When did I become Reese Witherspoon? But ya'll, I'm excited to wake up in the morning and help people see the world, probably because I saw it, too. I miss teaching, but I'm where I'm supposed to be right now.

Although I assist with all kinds of travel, I'm the certified Disney agent for our office (I have mortarboard graduation mouse ears). The summer I turned 19, I worked at Epcot, sweating through purple polyester and pulling pizza tickets from a printer. If we didn't fill orders fast enough, the machine spit the paper onto the floor, or more specifically, onto the caked rubber mat we hosed down every night at close. I have a very distinct memory of bending over to pick up a ticket and losing my balance, coming face to face with my own grimy regulation Reebok with its parmesan and sauce-encrusted sole, my visor obscuring my line of vision, my elastic waistband stretched to capacity, and sincerely thinking: "This is awesome." And in a lot of ways, it was. I'm practically dangling a lion cub over a cliff, my life is so circular.

In a few days, my agency launches a new website which features a section where I'll be blogging. My first foray into work communiqué happens October 23. I'm spending a week in Disney World and chronicling my daily adventures. I hope you'll join me for the month of October as I transition From Soho to Silo into a more travel-centric site.

Announcing My Place in the Family of Things

2010-08-08T11:22:00.120-05:00

A lot has changed for me in the last month. Dan and I moved to Athens, Georgia. We now live in a two-story house smack dab between two soul food restaurants. And tomorrow, I start work at a travel agency (smack dab between a sorority mansion and a psychiatric office). I've been mentally compiling a list of all the things I want to blog about, like taking a break from teaching, or tying knots in our makeshift escape rope. But after reading Anis Shivani's excoriating Huffington Post article, "The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary America Writers," I felt compelled to articulate my uneasiness. Let me explain.

I've called Athens home before -- it was roughly ten years ago that I finished my English Masters program and sped away so quickly that a North Carolina state patrolman pulled me over in a church parking lot for doing 55 in a 25 MPH school zone. I had both back windows rolled down to accommodate my recent ex-boyfriend's pleather loveseat (or just "seat," since the love had long gone). Next to me, and strapped in like a passenger, was my creative thesis. Yes, I'd buckled it up. Those stories and poems were such an extension of me, so hard-won and exhaustive, that I felt as if I'd born them from my rib (and without any anesthetic). When the cop asked me if I knew how fast I had been going, I nodded "yes," unbuckled my thesis, and handed it to him. Through a sheen of tears, and in a calm serial killer voice, I explained that it had been a very long week. It remains the only time I've gotten out of a ticket and received a "congratulations" to boot.

So I feel like a time traveler, or a matryoshka doll. Inside the me living here now are other me's who lived here before -- the woman I was at 22, dipping my fries in feta dressing at The Grill, or 23, staggering home arm-in-arm with friends after a night at The Manhattan. The same bartender still works there. I can remember carving my initials into a table at Little Italy, but I can't find the table. There are so many names, so many letters. I left Athens a decade ago heart-broken and directionless. Now I've returned, in a secure partnership, more self-aware.

I think we all walk around as living and breathing matryoshka dolls. Which is why Anis Shivani's diatribe against his successful publishing peers struck me as so unmindful. In his post, he exposes 15 contemporary writers to be talentless hacks (11 of which are either women or minorities). He says of Amy Tan that she "empowered other immigrant writers to make mountains out of the molehills of their minor adjustment"; that Helen Vendler "has never uttered one original insight about the great poets she has studied"; and that Sharon Olds' poetry "defines feminism turned upon itself, chewing up its own hot and bothered cadaver." While I'm all for promoting an open forum for substantiated critique, Shivani's anger precludes any reasonable persuasion. To rail so superciliously against popular authors in a poplar medium like The Huffington Post, without offering any pragmatic instruction or guided reading (he reduces each writer to a few lines out of context), is more than ungrateful. It's a form of self-deception. Anis Shivani, have you never outgrown an author but still remained indebted to what you once felt or learned? Were you born fully formed, a solid figure, less matryoshka than the rest of us?

When I was in my early twenties, I drove four hours to DC just to hear Billy Collins read. Shivani asserts that Collins "has perfected, over twenty years, a brand of poetry candy." I can't say that I disagree. I think that Collins relies too heavily on formula. I would love to see him employ more mystery. I wouldn't be afraid to say any of this to Collins' face. I would offer him the same honest critique that I give to my friends. And I would tell him that his poem "Japan" meant so much to me -- means so much to me -- that I once navigated Dupont Circle in rush hour just to hear him say "I am the heavy bell/and the moth is life with its papery wings." Collins contributed to my poetic education. Even if I have outgrown "Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes," there are layers of his poems inside me, poems that still resonate and affect the way I read today. I now have the tools to appreciate and critique. Haughtiness has no place in what we, as poets, are hoping to accomplish.

And Shivani himself is not just a critic, but a poet. We have more than ten Facebook friends in common -- which is to say, we are members of the same community. My fellow writer and friend Zach was recently asked, by a high school student attending the Iowa Young Writers' Studio, to describe his poetic process. I loved his answer. Zach, who has just won four contests in a row, who remains humble and indebted to the spirit and integrity of craft. "I don't distinguish between my daily life and my writing life," he said. "I'm always taking notes, seeing poems in everything." This resonated with me. Poetry is a way of being in the world. This existing can be analytical and discerning -- it must be -- but it must also be generous.

The term I taught Creative Writing at NYU, I brought in several poems to discuss on the first day. One of the those poems was Sharon Olds' "The Glass." I asked a burly boy, a Junior, to read it aloud. He stopped half-way through. He stood up, pushed in his chair, and left without gathering his books. We continued class without him. When he returned, after everyone else had gone, he explained to me that he couldn't take the course. His father had died the week before from cancer. I said I understood. "But I'll keep this," he said, unfolding the poem from his pocket. I hadn't noticed that he'd carried it out of the room with him. I'm still not sure if this was a failed or successful teaching moment. I do know that Sharon Olds meant something to this boy -- something that Shivani's reductive "tampons and lactation" doesn't account for.

So what is the purpose of poetry? Is it just to make us feel something deeply? I think we can start with feeling -- never condescending enough to take away a person's authentic experience -- and proceed to intelligent, respectful critique. I find that high school and college students really respond to Olds' poetry, and because of that response, I'm provided a window as a teacher. I thought a lot about Shivani's post and its off-putting tone, imagining my students poring over its content and feeling chastised. "I guess I'm dumb because I like Billy Collins' accessibility," or "Now I'll never admit Mary Oliver's 'Wild Geese' moved me." I thought a lot about the poetry project Dan and I undertook, to record podcasts to help give our parents a point of entry into this seemingly insular world we so adamantly defend. One of my Augustana students last spring said to me, while we were discussing Olds' "Sex Without Love," that the repetition of "come to the" was too obvious a device, that the poem would have been better if it had been more subtle. And I completely agreed. We weren't afraid to criticize the poem, but we did so without bitterness, with the shared understanding of what it feels like to buckle-up your work in the front seat of your car. Someone made this poem. Someone cared enough to try.

There are people behind poems. I like to think I earned another MFA working for Sharon Olds as her personal assistant. I did this job full time, for a year. I witnessed firsthand her process, the warm and seamless integration of poetry into her daily life. Sharon loves poetry. She loves helping others experience a poem. She would sit by her living room window, with its view of the Hudson, in the same spot where she probably rocked her two now-grown children, and draft by hand, or compose letters to friends. She, more than any other writer I have known, believes in a fellowship of writers, a shared compulsion towards, and reverence for, words. A great deal of my time was spent retyping the poems in One Secret Thing until I internalized its lineation and rhythms. I value her passion for exactitude. I value her political engagement with the world (an engagement that Shivani doesn't bother to mention). Inside me, then, is the mastryoshka of Sharon. There are poems I dislike. There are poems I love. I could have a real conversation with Sharon about either. We learned from each other. I wonder if Shivani has the guts to walk up to Louise Gluck and tell her that she is mediocrity ascended to the top.

As a humor writer, I welcome parody and sarcasm and snark. I think it's funny to imagine Mary Oliver talking to a snow owl. But there must be a way to critique that isn't so rantingly mean-spirited. Shivani accuses Mary Oliver of such egotistical elitism that you would think he never wrote a poem about Harold Bloom's old age. It's hard creating poems, and it's hard getting people to read them. Jennifer Moxley writes, in "Broken Poetics," that "It is easier to eavesdrop on and denigrate the compassionate, learned, and much interrupted conversation that makes up the history of poetry than it is to participate." Surely we can do more to foster a well-informed community.

Poems For Our Parents

2010-06-27T10:56:00.045-05:00

A couple of months ago, Dan and I decided that we wanted to record ourselves discussing poetry. The idea came about after we realized that our sweet parents were buying up our journals and chapbooks and using them as coffee table displays but never engaging us in conversation about the writing itself. Basically, we thought it would be a worthwhile endeavor to make a short podcast for each of our favorite poems, as if we were introducing these poems to our parents. While we're jazzed about the finished product (20 recordings), somewhere along the line, it became less "Poems for our Parents" and more "Poems for our Salty Little Sister at Boarding School."

Here's our discussion -- this particular one led by me -- of Yusef Komunyakaa's "Starlight Scope Myopia." We talked off the cuff, with no real notes or game plan. I could have said so much more about why I love this poem: the circling back to the ox cart in the final line, the slow transfiguration of impersonal shadows into individual men, the surprising temporal shift of "years after this scene" and its implied trauma. If you have any questions, please leave them as a comment!

Note to readers: a starlight scope actually looks like this and not this.

Starlight Scope Myopia

Gray-blue shadows lift
shadows onto an ox cart.

Making night work for us,
the starlight scope brings
men into killing range.

The river under Vi Bridge
takes the heart away

like the Water God
riding his dragon.
Smoke-colored

Viet Cong
move under our eyelids,

lords over loneliness
winding like coral vine through
sandalwood & lotus,

inside our lowered heads
years after this scene

ends. The brain closes
down. What looks like
one step into the trees,

they're lifting crates of ammo
& sacks of rice, swaying

under their shared weight.
Caught in the infrared,
what are they saying?

Are they talking about women
or calling the Americans

beaucoup dien cai dau?
One of them is laughing.
You want to place a finger

to his lips & say "shhhh."
You try reading ghost talk

on their lips. They say
"up-up we go," lifting as one.
This one, old, bowlegged,

you feel you could reach out
& take him into your arms. You

peer down the sights of your M-16,
seeing the full moon,
loaded onto an ox cart.

There's a New Deputy in Town: My Application to the Sheriff's Office

2010-06-22T17:44:00.085-05:00

Guess what isn't as easy as sliding off a greasy hog backwards. Finding a job in our soon-to-be home of Athens, GA. Tired of piecing together temporary adjunct teaching gigs, I've decided to only apply for full-time positions that offer benefits. Pickins are slim. I'm either grossly underqualified ("must have five years' experience constructing dioramas of swampland") or slightly overqualified ("primary job requirement is sitting for extended periods"). I've ruled out public high school, because I don't have my state certification yet, and I can't seem to find a private academy that doesn't require a letter of recommendation from my pastor. I don't have a pastor. I do have a phone interview with a travel agency on Thursday that looks promising. My plan for next year (as mapped out on my vision board using cut-outs from back issues of W magazine, which lends my goals an air of haute-couture) is to work an enjoyable 9 to 5, and in my free time, write a collection of personal essays. I also want to construct a catio (a patio for cats).

Because applying for jobs is exhausting and frequently unrewarding, I like to release stress by writing cover letters and expressing interest in positions I don't even want. I know, I know, it sounds like a big waste of time, but trust me -- it's really gratifying. Especially when you follow through to the end and attach the document in an actual email to HR.

Dear Sheriff's Office,

I can't tell you how thrilled I was to see your posting for Clarke-County Deputy Sheriff. My earliest memory is of wanting to become a Sheriff. Having long abandoned that dream because I couldn't meet the necessary requirements, I'm now eager to become a Deputy Sheriff.

I grew up watching Dukes of Hazard. That show planted the seed of civic duty in my fertile child's mind, and I feel that I have the necessary character, qualifications, and driving record to prevent the squirrely machinations of your county's Boss Hogg and Roscoe.

For the past two years, I have been teaching rhetoric and poetry at a small private liberal arts college in Illinois. I plan to bring the same enthusiastic focus to jail sentencing as I do to sentence construction.

One of my favorite books is Crime and Punishment. Dostoyevsky really gives voice to my correctional facility philosophy. I believe that a person's conscience is discipline enough. As a spearhead of Clarke County law enforcement, I would devote less time to incarcerating criminals and more time to the DeBeauty Sheriff Program.

The DeBeauty Sheriff Program would call for erecting beautiful things in public places. For example, a well-situated statue of a mama cat licking her newborn kittens -- in a bank plaza, for example -- would act as a deterrent to potential armed robbers while simultaneously making wanted armed robbers feel bad about themselves. Other examples of beautiful things could include a non-denominational Mary Magdalene made entirely out of sugar cubes, or a mural of the Georgia Bulldog cheerleaders superimposed onto a spray-painted reproduction of Monet's Water Lilies (each cheerleader would stand on her own pad or perhaps even wear it as a hat).

Although I have no prior experience in maintaining jail security or transporting prisoners, I believe I can perform the necessary functions to ensure the safety and well-being of inmates, employees, and visitors. In fact, this very morning I passed the 15-passenger vehicle road test and am now certified in the state of Iowa to drive a maxi-van full of summer campers to the Anamosa State Penitentiary Museum. I have planned this excursion, unbeknownst to the other staffers or kids, to further my Deputy Sheriff's education. The museum's "From the Gallows to the World Series" exhibit has much to teach a starless rookie like me.

My gentle exterior belies a rough and tumble interior. My BA in English, MA in Creative Writing, and MFA in Poetry have created an almost bullish need for justice. Assuming I pass the unspecified entry level physical ability test (I run an eleven minute mile and almost always take the optional leg extension in standing head to knee pose), I can see no more capable candidate for the position of Deputy Sheriff.

I look forward to hearing from you soon and discussing the job in further detail.

Sincerely,
Becca

Rue McClanahan

2010-06-03T11:02:00.005-05:00

She will be missed. Was it only three years ago that I held the Rue-did-she-wash-her-McClanahands contest? Click here and here.

The Story of Steve Burns (or: Boo's Clues)

2010-05-23T16:01:00.164-05:00

Within months of moving to New York City in my mid-twenties, I was dating my first actor. Let's call him Alex. Alex was a recent college grad with a BA in Philosophy who spent his mornings finger painting at a pre-school and his evenings performing improv in a Midtown sex emporium that had been converted into a comedy space (the walls behind the stage were still lined with mirrors). We met at a house party where I was miserable. That week I'd answered an ad to be a Bumble and Bumble hair model in order to get a free cut. I hadn't understood that the class theme would be Julia Roberts circa 1991 circa Hook.

I remember slipping away from the party and staring at my hair in the bathroom mirror, sort of poking at it with my vodka stirrer, then taking off my scarf belt and tying it around my head. When I reemerged, I sat next to Alex. We talked for five minutes about Fast Food Nation. (OMG! The chapter on slaughterhouse odors grossed me out, too!) Then that was it. His friend (girlfriend?) was leaving, he had to go.

Three times in my life, I've been on the receiving end of a grand romantic gesture, the kind that convinces you you're in Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. My favorite will always be the first time I met Dan in person. He drove to my Brooklyn apartment at 3AM and surprised me under a streetlight wearing a captain's hat. I was a goner.

The second was when a Catalan cop approached me in a bar in Figueres and told me I had "petty" blue eyes, which was a convenient segue into the story of my recent mugging. He asked permission from my friend's parents to take me on a date the following day, where he spent much of the hour proclaiming, in a bar full of leathery old men, that he would avenge my robbery. As a token of that promise, he even presented me with his boyhood copy of Neruda's odes while we said our forever goodbye in his Fiat. James Blunt's Back to Bedlam played. It was magical. He kissed me with minimal tongue. (We're still long distance friends five years later.)

And the third grand romantic gesture? On the way home that spring night in 2003, Alex called 411 to get the number of the woman whose party we were at so that he could deliver the message that he regretted not staying.

Two months later, when my relationship with Alex had taken a turn for the non-communicative worse (I'm flashing back to our Easter Sunday "stroll" through Prospect Park, when he jogged five paces ahead of me), I started to refer to my time with him as doing improve. As in improve the situation. I thought I could fix things. When we were together, I put on an unscripted one-woman show of denial and low self-esteem. Why won't you go fishing with me in the Adirondacks? Why are you emotionally distant? Why are you getting back on the highway? Alex had once explained to me that he had the awful habit of "fucking shit up" once a relationship got good. "It's like I'm at a really great rest stop," he said. "You're a really great rest stop! One with the best vending machines and bathrooms! And I don't want to get back on the highway and keep driving. Don't let me get back on that highway and keep driving."

That's when I made the very unhelpful, and desperate, suggestion that Alex simply walk alongside the highway for awhile. "Like you're part of a litter clean-up crew," I'd said, to which he'd replied, "You mean like a prisoner."

As part of my ongoing improve performance/adopt-a-highway program, I wanted to get Alex an amazing birthday present. I wanted to return his initial grand romantic gesture. But I was also poor. Just the night before, I'd paid for a can of PBR in dimes. So what was I to do? It wasn't until Alex and I were out buying red bean cakes at a Korean market, and a little girl ran up to him and demanded to know if he was on Blue's Clues, that the plan began to take shape.

"Oh wow," I said. "You do look like that guy."

"Steve Burns."

"No, the guy from Blue's Clues. The one who died."

"That's Steve Burns. And he didn't die."

"It's uncanny!"

"The kids at school always think I'm him. Sometimes I just go with it."

The following statement about the show and its format, taken from the Blue's Clues Wikipedia entry, pretty much speaks to my pathetic efforts at the time to convince Alex I was indispensable: "Its creators believed that if children were more involved in the action of what they were viewing, they would attend to its content longer than previously expected." Basically, I wanted Alex to attend to my content longer than expected. I needed to make his birthday more interactive. There was no better way to accomplish this goal than by getting Steve Burns to attend his party.

Even though I find most TV remotes too complicated to operate, I've always been adept at Google stalking. I have a gift for search terms. Still, just to be safe, I had allocated the better part of my working day at the ol' travel agency to finding Steve Burns' contact info.

I was emailing him in mere minutes. I'd known I'd needed to start slow, woo him with wit and charm, maybe ask for an autographed picture first, before launching into a full-on party invite. Turns out Steve Burns and I got along quite well, despite his wily protests. At one point, he tried to convince me he was Alex.

Steve, I don't think you are Alex, because Alex
would have addressed the main point of my email. That
main point being that I despirately need an autographed
picture of Steve Burns. So, are you in on this or not? -Becca

Becca, Alas, I am out. I kid you not. I gave them all away.

I have to go to Nickelodeon to get more. And I don't

like to go there. - Steve

Steve, you must have SOMETHING you can autograph

for me. An old sock, a paper plate, Nickelodeon

hate mail? I am in doubt as to whether or not you are

truly Steve Burns. Please understand that the state of my

relationship depends on your signature. PS Why do you

hate Nickelodeon? Did you get slimed? -Becca

I don't hate it. I just don't like going there.
And yes I have been slimed. It finds your nethers,
and it stays there. - Steve

I doubt that the famous readily discuss their nethers
online, so from this point out, I am just going to

assume that you are not the real Steve Burns. So, that
means I can't even get the guy pretending to be Steve
Burns to give me his autograph. GREAT. Is there
someway I can get in touch with the guy pretending to be
the guy pretending to be Steve Burns? -Becca

Sigh. What good is this website if I can't convince

people that I am me. This ALWAYS happens. -Steve

My friend Garth has this theory that most celebrities are more accessible that you think -- that their email address either consists of their name (ie, Judith Light@gmail.com) or the worst movie they starred in (Waterworld@hotmail.com). I'm not so sure. Either my emails are going to Judith Light's spam folder, or she's ignoring me. I do know that Steve Burns was gracious enough to humor my absurdity. While he didn't actually attend Alex's party, or my own Beer Garden Geburtstagsfeier a couple months later (something about how I might turn out to be an axe-wielder?), he did call my phone and sing Happy Birthday to Alex. I don't remember Alex much caring. We broke up soon after.

My brief contact with Steve Burns taught me an important relationship lesson -- that grand romantic gestures are fine, so long as they don't double as grand resuscitation gestures. It just took me longer to follow the clues, to piece together the paw prints. I just needed more time in my Thinking Chair.

(And Steve --I'll be in NYC celebrating my 33rd Birthday on June 1st. Just sayin'.)

I Couldn't Help But Hunger...

2010-05-10T14:05:00.125-05:00

Last night, I opted out of seeing Iron Man 2 in favor of baking a triple layer chocolate cake. I ran out of eggs and substituted yogurt (which is about as smart as trying to replace palladium with platinum in an arc reactor).

Anyway, somewhere between phoning up neighbors to beg for eggs and defeatedly dumping a container of non-fat Dannon into the Cuisinart, I turned on Entertainment Tonight. Mary Hart (a former Miss South Dakota) was introducing a segment about Donna Simpson, the 600 pound New Jersey woman with the personal goal of gaining an additional 400 pounds by consuming 12,000 calories a day. Donna Simpson is currently the world's Fattest Mother, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. She even has her own website, where people can pay to watch her hoover food. (She not only eats lying down in bed, but wearing lingerie.) While I was guiltily licking butter and sugar off of a small corner of a small spatula, Donna's husband, son, and daughter were preparing her a special pre-Mother's Day breakfast of 8 sausage patties, 4 pieces of toast, and a 10-egg omelet. I have to be honest here. My first reaction was anger -- anger that I had run out of eggs, and that Donna was throwing back a dozen.

What weighs 1000 pounds: the dog and cat food Kei$ha just donated to the Nashville Metro County Animal Shelter. Two adult black bears. Fifty regulation aluminum scuba tanks (full). 1,515 plastic fast food trays.

And yet, there's this: I ate my own way into the Guinness Book of World Records. A few weeks ago, in honor of Augustana's 150th Anniversary, I lined up on a football field with 2,693 other eaters to set a new World Record for most number of people in a chain licking ice cream simultaneously. It was a fire hazard. It involved standing around for hours on the buggy 30 yard line at dinnertime holding peanut butter-fudge-oreo ice cream you were forbidden to eat until the official signal. It involved group cheers of the "Give-Me-a!" variety and The Wave. It involved turning to your left, bending down, and tonguing a stranger's scoop for a full minute. In short: it was dumb, but we were making history.

What is it about the Guinness Book of World Records that compels a grown man to retype The Life of Abraham Lincoln working backwards from the last sentence (there are 956 pages), or Swiss chefs to make a 1,724 pound tiramisu? What is the allure of baking an even bigger tiramisu (with 661 pounds of mascarpone -- roughly the current size of Donna Simpson) and storing it in an ice rink? Maybe we all need to be the best at something, even if that something is inane or deleterious. This desire to achieve singular success is on the rise with obesity. We've upped the ante on shock value -- underage Miley Cyrus in a bird cage, Lucky Rich with his 100% tattooed body -- so that memorable is inseparable from ample. Go bigger, bolder. (Soon I will write about my friend Isaac's Red Lobster documentary, "Endless Shrimp," a cinematic musing on American excess. I managed to eat six plates of scampi on camera and didn't throw up once! Even though I promised him I would.)

Still. There's a wide divide between a 400 pound weight gain and licking ice cream en masse. I try to teach my students empathy, but how can anyone walk in Donna Simpson's shoes when she can't even walk in them herself? If I sit with my empathy, it grows vexed and demands the phone number for child protective services. (Clearly, a morbidly obese woman actively taking steps to further balloon is not just inflicting harm on herself, but on her family.) But then I do feel sorry for Donna Simpson -- sorry that she is conflating deep emotional issues with positive body image. Sorry that no regulatory agency has pulled the plug on her website, or at least helped her copyedit it (she lists "being feed" as an interest). I want to call her up and suggest other things to be the best at. Losing weight, for one. Or designing a containment dome for an oil spill. Or ridding school lunch food of sodium benzoate. Or simply taking her health seriously.

On Feeling Both Old and Wise

2010-05-07T14:16:00.027-05:00

My friend Kiki is doing the 30 day bikram yoga challenge. I'm trying to join her three times a week. The downtown studio is located right next to the University, so we're usually the oldest yoginis there, which means our instructors like to issue motivational phrases aimed solely at undergraduates. We sweat through commands like "Keep holding eagle, it's easier than studying!" and "Round forward, earn tonight's party!" This afternoon, Kiki sent me the best email:

Right before pilates started yesterday, someone put Rusted Root on the sound system and the sweet, slightly crazed strains of "Send Me On My Way" soon filled the space. I and this other woman who was probably in her 40s immediately began humming the completely incomprehensible lyrics ("pick me up with golden hands") while the youngsters around us flexed their smooth tattooed muscles and looked baffled. "Is this from the Lion King soundtrack?" one of them asked. And I felt both old and wise. I mean, remember this video? The bongos! The bare feet and crushed velvet pants! And is that a f***ing pan flute solo?

Downward Bulldog

2010-05-04T21:55:00.018-05:00

The job description for a Georgia public school teacher includes a detailed breakdown of classroom calisthenics. Great. I can expect to squat for approximately 10% of my working day, and throw my hands up in frustration for 65%, but I still can't figure out what kind of certification I need to even apply.

I think that stick teacher is trying to lift a Riverside Shakespeare.

(Oh yeah -- we're moving to Athens in August!)

Monsters of Poetry

2010-05-03T13:02:00.005-05:00

Video of me and Dan reading last weekend at Madison's Project Lodge. Dan's chapbook is soon to be released from Tilt Press!

Poem in Your Pocket Day

2010-04-28T23:17:00.019-05:00

Tomorrow is national Poem in Your Pocket Day. I'll be carrying around Rilke's "I Am Too Much Alone in This World, Yet Not Alone," and if anybody stops me and asks me to read it to them, I will. I just love this poem, and I've had it on the brain all afternoon. Dan and I decided to cancel television service for the summer but also buy iphones. I guess we're trying to strike a healthy balance between inundation and isolation?

Oh! and if you're in Madison Friday night, come hear us read at the Project Lodge.

"I Am Too Much Alone in This World, Yet Not Alone"

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone
enough
to truly consecrate the hour.
I am much too small in this world, yet not small
enough
to be to you just object and thing,
dark and smart.
I want my free will and want it accompanying
the path which leads to action;
and want during times that beg questions,
where something is up,
to be among those in the know,
or else be alone.

I want to mirror your image to its fullest perfection,
never be blind or too old
to uphold your weighty wavering reflection.
I want to unfold.
Nowhere I wish to stay crooked, bent;
for there I would be dishonest, untrue.
I want my conscience to be
true before you;
want to describe myself like a picture I observed
for a long time, one close up,
like a new word I learned and embraced,
like the everday jug,
like my mother's face,
like a ship that carried me along
through the deadliest storm.

Trivia

2010-04-26T22:11:00.067-05:00

On Saturday, Dan and I participated in campus trivia night. A group of students got special permission for us, two faculty members, to join their team, thus ensuring a totally legit yet underhanded victory. We did win -- $10 cash each and a heap of Good and Fruity licorice! -- but I was useless. Out of ten rounds, the only answer I knew with any degree of certainty was that the Walsh family on 90210 had moved to California from Minnesota. None of my teammates believed me.

On our one-hour commute home, navigating torrential rainfall on I-80, I suddenly just had to have a Coke. Dan was driving. I was so desperate for a Coke that I begged for it by its full name, Coca-Cola. "Dan," I said, "please please please can we stop at McDonald's for a Coca-Cola." It had to be from McDonalds, too. I like their ratio of corn syrup to carbonated water the best, not to mention their straw size.

I'm not proud of my occasional self-serving behavior, but I'm no longer ashamed of it, either. After I was assured of my soda fix, I did some really bighearted stuff. I massaged Dan's neck while he focused on avoiding truck spray and I complimented him on knowing in trivia that the first five books of the Old Testament are called the Pentateuch. (I didn't remind him that he botched an earlier question about Jews and lamb, costing our team a precious point and maybe a Frito Lay Big Grab Bag Variety.) I also voluntarily turned the station when Fergie came on.

We pulled up to McDonald's at 12:01AM. This particular McDonald's closes at 12:00AM. I banged my sandal against the dashboard a few times and yelled into the drive-through order board ("I just want a Coke! Fuck it! I know you're in there because you're mopping!") and then did some light pranayama breathing exercises before turning to Dan and stating, quite calmly, "Now we'll have to go to HyVee."

He mumbled something about "Driving Miss Crazy," but you know what? My amazing boyfriend took me to the grocery store and waited curbside. The late shift check-out dude gave me a stack of 2-liter Coke coupons, too. He must have seen the schizo in my eyes.

When we got home, I ran through the door and into the kitchen and opened the freezer and took out my favorite ice cube tray, the one that makes ice in the shape of duckies, and emptied the frozen duckies into a snifter, and poured myself the most picturesque, fizzy Coca-Cola. I took about three sips. Then I emptied the rest out in the sink. Dan didn't say a word.

Dan and I have been together for almost three years now, living together for more than half that time. Concealing neurotic behavior from the other person is no longer an option. The startling truth is, we wouldn't want to conceal it. I can finally admit to a man that I need the noise machine on high and the fan on arctic blast to get a decent night's sleep. Dan's crazy cards are on the table, too. I know that when he sees a hairball he'll pretend that he didn't, that he'll wait for me to clean it up, and if I don't, he'll step over it for days. Rather than let these hairball detentes go on indefinitely, I've come to enjoy scrubbing the carpet. Somehow it's sweet, another addition to our private, screwball language. He smiles when I say I'll do all the dishes, knowing fully well what I mean is "I'll do all the dishes but the colander." (Come on. How do you clean a colander when it's meant to retain food? Also: Karaoke has impeccable timing. He just hacked up a hairball in my study.)

"Becca's awesome. I'll take a little bullshit if it comes in a package. Those packages are out there." This is what I overheard Dan saying to his college buddy on the phone yesterday, fielding some question about girls. He gave the right answer.

Curious Gorge

2010-04-24T17:10:00.026-05:00

On our way back from AWP Denver two weeks ago -- a thirteen hour road trip -- Dan and Isaac and Kiki and I stopped at Fort Cody Trading Post in North Platte, Nebraska for some snacks. I *love* the woman behind the counter. She could be the Man in the Yellow Hat's wife. Also, my hair in this video is much grosser than bacon & cheese crickets.

One Man's Quarter is Another Man's Candy

2010-04-23T11:00:00.000-05:00

For their final paper, quite a few of my students are choosing to investigate romantic longing and how it manifests in this term's assigned texts. At the same time, I'm getting around to writing creative non-fiction about my six years living in New York City.

A 2000 article by Jayeeta Bagchi in the Social Scientist entitled "Looking For Reality in Romance" posits that trashy novels still maintain a toe-hold in this world:

The hero/heroine of the romance is not transferred to a fictitious land. The attempt is to delimit their spatio-temporal experience to the history and geography of our daily existence, though the time and space used is always mystified myth and is never authentic. The trick is to turn even our familiar locales into exotic spots through extraordinary situations.

My girlfriends and I forced elegance onto the dilapidated. We moved through sleepless crowded boroughs, sugar-coating troubles, sentimentalizing the unsanitary, writing off low pay and a schizophrenic downstairs neighbor as a necessary part of "The Dream." Most of all, we exoticized men.

The trick is to turn even our familiar locales into exotic spots through extraordinary situations. I was Cinderella attending the same open bar, but a bar of my own invention, and therefore new. I was searching for myself and giddy with the euphoria of being desired, of first being found by others. Prince Street and Prince Charming were one in the same, love and locale inextricably twined. I was both driven and lethargic: I worked hard at worshiping mundane vistas, mundane men. Even my poetry was full of hyperbole.

Time and space in New York City is a mystified myth. As a New Yorker, I never wore a watch, but always raced the clock. I would stand on the subway platform and feel a certain wind-swept relief when the train came that I was finally going somewhere. Then the waiting began all over again.

New York City is comprised of millions of romantics simultaneously creating their own fantastical landscapes; the city itself is gritty, visceral, real. Wonderful. Once, on the subway, I watched a mentally retarded man pick up a quarter from the ground and roll it around in his mouth. His teeth flashed silver. At the next stop, before he got off, he returned the quarter to where he found it. A businessman boarded the car, saw the coin, and smiling, pocketed it. Another man's private space and time.

(0:27)

203 East 4th

2010-04-22T10:17:00.021-05:00

As part of his on-going celebration of National Poetry Month, Jeffery posted one of my chapbook poems on his blog. I wrote it a long time ago, back when I was in the workshop and living on Madonna's old street, pining for some now forgotten emotionally distant lanky rakish boy. I'm glad Jeffery chose this particular sonnet. Both Dan and I are seriously missing NYC and looking forward to returning for a week in May.

Washington Square Park, Spring 2004

Dien Cai Meow

2010-04-21T20:05:00.028-05:00

Dan and I cleaned off the back porch and reinstated Karaoke's jungle gym, just in time for summer. We also redecorated with our neighbors' discarded couch. Here's hoping they throw out an espresso machine next!

This is a really happy/confused kitty (what? furniture outdoors? feed me?):

Here I am, seemingly perplexed by a student email with the header I Didn't Realize We Had a Final Paper:

And here's our little demon, fast asleep -- much like my student who sent that email -- on a copy of Yusef Komunyakaa'a Dien Cai Dau:

(Dien Cai Meow courtesy of Dan's witty brain.)

Habitat Forge

2010-04-20T10:46:00.038-05:00

According to Habitforge.com, it takes only 21 days to form a habit. So I thought daily blogging might be a worthwhile endeavor. I like the idea of forging behavior -- forging always makes me think of Pigeon Forge, NC, which in turn makes me think of Dolly Parton, a paragon of bootstrapping. Maybe I can successfully form a habit in only a day. After all, that's how long it took me to get hooked on Bacon Ranch Pringles (which are actually Kosher?)

While not writing, I've spent some quality time teaching, and rearranging furniture, and discussing Spartacus Blood and Sand with Dan, and looking up Western birds in a bird book, and figuring out why I take extended hiatuses from writing. I even went to a few sessions of sliding scale therapy to address my tendencies towards procrastination and self-doubt. My therapist works with children, so sometimes I asked to play with her multicultural puppet set. I can now also beat the steel-ball-in-a-hole skill game.

I think that by relinquishing rigid ideas of perfection, I will be more productive. Last night I had a dream that I caught a brightly colored fish, and when I attempted to unhook it, it transmogrified into a white-faced ibis (I know this from my book of Western birds). The white-faced ibis has red eye in every picture and a beak reminiscent of Edward Scissor Hands and is known to ornithologists as a "wanderer." Basically, it can't commit to a habitat.

In my dream, I reached out to my flighty ibis, but she made a squawking sound and zig-zagged away. Then I was rehearsing with the cast of Glee. The point is, there's some connection between habit and habitat. Repetition is a form of root-taking. I suspect that creative freedom isn't about spreading my wings, but standing still.

Mazel Tv

2010-02-17T16:50:00.039-06:00

Sometimes I watch the A&E show Hoarders to feel better about myself and to prove to Dan that no, despite the sorry state of our back porch recycling, I am not a hoarder. Nothing validates your own housekeeping like seeing a man forced to sleep in the tub because his own bed has been overrun with back issues of Popular Science.

Over the holidays, Dan and I were terrifically terrified by this one episode, which featured a middle-aged woman whose fiance had been killed in an auto accident years earlier. She was what I coined "a late onset hoarder" (I like to invent my own psychiatric terms while watching mental health shows). Basically, you got the impression that before experiencing this devastating loss, she was a believer in more conventional storage methods: shoe organizers, for example, or a place for your hair bobbins that isn't your dining room table. You got the sincere sense that before the crash, she didn't need to hold onto firecracker wrappers. But because she hadn't been able to control her fiance's death, her compulsions began overcompensating as a means of restoring order. She soon associated "things" with the memory of him, and by hoarding these trinkets and trifles -- and a bunch of other stuff that he probably never cared much for, like shampoo samples -- she was reclaiming power over her life. She might have had to wade through her kitchen, but she felt safe. Clutter became a kind of talisman against pain.

I've suffered from anxiety for as long as I can remember. It's not something I really talk about, and even those closest to me don't always understand its effects. I work hard at mindful living -- which entails a deep habituated focus on the present, and a deliberate rejection of worry and self-doubt. At the risk of coming across as a freak -- although, I used to time celebrities in the bathroom -- I think it's easiest for me to offer an example of the kind of compulsive worrying I do. When I was a freshman in college, my mother gave me a small satchel purse, you know, the tie-dye kind you wear across your chest and maybe keep your Dave Matthews tickets in. I really liked this purse. But I became obsessed with the inevitability of its fraying and ultimately falling apart. As a result, I couldn't stop messing with it. I feigned absent mindedness while twirling the clasp, but in reality, I was actively destroying it. I now understand that, much like a hoarder, inherent in me is a need to control disappointment -- not through accumulation, but premature ruin.

In Donald Barthelme's short story called (oddly enough) "Rebecca," he writes:

Very often one "pushes away" the very thing that one most wants to grab, like a lover. This is a common, although distressing, psychological mechanism, having to do (in my opinion) with the fact that what is presented is not presented "purely," that there is a tiny little canker or germ placed in it somewhere.

I've come to realize that I strive for a fantastical perfection, and hence, knowing it won't reach fruition, seek some modicum of control over its demise. But what anxiety can teach us is that pernicious thoughts aren't always bad. When I'm really afraid, it's just my way of acknowledging value. If I have compulsive thoughts about swerving into the next lane, that doesn't mean I ever would swerve. Rather, it means I love this life I lead, and the thoughts arise as a testament to that love. Very often one pushes away the very thing that one most wants to grab.

I guess the larger issue is why some people need control, need answers, and some don't. There's a trade-off to everything. I'm a better teacher because I over-think, but a worse flyer. When Barhthelme observes that what is presented is not presented purely, I flash to the Jewish tradition of breaking the glass at a wedding, which serves as a reminder that embedded in any celebration is a canker of sadness. It's learning to honor that sadness, rather than control it, that brings peace.

Why Didn't You Knock, Sir?

2010-01-08T14:18:00.046-06:00

I’m spending the week in Rural Hall, NC at a friend's Old Holler farm. The main cabin was build in the 19th Century. There's a mounted walrus head from a North pole expedition, a 1897 Holy Bible next to a mysterious miniature oaken coffin inlaid with the Camel cigarettes insignia and the initials R.C.H. I’ve been handling bellows and swords, gourds and barometers. I wrapped two sweet gum balls around the backs of my ears. We drank Lagavulin and posed ourselves ad hoc with a fake doe, her flocked velvet fur like nettles. Crystals tied to branches dangle from the ceiling. A ship's wheel is a chandelier. Framed prints decorate the walls: of Appaloosa show ponies, of water-color beagles in profile and a German Shepard named Major Von Tannenberg. To the right of the kitchen doorway is the serrated rostrum of a sawtooth fish. I wander from room to room, poking and prodding curios, smelling atlases, tasting the lips of old pipes. Everywhere: pictures of nattily dressed men in skinny ties and G-Men glasses, like UFO salesmen. A snakeskin in a milk urn: was it found outside and thrown away, or did the snake crawl indoors to shed in ceramic dark? I flip to the middle of an obscure local author's memoir --Why Didn’t You Knock, Sir? -- and study black and white photos of a man clearing a high school track hurdle and directing cannon fire in Germany. I know none of us will ever read this book to learn who didn’t knock and why it was so important. Instead, our clothes grow smoky. We strum ukuleles and guitars, compose impromptu ballads about ex-lovers.

I Really Need to Go to Yoga

2010-01-04T12:11:00.019-06:00

My dad mounted last Christmas' Logitech web-cam on a tripod and set it up across from a window feeder. He uploads the footage onto YouTube. Starting at 1:16, this video basically depicts the cardinal version of me in NC. If suet were Cheez-Its.

Sleigh-Over

2009-12-22T16:19:00.036-06:00

Guys, here's my version of "Sleigh Ride," just in time for Christmas Eve. I recorded it in the guest bedroom at Dan's mom's house, singing into a cheap plug-in microphone, so the jing-jing-jingling and ring-ting-tingling gets seriously percussive and the Farmer Grey section sounds like I'm shouting a birthday invite into a wind tunnel. I also botched some lyrics and left out the "these wonderful things we'll remember" part. Having said all of that, I'm proud of my horse at the end. If you've had a glass (or three) of wassail, you might convince yourself that this is Karen Carpenter with asthma.

Happy holidays from the Miami airport!

Gym the Tree

2009-12-22T13:45:00.004-06:00

Blizzard 09

2009-12-20T00:22:00.010-06:00

Dan and I are stuck in Millersville, PA, riding out Blizzard '09 or Megastorm or whatever else the news outlets are calling it. Personally, I'm calling it Polargebiet. Which means "polar zone" in German.

We left Iowa Thursday night after Dan finishing teaching and drove to Englewood, Ohio, where we introduced Karaoke to Best Western. He loved Best Western. He kicked up his litter on the carpet and pawed it around like he was making Fresh Step castles.

Then Friday morning we roadtripped to Pittsburgh (another 5 hours) to spend quality time with our friend Anjali. She's graciously cat sitting for us. In Pittsburgh, we ate Chinese food at a restaurant that considers "diced beef and "fat intestine fish" vegetarian:

We almost went to Pittsburgh stripper karaoke (Bareaoke) but in the end, opted for a showcase of silent short films where two live bands took turns improvising a soundtrack. Also, "testicles hung from the ceiling" (Dan's words).

Sometimes I don't "get" art. After we'd already clocked 10 hours of Interstate driving, we were treated to a short film about... looking out a car window.

Dan and I made our own short this morning en route through Polargebiet! to Millersville (another 6 hours) to eat lunch with his grandparents, who are pushing ninety.

At lunch, we chowed down on homemade fruit salad, spinach soup, open-faced roast beef sandwiches, cocktail shrimp, and walnuts (in that order). I'm pretty obsessed with his grandparents. They're fun and feisty and full of WWII stories. Dan's grandmother is bad ass. She took a fall a few months ago and was like "Well, I just pulled myself out from under the car and crawled across the gutter and went inside and washed my coat. I was lucky. The stains came out." Here she talks about wiring the control panel of fighter planes:

Now we're snowed in at the Heritage Hotel. Weather permitting, we drive to VA Beach tomorrow. Hope everyone is safe and warm in their Snuggies!

And the (Silent) Night Goes By So Very Slow

2009-12-16T15:06:00.097-06:00

Dan's older brother just reminded me that this happened:

I don't typically wear hard hats to karaoke bars, but there was a costume wall. It was a Heart hat.

I'm glad he unearthed this video because a)singing is a really big part of my life that I haven't written about and b) I've been giving considerable thought to recording a Christmas album. Dan would play the spoons and maybe rap the dreidel song (yes, a Christmas album). I'd like to lay down a vocal track over a looped soundbite of clydesdales whinnying. Basically, instead of gifting my friends and family half-finished scarves (I call them "knit ascots") I could tool around on Garage Band and come up with enough songs for a holiday EP. I think I can at least do better than Amy Grant. Hey! That's not a bad working title: Better Than Amy Grant. I also like Gay Yuletide.

Tomorrow we leave Iowa for three weeks to spend time with our families in VA Beach, Raleigh, and St. Thomas. We're taking Karaoke with us in a posh pet carrier simply called "The Sherpa." I'm not sure what to pack, and I'm terrified of forgetting something important, like my passport or yoga pants. Nicole Kidman's powder mishap at the Nine premiere destroyed any faith I had in personal preparedness:

This haunts me, and not just because she looks like she face-planted in the chalk bowl at a gymnastics meet. I feel like this photo captures the expression of a woman who has only just now realized the herky-jerky of her make-up, and we are right there with her. Adding to her humiliation is that Platonic ideal of ringlet. I don't know. I've studied this a lot today. The "nine" looming over her head seems like a different word altogether, a portent, if you unfocus your eyes and let the letters blur. It almost reads "talc."

In merrier news, her husband Keith Urban plays the ganjo. I need a ganjo on my Christmas album.

I'll try to write and post pictures of our trip. I'm asking you guys to vote on which song you'd like me to record as an MP3 to make available for download on the blog. I've pre-picked six for you to choose from. You reserve the option of writing in additional seasonal selections as a post comment, but keep in mind I'm going with majority vote and bottom line, I won't sing the theme from Polar Express or "Happy Birthday Jesus." I refuse to fake a child's lisp.

Vote at the top of the right sidebar now!

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

2009-12-14T00:01:00.009-06:00

Tonight, Dan and I brought Karaoke over to our friend Thea's house for a dinner party. She has two cats, Killer and Karate. The meeting of the K's didn't go so well. Karaoke acted like it was a murder mystery party where he was getting murdered.

Karate's breath smells like a dead skunk wrapped in a used diaper (sinus issues) which somewhat explains why our little man was keeping his distance.

In the Three's Company remake with cats, I think Karaoke would play Janet.

Making the Call

2009-12-12T11:31:00.017-06:00

According to a recent year-long Harvard Medical School study of 141 teens (ages 13-17) from well-to-do families, "40 percent of the boys and 46 percent of the girls had had sexual intercourse before their parents had ever given them advice on how to ask someone out on a date." This is a scary statistic. Keep in mind that the parents in this study who failed to communicate with their children were the same parents who had willingly volunteered to participate in a study about communicating with their children.

I read about these findings (published Monday in Pediatrics) on Newsweek's Nurture Shock Block. Earlier, I'd watched a CNN special report on the difficulty American parents have in initiating conversation about sex with their children. I don't have children -- just a neutered cat who humps his stuffed bunny -- but I do think about my own hypothetical offspring, how I will one day show little Bryon or Millay how to roll a condom over a banana.

No wonder adolescents are confused. Edward in New Moon exhibits supernatural self-control but Tiger Woods can't keep his putter in his pants. We promote abstinence while obsessively fingering the sordid. Sorry, bad choice of words. But if your fourteen year old insists on bumping uglies, shouldn't you first discuss protection before forbidding the behavior? The Centers for Disease Control report that a third of U.S. ninth graders claim to have already had sex. At what age do you have the talk? Not just the one about the birds and the bees, but the birds and the bees and the STDs.

I was a teen anomaly. I didn't even have my first kiss until the spring of my freshman year. Of college. It took place in the dingy basement of a dance club in Durham. Since this was 1996, I was "clubbing" in denim overalls, a flannel shirt, and Caterpillar boots. My hair was pulled back with an actual rubber band. I was sober. He was six years my senior, a sportswriter from Fayetteville who had one of those interchangeable first and last names (like Todd Scott). He told me I was really pretty (right...) and, in a gentlemanly way -- is that even possible with La Bouche playing? -- expressed his desire to make-out. I had that feeling of simultaneously being inside and outside of history. One of my pledge sisters in my music fraternity gave me a thumbs up from the bar. I didn't love the kiss but I didn't hate it. I know I didn't love it because while it was happening I was wondering what kind of sports writing he did and if maybe I should be a journalism major.

I never told Todd Scott that he was my first kiss. I did thank him after.

I like to think that I will be cool and collected (though perhaps go into too much detail) when my own children come to me with questions. I watch enough Oprah to understand that the jump from Rainbow Brite to Rainbow Party can happen all too fast, and I want to be thoroughly, realistically prepared. I take pride in my sexuality and I would hope to cultivate a similar sense of responsibility, safety, and self in others. In fifth grade, I was at a slumber party where someone suggested we watch a Skinemax movie. One of the girls said "Hold on a minute, I need to call my mom first." We all gathered round and held our collective breath while she phoned her mother at 11pm to ask permission to watch soft core porn. We couldn't believe what was happening. None of us would have hazarded that call. None of us had that kind of relationship with our parents. In the end, her mom said yes, but not before posing questions I've returned to many times in my own life: "Is this something you want to do?" and "Do you think you'll regret it?"

Grand

2009-12-11T15:32:00.025-06:00

Jeffery just wrote a great post on Cats, which got us both thinking about our favorite musical moments. At the top of my list is the late Michael Jeter's and Brett Barrett's 1990 Tony Awards performance of "We'll Take a Glass Together" from Grand Hotel. Brett Barrett had just taken over the role of the baron from the legendary David Carroll, who had AIDs, and was too sick to perform at the Tonys. Carroll later died of a pulmonary embolism while in the studio recording the original cast album. The whole performance is fraught with emotion, and features some of the best choreography (Tommy Tune) I've ever seen. Michael Jeter won the Tony that year.

Check out a very young Jane Jane Krakowski at 0:32.

I used to listen to this song on repeat while getting ready to go out in Manhattan. It's hard to dance the Charleston and apply mascara at the same time.

Here's a rare clip of David Carroll singing "Anthem" from Chess, another one of my musicals in heavy rotation.

High Fashion

2009-12-09T11:56:00.011-06:00

There's a blizzard. I've been wearing the same pair of sweatpants for 48 hours. I'm like, totally shutting it down here in my sweatlace (which is a a necklace made from drawstrings).

Picture Book, Of People with Each Other

2009-12-08T22:08:00.024-06:00

My friend Mireia, whose beach wedding Dan and I attended in Costa Brava, Spain, back in May 2007, just emailed me this photo snapped by the hired photographer. It's nice when strangers capture your candid happiness. It's ever nicer when you discover that candid happiness a year and a half later.

(photo by Michel M.B.-Eva Rubio Fotografs)

Six Years

2009-12-07T16:41:00.043-06:00

I wrote this in my New York City journal, six years ago last week. I was twenty-six, drinking Jameson and reading a thick biography on Elizabeth Bishop in my local east-side Irish bar at happy hour. Yeah, cliche. My writing anxieties are pretty much the same.

12/3/03

I am seized by horrible paroxysms of fear when I attempt to write -- like climbing the ladder up, up, up to the high dive. There are pictures of me age 3 or 4 in Chandler Pool, frozen on the edge of an immense water, learning it. I assume everything can be traced back to childhood. It's amazing that you can be present in time and not remember it, to have to be shown what you experienced firsthand. My awareness of time passing is a claustrophobic tightening in my chest. Elizabeth Bishop felt it too. I have an abundance of fears. I'm in O'Neils, "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies" playing. Sometimes I despise writing because it isn't living. It's pitching a tent inside time. I want to understand everything: Kant's philosophy, the exact location of Borneo, Latin for circle. "The suspicion that poetry, her poetry in particular, was somehow beside the point stayed with Elizabeth for a long time." What is my ultimate destination as a poet? There's the problem -- needing to arrive. Am I in love with D? There are moments when I forget his lips, the sharp chin -- when he is simply a globe of soul beside me, or caught on me, like a sweater snagged on a closing screen door. Writing is impossible. We never get at what we mean to get at. I'm thinking of that afternoon my mom and I spent in the Titanic exhibit at the NC Museum of Natural History. Those boarding passes we received with the names of actual passengers -- I was Emily Alice Brown, 31, from Stroud, England, with a husband and son -- and all that touring, the studying of artifacts, wondering all the while whether or not we had survived. It was so much like what I do now: see the present moment already embalmed. My mother and I placed our hands on the block of ice in the iceberg room, school children leaned in cheeks and eyes, like greedy primitive fish, I was afraid, for both of us, but in the end, the museum attendant told us we lived.

Christmas Past

2009-12-05T17:50:00.059-06:00

I went to middle school with Grammy nominated country singer Tift Merritt. She was two years older than me. We both auditioned for the big winter musical, "A Christmas Carol," and at callbacks (which took place around a wooden piano next to cubby holes) we were up for the same choice part: the Ghost of Christmas Past.

Tift had the pixieness of Peter Pan coupled with the allure of that actress in Crocodile Dundee 2. Her voice sounded like fame, even then. I was a sixth grader. I cross-stitched. I wore head gear to sleep that left faint indentations in my cheeks. In my spare time, I prank called the 1-800-Elvis hotline, or wrote and recorded monologues in the voice of the Mennonite woman who pushed the school milk cart. I sold dog food door-to-door in my neighborhood -- dog food I'd won at an NC Fairgrounds expo and simply repackaged with Print Shop labels made on my father's PC -- and had a crush on Johnny Tremain from the 1943 book Johnny Tremain. He had a disfigured hand and joined the Whig party.

Basically, I suffered from crippling self-consciousness that manifested itself as an eye twitch. But I knew I could sing. Ms Moore, the language arts teacher, had told me so. Of course, she had also told Tift the same thing. I was desperate to get that part. At the audition, after perfectly coiffed Tift twanged out "The Lights of Long Ago," and I delivered my own successful-in-its-own-way rendition, I felt I had an actual shot. The Ghost of Christmas Past, after all, should be a little shy and maybe sound like Anne Murray and have a nervous tick.

I bet you know where this story is going. Well, you're wrong. Tift was cast, not me. I wasn't even a soot-faced lamp-lighting extra. At assembly I crowded into the gymnasium with the other students to endure a hard bleacher, hard like hate. I spent most of that performance thinking about how Tift's name sounded like the new vocabulary word I'd just learned, tiff, "a slight and petty quarrel." Yes: I was having a slight and petty quarrel (with myself) about her vocal merits. Tift Merrit. I completely ignored Michael C Hall as a be-stockinged Ebeneezer Scrooge. Or maybe he wasn't even in this show. I swear he went to my school.

Tift Merritt is super talented and friendly. This post isn't about a life-long grudge. I don't smash snow globes whenever "A Good Hearted Man" comes on. It's important for me to tell the Story of Tift Merritt because she became the Ghost of Becca's Past. Flash forward to 2006. Woody and I are sharing the ground floor of a house in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Ainslie Street, two blocks from the L train. I spend most of my time writing shitty persona poems and booking other people's travel. One afternoon, I'm sitting on our front stoop drinking a cup of coffee from one of those cliche and kitschy NY coffee cups that say "We are happy to serve you" and reading Sophie's Choice when I happen to glance up and see a blond girl in vintage cowboy boots, leaning on our entrance gate, talking on her cell phone. I hear her say "Yeah, I'm lost." Instinctively, I know it's Tift Merritt. I just know. So I yell "Tift Merritt!" It's the wrong yell -- the kind reserved for people you spend a lot of time with, people who are equally as excited to see you. We're both surprised. "Do I know you?" she asks, sweetly.

Now folks, here's where I should have just stopped, dropped, and rolled. I mean, at this point, she'd been Grammy nominated. I should have played it cool. Tift and I were in an Honors fiction workshop together at UNC-Chapel Hill (she wrote beautiful short stories, too). That would have been an appropriate, viable, more recent reference. But what occurred to me in that moment -- me in tattered sweatpants, broke, reading a book about the Holocaust and hung-over after drinking too much Dessert Guinness (a kinda cocktail Woody and I invented at The Four Faced Liar circa 2005)-- was how much her presence felt like a divine visitation, an ethereal manifestation of middle school. I was totes seeing the lights of long ago. Also, maybe Tift Merritt was stalking me?

"You were the Ghost of Christmas Past."

"Huh."

"We went to the same middle school. Ravenscroft. You were --"

I have no idea what happened next. There was warmth, an exchange of email addresses. I remember we talked about Doris Betts. I remember giving her directions. Then that was it. She disappeared around the corner. From a distance, she looked like any other cute hipster.

Today, I was thinking about this chance occurrence for several reasons. One, it's almost Christmas, according to those Gap cheerleading commercials. Two, I wonder if my life would be different if I had been the Ghost of Christmas Past. Three, as you all know from my last post, my mind is on the vagaries of fate.

I still can't understand what chooses to visit us, and why.

Litany

2009-12-04T01:00:00.004-06:00

One of my best friends was just diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She's 32 and gave birth to a beautiful baby girl in October.

She doesn't eat meat. She doesn't drink, doesn't smoke. She doesn't own a cell phone. She doesn't scrub her bathtub without wearing gloves or spray Shout stain-removal into her clothes without removing them first. She's never taken Accutane or Zoloft. She's never lived in Brooklyn four blocks from a shiny generator that hums at night. She doesn't make photocopies with the machine cover up. She hasn't poked through an Olie sticker and held her sheeny finger up for a fourth grade boy to admire. She doesn't put plastic in the microwave (she doesn't own a microwave). She doesn't spray chemical drying agent on her nails. She hasn't chewed through a Glowstick at Lilith Fair. She's never digested a Milk Bone. She's never accepted fried Yojoa impaled on a pole and held up to a bus window in Tegucigalpa. She's never woken up drunk next to a Big Apple Circus clown. Never run her tongue along the spot where a cheap mall ring tarnished her skin.

See, I can't figure out why she's the one with the cancer.

I've been having nightmares. The most recent: Robert Young, the father on Father Knows Best, as my sous-chef. He wore golf gloves and gesticulated with a whisk. A goth pregnant Padma Lakshmi was there. She had wings. We were making an angel food cake. How is this a nightmare? Why couldn't I stop crying?

I have inappropriate thoughts. That "carcinogen" sounds like a sweet roll sold at Cinnabon. That a twin sympathy cancer is growing in me too, a celery root, a gnarled heart, a way for us to be physically closer when she is over 4000 miles away and on an island. This girl I have known since I was fourteen.

Today: I started a Tumblr blog to photograph my cat. I upped the wattage in our bedroom floor lamp. I bought new dishwashing liquid, the brand that purports to save seals from oil spills. I read part of a depressing novel by Joyce Carol Oates who additionally depresses me by being prolific. I fantasized about opening a 24 hour diner that specializes in punny literary dishes: Joyce Carol Oatmeal, Tony Toast, David Eggers and Hash. I went to a friend's art instillation. I held Dan's hand in the snow. I thought about how much I love Dan. I ate goat cheese pinwheels.

In Tuesday night's nightmare, Robert Pattinson is bleeding from the neck. He begs me to drink from his two delicate puncture wounds, leans in close and shakes my shoulders in a rough but not callous way. I recognize this as sexual tension. He whispers into my mouth: "I am the key to Lou Gehrig's Disease." I wake up on the living room couch, sweating. I've knocked the cat brush off the sill.

I'm angry that my friend has cancer. I'm angry that I dreamed about Twilight and not Buffy, which is really to say I'm angry that my friend has cancer.

I try to decide if Tiger Woods was drunk or beaten or just unlucky. I reread Bertrand Russell's essay "Why I'm Not a Christian" when I'm expected to be praying. After reading it, I try again to pray. I check the bikram yoga schedule online. I write down the day's times even though I know I won't go. I try to call my friend even though I know she's having a hysterectomy. There's no recorded voice so I hang up. I decide to cook something with celery root. I go out and buy celery root. While holding the celery root, I think to myself "This is how cancer looks. I should write about her cancer." I'm disgusted with myself. When I get home, I open two pages on my browser. One is AllRecipes and one is WebMD. I search for "celery root soup" in AllRecipes and "ovarian cancer symptoms" in WebMD. I immediately close WebMD.

I put on Sondheim's Into the Woods. Last Christmas, she didn't have a baby or a cancer. I think about chemo. I think about "prayer" rhyming with "hair." I don't write poems anymore. I think about the one-letter difference between "prayer" and "player." I dated a player once -- he never answered his phone when I called but would call back later, hours later, days later. "I missed your call," he'd say. I'd be in my room. I'd be listening to Dark Side of the Moon on LP, my body jumpy with the anticipation of his calling, and I'd be grateful when he did, finally, that jocular baritone, but it wasn't the same. He never picked up when I called. I think about God.

So now it's Thursday night. Tomorrow we're hosting diner for a 3 year old and her mom. We can't watch Fox and the Hound because it's too scary. I agree. I don't want to dream of Mickey Rooney's disembodied voice, of bear traps. I feel my belly under my robe. I re-read my own disembodied voice.

New Catographer

2009-12-03T15:52:00.005-06:00

My fun new side project. A little litter in lieu of literature. Link up!

All the Wolves, All the Lies, the False Hopes, the Goodbyes, the Reverses

2009-12-02T15:53:00.021-06:00

I just finished designing my freshman course for spring term. In an effort to post on my blog everyday, here's the catalog proposal. Can't wait to teach this!

Grey Matters: Thinking Beyond Black and White
In Stephen Sondheim’s musical Into the Woods, Cinderella sings, “Witches can be right. Giants can be good. You decide what’s right. You decide what’s good.” In this course, we’ll explore how moral choices depend on the subjectivity of the choosers. By examining texts engaged with familial, racial, and national identity, we’ll map the ambiguous grey space that frequently exists between extremist positions. Just a few of the difficult questions we’ll consider: What happens when an American soldier in Vietnam unexpectedly sympathizes with the enemy? When a child goes “bad,” how responsible are the parents? Does an illiterate war criminal deserve the chance to learn to read? We’ll deconstruct moral certainty through contemporary multi-genre study, looking closely at Stephen Sondhiem’s musical Into the Woods, Yusef Komunyakka’s book of poetry Dien Cai Dau, Doris Lessing’s novel The Fifth Child, Stephen Daldry’s film The Reader, selected short stories by Adam Haslett and George Saunders, and a smattering of fairy tales, criticism, and philosophical tracts. How easy is it to empathize in a post 9/11 world that so often defines us in opposition to an “other”?

I'm currently obsessed with Rachel Bay (not to be confused with Rachel Ray, ew) Jones' gorgeous folk rendition of the Into the Woods song "No More." She really showcases the lyrics:

Saved By the Bed

2009-11-30T19:39:00.025-06:00

Yesterday, I washed our bedspread. It wasn't dry by midnight so I scoured the house for a temporary replacement.

This is apparently Dan's comforter from middle school, which he brought to Iowa because...? Now I'm wondering if there's a collection of Treasure Trolls in the hall closet. Or maybe a hamburger phone.

Dan swears this comforter is an exact replica of the one Zack Morris had on Saved By the Bell. I ~~wasted~~ spent a solid hour watching YouTube tribute videos trying to spot Zack's room. I learned that not a lot of scenes take place in Zack's room. However, in one particularly moving homage to Kelly and Zack's relationship, set to Dido's "White Flag," it appears that his bedspread is just a very plain, very unsquiggly blue. Maybe to avoid overpowering the curtains?

Dan said duh, he wasn't talking about Zack's bedspread in the first two seasons. I asked him how many bedspreads did Zack Morris have, and why do you remember them? Dan said maybe four. OK smarty, but how many George Michael posters did he have?

(That may or may not be Kelly's room.)

I can't find our bedspread in any episodes. In SBTB the College Years, when Zack wasn't buying up more posters at the Cal-U quad sale, he apparently slept on a bunk bed under a polar fleece.

Here's a still of Zack throwing Kelly onto one of those other "latter season" bedspreads. Given the way her hair is whiping against her face to form a beard, and her frenzied propulsion towards the American flag, I like to imagine Zack is fighting off a terrorist.

Maybe Dan is just confusing his own coming-of-age bedspread with the colorful geometric partitions in The Max.

So, basically, I don't believe my boyfriend. But I did find proof that Kelly was clutching my childhood teddy bear.

Can anybody out there corroborate Dan's story?

The Stenographer

2009-11-24T14:45:00.051-06:00

Last Monday, I participated in a paid focus group at the public library. A few days earlier, I had been approached in the co-op by a slight Spanish woman who asked if I would answer a few questions about spices. "Sure," I thought. "Why not! I'm feeling generous." But because the survey dragged on, and I was lugging a heavy basket, and the slight Spanish woman looked so earnest, I just started answering "yes" to every question. "Yes, I frequently cook with caraway and marjoram" or "Yes, I would name my first child sorrel." In short, my sweet cinnamon deceit earned me a spot at Monday's round table.

I wasn't sure what to expect. Our discussion was lead by a politely skeevy Brazilian man with a ponytail, who kept repeating "but of course, this is my first time ever doing something like this" and "you won't even know the camera is there." There were 8 other participants, including a teenage cook who estimated everything with exactitude (he cooked with spices "approximately 13 times a week") and an aged German woman who talked a lot about "the war," or maybe "basil," I couldn't really understand her. One 40- something father rambled on about sustainability. I sat across from a woman whose name tag mistakenly read "Christ" instead of Chris.

My back was to the camera, so after I stopped obsessing over how fat my hair must look to the U-Iowa grad students observing us and taking notes in the next room, I was able to relax and enjoy free Milano cookies. The Brazilian and his team of researchers had hired a stenographer. "You must speak one at a time," our organizer advised, "so that you can be transcribed." Christ raised her hand and asked if we needed to sign a waiver. "Yes, yes, waiver, let me distribute, thank you Christ."

I started to visualize my spice insights in printed reports, the perforated kind, the kind that come in folders. I strove to be as creative and articulate as possible. I used the word "scuttlebutt." When we were asked to visualize a Simply Organic cumin shaker as a person -- who would it be? why? what would their day consist of? -- I steered clear of grandmothers and Amish farmers and picked a politician. I was speaking directly to our bent, attentive, invisible stenographer. I could hear her clicking away in a partisan frenzy. "The bottle is clear, and the spice claims to be simple -- good for you, down-to-earth -- but the text is fallacious. It has an agenda. It's Sarah Palin. Sarah Cumin." I wonder if the stenographer typed nervous laughter in italics.

Where else, outside of a courtroom or a focus group, do a bunch of strangers care so much about meticulous diction? After a teaching term where I felt I went largely unheard, knowing that this stenographer was obligated to record my thoughts on parsley flakes was somehow important.

Oh Captain! My Captain! Rise Up and Hear the Bells.

2009-11-14T15:12:00.061-06:00

Like most couples who have been together for a while, Dan and I have developed our own language and repertoire of childish, domestic games. One such game is called Falling Rock. Its premise is simple. Dan surprise attacks me. He hurls his 180 pound frame onto my weakling body yelling "Falling Rock!", at which point I must attempt to extricate myself from his dead weight. Because I have no upper body strength, and he tends to land on my arms, I usually just lie there. That's how you play Falling Rock.

My prolonged absence from the blogosphere (three months) has to do mostly with school, which initiated its own little game of Falling Rock in early August and never let up. I have to periodically take a hiatus from writing to appreciate my need for it -- words start to accumulate until I practically bloat from them, until my brain is so distended that one day I come home and say to myself "I think I'd rather write than watch Heidi Montag celebrate another birthday or New Years." (The only thing more pathetic than watching The Hills is watching reruns of The Hills).

This fall term was exhausting. For the first time in my teaching career, I visibly bored a majority of poetry students. With a room full of non-English majors fulfilling an elective, I shouldn't have expected Russian Acmeism to win out over a cellphone game of Bejeweled. But I did. I taught my heart out, over and over in a kind of lyric loop, and my reward was unmindful apathy. I'm careful to write "unmindful" because student texting isn't an aggressive affront. Indifference is default, almost sweet.

I made the mistake of showing Dead Poets Society the final week of class. I'm not sure what possessed me to give my students a Tinseltown example of professorial bravura, to reinforce the reality that they didn't form a secret society and meet up in an cave and read aloud to each other from Keats and worship me. While Meditations in an Emergency inspired only slight meditation, this film was of unparalleled interest. No one slept, no one texted. They arrived on time. Two boys in the front row cupped their chins in their hands like Precious Moments figurines. So I've been giving the Robin Williams phenomenon a lot of thought.

What exactly is my teaching style? Perhaps the best way to answer that question is to describe what I don't do especially well: carpe diem, stand on my desk, rip out anthology pages, teach motivational phrases via kickball, touch shy students on the face to encourage spontaneous public composition. When we spent a week on "Song of Myself," we didn't sound our barbaric yawps. My approach was to, well, read the poem. All of it, not just the lines that lend themselves to email signatures. Rogert Ebert, in his 1989 review of Dead Poets Society (he only gave it 2 stars) writes "at the end of a great teacher's course in poetry, the students would love poetry; at the end of this teacher's semester, all they really love is the teacher." He's right. When I paused the movie, and asked my class who penned "I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world," no one could tell me. No one really cared.

In my freshman rhetoric class, I teach a 1997 Harper's essay by Mark Edmundson called "On the Uses of a Liberal Arts Education." In it, he argues that college is an extension of consumer culture -- that students purchase their education and therefore demand to be enlightened and entertained. But like Edmundson, I don't want to entertain. At least not all the time. I resent relying on stories of working fast food service at Disney to make a point about Billy Collins, or impersonating John Berryman.

Most days, I just want the poems to speak for themselves. Is that possible? I want to be jovial and approachable but not have to compete with cellphones for attention. Our class would have been a whole lot better off if I hadn't felt the need to coddle them with media, to screen that Whitman documentary that culminated in a two minute homo-erotic scene with blousy shirts (note to self: pre-view!). Edmundson writes:

I don't teach to amuse, to divert, or even, for that matter, to be merely interesting. When someone says that she "enjoyed" the course -- and that word crops up again and again in my evaluations -- somewhere at the edge of my immediate complacency I feel encroaching self-dislike. That is not at all what I had in mind.

I'm so hard on my teacherly self, choosing to focus on those I don't reach, ignoring the thank you letters on the fridge. It's hypocritical to resist performance and still wish to be someone's Captain, but there you have it.

Child (s)care

2009-08-06T13:37:00.006-05:00

Holy Zwielicht --- this is the German au pair's purse!

Genious

2009-08-05T12:31:00.012-05:00

I’m in Blue Hill, Maine, living with a family of musicians, taking care of a precocious 4-year old who speaks with a vestigial German accent (“Becca, can I have a wrrrrrradish?) and a 7-year old violin prodigy. The 7-year old, Sabrina, bested me in an impromptu living room performance of the Bach Double. Which is humiliating. I remember a woman -- she must have been at least eighty, varicose veins mapping her legs -- flying past me in a Central Park 10K. She wasn’t at all winded. I tried to convince myself that she’d stumbled onto the circular path from a service road, that she was part of a Senior Citizens bus tour where everyone was forced to safety pin a number to their chest just in case they wandered off. I expected to see her collapsed at a water station asking why the Empire State Building had vanished. But no -- I was the one cramping at mile four, bent over and regretting my choice of race music (The Very Best of Hal and Oates).

I studied violin for twelve years, and at no point did I come close to experiencing music the way Sabrina does. The first time she heard the Mendelssohn Concerto, she jotted down each key change in her program. At age 4, she was playing Haydn (I spent a solid six months perfecting “Hot Cross Buns,” and before that, bowing a tissue box). I sit beside Sabrina at dinner -- her hazel eyes wide-set, her skin the color of moonlight, her long hair single-plaited straight as a fret board -- and cajole her into eating. She has no appetite for food. Her belly is full of notes. She’s an ethereal fairy we speak to in numbers -- take 3 bites, now take 4 -- and appease with stories of Issac Stern. She hungers for bits and pieces of her lineage. Her great grandfather was a world renowned violinist who studied with Franz Kneisel, who in turn studied with a master who studied with a master who studied with a master. This trail of masters leads to Vivaldi. If you drew a performance tree, the trunk would rise from the ground of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony orchestra. Last night at dinner, while I was fighting a losing battle with Sabrina’s meatloaf, she dropped her fork, shot up and shouted, “I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Vivaldi!” Her grandmother corrected her, slightly: “Musically. Musically you wouldn’t be here.”

When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a genius. Being a genius translated into being famous. I sought various outlets to get there (including a guest spot on the locally produced Uncle Paul Show, where I paraded with other children in a wobbly line behind our blind public television host, Uncle Paul). Once, in third grade, the same week as the Challenger explosion, an unidentified man with a raspy voice called our house and asked if I’d ever considered acting -- in a panic I hung up the phone. For months I lamented my lost chance. Why had no one taught me *69?

As I creep into my mid-thirties, I'm coming to terms with the likelihood of a humbler fate. My blood is not the blood of a prodigy. I frequently misspell genius. But I’m a good writer, a decent singer. Perhaps my greatest talent is my patience. Yesterday, I waited for an hour with Hannah, the 4-year, for her poopie to come. This poopie was not the first to come -- the first she was mostly wearing. I cleaned her up (after dissuading her from grabbing a toothbrush to “scrrrrrrrub die gerrrrrms!”), and then we sat together in the neighbor's bathroom, weighing the pros and cons of princesses and candy, coaxing the poopie with soprano songs. Ultimately, it was this little ditty that did the trick:

“Snow White, Snow White, she cast her magic spell,
And woodland creatures cried with joy, Look! Her poopie fell!”

Quite a virtuoso move, if I do say so myself.

Hair

2009-07-17T09:48:00.091-05:00

*This is part of a creative non-fiction essay that centers on hair and intimacy. I'll be writing a little every other day, until I have about 3000 words. I'm also hoping that several sections function as stand alone prose poems. I'll probably be reading this part at the Iowa Book Festival on Saturday.*

When I was twenty-four, I discovered a hair, the length of a unicorn horn, growing out of my lower back. I felt like a marionette in control of its own body. My then-boyfriend was drying his face with a washcloth. He was lanky and angular, his chest smooth. "Look, a web," I bragged, shirt lifted, sliding the hair gently between the tips of my pointer finger and thumb. He wanted to remove it with tweezers. "No," I said. After all, who knew how many years I had spent unwittingly coaxing the silver strand out of my spine. It was practically invisible in the bathroom light. When I straightened it, revolved to find a good view, it shimmered taut with centrifugal force. I was radiating. He had just begun flossing when I felt the rip -- flush from the root in a singular fluid motion, right out of my hands -- leaving me stupefied, emptied. He held it up to the mirror for close inspection. My loss doubled: power and power reflected. "Got it," he said, pretending to work the hair back and forth between his uniform bottom teeth. We kept it in the medicine cabinet, weighed down underneath a bar of hotel soap, for weeks. There I would sneak periodic looks until it finally lost its pulse. It blanched the color of an arctic fox pelt. No longer lambent. Rosewood scented, a thing dead to me.

The Hills Are Alive

2009-07-12T22:47:00.051-05:00

This August, I'll be in coastal Maine for two weeks as live-in help for a playwright and her extended family. My job entails grocery shopping, baking banana bread, making puppets talk to toddlers, and listening to Bach. One of her granddaughters is a violin prodigy. Part of my appeal -- because honestly, I have limited experience around children, and I don't know which is the smaller onion, chopped or diced? -- is my background in music.

I very carefully explained that I haven't studied violin in over 14 years. While I'm good at leading afternoon singalongs (better if there's box wine involved!), I might not be your go-to girl for Shostakovitch. Despite my disclaimers, I was hired anyway. Not as a primary teacher -- more like an upbeat attendant. Like Jiminy cricket. He didn't play violin but rather did the Charleston up and down the strings, encouraging moral behavior. Or did he play? Anyway, I'll be setting up the metronome but secretly life-coaching.

I can not wait to while away my mornings writing poems that feature hard to pronounce deciduous shrubs. And later, watch the sun set over schooners. And go clamming in knickers. And buy knickers. And hike in Acadia National Park. And perhaps most of all, rediscover my love of the violin.

Tonight I recorded a video of me playing about a minute's worth of a watered down adagio version of Bach's Double Violin Concerto. (Dan makes a dancing appearance around :47.) I don't plan on continuing to practice in the kitchen by the litter box and Swiffer.

I'm Seriously Procrastinating

2009-07-10T12:18:00.008-05:00

Thriller Kitty:

Cat Calling

2009-07-08T16:14:00.103-05:00

Last week, I made a shocking discovery: my cat Karaoke will come running and nuzzle my face when I whistle. I must say, this was a huge relief -- now that he has an automatic feeder and a stuffed bunny on a string, he isn't much in need of me anymore.

(Oddly enough, the playback of me whistling had no effect on him whatsoever -- he stayed sleeping in my study.)

Like the Pied Piper, I've been abusing my power -- luring Karaoke onto the couch to warm my sockless feet, or into the bathroom to keep me company when I've forgotten toilet reading. He always arrives purring but then looks vaguely disappointed, like he's bought front row tickets to the wrong show. "Hey Buddy!" I'll say, feigning surprise. "Did some whittle kitty come to play with this whittle square of Charmin, hmmm?"

I love my Tubby McGuire and would never intentionally do anything to hurt him, and because he rubs up against me and snuggles in my lap (once he's gotten over the disappointment of it being me), I'm assuming this lip trick doesn't cause him any pain. An exhaustive internet search provided no real explanation for his behavior. Bffer1 on Yahoo Answers posits it's the high frequency of my whistle, and that if I purchase electronic-sounding ringtones, I can achieve the same effect. Um, no thanks. Besides -- it isn't only the whistling that works. If I hum at a low frequency, or speak in an exaggerated French accent, or sing Beyonce's "Irreplaceable," there he is again, right on cue, with a look of "When will I learn this is not an emergency? Pet me now."

Sometimes I imagine that the day will come when I really do need him-- say I'm having an allergic reaction to Farmer's Market produce, or I'm losing a lot of blood because I cut myself on the Rotato -- and it will be at precisely that moment, when I put my lips together and blow, or manage a dying refrain of "to the left, to the left," that he'll ignore me. Something tells me I should just stop Life Alerting my cat for no good reason -- that is, until Dan and I are settling into bed, and neither one of us wants to go and get him from the hall carpet (nor do we want to be surprised by his tail in our faces at 3AM), and Dan turns to me and says, not exactly with seriousness, but not exactly joking around, either: "You could always whistle."

Another theory circulating online -- and again, I can't find a vet endorsed website -- asserts that cats respond to whistling because it triggers their nurturing instinct (they mistake you for a mewing kitten). Then why does Karaoke react to Beyonce? I guess she does solicit the affection of male cats.

So -- can anyone tell me for sure what's gotten into Karaoke? I don't want to whistle if it's harmful!

Oh Captain Eo, My Captain Eo

2009-07-07T15:48:00.055-05:00

Reverend Al Sharpton spoke commandingly this afternoon at Michael Jackson's memorial service, saying "I want his children to know there was nothing strange about your daddy -- it was strange what your daddy had to deal with." I think naming a child Blanket is perhaps cute celebrity whimsy. But sleeping in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, and hosting little boy slumber parties, is strange. Let's call a spade a spade.

I read Louise Palanker's moving post about Michael Jackson's culpability in child molestation. She very rightly points out how the public has turned a blind eye to his unorthodox behavior. But here's my dark and dirty secret: I'm unaffected by those allegations against him. Somehow -- and I admit I find this knack troubling -- I've gone merrily along all these years separating the man from the music.

Did Michael Jackson touch Jordan Chandler? I hope not, but my uncomfortable truth is that his supposed sexual deviancy doesn't lessen my love of "Off the Wall." Playdates at Neverland Ranch don't change the fact that my first grade class butchered a volin arrangement of "Beat It," or that I spent many an afternoon at Skate Town limboing to "Bad." I watched the network premiere of "Remember the Time" with my best friend -- each of us on a rotary phone. My childhood is infused with his melodies and movements. It wasn't Robert Frost who first taught me slant rhyme. It was Vincent Price in "Thriller":

Creatures crawl in search of blood
To terrorize y'alls neighborhood

I know he was acquitted of sexual abuse. I know that Brooke Shields and Madonna trusted him with their children, and that his daughter Paris sobbed today on a dais before the solid gold coffin, "he was the best daddy!" The great shame is, I probably would have still gotten tipsy in my kitchen the day he died, dancing barefoot to "Human Nature," remembering with a fond tear the time I experienced Captain Eo in DisneyLand Paris -- all of this -- even if he had been found guilty.

Was Michael Jackson bad? To what extent is it immoral to celebrate a bad man's good art? Ezra Pound was an anti-semite. Does that rob The Cantos of their lyric beauty?

And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us onward with bellying canvas,
Circe's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.

Pound envisioned them as "a poem to include history." I feel it should matter to me that his version of history might be, well, a bit heavy on the Aryan, but to dismiss all of the language... can I? And am I supposed to shelve Michael Jackson's History, too?

Just now, as I was writing this, a young black boy -- fourth of fifth grade -- came to my door selling salt water taffy and peanut clusters to help fight the war on drugs. No, I didn't buy candy for $7 a box, but when he heard me playing "Billie Jean," and asked me to turn it up, I did. I brought him a bottled water. We stood together for a moment on the stoop, both of us tapping our feet, memorializing -- what exactly? The soundtrack to our childhoods.

Regret

2009-07-05T16:24:00.055-05:00

I've had writer's block for the past couple of months, and it's high time I unblock. Since consuming vast quantities of Curious George fruit snacks doesn't seem to be helping any, nor does turning the hall towel closet into a kitty day spa (complete with a rest and relaxation box!), I thought I might try writing something.

I'm teaching at the college again come fall. This guaranteed money nugget has given me permission to work a handful of temporary, a-typical summer jobs, the most recent of which involved reading essays on regret written by 9th graders.

In my coffee stained, rain soaked American Heritage Dictionary, regret is sandwiched between regressive and regular. Which is precisely what being a 9th grader feels like. Reverting to baby behavior on the brink of adulthood. Looking in the mirror and facing the unshakeable imprint of ordinary. My memory of 1991-92 is a montage of me in various androgynous flannel shirts, moping in the school art room to an accompanying soundtrack of Andrew Lloyd Weber's Cats. Occasionally, I flashback to settling in (pajamas and pizza bagels) for a Saturday night marathon of Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman.

The world regret derives from Old French regreter, to lament, and possibly grata, Old Norse for moan. I imagine a lot of grata-ing among Norse women. Would you want to stay betrothed to your dead husband by joining him on his funeral pyre? Modern regret can be "a sense of longing for someone gone," or "distress over a desire unfulfilled or an action performed or not performed." Despite the tedium of holding regret up to the light of a grading rubric, I more often than not found myself either shocked, amused, or moved by what many high school freshman express grief and disappointment over.

Sure, there's the slew of expected regrets: stealing Pokemon cards, spilling nail polish on your parents upstairs carpet, teepeeing the neighbor's house, putting over 40 Cheese-Its in your mouth at once, ignoring your dying grandmother, accidentally knocking your little brother through dry wall. But for every innocent "I peed the bed" there is its nefarious twin: "I burned wet frogs" or "I ran over a little girl and regret not reporting it."

Regret is perhaps more intense, more aptly labeled, when the regretee has had significant distance from the... sorrified experience. Sorrified sounds so much like scorified: what happens to gold and silver when it separates from ore. As a 32 year old, I now have a better grasp on what is truly worthy of regret and what is not of any lamentable value. My precious metal laments have separated from yore. Given the same prompt as these students, I no longer choose to write about how sorry I am that I lied to my third grade class about my father being a leprechaun.

Or I could be wrong: maybe young regret breeds keener sorrow. "I remember smelling my own blood and looking out the broken window," one boy wrote. "But now I've slayed the dumb years."

Even in 9th grade, there is seemingly existential regret ("my rock would call out to me in my sleep and make me do horrible things"), addictive regret (At 9, I was gambling on a regular basis), and sexual regret ("his small masculine hands began to move slowly over my body"). There is regret over a vague game called "Little Girl and Puppy"(hint: the puppy was played by another little girl). Regret so seductive it makes you "feel like a wolf high on angel dust." Regret so hyperbole your stomach drops "like the bomb on Hiroshima." And, because these kids are still in the process of figuring out what it even means to regret, regret over a lesson half-learned ("that's why I haven't killed an animal larger than my fist since then").

I regret often. So often, in fact, that my regret has evolved into a kind of re-regret, a longing to undo the time wasted on regret in the first place. Maybe burning wet frogs is a metaphor for not creating. Maybe the rock calling out to me in my sleep is making me do nothing. All I know is, I've made a promise to myself to write every day this month, to see what newness happens, to make my grata non grata.

Happy Memorial Day from VA Beach!

2009-05-25T15:42:00.001-05:00

Cooking out, and teaching new friends how to blog.

Shea You, Shea Me

2009-05-20T11:06:00.049-05:00

I'm at home visiting my parents and taking the time to rediscover Aaron Spelling shows. Jeffery and I have been watching old episodes of Dynasty and Hotel online and lamenting the loss of the prime time soap. Henri Mancini themes and shoulder pads remind me of my childhood.

Hotel was a lot like a docked Love Boat. I was six when it premiered on ABC. The only hotel I knew about was the one my family vacationed at in Myrtle Beach, where I played pirate themed putt-putt and, on one misguided occasion, brought a horseshoe crab into the bathtub.

But at the St. Gregory, guests didn't miniature golf or domesticate marinelife. They cheated on their wives, got slapped in the lobby, died at the dinner table, questioned their parentage, got slapped in the lobby for questioning their parentage, ran from the law, even dueted with Mel Torme. They kissed and cat-fought their way through episodes with one-word titles: "Skeletons", "Obsessions," Lovelines," "Scapegoats," "Harassed," and my personal favorite, "Triangles."

I wasn't allowed to watch Hotel, just as I wasn't allowed to read the trashy romance novels I found in my aunt's spare bedroom after we'd gotten back from a faith-healing revival. Of course I did both. I was a travel agent for four years in Manhattan, and to this day, credit Hotel as my earliest customer service model. I learned comportment from Connie Sellecca and professionalism from James Brolin. I learned that there is usually an extra room available if you just demand it, aggressively clicking your manicured nails on the counter top. Once, I booked a client a slightly better rate at a Caribbean resort because the sales representative and I got on the subject of Hotel. "Remember when Christine and Peter were trapped in the desert?" I didn't, but that's the beauty of an Aaron Spelling drama -- if it aired long enough, you could pretty much guarantee that someone was trapped in the desert. Or falling in love with Engelbert Humperdinck:

I just rewatched the Pilot on You Tube and confirmed that Hotel is still relevant. I'd forgotten how inexperienced, hayseed Christine landed her job as Assistant Manager at the St. Gregory -- she simply pretended she was already hired and sent all other prospective applicants away. Risky, but brilliant! I'm going to show up at Kirkwood Community College this fall and start teaching dressmaking to a packed classroom.

(start at 5:25)

We live in a complex age. On the one hand, office security is much tighter. On the other, you can friend request your favorite 80's prime time soap stars on Facebook. Last night, I sent a message to Shea Farrell, the baby-faced All-American who played PR Director Mark Danning on Hotel. He promptly accepted my friend request and wrote back a few lines in the vein of "Why on earth were you watching Hotel?"

Hopefully, he'll agree to answer a few questions for my blog. I'm toying with the idea of going back to school in a couple of years for a PHD in Cultural Studies or Mass Media, because I'm fascinated by the reality TV phenomenon and how programming has evolved (I don't believe economics, ie cheap production, dictates public taste). Sure, Hotel was contrived and histrionic, so why do I disapprove of Americans watching this upcoming import?

Some Consolation

2009-05-12T16:31:00.023-05:00

I'm in Hilton Head, SC all week. I just found out that my friend's mother lost her courageous battle with cancer this morning. I wasn't sure what to do. I was sad so I ate a lot of cheese. Then I went for a run on the beach. It wasn't the ocean, but rather these two lightly joined shells that offered some consolation:

Our connection to this world is so tenuous, so lovely. In the end, she separated with grace and dignity.

Free Bird

2009-05-06T18:49:00.058-05:00

Some folks never forget a face -- I never forget an Oprah episode. Thanks to Oprah, I now know about the Great Pacific garbage swath, Patty Duke's bi-polarism, and Vulvodynia (which sounds like what happens to a sputtery '84 Volvo, but isn't). Sometimes I even troll the O online AHA! Moment community message boards to get useful tips from posts like "I Discovered Why Some of My Desires Didn't Manifest."

Yesterday, while sorting recycling (and thus doing my part to prevent an even greater Pacific garbage swath) I watched Oprah raise her messianic arms and promise the country free chicken. She urged Americans to take advantage of the 24 hour window and download a KFC coupon for 2 pieces of grilled chicken, 2 individual sides, and -- because we can't get too carried away in these harsh economic times -- 1 biscuit.

I immediately had 3 thoughts:

1) Can there please please be buckets under the audience's seats?
2) I would hate to work at KFC and have to collect these coupons.
3) Wait a minute -- didn't Lisa Ling and Oprah do an expose on chicken farming back in October of 2008?

Because I never forget an Oprah episode. The Queen of Give, on the other hand, must not have a memory like a steel chicken cage. Her scathing critique of poultry farming , in which she probably subjected poor Lisa Ling to lots of beak poking (her tiny head was REALLY close to those cages), now comes across as hypocritical. How can Oprah be advancing the organic free-range cause when she's so quick to crawl into bed with Colonel Sanders? (Insert inappropriate "thighs" joke here.)

Warning: this video is graphic.

According to PETA, KFC breeds their birds top-heavy, "so large that they can't even walk." This description befits Pamela Anderson, too -- and to be fair, I'm not sure I trust a spokeswoman who married Tommy Lee after only knowing him for a scant 96 hours, and who promoted her book Star on the Wal-Mart circuit. (Sidenote: I hope she saw the Vulvodynia Oprah episode.) Still, when Pamela says, in her best solicitous lifeguard voice, "these chickens never feel the sun on their backs, or the earth beneath their feet," I'm glad Dan and I started buying Quorn fake chicken patties. Which are AMAZING, by the way.

Here are some of the comments left by Oprah viewers on the message boards back in October, 2008, after the Conscious Choices episode aired:

I want to say thank you for having shows that are as eyeopening as this one. I currently live in SC and when i saw the difference between free range hens and the crated hens i was appauled . I didn't even finish watching the whole show before i logged into your web site to put in my two sense.

Thank you Oprah and Lisa for this story. I do hope it opened up some eyes and folks will make some adjustments so these practices are curtailed and the almighty dollar is not the only consideration. Thank you for bringing the conscience of humanity to these topics so that we can grow to a better place.

I'm not sure why Oprah is promoting KFC. Despite the chain's new healthier options, I don't see a free fast food dinner as a step in the right direction. It's like giving a struggling alcoholic a coupon for a complimentary soda and telling him to redeem it at the martini bar. Oprah, listen up: as a meat eater who once took a pilgrimage to Colonel Sanders' grave, even I'm disappointed, and frankly, glad I tried to sell copies of your magazine for 25 cents each at my yard sale.

(Click here for that coupon. Limit of 4 per person.)

Flowers, Swine, Poetry

2009-04-30T12:13:00.017-05:00

Spring in Iowa City! Happy Poem in Your Pocket Day.

Saint Francis and the Sow
by Galway Kinnell

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

Sow-ing the Seeds

2009-04-28T13:27:00.029-05:00

Yesterday, Wolf Blitzer was barking "pandemic" like it was the word on Today's Special . Larry King came close to interviewing a bottle of Purell. So why all of a sudden are media outlets noticeably quieter about the swine flu? Arlen Specter is the top story.

I feel resentful -- like the news and I had this intense first date, full of elaborate conjectures about our future (Masks! Zanamivir!), and now, after swining and dining me, it's lost interest. Monday, the news couldn't get enough of a janitor slo-mo disinfecting a high school desk in Queens. Today --

Of course as I write this, Arnold Schwarzenegger has just declared a state of emergency in California. With the caveat not to panic. Wait. I'm starting to confuse life and art. Morgan Freedman hasn't issued his statement yet, has he?

Last night, I dreamed I was a field nurse in WWI. I wasn't tending the sick but rather repeatedly smoothing out the wrinkles from my regulation, yet comely, uniform. There were poppies and gas masks strewn everywhere. (Apparently, all I know about WWI comes from "In Flanders Fields" and "Dulce et Decorum Est.") For the record, I do NOT recommend googling "Spanish Influenza 1918" at bedtime.

The 1918 flu pandemic affected roughly half of the world's population. More lives were lost than in WWI. The mortality rate in New Zealand was 5% and in India, 4%. 14% of Fiji's population died in a two week period. In retrospect, I'm not sure why we spent so much time covering The Black Plague, and not Spanish Influenza, in AP European. After all, medieval times weren't just dark but distant -- thankfully, I no longer spend my days making porridge and spinning wool. I bake muffins and knit.

Am I alone in not learning about the 1918 pandemic in school? Or was I just out sick that day?

What frightens me most about Spanish Influenza is that it affected strapping youth, those with the strongest resistance. In effect, their healthy bodies turned against them, and their immune systems overreacted. If it's true that this last century has seen not one but FOUR pandemics, then why haven't governments done a better job of preparing us for another outbreak? It isn't a "gay storm" that's coming -- it's a cytokine storm .

Maybe it's human nature to not just repeat history, but ignore it. After the 2004 tsunami, the United Nations began developing an Indian Ocean earthquake warning system. No such warning system existed in the Indian Ocean prior to the 2004 quake, which is why so many lost their lives. However, UNESCO has warned that there still isn't sufficient communication between governments and civilians in the event of noticeable seismic activity. This seems like it should be a priority, or have we all forgotten the shaky footage of tourists rushing hotel rooftops?

Almost half a million people have been killed in Sudan (and 3 million displaced) since the start of the Darfur genocide in 2003. The death toll in Mexico from the swine flu is currently 149. Clearly, I see the potential for pandemic, or I wouldn't have drawn comparisons to Spanish Influenza. But I think most governments (and Americans) are more comfortable with containment. A genocide can be contained and therefore ignored. So while I suspect Mia Farrow is a total nut job, I also totally admire her hunger strike.

I guess I'm asking for news outlets to commit. Ether scale back flu coverage because we are jumping the gun, or, go whole hog. Swine. Whatever. If this is serious, stop treating it like Swine Flu for XBox 360. Give us useful information. Don't unnecessarily scaremonger, 'cause I am unemployed and will watch that shit all day long.

What do you guys think? Have you stocked up on bottled water and frozen pizzas yet? Did your grandparents ever talk about the 1918 pandemic?

Arc of Time

2009-04-21T23:03:00.050-05:00

My friend Jeffery just sent me a mix CD called "Becca in Iowa." Jeffery and I have been making each other CDs for about four years now.

I did a funny thing after I opened the package -- rather than listen to the new one, I went and dusted off the first one he ever made me, back in May of 2005. May 2005: Jennifer Gardner announces she is pregnant with Ben Affleck's baby. A hand grenade is thrown at Bush but it doesn't detonate. Carrie Underwood wins American Idol. I am reading Somerset Maugham and casually involved with a fiction writer who, unbeknownst to me, is engaged to someone else. In another month, he will break my heart. I will break my pinky toe. Both heart and toe will heal right before I leave for a three week tour of Central America (christened the "Volcano Trail").

I didn't have an Ipod in the summer of 2005, nor did I own a digital camera. So when I hiked Maderas, the 1400 meters high volcano on the island of Ometepe in Nicaragua, I ascended with a portable CD player and my father's 1.5 pound Nikon F3. In this scaled back island scenario, I could only take one CD. I chose Jeffery's mix.

I must have played it straight through at least four times on that hike. We had to use our hands to steady ourselves in the muck so I stuck the CD player in my pocket. We fell a lot. I remember I was the first to descend into the mouth of the inactive crater (which is now a lagoon) and that "Speed of Sound" was playing when I took the rope. A stray dog followed us all the way up. I fed him cereal while humming Junior Boys' "Birthday," posed on a stump in the center of the crater chanting Triumph of a Heart, Triumph of a Heart.

That music and that climb and that summer are all inextricably linked. I thought I'd post some photos (taken with my monolith of a camera!), along with a journal excerpt and the track names to Jeffery's CD. The woman in the hat is my dear friend Mireia, whose wedding Dan and I attended last May in Costa Brava, Spain.

Maderas took us 4 hours to climb and 3 1/2 to come back down. Aside from the Virginia Beach Half Marathon, it was the greatest physical challenge of my life. But when you are ascending something, there is a forward propulsion akin to optimism. Time accelerates and your body acclimates to pain. You start, you finish. It was muddy and dangerous, but after we climbed the height of the cloud forest, and lowered into the crater, the cool lagoon was worth it. B and I went swimming. Getting in the water necessitated giant leg lifts like a moon walker. We sank up to our knees in silt. The day was spectacularly clear -- we were rewarded with several views of Concepcion which I photographed.

From The Razor's Edge: "How exciting the life of the spirit is and how rich the experience. It's illimitable. It's such a happy life. There's only one thing like it, when you're up in a plane by yourself, high, high, and only infinity surrounds you. You're intoxicated by the boundless space. You feel such a sense of exhilaration that you wouldn't exchange it for all the power and glory of the world."
-8/26/2005

Jeffery's Summer 2005 Mix

1.Carolina (Josh Rouse)
2. Do the Whirlwind (Architecture in Helsinki)
3.Feel Good Inc. (Gorillaz)
4.Girl (Beck)
5.Sunshowers (M.I.A.)
6. Arc of Time (Bright Eyes)
7.Speed of Sound (Coldplay)
8. My Heartbeat (Annie)
9.I Believe in You (Kylie Minogue)
10.All Through the Night (Cyndi Lauper)
11. Everybody's Changing (Keane)
12.Metal Firecracker (Lucinda Williams)
13.She Really Wants You (Aimee Mann)
14.I Turn My Camera On (Spoon)
15.The Real Thing (Gwen Stefani)
16.What Am I To Do? (Antony and the Johnsons f/Rufus Wainwright)
17.We Belong Together (Mariah Carey)
18.Triumph of a Heart (Bjork)
19.Everything You Need (Adam)
20.One Chance (Modest Mouse)
21. Birthday (Junior Boys)

Riverside

2009-04-12T18:20:00.058-05:00

On Friday night, in honor of an art exhibition, I participated in a reading at the Old Motley Cow with some other Iowa City poets. I read this very new poem.

Casino

I want to shake
an old woman’s shoulders, say:
“Vespers.” Say: “This coin tray.”
Boring circling. I arrange
poker chip tips to form the letter F.
I don’t have enough for the letter E.
The difference between a vowel and a consonant is
two dollars. My feet callous.
Maria Callas raised her tessitura
with practice. On occasion beauty happens
when something presses. What needs
brewing is coffee. That empty
Miller Lite Shelly Long would have by-passed
in the Cheers pilot. I think: “Coloratura.”
I make the coffee. I say “Cocktails, beverages!”
My frontispiece sallies forth.
A man lights two cigarettes in his mouth
at once. Double Dragon
was difficult to beat because of falling over
bridges, belts. One-inch heels,
cinched waist. I say “Clocktails!”
and check my watch. I say “Slut Machine!”
and reflect on my past.
A one-armed senior in a Disney cap says
"I thank you from my depths," but no
quarter drops from his stump. Shrimp
Mania. Heart Live. Lingerie
party invite from a female janitor.
If a river could lie down on its side
I’d lie down too, beneath so many
stacked branches. Drinks mnemonics: look out
for the Whiskey Rocks oh! Bloody Mary!
There’s a wheelchair at Wheel
of Fortune. There’s a pregnant belly
against Hot Hot Penny. “If a river,” I say.
Miles to go. I went to school
with a girl who died drunk at age 26 on Route 29.
Bring me luck. Bring me matches. I break
out the other waitresses. I feel buccaneered
by way of punishment. I think: "A river is
a tawny missal." The carpet is maroon.
A craps player tips me a nickel
as the chorus to “Honky Cat” comes on Oh the Change
is Gonna Do me Good. Trigger
the bonus. Such synchronicity
suggests the random number generator
might just bless us. When a robot too closely
resembles a human we enter the uncanny
valley. I entered it twice already this morning.
I found a fountain going off, old men secured
to machines by retractable cords
attached to their resort club cards.
“Soda, bottled water!” I bounce back my own echo-
location. Nothing’s lonelier. Not even a pair
of whales retracing the path of
their dead mother.

National Poetry Month

2009-04-02T00:03:00.008-05:00

April is National Poetry Month. I just came across this poem by Deena Linnett, and it inspired me to keep taking copious casino notes. Also, Jeffery was really sweet to feature one of my older poems on his blog!

3 Men: Portraits Without the Human Figure
by Deena Linnett

Hotel-casino: lights flash, crowds tread patterned carpets hoping for a turn in fortune. Despite the ardent wishes of the women you have left you are not dead. You’re good at lively passing things that happen here: at restaurants, in bed, at tables tossing dice and cards. That smudge at bottom right stands in for me, as you plunge breathless into chance as into women, risk like drink obliterating everything. Studio: smells of linseed oil and turpentine. Brushes, palette knives, mixing-sticks; bottles, jars, tubes. Paint in daubs and gobs and smears and dots and slashes. You left the window open and everything stained. Greenhouse. Beneath little panes pocked by time and dotted with mold and lichen, rot, a riot of tropical effulgence, small framed portion of the endlessness. Spiky plants blossom like ideas; light glances off the glass and gleams on the permanent hunger, steams. Everything blooms or is green. You shrug into your coat.

Casino: Day 1

2009-03-28T13:17:00.034-05:00

Yesterday was my first day cocktail waitressing on the floor of the casino. I'm not sure how I feel about it yet. When I got home last night, I wasn't ready to unload to Dan. I needed time to shower and wash the smoke out of my hair. I needed to decompress, to eat greasy wantons and watch The 40 Year Old Virgin.

I spent half the day shadowing a waitress who is about 7 months pregnant. "G" taught me how to use my server swipe card, and in the same breath, how to assemble a crib. "You have to do it twice," she said. I'm still not sure if she was talking about the card or the crib.

G didn't wear the regulation bustiere, but rather a see-through version of a blowsy maternity shirt. She discreetly unlearned me most of my managerial training: under-report your tips but stick to odd digits, chew gum but don't get caught, ignore the bitchy waitress who thinks she knows everything. Later, the bitchy waitress advised me to ignore G.

G is sweet as pie, but pie with a salty crust and an undercooked center. "How do you like it here?" I hazarded, to which she replied, "This is the most boring job you will ever have." She didn't know about the time I answered a Craigslist ad to sit all day in an unmarked van guarding hand bells.

G introduced me to a lot of regulars, including Larry, a bald retiree who drinks Bud Light and plays slots every Friday. G calls Larry her husband. "It's not what you're thinking," she said. "He's really a nice guy, good tipper. He just likes to chat." Later, G introduced me to another regular. "This is my Dad," she said. To which I replied something like, "That's cool, how you have nicknames for everybody." "Yeah," G said. "Only he's really my Dad."

The thing about casinos is, they don't inspire moderation. A lot of the folks I waited on at the start of my 10AM shift were still gambling at 6PM. On my initial walk-though, G pointed out a woman in her late 50's in the high priced slots room, chain-smoking next to what appeared to be Jerry Garcia wearing an eye-patch. "I call her French Vanilla," G said. "She'll drive you crazy. She'll sit here all day and order coffees with French Vanilla creamer, but she won't tip." Sure enough, every time I circled past her chair, she croaked "coffee, French Vanilla!" with her pirate companion wobbling his head like a somnolent. I learned to weave between machines and by-pass her row.

How to say what I saw? I watched a couple win $12oo, right as G brought them their strawberry daiquiris, and then tip her a $1. In the break room, where I retreated with my novel about Trujillio's dictatorship, I watched a line cook spread mayonnaise on saltines and slowly build a tower and eat it. I watched a mentally retarded janitor tell me I'm pretty in front of customers. Three times. I watched a woman light two cigarettes in her mouth. I watched a manager prop a casino chair up against a slot machine -- someone had elected to go to the bathroom in their seat because they thought hey, one more time, I feel lucky, this is it. (You gotta know when to hold 'em.) I saw amputees and retirees and genuinely nice, nice people. I saw myself in the mirror: short skirt, push-up bra, lipstick. Was it really only a few weeks ago I was standing in front of a class?

G said that she trains a lot of girls who quit after day one. "Can you do me a favor?" she asked. "If you're gonna quit, can you tell me? I'd like to know not to look for you." I plan on giving this job the chance it deserves. I'll stick it out part time for at least a month.

Blow-Town

2009-03-26T11:02:00.003-05:00

If Megan "Joy" makes it through to the Top Five this season, I might never watch Idol again! I'm just waiting for her to sing the sister's song from Dirty Dancing.

Little Bite

2009-03-24T19:25:00.014-05:00

Is it weird that I'm creeped out by this commercial? I've never understood personifying food so that kids will want to eat it -- especially when said food is made to act like a kid. Little Bite has on a book bag full of wheat and is all excited about learning but is really just going to get chewed up and digested. When does Little Bite find out fiber is like a scrub brush to the colon? Now that's an eight-layered nudge.

Happy Birthday to my Man(ley)

2009-03-19T00:47:00.000-05:00

It's true what Taryn said -- you do bear an uncanny resemblance to Gerard Manley Hopkins:

Remember last year's birthday, when I flew out to visit and got food poisoning from Los Portales? All I could do, for three days straight, was watch Next Generation and vomit. And now we live together. And I regularly order the fajitas on karaoke night. (Note to Los Portales: please get real song tracks and lose the You Tube.)

Happy Birthday, baby! I'm so glad I moved to Iowa. Here's to "the slap shock of being born."

Iowa
by Robbie Klein

It never completely gets dark on those back roads.
There are stars, deceptively few.
And velvet consumes and velvet erupts:
the softness is the leaves and the dirt paths and stables and skin. And eyes.

The dark places, the secret places: abrupt, always, fleeting
but indelibly there, like a muscle memory.
The ridiculous and impudent course of years means nothing:
the touch is the same, the taste. Iowa's sweet ground. I close my eyes to the
darkness and fall into it more and awake to the street disappearing into
fields and lost time.

A drive through the cemetery, a different place now
Winding up the hill marking a route in the dark with the pond
To stand breathless at the crest, arms wide open
I chart movements with a cartographer's conscience:
throw open my shirt and open my self to the sky flawed and stitched
and whole
and welcome my mother and forgive my father and
know the slap shock of being born.

Consumption

2009-03-17T17:04:00.007-05:00

Reworking green poems this Saint Paddy's Day.

Consumption

Keats swooned under a bright star
but in the end more stairs. Suppose a spine
can divine truth. Suppose the way leaves tender green

bellies to a coming storm, the way food begs hunger.
Then I would name everything.

Years my father cut
the grass and still it sprigged unformed --
who rides content into the final art, dusk

settling? Ah, here the cowboy falls
apart. Sunset. Something calls.

Love Lies Sleeping

2009-03-15T21:38:00.019-05:00

Karaoke has been an indoor cat for about six months now. There's a neighborhood tabby we've christened Ginger who's started showing up on our doorstep. She rolls onto her side and naps. Karaoke reclines in the front window and yawns. I think they're in love.

I snapped this picture after reading poet Mark Doty's disheartening account of a hate crime directed against him and his partner. I need to believe love is alive, that sometimes, it just lies sleeping.

Balancing Stick, Balancing Tray

2009-03-12T16:31:00.055-05:00

I appreciate all of the encouraging emails/comments re: the business writing position. I did accept the job, but unfortunately, for financial reasons, the Dean didn't approve me as a hire. The college went with a tenured teacher: understandable, but still disappointing. I wish I hadn't been approached by the Business Department in the first place.

Today I learned that Latin for "Here and Now" is "Hic et Nunc," which I prefer to the English. It just sounds like here and now, very directed -- like what a German mother might yell to reprimand her mischievous twins who've knocked over a jar of kraut in the Supermarkt. Hic et Nunc, hergekommen! The present needs attending to. In bikram yoga, I hold poses to stay centered in the moment. If I'm in balancing stick , I'm trying not to think ahead to cobra. I hic and nunc my body in hopes of establishing mental stand-still. (And because I'd like to lose that obstinate underarm waddle.)

This is a picture of three winded retirees discussing slots in the front lobby of the casino where, five hours ago, I was officially hired to work as a cocktail waitress. If you want to extend the yoga analogy, the casino is my balancing stick. Censorious voices might suggest -- sweetly, I hope -- that I focus my energies on cobra, that I think less about the moment and more about career. Who has two advanced degrees and wears a sparkle bustier? Granted, it's a tasteful sparkle bustier, what Clinton Kelly on What Not to Wear might call "dressy, with a dash of escort."

Before my interview, I jotted down a quick list of what makes me feel like I'm creating rather than taking up space (which is another way of saying what makes me happy):

-writing
-reading
-learning!
-my relationship with Dan
-my friends, family, and fat cat
-being kind
-yoga
-traveling and observing different cultures
-practicing Keats' Negative Capability
-living in our house and having enough to eat
-Lady Gaga's "The Fame"
-coffee
-Bravo

OK, so the list wanes a little towards the end. Would I rather teach than carry a full tray of drinks in heels? You bet. But the truth of my present moment is that I'd like more time to write, and the decision to work part time in a casino doesn't compromise my list. I'm more of a casino than a cubicle girl, anyway. This is where I'm at in my life's hic et nunc. I might change. For now, I'm excited about a job that's physically exhausting. When I bartended in Brooklyn, my bones were a barometer for tips: if my back ached, I raked in bank. There's immense satisfaction to be had in manual labor. And in "bluffin' with my muffin" in the poker room.

Corporate Ladder

2009-03-07T17:56:00.025-06:00

This afternoon I got a call from the college informing me that their Business Writing teacher fell off a ladder. They need someone capable (available?) to take his place third term. Apparently, I'm that person.

The problem is, I know diddly-squat about business. At age 31, I designed my first ever Power Point last semester -- the highlight of which was a profile picture of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova next to Jennifer Garner, to suggest that they have similar cheekbone structure -- so I don't know that I should be a mouthpiece for professional presentation.

When people at parties tell me they do consulting, I tune out and scan the room for Chex mix. I still think Nasdaq is affiliated with stock car racing. And I've never understood that a woman should wear hose on an interview (hence maybe why, when I was 23, I didn't get that Wachovia teller job).

As I write this, Dan is clipping coupons on the couch. Because he is the Suze Orman of our relationship. And I'm the radio caller, the one without employment -- the one whose only viable options, prior to this offer, were cocktail waitressing at the local riverboat casino and participating in a drunk-driving research study (when I called midday on the phone to apply, I slurred my words to sound earnest). So what's holding me back?

I've always thought that to be a good teacher you have to love your subject, but no matter how hard I try, I'm never going to be gung-ho about the memo. Also, I'm afraid of seeming incompetent. What if some senior in a suit raises his hand and wants to know about the perceived credit risk as MBS and CDO investors decline? What then -- I pull out a copy of Wallace Stevens' "The Snowman"?

I have until tomorrow morning to make a decision. Classes start Tuesday. I know I should be ecstatic that the unexpected happened. I'd wanted a class, and then, two days before the term starts, I got offered one. I'm like Molly on The Bachelor. The college changed its mind! Friends, readers, what do I do? I want to give this my all, but what if my all is ill-qualified?

Chap Shtick

2009-03-05T13:33:00.011-06:00

Tomorrow (Fri, Mar 6) at midnight, the advance sales period for my chapbook ends. Just a friendly nudge.

To purchase a copy, click here and scroll down to my name. Try not to get distracted by Nancy Kerrigan's The Voices. I highly doubt the figure skater released a book of poems (I'm praying that's a maze, and not a rink, on the cover) but even if she did, we can all imagine how those poems might go:

"Why me? Why anybody? Can't you see?
The world is but another bum knee."

Jew or False

2009-03-02T18:38:00.027-06:00

A recent article in Slate magazine tears The Reader to shreds, calling it a vehicle for Nazi exculpation. But I loved the movie. I didn't think Hannah was using illiteracy as an excuse for mass murder. To me, the film is about the unfortunate human willingness to follow orders (see the Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments) and the emotional gradations in relationships. Yes, she was responsible for the deaths of 300 people. But she was also the woman who sexually awakened the adolescent narrator; to Michael, she was a figure both inside and outside of history, existing in a courtroom and a bed. How did the past inform his present, the present his past? And just like Michael, we are uncomfortable with, and challenged by, our sympathies towards Hannah, our eagerness to eclipse her crimes. We root for her to read Chekhov. Because literacy is redemptive? Maybe. It's as if as an audience, we are Michael, haunted and confused. I'm still trying to make sense of my feel-good visceral reaction. After all, I live with a Jew. There's a mezuzah over our porch door. The last thing I want to do is support Holocaust revision.

The Slate article contains a link to this:

I remember watching Herman Rosenblat the second time he appeared on Oprah (of course I bawled). His lack of remorse over the fabricated story, his willingness to do it all over again, left a rotten apple taste in my mouth -- more than The Reader ever could. Thoughts?

The Girl Who Can't Cry Wolf

2009-02-27T13:13:00.069-06:00

I cry every day. Not a full-on sob, a jag that make my shoulders shake, but a mild welling. There are the obvious triggers -- Oprah, when she visits amputee hospitals or tent cities, or that SPCA commercial featuring Sarah McLachlan and an endless montage of maimed dogs. But usually, I'm surprised to find myself tearing-up. It's like eye whiplash. I'm hit by something --the epistemology of Transcendental Idealism, Bernadette Peters singing Sondheim -- and the world waters.

(Her husband died in a helicopter crash in 2005.)

Dan makes fun of me. I make of fun of me. I'm not depressed, or emotionally unstable, or, perhaps worst of all, self-righteous. I could probably eat veal in a calf hutch. I got tired of standing when I toured Dachau and sat down on the gravel. My point being: my sensitivity doesn't preclude selfishness. I'm not superior because I tend to cry -- nor am I convinced I feel more than anybody else.

It's the selectivity of crying -- what touches us as individuals, what doesn't -- that I find so interesting. A lot of the time, I get emotional not because I'm happy, or sad, or angry, but because I'm moved by the Human Condition. I might feel nothing for a particular person but be cowed by a concept. Here's an example: I understand the insufferable physicality of Guantanamo Bay. I've read about Jumah al-Dossari, a man who spent four years in solitary confinement, whose Saudi Arabian family was threatened with rape and murder, who attempted suicide more than a dozen times. But despite my intellectual disquiet, it's the much broader story of detainees writing poems on styrofoam cups -- cups that are then discarded -- that's most poignant. The universal need for creation in a place that morality all but abandoned floors me.

I'm moved by what isn't empirical: time travel, Ouija spirits, color theory, virtue. I'm moved by fidelity: Greyfriars Bobby, the Skye Terrier who mourned the death of his owner for fourteen years by laying on his grave in Greyfriars Churchyard (you can buy champagne flutes with Bobby's face etched on them!) I have trouble sympathizing with religious martyrs but get choked up during Storm Stories (tornadoes! hurricanes!) on The Weather Channel. I get overwrought if the person in front of me orders the last biscotti but could care less that the rare red wolf is almost extinct.

Fireworks leave me cold. So does the National Anthem. But watermelon at a picnic, cut into triangles and salted, is sublime. The sight of a newborn baby does little for me. The idea of birth -- that such a thing exists in our world, that one and one make one -- astounds me to tears.

Most recently, the Kindle, Amazon's wireless reading device, made me verklempt. I never want to stop buying actual books. A 19th century Russian novel should have paper pages. And you should have to turn them. And they should smell like Siberia, which is to say, used. I hate the idea of a screen display that "reads like real paper." How can you experience The Watchmen without holding it, without having to keep switching sides in bed because it's so heavy that it hurts your wrists?

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jeff Bezos

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

I know a friend of a friend, also involved in making art, who hasn't cried in two years. I guess I'd rather gurgle while watching Confessions of a Shopaholic than stay stony during The Reader. But my theory is we feel the same. Maybe I just have have a more high-maintenance lachrymal system. Maybe I just can't tolerate a dry cornea. I'll tell you what I do know: Carla's departing speech on Top Chef sous vide-d my heart.

(See 3:17)

Utcatasana

2009-02-21T12:49:00.009-06:00

Karaoke does living room yoga. Incorrectly.

Porn Poem

2009-02-18T13:51:00.009-06:00

When I lived in the East Village, the couple next door shot dirty movies. It was pretty annoying and used to wake me up. I've been trying to write about them for years.

My Neighbors Make Morning Pornos

Skim! she yells.
Early rising.
He throws rinds on the compost.
She ties up their arthritic Setter.
The paper: Chinese mistress contest takes tragic turn.
Her vulva ululating.
Her decibels.
Now move in a hush of flesh.
The body best read silently.
How a cloud licks a cloud, the sea its mirrored ceiling.
Hanging her life from his precipice.
A welter of sheets.
Fever-pitched.
And is she fading?
One more time.
The sad press of legs.
I've seen a concourse of angels.
Impossible to knot.

Those Who Can't Teach, Cook

2009-02-08T12:03:00.049-06:00

Tuesday is my last day teaching this spring. Because I was hired as an adjunct, I'm not eligible for additional classes third term; a higher course load would require the college to pay me benefits. You know that game where you add "in bed" to the end of your fortune cookie slip? I've been tacking-on "with benefits" to all my thoughts lately in a kind of educator's soothsaying.

I'm not angry at the college, because I like the people there. I find it easier to blame "the system" or "society" -- the very ambiguities I'm first to slash in student papers. I do think it was questionable for the school to feature a full-page picture of me, sipping coffee and grading, in the President's Financial Report. And the irony furthers: my good friend in Manhattan, who got that brochure because he graduated from the college, majoring in education, and who called to tell me about my photo spread, lost his own school job a week later.

Right now, the biggest reminder that come mid-February I won't be leading a class anymore is my freezer, where Dan and I are storing two fifteen-pound turkeys -- the bonus we both got for Christmas break. (Never mind that Dan is Jewish, or that we're mostly vegetarian.) At first, it was with something akin to pride that we claimed our birds, Dan tucking one into each arm as he maneuvered gingerly across the icy HyVee parking lot, looking like he'd just robbed a bank. Then we realized we would rather have had $25 cash. Or no bird at all. What if instead of gifting turkeys to the entire faculty, some of us adjuncts got to stay?

On Dirty Jobs last night, Mike Rowe visited a duck processing plant in northern California, where he interned alongside a sassy grandma, gutting geese and stuffing pillows. As I watched the old woman guide him through slicing open a gizzard to feel for digestive pebbles, I thought: She loves her work. And she's good at it. There's a clip of them standing together in the feather room, surrounded by wall to wall down, down falling down like year-old snow, and she just looks so right-where-she- needs-to-be, so content. That's the real root of my disappointment. I'm good at teaching and I love doing it, but soon, I won't have my feather room.

A life coach on MSNBC (that's what we unemployed do -- watch cable TV) gushed that this troubled economy is a blessing, that lay-offs are second chances. "Now you have the opportunity to pursue your dreams." But what if you've always pursued your dreams? Does this encouraging advice work in reverse, so that now I actually have the free time to pursue my disinterests? No more putting off providing administrative support to small businesses, or managing stocks, or compiling resin data for American Chemistry.

Last night I had a dream: I started Facebok. Its premise is simple. Users upload close-ups of themselves doing funny stuff with...bok choy. When I awoke, I still felt that this had the potential to be an easy money maker. But the Facebok.com URL is taken.

Yoga teaches me to live in the present, to focus my energy on the here and now. I've been fortunate to receive many last-minute blessings from a procrastinating universe. So I'm hopeful. I want all my creative, smart, genius friends to have a place at the table.

Some Birds Stayed

2009-02-04T13:54:00.105-06:00

This February, I'm trying to go back and work on stymied poems, the ones in the bottom of the drawer. Suggestions are more than welcome. I'm constantly revising.

Some Birds Stayed

Through the receiver I hear the rustling
of husks. You barely fit between rows. Gone
I say. For the first time in weeks I'm not thinking
in Central, not subtracting
an hour from here until everything is
less: pendent leaves, ice in a glass, everything
except my longing, our apartness. I'm a bar-
tender now. I tell you about the drunk
who asked, straight-faced, Do you have to be a judge
to be honorable? He didn't tip well. You're listening
but can't understand. I'm wasted you say.
My heart, sad laggard, wants more than ever,
and I know you've wadded up your coat
to make a pillow. I turn off my light
to eliminate distance. You shift
among stalks. If only you'd abandon
logic sober, were capable of sober fire-
water gesture, I'd cede East Coast,
calmed like a baby gummed on rye.
High proof. When you speak again
it's on Chernobyl. Today I read that
some birds stayed.

Yoga, or: It's Getting Hot in Here, So Take Off All Your Clothes

2009-02-02T13:14:00.058-06:00

Last Wednesday I started yoga. Actually, I tried to start the Monday before, but I wrote down the incorrect address and couldn't find the building. I drove around looking for markers: lithe men toting towels, women contorting into shapes vaguely reminiscent of land mammals. In the end, I wound up back on my couch eating a block of parmesan.

The kind of yoga I set out to conquer -- conquering is probably the wrong approach -- is bikram yoga. Practitioners of bikram progress through twenty-six asanas, or postures, for 90 minutes, in a room heated to 100 degrees. When I was eighteen, I worked at Disney World, pulling tickets and filling orders at a fast food pizza joint across from Epcot fountain. My uniform consisted of long purple pants and a matching shirt, both trimmed in yellow and maroon, with a tri-colored visor. I'd leave wardrobe and face a good five-minute walk through the park, and by the time I arrived for my shift, little Mickey Mouse-shaped sweat stains (because EVERYTHING was Mickey Mouse-shaped) would have soaked through the polyester. So last Wednesday, when I laid down my mat in the bikram room, I swear I smelled peperoni.

I knew nothing about yoga entering into this, except that when I tried out my cousin Anna's Wii fit over Christmas, I was able to distribute my weight evenly and keep the spastic red dot in the center of the yellow circle. Maybe this doesn't afford me bragging rights, because this morning, I got light-headed and had to sit during the Eagle Asana. My Eagle became an Accidental Downward Dog. What does that make it, then -- a Beagle?

When I think "eagle," I rarely think exertion. I remember watching one through binoculars with my dad in NC -- or was it a hawk? -- and it seemed drugged, with an enormous head, like a majestic bobble, and indisposed to do much of anything (though with great focus-- the way I can be riveted, for hours on end, by any Top Chef marathon).

This actual eagle just isn't working as hard as the yogini in lycra, nor is it perched on a branch in a sauna. Still, the pose remains a favorite of mine, surpassing even the Dead Body(where you lay on your back and simulate a corpse).

Camels and rabbits, cobras and trees -- you become like a spent exhibit in the Museum of Natural History, a diorama of one, because all your energy is focused on breathing and projecting to a controlled point the size of a third-eye. Like you're looking into yourself by concentrating outside of yourself, riding out a narrow beam of inner light. Man. I'm frightening close to wearing Patchouli.

Last Thursday, I had the pleasure of dining with the poet Li-Young Lee. He also came and spoke to my students. He dressed in all black and carried an orange and, oddly enough, called poetry "the highest form of yoga." His two sons run a yoga studio. Li-Young Lee believes breath and poetry are indivisible. (I'm trying to develop an essay on this.) We speak on an exhale, which is the body used, dying -- on an inhale, even though the body revives, words are negated (you can't breath in and speak). So poetry is a sacrifice, a need so intense it springs from death. Maybe that's why so many poets commit suicide?

Assuming all poems are meant to be oral, to be delivered with the breath, I find Lee's observation philosophically brilliant (Dan pointed out that sign language complicates things). And yoga feels like writing. After you really enter a poem -- after you lose track of time and place -- you reemerge better but exhausted. Like you've just held the bow pose, rounding your spine and radiating out through your toes.

My introductory week of $20 unlimited yoga is up, but on Friday, I'm buying a $100 a month membership. It's the greatest workout I've ever done. I plan on going three times a week. I like my teacher (I moved past the initial discomfort of a strange man in a Speedo asking me to bend over) and I'm already finding my stress-level has decreased. I'm not tapping my foot in line at the post office, or cussing in frustration when I can't put my necklace on (damn tiny clasp!) I think I sing better in the car, too, because I'm more aware of my diaphragm.

Check back for updates on my adventures in bikram yoga. Here's a link to where I practice (including a detailed description of the twenty-six asanas).

Chapbook Now on Sale

2009-01-24T16:04:00.039-06:00

I'm excited to announce that the advance sales period for the chapbook has begun.

I'm hoping to sell 200 copies in the next two months, so that my press run will be 1000.

The book only costs $14 (+$1 for shipping).$15 is the cost of a Snuggie, and my poems will keep you just as warm. (Plus, my poems aren't as much of a fire hazard if you're making S'mores.)

Also, did you know the opening of the Snuggie commercial rhymes in a sing-song shit way that the poems in my book do not?

I like these twenty-two poems. I've spent quite a while revising them. However, I'm not going to dupe you into believing my poems are motivational just for the sake of a sale:

Although the book is not accompanied by life-affirming puzzle pieces, it is $10 cheaper.

Thanks to everyone who has supported me! Please consider forwarding this post to friends.

To order, click here and scroll down to Alicia Rebecca Myers. Please ignore the temporary cover -- we're still designing the layout. Greener will ship on April 24.

And remember: Without YOU, the puzzle is incomplete.

Elizabeth Alexandirge: A Defense

2009-01-21T16:20:00.023-06:00

Elizabeth Alexander, Obama’s inaugural poet, taught me for a semester at N.Y.U. She was a visiting lecturer in our MFA Program. She never said “Take out your pencils. Begin,” but she did ask each of us to memorize a favorite poem and recite it.

I chose John Masefield’s “Sea Fever.” It’s not an especially good poem, but it is one of the first I fell in love with, in eighth grade, when my parents gave me a hardbound copy of One Hundred and One Famous Poems in my Christmas stocking, stretching out the toe. Masefield introduced me to the words vagrant and whetted. I spent a solid month dropping them into casual conversation, whether they belonged or not. “Pass me the vagrant macaroni, please, my appetite is whetted.” And all those incantatory sounds! When the long trick’s over was electric. I marveled at the poem’s compulsion. I felt Masefield was propelled by something otherworldly, that maybe, like me, he had vacationed summers at Myrtle Beach, tried to swim out beyond the buoys.

I had long known “Sea Fever” by heart the day I stood in front of the class, 28 years old, fidgety and vomitous, studying the industrial carpet. I hate public speaking. I’d waited relatively late in the semester to recite my poem. I’d put it off as long as possible, and when my friends remarked that afternoon on my blanched face, I’d simply told them I was, well, sea-sick.

When I began reciting “Sea-Fever,” Elizabeth Alexander’s eyes were eerily calm, beatific even, and in my moment of weak memory, as I envied her sitting in her chair, when I couldn’t move beyond the opening line of I must go down to the sea again, to the, I hated her.

So my immediate thought, when I heard she was chosen by Obama, was “Haha. Now she has to stand in front of 2 million people. 2 million cold people. Who are also standing.”

Now here I go, leaping to her defense. (Really, she is quite a lovely woman.)

No one, including the NY Times, seems to acknowledge that Alexander enunciated to indicate line breaks, or that maybe she read slowly so America could listen. Really listen. The rapid posting of the poem to websites -- the verbatim transcription -- denuded it of craft. Imagine, for example, getting your hands on a score for the piece Yo-Yo Ma played (John Williams’ “Air and Simple Gifts”) without measures, simply a string of notes regardless of length, a nonsensical lettering of AADEAG. Poetry is not prose. Line breaks matter. Look at the end to James Wright’s “A Blessing” :

That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

This is not the same as writing:

That if I stepped out of my body
I would break into blossom.

The caesura after the word break elicits surprise; we do not expect the flowering, such a startling revelation.

A random sampling of comments among U-Iowa MFA graduates include “that was a death blow to poetry” and “one of the worst poems I've ever heard.” I think, if we are so quick to use the term “death blow,” we ought to start with the giant club that is Jewel's A Night in Shining Armor. And let’s be honest. A lot more people would have stayed on the mall to listen to Jewel yodel a stanza or two on Obama.

One poster on the NY Times website wrote “A woman and her son wait for the bus. Is this all is takes to make a poem?” This ignores the juxtaposition of images, the pacing, the enjambment. Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg might seem simple, too. Sandburg’s “Grass" is in the voice of…grass. And “Song of Myself” begins with the lines:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I wonder if praise song for every hand-lettered sign is such a far departure from atoms that are good?

Elizabeth Alexander is not a flashy personality. She’s probably the last to take the mike at karaoke, shy to do the macarena at weddings. Aretha Franklin’s hat would have seemed silly on her. (Actually, it seemed silly on Aretha Franklin.) Alexander delivered her poem sans pomp, allowing it to exist independently of herself, which, to me, was how Obama delivered his address. This is about our country, she seemed to be saying. Not me. I didn’t think she was robotic. She chose to linger in the language , and that’s what I remember. I wonder if the public would have responded differently if Oprah had read the poem instead. And then given new cars to everyone after.

Alexander had a much harder time of it than me reciting “Sea Fever” to twenty of my peers, most of them hung-over.

Critics say she was either too condescending (what if the mightiest word is love?) or too impenetrable (declaim? thorn and din?). But she wasn’t given the task of rescuing the State of American Poetry. She was asked to reflect on an occasion. She had to appeal to both tenured professors and cafeteria lunch ladies. It’s a Goldilocksing I don’t envy.

Was it the best poem I’ve ever heard? No. I’d rather she had not used the word sparkle, and I’m never a fan of walking forward into light, both in life and in print. But at least it wasn’t a laundry list of colors and what rhymes with them. The Reverand Lowry -- God bless his venerable, Grandpa Cosby soul-- read a sing-songy poem that wasn’t even his (it was penned by James Weldon Johnson). The end of Lowry’s benediction fit a stereotype we poets are constantly struggling to shrug off, and yet it was memorable, primarily because, in the words of John Stewart, it came from the mouth of “the most adorable Civil Rights leader.”

When brown can stick around
When yellow can be mellow

Elizabeth Alexander, my bow-less hat’s off to you for a job well done on a poem that America took to be a downer. I’m hopeful for “When blue won’t get a boo.”

PRAISE SONG FOR THE DAY: A POEM FOR BARACK OBAMA’S PRESIDENTIAL INAUGURATION

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what’s on the other side.

I know there’s something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

New Moon

2009-01-02T12:44:00.030-06:00

When I got to St. Thomas, I realized the only book I'd brought was Three Dog Life, a memoir about traumatic brain injury. Which, big shock, turned out to be a downer -- more of a bog than a beach read. The cover deceptively features a dozing dachshund and two hale beagles, so I wasn't emotionally prepared for chapters like "Filling What's Empty" and "Learning to Live Alone." I don't know. I guess I was hoping for a more light-hearted spin on short term memory loss.

It was far easier to drink pina coladas and sun myself to Stephenie Meyer's New Moon. This is the second book in the tween Twilight series. I borrowed it from Dan's thirteen year-old sister. New Moon is 563 pages, but most of that is devoted to crying and falling down. I spent the entire week tying to get in touch with my inner puberty, but alas, I'm just too jaded and old, preoccupied with questions of ontology and craft. Isn't it creepy that a hundred year-old vampire still pines after an adolescent? How can he prefer an eternity of butterfly kisses with a whiny high school Senior over lifetimes of cold-blooded coitus?

I am fascinated with the sexual subtext of the Twilight series, which is basically an extended metaphor for chastity. If Edward and Bella consummate their passion, if he bites her in a moment of blood frenzy, then she will become a vampire -- so the two exist in a world of loaded looks and light petting. Bella wants to be turned more than anything -- she has a daily crying jag over it -- but Edward believes in heaven, and fears that Bella will lose her soul if he sinks his teeth into her.

I'm the first to admit there's something sweet to the story -- a safe approach to budding hormonal impulses. Edward, despite his icy touch and thirst for red, is non-threatening, a master of libidinal control. He's described as almost feminine. When he steps into the sun, his skin sparkles like diamonds. A lot of young girls go through this stage of liking boys who are sensitive and familiar, a bejeweled mirror to themselves. I'm thinking of David Cassidy of The Partridge Family.

Even Edward, in the movie, is a softer James Dean:

In a world where shows like Sex with Mom and Dad dominate, and Jamie Lynn Spears and Bristol Palin clearly do not have vampire boyfriends, Twilight is an odd phenomenon. I wonder if this high blown romanticism is damaging for teenage girls, or if they see through what they also enjoy. I grew up obsessed with Anne of Green Gables, a narrator also prone to tears and dramatic gestures near steep cliffs, but self-reliant, moved by the beauty of poetry and the natural world, and unwilling to surrender her ambitions for the living dead. In New Moon, Bella frets and moans, stays down on the forest floor like a depressed Scarlet O'Hara, contemplates suicide, resolves not to go to college in favor of staying by Edward's side, and recklessly risks her life by motorcycle and storm because nothing else matters. She has no interests outside of nursing a deep hurt.

You can open up to any page of New Moon and find either a weeping or sulking Bella.

pg 123: "Even as I shuddered away from the images, I felt my eyes fill with tears and the aching begin around the edges of the hole in my chest."

pg 459: "At least I could be with him again before I died. That was better than a long life."

pg 216: "I was an empty shell."

OK, we get it -- she's young, and in love, and an empty shell, and it hurts like hell to be apart. You can't eat, sleep, sit through movies, hang out with your werewolf best friend. And maybe I would be more sympathetic if I could forgive the writing. The epigraph to New Moon is from "Romeo and Juliet" -- of course, as readers, we should make the connection between the star-struck lovers and Bella and Edward. But while Juliet's impetuousness felt tragically charming, Bella's comes across as...dumb. She's an unlikeable Lear, spending all her free time trying to induce visions. And at least Romeo and Juliet got to go all the way.

(Now that's what I call a moon!)

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Trespass

2008-12-25T00:16:00.030-06:00

Merry Christmas from me and the automated Inflate-O Santa on a stranger's lawn in Virginia Beach.

Directly behind us, an elf is shooting a snowman after an unsuccessful candy stickup. Haha.

I appreciate the spirit spectacle, but have to admit that the dolphin cresting the center windows is a bit much. Also, if I were a middle school boy, I would have unplugged the "LE" in LET IT SNOW. Hehe.

Dan and I are flying to St. Thomas Dec 26th to spend a week with his Dad's family. So, internet permitting, I'll be blogging every day.

Happy Holidays, y'all!

The Lure of a Lemon Pie

2008-12-16T13:28:00.000-06:00

On our way back from the Coral Ridge Mall food court last night, Dan and I stopped at the grocery store to buy some cat food. Wow. My life sounds pathetic.

You might live in Iowa if... there's a laminated guide to freshwater fish sold alongside the Hostess snack pies.

Palindrome

2008-12-14T13:38:00.000-06:00

Today I decided to revise a short story, "Palindrome," I wrote when I was twenty-three. It's about an insecure voice teacher who gets involved with a widower whose dead wife happens to share her name. I want to post my fiction and poetry as it's still developing -- so please, I welcome feedback. Today I tightened up two sections of the story. I'm not working through it chronologically at this point. I'm still trying to get a feel for the characters.
____________________________________________

She called it dyslexing. Her grandfather had given her a word like a gift when she was six: racecar, a palindrome.

Now, vocalizing was a form of meditation. Half-stepping into her high register she could travel, abandon the physical to hover as bodiless language and pitch.

Memory sounded.

The simplest scale might trigger afternoons rocking side-by-side on the porch with her grandfather, Margaret staring at his scuffed patent leather shoes planted firmly on the planked floor. She could never get her feet to touch. That was when she first understood envy as tangible, envy as not being able to reach what others could. And death. That was when she first understood death, those weeks she and her mother stayed in the white-washed, two-bedroom house in Currituck County. She spent the summer circling the yard and touching fallen Granny Smith apples with her bare feet. They mushed with pressure. She could dig her nails into the peels and leave half-moons. Sometimes small worms, pink like slag glass, emerged.

Once, she asked her grandfather if apples were alive. He was chewing tobacco and spitting into a brass jug, and the setting sun reflected in the brass made her shield her eyes. Margaret tucked her tongue into her cheek to imagine how a wad of tobacco felt. He spoke to her in profile.

Fish ain't like an apple, Magpie.

Her goldfish had died that morning. She had won it at the State Fair only the day before -- had carried it all the way from Raleigh in a bowl in her lap, water sloshing onto her clothes and seeping into the seat so that her mother had to pull over on the Interstate shoulder to lay down a towel. That morning, finding it belly-up, she traced its slimy fins with a calm, curious finger, imitated its pop-eyed expression in the mirror. She didn't cry, but climbed back into bed and pulled the blanket over her head. She breathed trapped, hot air. Death seemed like a sheet, like a ping-pong ball tossed underhand. She stayed like that for a long time. Her mother called Margaret's grandfather into the room. He slipped a cigar box under the covers. Only then did Margaret sit up. She watched him reach a splotchy hand into the bowl on her dresser and drop the fish into an open handkerchief.

We're gonna bury it, he said, taking out a fountain pen from his trousers pocket. What was it named, Magpie. She managed to tell him she hadn't named it. He pointed to the box, Racecar Brand Cigars. Racecar. Spelled the same either end you start from.

They buried Racecar under the apple tree. Her grandfather whittled a pine fish, tiny spike at its base, to mark the grave, and they rocked together until dark.

Two weeks later, when she found her grandfather collapsed in the yard, death was irrevocably white, the same either end you start from.

*

David began as a blinking red light on her answering machine, a pulsating star she feared would explode if brought into unrecorded time. After she finally listened to his message, she made his name into a vocal warm-up exercise, practiced David as an ascending chromatic scale, along with I am 38 and I can't date online. She waited three days to call. When he answered, she hung up before he had a chance to move past breath, prayed he didn't have Caller ID. She tried again two hours later. It rang only once before the machine picked up, but David picked up at the same time, so there were two of him, overlapping, one taped and one live. Margaret heard him fumbling with buttons. She kept yelling "Hello?" into the receiver, even after he managed to shut off the machine. "Shit. Hold on. Margaret? Margaret?"

"Hello? This is Margaret," she said.

"This is David," he said, and laughed. "David Alpert."

"This is Margaret," she said again.

He explained to her that the night before, a recently fired employee had used a duplicate key to break into his pet store and remove all the lids on the tanks. "I spent my morning searching for reptiles."

"They were still alive?"

"Mostly," David said. "Some of the fish jumped."

Margaret wound the phone cord tight around her wrist. "I read somewhere that fish have hardly any memory. They experience the same moment over and over, believing it's new."

"Ah, yes. Have you ever had deja-vu?"

"No," Margaret said.

"Have you ever had deja-vu?" David exhaled like a winded runner. "Okay, new question. Do you have pets?"

"No. Well, I had a cat once. Nora. She ran away. And a goldfish when I was a kid."

"You have a nice voice." Margaret touched her throat's hollow, the spooned out skin above her larynx, with two fingers. Her body lightened, spine vibrating. "I teach voice," she offered. "I went to UNC Greensboro, studied opera. Music education."

"I know," he said. "From your ad."

"I've never --" she fumbled.

"Let me take you to dinner."

They set a date for Japanese food the next night. She recognized him immediately from his description -- tall, early forties, thinning hair, "a man who likes to figure out how things work and how to make them better" -- but was surprised that he was so delicately built. She noticed his hands, the skin almost transparent. He pulled a white rose out of his jacket and hugged her, smelled like damp fur and woodsy cologne. When he pushed her chair in for her at the table, he complimented her on her sleeveless lavender sweater. Margaret liked how his dark eyes flickered during conversation. She liked the black stubble on his chin, too, and how he shook his whole head when he laughed, which was most of the time.

"I found a baby black snake in some coral today," he said, over shrimp tempura. "This is news because the coral is on the opposite side of the store."

"That's frightening," Margaret said, and smiled.

They felt an ease with each other.

He told her about his wife, Maggie, who had died of ovarian cancer two years ago. He said she wasn't sick until they found it, so he always wondered if it would have gone away if they hadn't found it. Isn't that sometimes the way he said, but she was thinking about the sound of Margaret and Maggie, Maggie and Margaret. She moved her napkin from her lap to the table. She uncrossed her legs to leave. Their waitress appeared, asking if they wanted more hot tea. Margaret flattened her napkin back in her lap. The moment had passed.

After dinner, they lingered beside Margaret's Honda, David with his hands in his pockets. He explained that he'd had a long day at Pet Bazaar, but wanted to get together again. Soon.

"You don't go by Dave, do you?"

"Depends."

"I won't call you Dave." She was thinking evade, spelling backwards. She could hear her grandfather's voice.

"OK," he said.

Margaret turned to unlock her car door, but before opening it, spun back around to face David. He leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. She cupped his face and offered the side of one trembling palm to his lips, to the wet of his tongue.

When David proposed, eight months later, ring tucked in a California roll, Margaret accepted. She tried not to think about the picture of Maggie on the bottom shelf in his workshop, book-ending, unassumingly, Hoyle's Card Games.

What's the Matter Bob -- Our Cat Got Your Tongue?

2008-12-12T17:44:00.000-06:00

OK, great news. Dan and I get to keep Karaoke (Bob and his wife never called back). Also, I just discovered this website, and spent the better part of Wednesday trying to put the Nintendo Duck Hunt gun in Karaoke's unsuspecting paws. Your loss, Bob!

Dentist

2008-12-10T00:38:00.001-06:00

On Monday, I went to the dentist. I hadn't been in three years. I'm not proud of having waited so long, but no health insurance, coupled with the legend of my Grandmother's indestructible teeth (you could bounce quarters off her molars at age 90!), kept me away.

The Manhattan dentist I visited three years ago made me watch a cartoon of an animated tooth who cried dirty tears and spat out the words "plaque" and "calculus." Literally spat them -- he was trying to clean himself. Also, I didn't understand that calculus was another word for tartar, so I thought the tooth was accusing me of bad math.

By the end of last weekend, I was desperate to figure out where I would get the cash for a gum graft. I had convinced myself that my cavities and advanced stage periodontitis had led to irreversible clonus. Turns out that last one is a foot disorder, so you can imagine just how freaked out I was to find it had spread to my mouth. I did a lot of research. Most of it came from the Dental Fear Central support forum, where members have logins like ICan'tCope and OneToothLefttoBrush261, and post cell phone pictures of their receding gum lines. Pictures that would have required another person to get the right camera angle. Gross.

Karaoke losing a canine in his food bowl was a mouth-care wake-up call for me. It just seems if you're willing to drop $350 on your indoor cat's smile, you should also invest in your own dental health. But I almost didn't make it to Dr. Maxwell's office. Dan and I got in the car, and as soon as he turned the key, this song came on. Now I understand why Doctors' offices only pipe in Michael McDonald and Christopher Cross and songs about Santa. "Final Countdown" on the way to the dentist when you're ondontophobic? Seriously?

Dr Maxwell is an OK name for a dentist (better than Dr. Pinch -- is that for REAL, Jeffery?), and at least "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" got "Final Countdown" out of my head. My childhood dentist was named Dr. Parish. I think Dr. Die had a practice across town. Dr. Parish was a nice man, though. He sent you home with Archie comic books and toothbrushes -- as many toothbrushes as you wanted -- so I always left clutching a bouquet of them.

I'm lucky -- Dr. Maxwell pronounced me cavity free and assured me I don't have the foot in mouth disease I made up. And the visit only cost me $165! The only time I got nervous was when he measured my gum pocket depth and whispered "occlusion" to the hygienist, and even then, I rather liked the word "occlusion." My students are reading John Donne, and you can just hear Donne addressing God in a metaphysical conceit about bite.

I guess I really do have my grandmother's teeth, but it doesn't hurt that I brush with a Sonicare, floss daily, don't smoke, and drink plenty of milk. How long since you've been to the dentist? Any horror stories?

Shoeshine

2008-12-07T23:01:00.001-06:00

Last year, I gave Dan a penguin for Christmas -- er, rather, I gave him a framed color print-out of the penguin I adopted on his behalf.

We display this photo next to the coffee maker, where I frequently knock it over and spill grounds in its Lucite corners. Giving an animate holiday gift is more fun in the abstract. A meerkat, an endangered orca, a penguin -- all boil down to a certificate or an occasional update letter. Dan's penguin didn't even come with a tote. At the very least, I expected a car decal.

I named him Shoeshine. When I paid my $75 sponsorship (for a bird that can't fly, mind you), I was hoping Dan would receive more personalized notifications. Maybe home movies narrated by Morgan Freeman. Instead, we get bi-monthly bulk emails, pictureless, and full of cop-outs like:

The chicks are very small and weak at the moment, and far too small to disturb taking photos.

and:

Shoeshine has migrated northwards up the Atlantic coast of Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, and will be gone all winter.

(This second one is like an automatically generated away message).

Shoeshine is supposedly a five year old Megellanic penguin. According to his profile, he likes tussac grass and burrowing. The later might help explain why he is so rarely available to photograph. One thing is for sure -- he most certainly doesn't like this:

We've been led to believe this is a picture of Shoeshine getting weighed. Firstly, I would hope some of my money might go to purchasing a more humane means of weighing penguins (can't they step on scales?) and secondly, I don't for a second think this is the same bird. The flippers obviously look different.

Shoeshine lives in Southern Argentina. We've been invited, in multiple poorly worded emails, to visit his colony. You know, if we happen to be passing through Patagonia. But I never quite trust the invite, or the new information I'm learning about penguins, because the translation feels off. For example, I was warned of Shoeshine's viscous bite should we actually attempt to seek out his nest. I don't much like the idea of getting bit by a penguin, much less a sticky one.

I've been thinking a lot about Shoeshine lately because I have to renew him. I only paid for a year of bird. While I suspect this whole operation is being run from a basement in Portland, I'm still attached to the little guy. We've been given two weeks before he's transferred to another sponsor. I don't know. It sounds cruel. Like, what if our names are carved on a wooden sign next to his burrow and a researcher breaks the post over his knees while Shoeshine watches?

At least the penguin in the stock-photo has gotten really fat -- they probably can't even pick him up anymore to weigh him -- so I think he'll survive without us.

Maybe we'll just stick with Snunshine, who is clearly a handful.

Lift

2008-12-03T20:41:00.001-06:00

On my way downtown this morning, trudging through snow, two different men stopped and asked me if I wanted a ride. One of them offered me candy. Just kidding.

I must have looked miserable all bundled -- but I wasn't. I found the cold edifying. I think snow is good for composing poetry. You hear your foothold and see your steps. It's like your walk is lineated.

"White Dog" by Carl Phillips

First snow—I release her into it—
I know, released, she won’t come back.
This is different from letting what,

already, we count as lost go. It is nothing
like that. Also, it is not like wanting to learn what
losing a thing we love feels like. Oh yes:

I love her.
Released, she seems for a moment as if
some part of me that, almost,

I wouldn’t mind
understanding better, is that
not love? She seems a part of me,

and then she seems entirely like what she is:
a white dog,
less white suddenly, against the snow,

who won’t come back. I know that; and, knowing it,
I release her. It’s as if I release her
because I know.

Spencer

2008-12-02T00:08:00.001-06:00

Yesterday, coming home from dinner at China Star with some friends, I spotted this on a tree:

Which looked a whole lot like this on our couch:

That's because it's the same cat. Our cat. Karaoke is really Spencer. Spencer has been living on and off with Bob-from-down-the-block for the past thirteen years. Before his original owner left town, Spencer/Karaoke was raised in the house that Dan and I now call home.

Which makes a certain amount of sense -- sometimes he stands at the basement door and lets out a confused, guttural meow for what I can only guess is a half-remembered life by the washer-dryer. And he's always plopping down between the hallway and the living room, front paws on hardwood, hind legs on carpet. He's a creature of the liminal.

Because we've only had Karaoke indoors for two weeks, and because I've been grading University of Iowa Business School essays on ethical responsibility, we called the number on the flyer. Now Dan and I are involved in a kitty custody battle that apparently will be decided by Bob's wife (Bob is pretty chill). Dan and I aren't really confrontational, though. We're the kind of people who fight with inflection.

"No, no, we only want what's best for Karaoke."
"If Spencer's happy, that's the most important thing. We are attached to him, though."
"Of course. I mean, Karaoke was seemingly abandoned, outside in the cold, declawed, and we did spend $350 to fix his abscess teeth ...still, he should really be with you."

(But secretly, I'm training Karaoke to cry on command in front of Bob's wife while gathering up his little cat-belongings in a little cat hobo sack which he'll then attach to the end of his pink plastic teaser wand with the sparkle mouse.)

You can read more about Karaoke (back when we thought he was a she) here.

Snow and Tell

2008-11-30T16:46:00.001-06:00

This morning I awoke to my first ever Iowa snow and decided to start a new blog. Spread the word.

Hitchcock kitty