Does this song bring all the middle school summer vibes or what? I heard it on a preview for Pen15. (Seriously, try watching any of those previews and see if you can keep it together. You can’t!)

Speaking of memory lane, I was in the clouds last September when Libby turned 10! Two digits! I feel like I owe her a ‘best of’ mix, except she already has one. Which is kind of weird cause I think it’s from only the first year. I looked back and I’ve only mentioned it twice, The Best of Libellus.

The original mix was a gift. The online version has 11 songs, I’m not sure if there are more on the CD. I can’t really remember if they were my like best writing or the entries that spoke out most to the creator or you know, the ones you want your crush to notice the most. I’ve forgotten so much, I really need a boring print journal where I can record the kind of stuff I’m always forgetting without being so public.

I wanted to use an Okkervil River song for a new post, but realized I had already used it. It fits the current post, but I should have tried harder to find a Phantom Planet song that fit the mood. Reading over the post I felt a little pride.

I’m reading a book about Alzheimer’s and a book set in senior year of high school when final decisions are made about college and getting serious. Beteeen that and the slow aging of my own body, I miss much about that time. I wish I had found my college therapist sooner so that we could have set a more sturdy ground for me to trample across. I had such horrible test anxiety that I’m surprised I never puked before one. I would have benefited so much more from a peer study group. I wish I had tried less to be there for the cool stuff and just made it happen goofing off and baking and reading in all of those beautiful scenic spots. Sucked up my fear & did the work to be a DJ. I was just so intimidated all the time.

Anyway, my writing wasn’t half bad. I think I might need to listen again & make a Ten Year Reunion mix.  I remember the first mix did not sound all that great together. It was very eclectic. Was the mix itself organized by order of favorite posts or sets of themes or just the best one could do with those songs? I should remember, I’m sure I’ve had the conversation a few dozen times over the past decade. But my memory fades and each time has that hot-cheeked, deep smile satisfaction feeling like it’s the first time.

Boys have been bringing that smile back to my face and I forgot about the giddiness that comes with it. Is this why it’s better to fall for new guys and not pursue the same one (over and over, on repeat, just like my dreams)?  I had this one post back in the day with some high and mighty talk against girls only talking about guys, but I was such a little liar. I loved talking about my crushes. It was the relationship stage I never really talked about.

There is that ever present expectation for me to settle down and start planning that family, but I feel like the first spring flower blooming after the last of the winter frosts. Tell me all the ways you really like me. Let me see what else you’ve got to offer.

Labels: Best of Libellus, crushes, make me a mix, mixtapes, Okkervil River, writing

2018 is going to be a magical mystery tour year of my life, I can feel it. Not like the movie with the drugs and the weird shenanigans. This year is going to bring a lot of change for me. Loss of one of my favorite loved ones, birth of one of my new favorite loved ones, the final phase of my twenties, a year of firsts for my green initiative, and (God willing) a time for love to come back into my life.

I am writing small pieces for my new site, hoping to launch it later this month. I hate naming my writing. There is so much in a name - so much value, meaning, artistry. With Libby I pair my posts to the music that's playing, the song that replays in my heart and on my speakers. I don't like to do that with my poetry and fiction work though. So I'm going to struggle through it and make each piece, and then share my mood playlists separately.

I would not be surprised if a third of it included songs by The Beatles.

Labels: be more positive, be the good, find the good, new year, The Beatles, writing

This past week sucked.  Work kicked my ass.  I was in and out of "a mood."  Traffic was crazy.

I called my grandmother to talk and get prospective.  We're doing that thing where we ignore she's dying and it's totally normal to have hospice care.  I didn't realize she already needed hospice.  She's shared my post surgery tips with her hospice nurses already.  We're in such different places and yet we understand each other so well. 

She thinks that I seem more balanced, that I didn't need perspective from her, that I've been in such a good place since getting this job.  I'm more motivated.  I mostly believe her.  She doesn't know about Libby, but it is apparent I'm writing more, which is one of the things I factor in.

I told her about trying to find the good in my days.  I really need a big dose of good.  I need something to keep me in a good mood til the new year.  Not that I have anything planned for then.  I just feel like a need a big push of positivity and sunshine to get me there.

I've been writing more outside of Libby too.  Poetry twisted with all my confusing feelings. I'm trying to make something worth sharing, but I don't have any false ideas that it'll do anyone else any good.  My words don't seem to be as helpful for others anymore.  I wish they would.  I wish it was something I could be prouder of.

Labels: be more positive, family, i wish, writing

Heaven is a truck
It got stuck
On the breeze

-  Heaven Is a Truck by Pavement

They lay me flat on the bed of the truck.  Packed me in as tight as they could.  I didn't look behind us.  I couldn't really.  Instead I looked up.  I watched the sky through the tree tops.  I don't think it's a view seen by most.

It's beautiful.  Not jaw dropping like the cliffs or joy inducing like the waterfalls.  The sky and the trees and a truck and me.  I thought my Grandma might be there, just behind the clouds.  I prayed to her, but I didn't get a response.

It's not a fear of dying.  It's an understanding.  I messed up.  There will be consequences.




Two years later and I'm laying on my back again.  This sky is a bit different. Stars mapping out constellations fill the sky and the air is lighter, one deep breath away from winter.

They're going to lay me down in the room with all the lights.  They're going to spread my arms out on my own personal cross.  And then it's lights out until we meet again.

Labels: Heaven Is a Truck, Pavement, personal writing, prose poetry, writing

I am a very emotional person.  I love words.  I hate when people abuse them.  I am happiest when surrounded by well chosen words.  I am deeply influenced by words and by the thoughts that they command.

I just finished The Book Thief.  I just finished crying my eyes out.

Side Note: It's strange, and maybe a survival instinct, but I get these really awful migraines from crying. It feels like there's a storm cloud trapped in my head, all heavy grey matter crashing up against my skull.

Memorable quotes from tonight's portion of The Book Thief by Markus Zusak:

"Don't punish yourself," she heard her say again, but there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too.  That was writing" (Zusak 524-525).

"After more than two hours, Liesel Meminger started writing, not knowing how she was ever going to get this right,  How could she ever know that someone would pick her story up and carry it with him everywhere?
No one expects these things.
They don't plan them" (Zusak 525).

"I have hated the words and
I have loved them,
and I hope I have made them right" (Zusak 528).


Since music brings words to life and gives them a medium to dance in and since the music is always playing in my head, here are a few lyrics to ruminate on as well:

However you feel,
Whatever it takes,
Whenever it's real,
Whatever awaits,
Whatever you need,
However so slight,
Whenever it's real,
Whenever it's right.

- Spit on a Stranger by Pavement

Labels: books, I see the sunshine in your eyes, Markus Zusak, Pavement, The Book Thief, writing

I was approached to share my poetry, to be published, but that's not my current specialty.  One week to decide.  I've been putting things together in my head.  Drives in the country, the weather chilling, Alex Turner trying to escape his past loves.  It's inspiring as hell, but not poetry.  Not prose poetry.  Not sonnets or haiku or limericks.  I've been building back stories, towns, neighborhoods, internet friendships.

When I do think of my writing, I don't think it has any tie to this state. Nothing that says - that's a southern writer, that's a Georgia writer, that's all 285 and OTP, Chick'Fil'A and Zaxby's, Coca-Cola and CNN, Peachtree and Oglethorpe.

So there's that.  There's also the fact that all of the finished poetry I have is from college or about my ex or is in a primarily prose paragraph form.

Except, if you think of how much I've taken to this country life, you would think I would be free versing Georgia farms, barns, and American youth.

Labels: are you laughing yet?, poetry, writing

I'm working on poems again, but only have fragments and themes. Trying to decide if I could be satisfied with one or two stanza poems, but they just look unfinished to me. I'm so verbose though, poetry doesn't really come easy to me.

I have a few poems like this from that first year after college. They all relate to this general theme but they're not meant to make one poem. They're more like a series on the same theme, but none of them are named or finished. I think the first one is from my chapbook so it has a name, but I don't acknowledge it as the true title. When I think of all of them I think of the first line of the first poem and even though they're not one poem they all claim some connection to that first line, "I married my body to yours."

The poems are obviously not about marriage, but lovers and lost love. That phase after a long relationship when it feels like cheating to have feelings for anyone else. That hold that your first can have over you, whether they mean to or not. Actively or passively as the ghost of your failure.

They're not vulgar, or even really sexually charged at all. Maybe that's why they feel incomplete, because that sexual tension doesn't flow through them. Lord knows I'm not lacking in it. That's one of those crazy differences with being in a happy monogamous relationship and being single. Supply and demand. Somewhere that happiness becomes contentment and that contentment eradicates the sex drive, but whether you are happy being single or feel miserably alone, you are seized with this sexual charge that runs through you like a current.

That connection between feeling civilized and feeling the shock waves of sexual frustration reminds me of the book I'm reading, The Left Hand of Darkness. The book refers to this in it's alien world as somer - 22 days of being sexually inactive and having no sex drive and then for about four days they enter kemmer in which they cannot prevent the release of sexual energy. "On the one hand, the limitation of the sexual drive to a discontinuous time-segment...must prevent, to a large extent, the exploitation and frustration of the drive. There must be sexual frustration...but least it cannot build up; it is over when kemmer is over. Fine; this they are spared much waste and madness; but what is left in somer?" (Le Guin 95).

Labels: instigate, poetry, The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin, We used to be friends., writing, writing process

I'm not a big fan of introductions or forwards in books.  I do love a good preface though.  Introductions seem so haughty and cryptic and like they're written to be critiqued thoroughly in paper after paper.

With that being said, there are several parts of the introduction in The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin that I like so much I want to share here.

In reference to fiction writers:

"All they're trying to do is tell you what they're like, and what you're like--what's going on--what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen.  That is what the novelists say.  But they don't tell you what you will see and hear.  All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies.

"The truth against the world!" - Yes. Certainly. Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!"

 Then later:

"In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it.  Finally, when we're done with it, we may find --if it's a good novel--that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street that we never have crossed before.  But it's hard to say just what we learned, how we changed."

I don't agree with all her views on science fiction and I find her explanations on it quite bland, but I do love her view on fiction and fiction writers.

I tried to find a clever musical introduction to pair with this post, but I couldn't remember which artist I was originally thinking of so I went with the organ intro of The Ugly Organ by Cursive.

Labels: Cursive, fiction. novel, introductions, The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin, writers, writing, writing process

My mind has wandered off.  It is somewhere between Orphan Black and The Magicians.

There are times, during my commute or at work, when I can steer my thoughts to my story. The imagery of the countryside, the fog rolling in thick clouds over the asphalt, a piano interlude.  No it's not a classic piano memory recall collage.  It's actually deep and heavy base, British accents, and the occasional gritty New York band.

It's paralyzing, not knowing character names.  Trying to build dialogue without dialect, without physical features, without a face. I've begun to wonder if it's because her story starts before she's born, before it's her story. When you look at a child and you think you have an idea of what they'll look like as an adult, but you can't actually.  I don't know why it's so important to see her as a child.  I'm building a whole different world in my head, a place all it's own.  You would think I should be focusing on putting that to paper.  Why is her face so important?  What is in a name?

I think tomorrow I'll read more quotes from the literary legends. I've seen so many about the writing process itself, hopefully there will be more specific quotes out there about what to do when you have other worlds forming inside your head. 

Labels: BBC America loves women, Orphan Black, The Magicians, writing, writing process

There are a lot of times when I want to censor Libby.  Times when I want to go back and delete and edit and treat it like one of my fiction pieces.  I have been reminded recently how much of myself I have put into Libby - 'diary entries, letters of love, my notes on love and life.'  It's scary to think that my thoughts over the years have survived and that someone could get to know me without meeting me.  That's the internet for you, right?

But what about when you meet someone new?  Do you share all of the bad with the good?  The whole blog as it were?

I brought up Libby with both a coworker and an old work friend this past week, no relation to each other, no relation to what I've been writing about lately.  I described Libby as a great way for me to clear my head or to get into the proper head space for writing.  In both cases I brought up wanting to create a separate place to share my writing.  Neither person asked any follow up questions about Libby and I was relieved because I didn't want to share it with them.

So if I don't want to share Libby with new people, who do I expect to see it?  I certainly don't link it anywhere to drive traffic.  I have started going back and adjusting the labels, mostly so that I can find content about writing or family with just a quick search.  Most of the labels I had were continuations on a rant or clarifications on my feelings. I guess then that I write Libby for myself to see, to document and remember that with which I struggle with.

Labels: blogs, Libby, writing

"The nights were mainly made for saying things that you can't say tomorrow day." - Arctic Monkeys

There's something about their music that makes me feel like it is made for the night. The beats coupled with the lyrics, perhaps?  There's a way that it makes you feel like you're out in the cold, crisp night air that is enchanting. Listening to their music as I fall asleep makes me feel like I can appreciate the full breadth of the night.

There's this connection that writers have with the night, with this sudden outpouring of words that would dry up if you waited until morning to put them on paper. I've never thought of music coming out of artists the way words and sentences and scenes appear as writers drift to sleep.

I've been making playlists for different stories I have.  Songs that remind me of the time and place the story originated in me.  Songs that remind me of the characters and the mood of the stories.  Each character lives in my head, has a piece of me in them in such a way that I could never imagine them liking music that I don't.  Sometimes writers talk about hearing their characters talking in their heads.  They can hear those voices so clearly, but there are times when the voices go quiet and you have to craft a way to make them speak to you again. They come to you in the middle of the night, after you're exhausted from failing to fall asleep.  They start speaking and you forget why you wanted to sleep in the first place.  You feel crazy, but you love it.

“The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.” - Andre Gide

Labels: Andre Gide, Arctic Monkeys, how many secrets can you keep, night time, quotes, writers, writing

I know this is crazy.  I think I just need to get back to the basics.  The things that used to make me me.

I keep coming up with all these new plot lines and story ideas and character details, but they're all in my head and they never quite make it to paper.  Or keyboard.  I think getting in the habit of creating content that others could possibly read will help me push my new ideas into actual prose and that that would make me happiest.

I've written a few new poems, it's always the thing you're not thinking of that comes easiest, and I think it's time I have a place to share my written work.  A place separate from my inner most thoughts  (Libby) and a place that I could share professionally if I so choose because it's well put together and not the ramblings of a woman on the verge of figuring her shit out.

So I am currently:
1. Posting on Libby again to get my head on straight
2. Creating something separate to share my writing
3. Working on a few new stories, a retelling of an older story, and the details for a collaborative piece
4. Looking to create something else separate for all my musings on couponing and money management

Labels: couponing, finding happiness, Libby, writing

I have a soft spot for inappropriate lyrics, preferably when surrounded by a lot of wit. Hence my constant return to blasting Say Anything out of my car speakers.  Perhaps because I grew up with such a prudish sense of self, I felt it was acceptable so long as it was someone else's words.  Whatever the case, I have been crooning along with the start of a southern twang for many, many years.

So the thing about Say Anything is that I kind of love Max Bemis.  There was so much that I could relate to him with growing up that I kind of think I did a lot of my personal writing with him in the background.  The band took a huge hiatus because of his collapsing mental state and when they came back, he owned up to what happened and didn't try to downplay it at all.  I guess I was always encouraged to be myself, but there was that expectation to be normal and fit in.  That created this huge hole in me.  I tried so hard to hide my social awkwardness by not trying at anything else at all.  Then I figured out how to hide it all inside.  But the thing about hiding huge secrets is that there is only so much room for them inside your head.  So I pushed out all the pointless other things and found that once you let me start, I couldn't shut up.

During the past few years I started having problems with word recall.  I know so much about the word, but I cannot tell you what it is.  It's so frustrating.  As an English major it made in class essays a bitch because I would forget names or adjectives and I would just stumble through the rest of the essay praying that describing it would bring the word back to me.

So I've become frustrated and kind of a pain to be around.  Listening to Say Anything is like revisiting a younger version of myself. I kind of just want to immerse myself in it.  In that loud happy state.  The kind that comes when you allow yourself to embrace the sad moments and then scream about it.  Mostly I want to write.

I'm still the optimist though it is hard when all you want to be is in a dream. 

I feel like I've had all these amazing dreams recently and I live more in the dreams then I do in reality.  Pretty much work is awesome and I love being there.  Then I leave to go home and nothing that follows is as fulfilling or wondrous as my dreams. Except Fitz, because you know, he's like the best cat ever born.

Labels: crooning, dreams, English Major, Fitz, inappropriate lyrics, Max Bemis, mental instability, Say Anything, word recall, writing

I found a few words I had scribbled down about this abandoned looking barn house on my drive to St. Louis, way back in 2010, and I started tweaking it on the flight back from Pittsburgh.  I've been going through it to make sure that it has the same meter throughout, which I absolutely never do, and the alliteration and assonance has gotten so addictive in the piece that I am finding it so hard to not rhyme each stanza.  This meticulous manner reminds me of asking Kelsey for help while trying to write poetry for English 1101.  I really, really want to talk to her about this.

Then there is Monika Hey in Germany who the content of this piece constantly makes me miss.  The last time she came to visit she surprised me and read my piece in Stillpoint and then carried an actually amazing conversation about the deeper meanings in it and comparisons and it made me feel like a real writer.  I don't know how one person can make you feel that, but God it feels good to be taken seriously.

Every time I revisit a line to align the wording and the meter, I stumble upon different possibilities in the words.  Double meanings, a general build on themes in the piece.  I've finally started writing again, fiction mostly, and it's here in a poem that I feel like I can say the most.  I think it's hard accepting myself as a poet because I've always seen myself as a fiction writer, always wanted to use the elaborate stories in my head to build a fictional work and not hone in on it and condense it into so few words.

Labels: barn house poem, fiction, Kelsey, Monika Hey, poetry, Stillpoint, writing

Labels: mixtape, writing

Hide me under a rock already. I feel so insignificant. I have no real stable job with benefits and I'm no where near being ready for grad school. The most creative energy I've had lately was in a dream and it was still not strong enough to provide something worth writing about. I've gone back to having no exciting weekend plans. OR rather, I get back so early on Friday and Saturday nights that I don't feel like I've actually been out for the evening. And I really have not adjusted well to the amount of times I see friends per week or per month. I understand it's an appropriate post-college/adult amount but that still does not cut it for me. I still haven't figured out if this feeling is a result of the medication or the lifestyle. I want to see at least one friend multiple times a week to tell all of my crazy little daily stories to and to fill my days with something bigger than myself. Is that too much to ask for?

Labels: dreams, instability, post-college, unemployment, writing

The only poetry I can seem to write scares the shit out of me. Everything just flows into something darker, something that I didn't mean to develop, but it's there sifting inside of me. Dark lines and darker times. The worst was with the first medication. I never thought I would let myself go back to sophomore year, but the feelings came back with every pill I took to ease the physical pain. It's not as bad without the first medication, but it shouldn't still be here. It feels so secretively dangerous. Like it'll strangle me in my sleep. Like I'm tangled in the sheets. I'm not sure it's worth it to be twisted into this much sadness. I wish there was a brain tumor that could explain why my head often feels like the electric chair. Something there to prove I'm not crazy. I would court all of the brain surgeons if someone could remove it for me.

Labels: depression, medication, migraines, poetry, pretty delusional, side effects, writing

I need something to get lost in. If I'm not going to find a job any time soon, I'm going to need an adventure. I just can't stay here with the state of things. I will not work myself up over things that are out of my control. I will not fall any farther into this mess of emotion. I am salvageable.

All of my dreams are filled with this giant sense of adventure and I'm so much braver than I trust myself to be in them. I want to live. I want things to write home about. I want to write something every day that excites me. I have this chunk of money to fall back on if I need to, okay it's not that big but I could survive on it if I can't find a job right away. I'm like five steps farther off track from falling in love, but I don't think I could handle any more intensity right now. I really want simple right now. A simple place to dive off into adventure. Even if it scares me.

We're a kiss away from being dangerous
Kiss me and show me that it's true

Labels: adventure, recent college graduate, The Long Winters, writing

I first started liking The Redwalls because I thought they sounded a bit like The Beatles. I love this song because it reminds me of being not drunk, but a little tipsy. Maybe cause I like to sing it in a slur, or a drawl. Both I catch myself doing while tipsy.

Despite having a paper to finish, I found myself really nostalgic late tonight. I started rereading and editing my last updates in my Kaely piece and then I found myself listening to mixes I made while trying to write my Kaely piece. I am so impressed with some of the stuff I wrote. I know I've been coming back to this piece for the past four years, but there are scenes that I can hardly recognize they sound so intelligent. Every once and a while I am quite impressed with my word choice, probably because I started writing this when I was so young and I expect to find an eighteen year old's vocabulary. There's still a lot of moving from a to b required in this piece but I'm really glad I didn't rush it. The piece has definitely matured with me and the characters have taken paths I could not have foreseen at eighteen, nineteen, twenty.

I think one of the reasons I connected so easily with Kayley is because I knew I could trust her. I knew it in her name.

Labels: editing, Kaely, The Beatles, The Redwalls, writing

Temptation, why is it haunting me so badly? Well maybe because a - I welcome it and b - I am prone to it. I feel like I've wasted the whole day. I still have to write two 2 page papers for class tomorrow. It is 3:13 am. They are due at 9:05. Did I mention I'm taking a test right after I turn them in? I'm a little overwhelmed.

So really COME ON! There is currently too much drama or potential drama on my plate. I am not ready to be so overwhelmed. Really. They don't dismiss your writing skills in college just because you were overwhelmed and anxious every time you sat down to write. This truth is something that characteristically, professors 'don't buy.' Maybe I really am imbalanced.

Funny how originally I was going to comment on the good that comes out of certain separations. Break ups perhaps. You don't realize it first off. Or looking back. Or missing a certain person. Or hating a certain person. But there comes a day when you can play the knowledgeable mother and realize that sometimes things end at the right time, whether you at one time or another did doubt that. How much more of it could I have taken, some ask themselves. I was so consumed by him (her, them) that I lost time for myself, others might say. Maybe that's why adults are so eager to have flings with former loves. They forget the bad and cling to the reawakened desire, no matter how bad you may be for each other. But what do I know about inappropriate crushes?

Labels: anxiety, break ups, college, English Major, inappropriate crushes, papers, temptation, writing