Where we started from

I had a conversation with someone the other day about writing more. We talked about ways to trick yourself into writing, and the things that prevent us from writing. (Mine is that, there’s always something else I can/should be doing, and then complete laziness wins out. Mad Men won’t rewatch itself for the 4th time!) We also talked about insurmountable projects. Like, this crazy large idea for a story that I have, that I just can’t ever seem to work on because I have no idea where to start. And then this person said something that I always knew in my heart to be true and I don’t know why I had forgotten about it…"Write a poem." Write a poem. Poetry used to be my life. I loved poetry. I lived poetry. I was a poet. I performed it, I read it. I read a poem in a class once (not one of mine) and the professor liked the way I read it so much that he asked me to read it again. I was in the grocery store once and someone that I didn't recognize at all came up to me and said, “Hey you were the poetry girl, right?” Y’ALL I was the poetry girl in high school. (Also known as “white t-shirt girl”.) And what happened? I grew out of it? I started wanting to write more. I wanted to leave less to interpretation. There was a story I wanted to tell, a world I wanted to build, and I wanted to do that in a paragraph, dammit. I think there’s also a part of me that wanted to grow up. Poetry...I grew up with poetry. Poems were my writing training wheels. I wrote poetry as a self-centered teenager. It was how I processed the world, it was about me, for me. It was so indulgent, so myopic! That’s not what Real Adults ™ do. (Y’all I know this is not true. I read a ton of amazing poetry right now and I can’t even.) So I stopped writing poetry. And you know what I started writing? I can’t even pretend like I write fiction because I have never once finished a short story I started. (Not true, there was one, for a class.) I started writing BLOG POSTS. Jeez, self, if you thought poetry was indulgent, where do blog posts stand on that scale? Blog posts are the molten lava chocolate cake of self-indulgence. High school poetry is like, an ice cream sandwich. Anyways, so this person told me to write a poem. Because you only need to write a few lines. And then when you want to revisit it you just have to read a few lines, change a few words, and you can move on. I can do that. I can totally do that. 2014, more poems, less telling people about the novel that you want to write. Sound like a plan? Sounds like a plan. I'm going back to my roots. Back to where I started from. The irony, of course, that I wrote this all up as a blog post, instead of you know actually writing a poem, is not at all lost on me.

new home resolutions

I’m moving out with Lena in less than a month (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) and I didn’t make new years resolutions this year because of reasons, so it seems like a mighty good idea to make new home resolutions.

So here we go.

1. Buy less stuff.

I’m taking like, 1/10th of what I own to this new place, so it’s going to be decidedly clutter free. On top of being on a budget (because for three months there will be rent AND daycare costs and maybe sometime we can talk about how it is virtually impossible for a single working parent to save for any kind of future?) I just want to minimize the crap in my life. Literally. So this means no impulse toy buys for L, and definitely no impulse clothes/shoes/nail polish buys for me. Plus I have no excuses on this. I have enough shoes to last me a lifetime, and I have a bathing suit I like. What else does a girl need for the summer?

2. Clean a little every day.

Let me tell you a story about my bathroom sink.

Lena has decided that she is a “big girl” so she no longer needs a stool to brush her teeth which means when she spits out her toothpaste it usually goes all in the sink, and if that, it always sticks very high on the sides of the sink, and I’m usually distracted or something, so I let it dribble down the sides, where it dries. Repeat this every day, twice a day. After a month or so of this, I get really pissed off and have to scrub my sink clean. It has only just occurred to me that if I cleaned it a little every day, I wouldn’t not be stuck scraping toothpaste out of the sink. This is probably a really good metaphor for everything in my life, so I’ll start with the bathroom sink, and maybe I’ll also write up my methods and my data as I produce them and be a really productive graduate student.

3. No electronic devices from 6-9 PM.

This is going to be the hardest one. It doesn’t really need an explanation. Living on my own with Lena is going to be a big change. There’s not three adults ready to talk and to play and to engage her. There’s going to be me. (...cue me getting freaked out again...) This is going to be a big change for me on so many levels, the least of which is studying for class again agghhhh (CLASS my achilles heel) so when I’m home on the weekdays, I want to focus on hanging out and feeding my daughter. I’m not barring books, magazines, or newspapers, or ignoring my daughter for an adult conversation, I think her seeing me read and ignore her will do great things for her self esteem. I just...do not need to be playing Clash of Clans, well, ever really, but that’s another story.