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wBillieupool |
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Hi.
My name is Kate.
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wTuesday, December 10, 2002 |
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This is how it's ending for a month or so. I'm exhausted. I've one more exam to go and then the four hours of harried packing, out by 5:00 or fined fifty bucks. And this exam - not studied for nearly enough. And this room - warm and whole and my home and not packed up one bit.
Don't want to go, honestly. I'm twenty and I'm starting to feel like a seperate house altogether, like a person all my own with plans and hopes and ideas. But I'm exhausted.
So I'll just go now, quietly.
posted by
Kate at 10:38 PM
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wThursday, December 05, 2002 |
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The weather is changing. The kind of change that makes my fingernails peel, that gives me chronically dry skin. The kind of change that lowers my voice a couple of octives. The cold pillows in my eyelids and in the bags beneath my eyes. I feel like a hypothermia case, like if I could just lie down and close my eyes I'd be alright again.
posted by
Kate at 3:26 PM
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wWednesday, December 04, 2002 |
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It's the night before dead day. Normally, this day equals drastic amounts of hunch punch and fun, paddle whoopins and make-shift pole dancing with door supports. Then you wake up the next morning on your friend's couch, and you both spend the rest of the day laughing at the visible markings of your sinful rompings the night before - the perfect imprint of the wood grain deck she fell on, the bruises on your forearm from the unfortunate pole dancing incident. Then you call another friend, (this is the same friend you might have accidentally, um, been sick on - but not very, just slightly - and he didn't mind too much because he's your very good friend and he likes you even if you did imbibe just a little too much punch) and he can barely move because his thigh has welted up from the paddle whoopin delivered the night before in honor of his 20th birthday. But you all laugh because it's so funny. Everything is. We're juniors now, and there are only a very few semesters left so everything we do is fun and funny and fun.
Have a sober Christmas everyone.
posted by
Kate at 1:04 AM
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wMonday, December 02, 2002 |
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7:15 a.m. I crawled into bed, clutched at the sheets and pulled them up around my chin. Thus I spent the 10 most jealous minutes of my life. Sleep, you ho, you've made a cuckhold of me.
posted by
Kate at 11:42 AM
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wSaturday, November 23, 2002 |
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Friday Scenes:
Walking the channel of wind between two buildings on campus. Red leaves flooding the walkway like a snowstorm.
The bunny that let Miranda and me watch in wide eyed rabbit wonder as it calmly nibbled its supper just off the sidewalk next to the Natatorium. We stood for thirty minutes in the November cold, the tiny rabbit munching the last fall greens not five feet away, tolerating our dopey urbanite delight with eyes calm as a domesticated cow's. Finally he obeyed his ancient quivery-nerve rabbit genes and startled and bounded away, the flash of white bunny tail disappearing around the corner of Smith.
Then, shrimp and alfredo noodles at Allen's, red wine that didn't quite go so well with white pasta and Sinatra and Korn. Discord was, apparently, well themed...quirky and nice somehow. Afterward, there was the ride to Montgomery, strawberry ice cream at the Marble Slab, and The Ring at the theater. At one point in the movie the phone rings with what is most certainly ill fated news. "Hell naw," Allen said, "You check the caller id and if it says Grim Reaper you don't talk to that bitch."
Today, E. club restored eroded stream banks in Providence (Alabama). So it's been a dirty, dirty, woodsy day, sun-dappled and mud-caked and creek streaming. We planted many willows between rolled sheets of soil blankets and grass seed. We planted cedar saplings by a tiny water eroded ravine. We picked out deer and turkey tracks in the sugar sand banked in the crook of the river bend. Finally, an hour before sunset we piled into the back of the university car, four of us packed tightly enough to not need seatbelts, and I fell asleep with my temple on the cold window, the rolling pasture land of lower Alabama softly humming by in my ear as we fled back to Troy in the diminishing light.
posted by
Kate at 8:06 PM
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wFriday, November 22, 2002 |
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So this is how I feel about college, particularly this college: I hate it. Yes, I hate it. No, I don't think you understand. I hate college. In my opinion this four years is no better than an incubation period, time for me to grow up a little, time for my writing to get better, good enough to get me into an MFA program. And then I'll write for two years. After that, who knows.
posted by
Kate at 3:54 PM
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wThursday, November 21, 2002 |
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I realize this list is slightly belated, but I think it's important anyway:
WHAT I DID OVER SUMMER VACATION
drove by myself to Birmingham to visit Miranda
attended City Stages with M. S. and B.
worked as a counselor for physically and mentally retarded people at Camp Civitan
learned how to wakeboard
applied for a checkcard
got vaccinated for hep. B.
bought a new camera
bought lipstick
read The Nanny Diaries
got a DVD player for my birthday
watched a stage production of Hamlet
skinnydipped
skydived
had my eyeball licked
had a huge fight with my mother
got into some pretty serious trouble with someone not my parents for the first time ever
slept naked
worked as a counselor for mentally and physically retarded people at Camp ASCCA
read Little Alters Everywhere
drank beer with a British guy named Simon in Oxford, AL
discovered that my hair is naturally curly
read Maiden Voyage...again
took seven rolls of film
started a scrapbook / photo album
read parts of The Lord of the Rings, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, and Savage Beauty
watched Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood, Lilo and Stitch, Bandits, Animal House, Riding in Cars with Boys, Signs, XXX, Orange County, and A Beautiful Mind.
posted by
Kate at 1:34 AM
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wWednesday, November 20, 2002 |
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I suppose I'm just tired and frustrated. I could barely drag myself home after American Lit., crashed hard on my bed, one leg dangling off. Later the phone rang. Who ever it was let the answering machine pick up, but he/she didn't leave a message. I hate that.
It would be a shame to actually do my homework now as I've been on a homework strike for two weeks, but I suppose I will. Then I'll go back to sleep because even though I've had so much lately my body is worn out, worn out, worn out. Typical end of the semester blahs. I work like clockwork, doncha know. Very predictable.
posted by
Kate at 8:40 PM
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wTuesday, November 19, 2002 |
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Come to think of it, there was only one boy that left me anywhere near love, and he had me buckled over its threshold for four years. Maybe this type of love doesn't count at all because it was so very young (we were fourteen when it started). Maybe this love doesn't count because it was almost always unrequited on my behalf. Maybe I'm just making it all up in my head, but no boy has ever since come close to making me feel as much as this first boy did.
He was a wonderful boy, though. Maybe crazier than I was (am), certainly more lost. The last time I heard from him was this summer, and it seemed nothing had changed at all. He was moving toward his third college, third apartment, third job. I'm at a dizzy stasis here in Troy.
He could draw. He sure could. I wish he was still around just so I could show him all the nude pictures I've amassed this semester, how drawing was always something I loved too, but never knew how to catapult forward with until just now. He was smart. He had a wonderful smile, teeth he would whiten because he was forgivably vain. He was just a boy when I last saw him. Now I'm sure we're both being pushed into the adults we can't help becoming, and I wonder sometimes how he looks now and what he's doing and if he's at all different. I had to let go of him, though. You do that with things you love. You let them grow apart. Most times they distance themselves regardless of whether you decide to let them, but I've found it easier if you just allow the space to happen peaceably. I don't think it really was that I loved him. But I certainly do love the idea of what he was to me now. For the rest of my life men are going to come and go, but I'll never ever forget that boy. Somehow, that's a nice thought I keep returning to.
posted by
Kate at 2:18 AM
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wTuesday, November 12, 2002 |
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At the local Blockbuster: two men, each in dirty jeans and white undershirts.
"Whadja say the movie was?"
"Red Ocitpus."
"Red Ocitpus? You sure bout that?"
"Yip, Red Octipus. I thank."
"Naw, here it is. Red Dragon."
"You sure it ain't Octipus?"
"Yeah, it says rightchere. Red Dragon."
"I sure as hell thought that movie was called Red Octipus. Well grab it."
"Sure thang."
Is my life a movie or what? Two rednecks in the wild. I'm so lucky.
posted by
Kate at 1:11 AM
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wMonday, November 04, 2002 |
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Friday morning I woke up in a place I'd never been before, in the soft crook of a strange elbow, and the sun from the window next to the bed was very bright on my face. I could log the hours of my own strangeness, lying next to a snoring someone someone in the first lit hours of the morning, into a long logbook of patient stillness. There are all kinds of lonelinesses, and not being asleep next to someone who is is one of the sweetest and saddest I've ever known.
posted by
Kate at 11:41 AM
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wSunday, October 20, 2002 |
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I have consumed almost an entire jug of apple juice...just today. I didn't go outside either, woke up at just before 2:00, propped open the window, took a shower and cleaned my room. I read some. I watched Death Becomes Her.
I've got my halloween costume in order. I know that I could casually mention a reciprical interest to a few individuals and I would get lots of dates. I've been guilty of toying with people. I've got my palm over a raging world - mine.
I'm not so smart, not so hard. Sometimes I feel as if I'm being swallowed, and I just twist around and spit into the back of its mouth.
posted by
Kate at 9:44 PM
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wSunday, October 13, 2002 |
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Because there are very many good things:
Wednesday night. Sigma Tau Delta reading. My poetry in the air and falling like water in a still room. Afterward, wine and talk and laughter at Dale's apartment. We climbed out on the front landing through a window and watched his cat, Alvis, chase another cat across the dark street below.
Friday night at Dr. Stewart's. Very good lasagna and chocolate cake with the right kind of icing - cool and hard, not overpowering thick and fluffy sweet. Later, there were campfire and smores, though I could only sit and moan from the cheesecake and the rotel dip.
Tonight. A new friend. Two green eyes staring from the outside of my right thigh, a sweep of tail, sweet whiskers. The sting of it still in my mind, something very permanent, very good.
posted by
Kate at 12:50 AM
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wTuesday, October 08, 2002 |
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A few moments to complain -
I've got a test tomorrow in my American Lit. class. I'm paralyzed with fear. I must log at least a good 2 hours study into it.
I must go to the drawing room in Malone and work on my latest - an exercise on proportion, two chairs apparently humping.
I'm appallingly behind on reading for my Brit. Lit. class AND my African American Lit. class.
My room looks like a filthy hobo crashed it.
I'm tired, and I'm annoyed and angry and bitchy.
I must write. I must write. I must write. I must write.
All of this to be accomplished before tomorrow, yes? I didn't even have time to shower today.
posted by
Kate at 7:07 PM
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wMonday, October 07, 2002 |
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So I've been dirty for about 3 days. Clambering about rocks and dust and sunlit puddles strewn with empty beer cans and sad crumpled cigarette butts. Dominic picked me up at 2:30 on Friday. We were awkward - he, vying for politeness, and I, stingy with my personal space, my personal things, as always. I've never been very good at letting men do things for me like open doors or carry bags. I always feel so indebted afterwards...and for no good reason.
Sandrock is a half-hidden landscape of pure mettle. Rocks rear their ancient heads out of mud and dirt, out of grass and underbrush and the nettly growth of north Alabamian wilderness. They stand like ageless sentries over the lip of the valley below, stern and quiet. Friday night we toted beers up to a look-out point and clambered all over their knotty tops. The next day I would be predictably horrified by the sharp fall to beer consumption ratio, but that night it was simply beautiful. The valley below was lit up in a constellation of cities, cars moving smoothly like ropes of fireflies in the night. Saturday morning Anderson and Ray set up two climbs off the east face of a smaller rock. I was harnessed up, knot-tied, and belayed half-way up the first climb before I couldn't go any further. The second climb was incredibly easy once I scrambled up the difficult start. All the way up there are small puzzles for climbers to solve. Where can my foot go? Is that pocket in the rock big enough for me to place my hand in, sharp enough for me to hold? There's a perfect horn jutting out just three feet above me. How can I hoist my wait up to grab it. The key lies in your legs, not your arms. It takes a lot of trust and a lot of bravado, and sometimes you just have to lunge for something-not-quite-a-sure-thing and if you get a hold and cling to - congratulations - and if you fall off - try again.
I suppose the sense of accomplishment in a good climb is crack-cocaine to climbers. The body is trespassing the unforgiving rules of nature and gravity, snaking up rocks, clinging to vertical cliffs of sand and pebbles, of granite and dirt. Trusting yourself is releasing, lunging past safety toward something better. I'm not good at it, not by far, but I am unrelenting with my body and I try to be with my mind. There are so many things that I'm scared of. Fear is a constant agent in my make-up. I wake up to it every morning, fall asleep with it every night.
So I take a job where changing an adult diaper is the most normal part of my day. I learn how to wakeboard. I go skydiving. I climb rocks, then I rappel off of them.
Anything to understand that I am not defeated, ever.
posted by
Kate at 12:44 AM
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wTuesday, October 01, 2002 |
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Foot propped on the desk, red light blinking from my answering machine positioned upon the modem right behind the chicken lamp Audra gave Bonnie and me as a sort of but not quite gag gift for our first dorm room, Freshman year. There is a whole truck-full of people loudly conversating on the corner of the building right between my east and north windows. I distinguish a muffled "muthafucka" every so often. They gather there frequently, loud, excited, talking all at once late at night or early in the morning as I lie in bed, gathering their conversations all around me like folds of dark dreams fading too fast to be completely comprehended.
Earlier today I walked the stretch of mottled concrete down to Malone, my portfolio in tow. It bobbled against my legs clumsily, especially as the wind blew, catching the gigantic flat breadth of it in awkward gusts. It was quiet and cold inside the room. People began to file in slowly, set up their equipment, set the angles, dragging the heavy metal easels against the worn linoleum floor. Someone turned off the overhead light, turned on a soft spotlight. The model wore a red robe. When she took it off her skin glowed like warm brass. We were allotted 20 minutes per pose.
Drawing is like poetry is like swimming to the bottom of the deep end is like rolling from the belly of an airplane – everything is consumed by Now.
posted by
Kate at 12:58 AM
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wTuesday, September 24, 2002 |
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Poem a day. Why not? It's not like I utilize my day to its best potential anyway. And I'm always, always complaining about my output, so...
Poem a day.
posted by
Kate at 6:20 PM
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wFriday, September 20, 2002 |
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Warm mandarin orange spice tea, a fortune cookie: share your happiness with others today. I am happy, but the feeling is so unsettled within myself - a flashing light, something almost remembered but not quite - that I'm not sure how I could share it. I suppose it comes off in my smile, in my excess of good humor, jokiness.
Last night I added one more entry to my kiss list, argued over the quality of American chedder cheese, and witnessed (to date) some of the most excessive college party cliches...of Animal House scale (truly horrific, very entertaining). I also got asked out on a date but not by that last addition in my catalogue of kisses.
I've discovered that some things can be entirely fixable by a simple smile. People are suckers for happiness, and even more, for the happiness they feel they can induce in you.
posted by
Kate at 5:07 PM
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wMonday, September 16, 2002 |
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Oh my god. Cherry Garcia ice cream and soft star light lamp and Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf like armor glinting viciously in the sun. I'm in my pajamas now, and there's Bolero on my radio and warm socks on my feet and cool air conditioner on my bare arms.
This afternoon I trailed Miranda around campus while she sought out shots for her print photography class. Later I found myself stripped down to my white undershirt, my jacket, my belt, watch and glasses all disposed of in a rumpled heap to the side, while John (shirtless, shoeless) and I posed in various forms of religion and melancholy - both of which are necessary to the other I think. I may not have a very photogenic face, but my hair likes the camera, cascades down, big and tangled, in wild blonde curls over John's face. They were beautiful pictures, marred only by too little light as we later discovered, thumbing through the waxy photographs at the Wal-Mart photo lab.
Tomorrow I'm hoping for fall, coolness, for the unrequited blue of the sky. So much beauty, sometimes I forget where I am.
posted by
Kate at 11:57 PM
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wThursday, September 12, 2002 |
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It's no longer the 11th, and maybe I waited until now to say what I have to say because I resent this almost obligatory pull toward remembrance. Or maybe I was taking care of more important things like eating roast beef sandwiches with John and Sarah and talking for three hours in the dark cool night with Bonnie.
I gave my first performance ever with Collegiate Choir tonight, the dusk of evening enveloping the crowded town square, a rickety podium full of city officials, uniforms peppering the audience, fire trucks lining the streets, shiny red, yellow. We were all crammed in together, sweaty and hot on narrow risers. I was uncomfortable, sad, a little sleepy, a little bored. I've never liked the jaunty even time of patriotic music. I don't like marches. I don't like the perfect key signatures that never stray into minor, eerie sounds. I like my music a little dangerous, a little enchanting and foreboding. Patriotic music is very solid, very square, though very important for what it's worth. We did sing "Be Still My Soul," and I thought - how beautiful - before turning on my listening face and retreating once more into my Katharine-realm of daydream fantasy.
It can't be helped. I'm sorry New York. I'm sorry Pennsylvania and Washington D.C. I'm sorry all you good people. My heart really does hurt, but I don't know how that helps any of you at all.
What I can describe now - the only concrete memory I have to ground myself by, in fact - is just exactly what I was doing on September 11th last year.
I was in my introductory art class. I didn't want to be there. I heard a boy say to my professor, "Did you hear that a plane crashed into the World Trade Center?" I was sleepy. I was cranky. I didn't even really know what the World Trade Center was. I thought, how odd that a plane just crashed into a building. Subconsciously I didn't care very much. I live in Troy Alabama. New York is a long way away. After my class I walked to my dorm room. My roommate met me in the hallway outside our door. "Come look at this," she said. I walked in, looked up at her TV. I saw two twin towers, vaguely familiar icons of New York. Then I saw something small zoom across the screen and into the first tower. The explosion didn't look real. Then I realized I was watching the collapse. Then I realized I was watching people and papers and bricks and cement and lives all implode right there on my TV screen.
I called Josh.
We sat in the semi-dark of his trailer. He hadn't showered yet. He smelled of sweat and day-old boy, sweet and strange. His hair was greasy. CNN was flickering across the room. I would shudder from time to time and he would take his thumb from our interlaced fingers and rub it across the back of my hand or stroke my arm. I was dizzy from watching the videos of people running away, ash gray and terrified of the avalanche of debris and smoke roaring behind. I was dizzy from sitting by Josh because he was very new to me then. Later he would begin to relax against me, and then nod off and jerk back to alertness. I knew I had to leave, so I did. I ate lunch. I waited until it would be a good time to go back to Josh's. I talked to a few friends. I felt sick. I felt confused.
I drove to Thad's apartment. He and Laura were watching Independence Day. Thad was laughing a lot and brandishing the word retaliation like war could be as simple as a movie. Josh came and we sat together, squished and playful on an armchair. Dog allergies soon made me miserable. I made a quick exit, and Josh followed behind. We decided to go to his trailer. We were all alone, and on the couch. I was teasing him about his uncut toenails. We wrote definitions from my Earth and Space Science textbook on the terrifyingly scraggly white parts of them. We ate Mike and Ike's and laughed until we fell off the couch. We kissed for the first time. It was terrible. I wanted to go home.
I wrote in my diary. I fell asleep. I couldn't watch TV for a week. I listened to the radio instead.
posted by
Kate at 1:13 AM
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wTuesday, September 10, 2002 |
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Today I went to work, and, in the middle of sorting letters and sealing envelopes and slipping the vicious little orange rejection slips in all the SASEs, Mr. Hicks told me to go outside and pick a maple leaf. So I did. He pointed to the edges, said,
"See how the edges are yellowing? Each day they'll turn a little more. Fall is coming."
Of course fall is coming.
posted by
Kate at 7:30 PM
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wSaturday, September 07, 2002 |
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So I have doubts. Don't we all? Doubts that come like ghosts in the night, doubts that settle internally, almost invisible, and doubts that I never doubted I had in the first place. I doubt my intelligence in my 9:00 British Literature class. I doubt my talent every time I pick up a pen, or fit my fingers into the smooth groove of the keyboard, or read an excellent poem. I doubt my attractiveness every time I'm in the presence of a beguiling stranger. Even people I've known awhile, I doubt my magnetism. I doubt my ability to charm and hold.
I want a strong center of gravity, but I've come to accept this term (and my life right now) as possessing a strong sense of antigravity, of not knowing how I fit or where I can stand up straight or what I even like. I want that to make me more free - this unknowing. I want to unbase myself, if you will. I want to step out of the preconceived notions that came predisposed with this skin of mine. I don't want to be anything like myself anymore. I just want to make good grades, and write good papers, and spiral into a million poems.
I just want to make something right now. I don't care if it's at the expense of myself.
posted by
Kate at 3:30 AM
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wThursday, September 05, 2002 |
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I hate my intro to creative writing class. We're butchering poetry right now. I hate how I've turned into such an inflated egotist with regard to my own work, and almost overnight...though there was a hint of the self-righteous/self-adamant burgeoning in my head last semester during verse writing. I've always been very careful to pay poetry special homage, to be humble in all my pitiful endeavors. But there's also a machine inside me that knows the secret labyrinths of the craft, that takes to its nuances, its subtle metaphors, its ability to suggest something time-old in a completely fresh way. I have no excuse to not be at least a minor poet of some standing at some point in the future. I have it. I have it. I don't deserve it. But who gets to choose what they receive. Isn't there something divine in all of us that leads us about by the ass? Or is it just me, lost in all the excess of this wasting talent?
In a recent article in Time, Harold Bloom wrote, "poetry has always been to me a sacred threshold guarded by demons." Poetry is indeed a fickle, illusive art. Who knows why it raptures down on some, and remains unattainable to everyone else. I struggle with the ghost of it every day, though sometimes I am lucky enough to be pulled beneath the heady creation of it, and then I am completely, hopelessly lost
All of this just to complain about the quality of writing in my intro class.
posted by
Kate at 12:21 AM
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wWednesday, September 04, 2002 |
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I've been filling out this empty rectangle of a post place for weeks now and then promptly deleting everything as soon as I write it. The beginning of school always leaves me with a stupid, illiterate feeling. I clam up, freeze. I forget how to write. Finally, I rehabilitate in my written diaries, and then somehow the overflow seeps onto here - this electronic scrawl that no one, save myself, reads. Perhaps I like it that way. In the past, this blog has seen too many private moments. I don't know who I've presented as a person through these pages, but she seems altogether too illusive, shifting, and abstract. I am much more ordinary than my romantic travails, than my sporadic boozings, than my trailing digressions into my shifting perceptions of the world. Perhaps, the beauty I see around me every day has been captured here in the past. I am a connoisseur of the mundane, and I find pleasure in it.
Oh dear. All I was really trying to say is that I've created a really cozy home here.
posted by
Kate at 1:24 AM
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wThursday, August 22, 2002 |
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My room is chaos, a giant intermingling of not yet placed furniture, clothes, school supplies, books, and (gasp) hair and beauty products all in complete disarray. The most important part, though, is that this room is my room alone, and this is all my stuff that I don't even know what to do with because I've had to cram it all into half this space in the past.
The people are good so far - friends I didn't keep up with through the summer, interesting strangers, my steadfast girlfriends, etc... Old hurts have been forgiven. We've all moved on and grown up slightly. And some of us are feeling that irresistible working-grind pull already. Not me, of course, because I seem to harbor no real sense of life after school, after the writing is not just a confusing pull but an actual push toward something marketable. I got word that the review I wrote for Our State is actually quite good. Perhaps I'll be able to not starve by the time grad school becomes past tense. I want to always write nothing but the things important to me, but, man, I've got to eat, I've got to pay bills, I've got to have medical attention every now and then to make sure I'm not dying, you know? These worries are grounded by slight melodrama, yes, but they're an eventual reality that I must acknowledge now.
Mostly, right now I'm reveling in the small details of trying to organize myself - classes, secretarial work for environmental club, following through with the internship at the Alabama Literary Review, private literary ambitions, and, also, this semester I will date. I don't care who or how as long I'm having fun.
posted by
Kate at 2:02 PM
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wMonday, August 19, 2002 |
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Well hello there. A surprising case of insomnia has made for the first blog of the new school year. I was seriously tired, seriously, until I just couldn't go to sleep. I wish I could condense this summer down for you, tell you how impossibly bright the sun always was, how the light danced in the lake, fragmenting off the waves like a brilliant shattered mirror. I wish I could describe the weariness of being the primary caretaker for broken people, how that made me feel broken too and yet incredibly whole also. Instead, I'm going to forget about it for now. I'm going to concentrate on the school year looming ahead - that great beast of academy and social opportunity. It will be a wonderful year. I'm different now, you know.
posted by
Kate at 1:44 AM
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wTuesday, May 07, 2002 |
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Here at the end of it all (for three months, you understand, because I'm leaving to work at my camps tomorrow) I'm at a complete loss for anything relevant to say about who I've been these past two semesters.
Only, I try to write nice things sometimes. And sometimes I do.
Thank you for visiting billieupool. Please close the door on your way out.
posted by
Kate at 1:27 AM
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wMonday, May 06, 2002 |
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Also, I'm severely jacked up on M&Ms and Coca-cola right now, so a bit of self congratulation:
Three of my poems will appear in the Alabama Literary Review this summer.
And I'm excited.
And I still have one poem forthcoming in Cicada.
And I'm excited.
And I have one review of a book of poems forthcoming in North Carolina's Our State.
And many moneys more than I deserve from all three.
This should bring my total net worth this year as a writer to, um...approximately $300.
:-)
posted by
Kate at 1:21 AM
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So...
Here I am, staring into the abyss that is my summer vacation, when I realize that the logic of perceiving the next three months as a period of static dead time to rush through as quickly as possible is faulty to a, well, fault. I live viscerally through college, through my friends, through a systematic and structured process of learning, through the constant pressure to write, but come summer it all falls apart. That rug of familiarity is always yanked from under my feet, and I die slightly for a few months. Here it stops. I refuse to live like a zombie during the coming summer.
And by the way no Oxford. It fell through at the last moment. Instead, I might find myself in New York for a week or so. Which would be quite wonderful, actually.
I hate this part. This is when I start saying goodbye to you. I try not to get attached, but this time I did for reasons that snuck up on me, quietly in bedside confessionals, or during escapades in Montgomery, frisbee and ice-skating and buffet pizza places and Lord of the Rings until I wanted to barf, or in broad daylight adventure rompings, forests of rocks and rolling sand dune wildernesses and flat pine tree-forested trail blazings, or in bright swirling colors of dim-lit parties, cheap wine and The Osbournes, inexplicable bruises and the naughty evidence of occasional overindulgences stamped on our rear ends the next morning, in afro-puff hair, in bawdy water gun fights, in volleyball mishaps, in fabricated war stories and fabricated worlds, in boy problems, in more boy problems, in mountain top revelations, in Napster sing-a-longs, in Saga horrors, in gum propelled wastebasket targetings, in teacher crushings, in unfortunate hugging incidents, in fortunate hugging incidents, in a few hospital visits here and there...and those damn fruit flies.
Chicken Soup for Kate's Heart. Sorry about all the fuss.
posted by
Kate at 12:56 AM
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wWednesday, May 01, 2002 |
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Last Night = Big Party
Today = Dead Day
Tomorrow = Three Final Exams
Right Now = Sniffing Crack
No, I Mean, Right Now = I Feel Like I'm Sniffing Crack
Status = Death By Stress and Too Much Fun (flatline)
posted by
Kate at 11:28 PM
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wMonday, April 29, 2002 |
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Ought to be asleep. God knows this week will offer little chance to sleep soundly, not until the required brain calisthenics of Thursday have been exhausted, at least. Must admit that last week was lovely. Brief itinerary for the environmental club's earth week:
Monday: Tie-dye t-shirts for club profits. Sell only four t-shirts, all of which are pity purchases. Oh well.
Tuesday: Clean and spruce up beautiful, winding forest trail behind Troy Elementary. Add one weed eater to repertoire of mastered power tools (gas powered, thank you). Discover to wild delight that the area behind Troy Elementary is the hilliest in all of south Alabama. Remember how much you miss the rolling hills of North Alabama in this land of dry and listlessly flat cow pastures and pollen dusted pine trees. Not that there's necessarily a surplus of deciduous hardwood in north Alabama either...
Wednesday: Meet in the arboretum for more trail clean up. Turn (quite inexplicably) into a terribly unproductive member of the club. Refuse to muddy cherished Birkenstocks in a rank stream lined by beer bottles and discarded socks (I think people have been having sex in the forest most probably, or maybe, by evidence of progressing clothing items found, there's a naked man loose in the woods). Act like a girl. Feel quite unapologetic for it. Eat a hamburger. Gorge on the best strawberries ever, ever. Watch, first, as a weary spectator as the entire club unravels in the raucous throes of a water gun fight. Get blasted in the mouth by fellow environmental enthusiast and former friend. Say to hell with it. Become water gun-toting Rambo. Revel in the power.
Thursday: Photo op with the mayor and a young elm tree freshly planted in park downtown. Learn a few useful things about planting trees. Main objective, though: to keep top of sundress in place. Result: questionable.
Friday: Photo op with chancellor and a freshly planted young dogwood in obscure location on campus. When introducing yourself to the chancellor, temporarily forget you have a last name. Conversation goes as follows:
Kate: "I'm Kate..."(shake hands with chancellor).
Chancellor: "Oh, I'll remember that. I have one of those myself."
Kate: "FERGUSON!!!! Kate Ferguson."
Apparently, chancellor either has a daughter like-named Kate...or perhaps a dog. Either way, this is the third time you've introduced yourself to him, so you are quite sure he will not remember your name no matter what he otherwise claims.
Items consumed this weekend:
1 whole (excluding one last slice) apple pie
1 pint of vanilla ice cream (atop pie)
1 beautiful plate of spaghetti (Prego bottle strenuously bought by me, noodles laboriously boiled by me)
1 salad filled with good things like mushrooms and cherry tomatoes and shredded cheese...and, oh yeah, lettuce
5 pieces (I think) of garlic butter french bread toast (again laboriously bought, cut, buttered, and garlic powdered by yours truly)
1 Sho'Nuff barbeque baked potato
1 hot dog
1 side of baked beans
1 unidentifiable side of something green and leafy (spinach? It was prepackaged and frozen. Give me a break.)
Calories consumed: None of your business.
Defense taken: I'll sweat it all off this summer. Ha!
Other news: am suddenly stricken by strange exhaustion.
Result: Goodnight.
posted by
Kate at 1:34 AM
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wSunday, April 28, 2002 |
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Lately, all I can think of is how much I want to scream. There are so many wheedling little frustrations inside me, and they've finally been pent up long enough so that by now they're terribly pissed off, whispering little demons in my ear constantly, "kick some ass..."
I never thought I would have to so deliberately and routinely control the constant urge of my limbs to forget their tact and reserve and lash out violently. Be afraid, peeps. I feel like I could give the smack down to anyone one of you at any time. ;-)
posted by
Kate at 11:26 PM
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wTuesday, April 23, 2002 |
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The first freckles of summer have appeared on my nose. I mailed my camp counselor contract for summer today. Loose ends are being tied, one by one. I have one more paper to write and four finals to study for. This weekend I'm going home to a house empty of one brother, one sister, one mother, and one father. My cat and I are gonna chill on the couch all ding dong day long. We just might watch some movies too.
posted by
Kate at 2:41 PM
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wMonday, April 22, 2002 |
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Bonnie: Do you think we'll do this next year?
Kate: I'm always going to do things like this. I'm never gonna grow up. I'm going to be a little kid forever. In fact, if I ever have children it will be just a big excuse for me to play in an excusable grown up way.
Bonnie: That's good. That's a good reason to have kids.
Flew kites in the administration parking lot right outside of dorm sweet dorm, my poor little defective bird of a kite looping and swirling and thunking onto the cracked pavement. A nap and a couple of strawberry popsicles later, and now I'm blabbering about my very uneventful day. Next week will be a trial. Every single day is a countdown, a bittersweet latching onto of another year and way of life that will never quite be the same ever again. I'm going crazy, though. I need some massive rearrangements in order to remain a somewhat bearable person.
Also. I have a guestbook now. Make me a very happy girl. Use it. ;-)
posted by
Kate at 1:59 AM
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wSunday, April 21, 2002 |
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Picking and picking the bobby pins from my hair... Massive curls, springing from my scalp, lassoed back by the pins, some sprinkled with gold glitter on krazy glue, just to make me feel special. Tonight Scott took me to the Red Carnation Ball. Haven't looked this nice in years, I think. Almost feel bad as the last pin comes out, hair falling down into my eyes. After so many months of painstakingly growing it out, I am thankful that I have hair long enough to spiral out of control and then fall, helplessly, into my eyes.
Dinner was nice. Dimly lit room, the carnation I left there, accidentally, blood red embracing the cloth napkins like some cheesy romance novel cover. People speaking and speaking, to me also...I just never realized. Weird to be in a dress. Weird to feel pretty after so long of feeling ugly, ugly, ugly. I know I am pretty sometimes, and tonight was sometime...after the hair, after the makeup, after the right dress. After so long of looking in the mirror and not seeing myself...
Now I am so incredibly tired. Chugging water like everyone I've ever known has disapproved of...being fickle and cranky and picky. Sleep is like some foreign body of water, moving in now in lapidary waves. I love it. And water and this drunkenness that will not end. I'm sorry.
No I'm not.
posted by
Kate at 2:33 PM
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wThursday, April 18, 2002 |
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Perhaps you are tired of hearing this, but my back is an old battlefield, and sometimes I forget that I fight a constant war with the sun until I pick up a smaller mirror and reflect myself from a larger mirror, and then I remember all over again that I have to be careful. It's staring right back at me, right there - angry, red, slashing, and gaping - a crater, my own little Hiroshima, skin cells obliterated from the taut skin of my back in one massive surgical sweep and only a very small few of them actually cancerous.
posted by
Kate at 9:26 PM
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wWednesday, April 17, 2002 |
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Sometimes, when I am still enough, and sitting down with my knees drawn up against my chest and my head tilted down slightly, sometimes I can feel my blood pulsing and then my whole body pulsing and I close my eyes and I am nothing but rhythmic movement, rocking, just my body, rocking, moving apart from any conscious consent. My body is vibrantly alive even when I am tired and want to not be for a moment - as if my atoms could disolve and give my body a break from the constant pressure of holding itself so tightly together. Often I am reminded of what little control I have over everything...most of all myself.
posted by
Kate at 1:36 AM
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wTuesday, April 16, 2002 |
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Oxford scholarship finally submitted, job application mailed, decision to try Intro Drawing one more time made...
breathe, Kate, breathe
Speech to be written, fall schedule to be arranged, plans for weekend to be made, paper to be written, tests to be studied for, articulation video to be watched, passport to apply for...
posted by
Kate at 5:01 PM
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wMonday, April 15, 2002 |
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first the poem by Linda Pastan:
To a Daughter Leaving Home
When I taught you
at eight to ride
a bicycle, loping along
beside you
as you wobbled away
on two round wheels,
my own mouth rounding
in surprise when you pulled
ahead down the curved
path of the park,
I kept waiting for the thud
of your crash as I
sprinted to catch up,
while you grew
smaller, more breakable
with distance,
pumping, pumping
for your life, screaming
with laughter,
the hair flapping
behind you like a
handkerchief waving
goodbye.
and then my response:
To Mother from a Daughter Leaving Home
I hated you
for taking the training wheels
from my pink and white bike
because I was already too old
(eight can be ancient)
to not be versed in the delicate balance
of wheels on pavement
or the way my body should know
just how far to lean in
during the smooth swoop of a curve
like some graceful hawk
circling down to perch
and other children always laughing
sun-speckled
and pumping though tree lined streets
though I knew it was always raining,
even the sun, raining.
I fell in the crusty slip of loose gravel
until, disgusted, you left me to it
which was better anyhow.
Later, bumping through the springy
downhill pastures of my backyard,
I would teach myself
the secret ways of bicycles
and limbs sprawling and sprawling
in wet grass.
You weren’t even there
when, finally, I pushed myself
free from the soil.
Saturday, I took Carrie to orchestra practice in Montgomery. Afterward, to celebrate her 16th birthday, we ate at a nice restaurant, and then I took her to the mall and bought glitter hair spray for her. I wore a freshly picked pink flower in my hair until it wilted, bought a gigantic butterfly ring in pretty pastel blue, and made a sprawling mess with with chocolate covered donuts in the floor bed of my car. My 16 year old sister rolled her eyes and said,
"Kate, I can't take you anywhere."
posted by
Kate at 7:13 PM
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wFriday, April 12, 2002 |
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Suddenly, my blog has sprung into a feeble and certainly unpredicted notoriety. I had done so much jawing about the process of blogging that my friends finally actually took an active interest in it and looked up billieupool themselves. The result: plenty of taunting and bellyjelly. So here's one more blog for you to enjoy, straight from the mind of my lovably kooky and creative friend, Sarah. The world shudders with fear as Kate and her computer-illiterate compadres prepare to conquer the web!
Also, I'd love to implement a commenting system but can't seem to get anything to work. If anyone has any suggestions please email me.
posted by
Kate at 1:49 AM
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wThursday, April 11, 2002 |
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Juice, grapes, and strawberry popsicles... Let no man (or woman) come between me and my comfort foods.
posted by
Kate at 4:28 PM
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Joy stopped me in the Adam's Center today. Seems she saw a mutual highschool friend of ours during spring break - a chance meeting at a local restaurant.
So now, for the first time in a year, I have access to John's email address. I've purposefully let him slip through my fingers since high school. And now I have the oppurtunity to see what's still left, what's still there, who he's become, who he still isn't. And I still don't quite know if I want to know. His memory is such a complicated ghost.
posted by
Kate at 1:12 PM
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wTuesday, April 09, 2002 |
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Decided to post another poem. This one is...I'm having a hard time letting go of it. There is such anger behind it, rage really... I feel childish for being this sullen, this unwilling to come to terms with something that hasn't even really interfered with my life very much. It's just that I feel so betrayed sometimes - by the sun (a deep-seated love affair within itself) and by my own skin - its tendency toward, well, systematic decay.
Tattoo One Year After Melanoma
It was tiny, really,
delicate orange so that you almost didn't notice it
in the white nape of her neck,
nestled there,
just before the giving way of her upper back.
A tiny sun for light in rain
or fog or dark or any other place that could suggest
death lurking there
somewhere in the shadows where you couldn't even see it,
waiting,
which is why she chose a sun
to see by
and light the ragged sprawl
of the scar below it,
that terrible artwork of no one's consent.
posted by
Kate at 5:57 PM
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Mocha coffee icey. An actual attempt to be socially polite on a quick errand to purchase aforementioned icey. The very receptive attentions of an attractive almost-stranger. Afterward, a little privacy, time alone and room to breathe. Sometimes, I am very easy to please. Which is why I'm going to reward myself with a nap. :-) *Caffeine kicks in* Okay...maybe not.
posted by
Kate at 4:08 PM
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wSunday, April 07, 2002 |
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Geeze, such an unproductive weekend, scholastically speaking at least. I did nothing to further (or begin in some cases) work on my two impending papers or my Oxford scholarship application. What else? Schedules for fall 2002, job application for camps, applying for a passport, writing and writing because, really, my output is so pathetic... I did, however, take care of some much needed fun and me time. Friday, I cooked microwaved broccoli and reheated Wal-Mart chicken fingers. A half a bowl of grapes and a Bridget Jone's Diary later I was snoozing away. Saturday Scott called me and we went to Montgomery together. I found an 11$ pair of gold sandals for my formal dress (they're cool, really, and so cheap: they have clear wedges for heals! Should go nicely with my red and gold paisley strapless and my silk Japanese purse ;-). Afterward, we went to the Shakespeare Festival grounds. Glorious sunny blue weather + happy families with kites + paired off lovers with picnic baskets + the odd couple of Scott and me traipsing about on the rolling green lawns = slightly elated Kate with lots of energy and slightly carbonated tendencies. I'm annoyingly full of bubbly sometimes. We walked over to the art museum and visited for a while. There was a very enlightening portrait exhibit full of a wonderful assortment of famous characters. My favorites: Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot, Tallulah Bankhead, and Andy Warhol's Michael Jackson.
Back in Troy I ate more of everything I ate Friday night. Watched the Disney Channel, cried a little bit and went to sleep.
This morning Sarah drove up from Enterprise and together we drove to the Montgomery Zoo. We ate picnic lunches on the bleachers beside our makeshift parking space in a sports plex, gaped at the cheetahs and tigers, spied on a really hot fireman, argued over which one of us he had been checking out (it was Sarah, no contest - she's thisclose to getting a modeling contract), rode the train, ate two very disappointing and bitter snow cones, bought postcards from the gift shop, then drove all the way home, tired, sticky, sun-soaked and satisfied.
Mmmm... Weekends. Ah...
posted by
Kate at 9:28 PM
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Oh my god...Jimmy Eat World just gave the most incredible performance on SNL. Not their first single...the one they must have just released or are just about to release. More and more often songs are beginning to just take me out...I'll be minding my own business, driving or straightening my room or whatever and then all of the sudden...WOAH! Like a punch in the face - Alison Krauss, Dashboard Confessional, A Perfect Circle... Music is so incredible. If I had a job maybe I could buy more CDs...
So I was reading bluelikethat's beautiful blog (5 pts for alliteration) and she linked to a poetry workshop for undergrads. There's nothing quite like planning ahead, and it sounds so interesting so maybe I'll get that aforementioned job during next school year (since all of the money I'll make from this summer will go to my still tentatively planned England trip) and try my pen in Pennsylvania (more alliteration and *gasp* an almost-pun which is even worse than a genuine pun). There are fellowships awarded, but I'll still need spending money. And there are so many CDs to buy...
My summer is finally congealing into a somewhat concrete entity. I'm almost 100% sure I'll be working at Camp ASCCA and Camp Civitan. I worked both places two years ago, and...it was hard. Hard because I worked 24 hours a day, hard because I was dumped into the middle of it without any training, hard because I'd never been the new girl ever, hard because I did things like dress my campers, give them showers, change their diapers...hard. And I'm going to do it all again for very selfish reasons, because the alternative is going home and working a job in retail all summer long. Fluorescent lights, folding clothes, customer service, clock in, clock out, go home, bed, work...ugh. I just can't do it. Maybe someday I'll have to because I'll have to feed, house, and clothe myself all by myself, but for now I'm very lucky and I have parents who have agreed to support my little leeching butt all the way through college (but not grad school) as long as I keep the scholarships rolling in and make 'em proud every now and then. Sooooooo that means I'm going to have fun jobs for as long as I can. And as hard as both camps will be they will also be fun. I'll get to play. On my breaks I'll get to swim and tube and ski on the lake. I'll get my weekends off. I'll get to meet new people from all over. And I'll love my campers. I'll love them and I'll try not to but I will anyway. I've grown up slightly since my camp summer two years ago. So I think I'll be okay this go 'round. Well, not okay, but at least I won't shut down like last summer and become a human robot; at least I'll feel something, even if it is sadness and frustration and sometimes just plain anger because I'm exceptionally lucky to be as bright and healthy as I am. And I don't quite understand why my campers deserve anything less than to have just as many chances in life as I will.
posted by
Kate at 12:31 AM
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wFriday, April 05, 2002 |
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Testing.
posted by
Kate at 2:41 AM
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So when I wake up the morning after my last blog, I'm hyper conscious like I never went to sleep. I shower, go to my 8 a.m., come back and work frantically on my speech outline, finishing it just in time to shimmy into my black and rose sundress, grab my backpack and lope across campus to the symphony band's annual children’s' concert. The children are noisy and multitudinous, fidgeting and grinning, little energetic squirmings in the black of the cold auditorium. I connect the joints of my clarinet and someone coughs and then they all cough, little phlegmy scatterings and gigglings - some great enthusiastic secret, fun grown-ups just don't get. (It's a future symptom of mob mentality, and also, just because I love children doesn't mean that I've forgotten what political little beings they are from the beginning). But the energy is good. I smile. I laugh too.
Any disenchantment I've had with music this year immediately melts from my flesh as soon as we begin to play. Children don't have manners, they have unbridled enthusiasm. Music is a highly interactive art, and it deserves so much more than the sterile reception it receives from so many formal concerts. Its demand for audience participation makes music the most accessible art form...ever. Name one person you know who doesn't like music in any way. I dare you. Yeah, I thought so.
So here I am, high with music, high with playing for little ears that don't care for names, key signatures, or technical complexity, that care only for the energy behind the songs that makes them so accessible, so immediately fun and beautiful. And they clap and whoop and sing and shriek...and and and it's lovely.
Afterward, on my way to the band room to lock up my clarinet I pass a line of children waiting to load a school bus. One little boy with a star burst of freckles on his nose and scruffy hair the color of baled straw looks up at me, squints in the sun, smiles and says,
"Thank you."
I manage to mumble a "welcome." I'm bursting all over inside. I feel like music. And that hasn't happened in a while.
posted by
Kate at 12:20 AM
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wWednesday, April 03, 2002 |
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Sober now. Working on homework while simultaneously rambling to Bonnie (wrapped snugly in her bed covers just 10 feet away) about the moral obligations that America imposes on its average citizen. Said some really thought evoking, beautiful things: tiny revelations like lighting in my brain, just lit flaming matches against the dark of this room when I finally sputtered to a stop, realized her side of the room was unusually quiet.
"Bonnie? Are you asleep? Bonnie? Damn. And I really had something to say this time."
posted by
Kate at 3:05 AM
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Welcome back. In what has passed to be my most pleasant drinking experience thus far, I'm sitting here, head nicely fuzzy, toasted by what in effect has been a most pleasant night without any unwelcome experiences with male tongues, ect... Miranda and I went to Wal-Mart, she freshly 21 and I still a dirtily illegal 19, purchased a family sized bottle of blackberry merlot and another smaller bottle of peach Boones and finished both off with encores of The Osbournes and a couple of forensic science shows on TLC. I still have homework to polish off for speech and a children's concert to attend at 10:00 a.m. tomorrow, but I don't even care, will do most of my homework before bed, giddly and without the usual anxiety that comes inbred in undone obligations.
Mostly glad that the world can be such a dizzy, bright, beautiful place, and that I can have nice cheap wine and enjoy it so without feeling the need to throw myself at the threshold of said currently available male. Or very unavailable said male...whichever.
I'm only a little drunk. I have only one paper to write tomorrow. I have only one incredibly small life to live, and only so much time to drink with beautiful friends and feel sweetness course through every vein and feel glad, glad, glad that I can let go let go let go let go and still be myself and still know my responsibilities and still feel night, cool and insistant against every pore and still wake tomorrow and feel the burning of the too bright sun and love it and hate it all in one glorious breath.
Too much, you say? I am slightly cheesy. 2:00 a.m. blabberings tend to melt slack and surupy. It's delicious.
posted by
Kate at 2:05 AM
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wFriday, March 22, 2002 |
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Learning more and more every day about what my trip to Oxford will entail. It's really not settled yet. I still have to go through an application process even though I'm the only one I know who's interested in going. (Why? WHY? I don't ask these questions. I just politely thank god for obscure chances). Apparently there has been only enough money secured this year to send one person, though in the past they've always sent two, so if the stars align right I'll be on my own in Oxford the last week of July and then on my own in a seperately funded side trip to London for the first week of August. Sounds wonderfully, deliciously, frighteningly fun, and I get more and more excited every day. This application process is going to be a pain in the ass, however. I have to jump through the requisite hoops of fire to secure money that isn't mine. I'm quite sure it will all be worth it ultimately, though.
Last night Miranda and I went out walking in the warm/cool night. A sudden rainstorm caught us off guard, but we walked on. I like rain on my skin. It makes me feel amphibious. It also makes me feel silly and brave all at once. I know it's only rain, but it gets such a bad rap sometimes. I like to remind it that it's not so big or bad, and it likes to remind me that I should be silly more often and jump through as many mud puddles as good sense would merit (and a few others it wouldn't).
Tomorrow I'll be in Mobile with the family. I'll be glad to take a trip with them, especially to the city of ancient trees and blazing azaleas. Unfortunately, I'll miss Nikki Giovani speaking at TSUM Friday night. Heart is breaking now...
posted by
Kate at 2:51 AM
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wWednesday, March 20, 2002 |
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Can't hear out of my hears. Sinus pressure, taut as the air behind a baloon. I've fallen behind on my reading - my first Faulkner ever, As I Lay Dying. It's as rich as I expected it to be, but as a result I've been more languid in my reading habits than usual, savoring each ridiculously complex sentence like an exotic entree.
My room's a mess. A gross mess. I'm just gonna let it stay this way. Spring break is next week, anyway, and I'll have time then to worry or sleep or write papers or clean or do a bit of it all.
posted by
Kate at 12:50 AM
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wMonday, March 18, 2002 |
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Spent the weekend languidly self-absorbed, reading Faulkner in the 80 degree sun, one leg dangled over the chair on our back porch. I knew a head cold was imminent. I could feel it in my throat, in the pressure behind my eyes, in the peculiar lightness of my head.
180 degrees. I'm sitting in the harsh flourescent lit room where all 3 of my English classes are held this semester, and I'm taking my British Lit. test. It's 8:00 a.m. I can't seem to form one cohesive thought. So I link together a few broken ones. My brain feels like a large pot of oatmeal. I think I must be very dumb. I'm the last person left taking the test. My professor practically snatches it from my hands when I'm finished. She's out the door before I've even put my backpack on.
6:00 p.m. I wake up. I think I have a fever.
posted by
Kate at 6:25 PM
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wSunday, March 17, 2002 |
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Someone is sobbing, absolutely wailing in the hall, and I wonder about the nature of pain - what hurts so badly that you are at once reduced to primal reactions?
Primal. Like going back to him even though I knew the chances of him wanting me were beyond pathetically minimal, just because I was tired, tired, tired and I wanted to be held. Primal. Like being accepted, drawn in, his hands touching me again for just a moment before... Primal. Like skulking away, not even bothering to wrap a bandage around the wound, bleeding a trail of worthlessness back toward home.
posted by
Kate at 8:35 PM
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wThursday, March 14, 2002 |
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So I'm being sent to Oxford by the English Speaking Union (Troy sector, I presume) to engage in a week long conference about Britain and its role in international community. The only expense I have to provide is airfare, which will be hefty, hefty, but...wow, what a wonderful oppurtunity! I've never been out of the country before. Hell, I've never been on a commercial jet before. I get to own a passport! Surely, this is a mistake, albeit a benevolent one. Don't know yet what kind of summer job I'll be getting in order to pay for this.
So today in verse writing, a certain someone someone brought a song with him. It was actually very lovely. A bit haunting in the way it illuminated our (often) self-induced tendency toward isolation. The basic premise is this: He's on a train and while passing another one he sees in the window a girl with "straw colored hair and eyes that make [him] warm." He speculates on whether he should attempt to get on her train to actually meet her, but ultimately he decides his is a journey going somewhere else. "Life is more than her" and "There are always other faces." It's tempting to say he wrote the song with me in mind, but that's just because I do, indeed, have straw colored hair (which is so much more nicely put than "dirty blonde" by the way), and also it flatters my vanity to think I've inspired the creative process. BUT...that's really quite irrelevent because I identify with the girl on the train anyway. Mine is a face easy to pass by. That is in part because I hardly ever allow it to become more than a face. Substance breeds vunerability in my opinion, and though I can see myself stifling any chance for romantic happiness I chugg on through a life of solitairy train rides, paranoid that the passing faces could taint me, masochistically fascinated with my own solitude. I don't look at people and automatically see all the wonderful things they could give me just by relinquishing friendship, I see strangers whom I'll never really know. It's exactly the fault I accused Richie of having.
No time to think of this. It's like beating a dead horse except worse because I'm allergic to horses, and I'd just sneeze a lot. I'm actually going out tonight, doing the normal college kid thing. I fully intend on having as a good a time as possible, so I'm *gasp* dressing up and everything...only to unravel in a (hopefully not too) drunken mess of supple, clumsy limbs...relaxation and non self-awareness for one night. It's only a small price to pay for airing the moth balls out of my social reclusiveness.
posted by
Kate at 8:56 PM
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wMonday, March 11, 2002 |
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I lost today in a dream. People moved like shadows. I hate it when I get so thoroughly inwardly trapped, when trying to escape myself is like pulling booted feet up from sucking mud, one leg at a time.
One of the virgins just flitted by the computer screen. I'll have a private room next year.
posted by
Kate at 10:54 PM
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wSunday, March 10, 2002 |
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Many things:
My roommate loosed 3 beady-eyed virgin fruit flies in the room this afternoon by way of a tragic test tube accident. As we live in only one room you can imagine my consternation. I am fairly tolerant of bugs, and these are of the most harmless sort, but still, the thought of them winging around like buzzy little ghosts in the shadows of my bedroom is, well, creepy.
Also:
Absolutely gorgeous sunset. It rained all day, and just as the sun was melting into the west the clouds parted, and suddenly everything was ablaze with the purest lighted gold, and to the east a half rainbow materialized from the misty gray blue clouds. Bonnie and I had just stepped out of Saga (where they, thank god, finally had some decent food) and we lit off like 2 dillusional children whooping and hollering all the while something about leperachauns and gold and the ends of rainbows.
Also:
Back in Miranda's room we watched an old faux Disney documentery on the foibles of a lovably doofy linx and his faithful Irish Setter guardian and the bumbling Ranger Joel who adopts him. For some reason this corny old 60's feel good show magnified every single emotion I've ever had - from sadness when the adorable linx kitten is abandoned by his mother, to fear when he almost gets hit by a camper, to amusement when the old dog mothers him, to more sadness when Ranger Joel attempts to abandon him in the forest, to relief when the linx finds his way home, to howling laughter when Ranger Joel drops his towel by trying to stop the linx from antagonizing the sled dogs, to...well, you understand now.
Felt good, all that laughter. The fear felt good too. Jesus. I won't shed a tear for the newest gripping drama, but give me animal movies or a marathon of the Lifetime Channel and suddenly I'm spouting like a geiser. Oh yeah, and I cried like a baby when Sarah Hughes ended her long program for the Winter Olympics. Grueling persistance in the face of almost certain defeat: that one gets me every time.
posted by
Kate at 2:32 AM
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wFriday, March 08, 2002 |
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Wow. So I finally made myself sit down and try to better figure out how this whole weblog process works. The result: I managed to write links and a short biography into my template. It's a small step, but I'm very proud of myself, especially since working with computers, for me, is like trying to breath water. Anyway, I linked to the blogs I like to read regularly. These guys are all amazing in one way or another, but one constant remains: the quality of writing is excellent. Enjoy. I know I do.
posted by
Kate at 11:17 PM
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Last night I called Scott, and Josh answered the phone. Before I was quite aware of him he was prattling through the phone against my ear just as if he'd seen me the day before, not two months before. I told him to can it, that I'd be over in a minute. Fifteen minutes later and I'm sitting in Scott's room, trying to act as normal as possible, failing miserably. Thirty minutes after that I'm somehow in the social room with a drink in one hand and cards in the other. I go through wild mood swings: first utter reservation, then a bout of rigorous flirting with Josh (all the sweeter for its complete innocence), then sadness for being forced to socialize with a certain him for the first time in ages, then a bleary withdrawal, then a muted acceptance. Leaving is difficult. I'd refused eye contact with aforementioned old flame all night, and in a drunken abandonment of inhibition he attempts to give me a hug. His smell washes over me for a moment, and I'm back to simpler times. Then I'm in Josh's car; we're sitting in the parking lot of my dorm and he's saying the same things he always says to me. The world spins, more from tiredness than Bacardi, and I hug him and stumble up to my room.
2 hours of restless sleep and dreams that are more haunting than most anything my conscious mind could devise later, and I'm awake and going to classes in a world that seems mostly underwater. After dinner at Saga, Miranda and I take a walk beneath the treelined golf course road. The air is spring perfect, and the breeze feels like water flowing through my hair. Just the feeling of wind in my hair again is quite amazing. It's finally getting longer...
Tired. Tuesdays and Thursdays always provide ample fodder for quirky, absent minded writer to writer interaction. Poems come and go. Current crushing interest tells me I get a sensation on my face much like pain after I read my poems aloud in class. They come and go: the poems and the pain. My verse writing teacher is going to publish me in the Alabama Literary Review. I know I'm going to leave good stuff behind...but will I ever do anything else with my life?
posted by
Kate at 8:25 PM
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wWednesday, February 27, 2002 |
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I saw Amelie last Saturday night. Lovely movie. I join the chorus of people dreamily hailing it, convinced I, too, can have a better life if I but learn to enjoy the finer things, work a bit of magic into the world around me, and, in the mean time, focus on fixing my own (often) lackluster attempts at happiness. Really, the movie said very many things I needed to hear - about love and my (already) jaded misconceptions of it and about missed oppurtunities and lucrative chances. And it inspired me.
So after verse writing class today, instead of just watching him get up and walk alone out the door and out of my life, I called after him and together we walked the ribbon of sidewalk lining the Quad, stopped where our paths were to diverge and talked in furtive, awkward tones. The students streamed around us like rivulets of water catching on two pebbles in a river. I felt strange and disconnected, but I did it. I went after him.
posted by
Kate at 12:14 AM
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wFriday, February 22, 2002 |
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Several things:
Closest thing I have to an "old boyfriend" recently emailed me. Don't know what to think about that. He's a good person, but I'm just too different now to do him much good. Plus, he likes to use me as buffer to his own insecurities, quite subconsciously I truly believe, but it gets old.
My main preoccupation from last semester has apparantly inquired of me also. This is "what is Kate doing?" week, I suppose. I wish I could say that it didn't matter that the first thing out of his mouth was, "Is she dating anyone?" I wish I could say my head didn't get light and my fingertips didn't tingle and my breathing didn't get any heavier, but they all did, releasing a rash of old memories to haunt the nights without rest and the days of heavy speculation and idle dreaming.
My friends, good friends, are hurting and I'm hurting because they're hurting and I'm not hurting near enough. Doesn't do anyone any good, and I preside like a spectator. Life is just not good enough sometimes. At least my own discomfort and pain can be mostly justified, but when my loved ones hurt I cannot justify the fact that I'm not hurting just as much.
Detachment comes easily, effortlessly - so much so that I'm scared. I know what I want to do with my life.
But insecurities breathe as heavily down my neck as the next person's. I know where I go wrong: forget to wonder, forget to love, fall back to old comforts, scrape desire from the barrel, sleep too much or not enough, and never reach back.
posted by
Kate at 12:45 AM
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wThursday, February 07, 2002 |
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Eyes are much better. Apparently, when I took my contacts out the next morning I ripped the skin on my eyes. Ouch. Didn't even know eyes had skin. I've always taken them to be sort of like muscles with a smooth jelly-like coating. Ew. Eyes are much prettier than that. Certainly mine are now and other someone-someones'...
posted by
Kate at 9:03 PM
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wWednesday, February 06, 2002 |
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Diary entry, 2-4-02:
We camped at the foot of a massive sand dune 30 feet off of the wilderness trail. When we were done setting up camp we picked our way through a small dessert of rollng dunes, finally stumbled onto a white beach/gray ocean, then spent the rest of the day playing in the freezing surf and walking the abandoned beaches. Once dusk fell we watched the hot orange sun slide into the watery horizon. The sand all around us was first blue then a bruising purple, not sparkly like one might imagine but peculairly matte. The sky where the sun had just been was rosy, fanning out royal blue. When we unfocused our eyes and stared just below the ocean horizon the colors blazed: startling blues and firey pinks. In the distance a scattering of dolphins surfaced and jumped. The sudden cold forced us back to the campsite.
That night the sky emptied its jewls. I could see striped above me, for the first time, a sprawling hazy arm of the swirling Milky Way. Orion's belt glowed feircely, static. Some of the stars above were a pale blue, others were pink and still others, a stern white. We dragged our sleeping bags to the top of the sand dune overlooking camp, dug holes in the sand to stabilize ourselves then fell asleep, I, closer to a celestial heaven of wonder than I'd ever been before. There, even dead stars' lights still shone, and my last thought before falling asleep with starlight settling onto the stardust of my eyelashes was that I was seeing into aeons worth of light traveled distance, and that quietly shocked my little human brain to sleep.
When I awoke I couldn't open my eyes for a very long time. I touched my face to try to clear away the fog of sleep, but no matter how I brushed at it I couldn't erase that or the sand clinging to every pore. My contacts were glued to my eyeballs, and I immediately regretted leaving them in for the night. Then I unregretted it because how else on earth could I have fallen asleep under a galaxy of stars and actually have been able to see it? Eventually, I pried my eyes open then stumbled down the dune to camp. I was the first one awake so I pilfered matches from Bonnie's pack and tried to make a fire, failing miserably. At first my eyes were okay - just dry, but as the sun rose the light became more and more unbearable. I finally took my contacts out and then curled up in my tent and waited for the others to awaken. My car was parked two miles away, and I knew I would have to make two trips to get all of my stuff put away, and so as soon as Sarah was ready I made the first trip, following her exhaustedly, mostly blind, my eyes red and beyond painfully irritated, a constant flow of tears dripping off my nose. We made the trip in an hour, I - scared and blinded by the white hot sand, the white hot sun, by my eyes' failure to filter the incoming light to my pupils. The second trip seemed even worse, alleviated only because I only had to make it one direction. I gave my keys to Miranda, and she drove us back to Troy, each hour bringing neither relief nor further irritation to my constantly running eyes.
Back in Troy I showered then asked Bonnie to take me to the emergency room. Sarah and Miranda came too and waited while the doctor looked at me, let out a low whistle then cleaned my eyes and bandaged them both so that I was completely blind.
I spent the night in utter darkness.
This morning I dressed myself without sight, ran my fingers along the cool cement brick wall until I found the bathroom, touched everything I could like touching a man for the first time, soft and tentative. Bonnie took me to an eyedoctor referred by the ER, and the nurse clucked with pity as she unbound my swollen eyes, and later, the doctor was extra gentle with me as we sat in the half-darkness - I trying, rather unsuccessfully, to keep my eyes open. I've spent the rest of the day stepping from the shadows, trying to see again. I'm almost 100 percent better now. My left eye is still a little red and both are still slightly swollen, and my head hurts a bit now from writing in the half-light of this room where Bonnie sleeps only five feet away. I'm disasterously behind in schoolwork. Not quite sure how I'm going to pull off turning in my paper Wednesday or auditioning for chair placement in Symphony Band or making up the speech I missed today.
Sleep is heavy within my lids. The night is plain outside, corrupted by yellow streetlamps and orange-glowing buildings. If I had it to do over again I would sleep in my contacts just the same - anything for that myriad scattering of cold light, anything for the rough white slope of the dune beneath me, anything for the rushing sound of breaking waves, for the velvety darkness of night, cool and wild all around me.
posted by
Kate at 11:42 PM
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wWednesday, January 30, 2002 |
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Haven't posted for a while. It's quite obvious that technology is going to leave me even farther behind than I'd already resigned myself to being left. I'm not ever going to learn anything that will allow me to be an intellegent part of the internet community. I don't guess I care, though. But I like this instant gratification process of publishing...even if no one reads my words.
Speaking of which, in verse class last week my teacher stared at the poem I'd brought and after a while he said, quite flabbergasted, "This annoys me to admit, but I can't find anything wrong with it." After class he told me the poem is publishable. He wants me to stop by his office tomorrow, I suppose to discuss said poem and its possible placement in the Alabama Literary Review. Which would be nice, by the way.
Boywise, my life is quite boring. I've been doing some awkward flirting, but for the most part I've been too busy running away from high anxiety situations (which include interaction with cute, intelligent and attractive males). I've still got a very bitter place in my heart for last semester and everything that happened therein, as far as my love life is concerned. Unfortunately, I seem to thrive on staying hopelessly infatuated with bad ideas, and last semester had a bunch of bad ideas; however, I'm dealing. Heh, using the silent treatment for now, but who knows? Perhaps a party and a few drinks later I'll be back to waking up first to alien arms and then silence and resentment... Doesn't that sound fun?
Though falling asleep with someone is almost worth it. And that's the sad truth.
posted by
Kate at 12:07 AM
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wThursday, January 10, 2002 |
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Making messes with frozen hershey's chocolate drink...ran tonight...only a mile...but now I feel better...classes tomorrow...nearly fidgeted out of my chair during verse writing class...strange anthropology teacher...young and we call him Trey...weekend nearing...room rearranging...framed a picture I drew of a shoe...it looks good.
posted by
Kate at 11:45 PM
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My English classes go well. For the first time, I think ever, I'm really excited about the process of learning. I feel like I'm actually being benefited. We'll see how this new revolutionized attitude of mine will hold up after the first test and paper. I'm taking a verse writing class, and it's scaring the pants off me because I'm really uneasy with my poetry right now. There are only 5 other people in this class including someone whom I would very much like to impress (much like the male, I like to parade self-accomplishments in order to gain the admiration of the opposite sex).
This semester most certainly has a better over all feel to it. I think many surprises may come of it - good and bad, but mostly good. This is a semester of adventures and fun and work and some sorrow and some loneliness too, but mostly adventures and fun and work, I hope.
posted by
Kate at 12:31 AM
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wWednesday, January 09, 2002 |
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5 things about me:
1. I'm vain about my hair and it's not as blonde as I think it is.
2. I need at least 4 and 1/2 hours of sleep to be able to function normaly the next day.
3. I've religiously kept a diary for almost 8 years.
4. I seem to think I'm going to make a living by writing.
5. I once burst a spiders nest egg on my hand. All the little babies came wriggling out - tons and tons. I momentarily lost my sanity.
5 more things about me:
1. Last summer I was diagnosed with melonoma.
2. The surgery left a huge, sprawling painful-looking scar on the most visable part of my upper back.
3. I'm angry because I don't want to be looking over my shoulder (literally) for the rest of my life, scared that cancer is going to get me.
4. I'm dealing with that anger and trying to be more mature (and wearing sunscreen, though I always did that anyway).
5. My friend Miranda and I are going to backpack part of the Appalachian Trail either this summer or the next depending on when we can raise enough money. Whatever is left from our expenses we're going to give to charity. I'm going to keep a journal and attempt to publish it afterwards.
5 Things about my family:
1. I have a sister who's very pretty.
2. I have a brother who's very angry.
3. I have a mother who's very loving.
4. I have a father who's very long-winded.
5. I have a cat who's very stupid.
5 things about my crush/love interest.
Which one?
posted by
Kate at 3:09 PM
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wMonday, January 07, 2002 |
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Back.
Empty stomach and begrudging resignation to a new semester's worth of headaches. I will have fun in the next couple of months just as surely as I will be miserable too...
Goodnight.
posted by
Kate at 1:23 AM
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