sappiness and many, many links

So I see Poetry Monday isn’t necessarily anyone’s favorite entry theme.

That’s okay. I will deliver poetry into a new age of appreciation, so help me!

(Put that thing back where it came from! So help me! So help me!)

I have kind of skirted the subject of how it is having Matt be so far for such a long time, partly because I’m not sure how many of you are actually interested in hearing me say things like “MY LIFE IS AN EMPTY SHELL” or “I MISS HIS FEET, EVEN,” and partly because, well, it hasn’t been that long yet, only about two weeks, and I don’t want to seem dramatic.

Also–and this is harder to articulate–I feel that talking about how much I miss Matt would discount all of the awesome things that I have in my life besides Matt. And I don’t want to do that. Who wants to do that?

But I guess at some point there’s going to be no getting around it. What I will say now is that I talk to Matt almost every day on Skype, which is the best invention I’ve ever heard of, and that we email each other a picture of ourselves each day (which means that I email him a picture of myself daily, and he emails me one whenever he remembers). I’m saving all the ones I’ve taken of myself as well as the ones he’s sent me. I’ll probably try to incorporate them into some kind of project when his trip’s over, but I’m not sure yet. So yeah–lots of communication all around, and I’m definitely doing fine, but… sigh… I do miss him. Quite a lot. I feel like for Matt, he does miss me but he has all this cool stuff to do, like visit old castles and hang out with his groovy new English friends, and eat in pubs and drink pints of Guinness and stuff,

And I’m here at TCNJ, which I love–I love this campus, I love the teachers, I love my friends and my house–but everything about this place reminds me of Matt. My TV. My bowls. My futon. My refrigerator. The buildings. The weird vents in the ground that spew mystery steam from underground. Errant hair ties on the sidewalk. The supermarket. IHOP establishments. My car. My dog. Bottles of water. Movie trailers.

Everything.

Luckily, I have my roommates to distract me with bad/good TV like The Moment of Truth and Home Improvement, and lip sync competitions featuring old Britney Spears songs and that one really, really bad Miley Cyrus song. So for this, girls, I thank you.

poetry monday

I’ve been completely out of material to blog about. I am SURE that you guys don’t want to hear about my Modernisn, Gender, and Race class. Or my World Religions class. OR anything related to school at all. But unfortunately, that’s all I really have to talk about. There aren’t any more ill-advised day trips to museums, or fancy schmancy home-made dinners to blog about now that Matt’s in England. And my roommates and I have been disgustingly productive, so we’re not up to our usual shenanigans. Yesterday, ALL of our doors were closed for like, 2 hours, because we were ALL doing homework. It’s horrible.

So I’m resulting to gimmicks.

I’m working on a poetry booklet for my Creative Writing seminar, and I’ve been compiling a catalog of my influences as a poet. And it made me realize how much I really do love poetry, and how it can be so fun and engaging and not confusing at all–if you pick the right ones. So I decided that I would post some of my favorite poems on Mondays. I guess that eventually I’ll start to throw in my own, if I’m feeling particularly feisty. Let’s do this!

First choice to kick off Poetry Monday is obvious… the one and only Billy Collins.

Litany

You are the bread and the knife,
The crystal goblet and the wine…
-Jacques Crickillon

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general’s head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman’s tea cup.
But don’t worry, I’m not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and–somehow–the wine.

Billy Collins

no news.

Some Things of Note:

• I have a good feeling about the two classes I’ve had so far: my lit seminar and my creative writing seminar. More on those as the plot thickens.
• Tomorrow I’ll have my other two classes, and I’ll be able to accurately determine how stressed out I’m going to be this semester.
• I really, really enjoy being back at school.
• When I found out about Heath Ledger, I was in my writing seminar and had to furtively blot at my eyes with my knuckles. It was totally embarrassing. But honestly, I can’t believe it. I simply can’t believe it.
• It’s been three days on Weight Watchers and I’m still sticking to it, which feels nice to say. I’m trying this thing where I take it one day at a time. I know I won’t see results right away, but I think I’m willing to wait it out.
• I saw Cloverfield today. I think it can be summed up in a text message I sent to Linds immediately afterward: “I don’t know if it’s a great date movie. It was like, War of the Worlds scary, not suspenseful. Also, you might barf.”

Sadly, that’s really all I have to report. No news is good news? I think I’d have to update that to: No news is boring as ALL GET OUT.

snazzy new semester

Snazzy new semester.

Snazzy new classes.

Snazzy new doortags (Only Natalie’s is a CycLion).

Snazzy new backpack.

Snazzy new decor.

Snazzy new distractions.

Snazzy new monkey slippers.

Snazzy new… cupcake dish scrubber.

Snazzy new fitness/health goals.

Same snazzy people!

frenzy

Well.

I’ve been running around all day like a headless chicken

(Small tangent: how disturbing is that comparison? You know, though, it’s really true: after you cut a chicken’s head off it keeps moving, and if you don’t hold it down it really will run around like crazy for an extended amount of time. My mom told me. She used to cut chicken heads off regularly when she was a young girl in the Philippines.)

trying to do, in one day, the Going-Back-To-College preparation that I could have been doing over many weeks. I:

• gathered everything I could think of
• made a list of stuff I needed
• went shopping for it
• went food shopping
• put all of my church music back in their Binder of Gargantuan Proportions (back story: after I play a mass at church, instead of placing my sheet music back where it belongs–alphabetized into two 4-inch binders–I toss it into a pile sitting on the piano that has been accumulating for almost a year now). It felt GOOD.

in the time span of, oh, four hours.

OH

I also drove my sister to her friend’s house and used my dad’s GPS for the first time. It was way too successful, and hence it doesn’t make for a very good story. But it did feel, I don’t know, strangely…futuristic. Also, I couldn’t believe how easily I got used to having a strange female voice bark commands at me. Does this say something about my upbringing? Hm.

I couldn’t really get anything done this week since it was See Everyone For The Last Time Week. The saddest goodbye was, predictably, Matt. If anyone for some reason doesn’t know the situation, it’s this in a nutshell: He’s going to England (Northumbria University in Newcastle Upon Tyne, if you’re curious) and he’ll be there until June 1st. He’ll be gone for Valentine’s Day, both of our 21st birthdays, and our 1-year anniversary. But he’ll also have a RIDICULOUS experience that I’m totally jealous of.

I’m not going to lie, I cried last night. I was definitely more dignified in Matt’s presence: three tears rolling bravely down my cheeks as I maintained a weak, watery smile. In the car, though, once I was alone, I was a little more, how shall we say? Spirited.

(As long as spirited means that I played the saddest songs I could think of and bawled in great, heaving sobs and swerved into opposing traffic more than a couple times because my vision was blurred by my fat, abundant tears? Is that what it means?)

And then I got home and called him. Because our relationship is extremely unhealthy.

Now I’m feeling much better, and I’m thinking perhaps I was a little dramatic and a wee bit hormonal on the drive home. And maybe I’ll be okay. At least for another week or so. After that I’ll probably be begging him, via email, to come back home as soon as he can and never leave my side ever ever again.

**

Tomorrow is a new beginning in many more ways than one. I want to work on taking things one day at a time. I want to succeed. And I think–no, I know–I can.

Slam, Nick Hornby

I tend to devour books in one sitting. I’ll start a book and, for a day or so, become obsessed with it. I remember finishing Augusten Burrough’s Running With Scissors in about 3 hours, while on vacation in Mexico. I do the same for Harry Potter books, Gossip Girl books, and recently, these Mortified books I’ve been reading.

But Slam took me a couple weeks. And maybe since my reading was a bit fragmented, it made me like it less. Additionally, I think this is Nick Hornby’s first transition into young adult fiction, and it’s clearly written to be boy-friendly, so maybe some of his efforts were lost on me, a female who is no longer of the Young Adult Demographic. I bet it’s a fabulous piece of teen fiction. I kind of wish I had known it was YA before I started reading it, because the whole time I was evaluating it against his other Plain Old Fiction books. I think the themes and tropes spoke to me more in books like About a Boy, or High Fidelity, which is worrisome because it means I can’t relate to the Young’ns anymore. Great.

One thing I thought while reading it was that Nick Hornby does a REALLY good job of mimicking the way a 16-year-old teenage boy would probably write and talk and think, not surprising since he once was one himself. But Nick Hornby’s a long way away from being sixteen, and hell, it’s only been four years since I was sixteen and I can barely understand why the things that were important to me were important to me. So I’m impressed.

I guess that’s the gist of it. I’m impressed. But it didn’t change my life.

i thank You God, e.e. cummings

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any–lifted from the no
of allnothing–human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

**

It’s time to get back to my roots. Poetry and literature inspire me to the point of wordlessness. I want this semester to be an intellectual awakening. I want to feel smart again. I want to feel like I get a piece of fiction or poetry, and that whoever wrote it gets me too. The written word is the love of my life, and I think I may have just decided that I want to make a living out of it.

Resolved.

Because you care.

Before:

After:

Smiles McGee says: “I’d like to thank everyone who made this possible–Whoorl’s Hair Thursday, my friends, Ed from Aztec Hair Designs…your efforts are acknowledged AND appreciated! Oh, I can barely speak! YOU LIKE ME!! YOU REALLY LIKE ME!!!!!!” ::passes out::

/narcissism

Some things I think about a lot now

1) My hair.
2) Matt’s imminent departure for his semester in England (Saturday)
3) The upcoming semester

Issue #1 shall be resolved today, I believe. I hope I will soon have a before and after post to write. I printed out Picture 3 yesterday morning when my hair was wavy and bounciful, but today it’s perplexingly straight and smooth-ish, probably from sleeping on it. So I printed out Picture 1 as well. We’ll see what happens.

Issue #2 makes me all emotional and whatnot, so I don’t know if I should get into it because I don’t want to get too surrious. All I can say is that I’m going to miss him a lot, even though we have many forms of communication at our disposal. I think deep down I know how very difficult long-distance can be, both logistically and emotionally, and I’m scared. and nervous.

But on the plus side, I’ll get lots of presents when he comes back!

Issue #3 is making me the most anxious. I have a lot to make up for this semester: my grades, my physical health, my behavior as a roommate, etc. And while I know I can do it, I wish I could started on it right now. The hardest part is waiting, because I won’t even know if I can do it until I start–does that make sense?

Damn. This entry did get surrious, and a little cryptic, too. All will be made cleeeeear. Paaatience, young grasshoppersssss. Sorry. Sometimes I like to act like a gypsy/psychic/Mr. Miyagi.

Oh, okay, and also, I just read that Brad Renfro died?! He was 25?! What?!?!

I have to go get my hair cut now.

In which I overthink EVERYTHING

I really need a haircut but I’m totally afraid to get one. My hair is becoming overgrown and shapeless, and it’s all weighed down and stuff by its long-osity. I’m really happy that my hair is long now, finally after like, three years of Awkward Growing-Out Hair, but having it long makes me really, really shear-phobic. Anyway, I wanted to do whoorl’s Hair Thursday, but something tells me she has so many participants that if I wait for her prognosis, I’ll be getting my next haircut sometime after my college graduation.

But I like some of the options she’s offered to past participants so I ::cough:: saved the images to my computer. This is what my hair looks like:

Yipes. I mean, there’s lots I like about my hair. It’s shiny and stuff, and soft. And I like that I don’t have to use heat often because it air-dries decently, so it stays really healthy. But ugh. It’s like… just a huge mane of hugeness. Anyway, I’m planning to bring one of these pictures to the Haircut Depot. They’re essentially the same haircut, but will you guys (all four of you) help me decide which one to bring?

Here:

What I like about this one is that her hair is straight and light-colored, so whoever cuts my hair can see the kind of layers I want. What I don’t like is that… well, her hair is straight. My hair is wavy and I kind of want to bring in a picture of what I’d like my wavy hair to look like.

Don’t mind the “Option #x”s–remember, I saved these pictures from Hair Thursday, which I long to be a part of but I know I can’t. Whoorl does such a good job of finding pictures that actually highlight haircuts. I didn’t know where else to turn besides one of those tacky HAIRSTYLES GUIDES magazines that cost like $4.50. Neooo thank you.

Anyway. I am loath to bring this picture anywhere because it’s Jennifer Aniston and I categorically don’t approve of her. But it’s a good picture of what I might want, especially the bangs concept. What I don’t like is that whatever her layers are aren’t exactly what I want, but um. Maybe whoever cuts my hair will get the idea?

Last one, I swear:

This one has a good representation of both the bangs I want AND the layers I want, but I feel like her hair isn’t long enough in this picture. My biggest fear is that the lady will take off waaaaaay too much and three years of growing my hair out will amount to nothing in a matter of minutes.

I don’t know, though. What do you think?

(Name that musical!)

Comments? Thoughts? Snide remarks about how dorky and self-obsessed I am?