Welcome to Malaisia

Seriously, people.

2006-06-05T05:20:51Z

I know that of my approximately four readers, at least three of you read regularly. I was serious about wanting suggestions for good books to read. The request must have been overshadowed by the previous post's general whininess. I at least expected my mom to suggest some new-agey book I probably wouldn't want to read (No offense, Mom). So, dear readers, suggest away, or you shall be dead to me (I'm joking. Or am I?).

If you are reading this, it means the internet is back.

2006-06-02T05:56:55Z

I am composing on word with no internet right now. Life is stupid. That’s kind of the best way to put it at the moment. Without the internet I’ve really got nothing to do, because I have no job, and no matter how hard I look, or how easy it is for everyone else to get a job, it seems like the universe is against me. If anyone has any suggestions about good books to read, please let me know.

What if Spiderman and RoboCop were Enemies instead of Friends?

2006-04-25T08:00:15Z

I had my honors defense today, and I must say, it was close to my worst imaginings of it realized. I had asked numerous authorities who ought to know what a creative writing honors defense is like. From my adviser, S.P.: "Think of it like a conversation, and don't worry. I believe you'll find it interesting and even moderately enjoyable." From the department chair, S. B.: "This is pretty much the opposite of a workshop." From the other creative writing honors candidate, A.W.C., after the completion of her own defense: "It ain't no thang." I found my experience to be nearly the opposite of what these statements suggested. For those who aren't familiar with the process, the general consensus is that a Macalester honors defense consists of a committee of three relevant faculty members asking you questions, which are sometimes pointed, about the project you are presenting. Some of my questions were more than pointed, but downright toothy (if you can take toothy as an adjective meaning worse than pointed). Some of my questions weren't questions at all, but observations of how exactly I failed. I felt kind of like I was being subjected to a three-against-one workshop in which everybody is incredibly qualified in their opinions. Most of the fault of this I rest squarely on the notorious W.P., or Ping, as I have called her in this journal and in life. She's a good person. She's a good writer. She's utterly terrifying. I don't think she knows how to not intimidate the shit out of people. She was the one who really set the confrontational workshop feel of the defense, and started with the whole comments instead of questions thing. She also enjoyed making a criticism of one of the choices I made, then following it with a question about why I thought that was a good choice, rendering any answer I could possibly make idiotic. However, following suit, A.L. perfected this comment-question trap when he said something along the lines of, "I noticed you failed at creating a balance between realist prose and surrealist elements in your narrative voice. How did you go about finding that right balance?" Yeah. I also came off as dreadfully emo when I went on about the misery of writing this, how writing is pain and misery but slightly less painful than not writing. Then I used my house key to make a small vertical cut down my wrist which I lifted in the air to display to the panel, flinging droplets of blood onto each of their scribbled sheets of notes in front of them about how much I suck. Then they dismissed me from the room for a few minutes while they discussed my suckiness, let me back in and told me I had honors and congratulated me. Gee, thanks. As they left, they said, "You worked really hard." This is not a compliment. When in lieu of where a congratulatory compliment should be, it actually could be considered an insult. I don't even know what to feel anymore. I'm embarrassed that I brought this manuscript to them. I kept wanting to break down and apologize, saying that I never would have tried to finish it if I didn't feel like I was trapped, that I had to. Some things are cursed from the beginning, and this story was never meant to be. It bothers me that it's so hard to remember the specifics of what happened. I'm just left with a general dizzy feeling when thinking about the defense. In the manner of my heroine, I've blocked it out. Maybe I'll have to ask Kaila and Rebecca, who came to watch. One would think that I wouldn't want my friends to witness me squirm and hear my weaknesses pointed out to me. For some reason, it was actually nice to have them there as a somewhat neutral yet supportive element. If they weren't there, I might have feared that my panel would eat me. I'm glad they came, and Rebecca wrote me a nice e-mail tonight saying that I appeared to handle myself well. At least according to someone I didn't fail on all accounts. I guess Steve did like my actual project. Turns out he has bad taste. Everybody else I showed it to told me what was up. I just couldn't do anything about it.

In other news, Colin has come up with an awesome title for a song (see above), and I participated in coming up with another quickly-turned-down concept: RoboCop and Inspector Gadget are RoboGay for each other. Jimmy Johns is gross to me again, and I learned that T.K. really is an utter cunt in the most derogatory sense of the word. Oh, and I don't care how badly written this entry is. I stopped caring about that. I've just been faking it all along, being a writer, just like I've faked everything else in my education. My success to this point has really been due to tricking people into thinking I'm good. At this level trickery doesn't work anymore.

ESL

2006-04-13T05:09:49Z

Tuesday was my last day teaching second-graders English. I'm sad. Anyway, as a sort of tribute, I decided to share with you some of the sentences they wrote with a set list of words. There were pictures, too.

Chi: Tiger eat boy and girl. Some tiger not eat the people.

Niafong: Tiger eat boys and girls. Some tiger not eat pig and deer. Tiger like to eat people. (above the illustration of the tiger eating stick-figures are the words "Two boy dies")

Billy: Tiger like to play soccer ball. Tiger is fast like a turtle. Tiger love to eat Billy!

litost_again @ 2006-03-31T04:36:00

2006-03-31T10:38:20Z

I just had the most successful writing session I've had in months. Too bad by the time I wake up in four and a half hours, I will hate every word of it.

Sensitive matters

2006-03-24T04:20:09Z

I have deleted the previous entry, and for those of you who read it and are familiar with the Macalester English Department, I would like to ask you to be discreet from here on out. I have spoken with some people, and matters are about to get very tenuous (I'm not sure if that's the right word). To be on the safe side, I decided to reduce the chances of people talking about this by getting rid of what I previously said. So from now on, shhhhhhh.

This is probably a bad idea.

2006-03-17T08:34:05Z

Tell me all about me by going here: http://kevan.org/johari?name=Casseeeeeeeee

I saw this on Violet's facebook profile, and thought (for some reason) that I had to make one for myself. It seems that things like this could turn out to be disastrous, but at least none of the traits they have listed are very negative, so I won't find out that people are describing me as vindictive or heartless or soul-grating. On a disturbing side note, my journal changed its appearance without my knowledge. The fact that it's different doesn't bother me so much, because it was really ugly before and now is slightly less so. What bothers me is that I know I didn't change it, so someone else must have. Before I know it, they could start posting their child pornography here and I'll be the second Macalester graduate in four years to be prosecuted for distribution of child pornography. If I graduate, that is.

litost_again @ 2006-03-08T03:48:00

2006-03-08T10:19:03Z

I taught class today. At the first part, when I was lecturing, I felt like a total idiot. I kept thinking about how I was rambling and uninteresting and I should have actually practiced what I was going to say more, and nobody was paying attention. I occasionally saw Jim out of the corner of my eye writing stuff down, and that made me so nervous. I hadn't even decided whether I was going to discuss the Kundera reading I had assigned or not, so when I was done lecturing I just asked if people had any questions about the reading, and automatically someone asked me if I could give any background information on the author. I of course have a mini-biography of Kundera stored in my head, so I suddenly became a lot more confident. People seemed to be genuinely curious and interested in the reading, which for some reason surprised me, but I was a lot better at discussing it with them than lecturing, since I could answer their questions about the history, what events described in the excerpt actually happened and what was totally fiction (Yes, French surrealist Eluard existed, but no, he probably was not dancing in a circle dance with students in Wenceslas Square right after his friend was executed, and no, his circle dance definitely did not fly away through the clouds as he recited poetry). The exercise went a little better. The exercise I made up was that I would write a bunch of one word themes on the board, and for ten minutes they would write in the personal essay genre about some experience pertaining to those themes. I started out writing themes on the board before getting ideas from others. The first one I wrote was "death", then I wrote "sex" and a couple people giggled. After warming them up a bit, they offered up their own themes. When they'd done personal essay for ten minutes, I gave them another ten minutes to, in the manner of Kundera, explore the theme in a different way, like through fiction, allegory, academic writing, science writing, etc. While they were writing, I wrote things in my own notebook like, "what the fuck am I doing", and I tried to think of how I would explain my terrible lecture to Jim after class, thinking up things about how I was stressed about my Shakespeare class, I'm in the midst of a "situation", I only got three hours of sleep, etc. Everyone wrote voraciously, but when it came time for volunteers to share, most people clammed up. It didn't bother me so much to wait in silence until someone felt so uncomfortable that they read their writing. I realize now that I should have accused everyone of writing about sex, which is why they were so reluctant to share. But one kid who wrote about sex shared, anyway. After class, I just said something to Jim about how I was so terrified during the lecture, and he looked surprised and said that he couldn't tell at all. He seemed to think that I did okay, and was impressed that I could conceal my nervousness so well. That was a huge relief, even though I felt like a jackass while I was teaching. I then went to Alex Feerst's office, and as long as Steve Burt approves it, I think I can change my seminar to his class instead of Shakespeare, which would be nice. So starting at about 4:30, I was feeling very relieved.

Poetic Nonsense

2006-03-03T00:30:58Z

Today Jim wasn't in Creative Writing, so he had Alex Lemon come to teach a class on poetry, despite the fact that we just finished fiction and are moving onto creative non-fiction on Tuesday. I'm teaching the first creative non-fiction class on Tuesday, and I'm really freaked out. I assigned an excerpt from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Kundera, and passed it out today. Jim had previously voiced concerns that if I assigned a reading no one would do it and it would just end up being like a student presentation. My way of getting around that is that I told everyone today as I handed out the thirty page excerpt that there was going to be a quiz on it. It was convenient that Jim wasn't there, because he probably would have chastised me for lying to the kids. Well, this kind of back-fired because everyone freaked out when they heard the word "quiz" and became all worked up and wanted to know if it was going to be on content, themes, or stylistically based (damn overachieving Mac kids). I told them not to worry about it too much, but just to read the excerpt. Alex Lemon gave me shit about assigning a quiz, and also wanted me to tell him briefly everything I was going to be teaching on Tuesday, which I refused partially because I'm not sure yet, but more because I didn't want to tell everyone what I was going to be teaching the class before I actually do it. Anyway, I hate poetry but it was actually a pretty good class. We did an exercise in which we were supposed to free-write total nonsense for a few minutes without stopping or thinking, sort of in the manner of "Dang Me" by Bruce Andrews. So I thought I would post my nonsense. Because it's something to post. Though it's just nonsense. Anyway.

*EDIT* So my original intention was just to post this stupid exercise with a little explanation, but upon typing it up, I discovered how much longer my explanation is than my stupid exercise. Whatever, I guess you get a stupid little coda or something.

Let's shitroll off our backs and listen, you, I've got this "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" all clogged up in my gutter, throat-slap what with the chords breaking over the floor and you'd better clean that up before daddy gets home and tears new into fresh-closed old skin--or fingers slice on the linoleum manners of an old Elizabethan court lady who's secretly a whore who's secretly a Jap who's secretly literate and penned the first manuscript without a name about lovers stealing away into the night sliding through doors tatami room and demonic possession because love can't help but make you sick all over the floor and you'd better clean that up before the queen sees it and refuses to anoint you with a broken scepter you'd just as soon stab the peasants through their eyeballs--falling from her teeth clinging briefly to cracked lip and slipping down into pimpled cleavage, it all sounds the same.

Hear ye, hear ye!

2006-02-10T20:09:25Z

CHARLIE IS FOUND! Someone found him two miles from the site of the car accident and called my dad. My mom is at the vet right now looking at x-rays because they think he has a broken leg. They're renting a car and should be back home again tonight.

Survey taken from Grace who took it from someone else.

2006-02-07T05:15:45Z

This should be interesting, considering I only have about four people on my friends list, mostly family members.

Name a CD you own that you think no-one else on your friendslist does: Cristina--"Sleep it Off"

Name a book you own that you think no-one else on your friendslist does: The Yeast Connection--Though I suppose my mom could have a copy, since she's the one who gave it to me.

Name a movie you own on DVD/VHS/whatever that you think no-one else on your friendslist does: Kafka

Name a place that you have visited that you think no-one else on your friendslist has: I was going to be interesting and say Ketchican, Alaska, but then I remembered that was a family trip. So I guess I'll say anywhere in Japan.

Name a piece of technology or any sort of tool you own that you think no one else on your friendslist has: I don't know. Does anyone have a lamp with a kitty on it?

litost_again @ 2006-01-18T19:15:00

2006-01-19T01:41:54Z

I got less than three hours of sleep last night for no reason other than the fact that despite being tired, I couldn't fall asleep until sometime after 7 am. I had to get up at ten to go do some work for Jeanne, which was really quite easy and only took about an hour and a half. And that was me working incredibly slowly, because I was reading people's papers as I was labelling envelopes to SPO them back to them. I was back by one, and decided to take a nap around three and I'm totally out of it. It was one of those sleeps that feels like a load of bricks hitting your body or something like that. I'm writing boring shit about my day in my livejournal right now to wake myself up and prepare myself for a late night of doing fifty pounds of laundry, watching Lost, and writing hopefully five pages of crappy crappy crap crap crap for my story that I've been having panic attacks about. I actually kind of hate this story, its characters, and the process of writing it. I know there have been things I've enjoyed writing before, but it's been so long.

I heart gay cowboys.

2006-01-10T08:10:20Z

I half-assedly tried to write tonight, but I'm so fucking tired, and don't think I can go on. I'm kind of writing here because I thought writing about stuff that doesn't matter could be a good warm-up, but I'll probably just end up going to bed. I really think the problem is my story. It's so much work to write, and the process isn't enjoyable at all. If I had gotten a better start stylistically, maybe used the recent past tense rather than the urgent yet awkward present tense, it all would go more smoothly. I get angry at every sentence I attempt to write for being so ugly, and I'm really not feeling the plot anymore. At this point, I'm just working to fill in chronological holes, but there will inevitably be holes anyway, since it's poorly constructed. I dread writing this, and that's not right. I don't think there's any way to fix this state of things. It will always be a difficult story, and I've invested so much time into it already, I can't abandon it. Shit. Oh, and if you were wondering about the title of this post, it's pretty irrelevant. I saw Brokeback Mountain the other day, and thought it would be a good title. My birthday was pretty okay, except some unfortunate news that still has me rather despondent.

RIP Luke: 1991-2006. Best dog ever.

I almost forgot...

2006-01-06T07:53:48Z

...I found five dollars! On the sidewalk! It was awesome.

People's lives are boring.

2006-01-06T05:24:20Z

I've decided maybe, just maybe, a year after I started this shit-ass journal, that I should actually start writing in it semi-regularly. It's true that I might need to practice writing in a non-stressful setting, and I doubt posting regularly would hurt my literary muscles. Speaking of doubt, the major obstacle in my writing is that I doubt every single word that I put onto the page. I re-write the same sentences over and over again, trying to make them half-way decent, but I usually just have to capitulate and move forward so I'm not completely paralyzed. Allow me to give you an example. This insane self-doubt is not limited to my serious prose. In fact, it has been in action since I started this post. As soon as I typed, "It's true that I might need to practice writing in a non-stressful setting", I thought, how can you say something is true and also use the modality of might for the same statement? And do I really mean "non-stressful setting"? Isn't there a phrase that better describes what I actually mean, which is closer to "lesser medium", but not quite as snobby? Is the term "literary muscles" too reminiscent of the elementary school teacher expression, "Put on your thinking caps"? Is it out of place to use the word "capitulate" when the rest of my post is largely colloquial? I've made a conscious effort to not erase words or re-arrange phrases in this post, because if this is going to be a non-stressful setting, I need to ignore the voice of self-doubt that plagues me in my writing process. It's ironic that even when I make this conscious effort, and in fact greatly reduced my revising as I go along, I still re-wrote the beginning of that last sentence three times. Is this normal? I don't know. For some people, beautiful prose just comes out effortlessly. Rebecca's lj is filled with elegant, clever musings. Perhaps this will only be good practice if I make my posts elegant and clever. Anyway, I wrote a page of my beast of a short story today, a page which I didn't entirely hate, so it's been a good day, I guess. When I talked to Steve Polansky about how difficult it was to just get this story out, and how it worried me because it was only the first of the collection, he said that writing a story can be like birthing a child. The first one is the most difficult, but the rest just slip out. Not only did this conjure up disturbing images of Steve lying on his back with legs splayed birthing mounds of paper, it made me question his knowledge of women's health. I was a c-section. I don't know if that's easy or not. I guess Shakespeare would say I wasn't "of woman born" at all. MacBeth's prophecy from the weird sisters said that he would be killed by "no man of woman born", but since MacDuff was a c-section, prematurely ripped from his mother's womb, as he put it, he ends up with MacBeth's head. If you can't tell by now, I've been doing total stream of consciousness writing, and it's not very relevant. But then again, what ever will be? My life is boring. So is yours. My livejournal is doomed to be dull and irrelevant.

What good are kitties if not to eat your bugs?

2005-11-09T05:17:22Z

Colin and I were sitting on the couch about to watch a movie when seemingly out of nowhere, a bug flew over and landed on Colin's hand. This is unusual since we haven't had our windows open for weeks, and it's getting past bug season. Naturally, Colin shrieked like a little girl and shook his hand, flinging the bug onto the nearby chair. He looked back at me in panic and asked me what we were going to do. I suggested that we watch the movie, and he insisted we couldn't do it with a bug in the room. When I told him he could kill the bug if he wanted, he emitted another girlish squeel and expressed his disgust with touching it. So I came up with the brilliant idea of showing the bug to Genencor and seeing if he would eat it.

Now I don't know if this bug was stunned or what, but when we found the cat the bug was just on the chair not moving. Colin tried moving it with Genencor's paw, but it wouldn't do anything, thus the cat wouldn't get interested. I poked it a few times with my finger, and it started crawling a little bit. Genencor realized what was going on and climbed onto the chair in stalking mode. It was actually a pathetic fight. We watched with great interest as he tentatively batted it with his paw, then gradually gained the confidence to nip it a few times while it barely tried to walk away. Genencor will eat almost nothing but cat food and occasionally cardboard, and tries to bury all other edible things that kitties might consider tasty, so we were curious as to whether he would actually eat the bug, or just wanted to play. He finally picked the bug up in his teeth and took a decisive bite--then he promptly dropped the insect and bolted across the room. He cowered under the table pawing at his mouth, and as we tried to catch him to see what happened, he bolted all the way to the bedroom and hid under the bed. It took me a while to coax him out with a fun necklace, then we looked at his mouth and he seemed fine. When we returned to the living room, the bug was alive and in the exact same place as when it was first expelled from the jaws of a predator many times its size. I made sure that Genencor was there to see the execution, as a sort of retribution or something. I should also note that it was Colin (what a manly man!) who crushed the insect between a wad of paper towels and a movie case. We placed the corpse on the floor briefly to show to Genencor for closure, and as soon as he saw it, he bolted again. Natalie, what kind of bug attacks kitties? It was about firefly sized and shaped, mostly brown, with black tips on its wings and black stripes across its abdomen.

Anyway, in other news, last night I cut both Eileen's and Grace's hair. I generally don't cut anyone's hair unless they say they're just going to do it themselves if I don't, because I don't want to be responsible for fucking up someone's hair. Eileen had been threatening to lop off all her hair for a while when she requested my services. I did okay considering my lack of experience with curly hair, but I don't think Eileen liked it too much. It's understandable, though, because I cut off like a foot or something. I kept telling her I wouldn't be offended if she cried a little. Grace just saw hair being cut and wanted in on the action because she's impulsive. But she was happy with her hair when I finished. Maybe I should start charging people five bucks for giving them crappy haircuts, because several people I've told about it almost automatically asked if I would cut their hair. I don't know, though, because with the damage I could do to some people's hair, I would probably end up having to pay them.

Not posting in forever post

2005-11-01T05:08:54Z

I just spent the past five days or so drinking way too much and doing several things I never thought I would ever do, even under the influence of substances. Most of them involved karaoke. My little bender was entirely the result of being in Chicago with Gracie getting free drinks from her little dive bar that is filled with many colorful characters with nicknames and amusing backstories. The most notable of the "I can't believe I actually did that" moments must have been when we went to a sort of crowded bar and I performed a karaoke rendition of "Sabatoge" by the Beastie Boys with a live band. Bad idea. There's a reason bands rehearse. Anyway, it was all good fun and I finally met Grace's good friend, my ethnically ambiguous doppleganger, Anya Chatterjee. It also turns out we have similar taste in men. Haha. In other important updates, Grace saved my parents two-hundred dollars on a Christmas gift for me by stealing someone else's green ipod mini and giving it to me. Yay for Grace.

I think Genencor is melting.

2005-07-18T03:36:50Z

For some reason I only feel like posting when it's 95 degrees. Apparently the Twin Cities are facing a dirth of air conditioners, so I had to order one from Best Buy online. The woman at the store said that it would take 6-8 weeks if I were to order one in from them, but the website said that I should get it between the 20th and 25th. It sure as shit better. Genencor's been acting kind of weird. Usually whenever we come home from anywhere, regardless of how long we've been gone, we can hear Genencor meowing as soon as we start messing with the lock. We come in and he's right at the door, meowing at us really loudly, then he usually tries to escape out the door and we kick him. He demands attention for a while, then goes and lies down somewhere. This is normal. The last couple of times I've come in, he hasn't come to the door. I find him sprawled out a few feet away. He looks at me and says "Mrr" then goes on with his lying around. All he does now is lie on his back in the middle of the floor. If you stir him enough, he'll get up and stumble a few steps before lying down somewhere else. Even shaking his food doesn't excite him anymore. I thought cats liked heat, but I think it's getting to him. He really hates the fan, though.

It is 95 degrees right now.

2005-06-23T18:57:55Z

I'm in the basement of the library because that's the coolest place I have access to. My apartment is too hot to be liveable. I walked to school today to have lunch with Jim Dawes, and the cafeteria was filled with little high school girls from a volley ball camp. Lunch was gross. I had some turkey and carrot sticks and sat in the sun by accident which made me sweaty and squinty. Jim was supportive as ever, and told me if I got a degree in law it would open up a lot of opportunities for me in the social justice type area. He gave me an article to read and said that he would look into internships. He was nice and everything, and wanted me to feel okay with not doing anything this summer. Of course my life still isn't fixed. I wonder sometimes if I need someone to kick me in the ass rather than tell me that I'm great. Anyway. It's hot. I'm going to be in the library until it closes at 4:30, then I'll go to the campus center for AC (slightly warmer than the 'brary), and head back around six when it's dropped to 93 degrees. I really want to take a nap somewhere. It was too hot and bright to sleep this morning. Raaaarr.

litost_again @ 2005-05-31T00:59:00

2005-05-31T06:11:54Z

I tried to write in my real journal today and it hurt my wrist. I physically can't write anymore. I've discovered that I really am completely useless. Why is it that life is always either tedious or painful? I'm too lazy to make sense right now. I'm too lazy to do anything. My brain has been fucked ever since the SATs. Every fucking summer is the exact same thing. It makes me want to start school again and be miserable with that. I thought I would be doing something worthwhile this summer, something I wanted to do. But that fell through because I'm a fucking failure. My brain can't do anything but watch dvds of six feet under now. I'm terrified of tomorrow when I have to drive through rush hour traffic to sit on the phone for four hours and not get any donations and feel like I'm imposing on people during their fucking dinners. That's always their big objection. How dare you call me during dinner. Well, sorry I'm not telepathic. Then I would know exactly when you're eating your fucking dinner that is so sacred it cannot be interrupted by a phone call. Even though they break their sacred meditation of consumption to actually answer the phone, they always feel so put out when they find out it's me. Bastards. I'm afraid I'm going to get fired if I don't get any donations. I'm afraid I can't take this anyway. Why doesn't it feel okay to be useless?

litost_again @ 2005-05-21T00:18:00

2005-05-21T05:42:39Z

I'm upset. I haven't gotten out much today, and my only major goal was to write. I found that I couldn't do it, because I am utterly devoid of any creative energies right now. If I wrote anything, it would come out completely forced and shitty, because I have to drag every single word out of my creatively devoid brain. That's kind of what my semester in my writing class was like. There was practically nothing that came out without a fight. And the fight doesn't make it better. You can see the struggle in the tension of the poorly-constructed sentences. I tried to look over some unfinished stuff I had, to see if I could work on those if I failed at starting something new. I got two different feelings about my past writing. The recent stuff, I thought, was absolutely terrible. Just ugly. The prose seemed clunky and careless even though I knew how careful I was being. The older stuff, from as long as two years ago, surprised me. It was all short little fragments, but actually quite well-written. I wondered how I did that then, what happened. I certainly can't do that now. BUT, they were fragments, and probably not going anywhere. I couldn't even build off of them, because I didn't know how to make a single one into a real story. It's like trying to make a cake completely out of frosting. This all makes me depressed, because I think about how I can't write now. Then I think that two years ago when I was working at it I had potential, but it only would have gone further had I continued to work at it. Now it's too late, and my contemporaries have surpassed me in ability. Plus I just plain suck now. These feelings of suckiness were further exacerbated by the fact that I accidentally stumbled across the archives of creative writing honors projects on our library website. I looked at the descriptions and just felt seriously inferior. These people knew what they were doing, had interesting themes to explore in unique forms. I couldn't think of a common theme for my collection, so in my honors proposal I just said that I would explore the genres of magical realism and surrealism. I assumed it would come together later, but I have no reason to think that. Every single fucking thing for the past year has had to have been worked out of me, even insignificant papers, and nothing has been fun. Nothing is going to figure itself out with time. It's been assumed among the faculty for a while that I was doing this honors project, but I still haven't formally heard anything since I turned in my proposal. Maybe they've changed their minds. I really don't deserve to be doing an honors project, anyway. But Colin just said that he enjoys reading me on the internet, so maybe I should forget high literature. I'm just too stupid.

My racist writing prof

2005-03-09T02:39:05Z

Today in class we were doing anonymous workshopping. We read this story told in the first person about a girl who bitched about Cosmo and Ashlee Simpson for a while, talked about how messy she is (she killed a mouse with a mousetrap and left mouse guts on her kitchen floor), then masturbated to Ashlee Simpson's picture on the cover of Cosmo. Anyway, Ping (our prof) asked if anyone got the sense that the narrator was male. It was pretty clear to everyone that it was a girl. She asked if it was common for American girls to be this messy, and we explained that here messiness is not very gender-specific anymore. Then she pointed out that the character was masturbating to a girl's image. She said, "MEN masturbate to women, not women." No one said anything, because everyone is kind of scared of her. But seriously, there are like four lesbians in the class, which is about one third of the class. She is even familiar with the sexuality of at least one of the lesbians. And this piece was written by one of the four lesbians. As Macalester students, we were aghast that our professor would tell us who we could and couldn't masturbate to!

Voices

2005-03-02T05:37:58Z

Today Colin was sitting at the table doing his linguistics homework, when he out of nowhere made a strange confession. For some time now, the voice in his head, the internal narrator, and in this instance, the guy prattling on about phonology and such, has been the voice of Buddy Cole from Kids in the Hall. It’s not something he can control—he suspects that it started when he was pronouncing things in his head, and somehow something went sibilant. My boyfriend’s internal voice is that of an effeminate gay stereotype. Maybe that’s why he’s been so interested in cooking.

Are you happy now, Natalie???

2005-02-28T04:56:51Z

Here are the top reasons why I don't ever update my livejournal:

1. It doesn't do my thousands of pages of reading for me.
2. It doesn't make me less tired.
3. It doesn't create brilliant works of prose for my writing workshop to promptly shoot down.

However, since Natalie really wants me to stop being an elitist and post something, I guess I'll try to muster something up. Nothing happens to me. I read thousands of pages of books, work at the box office, and try to think of things to write. The last one that was workshopped was for an assignment to write something haunting. The class informed me that it wasn't haunting, it was creepy. This might be true, but apparently no one else had any idea how to write haunting either, since all but one or two didn't come even close. My story was about a guy with a beard who happens to be a medical supplies distributor, and he meets some crazy girl who has never seen an IV before, so naturally they start going to hotel rooms to get off on using weird medical apparatuses on each other (knowledge of weird apparatuses courtesy my dad). My prof seemed to like it better than anyone else, which is okay because the kids in class are mostly not anything special. I'm kind of learning just how many people can make beautiful combinations of words. Practically anyone can do it! A lot of kids in my class have mastered the beautiful combinations of words. However, the more I see how common and easy it is, the more I realize that there is so much more to writing than good aesthetic structure and words. While it's cool if you can do it, the kids in my class still don't have anything worthwhile to say with their writing. Almost everything that's turned in is just describing quirky interactions between two people. Overall, very small themes. Pretty boring, nothing special. Not very stylistically experimental. I don't think there's a single Toni Morrison or Zadie Smith in my class. Possibly a Jhumpa Lahiri, but she is so overrated. Since everything has been done a million times over already, you have to be really good to be any good at all. Speaking of good, I'm terrible at piano. I'm playing Bach's Musette, which to someone who doesn't know much about music sounds impressive, but believe me, it's not, not at all. I just can't make it not sound crappy because my fingers don't find their places soon enough. I guess I can rule out piano on my list of possible unrealized talents. I have finally ruled out writing, the last remaining item, from my list of talents. I used to have a few things, but gradually throughout college, each has been crossed out. I'm coming to the painful realization that I'm nothing special. This makes me pissed at all those people who gave me the false impression that I was. Screw you guys! Damn you to hell!

Natalie's Quiz

2005-01-07T01:10:43Z

Following in my sisters' footsteps, it's the quiz. You can see the family resemblance.

THREE NAMES YOU GO BY:
1. Cassie
2. Cassandra
3. Hottie

THREE SCREEN NAMES YOU HAVE HAD:
1. Kafkagoddess
2. sassybyrd
3. Bungeee

THREE THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF:
1. My hands
2. My state of unrealized awesomeness
3. The fact that I can outsmart most people

THREE THINGS YOU HATE ABOUT YOURSELF:
1. Hapsburg chin
2. Insecurity
3. Self-perpetuating thought circles

THREE PARTS OF YOUR HERITAGE:
1. Alcoholic
2. Fundementalist
3. Scottish

THREE THINGS THAT SCARE YOU:
1. George W. Bush and company.
2. Freshwater depletion (thirty years and counting down)
3. Manufactured Consent. Thanks, Noam Chomsky.

THREE OF YOUR EVERYDAY ESSENTIALS:
1. Toothpaste
2. Prescription pills (to make my brain behave)
3. Caffeine

THREE THINGS YOU ARE WEARING RIGHT NOW:
1. A necklace
2. Badly dyed hair
3. Fingers

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE BANDS(/SINGERS):
1. Only three? Shit, umm… at the moment, Belle and Sebastian
2. Tilly and the Wall
3. The Dresden Dolls

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE SONGS AT PRESENT:
1. Bluejeans 2.0—Ladytron
2. What’s a Girl to Do?—Cristina (not Xtina)
3. Piazza, New York Catcher—Belle and Sebastian

THREE NEW THINGS YOU WANT TO TRY IN THE NEXT 12 MONTHS
1. Being in a riot
2. Getting arrested
3. Cooking something delicious

THREE THINGS YOU WANT IN A RELATIONSHIP (love is a given):
1. Trust
2. Good conversations
3. Massages

TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE
1. Even if there is such a thing as Truth, it is unknowable.
2. How could I lie to that face?
3. I am currently wearing pants.

THREE PHYSICAL THINGS ABOUT THE OPPOSITE SEX (or same) THAT APPEAL TO YOU:
1. Hands
2. Voice
3. Money scent

THREE THINGS YOU JUST CAN'T DO:
1. A kip-up. Believe me, I’ve tried.
2. Admit to Colin that I’m wrong.
3. Get enough sleep.

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE HOBBIES:
1. Sleeping
2. Doing homework
3. I don’t like these hobbies at all.

THREE THINGS YOU WANT TO DO REALLY BADLY RIGHT NOW:
1. I want to want to clean right now. But I don’t.
2. Be finished with cataloguing the stupid library.
3. Get my shit together.

THREE CAREERS YOU'RE CONSIDERING:
1. Writing
2. Human rights advocacy
3. Quota adorable white host on Japanese TV (this is not a joke.)

THREE PLACES YOU WANT TO GO ON VACATION:
1. French Guiana
2. Fiji
3. Kenya (Holy crap! Lions!)

THREE KID'S NAMES
1. Toregene (The name of the Mongolian queen and head of the entire Mongol empire for five years in the thirteenth century. Still the most powerful woman in history.)
2. Julia (mixed results with actual Julias I know.)
3. Potato

THREE THINGS YOU WANT TO DO BEFORE YOU DIE:
1. Vengeance
2. Become fluent in a second language
3. Not choke back vomit when thinking about American politics.