Two, actually. I don't remember what Janine said on Halloween that provoked me to respond with "I've kissed more girls than you!", but here's the story.

It was the summer after my first year at Santa Cruz, I was 19. Thinking I wouldn't actually go for it, my boyfriend at the time suggested that I make out with his friend, Kiki. I said I'd do it if he and her boyfriend did too, first. I knew they'd both be repulsed by the idea, and wanted to see how far they'd be willing to go to see me make out with a girl (was new for me, not for Kiki). Their lips mushed together for 5 or 10 seconds (I don't remember what we had agreed to) and their reaction to the whole thing was totally worth it. Then I fulfilled my end of the deal, which was to kiss Kiki with tongue for the same length of time.

The second girl I kissed was also during the same summer, at a party. Also a dare. And we got $20 each for it. It was filmed, or so Mike thought he had filmed it, but there was no video on the camera the next morning.

And that's that. I haven't kissed any more girls since, nor am I interested in doing so.

I never thought I'd hear my video game say to me, "Change the blood of the virgin with the blood of the whore, and be ready for anything in the moments that follow."

Some poets insist on truth in poetry, and for them, truth means a faithfulness to the facts that inspired a poem. To tell the truth, I'm a little disdainful of these people. I subscribe to Plato's idea that "Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history." To me, the truth of a poem is not in its factual accuracy but in the heft and weight of its emotional cadences. In my mind, it doesn't matter if your poem was inspired by John riding his shiny new red bike down Main Street in the mid-afternoon - if it makes your poem stronger, then change his name to Pedro, and have him ride a rusted blue bike by the pier at dusk.

A professor of mine once explained this difference between truth and history in a way I found very compelling, using as an example the difference between a soldier's daily logs and a wartime memoir. Memoirs, said my professor, are always partially fictional, although they are based in fact; the author of a memoir adds in imagined details - perhaps a certain gathering of the clouds in the sky, or the crease of a well-loved photographed glinting in the fading sunlight - to create a more cohesive narrative or a more potent scene. The logs and diaries are more factual, but the memoir is more true - it has the ability to evoke more of the real feeling of wartime, more of the emotional ambiance of life in the trenches, than the actual history of day-to-day events.

Most of the time, when I write a poem, my first intention is not to express, but to communicate - not simply to give vent to my own feelings and experiences, but to dissect them, to make sense of them, and to convey my understanding of them to others, in language whose brevity forces me to weigh my words carefully, to be exacting.

Once in a while, though, I write a poem purely for myself - because I know no other way to say what I need to say, because the structure of poetry gives me the allowance, the freedom to be cryptic and metaphorical and open. That's how this poem () was born:

Loneliness is like a tree
in the tundra. How do you tell
a friend that another friend is
somewhere close to crazy? Tonight
I learned twice. In the morning
I am seeing a doctor. She
is giving me magic pills. They will
make me thinner, more energetic,
happier. I am afraid that nothing
will be real. I don't remember,
I can't conceive of what love
feels like, only a litmus test
of what I would miss. Only loss.
Flying causes onions, he says. I
am the one who taught him. I am not
a butterfly. Onions are a sign
of life. Cackling in the pot. Rouge
down your face. Did I do this?
Did you want this? My mother is growing
romaine lettuce. Her garden
is suffering from a romaine lettuce
infestation, but her friends can't
manage to keep it alive. I wish
my eyes were greener than romaine lettuce,
greener than the pond my bus passed
this afternoon, greener than Christmas.
If I bathe long enough, maybe I will
smell so good that it will be okay that
I don't remember how to feel.

Everything in this poem is factual; everything in this poem is true. It was a real, genuine, stream-of-conscious account of my frame of mind during a really terrible time in my life. I was about to start taking antidepressants. One of my closest friends had just been hospitalized for a psychotic breakdown, and I had to break the news to our mutual friends. I was hung up on a breakup already half a year old, a breakup that I was convinced I had perpetuated by encouraging every early friendly overture between my ex and his new girl. So I wrote this, a poem not really intended to be a poem at all and certainly never intended for a general audience.

But time changes everything. A year and a half later, I'm working on putting together my portfolio to apply to graduate schools for creative writing, and raw material is raw material, no matter from what depth it was pulled. As I was trawling through years of my writing, some of the lines in this poem caught my eye - so I gave it a title, added in some stanza breaks, made some minor revisions, and brought it to my workshop:

Without Birds

Loneliness is a tree
in the tundra. How do you tell
a friend that another friend is
somewhere close to crazy? Tonight
I learned twice. In the morning

I am seeing a doctor. She
is giving me magic pills. They will
make me thinner, more energetic,
happier. I am afraid

that nothing will be real.
I don't remember, I can't
conceive of what love
feels like. Only a litmus test
of what I would miss. Only loss.

Flying causes onions, he says. I
am the one who taught him. I am not
a bird. Onions are a sign
of life. Cackling in the pot. Rouge
down your face. Did I do this?

Did you want this? My mother is growing
romaine lettuce. Her garden
is suffering from a romaine lettuce
infestation, but her friends can't
manage to keep it alive. I wish

my eyes were greener than romaine lettuce,
greener than Christmas, greener
than the pond where
there are no birds.

I've seen hundreds of poems go through the workshop process, and I know how it works. A poem has to stand on its own - the poet cannot bolster it with explanations and lengthy prefaces. Once I give a poem to an audience, it isn't only mine anymore. I know this. And yet I was unprepared for how my class responded to this poem.

Most of them openly admitted that they just didn't "get it" - they loved "flying causes onions," they loved how crazy it sounded, but they had no idea what it meant. The professor concocted a narrative for the poem; in his version of events, I'm recounting the madness of someone I love, and the language of the poem is the language of crazy people, a complicated representational language that can even make sense to the crazy person and those close to him, but which is nonsensical to everyone else.

Everything in this poem was true, but I couldn't explain - I was not prepared to explain - to my class that a tree in the tundra was the image for depression that I created with my therapist. I couldn't explain that "flying causes onions" was something that my ex had actually said to me, months after our breakup, that I had in some metaphorical sense taught him how to "fly," and that like the bird you are supposed to let go of because you love it enough, he flew away without returning. I couldn't explain that "onions" represented the tears of that separation, that green eyes were an impossible ideal I had always wanted for myself. I couldn't explain that the nonsense they liked didn't come from some other delusional mind, but from my own - and that I wasn't really delusional, only lost in the shadow of a reality I can't even describe anymore. I couldn't explain that the revisions they suggested - getting rid of the third party, making the man in the poem be the crazy one, telling him that I am not a bird - were not true.

I was completely unprepared for my helplessness in the face of this revision process. I was unprepared for the sadness and loss that overtook me as I tried to work on this poem, for the sense that somehow I really was mad - mad to have written it, mad to have tried to workshop it. I had thought that a year and a half would be enough distance to revise this poem with the levity and ruthlessness that good art deserves, and I was unprepared for how near those experiences still felt.

That breakup was two years ago () to the day that I brought "Without Birds" into my poetry workshop. I came home and felt ridiculous for still keeping track of this, except that, in all earnestness, I have a more tenacious grasp on who I am now than I ever did then - and I think I could be better at this whole business of living and loving now than I was capable of two years ago.

And in the face of my scars and callouses, I'm still a poet. So I'm still revising - one day, one word, one line break, and one stanza change at a time.

Without Birds

Flying causes onions, he says.
I am the one who tells him
that this is not madness. I am not
a bird. In the morning

I am seeing a doctor. She is giving
me magic pills. I am afraid

that nothing will be real.
I don't remember, I can't
conceive of what love
felt like. Only a litmus test
of what I would miss. Only loss.

Onions are a sign
of life. Cackling in the pot. Rouge
down his face. Did I do this?

Did you want this? My mother is growing
romaine lettuce. In the tundra
there is a tree
that is not green. I wish

my eyes were greener than romaine lettuce,
greener than Christmas, greener
than the pond where
there are no birds.

---

This entry is my submission for therealljidol Season 5, Week 9: Unprepared. If you enjoyed this entry, please vote for me in this week's poll.

Constructive criticism of the poem in this piece is welcome and appreciated.

Not a wedding ring - posted to prove to Mum that I didn't lose it :)

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Да-да, меня можно любить и вот так.

(10:12:47 AM) Carrie: "[My boss and his wife] asked me if we wanted to be on their Trivia Bowl team in February (the 22nd I think).  IT would be us, [this couple], [that couple], and [another couple].  He is looking for a team representing generations.  What did you think?  I know it is during musical, but think of it as a night with just you and me and no kid."
(10:12:51 AM) Carrie: my man is so romantic
(10:13:10 AM) Carrie: then again, I am the one who joined Scholastic Bowl in order to spend more time around a guy I liked

SERIOUSLY YOU GUYS

[edit] Okay, okay, I admit there were multiple guys I liked who were on our team. Oh hush. :-p

First, I would like to say that I watched the damn woot-off for two days waiting for the bag of crap only to have the servers fall apart as I clicked the order button -- three times. But that's neither here nor there, and really in the grand scheme of things it was $8 that probably served me better in the form of dinner at Poncho's tonight!

Today's drama was brought to you by Microsoft courtesy of the XBox 360. You would think that this drama would be caused by the massive update they pushed, which seems to have broken many an XBox in its short lifetime. But no. Ours was a different sort of drama.

You see, once upon a time, Steve decided that he was going to be awesome and bought us some of those points so we could download some games. He used his Canadian credit card which, unbeknown to all of us at the time, evidently locked the XBox account to Canada forevermore. Forget the fact that the thing has never seen the outside of the Phoenix Metro area; the XBox Live account thought it was Canadian and it would not let us convince it otherwise.

The account wouldn't listen to reason from the Support people at Microsoft either, when we called. Turns out that there are lots of legalities that prevent them from allowing an XBox Live account to be transferred to a different country. So... an hour and a half on hold later, Steve ended up with a new XBox Live account (we can still access the old one and we have full access to the games we've purchased but if we want to use that account for saved data we have to redo everything on the game) and 500 points of credits, which is actually more than the message boards we looked at indicate that other people have gotten. Mind you, we'll have to pay for two overlapping months while the time on our old XBox Live account expires, but I guess that that's negligible.

On the other hand... Steve making that phone call resulted in us being able to watch the online content offered by Netflix on our 52" screen TV courtesy of the instant viewing queue that was released two days ago. So I guess this was drama that turned into win?

nothing is wrong with my ear. have antibiotics (in case of dental abcess? I dunno) & vicodin at least. Just once I want them to find a REASON when I hurt. :(

...and he falls down the stairs!


The stalking, and the end part from my POV.
eta: by end part, I mean middle. Apparently I stopped watching the video in the same place I lost interest irl.

Как меня задолбал этот ник "джеммикс". Так что теперь я с другим юзернеймом, такие дела, привет.

I know that I've been waiting for this vacation for a loooong time, and it's going waaaay too fast, but it sure is awesome while it lasts.

Tuesday I spent most of the day reading books in various locations around our hotel, trying to give housekeeping time to get into our room. Yesterday I decided to venture out a bit. I visited the downtown library branch, which had 0 quiet, comfy places to read. Then I went out to see a movie. I only got lost about 3 times, and ended up at another library branch, where they kindly allowed me to use internet to figure out where I was going. Finally made it to the movie theater. The first movies they were showing started at 3:00, so the ticket booth didn't open until 2:45. I was the first person in the theater, which was weird. I also had to go back up to the front to tell them to turn on the sound for my movie. But then everything was good--I enjoyed the first 90% of Molly Hartley. The rest was totally, totally lame. Then I came back to the hotel.

Earlier in the day, while I was looking at what was playing at local movie theaters, I discovered that the closest theater to our hotel (the Alamo Drafthouse) was doing a Labyrinth sing-along. NO WAY I was missing that. So, Rick, his boss and I all went down for that. It was hella fun--the theater has food (including many vegetarian options!), so we got dinner there. We all got little gift bags that included supplies for making a sock puppet (a CRAFT!) and various props to go with the movie. It was so so much fun, and I would be at that theater all the time if we lived in Austin. I am very, very sad that we will not be around for their annual Lord of the Rings movie marathon with accompanying hobbit feast. How awesome is that?

Today Rick gets done at about noon, so I only have a few hours to loll around in bed this morning. I think we might hop over and visit the capitol, as Rick has never been there. I don't know how he avoided it--in Louisiana it seems like we took a field trip to the capitol building once a month or so, but I guess it's a longer drive down here in Texas.

Tomorrow we wake up early and drive to Houston for a NASA tour! Then we are planning to camp that evening and hit RenFest again on Saturday. Saturday night we make our way back to south Houston and then Sunday we fly out around 11.

While I hate that this vacation is moving so quickly, we have so many more fun things left to do! It's hard not to be excited about that. However, I peeked at my work e-mail yesterday, and it made me upset and gave me nightmares (seriously), so I kind of got a preview to what I'm going back to on Monday. :o/