Moving On

Hi friends, family, and anonymous Poems About Oranges readers!

I've had a lot of fun writing about books, baking, and my life here, but I've been bothered for a long time about the lack of focus at PAO. I started working on this blog for career purposes, and I chose to cast my net very wide so that I had plenty to write about. My goal was to cultivate an active online presence and generate plenty of writing samples, and I got those things while I needed them.

But this blog no longer relates to my career goals, or to a lot of my interests. I still love reading, of course, but I post my reviews on Goodreads. And I still love baking, but I don't do much of it anymore because I've changed the way I eat.

That's why I have decided to retire Poems About Oranges and move onto another blog project: In the Key of Vegan. I've been experimenting with vegan cooking, and I wanted a way to document that experience and to maybe educate some folks about how genuinely delicious cooking without animal products can be.

You've probably noticed that I'm pretty invested in environmental issues, and this new project will hopefully allow me to make a small difference in how my readers think about food and their impact on climate change--even if I only inspire one reader to try one recipe, then that's a start!

I hope that you come check out the new blog or friend me on Goodreads. This has been a great experience, but I'm looking forward to the change!

With thanks and affection,
Lesley

Easter, "which is natural which is infinite which is yes"

For a lot of different reasons, the last few weeks have been rough. Like day-old stubble rough. Like poorly poured concrete rough. Like bouncing down a mountain made of pumice stone rough.

Well, maybe not that rough, but they haven't been exactly bunny soft, either. Luckily, today was Easter, my favorite of all my family's holidays.

We frosted cookies . . .

and hunted for the golden egg, and played our candy guessing games, and--for some reason--thought that this was a good thing to do to our beloved grandfather on a solemn religious holiday:

Every year about the time spring rolls around, I feel like I need Easter, a second chance, a new year full of baby-soft green grass and egg-blue sky, and every year--wonderfully enough--I get it. And "(now the ears of my ears awake and / now the eyes of my eyes are opened)," and there's nothing to do but to enjoy it.

I haven't read a lot of e. e. cummings, but I always think of this poem on fantastically beautiful, happy days like this one. Happy Easter, all.

[i thank You God for most this amazing]

By 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 love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of all nothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginably You?

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

I never thought I'd say this, but . . .

I think I've lost months to watching NCAA basketball. I mean, I've also been busy with friends and travel, which are great, but I feel like I've spent most of my nights this spring happily planted on my favorite bar stool in downtown Lawrence watching what has been probably my favorite KU basketball team ever. Later in the next month or two, look for posts on

• LONDON!!!
• Reading about London, in London
• A few of my favorite novels so far this year
• The Best American Poetry 2011

In the meantime, these guys--these guys I like, win or lose:

Young, Robinson, and Taylor via The Kansas City Star's championship slideshow.

Elijah Johnson on this season:

"From Day 1, we heard about how we weren't going to do this or we weren't going to do that," Johnson said. "Ever since the [Morris] twins decided they were going to the draft and we lost all our seniors -- for us to get this far with the worst-talented team that I've been a part of at Kansas, I'm proud of this team. I love this team. I'll remember this team forever."

(Tyshawn, I'll miss yoooouuuuu!)

My Year in Lists: 2011

Reading

• Final count: 47 books, including fiction, nonfiction, and poetry!
• Most fun: The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, which I read twice! I also read the first five sequels in the Mary Russell series in a matter of months.
• Biggest surprise: Eat, Pray, Love. I can admit that I found it profoundly moving when I read it last spring. Sometimes books live up to their hype.
• Greatest accomplishment: Vanity Fair. It was looooooooong. Fortunately, its awesomeness was proportional to its length.
• Highest quality to quantity ratio: Winesburg, Ohio. Written about small town Ohio in the early 20^th century, Sherwood Anderson's tiny little collection of short stories was phenomenally beautiful, sad, and honest. I have no idea why I left it collecting dust on my To Read bookshelf for so long.
• Best poetry: Sleeping Preacher. 
• Fictional character I was most in love with: It’s a tie between Mary Russell’s Holmes or Mr. Thornton from North and South. (Feel free to draw your own conclusions from this!)

Television

I was all about period dramas this year. My favorites were

• The absolutely brilliant Downton Abbey from Masterpiece Theater.
• Granada’s beautiful 1980s interpretations of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. 
• The VampireDiaries. (Hey, there’s enough Civil War in there that I’m going to count it!) 

All three of these were superbly written and beautifully produced and addictive as all get out. Thank you, Netflix!

Music

What didn’t I listen to this year? Here’s a playlist of a few of my favorite songs from a few of my favorite artists this year. Most of these albums didn't come out in 2011, but they've all spent a lot of time on my iPod in 2011. 

Real Life

This year was tumultuous, at best, and while I was never bored, I was never quite at ease, either. 

The good:

• Three good friends got married and another got pregnant for the first time. 
• I got a new job that I love and am consistently challenged by.
• I traveled to Denver and Winfield and Manhattan, Kansas had a great time with friends at all three locations. 
• I did a lot of yoga and played a lot of softball and even did a bit of belly dancing. 
• I started a book club with my friends.
• I submitting my writing for publication again for the first time in years, and had a poem accepted for publication sometime in 2012!

The bad:

• I had an icky bout of bursitis that kept me on the couch for a good chunk of the fall. 
• My university went through a substantial restructuring process, and not everyone made it out unscathed. 
• My mom was in the hospital twice and recovering from surgery for a good part of the year.
• My grandma was in the hospital for a stroke and had to move to a nursing home with her husband in the fall.
• My grandpa was in the hospital twice, first for a hip injury and again for blood clots a few weeks ago.

The confusing: 

• Even awesome new jobs can be terribly stressful, baffling, brain-addling things.
• I set aside my first savings for retirement and taught myself about a bunch of grown-up stuff like building credit and buying cars and health insurance deductibles. Yay responsibility?
• I spent a lot of time thinking about Occupy Wall Street and the recession and global warming and the crimes at Penn State. The future seems more complicated and challenging than it ever has before.

When I look back on this year, I think that I’ll remember it as the first time that I realized that whenever life gets harder, sadder, or scarier, it also gets more interesting, gains a richer texture, becomes more precious and vital in its complexity. Life is a bit like beer: yes, Bud Lite (i.e. college life) is easy to drink, but it’s the bitter complexity of the hops that makes an IPA (being a 28-year-old) memorable. 

I’m glad I was here for 2011, whatever challenges it’s held, and I’m glad I got the chance to drink it to its dregs. So if you're lucky enough to live in the Midwest, go find yourself a Boulevard Single-Wide IPA and have a happy new year. See you again in 2012!

The Vampire Diaries: A Comparative Review

So for the past couple of months, I've spent a lot of time holed up in my apartment due to some epic hip pain. I have bursitis in my hips. That's right, bursitis. And, yes, this does mean that I'm an 80-year-old trapped in a 28-year-old's body: I also spend a lot of time cat cuddling and tea drinking and thrift shopping and grouching at the noisy youngsters who walk past my bedroom window and staying in to quietly listen to NPR. I'm cool with it.  ;)

Anyway, my bad flare up has had one good consequence: I've had the chance to spend a lot of time sitting on my couch,  icing my hips, and watching The Vampire Diaries. Created by The CW, The Vampire Diaries is one of those shows that shouldn't be good but is. It's a vampire show written for teenagers, but don't think Twilight--think True Blood with more high school and less nudity. 

The Vampire Diaries

The Vampire Diaries follows a 17-year-old girl named Elena who just happens to have two really fantastic looking vampire brothers fall in love with her. She spends a lot of time tenderly embracing one of them (Stefan) and kind of flirting with the other one (Damon) and fending off other mean old vampires who just happen to not be in love with her. And, of course, there are some witches and werewolves hanging about and a lot of relationship drama and witty repartee. Add in a whole lot of painfully good looking people and a dash of gratuitous violence and it makes for a heady, addictive mix. It's not quite as clever as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but The Vampire Diaries has more plot twists than a spy novel and surprisingly complex characters who actually manage to grow from episode to episode (which is more than a lot of TV series can claim). 

But after the first few episodes, I kept thinking, "Hmmmm, the names Damon and Stefan sure sound familiar." That's when I realized that the show was based on The Vampire Diaries novels written by L. J. Smith which I had owned and read when I was all of 13! I remembered not being a big fan of the series (I'm pretty sure that I sold them at a garage sale when I was in high school), but I adored (and--I will admit it--still own) her other four series: The Secret Circle, Dark Visions, The Forbidden Game, and Night World. I read and re-read those books, like, a lot. And I'm secure enough in my intellectual and literary tastes to admit it.  ;)

The Secret Circle and Dark Visions. (Oh, yes, I did find these on one of my bookshelves!)

All of these books involve witches, vampires, werewolves, psychics, or some combination of these supernatural types, and they're all very romantic and soul mate-y and "tragic" and probably horribly obnoxious, but I loved them all. I doubt that they would hold up to being reread by my adult brain, but I can't regret those hours I spent as a lonesome, awkward, angry, dreamy junior high student, laying in my bed re-reading those novels, wishing that something, anything, exciting would happen to me. (Heck, I wouldn't have minded a bite-y vampire boyfriend, so long as I had one!) Those books were just right for me when I read them, no matter how horrifying I would find them now, with their lovely, thoughtless heroines and their menacing, controlling supernatural boyfriends. 

The newest The Vampire Diaries edition.

But, of course, I had to at least try to reread The Vampire Diaries novels to see how closely they followed the show, and this proved to be one of those rare occasions where the screen version of something vastly improves upon the original text. 

The writers and producers at The CW have (thankfully) taken a lot of liberties with the novels. The books are abjectly awful; I made it through the first one only by reading every fourth word and flipping a few pages ahead whenever I was annoyed or horrified or confused by a character, a plot point, or an adjective (this happened a lot). The main character was awful, the writing was insipid (yes, tell me more about how Elena's furniture was Victorian cherry wood and she wore a peach colored silk ribbon in her hair, because that is both realistic and vitally important to my understanding of her character!), and the plot was mainly about how making out with vampires is not just fun--it's fulfilling! I mean, these books make Twilight read like Hemingway, all precision and restraint and deep, deep feeling. 

When will I ever learn not to read books whose cover blurbs start with "A DEADLY LOVE TRIANGLE"?!

But I would still highly recommend the show, no matter how sordid its origins. It does a great job of yanking out the best parts of the original novel's story-line and trashing the rest: Elena's personality is (thank goodness) drastically different, she's given a little brother and a slew of friends with compelling story-lines of their own, and the tumultuous relationship between the two vampire brothers is probably the most complicated and meaningful relationship in the show. Instead of being about vampires or (*shudder*) soul-mates, The Vampire Diaries manages to be about the strength of family bonds, self-transformation and redemption, and accepting one's past. 

And let's be honest: who would ever turn down two really pretty vampire boyfriends for the price of one? 

(Don't forget to wipe the drool off your keyboard before you go, ladies!)

Purposeful Sight

I've been reading a lot of fashion blogs recently. I love them: they're like subscribing to Vogue, but funkier, more egalitarian, more influenced by thrift store style, and much quicker (they change rapidly in response to street style). Even for someone who's never been known as a fashionista, they're strangely invigorating.

One of my favorite fashion bloggers Jessica Quirk. 

I wish I could say that this has substantially changed my wardrobe--in a small way, it probably has--but it has changed a good deal about the way I see the world. I notice aesthetic details more often now, most often in others' clothing but in design in general. When I see a woman who looks stylish, I don't just think, "She looks cute," I think, "Look at that interesting ribbing on her cardigan. And what makes those shoes a little different? The higher ankle? I like her choice of watch size, etc."

I've made an active study of these details in the hopes of improving my own work wardrobe. I've taught myself to see differently to the point where, believe it or not, it's almost second nature to me to notice the impact of individual accessories on an outfit. To say the least, this is not something I would have ever thought I'd be doing!

But I wonder if what we choose to see always comes at a cost to those details we choose to miss. The human eye--and mind--can only take in so much at a time. It's a survival tactic: if we pay attention to every blade of grass on the plains, the fluffy clouds in the blue sky, and the grasshoppers zinging around our feet, we might miss the irate buffalo barreling toward us. We tend to see the most important thing in any given setting by nature. Charging buffalo: important. That cloud that kind of looks a little like a buffalo: maybe we'll notice that when we're not running for our lives.

Watch out!

But in the absence of a buffalo, the first things we notice are what we've trained ourselves to see by inclination and mental habit. This is why one of my first creative writing teachers encouraged our class to eavesdrop on others. She told us to keep our ears open on buses, in hallways, in our dorm rooms, to listen shamelessly whenever someone talked loudly on a cell phone in public. She said it would give us an ear for natural dialog, a familiarity with spontaneous human language which would seep into our own writing. I've always been thankful for her advice--it makes public transportation far more interesting!--and because it actually works: along with my writing style, she has altered my vision in some small way forever.

If you subject me to your cell phone conversation on the bus, be assured that I will be listening to you.

People choose their own systems of vision every day, seeing things and events as proofs of whatever interests, theories, assumptions, and prejudices that they have adopted most fervently (or allowed to be ingrained in them). We see the world through a lens shaped by our past, by our culture's ideologies, and by ourselves, a  lens that actively reshapes the world whether we want it to or not. Without ever knowing why, a depressed person driving home from work will see gray clouds, all the lousy drivers cutting them off, and roadkill strewn along the median, while a relatively happy person might see the light shifting through the clouds, the green fields nearby, and that nice little Toyota that got back into the right lane right on time. The road may stay the same, but a person's state of mind changes everything.

Distorted vision.

My point is that it's important to be conscientious about the sight you choose to exercise in the world. Seeing is not passive but an active reshaping of our surroundings, our relationships, and, consequently, our lives. I may choose to be more cognizant of fashion, yes, but I don't want to forget how to see others' personal strengths and struggles and uniqueness. I want to remember how to look past nail polish and bias cuts to see people how their friends and mothers must see them, with kindness and understanding and completeness, as people whose lives stand for far more than what they wear, where they work, or who they text as they wait to get off at their bus stop and walk home.

Opinionated

In the last year, I've found myself having more opinions, a lot more opinions: more opinions on music, on cultural figures, on literature, on fashion, on politics, and even on what I think are the best ways to live.


On the whole, I think this is great. I have more opinions not because I've started thinking more (trust me, I've always done far too much of that), but because I spent a large chunk of my growing up years thinking that the best way to get by in life was to not have any opinions. It seemed like a good way to get through the world without conflicts, without commitments, without ever making mistakes.

But now I know better: being afraid of having opinions doesn't lead to universal ease and understanding, it leads to being a damned milquetoast. Being opinionated obviously put a person at risk for experiencing disagreements and making mistakes, but not having an opinion means that a) you're not paying attention, b) you're not interested, or c) you don't have enough guts to try to be anyone at all, even yourself. To me, being opinionated means not that you're incapable of being wrong, but that you're confident and grown-up enough to handle being wrong every once in awhile.

But note the "on the whole" up above. What makes being opinionated less than perfect is that it's not all that useful for writing. There are some types of writing that are built on opinion and argument, of course--opinion columns, blogs, persuasive and academic writing of all kinds--but the types of writing I love aren't at their best when they're opinionated. Personal essays and poetry thrive on ambiguity, on challenging the pat answer, on withholding judgment for as long as possible for the sake of complexity, honesty, and surprise.

Keats's negative capability is probably the most famous statement of this--"when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason"--but I like Robert Frost's version, too: "No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader." I like my writing best when I've gotten from beginning to end and realized that I've turned around on my initial opinion--I don't necessarily make a 180, but at the very least I prefer to end up at an odd angle from where I started. It helps if I write about topics that I don't already have a firm opinion about; it's much better for me to start of feeling intrigued or confused instead of confident.

Writing like this helps me to remember to hold my opinions lightly. They're great, obviously, and probably 100% correct and as brilliant as I am (like, duh!), but writing helps me remember that the world is a fantastically big, complex, and surprising place; we're all muddling through as best we can, and all of our dearest beliefs and conceptions of the world may be proven absolutely false tomorrow. Writing helps me to remember that it doesn't matter whether I'm proven right or wrong in my views, only that I must remember to laugh when I'm proven wrong and to be gracious on those rare, glorious occasions when I can call myself something like "right."

How Way Leads on to Way

I've been away. You may have noticed.  :P

My new job has taken a lot of adjusting to these past few weeks. I like the work, but traveling back and forth has eaten up much of my free time, and I'm still getting use to it. On top of that, my poor, lovely, stubborn mother has been in the hospital with an unusually nasty strain of pneumonia. She's back home and feeling better now, but I was worried for her. So, dear blog, I'm sorry, but you just haven't been a priority.

But since I've last visited, I've been reading a lot and enjoying my Netflix subscription and trying (trying!) my best to take it easy in my time off. I've been in a particularly fun sort of reading/television watching path--it's one of my favorite things about being out of school and being able to direct my own reading. I choose books with perfect freedom and whimsy, and I never run out of new strands of interest to follow. Each new book I read has the potential to sling me off into some new interest that I never expected to love. In reading as in life, as Frost puts it, "way leads on to way."

Most recently, I've been loving all things Sherlock Holmes, which I never in my life thought I would be interested in. I used to think that I didn't like mystery novels or crime stories, and police detectives in tweeds smoking pipes seemed like the dullest thing possible. But here's what happened:

• I watched that fantastically witty Doctor Who episode where Agatha Christie solves a real-life murder mystery involving a giant space wasp. (Yes, that episode is as awesome as it sounds.) -->
• Curious about Christie, I read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder on the Orient Express, and Death Comes as the End. They were great--very clever and well written and British and astute. -->
• Thinking that I now liked old-fashioned British mysteries, I rented the new Sherlock Holmes action movie with Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law. I surprised myself by really, really enjoying it. -->
• Intrigued by the eccentricity of Holmes in the movie (drug use, bizarre fits of melancholia, a deep and curious jealousy of his friend Dr. Watson, etc.), I spent some time researching Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle on Wikipedia.  -->
• Curious about Doyle's writing and the oddity of Holmes as a character, I read two of the Holmes novels (A Study in Scarlet and The Hound of the Baskervilles). They were fun, easy reading, as clear and fast-paced as if they'd been written in the late 20th century, not the late 19th. -->
• Because I enjoyed these novels, I decided to read Laurie R. King's The Beekeeper's Apprentice (which features Holmes in later life, living in semi-retirement in the 1920s and 1930s). -->
• King's version of Holmes was fantastically appealing, even better than the original! On top of the typical Holmes-style plot lines, there was a brilliant feminist female sleuth to keep Holmes in check (Mary Russell!) and a romantic sub-plot and really cool flapper clothing. So I read the next two novels in the series (The Monstrous Regiment of Women and A Letter of Mary) and loved them. -->
• Finally, I took Netflix's suggestion and started watching the Granada Sherlock Holmes series from the 1980s and 1990s with Jeremy Brett. I loved it and spent a good chunk of this weekend watching Holmes chase down Professor Moriarty and a dozen other amateur thieves and murderers. I never, ever thought I'd have an opinion about Dr. Watson as a narrator or the nattiness of Victorian-era men's clothing, but now I do. So yay!

So what's next? Inspired by King's Mary Russell novels, Downton Abbey's portrayal of pre-World War I Britain, and Ishiguro's conflicted post-World War II butler in  The Remains of the Day, I'll probably track down some more great modernist British literature. But who knows where I'll end up next?

Goodness, isn't reading fun?  :D

Winter Is Magical!

And then you have to go outside. Gah! The cold--it burns!

In case you don't live in Kansas (or are an inveterate agoraphobe who never leave his/her house), it's been snowy and then cold and then snowy and then really, really cold again. I haven't been going outside much. In fact, pretty much all I've been doing is sitting on my couch attired in sweatpants, a hoodie, thick socks, and a lap-loving cat. My constant companions have been soup and herbal tea and young adult fantasy novels (Suzanne Collins and Phillip Pullman!) and a very cozy knitted blanket. Occasionally a Boulevard Amber Ale (my new favorite winter beer) makes it into the mix. Aaaaand that's about all the variation you're going to get.

Besides hibernating, I've also been extremely busy at work with the beginning of the semester and enrollment season. I like being busy and all, but dang! I don't even want to think about how many enrollment emails I've been sending. Obviously, I've been completely unmotivated to turn on my computer at home for blogging. The thought of it makes my fingers ache.

All in all, things have been good here. Maybe I'll get back into the swing of blogging soon. Or maybe it's time to start Catching Fire. Hmmm . . . decisions, decisions, decisions!

2010 Recap

As much as I'm looking forward to 2011, 2010 has already been incredibly novel for me. My life has changed drastically in the last year, and so have I. So instead of posting a list of resolutions or expectations for the new year, here's my list of my favorite novelties of 2010--I think they're worth commemorating.

1. Singlehood: Breakups are hell, but, damn, I love doing what I want to do when I want to do it. There are benefits to being single--I'm starting to remember that.  :)
2. New Job: No, make that three new jobs, including two part-times and my first real nine to five (not to mention the occasional freelance editing work!). Entering the working world has been challenging, but I love paying my own way.
3. New Apartment: Downtown Lawrence. Hardwood floors. Big, bright windows. Terrible insulation and laughable wiring and one very pathetic window unit. But I love, love, love it.
4. New Friends: You know who you are!
5. Yoga: I am officially that obnoxious yoga-obsessed person! I think a lot about posture now, and balance, and the importance of feeling strong every day.
6. Healthy Living: In general, I've eaten a lot better, drank a lot less, and worked out a lot more than I have since before I started grad school. It's been great, and it hasn't felt like discipline, really--more like setting myself up to feel good every day.
7. Music: I've been listening to music constantly these past few months, especially more of the ladies (Ingrid Michaelson, Kate Nash, Nina Simone, Cat Power, Erykah Badu, and Janelle Monae) and indie stuff (Ratatat, Arcade Fire, Yeasayer, and Phoenix). I've missed it!
8. TV Obsessions: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Doctor Who have improved the hell out of my life. Thank you, Netflix, Joss Whedon, and BBC!
9. New Style: My hair is red again, and shorter, and saucier, with stiff little bangs. I wear my big nerdy hipster glasses every day now. I've bought all of my favorite clothes within the past six months. I look and feel like a whole new woman.
10. New Ways of Thinking: I've worked hard this year to think in healthier ways. I try to be kinder to myself, more understanding of others, and more protective of my own mental health. It's hard work, challenging my own assumptions about the world and shedding my mental poisons, but it's work that has made me feel happier and healthier than anything else this year.

As far as years go, 2010 has been both incredibly difficult and richly rewarding, and I expect nothing less from 2011. So I'll leave you with this, one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite books of 2010: Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet.

People have (with the help of their conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult: everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us.

Thanks, Rilke, and happy 2011 to all!

Nerd Girls

Velma Dinkley from Scooby Doo

Annie Potts from Ghostbusters

Tavi Gevinson, author of The Style Rookie, a fashion blog

Me, newly shorn and be-spectacled

Six Things Worth Knowing About Me

1. I'm the kind of person who has to carry a Band-Aid in my backpack at all times. I used to carry Neosporin, too. If placed in the right habitat, I'm almost comically prone to cuts and scrapes and bruises.
2. I kind of love bad weather. I hate getting cold or wet like anyone else, but there's something I enjoy about a semi-catastrophic weather forecast. Snow? Tornadoes? Big windy electrical storms? Exciting! I think it comes from all those tornado drills and warnings in elementary school. We'd all get to hang around in the basement where the kilns and art projects were kept. We were safe-ish and bored and we got to goof off for an hour or two. When bad weather is imminent, the world seems to sing with gleeful possibility: I always know that true disaster is unlikely but that I'm pretty much guaranteed an hour or so of a break from my regular day.
3. When I was little, I used to run everywhere. I think it's a sign that, deep down, I'm pretty much excited about everything.
4. I really, really, really dislike fake laughter, especially the kind that ineffectually masks anger or displeasure or nervousness.
5. When I was younger, I never thought I would like getting socks for Christmas; having a sparklingly clean kitchen; NPR; or drinking boring old caffeine-free, sugarless herbal tea. Sometimes I wonder what else I'll come to enjoy as I get older. Watching the six o' clock news? Cooked spinach? Sweaters with ribbons and spangles on them? The sky's the limit!
6. I've never particularly wanted my life to be like a TV show or a movie (though I really wouldn't pass up meeting a time traveling adventurer in a snazzy suit, if given the opportunity), but I wouldn't mind life being a little bit more like a novel: it would show more unity, have clearer themes, and have most of the duller parts lopped out.
   

Feel the Burn

I've been a little out of commission this week. I didn't expect to be, but my car got broken into over the weekend, causing a helluvalot of unnecessary hassle. I think that everything's finally under control on my end, but I'm still pissed about it. I feel like I've been gritting my teeth all week.

On a related note, I've been going to the gym a lot recently. It cuts into my Buffy time and my writing time, but it's the best thing in the world to do when I'm feeling stressed or angry or frustrated.

I used to think that people who liked to work out were nuts--completely off their rockers. But about two years ago, after six months of daily bike riding through hilly State College, I realized that I was addicted. I needed those endorphins. I needed the release of pushing my body to work through tension and pain, that feeling of reaching deep and steeling myself against that burn in my legs.

So now I work out. I like the gym: I like the elliptical machine, I like free weights, and I think that I'm really going to like yoga, which I did for the first time ever last night. It burned (I can't hold my arms at shoulder height for more than about three seconds today), but it made me feel really strong to settle into a pose and hold it, and hold it, and keep on holding it, even when I was shaking and tired. Somehow, that burn helped put out the burn of anger in my gut. I feel a little less pissed today.  A little.  ;)

Random Five for Friday

1. Dead Tired. I've been planning to write a blog post all this week, but I didn't expect for my travel hangover to last quite so long. I have been beat. My trip to State College was fantastic, as was my family reunion in Marion, but they made for a whole lot of traveling and not a whole lot of sleeping. So my post in praise of Susan Orlean will just have to wait until next week!
2. Spicy Food. This week, I attempted vegetarian chili, which is basically a bunch of beans with some spices and tomatoes thrown in. The problem with vegetarian chili is that meat adds a good deal of fat and flavor that is indispensable to the whole chili experience. I was forced to turn to lots and lots of red chili flakes to make my chili appetizing. My taste buds have been feverishly thrilled all week, but every day my stomach growls at me and says, WTF, Lesley! Are you kidding me? MORE of this stuff? Ahhh! Stop it!!! Where's the Tums?!
3. Good Reads. I finished two really excellent books this week: The Art of Losing (a collection of poems on mourning that I wrote about here), and Jonathan Franzen's How to Be Alone. I picked up Franzen's essay collection because I was curious about his writing, but I didn't want to commit to taking part in the Freedom "best novel of the century" hoopla.Though many of the book's essays are about reading and the state of the novel, How to Be Alone consists largely of an old-fashioned curmudgeon's complaints about modern society (its disinterest in serious fiction, its mindless passion for new technologies, its meaningless passion for privacy, etc.). It can easily be read as a work of late adopter naysayer-ism that frequently contradicts itself, but Franzen is so brilliant in his thinking and so adept in his prose styling that you're willing to growl and harrumph along with him, just for the pleasure of spending time with his voice. The collection made for surprisingly good airport reading material, and it's convinced me to put The Corrections on my to-read list.
4. Writing & Wranglin'. The last week's busyness has put a serious crunch on my writing time, so the writing has been going slowly. I'm in the process of radically revising my chapbook, and I'm trying to work my way through a new process of drafting and revising. In grad school, I had to write fast to keep up with the pace of workshop (I wrote one poem a week for years!). Now, I'm trying to write more slowly and to think more deeply. Instead of playing with images and making up the substance as I go along, I'm trying to clarify the ideas and feelings I want to express before I start worrying about image and diction and line length. I think that this will be an excellent method in the long run, but it's trying right now. Writing more truthful, more emotional, more intellectually interesting poetry is hard. I'm trying for a sort of clarity that is extremely difficult to achieve. So, like one of my Penn State MFA Reading Series t-shirts says, I "Just Keep Pounding Those Keys!"
5. Wedding Weekend. Last night, one of my third cousins got married. She's having her wedding reception in Abilene this weekend, and I'm going with my mom. Though I'm not thrilled to be traveling for the second weekend in a row, I'm really looking forward to it. Charlie's stepfather once told me that the quality of a wedding always depends on the feeling between the couple. If the couple is joyful and deeply in love, the wedding celebration will feel joyful and easy and sincere. Consequently, I expect this weekend's celebration to be an excellent one. :)

Bringing It All Back Home

So I'm back.

I took a long Blogger break for a couple of reasons. The most important one is that I broke up with my boyfriend of four years. Naturally, it's been a very hard few weeks. The adjustment has been extraordinarily difficult. I didn't just break up with Charlie, I broke up with his friends, his family, our shared hobbies, our plans, and some of my hopes for the future. It's left me shaken in a way that I haven't felt in a very, very long time.

The breakup has made me question a lot in my life, including this blog. I considered quitting it permanently. I started writing here to help with my job search--the idea was that I could use this space to showcase my writing ability, my journalistic style, and my ability to write lots of prose really fast--but it's outlived that use. It's transformed into a place to talk about things that I love, about what I read and write and bake and listen to and watch and experience. It's become a place to connect with family and friends and other bloggers. It's become a casual place, a place of impressions and expression.

Largely, I like it that way. I like that my audience has changed from an anonymous potential employer to people I truly care about. I like that this is casual, that I can post as frequently or as rarely as I would like, and I like that I write this largely for me, not for anyone else.

So I've decided to return to writing here for as long as it makes me happy. I'm also working on a chapbook of poems, which is, honestly, a much larger priority than this; if you ever wonder why I haven't posted here in awhile, just assume I'm neck deep in poetry! I'm also taking a class in letterpress printing, spending a lot of time with friends, going to concerts, and listening to music voraciously. I'm spending a lot of time on me and on doing my thing, on figuring out who I am and what I have to do in my life to be happy.

As hard as the last month has been, all this, I know, is a good thing.

And now, an extremely beautiful and extremely convoluted Gerard Manley Hopkins poem that's been on my mind lately.It's a tough read, but it's lovely to hear out loud. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Yours with much blogger love,
Lesley

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Carrion Comfort

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me	5
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?
Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,	10
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.