bad student habits.

Sometimes, when I'm at work, I linger by the window.  I imagine backing up, running, jumping and soaring through the glass.  Sometimes I fly.  Other times I plummet down but I always land on a conveniently parked dump truck that breaks my fall, and then I'm out of there.

Last summer I'd get up at five in the morning to go to the gym with my sister.  But that was when she was separated from her husband and I'm pretty sure she was going that early to spy on him.  Now she's just unreliable.  So I've been sleeping in, but I managed to pull my ass out of bed to work out because I figured it'd help work the demons out of me.  The demons being all my awful impulses.  I guess I should have worked out longer.

I was getting excited remembering the last time I had an EPIC cousin bash.  But then I remembered that if my cousin's boyfriend is there it'll probably end up as a more mellow dinner party.  He's my age and his boyfriend is approaching 50.  He's a respectable and responsible member of the adult community so those gatherings are a little more. . . tame.  I wonder if I should invite my loser uncle's baby mamma.  She's only a year older than me and she was always kind of weird around me and my male cousin, like, awkward and out of place.  She always favored our younger cousins who had children.  I tried to make her feel welcome but it was hard.  It's always hard to warm up to someone when you know that soon they're going to be history.  Yeah, he always invites women over to family functions -- even women who should just be flings, which, I guess they all should be -- and so they think that they're special, but they're not.  Eventually he'll cheat on them and rip them off or he'll hit them and they'll file a PPO against him.  So, I liked her but I didn't want to like her, but I tried to be nice, but not too nice.  I'd hate to be too warm and too kind and have someone stay with him because they are enamored with his obviously lovable family.  And, damnit, she was the only girlfriend of his that could cook!

Speaking of nonnuclear families, I'm interested in different representations of families in schools and the way teachers handle the nonnuclear family, meaning the same sex family, or the divorced family, or the divorced and remarried family, or the single parent family, or the grandparents raising children family, or anything that isn't one dad and one mom who are married to each other. (Remember to come back to this.)

 

I added another goal to my list of things to do while on break: organize my purse.  Mainly because I hate it when someone sees me looking for something in my purse and decides they can find it faster.  Taking away my purse said person mocks me and my cluttered ways.  I say, "give it here, you don't know how to look for anything!"  Because they don't.  And said person begins to pull my stuff out of the purse, dropping the contents all over the place.  Today, it was a folded up post it note that I had written on.  I said, "You're dropping my important words!"  That caused just enough laughter so that I was able to yank the purse away and find my stuffed monkey key chain without taking all the shit out of it.  Organized people blow my mind.  How can they do it?  How can they stand it?  Sometimes I look at three ring binders and folder tabs and I want to cry.  I hate to feel confined. 

So:

1.  Workout.

2.  Organize Purse.

3.  Read McKay poetry, Cane, Savage City (nonfiction), Houellebecq's The Elementary Particles, more to be determined.

4.  Write Claude McKay paper.

5.  Write my own crap and do all that crap.  Crap. crap. crap.

6.  decide on fake class content.

7.  Try to become a nice person and good citizen.  Which means, in the summer, while walking downtown on lunch or for whatever reason, DO NOT tell yuppie strangers in SUV's who ask for directions "I'm not from around here" like I did all last summer.  Also, try to figure out how to actually give directions. 

8.  Return to important work. 

I've been preparing for Creative Writing class. . . I've been writing poems which I don't normally do.  I am writing a poem about librarians and their skinny thighs and libraries.  How I hate them!  How I love them!  How their silence murders my soul.  Because it does.  I hate silence and what worse place to have silence than in a public library.  The librarians I know have such short wave lengths of joy.  It's like they keep their light contained in tiny bubbles, space bubbles maybe -- like my middle school art teacher would call them as she'd waive her arms around her and tell us not to get into anyone else's space bubble.  But that isn't me.  I have no space bubble, and I'm loud, and I'm obnoxious, and all I want to do is take a pin and pop everyone's space bubbles.  How can someone keep joy or passion so quietly contained?  What a travesty.  What a betrayal!

So, basically I have been writing bad poetry.  But sometimes I read poetry of people who are like, I don't know, maybe not good but good enough to graduate from an MFA program and call themselves poets.  And so then I read that poetry and I don't feel so bad about my bad poetry anymore.  Is that an asshole thing to say?  I have such a hard time telling. . .

I've read some playbooks.  The "best of short plays" I read sucked.  Some of the full length plays are okay and they were helpful in showing me how one can write plays.  I think I figured out what I'm going to do.

I had an opportunity to move to a window at work but I declined.  It'd be too hard to focus on what's going on inside when I can see all that there is outside.