i'm feeling extremely pessimistic this morning for no good reason. at least im totally alone so im not taking it out on any unsuspecting cheery soul. thats all.
UPDATE: i now have a good reason to be pessimistic: it just came out in an all staff meeting that there has to be a lay off on our team. today. meaning my actual client team. which could easily be someone in my office since 90 percent of the boston office works on this client but even if its not in my office, im going to know and have worked extensively with whoever is laid off and that means i can say with certainty that itll be a damn shame because everyone i work with is high over qualified, ass busting and supremely deserving of the jobs they have. not to mention beautiful smart and funny. its almost creepy how across the board gorgeous the people i work with are. and if its someone i actually WORK with, in my office, im just warning you, my fair reader, im going to be pissed. i love those women and i know what they do and what they deserve and if they get laid off somethings fucked up in the system.
today i am being a very bad worker my supervisor is out of the office and while i normally do quite well unsupervised :) there have been some drastic budget cuts lately that have reduced my time from about 150% capacity (read:hamster on a wheel) to about 75 percent capacity (read: i have "free" time?) and its really thrown me for a loop. itll change soon enough though so when i suddenly hit the bottom of my to-do list, something i never even thought possible, im taking advantage of it. headed straight for the poetry blogs. and in my wanderings i came across something so quietly human and beautiful it really did make me ache a little. its called the Free Verse project and its by the academy of american poets. the deal is theres a flickr pool and people can post photos including lines from a favorite poem written off the page in an unexpected or ephemeral way... this is the intersection of so many things i love. its like andy goldsworthy meets post secret with great poetry... im hoping to submit, a little overwhelmed by the options. heres the site Caption reads: "I want to do with you what spring does with cherry trees."
when i was ten i saw Rent on broadway. my favorite song in the whole show was tango maureen. i used it to audition for tom sawyer the musical at my westchester elementary school. played both parts and everything. thinking about it now i probably caused quite a stir in the faculty meeting that week but was completely oblivious. i just loved the song. maureen and joanne were also the first exposure i had to a lesbian couple. maureen is not a common name. it is however, the name of the girl i have, for a month now, been dating. there, i said it in plain english. i am and have always been attracted to a very specific-and not very prevalent- type of woman. at age 23 im finally sorting out what that means and how far that extends and its been a thrilling adventure. particularly exciting because this girl, maureen -and i do feel fine using her name here because 1. shell never read this. ever. and 2. she doesnt actually go by maureen on a daily basis- is absolutely 100% infuriatingly unpredictable. unfortunately the personality of the infamously flakey, unfaithful, unreliable and manipulative maureen-of-rent and maureen-of-my-life are uncannily similar. i resisted drawing too many parallels for a while, despite my musically-inclined roomies excitement at the near perfect overlay of life and art, but ive officially given up. maureen is maureen. and i am joanne: completely addled, defensive and deeply in denial that, to quote a wise man, i've driven into fuckville, and shes the MAYOR. well today she finally wrote me an email that hurt enough to make me realize im being played. and to make me see how crazy it is that ive been hinging my happiness on this baited hook... the experience she gave me was wonderful, transformative, i'll never forget it. i am grateful. but trying to make that experience into an extended relationship was foolish and a symptom of me trying to fill the large hole left by a very worthy person who i miss very much. at any rate, today i drove to speak to a (legitimately) wise woman i concord, MA. shes the former dean of radcliffe and an old colleague of my great cousin once removed or something. whatever the relation, shes brilliant and im blessed to have met her. she got her phD in french literature and gender studies approximately 50 years ago. speaks three languages fluently and listens to NPR 23 hours a day. she kept me on my toes for two hours on topics ranging from Pinter to TiVo to the sexuality of The adolecent boy in The Reader. At the end she bought me a book she just finished at the concord book store, The Madonnas of Leningrad, i'll let you know how it goes. this meeting was the highlight of the week. but the point is, driving to and from the place, i rolled the windows down, turned the music up as high as it would go and let the almost-spring wind blow the cobwebs out of my car and out of my brain. it felt great. i felt free. not sad, free. and as a tribute to the entire experience i will give in and post the song that started it all.
primarily a violinist but often playing everything from a hub cap to a harmonica in between, with a sound that varies from bjorky etherial to biggie covers... this girl is good. no energy to say much more but do enjoy:
for supplying both the poems i read last night at my first poetry reading in boston! both revised versions of stuff ive thrown up on here. this morning i was met with an eager crowd of my coworkers, all of whom had intended on attending the reading but couldnt for various reasons, who insisted i do a private reading in my cubicle.
me: really guys? its 8:30 AM. no one wants me to get naked at this hour in the day. and besides, the freaky techies are listening. boss: take it OFF! me: right here? right now? boss: do it or you're fired. me: which one do you want to hear first? angsty angry or sexy?
some days, like to-day, i love my life even more than i thought possible. i am trying this new thing of day by daying it. not requiring more than what i have in this moment. its tough for me, i like to know whats coming and then i like to control it but someone has entered my life, if tentatively, who is lovely, affectionate, intriguing and interested in me, but refuses to be controlled, refuses to commit, refuses to plan more than a few hours ahead...often changes plans last minute in ways that suddenly dont include me. we are a recipe for disaster. or at least a little heartache. but i want to find out for myself if thats true. there is for sure an element of selfishness in that kind of personality. theres also a large element of selfishness in mine. maybe between her extreme and mine we'll find a happy balance. to be decided.
i woke up this morning so confused. 1. that it was monday and 2. that it was snowing. the confusion stemmed from the fact that the weekend encompassed such major events that it seemed like something new should begin on the other end of it. an entirely new day... say, moonday, perhaps. events on both nights rocked my socks off in different ways and then daylight savings on a 60 degree afternoon actually coerced the words "spring has sprung" out of my mouth. and yet, monday came, and with it, the same old drudge and dread, as if those 2.3 days and all their glory hadnt gone down at all. i could almost hear boston wagging a finger at me: eh eh eh... not so fast, sucka. pull out those boots you packed in the back of the closet and slog to work in st bernard slobber-snow attacking your face. oh and itll be ten degrees colder and darker because of that daylight savings you were all excited about yesterday. whip snap. but even still this weekend was big. and the big undeniable changes made me reflect on the small creeping changes that have been working on me, slowly turning the unwieldy boat of my life in a completely new direction. i turned 23 on teh 23rd last april and everyone liked to tell me that meant this was going to be my "golden year". i'm a believer in useless things like that and even though i couldnt really imagine tripping over treasure or winning an oscar and no relatives seem poised to croak and leave me scaths of jewelry, it was easy to feel like this year had the potential to be 'golden' or at least monumental as i faced down graduation, jobs, Relationship decisions, moving cities, living on my own time for the first time... this weekend made me sit back and reflect, i was lurched off the gravitron of the last 11 months to realize that the choices ive made and people ive met have changed the entire landscape of my life. and my internal landscape as well. now a month from the less exciting and signifigantly scarier '24 on the 23rd,' theres actually no question this year has been the most influential of my 23, and its not even over. six weeks to go. exciting stuff, life.
last night i went to see missy higgins at the house of blues. her music is love ive had these tickets for three months , been looking for a way to see her live for a year ( im pretty sure one of the first posts on this blog was with her music) and somehow even with all those long odds the concert managed to fall on an eerily appropriate night. missys music got me through some shit last year and then this summer i read an interview with her where she described her 'sexuality,' her orientation, in a way that, for the first time, made perfect sense to me. everything came full circle last night. i posted a few of the vids i took on youtube. im now reposting my posted videos here. which is ridiculous. we officially have too many internet options. i comment a little on some of them on youtube and i refuse to rewrite the comments here so jsut go to my profile and click through them. nightminds:
warm whispers:
wrong girl: (which i wrote a post about a few months ago!)
and finally, steer, not my favorite song but maybe my favorite video. there were couples all around us but right in front of me was a particularly adorable pair of women who im sure L, my concert companion, was ready to kill, but i was entranced by how in love they were...so i blatantly filmed them for a few seconds. the whole experience was so uplifting.
Judith Warner's column Domestic Disturbances is one of my favorite opinion pieces. she posted something brilliant recently about feeling a sense of loss when her previously sarcastic bitter bitchy friend adopted a turn-the-other-cheek attitude. ive felt it before with friends- people i called when the car broke down or when the check out girl took five minutes to figure out what the code was for asparagus, friends who agreed completely that some children shouldnt be seen OR heard. ever. ive also heard the dissapointment of my worked up friends when theyve called expecting me to slap down some sassy supportive judgement and instead found me peace loving and shoulder shrugging, as i am want to become in moods of excessive good will. usually brought on by sex. Judith says: "I’ve also come to wonder if something desirably human is being lost in all this new and improved selfhood. That is to say: an edge. That little bit of raggedness that for some of us is really the heart of what makes us human." im all for practicing patience-and i do need practice- but theres a point when people who dont lose their patience have lost their personalities. briliant article here
just read this and now im imagining there was a pangea of art in my brain that years of academia wrenched into seperate masses... 10-12 Drawing I, 2-4 Creative writing II etc. and slowly the resources availble to each continent of creativity became so disparate that one began to colonize and brutalize the other, creativism took hold breeding fear and discrimination... and now im just a struggling kinda-poet. damn!
According to the 90 question test in the introduction to "what color is your aura" -the book i sat on a used book store floor reading for an hour last week - im equal parts five lightcolors. the author swears every one is ONLY ONE. sometimes there are internal and external rings of light. but thats rare and usually because of a life changing trauma of massive proportions. but i did the math twice and there is no way around it. i come out to a poop brown. this is not the first time ive flown in the face of an ancient art of telling-you-who-you-are-because-you-cant-figure-it-out. i defy palm readers, i once had my cards read and blew the woman out of the water, it doesnt matter if mars is in my venus, or plutos in the house shit never makes sense when it comes to me. and why should it? my rational 90 percent knows the only way to know thyself is turn off the music and listen... and yet, im wierdly determined to try it all, fixated on finding a system that will somehow make sense of the chaos. ive always had a suspicion that i've got more than one guest in the old upstairs hostel - something beyond voices, beyond the average self-conscious person's running inner commentary. also beyond the average hormonal bitches mood swings. all of which have been suggested by well meaning and somewhat uncomfortable friends.
