the best lately.

The other day I was walking my happy Sunday self to church and this happyself was pleasantly surprised to see two usual Remedy suspects in Market Square. As I was talking to them usual suspect number 1 (Josh Birkebak) said about usual suspect number 2 (Drew Norris): “Drew loves words.” I swear, it was like showing up to a party where someone was wearing your dress. Take. it. off. I had it on first. I said, “I DO! Me too! I LOVE WORDS.”Happyself hadn’t thought to make that declaration at that point at the conversation and suddenly I became weirdlydefensiveself. Usual suspect number 2 remains calm. To metaphorically strut my stuff in my dress, I say it again: “I really love love words. okay?“. Usual suspect 2. "Okay."Most of my 24 years of life I've been wearing that dress like skin. All myselves, happyself, lonelyself, sadself, youngself, nowself, futureself love the collection of words on the page.

“And I begin to string words together words together like beads to tell a story” Anne Lamott.

This love of words in general and how they are strung together for sentences, paragraphs, poems, novels, memoirs, etc.etc.etc., I have developed a habit slash obsession with looking up quotes. Hours, people. HOURS. This is a throw back as early as middle school, back in AOL days when I would write down quotes about love (“love”) and dot all my i’s with hearts. Because I heart words. From then until now until forever and ever amen. It’s “self-care”, it’s interesting, and clarifying and snapshot of bigger moment. Here’s what I do: I put two names in quotes with the word quote right after it. “Ernest Hemingway” “Mary Oliver” quotes. And then I sit in Blackbird on Saturday morning and instead of writing my CTE I read excerpts from “A Farewell to Arms”. Which I will copy and paste on to my quote page where Hemingway will end up right beside lines from Pulp Fiction that I looked up last week and which are right above Mary Oliver and Willa Cather. These people would make strange bed fellows all together because I’m pretty sure Jules and Vincent would probably try and act like gentlemen but would more than likely scare the hell out of Mary Oliver. Understandably so. She’d probably write an amazing poem about it that I would love to read. So this is what I do. Some of you might not think this is a rocking great time. I don’t know what to tell you other that I'm sad for you. And this is a selection of the best. Lately.

"If you really want a challenge, just deal with yourself."— Tori Amos

"Inelegantly, and without my consent, time passed."— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You)

"If Jesus was right, these are all my brothers and sisters. And they are so letting themselves go." Anne Lamott

"i carry your heart with me
(i carry it in my heart)
i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing,
my darling)
i fear no fate (for you are my fate,
my sweet)
i want no world (for beautiful you are my world,
my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)"— E.E. Cummings

#70"For some it is harder towrite a novel than to row a bathtub across the North Atlantic."— James N. Frey (How to Write a Damn Good Novel: A Step-by-Step No Nonsense Guide to Dramatic Storytelling)

who pays any attentionto the syntax of thingswill never wholly kiss you"— E.E. Cummings

"I would like to perfect the art of being studiously aloof"— Ani DiFranco (Ani DiFranco - Little Plastic Castle)

"While the sad, galloping wind murders butterfliesI love you, and my happiness bites into the plum of your mouth . . .I want to do with youwhat spring does to the cherry trees." -Neruda

"She would have been a good woman," The Misfit said,"if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."-- Flannery O'Connor, "A Good Man is Hard to Find"

"everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing,though sometimes it is necessaryto reteach a thing its loveliness" -- G. Kinnell

Relax. Only 1/6.5 billionth of this is about you. Bumper Sticker.

You’ve got to love this in a God—consistently assembling the motleyest people to bring, into the lonely and frightening world, a commitment to caring and community.
— Anne Lamott
"No, I don't like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don't like work -- no man does -- but I like what's in the work -- the chance to find yourself. Your own reality -- for yourself, not others -- what no other man can know. They can only see the mere show, and can never tell what it means." Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

"Speak to us about the deepest yearning of our hearts, about our many wishes, about hope; not about the many strategies for (mere) survival, but about trust; not about new methods of satisfying our emotional needs, but about love. Speak to us about a vision larger than our changing perspectives and about a voice deeper than the clamorings of our mass media. Yes, speak to us about something or someone greater than ourselves. Speak to us about God."--Henri J.M. Nouwen

"Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living"— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

Christians whose loyalty to the Prince of Peace puts them out of step with today’s nationalistic world, because they are willing to love their nation’s friends but not to hate their nation’s enemies, are not unrealistic dreamers who think that by their objections they will end all wars. On the contrary, it is the soldiers who think they can put an end to wars by preparing for just one more.
— John Howard Yoder

Mia: I do believe Marsellus Wallace, my husband, your boss, told you to take ME out and do WHATEVER I WANTED. Now I wanna dance, I wanna win. I want that trophy, so dance good. Pulp Fiction.

Jules: Whether or not what we experienced was an According to Hoyle miracle is insignificant. What is significant is that I felt the touch of God. God got involved. Pulp Fiction.

"Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person. "— Zora Neale Hurston

"Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly -- all these make for great stories."— Chuck Palahniuk

"We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it's our job to invent something better."— Chuck Palahniuk (Asfixia)

Each must enter the nest made by the other imperfect birds" Rumi

There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won't have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus. Annie Dillard

Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper."— Anne Lamott

The Christian writer does not decide what would be good for the world and proceed to deliver it. Like a very doubtful Jacob, he confronts what stands in his path and wonders if he will come out of the struggle at all.– Flannery O’Connor

Nationalism is an infantile disease; it is the measles of mankind. Einstein

If there is any meaning in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, it is this: that there is a God who created us, and who loves us so much that He would stop at nothing to bring us to Him. And I really suspect that of all the things we think we want to know, the only thing we really want to know is that we are loved. And if Jesus means anything, He means that you are loved. I hope you know that. And I hope you stop worrying about all the stuff you don't know, because I don't think it amounts to a hill of beans. Rich Mullins. Arrows pointing toward heaven

I think that all these doctrinal statements that all the congregations come up with over the years are basically just not very worthwhile. I don't mean to sound mean toward the people who came up with them. I understand in the past there have been many heretical movements, and we still need to maintain sound doctrine... But I think our real doctrine is that doctrine that is born out in our character. I think you can profess the Apostles' Creed until Jesus returns, but if you don't love somebody, you never were a Christian.
Rich Mullins

"There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for."— Albert Camus

"If the gospel isn't good news for everybody, then it isn't good news for anybody. And this is because the most powerful things happen when the church surrenders its desire to convert people and convince them to join. It is when the church gives itself away in radical acts of service and compassion, expecting nothing in return, that the way of Jesus is most vividly put on display. To do this, the church must stop thinking about everybody primarily in categories of in or out, saved or not, believer or nonbeliever. Besides the fact that these terms are offensive to those who are the "un" and "non", they work against Jesus' teachings about how we are to treat each other. Jesus commanded us to love our neighbor, and our neighbor can be anybody. We are all created in the image of God, and we are all sacred, valuable creations of God. Everybody matters. To treat people differently based on who believes what is to fail to respect the image of God in everyone. As the book of James says, "God shows no favoritism." So we don't either."— Rob Bell

"You do not know how long you are in a river when the current moves swiftly. It seems a long time and it may be very short. The water was cold and in flood and many things passed that had been floated off the banks when the river rose. I was lucky to have a heavy timber to hold on to, and I lay in the icy water with my chin on the wood, holding on as easily as I could with both hands."- Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, Chapter 31

Left to its own devices, her mind is a fat hummingbird flitting through leafy trees of anxiety, apology, sorrow, excuses, and dreams of grandeur, dreams of humiliation. Sometimes she watches it run off, and it makes her laugh and shake her head. It's like a video game. Bright fast blips of worry and anger come at her, and, after fending them off, she's attacked by the huge lumbering Czechoslovakian blobs of tiredness and broken-spiritedness which break into small, faster missiles of regret when she fires at them. What a half-baked species we are, she thinks, and does what she can to make her insides more habitable. Anne Lamott, Joe Jones

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.(Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), U.S. author. First published in Paris Review (Flushing, NY, spring 1958). Interview in Writers at Work, Second Series, ed. George Plimpton (1963).)

"...there are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone."— Nicole Krauss (The History of Love)

Ever since there have been men, man has given himself over to too little joy. That alone, my brothers, is our origianl sin. I should believe only in a God who understood how to dance. Henri Matisse.

"Every artist has a basic premise pervading his whole life, and that premise can provide the impulse to everything he creates. For me the dominating premise has been the need for understanding and tenderness and fortitude among individuals trapped by circumstance." Tennessee Williams

"And now the old story has begun to write itself over there," said Carl softly. "Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes for thousands of years."— Willa Cather (O Pioneers!)

"I am a man. Nothing human is alien to me." Montagne

"it is now hard to leave the country but it is in no way impossible."- Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, Chapter 33

still learning.

Wild Geese. Mary Oliver.

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Let's climb trees.

twitching.

This is basically just a bunch of junk rattling around in my head that I don’t have time to be thinking about much less blogging about, much less blogging about in an unapologetically disorganized, non-sequential (GRE word, that was free), too many (parenthesis), messy mucky run-on sentencey way. Whateva, whateva, this is my blog. I do what I want. You don’t have to read it (please do, I like you. Sparkles to you).


So this blogging business lately has been out of control. All this time I spend staring at this screen I could be working a school stuff, not the least of which is an assignment called a CTE which social work speak stands for Critical Thinking Exercise. It is no coincidence that CTE rhymes with ‘harder than this has to be’. That is the little sing-song that plays in my head while I’m sitting at Golden Roast. “CTE, harder than this hasss toooo beeeee.“ It also rhymes with, ‘damn I hate this’.. (oh wait no it doesn’t, my bad.) Sometimes when I think about writing my CTE, my eye twitches. I’m not kidding. It twitches. Seeing as how I already have a habit singing to myself and laughing out loud to myself, and talking to myself (sometimes with hand gestures), all of this alone in public, I feel like a twitching eye makes me look just on that wrong side of crazy. So when I’m trying to procrastinate and quell the twitch, instead of watching TV or sports or fantasy football (that’s you people), I resort to Internet. Where the blogs flows like milk and honey. To stop your eye from twitching too, here is the regular beat of blogs I patrol. Just what the I doctor ordered (pun intended always):



Kelle Hampton: Click on that and try not to pee on yourself before you even scroll down. The background on my computer are pictures of this woman’s children. Read Nella’s Birth story. Generally I don’t ready every entry, I just scroll down and look at her blissfully beautiful photography of the “almond-eyed one and wispy one” and vicariously live through these children’s sidewalk chalk and beach trips every single beautiful shot as they stare back at the the camera that’s always in their face with the doting mama behind it. I hope they are 1 and 5 forever. I will never dress as well as these children or Kelle herself, who’s skinnier than me even after having 2 kids (twitch, twitch). When Nella got glasses, I didn’t know if I could hold it all in:





MODG. Martinis or Diaper Genies. I have no words, Modg. Laughing outloud at the computer myself hot blogtastic mess this is. This is where I get the phrase sparkle hearts, NBD, BD, among other phrases. I straight-up steal from her because I envy her skillz and wit and honesty and hot husband. She’s pregnant and hasn’t named the baby so she refers to it as plankton, or planky for short. She tries to get readers to buy tranny shoe memberships from Kim Kardashian. Bathroom humor, confession fridays, among a million other hilarious and random things. I could go on. MODG, You are the Lebron James of blogging, the matriarch of all bloggessness. Anywhere. Everywhere. Amen.

ALSO, I have a few people in real life who blog’s are pretty wicked too. Like this girl. Morgan Harris Trinker. This is her wedding, which I talked about so adnausem to my roommates while they were wedding planning that they asked me to stop. I didn’t. Now I just say, Have I ever to you about my friend Morgan? The bees knees. All that trendy speak that just means awesome. I want to fake my own wedding or pregnancy just to get her to take my picture. Or better yet, actually get married. I’ll keep y’all posted on both of those. And at Morgan’s wedding (have I mentioned Morgan’s wedding?) one of her bridesmaid was Amy Pratt. Thereisgaymaninmycloset. If I were to have a girl-crush on a blog other than MODG, it would be this one. (Settle down Tara, I’m just crushing on the blog)

So there are some others but these are the favs. But ya know, sometimes even the blogs don’t ease the pain, the grad school blues, the single girl swag (or lack there of). and it’s then time to bring out the big guns. I think you know where I’m going with this. Those days that you feel like your mood and your ‘tude need a time out. You might have sat and mighta cried through yet another beautiful wedding. Came directly home and stood at the kitchen counter and before your diet knows what your face is doing to tell you WOMAN NO you are dipping chocolate chip pancakes into peanut butter icing. WHAT? These are my confessions, Usher-style. For all those times I feel like I have gotten punked by my own estrogen. Just like all those dumb girls I judge, I am one. I am them. They are me. I am straight-up she-fool. who am I gonna call? Not ghostbusters, kids, but Bridget Jones. YES. Ahhhh it’s just so rich and great and sickeningly comforting to me the extent to which this slightly chubby and very awkward version of Renée Zellweger pre-Kenny Chesney annulment reminds me of myself. The sequel is not as good. You don’t repeat something wonderful. (Ask all those UT fans still sporting 1996 championship t-shirts about that). Did you learn nothing from Home Alone and Karate Kid, Bridget?? Where were you in the 90s? Oh thats rights, you were busy being awkward and female and trying to get Hugh Grant to love you. All the women in the world baptized in estrogen and licking peanut butter icing off their fingers salute you. To blogs and to Bridget.

3 of 77

Three poems in Garrison Keillor's 77 Love sonnets

1.
March

It's March in St. Paul. Eight a.m. A pale
Frozen mist in the air. The snow is gritty gray
Around the stone statue of Nathan Hale.
Scott Fitzgerald walks here almost every day
Hand in hand in Bessie Smith, or Maria Callas,
And Franz Kafka and Judy Garland stroll in the snow
And Princess Diana escapes from Kensington Palace
To meet Jack Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe.
They all look calm and very elegant indeed,
Despite all the grief they've been through.
To comprehend a nectar requires sorest need,
So said Emily Dickinson. (She's here, too)
Life is tragic. Oh God, the miseries we bear
But it's always good to get out in the fresh air.

2.
Supper
You made crusty bread rolls filled with chunks of brie
And minced garlic drizzled with olive oil
And baked them until the brie was bubbly
And we ate them lovingly, our legs coiled
Together under the table.
And salmon with dill
And lemon and whole-wheat cous cous
Baked with garlic and fresh ginger, and a hill.
Of green beans and carrots roasted with honey and tofu.
It was beautiful, the candles, the linen and silver,
The sun shining down on our northern street,
Me with my hand on your leg.
You, my lover,
In your jeans and green
T-shirt and beautiful bare feet.
How simple life is. We buy a fish. We are fed.
We sit close to each other, we talk and then we go to bed.

3.
So Much
She is ten. "I love you. So much," she tells me
On the phone in the evening. She loves the phrase
And "I miss you. So much." I'm in Knoxville, Tennessee,
En route to Phoenix, on the road for six days.
Four to go. Airports, freeways, Holiday Inns,
Dennys, USA Today, highway America.
Every night, audiences expecting the genuine,
And me, lonely, on the road through Jericho.
It's an okay life. Dangerous but okay.
I don't drink. I don't stay out late. I eat right.
But the lonesome road blues follows me around all day
And there are rocks and nails in my bed at night
I think about her. I miss her. I get dressed
And go tell stories about families in the Midwest.

4. (1 to grow on)
Prayer
“Here I am Lord, and here is my prayer:
Please be there.
I don’t want to ask too much-miracles and such-
Just whisper in the air: please be there.
When I die like other folks,
I don't to find out You're a hoax.
So I'm not on my knees asking for world peace
Or that polar icecaps freeze
And save the polar bear
Or even that the poor be fed
Or angels hover o'er my bed
but I sure would be pissed
if I should have been an atheist;
oh Lord, please exist.

Wonder Years.

Ladies and Gentleman, The Wonder Years:


Narrator: Growing up happens in a heartbeat. One day you're in diapers, the next day you're gone. But the memories of childhood stay with you for the long haul. I remember a place, a town, a house like a lot of other houses, a yard like a lot of other yards, on a street like a lot of other streets. And the thing is, after all these years, I still look back, with wonder.


Narrator: If there’s one thing every kid learns growing up, it’s that life is a series of risks. It’s a cause and effect relationship. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Still, with the proper guidance we learn to deal with the risks. Pretty soon we set out into the world, sure in our options, confident in our choices.

Narrator: At some point in your teenage years, if you're lucky, you make a discovery. You find out you're actually good at something. It's that critical juncture, where talent becomes...expertise - kinda. It's your chance to start or, end up flat on your face.


(HOW DO YOU WRITE SOMETHING THAT GOOD, WONDER YEARS NARRATOR?)

i love the wonder years. hearts hearts hearts Kevin & Winnie hearts hearts hearts. I love how it paints the picture of growing perfectly and it brings me back to my wonder years. When I was still cute and not awkward yet, and running around blonde with a koolaid mustache and a sundress. So full of energy that I can’t get words out fast enough (AND I stuttered so that's just cruel) full of ideas and imagination. Back in those wonder years there was plenty of ‘you can grow up and be whatever you want to be’. With the exception of public speaking on account of the afore mentioned stutter. I also eventually discovered I was terrible anything having to do with math, I’m pretty afraid of heights/high speeds/uncontrollable forces of nature. So eliminated candidacy for president, tornado chaser, professional skydiver, and high school algebra teach from my list of possible careers. But there was still big world out there and Kevin Arnold and I were going to explore it. Maybe I could grow up and be a high school English teacher and teach Maya Angelou and Mary Oliver and Salinger.Or I could open up a bookstore downtown Knoxville and be bid-ness woman. Or join the peace-corp. Or I could move back into the hostel I lived in in England and drink cider at the Free Press pub. I could be a book critic or figure out some other way to get someone to pay me to read. Or maybe I want to buy Manhattans. And really, I really wouldn’t hate being in college for a long time and learning a little bit about everything. Psychology, Women’s studies, every single language, Music, Underwater basket weaving, Anything but Math. sick. It's like a good ole fashion after church buffet. And i intend to eat it. All.




That’s me.

So really, you can go to 2 colleges, declare 2 majors, take 5 years for undergrad and ton of classes that you don’t need but after all that, at some point, another critical, important, expensive point, one must decide on something. The little girl with the sundress and the imagination must meet the adult(ish) girl with reality: public enemy #1. REALITY. sick. Pick a plate at the buffet of life that is vocation selection. What would make more sense than going back to school (cue Adam Sandler, back to school, back to schoool ...). So. Grad school. MSSW, 2012. It would appear my on again/off again love/hate relationship with school is on again. A lot of staring out of windows of coffee shops with open books in front of me and conducting life at business end of a highlighter. In these first couple of months, here are some things that I have found that have quelled the boredom and dulled the pain, in no particular order:

Coffee shops: Less than 3 them (Read the previous blog, people. This stuff BUILDS on each other. Like LOST). So I heart coffee shops. If coffee shops were bars and iced coffee with sugar free vanilla was something alcoholic, I would have a sho ‘nuff problem. Golden Roast is like my cheers. I order that same drink every. single. time. To the point that one of the baristas saw me at counter, looked at me, and made the drink. I have arrived. So I like having places, having people at those places, and drinks I order and specific tables and even seats at those tables. These routine things comfort me and my brain agrees to work. (OCD people, pass it on. Making it work for me since 1986.)



wikipedia. Somewhere in undergrad basically well meaning (but basically incorrect) professors gave me the idea that wikipedia is somehow not substantiated by “facts” and therefor unreliable. This is false. Totally erroneous. Wikipedia is full of information that is very helpful to me. It actually belongs on JSTOR. Seriously, it practically saves me. On the daily. It is the Gayle to my Oprah. The trucker hat to my kid rock CD. The scarf to my hipster jeans. (I don’t have a Kid Rock CD or hipster jeans. But i do love Oprah. Hard. DON’T HATE.) Chalk one up for wikipedia and the GP (general public) with their effortful collaboration of knowledge.



Bed: She’s a beauty. A Maple sleigh bed with deep crimson sheets and a ton of blankets. When I moved back from MTSU to Knoxville, I discovered wonderful and crumby pleasure of ending the day eating cereal and reading in bed. Just cereal (delicious), no Milk (digestion. I am FOR IT. Milk is a bad, bad choice). I remember one summer reading East of Eden every night by flashlight and eating Special K with Strawberries. (The flashlight was not to create an ambiance with Steinbeck, it was, in fact, because I was too lazy to get out of bed to turn the light off). Crawling into bed with my little baggie is what my girl Sarah Jessica Parker via her girl Carrie Bradshaw calls a “Secret Single Behavior”. It successfully combines 3 of my favorite things: bed, books and carbohydrates. for the win. Now i have to spoon with my APA stylebook. For the fail. These days I crawl in at night and I start to whisper my sweet nothings: I love you bed. I am gonna sleep on you SO HARD tonight. (whisper:) so hard, so hard. Bed: not having it. “You smell like caffeine. Woof.” Hell knoweth no fury like thread count scorned.



Remedy Coffee. I guarantee that I like my job more than you like your job in a my dad can beat up your dad kind of way. Work is my joy. For the downtown-ness and big windows and good coffee and regulars and strangers and friends and musicians and music. Beautiful people come in and out of there all the time. I’m serious. And I get to sit on a stool behind a very, very slow register and meet them. “Small or large?”, “for here or to go?”, “ tell me your name?” “Blended coffee, it’s like a frappaccino”, “iced or hot?”, “Do you need cream?”, “Remind me of your name?”, “Bathroom key’s on the wall, bring it back.” (seriously, bring it back), “Sugar on the table. Do you need cream?” “Music at 8, close at ten”, “I’m sorry, tell me your name again”. “um, your bathrooms are locked. yeah, the key. it’s on the wall.”. “How long have you guys been here?”, “ohhhhh this is soooo niiice!I love this place!”....me too. I love it too. and I do. a lot. a lot. and I’m thankful thankful for it. 125 W Jackson, Avail yourself, people.



TV: This was recent rediscovery. Short lived. I don’t watch TV much, just a little Today show, just enough to thin the blood and to give a good morning to my main man Matt Lauer. Don’t watch the rest of the day because Matt and Al and Ann and Willard Scott (less than 3) aren’t going to be on be it. But recently while housesitting at my dear old dad’s I was taking a swim in his king size bed and flipped on the TV at night. And I mean. Come on people. Have you all been aware of nighttime television programming this the whole time? Honestly. Jerseylicious. Hoarders. Sister wives. (SISTER WIVES?!). Now given, on a very basic level, all of this rampant social dysfunction is good job security for social work but still makes me concerned that these are same members of the GP contributing to wikipedia and polluting my virtual well of intellectual and academic knowledge. UNCOOL.
And now to totally contradict what I just wrote about not watching television, Go Bravos. You got this.


What would you do if I sang out of tune? Would you stand up and walk out on me? Lend me your ears and I'll sing you a song, I will try not to sing out of key. Wonder Years Theme

Tabs Down the Side.

Tonight I was sitting at Golden Roast, where I take my brain to study (or where my brain takes me, I don’t really boss my brain around much), I was reading for a quiz on Wednesday. I was skimming the pages, highlighter in hand and was pretty thankful for whatever fellow procrastinator thought to invent that genius concept of the embolden word. Here's to you, Mr. Textbook company Editor man, after I shelled out a cool $100 + bones for this tantalizing read about Research Methods in Social work, you fine people had the courtesy to embolden some important words. Poor, bored, ink-logged, highlighter logged, paper cut grad students certain appreciate that gesture. Just your way of throwing a bone back, if you will. (Lets be real, for how much it costs, the book should read itself to me, make flashcards of itself, take quizzes about itself, make me snack, and give me a nice long back scratch). BUT seriously, bold word are so helpful. Nice long definitions behind them, examples, perhaps even a glossary and index with lots of other important words you need to know. They stand out on the page as if to say,”HEY.Right here. You’ll see this again. Pay Attention.” Big, black letters on a white page, left to right, top to bottom. This is clear, wonderfully objective and helpful and saves me time. (Usually this would be an appropriate time to say something like, “hey, now, time is money folks” but that is in fact totally inappropriate because I’m getting paid exactly $0.00 for school. Time does not = money. Thanks for reminding me. I will get paid something sad when I get out, I’m sure, and I’ll be buying Kroger brand cereal for the rest of my days. Whatever, it builds character. Like acne and slow metabolisms. Right now, time basically equals sleep, which is almost as precious as money and almost as hard to come by.) I digress. I appreciate bold words and indexes and glossaries because they are means of efficiency and organization, which is also, coincidentally, the same flame that sparked my love affair with office supplies. Honestly, if I was in the unfortunate habit of saying that I “heart” things, or that I less than3’d them, now would be a good time to express my virtual character love for office supplies:

(see, there's a heart in the middle for reason).

Now these bold words today got me thinking, what if, in an alternate super-office supplied wonderland, we could micro-manage, file, highlight, bold, strike through and shred our actual lives. For example, in a sea of people in puke-orange in Neyland Stadium on a Saturday in the fall, you could look out and see specific people highlighted for specific reasons. In a crowd, at a show, in a store, your eyes would be skimming over your world and suddenly you would see ‘Aha, you’re bold or highlighted or underlined, there is a circle drawn around you, you’re scratched out or there’s a smiley face beside you. and you would know that they were important, it would save you time (which would also save you sleep or money, respectively). You paper clip people and things to you that you think you might want to keep for a while with no great commitment, or staple people you're pretty sure about, and super glue the ones you want to stay forever (but be sure, like REAL SURE, that you do, infact, want them there for forever. Super glue does not play). In office-supply fantasy land, There would be big huge binders and you could organize, categorize, and file people and places and memories. I’m talking a lonely planet guide with A-Z tabs down the side. Categories like: Beautiful things, that which is not so beautiful, Straight-up ugly, Hilarity, Stuff I like, Stuff I hate, Questions that have been answered (small tab), Questions that have not been answered (big one), Really great meals, Really great memories, Awkward phase (there’s another big one). And each tab would be complete with pictures you could would take with your mind, moments where you could just look at something and blink or close your eyes and whisper, click. and that moment would be captured, held and filed. I would have taken pictures of Borders, back in the glory days of the “Borders Mafia” where it was the best shittiest job we all had ever had. I would take all the bad moments to through the shredder and then shred the shreddings again, and then again, just for good measure, can’t ever be too careful, and recycle them like the good tree-hugger that I am. I would make these binders, oh there would be dividers, indexes, page tabs, systems, colors. YES! All of life’s “quizzes” that I continue to fail, I would figure out why that is because I could compare and cross-reference my tabs and notes. I would keep my binders in my bookshelf beside my desk next to the books because books are the closest thing I have found to road maps of life so far. All of this just in an effort to organize and understand myself and my world and last year and the years before that and yesterday and tomorrow. This effort would not only be wonderfully fun exercise with office supplies (never time wasted), it would also save me time and sleep (for sure) and money (somehow, probably). If you all ever figure out how to organize and explain your own world using anything provided by the fine people at Staples, holler at me. I’ll start stapling and paper-clipping away.

"I cannot explain myself, because I not myself, you see" Alice. Alice in Wonderland.