julikins’ blog

I am oh so nervous about oh so many things.

fooling myself fooling myself fooling myself fooling myself fooling myself fooling myself fooling myself fooling myself

- Too much coffee, and consequently I have to poo a lot. Fun.

Goodness abounds:

• did good job on Narratology presentation
• excited about presenting on 'Carta de Jamaica' for Spanish class
• GOING ON OVERNIGHT TRIP TO SKI CABIN + SNOWBOARDING!!
• Vallejo poetry reading tomorrow
• An appointment with the counselor, FINALLY, tomorrow

Main reasons for good mood:

• Did twenty push-ups in a row for first-time, record
• Good conversation with Robin outside the Paradox
• surprisingly lucid, awake and cheerful despite not having gotten any sleep last night
• excited about plans for reading "Saturday", "The General in His Labyrinth"
• planning to write a story about a mermaid

I should feel this way more often! Yay!

Most things...... are not going the way that I'd hoped.

OK, things to do tomorrow:

• Finish reading as much as the Canterbury Tales and the article on it as I can; catch the night bus at 2:15
• Wake up; take Nodoz; catch bus at 7:49 so I can get to the library when it opens at 8
• Finish reading for English J-Sem
• Finish Spanish reading. GOD, the presentation for Wednesday...
• Go to health center; make appointment with counselor. YOU NEED TO DO THIS. You've proven beyond all means that you are not strong enough to cope with this by yourself.
• Read "Narratology". Write Mini Paper #2 on description in Melville (do research with books in library). Write presentation on "Narratology." Maybe e-mail to Nathalia, ask her what she thinks of it?
• Mail rent check.
• E-mail Roger and Rosalyn asking for recommendations for HA application
• Go to P.E. class at 6PM
• Call parents!! My God!! Jesus, quit being such a bad daughter. Maybe even try calling Alex again.
• Actually start filling out HA application. Double check to see when interview workshops are.
• Tuesday: go into Career Services; have them look over resume, maybe even HA application stuff. Look into ESL teaching positions for the summer.

I am most scared about Spanish and getting the Eng 333 presentation and essay done in time. God. okokok

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

Hopefully I'll get it basically done and typed up to post it here tomorrow.

I watched "Master and Commander" and "Chicken Run" today. Along with reading Niall Ferguson's account of British imperialism, I am now basically very into saying things like "Damned fine gunnery, sir. Damned fine gunnery."

Today I felt very calm and mature and happy and like I have a lot of perspective on life, which is always a good thing. You know, I even felt like I can keep it up.

I'm thinking I'm going to try applying for a half-credit Independent Creative Writing project next semester. I have no idea what the criteria is, who to talk to about it, how it is done, what has been done in the past, etc. But whatever, I lose nothing by trying, right? And all I have to gain is 0.5 units of academic credit for creative writing that I'll be doing anyway. Good stuff.

...... though you wouldn't really know it from checking here. I work at night, which means when I'm done for the night I usually just go straight to bed too exhausted to bother updating the day's progess here. Heh. Anyway, to make up for it here are the first three pages of a story called "Abbey". It cuts off rather abruptly, because, well, that's just the way the pages are, har har. I'll post the rest once I finish typing it off (to say that I'll post it when I finish the "final draft" or whatever is rather senseless... is there ever *really* a final draft?).

I've been calling this "the magical sword post-colonial story" (though the sword isn't magical and I don't really know if it's that 'post-colonial'... I tried!). I'm quite pleased with it, in the sense that I wrote it fairly quickly and it went exactly where I was trying to get it to go. Why is that the stories I agonize over for weeks and months die slow, painful deaths (I picture their faces twisted and bloated purple, like victims of Claudius' poison: "the rest is silence. O, O, O, O!" That Shakespearian rag!"). And then with other words it's like Wham, Bam, Thank You Ma'am. Popping the baby out of the vagina as quickly and as easy-peasy as you please.

There's so much about the writing process in general that I wonder about... the psychology and the science behind it, that is. I'd love to see a picture of a writer's brain at work..... Like Virgil supposedly writing three line of the Aeneid per day, versus Kafka pounding out "The Judgement" in one frenzied insomniatic night of work, pow-pow-pow. Or Bruce Springsteen writing pages and pages and pages of lyrics in order to come up with a few lines for Darkness on the Edge of Town, vs. Tori just sitting down in the studio at the piano and improvising, coming up with lyrics, melody, bridge, a whole song in one session. It's mystifying and terrifying, and yet also quite beautiful and reassuring (to me, in the sense that there is "no one right way" how to write). So, there it is, I guess. The best (and only) way to learn is to do it yourself.

* * *

Abbey

            Lily found the sword buried in the back yard of her mother’s house. She was sitting on the ground in the gap between the outer wall of the house and the brick wall that divided their yard from the neighbor’s. Flecks of whitewashed paint lay half-buried in the dirt around Lily’s bare feet, looking like minature sharp teeth. She was sitting on the edge of a very sharp rock that poked rahter painfully into her cocyx, taking the last long, thoughtful drag on the butt of her cigarette. To the right of Lily’s foot was a V-shaped hole in the ground, filled with the white corpses of all the Kools and Marlboros and Parliaments she had consumed over the past two weeks. Some of them had now turned a dirty brown color and looked flattened and deflated, undergoing the slow process of decomposing their way back into the soil.

This was the only place where Lily felt safe enough to smoke in private, without having to worry about straining her ears or craning her neck at every single sound of rustling through the bushses. Nobody ever came back here anymore: the grap was filled with the crinkled remainds of dead leaves, shards of broken red brick, tall green stems of weeds, a few hollow bamboo poles, and the hole in the ground filled with the remains of Lily’s cigarettes. The last time the place had actually been used for something besides a cigarette graveyard was way backin the day, when Lily had used to loose her pet rabbits here for a daily exercise session. They would nibble at the weeds and hop jumpily among the stones, nervous expressions on their furry faces as they stretched their legs outside their huts. Lily would stand back, arms akimbo, her back tickled by the stray branches of the wild bushes growing behind her, and watch them.

She took one last deep drag on the cigarette and stubbed it out forcefully on the side of the house wall. It left a gray smear on the white paint and some crumbs of ashes fell down into a spiderweb below. She dropped the butt into the cigarette grave. Impulsively, she started pushing dirt into the hole with the side of her foot. Even though as far as she knew nobody ever came back here anymore, she didn’t want to take the risk of the gardener or somebody coming back here to dump an armful of dry mango tree branches and find the guilty site of Lily’s ritual burials. Even though she was, by any means of logic and reasoning, and in practically any world and culture, her own independent, hard-working, grown-up twenty-one-year-old woman—the last thing in the world she needed right now was to be snitched on to her mother of her secret dirty habits by the hired help.

As she pushed the dirt over the hole, her foot hit the side of something sharp. She swallowed a swear word as she pulled her foot back and examined the scraped heel, the tiny dew drop of blood. She slid off the edge of the rock and reached forward, her legs bent in a crouched, hopping-frog position. Her fingers pushed weeds and dead leaves aside until they touched something hard sticking out of the ground. Beneath the debris, she saw a small circle of metal slightly protruding from the ground. Without thinking too much about it, she scrabbled busily about it in the dirt, wanting only to pull it out of the ground completely so that she wouldn’t have to worryabout accidentally stepping about it some time again.

There was more metal underneath the dirt than she’d originally thought. She scooped the dirt away until the entire surface of the object was revealed. It looked like a large, red pommel stone, but when she tried to pick it up and pull it out of the ground, it wouldn’t budge. It was tightly attached to something that was still buried underneath. More digging (layers of brown crumbly dirt growing thicker underneath her nails) revealed theproblem: the stone was set into the top of a hilt.

Lily tore the roots of weeds and long-gone plants from the ground. Dried beatle shells and tiny pebbles flew past her leg. She changed from her crouching position so that she was kneeling, knees digging deeply into the earth. Her heart began to pound slightly from the effort. Her face began to feel itchy and sweaty, as though covered by tiny bug bites. Her entire body felt hot and bothered. A thin trickle of sweat slid down her neck and formed a puddle in her bra. Fumbling through the soil, her hands finally found a firm grip, closed, and tightened. Slowly, forcefully, inch by deliberated inch, Lily pulled the sword from the ground.

The force of the effort caused her to fall back against the wall. She put the sword down carefully next to her. Some dirt slid into her cigarette hole, which was still half-exposed. Blowing the strands of hair from her eyes and wiping her forehead with the back of her dirty palm, she stared at it. The blade was long and thin and double-edged. Despite how much she’d had to dig, it was not completely encrusted over in dirt. She could still see the steel shining ruthlessly through some of the black clumps that clung to it. The handle was made of black leather and there was a red stone set into the top of the hilt. There were symbols running up and down the center of the blade that she could not clearly make out.

Lily rose to her feet slowly. She brushed her hands off the sides of her baggy gray shorts. Somewhere over her head the drainpipe rattled loudly from where a cat was climbing onto the roof. She bent over and wrapped her hands around the black leather handle. It was heavy, but not so heavy that she wouldn’t be able to lift it.

She left it there, leaning carefully against the side of the house. She walked back onto the back porch, retying her scraggly blond hair into a ponytail, accidentally smudging her cheeck. She walked back onto the back porch, ducked under the creepers hanging down from the roof and weaving in between her mother’s squat orange flower pots as she made her way toward the door, shaking her head back and forth every once in a while.

* * *

            She pushed open the screen door and went into the kitchen, where her mother was making lemonade. “Did you know that there’s a sword buried in the yard?” she said.

            Her mother looked up and blinked from behind her round spectacles. Lily watched her hand continuing to move the spoon, back and forth, from the jar of sugar to the pitcher.

            “A sword,” she repeated, “buried in the yard. In that little gap between our house and the neighbor’s. I was—I was following the cat, to stroke it, and my foot bumped against the hilt.” She rubbed the back of her leg with the ankle of her other foot, remembering the little red dewdrop of blood. “It was sort of sticking out of the soil,” she remembered aloud, “the sort of jewel stone in its hilt.”

            “Which neighbors?” her mother said.

            “What?”

            “Which—neighbors?” her mother said again, louder and slower this time, in her soft British accent. She put the spoon down and began screwing the orange lid back onto the sugar jar.

            “Um—I don’t remember their names. The ones with the husband in the wheelchair.”

            “The Brikers,” her mother said, nodding. She turned to put the sugar away on the shelf. Lily stood there watching her. “Second-generation from Switzerland,” she said to Lily over her shoulder, wiping the counter with a nearby dishrag. Ever since the last of the maids had disappeared, her mother was always sure to clean up after herself now, when she could remember to.

She turned back towards her daughter, paused and rested her hands on her hips. For one brief moment the two women stood there, looking at each other, almost the same in stature, one brunette with streaks of gray pulled back into a tight bun, one a wild blond mess, stray strands of hair sticking out of her ponytail band, a twig stuck above her ear. Lily’s skin had the light tan color and tge stretched, taunt scaly texture of a recovering sunburn, while her mother’s was pale and liver-spotted. They looked at each other, then her mother removed her hands from her hips and sighed, reaching for the long-handled spoon on the counter to stir the lemonade with.

“Well, your brother, you know,” she said, the metal clinking against the glass, “he was into swords. He reached the level of—I’m not sure what, but he did that samurai training for a long time. He kept at it for years.”

“That’s Japanese, though,” said Lily, opening the cupboard and taking out a blue plastic cup. The lemonade looked cold and good and she was thirsty, her throat always slightly sore after every time she smoked. “This sword looks more like it came from King Arthur, or someone.”She said the next sentence brusequely, without even bothering to pause or heisitate for effect: “Do you think it might have had something to do with Dad?”

“Mmm,” her mother said. She watched the tiny beads of water trickle down the side of the pitcher carefully, as though daring them to make a puddle on the counter she had just wiped. Ï don’t think so. I can’t thinkof why it would have anything to do with him. He never gave much thought to swords, one way or another.”

“I guess that’s true,” said Lily. She pushed the cup forward across the counter. Her mother poured her some lemonde, the ice clinking, and Lily drank it. The sweetness made the back of her throat feel closed-off, as though she might choke.

* * *

Lily went into the computer room with her cup of lemonade in hand. She was going to check her e-mail. Her mother had toldher she’d heard her powerbook “singing”; a new e-mail, with a bouncy, declarant jingle, must have arrived for her. The computer room was actually more like the storage room of the house; it was only called that because the computer Lily’s father had bought a long time again now sat upon a desk, a dirty gray cloth thrown over it.

The floor and table surfaces of the room were covered in objects that didn’t really have a place anywhere else in the house. Two large oil paintings of a mountainesque landscape leaned against the door. The legs of two grim-faced Indian corncob dolls dangled over the edge of the desk at which Lily sat. Large wooden heads carved out of firewood, with enormous curved lips and hollow eyes, hung precariously from bent nails above the door. Somewhere in the mess, buried amongst the boxes and the dust motes, was the brown leather cowskin that had once been slung over the living room floor. Somewhere there was the warrior’s portrait that once hung in her parents’ bedroom. A drum decorated with shiny red beads, a gaudy basket that was half-eaten by termites. The small toy animals she had played with as a child: a tortoise, a tuucan, a leopard. She sat down in the wooden chair, which was crudely carved out of wood but exquisitively decorated with the long slim bodies of snakes, and tucked her dirt bare feet underneath it.

It was a strange time for her to find a sword buried in her mother’s yard, hidden away in her secret cigarette smoking place: an object that so obviously reeked of the past, beneath the clumps of dirt and wispy strands of roots. Ever since she’d come home for this visit, she’d been receiving e-mails that had apparently been addressed to her from the future. Lily really didn’t know anything about computers, and she was sure—absolutely sure—that it would be more than easy enough for somebody to hack an e-mail, to “fuss” with it as her mother would say, and somehow magically make the date and time of the sent e-mail read 2027, as opposed to the actual, real time of the present. She was convinced that this would be easy enough for anybody to do with more computer knowledge and experience than her—which could be virtually anybody!—to mess with an e-mail this way, to make it seem as though it had been written for her in the future (in 2027 to be exact), and sent to her in the past—to her here, in this, the present. She was sure—more than sure—that this would be easy enough for anybody todo.

However, the other issue that Lily had with this matter—the other thing that was slightly perturbing forher, in her mind—was that these e-mails that were consistently being sent to her now were apparently written by the family’s old maid. Bettina had disappeared from Lily’s mother’s house several weeks ago.

- Spent some time researching internships, for the summer and perhaps for the spring (I dunno about that, though, Reed *is* an awful lot of work...). I need to be a Successful Being in this life, I suppose. My plan for next semester is to essentially drown myself in as much work as possible so that I will be too busy to stop, think, feel those silly things such as emotions. There are a lot of publishing houses and literary magazines in Portland (duuuhh-doy!). Surely one of them will be willing to accept me. I need to learn mad skillz such as Adobe photoshop, Microsoft Word, etc. etc. etc. I hate the feeling of uselessness.

- I seem to be very good at doing planning and outlining and sketching, but actual work, not so much. Example: I have decided to write a novel. The easiest thing to do would be to sit down and write it. Obviously, this cannot be done overnight. One of the major problems I'm facing here is that I plan on basing the novel on a 30-pg short story I wrote about 2 years ago... BUT I CAN'T FIND A COPY OF IT ANYWHERE. I'm praying to Jesus and the goddesses and the mango tree in the back yard that I will find it among my stuff in Portland. If I don't, then...... this enterprise will become suddenly, decidedly harder. Sigh. Well, if nothing else I have three-six pages of a beginning. The beginning is always the hardest to write, so they say. I don't know, I feel like I have to get this story OUT OF MY HEAD and onto paper before I feel like I can move on to writing anything else, i.e. ambitious interesting historical fiction. Maybe my dinky little novel about college students will not be of much interest to anyone, nor will it likely be very good (same as my dinky awful high school novel). Still...... the only way you can gain experience for things is doing them. And this is something I think I want to do. I'm fucking terrified and scared and nervewracked. And well, there it is. Put the pen on the paper. Move it.

- Going to edit a story for 'Brave Little Girls' project tonight, "Beast." It's about rape. I'm nervous about it. Alice Sebold's memoir "Lucky" was such a personally profoundly affecting and moving memoir for me, I don't really see how anyone can write about the same subject anymore and not have it be completely redundant... 

Lucky: A Memoir

Alice Sebold

So much planning, so many ideas...... very little product. Well, there it is. Musn't get down on oneself now.

I started out the New Year by trying to get my family to guess "Remains of the Day" during a game of charades.

I wonder what it bodes.

I'm not going to fuck it up this time.

Kafka on the Shore

Haruki Murakami

I've had an unproductive day, which is fine, because my horoscope predicted it. Whether or not I would have been unproductive *without* having read my horoscope, however, is the question, heh. My horoscope for 2007 claims I should "deepen your relationship with trees--both the actual and mythical kinds. Get to know them better. Learn from them. Plant some. Put a picture of a favorite tree on your altar. Hug one now and then." Um. Okay.

Anyway, onto the bountiful booty of literature from Christmas! One of the nice things about my family is that we always give each other books, so there are lots of luuverly new paperbacks floating around the household for me to sink my teeth into. I'm going to make some lists now:

books that were Christmas presents
Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami) -- currently reading

Saul and Patsy (Charles Baxter)

Hotel World (Ali Smith)

Like Life (Lorrie Moore) -- read it yesterday

Snow (Orhan Pamuk)

The Historian (ELizabeth Kostova) 

some books about Australia: Oscar and Lucinda, The History of the Kelly Gang, Dancing With Strangers, a few more I can't remember.

other books I'm planning to read
The Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie)

The Portrait of the Lady (Henry James)

To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf)

The Road to Wigan Pier; Homage to Catalonia (George Orwell)

(maybe) The Tipping Point (Malcolm Gladwell) -- my sister certainly couldn't put it down.

books I've read so far over Christmas break
Gweilo (Martin Booth)

River Town (Peter Hesely)

Elizabeth Costello (J.M. Coetzee)

Maybe I'll start writing reviews for the books I've read... It's nice to have a place to keep track of it. I find myself sometimes having trouble remembering whether I've read a book or not (To the Lighthouse is an example); it seems one reaches a point where it all starts to irrevocably blur together...