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2021-08-25 02:08 pm

The Power Notebooks by Katie Roiphe

"I read Doris Lessing in literature class and that depressed the shit out of me too. I just hated reading work by women or about women because it always added up the same. Loss of self, endless self-abnegation, even as the female was trying to be an artist, she wound up pregnant, desperate, waiting on some man." -Eileen Myles


we liked the idea of powerful women, but we don't like powerful women themselves


Is there a particular kind of abjection that some of us are drawn to, participate in, possibly romanticize, even though nothing about our external lives necessarily suggests it?... How to be someone who has to win every argument with a man and also sometimes likes the idea of being overpowered.


I was afraid I was trading important things for the baby, trading my body itself


Hemingway if Hemingway had taken women's studies classes


He liked to map out his books on the walls, which struck me as a very male impulse, wanting your whole thought process made manifest, inflicting it on a room.


One night we spent three hours talking about John Berryman's Dream Songs


It's like sleeping with a sparrow.


it was like being suddenly tumbled by a wave: I am alone.


He was also the most beautiful man I knew, and I never became immune or even habituated to his looks.


When we see each other, it's always the last night on earth: there is too much wine, a frantic, addict-y ardor.


Whenever you represent anyone, you are misrepresenting them: you will never capture them exactly as they see themselves.


Read more... )
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2021-01-24 12:41 pm

Woolgathering by Patti Smith

I never had a sense that the ability to win came from me. I always felt it was in the object itself. Some piece of magic that was animated through my touch. In this manner I found magic in everything, as if in all things, all of nature bore the imprint of a jinn.


I would gaze, gauge and just like that, be gone--vane avion, flitting  from earth to earth, unconscious of my awkward arms or wayward socks.


we'd play statue and red rover


I did this so often it was no longer necessary to see what I was looking at.


Patty Waters--"Black is the Color"


I sat in the changing light in the center of the room, copying out the Lord's Prayer Aramaic, hoping something would be revealed in the process.


I went from place to place issuing lengths of heavy gauze


I awoke in the center of night.


I was satisfied to note that I was dressed exactly like the drunken poet


They poured out into the street waving the flags of the future. I felt I knew them, but I also felt they would not know me--a mere intruder spirited through a dusty glass from a realm where a transistor dictates the sublime.


I entered the cafe unnoticed; the unaccountable wound was my ticket in.


The poets were sizing me up.


murmuring like indiscernible bees



commonrue: (Default)
2020-12-23 12:46 pm
Entry tags:

Hood Feminism: Notes From the Women that a Movement Forgot by Mikki Kendall

There's no magic shield in being middle class that can completely insulate you from the consequences of being in a body that's already been criminalized for existing.


One of the biggest issues with mainstream feminist writing has been the way the idea of what constitutes a feminist issue is framed. We rarely talk about basic needs as a feminist issue. Food insecurity and access to quality education, safe neighborhoods, a living wage, and medical care are all feminist issues. Instead of a framework that focuses on helping women get basic needs met, all too often the focus is not on survival but on increasing privilege. For a movement that is meant to represent all women, it often centers on those who already have most of their needs met. 


No one can live up to the standards set by racist stereotypes like this that position Black women as so strong they don't need help, protection, care, or concern.


Girls like me seemed to be the object of the conversations and not full participants, because we were a problem to be solved, not people in our own right.


For women of color, the expectation that we prioritize gender over race, that we treat the patriarchy as something that gives all men the same power, leaves man of us feeling isolated.


No woman has to be respectable to be valuable.


The sad reality is that while white women are an oppressed group, they still wield more power than any other group of women--including the power to oppress both men and women of color.


Read more... )
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2020-12-15 05:23 pm

The Witches are Coming by Lindy West

It seems that a lot of men are confusing being asked not to violate people's sexual boundaries with being forbidden to participate in basic human activities such as dancing, dating, chatting, walking around, going to work, and telling jokes.


Indeed it is men who are the true victims of witch hunts. Which they invented. To kill women.


Such has it always been: powerful men sorting women's bodies into property and trash and "good" guys, average guys, guys you know, guys you love, guys on the Today show, going along with it.


I'm sorry to say it, but you just might have to tiptoe through the minefield for a while. We're tearing down old systems, but we haven't built new systems yet. (Feeling uncomfortable at work? What's that like?)


It's about who feels at home in the workplace and who feels like an outsider--which, by extension, dictates who gets to thrive and ascend, who gets to hire the replacements, who gets to set their children up for success, who gets credit and glory, and who gets forgotten. It's about who feels safe in public spaces and who doesn't. Which is to say, it's about everything.


We have flesh-and-bone evidence sitting in the White House--butt chugging Fox News and eating cheeseburgers and always disturbingly, profoundly alone--of exactly how far the status quo will go to protect itself.


Read more... )
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2020-12-15 03:47 pm

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

When Jim Donell thought of something to say he said it as often and in as many ways as possible, perhaps because he had very few ideas and had to wring each one dry.


When I was small I thought Constance was a fairy princess.


She was the most precious person in my world, always.


On Sunday mornings I examined my safeguards, the box of silver dollars I had buried by the creek, and the doll buried in the long field, and the book nailed to the tree in the pine woods; so long as they were where I had put them nothing could get in to harm us. I had always buried things, even when I was small; I remember that once I quartered the long field and buried something in each quarter to make the grass grow higher as I grew taller, so I would always be able to hide there. I once buried six blue marbles in the creek bed to make the river beyond run dry. "Here is treasure for you to bury," Constance used to say to me when I was small, giving me a penny, or a bright ribbon; I had buried all my baby teeth as they came out one by one and perhaps someday they would grow as dragons. All our land was enriched with my treasures buried in it, thickly inhabited just below the surface with my marbles and my teeth and my colored stones, all perhaps turned to jewels by now, held together under the ground in a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us.


Read more... )
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2020-12-15 03:29 pm

Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner

not wanting to go anywhere, but having given my word that I would stay away for a month until everyone decides that I am myself again. For a moment I panicked, for I am myself now, and was then, although this fact was not recognized. Not drowning, but waving.


all these sad cypresses


She would have liked a gin and tonic but could not quite make the effort.


To Penelope, men were conquests, attributes, but they were also enemies; they belonged to the species that must never be granted more than the amount of time and attention she considered they deserved.


I have been too harsh on women, she thought, because I understand them better than I understand men. I know their watchfulness, their patience, their need to advertise themselves as successful. Their need to never admit to a failure. I know all that because I am one of them.


I have taken the name of Virginia Woolf in vain, she thought.


But why must I be called a romantic just because I don't see things the same way as you do?


My idea of absolute happiness is to sit in a hot garden all day, reading, or writing, utterly safe in the knowledge that the person I love will come home to me in the evening.


Good women always think it is their fault when someone else is being offensive. Bad women never take the blame for anything.


If your capacity for bad behavior were being properly used, you would not be moving around in that cardigan.


Read more... )
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2020-11-14 01:02 pm

"The Once and Future Witches" by Alix E. Harrow

Every woman draws a circle around herself. Sometimes she has to be the only thing inside it.


Why do men always want to give you some smaller, sweeter name than the one your mama gave you?


Bella produces a stiff woolen dress from her office closet. It's one of those respectable, pocketless affairs that obliges ladies to carry stupid little handbags, so Juniper can't take so much as a melted candle-stub or a single snake tooth with her. Bella informs her that this is the precise reason why women's dresses no longer have pockets, to show they bear no witch-ways or ill intentions, and Juniper responds that she has both, thank you very damn much. 


They stand above her like a matched pair of Old Testament angels, the kind with flaming swords and vengeful hearts. Stories spin through Agnes' head again, except this time she isn't thinking of the dead mothers or their lost daughters. She's thinking about the witches--the women who dispensed the glass slippers and curses and poison apples, who wreaked their wills on the world and damned the consequences.


Read more... )
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2020-02-28 11:05 am

"Devotion" Patti Smith

we pillage, we embrace, we know not


The taxi arrives too quickly as I realize I haven't yet chosen what books to take. The prospect of boarding a plane without a book produces a wave of panic. The right book can serve as a docent of sorts, setting a tone or even altering the course of a journey.


The Garden of Simples (look this up)


What is the dream? To write something fine, that would be better than I am, and that would justify my trials and indiscretions. To offer proof, through a scramble of words, that God exists. 



commonrue: (Default)
2018-09-01 10:15 am

Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman

I recently found a little book at the library full of essays about books. Before I return it I want to record some of the passages I loved from it. Also: I really recommend this book if you are a bookish person yourself.

On why she uses Ms. instead of Mrs.

"In twenty-three years--an eyeblink in our linguistic history--the new little word has evolved from a cryptic buzz to an automatism. From the beginning, I saw its logic and fairness. Why should people instantly know if a woman, but not a man, was married? Why should they care? The need for Ms. was indisputable. The hitch was feeling comfortable saying it. It sounded too much like a lawn mower. Gradually, my ear returned. Now, although it's probably a moot point--everyone except telephone solicitors calls me Anne--I am, by process of elimination, Ms. Fadiman. I can't be Miss Fadiman because I'm married. I can't be Mrs. Fadiman because my husband is Mr. Colt. I can't be Mrs. Colt because my name is still Fadiman. I am, to my surprise, the very woman for whom Ms. was invented."

On feminism and grammar

"As is all too often the case these days, I find my peace as a reader and writer rent by a war between two opposing semantic selves, one feminist and one reactionary."

"Changing our language to make men and women equal has a cost. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. High prices are attached to many things that are on the whole worth doing."

On writing with a computer

"I prefer to move the rejected phrases to the bottom of the screen, where they are continuously pushed ahead of the text-in-progress like an ever-burgeoning mound of snow before a plow."
commonrue: (Default)
2016-05-02 09:43 am

"The Last Night at the Ritz" by Elizabeth Savage

"Gay's never approved of me. But she's always loved me. The two things don't have as much to do with one another as some people think."

"now that I am older my face has grown up to its bones"

"I am superstitious. It's my belief that everybody is, but if you don't admit it, you can't take advantage."

"I haven't been in love with Len for a long time, although I like him with all my heart. But there was a time when one of those grey glances would turn my day upside down. It wasn't love, of course, but one of those overwrought, star-cross't attractions like that of Romeo and Juliet, who weren't old enough to love, either. How can you love anyone you don't know? At that age you have barely made acquaintance with yourself."

"He was a hulking, friendly lout who was on the football team and Doris was small; he always looked way down at her as if she were something precious."

"like any proper poet I had from time to time been in love with easeful death"

"I am a person who believes not only that you can change the future but, to some extent, the past. If you elect to wipe out what has happened, pay it no mind, give it no room in your consciousness--why then, it didn't happen."

"Gay's grandmother was a formidable woman, but you didn't see it right away because she was pretty."

"But that morning, in that wild wonderful library, I felt that I had met my Leader."

"What boy? she said. "I've known so many boys."

"Maybe it was the burden of old disasters."

"Everyone in that house liked to read; not that they were all scholars; they just liked to read, and there was no corner of that big house that was not littered with literature, as though they were all afraid that they might be caught at any moment without print."

"To Gay love was becoming someone else; alas, that does not happen."

"There is no knowledge like the bitter knowledge of old lovers."

"I hadn't discovered yet that there are many people who don't write books and are not impressed by those who do. I know better now. There are even those who don't read them."

"It is very dangerous to get caught without something to read."

"But you can't very well lug an encyclopedia around hotels. Fortunately, I did have my flask."

"She'd always wanted to be the life of the party, but she was only asked to the party just that once."

"On with the dance. Let joy be unconfined."

"The young aren't cruel. They just don't know anything."

"They both survived their first and savage loves, and now we can all be quiet and hold hands."

"When you have been friends for a long, long time, it is not always easy to distinguish what you have seen for yourself from what the other has told you."

"After small furors, one does like to depart with dignity."

"But useful as my flask is, it is not ideal for us gin drinkers. Warm gin, even laced with warm vermouth, is honestly not very palatable. So whiskey it has to be, no matter what went before it or what will follow."

"I shut my eyes against the blinking of the neon tubes and told myself that if the other cab came before I had counted fifteen, the evening would still end well. I often do this. If this happens, that will follow. It often works out this way. Try it and see."

"She was a slim little thing who burned like a flame."

"If you ask me, there's a lot too much loose talk about sincerity. I go for deference and courtesy and girls who know how to get in and out of rooms."
commonrue: (Default)
2016-03-13 05:06 pm

lines from jessica hopper's First Collective of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic

"We deserve better songs than any boy will ever write about us."

"It is on my short list of why I will one day move to the woods. Nothing is grosser than people after last call. I want barn owls in their place."

"Riot-grrrl wasn't the end result, it was the catalyst."

"showing new girls that they are part of a continuum, not just passing on this epic mantle of the struggle."

"That is all we should ask of it as feminists: BLAZE THE FUCK PAST US."

"he's wholly ghosted by what might have been"

"It is an alchemical shift, where music becomes exactly what you believed it was when your heart was 15 and pure, and all the hope and time you've given it pays out."

"The Buddhists say hope is a trap, it's a set up for suffering, but the hope is in this song, it is free, it drags nothing with, it is only onward, onward in love and frailty."

"a died-young druggie poet-totem"

"buried upside-down--an 18th-century practice to prevent suicides from haunting the earth"

"romance is a loaded topic among the feminist cognoscenti, perhaps because it's considered unseemly for a feminist to openly admit to wanting something from men (or caring enough to be disappointed with them)"
commonrue: (Default)
2016-03-13 01:34 pm

lines from patti smith's M Train

I'ma put these here for safekeeping.

"High winds, cold rain, or the threat of rain; a looming continuum of calamitous skies that subtly permeate my entire being."

1. Le Rouquet in Paris
2. Cafe Josephinum in Vienna
3. Bluebird Coffeeshop in Amsterdam
4. Ice Cafe in Sydney
5. Cafe Aqui in Tucson
6. Wow Cafe at Point Loma
7. Caffe Trieste in North Beach
8. Caffe del Professore in Naples
9. Cafe Uroxen in Uppsala
10. Lula Cafe in Logan Square
11. Lion Cafe in Shibuya
12. Cafe Zoo in the Berlin train station

"I have a fine desk but I prefer to work from my bed, as if I'm a convalescent in a Robert Louis Stevenson Poem."

"dragging my malaise through December, with a prolonged period of enforced solitude, though sadly without crystalline effect"

"Yesterday's poets are today's detectives."

"eyes the color of water"

"Gumshoe phrases bring to mind the low side-mouthed tones of William Burroughs."

"I wrote about writing--of genies and hustlers and mythic travelers, my vagabondia.

"Such things that disappear in time that we find ourselves longing to see again. We search for them in close-up, as we search for our hands in a dream."

"We bought miniature vials of the water discovered by Ponce de Leon--a hole in the ground gushing the supposed water of youth. Let's never drink it, he said, and the vials became part of our trove of improbable treasure."

"an insomnia counterattack"

"There is a theory that it is good luck to see one's own hands in a dream."

"Every time I put it on I felt like myself."

"We lay our flowers yet cannot sleep."

"One can only shudder at the existence of such overriding desolation." (on Sylvia's death)

"Nothing can be truly replicated. Not a love, not a jewel, not a single line."

"I have relived moments that were perfect in their certainty."

"I rose and performed small tasks with the mute concentration of one imprisoned in ice."

"Some things are not lost but sacrificed."

"I was my own lucky hand of solitaire."
commonrue: (Default)
2014-02-17 05:34 pm

Using Livejournal More

I really want to write in livejournal again more often. I was writing this really long entry about how Risto proposed to me, and it really was beautiful, but the entry was taking forever. I'll finish it at some point, but basically it was perfect. I know that sounds sappy, but it's true. It was in this beautiful courtyard in an art museum that was having an exhibit on American poetry, and the proposal included a recitation of a Lorca poem. So you know, exactly the kind of thing I would have imagined for myself, if I were the type of girl to imagine the way I'd like my proposal to be.

We're pretty far into wedding planning now, and we're getting married on August 31 of this year. When you just break it all down it doesn't seem as scary, it's only when it's first just sitting in a big pile and you haven't started. Right now I'm kindof absorbed in honeymoon planning. We're going to the south of France, staying in I think Nice and also Juan-les-Pins. Town names sound so much more romantic when they're hyphenated, for some reason. It's going to be expensive, and at first I was thinking we should dial it back, but what the hell, we're only going on one honeymoon, and we're both making good money now.

I guess that's the other main thing going on lately with me--new job in the city. I'm making a lot more money than I was at United Way. They just really weren't paying me what I'm worth, and that's not sustainable in a wedding year...plus it was really unmotivating. I never was up for working extra hours, for example, because I felt like I wasn't getting paid enough to work on weekends. So I started looking around the holidays and I found something new pretty quickly. Partly I think online learning expertise is very much in demand right now, and partly I'm really good at finding new jobs. I mean, it's tough, and takes time, but if you're not happy at your job, it's a situation you can change, and you have the means to do it. So anyway I found this position, "Digital Education Project Manager" at AWHONN, a small non-profit in DC that works with women's health issues. We just got a new lady CEO. Take that, glass ceiling. So my goal while I'm here is to stay for at least 2 years, and to get my position upgraded to Director level. I think that's do-able, I just have to prove myself. Eventually I'd like Risto and I to start something on our own--I want all the work I do to be making money for myself. I mean, that's the goal right? Not to work for someone else. We've got some ideas, just kind of waiting for the right time and learning. At AWHONN I should have a lot of increased budget responsibilities, which will be good for me to learn more about. I dig my new lady boss too--she's pretty kick ass in the office, she does crossfit, and she's very direct, but lets me have autonomy as well. So far so good.

I've been listening to podcasts on the metro because I get really motion sick and am not good at reading. I love This American Life so much, and wish it came out more than once a week! I listen to Fresh Air too a lot. Anything else you guys like or would recommend? I'm somewhat new to podcasts. Good thing Risto thought that up for me.

What else? Right now we have a turkey in the oven for "Lovesgiving" which is a thing that we came up with for Valentine's Day, because I really don't like traditional valentines day stuff. I mean, I don't even like chocolates and stuff that much, and just feel like I'm giving in to this weird pressure that says that I should stockpile flowers and candy from my SO and than show it off to my girlfriends in some weird competition. Like, I've got this gorgeous rock on my finger, I don't need to prove how much Risto loves me to anyone. Anyway, but I do love turkey, gravy, and stuffing, so that's what we're doing instead. We might even make it a new tradition!
commonrue: (Default)
2013-04-30 01:36 pm

poem riddles

A new poem by Anne Carson published by the London Review of Books--she mixed up the lines into a random order in the published version, and I dorkily ran over and reorganized them to find out the secrets/see where she started.

By Chance the Cycladic People

1.0. The Cycladic was a neolithic culture based on emmer wheat, wild barley, sheep, pigs and tuna speared from small boats.
1.1. The boats had up to fifty oars and small attachments at the bow for lamps. Tuna was fished at night.
1.2. The Cycladic was an entirely insomniac culture.

2.0. They wore their faces smooth with trying to sleep, they ground their lips and nipples off in the distress of pillows.
2.1. It was no use. They’d lost the knack. Sleep was a stranger.
2.2. Well, they said, these are the pies we have. It was a proverb.
2.3. This became a Cycladic proverb.

3.0. While staying up at night the Cycladic people invented the frying pan.
3.1. Quite a number of frying pans have been found by archaeologists. The frying pans are small. No one was very hungry at night.
3.2. Or they may have been prestige frying pans.
3.3. A final theory is that you could fill the pan with water and use it as a mirror.

4.0. Mirrors led the Cycladic people to think about the soul and to wish to quiet it.
4.1. To uncontrive.
4.2. My point of view is admittedly faulty. My nose is always breathing. I am worn out with breathing. I suspect you have days when you choose not to breathe at all.
4.3. Is it because you don’t want the impact.
4.4. How you spear it, how you sheer it, how you flense it, how you grind it, how you get it to look so strangely relaxed.

5.0. The Cycladic people were very fond of Proust.
5.1. Possibly because of his blanket refusal to listen to another person’s dreams at the breakfast table, for Proust dismissed this type of recollection as ‘mere anamnesia’.
5.2. Proust liked a good jolt.
5.3. That moment when everyone sees exactly what is on the end of their fork, as William S. Burroughs said of celebrity.

6.0. To the Cycladic people is ascribed the invention of the handbag,
6.1. The handbag, that artefact which freed human beings from having to eat food wherever they found it.
6.2. So began the dinner parties.
6.3. And after dinner, harps.

7.0. To play a stringless harp requires only the thumbs.
7.1. Abstention from grain is helpful.
7.2. Abstention from grain is the same for men and women. You put your lungs in an extraordinary state of clear coolness.

8.0. Not sleeping made the Cycladic people gradually more and more brittle. Their legs broke off.
8.1. They worried about this and kept their arms close to the body, clasping the torso right arm below left, like a cummerbund.
8.2. Left arm below right was considered uncouth.

9.0. When their faces wore smooth they painted them back on with azurite and iron ore.
9.1. Did I mention the marble pillows, I think I did.
9.2. They painted wonderful widow’s peaks on themselves or extra breasts.
9.3. Their eyes fell out.
9.4. They put stones in their eye sockets. Upper-class people put precious stones.
9.5. Perhaps now they were glad after all that they did not sleep.

10.0. Eventually the Cycladic people died out all except one, a ferryboat captain.
10.1. She plied the ferryboat back and forth, island to island, navigating by means of her inner eye.
10.2. Her inner eye grew sharp enough to slaughter goats.

11.0. Three times a day she put the boat on autopilot and went down below to the cool silent pantry.
11.1. The pantry, what a relief after the splash and glare of the helm.
11.2. In the pantry she sat at the counter and ate with her hands.
11.3. The food was tastier that way.
11.4. Left hand on Tuesdays, right hand on Wednesdays.
11.5. This may sound to you like a mere boyish stunt.
11.6. She thought it a good idea to silence mental conversation.

12.0. Clouds every one of them smell different, so do ocean currents. So do rocky reefs.
12.1. All this expertise just disappears when a people die out.

13.0. One night there was a snowfall, solitary, absurd.

14.0. That was the night she looked to her soul.
14.1. There it was plunging up and down in its shallow holes.

15.0. She’d been a pretty good harpist before the die-off.
15.1. See me leaving you better hang your head and cry, she liked songs like that. Honkytonk influence.

16.0. As far as the experience of stirring is concerned, small stillness produces small stirring and great stillness great stirring.
16.1. There it lay, the foredeck in the moonlight, more silver than the sea.
16.2. Prior to the movement and following the movement, stillness.
16.3. All of her leapt before her eyes.
commonrue: (Default)
2012-01-15 06:35 pm

scents I ordered from Bpal today

1. bread-and-butter fly: bread, lightly buttered, with weak tea, cream, and a lump of white sugar.

2. smut 2012: three swarthy, smutty musks sweetened with sugar and woozy with dark booze notes.

3. blackbear moon: hazelnuts, acorns, black cherries, wild winter berries, and warm black fur dusted by moonlight, honey, and pine needles.

4. rose red 2011: the perfect winter rose, dew covered and freshly cut.


I'm really excited :)
commonrue: (Default)
2012-01-15 06:30 pm

to use in a poem somewhere

to break in a pair of hockey skates:

put shaving cream in the skates & play in them (the lanolin softens the leather)
commonrue: (Default)
2011-09-11 04:51 pm

two poems I like by Deborah Garrison

Saying Yes to a Drink


What would a grown woman do?
She'd tug off an earring
when the phone rang, drop it to the desk

for the clatter and roll. You'd hear
in this the ice, tangling in the glass;
in her voice, low on the line, the drink

being poured. All night awake,
I heard its fruity murmur of disease
and cure. I heard the sweet word "sleep,"

which made me thirstier. Did I say it,
or did you? And when will I learn
to wave the drink with a good-bye wrist

in conversation, toss it off all bracelet-bare
like more small talk about a small affair?
To begin, I'll claim what I want

is small: the childish hand
of a dream to smooth me over,
a cold sip of water in bed,

your one kiss, never again.
I'll claim I was a girl before this gin,
then beg you for another.





She Was Waiting to Be Told


For you she learned to wear a short black slip
and red lipstick,
how to order a glass of red wine
and finish it. She learned to reach out
as if to touch your arm and then not
touch it, changing the subject.
Didn't you think, she'd begin, or
Weren't you sorry....

To call your best friends
by their schoolboy names
and give them kisses good-bye,
to look away when they say
Your wife! So your confidence grows.
She doesn't ask what you want
because she knows.

Isn't that what you think?

When actually she was only waiting
to be told Take off your dress--
to be stunned, and then do this,
never rehearsed, but perfectly obvious:

in one motion up, over, and gone,
the X of her arms crossing and uncrossing,
her face flashing away from you in the fabric
so that you couldn't say if she was
appearing or disappearing.
commonrue: (Default)
2011-06-13 09:32 pm

forgive me first love

...and you realize that, though you're not in love with him, you're still in love with that moment of loving him and you'll never be rid of that feeling.
commonrue: (Default)
2010-10-21 03:00 pm

more about computers

In the story of "one time my company went dumpster diving for labtops and I ended up with one of them," there have been some new and exciting developments. Such as, a Dell service rep was sent out to replace the motherboard, put the labtop back together wrong, and now its wireless card won't work, the keyboard is buckled, and it actually refuses to turn on anymore. Actually, I'm fine with that because I hate the piece of crap and got all my important documents off of it in time. The Dell service rep told me three interesting things:

1. The warranty for this labtop was extended because there's a known problem with the video cards.
2. My cat is very handsome.
3. He's saving up for an apple desktop computer.

Risto looked up this particular model of labtop, and apparently they're just absolutely ridden with problems. This has been 4 significant hardware failures in the span of two months. Is it me, or should people expect better? I guess that in the last 5 years of owning a mac I've come to think of computers as reliable and easy to use, and of customer service as reliable and easy to work with. I knew that apple makes a superior product, but I just assumed that the rest of the industry had made some attempt to catch up in the past 5 years. Not so. How disheartening. My mother suggested I turn it back in to my company, demanding that they "declare it a lemon" and get me a new one. Tempting. It definitely is a lemon.

And now, time to play with excel for budget time. This day just keeps getting better. I am going to make Risto a nice dinner to thank him for helping me so much with my computer issues, and drink one of the hard ciders I bought as a treat for doing the budget work later.