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Andulka
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d e v o n
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
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Discoholic 🪩
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Claire Keane
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
KIROKAZE
JBB: An Artblog!
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Xuebing Du
oozey mess
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@marvelandmess
I wore this dress once last year, and felt self-conscious in it, though it's one of my favorite dresses that I used to love in 2012-2013. So yeah, losing weight feels great. (One of the only real drawbacks of losing weight is that my calves are now asymmetrical. I don't understand how you can lose weight so unevenly, but you can.)
So I hear we have replies. (Maybe I don’t have replies because I’ve been gone forever.) How are you tumblr?
Tomorrow I’m going to Los Angeles for the first time ever for AWP. Actually, tomorrow I’m going to California for the first time ever AWP. I know it’s stupidly absurd to be excited about and idealistic about an entire state, especially one in my own country, but I am. When I was growing up in Kentucky, I felt like I was always waiting for my life to start. We were poor(ish) and rural, and I spent so much time in small town Kentucky that I was always bored. Meanwhile, California felt like the center of the world, where everyone lived and died and made things I loved. I might’ve grown out of this when I got older, but Joan Didion’s essays gave me a new ideal, some dreamers of the golden dream, and I’ve never quite outlived that. Even though I am 34 years old now.
That’s right, I’m 34 years old now. Am I too old for tumblr?
Regarding other updates: The only real thing you need to know is that I am so busy I don’t know how I’ll survive this semester, and also! I gave up fancy coffee drinks and Coke for Lent, and I started tracking my calories on MyFitnessPal the same day, and now, one day short of seven weeks, I have lost 26.4 pounds. As a plus-size woman, I can tell you not everyone has noticed, but I have. My face is thinner. My clothes fit. I’m only about 10-15 pounds from fitting into a dress I haven’t worn since 2012 (maybe 2013). And I roll out of bed every day excited to see the numbers on the scale change. I promise I’m still eating enough, and I’m not depriving myself of eating out once a week, but for once, I finally feel in control of my body. And that’s pretty amazing.
Anyway! I have to go wash clothes and clean my place and write and maybe, just maybe, nap with my cat for the last time in a few days. I’m pretty excited about AWP, but just once, I’d like to do absolutely nothing for ALL of spring break. Only two more years to go for this PhD. 🙏
Indulge my curiosity:
I’ve noticed there’s a fashion to middle names. For example, my middle name is Ann and I was born in 1987. Lots of people born in 87 have Ann as a middle name. My cousin was born in 1992 and her middle name is Rose, like a lot of other girls in 92.
Reblog with your middle name and birth year!
Colleen, ‘88.
Lynn, ‘74
Lynn, ‘75. However, it was also my mother’s middle name, and she was born in ‘46.
In further evidence that ohtehjenn and I lead oddly parallel lives, my middle name is also Lynn, born in ‘81. It’s my mom’s first name.
Going with the Lynn theme my sister’s middle name is Lynn and it comes from our maternal grandmother who was born in the 40s.
damn mine’s LeAnne and i was born in 87. i was middle-named after this girl my mom taught in Sunday School, and she wanted me to be as sweet and kind as this other LeAnne. aaaaaaand she fucked up
Ane, 85. My sister is Lyn 87. Apparently removing one N makes them unique or some shit.
Anne. ‘88. Didn’t know there was an E on it until I was like 12.
78 and Marie here. Mine is my mother’s first name, but it’s def a SUPER common late 70s middle name.
I don't usually reblog this, but mine is Lynn and I was born in '82, and my sister's is Marie and she was born in '71.
Today
-I read fifty pages of Persuasion (I have to start the discussion on Tuesday’s class) -I read and made discussion points on Phillis Wheatley for the Early American lit survey I’m teaching tomorrow -I finished making up my midterm for Early American lit -I made Martha Stewart’s One Pan Pasta for dinner -I tracked my calories through MyFitnessPal -I read a New Yorker piece on Roland Barthes -I figured out what I wanted to say about Roland Barthes and semiology and semioclasm (from Mythologies)
But I still can’t seem to write the first sentence of this short (one-page, singled spaced) essay on Barthes that’s due tomorrow.
It’s based on untangling this sentence in Barthes’ preface: “What remains, however, beside the essential enemy (the bourgeoisie norm), is the necessary conjunction of these two enterprises: no denunciation without an appropriate method of detailed analysis, no semiology which cannot, in the last analysis, be acknowledged as semioclasm.”
No matter what I’m writing, whether it’s my creative work or my academic work, the first sentence is the hardest.
“She was a marvel and she was a mess.”
My tumblr URL comes from Angela Carter’s Wise Children, a novel, like so many others I’ve been assigned in the past year and a half, that I read half of in order to discuss in class and then ran out of time to read the rest. By the time I had, well, time to read it, it was a month later and all I wanted was a break and books I’d been dying to read for months. I miss reading for fun, but I’m learning so much.
This is my way of saying hi. I’ve been gone, busier than I’ve ever been, but living such a quiet life lately. I’ve gained weight. I’ve started to lose it with MyFitnessPal (but it’s been only 11 days). I gave up Coke and fancy coffee drinks for Lent. I dated a dude really briefly, as everything seems to be these days, and I wrote a teeny bit about it here. As it turns out, another dude I used to date/thought about settling down with turned out to be a liar and a cheater. At the end of January, I submitted to a big book contest I’ve been dreaming of for years with a manuscript in progress of 26,800 words (around 100 pages). I wrote three new essays in the space of a month for that contest. I have four essays submitted to various journals right now, and that’s more than I’ve ever had out at once. My book of essays/memoir is starting to look like a book. I bought a new car in November when my 14-year-old one died. This is the first car payment I’ve had in my life. I revamped my fancy dot com site via Squarespace, but some people in my family/exes they had are determined to read it/cause a ruckus. I am still paying off my CARE bills from 14 cavities, and I have more teeth issues to fix. I am currently taking three classes (Fiction Workshop, Romanticism, and Lit Theory), auditing one (the Brontes), and teaching two (Early American lit survey and English Composition II). And next year I’m taking comps. All of this is to say this is my life, sorry I wasn’t here.
I’ve missed tumblr.
How are you? How do I tumblr without replies?
I am listening to Vince Guaraldi today in an attempt to ~get in the spirit~ and so far, it’s working pretty great.
Should do this ASAP.
Central Park, New York, USA.
But while we’re at it (and I’m procrastinating in doing my semantics reading, which is already dense in its second sentence--"Linguistic studies of event structures and semantic representations have often invoked universal conceptual structures underlying different cross-linguistic verbal patterns"), these days all of my stories about dating seem to involve this sentence:
I slept with him, and now I have to find a way of getting rid of him.
New username, same me in Louisiana, getting a PhD, burnt out, tired, and trying to avoid my father and his current/ex girlfriend knowing anything about my life. I suck as a blogger these days.
PhD Talk
After a ton of stressing over comps next year, I’ve finally picked my four: Creative Writing Studies, Modern American Lit, Nineteenth Century British Lit, and Creative Nonfiction. I picked CW Studies as my primary area, because I’m a writer and because if they switch this to a portfolio*, I’ll likely be able to write craft essays–which I’d want to publish–making this comps process actually useful. I picked Mod Am Lit because it’s the period I’m writing in, and because I’ve already taken a Modern Poetry (Ezra Pound & William Carlos Williams) class and a Modernism/Postmodern/Post-Postmodern class, both of which I loved. CNF as a comp area should be fairly easy, because I read so much CNF–because I write CNF. I really wanted to do Nineteenth Century British Lit because I thought I’d read so much of it already and because I love it, but as it turns out, I’m even better off than I thought. I’m looking through the reading list, and I’ve already read (often on my own, because I wanted to):
Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma
Charlotte Bronte - Jane Eyre
Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights
Charles Dickens - Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend
George Eliot - Middlemarch
Thomas Hardy - Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
Bram Stoker - Dracula
William Makepeace Thackeray - Vanity Fair
After I take a Romantic literature class in the spring, I’m going to be good to go for that area. (I’m still going to complain about Percy Bysshe Shelley.) I’ll also be auditing a class on the Bronte sisters, taking a lit theory class, and (if I can) taking a fiction workshop. And then I’ll be done with my coursework after the spring. So what’ll be left is four comps next year (2016-2017), a French translation exam, an oral exam, a dissertation prospectus, and the actual dissertation and defense.
You guys, this PhD is super stressful, but it’s also going by way faster than I thought it would. Four years feels like nothing anymore.
—-
*My university’s English department has been debating revising the comprehensive exam process for years and years and years, and the newest option is to change the primary area so that it’s a portfolio instead of a five-hour seated exam. They’re voting (again) this November.
“Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye
Constant reminders I need when dating:
1. If I go out on a date with this man, this does not mean I have to go on another date. If we go on two dates, this does not mean I’m locked into a relationship with him. I can leave at any time. He is not going to propose marriage soon. I can unfriend him on facebook. If I sleep with him, I still haven’t given him my world. I can stop hyperventilating.
2. It is okay to sleep with this man. I am not a slut for sleeping with him on the first date. Slut is a gendered term. Even if I were a slut, being a slut is okay. Use a condom.
3. I am not really having a heart attack when this dude texts me on a daily basis. An elephant is not sitting on my chest. My heart is not in vise grip. This is just anxiety. See step one. Breathe.
4. I should go back to therapy.
But yes, the essay form is indeed rooted in meta moments. We live our lives and then relive them on the page in a relentless search for some nugget of discovery, some further comprehension of what it all means. Otherwise, essay or memoir is flat: it is just “this happened to me” or “I happen to think this about that.” If a writer isn’t examining and re-examining her ideas and observations in each draft, ending up places she never thought at the beginning that her essay would take her, then she is not doing the job.
The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Dinty W. Moore. (via therumpus)
President Obama after Oregon shooting: “Our thoughts and prayers are not enough.”
Hours after today’s massacre in Oregon, President Obama took the podium for the 15th time after a mass shooting. Sounding stern and appearing frustrated, Obama challenged Americans to respond more forcefully to this shooting. His full, impassioned statement is one every American needs to hear.
Tumblr, can you keep a secret? I said no no no to Kate Spade for a long time. But yesterday, just like that, I became a fan.
Unless you're a doubter and a worrier, a nail-biter and apologizer, a rethinker, then memoir may not be your playpen. That's the quality I've found most consistently in those life-story writers I've met. Truth is not their enemy. It's the bannister they grab for when feeling around the dark cellar stairs. It's the solution.
Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir
Great Britain [4] - Beachy Head, York, Bath, Luss, Snowdonia, Conwy, London, Isle of Skye, Wells, Kynance Cove
