This is Beautiful

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/09/18/science/091809_Scienceweek_3.html

Stay up all night.

DayQuil is bad.

Here’s a likely unreliable article about how “creative types” have more sex than others. What do you think? Based on what I know of my rowdy group of friends… and the existence of the blog Samuel Fuckett, I am giving this wishy washy report a coin-flip for believability.  Here’s another article from the same site about us artsy types. I am not sure if this is my new favorite source of information or my new least favorite trash. Overall, I would say that every article I have read on the site gathers information from a single, inconclusive study, then misreports it in order to attempt to reinforce silly stereotypes. Oh, well. So much for science.

But seriously, here is a much more reliable article about why you should give your would-be lady-lover gifts aplenty… and not just when she’s ovulating… on her birthday, too. We’re all prostitutes of some kind, I suppose. The female chimps in this article, however, have got their shit together, reaping all the benefits at half the cost. Ho yeah!

Get to bed!

Empowering

The 2009 Human Development Report has arrived! Check it out to see how badly the US’s ass is kicked by Burundi (Yes, this Burundi where US personnel are not even allowed to travel around after dark.) in terms of equal pay for men and women.

The HDI was one of my favorite toys as a child; it helped give my imaginary travels a much more realistic edge.

“Imagine there’s no country.”

P.S. I want to move to Liechtenstein where GDP per capita (PPP US$) is $85, 382. That is roughly $40, 000 more than the US!!!!!!!!!!!

After Brawl-Breaking

I am writing a lot of poems about my feelings, my friends, my family. I am writing a lot of poems about the history of my love, and it is killing me because I am having a thousand dreams every night about a mysterious lover touching my shoulder to wake me up in the morning, and frankly, my subconscious obsession is becoming a fucking Freudian nightmare at this point. It is like I am waiting for somebody all night long, which leaves  me with a lot of emptiness in the morning.

But it sets me to work.

The death of publishing is on the tip of every writer’s tongue these days, but I think it’s a dumb and dull conversation. I wrote a long splurge, spelling out my piece and now I am ready to be done with it all. I just want to get a job and pay off my student loans and write beautiful poems and own a really good vacuum.

Seriously, the vacuum has become a standard of success for me– when I have the vacuum, my life will have a sense of completeness, like I will have gotten where I was going and I will stay still there for the rest of my while, which will be lovely.

A man paid for the cab ride of a friend and I the other day. We said, “You really don’t need to do this; we are content riding the subway.”

To this, he responded, “First impressions are very important,” and he hailed a cab, and I decided it was an appropriate time in my life to check Gone With the Wind out of the library. I have neither read it nor seen the film before. Now, I am ankle deep in the text, and I love the cavalier luxury in which they all live. I want to bring back the days when socializing was a career. Or at least, I wish people would date more… real dates with meals and dancing and low, sparkling lights.

I don’t have time to hunt for my future, which may be the best or worst thing to happen to a person, I am not sure which yet. Outlining my internship prospects for class, I feel very solid, but also very much like I am the ideal personal assistant, and maybe I should just stick to that. Personal assistants and office managers are paid very well in New York City. I know a few, and they seem content.

My mother would call this giving up, like when I told her that I would probably end up working as a bank teller. My mother has more faith in poetry than anyone I have ever talked to, which is magical in its own way because I am fairly confident that she doesn’t give a damn about poetry.

I think about moving west almost every day. I want to drive a car. I want a full-sized oven. I want enough space that I can run around naked in the dark without running into everyone or being arrested.

I think about moving to Manhattan almost every day. I want to hail cabs. I want a doorman building. I don’t want any more space than it takes to pile my books.

I am afraid that I should have been an economist. Maybe a publicist. Maybe a movie star. Maybe a lipstick model. Really, I don’t know if I ever want to work at all. I am tired of being powerful.

No, I’m not. I am deluded about the comforts of letting somebody else run my life.

An associate of mine has started a blog, which I quite enjoy. It is all about how much things suck. It has a nice balance of journalism and humor, and it makes me think. You should all visit it.

You should all also visit The Corresponding Society because they are good people with ambition for the art of writing and, oh yeah, they publish my work in their fly journal, Correspondence.

I am talking about traveling all the time, but I am making no efforts to actually move myself around. If anyone would like to make plans for me, please do. I’d be happy to travel with you.

Be a rock star.

Murder

Listen to this excerpt from a Harper’s Bazaar interview:

“Diane VonFurstenberg: Well, I lived in Paris [in the 80's], and I was living with a writer. And I really didn’t do very much, except I read a lot, and I had this fantasy of having a literary salon. When you live with writers– when you live with an artist– you don’t do much except live their lives.”

So true. We can be infinitely self absorbed people. We are all obsessed with our next adventure. When will we learn to be fictive? When will we learn the writer’s true craft? “Never!” sing the poets, drunk on their streets and rooftops.

Get into it.

It’s A Giggle

My friend tells me about the way his friends talk to him now that he lives in New York. “Oh, my god, are you going to the VMAs?”

“Yes, of course. And afterward I’m going to fuck Lady GaGa in the back of her limo. We run into each other all the time. I mean, New York is so small that she has to cut through campus to get to Radio City Music Hall.”

I am pleased to feel myself sinking deeper into my work, even as others begin to float on theirs. The pleasure I take in words grows each day. My degrees of separation from my idols consistently shrink. I came to Brooklyn for this fluttering feeling of influence, the cheap smile that haunts your face in private after someone says, “I spent quite a lot of time with your poem,” becoming a garden party.

To divulge secrets puts us at risk, but it also makes us more fun. Opening our hearts and our faces. I spend many hours alone with my fancy. I am learning to spend many hours with companions of fancy.

Tomorrow, any one of us could meet the love of our life and not have any idea until it was too late, and we were married, and we had to come home every night. And babies. But babies are even more surprising. Where do they come from?

I am romanticizing the west again. But, having lived there, I have to wonder if the romanticization is complete enough.

Go play.

Intrigue, Intrigue!

The year has started, and I could not be more pleased.

I am focusing on meeting new people, branching out socially. I want to focus on my work even more this semester, and I’ve been doing well so far. This semester, I feel like I am finally developing into a professional poet. I even listed it on my resume.

Patriot’s Day passed with little comment. The coordinator of my program gave a bizarre spiel about how a massive swell saved hundred of surfing businessmen’s lives that day, but he seemed confused about whether he should hate himself for feeling detached from the attacks. I say no.

Stay dry.

First Day

I am so busy I can barely breath. But it feels so good to fall into bed each night.

Last month, a very dear friend reminded me of my own ability to survive. And here I am, doing to all like they have done to me. There is nothing to resent in another’s being busy. Only something to resent in one’s being free enough to notice.

I know so many of my residents. I am charmed by their open doors and loud music. My new roommate woke up, hungover after her 21st birthday, and slapped herself on the face a few times before going out to model in a feminist photographer’s shots.

The dorms can be so warm.

I have a television.

My body aches at the end of long days, but I can say, “I fed 500 people dinner,” or “I gave 60 people a place to call home,” or “I am angry,” or “I am happy.”

Catch up with yourself.

Moving Day

I bought cute new shoes at Payless because I have no self control. They are lavender. They gave me fat blisters on my pinkie toes and heels.

Herman Melville did his best to make my last night at Gates into a living hell. I’ll be pleased to never see his too-long face screaming at my window again. Poor baby has worms, though. Someone must adopt him.

Friends moving upstairs from old apartments. Gates will carry on.

It is moving day for me. For my peers, I make the following recommendations:

Pack sculptures in dirty laundry.

Have a linen suitcase instead of a linen closet.

Do not own furniture. You can always sleep on a pile of blankets in the corner of someone’s living room.

Do without.

Treat trash cans as luxury goods.

Divest yourself of “home”.

If you can’t leave it behind, don’t bring it with you in the first place.

Shop street corners. If that isn’t good enough, shop Salvation Army. If that isn’t good enough, shop Ikea. If that isn’t good enough, move to Manhattan.

Everyone is gabbing about love all the time. I am reading JT Leroy’s story collection. It is aptly names, “Above All Things, The Heart is Deceitful”. JT Leroy is deceitful. I don’t know about love. Youth is a product of sex, and it produces sex. I don’t know about a lot of things. When I grow up, I want to be just like her.

Today, I got a Twitter. Next week, I’ll go swimming. Isn’t summer grand?

At the end of a sunny Saturday, Coney Island is more like Templeton the Rat than I normally imagine it. I learned that last weekend.

Our waitress at our diner said she sees me speed-walking. She asked me if I was trying to lose weight, told me I look good. I nodded and smiled, too charmed to tell her that no, I just storm around with that much intensity in my stride all the time.

Dr. Pepper freeze pops are the best. Eat one.

Still without computer

I accidentally talked to my mother for two hours. It was a long phone call in Pratt sculpture garden. I watched a lot of young lovers come and go. In the heat, we become attracted to the grass. It’s almost upsetting how many mosquito bites I am willing to sustain just to be close to the ground.

Movies have become important to me again. Somehow, I blurred over that New Yorker line, so now, $12.50 doesn’t seem like such an outrageous price for a movie, although I still try to catch the $8 student tickets at BAM.

I have not been to Coney Island all summer.

I just ripped the wings off a mosquito I found hitching in my hair. I meant to kill it, but it was too quick. I wish I were closer to my own violence.

There are a lot of books at this time, but I still want to write one very badly.

My fingers are peeling. I am the dryest girl in the whole world. There is not enough Cetaphil to satisfy my skin’s thirst.

I think about grad school. I think about apartment shopping. I think about living alone. I think about marriages. I think about my thinking. I think, wow, that’s so meta.

My roommate said, “We’ve been passing like ships in the night.” He’s almost right. We stop for quick chats in the courtyard when one of us is on the way here or there. In thinking about my future movements. I have adopted a sense of homelessness. After work, I go wandering or loitering. If I make it to my bed, I know I’ll be asleep. My sense of place is distorted. I have woken up to the steady sounds of raindrops and the cat, hurling themselves against the outer perimeter of my room.

That could be a good band name, Cat and the Raindrops. I imagine they would appear on soundtracks like that of 10 Things I Hate About You.

I miss television and wall to wall carpeting. When I have those things, I miss quiet and refreshingly cool floors. I believe in grey areas. I also believe in grey matter.

Jump into Samuel Fuckett.