Boy

I liked being small. When I’m on my own
I’m small. I put my pyjamas on
and hum to myself. I like doing that.

What I don’t like is being large, you know,
grown-up. Just like that. Whoosh. Hairy.
I think of myself as a boy. Safe slippers.

The world is terror. Small you can go As I
lay down my head to sleep, I pray … I remember
my three wishes sucked up a chimney of flame.

I can do it though. There was an older woman
who gave me a bath. She was joking, of course,
But I wasn’t. I said Mummy to her. Off-guard.

Now it’s a question of getting the wording right
For the Lonely Hearts verse. There must be someone
out there who’s kind to boys. Even if they grew.

- Carol Ann Duffy

Pericardium

Am I not alone, as I thought I was, as I thought
The day was, the hour I walked into, morning
When I felt night fly from my chest where prospect had
Slackened, and close itself off, understanding, as I thought I did,
That the ground would resist my legs and not let them
Break nor let them be released into air as my heart, in its
Muscle, might be released from the body that surrounds it, 
Like someone who, placing a hand on a shoulder's 
Blade, felt a life move inside an hour and a day 
Break from the day the hour meant something more than weakness, 
More than fear, and flew forward into the depths of 
Prospect, your arms, where you'd been, before me, waiting
For me, the way the body has always been waiting for the heart to sense 
It is housed, it is needed, it will not be harmed.

- Joanna Klink 

Mint Julep - Adorn

gorgeous music by keith and hollie kenniff

buy the ep here

things to do while waiting for the fifth season of mad men

1. learn how to dance the charleston

 2. see a psychiatrist

3. make every night a boys' night out

4. work on being as badass as joan

5. bang head against the wall (or table)

  

6. ponder on the existence of don draper

happy birthday, virginia

59 things you didn't know about virginia woolf

hold beauty

i've come to rest

How Musical Are You?

take the test here

unstill

Off the map

Artistic creation is a voyage into the unknown. In our own eyes, we are off the map. The excitement of potential discovery is accompanied by anxiety, despair, caution, perhaps, perhaps boldness, and, always, the risk of failure. Failure can take the form of our becoming hopelessly lost, or pointlessly lost, or not finding what we came for (though that last is sometimes happily accompanied by the discovery of something we didn't anticipate, couldn't even imagine before we found it). 

If we attempt to map the world of a story before we explore it, we are likely either to (a) prematurely limit our exploration, so as to reduce the amount of material we need to consider, or (b) explore at length but, recognizing the impossibility of taking note of everything, and having no sound basis for choosing what to include, arbitrarily omit entire realms of information. The opportunities are overwhelming. This explains why it can be so difficult for beginning writers to embrace through revision--which is to say, to fully embrace exploration. The desire to cling to that first path through the wilderness is both a celebration of initial discovery and fear of the vast unknown.

- Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

the frontier was everywhere

the pale blue dot

 We were hunters and foragers.
The frontier was everywhere.
We were bounded only by the Earth, and the ocean, and the sky. The open road still softly calls.
Our little terraquious globe as the madhouse of those hundred thousand millions of worlds.
We, who cannot even put our own planetary home in order, riven with rivalries and hatreds; Are we to venture out into space?
By the time we're ready to settle even the nearest of other planetary systems, we will have changed. The simple passage of so many generations will have changed us. Necessity will have changed us. We're... an adaptable species.
It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths, and fewer of our weaknesses. More confident, farseeing, capable, and prudent. For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness.
What new wonders, undreamed of in our time, will we have wrought in another generation? And another? How far will our nomadic species have wandered by the end of the next century? And the next millennium? Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds through the solar system and beyond, will be unified by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that whatever other life there may be, the only humans in all the universe come from Earth.
They will gaze up, and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of raw potential once was. How perilous, our infancy. How humble, our beginnings. How many rivers we had to cross before we found our way. 

On being a woman

1. What Do Women Want?

I want a red dress. 
I want it flimsy and cheap, 
I want it too tight, I want to wear it 
until someone tears it off me. 
I want it sleeveless and backless, 
this dress, so no one has to guess 
what's underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty's and the hardware store 
with all those keys glittering in the window, 
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old 
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers 
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly, 
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders. 
I want to walk like I'm the only 
woman on earth and I can have my pick. 
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm 
your worst fears about me, 
to show you how little I care about you 
or anything except what 
I want. When I find it, I'll pull that garment 
from its hanger like I'm choosing a body 
to carry me into this world, through 
the birth-cries and the love-cries too, 
and I'll wear it like bones, like skin, 
it'll be the goddamned 
dress they bury me in.

- Kim Addonizio 

2. The Women's Guide to Mad Men

3. Cinema mon amour

Modern Love

My Mr. Right, in the Land of Make-Believe
By KIM GAMBLE
Published: January 30, 2009

SEVERAL months ago I flew to Beijing so I could introduce myself to a man I’d never met but with whom I’d been corresponding on-and-off for almost a year. He was an American, a journalist based in Beijing covering China for a United States news media outlet. I first became aware of him when an article he had reported garnered attention and he was asked to discuss his findings on the television show I was working for at the time.

On the afternoon of his interview, however, I wasn’t in the studio where he was, but in my office, half-watching him on the internal video feed, half-producing a segment for broadcast later that week. On screen he was cute in a young professorial way: someone who should wear glasses regardless of the requirements of vision. My attention only fully focused when I heard a deeper, more authoritative voice coming from him than his features suggested. I found myself tilting my head, even grinning a little, but otherwise giving him, and his interview, little thought.

Until after the taping, that is, when the show’s talent coordinator, who is responsible for greeting the guests and keeping nervous pacing in the green room to a minimum, marched into my office waving his business card. She pushed it across my desk and said, “Don’t be mad, but I just told the guest I think you two might hit it off.”

In my experience, ambivalence is the best way to pique a man’s curiosity, so I made the apologetic e-mail message I sent him accordingly nonchalant: “Sorry my co-worker is being so presumptuous. Just ignore her attempt at match-making.” I went on to make a joke about blind dates being a standard parting gift for guests.

But in truth this had never happened before. Nor had I ever been so intrigued by the prospect of having a grown man for a pen pal. Which is why I laced my nonchalance with flirtation.

It worked.

The two of us were soon writing on a regular basis. The e-mail exchanges, at least on my end, continued to be an exercise in the appearance of breeziness, the written equivalent of spending $500 at the beauty counter to look as though I’d only put on lip gloss. At his end, he was articulate and smart and impossibly thoughtful.

He was also a bona fide reporter: curious about my hometown, my job, favorite this, favorite that, compensating for having never seen me, or heard my voice, by routinely asking as many questions as he answered.

Within weeks, bits of personal information began injecting themselves into our letters. I have never collected anything, but acquiring names of his family members, cities where he had lived, details about his projects, vacations both complete and being planned, fueled the illusion, piece by piece, that one day I could be in possession of his complete life story.

My responses also became more open and sincere, but after some time I realized I was writing more and receiving less. And the less I got, the more I fantasized. Being human, I rationalized, means I’m wired to fill in blanks, to create a whole out of parts. He was available enough to maintain correspondence, yet invisible enough to allow for some invention. For all I knew, he was taking the same liberties with me.

In the months that followed, I became more preoccupied with China than was otherwise explainable, developing a sudden passion for the Olympics and conducting graduate-student-worthy research on the Gang of Four. I started getting out of bed at midnight to check my e-mail, estimating, with the time difference, when he most likely would have had a moment to write.

A series of unremarkable dates with men who live in the same country I do had the effect of making me more hopeful about the journalist, more sold on his rightness for me. I found myself lonely and grasping, alarmed by how long I’d been single, how little attention I’d paid to meeting a viable mate. His e-mail messages were starting to feel like a gateway drug, and one that I knew was about to send me on a bender.

I was finally moved to action, pathetically, by the arrival of an Asian-themed issue of Condé Nast Traveler. I logged on to Expedia, entered my credit card number and booked a flight out of J.F.K. for Beijing.

In preparing for the trip I didn’t bother to look up the translation for words like “desperate” or “crazy.” Though such terms undoubtedly exist in Chinese, they weren’t yet in my vocabulary. At the time, I was interested only in the translations for “fate” and “destiny,” along with practical phrases like, “Where might I find some good pork dumplings?”

Having already made the psychological journey, it was easy for me to rationalize the physical one. But for him I would need to provide some other explanation while maintaining my air of detachment. So I lied in both tone and fact: “I have to be in Beijing for a freelance assignment,” I wrote, passing it off as fun coincidence. I actually typed “FUN!” in capital letters. It seemed important both to internalize and project that I wasn’t actually a woman who would spend $3,000 to travel halfway around the world to have a gin and tonic with a stranger.

We made dinner plans shortly after I arrived, and I agreed to meet him in the hotel lobby so we could go together and he could direct the taxi driver. Curled up on a sofa in the lounge, I spent 20 minutes debating my posture and what waiting activity would best convey a sense of cool.
When he arrived I was reading — or rather, staring at a page in a book — and just like the day of his interview, I heard his voice before I saw him. He sounded surprised, pleasantly I think, that I was me. We blushed, smiled, hugged, and I immediately felt a sense of calm.

The restaurant he selected was a loud, sterile establishment with a cafeterialike quality that screamed, “You are not on a date!” But as we waded through requisite chatting about family history and politics, favorite books and travel experiences, the atmosphere faded and the journalist took shape. The clatter of the restaurant was replaced by an effortless, warm way of communicating. I forgot how much orchestrating my being in Beijing had required. Forgot how unflattering fluorescent bulbs can be, and how well I’d hoped this would go. Forgot how many lies I’d told, to him and to myself.
MY fantasy narrative, the fairytale, the fictional man in a foreign land — it all began to vanish under those bright lights. The person who remained, sitting across from me, reciting movie lines while wrestling with his chopsticks, was intimidating because he was real, and someone to whom my imagination hadn’t given enough credit.

We were the last two people in the restaurant when he paid for dinner and excused his generosity. “You can get it next time,” he said, implying there would be one, and then immediately volunteered the location of some friends at a local bar and suggested we go.

Soon we were seated in a cozy, wood-paneled pub that may as well have been in Aspen, were it not for all the smoke and lack of snow, and I sipped Coronas while we told his friends the circumstances of our having met that night. The hours and alcohol conspired to make us more comfortable and flirtatious, and by the time he walked me to a taxi, long after the bar had closed, he kissed my cheek and asked to see me again.

Despite its success, I still didn’t pride myself on having orchestrated the whole scenario. Although I privately permitted the vision of us laughing about it one day, I knew better than to confess to him what I had done. So the following days consisted of us talking on my hotel phone in the evenings after I had secretly gone sightseeing all day — while he believed I was occupied with work. This meant, in addition to more lies, that I had to resist sharing the victory of finding some really fantastic pork dumplings, and reporting the drama of crashing a bicycle I was recklessly steering through the hutongs, and confessing to the brave stupidity of paying a local villager $20 to drive me to the Great Wall in his family’s Chrysler LeBaron.

On my last night, we met for dinner, joined by several of his friends. The meal was abbreviated, however, when he stepped away to take an urgent phone call from his editor back in the United States. An early morning deadline, and a 12-hour time difference, required him to leave immediately so he could file a revised article. Innocently, I offered to go with him, surprised by how easily, after all this maneuvering, I ended up in his apartment, thumbing through the books on his coffee table while drinking a beer on his sofa.

We never reunited with his friends, and instead stayed up talking for the next few hours. I wanted to tell him the truth about my trip and my intentions. Wanted to admit what I did was insane, and also one of the best decisions of my life. But I didn’t.

Around 1:30 in the morning, the time in most of my romantic experiences when a man leans over and kisses me, he was the one who confessed. He told me he had been seeing someone, a woman he met a month before and with whom he felt potential.

The omission of this information — until the last possible moment — felt deliberate, but if that’s true then I was just as guilty. Much as I wanted that night to end differently, it was a relief, in a way, to know we had both indulged in make-believe: that I’d traveled farther, but he’d made a small leap, too; that my lie was bolder, and more expensive, but that together we’d decided to ignore the truth, for the sake of creativity, possibility and fictional gratification.

I looked out the window as I flew back to my side of the world the next morning, unable to project any more details onto the journalist or our story, unable to deceive myself any longer. I’d met him, been in his apartment. A finality accompanied this knowledge, and the space between fantasy and reality, between truth and fiction, was, for the first time, as distinct as the sky and land.

it is a good morning

for crossing bridges

for flight

for this song