sooner or later

According to my laptop it is 22:23
According to my alarm clock it is 10:33
According to my ipod it is 5:23
According to my phone, and the rest of Toronto, it is 18:23.

According to my empty underwear drawer it is time to do laundry.
According to the fading light and my disappearing silhouette on the wall opposite the window it is time to draw the chinese silk over my window and switch to electric light.
According to my amber reflection I don't want to do this just yet.
According to my goosebumps it is time I got dressed.
According to the cracks in the translucent green plastic it is time for a new toy.
According to these split ends it is time for a haircut.
According to my  bestilled beating heart it is time for something new.
According to this impending visit it is time I buy new sheets.
According to this track it is time for the breakdown.
23:21
11:31
6:21
19:21

Story, bud?

First page.

This is your life and here is your pen. Where do you want to set it? You need an antagonist. You need character development. You need conflict resolution.

What if I want to be my own antagonist?

What if I want the character development to be the conflict resolution?

What if I want to begin with the epilogue and conclude with the setting?

I want to make it one of those 'choose your own adventure' books I loved when I was nine.

I might throw a couple pop-up illustrations in for good measure. Dirty ones.

Perhaps a 'where's wally' style puzzle for chapter 7:finding myself.

You should buy my book. You can put your laptop on it when using it in bed to prevent overheating. [I am doing this now with the Bust Guide to the New Girl Order.]

You could use it as a tray for painting your nails, as Laura and I did last week with her large,  hardcover copy of Tattoos and Piercing:an anthology [or something like that.]

As a tool for hitting on boys [ah Kerouac] or you could actually read it [Susan Faludi's Backlash at the moment.]

In my acknowledgements I will thank my junior infants teacher Ms.Scully for teaching me how to write and my sixth class teacher Ms.Clarke for telling me I was good at it  and my Leaving Certificate teacher Mr.Chesser for telling me I was wasting my talent and my first year professor, the most recent and the only one whose name I cannot remember for giving me a round of applause and that A+ before I dropped English.

Juice

When you crave juice but the large carton in the fridge shakes empty, do not give up hope. There in the crisper looms a large box of madarins, reach in through the netted plastic veil, lift out one of these orange planets, and admire for a moment its perfect shape and colour, the phenotype of all phenotypes. Only then should you dig your thumbnail under its crust and peel away tectonic plate by plate, letting the acid sting the skin under your nail. Therein lies the pith, clinging to and dulling the glow of the flesh, like mist at sunrise. These cobwebs must be swept away. Gently tug and the vines will detach from the fruit like the world's borders being drawn up and out of an atlas. It is a delicate task, removing the clinging veins without ripping through the organ's flesh, but worth it for a smoother treat with less residual chewing. Orange you glad you did?

blog standard

I am the worst.
I  really want  to update this regularly. Maybe even on the daily.

I have this problem. I love notebooks. Because of this, I buy cute notebooks and people give me cute notebooks and it leaves me with a surplus of notebooks and a terrible mounting pressure to fill them with words.
I mean, I like writing. And making lists. And jotting down ideas, bus timetables,  bits of dreams I remember, and every once in a while I like to write down the names of all the boys I've fooled around with just to make sure I can. (I have a very juvenile goal to have kissed boys named with every letter of the alphabet... okay, not an active goal, that would be super lame. However, if one day when I'm sixty, I go through my list and realise I've done it, I will wear shades all day, even indoors, because that's how cool I will feel. So far, I haven't met any rad Quentins or Xaviers.. )

Anyway, what I'm saying is I have plenty of stuff to fill all these notebooks, technically. But I just can't justify ever soiling a perfect notebook page with ink so flippantly. It's a big commitment, designating a notebook a particular purpose, and one I've always shied away from. This also may explain my penchant for spiral bounds. Spiral bound notebooks are the notebooks of choice for flighty, flaky, indecisive, mind changers like myself. It's so easy to tear out a page and make like it never existed.

I feel similarly about blogs. I have a blog for feminist rants, then decided I wanted a different one for creative writing, then I figured I needed another for general crap (that's this one. Obviously) and even with this one I hmm and haw about whether I really want to post the posts.
For years and years I had a blog on myspace, and it was basically an online diary. I wrote in it every day, about everything. I really enjoyed it actually, both writing in it and reading backover it, seeing what I was doing on this day five, six, seven years ago with a click of a button. But that was back when the internet actually felt anonymous (I know, I'm old)

Anyway, back to the notebook story. What eventually happens, despite my love for and abundance of cute, pretty notebooks, is I find the ugliest, crappiest notebook of all, and because it doesn't matter I start scribbling in it, or doodling or writing down some thoughts and next thing I'm carrying it around everywhere and it has everything from train ticket booking numbers to email addresses and bits of poetry and suddenly I can't even live without it.

So I guess, I'm hoping that by just posting a bunch of crap, this blog won't matter anymore, and then I'll be free to post whatever, whenever without over thinking it. Something like that.

Update: I am consolidating all my various blogs into one, instead of having bits and pieces written here and there. The chronological order might not be right for all the posts, though I have tried to get the dates right for some. But I'm making this the oldest post. To beginnings!