PSA

This may soon become a blog about how David Tutera doesn't know what actual words mean.

A half-assed evening

Tonight I'm going to move a box spring, throw together this for dinner, and then run to a vaguely 1964-themed housewarming party. I'm doing the pasta because I have goat cheese and I want an excuse to drink wine while I cook.

For the party, I was considering not dressing up at all. Then I thought about how little effort it will actually take. My plan is to put on a mod little dress, my old-ass, secondhand pair of Ferragamos, and some eyeliner. I'll tease my hair a little, which will be easy since I haven't washed it in a few days and it's full of dry shampoo. That's all. It's going to be a good night.

Bad moon rising

It may not be a good sign that it's not even 9:45 in the morning and I am craving curly fries.

(Spoiler: the curly fries will remain an unfulfilled dream.)

Thoughts on genre

I'm curious about why some things come to me as essay ideas and some as poems. What is the distinction? Maybe that the poems are a way to talk about things I want to discuss without getting into the thing itself. They're a way to look sideways at something, to edge at it, and they have a distinct ending point. They're contained. Poems are a way for me to talk about some of the deepest, hardest truths in metaphor. There has to be truth in a poem, of course, but it's more possible in a poem to talk around something.

The essays are what I write when I want to go straight into the heart of something, put it out on paper in the barest and rawest way. Essays demand truth. Maybe not absolute truth — there are ways to hide in essays, to distract with one confession in order to keep another — but the narrator in an essay must be a trustworthy one. There's not the same kind of room in an essay for doubts of narrative authenticity, for fiction. Essays are for when I'm trying to work something out, and there is an itching bit of truth buried somewhere that wants to be dug out. It's still a process of discovery, and of metaphor, but I cannot begin an essay with a topic that I know I'm afraid of. For me, essays are a bit of a confessional. Whatever I carry into them will, I know, weigh on me until I set it down in ink. It will show in the writing that I'm holding back and keeping secrets.

This is, of course, the interpretation of a prose writer who dabbles in poems sometimes. My education is in prose, and I don't have the same hours logged in poetry workshops, debating the narrative integrity of fourteen lines. For some, I'm sure that poetry is where all of the blood and guts come out, and I don't want to give short shrift to the possibilities of poetic honesty. From what I know, though, in a poem you can mean blood and guts but say wine and curry, and it's often better if you let the vehicle stand and the tenor fade away, a watermark behind the flash of the metaphor. In an essay, you can say wine and curry but if you don't get into the messy stuff, the literal, you will have a revolt from your readers.

Now that I think of it like that, it's that very blending of bald, literal baring and literary weaving that fascinates me about essays. They can be about the language, the intricacy of sustained metaphor. The most beautiful moments of them, though, are often the ones in which the thing is stated as plainly as possible. It's a balance of different kinds of honesty, but it is, at the bottom of it, about honesty. It's reporting the world as it occurs in the essayist's eye. The interest is not in the thing itself, usually, but in the unique interpretation. The essay is a test of character, and of humility.

Interpreter of my own maladies

I am a physical interpreter of the world. I was raised by runners, grew up in ballet classes and cheerleading practices and track meets. I'm not a new-age anything, and am made uncomfortable by talk of auras and chakras, but I believe that the full moon and the low tide affect me. I understand things by how they happen around and within my body.

That tough time I mentioned got a little tougher. I notice the result, as always, in my muscles, in my legs suddenly weakened, my shrunken lungs. I feel hollowed, a rasping reed through which the wind cuts with every gust. I try to eat, but food feels like an invasion, an unbearable confusion. I sleep and dream of hopping planes to faraway places. I dream of escape, and of meeting generally damp-looking men who describe themselves as "physical phlebotomist poets." Most of the days I feel dizzy.

Most of the days I can bear this because I have been here before. When I get an emotional hit that's too big, my body absorbs the excess. It isn't pleasant, but I'm not worried. I've been here before and know that I will, again, feel hungry. I will, again, feel the strength wash into me like blood into a leg that fell asleep. It takes patience.

Some goals

I've been having a tough time lately. Nothing earth-shattering, nothing super traumatic, just one of those periods of a lot of change that I'm not handling as best I could.

I still haven't gotten the new apartment in order. It's been a busy couple of weeks full of social engagements and work stuff. None of this is an excuse. I have trouble feeling centered at all when my living space is in more than the usual disarray, and I know this about myself, and still have not taken enough steps to fix it. I blame only myself.

So, internet, I state a goal: today I will unpack some boxes. I know that doesn't sound like a whole lot of a goal, but I want to set something manageable. I have six hours before my next social thing, and in that time I need to unpack a bunch of stuff, take a trip to Home Depot, get some exercise, and bake something. All of this is possible.

First, I need to change out of my chic, layered pajamas (it's cold in the apartment this morning — glorious) and get my butt in gear. To productivity!

I moved a week ago, and have finally cleared enough space that I can walk to my kitchen without tripping over anything. Today, this feels like a victory.