I got a new phone!

Ok, so this may seem like a lame blogpost to end a lengthy absence with, but I am very excited about this new phone because I have not gotten a new phone in 6 years or something. Now that I am the owner of a dual slider QWERTY keyboard/keypad phone that allows me to text, video and instant message at the click of a button, I feel so modern it's ridiculous.
The reason for my recent update in techological partners is my promotion to Editor-in-Chief of Spectrum Literary Magazine. I've been updating the website, creating a new look for a new year and reading the Anthology of Contemporary American Fiction to prepare. I've also been recruiting people to work on staff that I know will help improve the quality of the publication. In addition, professors will be using their contacts to ellicit some pieces from swankier writers in order to publicize the existence of our magazine more fully.
I'm really very excited about assuming my post as Editor-in-Chief. I'm also excited about taking less classes to make more time for Spectrum and other work-study activities I will be involved in this year. Less classes means more time to spend with my favorite roomie, Martian McMartian and doing things I probably should have done more in my time at UCSB. Because of all the extra time I will have to waste, I am going to make a list of all the things I will take the time to do this year:

1. Go to the beach at least once a week.
2. Have a drink at least once a week.
3. Attend at least one club soccer practice a week, if not both.
4. Watch TV at least once a week.
5. Cook something other than cheesy chicken pesto pasta at least once a week. No, fuck that, once a month.
6. Take naps.
7. Learn to make some good quality drinks.
8. Have friends over for dinner.
9. Curl my hair, and try different hairstyles in general.
10. Participate in Halloween.
11. Host a party.
12. Eat at every restaurant in IV.
13. Go for walks at night on campus and in IV.
14. Go to the beach at night.
15. Use the gym more than last year. Especially if the new pool is done.
16. Write every day.
    

And my final resolution is to do at least half of these things I've just listed.

Some "poems" I jotted down

I just scribbled these things down. I call them poems only because the fact that I wrote them down in a notebook all within 5 minutes sounds poetic to me.


I feel like locking myself away with my curling iron
and creating something new
out of something crinkly and crunchy
adding fingertip-burning heat to dry lifeless hair


My curling iron is my best friend--
I flip the switch and it heats up.
It transforms my hair from what it is
into what I want it to be.
It transforms me from what I am
into what I want to be.


I always start books
but can never finish them
because I have philophobia--
the fear of relationships
coming to an end.

Lost in Translation

So walking around Tokyo Disney Sea yesterday, my brother and I decided to document this bizarre Japanese phenom of t-shirts with seemingly "American" phrases printed on them that make absolutely no sense at all. Here are some highlights:

• little girl wearing a pink t-shirt with a sparkly crown on it, above the word NEBULA printed in pink sparkly letters
• guy wearing purple t-shirt with the word VIVACIOUSNESS printed in sparkly silver cursive
• middle-aged man wearing polo shirt with SOUTHERN CAL printed across the back
• teenage girl with surf-y type shirt; on the back in a circle with big bold letters written LOVE TO ENJOY BEACH and in the middle in cursive says "Smiling is my the Time of Your Live"
• mid-20's dude wearing a P.E. shirt that said MANY GREAT then underneath FOOTBALL then the size XL
• another mid-20's dude wearing a jersey style t-shirt with 3/4 length sleeves that read FROMAGE above the number 84
• teenage girl wearing a sweatshirt with phrases printed all over randomly, but the only one clearly visible in the middle of her back around a silhouette of a girl read TOO DRUNK TO FUCK

And that is it for this edition of silly Japanese t-shirts. The main consolation is that I'm sure our t-shirts with Asian phrases on them say similarly ridiculous things.

Additional t-shirts seen on July 5th around Akihabara and Shinjuku:

• In swirly, surf-y type letters, HURL DEFIANCE CAROLINA
• A JESUS jersey with the number 13 on it
• A light-blue polo with writing on the back, above the left butt cheek that read MIND MOST MEN BUT MOST YOURSELF
• A bright yellow t-shirt with two rifles crossed on the front and BLACK PANTHER PARTY OAKLAND written in black lettering

Around Harajuku on July 6th:

• The Peanuts characters dancing in front of a wall of speakers, AT THE CLUB WE LOVE
• A girl walking out of the Japan Rail station wearing a white t-shirt with swirly silver lettering that read PERVERT THE TRUTH
• A jersey-style shirt that said on the back SURF WAVE LIFE CATCH BIG WAVE STYLE around the number 32
• A tall, thin boy wearing a black shirt that in pink letters said I <3>
• A small girl in a white t-shirt that read I <3>
• A teenager girl in a green t-shirt that said CHECK MATE in blue bold letters

Walking into a t-shirt shop in Harajuku we found the following hilariously sloganed t-shirts for sale:

• MY LOVE... WANNA LOSE MY MIND INSIDE YOUR HEAD
• ROYAL HOUR
• SUNSHINE GOOD WAVE THE RAINBOW
• STYLE FREEDOM WEST CORST (no that's not a typo) DRUGS M.H.C.
• DISCO DISCO DISCO DISCO ALL NIGHT FEVER
• LA COUNTER OF THE COUNTER AMERICAN DREAM
• SMILING ARMY with a camo smiley face
• GO TO DMC
• DETROIT METAL CITY
  

And more around Harajuku:

• PLEASE EAT ME
• YOU BITE ALL THOSE STICKS and it continued into something else we couldn't read but who cares
• I <3>
• A muffin over crossbones? Death muffin? Death cupcakes? Hm...
• BIG LOVE OF SOMETIMES MAYBE GET IT
• pink shirt with GRANDMA TAKE ME HOME written on the back in green lettering, worn by guy in his twenties
• young dude on the train, in a yellow t-shirt with an orange monkey sticking his middle finger up and the word PSST! written underneath
  

the final countdown

1. Jordan gave me a beautiful journal as a thank you for being on Teeth staff =)
2. Tabor was showing pornographic videos in class and was almost failed as a result.
   
3. Finally established a ground rule in week #10: no porn in class.
4. Britta got me some super cool software that I will probably become obsessed with very quickly.
5. I did a total of 25 submissions this quarter which, compared to the average, is a lot, but Jordan did 42. She's such an over-achiever =P
6. I won the Brancart prize! 600 bucks! What the fuck am I going to do with 600 bucks!?! I know I want a new phone but I'm not sure my contract will allow it right now. I want a new camera so I can document my entire final year next year in CCS. I was going to buy Adobe InDesign but...
7. I have sold all but 3 copies of Short Shorts.
8. We had a reading last night for the CCS Writing Contest winners and I made cupcakes.
9. I made watercolor stationary to send out the contributors' copies of Short Shorts.
10. CCS Graduation is Sunday and I have to pick out what to wear.
11. I'm really glad I'm not graduating yet.
    

Thoughts on the World Cheerleading Championship

My boyfriend and I were flipping through the channels this morning. It's always difficult to find something to watch on Sundays. Have you noticed that? Anyways, we had to settle for the World Cheerleading Championships at Walt Disney World. And after watching it for half an hour, I have some serious questions about the sport of cheerleading:

1. Why does the background music always consist of one line of fifty different songs, instead of longer parts of only 5 songs? The songs change so fast, you almost can't tell what song every single line pertains to.
2. Why do the girls wear skirts over their granny panties? The skirts always flip up and then the girls spend half their performance rolling them back down. They could just wear the bottoms without the skirt and really no one would notice the difference.
3. Do they get points for smiling? Because it seems like every time they lift their heads, every cheerleader has to have this really surprised look on their face. Why else would they be doing it if not to acquire points?
4. If #3 is true, why does a smile get you point-wise? I mean, compared to the tosses and flips and pyramids and crap, how many points does every single smile get? And can you get deductions for forgetting to smile? Seems so unnatural.
5. And finally, why does Walt Disney World support this? My boyfriend says it's because South Park was right: Disney sells sex to little giiirls.
   

I turned off the World Championship of Cheerleading because it confuses and depresses me.

The Whiteboard of Publishing

Upon Sarah's request to hear about publishing from the other side.
Since I recently gained a plethora of knowledge about how Word documents become a physical book, I utilized the whiteboard (after erasing a bunch of Physics problem sets, bwaha) and listed the 23 1/2 steps of publishing in more or less a correct order, along with side notes relating to and expanding on certain points.
Attendance was unusually low yesterday, so Britta took some pictures of my masterpiece so anyone who missed can still get the notes.





For larger versions, visit my Flickr.

Week #8

This week, we had a guest lecturer, Robin Tiffney! And in addition to bringing homemade brownies and lemon bars, she imported a wealth of knowledge to our class.
She handed out a 4-page summary of tips and insights to the world of publishing to start out. It includes lists of helpful books and websites that can help writers with a myriad of tasks such as finding an agent and choosing an editor.
Robin stressed, first and foremost, the importance of writer's groups. Writer's groups, she explained, are like marriages. Sometimes you don't get along with the people in your group, or you don't like what they're writing, and it's hard for you to do it but you have to tell them the truth because you are married and honesty is the only policy. This means that you should choose your writing peers carefully. Pick people whose criticism you take well and whose opinions and writing you respect, because in theory, once you pick your writers, the only way to get out involves a massive amount of paper shuffling and exchanging. Something akin to divorce.
A lot of publishing and writing for that matter is comparable to love life. Not only do you enter into a polygamous relationship with the members of your writing group, but you must also seduce agents and editors into long-term affairs on the side. This can be very tricky considering many agents have their own agendas or do not have time to give you what you deserve. Just like having an affair, you need to find someone that is not going to run off and start another affair with the next hot blond that walks down that block. Your agent needs to have your best interests at heart and that's a difficult thing to discern in people in general. The contract your draw up with your agent should include an escape clause that allows you a somewhat simple way out if the relationship turns sour. A good place to meet agents is at conferences, which agents specifically attend to sort out who is a whack job and who is not (ok, Robin used the word 'kook' instead of 'whack job' but I'm paraphrasing). Editors also attend writing conferences but a relationship with an editor is almost more like one with a prostitute at these conferences; you usually have to pay extra to talk to them in person, but it can be worth it if you hit gold and get an editor that you really like that could really help your work get to that next level, for a good price, of course. But because of the immediate pay-off, editors are easier to acquire. Agents, however, have to be literally seduced by a "pitch" of your work. It should be one sentence, maybe two, maybe three, that explains very concisely your motive in writing your novel, or what have you. It should detail the emotional arc that the character(s) go through and it should have a hook in it. These pitches can be submitted in person or by mail. Although many manuscripts go straight to the recycling bin at the agent's office, agents do read the pitch letter atop your bulky manuscript. The book Making the Perfect Pitch by Katharine Sands was offered up as a good tool for "honing pitch letters" to be as effective as possible. It could be the difference between a polygamous marriage and a polygamous marriage plus a long-term, hot and heated affair on the side. And as everyone knows, more is better.
Robin made a point of saying that contests are worth checking out for several reasons: there are thousands so the more you enter, the better your chances are. It's like buying raffle tickets. If you win, as long as the amount you profited from contest is more than the amount you spent entering contests and submitting work, you can deduct your expenses from your taxes. But you should never submit to contests whose judges are yet to be appointed or not named. You can tell a lot about what a contest is looking for in the winning piece judging by the people they've picked to judge. Also, contest winners get more publicity and recognition than those who are simply in print in random journals across the world. The cash pay-off doesn't suck either.
Robin went into detail about strategies of publishing that I found very insightful. She addressed the issue of simultaneous submissions first. Although some places may say they don't accept simultaneous submissions, you should submit anyways. In fact, Robin suggested, you should be submitting to 5 places simultaneously whether they accept simultaneous submissions or not, just to keep your work circulating. In the case that something gets accepted at one place, you simply send a letter of withdrawal to every other place it was sent to, and the staff is never the wiser.
Publishing short stories, she said, is like a gateway into the world of publishing. You start small
and work up to writing longer stuff. If you start out with a novel with nothing published prior, no one will take you seriously. However, a "track record" of shorter pieces already published will attract more agents and publishers to a novel quicker.
Rejection slips should not be dwelled upon too much, Robin also offered up. A lot of publishing turns out a lot like working with politicians: a rejection slip from anyone (an agent, a publisher, a journal, etc.) that blatantly expresses genuine interest in your work, but just not in the stuff they sent you, is an open door. You can always go back and send them new stuff and you can count on the fact that they will be looking for your name in that stack of submitted work.
One of the biggest pointers Robin gave us was that getting published is about keeping your name out there any way you can. If you know people in publishing, tell them you're writing. Even if they do not personally have a use for your stuff, they probably know someone that does. This can be a big help in getting your stuff salvaged from the slush pile. Just make sure you give them your best stuff. Once you get published for the first time, it's also important to establish a web presence; create a blog or a web site because people will start googling you.

Among her lists of useful resources were the following:
Finding out about prospective agents: (1) (2) (3) (4)
Making the Perfect Pitch by Katharine Sands
Write Ways to Win Writing Contests by John Reid

All in all, this meeting was extremely successful and Robin Tiffney is not only well-versed in the ways of the publishing realm, but she also has unbelievable prowess in the genre of science fiction. Hers is a good brain to pick.

The wide, wide world of publication

For the past two weeks, I have been holed away in the cave that is the CCS computer lab putting together the collection of short stories from the Short Short Fiction class. With the help of my good friend Britta, who taught me how to use InDesign (and a Mac, for that matter) in just two hours, I began my epic first creation in the world of the books.
I have to say I thought it would be harder, although it probably helped to have someone showing me what to do instead of having to figure the program out by myself, as Britta did years ago. But now that I know how to use InDesign, I'm seriously considering paying the couple hundred dollars to buy the program. It's really, really cool. You can do so much with it and after you're done, printing your book at Kinkos is really, really cheap.
First, I tried out several different fonts (ok, every single one) before deciding with Britta's suggestion on Adobe Caslon Pro. Adobe Caslon Pro is a little old-fashioned, but also looks professional and reads really well on a page. Even in smaller scale, the typeface is readable. That's a sign of a great professional font, to me.
Using a basic mock-up which consisted of a couple blank pieces of paper folded together (another great strategy I picked up from Britta), I decided on using running headers that would print the author's name on the top left and the title of the story on the top right.
After I decided on a style, we set out creating master pages that would keep the style consistent but easy to adhere to when placing the stories. It took some fiddling around, but we figured out that the running headers needed to be placed on the masters and in order to change the running headers for each author's story, the easiest thing to do was to create a new master for every story. A title page master was created separately to exclude running headers on the title pages.
With the name Short Shorts, a wingding pair of scissors seemed oddly fittingly. Placed between the title and its author and the start of the piece, it was a simple way to add extra personality to the journal through the title page.
Once all the pieces were placed, a real feat considering the layout relies on other people to submit electronic versions of their stories in a timely manner, the tiny, tiny things were attended to: putting double spaces between every new sentence, making sure all quotes were curly, not straight and boring, all dashes and hyphens were the same size, all those fun things.
The hardest parts were the imposition of the pages and adjusting the cover so it will come out fine no matter how it is lined up over the bound pages. The imposition we achieved (finally) using InBooklet SE on InDesign. We found that exporting InDesign files is often a little quirky because InDesign has default settings that mess with bleeds and margins of the pages. But after we discovered where and what those were and fixed them, everything came out great. The imposition was doen by printing to a PostScript file, then converting the PS file to a PDF.
The cover was finished mainly through actual size comparisons between the screen and an 8 1/2 x 11 printed copy of the cover. Knowing the cover would be lined up on the back, I formatted the front picture and text using measurements that would account for the spine of the book. I estimated the spine using an example that was an 80 page book. Knowing mine was 60, I guessed and adjusted the cover photo accordingly.
Despite massive printing problems that even my nerdiest friends could not solve, I completed my print-out of my final project at 12:49AM this morning and fell asleep in my niiiice warm cozy bed around 2AM.
The final project looks pretty spiffy, if I do say so myself.
The test copy should be in on Tuesday and I can't wait!

A big thanks to everyone that helped me survive this project

Education: a time for work or a time for play?

Today I had a meeting with my new faculty adviser. She is the type of person that would memorize the dictionary and feel inclined to hand everyone she comes in contact with a list of words they must know in order to "survive in the real world". Thus, going into this meeting, I knew she was actually going to advise me on what I should be taking next quarter, rather than just nodding her head when I listed the classes I wanted to take.
I was looking forward to reading some more Proust. My first attempt was hearty but short-lived. Proust is a toughy. Although I enjoyed the parts I had the time to study, I figured a true delving would have to wait until retirement. Then this class appeared like a twenty dollar bill on the ground; what an opportunity. There is nothing like a ten-week course to force you through something you know you should be hit with.
I also thought The Tales of Genji would be a nice followup to my travels in Japan this summer. The prospect of reading two huge novels, I admit, did cause me to recoil at first, but after War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov in one quarter, nothing could compare.
I am desperately trying to finish all my French courses for the double major before I graduate, however my hope was growing dim when I looked at the course offerings and saw a grammar course I need to take, one course I took abroad, one course that looked interesting but was in English and conflicted with the grammar course, and a few classes on random topics that did not intrigue me at all.
I have already given up continuing with Greek next year. Falling behind every other day because I can only attend half the classes is getting annoying. Luckily I didn't have to actually make this decision because Greek 14 was canceled due to budget cuts and lack of professors to go around.
The fact that I forgot my advising slip, already detailing out which courses I wanted to take, was probably not helpful to the situation.
In any case, my adviser sat down with me and began by asking me what track I was on. Upon hearing I was on the creative writing track, headed for a Creative Writing MFA program, she proceeded to list off classes I had yet to even hear of that I had to take.
Experimental Prose sounds really cool, but conflicts with my French grammar class.
The Memoir class also sounds really great, but I've already taken a memoir class.
French Grammar is not required for my minor but I have this fantasy of taking all the classes for the French major and just not receiving a diploma with a double-major on it because I don't want to take Writing 2.
Literature and Visual Art does not interest me at all, but apparently that means I should take the class because it will expand my horizons.
I trudged home and attempted to fix my schedule, molding into the new, reformed, advised version of me, only to find that all the classes I was going to switch in to conflicted with one another.
After an hour of toiling over department course listings and GOLD searches modified by instructor, days of the week and times, I finally ended up with the following schedule:

Comparative Literature 188: Narrative Studies M W 12:30-1:45

CCS Literature: Experimental Prose T R 1-2:30

CCS Literature: Memoir TR 2:30-4

Twelve units seems measly, and perhaps I will add one more. I did sent an insistant email to the professor of that Lit and Visual Art class in french. Maybe I'll get in to that despite my lack of prereqs.

All this has made me think:

• Is school meant to be fun, or to be purposeful but not necessarily enjoyable.

• Does your education mean more if you take classes you're not interested in just to challenge yourself?

• Just because you take classes you want to take, does that mean you aren't being challenged?

• Are you wasting your money if you take classes because you're told to?

CCS sure breeds us to think so, but not all professors adhere to the same ideology.
So, I made a compromise, signing up for one class I'm not particularly thrilled about while also taking a few classes I really want to take. It will just figure when I find the classes I am eager about totally suck and the class I thought I wouldn't like is the best class I've ever taken.

It would just figure.

the week of seven sins

1. Tabor is spazzing out to "Super Freak". It's 80's day in colloquium class.
2. Desmond is missing class because he fell asleep on the bus and ended up on State Street.
3. We found Spectrum's listing on PW.org and it's lame. Made a note to add some color pictures to it and some more useful info in order to get a jump on reclaiming Spectrum's national reknown.
4. The Lit couple seemingly broke up as they are not sitting next to each other in class anymore. And it's only been three weeks.
5. I didn't finish reading The Grapes of Wrath because I hate it.
6. Almost everyone in my class has used up their two absences, some more.
7. Nothing is better than drowning stress in alcohol.

1st rejection!

Tonight, I received my first rejection letter from Boxcar Poetry Review. No hard feelings, guys. It was pretty cool, a bit of initiation, if you will. It reads as follows:

Thank you for submitting your work to Boxcar Poetry Review. We have read your submission with interest, but have decided not to publish these particular poems. We appreciate your efforts and wish you all the best in your writing and publishing endeavors.

Warmest regards,
Editor

Sort of nice, if you ask me.
Out of the seventeen places I've submitted to, this is the only one I've heard back from.

Week #5

Barry joined us today to offer up some wisdom and insights into the world of publishing. A published author several novels and a great many literary magazines over, he definitely has a wealth of knowledge and we got to pick his brain for an hour.

Some things that came up were:

• using Post-Its as cover letters with a quick note such as "Dear Editors, Hope you have time to look over some of my stuff, Signed" to show, in effect, you've done this before
• keeping track of submissions using hard copies which enables several drafts of the same piece to be kept on file even after the computer file has been revised
• agents being necessary to get book contracts but otherwise generally obsolete people in most other types of publishing (especially the kind we are doing, sending our stuff out ourselves to smaller names)
• not hoarding your "best piece" hoping it will be published in The New Yorker because you will write better things as time goes by so don't get too attached. The publishing process is about letting this child of sorts out into the world and you have to have faith. You can always make another baby whenever you want something to dote on
• you are your most efficient marketer, publisher, etc.
• Barry's blog, Poetry Matters
• using numerous rejections of the same piece as hints that the piece may need more work
• the convenience of email/electronic submission and its pros and cons (pro=easy, fast; con=so easy more people are submitting which ups the competition)

It was a day filled with fruit baskets of knowledge!

Barry also shared with us some other resources for writers seeking places for publication in addition to the ones on Poets&Writers.org:

USA Magazines

Poetry Publishers Who Accept Email Submissions

Literary Magazines

Creative Writing Opportunities Listserv

As Barry says, "onward!"

My stint on the Literature Collaborative blog

Britta invited me to be a guest blogger on The Elephant Speaks, the official blog of CCS' Literature Collaborative regarding the Literature major meeting with Bruce held this past Friday.

View my post here.

Show and Tell

Today was Show and Tell at school. Krista, Aimee and Laurie all brought in their My Little Pony Dolls and Mrs. Clasen let them go up together and talk about their My Little Ponies. Krista’s is blue with yellow hair and a sun on its butt. Aimee’s is purple with green hair and a clover. But Laurie! Do you know which one Laurie has? She has the best one of all. It’s pink. And it has rainbow hair. And a rainbow on its butt. I want the one with the rainbow on its butt. I’ve asked for it for my birthday and Christmas and Easter. I even showed Mom the commercial on TV. It came on and I grabbed her hand and I dragged her over and I said Mom, Mom, Mom, look. That’s the one I want. But did I get it? No, so I couldn’t go up with Krista, Aimee and Laurie even though I play with their My Little Ponies all the time. Mom, I need a My Little Pony I said when she picked me up from school. You don’t need any more toys, Becky. No, Mom, I need one. Why’s that? Because today Krista and Laurie and Aimee all brought their My Little Ponies in for Show and Tell and all I brought was my stupid stuffed dog. But you’ve had that since you were born. I’m not born anymore, Mom. I’m in the third grade and I need a My Little Pony. Well, we’ll see.

That’s what Mom always says when she knows I’ll cry if she says, No.

Week #4

IT'S WEEK FOUR ALREADY!?!




wtf.

The Dalai Lama is visiting our school today. And it's Alumni weekend. Needless to say, there are people everywhere. Too many people.

I almost ran over 3 people biking to class.

CCS' annual writing contests are now accepting submissions: http://www.ccs.ucsb.edu/award/writing_contests/

DEADLINE MAY 1ST, 2009

I need some new sunglasses.
Last night I found out that my boyfriend and I have very different tastes in women.
I tried to convince my doctor to give me a booster for my meningitis shot and she wouldn't give it to me. She said I didn't need it. What she fails to realize is that need is not my concern. I it because I do not want meningitis. It kills you within like, 24 hours, or something ridiculous like that.

Quoth he...

some uplifting quotes about writing:


"Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications." - Raymond Carver.

"It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send chills along a reader's spine.... That's the kind of writing that most interests me." -Raymond Carver.

"No cheap tricks." -Geoffrey Wolff

"No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place." -Isaac Babel

"In the end, the satisfaction of having done our best, and the proof of that labor, is the one thing we can take to the grave." -Raymond Carver

Week #3

We are making headway!
Talked about the following:

1. Format of documents
2. Cover letters
3. Bios
4. SASEs
5. Misc. (file names, email subjects, page #s, etc.)
6. Blog addresses
7. Picking publications

We have made some discoveries already:

1. Every publisher has a certain way they want submissions formatted (inc. file names, email subjects, page #s, etc.)
2. Big-name publishers often want you to cough up 2 or 3 bucks to have your stuff edited
3. Desmond is addicted to Facebook
4. It takes roughly 4 stamps to send a 10+ pg. manuscript in a large envelope
5. Submitting work is a lot of work

No rejection slips as of yet, nor any acceptances either, so we wait.

Next week, we are moving on to agents and will try to get more submissions out.
Everyone has been challenged to send at least one by snail mail in order to replete my wallet of the 100 stamps + 150 large envelopes + 500 small envelopes that I bought at Costco specifically for this purpose.




I sent away two submissions today.

Tumble

After I spent hours transferring this blog to tumblr, the site managed to completely erase all the HTML I coded as well as the regular HTML stored for my tumblr theme. So now my tumblr is blank.
Actually, no it's not.
I had to switch it to a theme to get back the post I had made to christen my hard work.
Also, having completed my first post, I realized there was no way to allow people to comment on your blog, which is sort of the major point of a blog.
In conclusion, I am deleting my tumblr. There are too many things wrong with the website and yes, I'm a little biased considering the website erased my work.

Colloquium Week #2

Ok well minor snafoo regarding class time began our second session and what sucked about it was that it was totally my bad.

But many good things came out of our second class, including

blogs!

I spent all day today transferring my blogspot blog to tumblr, trying to make it look exactly like the blogspot one I spent hours making. The only thing I couldn’t get to transfer was the double line border around the header. Boo.

We began submissions today!
I originally estimated that we might be able to send out 10 submissions / half hour but was proved horribly wrong when the average number for the people I polled after class was 1.2 submissions / half hour.

Although this made me look like a fool, my hope for this class is rejuvenated because I was worried that we might run out of things to do and that, apparently, is not the case. This confirms that my original idea for this colloquium was correct:

You need a set-aside time to submit your work.

Why?

Because it takes fucking forever!

I submitted to the Bellevue Literary Review and Brink Magazine a short story and some poems, so : progress =)

Jordan played some really cool music to keep the silence out of the room while we toiled away on submissions and that turned out to be a good mood-maker.

I have yet to decide which blog I will keep, this one or my blogspot. I miss the second border inside the header, but perhaps I will get over it.

American cuisine is the best.

"If you could only eat one type of cuisine for a year, what would it be?"

I would have to say American cuisine.

Why American cuisine?
Why!?! Well, because it's AMERICAN! It's barbeque! It's apple pie! It's hamburgers and hot dogs and peanuts at a baseball game, that's why! It's slushies and sundaes and mint julep!
No, really...
Though I really do enjoy these aspects of American cuisine, these aren't the major reasons why I would eat only American cuisine for an entire year (BBQ was a major deciding factor, to be fair). While some may argue that American cuisine doesn't really exist, I have to say that not only exists, but it is also my favorite. Some are of the opinion that because Americans haven't really invented their own food stuffs (cereal? Come on, people...) we can't claim our right to a national cuisine since our cuisine would be made up of stolen foods.
What's not more American than that, right!?! We invaded other countries, yes, but in the meantime, something good came out of it!
Take Germany for example: beer, sausage, schnitzel, pancakes (origins could be traced to surrounding nations as well, I grant you), veil!
In fact, all cuisines have been shaped in these same ways, so it would be unfair to rob us of our right to a national cuisine just because some aspects of it may be borrowed from somewhere else

Take French cuisine: Until the 17th century when nationalism grew in France, French cuisine was thought to be "mini-Italian." Would it be correct to say that France, now the center of the culinary world, in fact doesn't actually have a cuisine because theirs evolved with many Italian influences?
Hell no. Have you ever eaten French pastries? If you have, you wouldn't be dismissing the validity of French cuisine.
Now that we've established that American cuisine does in fact exist, what exactly is it?
What is American cuisine?
It's a blend of all the different cuisines from all the different cultures of the world that have settled in the same space. Food brings people together, and the sharing of food most definitely is one of the main causes for the creation of today's American cuisine. A country's cuisine can tell you a lot about their past, their culture, and their people.

American cuisine is Japanese, African, Jewish. It's Mexican, Spanish and Greek. It's Italian, Chinese and Russian. American cuisine is Australian, it's English, it's French. It's modern, it's traditional, even medieval. It's everything that we are.

So what is America? It's a mix of everything. It's a place where people have fled to, emigrated, and struggled to get to. The amount of influence of a certain culture in our cuisine could tell you exactly how long that culture has been in America, and also could tell you something about the region in which you live, because all our cuisines are not the same.

For example, in San Francisco, the hint of Russian cuisine (whatever that is) is going to be stronger, more prevalent, than say, in Alabama. But the amount of Russian culinary influence in San Franciscan cuisine would tell you how long ago the Russians began seeking refuge in this country.
Why would I eat only American cuisine for a whole year? Because it encapsulates everything. I could, in essence, eat anything I wanted to for a year which is what I do normally anyways.

Why do you feel like you do right now?

Right now, I feel weird. Why? I don't really know. If I did, I probably wouldn't feel weird because I'd be able to fix whatever was bugging me.
It might be the fact that I did a cycling class at the gym this morning after a week and some of no exercise and I'm just tired.
It might be the fact that I'm driving back to school tomorrow and traveling makes me nervous. It doesn't matter if it's a boat, a car, a plane, a train, or a golf cart. Something about traveling long distances makes me nervous.
Mostly I'm afraid that this will be the last trip I ever make because I'll get in an accident and die. Everyone tells me this is a stupid thing to worry about because trains rarely ever crash, a boat is safe because even if it sinks I can swim, I am more likely to be killed by a rogue pig than in a plane crash and as long as I drive defensively, I decrease my risk of an accident by at least a third. Plus, spending an entire life worrying about when I will die is not really living therefore death would sort of be irrelevant.
These facts lead me to believe that there's something else fueling my fear of travel, and this may seem like a basic psychoanalytical conclusion, but it is probably change. Change of any kind makes me anxious. I just hate going back and forth between steady places, from one home to another even.
Despite being able to recognize the probable sources of my anxiety, I still can't completely ignore my worries because in my experience, the things you worry about never happen when you think they will. Things in general happen when you lease expect, so if I worry about dying in a car accident, the chances of it happening are greatly reduced.
Although, this leads me in a circle because then I start to think that because I'm assuming that worrying will prevent these things from happening, they will happen just to spite me.
So the reason why I feel weird tonight is not because I ate five helpings of Hot Pot tonight and topped it off with two brownies slobbered in vanilla ice cream and doused with whipped cream and chocolate sauce, but simply because my mind is running in circles and there is no way to end this vicious cycle except to sleep for awhile and resume worrying when I wake up.

10 Favorite Quotes

"Sometimes, you just gotta say, 'What the fuck.'" -Risky Business

"'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." -Alfred Lord Tennyson

"And the best thing you've ever done for me / Is to help me take my life less seriously / It's only life after all." -"Closer to Fine" Indigo Girls

"They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and a higher grade of manure." -Ernest Hemingway

"This whole word of ours is just a bit of mildew that grew over a tiny planet. And we think we can have something great - thoughts, deeds! They're all grains of sand." -Tolstoy

"Sometimes you love and you learn and you move on, and that's ok." -Meryl Streep, Prime

"You, you always told me / No matter how long it holds me / If it falls apart of makes us millionaires / You'll be right here forever / We'll go through this thing together / And on heaven's golden shore we'll lay our heads." -"Golden" My Morning Jacket

"I like my men like I like my ice cream: made of ice cream." -Marti

"No good intention goes unpunished." -My mother

"No one said it would be easy / yea... but jeez" -Neal Crosbie poem

"Share your scar(s)."

When I was a year old, I decided to climb this bookshelf that my daycare lady had in her house, for reasons that have been forgotten. As I hauled myself up to the second shelf, my tiny fingers clutching the top of the bookcase, my little shoe slipped and I hit my eye on the edge of the wooden frame. Of course I screamed like a banshee until my daycare lady came to find me gushing blood from the eye in her living room.
My mom came and picked me up and took me straight to my pediatrician who promptly informed her that he wouldn't give me stitches because he was worried I would end up with a big bald spot in my eyebrow and sue him 17 years later when I wasn't voted Prom Queen and blamed my scarred brow. He suggested that my mother take me to the hospital to see a specialty surgeon but by the time we got to the hospital and found a doctor that was actually willing to attempt to stitch up my eye, it had almost stopped bleeding.
Since we had spent all afternoon rushing around in somewhat of a panic trying to find a doctor with some balls, my mother had the surgeon stitch my eye up anyways. To this day, I have a line running through my left eyebrow but you can only see it if you look closely because my other eyebrow hairs cover it up. Oh, and I was never voted Prom Queen.

"On heaven's golden shores we'll lay our heads"

"Write about a song that reminds you of someone, then state why."

Every time I hear the song "Golden" by My Morning Jacket, I think of Lindsay.
Not really the entire song, but there's a specific part that reminds me of her and it goes like this:

"You, you always told me / No matter how long it holds me / If it falls apart or makes us millionaires / You'll be right here forever / Go through this thing together / And on heaven's golden shores lay our heads."

This quote reminds me of Lindsay because this girl single-handedly got me through the most miserable days of my life to date. And I feel guilty that I never acknowledged the part she played in getting me back on track, or that I have never been able to return the help. The day the shit hit the fan, she was the one I called and she was the one that told me that in time, I would pick myself back up again and move on, just like before, and she was right.
Lindsay spent days and nights listening to me sort through my problems out loud on the top level of the parking lot as we rocked back and forth on our skateboards, offering up advice and reasoning even though time and again I couldn't hear what she was really saying. In the end, I think it's important to note that Lindsey taught me that everything happens for a reason, and that in the end, it will all work out the way it's supposed to.
I came out on the other side better and stronger than I was before and a lot credit goes to Lindsay for that, simply because she was a good friend to me when I needed it most.
Although I don't adhere to all aspects of the Christian religion, Jesus can feel free to approach me if there is any speculation at all over Lindsay's character. I will personally vouch for her.

So there was this boy...

"When did you notice it had left you, assuming you noticed at all? Write about a strong emotional feeling you had once, one that you were sure would never go away. Write about how it went away slowly or suddenly."

Doctors in the Middle Ages used to believe that lovesickness actually existed and caused physical problems and that the only way to cure lovesickness was to consummate the love through sex. Although I can't confirm that sex cures it, even though I believed this theory was a crock of crap for years I now know that love can make you sick. After I first saw him I was ill for three weeks. He was the only thing I could think about and my stomach felt like it was churning all the time. I couldn't keep down any food except buttered sourdough toast and EasyMac.
Given my symptoms at the time, I think it's safe to say that this boy threw me for a loop. I remember being so upset at the fact that we couldn't seem to just get together, because to me, it felt so inevitable. What I didn't realize was that I had entered into an infatuation with a boy that was socially inept.
Finally, after an extremely long time deliberating what I should do to put things in full swing (as I assumed they should be ), I approached him and admitted that I liked him. I remember the moment so vividly because it was on a whim that I decided to confess myself to him and I entered this sort of tunnel vision. I stood outside his dorm-room door for a good five minutes, pacing back and forth, trying to talk myself out of it. I guess I must've known by then that I was doomed, but I just didn't want to admit it (because you can never admit these kinds of things when you've been so blindly in love with someone for so long).
And so it was that I found myself standing next to him, balancing on the back legs of the chair at his desk, dumbstruck at how I had gotten myself there, unable to come up with the words I'd rehearsed for months. I made some excuses out loud about not being able to remember what I came in to talk to him about at midnight on a Thursday, but finally forced myself to state, very simply, that I liked him, and that I didn't see it working out and that I just needed to admit it to him so I could get it off my shoulders and move on.
He didn't say anything. He just sat there, his arm draped lazily over his head, his eyes on me but not giving it away. "Ok," he finally managed to reply.
"Ok," I said. "So, I'll see you around."
And with that, I left.
As I walked home under the dark, drizzling Parisian sky, I felt relieved, and free of all the feelings that had been haunting me for so long. I thought I was just leaving him behind with all those quick strides I took further away from his tiny dorm-room in a modest Parisian high-rise apartment building, but now I realize how much I left behind that night.
I left behind a list of naive impressions and hopes and dreams. I left behind that dazed and confused cloud I'd been walking around in for so long. I left behind that sick feeling in my stomach that I still got every so often when he looked straight at me with those big blue eyes. But the sick feeling was replaced by something else; it was more of a heavy feeling of loss and of hurt, deep down.
More important than my naive daydreams of love and what should be, I lost the confidence I had, if only briefly; that tunnel vision with which I was driven for those ten minutes that became one of the defining moments of my life.
Looking back, I know I had to do it, and that it never would have worked out, but every once in awhile, I remember the boy with the blue eyes that make me sick with love and how I was lost in this daydream for months and months and months. Then suddenly it all washed away; the way he had once transformed absolutely everything now just seemed like it had been obscured, abstracted, refracted and fragmented.

*** Disclaimer: Yes I was really emotional when I wrote this but this is my blog so I get to post whatever I want which means I get to write about whatever I feel like writing about in whatever manner I choose so deal.