Rampant thoughts after a weekend at C-ville

Man! This weekend was amazing. I'm really tired right now so this post won't be very coherent, but I want to get it while it is still loose and running around in my head. These will be rampant thoughts.

Kate Singleton is sort of the female version of me, and I can honestly say that I will soon end up loving her. She is always sincere and picks out the nicest things about people. Her observation of others is always a refreshing truth too, either an affirmation of what I've noticed about another individual, or something completely fresh that I can agree with. When I speak to her in private, I feel that she is always so intimate and open, genuine and perceptive, almost wise... (I shrink away from that word because we all do silly youthful things, but what I mean is that she knows what is more important above that silliness). She is always a good time, laughs at all my jokes, loves farts like I do, loves Edith Piaf, sings with me always, and loves poetry. I also admire her ability to declare love for people openly, whereas I'm not fully comfortable with that yet. She makes me feel really good about myself too: one of my earliest memories of her was her putting makeup on me for Queer Prom. She basically picked up a wounded doe (me) from the side of the road and nursed him back to health.
Kate, I know you're reading this,
and I meant every tired, scattered thought I just typed out.

Alex Maliwanky (har har) is not as impersonal as I thought he was. This weekend was the first time I really had extended conversation with him, and beneath his attractiveness and disconnected poise (which I guess is hot to people?) he is actually just as vulnerable as me or anyone else. Maybe more.

I miss Victor. I haven’t talked to him in more than a week. I wonder what we will be in the future.

Note to self: don’t dress too weird at Escafe and show up early. People look at you funny, and the only compliments you get are from chicks and fat, old men. Make sure to keep things sorta hot, but not too costumey.

I want to watch the full season of RuPaul’s drag race online. Jujubee is my hero.

Michelle needs to stop being petty.

Inception was amazing. I cried twice watching that movie, and it’s a fracking sci-fi movie.

I have Oral Allergy Syndrome and I’m specifically allergic to alder pollen.

Leah Funk is sorta rude and fake.

I need to get this blog link off of Facebook because I’m talking bad about people.

Only my closest friends can read this. Or those who are irrelevant.

My pee smells like sulfuric asparagus pee

And I sort of like it.

I’m afraid that my family will hate me, but I think there is more to what I think is fear. I’m not quite sure what it is...

Amanda Chase, break up with her. Nothing is worth cheapening yourself. Just do it, please. It hurts me just thinking about you lowering your own worth to be someone’s “another”.



Ian Dohm is FUCKING annoying, hypocritical, self-absorbed, a user, and generally immature.

Here are some poetic thoughts that I had and heard at Chuhern's place:

Rocking Chair Kamasutra

Arms extend to sky
Wave.
I am tall grass.
Hide your face in me.

Fall out of chair and flow
to hardwood floor.
Splay.
I am an oil spill.
Set me on fire.

Line

My heart has melted
and now flows in your veins.
In pound, out pound
against the walls of your veins.

"Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds upon the heel that crushed it."
-Mark Twain

3:46 AM July 08th, 2010

Haven't posted in a while

So dear blog,
I've been cheating on you. On two different sites too...ouch. I've been sort of distracted these days with my new summer passion of being a Youtube starlet. It's not easy, you know? An internet celebribante has to put as much time into her art as any Hollywood celebrity.
From articulation lessons, to acting workshops, to late night video-editing, the glamor life is never at rest.
Really, what I'm trying to say is

it's hard being an attention whore.

So, I've been busy with Youtube and Dailybooth, both of which I am excited for. Dailybooth seems supercool; the concept of the site is that you upload a photo of yourself everyday so that a slice of your life eventually gets encapsulated onto the internet, open for anyone to see and comment on. And the sense of human community is pretty strong on the site. Post a picture asking the public a question, and you're bound to get some responses, in text or in photo. That is if you're not hideous.
But don't worry! I'm not hideous and I'm a good enough photographer conceal what deformities I carry, haha.
But jokes aside, another aspect of Dailybooth I really enjoy is that it almost gives me a prompt for photography. For once I have a real reason to take pictures of myself. And how little pictures of myself I had before this, too! Being considered "the photographer" in my group of friends, I've taken oodles and barrels of photos of other people, most portrait-like photos. But now, I can set up my own photos how I envision them AND be the subject in the photo. It's a dream a come true.

So yeah! Check out my Dailybooth and Youtube channel! Follow/subscribe if you like me or want karma points. Oh and I highly suggest you making a Dailybooth, too; it's really fun.

So this line kept popping up in my head today

Your faith is as shallow
as the lines you carve
into your wrist, as shallow
as our footprints
in the first snow of last year.

4:56 AM--July 7

An offensive image in words

My heart sails across oceans
like an 18th century vessel.
Flesh packed too tight in bottom cargo,
and the heart dies of its own heat.

3:23 AM--June 24th, 2010

Casual post of fragmented thoughts upon finishing my first full bottle of beer

Well, half of Operafest is now over... I've gotten my Papageno scene out of way. I will post a video of it soon when it goes up on Youtube. Look forward to it!
Recently I've started making flamboyant music videos of me in makeup (or not in makeup) singing over-the-top power ballads. I am now making a Youtube account named MrKatKween where I can hopefully compile my collection of videos involving me singing in my room, hahaha.
Anyhow, Operafest is almost over, THANK GOODNESS!

I'm sorry but
I carve in you
only to reach your soul,
only so that I can touch
your expansive soul.

2:15AM--June 18, 2009

The sestina form is something genius

Well, it isn't often I do form poetry, but one poetic form I do enjoy is the sestina. The joy of the sestina lies not only in the satisfaction of successfully fulfilling the form's requirements, but also in the surprisingly strong sense of obsession the poetic form weaves within. This sense of obsession, a sense that one is chasing circles in memory, is unavoidable in the sestina because the principle requirement of the sestina is that the poet must end on the same end-words for each six-lined stanza. The six special end-words of each stanza must be reused in every following stanza in a specific order. With each stanza composed of six lines (a sestet if you will) and the poem itself composed of six stanzas, followed by a three-lined envoy that uses each of the six special ending words in a specific order, the sestina forces the poet to dwell on subjects, attacking and reattacking the a subject anew with the same words (taken from different angles if you're really good with your words!)

Wikipedia explains the specific ordering of end words in the sestina form pretty decently:
 "If we number the first stanza's lines 123456, then the words ending the second stanza's lines appear in the order 615243, then 364125, then 532614, then 451362, and finally 246531...These six words then appear in the tercet as well, with the tercet's first line usually containing 6 and 2, its second 1 and 4, and its third 5 and 3..."

If this isn't making very much sense, I apologize; it is late and I am making this post on 5 hours of sleep (wah wah! I'm a whiner at times I know). Anyhow, here is a Wikipedia article to clarify things if my explanation still doesn't make sense.

For an example. here is a popular one by the dear Elizabeth Bishop. We all probably read this in high school:

Sestina

September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.

She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,

It's time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac

on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.

It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.

But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.

Elizabeth Bishop

* * * * * * *
Aw, wipe those tears from your face dear reader... anyhow, this post is ultimately about the first sestina I ever wrote. I spent 7 hours on it--on and off--in about 2 to 3 hour increments. Crazy, right? But I never even felt the time passing. It's moments like that that convince me that I want to be nothing more than a poet...Alright, anymore of this and this post will come to uncannily resemble a can of Cheese-Whiz (it's a lot of cheese compressed into a small space, get it?) This sestina is about some childhood memories because they are the things of all our obsessions, no? It was published in Inkstone Magazine, the Asian-American magazine at UVA, and I had to give an awkward reading of it to like 25 people... by that time I had come to sort of dislike this poem, but I guess people liked it. The reading was super awkward because I was just standing on a hill in the beating sun reading about intimate things from my childhood...to a crowd of people that I really didn't care for eating fake Chinese food.

Deconstruction

Imagine how the Chinese boy could know

to ignore the double-u in “answer”.

It was impossible in first grade, not

saying he thought that “ants were” wasn’t wrong

so he asked a girl, “How to say this word?”

and she taught the sound of double-u through silence.

Years ago, the boy had constructed a riverside palace in silence

when on the first day of school they asked “Do you know

what you want for lunch?” He knew the color of bok choy but not the word

so seeing lettuce, he pointed and that was his answer—

for a week—it was salad and it tasted wrong.

Even if he knew the concept of dressing his greens, he did not

because he was used to vegetables being naked and Asian, not

unlike in the kindergarten bathroom where there was no silence

and anatomy was louder than three boys giggling in one stall. It was wrong,

but why they giggled while he peed the boy would never know

and nonetheless he was almost proud because his silence was answered

with giggles, the only understandable words.

There was a time when the boy could toss words

like rough pebbles in a yellow river, but not

across the river, where yellow pebbles weren’t answers.

So he swallowed jagged rocks in silence

and played alone, because the kids he didn’t know

enjoyed throwing boulders, while he could only chew gravel that tasted wrong.

Years later, the boy learned the shades of left, right and wrong

long before they washed up as yellow pebbles. These were English words.

The girls in the class began to lose their markers, not knowing

the boy was shepherding them after they rolled off desks and were not

found so he took them in and painted his palace in silence

and one day they looked accusingly, waiting for an answer.

Years later the boy would wittily jest and answer

that the markers were MADE IN CHINA, so it was not wrong

for him to rescue them and redefine the silence

of colors, where red should have meant fortune, not the word

bravery, and yellow would later be the shade of his tunic at the funeral, not

just an obscurity like the grandmother he hardly knew.

Imagine the silence of childhood deconstructing like words

and the boy knowing that it all sounded wrong,

but not hearing it until years later, like the letter double-u in answers.

10/18/09

1:15 AM--June 16th, 2010

First poem I ever turned in for poetry class

I like it when your hands are cooking

I like it when

your hands are

cooking

and your fingers

are moist

lightly with the

oils from our

spicebushes,

last year.

I like how your

breath smells of

Mexico

and of the days before

velcro and silica

taught our muscles

to contract.

I like how

your eyelashes

collapse

like mint leaves

in autumn.

I like how

you smile,

heavily.

10/08/09

4:23 AM--June 15th, 2010