Category Archives: relationships

relationships

Words, words, words

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Meh.

I wrote something once, “Words will be the death of me, and in Truth I shall be reborn.”

I think it’s fitting…the difference between words and truth these days, or, perhaps more accurately, Truth these days, is astounding.

We’re talking about style in ficiton writing class last night. What’s style? Out of all of the elements of fiction, I think style is the most difficult to define. It’s more than grammar or syntax. More than mere word choice. But it has little to do with storyline or plot or even character, I think.

If you find that one writer that just zings off the page, it doesn’t matter if he or she rewrites a nursery rhyme or a short story — her style is there, and you know who wrote it.

Mark over at the Naked Soul wrote this post about fingerprints, and it made me think. It made me think that style and fingerprints in that sense, aren’t really all that different.

But back to words.

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relationships

And There It Is

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I had to go back up to work tonight to get my bag o’ medicine.

Of course, by the time I got around to it, it was after 10 pm.   As I was walking into the building, I saw Melody who called out to me, smiling as she lit a cigarette.

K was walking with her, K of the Carpe Diem girl fame.

She put her head down, walked around me, and practically ran to her car.  It’s the first time I’ve seen her since the nicotine withdrawal conflict. (It wasn’t a war because I couldn’t pull Congress into it.)

I wanted to say something or to text her or something, but I didn’t know what to say.

My first reaction (thank God I didn’t!) was to laugh. I didn’t even know she could move that fast.

My second reaction is to feel bad for her.

For several reasons.

But I didn’t call her or text her because I didn’t know what to say. Truthfully, had I not seen her, I wouldn’t have even thought to call her in the first place.

It didn’t hit me til tonight that when I worked my way through my list of people with whom I had distanced / fractured relationships, she wasn’t one of the people I called.

I didn’t even think to call her, and I think I feel guilty about that.

I guess I’m sorry that I hurt her feelings.  I guess I’m just not sorry that she’s gone.

And I might just feel a bit guilty about that, too.

relationships

Adieu, Carpe Diem Girls

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I miss Sherry.

With all of the hubbabaloo about the feminist paper — especially that feminist paper, I’ve been thinking about her more often than not for the past few days.

This paper, the jalepeno-cheese paper, offending people in the pizzaria while we’re talking about BDSM, submission, and feminism. This paper that caused her to crow “I knew you were a feminist” like she’d caught me with my hand in the cookie jar. This paper that prompted me to look at women’s silence as something subversive and the importance of voice and presence in a Shakespeare play.

This paper, the one in which I discovered my own voice. It wasn’t just my paper. It was our paper in a way that I really can’t describe.

I went to the seminar on relationships a couple of weeks back, and I can’t explain how powerful it really was. Chris Chenoweth really put things in perspective for me. He talked about how people don’t fall in love with other people; they fall in love with the way people make them feel.

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relationships, semester break

And So it Goes

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I knew 2008 would be a year of loss. Of “positive” loss, I thought.
I just didn’t know it would be this sort of loss, or of this magnitude.

They say you find out who your friends are when times are bad, not good.

When I hit bottom on Wednesday, and I was at my absolute worst, I was lectured by a Carpe Diem girl. While I cried (and, oh, did I cry, knowing the whole time that one cigarette of hers — which she had been smoking around me — would have made it better), she lectured me on what a shitty person I am.

She then left me stranded: all of my stuff’s in bags and boxes and my rooms are filled with organizational stuff that I have no idea how to implement. I can’t find my socks. I can’t find my school supplies.

Hell, I can’t even find my brain right now.

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relationships

A-O-Hell

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Between papers, blogging, journaling, posting, and email, I write a lot. To read me, I think, is to know me, and it struck me today that I’d put money on the fact that my professors, after 2 years of reading my papers, know me better than my parents do, who have never read anything I’ve ever written (that I know of. There’s a questionable incident when I was a kid with my diary, but it was never confirmed.)

That kind of made me sad.

Today, though, full of spunk and half-way clear lungs and nose, I spent a couple of hours showing my dad how to use the internet.

It’s an exercise in futility, since I’ve done it several times before, and I will most likely do it several times in the future.

Today, though, was rather enjoyable, despite the crossed arms and the curse words which were, unbelievably, not my own.

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literature, relationships

I should be writing a paper, but…

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I just had to get this off my chest.

There are some books that are simply great reads. Books tattered and torn, scribbled in and folded, books in which passages are memorized and can be repeated at will. Books that, with every read, simply get better. There’s a frame of the familiar, and within the familiar, there is constant surprise. Whether it’s a new connection, a stunning simile, or simply an image that sits with you differently than it did the first time.

Tom Robbins is the example I typically use for this. His writing is magnificent, even blurbed as a roller coaster of prose. With that, I heartily agree. And yet he has characters that, no matter how many times you pick up the book, never change from the last time you picked it up. Sure, they’re not static within the confines of the paper, but within the book itself, they are as unchanging as the clock in Arizona. But set within a familiar story, new details can and do leap out at you when you least expect it, and often when you’re not looking.

I think a good relationship is like this.

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