It was a regular battle between me and my mother. I was dubbed the "car dj" when my dad wasn't around when I was in 6th grade and since my Mom worked at my high school, my duty followed me. On days when we had to go in an hour early (Alice had jazz band practice) and days when we barely made it on time (8:25! No time for a locker run), I would be scrolling up and down on my ipod's screen. In seventh grade, I quit playing Beatles' songs when my mom exclaimed "All their songs sound the same!"
For a long time, I tried to play things that would make her happy. She used to ask me to play Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1 everyday. That was before she went into therapy. By the time I was in my Junior year of high school, I started trying to play songs that I liked, that she didn't like. My playlists consisted of The Mountain Goats most off-key songs, the Teeth and Joe Jackson. I was waiting for, wanting, her to turn the music down so that I could turn it back up, louder. The gesture, the reason to snap at her and scowl; I was praying for it every time I put on Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod. Joni Mitchell wasn't played anymore, I used to play Cake's Nugget every week:
"heads of state who ride and wrangle,
who look at your face from more than one angle,
can cut you from their bloated budgets
like sharpened knives through chicken mcNuggets.
shut the fuck up.
shut the fuck up..."
Sometimes she would turn the music down. Sometimes she wouldn't. This was the closest to rebellion I ever got.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Monday, July 11, 2011
Prompt Four: Unsure Person
Describe a day in the life of a person who is unsure of him/herself.
(schoolgirl, old man, youth at war, a friend, autobiographical, ect)
submitted by my mother.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Prompt Three: Gesture
Write: not just about a gesture, but a piece that totally embodies the gesture. Like the 'where' piece, but with people (unless, of course, you choose to write about a cat's gesture, I'm sure that's acceptable as well)
If you still want to write the last one, or for this one as well, remember that this is creative writing, not necessarily non-fiction. This one was submitted by Hannah (thank you!!!), submit prompts if you want, of any type. If you have been writing about something in your head and can fit a prompt to it, that is one way to kill three birds with one stone (one for you, one for me, and one for everyone who doesn't have to endure my bad prompts).
If you still want to write the last one, or for this one as well, remember that this is creative writing, not necessarily non-fiction. This one was submitted by Hannah (thank you!!!), submit prompts if you want, of any type. If you have been writing about something in your head and can fit a prompt to it, that is one way to kill three birds with one stone (one for you, one for me, and one for everyone who doesn't have to endure my bad prompts).
Saturday, July 2, 2011
One More
I never know if I should drink the next glass.
Alcohol is supposed to have certain effects on you. It is often dubbed ‘liquid courage’, it is used to reduce or remove inhibitions, to relax. But I never really get to that point. I drink a couple, and then after that it’s always a pondering of…should I?
I know what it does in theory, according to all those beer commercials and portrayals of frat parties in movies. But it never does as promised. If I’m upset it doesn’t make me happy, if I’m anxious because of the number of people around me, it doesn’t relax. In fact, if anything, it only makes me frustrated, because if it’s not fulfilling expectations, there must be something wrong with me.
And yet knowing this, I still often ending drinking one more after I already not really feel like drinking. Just one, hoping, that, perhaps it will be different for once.
It is trivial. It’s just one night and just one decision. It doesn’t really affect much, because I never really get drunk. But all the same, it causes me a moment of pause every time.
Monday, June 27, 2011
Prompt Two: Trivial Dilemmas
There are dilemmas that we face daily. They aren't 'how would one go about bringing world peace?' or 'what exactly is Truth, does it even exist?' Sure we can think about these things time to time, but more often it's 'what shoes should I wear if it might rain but also might not' and 'should I eat more watermelon or should I keep myself dehydrated because otherwise I'll have to use the porta-potty and it's disgusting because there are 100s of people here' (can you feel the anxiety!?)
Write about a trivial dilemma that for one reason or another gets you on an internal rant. Look at the inter workings of your mind in terms of logic in the real world, in day-to-day life. This may seem really random right now, but you will probably catch yourself thinking about one (hopefully, that's what I'm betting on to make this worthwhile.)
P.S. Okay! Great! Feel free to comment on eachother's pieces-I will do so as well, I think it will give us more motivation if we see eachothers reactions :)
Also, you can, once again, submit topic ideas. They are harder to come up with than you think, it's a challenge in itself, and I would really appreciate your ideas.
3rdly I made some clarifications to the instructions about how to write this all, since there seemed to be some confusion. If you have any questions, just ask! I'm just trying to systematize it in some way.
(To post this or not to post this? On one hand, I don't actually know if this will work-I have doubts that other people encounter these dilemmas as often as I do, or will be inspired. On the other, I currently have not come up with any better ideas, nor has anyone else. Therefore it is either this or nothing, or putting up a prompt late (with no guarantee that it will not be this one) and so, yes, I shall post it.)
Write about a trivial dilemma that for one reason or another gets you on an internal rant. Look at the inter workings of your mind in terms of logic in the real world, in day-to-day life. This may seem really random right now, but you will probably catch yourself thinking about one (hopefully, that's what I'm betting on to make this worthwhile.)
P.S. Okay! Great! Feel free to comment on eachother's pieces-I will do so as well, I think it will give us more motivation if we see eachothers reactions :)
Also, you can, once again, submit topic ideas. They are harder to come up with than you think, it's a challenge in itself, and I would really appreciate your ideas.
3rdly I made some clarifications to the instructions about how to write this all, since there seemed to be some confusion. If you have any questions, just ask! I'm just trying to systematize it in some way.
(To post this or not to post this? On one hand, I don't actually know if this will work-I have doubts that other people encounter these dilemmas as often as I do, or will be inspired. On the other, I currently have not come up with any better ideas, nor has anyone else. Therefore it is either this or nothing, or putting up a prompt late (with no guarantee that it will not be this one) and so, yes, I shall post it.)
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Hannah Prompt One
Lawn
In the grass, scores of new chipmunks leap and twist in their little jackets of flesh. I remember coming back from the ocean, or a lake, and seeing our lawn again as it really is: how small, how managed, how hemmed in by the neighbors’ fences and the side of our garage and the azalea bushes it is. We can hear dogs we have never met barking in nearby houses, the slamming of doors, other people’s phones ringing, a tumble of voices. I know all of these things, but I also, mysteriously, know a parallel sense of its infinite space.
One summer, my brother and I woke up early every morning to look in the Have-A-Heart trap our parents had set under the azaleas. There were frantic squirrels. A raccoon, once or twice. Two baby possums who had bloodied their snouts struggling against the wire cage. In the end, we never did catch the woodchuck. (Canny, grizzled, and placid, he never moved more than was necessary and, with his small black hands and his formidable incisors, meticulously demolished what vegetable matter there was surrounding him. He was never startled, but when disturbed, raised himself on his hind legs with slow deliberate gravity and looked at you fixedly until you took a single step too close, and then he ran).
In the spring, curled ferns march over their brick-bordered plantings and into the tangled grass. I dreamed once than in the little alley of overgrown cedars in the back, you could find a path of beaten earth that led all the way to the lip of a canyon overlooking, out a long way off, other houses, a sort of distant village I had never seen before, that certainly had never been there before.
It’s late afternoon. High above in the hazy distance, troops of clouds mass in portentous billows. I’m on the lawn, flat on my back, staring up at the sky and trying to feel buoyed by the shadow I know I’ve trapped beneath me. What I really feel is the way the heat flattens everything, drawing together the ground and the white sky, so that existence becomes merely schematic, two dimensional. But lawn and sky are drawn apart again by the bulk of faraway thunderheads piling up like pale nebulae.
It’s this vertiginous double movement that I can’t quite explain: the way the opening of this distance thrusts earth and sky apart even as the heat collapses the one into the other; and how what emerges is the dreamy impression that I may be falling or floating—and the neighbors, too, may be floating, each sprawled on their own green handkerchief-square lawn—across a blank void, a white hole composed only of vast distance and heat.
In the grass, scores of new chipmunks leap and twist in their little jackets of flesh. I remember coming back from the ocean, or a lake, and seeing our lawn again as it really is: how small, how managed, how hemmed in by the neighbors’ fences and the side of our garage and the azalea bushes it is. We can hear dogs we have never met barking in nearby houses, the slamming of doors, other people’s phones ringing, a tumble of voices. I know all of these things, but I also, mysteriously, know a parallel sense of its infinite space.
One summer, my brother and I woke up early every morning to look in the Have-A-Heart trap our parents had set under the azaleas. There were frantic squirrels. A raccoon, once or twice. Two baby possums who had bloodied their snouts struggling against the wire cage. In the end, we never did catch the woodchuck. (Canny, grizzled, and placid, he never moved more than was necessary and, with his small black hands and his formidable incisors, meticulously demolished what vegetable matter there was surrounding him. He was never startled, but when disturbed, raised himself on his hind legs with slow deliberate gravity and looked at you fixedly until you took a single step too close, and then he ran).
In the spring, curled ferns march over their brick-bordered plantings and into the tangled grass. I dreamed once than in the little alley of overgrown cedars in the back, you could find a path of beaten earth that led all the way to the lip of a canyon overlooking, out a long way off, other houses, a sort of distant village I had never seen before, that certainly had never been there before.
It’s late afternoon. High above in the hazy distance, troops of clouds mass in portentous billows. I’m on the lawn, flat on my back, staring up at the sky and trying to feel buoyed by the shadow I know I’ve trapped beneath me. What I really feel is the way the heat flattens everything, drawing together the ground and the white sky, so that existence becomes merely schematic, two dimensional. But lawn and sky are drawn apart again by the bulk of faraway thunderheads piling up like pale nebulae.
It’s this vertiginous double movement that I can’t quite explain: the way the opening of this distance thrusts earth and sky apart even as the heat collapses the one into the other; and how what emerges is the dreamy impression that I may be falling or floating—and the neighbors, too, may be floating, each sprawled on their own green handkerchief-square lawn—across a blank void, a white hole composed only of vast distance and heat.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Rosette Prompt One
The house that my grandparents' lived in always did harbor dust. However, I think you're allowed a certain amount of dust in your house when you're older. And not because you, yourself are older, but because maybe your things are. These old, antiquated possessions deserve the seasoning that can quickly dignify them as objects that have perhaps seen more than the observer. And my grandparents' had a lot of those. This dresser, that clock, these lamps. I was used to being the youngest thing in that house for quite a long time. I never minded. No matter what I did or where I went, there was always more to see, do and discover in that old house. I would sock-slide across the exposed wood floors of the entry way and living room into the kitchen where the sunlight would pour in around me. It's then that she, my grandmother, would find me. Jingling into the kitchen from the creaking back door, she would be pinning her curly hair up, and smelling of french perfume baked into her from the summer sun. Everything was yellow in those moments, the kitchen, the singing canary, my grandmother. She would fetch me the coldest water. No ice, but mint. The water from the tap at that house was always so perfectly cold and crisp. I would sip my water as she fussed with my hair, smoothing, braiding, and pinning. Ever since my grandmother died and my grandfather moved out of that house, I've often dreamed of that water. It sounds ridiculous but I have searched and tried too desperately to re-create that perfect taste. There is most certainly a chance that I will never succeed. But I think there might be more to that water than the fresh mint and the mineral balance from the water ditstrict. And I may just have to collect some dust of my own to figure out what that is.
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