My Existence Led by Confusion Boats

I did it. I gave notice. I'm FREE!!

I was very nervous. I always think people are going to be mad at me. Once I moved into a big shared house in Toronto, and it was a sort of creepy atmosphere and I lived there uneasily for a few months until one day, one of the creepiest women said to me, "We're getting evicted" and I felt a surge of joy. Released! Of course, it made me realize I wait for fate to decide things.

On the subway on the way to work, I was sick to my stomach from fear. (I've been sick to my stomach a lot lately which I've been attributing to stress, but it might actually be that I'm dying and this whole thing will be moot.) I started thinking about bills and health insurance. Fear! Fear and doubt hammered at me. The train lurched sluggishly under the city and I felt doomed.

Moods are funny. When I got to work, I sat miserably at my computer for a while. I wasn't sure. I didn't know what to do. I felt like putting it off.

I put everything off. I treat all of life as if it's too special to be touched. After a while, I got up and went to talk to my supervisor. She looked amazed, but not angry at all. I explained my newfound clarity about pursuing comedy writing. She couldn't have been nicer.

This whole day is now one of the weirdest in a long time. I feel dazed and unreal. But I feel happy.

Confusion

When you make a decision, are you buoyed aloft for a day or two and then paralyzed by doubt-ridden fog? Because that always happens to me. I decide on a course and then, as if riotous spirits are playing with my inner compass, I become unable to see in a straight line. I can't, or won't, do one thing in the service of the decision I've made. Instead I find myself sleeping too much, feeling sick to my stomach, developing disquieting pains and maladies and generally running out of all life energy, much less energy to embark on a new path.

This can't be a coincidence -- it always happens. So now that I've decided to become a comedy writer, I find myself buying copies of Anna Karenina and Lipstick Traces because I need to read them for my novel. Wasn't I, like, writing a novel? Could I somehow whip the novel off and then not be dogged by the sense I'm abandoning something else? Because my creative life is littered with abandoned carcasses. I could paper a giant luxury hotel with the starts of things I've written and never finished.

Oh well. Maybe I should just focus on the pair above, who seem to be having a good time and not thinking about whether they're novelists or comedians. I didn't just slap that picture up there capriciously, by the way -- it's the first one that comes up if you Google 'confusion' in Google Images.

I like the way the woman is touching that guy. I like the way she's tugging on his jockey shorts. I like the angle of the jockey shorts. God, those two look confused. Good choice, Google Images.

Skies as Couple-Colored as a Brinded Cow

La Misma hopes her readers have been enjoying her excursions into poesy. She certainly has. They are ego-free exercises in wordplay, sort of like playing with a huge box of pastels but with words.

I find it's very fun to rhyme, and it's been making me remember my inveighing against rhyming to my students when I taught creative writing. I told them they couldn't rhyme in their poems -- that it sounded like doggerel, and was trite and Hallmark card-y. Of course, I encountered a lot of opposition and I frustrated a lot of rhymers by my insistence that modern poetry had moved beyond rhyming and to rhyme would be a goofball move, a corny excursion to the dark ages, or the corny ages, or whatever.

What did I know? I was way out of my depth teaching poetry writing -- I had barely written a single passable poem myself, even after a terrifying upper-level workshop in my MFA program. I learned, during that semester, that I didn't even really know what a poem was. I would produce a string of non-rhyming, sensitive lines about something and submit them to my then-boyfriend who would shake his head, decisively. No. I hadn't gotten it yet.

I finally wrote a couple of half-decent poem-like things, but it was a struggle. But one thing I thought I knew as gospel was that a poem should not rhyme. No one in my graduate workshop wrote rhyming poems. The poems we read together, by people like Galway Kinnell, Jorie Graham and C.K. Williams, they didn't freaking rhyme. Rhyming was for babies!

But now I think we were wrong. Rhyming's fun. The rappers are right. The more rhymes you can think of in a row the more exhilarating it is. It's like surfing or something. It's like volleyball.

Maybe it's really more like songwriting, and maybe my years as a songwriter have made me extra-fond of rhyming. But I say, bring it back. Bring back formalism! We've had enough of those ragged claws scuttling around in silent seas. Let's have some straight-up rhymes.

Poem #2

Floral littoral memory zone
Tasks forgotten tranks for cut rate loans
Ship’s holds are full of numbered bones
There’s a tally like a rally --
Confusion tomes.

Sidestep heart
Matchless heart
Misspent part.

I now hit the forfeit.
It’s in full respect
Of the Montrechat and the moon
And the unspent wound
And sounds you made while loving
And thoughts that crash too soon.

I’m eating Lorna Doones.
Comfort on a hard afternoon.

I'm Just Sick About Pluto

What a bummer. You're just sitting out there, the furthest, coldest and smallest planet in the solar system, and then you get the word that you aren't even in the system anymore. You aren't even a planet anymore. A bunch of people on Earth have demoted you. And Earth, what's Earth? Only the planet who thinks they know everything, right up to who's a planet and who isn't.

Earth is unendurable for their invasive and patronizing attitude to the rest of the galaxies.

Helllllp!!!!!

My blog disappeared for days. It just went away. I felt so sad. I didn't realize how much I've come to love and trust my blog. I often go read it even when no one's commented and the post has been up for weeks. I find comfort in my own sentences. If that sounds vain, so be it. You don't know how fond you are of your own sentences until they've been zapped out of existence and all that's left is gray.

I'm writing this experimentally, not knowing if it will appear on my still-gray blog, my M.I.A. blog.

Has anyone heard the rapper M.I.A.? Thoughts?

I wrote to Blogger but they keep sending me form answers about consulting other links. I tried, but nothing came of it. The one person who'd had a similar problem was told "your template is probably gone -- you should have a backup template." Roitt. I have a backup template. Like I'm going to the moon next week.

Oh well...

"I know everybody has a little bad luck, sometimes ...
I know lately, I been havin' mine."
Cat Power, the Covers Record.

Poem

This is the last time, this is the first time, this is always the way I sit
In clothes that do not fit me one bit
And slated to perform at jobs that do not call on my gifts
And promising things to people that are not crucial to me
And missing the things that are most crucial to me
And the soul of life seems missing and I’m missing everything
And you can always point at money for the reason you are losing
You can always say money is the reason you lose everything
You can sit in the back and never meet the eyes of people you admire
And you can step right up and please the people who don’t mean a thing to you
And get too tired to go see things by the people who mean the most to you.
You can fail to sit in the small garden and watch them put in wildflowers
You might get trapped in midtown with screaming shoppers
And you might let that dictate the terms of your agreement
With this hardest city to live in.

Time Takes a Cigarette, Puts It in Your Mouth

Today is my birthday. So far I've had a cupcake, a chocolate donut, roses from co-workers and a nice photograph of myself smiling with uncharacteristic cheerfulness that someone in the office snapped and emailed to me.

I usually don't feel happy on my birthday, but today I do. Though I woke up feeling morose, the gloom slid away. I played the new I Feel Tractor album in my apartment this morning and danced. That is one great album. Look for it in small, discerning record stores. I went down the street and bought myself a cupcake, explaining I wanted the yellow one because it was my birthday and it looked more birthday-y. An older woman nearby looked delighted for me, as if birthdays are unusual. "Your birthday -- that's wonderful!" she said. "This is a feast day." Something like that. Something surprisingly formal. "You need a candle," she added, touchingly. I said I might have one at home. The kindness of strangers in New York is surprisingly strong and bracing.

I'm excited because I've made a momentous life decision. I am going to leave my job at the end of August to pursue a career as a TV comedy writer. For once, my birthday doesn't feel like a marker in a sea of directionless drifting -- an embarrassing notch on a bedpost full of embarrassing notches -- a giant glitch in the cosmos -- an unfortunate reminder of a random and oft-cursed event -- an occasion to receive cards from parents not merely wishing luck for the coming year but seeming to plead desperately for it -- a time to take stock of a dwindling set of options and an even drearier future.

No. Ha ha! This year it comes right on the heels of my decision to seek my liberation. I actually feel I have something to celebrate. Do you know how long it's been since I've felt that way?