After some thought, Lauren

I've decided that there are some things you are not supposed to live through
and when you do
you have to make a life again
its raw
and so am I

so there
is the conversation you wanted to have
last night

Love Song - Sara

Head under water,
And they tell me to breathe easy for a while.
The breathing gets harder, even I know that.

You made room for me but it’s too soon to see,
If I’m happy in your hands.
I’m unusually hard to hold on to.

Blank stares at blank pages.
No easy way to say this.
You mean well, but you make this hard on me.

I'm not gonna write you a love song,
'Cause you asked for it,
'Cause you need one, you see.
I'm not gonna write you a love song,
'Cause you tell me it's,
Make or breaking this.
If you’re on your way,
I'm not gonna write you to stay.
If all you have is leaving,
I’m gonna need a better reason to write you a love song today.
Today.

I learned the hard way,
That they all say things you want to hear.
My heavy heart sinks deep down under you,
And your twisted words, your help just hurts.
You are not what I thought you were.
Hello to high and dry.

Convinced me to please you.
Made me think that I need this too.
I’m trying to let you hear me as I am.

I'm not gonna write you a love song,
'Cause you asked for it,
'Cause you need one, you see.
I'm not gonna write you a love song,
'Cause you tell me it's,
Make or breaking this.
If you’re on your way,
I'm not gonna write you to stay.
If all you have is leaving,
I’m gonna need a better reason to write you a love song today.

Promise me you'll leave the light on,
To help me see with daylight, my guide, gone.
'Cause I believe there's a way you can love me because I say,

I won't write you a love song,
'Cause you asked for it,
'Cause you need one you see.
I'm not gonna write you a love song,
'Cause you tell me it's make or breaking this.
Is that why you wanted a love song,
'Cause you asked for it,
'Cause you need one you see.
I’m not gonna write you a love song,
'Cause you tell me it's make or breaking this.
If you’re on your way,
I’m not gonna write you to stay.
If your heart is nowhere in it,
I don’t want it for a minute.
Babe, I’ll walk the seven seas when I believe that there's a reason to,
Write you a love song today.
Today.

Quotations that I'm into right now...

We must not say that every mistake is a foolish one. - Cicero

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.
Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948)

If you have made mistakes, even serious ones, there is always another chance for you. What we call failure is not the falling down but the staying down.
Mary Pickford (1893 - 1979)

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
Cyril Connolly (1903 - 1974)

Keep writing. Keep doing it and doing it. Even in the moments when it's so hurtful to think about writing.
Heather Armstrong, Keynote Speech, SXSW 2006

Let each man exercise the art he knows.
Aristophanes (450 BC - 388 BC), Wasps, 422 B.C.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?
Edith Wharton (1862 - 1937)

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.
Frida Kahlo (1907 - 1954)

What I dream of is an art of balance.
Henri Matisse (1869 - 1954), O Magazine, April 2003
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.
Henry Ward Beecher (1813 - 1887), Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 1887

Steve Warner's words to me

It sounds like "Magnolia" made a serious impact on you. Sometimes we find a film that speaks directly to us at a specific moment in our lives, and those are the movies that are most memorable, and prove that film is something far more than just a flickering image on a white screen. Movies can be magical, transformative. They truly are art. By looking at and analyzing all of the cinematic elements that make up this film, you were able to see how the director manipulated each individual piece to create this stunning final product, and it is through this analysis that we learn to truly appreciate the film itself. This is an excellent paper, perfect in all regards, that shows you know what it means to truly appreciate a film, and the steps that sometimes must be taken to achieve this appreciation. Great work, awesome job, bravo.
A

the boys in the parking lot

oh boys
you will never grow old
and you will never grow up
i saw you,
peeling away and fishtailing
in the snow
this poem sucks
but i was talking to my mom and wanted to remember that moment
you helped because you were so immature
and reminded me of ex-boyfriends back home
thank you

ee cummings

[somewhere i have never travelled]


somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands

Funny, isn't it?

How my dearest friends
know nothing about the
second worst night of my life?

That talk with Barbara today

She said, how have you been dealing with the guy?

and I said,

I don't want to talk about it to people,
not because I don't want to talk about it.
But because I don't want their pity, their condolences,
to be treated as though I am weak or damaged,
with kid gloves,
or as a freak.
I don't want them to see me as a victim
when I see myself as stronger than I've ever been.

And I've found a peace with myself now that I'm living in the present.
And while I can talk about the past,
I refuse to live in it.
Don't place me there in your mind,
because I will fight you to the death

like I fought the guy to survive.

I'm pretty sure I just drooled on myself

Things like...
wormwood...
work their way into my mind at this hour
and i think of all the inks
i want to slip under my skin and carry with me
as a testament
to my endurance
and my temperance.

Never will I be real enough to some people in this world to matter
but to the world I walk in,
I will leave a mark.

The world may leave marks on you,
but you must leave a bigger one on it.

I could list and check my way
down the myriad of SHIT
that has hit my fan this semester.
But it would all sound like excuses

instead of the collection of scars I've grown into and now
cherish so much.

So I don't want to sound like a whiny bitch,
and I'll let you guess what has gone so horribly wrong
in the life of this girl
who grew up in the country
but whose eyes never left greater things.

Vaseline

cover my eyelashes with vaseline
and let the goop shape the world
that surrounds.

the light filtering in through a layer
beating its way through oil and protection

and i'd never have to see your face on the L again.

i'd never fear my fun times in Chicago would be shortened by your judging gaze.

I'd never have nightmares of walking onto the L at Belmont and watching
your eyes shift up
from my feet
to my legs
to my thighs you knew so well once
and finally to my face.
Which would look at you and smile, knowing my strength now.

And that smile would kill you.

I have nightmares that my smile will kill you,
since I know you are and were made of so very little substance.
And the grit that's collected in my laugh lines may have looked like dirt to you
but you never got close enough to see the diamonds.

Illness and Uncle Geary

When death knocks the bones of your frame
and you feel your laugh rattling through the cage
that is your skin.

you know that the body is only so much.

and when the body that could have given life to one so close
barely survives a lonely, bitter, harsh winter flurry
of emergency room visits
and iv's
and blood tests
and vomit bags
and spit and snot and piss

i would give anything to go back and give you the healthy part of me, Uncle Geary.

Your life taken so many years ago, by idiot doctors
who couldn't put two and two together.
The recent West Nile Outbreak...
and a severely sick man with an unknown illness causing
HUGE
organ failure
brain swelling
diabetes
and blindness

I'm so angry at those doctors for cutting short your chance to hug your grandchildren.
And for them to hug you.
They were just starting to say, "Ganpa"

And the quiet gentle giant you were
endured so much pain in these past few years
and lost so much weight in the battle
but gained so much dignity and pride
and so much of my respect.

All my love to you, who is in a better place now.
Healthy and robust again.
You will be missed.
I love you, Uncle Geary.
What I wouldn't give to kiss your scruffy beard one last time before I go home.

Vintage Vinyl

The wine sits cold in the bottom of the bottle
aching to be slipped through the neck again
so tight
and close.
It aches for the green glass embrace again.

The firmament of our lives gets paint
splashed and splotched and pushed upon itself
and we become the artist
with no brush
but some torn threads and loose ends as bristles
and we paint this way.
We push the paint across the canvas and through the clouds
until the sky itself is inky and muddled with the pigment
that blood carries.
Only raw. Let it only be raw.

Cajoling the oils and pastels into the weaved webwork knitted into our lives
no, not knitted.
it IS our lives
the intertwining loose ends.
the brush becomes our hand
the brush becomes our canvas
and do you see how we become the painting that is our life,
just at the same time as we are the painters?

it's the choice of the wine to sit
the sediment filtering and sifting down through the sunlight
in the open door of the chiller.
it sits at the bottom of the bottle, yearning for the past
and what will again be the present
in the future.
knowing that the cold green glass bottle embrace
will again bring calm energy to these tired bones.

Katie's Hurt Feelings

I hurt Katie's feelings tonight.

She crawled up into bed and started throwing bobby pins at everyone. I said, stop throwing them. Because I knew, they would clutter the room and eventually I would pick them up and throw them away because Katie just doesn't notice them. And that's fine, that's the way Katie is...her life is busy and hectic and she's constantly running and that's not a bad thing! I'm not upset that she doesn't see those little messy things, because it's her nature and I love her.
However, we JUST cleaned the room and we've all been expressing how much we love the clean room, how orderly it is...how wonderfully clean it is. I pointed out that I didn't want it to get messy.
She said, ok, you can stop being my mother.
And I said, no, Katie, I'm not being your mother, I'm being your roommate. And I have a right to expect that my desk and my bed and my side of the closet and my living area stay clean, especially after all three of us put SOOOOO much time into cleaning it yesterday. She just looked hurt and didn't respond and rolled over and apparently went to sleep. I think she's just lying in bed angry and isn't speaking to anyone.

Throwing the bobby pins was a way to get attention because when there's more than just Katie and a friend, when it's a group of people, Katie wants the attention on her. This doesn't define her, it's a small character aspect, and like all character aspects, it has a legitimate motivation and isn't always a negative thing...We're both a little like that but I find myself loving to observe/sit inside my own head more and more as I get older.

I don't know, I'm fearing that Katie will turn this into a cold-shoulder drama instead of an adult discussion. I just want to sleep on it, get over it, think it over rationally, and then discuss it. I hope this happens. I hope this is capable of happening.

And now I want to write poetry, so...new blog!

College Education Semester

late for class
nap
work
I slept through lecture
study at library
text
read another book
weekend party
school again
graduate

The Refrigerator Poem by Lauren (last two lines from Amanda)

What is feeling
she has her tune
write on paper
no way this question was ever easy
like night with serious sleep
or when time's extemporaneous
there by the room
find us all far from LOVE
and what will they have here
go longer needing smell of him, it
take heed our a.m. drop

About Me Section

This was such a good about me section I wanted to save it somewhere...

A lot of things in my life are in a transitional stage right now.
I'm learning to love myself. I know, that's so cliche, right? But it's really true. Today was the first time in a LONG time that I was able to laugh with abandon, to say that I loved my life! Yes, there are a lot of...complications...
I had just given up on my life before, I wanted to throw it out the window like a shitty computer and just start over! But now, I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.
I am who I am. I understand my behavior better, I understand myself better, and I'm so grateful to have control over my life again.
For many reasons, having control in my life means so much. When a person loses control of things that have occured in their life, it's crucial that they find some way to gain control again.
It took so much sacrifice in my life - unfortunately, I may have sacrificed that which was most dear to me. I destroyed my relationships, my self-confidence, my enjoyment, myself, and (most horribly) those I love before being able to make a change.
I've come to terms with a lot of loss in my life, and I consider this a sort of renewal. I've had to lose a lot, but hopefully I haven't burned all of my bridges and I can regain much of what I have destroyed.
My relationships have born the brunt of my problems, and for that, I am eternally sorry.
I understand if what I've done is unforgiveable, because I am not sure that I will ever be able to forgive myself.
I've begun to surround myself with love again - making amends with my parents, my family, old high schools friends. I'm reconnecting with a past I thought I wanted to leave behind. Where my new friends have fallen short, my old friends have picked me up. In the greatest times of need, true friends have kept me from myself in times where that was most crucial. It is true - make new friends, but keep the old - some are silver, and the other gold.
I love my golden friends.
The light at the end of the tunnel is so bright, so beautiful...it's the rest of the my life, the hope for my future, the determination to perservere through all. It's the love of my family and my friends, it's the carefree laughter, and the times to simply be held and cry.
I thank you all for loving me in a way that I have been unable to love myself lately.
You have given my reason to move forward, strength to take on tomorrow, and courage to make my mind up for myself and for no one else.
To everyone -
Surround yourself with love.
Apologize when you have done wrong.
Forgive when you have been wronged.
Spend time in the sun, if only to remind yourself that there is one.
Play with carefree and giddy laughter.
Hug often. Hugs heal pain.
Choose the life you want to lead.
Be kind, compassionate, and considerate to those who do not, or cannot, show the same to you.
Real love is a permanently self-enlarging experience.
Let yourself be loved. This is the most difficult of all.

Sorry about the delay

I realize it's been a while since I've blogged, and that's mostly because I've been fighting off death. Literally. With four health center visits, two emergency room visits, three antibiotics, and five prescriptions medicines (including some narcotics), you'd think that I'd have kicked mono's ass.
Oh no.
It was surely kicking mine.

But now I'm feeling better (knock on wood) and I have been thinking and feeling much inside myself lately.
The urge to write and get it out of my skin is....tingling inside.

So...I want to write down some things tonight that I was thinking about and that inspired thought/words/poetry before I forget them. Forgive them if they don't make sense right now...they will be elaborated upon later.

I went to rainy Kansas and I learned the truth.

The trinity of the past, the present, and the future. Doors. Locked doors, locked away, the past.

Speaking the language of the otherworld. Translation.

And now...to what Lauren and I have been talking about over the past half-hour or so...and what triggered my nose bleed.
Yeah, a nose bleed.

We started talking about insane asylums and how cruelly they treated the patients. For whatever reason we started talking about the Holocaust and concentration camps.
I said that I've never been more overwhelmed by a sense of darkness and evil and despair than I have when I was at Mauthausen. You see some things that you just can't forget.

And I let it rest at that for a while. Then I started dwelling on it, and I knew unless I said something, I'd sink into the pit of darkness in my head and have bizarre nightmares about the intense and indescribable suffering that these innocent people underwent.

So I started speaking about the things I saw and felt at Mauthausen, things that I haven't been able to tell anyone or even get out of my mouth without just losing it.

I told them about the barracks. How the museum people had a few of the standard bunks set up for us in an otherwise empty barrack and explained that three people would sleep in each bed frame, with no mattress, of course. Three people in each bed, three beds high. Nine people in a space that we wouldn't expect two people to reside within.

And next to the bunks on the worn grey hardwood floor was a dark splotch. The floor had been waxed years past, but of course the varnish was missing in spots and it was mostly dull bare wood, aged and matte. And then, a dark stained splotch on the floor. We all wondered but no one opened their mouths to ask because we already knew, really.
Using human blood as a wood stain...I can't even walk on the floor the same. I avoided that spot when they shuffled us through the room, out of respect for those who were fell in that place, for the dead who were killed without respect, without dignity, without their family near. For those who were forgotten as just another number, and moved, and disposed of because that's just how life was on the inside of those granite walls. For the people who died in that spot, inside the walls of a prison that they built with their own backs, their own sweat, their own blood, from the quarry down below. Can you imagine??? Being put to work to build your own cage?
When the work didn't kill them, the SS did.
Officers given strict commands to work the prisoners until they were dead. Literally.

I was so angry, I wanted to kneel and cry and scream and tear at my eyes and my hair and my ridiculously proud clothes and the haughty life that I lead without considering any of it. I wanted to go back in time and bash the heads of the villagers together, villagers who lived with a dark secret in their backyard. Don't tell me they didn't know...they KNEW goddamnit, and they did NOTHING.
Oh, but they had to survive somehow, and loose lips sink ships.
Really?
Because I know 6 million ships that sank without a sound in a dark harbor, without a single SOS response, without a single nod in their direction, slipping into the inky abyss without a flag raised in respect.

I hate getting irate about this, because I rant like a Republican preacher. There's nothing less convincing. I know that my anger is justified. That my disgust with the past, the lives of the guilty and the guilty by choice of silence. I feel the disgust with my own privileged life. With the ease with which I live.

I remember walking down the stairs into the areas where they did they worst business of all. Hanging from above the steps was a wire, with a loop on the end. I was confused...this wire didn't overkill for simply hanging decorations or signs. And then, they told us, "That wire was used to hang people on the steps, where you are standing. They would attach the rope here - to this loop - and then push them off from behind."
Even in the sunlight I was afraid to touch it.

Then in the corner, at the bottom of the stairs, to the left. A corner. Very dark, because no sunlight reached it. I wondered what was in that corner, and peered closely at the wall. I didn't step into the darkness because I felt a sort of respect for it, a fear or understanding of its depth. The plaque read - Headshot Corner. The officers would make prisoners kneel here, interrogating them before shooting them in the head at close range.
The darkness had less to do with direct sunlight and more to do with the fact that the cement walls and floor were saturated with the blood of innocent men and women. Stained.

There's more I can remember, images burned into my mind. But that's all I could handle tonight before I started to cry and my nose started to bleed.

And it's all I can handle right now.

My heart goes out to you.

Amanda