meme

Is it a meme if you don't tag anyone? I tagged people on facebook. But I like this one so much I have to do it here, too. If you like it, consider yourself tagged.

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My Life According to the Indigo Girls

The rules:
Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, cleverly answer these questions. Pass it on to 12 people you like and include me. You can't use the band I used. Try not to repeat a song title. It's a lot harder than you think! Repost as "My Life According to (BAND NAME)"


Pick Your Artist: Indigo Girls

Are you a male or female?: Dairy Queen

Describe yourself: Girl With the Weight of the World in Her Hands

How do you feel: Closer to Fine

Describe where you currently live: Starkville

If you could go anywhere, where would you go: Come on Home

Your favorite form of transportation: scooter boys

Your best friend is: Hope Alone

Your favorite color is: Bitterroot

What's the weather like: Southland in the Springtime

Favorite time of day: Cold Beer & Remote Control

If your life was a tv show, what would it be called: Language or the Kiss

What is life to you: Moment of Forgiveness

Your fear: I don’t wanna talk about it

What is the best advice you have to give: Love Will Come to You

If you could change your name, you would change it to: Cordova

Thought for the Day: Shame on You

My soul's present condition: Fill It Up Again

My motto: Everything in its own time

Fill in the blank

I was just reading this blog, which I've never read before, and found this survey. I like it, so I'm going to fill it out. Besides, I've accomplished exactly nothing since I got home from class, and doing this will at least get me typing.

• My uncle once: umm...I can't think of an answer for this one. This is not starting well.
• Never in my life: will I eat liver, sushi, or mushrooms on purpose.
• When I was five: I believed I could make it rain.
• High school was: somewhat torturous, but great fodder for poems.
• I will never forget: the day of my mother's lung transplant.
• Once I met: Al Gore.
• Once at a bar: I wrote a terrible poem on a paper towel from the bathroom.
• By noon I’m usually: starting to be productive.
• Last night: I worked on my manuscript for the first time in a long time.
• If I only had: the power of teleportation...
• Next time I go to church: I will probably cry my eyes out.
• What worries me most: is that people will only see the worst in me.
• If I were a character in Shakespeare: I would have an amazing wardrobe.
• I have a hard time understanding: philosophy, and people who like it. (Love you, bf)
• You know I like you if: I overshare. It makes me feel close if you know my secrets.
• Take my advice, never: write an email when you're drunk.
• My ideal breakfast is: mom's waffles with bacon cooked inside.
• If you visit my hometown, I suggest you: bring a camera and a picnic basket.
• Why won’t people: respect my personal space (especially on the el)?
• The world could do without: girls wearing leggings instead of pants.
• I’d rather lick the belly of a cockroach than: do a shot of whiskey.
• My favorite blonds are: babies.
• If I do anything well, it’s: obsess.
• And, by the way: I'm glad things are getting back to normal.

All about the NEO

Mary revised the tag.

The rules: list 6 things you love and one thing you hate about the place where you live.

1) My people are here. Have always been here.

2 )Trees. Big trees with lots of leaves. And grass. When I went to Arizona I missed the trees and grass almost as much as I missed my family.

3) The Medina County fair. Sure, every place has a fair, but from what I hear, the Medina fair is one of the best. I normally hate crowds, but when I'm stuck in the midway aiming for the Gyro stand and 400 people are milling all around me, I feel like a kid again.

4) It typically only takes about a 20 minute drive to get out of or into a city. If I'm living in Akron and need a good dose of farm land, I can be there in less than half an hour, but when you're living in the country, it doesn't take all day to get to where the rest of the people are.

5) People always say they're getting the heck out of dodge as soon as they graduate, but they usually come back. Especially around holidays, you're bound to run into an old friend somewhere.

6) Watching the seasons change, the barns falling down, the houses being built...having enough history in a place that you notice every tiny change.

And the one thing I hate:

The extremes of our wonky weather. Is there anyplace else in the world where it can be 95 and really humid one month and snowing the next?

You're it! I'm not tagging anyone for this unless you want to.

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PS - I did two applications last night, which took about 4 hours (okay, so I'm easily distracted). More of the same today.

Reading List + Seven

Last night, instead of working on my PhD apps, I reorganized my shelves into read and unread. Here's the unread shelves:

Some of these are partially read but not finished, or read but don't remember. At any rate, this is my new goal. At least one book per week (with the exception of the Nortons on the bottom shelf, those might take a little longer). There are 104 books on these shelves, so that means I should be all caught up by the end of 2009. Of course, new books will always be added, so it is really a never ending project, but an admirable goal, right?

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Karen tagged me. Here are the rules. Link to the person who tagged you and post the rules on your blog. Share 7 random or weird things about yourself. Tag 7 people at the end of your post, and include links to their blogs. Let each person know they have been tagged.

1. When I was little, I used to collect the little cardboard tags that get punched out of toy boxes and whatnot so they can be hung. I called them "collecties."
2. I also used to collect clown figurines. I know people think clowns are creepy, but when I was a kid, I thought they were cute. I wanted to be one. Unfortunately, once everyone knew I collected clowns, that's all anyone ever bought me. At the height of my collection, I had about 60. Then I got a cat. He thought clowns were creepy. Broke most of them by jumping on the shelves and swatting them down. Now I have about 10/15 nice ones stored away in a box. I don't think I'll ever display them again.
3. My mom used to make ruebens for lunch a lot, except she put salami on them instead of corned beef. My sister didn't like saurkraut, so hers were just salami and cheese warmed up in the microwave. She called them "roonies" and they are one of my favorite comfort foods.
4. I used to think the word "burlesque" was pronounced "burly-que." Then people laughed at me.
5. I am a sucker for animated Disney movies. My favorites are The Little Mermaid and Aladdin.
6. I used to loooove playing football. Tackle football. I can't throw or catch, but I'm a damn good tackler.
7. I say "bless you" when people burp. My dad does it too. I learned it from him.

I tag: Jennifer, Jay, Emily, Frank, Kelly, Amy, and Nin. But I'm not going to tell them unless they come here because I'm lazy.

106

I’ve been tagged.

Below are listed the top 106 books listed as "Unread" in Librarything. No one seems to know why 106.

The Rules: Bold what you have read, italicize books you’ve started but couldn’t finish, and strike through books you hated. Add an asterisk* to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your "To Be Read" list.

Jonathan Strange & M. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a Novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre (hated it - don't know how to strikethrough)
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein*
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula*
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers


Pretty sad. I've only read 17. This is why I need a PhD.

And the survey says...

Joanna wants me to fill out this survey. I'm not one to ignore requests, so here goes.

1. Pick out a scar you have, and explain how you got it.
I have a half-circle on the inside of my right arm from a tray of baked potatoes when I was learning how to cook at Ruby Tuesday. You have to really look for it, though. I don't scar easily.

2. What does your phone look like? List your reasons to buy it?
I'm sorry, Joanna, but this question sucks. My phone is red. I bought it cuz I like red things.

3. What is on the walls of your bedroom?
Various posters, framed photos, and a bulletin board

4. What is your current desktop picture?
one of the stock windows backgrounds-a branch with raindrops or something

5. Do you believe in gay marriage?
I'm fine with it. Straight people can't seem to get it right, anyhow.

6. What do you want more than anything right now?
For someone else to organize my submission packets and write my cover letters.

7. What time were you born?
5:56 p.m. What's more interesting is that my sister's best friend was getting married at the same time, and my sister had to drive my mom to the hospital, so she wasn't very happy. Actually, I'm not sure that's a true story, but it's one I have always thought was true.

8. Are your parents still together?
yep. Which makes my answer to 5 not make much sense.

9. Last person who made you cry?
My nephew.

10. What is your favorite perfume/cologne?
Curve

11. What kind of hair/eye color do you like in the opposite sex?
I usually like dark hair/eyes but there have certainly been exceptions.

12. What are you listening to? Why?
Star Jones's cameo on Law & Order SVU.

13. Do you get scared of the dark?
yes. often.

14. Do you like painkillers?
I take a lot of advil.

15. Are you too shy to ask someone out?
Kind of. But like Joanna, I don't like the idea of traditional dates, anyhow.

16. If you could eat anything right now, what would it be?
A grilled cheese sandwich with tomatoes and french fries.

17. What was the last person who made you mad?
Why do people who write surveys always have bad grammar? The last person who made me mad was the lady that First Merit uses on their automated help line. She wouldn't let me pay my Visa bill.

18. Name one habit you have that has the potential to annoy people?
When I get excited about something, I cannot stop talking. And I often get excited about stupid things.

19. Who was the last person who made you smile?
Joanna.

Well, I'm not going to tag anyone, but I won't be mad if you tag yourself.

Always running late

Ages ago, Talia tagged me for some quotes by writers about writing. I haven't had much time to look, but here are some that have smacked me in the face from the pages of my journals:

“The work of art which is most ‘worthwhile’ is the work which would need a hundred works of any other kind of art to explain it. A fine statue is the core of a hundred poems. A fine poem is a score of symphonies.” Ezra Pound, Vorticism

“The story behind each word must be told so there could be no mistake in the meaning of what had been said.” Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

“A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with.” Robert Frost

"...save yourself from these general themes and seek those which your own everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts, and the belief in some sort of beauty--describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, and the objects of your memory." Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

"Just once I'd like to hear a writer tell the truth about why he can't deliver. Just once I'd like to hear someone say: no words. The reason no one says it is because when there are no words, nothing will save you." Betsy Lerner, The Forset for the Trees

"Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy... a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink." Stephen King, On Writing

Some of you might snicker at the King quote, but despite his mass market appeal, On Writing is one of the best books I've ever read.

I reserve the right to add or delete quotes as I see fit.

Happy 4th of July.

Mary said

to do it again, so here I go. But this time, I'm not following the rules, because it is shameful how few contemporary poets I read who don't have a blog that I read as well.

So, here's the unrestricted list (although a few do still fit the rules)

1. Lelani Hall
2. Lucile Clifton
3. Simone Muench
4. Aimee Nezhukumatathil
5. Peter Pereira
6. Paul Guest
7. Jeannine Hall Gailey
8. Kristy Bowen
9. Neruda
10. Ted Hughes
11. John Wood
12. Brandi Homan
13. Edna St. Vincent Millay (I know, not contemporary, but she's the one who made me fall in love with poetry, so she makes the list. So there.)

It goes without saying that I would recommend Prairie Fever, if for no other reason than I can say "I know her!" : )

I consider myself

memed. This is going to be tough. Here are the rules:

Say someone asked me, "I kind of like poetry, but I don't know anything about contemporary poetry. Who should I read?"

No personal friends, mentors, or blogroll buddies are eligible, sorry.

1. Joy Harjo
2. Rita Dove
3. Sharon Olds
4. Philip Levine
5. Li-Young Lee
6. Kim Addonizio
7. Denise Levertov
8. Michael Ondaatje
9. Louise Gluck
10. Denise Duhamel
11. Afaa Michael Weaver
12. Eve Alexander
13. Charles Bukowski

I'm not following the living poet rule...but since I memed myself, I don't have to follow all the rules, do I?

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In other news...I printed and ordered my thesis and made a table of contents. I have a manuscript!!