welcome to the dungeon + writing from writers

Babes and bots, 

If you know me, you know I've been working on this blog post with limited success for almost 3 weeks. Today is another day in the mind's dungeon. Those of us with bad brain chemistry know we are this way only because we would have dominated the world otherwise. I'm fairly confident that if I slept less I would reach my optimal level of success. But, here we are, a proud member of the Snooze Button Club; living at home, hanging on monthly paychecks, spending Saturdays in bed, it's a fuckin party. 

another tinder escapade (this one isn't for prudes)

You know shit really hits the fan when the only thing I can manage to write about is the world of Tinder. I recently tried to get through one of Nina Dobrev's movies, which just so happens to be about a perpetually single blogger who makes her money writing about bad dates. This sounds exactly like my life if my life was better. 

So check out this hot commodity: 


What a proposition! About this particular bio, my mother's friend says, "people are much more open these days." I, for one, am proud to be part of the "more open" generation of hot people looking for love everywhere they won't find it. Call me over confident, call me hopeless, but don't you dare call me unsuccessful. I am a fully fledged Gen Z/Millenial babe with a dump truck butt and one highly successful blog (i.e. you're reading it). What's to complain about? 

so i started re-reading emily dickinson

When life hands you flowers, or bugs, or a glass ceiling, read poetry. Or love a dog. I did both. 
My river runs to thee:
Blue sea, wilt welcome me?
My river waits reply.
Oh sea, look graciously!

I'll fetch thee brooks
From spotted nooks,--

Say, sea, take me! 

So who is the sea and who is the river? Am I even asking the right question? Emily Dickinson can be about as elusive to me as Annie Dillard, both of which capture my heart regardless. Like I said before: I don't know why I love the things I love. I will now add this: I often do not know what they mean. This brings me to my next question: how often do writers make magic on purpose? I remember Suzan Lori-Parks.  

My first year of college I read Venus, a play by the aforementioned genius. I, along with all the other first-years, were required to attend a talk with the author that included a Q & A and evening dessert. When one student asked Lori-Parks, the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, how she came up with her characters/what her intentions were, she said the characters just came to her. She spoke of writing as a wind, not a practice. In short, she told us it came naturally to her, that it was essentially easy. 

I have never had that talent for characters, or writing in general. In fact, I recently submitted my work for feedback and received this link in a slew of other comments: https://www.writermag.com/improve-your-writing/writing-education/remove-filters-fiction-writing/. Upon first glance, I found this to be a cruelly placed article with a definitively hostile title that read, to me, as be better. My feelings on the topic are much more balanced now. The feedback itself was very helpful. 

In an attempt to cheer me up, a dear friend of mine likes to say the world is not ready for my work yet. I remember George Wallace and his 2,000+ rejections. I remember Nabokov and the 25 publishers who trashed Lolita. And so the writing continues... 

 That's all for today, folx. Thanks for taking a bite out of the sandwich with me. 

xoxo BLT

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Cooking Dinner Looks Like in an Environmental Co-Operative

On a Sunday night at Bryn Mawr College, most students are rushing to finish assignments or stumbling over paper topics. But in the college’s only environmentally conscious living co-operative, Batten House, spaghetti squash is a much more pressing issue.   Varuna, 22, and Sophie, 21, signed up to cook dinner for the house that night. They began slowly and with conviction, two friends using each and every week-old vegetable in the fridge for their meal. They prepped four pans for the stove with canola oil. Varuna, with one of her white t-shirt sleeves, pulled up and a dark green apron attempted to cut a hard spaghetti squash open with a long paring knife. Apparently, they tried a larger knife before but it couldn’t pierce the squash’s skin.   Sophie, sporting a light green shirt and white apron, lifted the squash in the air with the knife handle and looked at the large yellow mound quizzically. After yanking the knife out, Varuna succeeded in cutting the squash with a bread kni...
Read more

maybe this and maybe that

Babes and bots,  How's it going? Are you also dairy-free? Do mysterious Thanksgiving leftovers make you fart silently, atrociously, or fantastically? Are you reading this in a bedroom? A living room? At work? In the car? In an office somewhere you'd rather not be? Are you sad? Is your dad a jar of ashes in your car? Yeah. I guess that escalated quickly. Don't be alarmed, read a book. Maybe one by Alice Wong called  Year of the Tiger: An Activist's Life . It has pictures!  Or maybe read this poem by Chen Chen about poop and buttholes and anal sex, somehow titled "Winter." Or maybe read this other poem by Chen Chen, "When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities" Or maybe talk to yourself the way you did when you were younger. Give yourself that agency. Do it!  Or maybe half-ass something, like I half-assed this blog post. And then realize you can't half-ass anything, not really. Not even wiping your butt. Everything you do you do wi...
Read more

Is Compostable Plastic Really All It's Cracked Up to Be?

Buying compostable plastics or composting your food scraps is an attractive choice for many consumers, but do we have the infrastructure to make this eco-friendly market work?   Composting is the process by which organic matter is turned into fertilizer. Compostable plastics used in food packaging, take-out utensils, and napkins are often labeled with a green leaf or ‘100% Compostable’ tag.   Compostable cups, the most heavily purchased compostable item in the U.S. and Europe, are made from a corn-based substance called polylactic acid (PLA). According to Jeremy Kranowitz at Sustainable Living, “PLA cups are better in terms of greenhouse gas emissions since the corn used to create them captured carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and the cup, if recycled, can enrich the soil.”   The problem is, most compostable plastics are not disposed of in the proper composting facility because the municipality in which those products are being circulated has no infrastructure for it. ...
Read more