Monday, January 31, 2011

Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?

We all know I like to write about silly, beautiful little things that don't really matter that much, probably.
But here's something (or someone, rather) who matters a lot:

Beatrix Rose
who is now two days old
and the most beautiful thing.
   
not to mention
Daphne Marion
who is four and a half months 

and
Lily Belle 
who is almost three and so excited about her new baby sister.
 

 Am I a proud auntie?

Love, pink, and uh oh! She came early I need to get KNITTING,
Banana

Saturday, January 15, 2011

On James Baldwin and how he gets it (and me).

I wrote my first short story this week.
JINKIES!
 Was it good, you ask? No. Not really.
And of course that's okay.
So it's not a very big deal, really. I wrote most of it the night before/ morning it was due.
Just like I do everything, you know?
 So why does it matter so much to me? And why do I do that anyway (write everything the morning of)?
I'll tell you why. 
And James Baldwin will tell you why.
It's because I'm scared scared scared SCARED SCARED.

And this is why:
Of all the things I want and hope and yearn to be (which is a considerable list of things, you have perhaps noticed), a writer, in its most hazy and glamorous depiction, is perhaps what I want most.

 So write, you might say.

Write every day! Write everything. Write poems. Write dumb things. Write brilliant things. Write about people you don't know and people you wish you knew and yourself and weak people and brave people. And I DO. Kind of.
Actually I write all the time.
But I'm so afraid of writing something good (or trying to) because that's what I want more than anything, and if I fail... well then, I fail everything.
So purposefully procrastinated mediocrity is safe. Huh? I've been planning that story for WEEKS.
But I wouldn't let myself write it. SCARED SCARED SCARED. Waiting waiting waiting.

As the brilliant James says,
"I thus gave the world and altogether murderous power over me, but also that in such a self-destroying limbo I could never hope to write.
One writes out of one thing only-- one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give".

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Oh dear

I'm paying so much money to earn a degree in thinking myself better and smarter than everyone else, and then not being able to do anything with it.

And I love it.
Oh dear.

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Here it Comes...

A better version of me.

Happy Belated New Year, I guess.
The sun has been incessantly flirting with me. It's toying with my affections, giving me a beautifully bright false hope that perhaps this winter might just be a little less miserable than the last.
Well, maybe it will be.
I will be, anyhow.
And you know why? Because "The strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung" [via Walt Whitman]

And I should at least be humming along.
...Don't you think?

Resolutions, renovations, and hesitant hopings,
Banana

P.S. I'm moving to Paris with Gracie in the Spring. Have you ever heard such a lovely sentence?

Carry

I want to carry you
and for you to carry me
the way voices are said to carry over water.

Just this morning on the shore,
I could hear two people talking quietly
in a rowboat on the far side of the lake.

They were talking about fishing,
then one changed the subject,
and, I swear, they began talking about you.

Billy Collins


that's all, folks

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