. . . and we’re back!

I’ve been sick the past few days, since returning from vacation. I’ve spent a lot of time in bed watching anime, reading metafilter, and viewing every single episode of the Nostalgia Chick that I could find. Because I will have to entrench myself in work soon (edits!), I wanted to pop in and say hello.

Hello!

The ocean was beautiful, as expected. Because whatever illness I had was germinating, part of me wanted to just enfold myself in the warmth of the sun and not think about the winter that waited for me back home. I read many books (check out my goodreads, as usual, for bookish updates), saw sights, took pictures of birds and alligators.

We made a pitstop in Gainesville, just long enough to get pizza and bumperstickers from Satchel’s before hopping on the road again. It made my heart hurt a little to drive through downtown, passing my old route home from the library but to know that the little apartment there on the second floor of a pink house was no longer mine. I didn’t expect that–it was a feeling I usually only associate with driving by my childhood home in New Jersey. But I suppose that Gainesville, Florida was really the last place I let myself get settled, put down roots.

Sometimes I feel torn in two directions. I’m fundamentally a homebody. I love my bed, my cat, my routine. But I’ve also seen so little of the world. A few islands and one foreign country. Most (but not all) of the East Coast. Vegas. Indiana. There’s so much I need to see and do. I need to give myself permission, I think, to make that a priority. I need to push myself out of my comfort zone, see new things, meet new people.

But first, I suppose, I should push myself out of bed and take a friggin’ shower.

Some recent pictures:

Snow slippers!

Basil flowers!

Gluten-free cookie of my heart!

My head!

That dude!

hmmmmph!

I hope your Valentine’s Day was as good as ours, even if it wasn’t quite so full of cookies, chocolate-covered strawberries, or Indian food!

I’ll be out of town for the next week on a well-deserved vacation with some lovely people. Expect lots of pictures! Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. Write when you find work! (etc. etc.)

In her blog, my friend Fran asked what books you share.

The answer is simple: I don’t share no stinkin’ books.

I used to. When I was fifteen, sixteen, I loved lending out books–sharing words that meant the world to me or else foisting those words on others. Until a boy I liked taught me a lesson about that.

I’m not sure if I want to get into details, but I’ll tell you this: he had very blue eyes and lived very far away. He thought about things, and I liked him a lot for that. In my hometown, it was rare to meet boys who thought about things and also openly seemed to like me. I was this shy girl who was always blushing a lot but who, when provoked, had opinions and stuff. And I was strange–really strange. Not just because I liked fantasy novels and dyed my hair funny colors but because in middle school I used to eat the ABC gum off the bottoms of desks (ew!) because I thought it made me a bad ass or something. This boy didn’t know about these things, because he was from someplace else.

At the beginning of my senior year, I read Fight Club. I’d already seen the movie, but still, it felt like a revelation–I hadn’t realized that books could be like that, metatextual and poetic. Boundary challenging, you know? Later I would read Vonnegut and realize Chuck Palahniuk was not the first, but at the time it was a special, special book, as weird as I was. I lent it to every one of my friends. It was a movie edition, and the floppy cover got all dog-eared and curled. Just after graduation, this boy came for a visit, and we kissed–my first kiss–and I lent him the book.

Then he left and I found out he’d had a girlfriend back home the whole time he’d been kissing me.

I asked him to mail me the book, but it didn’t happen. I was tetherless–Fight Clubless. I learned something about lending books then: not to do it unless you can live without ever getting that book back. That’s not to say that I don’t have a certain generosity when it comes to books. In fact, I love giving them as gifts, whether used or new, love sharing words words words. But certain words I keep close to my heart. I’m selfish with them. They’re mine.

But there’s only one person who I lend books to–to the guy who is sitting in the next room chattering on vent right now. Nowadays our books are all mingled together on the shelves, so mixed up that they might as well be ours rather than his or mine. It doesn’t even bother me. I know I can trust him. I know that because on my nineteenth birthday–six months after I lost my first copy of Fight Club–he gave me another, a hard copy, nicer than the one I lost. And he wrote his heart down on the flyleaf in ballpoint pen.

I call the above Twilight Self-portrait with Bags Under My Eyes. Yes, I am a tired Phoebe.

I was just talking to Sean over IMs about poetry, of all things. He asked me for some recommendations, and I began to wax excited about Richard Siken. Then I thought: maybe I should post one of my old poems on my blog. After all, they’re not going publish themselves, and I stopped sending them out long ago.

Combing back through those old document folders is always a little strange, a little difficult. So much of what I wrote back in graduate school now looks half-baked to me, as if I had neither the patience nor the stamina to see any of my concepts through to fruition. Some of it is bad–derivative, mostly of poems I’d already written. And I can’t bear the thought of those seeing the light of day, even on my blog.

But oh, a few of those poems . . .

Look, I’m a better YA sci-fi novelist than I ever was a poet. I find the act of writing fiction to be more fun, more challenging, and more fulfilling. The perks–an audience of passionate, engaged readers (for one)–can’t be beat.

But I can’t deny that there was a time that I loved poetry, and a time when I worked very hard at it. For four years, I dutifully sent out poems to literary magazines, yet still got next to nowhere with it. I felt like I was treading water, so I gave up. Most of what I wrote back then will never see the light of day.

And maybe that’s good. Many of my poems were sort of . . . fetal. Juvenilia, is the only way I can look at them. But a few of them were good. Very good. They weren’t always the ones that were held in high esteem either by editors or by those I encountered in graduate school, but I read them now and feel a little shiver. “Hey, that’s a poem!” I think. And I feel reluctant to post it here because, man, it feels like it belongs in a magazine somewhere or something.

I don’t really know what to do with these poems. In some ways, my life has been an experience of winnowing broad passions down to narrower ones, and while my core art is better for it, the aftermath is that talents lie fallow, artwork ignored. When I was in eighth grade, I sat in my guidance counselor’s office, weeping because I couldn’t take Creative Writing, Music and Art. I choose art. It was the right choice for me then, but I hardly ever paint nowadays. So I can’t help but look at this stuff–this work, my life’s work!–and, sighing, throw my hands in the air.

One thing hasn’t changed from the days of poetry: I still do have a flair for melodrama.