Mad Girl's Love Song

I know this is supposed to be a blog of original poetry, but I loved this poem so much I thought I'd share it.

Mad Girl's Love Song

By Sylvia Plath

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

Love, Sex, and Death in the Digital Age

I've recently been roaming the internet on StumbleUpon, my newest web favorite. I always assumed that, as per internet standards, StumbleUpon would yield ten boring, disgusting, or childish pages for every interesting one, and so never bothered to check it out. I recently did, and was surprised to find that like an experienced and sensitive lover, StumbleUpon seems to always know just what I like.

(What's this? A joke about sex and the internet that doesn't involve porn?)

Anyway, I found this website: blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2010/01/20/the-4-big-myths-of-profile-pictures/

It's basically a statistical analysis of the activities of participants on dating websites in relation to elements of their profile pictures (self-taken pictures/smiling or unsmiling/eye contact / 'flirty face' / etc) Most of it was pretty dull, to be honest, but one part piqued my interest:

When analyzing position/ eye contact in pictures, women's results were about what you'd expect - they were far more likely to be contacted if they were smiling, and also if they were making eye contact with the camera. Their results dropped, however, when looking unsmilingly into the camera

women_smiling.png

What's curious to me is that the results were exactly the opposite with men - men's results were far less successful if they smiled, and their chances were actually damaged by making eye contact with the camera - whether they were smiling or not.

men_smiling2.png

The results were by far the worst from both genders when the picture was both unsmiling and making eye contact, which is understandable - a serious face staring you down, to me, comes off as either pretentious, humourless, or vaguely threatening.

So why might it be that women so strongly prefer a man frowning in another direction, while men prefer a warm, adoring gaze? In gender studies you're always hearing about woman as the "seen" object - woman is "to be looked at", whereas men are "looking", but then why would men more strongly respond to a woman looking into the camera? The only thing this seems to indicate is that men enjoy being the subject of cheerful and adoring attention from the opposite sex, but then, who doesn't?

Well, women, apparently. Why we would prefer a sullen, preoccupied photo over a positive, open one is completely beyond me.

I think it's indicative of the "Edward Cullen" syndrome that seems to be sweeping the nation. I don't know much about Twilight, but I know that old Edward is apparently the new standard for all that is hot and desirable about men to young women. Edward is:

1: Serious

2: Aloof

3: "deep"

4: pretty

5: sparkly

And since so many girls are so hot for his sparkly self, he must be the next big thing in attractive males. If Edward took a "mycupid" profile picture, he wouldn't be smiling, he wouldn't make eye contact, and I very much doubt he would be making the "flirty face". So despite all this Gender Studies talk about men being the subject and women the object, it seems that women too have a tendency to want a man who is seen and not heard - a man not looking at the camera is unthreatening, but he is also mysterious - it takes some work to figure him out. He's also separate and inhuman (like Eddie Cullen) free to be attractive and looked at without revealing any of those pesky flaws and imperfections that happen in real life.

It seems a kind of alarming trend for young girls, if you ask me.

Fridge poetry 2

Someone took letters from my poem and made their own. I checked back. It's slightly influenced by mine. It's so cool to think I was part of this changing constellation of words and ideas, and that each poem flows into the next.

Give no man your story,

to take you as they grew apart, longing

Draw Grow Read Study

----

Mass media geek out!

fridge magnet poetry

I. LOVE. FRIDGE. POETRY.

Randomness is good for creativity.

I found stumbleupon today, which was phenomenal in it's own right, through which I found this, an interactive, real-time, shared poetry fridge: www.isnoop.net/toys/magwords.php

Strangers on the interwebs keep messing with my words, but here is what I came up with:

May no man's eye read yours,

his longing pressing in, as cities do,

here in this gingerbread country.

Verb.

To peregrinate. Verb. To travel or wander from place to place.

Untitled

Such synthesis of sense and nonsense!

Monstrous, and divine

finding (I hope) hope

in this mundane mythology of inside-out kisses.

Improvisational pancakes

Peanut Butter and Molasses pancakes:

Some 100% peanuts peanut butter

Some molasses

1 egg

a couple big pinches of baking soda

milk

Flour

sugar

vanilla extract

a bit of salt

some vegetable oil

---

Put all the stuff in a bowl. Add more or less according to your whims. If its thick, add milk. If its thin, add more flour. Trust to fate. Mix it until it looks smooth and tasty. Fry it. Hope you lucked out. Eat it. Orgasm.

Never mind the why and wherefore...

Still working on that Evelyn Evelyn article. It's gonna be heavy on the pretentious, a little lighter on the whimsy, but we'll see what goes.

I wanted someone to bounce ideas off of, so I went online looking for some kind of pop culture geek forum where geeks who are into culture studies go to geek out to each other. Alas, no such place seems to exist (an internet full of geeks with varying geeky tendencies, and I can't even find a single haven for my particular geekery of choice? And yet, somehow one can find porn for just about any obscure and stigmatized fetish out there?)

I've mentioned it to a couple of people, and met with little interest. I find that when you start to analyze anything (from pop culture to music to literature) people get very standoffish with you. There's always a sense that if you analyze something, you take away some of its value; a fear that if you break the delicate surface of the illusion, you will look beneath and see that it was smoke and mirrors the whole time.

Which makes me a bit sad, really, because hidden in that assumption is the belief that the inner workings of things are inherently either dull, incomprehensible, corrupt, or all three. It's a view that I see as both naive and cynical at once. Why is it so hard to believe that beneath what is beautiful and fascinating lies an even more beautiful and fascinating clockwork machine to make it go?

When I listen to Evelyn Evelyn, I am unsettled, saddened, fascinated, and entertained all at once. I don't automatically know why, but the answer lies in a complex web of nature and nurture. If I take my thinking a little deeper, I can find all sorts of things; anxieties about the body, about the media, about ideas of normalcy and identity, all kinds of comfort zones regarding what is and what is not, and what labels we assign to both. Understand why a song effects you and you understand more about yourself, and about the people and ideas surrounding you at all times.

I don't listen to the song and go, "Aha! Here's the metaphor! Puzzle solved!". I listen to songs that tinker and play with my own inner clockwork, which makes me want to find out why, and look at the cogs and springs of the song itself. It enriches the song, teases out more questions that will haunt you in different ways, and inspires a kind of awe in just how wild and unfathomable this bizarre little existence really is.

And I promise, no matter how much you find out about things, there will always be more to find out.

Evelyn Evelyn

Holy shit, you guys. I found something really special today while I was procrastinating.

Amanda Palmer tweeted something a while back about how she was producing an album for another artist, a band called "Evelyn Evelyn". I remember thinking, "That's cool, I'll look into that at some point, but... being produced by Amanda Palmer doesn't mean its necessarily awesome."

And oh, how wrong I was.

After listening to and loving their first song, I read this bio from their myspace:

Evelyn and Evelyn Neville are a songwriting duo performing original compositions on piano, ukulele, guitar and accordion. The sisters are parapagus tripus dibrachius twins, sharing three legs, two arms, three lungs, two hearts and a single liver.

"No way," I thought. "Seriously?"

I poked around the interwebs a bit more. Sources supported the story. My beloved Palmer and co-producer Jason Webley supposedly discovered the pair, who were working as circus performers prior to their musical career. I was starting to fall for it when I discovered an article somewhere ruining the fun of the hoax: Evelyn and Evelyn are (SPOILER) Palmer and Webley with one hand tied behind their backs, in a giant dress.

The full album can be streamed from the myspace (although I want to buy one cause I totally support this weird project). It's a concept album, telling a gruesome, creepy, and at times very funny story of this duo's wildly eventful and fantastical upbringing, all leading up to the day they discovered how to upload songs to myspace.

The songs are eclectic, spanning all kinds of genres and moods, sampling many bizarre flavours of music, but always with that twisted vibe in the background that accompanies Palmer's work. (I can't vouch for Webley, I hadn't heard anything of his prior to this, but he seems incredibly talented in his own right) Some I like a lot more than others (which is inevitable when your album crosses so many stylistic borders) but what fascinates me the most is the viral hoax used to publicize it, and how it involves the reader in the story. This album wickedly and perceptively manipulates our modern brains and entrenches itself in the smoke and mirrors of our digitized, media-centric world.

So, I'm going to write a proper analysis of it, something that I could have handed in in my pop culture class (although I'll probably swear more than I did for that class. Swearing is inevitable, unless I have a really, really good reason not to.) Just to avoid a monster blog, I'll use this one for backstory and save the essay for the next post.

Hey, remember when this blog was for poetry? I gotta get back to that at some point.

While you're waiting to pretend to read my pop-cultural analysis (which will be no doubt very long winded and of interest only to myself) why not check out the album here: http://www.myspace.com/evelynevelyn

(if you scroll down past the concert dates, to the second "play" box, you can listen to the whole album. The first one only has 3 songs)

Remain awesome until I see you next.

-L

A thought

It's curious to me just how many movies are made nowadays with the teen and young adult demographic in mind. I would think it easily lands in the 50-80% range.

It's curious because the teen and young adult audience is precisely the audience that is most proficient at piracy (online streaming/torrenting) these shows. I mean, a large percentage of our generation (myself included) doesn't even own TVs because it's so easy to get all your watchable media from the internet, and even some of those that do just hook their computers up to their TVs. This generation is so incredibly plugged in that, if it exists and it is mediatized, we can access it, almost without a second thought. This fact only increases in scope and impact as time goes on.

Maybe it's a mark of our youth-obsessed culture that an industry that is drowning fast and sinking its dwindling funds into marketing to come up with cheap gimmicks like 3D to draw us back in has never thought to simply adjust its focus to an audience that isn't as likely to pirate. Image is everything in the culture industry, and being seen as "old" and "out of touch" is apparently not an option for the production companies.

Of course, that would be a temporary solution, since people keep getting old and dying. Eventually, all us 20-somethings will become the next crop of 80 somethings, and the new 20-somethings will have magical psychic machines wired directly into their brains so they can access the 25th season of Glee instantly. But they haven't come up with any better solutions, besides gimmicks and fads, so as temporary fixes go, its cheap and harmless.

You know, for a complete and unapologetic atheist, I am pretty superstitious.

Well, maybe superstitious isn't the word. I tend to think of it more as literary. Narrative-driven. Plot-arc sensitive.

Maybe it's just 'cause I'm an english major, so I see it everywhere. When my apartment burned down, my most powerful reaction was. "Wow. So what does this symbolize in our protagonist's plot arc? And where are we in that arc?"

In general, I've had the building blocks of literature tinkered into my brain enough times that I kind of look at life as a series of poetic moments and images, with all the peaks and valleys of a good story. So even though I'm pretty atheist, and I view the impulse to find meaning in the randomness of this world as an essentially religious one, when I see something potentially symbolic I look at it as a hint to the moral of the story.

I went book shopping today. I haven't read a good book in too long. And I was meandering through the shelves, feeling pretty blah about what I saw (I couldn't figure out what I was hankering for), I saw a plain, tan book, with an ambiguous but pleasing title: "The Icarus Girl".

I have, once in my life, bought a book specifically because I knew nothing about it. It was at a used bookstore (not unlike Black Cat) and the dustjacket was missing (like with The Icarus Girl) so I couldn't read the blurb. And in a moment of poetic, narrative-driven hipsteriness, I bought it. It turns out my life author has good instincts, because it turned out to be one of my favorite books of all time ("The Devil's Larder", by Jim Crace, if you're interested). So when I saw that unassuming, mysterious beige tome, I felt compelled, out of a sense of poetic happenstance, to investigate it. I picked it up and flicked through the pages experimentally.

The very first page that I opened to, right in the centre of the book, clinched my decision. A bright little wink to my obnoxious poetry obsession, a deep red leaf had been flattened in between the pages by some previous reader. It had been preserved beautifully, and the moment of revelation was gorgeous.

So, obviously, I had to buy the book. If this completely random and flakey decision pays off, it will be two for two. I should start doing my book shopping blindfolded.

Wrote a new poem today, but I'm not gonna post it until I like it, and it still needs some editing.

Don't forget to be awesome!

A chemical revelation...

Taken from my portable notebook. Probably not as deep as it sounds.

Deep or not, it earned me a hug from Ben and a few appreciative "whoa"s from the group.

"I don't know if this was happening yesterday, or if it will continue to happen tomorrow..."

An argument with a stranger on the internet

STRANGER: However, the curious thing about fallacies is that they're only actually fallacies if they're both illegitimate to the subject of the argument and included within its structure, rather than simply extraneous premises. (An argument, of course, being more or less a conditional conjunction of premises.) And your own argumentativety, which I've so astutely pointed out, has no bearing on any of the conditional conjunctions I've made. In fact, one well-known argumentative technique, "reducto ad absurdum," relies entirely on constructing an obviously fallacious sub-argument as part of the overall structure.

ME: I'm terribly sorry, I couldn't quite make out your point over the sound of you masturbating.

Three found poems

Guess what I found in my Gmail inbox? A few old poems, back from when I took a poetry class at OSU. These are about 3-4 years old (plus some minor edits I did just now). I used to send things to myself when I needed to print them off in the computer labs, and lucky for me now that I did, because I'm finding all kinds of backups from things on my old computer. The two that I think are worth anything, I'm posting here.

The first one's original title was, "Calliope Rising" which, in my now-aged wisdom, I realize is appallingly pretentious. Renamed it simply, "Talk", but I don't feel much one way or the other for a title like that. Any suggestions?

Talk

Sing, Muse, of the Urban Myth!

Of the swarming, of the syruped air

(Friend of a friend of a friend of a --)

I forgot I was a skeptic

We drank tequila and lime

Your tongue touched your teeth,

and told a story the length of my spine

Our eyes danced the tango,

Yours believed mine

It echoed, like a whale song

Once upon a time

a time

a time

-----

This one might be my favorite. It's what the teacher called a "Prose Poem". Basically, it's poetic ideas told through the medium of prose (no lineation, no rhythmic devices, alliteration, etc.)

Once again, the original title was pretentious, so I renamed it.

Blink

Sometimes, when I’m talking to people, I worry about my eyes. I think, am I blinking too much? Too little? Are they gaping like mouths or squinting like button holes? Are they telling all my secrets? Do they know that, behind them, I’m just mellowing, like a wet towel on the floor? Do they know I put cheap mascara on them, and that I never grew up past seven? Do they know? Do they know? Eventually, I just become one great set of eyes, trying to swallow the whole world. And everyone looks away. They play with their fingernails and whistle, because they’re too polite to point out these hungry, greedy eyes that are taking all the looking. Sometimes my eyes get angry. They stomp off and terrorize Tokyo/Manhattan/Salt Lake City. Little screaming people rush between the toes of my eyes. They look like beads in a kaleidoscope. I smash a few buildings. They scatter like ball bearings. The National Guard is called in, with little toy planes and little toy tanks and little toy soldiers. I beat my chest. The helicopters look like dandelion seeds. I look. You can see everything from the Empire State Building. I look and I look, and everyone screams and I look. Do they know?

Then the eyes get homesick. The kaleidoscope becomes people, the seeds are flying machines, the toy soldiers are scared kids, and I blink.

------

This last one I don't like so much as a whole, but as the sum of its parts its OK. It has some problematic bits, but there are a couple turns of phrase that I'd like to keep.

The Paper Child

You were sneaker-shod,

skinny-armed, and you

had just a little

madness

Two firefly eyes, and

One ragged smile,

all teeth.

Sneaker-slapping, shirt-tail flapping

Knuckles, fists, and dirty knees,

Like in those books you loved to read.

Books of big-armed men shod in leather, and

paper tongues, and

big black bugs, and

gears and wheels and chains, and

justice, and

fire, and

stuff.

And colours like no colours are in life.

You found a world made up for you

with just a little madness too.

Instructions

No.

You

may not

come back inside the house until

You've written me a good, wholesome,

poem.

Use the twine from the shed

and, little by little,

bind its delicate tendrils

into an earnest web

(you may use the duct tape if it is stubborn)

Be careful not to let the dog out!

And be the most careful,

(for I have seen your shoddy work before)

to spread the tender petals of its memories

Just so.

Do not allow it to seem constructed by a human hand

Nor let it imitate your

sweat-and-sunscreen smell.

Remember to wash your hands afterwards, though

And to wipe your feet

On the green mat

In the hall.

University drudge

Tongue-in-cheek tone inspired by Jeff.

-----

This coffee tastes like

the last goddamn time I wait this long to get started

(I mean it

this time)

Highlighter poised

Ripe and yellow, tart and barely harvested,

to let its jaundiced juices flow

over something significant.

I have banished myself from YouTube

but Times New Roman still crawls

at an unmedicated ADD kid's pace

(lets face it, poetry was not the assignment)

I stopped being smart around 2 am.

Goddamn it.

Notebook vomit 2

"You miss the point of missing the point".

Notebook barf

I have a pretty disorganized brain. My notebook looks pretty much like my brain does from the inside- sprawling doodles, sketches, small notes, long rambling diatribes, catchy little phrases that I liked, quotes, etc... all thrown together haphazardly, in all directions, peppered with doodles and arrows, taking no note of which side is up or where the lines on the paper are. I find it the most relaxing way to write, and the more relaxed I am, the easier it is to come up with something I like.

I had an idea for a blog post that would just be a list of the disembodied (or, "disempoemed") bits and peices that I've always meant to work into something, but I don't have the time to sift through the jumble and come up with that. At the moment, anyway, I'd rather mention something that happened with said disorganized journal today, which made me extremely happy.

I wrote a little poem by accident today. As I was daydreaming in the booth, waiting for the show to start, I found a little phrase that I liked, drifting through my brain. "I am engaged in the business of thinking".

I continued to engage in said business for a bit, until the audience came in. I like to eye the audience from my booth-nest, and size them up, and I noticed a couple of white-bearded old men sitting together. I talk with a lot of white-bearded old men at work - none of them know much about computers. They are, generally, delightful, and they all tend to have this sort of cheerful, "white bearded old man" vibe coming off them. Or maybe that's just a professor thing. Anyway, I scribbled down the thought, right under the first one, "All white bearded old men look the same".

I rested my pen inside the journal as the show started. It remained there, in my bag, for the walk home. Upon returning home, I saw that the pen had rolled around between the pages and made a couple of marks. One of them was a line through the words "I am", in the first phrase. Another was a mark after the first phrase that looked something like a comma. The effect was this:

"Engaged in the business of thinking, all white-bearded old men look the same"

Which I liked more than both peices separately. I'm calling it my "accidental poem". Chance is awesome.

So maybe sometimes it pays to have a journal that looks like you threw up into it.

Ladybird Ladybird (2)

Favorite quote of the moment:

"Everything here is a ghost of something else."

Blast from the past

I found my blog from high school! No, I will not give you the address, because it's full of embarrassing teenageriness. Reading that blog is an excruciatingly embarrassing experience. But, I did find a number of poems that I wrote. Once again, still pretty embarrassing, and I have eliminated the angstiest of them, but for the sheer nostalgia of it (and because I have like nothing creative in my brain these days), here is a pretty crappy poem I wrote when I was 17.

Untitled

Through the white noise and the static
I had to squint to see you
(Telling someone else's jokes,
and putting laughter in a box)

But what's the point of all my education
If nothing makes sense anyway?
Should I live like Hunter Thompson
Or die like Hemmingway?

And how do you obstruct my view
A thousand miles away?

It was so absurd I had to laugh.
(and laugh. and LAUGH)

It was so funny at the time
I finished off the poem with a rhyme.

Oops... kind of slacking lately

I don't have much that's creative and good. Maybe in a day or so I'll substitute in some more chunks of my play. Basically... I'm a failure.

Totally just lived vicariously through a friend making a major life choice. Yep. Enjoyed that. It was like crazy dramatic, like on TV except in real life. And man, it makes me want to swim.

And?

And bold, like wheat sifted through the long, pale fingers of a woman's name forgotten, I drew in my breath like a cloak around me and forgave.

Ladybird Ladybird

I gots nothing to post, so I'll fill some space with the opening monologue from my play, Ladybird Ladybird. See if you can make sense of it.

Sunny is mentally ill, and appears distracted, disoriented, and has a twitch and a stutter, which often breaks up the flow of her speech. Despite this, she manages to maintain an eerie sense of insight. She finds, on the ground, a charred copy of a large English textbook, and scrubs at the soot on the cover with her sleeve. She tries to read a passage but her twitch makes it difficult. Agitated, she flicks through the pages.)

SUNNY: No, no, no, no. I’m not in here. Understand? I belong, I have, I belong right here, in the, in, right here. Right here, between page three hundred sixty-two and three hundred sixty - and a half, three hundred sixty point three repeating, page, page, this page, that’s my page, right? But I’m not here. All these letters running off in all directions, like they know something I don’t, and here I am more lost than found with three hundred and sixty two pages and not a one of them more than half an ounce, half, three quarters, like they didn’t think I’d check, I’d check, I’d check?

(leafs through a few more pages)

As if she even noticed. As if she would appreciate my contribution. As if, as is, as if that nose on her face weren’t as long as a fucking telephone wire with all the pages she’s written. Three hundred sixty? Thirty days in September, that’s what I thought, that’s what she told me, and I said, why not? Rearrange the calendar, put her right on time, right on time, and it’ll all make sense in a language only we two understand, which was a sweet thought and everything but she doesn’t even know my goddamn name.

(She reads from a page)

‘Tyger, Tyger, burning bright.”

Poets. Feh.

(Turns a few more pages)

“It is a melancholy object to those who walk through this great town or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads, and cabin doors crowded with beggars of the female sex...”

Three hundred and sixty-three kinds of nonsense.

Duck Hilarity

How do you laugh when you have a beak?

BTW

Oh, and by the way;

To that great unfathomable nothing with the fishhook smile and the sprained angle whose adolescent anguish annoys and whose unplaceability gets caught in my throat every time, you who languishes after even the coldest of showers, you with that tired philips screwdriver tinkering in the cogs of my poetry machine, you, you, you, you --

You left your keys on my coffee table.

I am so deep

ME: I think Splenda tastes like evil.

COWORKER: Evil tastes sweet?

ME: Of course it does, man... Of course it does.

Yeah man. I have thoughts.

Months of minutes

Months of minutes in the mending

And at last the world is a kaleidoscope:

Beautiful, but in pieces.

Twee

Twee!

Words, words, words

I made a resolution to write every single day, and despite how stupid busy I am, the whim has held strong. Third entry. Since I'm almost dead, I don't have much in the way of deep thoughts or creative snippets. I did, however, learn three new words today, and since I can't think of anything else interesting, I'm going to review them here.

1: Vulpine: In the manner of foxes. Crafty. Sneaky. Trickster-figure. My director used this word today to refer to Fagan, one of the characters in the play I'm in. A tasty little word. Although I always liked foxes - I think they get a bad rap in folklore. Too many chicken farmers making up stories.

2: Platitude: A meaningless or overused statement, presented as though it held deep wisdom. I could choose trope or cliche, but "platitudes" has a nice rhythm to it. I want to use it in something. I don't know what yet.

3: Phantasmagoria (or phantasmagoric): my FAVORITE one. It means a constantly shifting, dreamlike procession of imagined or hallucinated images and ideas. Delerium. Haphazard, loosely related or unrelated stream of consciousness. It comes from a device used in a circus in the 1800s that is sometimes cited as a precursor to film - the quick succession of images used to create the illusion of reality. Don't really know how it works, just that it really, really spooked the people of the time.

Seriously. Say that word out loud. "Phantasmagoria". Mmmmm....

Kinda thinking I should have named the blog that, actually. Kind of fits. We are such stuff as phantasmagoria are made of...? Nah.

Like

I catch words like I catch a cold.

As dreams are... fuck it.

About twenty minutes ago, I felt a whim. This whim started to tickle, about three inches behind my left ear. The whim nagged me continuously for those twenty minutes, the tickling got worse and worse, and, in the end, I had to follow it. So I started a blog.

My whims are unreliable. Perhaps this one will fizzle out and die quickly. But here is the general idea:

I have a lot of thoughts. Generally they sort of drift away, or get scribbled on the back of something and then lost. With a blog (my whim said to me) maybe I could keep it all together and make something useful out of it. I'll set a goal to write every day, just little snippets, thoughts, and poems. Perhaps they will interest you. Perhaps not. You never know with whims.

I'll probably dance a dangerous dance with pretension and self-absorbtion, which is why I hope to apply a healthy dose of humor and self-deprecation. We'll see how that goes.

So this blog will contain such stuff as gets scribbled in the margins of my class notes, such stuff as gets tangled up in swirly doodles of my journal, such stuff as I forget when I can't find a pen. Such stuff as whims are made on.

God help me. I've gone pretentious already.