Debate Poem

Ibrahim and Ishmael side by side,
tired eyes and
winning smiles,
100-watt bright.
Each takes his turn, polite as you like.

Balance the budget
restore jobs, borrow from China
or adieu to big bird,
tighten your belts,
recession is here,
we gotta dive in.

I did it for you…
Think of the children!

The best you can hope for,
all we have to offer you.

What of Gitmo?
Let's not talk about that.

Abracadabra, magic wand.
Subjects sleep, mesmerized.
Tweedle dee, tweedle dum,
old brothers at last.

Thin Brown Wings

I'm going to try experimenting with posting excerpts or vignettes here and see how that goes. 

*

Across Lake Union, her unbuttoned cardigan blowing in the breeze as she pushed the pedals so she had thin brown wings propelling her as she rode. Light and nimble, it wasn’t hard to imagine her as a mythical winged being. She hovered at intersections every so often, waiting for me to slog up hills which minutes ago she’d effortlessly summitted, not breaking a sweat. In between panting I appreciated the view of the towers of downtown Seattle as the sun sank. We were high above, parellel to I-5 on a skinny bike trail I hadn’t known existed. A blonde man thoughtfully dressed in dark denim and button-down shirt paused to snap a picture on the sidewalk. 

Solo Sushi

My friends taught me how to make sushi. At our local natural and organic supermarket the salesclerk scanned the packet of seaweed, bamboo rolling mat, sushi rice and rice vinegar - my guiding cookbook had preemptively warned against using regular vinegar.

“Ooh, sushi!” she gushed. “Is this your first time?”
"It'll be my first time without guidance." She said she'd recently undertaken the same transition from guided to unguided sushi, and it had gone over well enough.

So, a few days later, avocado good and ripe, and the clouds bountifully shedding near-incessant rain and making me think home was a pretty good place to remain, I decided today was the day.

I didn't realize I would have a strong friend-missing moment rolling my own sushi. Back in Cairo, we’d had a Sushi Making Workshop (slash party) where our brave friends who'd already ventured into sushi-making territory guided us all into making perfect little rolls, with tons of photo ops along the way, not to mention a rule that any deformed sushi could be consumed immediately.

But thousands of miles away, I wondered how I had been part of this perfect-sushi universe. I was confronted with sticky rice that stuck to my fingers, not the seaweed; mushy avocado; and forgot which direction I was supposed to roll in. Not to mention that the rolls didn't want to bow down to the fate of the knife and be sliced.

A few Google consultations later (which weren’t that helpful – I needed pictures!), and a few last-minute sushi set-up readjustments, it came together. Cucumber, avocado, and thin leek slices united together surrounded by the sweet vinegary rice and the rolls submitted to their sliced fate – and their ultimate destiny of soy-sauce dipping and happy consumption.

Lighter

I did an experiment today. It wasn't intended to be an experiment, it was just supposed to be a walk. I left the house with only a set of keys for a 20-minute brisk walk. It took me a while to decide to do this. I don't really usually like leaving the house, especially not alone. This is not because of safety issues.

So, as I used to do especially right when I first got here, I let myself walk in whatever direction I liked, turning when I pleased, with the vague idea of reaching either a park half an hour away or a neighboring district (maybe 15 minutes away). The idea of walking - no, the actual walking with no possessions on my person save for my keys and the clothes on my back, as it were, was physically light. I generally like to lug around my (currently) 6 x 8.5 inch journal, pen and marker, book to read, wallet, tissues, a water bottle, and (recently) a set of colored pencils. Individually, they are all light enough, but together they form a collective burden on walks exceeding 15 minutes.

The going out without money was interesting too. I have a friend who did an experiment where she would go out with neither money nor possessions on alternate days for a period of her life. She had to walk everywhere, even if she had an appointment all the way across the city unless she had a ride from someone (no possessions = no car and no cash and so no cabs).

Like my friend, the lack of possessions carried with cut down on my options. No stopping for coffee or buying something impulsively or giving a dollar to someone asking for change. I always think that money gives people options, in a bigger sense. And there is of course the inherent assumption that options are good. More options is just better. I'm not saying I want to wake up tomorrow morning and discover my bank account has been depleted - and there is no point in glorifying poverty from a position of privilege like the one I have essentially been born into. I guess I'm just saying that options, in certain contexts, can be maddening, and I think can create shortened attention spans. I rotate in five-minute intervals between crocheting granny squares for a blanket, perusing my laptop and the time-consuming wonders of the internet, reading an Italian-American woman's 'food memoir', and checking my new cookbooks for recipes to try. Sitting on the lime green couch in my living room, surrounded by my things, switching back and forth from one activity to another, not knowing which to focus on, because there are so many choices at my fingertips.

Everyone has talent.

What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads."

-Erica Jong

from the book "The Lie that Tells a Truth: A Guide to Writing Fiction," by John Dufresne.

Manage your secrets

I want to be a writer, or an artist. I want to be, but I'm worried that I can't, because I have too many secrets. I used to wish that I was the kind of artist who naturally wanted (or could) paint soft watercolors of nature scenes, the felluca bobbing up and down gently with Nile water lapping at its side and a clear blue sky overhead...

I don't want that anymore. You can't write about what you want to write about. I don't think so. You write about what you have to write about, what you must deal with. The things you face. The things you are struggling with.

It feels like the laptop is burning my legs with its heat. It's not a good feeling.

So, what? Adopt some kind of pen name? Self-censor? Selectively show pieces to close friends only? Stick to cooking instead, which is much less likely to lead to persecution? Or shed my secrets? Or none of the above: write sporadically and wait for a solution to present itself?

My writing sucks... (lately)

Hi, internet world. I'm not writing much these days. And obviously I haven't blogged in a while, as usual. Everytime I type up a little post, a few lines or even a full paragraph, I pause and think that it reveals too much, or that nobody really will be all that interested.

I'm not writing because the past few times when I write, I feel it is so bad, that I really should stop. That why, why am I writing, when it is so bad. Even though I want to write. I don't really feel healthy not writing. I think writing is good for me. But I come to put blue-inked pen to plain white paper and it's not like it was in my head. It's like a really really bad pop song, except worse, because it makes no sense and it doesn't even rhyme. Now I've read a few writing books. I know the general advice. Not to be so concerned with the end result. To cultivate writing as a practice akin to meditation. But I just can't bring myself to do it with these kinds of results.

Ok, I will post this now. I have to get off the internet. And I have to stop half-writing posts and not publishing them.

Processing work

A lot of work these days, punctuated/ ameliorated with listening to the Juno soundtrack.

Yesterday I went to a lecture about writing by playwright Naomi Wallace - I hadn't heard about her before. It was a pretty good lecture, about teaching students to write as an act of transgression. Very Marxist undertones, which made me want to know more about Marxism. I think the lecture and the combination of working a lot contributed.

My academic exposure to Marx was limited to The Communist Manifesto and Hegel, who inspired Marx with the things he wrote about work. The last philosophy paper (maybe the last last paper) I wrote in university was for my Hegel class and titled "Process and Product: Labor, its Fruits, and Our Relationship to Both" and actually included Hegel and Marx (and Levinas).

Now (right now) - yes, I opened the paper to reread it - it's on my computer - and I am half-thinking of going back to school to do my master's in philosophy... Part of what I didn't like about writing for university was the fact that I felt it was in such a bubble - nobody was thinking about this stuff, it's so far removed from most people's lives, and worse, nobody besides my professor and friends was reading it.

I don't know if those things bother me so much now. I'm not sure if I'm really cut out for journalism, if that's what I really want to do. I think (thought) what I want is to write about myself, essays.

I know this isn't very well thought-out... but I'll post it now in the immediacy of the internet and try and actually commit to something clearer later.

An hour a day...

will make you a better writer.

I'm rereading Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, which I honestly cannot recommend highly enough. Her advice is simple but essential. Like most writing advice its core is, ' just write,' but she also offers a lot of encouragement and good ways to view writing. She advises that we write for sanity and as a way to penetrate our lives. And she reminds us that the writing is the important thing, not the finished work. That we are not the finished piece, that we are already good and deserving of love without having to be good writers.

In fact my friend gave me a very good piece of writing advice along these lines just now: "enjoy the process and you'll love the outcome even more."

So we'll see how long this an hour a day thing lasts. I'm always very reluctant to set goals for myself then fail to meet them, preferring to 'wait and see how it goes.'

Weekend off

I decided to take the weekend off. Not that I've been busting a gut working or anything, but I just think some breathing room, time to do something else and not feel guilty for 'not working' when as I've mentioned before 'working' so often translates into a rotation between Facebook and the blogs I check everyday, is a pretty good idea.

I actually did some proper writing today - pages and pages. Not necessarily brilliant, actually quite straightforward, basic writing along the lines of 'the dog jumps over the fence,' but definitely a breakthrough given that I haven't hit that stride which brings forth pages and pages for a long long time.

**

Link: Cary Tennis' advice column yesterday was on writing, and it contains some solid tips relating to Virginia Woolf's mandate of a writer needing money and a room of one's own.

Thursday afternoon

I'm waiting for my sister to come home so we can go to a family lunch together. 4:30 on a Thursday afternoon, but that doesn't mean much if you work from home.

I wrote an email today to my ex telling him that I am writingly constipated. It doesn't feel good, but it's not bad either. It just is, as faux Buddhist as that sounds.

I don't want to share my writing. I don't want to write because what's writing if you're not sharing? To paraphrase someone who said it better, little black marks on a page. Meaningless squiggles.

It's true, there's nothing like reading to keep you from writing.

I guess the trick is to take one's self less seriously. So what if you don't write?

In her most recent blog post, keri smith wrote:

"In fact nothing defines me, not even this amazing career that I have created. It feels really good to know that. I would in fact survive just fine without any of it. More important to me are the bigger things, my family, my health, my love of the world."

This is true; you just need to remember it. And I'm just not these days.

Some Writing References

Writerly friends, colleagues, strangers:

I've recently come across a wealth of information on the (majestic/overrated?) internet about writing.


Sunday Scribblings- An online group writing project where every week a new prompt is put up.

Chuck Palahniuk (of Fight Club fame)'s writing tips.

About.com's fiction writing section. Check out some of the new year's resolutions for writers. Also reviews books on writing.

And for the boot in the pants to actually get you writing, you should check out the 37 days blog (especially "Why 37 days?")

quitting and making the leap

Wow, I really have been posting infrequently.

Part of the reason is that I'm thinking of changing the blog's URL to something more memorable, and yes, something without a spelling mistake.

So it's like every time I come to post, I'm thinking, it shouldn't be here, it should be on the other, better address.

I'm trying to write more, like I said before, although I quit NaNoWriMo '07 to try and work on Nano '06. Truth be told, I haven't quite just parked Nano '06 since completing it last year (by completing I mean the word count), but trying to edit it was just so overwhelming, the only thing I really managed to do was fix the typos and grammar (pressuring myself to reach the word count, I really didn't bother worrying about those little details).

In addition to that, I also just want to write. Anything. The other day I was reading an interview with Ariel Gore about her new book How to Become a Famous Writer Before You're Dead (which I read and found really useful). Ariel is posed this really great question: "How do you know when to put up (and start working on an actual project), or shut up (keep doing this "practice")?"

Ariel's answer is "there is a point where enough is enough," and that we should really just take the leap and embark on a project. She continues with, "If you fail, you can call it practice. But you will not fail."

So I guess that is what I decided: enough is enough. Why start a new draft when I already have one? But also I think practice and working on your project go hand in hand, and like Ariel says, the project is the practice.

Writing is Better than Not Writing

Doing something, even badly, is much better than not doing it at all (as the wise Jim Munroe once wrote on his blog), because something is better than nothing.

Anyway, if like me you agree that (specifically) writing is better than not writing, go ahead and sign up for NaNoWriMo ([inter]National Novel Writing Month). It's starting tomorrow. Oh my. November somehow seemed further away than that.

Right now my "do something badly" thing is going to be blogging. And as The Artist's Way reminds people, it's normal that you're bad in the beginning. Later you could get good.

Writing Link; Paper Chinaman

I made this happy-looking Chinaman with my origami class yesterday.

**

Good link for the writerly-inclined: How to Become a Famous Writer. An excerpt from a book of the same title at the No Media Kings website, where she advises to publish as much as you can, however you can. One suggestion: "Print poetry on stickers and post them around town and in train bathrooms." Ariel Gore, the author, also has a cool blog.

The Locusts

Okay. December 15, the one you've all been eagerly anticipating, (no not "the Egyptian Woodstock" aka SOS again) but the 2nd Open Independent Art Exhibition in which you can participate by submitting your artistic pieces in any medium. You can contact me directly at ninethprotostar@yahoo.com if you need more information.

Further: I recently re-read this list to boost your creativity at getcrafty.com.

Finally: the following is an excerpt from an old nano that I did that is pretty unrelated to the rest of the story (i.e. should be enjoyed as a standalone piece).

I was in Cairo when the locusts came.

I went to the roof of the library, not that high, but still, you could see them up close there. They were so confused, you could tell. What had brought them here? They crawled around on the floor, seeking something familiar. Something to eat I guess. I knew there were the same locusts who brought famine to African villages. But here they were, and they seemed vulnerable, confused, lost.

They were large, exotic-looking. They weren’t’ your regular garden-variety brand locusts. They were reddish. Flying, you’d think them to be dragon flies.

I wondered, could they attack me? It seemed so classically Us versus Them, yet here they were, fi halhom. Ignoring me pretty much.

A man came by, crushing a locust with his foot on purpose, then took it with him into the building, carrying it in his hand. Is this when, how the enmity would begin? Would the other locusts see and vow revenge on that man, his family, his kind?

I wanted to tell him not to do it, it seemed so mean, but even though I flinched when he did it, I said nothing. I chose to remain silent, and so what did that mean?

A girl came on the roof, not really wanting to be there, you could tell.

They were quietly, silently threatening. I thought of something my boyfriend had told me about the other day: the four horsemen of the apocalypse. I was sure in fact that very soon I would hear people talking about how this was a sign of the end of days.

They were little aliens. Maybe they weren’t lost and confused. Maybe they were surveying the landscape, playing out their next move in their heads. Maybe they understood FOL. If x then y. If and only if z, q.

It walked towards me, its face incapable of ever expressing any emotions I would be able to interpret. Its antennas were poised; did it need them to fight, to attack, to charge?

What were they doing, what did they want?

Could a sudden movement on my part trigger a response? A sneeze, perhaps?

The walking are, walking in circles on the tiled floor. It tried to flap its wings, presumably in order to fly, but it remained on the ground. Maybe it didn’t want to fly though. Maybe it was testing, it had an elaborate complex formula in its head, computing how wind resistance would impact its flying speed.

Individually, they looked almost pretty, fluttering around endearingly, like an innocuous butterfly.

In the sky, they could be mistaken for a new manifestation of pollution enveloping the Caironese atmosphere. Little black moving specks. But no, closer observation revealed the specks to be alive, enabled me to observe they were in fact a swarm of locusts.

The same man, an impromptu, perhaps self-appointed groundskeeper came back, still bent on eradaicating every locust wandering about in the vicinity of the roof. Now he was armed with a broom, using it to attack locusts with the brush side then sweeping them into a corner.

It raised so many questions.

Of course, I wanted a relevant expert to explain this phenomenon. My driver said he estimated it’d been approximately twenty or so years since they’d last graced the skies of Egypt with their presence. So it had happened before.

A chill came over, a cold wind, could this too be attributed to them?

And maybe there was nothing sinister. They had their ends, we ours. Was I supposed to side with “my kind,” the farmers and fellahin who would most likely come to great harm as a result of the locusts eating their crops?

The man had succeeded in eliminating the locusts accessible to him for the time being.

I returned to my plebian task of reading Heidegger, wondering slightly what he would make of such a situation.

Dino Comics; il kobry

Good news: I have a great link for today! Rejoice, comic lovers and also comic not-minders. It is Dinosaur Comics. It predictably features dinosaurs, and I found it featured on the good Jim Munroe's website, No Media Kings. So double link then, because both sites are worth checking out, dudes.

Featured in the photos: On the left, a sign that says Obeying Traffic Lights is a Civilized Behavior, and below, a lovely view of the billboards on a certain bridge we all know and love. (Guess which?).

Til later, cheers.

P.S. The creator of Dinosaur Comics, Ryan North, appears to have a pretty cool livejournal thingie that should also be checked out, especially the third post that now appears there.

Speaking of that post (check out the post already so you get what I'm about to say), a word to the wise, using Google as a divining source, especially Google image search, doesn't really work out that well. Still, it's a fun exercise. To try: insert relevant phrase into the google image search and interpret the picture that appears. If you try it with the names of your friends, you'll see what I mean. You could always try Bible dipping, as outlined by Augusten Burroughs in Running with Scissors, his most excellent memoirs. (Bible dipping involves asking a question, flipping through the Bible [feel free I guess to replace with holy text of choice], flipping pages and stabbing your finger at a random word for the answer).

Free hint from me: If you're trying to be a writer sometimes, you can modify the Bible dipping for a cool writing exercise in which you use any book to stab a word then write about it for a certain amount of time (timed writing). It's great.