Tori’s Writing Hole

This innocuous sounding invader has ruined my weekend. Ick. Instead of going to the World’s Largest Garage Sale, I ended up spending my time in bed, drooling puddles on pillows and hacking. Oh, and using up at least a tree’s worth of tissues. So not fair - I’m just starting to feel more balanced emotionally and then I get my happy rhinovirus. I picture those little crystalline structures invading my cells, filling them to bursting, and then forming a happy virus conga line through my bloodstream. Yeah, I’m a little science obsessed right now. What of it?

Speaking of science, I’ve done well on my first two papers in college. Yay! So I didn’t lose the ability to think all academic-like after all! Not like two papers makes a semester, but it’s a start. More homework is yet to come.

As for my writing, I really, really want to transition to writing long fiction. From a poet, that’s a tough idea. I’m tryin to steel myself for the first sentence, for the idea that I can write something longer than 500 words. Oh well, everything in life’s worth a try.

Technorati Tags: cold, virus, writing, college, novel

We took Julia to the Big E - the Eastern States Exposition - yesterday. Think county fair on steroids. It’s held in West Springfield, MA, about 1.5 hours from our house. We’d been there once before, but I was pregnant with Julia and in the throws of “all-day” sickness, so the entire time seems clouded by nausea. This time, I wasn’t sick to my stomach, but still vow not to return.

The idea was to show Julia the animals, cows, sheep, etc - and maybe do a few other fair-like activities. Instead, we were moshed into buildings filled with people wearing tube tops and stained shirts from their 80s rock concert trips, smacked up against each other for the opportunity to buy overpriced beer and craft show rejects. The few animals in the place were tired, stuck in a building that smelled like the bathroom ABOVE the smell of cow poo.

Not that the entire thing wasn’t fun - there were some instances of interest, and Julia behaved like an absolute angel. She got everyone in the place to smile at her, and melted hearts near and far. But besides that, I think I may have outgrown fairs. I felt all like, snobbish, wondering why people didn’t dress up more to attend an event that includes eating fried foods, walking through clouds of cigarette smoke and kicking into horse apples. I think we’re going to have to stick to either smaller, local county fairs or just take Julia back to the zoo.

Technorati Tags: fair, animals, fried foods

Ok, I really don’t remember reading textbooks being this hard. But now, I can think of a million other things I should be doing other than reading sociological theories about deviant behavior. Not that said topic isn’t interesting, it’s just looking at the floor - which needs a vacuum, or knowing that there are clothes that need to be folded - being a mom seems to have sucked some of the student out of me. I’m taking it as a sign that I need to shift my thinking a bit, I need to try to be mom, then writer, then student - but damn, that’s a lot of mes. I hope it will get easier, well, I know it will… but I get scared. College looms like this giant unfinishable task, and I’ve been spending the last 10 years chipping away at it and I’m still not complete.

Right now I’m working on so much, working on ME… I hope that school falls into this pattern as well.

Technorati Tags: college, writing, textbooks

We got two kittens on September 9… which started out as the cutest of propositions. Roswell and Ridley loved to play and jump at each other - and Dakota. But there was a dark secret underneath the cute fuzzy exterior of one of our kittens… Roswell would not use the litter pan. This wouldn’t have been such a big issue, except… he pooped and peed in the tiniest of crevasses in our house. Places that I couldn’t reach, and that left stinkiness throughout the rooms. We tried and tried, but Roswell would not go in the pan, despite multiple instances of putting him in the pan.

Unfortunately, I can’t deal with a cat who is so very resistant to using a pan… poo in little places is not easy to clean up. So we had to reluctantly return Roswell to his previous home.

Ridley is still with us (good pan-using kitty) - see his cute face below:

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about things people don’t know about me, about the shocking, the different, etc. Well, I really don’t think that what foods I enjoy are all that shocking and different (although, who knows? I mean, I guess there are still people out there who don’t like Indian food).

Maybe I’ll relate something else.

When I was little, one of my first remembrances of going to my grandparents’ house is because my grandmother had taken too many pills. Sure, I know we’d been there many times before that, but I have this clear memory of Omi (her German-diminutive Grandma-name) sitting on the grass in one of those woven canvas and plastic chairs, holding a cut crystal glass filled with 7up. I know it was 7up because she blubbered about it. There was spittle in the corners of her mouth, and I know we had to stay at the house while my father (it was his mother) and his dad took her to the ER. I believe the drug that time was Valium.

Of course, my grandfather succeeded where she failed (albeit with a different method).

Suicide’s a recurrent theme in my life. I’ve known many who no longer are because they decided to die at their own hands. I think it’s an even bigger deterrent sometimes to killing myself than anything - even than my massive fear of dying. I know what happens to those left behind.

Technorati Tags: suicide, stories, german