fire monster
This weekend’s SNL was amazing. Thank God for Tina Fey and all of her hilariousness. This fake commercial was so funny I actually scared myself laughing so hard.
update: this video isn’t available anymore b/c it’s the property of NBC–but if you get a chance, head over to the NBC SNL site and see some of last week’s show.
wicked alice
A few new poems at Wicked Alice. I love Kristy’s illustration. I’m really thrilled to be featured with JS as well.
no thanks
Early this morning I saw this commercial for Vermont Teddy Bears. I was watching the History Channel and a show about the Tibetan Book of the Dead. With a big cup of coffee and an overcast sky, the day was really starting off spectacularly. And then this came on:
I. really. don’t. know. what. to. say. I realize I’m breaking one of my cardinal blogging laws here by writing about a teddy bear, but honestly, I can’t imagine a way to lose a lover faster than to get one of these. No thanks.
On the upside of Valentine’s Day, these cards from some e cards are really great. When you care enough to press send, that is.
many are making love
Tomorrow I’ve been invited to host a Love Poem workshop for the writer’s club. And for the last six hours I’ve been staring at my computer screen trying to figure it out—what do I know about love poems? Type and erase. Type and erase. I worry, as I worry in all of my classes, that the students are too conservative for my poems on this topic. But I don’t know how many young poets’ truths align with Elizabeth Barrett Browning or Lord Byron anymore. No, I’d rather you didn’t compare me to a summer’s day. thanks.
I have about fifteen hours to figure it out. I don’t even know what my favorite love poem is. Probably Karen Kovacik’s, “Sapphic Sonnets” or maybe Robert Hass’ “The Privilege of Being,” which isn’t even a love poem, really. But what is?
Eureka!
jessica–2 american baby–3
in the mail yesterday:
well played, american baby. well played.
the latest is the first
Today was a beautiful day in northern Georgia. I was able to get in a strong eight miles before most people were awake. And at the top of an previously unexplored hill, I finally found the little gas station BBQ place that I’ve been looking for these last eight months. The man with the morning coals waved to me as I passed. This doesn’t happen in Ohio in February.
Sometimes up north in the winter there will be a really lovely late morning when the sun knifes through the clouds and there is a crackle from all of the melting.
But it’s not like it is here. Not the weather. Not the sun.
Tonight, I sat on my balcony with a nice Nappa red in a vintage Steelers tee shirt and flips and watched the pomegranate sun sinking behind the apartment buildings. I revised some poems. Thought about Spring and Tombstone and the upcoming season of blooming, which always seems so far away in Ohio, and here seems just around the corner. Like something you can actually count on.
I guess I understand why people get writer’s rooms or second homes or vacation time-shares in the South for the winter months. No matter how unhappy or empty you might feel, it simply doesn’t last a whole season here; maybe just a day or two. Because before long, the sun is out again, running up 65 degrees, and an old man in overalls is smiling at you, ma’am, in the early a.m, while sweating a brisket outside a gas station on Barnet Shoals.
And that’s all I have to say. It was a beautiful February 9th. To steal from Szymborska: My apology to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first.
jessica–2 american baby–0
So, the saga continues. Yesterday, I received a special delivery in the mail from Huggies congratulating me on my upcoming due date and giving me all of the preparation I will need: one infant baby pooh and eagor diaper.
In all of my smugness, I decided, of course, to do a little photo shoot.
But when I opened it, I was suddenly overwhelmed with a strange motherly emotion. I really had a tear welling up in a duct. It was so little and cute, and I could imagine my hypothetical baby wearing it.
And that’s the thing. It’s not that I don’t want children. I really do, actually. But I just don’t need American Baby Magazine forcing me to become a scrapbooking infant factory right now, nor Huggies saddling me with a due date.
I’m starting to worry that American Baby is going to take this marketing push too far, and one day I’ll come home from work to find an actual baby in a basket on my doorstep with a little note: see–we told you you’d need us.
So I did the only thing I thought would be right:
Made it into a little bowtie and stuck it on Irie. She loves it.
feel good. run hard.
Well, I survived my first 13.1, and didn’t once have to be rolled into a ditch on the side of a Georgia road. My time was just off world record pace (well, if I had been able to use the time for the marathon instead of the half, that is!) Still, I’m here this morning mostly attached, and thinking about literature, my lesson on Susan Straight’s story, “Mines,” and how long distance running doesn’t really have time for heralding.
I was watching a documentary the other night about the 1984 Olympics. Joan Benoit Samuelson was interviewed (she won the first woman’s Olympic marathon). It was thought, before this time, that women shouldn’t run more than 1500 meters (just over a mile) because it would be too damaging to their bodies and prevent them for having children. Anyway, after she won, instead of rushing through the celebrity athlete circuit, picking up endorsement deals, penning her memoir (which I imagine a publisher would have demand be called “what a fast lady!”), she just went back to Maine, started a family, and kept running. In the interview, she said that she doesn’t really think about training as a thing to be achieved. That when she goes out in the morning, if she feels good, then she runs hard. And that’s that. She runs and lives in Maine because it’s where people know what hard work is, and it helps her keep her life and her running life in perspective.
Obviously I had a lot to think about over 13.1 miles, but mostly I’m realizing that distance running is a lot more relevant outside of the heralding. I feel more peaceful. I feel more appreciative of slowness. In his book, “To the Edge: A Man, Death Valley, and the Mystery of Endurance,” by Kirk Johnson, which is about his running the Badwater Ultramarathon, he writes somewhere that his kids are always complaining about how slow he drives. He says something like after you’ve run 100 miles in a day, you start to appreciate moving at a slower pace. Anyway, I don’t mean to wax Zen here, but of all the sports I’ve participated in over my lifetime, this is the most rewarding and for mostly non-athletic reasons.
