This Girl is 12, She Called Automatic Rhyme, I'm Emo, Maybe 12 or 13 and I'm Fine

Insomnia Poem #500

There's no-one to [redact]
It was just an act

Not mine -- I'm fine
we missed all the signs,
always pushing my love
under your Borderline

'Cause I thought I knew the distance
between reason and rhyme
but really you were lying
all that time

So I'm angry, but I'm fine
No gun, I'm stunned, no crime.

Sometimes I wonder who you really are
Sometimes I wonder why you never fixed your car

While you waited for us to tell you who to be,
As mirrors go --

I like yours,

I mean

that's what I wanted to see.

Well we're done, now it's over, now we're free --

All I wanted

was safety --

What came first, my helplessness, or you helping me?

You'll be busy with
your cast of 99,
though no one's on the other line

and We Had a Time --

Your gifts soothed my spine
You built my castle, poured our wine
Whatever I wanted; you made it mine mine mine
You offered, you protected, you designed,
hire me, fire me, thrill me, fill me.

I'd taken care of everyone else for so long, you know?
My heart got snagged in the undertow
and
they admired me, inspired me, killed me, billed me
but you ...

you

chilled me ...

You flew in on a whim, we were stars, so I shined
We played, we complained, we drove, we dined ...

So I'm grateful, I'm fine
I'm lucky to be on this side.
With my ass off your line.

You made me laugh, I made you laugh, we had fun.

I believed you when you said

that we auto-win some.

Now I'm out from underwater, I'm floating, I'm wood
I'm that guy, Who am I, remind me where I stood
But I don't think you could
or should
or would

Who are you?

Don Quijote sans ambition
A Genie without premonition

Echo without immortal fate
Santa with an expiration date

A savior often spotted running away
An angel no-showing on judgment day

Frank Abagnale but you never took, you gave
The Hipster Grifter sans sexual games
Catch me if you can, and we did, and we cried
Let you back in, and you lied, and you lied.

A martyr, a giver, a servant, our mom
Victim, loner, hero, helper,

time bomb

You're sick, she's sick, she died
She sued, she's rude, you lied
She fled, she's dead, I eulogized
I trusted you

we busted you --

You saved, I forgave, I tried

And when you cried, I cried

We got out of town,
We fixed my frown,

made my throne

and my crown --

I wanted to say "this one's on me,"
A renegade team so fancy/free
I said you want sunshine, come with me
your dreams will come true,
I'll fix everything for everyone
starting with you

Why is my anger
so long overdue?
Because you helped so much?

'Cause of all that stuff?

'Cause my broken record's a sad sad song
and it's waaaaaay tooooooo long ...

I was a good friend to you, that's the rub,
Treat me like I'm someone you love --

Like we treated you --

that story's true --

enough is

enough

I love you but

I'm tough

I like it rough

Meanwhile, we'll sort through the stories, what remains
The honest hearts waiting in the wings, soul-stained
and oh I'll try to explain.
"Here I am again, wanting to place blame ...
and I'm ashamed."
I'll try to fix the honest love that stuck around
Here I am again, myself, and I've found

Folding into you
Was not the thing to do

This story's

true: fuck you.

I never had a chance
You never wanted to be well
There'll always be new lies to tell --

It never had to be me myself
did it
there's always somebody else
quit it

Let's dance

I like your pants

Where's my grant.

Nevermind I don't want it
you can take that grant
and suck it.

I never asked for that.
Tit-for-tat.

And I'm no sleuth
All I wanted

was your truth.

Autoportrait 3.0

[Autoportrait]

It's April of last year. This is where I've started to begin; April of last year. We're in Malibu and the wind is as perfect as wind has ever been. You're looking at the beach because you recognize a celebrity and her dog down there and she's huddled in your hoodie, her whole body squeezed up inside it 'cause she's always cold and even colder now smack between the pool beside us and the ocean below. She's so tiny in there, like a girl, and now looking back I remember it like this: it's because it was your hoodie, that's how you made both of us feel sometimes, like a girl all wrapped up. And alternately, like something torn of its surface and alone. But maybe that was just me. It's just easier to imagine or remember that it wasn't just me. I mean I feel smarter that way.

The wind picks up. We put rocks atop our construction paper and our crayons throw caution to the wind.

I come back to this beginning [Malibu, April] because this is the scene that opens the novel [fictionalized, of course, with everyone playing someone else, including me] I assume I'll eventually finish, otherwise this whole thing [my life] is kinda anti-climactic. In the novel, we are there with our crayons when I get an email on my phone from my other half, who I haven't heard from in years -- I've lost him, that much is true -- and it turns out he's in LA but he doesn't know I am too.

When I tell vosotros, you say, Clearly we are going to stalk him right now. My friends love me like that, drive faster for me. It's a novel. This didn't happen.

++

Malibu in April was a place where everything felt perfect except me. And you and you and you and you and you, and her. It was like crying and laughing at the same time, it was the opposite of fucking & laughing at the same time. The air and the sky, and how at night the stone floor would get so cold, and how I slept so easily next to her because I trusted the silence so bad. I was torn up from all sides, like a fistful of frayed rope.

The three of us in the sunshine; three jellyfish with hoods up and phones out but unimportant, dream on, shades shading.

See -- I'd decided to go to Malibu only a few hours before I got on the plane to go to Malibu. I was still packed from the trip to China I never took, and though that dream had been dashed a few weeks prior to Malibu I had not yet unpacked because I was very busy self-destructing in New York, crawling with blades flared across those creeping warm dumb almost-spring days. Then you called me from the airport and said do you want to go.

That was the week when my heart crashed. I don't mean broke. I mean everything breaks my heart but my heart still works though, I mean that my heart crashed.

I was alone at the time of the crash. There were no witnesses. Or there was one witness; later. Your finger on my skin, and maybe I told you it was your fault and maybe I didn't but it didn't really matter, it wasn't her fault, I mean it wasn't your fault, I mean it was my fault, I mean nothing is anyone's fault except my own and cracks like blades and I had a magic pill that made me forget. It kills me now not to remember.

++

In Malibu we spoke in little bright charges of electricity and then retreated like lights going off. We drove like nothing bad had ever happened. Does she know, she would ask, does she know? Does she know?

No, of course not. No one knew. We thought we knew and we didn't.

Something changed that week inside me. I mean it changed before I went. In a way I knew what I had to do but I decided instead not to do it because I was scared that if I did what I had to do that I would end up alone and heartcrashed. I mean that writing this I have to pretend like you'll never read it. You, and you, and you and you and you and you and you it was not just you, or even just you, vosotros, you, you ah'tem, ah'ten.

I mean that now as I write this I am heartcrashed to know two or three things I know for sure: that you will not read it, and that you won't either. You weigh against one another like steel and iron, like fire.

++

In the past week, three people have mentioned to me that it's still hard to see themselves, here, sometimes, in the right kind of light. If I get you at a bad angle. If I was in the right place at the wrong time. I was, I guess. I love the wrong time. I am the wrong time, you're a circle and I'm a fist and an angle. No, I'm a circle.

It's just that I don't know that much about the right time except that I'm determined to prove to you that right can come out of wrong, that right doesn't need to be new. Like I don't trust my own decision to always prefer the blank slate. Like I don't know what I want so I just feel like right now I am trying to remove myself from everyone who could be impacted by that decision.

++
I was someone else before you and you. The red bulb and drawing on her back, the girl who lied and the girl who cried, Brooklyn and Harlem and red red red and smoke in the air and the secrets you share alone and naked that you can't explain, which is what makes everything exactly what it is.

And now when we talk about the way we were back then (before you, and you) -- before I knew the jellyfishes I know now.

I don't think I could do shit like that anymore, I said, I mean. Now you can't pretend like you don't get what you deserve when you get it.

Dra-ma, she said.

I don't want to do anything we won't remember, I'd said then.
But it's fun, she'd said.

I don't know that girl back then. I was all desire, no want. I was patient and fast. I dug that Radiohead last night, she said the next morning a chunk of years ago. I love the things there isn't time to say at the time. That was years ago. One day I too would no longer want to remember.

++
I was born with three wishes, but I didn't know any words. My head like a cannonball and flames to the brain. I wasted my first wish on words. My second: no one can leave before I'm ready. Third wish = Infinity.
++

Now she's picking glass out of her foot with tweezers.
I missed the part when she stepped in the glass.

"Don’t hurt me," she says.
Her first wish.

I ask her if she wants a the middle or the end of the sandwich

and she says she wants the end. She says she likes the ends of things.
"I like pretzel ends, I like hot dog ends, Twizzler ends. The ends of things."
++

When she wrote me and said It's stagnant, and you don't like that, I said you're right even though I'd never really thought that before. I never thought I craved change because I didn't like staying still. I always assumed I craved change because where I am never feels right. By "assumed" I mean "I've always known."

But did I tell you about how the air in Malibu was so perfect, how everything was so perfect and airy, how slippery it is on top of a rainbow and skating.

I'm telling you the air was perfect. I mean it when I tell you that I think it was in the air. In Malibu, remember? Where we were when this story began, and a place we will never be again. Those were the last moments of that dream. So there it is. Behind me. I had mentioned, after all, the ocean.

++

I've never been good at describing the weather 'cause it always just seemed so obvious. Now I'm obsessed with it. I want to know about the wind and the ocean and all the things that people who like life like to be close to.

Maybe that was because that was the week I realized that everything was so much larger than me. The good and the bad. That's when things started changing in me. In the fall I decided I wanted to be infinite. In the winter I hid in the middle of everything.

Now there are so many yous, there are so many shes, it's like the universal you. The universal she.
The memory, which we can forget if we want to,
or change when we re-write it,
or eat it, and keep it in our guts forever
like o
like h
++

When I re-write you, I will make the breeze breezier. I will make your eyes bluer even if they weren't blue in the first place. I pick blue because it's the color of sky. You will laugh at me when I say this.

And now I feel like you laughed at me from above and she laughs at me from below and here I am in the middle, nowhere near the ends of things. And I can't hear. Because isn't the wind terrible.
++
Which is to say none of the pronouns I so carelessly employ necessarily apply to anyone specific, I mean that.

I wish we had a proper vosotros.

I'm sort of on my own right now, in a weird way. Not for reasons I can explain. But I am, in my head. Oh, no one ever makes sense.
It feels almost like when I stopped taking the anti-depressants years ago,
like coming up from underwater onto a shore that looked black to you but golden to me.

++

The night before I left for Malibu (before I knew I was going to Malibu), I was on the phone with her and then you arrived and I told her my Mom was on the other line but she wasn't, and never would be. Not at that hour.

And I saw you. And we were together for a moment or twenty in the darkness. And then you left. I felt like a very very bad person, which was sweeter than saltwater. Maybe that happened or maybe you didn't.

I called her back. "So anyway ..." I began.

And we spoke like only simple things had transpired between before and now, like nothing had changed, maybe she'd had a snack or I'd put on my pajamas, like we are two little rocks of love that are stronger than time or change or memory or anything. That's something. You need two or three things you know for sure, a person and maybe two or three more people who are like rocks. Then you can have wind on top of the rocks which don't move. The trouble begins when you mistake Malibu for forever. When you mistake anything for forever.

And the next day I slept until I couldn't sleep anymore because every waking moment was hard. I woke up and you called and asked if I wanted to go. Of course. Of course all I ever want to do is go. I didn't tell you that I'd gone until I got there and you were mad at me for going. But I was safe.

And I went.

++

We came back laughing. We took two Valiums each, or maybe you took three. Then we were really flying. Nothing hurt. I'd always hated flying but I wanted that flight to never end. Our seats were large, we pretended to be rich people because you pretended to be a rich person all the time and I went with you wherever you wanted to go.

And I loved you so much in that moment. As a friend, perhaps I had never loved you or needed you more as I did in the air that day, coming back from where you had taken me and feeling you'd never take me anywhere again. I always knew, you know.

Hiding in your hoodie, and the Valium you put into my palm.

The food they brought us on trays. We flew through sky and clouds and the world was as perfect as it had ever been.

++

Nobody ever really changes. So you take it or leave it.

++

I've always wanted to run away with someone crazy.
Instead I came back to someone who made me smile.

Instead now I

++

I think of Neal Cassady,
I even think of Old Neal Cassady the father we never found,
I think of Neal Cassady, I think of Neal Cassady.

I've got a postcard super-glued to my desk of William Burroughs trying to stab Jack Kerouac with a dagger. I did that 'cause I opened a super glue bottle and it got everywhere and so I had to put something new on top of it, so I put this postcard on top of it and after all this time it is still here on the desk from the whorehouse. "That's what you call it?" She asked me, once. "You call it 'the whorehouse'?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said to her.

++

The ends of things.



Then you left, and I wasn't ready.

The Year in Review 2008 [All I Know is That I Should]

Dear Dad,

I’m writing you from the airplane. It’s a really tiny jet, just one seat in my row and two across the aisle. On the right side (I’m on the left) you can see the sun setting across the whole wide world. There’s one solid line of burnt orange, sandwiched by a dark sheath of cloud and the earth below it. It’s pretty beautiful.

I had lunch with your Mom and Dad today. Grandma’s doing well, actually, better than I’d expected, maybe even better than she was a few years ago. Grandpa just sits in his chair, he doesn’t know what’s going on. We were having dinner yesterday, for Christmas – we still do our celebration on the 24th, but now on the 25th I'm flying instead of going to the movies like we used to do together -- and everyone was watching the babies play with their new toys and Grandpa says “Where am I?” and everyone ignored him. It was real quiet and maybe only I heard him. He says stuff like that all the time.

Anyhow we were watching the babies. Carrie and her husband have a boy, Kyle and his wife have a girl. I guess we always knew they’d be the first ones to do that.

Grandpa’s chair has a button on the arm-rest so he can lift himself up almost all the way into a stand. Sometimes you’ll just be sitting there and you’ll hear this buzzing – that’s the sound the chair makes when he’s pressing the button to go up. That’s how you know Grandpa wants to go somewhere.

Everyone helps him get up and then he gets on his walker and walks to the back of the house, then he gets confused and Grandma goes and takes him back to the chair. She takes care of him all the time. It’s something to do.

Anyhow, it was good to see them and see everyone – Mom, and your sisters and my cousins, and to spend time with Lewis. I guess you know what happened with S., I’m sure your sister told you about it, or maybe she didn’t. All the lies he told and what he took from her; his mother. One of the things I learned this year was that that kind of thing actually happens more than people think. You know – people make up lives and stories they like better than their true lives and stories. Sometimes they do it for love or money but usually they don’t even know why they do it, they just do it. Like how I don’t know why I sometimes get swallowed in darkness, it just happens and there I am with my eyes open but nothing around me seems light.

I wish I’d had the time to know you. Maybe what I mean is I wish you'd had the time to know me. I’m obsessed with you.

++

Last night we were talking about Obama and Aunt B said “You know I’d always wondered about your father, you know, like now with Obama -" and I said that I know you would’ve loved him. (Mom said that too, she called me the day after, she wishes you could’ve seen it happen. You know Aunt B went door to door in the whitest whitest parts of plain flat Ohio for Obama? She did that. And you should’ve heard Grandma talking shit about Palin Dad, you would’ve been so proud of your parents. (Grandma told me a story about when they first met my Mom, the first “Jewish person” they’d ever met, and Grandma made these potatoes wrapped in bacon, and Grandma Goldstein went apeshit? Amazing.)

Then Aunt B said, Oh no honey. I mean I wonder if your father would have been in the cabinet. I laughed like we were talking about spaceships or something. He was on track to be an economic advisor for Clinton’s second term, she said then. I probably laughed again. I mean still as I write this I feel like I’m writing lies too.

Uncle T said: At the funeral, strangers came up to me and said losing Vic is not just a loss to the accounting community and to U of Michigan and to Price Waterhouse but losing Vic is a loss to the world economy.

We talked for a little bit about that; you know, how you never told us anything. Top ten accounting researcher in the world, Lewis saying your study was material in an investments class he took in college. You never told us anything besides that your work was boring and we didn’t want to hear about it.

Maybe telling myself you quit while you were ahead was the only thing that got me through, so I’m going to say that I think they were bullshitting about that too. Everyone seems better in retrospect. I mean it’s over Dad so what can anyone really say?

++

Everyone always talks about how you were a genius. Does that mean I’m a genius too? Sometimes I feel really stupid, Dad.

++

Anyhow so I was going to tell you about 2008. It’s probably weird that I’m putting this on my blog. You get it though, you always knew this is what I’d be doing. When you and Mom started having me dictate my diaries to you before I knew how to write? You told me it mattered enough to write it down. Maybe that’s all I needed, maybe that’s why I guess you get this.

I hope so ‘cause everything I do, I do hoping you’d approve. It’s kinda difficult since you’re dead, I have to do a lot of guesswork.

++

Anyhow so 2008 was crazy. 2007 was crazy too but 2008 was a different kind of crazy. You're a good person to talk to about the years because it's your birthday. December 31st. You were born and then the new year started right away.

++

I’ve spent the last two years in other people’s fantasy worlds. I think that says something about my ability to accept the world as it is. It’s just that as it is; the world is sort of ugly and mundane and miracles don't happen every day. In the subway I look around me and see faces like paper plates. It’s just that I died when I was only 14. Fuck. I’m sorry. I mean that you died when I was only 14.

I’m obsessed with you, I like you so much, I talk to everyone but you. I pretend sometimes I couldn’t care less.

I've learned that I don’t have eternal life, that I haven't been chosen by some higher power to change the world, I'm the one with that choice, and speaking of the opposite of that I learned this year that I’m not truly able to jet to Malibu and drink cocktails and read novels by the pool all the time and over-tip and give everything to everyone who ever needs anything. It was fun though to believe those things. It was a time. We laughed and ran, like you did. Always running, laughing, always in the air going places.

I tell you Dad, I loved it. All the places I got to see. I’ll see anything. I feel like everything is interesting! Crossing that bridge at night in Austin, heat like a desert dressed up as an acoustic embrace.

The moment right before Austin I first saw my secret cyber-savior walk up the stairs to my stupid linoleum Harlem place and even though I was so nervous I was already high enough to not know what to say, and stayed nervous for weeks, and then how this year I nearly lost her like I lost you – I mean it Dad -- and how one day when we have that kind of vocabulary Dad? I’ll understand how much it meant that I didn’t. We didn’t lose her. Anyhow I was talking about flying.

The peace of the bed in Miami, alone when they went into town without me. Hiding from the world beneath those sheets, and the silver to eat with. I said, what do you want. I said, I have access to your happiness. I know someone who knows someone. I said I was a superhero. No one is but like I said anyway I was talking about flying. The thing about flying is all you see. You can see for miles, sandwiched in that hot orange place between earth and sky.

I went to a lot of places, which is funny ‘cause in ’07 I never went anywhere at all, just to Philly, and out to the hospital and out to see her family in the suburbs. ’08 is the first time I’ve traveled for the sake of traveling since you died.

Right after you died, we tried to go on vacation without you but it wasn’t the same so we stopped trying at some point. It wasn't anyone's fault, it's just we were reminded. Grandma mentioned Hawaii, she still remembers the food on the airplane. That's the farthest away your parents have ever been from home, because you took them there.

++

In 2008, I tried to fix the biggest hole that’s ever been dug in my heart since you’ve died and for a lot of reasons, I failed. So I just have to let that hole sit there, un-fixed, and do what I can to tread efficiently and productively on the fissures. I am figuring out how to see it and feel it and say: that's okay, I can go on.

I’ve found some wells of happiness. I sometimes sit at the bottom, splashing and happy as a clam.
I mean it. Eyes like saucers, blue and open to anything, even me.

I had a really brilliant June and July. A solid January full of hope. Some of February. Oh ... some of all of it.

I can’t really say anything more about that part of my life because something else I learned this year is that when I write things down, I make them true – permanent at least – so I try not to do that to things that are still happening. I don’t want to fuck with time and space. I mean that I do – I do want to fuck with time and space. What I learned this year is that I actually cannot do that. All I have is this time, my little space. Insert myspace joke here.

I think I’m more confident now than I was, even if I don't deserve to be. Remember how I kept getting fired? I was the worst. Not all of us were put here to work, Eileen Myles says: “Why can’t I just act that way. why can’t I write everything down like my life counts, like I’m the Queen of England or Bobby Vee, and that way I can be safe and not have to wait to die ... why can’t I live right now. Because I am not rich, I am not a saint. But I do know this: not all of us were sent here to work.”

Actually I think we are all sent here to work, it’s just different kinds of work.

Anyway Dad I was talking about flying and in that burnt orange space I need to tell you that anyway I have this hope that people are gonna come to me when they oughtta. I gotta believe that things are gonna work out somehow and that all choices in retrospect become good ones because they are true and if something is true it must be good. Anyway I was saying honesty is a real bitch.

I want to be more self-reliant because when I hand the wheel over to someone else, I’m not even like a backseat driver. I just recline and stare at the stars and wait to become infinite.

Like you; infinite.

++

I have some really good friends you’d really love, I’ve always been blessed with good friends. When I fall to pieces they’re there. When THEY fall to pieces they’re there. Like angels. They aren’t angels because no one is angels but they are very similar. There are some people I love with a deep, radiating love, a love so strong it transcends logic but not in a crazy way, just in a super-love way. Like the way superheroes love other superheroes after they’ve lost their powers.

I have really amazing readers who do crazy things for me! It’s so awesome, I think you’d be kinda proud of me sometimes.

I’m living with someone I love and I love our apartment and being here with her. I get scared just writing that, I always jinx good things.

"Listen, my truest love.
I've tried to clear a late century place for us
in among the shards.
Lie down, tell me what you need.
Here is where loneliness can live
with failure,
and nothing's complete.
I love how we go on."
(Stephen Dunn, “Loves”)
++

So anyhow. I’m still writing and editing videos. Still scraping by. Still have all kinds of debt I know you’d hate. I think you wrote the book on how to avoid that. I still rely too much on substances to make me feel anything other than this. “Not me” is what all those pills and drinks should be called. I’ll just have a “not me on the rocks.” But Dad I don’t think that’s going to change any time soon, so I’m gonna figure out how to better live with it.

I guess that’s the thing – accepting things as they are. Accepting discomfort and making a life anyhow. I want to start my own magazine online so I’m going to do that, alone I guess, starting real soon I hope, I’m getting ready. Or not, I mean. I was talking anyway about flying. One time we went running together, you and me. One time in Orlando she jumped on the grass, one-two-jump-on-three. Everything was beautiful and perfect. It’s just that I rarely let go. I let go a lot last year and this year. I was dropped too, but first I opened up to like ... I dunno. Joy? Comfort? I just always felt like if first I had the help to jump, I could fix something. Just I want to help the world get better. God, I mean, that’s so pretentious. Who am I, no one. But that’s the thing who cares? I’m no one but if everyone is who is no-one wants to help the world get better than surely we’ll all make a difference like by default.

I think I have some things to say and I’m hoping there are people willing to listen. I know the economy has crashed – which probs made your head explode, how avoidable that whole thing was – but we have a new president who you’d like. Hope and that.

I feel optimistic right now, who knows how I’ll feel in five minutes. I feel sad right now, I wish I could die tomorrow and I hate myself for a selfish wish. I feel so happy, I feel so beautiful, I feel ugly, I feel terrific, I feel whatever the fuck ever, who cares. Enough feeling ... I'm hoping to act on that.

I love how we go on.

Anyhow, I just wanted to let you know what’s been going on. I know you’ve been worried. I keep trying.

You two were so close, your Mom said to me. You two were glued together. You were just two peas in a pod.

++
later:

So, you, it’s Christmas. I’m writing you now from my bed, it’s been several hours since I was on the plane. My friend picked me up from the airport, I had champagne and we talked about how things are better in a lot of ways since last year, and how there’s nothing else to do but go up. Okay, so we didn’t say that about going up exactly but that was what was said. We will. What I mean is we try to predict the future, which is boring 'cause it's never true, so in the meantime we can play infinite. Anyway I was talking about flying.

I made some bad choices this year, you know. But I grew and keep on.

My number one feeling is dancing. My number two feeling is:

I love the past, which doesn't exist
until I summon it, or make it up,
and I love how you believe
and certify me by your belief,
whoever you are, a fiction too,
held together by what? Personality?
Voice? I love abstractions. I love
to give them a nouny place to live,
a firm seat in the balcony
of ideas, where music plays.
(Stephen Dunn, Loves)
++

I just want to live like music.

I'm still trying to reach you.


As Ever,
All my Love,
Ree

what we write about when we write electron blue & 8against8 contest results

[picture = barnaby ward]

[Results of the 8 against 8 contest in a video at the end of the post, for SON recap click HERE.]

So anyhow, back to memememe and my feelings. Much like the Dow Jones Industrial Whatzit, my feelings go up and down. Not that I understand, even abstractly, what the eff the Dow Jones actually IS, but my feelings about feelings are perhaps also quite conceptual -- they've got something to do with chemicals or the imbalance thereof, they fluctuate hour by hour, sometimes minute by minute, and are subject to massive drops and/or gigantic sky-charging leaps at any unexpected juncture.

Some humans choose to regulate these involuntary emotional fluctuations via the drink or the blow but ultimately these things kill you and/or ruin your life [and consequently lead you to Intervention, the best/worst show of all time]. So in lieu of smoking or xanaxing ourselves into rock bottom, we do the next best thing to get us through today which is making BIG plans for tomorrow! And what better time to make big plans for tomorrow than RIGHT NOW, this amazing moment in our nation's history when we've been assured & reassured that today is not gonna rock at all whatsoever.

So I've had a few ideas. I have these ideas all over the place, who knows where ideas come from, they just appear. I jot them down in my notebook. I have about 5-10 notebooks. Tomorrow I will get organized and consolodate my thoughts into less notebooks, obvs. (no I won't! i never will!)


In the interest of sharing with the group, I have transcribed below my collected notes more or less. one item is re-written from one page with variations, you'll see what I mean.

Autowin's Colossal Notes on Life:

- Ppl will return to roots, live in trees, etc., grow vegetables in the garden. will unite humanity, hope = seeds/soil.
humans not intended for such evolved desire, intended to hunt and gather (boring?) (what did artists do?)

- I should do national novel writing month i mean why not.
must totally restructure life, take self seriously
make schedule stick to it
SERIOUSLY

- unified by collective lack-of-wealth
a lot of sales at american eagle

- eventually things will become cheaper, like vacation
books, love

-things that give me hope: The West Wing, raspberries (raspberries are perfect - right? they are the perfect berry. if we can grow raspberries, we can do hope too)

- i totes heart rock bottom, it's where we finally meat each other

- universal problems --> universal understanding --> revolution?

- why do we always have to be the ones to move? why can't the republicans move ? where? they need a country (alaska? if rachel moves to nyc?)

- things that give me hope: The West Wing, raspberries, the cruise, poetry

- 1998: smoking w/krista in motel, reading southern lit out loud, coffee, cigarettes, pancakes, fudge, listening to ani like we meant it.
-2008: guitars seem too earnest

- the past keeps getting farther away, chronologically,
but closer and closer, emotionally, maybe i should've paid attention at the time

-things that give me hope: The West Wing, raspberries, the cruise, poetry, the fact that after all these years i still think ani difranco probs said it best, dancing, toast

-eyebrow wax has been on my todo list like every day

-why do i have so many friends who think that i have too many thoughts per day? they should try to keep up! we can have a race like odyssey of the mind.

-ladies and gentleman, the fabulous stain removers

--things that give me hope: The West Wing, raspberries, the cruise, poetry, the fact that after all these years i still think ani difranco probs said it best, dancing, toast, obama, perfect pens

-writers should go on strike -- no more writing for free
then what will everyone read?
perez?
i mean REAL WORDS

-goal: make new room represent a more organized, streamlined mentality

-find projects to pursue & use the pieces as blog posts -- see my drafts, give feedback. and "professional" feedback?

-i just need to write a novel next month. that will make everything better.

--things that give me hope: The West Wing, raspberries, the cruise, poetry, the fact that after all these years i still think ani difranco probs said it best, dancing, toast, obama, perfect pens, perfect books, purposeful pointlessness, alliteration.

++
It's hard to focus on more than what's in front of you
Electron Blue
Tomorrow's gaining speed on you
It's all you want to do, you,
You know where to run
You run Electron Blue

(R.E.M., Electron Blue)
++

Who won that 8against8 contest? Well, everyone who sent a photo or forwarded me proof of their donation to Equality California was entered in a drawing, which was held this afternoon at approximately 3:45 P.M., in my apartment [a.k.a. Haviland's apartment that I'm staying in for one more day] while A;ex should've been working, but needed to swing by to get this bright blue headband I'd borrowed. Very important. Then I made her do this.

Prizes:
1. Best of "Good Dyke Porn" DVD, courtesy of Bren, who donated it to the cause! There's a hot photo to the left of my window now 'cause I opened her window in a new window. That's the magic of Firefox and eyesight.
2. (2) copies of The L Word Season Five DVD Set. [I'll be giving away more copies soon, with a full promotion/contest thing]
3. (2) copies of Auto-Insomnia 'Zine #1.

Here we are, let's see who the big winners are. Unfortunately no stuffed animals or small children won prizes, then I could've gift-wrapped. Email me with your address if you've won and I will mail it to you sometime in the near future probably.

Sunday Top Ten: Entries From a Smokin' Hot Pink Notebook

When I was a little girl in Dork Middle School, anybody who was anybody (which was almost everybody, 'cause there were only 16 girls in my graduating class) read Lurlene McDaniel novels ravenously -- stories which confirmed our suspicions that the world was a cruel, cruel place. Also, anybody who was anybody was allowed to go to the mall alone w/o parental supervision, except me, 'cause my mother was a fascist dictator who didn't want me to have fun or be happy. (JK Mom! Love you! Loved going to the mall with you too!) (Wouldn't it be fun if instead of Mother's Day being "Celebrate Mom" day, it was an April Fool's Day combo? The fam pools collective wisdom to play a big trick on Mom? Like in Home Alone, when Kevin sets booby traps for the thieves? Mom'll get up expecting breakfast in bed and then be like wtf are there micro-machines on the floor, um, hello blowtorch, KEVIN!") Anyhow. What was I talking? Oh yes. Literature.

Since leaving my Dork School peer group for greener pastures, I've not met another fan of McDaniel's cannon of Dying Children Lit -- until last weekend when I met my friend's sister who was also a big fan, which is AMAZING, and we bonded over it.

Also, I just started reading Rachel Shukert's Have You No Shame, in which the author's mother uncovers her daughter's collection of Holocaust Lit and replaces the books with Babysitters Club and Sweet Valley High, delaring that: "I'd rather have you shallow and sexually precocious than morbidly psychotic."

So I started thinking about all the morbidly psychotic books I read as a kid. I wasn't allowed to read Christopher Pike or R.L Stine like everyone else (see: mother's general desire for me to be ostracized from peers), but I feel like the shit I was allowed to read was probs way worse for my little baby mind than those authors' straightforward & blatant horror/violence.

Which brings us to an actual Sunday Top Ten. For the first time since um ... oh, I don't know.

---

SUNDAY TOP TEN: SEEMINGLY INNOCUOUS YOUNG ADULT BOOKS THAT PLEASED MY TWISTED LITTLE SOUL, AND WHY
or "Things that affected me more than going to the mall w/o a parent would've."

*

10. Cynthia Voigt's "Tillerman" Series: Homecoming, Dicey's Song, et al., also The Boxcar Children
Amped up my desire to be an orphan forced to live by my wits,
as well as my certainty that I'd be better off alone like the pop song "Better Off Alone,"
therefore increasing my implicitly unfair & ungrateful resentment towards my family for feeding, clothing and loving me,
inspiring me to write my own bad novels about runaways.

In Homecoming, 13-year old Dicey Tillerman and her three younger siblings experience the literal opposite of my life situation -- they're actually abandoned at the shopping mall by their mother, who subsequently lands herself in a psychiatric hospital. Meanwhile, I was being followed around the mall by my psychiatric mother (ten steps behind, providing both protection and distance), therefore preventing me from Having Adventures like Hunger, Misery, Orphanhood, Eccentric Aunts on Dilapidated Farms and Evil Catholics. Reading the plot summary of Homecoming, I realize it's possible I stole it for my epic novel Fly by Night, in which young pyromaniac Erin leaves her abusive home w/precocious brother Tommie, eventually meeting a guy named "Fly," who looks a lot like Jordan Catalano. 'Cause Erin can't stop burning things down & 'cause their number-one income source is carrying groceries to cars (in real life, I suspect this is not the growth sector Voigt's novels implied), they're forced into homelessness and then communal living with Fly and his super-fly buddies. There's a happy ending, I won't spoil it!

Also, how dykey does Dicey look on that book cover? Yow.

As I mentioned in the "Family Film Edition" of "What I Learned from the Teevee," I was a big fan of Orphan Lit and wanted to live in a Boxcar, eat hobo stew and scavenge for loaves of bread, etc. Unfortunately, I was never orphaned, though I enjoyed building forts and pretending to run away from home. Honestly, my coping mechanisms haven't really changed much since then.

---

9. The Face on the Milk Carton, by Caroline B. Cooney

Among other imaginary acts of heroism, I often hoped to find a classmate or friend on a milk carton and save the day, like in America's Most Wanted which I wasn't allowed to watch. Once a lax babysitter let us watch the show (she was fired, clearly) -- this guy killed his wife and hid her in an egg incubator behind his trailer, I still have nightmares about it. Also I believe this book fueled my fear of being kidnapped, and a ridiculous obsession with cults. Later, this became a TV movie staring the foxy Kellie Martin.

---

8. The Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess

I know what you're thinking -- "The Clockwork Orange" is not a young adult novel. This is true. Howevs, my father felt I was very mature, and 'cause he wanted me to become a great filmmaker like Stanley Kubrick, he made me read this book (we had a serious book-before-the-movie policy) when I was 13. Though most grown-up lit was off limits (e.g., Stephen King, other crap), I was permitted both this and Lolita. This is the essence of hippie intellectual spirit. I was like "Dad, what's 'the ol' in-out-in-out'"? Which was a very special moment for everyone and eliminated any perceived need for a "birds and the bees" convo.

---

7. Face at the Edge of the World, by Eve Bunting
Romanticisation of Suicide, Additional Reasons to Fuck it All

I'm not sure if this is the right book, 'cause I probs read more than my fair share of suicide-related narratives. But I think this is the one where the protagonist spends the whole book trying to figure out why his successful and talented BFF suddenly offed himself, eventually (SPOILER ALERT!) determining that perhaps he simply wanted to "quit while he was ahead." So basically all bets are off, re: offing oneself, not good news for me as I believe I was diagnosed with clinical chronic depression at the age of 5. Logistically, it would've been impossible to do myself in since I was so well supervised, especially at the mall.

---

6. Eating Disorder Lit, including:
Second Star to the Right, Stick Figure, and Little Girls in Pretty Boxes

As I've noted previously, I was the scrawniest little kid you ever did see. Howevs: my Mom was a nutritionist who helped people diet, I wanted desperately to gain weight, I was a first worldian adolescent in the 80's/90's surrounded by body image obsessed girls. Therefore, I was totally fascinated by everyone else's fascination with thigh girth. As a chronically pre-pubescent teen, I looked to literature to psych me into understanding wtf the deal was ... later, I employed this background when counseling the reedonkulous number of severely anorexic and/or bulimic friends I acquired over the years. I think it's 'cause subconsciously, ED'ed peeps are drawn to me, thinking "what is her secret of svelte-hood?" and then eventually they learn that I hate myself too, it's just more annoying coming from me, 'cause I'm not actually fat, just completely insane, and have read too many books about eating disorders (late-adds include Appetites, The Body Project and Wasted) and also; the media, etc. Calvin Klien fashion magazines hoo-ha. Kazaam.

---

Teacher: How would you describe Anne Frank?
Angela [distracted]: Lucky.
Teacher: "Anne Frank perished in a concentration camp. Anne Frank is a tragic figure. How could Anne Frank be lucky?"
[Jordan Catalano walks in, late]
Angela: "I don't know... Because she was trapped in an attic for three years with this guy she really liked?"
(My So-Called Life)

---

5. Judy Blume Novels

As I've mentioned 500 times, I'm essentially a human sponge, willing to take orders and absorb desire from whomever's speaking the loudest. Through Judy Blume, I verified that I was, indeed, justified to angst over my bust which wasn't increasing though I thought it must, it must, and that the best way to bond with other girls was via boy-related discussions. I've since learned otherwise, but I still love Judy. The girls in Blume novels are relentlessly catty and tell me srsly if you can't imagine this on the back of a porn DVD: "Rachel is Stephanie's best friend. Since second grade they've shared secrets, good and bad. So when Alison moves into the neighborhood, Stephanie hopes all three of them can be best friends since Stephanie really likes Alison. But it looks as if it's going to be a case of two's company and three's a crowd." Anyone? "In bed"? I know I was reading Lolita at 12, but c'mon now ...

---

4. The Quiet Room, by Lori Schiller and Amanda Bennet

I'm 99.9% sure schizophrenia is one disorder I defo don't have, but I seriously used to hear voices sometimes as a kid (probs it was G-d, before She lost faith in me altogether), and reading this book really freaked me out -- clearly I had enough neurosis w/o worrying that one day the voices would stop arguing with each other about my self-worth and instead command me to kill someone. Luckily they went away ... now the only voice I hear is Tegan in my iPod. Who's going on MONDAY!?! TO TEGAN & SARA?!!!

---

3. Entries From a Hot Pink Notebook, by Todd D. Brown
Felt I related to the protagonist's psyche deeply,
began early fascination with gay male culture,
subsequently realizing literally as I write this that perhaps I identified with the narrator's feelings of alienation and outsiderdom for other reasons,
e.g., personal gayness.

So, it featured my fave plot device, the gay reveal and subsequent gay crush gay reveal (y'know, the "OMG, my BFF I'm in love with is kissing ME BACK!" thing) and it's actually a really good book, though I realize the title suggests otherwise. Sometimes it hurts: the titles given to brill books. It's much easier to recommend a book called "The Sound and the Fury" than "Entries from a Hot Pink Notebook." I read this approximately around the same time I was writing in my own diary: "my greatest fear is that I'll turn out to be a lesbian. Yuck." Also, gay men were sorta "in" in the mid-nineties amongst liberals -- Rickie Vasquez, etc.

---

2. Lurlene McDaniel books

According to Lurlene McDaniel's website, "everyone loves a good cry," which's why McD's written 40+ books about "kids who face life-threatening illnesses, who sometimes do not survive." Sample titles include: She Died Too Young, Sixteen and Dying, Please Don't Let Him Die, The Girl Death Left Behind, Letting Go Of Lisa, When Happily Ever After Ends, Goodbye Doesn't Mean Forever, etc. The best was when two kids with different illnesses fell in love (e.g., cystic fibrosis + leukemia = true love) or when everyone would get into a car accident right before they were supposed to go to college on scholarship (w/bright futures, obvs) except for one girl who'd be left behind to angst. In a rare appearance by an African-American character, McD brought us Baby Alicia is Dying, in which a teenage girl grows attached to the HIV-positive black baby abandoned by her crack is whack mother, probs in Planet Harlem.

Basically, Lurlene McDaniel peddles the most demented books of all time, and I somehow ate them up. We all did. I imitated them, too, with similar plots in novels I wrote (for fun?). I guess we all felt strange and sad all the time for no reason, our little Dork School, filled with kids who suspected that, given the chance, public school would eat us alive and stuff us into lockers, and also: that perhaps we weren't fooling anyone (least of all ourselves) by avoiding the resolute knowledge that our problems weren't really problems, actually. We read the newspaper. We had politically aware parents. We didn't know jackshit, hadn't lived through anything worth crying over. Faces on Spilled Milk Cartons.

I coped w/my sense of alienation as a kid by reading, constantly, both intelligent books not mentioned here and the lame stuff I'm talking about here ... or by trying to be like everyone else as best I could though I felt hopelessly different. I'd been sad all the time for no reason as long as I can remember ... while driving w/my Mom from one place I was running from to another place, I mentioned wanting to get back to some childhood place where I'd been happy and she said I'd actually never been. "Intense," was her word. I guess I knew that already, I just wanted her to disagree, or blow it off. 'Cause I mean, seriously. I don't mention Elizabeth Wurtzel all the time for no reason, I'm legitimately afraid of her & her entitled torture, her ... whining.

I had an association and fascination with terrible & morbid circumstances and latched onto the littlest things to excuse my moodiness -- these books tapped into the part of me that wanted a reason for it. I wanted to be told, again and again, that tragedy waited around the corner. I'm certain there must've been wood nearby worth knocking on, if I'd known enough to do so. Clearly; I knew nothing.

*
"I know sad stories aren't for every reader, but it's the kind of story that most of my readers like from me. When I write "happy" books, many readers complain. So I focus on what I do best---stories that might bring a tear, but that focus on real life (where happily ever after rarely occurs). And while the books may not have "happy" endings, I try to give readers a satisfying ending---life is full of trouble and matters out of our control. How we deal with troubles determines our own character."
(Words of Wisdom from Lurlene McDaniel, clearly a Sick Puppy)

---

1. Sweet Valley High

I actually was prohibited from reading these books an account of their apparent vapidity, etc., But I finally sneaked one home, probs using crafty techniques learned from another YA novel. Just my luck: I got the book where Elizabeth gets kidnapped. Not good. This verified, to me, that my Mom was Right about these books being Bad; which's why Mothers have special powers that cannot be questioned. Like how the first time I drank alcohol, I threw up all night, which's exactly what she'd told me would happen. Actually, that still happens. Yet I continue drinking. Hm.

Howevs, I'd like to once again point out that nothing scary ever happened to me at the mall, except for this:

On that note of "things I did 'cause everyone else was doing it," if anyone's got a bridge in Brooklyn they'd like to sell me ...

Mark All As Auto-Read

I have 454 unread items on my Google Reader, it's probs like how the pioneers felt in 1752 returning from their Oregon Trail vaycay to a huge stack of unanswered telegrams. I can attribute 41 of these unread posts to Stef's shared items and 48 to mediabistro, but still.

It's kinda funny 'cause, like I said, two weeks ago I'd been writing a post about taking a break from blogging but I never finished/posted it, and then the real world kept shifting, like going through stages, 1. mean & tragic & unpredictable, 2. lonely, unhinging, unstable, 3. sunshiney & safe & sad/optimistic, 4. unreal, 5. the yet to be defined but hopeful present. So before I knew it, I'd taken a break from blogging by accident, like sometimes I'd forget I had a blog at all, though strangely I never forgot facebook. Probs 'cause facebook is HOW I REALLY FEEL.

Beautiful things have happened too, and I feel I've gained back some people I didn't have a few weeks ago, and, well, oh, the internets ... is a lot ... this has been known to happen.

Hey, remember when I didn't win "Lesbian Blogger of the Year"? Well, luckily Crystal thinks I'm Lesbian Blogger of the Year anyhow, 'cause she sent me a Dyke Duck. Also, the Uh Huh Her Prize Pack has arrived, although the video hasn't yet materialized. Probs 'cause Leisha has a lot of feelings about/for me:

*
i. Now I Will Pay Attention to My Google Reader: Live-Blogging Auto-Fun

My hero for life: Four Four's Recap of America's Next Top Model. I'd begun free-falling off planet secretly before the Dirty Girls reading, fo'real afterwards, and now let's catch up: AVN write-up, book release party in San Francisco. This photo from my reading; Stephanie looks beautiful, I look insane. I'm not being self deprecating, I really do look insane.

Oh! Wanna watch our vlog again, but on Haviland's page? Elsewhere amongst "VIP" label; Stef also finds that she'd like to lie more often than she does, 'cause honesty is a real bitch. Lozo's posted 16 times, and I'd give him Most Reliable Unpaid Blogger of the Year Award if it wasn't 75% videos (two girls kissing!) I wouldn't say this if he hadn't bitched about me not blogging. I just used the word "blogging" like ten times in a row so now I've gotta punish myself by spraying Glade in my eyeballs.

She always reminds me of me but younger and closer to mountains and in some ways braver. I don't know what to do about that, at all, so I do what I do which is wrong. I like this: "I feel like we're married, like I need a really really really good reason to ask for divorce, better than I'm tired of you, better than you make me scream without even doing anything necessarily wrong." Speaking of girl-children in faraway places who're wise beyond their years, Moonkiller's blog is one year old! She already knows everything there is to know.

"Mark all as read" is satisfying. I don't need all this Elegant Variation, NewPages, Critical Mass, Mediabistro. I need this Bookslut ... later. Is it May? Does anyone still trust me to relay a perspective on reality? Do I live your nightmares for you? Sometimes we all feel like this at once. Sometimes we don't read about it 'til it's over. Oh ... and. Scene. Eric Mathew to himself: what can I do today to win the hearts & minds of the lesbian community.

Oh ... and wow, and oh, and: this: Now this, the / dreaming breathing body / lying right beside / my own, just think -- ("The World of the Senses," by Franz Wright). The New Yorker's unofficial theme, this week, seems to be "Poems to Break Your Heart." "The God of Loneliness," "Grief." Fuck. I love poetry. I know that's like saying I love food. So I'll clarify; I love good poetry. More than almost anything, except kissing, laughter, and string cheese.

OMG, my agent, who probs wonders why she's still my agent considering I've yet to produce any material worth selling (but man, I sure do talk about it!) wrote a new post.

Sometimes there's people who've known me since I got here, and I get too embarassed to talk to them again and admit I keep making the same mistakes over and over. And then; how I don't think they're actually mistakes. I say: "I'll never trust anyone again," but then I laugh, "Yeah I will. I will. Over and over, I will."

Haviland was just talking to me about The Sound and The Fury and now she is, and also, this Phillip Glass opera; I must see it.

While sans-internet in Malibu, we were forced to settle arguments the old-fashioned way, like cavemen, with buffalo-killing competitions. Like; Cait said Polaroids were going extinct. I called nonsense; slogreenx says Cait auto-wins.

Note to all ye 12-year-olds: back in the day, when I walked ten miles to & from school, uphill both ways, we had cameras called Polaroids. Magic photos shot out right away, you wrote on them. Once we had a Polaroid Gallery Opening in our apartment, apparently I made a graphic about it once, don't know why:

Note to all ye newborns: you're really missing out, growing up in a world w/o Polaroids. Also good job on already knowing how to read.

Also speaking of lesbians I love them. Via Alex's shared items, and its respective cute user icon: more on feelings.

OK, I have like 184 items left, but I can't, I'm tired.

Some other things I'd like to bring to your attention:
1. Sam Anderson's feature on Augusten Burroughs, memory, life, everything: 'The Memory Addict"
2. The Anorexic's Cookbook, by Rachel Shukert, at nerve.com.

*

ii. Promise I'll Be Perfect From Now On

"You say that you're broken,
I just wanna fix you.
Tell me what to do, and baby I will listen."
-Uh Huh Her

Sometimes I wish life didn't have rules. I mean, because it does, you know? History's proven certain ideas good, others bad. Sometimes, it's fun to break the rules, but also, if you keep breaking things (e.g., rules) you'll end up alone w/o things. Or, rather, you'll just have many broken things, what do you do with broken things? Fix them. Leave them. Hold all their broken pieces. A combination of all three.

There's 10,000 children in Ethiopia who'd beg to have problems so ridiculous as mine.

There are so many people that I love and late at night all my mixed feelings fade away and I wish they were all here, even the ones that hurt me so badly I thought I'd never breathe again -- no -- especially them. Sometimes I want everyone so bad I could fuck or hit them all. It's like my heart turns honest at 1 A.M. Sometimes, in the winter, B. and I would get off the phone by one of us declaring; "I'm over this day. I think I wanna go to sleep, just so it'll be over," and the other responding "Totally. Over this day."

Below this sentence are a million other sentences. Perhaps later, like tomorrow or the next day, I'll publish them. But right now ... gtg, kiddos, mermaids await. There is fun to be had, and trees we've yet to live in ... for real. Wheeeeeee!!!!

It's a Top 10 List of Things that Move Me the Most, Bother Me the Most, Scare Me the Most

Leisurely reader: you don't need me to swear that I longed for this blog, born out of my little brain & navel, to be the most smokin' hot baby imaginable, the most purple, the most intelligent and quasi-intellectual. But could I contradict the natural order of things? Like creates like.

So what could my emotional, mediated/oft-intoxicated "wit" give birth to except the history of a hysterical child, over-metabolised, whining, its head stuffed with all kinds of thoughts no one else would even think of, like a girl bred in an emo cave of her own design, where everything grates on your nerves and every new sound (for example the men drilling giant holes on my sidewalk who woke me up this morning), makes you still sadder. Other circumstances (e.g., flying lesbians, L Word character development, fresh fruit, kind awakenings, tranquil spirit) would turn even the most sterile Muses fertile, filling the world with almost-hipsterish, consistent, honest and well-bred offspring. But instead ... we have Auto-Win. Who is here to celebrate.

Yes! Two years ago April 8th, in order to best allow you to make the acquaintance of such a noble/honorable knight, the celebrated Sancho/MLB [not major league baseball or the modern languages building] began writing a blog called "This Girl called Automatic Win." ¹

Actually, my motivations for beginning this blog, as I'm sure most of you know by now, isn't related to extolling virtues, it was 'cause my roommate/everything at the time (as in -- "everything a person can be to another person," including best friend & co-worker) (this is a common recipe for disaster) had a blog, and so I wanted a blog too. She had other things I wanted too, like rock-hard abs, black legwarmers, rhythm, a savings account, reasonably sized feet, a functional bicycle and usually a large bag of miniature candy bars. Aside from the legwarmers, which I took and still have, I couldn't have any of those things. But I could have A BLOG! I was very mature then, just as I'm very mature now, and I do not covet, just like Moses told me to. Actually, yeah I do.

[Also I haven't rocked the legwarmers in a while, 'cause I haven't worn a skirt and/or dress in a while, 'cause I have short hair now and I feel like girls with short hair in dresses always remind me of Seasons 1-3 Miranda. Miranda is obvs my favorite SATC character: she's got the best comebacks/one-liners, reminds me of me, and let's face it -- I'm no Charlotte, and Carrie & Samantha are annoying. Howevs, somehow her overall look's always suggested something self-consciously "power-wifey," like the "Before" Nicole Kidman in The Stepford Wives remake or a female newscaster from the early 90's w/shoulderpads or a politician. You know what I mean? Mainly, the thing is that I'm 26, not 46 or even 36. I don't expect to live past 56, so I've gotta harvest my rosebuds while I may, etc.

The point is that starting around Season Four, Cynthia Nixon's undoubtable hotness finally came out of the closet via a new improved haircut that suited her overall look and the format of television itself quite well:

Does everyone get my point? How'd I start talking about Miranda? Oh yes. Skirts --> legwarmers ---> blog.]

So I've been trying to think of a Sunday Top Ten topic that relates to the Second Bloggiversary without being like a VH1 special for myself. Like you know they're just ACHING at VH1 for 2010 so they can start filming "We Love the Aughts." I'd pondered "Top Ten Moments on My Blog of the Last Year," or something equally self-obsessed ... but I did already do a Best of the Top Tens post, and a few Year in Review posts, so really, how much more can I possibly indulge in the self-reflexive navel-gazing related instant nostalgia you've come to expect here at Auto-Win?

OMG, So Much More!!!!

---

Sunday Top Ten: All The Top Tens I Thought About Writing In Honor of the Bloggiversary, But Then, Obvs Didn't
[Or, "The Soul's Agents"]
[Or, "An Autowin Buffet! Something for Everyone!]

[This post isn't going to flow upon your readership perfectly but I'm hoping, and therefore telling you, that it's worth it.]
[This is a long one.]

"Every night before bed, say for a week, / we recommend admitting a lie / or a deception, sotto voice, a rogue's prayer /
to the soul you know you have, / no matter how tattered or dormant.

Trust us, your secrets differentiate you

from no one, but the soul awakens
a little when it hears them."

---

10. Thunder Perfect Autowin/ Top 10 Paradoxes

"And if only you could raise / your hypocrisy to the level of art, / like forgery, there might be / real hope for you."

In December, Stef and A;ex did a vlog with us for Cait, who's shoulder wasn't feeling nice. After filming, sitting in the hallway, A;ex said to me, dead serious, re: the vlogging experience: "I thought I'd lost you there for a minute."

That night was the first time I'd declared I wanted to stop vlogging, but I was convinced by my comrades to soldier on. Last week sometime, A;ex and Cait were talking about how truly weird it is -- the way Hav & I change when the camera goes on. Hav's a professional, obvs, but for me I guess it's protection ... a "character," 'cause that open revelation of physicality felt too personal for me. I'd nixed footage from the car on the night Hav met Lozo 'cause it felt too "real," and did attempt to halt "Uh Huh ... Her?" production once too. Thank G-d I didn't, 'cause that prize pack probs has a genie in it, and I hope a few posters/real dolls.

Speaking of "real" dolls ... I'm not sure what the "real" me is ["real" is a problematic term ... "authentic"? "full"?] As my profile suggests, I do not know who I am. I don't know what that means -- it's not that I'm just growing up, it's that I change my mind a lot. It's that until the age of 14, I wanted to be an actress. 'Til 18: filmmaker. Now: marine biologist. JK, I just liked Sea World a lot once.

So now that Haviland's in L.A., why am I still vlogging? Clearly being on camera is more her thing. Well ... follow-through. Is an interest. And it's fun! It's fun now, w/various guest vloggers. But mostly: I la-la-love editing, it's like my number one favorite activity. I like the feedback, it's another way to be "known" in this performance art liveblog known as um, whatever this is. I find it interesting. I love that it's brought new readers/audience, which I didn't expect (for people to watch the vlogs independently from reading this, like that they'd be entertaining enough on their own?). Different circumstances, different formats or media, calls for different attitudes.

And y'know, there's that "lonely little lez in Iowa" ... 'cause I wonder, always, if I'd seen Shane as an adolescent and believed that there were lesbians out there who weren't just like my Mom or her friends, if maybe that would've changed everything.

But also, clearly that is also me, even if it's not all of me. What is the "real me" anyhow? Can it be a lot of things, or is that a lie? I often gravitate towards very specific & self-assured people, maybe 'cause I want clues of how to be so sure of myself, because I'm a Sancho at heart, never a real knight. Childhood and adolescence demands a choice, adulthood I hope offers more freedom.

'Cause paradox, contradiction, inner conflict ... is my bag. Because I am also opposites. Because that's why I feel like I'm always lying, which is consequently why I feel the need. To talk so much. "This is what I just said, but [this] is what I meant." [pause] "No. [this] is what I meant."

To start with, "pop" culture vs. "high" culture. Bisexuality. Like You vs. Like Everyone. Insecure vs. Sure. Smart vs. Vapid. Ambitious vs. Depressive. And so on. I feel howevs that I've possibly discussed this so much that I must've done a Top Ten about it at some point?

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9. Top Ten Things I Don't Say, Haven't Said

"Some people of course expect / to be rewarded for stumbling / and rising from the floor / and stumbling again, but we give / no credit for living."

Our culture, now, is very "Behind the Music." This "what can I avoid saying? what do people know anyway?" complex has clear origins: meeting people in 3-D via blog who say "I thought ____ was happening, but I would never have said so, or asked" (and it was) (or wasn't), the occasional succession of questions via comment or email, some interesting reader survey responses, the fact that I feel -- because I read too much into everything myself -- that some things are obvious, that I don't need to say them, but also realize, no-one's paying nearly as much attention as I am (to myself). I've lately started to assume that no-one assumes anything really. Do you?

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8. There Are Beautiful Things I Want to Dispose Of [reader suggested topic]

"We favor vitality / over goodness, even over effort;"

Sometimes I obtain books I've already read just to have my own copy. For example, I borrowed "The Year of Magical Thinking" (Joan Didion) from Krista, "I Am Not Myself These Days" (Josh Kilmer-Purcell) from Lo, "Appetites" (Caroline Knapp) from the public library, "Girl" (Blake Nelson) from Kristyna in 10th grade. Then I'll see a copy at a used bookstore and think, well, I'd like to have my own copy. But it has no underlines. Now, I rarely borrow books I intend to return. I haven't forgotten ... I just cracked the spine, dog-eared the pages and possibly also underlined.

I gave up tight jeans about six months ago. I keep them, in case I give up baggy jeans again. History would suggest role reversal could occur at any moment, I'd like to be prepared/budget about it.

Once, my legendary (and presently radio silent) high school soulmate/BFF/everything sold all his clothing and possessions and moved to Africa. I'd like to do that, but maybe stay here. Just to prove that I can. But what if I can't?

I just found a Calvin Klien tag for a push-up bra. $36.00. Underneath the iconic font spelling out "Calvin Klien," handwriting reads: "Aspects of a Theory of Syntax (1957)."

Sometimes people would give me earrings as gifts, though I didn't have my ears pierced. Being female, I guess, was enough.

I have a file in my file folder called "The Way We Were." Some happy, some sad.

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7. Top 10 Most Important Autowin Moments since April 8th, 2007
"'we love a great belly laugh / more than anything."

1 be my intern (may 07), 2 breakup (june 07), 3 living it out (july 07),
4 we're alright we're up all night, and y'all emerged from the vortex (august 07)
5 the big reveal (august 07), 6 first vlog (oct. 07)
7 getting fired (deleting my entire blog and then re-posting it) (oct 07),
8 renewal (nov 07)
9 visiting the actual carousel of progress, obvs (feb 08).
10 because i heard from a lot of you i hadn't heard from in a while (march 08).

The problem is, I don't think that's true, I think I'm picking the wrong things and missing things, and even thinking about this list makes my head hurt and then it makes me feel too self-centered anyhow, so I have to stop.

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6. Top 10 Things That Have Changed Since April 8th, 2007

"In your case we do worry / there may not be enough / quarrel in you, or enough courage / to acknowledge your worst inclinations."

I live somewhere new now. I'm sick of hearing gunshots all the time. Sometimes I think it'd be easier if I just saw someone get shot, 'cause maybe it's not hearing shots but the sense of impending doom that one day I will see it happen, but then I remember when they shot her up at the hospital, and that it made me so sick/sad that I fell on the floor too, and sobbed, and then they made me leave, and then I realize I couldn't handle witnessing a bullet from a gun, could I. I don't wanna see people go down. What did the hands feel like? and about the hearts. could you feel their hearts beating beneath their chests?

I cut my hair so I'd stop being heckled, so I could pass for a boy in the dark & winter, or at least a lesbian in the light & spring. I no longer purchase unlimited metrocards. There is Tegan & Sara.

Oh ...

I might, in fact, argue: everything, absolutely everything.

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5.

"Know that the soul converts them / into tenderness. Nothing pleases it more."

So, I was reading my friend's post about April's cruelty and thought I would like to somehow
write about the concentrated succession of tragedies upon single beings [not referring, here, to a specific being [unfortunately, I am referring to life generally as I know it but also to many specific beings], but I don't know enough grammar to tell you what I mean] without naming tragedies.

5a. And realize this:

That I grew up in a swamp of it (my mother: her parents divorced, her father disappeared, mother died at 14, raised by grandparents who died, her father reappeared, then died, she divorced, her ex-husband died, my father: nothing much, 'til his own. i don't know if that's fair or not, my suspicion is that life isn't). Therefore, wasn't expecting otherwise, necessarily, though I was hoping and still believed -- until about a year ago [a feeling that's grown stronger and stronger still] -- that there was a certain amount of order to be expected. I no longer believe in such things.

All you can do, as a woman once said in a suprisingly wise moment of a vlog, is "just wait for the next joke. So we should just try to laugh and make out as much as possible."

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4. Top 10 Things I Talk About But Maybe Shouldn't, Due to Technical Problems, like Actual Lack of Authority

"So next week why not admit / that what Raskolnikov did / has always made you dream?"

Why not admit that I didn't know who Raskolnikov was, so I googled him, and found him on Wikipedia, and, in lieu of ever actually reading Crime & Punishment: yes, I find what he did [according to the good people at Wikipedia] dreamy. It's the dream of being right enough to take an axe to it, right? I often dream of losing my teeth or being inconveniently naked, I still dream in clichè.

This topic I thought of when Slicey (of The L Word Online) asked me how, if I claim to never watch teevee, I know so much about pop culture. I thought I could do a list of things I talk about unknowingly -- shows I've seen 0-6 times but still speak of with authority, like Tila Tequila, The Office, Heroes, Sugar Rush etc. The answer is: I read a lot about pop culture and therefore feel like I know more about it than I do, I watched A LOT of television in the mid-nineties, and the shows that I do know, I KNOW -- The L Word, West Wing, Six Feet Under, My So-Called Life, Queer as Folk, Sex and the City, Beverly Hills 90210, Dawson's Creek. Also I'm compulsive and generally watch entire seasons of one show in one weekend via DVD. Also, I watch TV at the gym, that's how I've seen America's Next Top Model and Tila Tequila.

Also: I don't know, really, actually. I just do? It's just that I rarely sit down and watch, though I guess maybe it's just on sometimes. I really don't know.

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3. What Was Life Like Before _____?

"The more you explore yourself / the more you become unrecognizable."

Let me confess: Tinkerbell was an impulse buy. We debated returning Tinkerbell, due to concerns related to value vs. cost. I'm so glad we trusted the impulse. Cait asked a few days ago, "What was life like before Tinkerbell? I can't remember, what did we do?" I think I generally put words in my friends' mouths, instead of Tinkerbell's. If I wanted to hide something I swallowed a capsule like Maria Full of Grace. JK, there's never anything good in Tinkerbell's purse-pouch. Seriously, never.

*

Even though I was almost always living elsewhere, I still had a room at my Mom's 'til about '02, and the last time I stayed there for long was for about six weeks in the summer of 2000, between living in NYC and moving on to campus at U-Mich. An old friend came over w/a bottle of wine -- a jug, really, and we finished it, and then I hid the empty bottle in this storage bin/headboard which was filled with stuffed animals.

I couldn't put it w/the rest of the recycling. I don't know how I planned to hide it from my mother forever, or what consequences I expected if she'd found it. Sometimes it's hard to remember life pre-21. I guess that's for a lot of reasons. Anyhow, I still do that. I don't know why. Now that I've confessed this, I'll have to stop, 'cause my friends might look in my closet and wonder why there's an empty wine bottle next to the sheets. Then, before they can think about it too hard, they'll be on the ground wondering what large soft object just fell on their head. Srsly don't open the closet.

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2. Top 10 Most Important Things to The Very Existence of Autowin

"Remember, we are here to help. / What you decide to keep / from the world, tell us."

Stephen Dunn, Tegan & Sara, my Friends, The L Word, Google Reader & Google Docs, the drink, fourfour, bartleby, commenters, Victor & Maureen.

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1. Lucky Numbers: 3, 11, 21, 31, 41, 43

I've been saving this fortune cookie for the end of this blog. That's the kind of thing I'd make up. But I'm not making this up, actually. I've been tempted to crack it open and see right now for hours, in the same way I was always tempted to watch the next episode of TLW I had on disc but didn't, or -- in a former life, a life more reckless than the one I live now -- to be tempted to do the whole gram at once [but did]. [In the same way that writing that gave me a craving strong enough I'd've fulfilled it, if it was in front of me, with its twenty minutes of oblivion all lined up.]

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"Some people never have anything except ideas. Go do it"
(Chinese word on the back: WAIT [deng])
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"We understand everything / we pass it on."
-Stephen Dunn, "The Soul's Agents"
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¹ This opening paragraph is from the intro paragraph to Don Quijote, but like if it was Mad Libs. I haven't read DQ [see "4"], but I did read the first 300 or so pages, including the introduction, which this is from, so it's not cheating. I don't, for the record, talk about books I haven't read.