Saturday, August 30, 2008

archive: 30 August 2008: News

So the news... I decided not to wait until the first of September to email VA Tech to find out about the archivist positions I applied and interviewed for back in June. I had already from them in early August and at that time they said they were still deliberating over the last two positions and had hired one person for the third position. I would either hear something from them by phone (job offer) or by letter (rejection) soon. Well, "soon" stretched into three weeks and I decided I was impatient and tired of being strung along.

Today I emailed them and they emailed me back nearly immediately to let me know that VA Tech has "voided" the two positions. They'll review the two positions again in January. I can only assume that the university wasn't going to find them at this time, or some other budgetary matter came up. I am supposed to be getting a letter any day now, she said. SO... VA Tech is ruled out.

I have one possibility working for me right now and that is the interview at the Cowboy Museum in Oklahoma City, OK, on September 15th.

Just an update. Bummed, yes, 'cause Blacksburg, VA, really appealed to me. But I am trying my damnedest to believe that whatever that happens will be the right one for me right now... I don't want to leave the mountains yet. But I'm open to whatever the world gives me... with a little patience and hope.

.........

I had the strangest but most comforting dream last night, if it could be called a dream at all. It was more like a sensation as I fell asleep and I was surprised to wake up with it again this morning. Its unexplainable, really. It was nice, sincerely felt to the core without me knowing the source, whether from within myself or from some other undefinable source.

Friday, August 29, 2008

archive: 29 August 2008: Love

I want to love you but...

...the highway disappears into the sunset every night and I cannot find my way, so I turn back and follow my footsteps home in the dark until sunrise, and begin again.

...the trees in the horizon are black and confuse me when they sway under the wind I cannot feel here as I stand at the window waiting.

...when I look up at the stars, the constellations have moved and I believe that star on which I sent a wish up for you has vanished from the sky.

...these songs that lyrically remind me of you also remind me of conversations, long walks, button-down plaid shirts, black leather, and train whistles.

...Yeats and Eliot have spoken to you and sent you on escapades of experience.

...the hurricane within you have spiraled you to another place, while I am a volcano awaiting my peak to erupt, shake the earth, and force the landscape to die and be reborn.

...I already told you in words I could muster one evening, and it seemed to hang in the air like humidity in Mississippi Summer, until I rambled on I knew that you felt I was just a friend. A close friend, you said.

...my wings have been clipped by the world, left to flutter in a cage until this song has been sung to my keeper's contentment.

...I've loved you all along.

Monday, August 25, 2008

archive: 25 August 2008: A True Story

A man walks up to two young women sitting outside a coffee shop. One has a laptop in her lap searching for an author's quote. The old man with a cane walks up to the young women and says, "You ain't watching porno, are ya?"

They laugh and the one with the laptop responds, "Nah, of course not!"

And as he continued to walk pass, he replied matter-of-factly, "Well, ya ought to be."

And the women laugh heartily.

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This is a true story. August 25, 2008

As Mitch Barrett says, "I ain't lyin. I'm tellin' you a story."

Thursday, August 21, 2008

archive: 21 August 2008: when harry met sally

I just watched When Harry Met Sally... again. Its probably the only film I actually like Billy Crystal in, and I adore Meg Ryan's kooky character. In some ways I identify with her character Sally. I think that Sally's either a Virgo or Capricorn (maybe Taurus) and that Harry is definitely a Cancer or Scorpio. Very much earth and water.

Anyway... Just watching that again makes me a bit curious. How are things going to pan out? Will this continue on forever and forever simply as friends? Long-time writing friends, friends who call each other up occasionally to ramble on about this new writing project or work plans or... I don't know. We never had the obvious sexual tension that Harry and Sally have, but... there was definitely some tension floating between us. I wonder if I will ever know.

And will the people I will feel drawn to emotionally and become involved with... Will they end up being people who are distractions for a while until the time is right? Until things can be understood, realized, expressed?

I did just read that the original script did have Harry and Sally becoming just friends after everything afterall. But they changed that for the film's optimistic "happily ever after" effect and romantic comedy high sales benefit. Ah well.

Humans are interesting creatures. I have said it before, and I can say it again: There's hardly anyone I didn't found attractive even for a few moments, or few days, or weeks, or months... :) Mini-crushes or more intense ones. I guess it comes down to truly appreciating a person as they are.

I wonder though, if in fact, I will be stuck on this one person. Right now I might feel that way. And nothing's ever happened but hours long conversations and bourbon drinking, hugs, one movie-watching evening together (The Hours), running into each other during long walks, and hanging out with some of the greatest musical friends ever.... That's a lot of great times. And now my last memory is visiting in his hometown, standing in July's bright sun, last hug goodbye, hair golden brown, smile half-cocked sincere, and a good laugh. "See ya later, Ol' Cat," he says.

I had a dream the other day... A photo and a caption: "Miss." The comment, from him, would be, "I miss you, too." I'm a silly ol' gal, all right.

I can only post this here, and not on facebook.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

archive: 12 August 2008: meteors and goodbye midnight

Last night I saw a deer. A young one walking very hesitantly in what is a field. The tall weeds (or had it been a corn field?) bush-hogged down and under distant street lamplight and high light of the half-moon, the deer perked its ears curious. I turned off my music and sat in stillness, silence. She came a little closer, nudged the ground, and made a few more steps. She was coming towards me timidly when a distant car backfired and she ran off in the direction of the road. I was afraid for her. I couldn't see into the darker shadows if she went into the road or back across the field into weeds not yet bush-hogged. But my evening was marked by her presence. A sweet hope welled inside. Patience.

A little later last night the stars fell across the sky, but I was reminded they are not for wish-makers but for astronomers to gaze upon. I laid on a blanket in the clearing near the grove of trees. If I could have I would have climbed one tree and watch the sky from the tallest limbs. If I could have I would have wished on stars, not planets. The constellations were forgotten by me; was that Scorpio? There's the Big Dipper, so is that the Southern Cross? And is that Capricorn? Or Virgo? Andromena?

On this blanket under stars and planets and meteors, the half-moon filtering through the far trees. Leonard Cohen in my ear. I heard him like I had never heard him before...

"I'm not looking for another as I wander in my time,
walk me to the corner, our steps will always rhyme.
You know my love goes with you as your love stays with me,
it's just the way it changes, like the shoreline and the sea,
but let's not talk of love or chains and things we can't untie,
your eyes are soft with sorrow, Hey, that's no way to say goodbye."


And...

"Baby I have been here before.
I know this room, I've walked this floor.
I used to live alone before I knew you.
I've seen your flag on the marble arch.
Love is not a victory march.
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah"
....
"I couldn't feel, so I learned to touch
I've told the truth: I didn't come all this way to fool you."


The deer had left. The moon was no longer behind a tree. I saw a few meteors streak the sky. Lightning bugs pretended to be meteors, setting off their light bulbs just above me. Mosquitoes bit my toes.

Midnight had come and gone.
It was now time to go
and time to say goodbye
to stars and wish-making.

Saturday, August 9, 2008

archive: 09 August 2008: writing themes

Today's free-write was pretty good and I felt like something new is coming out of the writing. I seem to be moving into new ground for these characters. These will all still become poems, not prose or fiction, but for now the free-writes stand alone as is. Here's Wednesday's below and then today's below that.
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August 6, 2008

"big whispering sound all over. Geese by the thousands. They blacked out the moon."
"language older than the spoken word."
both attributed to Cormac McCarthy
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When the locusts came it was a great sound throughout the woods, a crowd gathered at the church waiting for the sermon to start, but gossiping and storytelling all the same. Their insect voices chanted and hummed and hem-hawed around the worries of the farm folk. The noise drifted in through open June windows as they dreamed in their beds, and frowns furrowed their faces, of tall weeds which blocked the sun and snakes striking ankles. Wake into the loud orchestra and sigh into the fear. They were incessant and insistent. What could Jake do with the land? Sell it? Farm it and hop next year's crop happens? Let it field rot and let the family sink into debt? And the locusts just kept singing their humdrum song.

One morning in August, after a fight that stormed the porch and left down the gravel road the night before, she swept the porch as she cried. When she had gathered it all into a blue bowl and set it down on the big table, she walked out into the field and plucked the petals of the black-eyed susans for the bowl.

When Jake came home, the house was empty save for the blue bowl of yellow petals. It smelled sweet but sharp -- under the petals he found the dead locusts. She must have swept them from the corners of the porch.

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August 9, 2008

love is memory. "...being earth and water of existence, memory." - Truman Capote
-------------

When Spring came with its rain, long Spring rains that brought in the morning light in silken colors, soft like the lamp light in a woman's room after her life has been spent traveling the world, traveling this field, searching for bits of self in the shadows where the moon had shone the night before. When Spring rain came, the field barely absorbed it. The dry earth became a muddy sludge that ran down to the house, under the porch, over the bottom steps. The longest storms made the house an island in a field lake.

But as she sat on the top step, the rain still coming down, and she looked out at the water, she could see him storming off down the gravel road and she felt the old run-away fear. She saw herself walking with barely anything -- She had buried all her belongings under the moonlight, everything in the house except the blue bowl. She took it all and buried it. If she could not have him alone, he could not have even the memory of her: the blankets, the skillet, the pillows, the dresses she had worn when they used to lay on the far side of the corn field looking up at the stars and moon, the overalls he wore on Saturdays when he came back from the bar... Everything buried and, she had hoped, forgotten.

But here she sat on the old porch, the windows broken, the shingles half gone, and stubborn weeds forcing themselves between the floorboards. No telling where he is now, gone. But all those memories resurfacing in the earth and water, all those things threaded and stained have turned in their shallow graves and sought sunlight as Spring flooded the top soil away year after year.

And that's when she remembered the apple tree. She raised herself from her top-step perch and walked out into the rain and field lake, the muddy water mid-calf, and walked to the far left side. The apple tree now full with limbs and beginning to green. The rain will bring the blossoms. The fence cornered the tree, the place where her mother had died now will bear fruit, apples yellow and spotted, but sweet and soft, and so many that the ground would be littered with the apples, and the earth would bury them, take its own back into the soil and give them back, reborn.

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Writing Prompts, August 9, 2008:

"...for so few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportion suspect, pity; and still fewer know that happiness in love is not the absolute focusing of all emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come only to symbolize; the true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilac openings, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all the seasons, memory, yes, it being earth and water of existence, memory."

p. 141-142, Other Voices, Other Rooms. Truman Capote

"...there was always between us something muted, hushed; still our silence was not of a secret kind, for in itself it communicated that wonderful peace those who understand each other very well sometimes achieve..."

p. 143, Other Voices, Other Rooms. Truman Capote

"...this was not a hotel; indeed, had never been: this was the place where folks came when they went off the face of the earth, when they died but were not dead."

p. 118, Other Voices, Other Rooms. Truman Capote

Friday, August 8, 2008

archive: 08 August 2008: moods

Moody. Too much change going on around me. People coming and going and connections are too thin. And my standing threatens to toss me east or west but I have no clue which direction.

I went to Clifftop and had a great time, most of it. I think constantly being surrounded by people I didn't know and talent I didn't have but wanted to have played a toll on me by the time it was late Friday night. Cajun/Zydeco dancing tent, people, wallflowers, and a mass of other feelings. I had to retreat for a brief bit that evening. It could have been the New Moon. It could have been the amount of bourbon I drank. It could have been my insecurities I always ignore on the surface. It could have been biological. But I had to retreat. Rain. And then I was able to go again and avoid what hurt. I stayed up until 6 a.m. with some folks from Ohio and Toronto, and that brought around a good dawn. And then I slept until the storm came, a literal CRACK! of thunder and lightning around 7 a.m. Fear subsided back into sleep.

Stress of not hearing from a potential job opportunity. If I receive an offer, I have to say all this waiting and waiting and no communication is NOT the right foot to start on. But at the moment I would prefer VT over any other non-Appalachian opportunity. Ah well.

A friend drove up to NY sometime around Sunday or so and is looking forward to change and finding a place in Maine, etc. So I am glad I had the opportunity to get to see and visit with him in early July in his hometown. Someone I hope to always keep in touch with, good friendship and affection.

Another friend has met someone who makes him quite happy and he's just bubbling with that new feeling. And its good to know he's happy. I hope this becomes something good for them both and doesn't fizzle into something that'll make him bitter and skeptical.

Another recent friend is heading up to England as well. Like I said, just as folks come along, they also leave.

I'm tired. Sad. And ready to know what I think I ought to have heard by now. And wish I could say the things I have wanted to say. But what is done is done, and time moves forward, not backward.

I think tonight I am going to go for a long walk... I have not done a midnight walk in a long time, nor have I visited those train tracks in a few months. Or the grove. Ah well. Come what may.

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ADDITION: I have been sending out resumes now. I still have not heard from VT and it is 5:30pm on 08-08-08! I do, however, have a phone interview on Tuesday morning with the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, OK. Interesting. I sent a resume and application to Kean University in Union, NJ. Also one to the Ohio Historical Society, Columbus, OH. And sent one to Harvard as well.

Yesterday I applied for unemployment. I returned applications to Rite Aid and a gas station for part-time work in the meantime. A former co-worker convinced that is OKAY to file for unemployment insurance. I did online and according to it I won't get the first check of that until Aug. 20th. If VT will finally tell me some good news, I won't even need that.

I just want to KNOW now. I don't want to go through more interviews. I want what felt positive and hopeful and good and forward. I DID send an email today at 1:41 pm to the library human resources person at VT and I have not heard from her yet. This is disappointing.

Well, I don't know yet what I am doing tonight. Saturday night should be nice with meteor showers and friends. Sunday will be moving into the guest room at another friends' place out in the countryside, which will lead to walks in the field and by the small ponds out in the sun. It will probably help my latest theme in writing.