Me: What are you looking at? *follows gaze* Do I have bird poop in my hair?!? *frantically bats at head*

Frank: Just checking to see if those two gray hairs I saw the other day are there.

Me: *stares* It’s weird that you think that’s an acceptable thing to say to me.

Frank: It is though.

Me: I just found them last week!

Frank: Oh great. So I stress you out.

Me: I was at R’s house and I saw one in the bathroom and came running out, yelling look! I have a gray hair!

Frank: See? It is ok to say to you. I knew it.

Me: Are you trying to get back on the blog?

Frank: .…

Me: But they are your fault.

Frank: We already covered that.

Me:  And there’s only one.

Frank: There are two.

“Do you know this person in real life?”

What the hell, Facebook!

First of all, it’s none of your business who I know or don’t know in real life or if I want to photoshop my head onto Conan’s wife’s body so I’m standing next to him and touching his butt.

Second of all, maybe I do and maybe I don’t and if I want to pretend FB is LinkedIn, then you’re not going to be able to stop me. I need to get my network on, yo.

Third, if I’m treating FB like it’s Match.com and using it to connect with boys who wear flannel in their profile pictures, then help a sister out and just create a shazam-ing mechanism for that dude in the coffeeshop already OH MY GOD DON’T DO THAT FACEBOOK IT’S CREEPY I KNOW YOU ALREADY HAVE FACE RECOGNITION SOFTWARE AND OH DEAR LORD I PROBABLY COULD JUST REVERSE-IMAGE SEARCH HIM ON GOOGLE HUH now I am terrified and will have to go live in a cave and will never be able to interact with civilization again and I will die alone huddled in fear that the vultures’ eyes are cameras recording me for a reality tv show.

Fourth, FB, you know I could just lie, right? Like, I can click any button I want to. By the way, can someone explain to me why we ask people online in multiple choice format if their suitcases have knives in them? This seems like an egregious faith in the honor system.

(Look, I know it’s a reminder but don’t you think it’s more likely to make someone– definitely not me– be all, oh I totally forgot to pack my hunting knife for my trip to visit Grandma. You know, in case I run into the wolf.)

Fifth, FB, I don’t friend anyone on FB who I don’t know in real life, because I know you have a tiny little GPS running through your app that shows where I am at all times and I only want 637 random friends-of-friends-of-friends to know that, not strangers. Geez what kind of a fool do you think I am. 

And in one of the last scenes, Ethan Hawke is swimming out into the ocean with his brother in a distance contest, and Ethan Hawke beats him, which shouldn’t happen given that he’s supposed to be weaker and inferior, etc, whatever, watch the movie if you want to know, the point is that his brother asks him how he does it and he shouts:

YOU WANT TO KNOW HOW I DID IT? THIS IS HOW I DID IT, ANTON: I NEVER SAVED ANYTHING FOR THE SWIM BACK.

And my friend paused the movie and turned to me and said, “Whenever anyone asks how I do so much, I tell them that: I never save anything for the swim back.”

All of which is a much nicer way of saying, “You can sleep when you’re dead.”

Which I agree with, in theory. In reality I am so fond of my bed.

So today I’m trying to think through how that works out with my personal philosophy of taking as many naps as possible.

Ohh-kay.

I’ve been thinking about why it’s so hard to talk about our pet projects out loud. And by that I mean our favorites, the ones we guard a little carefully– not the pet eggs we’re hoping to raise for the state fair “who has the best hens” competition. Although those could certainly count too. I wouldn’t want to not count my chickens before they hatch.

Ohhhhhh-kay.

My second year of grad school, I was teaching for the first time, and had a workshop assignment to write a poem a day for the whole semester, and was taking a full load of classes, and I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), wherein you write 50,000 words in a month (November). I was 42,000 words in at Thanksgiving and had a week left– in other words, I was right on target and would have easily finished. I mentioned the project to my parents, who asked what the word vomit “novel” was about, and as I explained its loose plot line, they asked a few gentle, curious questions, and I realized how many problems there were with it– how many holes left to fill, how many major wrong turns I had taken along the way– all of which I already knew, it just sounded so much worse when said out loud and the whole idea so much more hopelessly silly when said in front of others.

And despite knowing that I had written 42,000 words in three weeks and that no one emerges with a finished draft of a novel, and that I had gone in knowing the point was just to finish, only that– I gave up. Entirely and completely. The project and my own hubris overwhelmed me, and I felt embarrassed that other people knew I was doing this foolish, pointless thing (although thousands of people do it each year and I think it’s great, and always results in something– “but for other people, not for me,” goes the little voice in my head, “wah wah”). I didn’t write the last 8,000 words. I haven’t looked at it since. I can’t bear to. I’m somehow convinced that every single sentence I wrote for it was complete and total shit, and that the whole thing will reveal what a fraud I am to pretend I know how to write even the simplest of emails. House of cards.

Sometimes we don’t talk about our projects because we’re afraid of what they’ll look like when held up to the light. Sometimes we can’t talk about them to specific people because we know those people will chime in, and we know those people’s chimes are valuable but also, maybe, dangerous– a little bit out of tune with our own, or perhaps just so loud we’ll be unable to tune them out, or maybe they’re really lovely tunes in harmony with our own but that’ll make it hard to disentangle when we see what they could bring (and this was my project dammit) or they do play your tune and are eagerly enthusiastic and sweet and lovely about it and overwhelming with their beautiful thoughts and coherent vision and you start to think oh it sounds so good when she does it I should just give it to her she’ll do it so much better than me.

And have you ever given away a project easily– talked about it carelessly, to someone who doesn’t take the time to listen, or lives in a different universe, or dismisses it or you, or who then repeats it loosely? Oh, it’s like when you were a child, and you had a new beloved toy, and you were so eager to show it that you gave it to the first person you saw, and they broke it, and it was your fault for not taking better care of something that deserved to be tended a bit more closely, at least for a time.

Sometimes we don’t talk about our projects because they exist, whole and perfect in our minds, and the minute we try to articulate them, we realize how crumbly or slippery they are, we hear how raspy our own sentences sound, and the project gets scared and skitters off into a dark corner of your mind and can’t be coaxed out again, and instead of emerging a whole if shadowy animal, it throws tufts of mangy fur and bits of toenails in your direction.

Sometimes we can’t talk about our projects because we’re afraid of what we’ll look like when held up to the light.

It’s hard to talk about our projects because talking about them always, in some way, even in a tiny safe contained one, reveals talking about what we want. What we hope for our art, which is what we hope for ourselves.

I don’t have a good ending for this post. Because yes, there’s something to going quiet and letting things solidify in our minds before parading them about. Yes, there’s something wholesome and nurturing about talking about projects with the right people at the right time. Yes, there’s something necessary about the changes that occur when a project begins to exist in the real world rather than the initial fabricated vision. All art is about learning, each time and with each draft and each undertaking, how to move the end result a bit closer to the thing we originally saw in our minds. Yes, there’s something about taking notes, or drawing sketches, or writing lists, or creating graphs or boards to guide us along the way so we don’t stray too far from the path once we start wandering in the fields.

But at some point, it’s just time to start. And let it get messy. And ugly. Like that painting, hanging framed in my parents’ kitchen, right below my sister’s Jackson Pollack rainbow art, that I did that looks like some red blurs and a splotch of green surrounding a huge brown blob of poop.

I think it was supposed to be a social commentary on our narrow definitions of beauty. And poop. And Mr. Potato Head in a teal tutu attempting to ride a terrified rare red sea turtle.

And so your options are to:

1. Flail about in a failed attempt to regain a toehold on the diving board, which will fail and you will belly flop
2. Try to twist really desperately in the air in an attempt to correct into a semi-graceful dive
3. Duck and roll into a cannonball and hope to take everyone else down with you

This giant literary conference, called AWP, which stands for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (don’t think about it too hard), is going to be in Seattle next year. And so even though AWP always brings with it madness and blinding exhaustion and some sort of simmering rage, usually (one of my former professors calls it The Hunger Games) (all those writers! so many feeeeeeeelings)– somehow everyone I know, instead of feeling those feelings for a week in a snowstorm in a far-away city, is having some sort of pre-emptive host anxiety. We’re already laying out cheese plates and frantically saving hangers from the dry cleaners so we’ll have a place to put all those coats.

I was talking to some friends about it and the conversation went like this:

J: “I don’t know if I want to be on a panel, but I want to be invited.”

Me: “That’s like me and birthday parties.”

C: “I want to be asked to be on a panel that’s actually a reading.”

Me: “I sort of hate birthday parties. Except my own.”

J: “I love being asked to give readings.”

C: “You are great at readings, J.”

J: “So are you, C!”

Me: *knocks over my water glass and spills water everywhere*

Me: “I want to be asked to give a reading at an off-site event. That’s really actually just a dance party.” *stares at spreading water*

J: “Ooooh me too!” *helpfully gets towels*

C: “Oh yes. Oh yes.” *helpfully mops up water*

Me, J, C: “No one is going go to ask us to do that.”

J: “I could organize an offsite reading. That’s a thing I could do. I could do that.”

Me & C: “Yes!”

J: “I would be so much happier without that in my life.”

Me & C: *nod rapidly*

C: “Do you want some more water?”

Me: “No, I’ve lost my privileges.”

Which brings me back to my original point, Projects We Would All Be Happier Without. Examples include:

• Retiling bathrooms
• Planning weddings
• Making chap/books, especially conceptual ones that try to wring our throats with our own self-imposed delusions and aspirations
• Making paintings
• Making movies
• Making graphic novels
• Making documentaries
• Making photographs
• Making houses
• Making chicken coops to hold chickens we’re getting
• Making activist organizations
• Making protests
• Making babies
• Making dinner
• Starting a new reading series (this sounds horrible why would anyone do this it’s such a headache I am not going to do this I am not going to do this OMG YOU GUYS I HAVE AN IDEA)
• Accepting unpaid work just because we love things and want to work with amazing people and are totally suckered into the idea of accidental glory and we are so afraid of unrealized potential and we are so grateful and excited to be given what really, at its heart, is such an incredible opportunity.

Oh yes, have I mentioned that I’m the new Poetry Editor of the Los Angeles Review?

PS– If you were about to offer me a full-time paid job with health benefits, I still need one of those.

And Here Is the Underworld: Where We Are Just Waiting for the Next Train

The fact of the matter is, I half-sleep through the underworld as our train passes through it on our way out of Rome.  This is the underworld, my travel companion on my left whispers to the one across from me as our train enters a tunnel.  The one across from me responds, No one seems alarmed.  Everyone, if truth be told, seems rather excited.  It’s cooler in the underworld.  The wind is faster.  Our bodies breathe more efficiently.  Everyone sits up.  They rustle their newspapers and turn pages in their books and finally choose which card to play, which red queen to set on a black king.  Their eyes open into wider curves and their necks stretch towards the open windows.  I shift in my post-dance-club, rocking-train sleep at the advent of movement around me.  The whole thing happens again on the way back.  This time, I am deep in post-midnight-sick sleep.  I had spent the night on knees in front of an Italian toilet, the result perhaps of too much sun and sand and wine and stars, my body refusing, suddenly, the intensities of the July countryside, and still I notice the mass bodily shift that occurs with our passage through the underworld, still I turn my head from one side to the other on the gray-blue headrest, that fabric particular and common to all mass transit, I lift my feet and set them down again into deeper sleep.  The underworld, on a train from and to Rome, inspires impatience—not a desire to hurry towards death, but a molecular impatience, nerves hurrying along our arms and backs.  It is a source of stimulation and pleasure.

In the Salerno train station, our point of transfer between Rome and Paestum, we meet a boy from Colorado, which is where my mother is from.  He has been farming in Beirut with WWOOF, which everyone seems to be doing these days.  His name is Grant, and his mother’s family is from Capaccio, he has been to visit them, his Italian cousin has just fallen in love with an American girl he has known for two weeks who is from Seattle, which is where all four of us who are traveling together at this moment live, even if we are not from there originally (although I am).  This is a small thing, our meeting him.  But he happily contributes a line to our ninth and penultimate exquisite corpse of the weekend, and happily makes an appearance in that same poem as “in the Salerno train station / you will meet a boy, a farmer, who will /.”  I’m afraid I don’t remember the rest.  But we do meet him, and he does whatever it is that our poem asks him to, and he laughs in happy recognition when, still sitting at plastic train-station-restaurant tables, we read the poem aloud.

Grant is worried his cousin will move to America for the girl, tell the entire family it is to spend more time with Grant, and he will take the blame for losing the favorite son to across-the-ocean.  Falling in love with someone you’ve only known two weeks is a big thing.  Family anger is a bigger thing.  Italian family anger, I imagine, is an epic thing.

This is the day the ticket machine asks us to “touch the solution you prefer.”

I like this.  It makes me see my fingers reaching out into the world towards a mirage of best-case scenarios.  They’ve arranged and shaped themselves like digital buttons, rectangular but with soft corners, like Apple products.  They line up and float at a convenient distance in front of me.  When I choose, my finger sinks in, leaves a faint impression, the way pixels on a touch screen sink inward, gather around your touch like they want to be near something living.  The mirage shakes, bounces back.  I try to put the phrase in this poem, then that one.

The next day, we reunite with Rome and with our larger herd of traveling companions and with our larger purpose of writing poetry while in Rome.  We go to the Papal Basilica of St. Peter and we are asked to notice big things and small things.  To sort things into two columns.  To label and list experience, to demarcate it by size, to neatly encapsulate our descriptions and observations of St. Peter’s into an hourglass shape of infinite to infinitesimal and back out again.  This is often how poetry starts.  This is not at all what poetry is.  St. Peter’s is a big thing.  The line to get into St. Peter’s that I wait in is a small thing.

Inside, I scrutinize the anklebones of Jesus on Michelangelo’s Pieta.  These, I think, are a small thing.  But they are plural; maybe they are small things.  Then again, maybe they are not.  Anklebones are hard, I imagine, to carve, because they are small.  And curved.  They are precise.  Jesus does not have fleshy ankles; his anklebones are delicate and prominent.  I look at my own, then back up again to the back of a large woman’s head.  The statue, as I think about it again, reminds me of the statue of Lincoln, the one in Washington, DC.  Is there something inherently similar about cold marble laps?  Or am I fabricating a similarity as I search for reference points, am I paving roads in order to connect the signposts in my mind?  The cleaning carts in St. Peter’s don’t make any noise.  Unlike the ones in the Pantheon.

We go early to the Pantheon.  We share the dome—that dome—with fewer tourists than usual and with the cleaning carts of modern Rome.  When people read out loud to one another that evening, someone asks in a thoughtful voice, examining the scrawled handwriting across a white-papered notebook as if it is not her own, If you cleaned the pantheon, how would you feel about it?  Would I feel differently? she says.  Four people look up, amazed.  Look, they say, crowding around her like crows about something crumbly or a bit of shine, look, I wrote that exact same thing in my white-papered notebook in my scrawling handwriting.  Look, look, we are exactly the same, we are familiar in this foreign place.

I wonder if it’s a Papal decree that cleaning carts not make noise—if tucked among Windex and rags, paper towels and holy water in spray bottles, each cart has a can of WD-40 to grease its own wheels in case of creaks.  Handsome men in suits stand in front of low fences made of red velvet everywhere.  They smile politely and answer all queries in quiet, modulated Italian.  They too have been greased until they are rid of any creaks.  Small thing?  Big thing?  (Venial sin or mortal?)

Fifteen red-robed children pass speaking Spanish.  Their robes extend down to their ankles, hoods hanging down their napes at the ready to cover their heads.  A choir.  Or a camp group overly concerned with knees and shoulders.  Each has a gold cross strung around a child-sized neck.  ¿Pero por qué no? a boy asks, his shoulders rising up in rightful indignation, his voice carrying in high-pitched insistence even as it is rushed away into nothingness under the massive ceiling (big thing).

My mother, who went to Catholic school, asks, what is it do you think about knees and shoulders?  I say, perhaps just a way of censoring upper thighs, but knees aren’t sexy, knees are not possibly sexy.  When we were little, she says, it was knees and elbows.  Our skirts had to touch the ground when we knelt, and our shirts had to cover our elbows.  Elbows, I say, now who in their right mind is concerned about seeing a woman’s elbows?  Oh Maggie, she says, you don’t know about upper arms?  Oh, upper arms are really trouble, she says.  Haven’t you ever, she says, read a Victorian novel?

I stare at a painting.  Who knows which one.  It’s lost already.  I look in my white-papered notebook of scrawled handwriting: it’s not lost at all, it’s right there, it’s the Transfiguration of Christ on Mount Tabor, it was done in 1767.  It’s not a painting at all.  It’s a mosaic, of pieces so small I’ve mistaken it for a painting twice now (mosaic pieces: very small things).  Who is present at Jesus’ ascension (big thing) and does not watch?  Who looks at the faces around her, on the ground, rather than the one rising upward?

Is it me, with my dilettante’s mind?  I keep writing down the conversations of people I am traveling with rather than notes on the light, or lack of light, or variation of light, in paintings: these taxi drivers are the worst, someone says, not only are they all fascists, but they rip you off.  When I was in middle school, I wore all black and told everyone I was goth even though I was emo, someone says.  A third: That satyr has attitude.  A fourth: I’m going to needs lots of bones and fetuses for this poem.  A fifth: I have a dilettante’s mind.

A sixth: This is the story of John the Baptist.  Me: Tell me the story.  John the Baptist, she says, baptized Jesus.  (This crawls inside of me and settles itself in a place where things that make sense go.)  He didn’t want to.  He said he was unworthy, that Jesus should baptize him.  But Jesus insisted, and through baptizing Jesus, John the Baptist became holy.  It was a moment of communion for everyone present.  I make her statement present tense in my notebook and I look around at everyone present.

She and I come to a sign, saying prayer alone.  Or maybe it says prayer only / silence please.  The Vatican translators, like the cleaning carts, don’t make any noise.  There is no low fence of red velvet here, but a full curtain, thick and muffling.  We nod to the quiet, non-creaking guard, we go in, we sit.  We stay for a long time (I think).  Unlike the underworld, this place creeps in, not rushes.  It lulls.  It is the only space in St. Peter’s where you are not pushed.  I put that into the column of big things, important things, things as large as elephants and obelisks.  (Although the elephant obelisk, which is near the Pantheon, is a rather small obelisk.  But for a small obelisk, it inspires a rather large fondness.)

Outside, Mary’s breasts are free from her robe just as Minerva and Arachne freed their arms from their robes so they could weave (bares arms, small thing.  Freedom to move without constraint, big thing).  Lady Justice sits nearby with her scales of justice.

In the colonnade, I see a pretty-lipped faun with red hair and blue eyes.

Our tour guide for the excavations below St. Peter’s has a tattoo of a butterfly on her ankle.  Not on the side, as one expects, but in front, right where her ankle slopes down to create her foot.  She speaks in a sexy, soft-voiced, mangled English.  She says things like, In passing we are an open sky.  The most important personality is the lion.  He probably seems a pagan god, but is Christ the sun.

The excavations below St. Peter’s seem very mysterious to me.

I wonder about her tattoo, her modestly low heels, whether or not she rides a scooter, why an Italian boy would fall in love with an American girl he has only known for two weeks.  I think, I like how Jesus always has his friends near him, flanking either side.

I list more things into big and small columns: last week I got hit by a scooter ridden by a woman named Paola while crossing the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, the bruise is now a perfect green on my elbow—small thing; today is so hot a truck swells and gets stuck between a parked car and a railing—the truck is a big thing, the being stuck a small thing.  The driver waits patiently for someone to come with butter or keys.  Some people are easy to have patience with.  This is a big thing.

I sit down to write about St. Peter’s (big thing).  I write about the train, instead, about the anklebones and the cleaning carts (small things) and the Roman rolling black-outs, which might be the underworld passing through Rome, rather than our train passing through the underworld.  Last night, the Carrefour supermarket.  At lunch, the restaurant.  I am having trouble writing about St. Peter’s.  I keep thinking about my mother, whose name is also Mary, instead.  I am having trouble writing about Rome.  I keep thinking:

This is not a place for travel stories.

“I feel incredibly fortunate to be alive now on a personal level, because, let’s face it, though the world is really falling apart, I am thankful I can be here as a witness and a consoler.” –Noelle Kocot

I wish I was able to say things about all of the things, but I don’t think that’s in the cards beyond some basic facts. I’m not even going to sort out the good from the hard because I feel it’s more accurate right now to just leave it all here in once place. If you’re FB friends with me, this is going to be redundant, because I’ve been setting things down there all week.

On a personal level, I’ve eaten a lot of ice cream and gelato this week, which is always wonderful. It was beautifully sunny a few days, and I have the space and time in my life to sit in it and soak it up.

• Dan Chiasson’s somehow heartwrenching and comforting piece on Boston in The New Yorker.
• A really smart, kind, wonderful piece on empathy and its purposes and limitations. I feel lucky to know this nosy girl. Plus, she offers wonderful reading advice if you want to keep delving into the subject.
• More smart and kind words from people I admire and feel lucky to know: portrait of Keats as a community college student. “A prime example of a typical community college student is a 25-year-old man who can’t spell, who has no money, is often dealing with what we broadly call family situations, and who is looked down upon for being from the marginal aspects of mainstream culture.” And oh, how we need Keats.
• I just…we just…it just really doesn’t make sense to me, and I’ve had to mostly shut it out, because we are so stalled and it is like we are mired in mud. Gun control legislation. Any measure, whether or not it’s entirely effective. Let’s pass it. I don’t care if it’s mostly symbolic and can’t be enforced. You hear me? I do not care. Pass it anyway. (Here is Obama talking in case you missed it.)
• Speaking of mud, there’s a sinkhole in Chicago that swallowed three cars today. This is becoming one of my worst nightmares.
• All of which makes me think it really might be the end of the world.
• But then here are some pictures of baby sloths crawling around the zoo and touching things with their creepy little hands and that makes me think probably the world will keep going, for at least a little while. The sloths are not worried. The sloths are curious, and they are so fiercely protected by their mother that their human caretakers (zookeepers) have not been able to determine their sexes.

So that’s where I am. Where are you?

I stared at her, stupefied.

“Because I want to win.”

Me: My 5th grade teacher had some sort of psycho-sexual fetish for airplanes and Eddie Rickenbacker, an ace World War I fighter pilot.

BK: My grade school principal had jerry curls down to his shoulders and he had an affair with the secretary. It was great. Everyone knew.

SJ: How did everyone know?

BK: Someone saw them having sex in his car. In the school parking lot.

Me: A kid or a parent?

BK: A parent. I think.

Me: Why didn’t they drive somewhere where a stranger would catch them, instead of staying in the school parking lot?

My sister: Why didn’t they just have sex in his office?

SJ: Maybe his office door had a window in it.

Me: …Cars have four windows in four doors.

My sister: Six windows, actually.

ML: I still remember walking by a truck that was rocking on Lake Washington Boulevard– a really busy, high traffic street– in the middle of the day once. And all you could see was just a man’s hairy butt, thrusting away.