Swing High, Sweet Vine

Carbondale, IL

I'm glad I decided to leave the City and come here a day early and just chill out before I perform my duties tomorrow. I was invited here by Southern Illinois University's own diva professor, Allison Joseph. Allison is also the editor of the Crab Orchard Review. She asked me to come and teach a performance poetry workhop to teenagers for a young writer's conference they have here every year. I love the work that Allison does. The workshop will only be for an hour, which I know will go by at whiplash speed. Then I am to perform later on tomorrow night and judge a youth poetry slam. I'm thinking I will talk a little bit about the misconceptions of performance and performance poetry and do a hands on performance activity involving colors. That's usually really fun, especially with younger people.


I love designing curricula: from my semester at Juilliard, to one shot deals like this, to the summer curriculum for my teen summer camp. By the way, I don't know if i ever mentioned this, but my boss as the Children's Aid asked me to design and implement a 6 week, 40 hr a week summer camp for 13 and 14 year olds. Quite an undertaking, needless to say. It's been an incredibly energizing experience, from the brutality of paperwork down to lecturing indecisive teens on the phone about the sins of sitting on their asses all summer. I've been hustling the hell out of this camp. The parents are all for it; it's some of the teens who need convincing. Many of them are just afraid of new experiences and are afraid of exiting their comfort zones (i.e. sitting on their asses all summer).

Almost everything is in place. I'm mainly doing outreach now, to get these kids enrolled in the camp. I'm especially trying to reach out to the families in our Foster Care Unit to try to get their children in here to experience some cool things. I want more foster kids involved in my program in general, starting in the fall. I'm going to have my little unsuspecting campers doing a lot of shit: Central Park Restoration, learning how to make copper jewlery, photography, African dance and drum, field trips to Broadway plays, learning how to start their own business. It all looks like fun on paper and especially in my head, i just hope that the implemention of it all will be effective.

My boss at the Children's Aid has been mad cool about letting me do the things I want to do for/with the young folk. I feel like I'm constantly down in her office trying to sell some idea to her and she pretty much goes with it, after asking a few pragmatic questions. We have a surprisingly good working relationship. At first, months ago, i think she was pretty skeptical about hiring me. She found me a tad bit edgy. Now, she's trying to convince me to become a full time employee. Now, the tables have turned and I'm the skeptical one. I've been resisting her seed dropping. The other day after a meeting she asked me, "So, are you sure you don't want to come on board full time." I looked at her and said, "yeah, I'm sure." She knows that I have a life that I don't want to leave. She asks me almost every day and I tell her no almost every day. She's persistent though, my boss. And I'm not mad at her for it.

I really do love this work. But, I also love my freedom. I love the fact that I'm in Carbondale, IL right now in a hotel room, in my underwear, typing this. I love the malleability of my life, and the fact that I can go on a 10 day excursion without my little self-created world at work falling apart in my absence.


Short History of my 9-5's

I got my first part time job at 15, in a little independantly owned toy store in Wellington, FL where all the toys were wooden. The very day I started working there, the owner got into a shouting match with Patty Paulino (a girl in my grade, mind you) and decided that she was going to close the shop down forever. I don't remember what the fight was about, but it wasn't that serious, that I remember. Anyways, I thought the owner was just upset and bluffing, until she folded forty bucks into my palm and told me to go on home. She closed the store down the very next day. My first day turned out to be my last. That clearly wasn't a very auspicioius beginning.

A year later, I got a telemarketing job where I had the propensity to make more money than I'd ever made in my entire 16 year old life. The company had an acronym with no meaning, which they told us we could make it into anything we want, if people asked. We were selling some long distance service. By the second day, I realized that this place was a scam. I worked there for a grand total of three days. The fourth day I walked in, picked up the phone to make a call and couldn't do it. I feigned a stomach virus, went home early and never returned (except to pick up my $150 check).

I worked at Walgreens in the photo lab my senior year of high school and worked there for 1 1/2 months. I left and don't remember why. Oh, yeah, I hated fixing the shelves, getting off at midnight, and having to pay for a bag of cheetos at break time. I found it all a tad bit unfair. I didn't like my manager either.

The two jobs I did like: I worked at an answering service for a year, between my junior year and senior year in high school, and loved it. I learned a lot about air conditioners, fradulent companies, and prescription drugs to quell incessant sobbing. One summer, I started dating one of my supervisors who asked me to be his girlfriend in Creole. I said yes, thinking he was asking me if i was hungry. By the time I recognized my mistake, I didn't have the heart to tell him that I misunderstood his question. I dated him for a month and then broke up with him because he was a Virgo. I learned to type at the speed of Southern speech and now, I'm really good at transcribing interviews as a result (as long as the person is Southern).

At Florida State, I worked for a survey research lab, where I got to ask teenagers if they ever tried smoking. They only had to answer in yes or no answers so their parents could be standing right there and wouldn't know that their child was confessing to a total stranger to being Puff the Magic Dragon. I worked there for over a year. I developed a hard crush on a handsome brother named Amir who worked with me, who I ended up making out with in the jacuzzi at Jefferson Commons in front of all of our friends. His girlfriend never found out.

I worked at Barnes & Noble a couple of years ago, in 02/03 my first year in grad school at UVA but eventually quit after 4 months because I kept going on the road for gigs and got tired of writing time-off request letters. After a while, I started turning in the same exact letter, and just kept changing the dates. Needless to say, my manager wasn't shedding tears at my departure.


Hustlin' Ever Since

Basically, I've been getting by teaching poetry at several different sites, doing residencies, giving talks, performing, selling CD's, transcribing interviews and freelance writing. The Children's Aid Society is the first steady "job" that I've liked in years. And now, they're trying to put me on lock and as my dear friend 13 of Nazareth once wrote "my mind is torn at the hemispheres."

This is the thing: this life of unidentical days and no health insurance benefits...this is the only life I know. I have found a strange sense of comfort in this unsecure existence. This lifestyle isn't the type that most people are comfortable with, and for good reason. It's hard to budget. It's hard to plan, unless you're planning for the worst. That (planning for the worst) becomes very easy to do after some practice. Most of the time, I honestly don't know if I'll have another swinging vine to grab on to when it's time to let go of the one I'm holding on to now. I don't mind living in mid-air for a hot second, but I'm afraid as hell of falling. But, this is how I sleep at night, knowing its all going to work out when in truth, I really don't know shit. I guess that's faith. Knowing, but not knowing.

This kind of life is all that has made sense to me for the past few years. This is how I feel most alive. I think it's mostly because I have my freedom, or at least, I feel closer to what freedom means. None of us are free, really. Freedom is an illsuion, though I think it's one of the most important illusions to believe in and to strive for.

I think I fear becoming an integral part of any machine. I don't want to be that screw that when you take it out, the whole thing falls apart. I don't want to be that conveyor belt that just transports other people's genius all day. Though I've been and am a part of a few organizations, I've never been dogmatic about any group. Don't get me wrong, I believe in groups much more than I don't believe in them. But even when I'm in the thick moist center of things, I always view things as an outsider, because the nature of groups is a paradoxical one. Groups are a paradox in themselves; they are inclusive and exclusive at the same time. That's why I will never completely trust them. It's always a question of who gets in and who is left out.

I don't want to be that jenga block: i don't want the whole edifice to come down just because I'm not in it, or because I've been clumsily taken out. I just want a cluster of the world to remember that I was once here. I don't want people crying and crumbling at my funeral; I want them to dance in ways that i couldn't (b/c i can't dance), make fun of me, and eat all my favorite foods.

I've just never felt all the way comfortable with being too depended on, though this does not make me undependable. I don't want to belong to anyone, though this doesn't mean that I don't want to belong somewhere. Dammit: what the hell is all this paradoxical talk about tonight?

I guess I said all of that to say: I'm considering working full time. One reason is because I feel it's part of growing up, to be fully committed to something outside myself, something other than my own craft. Another reason is that all the work I want to do next school year with the 12-14 year olds is going to require more than 20 hrs a week of my time.

I'm not desparate though. I'm in a good position: I know in my bones that I'll be all right, whether I work full time at CAS or not. I'll find other gigs to make ends meet, like I always have. So, if CAS offers me a salary that I don't want, or one that isn't conducive to my financial needs, then I can easily refuse without blinking an eye, and I'll just continue working there part time, looking for other vines to swing my way.

Two Fountainheads Better than One?

For months I've been at a standstill with my novel, which I started last October at a writers retreat. Even though it's always been on my mind and even though I've been working on it occasionally, perhaps too casually, I still felt like I was running in place, like on a treadmill. And for the record, I hate treadmills, elliptical machines and stairclimbers because I dislike the concept of stationary progress.

Yesterday, an explosion happened. I don't know what else to call it. I started writing around 4pm, tentatively at first, then manically. I cancelled all of my plans for the night telepathically, I'm hoping, because i didn't pick up the phone once. For hours my hands flew across my keys with the necessity of an impending breath. My head was a bowl of fireworks, uncanny synaptic connections resulting in unpredictable bursts of backstory and myth making. I made a decision on yet another major structural change and did more character development in one night than I've done in 7 months.

I spent all night putting out fires while simultaneously starting new ones. I wrote and deleted, switched around and tightened up until my eyes rang like bells signaling for me to go to sleep. I woke up this morning like a woman in love: obessessive and neurotic and here I am. I really am my own favorite audience.

I don't know if it's the fish oil capsules I just started taking this week, my sharing session with my dear friend Lightfoot who came and visited last week (who is also writing a novel), or the Ayn Rand book I'm reading now (The Fountainhead--fucking incredible!). Either way, once I decided to make a major structural change, which is to write the novel in third person as opposed to the first, all of these backdoors to my characters opened up, doors that I was never supposed to imagine.

The first person point of view was limiting me greatly and I had no idea how much until now. I'm in love with my characters now in a way that I never was before simply because I didn't know them--and I'm still learning them. They're now behaving with much more depth and I find myself really letting them be themselves, and letting them take risks in their decisions and in their behaviors. I love them in all of their beauty and ugliness. I love the things that I've learned almost as much as I love the things about them that I have no clue about yet.

As far as character development is concerned, I definately thank "the Fountainhead" for that. This is the most irresistable book that I've read in a really long time--no bullshit. Between this book and my manuscript, I can't tear my eyes away from words today (with the exception of my ex-lover's face, who I met for a brief margarita-involved lunch). Anyways, many of Rand's characters are utterly despicable but so fascinating. And how they react to each other is priceless.

What I like most about her characters is that I find myself unconcerned with their flaws and perfections. And by this, I"m talking about the characters themselves as people, not as chess pieces of craft. Rand's characters are much too round and much too developed for such preoccupations. I've found that it is only flat, underdeveloped characters, as well as the people who are the most one-dimensional to me in the context of my life (by my volition or by theirs) that leave me contemplating the extent of their perfections and imperfections when I know damn well that humanity is much too complicated for that.

Take for instance, when I meet someone, romantically let's say, I gauge whether or not I want him in my life singularly by picking out his flaws, because it's easy to do that when someone means essentially nothing to me. His flaws alone can help me make a decison. They're absolutely extricable from the rest of his person. Oh, his arms are too skinny? His breath a little tart? Well, to hell with him. However, when I've grown to like a lot or love, which I've been known to do, his flaws become inextricable from his good qualities and the rest of who he is. I've become more invested in the mediocre but oh so grand things that make him who he is. And the "flaws" are all wrapped up in it. That's the model for good character building, I think. Rand's characters are just unequivocably and unapologetically who they are: from her most defiant to her most insecure.

Ok, so I'm going back to my world. Just had to come out and say hello.