and that is all.
April 21: Reef
some kind of freedom this is,
that keeps me locked up tight as
an air bubble in pancake batter
fried with too much oil so it stays
down to the stomach acid.
some kind of freedom this is,
that smiles me into repressed
shouts and punches and remarks
sharp as an untrimmed nail,
or an unsanded nail.
What do you know. I whirl around and nine days have passed since my last NaPoWriMo post. I’m so bad at commitment.
I’ll double up on poems every day to catch up. I hope I stay more together until the end of April.
April 5: houses lol
when i talk to you
i feel as if im talking to myself
the slight bounce of my voice off
the posterpasted walls of my room
announces absence
yet you receive
houses lol
while i speak of enthalpy change
you flash me pictures of
houses lol
you are a presence
This comes from my attempt at using Google Pig Latin Voice Search to search for Hess’s Law and ending up with a search for “houses lol” instead. I had to go through my Twitter feed to remember what I did on April 5. Guh.
April 14: Sluice
A tumble of water,
Sulfur-tinged, gulf-impinged;
An outflow of molecules
upon molecules upon molecules
gripping each other by the
tips of their fingers
and somersaulting into a
summery street.
The morning raises them to the sun.
April 3: Single-Legged Soldiers
Grandma’s knitting needle: clack, clack.
Crossfade to the whirring machinations of
the marching needle,
Stepping in time with scurrying fingers.
Minty tooth-decay-preventing chewing gum chatter and
railings clanging against hangers
drown out the cyclic stamp of these single-legged soldiers.
Peeking through the hole left by a dropped stitch,
The world is not as clear.
John Green once said that college won’t be “the best years of your life…unless you have a terrible, terrible life.”
So why do so many of the other adults in my life keep telling me the opposite? When they tell me that college was the best four years of their lives, they’re just confirming to me that their adult lives have been sad and mediocre in comparison to their college years, and by telling me that I’m going to feel the same, they’re basically condemning me in their minds to decades of crappiness, reminiscing about college and waiting to die.
Okay, maybe that’s a little overdramatic. It’s just that last week was my last week of classes, so almost all the teachers made a little speech about moving on and tips for the future and whatever. The majority of them told us these would be the best years of our lives. And just now, my dad was lamenting the cancellation of the ferry route that he used to take to university every day. He had to tack on the fact that his university days were the best of his life. I’m mainly sick of hearing it because I’m scared that it’s going to be true. I don’t know what I want to do with my life, and I’m worried that after the structure of education completely falls away, I’ll collapse with it and become flat.
If there have to be a best x years of my life, I want x to equal the number of years I live.
So April is National Poetry Writing Month. I’ve been intending to do this for ages, but yesterday was my last day of school and I spent the entire day lazing around on the playgrounds, running on two and a half hours of sleep, so I didn’t manage to start on time. As a consequence, I’m posting two poems today.
I’ve been writing poetry for years now, but my productivity has really been lagging recently. I hope this gets me back into it.
April 2, making up for April 1: Them
She sits, sunken,
All slackened jaw and bowing spine and withered thighs,
Skin spreading across the easy chair
almost like a cold teabag, one day old.
But even a seaful of hot water
would do her no good.
There once hung a canvas on the wall behind her,
Smeared in a shade that she called green
and they called blue.
They said the same about the beach,
How it smelled like rotting fish
when all she could smell was summer
and learning to stop ice cream dripping down the cone.
She eats ice cream perfectly now.
April 2, the real one: Verre Vert
He lived with green glass.
The smashed green bottle bleeds as darkly
as his head next to it.
The occasional head turns to
the wall of green windows
across from his green window.
Finally one sees and opens its mouth
and squinches its nose
and twists its eyebrows
and widens its green, glassy eyes.
It looks like the blown green sculpture
gaping on a shelf high, high above
where his head had reached when he stood,
Its abstract twisting giving way
to images of horrified death-seers
like the shadows of a cloud’s surface.
Oh well, this blog’s here, so I might as well use it. I guess I’m just in a writing mood.
I’ve never been one for New Year’s resolutions. I used to make them, but I’d never stick to them, so last year I decided not to make any. I didn’t make any this year either, but I thought of a couple of small things I can work into my routine that will have a long-term positive effect. (According to, like, everyone, writing stuff down is supposed to help you stick to it. Okay.)
Read an article from the Chinese newspaper over breakfast every morning.
This was the first idea I had a couple of weeks/ months ago. I’m always fiddling around on my phone in the morning, tweeting and sometimes reading the New York Times if I feel like it. But I can do those things anytime during the day – I always have my phone on me – while I only have the Chinese paper at home. I really need to improve my Chinese, because spending an hour and a half zombie-ing my way through tutoring isn’t helping me all too much. Like my German teacher said last Friday, you can’t learn a language in a few hours a week. He made spending half an hour revising the language every day sound easy, but it’s hard to start with and gets even harder if you’re learning three foreign languages and one native language that you don’t really speak. At least this is a step.
Exercise.
I had a going-to-the-gym thing going strong for three weeks, but I went to a concert last Monday, which made me skip the gym on Monday and also made me really tired and unmotivated the rest of the week. And then my dad had a cold and passed it onto me, which just gave me an excuse not to go this Monday…and everyone knows that if you start the week off badly the rest of the week goes badly too. Well, this is just a written reminder to myself to get back on the track I was on for three weeks.
Read books instead of trawling Tumblr/ Reddit/ YouTube/ forums for something to do.
I woke up this morning and read 80 pages of Let the Great World Spin before I even left my bedroom, something I used to do every weekend, holiday and sick day morning. Hell, I used to start and finish whole books in one morning. Or stay up until 3am reading. But now those late nights are spent talking to friends on Skype, watching every single Gregory Brothers video, reading fanfiction…you get the point. This was partially triggered by a discussion our psych class has had several times over the last term or so. My teacher (and two of the people in my class) thinks technology is basically ruining our lives and making everyone really, really stressed out. Which is true, but it’s also presented us with a lot of advantages. Plus it’s here, and here to stay, so that argument is really fruitless. Still, when we were having that discussion again yesterday, she asked us if we all read. And I realized that it’s not because I have too much work that I haven’t been reading, it’s because I have too much other distraction.
It pains me to admit that, but I’m glad I have. Okay, tl;dr – I SHALL READ MORE AND MORE OFTEN AND CLEAR OUT THOSE BOOKS ON MY BOOKSHELF I HAVEN’T READ. Jeez, I never used to have a book on my bookshelf I hadn’t read at least once.
Brush my teeth straight after dinner.
Simple. Especially because I have braces, brushing my teeth is a big production, so I really don’t like eating stuff after I’ve brushed my teeth at night. If I brush my teeth, I’ll stop eating after dinner. I’m not usually hungry after dinner, but it’s an empty couple of hours that make me feel like I should eat. And eating when you’re not hungry is bad.
Sleep before 11:00.
Maybe I should set the demarcation time even earlier, but we’ll start with 11. Particularly in the last two or three weeks, I’ve barely had any homework. My evenings are spent watching Law and Order: SVU with my parents, but somehow I still find myself staying up until 12 on a normal night or 1 on a late one. Seeing as I wake up at 6:30, that’s kind of ridiculous.
Well, that’s all for now. I’m sure I’ll think of some more in the coming days. It’s good to know this blog is here whenever I’m in a brainspilly mode like I am right now…committing myself to a personal blogging schedule will just make me hate it. But I’m on WordPress all the time for my food blog, anyway. I’m coming dangerously close to not making sense. Okay.
Bye.
jhwu 