chicating

about pitching one of my essays, like, right now."I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and damn it, people like me."(Well, I'm not sure they do, really. Especially around here.)

But I had a target in mind and they seem like they don't really do personal accounts anymore. So, there goes that head of steam...felt nice for a moment though.But I guess any thought that includes me and"tackling" anything is just sort of wrong. All that wasted, misplaced self-love, bubbling around for no good reason...can a person's ego get blue balls? It's probably from the story and how eager I am to try to prove I'm not some...literary make-a-wish. But, now I feel like I put on makeup to lie down alone. Either I can focus on how pretty it was or what a pain it'll be washing it off the sheets...usually, I admit, I'd pick the sheets because that's just what my life is like,

Maybe it was Jacqueline....it was sort of frustrating when she made me feel good about myself when she was alive, too. Good that we can keep that streak going across time and space!

It's not really that I hate myself *that* profoundly, although I do have my moments. I don't know, the timing would usually be really bad. Like, "Fill out a fellowship application in three days because you can't win if you don't play," bad.(Do I seem like a person that could EVER happen to? Leaving aside the whole can't-be-accomplished on benefits thing, which I don't think she ever understood, where winning that would have closed one door as it was opening another. maybe.) Looks like it still is.
There'll be some contest(that I won't win, either) Or I'll be bored in the heat of summer(Hopefully strong enough not to get a Bluesky) put it up the blog and vaguely remember this little hint of drama.

for "knots", which might have been different, further from the holidays.

She pulled at the ribbon of the small, compact package, that kind of put up a fight. Looking at the shiny blue paper and the neat wrapping job(She couldn't see any tape!) she wondered why the knotted ribbon that someone had fluffed up and made fancy, was green instead of white or silver, which seemed like the logical, stylish choices someone at the store might make. "Wow, good things come in small packages." For a moment, her cheeks got hot, because they'd just taken things to the next level recently, and she hoped he didn't think...well, never mind. In one of those moments of partial telepathy that she might have been glad had skipped a beat, he said "I got you a green one because it's your favorite color."

people are still trickling in from their holidays, I guess. Kind of a lonely feeling when your festivities are the same few people...kind of doing the same stuff. But it was okay.
Skipping the last zoom of the year to finish a writing sample for a workshop I picked as a gift that starts 1/20. I don't have to be done till 1/11, but I get tired of all the Zooms anyway...a few times a month is more than enough.
Reading a fascinating book about LA in the 1960s...it's something of a tome and I'm on page 34, but it seems promising so far!(Wishing it wasn't quite so physically huge so I could take it around, but if that's my biggest gripe then that is truly a great book, right? But I'm not going to overfill the office again.

really did help me spot some trouble spots so the virtual group is worth it, two sessions in, even if they start late all the time and aren't, like, The Answer or anything like that. (Not that I really thought that would happen, and I'm only aware I have the hope, down deep, because of that little deflation when it doesn't happen. Again.) It would be so *easy* if I could find something that would make me WANT to crank away in this little corner again and I'm trying my hardest to pretend this is true, but, meh.

(in my next life, I'm signing up with the hedonists, I swear--a writing exercise)
Theme: a forbidden object.( Read more... )

I think I am kind of like The Bear.(Although I don't think I ever reached his dizzying earlier heights.)
But I need to find my writing "Beef sandwich"

My last biggest publication was in the wake of the Great Recession, and I have submitted to that Big Mystery Magazine...don't know, between every six months and every year and a half. Never got a ton of love back, but they like my baby-shower caper thing? Maybe?(Women editors are essential for my Southwestern faux Lippman side.)

Still, it might work out for her today. She did feel a minor flicker of guilt as she added the Big Boss’ info into the section of code that her team, and those fucking kids, hadn’t fixed yet—it was bigger than she might have expected—Kat was fast, too, which put the bitter tinge back in her smile of satisfaction. She did what she could do, and when she hit enter, she did feel a cold pit in her stomach. It was soon replaced by the memory of her aching eyes, pounding head, canceled plans, all to be cast aside. If she could have boiled his virtual rabbit—she might have. But, of course, that would bring suspicion down on her. She hadn’t thought of herself as the gloating type and it wasn’t the kind of expanded possibility that essays about jobsearching touted

(from a joke from my stepdad when I wrote college applications and wrote many of them.)
Hope this one was more worth writing than all of that stuff... this is just a sample, though.
One thing I remembered from those first months is not feeling good enough for them, acutely conscious that I went to a state college with a big reputation as a “party school”—not that I, rushing home on paratransit, ever got to party much. But that same rush home also kept me from all the chatter about art, films and the big questions that people had told me I might love about college
. I also still debated hiding a few things: the severity of my disability, and, in a very related topic, how little I knew from my own experience about dating and sex. It was easier, back then, to hide my physical being, to take what I had learned in junior high and high school about being the dry little voice in the front row and apply it to the wilds of pixels.

Living as an idea was gratifying until we all started to become real friends. But maybe I might have dithered about the reveal longer if someone in Illinois hadn’t had a daughter with a diagnosis somewhat like mine. Also, people were wanting to meet me in my actual life which was certainly possible, but more logistically complicated than with my abled counterparts, on grounds that I couldn’t just hop in a car and meet someone, at the very least. Being more honest only felt like giving up some freedom for about a week, even though there was a part of me that had tried to conform that halfway expected, even though our guiding spirit was a televised cheerleader with a mystical calling, to have my thoughts and impressions valued less, or to become a curiosity for all the wrong reasons after people understood about the wheelchair and some of its discontents.

I guess having people at college say “But you’re so smart! “after revealing my mobility deficits and brain damage(different part of the brain) left a mark. I’d found a community that was intrigued by my differences.
Which is not to say that over the years, there’s never been a divide....

After all this time, I finally wrote an "OMG, the stick's blue," story, as a lot of people did in my creative-writing classes in college. (A few were good, but I think that's what drama is, when you're twenty in the burbs. (I couldn't write one because I wasn't having sex--not that I am now, again, but a sort of speculative-fiction elegy to my would-be fertility seems appropriate now, in ways it might not have when my fondest dream was to Fit. Which, of course, I never really managed, more than being the quippy mascot who makes everyone feel better with how weird she is.But I guess I didn't want to fit enough just to copy, though I did want to rip off Ann Beattie and Philip Roth pretty hard in those days.