For @batarangst bc Idk if it will fit in an ask, and I hate being constrained by word counts anyway.

Back when I was 23 or 24, some friends visited from downstate. It was T’s 21st birthday, so I figured the best thing to buy her was alcohol. She requested a bottle of 99 Apples, which 99 proof apple schnappes. We all bought other alcohol too, but it isn’t relevant.

So we go back to my other friend’s apartment, and start drinking. Now, I have very little self-control once I start drinking. I’ve gotten better over the years, but it was bad back then. We were playing drinking games, and I just kept taking shots. I know I bought myself something to drink, but I ended up drinking a lot of the Apples.

We must have been getting loud, because someone in the complex called the cops. I have no idea how I managed to compose myself while they were there. All I remember was everyone telling me to shut up in desperate whispered voices. After the cops left, the mood was kinda ruined, so we all decided to go to bed.

I was drunk. I was so drunk, I started stripping the minute I got into my apartment, completely forgetting that my friends were behind me. Somehow, my husband got me to bed.

After a night of drinking, I always wake up really early. It’s very frustrating. Anyway, my husband decided he wanted to take care of me, so he asked me what he could get from the store for me. Bacon. Eggs. Hashbrowns. I was suddenly so hungry. I wanted everything.

So he leaves, and I’m sitting there waiting in the bedroom bc T was out on the couch still sleeping. I don’t know why my husband and I didn’t just go out for breakfast, but maybe I didn’t want to. So I’m waiting, and I start to feel a little nauseous. Then worse and worse and worse. I don’t think I threw up, but I felt awful. By the time he got back, I certainly wasn’t in any shape to eat anything. I wanted to sit and watch tv, but T was still asleep in the living room.

My husband had the key of our friend K’s apartment (who hadn’t been drinking with us bc he doesn’t do that kind of thing.) K was at work, so we decided he probably wouldn’t mind if he hung out at his place until T woke up. Well. I spent hours throwing up. Once, it started, it did not stop. I had a bucket, thank god. We didn’t mess up K’s place. But to this day he doesn’t know that I spent an entire morning puking my guts out in his apartment. I threw up water. I couldn’t keep a thing down for longer than ten minutes. Eventually, it calmed down enough for me to eat, but it was rough. The sickest I’ve ever been from drinking.

And that is why artificial green apple flavored stuff makes me nauseous.

miffly:

airy-minotaur:

strangeasanjles:

laughingacademy:

commovente:

While in graduate school at the University of Houston, I supplemented my income by working as a writer in residence for Writers in the Schools (WITS). I was with WITS for three years, during which I visited third, fourth, and fifth grade classrooms, and worked with groups of students visiting the Menil museum of art, the Houston Historical Society, and the Houston Arboretum.

When first hired by WITS, I expected that working to explain some of my favorite poems to fourth graders would result in me becoming a better teacher of poetry. What I wasn’t expecting was that (thanks to having my brain blown apart on a weekly basis as I browsed my students’ folders of barely legible poems) I would become a better poet.

Here are some lines written by students in grades 3rd-6th:

“The life of my heart is crimson.”

[Writing about a family member’s recent death:]

“My brother went down/ to the river
and put dirt on.”

“Peace be a song,
silver pool of sadness”

“Away went a dull winter wind
that rocked harshly, and bent you said,
‘Father, father’.”

 

[Writing about a terminal illness:]

“I am feeling burdened
and I taste milk……
I mumble, ‘Please,
please run away.’
But it lives where I live.”

“The owls of midnight hoot like me
shutting the door to nothing.”

[Writing about life as a movie:]

“The choir enters, and the director screams
‘Sing with more terror!!!’”

 
“I have provisions. Binary muffins.
It’s an in/out/in/out kind of universe.
We cannot help you,
this is a universe factory.
A sound of rolling symbols.
Disappearing rocks, screams of lizards.
Sanity must prevail. Save vs. Do Not.”

“I, the star god,
take bones from the
underworlds of past times
to create mankind.”

These young writers are addressing subjects that still obsess poets fifty years older: sadness, death, love, responsibility, aging, family, loneliness, and refuge…and they are addressing these subjects in language that is new, and thus has the power to emotionally effect a well-seasoned (/jaded) reader. The average fourth grader is able to do this because she hasn’t been alive long enough to know how to do it (and by “it” I mean talk about the world) any other way.

Story time: When I was a child I believed that one day I might be allowed to cross into an alternate dimension by walking through a quilt hanging on my living room wall. As I got older I stopped believing that this was a possibility—not because I grew to believe that the universe was not an extremely strange place where incomprehensible things could happen on a daily basis, but because I passed year after year after year not being able to enter the spirit realm through a wallhanging.

Anecdote that I hope you’ll find relevant: When Jean Piaget began studying the intellectual processes of children, he was not doing so because he had any special interest in children. Piaget was interested, rather, in the intellectual processes of (adult) humans and was seeking a control group. [His first thought was that the best control group would be comprised of martians but, as he did not have access to martians, he decided to use children since children possessed what is farthest from human consciousness.]

So let’s look at what happens to our young writers as they age [I took these lines from poems written by middle-school/ high school students (Italics, mine)]:

 Snacking on this and that
my friends and I keep the party going
even when it is over”
 

“Whispers of a
secret crush being unraveled”

“I’m trapped in this hole that
I can’t break through”

“Barack Obama in the White House.
I can feel the inspiration
Can you feel it?”

“Now I feel secure with my head held high.

Sad times. By middle school/high school, the average student has learned how normal people talk. The resulting language is underwhelming and predictable—the safe regurgitations of a thoroughly socialized consciousness.

While the average older student’s poems are heavy with allegiance to a limited view of reality, the average younger writer’s vision of the world is nimble and surprising—bazaar, yet true.

Last year I spent every Saturday tutoring an extremely undersocialized kid in vocab. When I taught her the word blandishments (“to flatter, coax, sweet-talk, appeal to”) she wrote this sentence: “The blandishments of the sugar flowers made the cake so much more inviting.”

The sentence is interesting because the student understood that a blandishment is something that attracts favorable attention without fully realizing that people almost always use the word to refer to a human action.

The poet’s job is to forget how people do it.

(source)

Never has such a short line of text completely broken my heart like “my brother went down to the river / and put dirt on”

daystarsearcher

adults often forget how complex and intense the emotional lives of children are. i do too, sometimes. that’s part of why stuff like this is so important, a reminder that while yes, kids are kids and do kid stuff, their lives are not necessarily easy.

thedisreputabledog:

raptortooth:

clevercheshire:

geardrops:

cupcakewitchery:

geardrops:

pyrrhiccomedy:

spacetimeandcoffee:

pyrrhiccomedy:

pocketofmadness:

pyrrhiccomedy:

I see a lot of posts about people feeling embarrassed, like, about everything, all the time, being embarrassed is I guess a huge part of some people’s lives. well listen

my girlfriend left her shoes in the middle of the living room floor, so I hid them in the oven drawer. because I thought it was a drawer that you could like–store things in?? I don’t know, I somehow made it to this point in my life without knowing that the fire happens in there. then I forgot I’d done it, and like, two days went by.

so the next time we went to make dinner, the shoes caught on fire.

then the oven caught on fire

then our whole house was full of black smoke

then the NYC firefighters had to come out to our apartment. there were like six of them.

half the people in our building came out of their apartments to find out what was going on, and if they were going to die or if they needed to evacuate their cats or something

and then an actual, New-York’s-finest firefighter looked me wearily in the eyes and said “try not to keep shoes in your oven” as he left.

and now we need a new oven.

and I would say that I felt…mild embarrassment? I experienced a patina of chagrin. “whoops,” I thought to myself, as the firefighters tromped off and the firetruck drove off into the night. “I should probably have known that about oven drawers.” then I bought my girlfriend a new pair of shoes, since I’d burned her old shoes. then we ordered a pizza.

if I can not feel embarrassed about that, I hope you guys can take heart.

Serious question: What is an oven drawer?

I mean come on, it just looks like a drawer, right

Isn’t that where the pots and pans go?

I definitely remember pots and pans getting stored in the drawer of the oven we had when I was growing up. so I figured, okay, that’s a drawer for putting stuff in. key detail I guess: pots and pans are fireproof

unlike shoes

GUYS

THAT’S THE FUCKING BROILER

OH MY GOD

Not always the broiler actually. Sometimes it is just a drawer. My aunt keeps snack foods in there (Oreos, Cheetos, the shit she doesn’t want people to know she eats) and her oven has never caught on fire.

So this is handy information for me to start inspecting the oven of every place I ever move into from now until eternity.

fair enough but i feel like if shoes go in and fire comes out it’s probably the broiler

Oh thank god it’s sometimes a drawer. I thought I had a broiler for years and never used it.

So there’s a compartment that SOMETIMES is extra storage and SOMETIMES is full of fire?

Yep, basically.

gearstation:

sacredassbutt:

baruchsbalthamos:

Americans pronouncing it ‘Noo-tella’ as if it were made from fucking hazelnoots.

ahem.

#man you just got roasted like a hazelnoot