"Working For The Clampdown" or "Your Heavy Kisses Don't Know My Worries"

Once again, things are coming apart at the seams. Why do you bother reading here anymore? We know what it will say: "I'm overhwelmed blah blah blah boys blah blah schoolwork is too much blah blah my own fault blah blah tears blah blah boys again blah blah to- do list."

Well, I suppose today is to-do list day.

-Get advised, even though you're already a day behind
-Meet with French teacher about what you missed this morning due to alarm clock malfunction
-Get at least starting coat of compressed charcoal on drawing
-Physical therapy appointment at 3:30
-Math Test at 6:30 tomorrow, which you haven't studied for enough
-Engish Midterm tomorrow 9:30
-Read for Blount and have outline for project done [this feels impossible]
-Work tonight from 5-8:30
-Finish homecoming display by Friday
-Get ready for DC next week, and explain to your teachers how much class you have to miss
-Keep personal life personal
-Remember basic things: eat, sleep, cellular function

I have not been myself this semester. I have been a complete slacker, the worst procrastination I've been a part of in a long time. I am not taking care of myself, I am not taking care of business. I am so afraid I am going to fail. My personal life is in utter upheaval. That is, by no means, helping.

But I totally have time to blog about my problems. Yes, that make sense.

<3gen

"The Ways That God Speaks" or "The Clampdown"

I have this weird psychic connection with music sometimes. There are these moments, these tiny little flecks of the universe that travel through my radio when I'm least expecting it and the universe talks to me. It reveals something. Tells me what I need to hear.

When I was in highschool, I was driving to the Barnes&Noble in my town that I knew this boy frequented often. I knew that he didn't like me, and I knew that the night he kissed me the week before prom was silly and he had been drunk and it hadn't meant anything. And yet I was skipping a movie date with friends, and avoiding homework to drive to the bookstore with the slight chance that he might be there. I was a silly 17 year-old. On the way there, as I waited at a traffic light, my car quieted down enough for me to hear the song playing off a Dashboard Confessional CD I had playing low. The lines "No one is waiting for you" repeated over and over again, and I turned off the music. It was right. He never showed, but my heart skipped a beat every time I saw headlights park out front.

Again, within this past year, yet another problem with the men in my life. This one I'd been going back and forth over, questioning myself and pulling back, moving forward, questioning judgment and changing my mind. I didn't know what I was doing or even how I felt, but I knew it wasn't good and I was unhappy. Again, I turned up the music at a redlight on the way to his house, and the radio played this time. The end of a song by "All American Rejects" where the line is repeated, "It ends tonight. It ends tonight." I listened, and it did.

And now, tonight. Several weeks of completely overwhelming activity. Schoolwork piling up, extra-curriculars filling to the brim and overflowing, my eyes welling up in the daytime with the sting of feeling like a failure. Not even to go into the emotional tightrope I've been walking recently with strange sorts of crushes, confusing kisses, phone calls from boys in Illinois, proposals, and sad boys who beg for me back, sometimes my heart has to remind me that I promised to leave it alone for a while. This week, albeit only Tuesday, it seems I'm caught in the trash compactor from Star Wars- my greatest fear growing up as a child. The walls close in on both sides and there's no where to go but dead. Tonight I finished French homework, only to be kept awake by the pain in my leg that I can not subdue with heavy painkillers because then I won't be able to wake up at 6AM to get to school early and finish my art project by 1PM. I start music playing, but mute it while I write in my planner, and I turn in back on to hear the Clash just yelling at me:

"The voices in your head are calling
Stop wasting your time, there's nothing coming
Only a fool would think someone could save you"

Now what am I supposed to make of that? Do I want to know?

I'm praying myself to sleep tonight.

<3gen

"The Ocean's Just A Wetter Version Of The Sky" or "My Paintful Afternoon"

I'm not sure how many of you diligent, faithful readers have ever had to experience the true joy and rapture of physical therapy, but I have a new-found sympathy for you if you have. This afternoon was the most physically painful hour of my entire life, at least that I can remember, and I have to go through it twice a week. I don't know how I'll be able to.

This afternoon, while this perky little cheerleader-type named Christiana*COUGH*Mengele*COUGH* started sending electric shocks through my leg to contract the muscles, while I had to lift my knee in the air and hold it, I spent most of the hour in tears. She insisted that the girl next to me, who had almost identical stitches on her knee, was going through the exact same thing I was and she was fine. This other girl, who had injured her knee while running track, so had a little bit better muscles to begin with, is sitting over doing her exercises like she's in a day spa. By the end of the electro-therapy, I craved my life be snuffed out by a gracious and merciful God. Kindly Christina then proceeded to stretch and bend my poor, eroded tissue every way she could discover, no matter my protests. She kept saying I should have taken a Lortab beforehand which, yes, I should have, but I had to drive there and I had class all day and I couldnt' go around doped up all day. Also, I didn't realize I was going to spend this hour in a goddamned torture chamber, lady. Shut up.

The worst part about this situation is that it was one, silly second of poor judgment horsing around a friend, and now this injury is completely in control of my life. I can't even get to my apartment, and although the kind folks at Gribbin House have taken me in as they have so many times in the past, I know they're sick of me. I am shirking responsibilities left and right, without the ability to walk more than a few yards at a time, I'm late for all my classes, can't help with Obama, can't make it to my Apwonjo commitments, and I can't go to work. And God knows with gas driving more since I can't walk, and copays and prescription refills I need the money and I can't go. I'm not finishing work, I'm not making it at all.

I feel kind of alone in all this. Alone in someone else's house. A house that stays cold.

I really just wish this was over. I've never wanted to crawl in a hole and ignore the world for a month so bad in my life. I just want it to be over. Over. Over.

<3gen

"The Combined Genius Of The Wainwright Family" or "200 Emails In My Inbox Without A Place To Start" and "I Do Not Think I Have The Strength"

The To-Do List I Don't Number Because Then It's Overwhelming:

-Email Apwonjo members schedule for this week [table schedule, pomping, chalking]
-Invisible Children on campus Thursday, screening at 7
-Reserve table in the Ferg the day after Darfur Screening to write letters to congress
-Try to get over the superb failure of my pet project, EQUALS, and accept defeat with honor
-Help build this giant Homecoming structure that will take an enormous time commitment that I just don't have [nor do I have the faith]
-Obama fundraiser tomorrow afternoon 5:30 [attendance contingent upon ability to walk]
-Chalking tomorrow night @7 [also contingent upon walking skill]
-Physical therapy @2PM at the Rec Center
-Inkwash drawing and beginning sketch due 5:30 tomorrow at art teacher's office [oh jesus]
-Chapter 1-3 on Consilience read by tomorrow at 11AM
-Reading Langston Hughes due at 9:30 for English class
-Email building rep for Foster hall about election night [he's british, rock on]
-Email Dr. Hornsby about loophole for facepainting [but first ask Lindsey if you're supposed to]
-Register Lydia to vote before Friday
-Turn in receipt from benefit concert to FAC for reimbursement
-14 pages of homework for French 202, composition on 'relationships' [which I can't even write about coherently in my mother tongue, kiddos], and 2 vocab lists and 2 verb pages
-Deposit check from Honey so I don't bounce any checks [if you don't read the sheer panic in this one, trust me, it's there]
-STOP THINKING ABOUT MY SILLY BOY PROBLEMS, SERIOUSLY, COME ON
-Do some semblance of laundry, as soon as I can climb the stairs to my apartment
-Deal with the fact that I will be in no shape to attend Daniel Marbury's 21st on Thursday, as much as I want to
-Physical therapy exercises twice a day, ice knee twice a day [when do I have time for this?]
-Finish/Start research on Blount project, including find scientific articles, send out questionaires, compile research, write 15 page paper [you know, the project that's like, 80% of our grade? Yeah, that one.]
-Convince my fellow officers in Apwonjo to let me use our screen for minimal charge
-Try not to feel bad that I accidentally roped my parents into a contract when I bought this new phone
-SERIOUSLY, BOY PROBLEMS, DROP THEM
-Finish writing the list and get started, knowing that no one, not even I, will read through this damn thing

"So What If I Like Pretty Things" or "Oh How I'll Feel Like A Beautiful Child Again"

Sometimes I think that Rufus Wainwright found a way to crawl in through all the cracks and holes, crawl into me and sift through all the ugly things and find these great, beautiful things and write songs about them. I just know that he has to know me to write things that I'm supposed to listen to.

I also think that since my good friend Rufus knows me so well, he should know that his songs this late at night, after long days of alternating pain with sleep with overthinking with pain again, he should know that his songs on nights like this make me cry. He should know this.

Maybe he does. I bet he thinks it's okay for me to feel.

<3gen

It's just been a rough time recently kids, no worries. Everybody gets like this sometimes.

"Love Is The Tired Symphony You Hum When You're Awake" or "Yes, Lenny, The Rabbits. The Rabbits."

I really wish I wrote more. I used to fill notebooks from margin to binding, full of poetry I had faith in, fiction that I wrote myself into, and nonfiction that I tried my best to write myself out of. I found security and safety in the sea of a blank page, those light blue lines shaking on the paper in anticipation of words and allusions, literary devices, metaphors about highways and track marks and boys with calloused fingers from guitar strings and holding too much weight.

I have shelves and boxes of notebooks. Full of the days where I couldn't get you out of my head, where I couldn't get you out of my veins, back when I thought about nothing else. Notebooks about school, notebooks about poems and people without souls and songs that I heard and loved and teachers that I learned from. I have notebooks full of my sister, full of instant messages, text messages, emails, taped together photographs and pictures from magazines that I stuck between the pages with glue sticks because the girl in the ad had the most amazing eyes. I can't fit all of my notebooks on one bookshelf. Kat Wood understands this.

These days my writing lives in email boxes, microsoft word compositions, my cell phone's outbox. I haven't turned out pages upon pages of beautiful simplicity when I've been reading too much Hemingway, flowery stream-of-consciousness after 56 pages of Faulkner, wistful songs about blonde hair when I've got Fitzgerald in my head. I haven't been writing short, heavy sentences about war when I've had O'Brien echoing in my lungs, or conversations full of innuendo when I've had Bukowski on my table and a beer in my hand. Writing full of tears after a night of Steinbeck, tattoos after a night of Fitch, long legs and snowstorms after Atwood, train tracks and fires after Bradbury. I need more nights where I spend my hours with authors, and not my own head. My own head is not providing inspiration.

My hands itch with my addiction to words, and it's about time I found some kid in a back alley with a couple of good, fresh grams of poetry that wakes you up at night, a bag of sentences that make you close your eyes and hold it there for a minute, and maybe just one dose of words Shakespeare invented and don't get used enough.

That sounds like a beautiful night.

"Fitzgerald's green light is haunting me,
Hemingway's bullet I hear,
and Faulkner is handing me Jim Bean on ice,
and I can't turn a deaf ear.

If writer's mistakes were meant for them,
if that's what made them good,
then I'll take a break, and make every mistake,
every writer should."

<3gen

"This Is The First Day Of My Life" or "It's The Tattood Broken Promise That I Hide Beneath My Sleeve"

I know that I recently posted about priorities, ad how 'boyfriend' had fallen completely off that list. Know that this is still true, and this post is about feelings, not about boyfriends:

I don't think I'm ever going to outgrow the part of me that loves to be loved, or the part of me that craves contact and being able to be close enough to another person to actually see their heart beating in their throat. I don't think the addict in me is ever going to stop getting the shakes around the stuff, and I don't think my relationship track marks are ever going to stop aching every time there's someone near me who says they care, or holds my shoulders, or makes me weak.

That's not ever going to go away.

However, many people in my life, including myself, would choose to believe that I'm just not all the way "grown up" or "grown out" until this part of me is gone. I think that now I can handle someone saying "No Genevieve, it isn't like that." and I can walk away from it without tears, without feeling broken, and without writing in a notebook for hours with metaphors about car accidents and drug addictions. I can also walk away from someone who says the opposite, who wants me, who loves me, and who will do anything to get me close again. I can walk away from it, hold my head up, and know that I'm fine without all that.

That doesn't mean I'm ever going to stop wanting it, and I never want to stop wanting it. For so, so, so long I have thought that the craving in me, the part that loves love, the part that loves touch, is bad and bruised and it meant something in me wasn't all together. But I hope that whatever it is inside me that flutters when a boy wraps his arms around me never, ever goes away. I hope I always get excited when I think someone likes me. I hope that I am always eager to love, to be in love, and to be loved. I hope that those feelings never goes away. It's painful to walk away from the opportunity for love, and it's more painful to walk away from someone who gives you butterflies and they don't feel the same, but all of that is just a finger prick compared to the pain when you don't feel anything anymore.

All this time I wanted to change, but now I want nothing more than to stay the same.

<3gen

"We Intend To Sing The Love Of Danger, The Habit Of Energy and Fearlessness" or "Modernist Manifestos"

We read manifestos in English class today. In between feeling the normal disdain that I feel so strongly toward my arrogant teacher and trying to define completely useless vocabulary, I thought about what my modern manifesto would look like. I thought about what it would include, my goals in life, strange things about me, the things that I love. What does a manifesto look like? Is it a promise?

So if you read this blog but you never comment, or you never really know what to say when I write about my parents or my many other overwhelming problems, here's your chance. Tell me what goes in my manifesto. Tell me what about me needs to go in it, how it should read, or what yours would look like. That's what I need from all of you.

"Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry." -- F. T. Marinetti
[I know he was a fascist, but he was also a beautiful writer]

<3gen