There is a fine line \ Between genius and madness. \ It is called timing.
I felt naked in that room. No one was looking at me like I was naked, but I was certain felt like I physically had no clothes on. It was an art class, and I feared that people would take my nakedness to be an art statement; a “bold” but insignificant comment on the nature…
The text of the thread. …should Twitter explode in the blaze of ignorance reserved for a spaceX 4/20 rocket launch. Being queer and commenting on something related to Pride draws people out of the woodwork to prop up children as a shield like they’re just another Anita Bryant. To put it simply, she “didn’t hate…
This was originally written before the COVID-19/Coronavirus pandemic was full blown in the US. It feels extremely petty now and I’ve lost all steam on finishing it. Suffice it to say, I enjoyed this book and do recommend it to all to read, even if the troubling times depicted seem prescient to the current situation….
Oftentimes, the reader that could benefit from reading a work of literature that is intended to develop empathy for a particular plight is not likely to pick up a book that clearly advertises itself as being about that hardship. Many authors have tackled this obstacle in the past by writing speculative fiction rather than a…
The below text was written for a class on British Literature, focusing on Virgina Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own”. Lately, I feel like I’ve been living the reality that Woolf describes regarding women and fiction – obligations from being a woman, a mom, an aunt, etc, have to be juggled with my schoolwork, my…
I’m stuck on one line Maggie Nelson wrote on page 37. “I cannot hold my baby at the same time as I write.” This is something that I feared when I became pregnant, when I decided I wanted to have children. I wanted more than one before I had one; but having one has made…
While I plan to finish the entirety of I’m With the Bears shortly, I am still on a deadline because this is for a class. I spent yesterday at a relative’s house for a family reunion, in the 94°F (34.4C) heat (“feels like: 100°F” (37.7C) says the Weather Channel) when outside, in something significantly cooler but…
Last Christmas, I think it was, I bought a copy of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife for my brother in law (it was on his wishlist) and didn’t bother to peek inside. I know now that if I would have, I would have ended up giving him a used copy. I often wonder how I got…
I will admit, I did not read the whole of The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy. I have been busy at work, getting back into the swing of things after being off for a week recovering from surgery. I skimmed the book, found a few short chapters that struck my interest, then ended up…
A quote from last week’s email from the professor for this course: THINKING ABOUT BLOGGING As we hit the midway point of this course, it may be valuable to you to blog about blogging: what is it like to write online about your writing, in this (somewhat) public way? Have you blogged before this course?…
In her novel Future Home of the Living God, Louise Erdrich grasps and explains some rather important parts of the apocalypse: Humans known not the scale, and indeed prefer to not know (even with all their clamoring to just know), the scale of the end of life as we know it. The format of the novel…
The premise behind Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is what to do to raise your child a feminist and/or be a feminist while raising a child. Hot on the heels or reading Crispin’s so-called manifesto, I was thrilled to read something that actually added to the conversation of Feminism…
Last week I read The Road by Cormac McCarthy. To keep with my theme of comparing the novels I read for class to video games, I’d love to compare The Road to The Last Of Us (Naughty Dog, 2013), but I’ve never played the game. I only know its a zombie apocalypse game that focuses on the…
The readings for this week were the “Race and Entertainment” section of Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay and “Moving Beyond Pain” by bell hooks. One of my classmates touched on a point I previously hadn’t considered regarding these two takes on pop culture representations of race and women. There is a lack of diversity while…
In my previous post regarding Edan Lepucki’s California I mentioned the symbolic “newness” of the turkey baster and the meaning Frida attaches to her other artifacts. There are several times where objects—possessions—are triggers for memories or behaviors for Frida and Cal. These same objects, when handled by others, affect the characters. The Bee that Frida finds…
My fear with any feminism class I take and any feminist book I read is that I’ll be beaten with the two-by-four of feminist rhetoric telling me how awful I am for not embracing the gold-star feminism of hairy-pits and man-bashing. It seems Roxane Gay has this same fear. While she starts the book with…
Read More “ENG 363 – “Bad Feminist” by Roxane Gay (first half of book)” »
The opening of California (by Edan Lepucki) has been refreshing. Growing up with media such as Captain Planet and Ferngully, I’ve been inoculated against the over-the-top personal pleas for the average person doing what they can to fix whatever is wrong with the environment that week. If you, average American child, do not recycle that…
I’m enrolled in two English classes this summer that require blog posts for interaction. I’ll be putting them here on SDO with tags for each class—ENG350 for Dystopian Lit and ENG363 for New Feminist Memoir. Use the links here or below the post to find all writings as they are posted for each class.
Back in January, at my 6-month dental cleaning, the x-rays showed I had a cavity. My first one ever. I went along with the suggestion to get it drilled and filled right away, and within two weeks I had some white resin where there had been solid tooth before. Almost immediately, I had cold sensitivity…
I’ve been researching various spiders recently because I’ve been trying to find out what bit me, and I’m fairly certain that it was the brown widow. We’d seen the spider around the bathroom previously, and she kept to herself. She had that definite black widow shape, but with a big brown booty instead of being…
I never meant to kill my first one. It was passion first, an accident second. After that, though, all intentional. I lived as a wanderer, always. To succeed in my detached lifestyle, I needed to acquire certain skills. I could have, like many other women in my position, fucked my way to safety every night….
I haven’t updated in forever. Here’s some writing. Husk bore no grudges against the living. Her pursuit was of knowledge, not vengeance. She remembered few of the things he learned, however. This, in part, is what kept her from seeking any retribution for what the living had done to her. Why seek revenge, she reasoned,…
I had a dream last night that some bad artist was selling poster prints of 1. someone else’s (much better) art, 2. their own crappy sketch-comics, and 3. horribly patched together photoshop-recolored emo photographs. The prints were on display in a Walgreens, and the artist insisted that everyone must leave comments in writing on fabric….
Though I walked ahead of Cefin and could not see him struggling, I heard increasing instances of dirt and gravel slipping under his feet. He needed to rest again, but would not admit it. He had walked for hours before coming to my home, and now I have made him walk several more. “Let’s rest,”…
Outside the shop, a man nervously approached the door. He would take a few determined steps forward before losing all courage, at which time he’d stop, turn, and go back the way he came. This repeated several times as Darina watched. He made a small amount of progress with each attempt, small enough that she…