Beyonce is the Queen

For those of you who are living under a rock (jk, jk), Beyonce released an album on December 13th at midnight, without promoting it at all. It has sold 828,773 copies worldwide in just three days, as reported by Apple, and is the number one album in 104 countries. Basically, Beyonce is the queen. No one, in my opinion, can get on her level. I obviously have bought it, as much as I'm going on about it. And I can't stop listening to it. I just love it so much, and I love her. This is quickly turning into a post about my lady crush on Beyonce, but whatever. So far, my favorites are Pretty Hurts, Partition, Flawless, and Blue. I think they're on YouTube by now, so give them a listen and let me know what you think.

Long Post Alert

I've been watching Slam Poetry for the better part of the night. Here are some of my favorites.

Persephone Lied

The truth is, I was bored.

My mother blissing ahead of me, rosebuds rising in her footsteps,
And I skulking behind, thinking,
Oh look. She walks in beauty.
Again.

Her power could boil rivers, if she chose.
She doesn’t choose. She scatters
Heliotrope behind her.

And me, I’ve no powers. I think she’d like
A decorative daughter. A link to the humans
She feeds with her scattered wheat.
A daughter wed to a swineherd’s just the thing
To show that Demeter’s a down-to-earth
Kind of goddess.

Do you know what swineherds talk about?
Swine.
Diseases of, ways to cook;
“That ‘un’s got no milk for ‘er shoats;
Him, there, he’s got boggy trotters.”

And when he leaned in, smiling,
While we sat in a bower sagged with Mother’s honeysuckle,
When he said, “Now,
My herd’s growing and I’m thinking I could feed a wife—”
That’s when I snapped, I howled, I ran.

And when a hole opened up, a beautiful black, in all the pastels of my mother’s sowing.
Let me fix the lie: Nobody grabbed, nobody pulled.
I jumped.

I thought it was a tiny earthquake,
Thought I was killing myself,
Starting a long journey to Hades.
It was a more direct trip
Than I’d imagined—
I landed in his lap.

He just looked at me, said “Well,”
And kept driving his chariot down,
Flicked his leather reins near my face.
He did not give me flowers.
He never spoke of pigs.

Didn’t speak much at all. Just took me down in darkness
And did dark things.
I liked them.

I stumbled through his grey gardens, after,
Sore and smiling.
And the gardener said, “Little girl,
Little sunlit flower,
You belong in the world above.
Trust that they’ll come for you,
But while you wait
Don’t eat the food of the dead, for it will trap you here.”
And I said give me the fucking fruit.

But when I ate I could hear her howling,
See her spreading winter on the world.
My poor mother, who missed me after all;
My poor swineherd, starving.
Huddled up for warmth with the few he hadn’t eaten.

I spat out half the seeds.

So now I suffer through the summers,
Smile at the swineherd who tells me
Which shoat is off its feed.
Smile at my mother and walk behind her.
My powers have come to me now, and in her candy-colored wake I scatter
Sundew and flytrap, nettles and belladonna.

I smile and wait for November,
For when I come back to you.
Your clever cold hands and your hard black boots.
I don’t ask what the leather is made from.

I don’t think I want to know.

-Spuffyduds

I love, love, love this poem. I think the only one that even comes close is What Lot's Wife Would Have Said (If She Wasn't A Pillar of Salt).

On Happiness

“Don’t ever put your happiness in someone else’s hands. 

They’ll drop it. They’ll drop it every time.” 

—  Christopher Barzak

I hadn't ever thought of anything like this. (Maybe one day I'll be able to coin my own inspirational thoughts that people will blog about, or post in Facebook statuses or on Twitter, but not today.) I am the only person who is in control of my happiness, which makes sense. When I depend on others to "make" me happy, I'm usually not. I can be happy because of other people, but they don't control my happiness. 

NaNoWriMo

So for those who might not know what that is, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month, (November). And I just signed up. I'm excited, but also a bit apprehensive. I want to further the writing that I do in class and turn it into a novel. I have to write 50,000 words in just the month of November, so filling in the blanks from where my writing jumps from one subject to the next is what I'm going to do, since the writings I've already completed don't count. I'm hoping that by telling all of you here will keep me motivated and will make me want to write in my spare time. This project will give me something to do, something to focus my writing towards. And maybe I'll get a book out of it. Who knows, right?

The things I find on Tumblr

This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals—sounds that say listen to this, it is important.

-Gary Provost

Found: Inspirational Advice For Writers

What nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish someone had told this to me … is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, and it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not.

But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story.

It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

-Ira Glass

Neil Gaiman is quite possibly my favorite person at the moment...

...although since my favorite person at the moment is entirely dependent on my current mood, this could change later tonight or next week or whenever. I'm not too worried about it, because I think there are lots of people out there who could be even better than Neil Gaiman and I want to give those people equal amounts of dedication. But I'm getting off topic.

Neil Gaiman is probably most known for writing the graphic novel The Sandman, which was published by DC Comics, as well as his novel American Gods and Coraline, which was turned into a movie. I'm not very familiar with The Sandman or American Gods, but I read Coraline when I was in middle school, before it was turned into a movie. I see a lot of Neil Gaiman quotes on Tumblr, so I'm going to post some of them here:

Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten. (From Coraline)

I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. ... I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it. (from American Gods)

There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts. (from Fragile Things: short fictions and wonders)

All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them. (From American Gods)

You get what anybody gets - you get a lifetime. (From The Sandman)

I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you'll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you'll make something that didn't exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will have people to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now), that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that you will always be kind.

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're Doing Something. So that's my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before. Don't freeze, don't stop, don't worry that it isn't good enough, or it isn't perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life. Whatever it is you're scared of doing, Do it. Make your mistakes, next year and forever.

These I Can Promise

The reason I titled my blog "What I Can Promise" is largely because of the Mark Twain Poem "These I Can Promise":

These I Can Promise - Mark Twain

I cannot promise you a life of sunshine; 

I cannot promise you riches, wealth or gold; 

I cannot promise you an easy pathway 

That leads away from change or growing old. 

But I can promise all my heart's devotion; 

A smile to chase away your tears of sorrow. 

A love that's true and ever growing; 

A hand to hold in your's through each tomorrow. 

I think this poem holds true to many people's idea of the future and the person they'd like to become. There are a lot of things in life that I can't promise. But I hope to be able to be there for the people in my life, to do all the things this poem lists, to be devoted, to help ease sorrow, to love, and to help someone get through the day. There are a lot of things I don't know, like how many miles it is to the moon, or what the population of Greece is, or what the meaning of life is (although I am starting to think that the meaning of life is to find the meaning in life, which is a whole complicated idea all in its own) but I do know that I have a lot of compassion, and I'd like to be able to share that with the people in my life.

The other reason why I named my blog "What I Can Promise" is because of what I mentioned earlier in class today. I want to make a difference in my life and the society that I live in. I've started that a bit with the work I'm doing with Umbrella, but I want to go further than that. I want to write articles about conflicts in the middle east and about feminism and how the world is entirely unfair. More importantly, I want those articles to be read and talked about, and maybe even change someones idea about something, to make them think in a different way then they did before. I remember the articles in The New York Times that I used to read, the articles in my father's copies of The Rolling Stones, articles in Reader's Digest that would be at my doctors office. All the articles that I remember impacted me in some way. They opened my mind to ideas that I was previously shut to. They made me think about life, how I was living it and how I wanted to begin living it. There are books that I've read that made me think as well. The Great Gatsby - Fitzgerald, The Fault In Ours Stars - John Green, As I Lay Dying - Faulkner, Huck Finn - Twain, Where The Sidewalk Ends - Silverstein, Henry V - Shakespeare, The House on Mango Street - Cisneros, 1984 - Orwell, The Color Purple - Walker. Most of these were school assignments, but I ended up loving all of them and they changed me in a way. This is what I want to do with my life. I want to change someone, just by writing down an experience and developing it further, to explore the meaning behind it. This is the type of writer I hope to become.

Kaitlin