Summer Reading (and whales)

It's kind of amazing what I will do to avoid cleaning my room. This week's extracurricular activities included fixing and then breaking my bike again, driving around Issaquah for the better part of Wednesday night trying to find northeast facing darkness to see the Northern Lights in what would have been at best a 1 in 200 chance of seeing them but was an even longer shot given the clouds and the iPhone's inability to lead us up Tiger Mountain, baking chocolate chip cookies using Karen's secret recipe, completely dismantling (and fixing!) the vacuum I broke over a year ago when I sucked up a superlong string my old roommate used to leave on the floor for her cat to play with, and cutting whales, lobsters, and goldfish out of construction paper because I decided we needed to have an old school (or should I say, "old library") summer reading club.

The August Reading Club is currently accepting members in all locations, so please let me know if you'd like to join. Our theme is preppy New England sea creatures.


P.S. Thanks for the comments, blogger friends (i.e. Tom and Kate, who actually update their blogs)! Yes, it was a long overdue facelift for ye olde nonblog. But I can't take credit for the background photo (but maybe I'll put some time into trying to figure out if I can switch it with one of the many mountain photos I've taken because that would be much cooler).

Two Reasons for an Update

1) A Threat

Chloë: you better update your blog

or im gonna delink it from mine

Valid. I am a pretty delinquent blogger. But at least I am doing better than the other blog she found called "Not a Blog," which appears to have a single post written in May 2006. So I win based on both recency and quantity. Also, from what I can gather, the post appears to be about tips for MSN chat?

Haha, I just translated it using Google translator. And 1) I was right about the topic and 2) I think it's funny. And speaking of finding new blogs, you should check out Chloë's.

2) A Sign

The other day I got really excited about going back to school in a couple months and decided to look up the reading list for the lit class I'm enrolled in. One of the books is called This Is Not a Novel and it appears to be much more of not a novel than this blog is not a blog. Which I suppose we will discuss--it being a novel that is not a novel, that is, not comparing it to my sub-par blog. This makes me more than a little nervous to think that less than two months from now I will be expected to not only write, but also think. Think about things like whether or not novels that are not novels are actually novels and really what is a novel.

The Neighborhood Project (plus overdue updates)

Today was a beautiful day for a motorcycle ride so Diana & I decided to make some progress on our latest undertaking, which we refer to as The Neighborhood Project. This is our attempt to visit every single neighborhood in Seattle. There are a lot of neighborhoods in Seattle, and it's hard to find a comprehensive list. The best we've found is the official City Clerk neighborhood map here. But that doesn't even include the lesser-known sub-neighborhoods, like Puget Ridge and Pigeon Point, which we passed today on our quick drive-through of most of the Delridge area. Anyway, we're about halfway done and it just occurred to me it would have been a good thing to blog about. I haven't yet gotten around to writing up the highlights of the day. (Most neighbhooding days include cupcakes & trying new drinks at Asian markets. Sometimes these drinks include white fungus, sometimes they look delicious but prove too complicated to open.)

But I did start a Google map of our stops this afternoon (and I do plan, of course, to update it with past adventures). Check it out the new Neighborhood Project Map.

And, while we're at it, here are some more updates:

1) I got into UW's fiction MFA (Master of Fine Arts) program. I'm excited to be able to stay in Seattle and get to go back to school.

2) April will not be the best month for me to renew my dedication to blogging since I will be taking a course to get my 50 Ton Masters license (a Coast Guard license that is better than my current limited masters which only allows me to drive launches and duck boats). This means I'll be working from 9am-6pm then in class from 6pm-10pm every weekday for 5 weeks.

3) I am almost 28.

4) Did I mention I am going back to school this fall? Crazy.

5) I am currently working on a chapbook of recent writing. It has the same name as a mix CD I made a few years ago. I will post details when I am done.

Thanks for reading!

2010

Not sure how many times I've resolved to actually blog. It's a little scary how long this non-blog has been around (almost 5 years . . .)

This new year will include a lot of writing. Hopefully this will spill over to this little outlet, in case anyone is still reading.

Happy New Year.

Kind of forgot I had a blog

If anyone's reading, here's a piece I wrote recently. (I think I might try to revive the blog, but not until after my applications are in in January).

No Rest for the Queery

I'm afraid of public restrooms. I'm not a germophobe; I'm an androgynous-looking lesbian.

Most of the time when I'm in the women's room, people think I'm in the wrong bathroom. Actually, they think they are in the wrong bathroom. If I had a nickel for every time a woman saw me at the sink and then walked back outside to check the sign on the door, I could buy a really fancy pink bow.

You'd think I'd have a comeback by now. It's been long enough. In second grade, I was recruited for the Cub Scouts. I've gone from being asked "Are you a boy or a girl?" by my third-grade peers to the third-graders I tutor. But I still haven't come up with a snappy one-liner, not that I'd have much opportunity to use it. While I do get the occasional "Dude, this is the women's room" from the drunk girl swaying over the sink, mostly it's just stares and doubletakes. Judging by how often people look me up and down on my way to the stalls, it seems as though the one thing soccer moms, grandmothers, and 8-year-old girls can agree on is that I am unbelievably attractive.

But the real problem is not that I look too masculine to feel comfortable in the women's room, it's that I don't look feminine enough to use the men's room. I realize this sounds counterintuitive, but hear me out. You know when you're in a gas station and there are two bathrooms-- both locked single toilets, but labeled "men's" and "women's" anyway just so our society doesn't crumble--and there are three or four women in line but the men's room is open? If I was confident that I would be seen simply as a woman asserting her right to pee in the empty, arbitrarily labeled men’s room, I wouldn't hesitate to do it. But I am unsure of what I would look like. A man? A woman? A woman that looks like a man? A woman that looks like a man looking like a woman overthinking her gender presentation?

I don't know if this obnoxious tendency to overanalyze is the egg or the chicken of the fact that I am forced to think about my gender identity at least seven times a day. (I have a small bladder.)

But it's hard not to obsess about gender in our gender-obsessed culture. Sometimes just for fun I'll go on a search for the archetypal man and woman. I see signs for them everywhere-- in restaurants, malls, airports-- square shouldered and lacking extremities. But I never find them. Following the signs, I always end up at a restroom. Am I the only one who thinks it would make more sense to represent the concept of "bathroom" with a picture of a toilet? It's clear that in our culture the functional use of the room is secondary to how we sort ourselves when we get there.

This societal obsession with dichotomies really takes the rest factor out of restrooms for the rest of us-- the inevitable remainders when society is divided by two. So until evolution starts selecting for a gender binary, sorting us neatly into those who wear skirts at 45 degree angles and those who appear to wear no pants at all, we need to find a better way to accommodate everyone, even people like me-- genderqueers with small bladders. I think we should add a third restroom option labeled "freak." I can't take credit for this idea-- like most of my brilliant thoughts, I stole it from an angry homophobic blogger. But really, I'd love to use that restroom. And you know it's only a matter of time before all the women start using it just to avoid the lines. Then I'll finally have my chance to look at them as they're washing their hands, gasp audibly, and look back at the clearly-marked door before announcing in a loud voice, "I thought this was the freaks' room."