Hoppy Easter to Every Bunny!

This is it!  It's Easter Sunday for those who celebrate it, and another Sunday before April Fool's Day for everybody else.  It's the end of Lent as we know it, and you know what that means.

No more promises of regular blog posts.

Because I'm a bum.

I'm also a bum who's totally kidding because I should be writing things consistently and not necessarily poetry.

Plus I'm a bum who has loyal readers.

Out there.

Somewhere.

Anyway...

There's one thing that I've always wanted.  A white Easter.  Forget snow-covered Christmas, I'll settle for snow on a day when little girls are forced to wear white Mary Janes and flowered dresses so they have to also be forced into their puffy pink winter jackets.  I want little white snowflakes flying around my head as I trek out to the car for Easter brunch with a friend.  I would love for an icicle to form.

I'm not sure when this wish was created, but I was thinking about it, and for the past four years I spent Easter at school because our spring break never overlapped with the holiday.  And my school is super pretty when it's covered in snow.  I highly doubt that Easter could muster a snow dramatic enough to make the campus look like Narnia as it does in the winter, but I would love for snow on Easter.  That'd be great.

If there's a way to request certain types of precipitation, I'd like to submit a form for a white Easter for the rest of my days.  That would make me very happy.  I mean, it's possible.  This is Illinois, and weather is weird, especially with "global climate change" and all that.  So there is the slight possibility that the air might just get cold enough to freeze whatever precipitation might be promised for this Easter.  I'm really hoping that that possibility is high, but considering the 41 degrees that I'm seeing right now, it's more likely to get warmer as the day goes on.  Mildly depressing for the idle snow-wishers, but hey, the people looking for sunshine and daisies might get their wish, so at least someone goes home happy, right?

"Hedwig didn't return until the end of the Easter holidays.  Percy's letter was enclosed in a package of Easter eggs that Mrs. Weasley had sent.  Both Harry's and Ron's were the size of dragon eggs, and full of homemade toffee.  Hermione's, however, was smaller than a chicken's egg."

-  J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

"She's like...twelve!"

Whenever I'm talking about someone who's much younger than me, or someone who seems much younger than me, I typically make the observation that "[NAME] can't do that, he's like 12!"  This is a tendency I picked up from a friend of mine because I thought it was hilarious, and it's been stuck in my brain's lexicon ever since then.  I think I was 15 or 16 when I picked this up.  Maybe.

So now that one of my younger cousins (who am I kidding, I only have three) is turning 12 for real, I'm realizing that I really can say what the older old people say when young people walk into the room: "I remember you when you were this big..." and suddenly I feel decades older than I really am.  And I can't even say she's "like 12," because she will actually be that age.  So this weirds out my speaking patterns.

My mom and I were out shopping for birthday presents for this cousin, because that's what you do when you're family members and you're invited to a birthday party, typically you bring presents, and I was thinking.

What did I do for fun when I was 12?

And I realized that I have no idea.

I was in middle school at the time, leaving a handful of my friends behind at the local elementary school so I could go forth with my best friend to this special program through the local high school that would involve white collared shirts, and dark pants/skirts as a dress code and French class.  I was particularly excited about learning French, let me tell you that.  So presumably, I did a lot of homework.

I don't remember hanging out at friends houses very often, and I don't particularly remember what books I was reading at the time, only that I'm sure I was reading things.

And I have no idea if I was writing at that time.  Because I'm fairly certain that there was a time in my life when I took a break from writing.  I just didn't do it.  Like ever.  I don't know if it's because I didn't have the time or the ideas or the inclination to write short stories or what, but I'm pretty sure I hadn't figured out that I could scribble down ideas or whatever randomness I wanted in a notebook and call that "writing."  Yeah, pretty sure I wasn't doing that.

I think I was doing Girl Scouts, because I had joined the local troop when I was 11, and continued on.  And I don't think that this was the time when I called my Girl Scout leader every week to ask if there was a meeting, I think that was in high school.  So 12, I probably remembered when the meetings were, and went to them as well as the camping trips and other fun things.

If I remember correctly, I did the drama club at middle school, but we didn't really do much that year.  When I was 12, we did a lot of improv.  And I wasn't very good at it.  At least, I didn't think I was particularly good at it, but I had fun, so that's all that really mattered anyway, right?

I must have hung out with friends, but considering we were 12, I have no idea what we did.  Pretty sure that would mean I went to their house and we hung out or had a slumber party.  I must have painted my nails a lot.

I seem to remember a long black skirt that I really loved to wear with brightly colored argyle knee socks under it, because this was a way I could wear bright colors and still be in dress code, because no one was looking at anyone's socks.  This is also when I started liking colored/patterned socks, because dress codes suppress pretty colors otherwise.  Though I'm not sure how this paragraph is relevant to what I did as a 12-year old.

I'm going to guess that I spent a lot of time at home reading or watching movies with my family.  I really love movies, and my grandpa has this really great collection that he lets us borrow from, as long as we swear on our lives that we'll bring them back.  They used to be all VHS, but he's since upgraded to DVD.  I wonder if he'll go as far as blu-ray, but I highly doubt it.  This was also an age when Blockbuster was thriving, so I could have gone there as well.

Not really sure, but I've got a couple ideas, I suppose.

"The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been."

- Madeleine L'Engle

Poetry Friday: Preludes

I forgot it was Poetry Friday.  I almost didn't write about a poem, but luckily I remembered in the nick of time!  Huzzah!

So today I read T.S. Eliot's "Preludes."  I remember reading bits and pieces of this poem in my British literature class, junior year of high school.  This was one of the first poems that helped me decide that poetry might be cool to read.  It helped that there are some lines in here that show up in "Memory" from "CATS," and there was a time when I was in that musical...I don't really want to talk about it, it involved spandex and a painted wig.

And my brain is fried.  Hooray!

I promise that next week I won't be so horrible with Poetry Friday.

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Now is about the time of the month when I talk about my plans for the upcoming month of Poem-A-Day.  April's actually National Poetry Month and also National Poetry Writing Month, so hopefully that means that people out there in the world are taking part in some sort of poetry writing/reading shenanigans during the upcoming month.  For myself, I'm setting myself the challenge to write a poem about each sign of the zodiac. I'm not really sure how I'm going to time them or how I'm going to set them up, or even if I'm going to write them all in similar styles, so we'll see how that goes.  I'm also playing with the idea of posting this month's poems here so I can formally take part in the National Poetry Writing Month things, but that didn't work out too well last year, so I'm a little hesitant.  Plus that would throw off my whole "putting poems in an envelope and not reading them till the end of the month" routine.

"I am moved by fancies that are curled

Around these images, and cling:

The notion of some infinitely gentle

Infinitely suffering thing."

- T.S. Eliot, "Preludes"

Kaleidoscope Heart

I learned recently that one of my readers recently (how many times can I use that word in a sentence...) is an attorney, or at least works at an attorney's office, so their name links back to that website.  You know who you are if you're reading this now!  And I find it interesting that they commented on one of my posts to stress legality and getting everything down in "black and white."  Just wanted to take a moment to thank that commenter, and assure them that my Last Will and Testament post was a draft, I'll be working out the kinks soon, and when I'm closer to my deathbed.

Moving on to today's prompt which I pulled from my box (yes, I'm going to announce that every time I pull a prompt from the box, you'll probably get irritated, but you'll have to either deal with it or...deal with it, thank you!).

Today's prompt:  What music album would be used for a movie about your life?

I was just thinking about this fairly recently (it's that word again...).  I'm actually making a list of all the songs that are out now or that I'm hearing played on the radio right now that apply to my post-graduation "real world" life.  So I've got a couple songs on that list, but it's not a whole album.  One that I'd just like to mention because a friend shared it with me and I feel like it suddenly applies with "22 is like the worst idea that I have ever had..." is Paramore's "Hello Cold World."  It makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

What's strange is that there's one album that would be pretty good for a movie about my life right now.  Or at least, how my life is right now, and that's Sara Bareilles' "Kaleidoscope Heart."  I shamelessly borrowed the CD from my local library so I could familiarize myself with the music, because my same friend who sent me Paramore's song also sent me "Uncharted."

There was a good week when I played this song on loop.  It was in December, and I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life when I got home from Florida.  If there was a movie montage to go with this song in the movie of my life, it would be me puttering around the apartment, playing on my computer, and writing stacks of poetry.  Which is interesting in that that's exactly what I'm doing right now since I've been back from Florida.  But this is how I've found myself approaching my life right now.  It's uncharted.  I'm the one making my decisions and determining my own future, drawing the lines on my own map, and I don't want to listen to other people telling me how "to get started."

Then there's "Gonna Get Over You," which makes me love Sara Bareilles all the more, because the music video is so fun.  I don't really know what to say about this.  I'm not sure it's making a promise that I can keep, but I don't know.  "I'm not the girl I intend to be."  This is something I want to live, I want to be the girl that I do intend to be.  Just...need to figure that one out.

"King of Anything."  The song that I've heard on the radio and sung along with.  This would be perfect for the movie of my life because the movie of my life is going to be a romantic comedy of some sort, and I'm going to sing this to someone in a diner.  At least, that's how I'm imagining it.

I'm not really feeling coherent right now, but my feeling is that this album as a whole pretty accurately paints my life as it is right now.  I'm still figuring things out, feeling like there's potential for everything, and yet having no idea how I'm going to get there.  I feel like I want everything but I don't have enough room in my arms to carry it all to the check-out counter.  So there's a lot of reflection needed, but I'm going to be playing this beauty on loop for the next couple forevers because Sara Bareilles is keeping me sane right now.

"Each day, countin' up the minutes, till I get alone, 'cause I can't stay

in the middle of it all, it's nobody's fault, but I'm

so low, never knew how much I didn't know, 

oh, everything is uncharted.

I know I'm getting nowhere, when I only sit and stare..."

- Sara Bareilles, "Uncharted"

Love Me Dead

There's a book out there in the world called 642 Things to Write About.  I saw it at Barnes and Noble the other day, and because I'm a cheapskate and because I bought a bunch of Sharpie pens that I didn't need, I didn't get this book.  But I DID shamelessly Google it and find a bunch of Tumblr posts from it, which conveniently provided me with a couple ideas for things I could write about here.  Go figure, right?

Today's prompt:  Write a story based on the title of your favorite song.

My favorite song is currently Neon Trees' "Everybody Talks," but I wasn't really feeling it...so I'm using another one of my top favorite songs, Ludo's "Love Me Dead."

Thump.  Draaaaaag.  Thump.  Draaaaaag.  Thump.  Draaaaaaag.

This is the soundtrack of the afterlife.  When you're the only one wandering the burnt out streets of your hometown and you've suddenly lost all desire to speak more than a couple syllables, this is the sound you have to accompany your travel.

Thump.  Draaaaaag.

And that's because I twisted my ankle in some strange direction, and because the bone didn't heal right, or at all, I'm just dragging my sad left foot along through the dust and ash.  I feel like a weird cliche, but the shriveled remains of my brain can barely wrap itself around the concept of marbles let alone a cliche.

Westley whispered into my ear, "Death cannot stop true love, all it can do is delay it a little while."  And I believed him.  I believed that we would be together and we would love so much and so deeply it would embarrass the neighbors.  I believed that no matter how many times I received word that he had died, he would show up at the door that evening for dinner.

And I should have suspected somehow that his attachment was deeper than mine because he's gone off and died, and I'm stuck here.  He loved me just so much, his love isn't letting me die properly.  Which is great for me, I guess.  Prince Humperdinck doesn't really mind that I can't speak well or the limp I've got going on, and he's desperately wanted me for some time now.  Well, Westley, you had your chance, and now you screwed it up for all of us.  Thanks, thanks a lot.

"Kill me romantically, fill my soul with vomit, then ask me for a piece of gum.  Bitter and dumb, you're my sugarplum."

- Ludo, "Love Me Dead"