over the cliff

I wrote two new poems today, and revised a third.

I rule.

Still no word on the three subs I have out. But for some reason it’s not making me as angsty as normal. Perhaps I’ve just gotten so used to rejections that I basically feel that what I’m doing is simply collecting rejections from different magazines for a group of poems. Like a carousel and the poems periodically jump off and then get on a diferent horse or toad or whatever freak animal those psycho carnival operators would create.

I brought the two new fairy tale poems I’ve written to writer’s group last night. Not exceedingly helpful comments- mainly because there were only two people there and Oliver had already seen both poems. I did come up with a title though for one of the poems. Tell me what you think:

[Insert Title Indicating that this is a Poem about Bluebeard the Wife Murderer, not the Pirate]

I kindof like it. Mainly beause it means I get to be lazy and not think of a real title.

I really suck at titles.

And it turns out that I was right about weddingchannel.com (Click here to view ‘Your Wedding Date is in 16 Weeks’). I got two e-mails from them a while back. The first one wanted to know what professionals helped me the most on my special day, and the second one was a link to their “For Better or for Worse” section. It can tell me how to change my name, how to merge my stuff with…err… my stuff I guess. And other stupid marriage crap.

I’m tempted to re-register with all the same information except a new wedding date and see if I get reported for attempted polygamy.

I warn students the first night of my Open Water courses that North Carolina diving is hard. Not impossible, but significantly more difficult than the great bathtub that is the Caribbean. Our weather sucks, our currents suck, and our visibility can either be really great… or really suck.

Like Radio Island. A good dive at Radio Island means 8-10 feet of visibility. A PHENOMENAL dive: 10-15 feet. A normal dive: 5-6 feet.

The real problem with low visibility diving is not only can you not see more than a few feet in front of you, but the deeper you go, the darker it gets. So today my father and I took two students out to Radio Island- hoping it’d be a good day.

It wasn’t. If I stretched out my hand, I could see my fingertips. And not much else.

Because of the poor conditions, I took one student, my father took the other, and we didn’t plan on running into eachother. So Dan and I swam out to the rocks, and started heading down the slope towards deep water and the bottom of the channel- the idea being to swim over the sand with the rocks on your right. Easier to maintain neutral buoyancy that way.

It got darker. And darker. And darker still. I kept waiting for Dan to grab my arm and point frantically at the surface. I kept waiting for him to remember all those times I said that the reason sharks don’t attack divers is because they can see us coming- and recognize that we aren’t fish. There would’ve been no such luck today. If we saw something big enough to bite, it was going to because we were looking at the wound.

(For you wusses who read this blog: there are no sharks at Radio Island. The only thing there that can bite you is a toad fish- and you’d have to stick your hand under a rock in order for that to happen)

Now as for me, I’ve done Radio Island so many times I could find my way around blindfolded. I know where the shore is based on how the current is moving and sand ripples. But a student? All he knows up to that point is the pool. And even though pools can be murky and nasty, they’re a hell of a lot clearer than anything they’ll see offshore.

So I really have to tip my hat to my students. They don’t panic. They just follow me down into the murky depths with nothing but blind faith that eventually I’ll bring them back up to the light.

Gullible fools aren’t they.

Destin Shark Attack

When I was about 9 or 10 years old, we went to Destin for a week during the summer. One morning my cousin Ellen and I took our rafts and went swimming in the ocean. We didn’t really pay attention and before we knew it, we were pretty far offshore.

The reason we figured that out, was my mother started screaming “SHARK! SWIM! SWIM FASTER SWIM FASTER! SHARK!”

Or something to that affect. Been a couple of years so I don’t really remember the exact wording she used.

I do remember obeying the number one rule of horror movies: Start paddling and don’t fucking look back. My cousin wasn’t much help, I was doing most of the work and she just clinged to my raft since it was the one that was moving.

When we finally made it to shore, my mother told us that she’d seen a dorsal fin pop out of the water and start following us.

I still say sharks aren’t as dangerous as CNN, Steven Spielberg, and Saturday Night Live would like for you to believe. Most shark bites are exploratory. The only problem is, sometimes they exploratorily bite something important.

Parody of Kokomo

Okay I was bored so I looked up my name in yahoo and I came across some article that the Times Picayune did about ‘Drop In Debs’. I’d almost forgotten about it.

From the Article:

But some young women are opting to carry on the New Orleans debut tradition even if their families no longer live in the area. Typically, these families still have strong ties to Carnival as well as to other New Orleans traditions. This was the case not only with Rhodes, but also with Queria Dominique McDonald, whose family lives in Little Rock, Ark. It was the same, too, with Helena Leigh Bell, only in her instance there was a twist: She was an out-of-state student at Newcomb College while making her debut and it was her parents who commuted from their North Carolina home to the local festivities.

…

Helena Bell, whose family moved from New Orleans to New Bern, N.C., when she was in the first grade, was equally committed to carrying on a family tradition.

Over the years, she said, she listened attentively to the almost magical stories her mother and aunts told of their debuts. She never expected to be able to participate in the same debut experience as her mother, the former Margaret Leigh Pratt, but when the invitation was extended to her she was ecstatic.

“When I was 7 or 8 the queen of Comus lived just a couple of houses down from us and I never did forget how beautiful her dress was. It was all just so fairy tale-like to me,” Bell said in the midst of her own debut, which she made during her junior year as a women’s studies major at Newcomb. “Some of my women’s studies friends just laughed when I told them I was participating. Many people just don’t understand the beauty and innocence of the whole experience.”

While the debutante herself didn’t have to travel, her parents, Dr. and Mrs. William Harrison Bell III, did make the trip back and forth several times to attend parties with her and help celebrate her debut. It was, in fact, the year that Bell’s mother made her own debut that her parents started dating, so in many ways, Bell said, her debut was a trip down memory lane for her mom and dad.

“It was like coming full circle for my parents because here I was, their daughter, making my own debut just 27 years after they met and began dating,” she said. “It was like a Cinderella moment, really.”

One day, Bell said, she might end up living in New Orleans more permanently and it is her hope that she would be able to give her own daughter, should she have one, the same opportunity to be presented. “I would leave that decision up to her,” she said, “but I will always speak fondly and cherish the experience that I was able to have.”

*amused*

Full Text (Printer friendly page so it may prompt you)

“But unluckily he had also a blue beard, which made him so frightfully ugly that every woman wanted to scream and run away at sight of him”

I wrote a poem inspired by this fairy tale. I showed it to two different people. Neither of them knew what the hell I was talking about. I asked a third person if she knew the story. She didn’t.

Just because Disney never made it into a movie, doesn’t mean it should be the most uknown of all fairy-tales… does it? It’s like not knowing that the original slippers in Cinderella were made of fur, not glass.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is… Man is scary. Man marries woman. Man gives woman keys telling her she can use all except the little one. Woman uses little key to open closet containing all of man’s former (and murdered) wives. Woman freaks out. Man comes home. Man finds out. Man attempts to behead wife. Woman’s brother kills man. Woman lives happily ever after with all of man’s money.

Moral of the story: Marry rich, then kill the blood thirsty psychotic bastard and live happily ever after.

My spider solitaire game feels like it’s being ruled by politics and social etiquette… is that normal?

I have a confession to make. I like watching golf.

Please don’t judge me?

But seriously, it is the most masochistic game in the history of the world. The game is designed to make people cry. And no competition in the world better exemplifies this concept than the US Open. A few minutes ago I watched a player hit the ball onto the green, it rolled, and it rolled, and off the green it went. So he hit it onto the green again, and it rolled, and it rolled, and off the green it went. At what point do players collapse into hysterical sobs? When will some sponsor hire a blimp to fly over with the words ‘Are we having fun yet?’ emblazened along the side.

Sometimes it’s a painful game to watch. With players you like (Tiger Woods is a cave diver, gotta cheer for my people), it’s not fun to sit back helpless as the greens fuck with the ball again and again and again. Of course, that’s assuming that the rough doesn’t swallow it after the drive. Have I mentioned yet how narrow the fairways are on this course?

…Errr… not that yall care.

If you really want to hear something amusing, watch the Robin Williams Live on Broadway DVD. He has a bit where he impersonates the Scotsmen who invented golf. (Click here and scroll down to the downloads section to listen)