tammytoes

*sigh*

this place really is starting to feel like home.

Since last I linked, here are my New York Mag Vulture posts:

• Slave Leias Invade Comic-Con, Proving Spike TV Right
• ‘The Dark Knight’: Harvey Dent Makes a Surprise Appearance at Comic-Con
• Where are the Roles for Superwomen?
• 10 Rock Star Stunts Even Ridiculous Than Flying to Antarctica
• Global Warming, Bad Weather Scuttle Fall Out Boy’s Quest for Antarctic Glory
• Can Fall Out Boy Make It to Antarctica?  An Anxious Nation Waits
• ‘Lost Boys: The Tribe’ Trailer: Corey Feldman Needs Some New Pants
• Uwe Boll Vs. Steven Spielberg

I also write the Quote Machine column twice per week, but that’s really all about whether or not celebrities have anything funny to say.  And you know celebrities: they’re notoriously unreliable.

Bitch Magazine:

• Current Issue! Of Woman Borg: Bionic Betties, Radical Robots, and the Evolution of the Artificial Woman (You can’t read this online, but you should really head to the newsstand and buy a copy, yo.)
• Summer Issue!  Two pieces…exciting exciting…stay tuned..

Feminist Review

• Review of Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire

I have also written bunches of resumes, created a mountain of process flow diagrams (don’t even ask what those are unless you have some sort of secret desire to break into corporate operations excellence…bleah) and helped a bunch of aliens of extraordinary ability obtain visas.

tammyworks all right.

today was margi’s moving day.  we piled her stuff into the cargo van rental, spun the red couch until it fit through all the doors, and watched clinton’s apartment fill up with doubles: another bedframe, another sofa, another set of bookcases, another another another.  she’s moving in with a love, traveling to china for the summer, and then spending the fall with her thesis.

i wash the baseboards, scrub the kitty paw prints off the walls, get a little bit giddy about having a whole new set of furniture (this time my own, not the marital kind) and try to make the place new – enough – for a new roommate. she is not denver.  that tether is totally gone, it seems.  she is all new york, recently of manhattan.  she is of hospital scrubs and bronze clogs and two kitties i haven’t yet seen.

it feels at once so awesome and so sad that my connection to the west is not at home, not immediate anymore.  there’s a finality to it, a cosmic shrug about where i used to live and where i live, squarely, in the now.  i’ve thought a lot about visiting denver lately, but i’ve come to realize something about myself lately: when i leave something i’ve loved so intensely, i require a long long long period of reckoning.  i have to leave it and find myself again.  only then can i go visit.

you can’t go home again, that’s the truth.  but you can live in the home you have.  so i guess that’s what i’m doing.

This poem arrived in my inbox this past week as part of National Poetry Month. It seemed just so right. (And sometimes my heart feels like deep space.)

Sleep Door
by Kazim Ali

a light knocking on the sleep door
like the sound of a rope striking the side of a boat

heard underwater
boats pulling up alongside each other

beneath the surface we rub up against each other
will we capsize in

the surge and silence
of waking from sleep

you are a lost canoe, navigating by me
I am the star map tonight

all the failed echoes
don’t matter

the painted-over murals
don’t matter

you can find your way to me
by the faint star-lamp

we are a fleet now
our prows zeroing in

praying in the wind
to spin like haywire compasses

toward whichever direction
will have us

and I’ve been hiding under the cover of an excuse that I use too many words. Who uses too many words? Not writers, certainly. No.

It’s been so long that WordPress has changed on me. A brand new interface with all sorts of pretty colors and new shortcut buttons. Oh, WordPress, you’re fancy this season.

Last night I had a dream that I was adrift in some huge body of water on a plastic floating thing, and I was looking for shore with a pair of huge binoculars. I could see it, but I knew I couldn’t reach it. For some reason, I wasn’t worried. But I remember wondering that maybe I should be.

A significant portion of my life has taken shape around a very strange vocation that involves writing pop culture criticism. It is the most out of out theres, wondering what it means out there, removed, maybe how it touches in here. But just touches. I haven’t spend much time shaping words inside, thinking in here – what does this mean in here?

I went to a poetry reading tonight and sipped ginger ale. Marie Ponsot read, “No cloud is measurable.” Joanna Klink said, “hubris, ampersands and thumbtacks.” I loved these words, the shape and sound and meaning of them. They resonated in here.

I went home after rice and lanie, who means more to me than I can say, and found an email with a link to a Defamer post that referenced a recent post of mine on Vulture. It takes shape!

I miss my blog. I appreciate those of you who tell me that you miss it, too.

Life is indeed good. Various. Challenging. Those words don’t have much shape, though. What do they mean in here? I should like to know.

There are never too many words, really. Not these kind.