just because you cant see it...

i cant decide if it is because we, the people who write, are so caught up in our own lives, or if it has something to do with the irregular way life seems to happen lately, dotting time with strange instances and too much rape and pain for the world to breathe healthily again. i'm not certain if it is a trend, or a permanent ocurance, and i sure as hell cant figure out if it is happening all over the globe, or just in the tiny whore-house that is the charles royal building at my particular university.

but the truth, mapped out in so many fonts on too many pages to read in an hour, is that fiction has faded into a fifth genre. if the first is poetry, and the second is drama, and the third is fiction and the fourth is essay, then the fifth is that slurry line between fiction and essay, a fraction of writing, if you will, where the inexperienced writer writes about him or herself and tells a life story, plays with form, and labels it as fiction when it is actually memoir.

everything has become memoir. of all of the fiction submissions to the welter literary journal, only two are actually fiction and not memoir, one of which is mine.


where has fiction gone? has the imagination finally given in and admitted that it cant keep up with how screwed up life really is? or are all of the characters on vacation? living in a place where storys are written about fluffy kitty cats and unicorns? maybe theyre waiting like the romanticists did for the world to turn itself upright again and for the rain to stop falling up. gravity has to take over again and set things right.


in the mean time, do we let them go on thinking that memoir is fiction? perhaps they just dont see the difference, or cant believe what has happened to them. it must have happened to this character that has assigned itself a first person omniscient point of view with which to tell a true story in disguise as fiction.


at least there are submissions. amd im not complaining, im just happy to be around to see it happen. the genre that was not a genre 15 years ago, that is only now being accepted by the literary big wigs, is taking over like it owns the joint, building a work out room in the old nursery and tearing out the flower beds that old aunt eudora took so much pride in. It plans to open up some windows and air out the rooms, finally get rid of the smell of cigar smoke from grandpa earnest and uncle charles. but the carpet hasnt changed, and no one will ever knock down the giant oak in the front yard or dry up virginia's lake.

the winter of my discontent

I have lived in this house since 2001. Seven years. Seven long years without air-condition or heat in my bedroom. I have silently suffered freezing winters beneath multiple layers of down, wool, and fleece blankets, and seven blistering Julys with a small desk-fan to relieve the sultry Maryland summer.

My house is not old—no more than 12 years old—and it has central air. Every room in the house has central air conditioning and heat. Every room except mine. It is miserable.
Summer is not so bad. My room faces the back of the house, and I rarely have direct sunlight. Combined with the constant breeze that flows through the valley below my house, I am comfortable during the summer.

Winter, on the other hand, is miserable. If I am in my bedroom during the cold season (I call it that because winter is not always cold here, as we have already discovered in a previous blog post) I am under a blanket.

The worst part is the draft. My bedroom (the one I picked out of the four possibilities on moving day) is directly under the attic. The attic is pretty open, and wind gets in easy. On particularly windy nights, the plywood that sits over the entrance to the attic will shift in the wind. I also get drafts through my window. I am not sure how. I spent my morning draping a heavy blanket over the window to keep some of the draft out and the heat in. I then stood on my bed with my hand right below the vent in my ceiling (the one that is supposed to deliver the heat) and noticed a slight cool draft coming from there as well. Makes no sense. The rest of the house is toasty, and I have a cold draft.

At least I don’t have to worry about my Macbook overheating. I’ll never die of heat exhaustion. I will be able to survive if the world runs out of heat.

Those are all of the situational pros I can think of. Right now, my cold fingers can only think of cons.

Getting out of the shower is the worst. My bathroom has the best heat in the house. (funny how a house has different heating scenarios in each room, despite the “central” air conditioning.) The bathroom is always perfectly toasty in the winter and refreshingly cool in the summer.

Getting out of a hot shower and walking into a freezing bedroom is unbearable. This morning, the doorknob was even cold to the touch. The way the metal of a seatbelt is when you first get in on a snowy day.

Nothing beats the terrible feeling of being cold and getting under a comforter that is still cold. The minutes of waiting for your body temperature to catch on and kindle the heat trapping properties of said comforter could feel like hours. But once the heat is trapped in, life is good.

Until you have to move your leg and it happens to reach just beyond the warm area and into the uncharted cold desert that is the uninhabited sheets outside of the body-heat zone. Perhaps the leg of your pajama pants becomes stuck around your knee, leaving your whole leg exposed. You might kick and swing your leg in attempt to pull the pant leg back down. A shiver runs from that foot to the very tip of your nose, and you gather the blankets closer to you, tucking them beneath your body to keep the cold out. For that minute, you are an Eskimo, or a biologist studying the snow in Antarctica. The world outside of your comforter is frozen tundra home for all sorts of misery and suffering.

My bedroom is the North Pole.

Serving Chat Book Idea

I work at the Olive Garden. I admit it. This hateful place has become the fuel for my writing fire. My memoir class was the most inspiring and useful writing class I have ever taken, and I learned that creative writing does not have to be fiction.

By the second week of the class, I decided that I would begin constructing personal essays based on my experiences in serving and food service. Most people think it has been done before, but few people have written about the restaurant industry in an unbiased and constructive manner. Movies and books on this topic are written by bitter servers who want to 'get back' at restaurant patrons.

I want to tell the truth. The unbiased truth from a fly-on-the-wall point of view. I want to leave m opinions and feelings in the kitchen, so to speak, and write in the same way that I serve.

Serving tables takes quite a bit of patience, creativity, and the ability to put your own feelings and opinions aside long enough to feed a group of people and get them out of the restaurant quickly with a smile on their face and as much food as possible in their belly. Servers are self-less, servile actors and actresses. We really don't care about your day or your problems, or the weather, or even what you thought of the food. we care about the wallet that you usually do not open wide enough to pay us. An objective view of this 'caring to not care' phenomenon would be much more important than a personal essay about how servers hate their jobs.


I strongly believe that I must follow through with this idea. I have to publish it, if only because no one else can. Though, as a student with no previous publication experience, I'm just a bit intimidated by the idea that i might not be good enough to do it.


If I'm not good enough to have my work published, perhaps I should chose a new career path.

ten books to read this year

Since winter break only lasts so long, I am going to condense my reading list to one book: The Brothers' Karamazov.

I read constantly during the semester, but never what I want to read. I get stuck with things like Logic of Language, Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum, and The MLA Handbook. Not my favorite things to read. For Christmas, I asked for and received quite a few books, including Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland and the complete collection of Fairytales from the Brothers’ Grimm. Sure, these sound like children’s’ books, but they really aren’t. Any Writing Major or Writer, for that matter, who has not read those books should be ashamed.

Writing is about telling stories, and a writer who does not read is probably not a good writer. One does not understand the art of good story telling unless one first investigates the classics.

I have an extensive library ranging from current best sellers to classics, to self-help and chat books. I have read…. most…. of my books, but there are a particular few volumes that continually hide from me and avoid being read. I have made a list of the next ten books that I will read no matter what. Excepting those required texts for the coming semester, I will read no other books until I have completed the list. (Perhaps I will be lucky enough to find one or two from my list on the textbook list this semester. Doubt it, but it is possible)

1. The Brothers’ Karamazov
2. Don Quixote
3. Garden of Eden
4. House of Mirth
5. Galapagos
6. Mrs. Dalloway
7. West Side Story
8. Les Miserable
9. Catch 22
10. The Catcher in the Rye

How, you might ask, have I survived as an English/Writing student for so long without reading some of theses books??!! I really must be a poor excuse for an English major, having not read The Catcher in the Rye. Non-readers accost me all the time and try to get the best of me by telling me how they ready TCitR and Animal Farm for their Freshmen Composition class. I am perfectly happy having skipped over that class altogether.

I find that I have developed a horrible habit: I do not read the required reading for class; I wait and read it the week after the semester ends. I never have enough time to devote to each book, so I wait. Otherwise, I read sections of the book and have no interest to read the whole thing later. I just wish professors understood this instead of thinking that I am lazy. It never occurs to them that I simply take my education more seriously than they do.

questions to start the year

Something must be written. I really must write. Write must I, really. Really, I must write. I must really write. There are many topics to write about, yet I ain't got nuthin. New Years Day. And no topic sparks an idea. Nothing seems important enough to write. So, instead, I write nothing.

I went to Baltimore last night. That sounds like something worthy of my keyboard. There were hordes of people. The SWAT team circled Harbor Place, and I left. The lights and reflections and boats were pretty.

Nothing stays the same. Some people argue that change is good, but I must disagree in some instances.

As a child, I could roam the Inner Harbor for hours. My friends and I would walk the two miles to the Harbor and occupy ourselves with watching people and eating food. Back then, it is important to note, food would not take up all of our money; we might even have enough left over to buy a new scarf.

"Mayor Shelia Dixon" was plastered on every poster, truck, stage, instrument, building, boat, inanimate object within a mile of the Harbor. Before midnight, she yelled to her "multitudes" that she plans to make Baltimore the safest city in the world.


crack dreams.


Queen Elizabeth has more power over Baltimore than this woman.


And she was wearing a dead animal on her neck.

Not sure why I am personally offended by fur coats. I wear sheep skin UGG boots, and have several leather purses. What is the difference? Am I just a hypocrite? Probably.

Midnight was destroyed by a fight between myself and my boyfriend. I do wonder about this year. I was fine with 2007. Not a bad year, though they seem to get progessively worse. Is it the year? or is it my age? or is it my increasing pessimism? cant it be helped?


Why do people collect things? My mother obsesses over antique dishes. Obsesses. She never uses them, wont sell them to collect their monetary value. She just hordes them.

I collect items of no use that would ordinarily be thrown away. Not because I want to reclaim them, or give them purpose, or because I feel they have a value to anyone. I collect the items I collect because they are pleasing to my eye. They are pretty, or evoke some feeling.

What does a coin collector feel about his coin collection?

Without collections, items would be lost. Someone needs to collect old coins because of the historical value.

the same might be said about pottery and art.


Who decided that people should collect Holiday Barbie? Beanie Babies? Star Wars figurines? teapots?


Is it a race to see who can own the most items?

Why do we continue to make some things? we mass-produce so many things that no one wants.


everything is liked by someone. This is a point that fascinates me to no end. Somebody in the world likes the sound of breaking bones. Someone likes cabbage. Many people enjoy the smell of dog poop. why?

is it an appreciation for something strange that makes people like some things? Are masochists and sadists mentally unhealthy? or am I weird for being repulsed by such things?


I wonder, often, if I am the one who is wrong about life. Is my perception skewed?

I think it is wrong to drive 90mph on twisty roads while drunk. Am I the one who is wrong?
I find it repulsive to smear my feces on public toilets. Am I wrong?
I cannot bring myself to torture, hurt, maim, kill another living being. Should I try harder to do these things like other people? Are people who hunt for sport intelligent beings who have life figured out?

Do some people feel that they are more important than the other 99.9% of the world's population? what is the difference between this and selfishness?

Does the person speeding at 90mph have a much more important destination than the rest of us? what about the person they rear-end and kill? Was that newly-departed person simply in the way? does this qualify as "survival of the fittest?"

who are these bi-ped fiends I share a planet with?

should marijuana be legalized and alcohol banned? I'm beginning to think so.

The Wait

“You told us it would be about 45 minutes and we have already been here for an hour,” a broad woman with a rigid grin says to the hostess, her teeth clicking together, annunciating each syllable carefully.
“I’m sorry ma’am. Your name is up next.” The short hostess looks up at the massive shoulders and forces a smile.
“How long will it be?”
“As soon as a table for eight clears, we’ll clean it and seat you.”
“Are we talking hours or minutes?”
“Probably only minutes.” She turns her smile on again, larger this time, showing her bright teeth.
The woman walks sour-faced back to her husband, four kids, and in-laws.
“She says we’re next.”
She returns to her spot against a wooden table where she places the round pager down and continues watching her youngest daughter twirl in circles around the center of the lobby, knocking into passersby and forcing the people gathered on the perimeter of the room to push their backs against the walls to avoid being hit. She doesn’t even notice when the pager lights up in a pattern of alternating red lights. People near her watch as the pager reflects in a wine bottle. No one calls her attention to it. They want her table.
“Is there a Parker party of eight?”
The woman snaps out of her reverie. “It’s about time!”
“Do you have your pager?”
“Little good it has done me.” She gropes around the table and picks up the disk. She narrows her eyes and clenches her jaw at the flashing lights.
“Ma’am, we’ve been paging you for five minutes. We almost gave your table up.”
It is nearing 6p.m. on a Friday night , and the lobby at this popular Italian restaurant is overflowing with people. Children are running in circles, babies crying, parents talking, the front door is opening and closing as those coming and going maneuver among people standing or sitting on benches and chairs, all hunkering down to sit out the hour wait for a table and dinner.
As soon as “Parker party of eight” is swooped away, an older woman with silver hair and matching earrings steals a glance at the chair where the older Mr. Parker had been sitting. She makes a lady-like dash for the chair and is narrowly beaten by two teenage girls who plop into the bench as if the music had just stopped in a particularly competitive game of musical chairs. The silver-haired lady redirects herself past the chair, pretending that she has no interest in it, and leans against a wall near the dimly lit bar where a little boy with freckles is pulling leaves from a plant on the floor and counting them.
“One, three, eight, severnneen, twenny, fives, three, six” He counts each one as he stacks them on top off one another. He smiles up at the silver-haired woman, who smiles back an angry, forced sort of smile before looking for an excuse to ignore him. Not affected, the little boy starts his counting game over, taking each leaf from the pile, folding it neatly, and dropping it in the woman’s purse that hangs conveniently at his eye level.
Meanwhile, a little girl in orange crocs and a purple dress is staring at the freckled boy between adult legs from across the room. She breaks away from her mom and clunks over to him, upsetting a new mother and her baby carrier.
“Hannah, be careful. Come back here,” a voice calls from the other end of the lobby. “Frank, go get Hannah, please!”
A hand reaches down from the sky and grabs Hannah by the back of her lilac dress. She is yanked up from the floor, and just in time; a man swollen with pasta and bread and sporting a marinara stain on his crisp blue shirt has almost stepped on her fingers. He smiles a big toothy grin at Hannah who starts bawling back at him from over her father’s shoulder. She inspects the pager in her father’s hand before snatching it away and putting it in her mouth.
Pasta Man holds the door for three women peacocking in from outside. They form a line by the hostess’ stand.
“Hello, how are you tonight?” the hostess asks.
The woman with the largest hair answers, “Three, non-smoking.”
“Can I have a name please?”
“Sherman.”
“It’ll be about 50 minutes. This will blink when we page you.”
“An hour? Are you serious? I’m not waiting an hour.”
The three women tromp out the door, but are immediately replaced by two elderly gentlemen in suits and ties. The first, a slightly balding, skinny man in a too-big suit makes a dash for the hostess.
“How long a wait for two?” he asks, out of breath
“50 minutes or so.”
“That’s not bad.”
Again, the exchange of pager and instructions, and the men survey the lobby in search of a place where two men might sit or stand comfortably together. The people who have already been sitting in the lobby for 40 or so minutes understand the surveying look and spread their legs, move their purses, and lean at a wider angle.
The men eventually find a small nook by a window just in time to hear two old women with penciled eyebrows complain about the wait. “You know, Barry and I were at Texas Road House two days ago, and the wait wasn’t this long. We got in and got sat real quick. I don’t know why this place takes so long,” the first woman wheezes to her friend who nods in agreement.
“They’re always slow here.”
“Maybe it has to do with the fact that the tables have people sitting at them. They can’t kick people out,” the oldest and biggest of the two men interjects good-naturedly.
“Well,” one of the women huffs. Both arch their indignant eyebrows and turn their backs to the man, unable to argue with common sense.