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Apparent detours and crumbs left along several paths simultaneously

23-Oct-09

Long time, no blog. Sorta.

As has been the case for some time, most of my (most succinct) material is relegated to my account on Twitter. If you wish, you can follow me at @vmarinelli. To manage my own (notoriously terrible) attention span problems, I can only follow back less than 1% of those who follow me there, but, for whatever it’s worth, I do follow back most of those who follow me at my local, more conversational account, @vmarinelliRVA.

I also have an active account on Tumblr, here. Tumblr is kind of a weird hybrid of social media (in the vein of Twitter and similar apps revolving around “following” and having “followers,” and a dynamic of sharing and exchanging material) and “regular blogging.” The good thing about this is, if you’re clueless about its social media elements, you can just read posts there as you would on any blogging service, leave comments, etc.

At least half of what I post on Tumblr is fairly ephemeral silly internet shit, but every now and then actual material of substance gets posted. I’d love to have some sort of semi-automated digest I could post here on a weekly basis (with the option to remove the more ephemeral/ridiculous items in advance, so as not to overwhelm), but since I have no coding skills or the slightest clue about how one might go about such a thing (Oh Lord, won’t you send me a WordPress plugin geek), I’ve just been leaving this site to rot, while I post stuff here and there and also while I work on more substantive material – all of which manages to skip over this blog.

Full disclosure: It’s very possible that part of my reluctance is subconscious; this blog is still syndicated at feministblogs.org, which used to make me really happy, until the 2008 Presidential election, when certain minds began to conflate gender essentialism with feminism (adding bonus racism!), and I was more ashamed than I could begin to articulate at having my own articles showing up on the same website with theirs. For the most part, I silenced myself rather than deal with my disgust (and shame at having been, at one point, closely linked to some of these authors).

At any point, I could have opted to have my feed removed – but this felt like defeat (and also, potentially, an affront to the person who maintains that site, with whom I have no beef whatsoever). And I could have blogged more actively on these subjects – but this also felt like defeat, because, while I am (most certainly) a committed, politically engaged feminist, I didn’t want to be a “political writer” or a “feminist writer.” Not because those are bad things to be (hardly! and I thrive on many such writers’ works), but because it’s just not the best use of my skills. Whenever I’ve detoured in that general direction, it has made me utterly miserable, and it has taken away from other work I need to be doing.

Eventually, I’ll figure out what the hell I’m doing with this space which is more expansive than what is afforded through my two primary Internet venues, but which is curiously far less expansive than what I need (for the writing of not especially “short” stories, and, ultimately, all the books – both prose and poetry – I am slowly piecing together).

Meantime, I’ll try to pop in here at least once a week, to provide a clumsy weekly (or so) summary of stuff posted elsewhere which may be of interest here. Since this is the first time I’m doing that, I’ll go back a bit farther back.

Okay, that’s about as digest-y as I can get this.

Consider yourselves approximately as caught up as me (which is to say, still ridiculously behind).

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Hey, I’m in a book.

25-Aug-09

Hey y’all! Long time, no blog. (Your patience is appreciated while I’m working on my own book, letting off smaller amounts of verbal steam here and here as I go.)

I have, as far as I know1, a whopping total of 55 words in the above anthology, all originating with Twitter. I didn’t send anything in particular to the editor, but told him he could use whatever he wished from my posts; I’m told this post as well as this one made it in.

But there are several hundred more contributors, many of them writers and comedians you may have actually heard of (even if all you know about Twitter is that it’s something CNN won’t shut up about), such as John Hodgman, Margaret Cho, Diablo Cody, Neil Gaiman, Paula Poundstone, Eugene Mirman, Susan Orlean, and Ana Marie Cox.

AND if you’d like to get your mitts on a copy, you can do so while also benefiting Team Lucy Kate for the March of Dimes. Rad, huh? (More on Lucy Kate, who is presently recovering from heart surgery, here.)

Go, Team Lucy Kate!

Lucy Kate, August 24

Lucy Kate, August 24

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1 Going here on what I’ve been told made the book, by someone who had an advance reader; haven’t received my contributor’s copy yet.

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“P.S., I forgive you for stealing my underwear…”

25-Jul-09

Note: I know I haven’t blogged here in forever, and this is a weird place to start again, but the following started as a short post on Tumblr, and just got a little too long for that venue, so I decided to actually post something here.

The above is a notation from my 11th grade prom date, Kiko Bukoski, in our senior yearbook from Kapa’a High School (class of ‘88). I will never know exactly why he asked me to go with him – he was an extremely popular bad boy, and I was a huge nerd; his regular girlfriend was one of the cheerleaders; while they may have been broken up at the time he asked me to the prom, he was very clearly still with her by the actual event.

This is to say, I ended up being sort of his second date. Like, I was the one he drove to the event itself (in some rented lavender sports vehicle – I couldn’t make this shit up), and there is a ridiculous official “prom portrait” taken of us, but once there he was basically with her and all his friends who wanted nothing to do with me.

I have speculated that he envisioned (yes, seriously) some sort of Carrie prank for me, but didn’t have the heart to go through with it. Or maybe he’d asked me on a dare, never expecting me to say yes, because all I did in class was give him shit. (He was one of those with bigger, deeper ideas than he liked to let on, due to whatever burdens popular people imagine they have – namely, that they not be mistaken for nerds.) But I figured it’d be a good participant-observer sociological research opportunity (this is how I treated most potential social interactions), so I’d said yes when he asked me.

Or maybe (though I doubt it) he actually liked me. Who can say? All I know is that we all ended up skinny dipping in Hanalei Bay, and that, just to fuck with him, I stole his underwear from where he’d stashed it (in a canoe, I think?). I don’t remember how I got home, and I don’t think we ever kissed or anything of that nature at all. It was hilariously stupid.

(The only fun part of the night – before the skinny dipping – involved dancing by myself to a hired band’s lazy version of Louie Louie; my stoner friend Dave was in the band, and we kept looking at each other like Why the fuck are we even here?)

After the event, Kiko continued dating the aforementioned girlfriend and we proceeded as if nothing had ever happened between us. (Which it really hadn’t.) But his note in my yearbook made it seem far more salacious.

I’d still love to know what the hell he was thinking.

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Another Olympia queer history fragment, this time from the bottom of a box of files

07-Apr-09

[the last one having been discovered in my underwear drawer, at which time I was delighted persons still in Olympia shared my delight.]

This flier:

Queer Nation flier, Olympia, WA, ca. 1991

Queer Nation flier, Olympia, WA, ca. 1991

…was from the first meetings of Queer Nation in Olympia, hosted by my roommate Tod Streater (RIP). With him, I attended said meetings – along with the first local meetings of ACT-UP, which was hosted somewhere else. I have to confess, though, that the only clear memory I have from the Queer Nation meetings was the time Tod answered the door, took one look at the guy who’d just knocked, and said “Why hello, FBI! You don’t belong here!” And then he cackled in his most gloriously queeny voice and slammed the door. (As for whether the Olympia chapters of such groups were, indeed, under any sort of government surveillance, I have no idea – but Tod, as one of the loudest voices around in terms of AIDS and queer rights activism, had every reason to be suspicious.)

The fliers were placed on bulletin boards at the Evergreen campus and the like. The phone number was for the campus queer rights group. The address was our rented household, affectionately then known as The Dreary Biscuit (one roommate – Julia, I think? had once lived at another Olympia household called “The Sunny Muffin”).

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Update!

26-Mar-09

I forget sometimes that there are some folks who still read this thing, who do not also follow me on Twitter, so for the benefit of these 3 or 4 people, an update: my husband has a job! (Or will, in 11 days. It’s temp-to-perm, but still promising.)

I’ll edit the paypal link in the right hand column accordingly later, but for now, this will have to suffice. (In any case, know that while we’ll still be struggling for awhile – anyone know any trustworthy bankruptcy lawyers in Richmond, Virginia? – there is palpable reason to have hope, here.)

Thanks to all for your incredibly kind support over this difficult period, material and otherwise.

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A gentle word for the haters of the Oatmeal Raisin Cookie

09-Mar-09

(Such haters being rather epitomized in this tweet by my pal tj, who actually knows plenty about matters of hunger, poverty, and benevolence, and so, I trust, will not take personally my using him as a playful example of Anti-Oatmeal-Raisin-Cookie zealotry.)
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Note: Want to skip the personal story (conveyed though it may be through an oblique discussion concerning the relative virtues of the oatmeal raisin cookie), and get right to the point? Leave this blog and go here.

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Hey, folks. Long time, no blog. Have had a few things going on, not least of which has been anxiously shuffling piles of debt from creditor to creditor in order to help keep a roof over our heads, as we continue to cope with my husband’s extended unemployment. We have two children, ages 14 and 9; we are not homeowners (have never owned real estate); our sole car has nearly 200,000 miles on it; we have no savings; and we are hanging on by thread. (But, yes, hanging on – by the grace of God and any number of gracious human beings.) Through FAMIS, a program of low-cost health insurance for children here in Virginia, we are grateful that our kids receive all necessary medical and dental care; however, my husband has no health insurance, and my own coverage is limited. (My medical and hospital visits are, thankfully, covered after a copay; but my prescription copays are high enough that I routinely go without medications I’m supposed to have on a daily basis, to save money for utilities and the like.)

Incidentally, when I refer to my husband’s “extended period of unemployment,” I mean that my husband has now been laid off since April 22 of 2008. For all 11 months since his job was eliminated, he has been diligently applying for new positions, but the competition is fierce. He hasn’t collected unemployment benefits for the entirety of this period (or they would have expired by now), but we are nearing the end of our eligibility, and frankly, we’re terrified. The employment sector – most broadly: consumer electronics and the cable industry – which constitutes the entirety of his work history, has taken major, repeated blows in our community, most recently with the closing of Circuit City, which had been headquartered here in Richmond, Virginia. (More on this – with bonus awkwardness! here.)

But back to the truly critical issue at hand: the esteem in which various factions hold the oatmeal cookie.

I just wanted to say that when I recently posted this to Twitter, it was no joke. Nor was this, as long as we’re discussing the economy. (Post continues below image.)

Oatmeal cookies, 10 weeks expired.

Oatmeal cookies, 10 weeks expired.

You will note in the above picture: there is but a single cookie remaining in this container. This is to say, we eated1 them. (And after this post, I will eat the last one, unless one of the kids calls dibs.)

Would we have preferred chocolate chip? Sure. Would we also have preferred that these cookies not have an expiration date in 2008? Obviously.

But we eated them anyway, and we were grateful.

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So, what’s my point today? Only this: if you are able to donate to the Central Virginia Food Bank, please visit here. (We are fortunate to receive help from them via one of their partner agencies here.) As you may have heard, they have had to turn away volunteer assistance in recent months due to a lack of actual food donations – so to be clear, what they most need are donations of actual food and/or money.

If you are in the U.S. but outside Virginia, and/or you would like to locate a hunger-fighting organization in another state, please visit Secondharvest.org. Thanks.

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1 We are also aware that ‘eated’ is not a real word, but we like it. As has been (haz been?) already established, we are a family already ruined by LOLcats.

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Because Googling lyrics is cheaper than therapy

21-Feb-09

Some time ago, I tweeted, “I really need to find a way to sort out which of the voices in my head I should be listening to, and which I should ignore.” Lest anyone imagine I was joking, I present the following, composed, yes, entirely on my blackberry this morning (with a few edits/link and file insertions) – or, shall I say, afternoon – after long, fitful dreams into which I could not, finally, collapse until well past dawn (the insomnia thing is killing me lately), because it was too important then, for me to wait for my computer to fire up. (Which is happening a lot lately. I swear I’m doing 80% of my writing entirely on my phone, and when I choose to share it, posting directly from there to my Medium Sized Blog – relative to the bloated largess of this one – on Tumblr.)

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Image: Tears spilled listening to Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers & reading email, taken with the crap phone I had back in June.

Pertains to different album by The National than is referenced here, but it's still apt.

Pertains to a different album by The National than is referenced here, but image is still apt.

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Some notes on waking, early one Saturday afternoon

Why go to your shrink, when you have the song that’s been stuck in your head for going on 72 hours, which, even though you love the voice of the man who sings it, is getting excessive, so finally you Google the lyrics and then freeze, with a certain horror of recognition, on reading this (on your blackberry, while you are still on the potty)?: If I were a spy in the world inside your head/ Would I be your wife in the better life you led?1

For context: In 1990, when I was first with my future husband (whom I’d first met when we were ages 3 and 4, respectively, and again in 1984, when I was 13), we had a romantic date at this Mongolian and Japanese restaurant in a strip mall, anchored by a K-Mart2.

When we got our fortune cookies, his said “Friends long absent will be returning to you.” (Through the seven years following – through each of our insane girlfriends, which in my case included decidedly non-awesome confrontations with the law – he kept it in his wallet, along with a picture of me he’d taken of me, in the yard of my now-estranged aunt.)

We laughed then, on reading his fortune, because that was how it had always been with us: rotating in and out of each others’ orbits.

Then I opened mine, which read, “You and your wife will be happy in your lives together.” We laughed at that too, because I was entirely out then as “bisexual, erring on the side of women.”

Coming back to him, seven years later, was, among other things, an admission that my fortune had been very, very wrong.

It took awhile for us to figure out that perhaps our fortunes hadn’t been so much “wrong” as “switched.”

Even so, I’ve had moments of ambivalence, in which my brain takes leave of my body, aimlessly wandering its “less traveled” roads. (Or, perhaps more accurately: “roads traveled extensively, but finally abandoned out of dire necessity.”)

And that’s when I need to get back into my own head, cutting through the static of last night’s drinks and dreams, to figure out what that persistent melody is trying to tell me, so I can pull myself back from the detour, and remember “this is the person I married, for all kinds of good reasons stretching far beyond the necessity of abandoning those other failed, landmine-infested roads, and I truly love him.”

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1 The song is Bitters & Absolut, by The National (from their eponymous record). You can hear it and read the lyrics here here, and/or buy the mp3 from Amazon. No, there’s no affiliate link giving me any kickback from purchases (not that I couldn’t use kickbacks! See pathetic note in column at right, unless you’re reading via RSS!), because I’m too lazy to figure that shit out.

2 Said mall having been built over the literal rubble of one of my numerous, vaguely remembered childhood homes. Only clear memory from that address, on or near Williamsburg, Virginia’s Waller Mill road: when the stepfather I had for a brief period stepped on a nail in the yard, which may or may not have gone all the way through his foot, but there were weird and, considering his artistic rages and otherwise erratic behavior, nonsensical and scrambled allusions to Jesus that, still, I somehow associate with that moment. (And a further tangent: Since the restaurant still exists, we celebrated our 6th wedding anniversary there, in 2007.)

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Seven things about two brands of whiskey I’d just as soon never drink, and why

12-Jan-09

(But First, A Ridiculous Preamble)

Tonight I was reading one dude’s entertaining post in response to a “Seven Things No One Knows About You” meme. This led me to recall the fact that a number of perfectly lovely people have “tagged” me with such memes in the past. However, because I am a surly and uncooperative person (the handful of people who will read this already know this about me), I failed to respond. (So too with well-intentioned “blogging awards.”)

First, I don’t have too many secrets. (Particularly from those following me on Twitter. The poor wretches.) Second, if I wanted to make lists of stuff about my life that could be considered freaky (shall we talk about the funeral of my uncle, which had its own bouncer, or about being reported as a missing person in 1993 to Washington State police?), I could do that full time and never run out of material. Third, my best material is precisely the stuff I need to pull together for more sustained narratives – e.g., more short stories and fewer itemized blog posts. (And when I get better at finishing the goddamned stories I start – and, omigawd, start sending out work again – this is the last thing I published – can you say “pathetic”? – I need to move back in the direction of books.)

But whatever. Tonight I figured, “oh why the fuck not.1” So, following are seven things you don’t (or at least, probably don’t) know about me, which, rather than being individually substantive, are tangential but still (one hopes) relevant. I should be able to keep that short and sweet, right?

Seven things about two brands of whiskey I’d just as soon never drink, and why

  1. I am named after the granddaughter of the founder of Southern Comfort, whom my parents met at William and Mary: a woman named Vikki Fowler. (This has something to do with my blog’s title, although that’s only part of it.) I’m told I met her as a baby, and that she may have gone to Africa (on the inspiration of the 1966 film, Born Free, supposedly); in any event, a relative of hers, reached at the Fowler Museum of Cultural History some years ago, had no idea where Vikki ended up; in fact, she said if I ever learned what had become of Vikki, to please let her know. (I’d still really like to know.)
  2. Yet I can’t stand whiskey.
  3. Which is because whiskey was the beverage of choice for one of my most heinous ex-girlfriends, late in 1990 through early 1991.
  4. Who claimed to have a (juvenile) record for attempted murder, and whose behavior was otherwise sufficiently terrorizing that still, from time to time I run her name through her hometown newspaper’s search engines, because what’s more interesting to read than any given town’s police blotter?
  5. Which is how I know that among items she has been arrested for stealing (in addition to violent crime arrests), one of these was, indeed, a bottle of whiskey.
  6. However, that whiskey was not Southern Comfort. It was Black Velvet, which I understand is a) Canadian and b) Also the name of an extraordinarily cheesy late 80s tune recorded by one Alannah Myles.
  7. Who was just her type.

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1 Not to worry, however. I will not further perpetuate the tagging-with-memes thing; I trust that if you feel like writing something in response to the “seven things” notion, that you will, and that if you don’t, you won’t, and I will love you just the same.

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These are a few of their favorite things

04-Jan-09

My neighbors, last joked about here1, have what looks to be some strange former craft project set out with the trash. And not only is it set out with the trash, it also seems to contain trash. (I figured snapping these pictures was obnoxious enough as far as neighbor behavior goes; I didn’t actually investigate the contents of the container.)

(Click through to Flickr if handwritten captions are difficult to read at this resolution.)

(Click through to Flickr if handwritten captions are difficult to read at this resolution.)

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1 Really, it was a joke. I do, in fact, carry a poop scoop with me when I walk my hound. (This is not to say I didn’t briefly consider leaving his poop there. Anyway, their guy lost, so NANNY NANNY BOO BOO.)

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Who would like to use me as an illustration for their ADD textbook?

03-Jan-09

Recently, I was invited to join a group called “52 Stories” on Flickr. After leaving an exceptionally long and undoubtedly annoying comment in the group’s discussion forum about how I wasn’t sure how this or that would work and how I’d most likely flake out after making a sincere initial effort, I finally posted something. (So here is my sincere effort.) Of course I’m doing it wrong (Moltz! You are my inspiration!) because I think you’re only supposed to post one photo per week to the group – hence “52 stories.”

Also: between these two photographs – click through to Flickr for the rather exhaustive and bizarre annotations (mouse over the images and they pop up) – there are at least 52 stories, so maybe this covers my group participation for the entire year.

Post script: After all the notations in the photos specifically pertaining to issues around psychiatric medications, it occurred to me that amid the papers, I found not one, but two, written prescriptions for ADD-specific drugs (Concerta, in the highest dosage available) – but since I’d managed to lose both prescriptions before getting them filled (while we still had good insurance), they really weren’t much help.

From my office, after an all-nighter of cleaning:

Click through to images hosted on Flickr for annotations.

Click through to images hosted on Flickr for annotations.

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