What you won’t see on CNN.
Awhile ago I mentioned a film that I’d seen in my history class called,“Palestine is still the issue.”
Obviously it is coming from a certain view point, but it’s not the things you hear everyday. I thought it was pretty amazing, and you can watch it right here on google video. I don’t think you’ll regret it.

Fidelity by Regina Spektor

Hands Open by Snow Patrol

Evaporated by Ben Folds

So Many Ways by Mates of State

She Doesn’t Get It by The Format

Star Mile by Joshua Radin

Well since I spend my days writing for class instead of for this blog, I have to double my efforts by sharing my writing with you. (I’m not really sure if that sentence even makes sense really…)
Writing my first fiction work for class proved to be a small trauma. After brainstorming for days I woke up the day it was due with no concrete story in my mind, and little half-moon indents on the palms of my hands. (I was making stress-fists as I slept apparently.)
However, it came together and I wrote this story and photocopied it for 20 classmates. Now the critique. Its just a first draft, so go easy on me.
Enjoy.
Also it’s fairly dark. Don’t judge me. ;)
P.S. Sarah wanted to make a cameo appearance in my production, so I named my narrator after her. However, I ended up writing it in the first person, but you’ll notice her name is mentioned once. :)

Cicada Summer
Maria Vermeer

The summer millions of cicadas crawled from their earthy tombs was the summer we buried my father. And like the incessant whine those insects made, he was still with us, his reeking breath on our necks, the fear in my mother’s eyes. Though dead, he still caused her to curse the spoiling milk she pulled from the fridge and cry at night. When my hands were slimy with dirty dish water and I accidentally broke the plate that slipped away from me, she flinched, and I wondered if she saw his ghost.

We lived in a dead mining town. I heard people call it a ghost town and thought it must be because all those who were dead and buried still walked with us. Sickly-curious I watched for these ghosts in the windows of the abandoned homes and in the wrecked cars outside the old high school building, and most of all in the junkyard outside town, where people dumped old things to exorcise their decaying lives of unwanted memories. I was sure they would walk there.

And I’m sure he still walked with my mother. I knew she loved my three brothers and I, but she was crushed, like the man who used to be our neighbor who got his legs caught beneath his tractor, she was crippled, unable to support our pain with her own. So we supported ourselves during those long summer days. My brother’s created anarchy and I tagged behind wondering whether their acts weren’t very much like the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, who the pastor eluded to that one Sunday. I was sure fire and brimstone would be rained down on us the day they fed our gerbils vinegar until the little animals puked up their insides. It made me sick, but they all seemed to think it better entertainment then the static on our old television set.

Our teacher at school had told us that cicadas spent seventeen years in the ground as nymphs, then emerged for a couple weeks to mate and die. I was convinced they must have been nymphs when I first saw the winged-demons with their armored bodies and unblinking red stares. I hated them, and I hated the pungent smell of their decay, bodies rotted on the sidewalk and window sills. Mother said they sounded like the neighbors weed-whacker, and our teacher told us that their abdomens vibrated and that they were singing a love song. That could have been, but that’s not what it reminded me of. I imagined what they must have felt, the feeling of a thousand flies caught in your chest, pounding against the walls, humming, screaming, like the flies that gathered over the smeared remains of that rabbit that tried to cross the highway

Their song was as oppressive as the humidity that made my hopeful cotton dress cling to my sweaty legs and made it hard to keep up with my brothers as we walked down the road towards the junkyard.

“Hurry up Sarah!”, they yelled over their shoulders as a car sped by covering my sweat in dust and making me squint at them in the distance. I was always left behind, alone, except for our dog. His black and tan skin hanged limply over his bones. Hundreds of cicada carcasses crunched under my feet and the dog bent down to scoop them up into his mouth as we walked. I wondered why he did that, but they didn’t seem to make him sick.

I didn’t mind being left behind. The boys went to the junkyard to hunt, to break the antennas off of the wrecked cars and make sharp spears that they’d shish kabob mice with, waving them above their heads in victory. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t stomach the slaughter and so I came to see Joseph instead.

I’d met him less than a week ago. He was older than me, much taller and awkwardly lanky, with wild black hair and dark eyes that I was convinced held a hundred secrets. He had become my religion. Joseph knew everything and although I doubt he ever left our small town for more than an afternoon I remember thinking that surely he’d seen Indian temples and African plains. Joseph spent most of his days in the public library, except for Thursday afternoons where I could find him in the junkyard collecting old bottles that he’d take home and line up against the window.

I found him almost immediately, sitting near a pile of tires by a wrecked car, with his cardboard box filled with a few treasures, a cobalt blue bottle and a small red one that was as deep as blood until the sun’s light caught it. I came up and sat beside him. It was enough to sit. Joseph rarely spoke and he never looked you in the eyes when he did. That made people afraid. When he talked it was like he was speaking to a ghost beside him, and you were merely eavesdropping.

After awhile he said, “This is a pharmacy bottle,” he held up the blue one. “It was used to hold medicine—can you imagine.”

I answered, although it was not a question. “Imagine what?”

He continued, “Something that looks so beautiful was just used and thrown away.”

I did not understand, but I nodded. “This one,” he said, cupping the red on in his hand, “has the Star of David embossed on it.”

I said I liked the red one best. Joseph got up and started to walk through the field bending over and running his hands slowly over objects, pushing things aside, and I followed, although we did not find anymore bottles that day.

In the late afternoon we walked back to town and sat on Joseph’s porch on the steps, loose with dry rot. Joseph put on a record. The music played to the fading dusk and its soulful beat made me sad, although I didn’t know why.

Later Joseph gave me a book to look at full of paintings by Van Gogh and he explained to the darkness why Van Gogh painted, and why he died. I stared at a picture of a city at night and a sky full of life and movement, a celebration sky. I looked up at our sky. Before I thought perhaps the stars were holy fire poised to destroy us, or eyes, like the animals in the woods, eerie, glowing and watching. Now I thought, maybe they were tunnels of light to other worlds, or a hundred candles burning like on Christmas Eve. And then I thought maybe we’d both, like cicadas, emerge from this dark tomb and shed these shells of lives, and be able to sing a brief sad song before we too die.

I was procrastinating my fiction writing and came across a website put together by a guy who collects old undeveloped and lost film.
Maybe its just me but I loved looking at these pictures. The guys commentary is pretty lame, but the pictures themselves are enough.

1)Geist
a literary & cultural magazine within Canada that I just discovered. They have this thing where people submit “flash fiction” in the form of a Postcard Story. Kind of like Post-Secret I guess, only fiction. I’ve been reading them and thinking, since my fiction assignment looms.

2) This poem:
Anger Sweetened
Molly Peacock

What we don’t forget is what we don’t say.
I mourn the leaps of anger covered
by quizzical looks, grasshoppers covered
by coagulating chocolate. Each word,
like a leggy thing that would have sprung away,
we caught and candified so it would stay
spindly and alarmed, poised in our presence,
dead, but in the shape of its old essence.
We must eat them now. We must eat the words
we should have let go but preserved, thinking
to hide them. They were as small as insects blinking
in our hands, but now they are stiff and shirred
with sweet to twice their size, so what we gagged
will gag us now that we are so enraged.

3) How when we want to justify our behavior it is so convenient to use ideology.
I’m taking “Emergence of Modern Society” and it strikes me over and over again how Christian rhetoric has been used to justify the most inhumane and sinful acts. It makes me worried, what part of our faith is merely the truth manipulated to justify our behavior.

4) A film I saw on Thursday called, “Palestine is still the issue.”
Suicide bombing has never made so much sense, and I wonder if right-wing ideology, that backs Israel’s military state, is the only reason why we don’t send more missionaries to help the Palestinians. The comparison of Palestine and apartheid South Africa is shocking.

Ok. So I’m in this Creative Writing class this term. We had to write two poems, which were each critiqued by our classmates. This coming week I have to submit one of the poems, completely revised, with a lengthy paper outlining my revision process.

So, this is all well and good however the critique group I got put with, well…to put it nicely, sucked. They had very little input and it was so frustrating since I need some people with brains to read the poem and tell me their insights. Also the prof told us she’s not giving any comments this time. What am I paying her for? Anyways, I know you are all so intelligent, so can you do me a huge favour? If you happen to stop by and read my poem feel free to give me some feedback! Just let me know what you liked, what you didn’t like, what you understood, what you thought it was about, what you would change…and anything you’d like to tell me. :) I’d be so thrilled. I’ll write a real blog soon!

Undertow:
What her sisters and mother said.

It started out beautiful,
natural as the sea.
He pursued her with tidal-persistence,
insistent.
Her sea-glass heart,
deep green and cobalt blue,
was worn down by his waves, but
still, she had oceans of hope
and bottlenose dreams.

With a gentle tug to sea
She went with him,
his Atlantic assurances and
Pacific whispers.
She was carried freely,
a piece of driftwood.

With a billow and surge of excitement
she risked the undertow,
the rolling,
the swell.
A touch of sea sickness and a sense of danger.
The taste of salty tears
on sun burnt cheeks.

Who could fathom it?

It ended in the rip tide and the
roar of the breaker.
Crashing.
Plunging.
She was swallowing words,
choking on pain, and
losing breath,
being pulled.
The grasping
ebb tide,
tearing, numbing,
screaming sea.
The abyssal.

We tried!
She was too far out,
too far down.
Our voices
drowned.

Today I spent many hours in the basement of the Dana Porter library in search of inspiration for my next poem for my beloved/loathed creative writing class. I’ve discovered that particular room lacks poetic inspiration, although I am left with pages of scrawled notes and cryptic drawings and an orphaned stanza, that may never be part of a poem.
Having been up since five a.m. doing projects and going to class, I was having one of those days.

insecurity:
Ten seconds ago I was happy in
loose-life pony tail,
yesterday’s sweater and
last fall’s shoes until
you looked at me and
I forgot myself.

No worries. Today I’ve decided what I want to do when I grow up!
I think I would like to be…
a high school teacher.
a script writer.
a stage actress.
an editor.
a film reviewer.
a photo journalist.
a freelance writer.
an aid worker…
Is that all? Yes. I think that’s all for today anyways.

Just a little taste of my life in Waterloo.
Enjoy at your own leisure.