I have not updated in what seems like a long time, but in the reality of how we run things here at rocket-fish, it's been merely an eyeblink in the universe of Oh God Why Doesn't Glynnis Ever Update. Let me just say, I really, really miss moveable type. I'm always breaking precious, irreplacable things that exist in the abstract world of the internet, where you can't just go buy another one. Why can't you ever just go buy another one? It's fate that I've been shoved out of my little corner in the internet's heart. We've been having relationship problems for a while.

I don't really know what to say about things lately. I feel grown up.

My cat died last week, and I'm finally getting to the point where I can say that to people without reverting back to what happened. I can finally say it the way I would say any other sentence. I don't know if that's a good thing. I've avoided telling people just for the sake of not being fussed over, but most of my school friends knew last week after it happened (I should just start calling them FamilyII or something -- I spend more time with them than even my parents). It happened last Monday night, and Tuesday I was back in school with a runny nose and puffy eyes and I went home early to lie on the futon and watch TV and get my mind off things. As we were coming down the driveway Monday night (a steep hill, probably something like a twenty degree incline from the bottom), she ran in front of the car, just as we were parking, and we hit her.

Friday, after school, I scrounged through my room, looking for a back-up disc that I made a while ago, with all my old digital pictures. I took the CD to CVS and used one of those Kodak printing machines. Now this is on my bedside table, framed, 5 x 7:



It's weird that it's only been a week. It seems so long ago, even though there's this eerie absence that hangs over my bed every night. Lack of warmth. What they say about pets lowering blood pressure and generally being theraputic is really true -- my body misses finding her in the bed every night, or waking up to find her looking at me with her green eyes. My body misses her the way you miss the warmth of that pocket beneath blankets once you've risen and put your feet on the cold, winter floor. It's the same kind of absence Mark Strand wrote about.

My sentimentality regarding my cat is probably disgusting -- I get the feeling that it comes across as some rash teenage love -- holding hands at lunch or walking each other to class -- when we were really more like the old married couple, bending and shaping to the movement of the other half until the way we existed together was so complete it seems impractical that either of us should exist any other way.

I'm supposed to get her ashes back soon, and I don't really know what to do with them. I wish I could sew her into my sheets like an outline of a pattern piece.
I wonder how long it will be before I have another cat.

I'm doing well, though. Things are wrapping up, and the semester has gone by so quickly. We still have plenty left, I know, but tonight I'm finishing our last book in creative writing, The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert. It's one of those books that, when I reach the end, it will leave me blank, like an open mouth with no words inside. I'll still reach for it instinctively. My whole life, lately, is an open mouth with no words inside. (Is that as melodramatic as it sounds?)

I have more writing to do, though. As much as I've been reading, I haven't been writing, and I have shorts and final projects and exercises and proposals to think of. I haven't turned anything in in three weeks or more. Carolyn and I are working on a massive pile of a poem, which I think will remain completely disorganized until the end of its days. The idea was that we'd take lines from famous American works and throw them in with lines of our own, attempting to shape pieces of our own experience into conclusions about America (as an idea, philosophy, place, home). Right now we have four pages of sentences that sound nice, but don't really fit together. My favorite stanza is Thoreau's:

   I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately
   but found I could barely survive.
   There is nothing there that I understand;
   every leaf is foreign, odd,
   meaningless.

And a small part about bananas:

   What value have I in dirt or in seed
   when my food comes packaged and labeled—
   each wrapping a barcode,
   each banana a symbol
   of journey by boats or barges,
   trucks or trains.

We are making a team effort to work through the mess that has been our poetry. I got assigned poetry workshop next semester, so hopefully a lot more of that will be happening. Everything keeps coming out in spurts and short stanzas that never fit together. There's rarely a bigger picture -- my poetry is more Pollock than Rembrandt -- not even Monet or VanGogh. I don't think poetry is calling for a Pollock revolution (we got enough of it with "We Real Cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks).

Anyway, that's my semi-weekly vomit of happenings. I'll be empty for a while.