unsmush

People at work are driving me a little batty. Everyone is coming up to me and saying I heard you’re leaving for Trader Joe’s! NO, FOOLS! I AM A WORD ARTIST NOT A DESK JOCKEY!


I’m leaving to get on with my creative life, to create the life I want to live. I’m leaving for the freedom to persue dreams, I leaving because this air-conditioned, beige cubicle is murdering my muse! I went back into my original Nashville-move journal last night and it was full of gems, poetry, beautiful thoughts, story ideas, creativity.

Now my journals read like laundry lists. “I am so sad and bored and stuffed up” blah blah blah. It is possible for a place to stifle a person but only if that person allows it to. And I have allowed this place to smush me. I officially unsmush myself.


Sure, I’m working at a grocery store part-time. A grocery store I love, that treats people right and provided free benefits and good options for good workers. I am learning to work at work again, to find my motivation, to be among the living while being paid essentially what I am paid here.

but I am also putting my art into the world, I am starting an etsy, I am performing a rock opera, I am freelance writing, I am poet mentoring, I am LIVING and I don’t need a big Daddy corporation to take care of me. The world is changing, work is changing and America has become a service-oriented culture. what service can I provide my community, my friends, my neighbors? Well I am surely not providing it here at a Christian publishing house. I am a creative free-spirited silly outspoken authentic artist and until I own that and live that I will be miserable and I will only bring those around me down. I am living for myself and for the betterment of the people around me.

Love to everyone and every living thing.

Darrel, the IRS super

Yesterday I had my taxes done at the IRS. If you make >$49,000 per year, the IRS has to prepare your taxes for you. Even though this often takes an hour or more (wait time), I love the security of knowing the IRS prepared my taxes and cannot audit me or otherwise say they were done incorrectly. They did it.

I walked in about 2pm, there are over a dozen people waiting but the man at the counter says “whatchu got?” and takes all my tax papers. He has tightly curled black hair and red-brown skin with (oh, my favorite) dark brown freckles. Very dark brown, like little chocolate buttons. Probably in his early forties, dressed like a jazz musician from the 30’s, slightly taller than me, soft brown eyes.
“You just walked in here?” he asked. It seemed as if I was over-prepared.
“Yeah.” I say and he doesn’t give me a number to wait (although most of the people in the room have these). Slightly concerned that I have no number, I trusted my gut which was telling me this guy liked me and wanted to help.

After about twenty minutes, he calls me up with a few others to go to another room where someone is preparing taxes. He keeps calling me by my first name and has a very tender demeanor. I wait in this other room for about 45 minutes.

“Julia! Are you still here!?” He says when he sees me. I’ve been doodling. “Oh you’re an artist! Look at that.” What a sweet kind man, when the tax preparer has some problems itemizing my mortgage stuff, he comes over to help, he laughs at my secret-unclaimed-beach-house joke. She calls him Darrel. He tells her I am an artist and asks (in earnest) to see my doodle again. Thank you Darrel, the sunshine on my Tuesday tax ick.

writing workshop

This weekend I took part in a critiquing workshop at the main branch of the Public Library.

The creator of the workshop sloppily foretold in emails what s/he was planning. Declan, an obscure male traditionally-Irish name, turns out to a be a young woman. She is probably in her early twenties and proactively decided to begin her own writing workshop to built her resume. I appreciate the gutsiness.

About 12 of us show up, as soon as I walk in I see my son's grandmother. The woman who served us with papers filing for full custody at the behest of her son, who took part in the brief time when we were denied access to our child until the courts rectified that. This all took place after a painful and unfortunate accident that left our son injured, a time when he needed his parents (all of them) the most. I was shocked, but being who I am it was easy to hide shock and I only said, "hello".

She didn't recognize me at first then, registering shock in her wide blue eyes, she stuttered "I'm so happy to see you here."

It was all I could do not to say "I'm so NOT HAPPY TO SEE YOU here." I felt invaded, scared, irritated, angry. Then, I took a deep breath, let her sentence hang in the air and said something non-descript like "what a surprise."

In typical steam-roller fashion, I had agreed to share one of my poems at the first meeting. I waffled, thought of reneging then just decided whatever the world has in store for me, it will out. So I guess I'll go back next week. I am thankful that such a program exists in this city for broke writers such as myself, even if it comes with unwanted lessons in forgiveness.

the iNterNet

The internet is freaking me out today. I was searching for a contributor online because sometimes our contributors fall off the face of the Earth and I still have to pay them. I stumbled across the website, ussearch. I'm not linking to it, it's too creepy.

I typed in MY NAME and it knows where I live, how many addresses I've had where and promises more information like annual income, value of property and current address (verified by utility bill payment!) arrruuuugghghhgh! Freaky!

So imagine I accidentally call some guy who is crazy because I push a 9 when I meant 6 and he gets pissed off and is will to spend $4.95 (!) to look me up on the internet and hunt me down because he's crazy and he knows the only way you get away with killing someone is by not knowing them at all! Of course, his number would be in my phone but only once and if the police called him he'd probably say it was a mis-dialed number. Then he'd laugh to himself at home, rubbing his hairy hands together and remembering my corpse. SO CREEPY. I am NOT friends with the internet today.

Composting classes

Last night K and I got a babysitter for the first time ever and went to a lecture by Eric Schlosser at Belmont University. It was a refresher course for two organic local-food-buying, non-junk food eating women (us) but it gave me a renewed vigor regarding composting.

Schlosser was talking about the guy who started the organic food movement in Britain, Sir Albert Howard, and how we are all interconnected to the soil. That in turn got me thinking about composting. I have a little compost plot in my back yard. It isn’t beautiful and in the summer it draws bugs but I love watching the eggshells, coffee ground, paper towels, broccoli stalks and other vegetable scraps turn back into this black soggy gorgeous earth. I love that I am teaching my son this by doing it with him. I love watching the birds twitter around it looking for goodies. I love that my trash never stinks.

In fact, our household makes very little trash. There is usually a week every month we have NO TRASH to pick up. I wish this was so for the rest of the neighborhood. I drive down the street on trash day and some of the bins are full to bursting and they have NOTHING in their recycle bin on recycle day, some don't even pull it out.

So all of this has me thinking about having a composting class at my house this summer for people in my neighborhood- especially kids- because they love to learn this stuff. Then as time goes by and more people in our neighborhood are composting start to have a gardening class. I always have a liberty garden with lettuce, spinach, herbs, cucumbers, pepper and a few tomatoes (tomatoes don’t love me and don’t grow very well for me). Very little work is required to grow a small garden as long as you’re composting because you are providing all the nutrients the plant need to grow by composting your scraps.

So that is my idea for the day, start a composting workshop at my house this spring and get people to have less trash and more beautiful rich healthy soil. I want to help people to begin to see that everything is everything else, we are earth and sky, that without bugs and birds and possums and bats and trees and lovely dirt we can’t thrive. We are merely surviving when we buy into this technological insanity and disconnect ourselves from the beauty and wonder of creation.

IGNORED: old people and young people

Old people in nursing homes are bored, I mean, they seem to be bored- and cranky. Kids in public schools are also bored and cranky. No one has time to listen to anyone anymore and the very act of honest conversation is going down the toilet. To remedy this, I think old people in nursing homes should be bused in periodically and assigned to kids in public schools.

I have friends who are teachers for Davidson Metro and they are now responsible for case-working a few kids. This is a new responsibility on top of all the stuff they already have to do. They work ALL THE TIME. They arrive at work at 6 am and don’t leave until 4 or 5 in the afternoon, there is paper grading to be done at home and they have to be available to answer emails from students, evenings of Parent/Teacher meetings, school assembly, all kinds of weird stuff. They work ALL THE TIME and now they are basically responsible for the well-being of a few “troubled” students as well. Way to overwork the overworked.

Old people have mostly gotten over themselves enough to be able to give good advice so I think this would be a win-win situation. The kids would get some much needed attention and the old people would have someone to tell their life lessons to. The only real downfall I can think of is a kid’s assigned old person kicking the bucket or being a secret molester. I think this would be supervised though, maybe like Study Hall.

So old people would sign up for this, it would be advertised in newspapers (old people still read those) and in nursing homes. PUBLIC SCHOOLS LOOKING FOR MENTORS! 65+ and explain it was on a volunteer basis, maybe provide a free lunch or something. The mentors would be screened and the kids would be given a self-assessment, then matched according to their interests. It would probably be expensive to begin it but once it got started I think it would work really well.

Parents would have to sign a waver that stated if you wanted your kid to attend public school you have to agree to this because it would be the freaky parents who would feel their “privacy” being violated or whatever over this that would cause a stink. Man, I wish Americans weren’t such assholes and suing each other all the time. We’d be less afraid of everything.

trains vs. buses

If you live in Donelson and work downtown, I highly recommend a jostle on the train. The rates went down to bus fare price in July, only $1.60 per trip. I rode the Nashville Star today for the first time. From Donelson, it takes about 13 minutes and then another ten to walk to my office.

When I stepped off the platform onto 1st Avenue, the same intense connectedness that I’ve associated with the trains in Boston, New York, D.C and Chicago welled up in me and I felt like I was living in a city. A city! To call Nashville a city after experiencing the great thrive of big cities in this big country seems laughable but I felt it. The City-ness of it all and happiness and possibility seemed right there in front of me, chasing the frocked pedestrians and dark-clad queue waiting for the connecting bus. I wanted to run all 8 blocks to work chirping out how crazily wonderful everyone could feel if they’d ride the train with me every morning. I wanted to screen-print posters saying “Trains make people Happy!” and put them on every electrical pole. I wanted to hop back on and ride home again so I could ride back.

buses and I have never had the same heart-swelling relationship. I rode the bus to school for the first time when I was seven. I didn’t know when to get off. The bus driver found me huddled near the back, biting my fingernails (I’m sure) and walked me into the school where he’d parked and found someone who knew where I belonged. Unfortunately, it was my last school and the person he found was my previous 1st grade teacher, Mrs. Daniels, who did not like me at all.

At seven, I don’t remember thinking it strange that there was a teacher who didn’t like me and was very obvious about it. But looking back on it, the situation does seem odd and mean. Mrs. Daniels made sure I felt extremely foolish for not getting off the bus and explained to me what a bother it was that someone was going to have to drive me all the way over to the school I was supposed to be in. She made sure my mother knew which was not going to go well for me. Since then I have never liked taking a bus anywhere, but Trains! Trains are clackery thumpy stumble fun. I would take a train to the moon. (Although I’d still be nervous about when exactly I should get off)