Author Archives: K

Hacked

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You may have noticed that this blog has been disappearing and reappearing a lot lately.  I thought I’d try to explain why.

Let me first say that I love the internet.  I’ve loved the internet ever since the internet was a thing to love in my life.  There’s a photo somewhere of me in 1994, 10 years old, sitting at my family’s First Computer, staring in awe at the Prodigy Internet we had back then.  I was hooked from the very beginning.  If I had a copy of that photo, I’d post it below but instead let this Hyperbole and a Half illustration get the point across:

 Me, age 10 to 28

That Love of Internet has perhaps understandably grown over the years into a Need for Internet.  That’s not to say that I’m addicted or need help (besides, aren’t we all addicted and don’t we all need help?), but rather that much of my sense of self is deeply connected to my online existence and online habits.  The things I read, the things I share & post, the things I watch, the people I communicate with and become friends with–these are all incredibly important components of who I am.  And so, with the internet such an intrinsic part of my being, I need it.  It is a necessity.  Let me use another illustration to get the point across:

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So with that understanding of me, let me drop a couple of mind-blowing knowledge bombs on you.

1) I still use livejournal. That’s right–that weird old Russian-owned website that you might remember from 2002. I use it. I use it a lot.  I use it for its communities (well, one community, really–shhh, it’s a secret) and I use it to read the five or six other people who still write in their hopelessly uncool online journals and I write in mine PROLIFICALLY.  Like, almost every day.  And I’ve been doing this for like 11 years.  Writing in my livejournal has become part of my creative process and part of my therapeutic process and part of whatever the heck else constitutes me as a human being.  It’s important.  And needless to say, my journal is personal.  Gaining access to it would give you a horrifyingly unfiltered glimpse into me as a person, me as a writer, me as an ev.er.y.thing.  This leads to the next bomb…

2) About a month ago, I discovered that someone from my past has been repeatedly hacking into my livejournal.  I can’t go into details (I KNOW!  I want to, but I can’t), but it happened and has been happening for I don’t know how long.  It’s weird.  It’s more than weird.  It’s surreal and invasive and disorienting and upsetting and something I still can’t make sense out of.

But that’s more or less the reason I’ve been playing this game of hide and seek with my internet presences.  My immediate reaction after learning about the hacking was to panic and delete everything in an effort to gain some control.  Then I sort of berated myself and said stuff like, Don’t let someone intimidate you this way, keep on internetting like nobody’s watching, which worked for about five minutes because WHO AM I KIDDING?  IT’S THE INTERNET.  SOMEONE IS ALWAYS WATCHING.  

Now, though, it’s been about a month since I discovered the hacking situation, it seems as though it won’t happen again, and I’m trying to make peace with the idea of someone always watching on the internet, because I guess that’s a good thing to come to terms with not matter what and could potentially stop you from doing really stupid shit on the internet.  Like hacking into someone’s goddamn livejournal, for instance.

Here’s the thing:  I really love the internet.  It gives me a lot.  And I have really exciting things coming up–like moving to Kansas, starting a PhD program, and all that rot.  I want to blog about it and about writing and publications and readings and STUFF and I don’t want to hide or feel unsafe and the best way to combat that feeling of unsafety is probably to get all negative capability Keats-y and understand the limitations of my (human/internet) context but keep on existing in that context anyway.

So I’m going to stop deleting and undeleting my blog, basically, is what I’m saying.

Rock Chalk

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Well, it’s official–I’ll be attending University of Kansas beginning this fall for my PhD in Creative Writing.

I don’t think I could be any more excited!  Kansas has been my first choice from the very beginning, back when I first started researching programs three years ago.  Very much looking forward to the time I’ll be able to spend on my creative work, the opportunities I’ll have to study more of my critical interests, and once again live in such a cool little midwestern college town (I miss Bloomington!).  At the moment, I’m also excited to start teaching and be busy again, though we’ll see how I feel about that come November or so…

In the meantime, it’s time to say goodbye (for now) to Portland and everything and everyone that goes along with it.  How does one do that in a healthy way, exactly?

Jennifer Lawrence and the Manic Pixie Cool Girl Twentysomething Child Star

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As much as every girl on the internet hates Valentine’s Day, every girl on the internet loves Jennifer Lawrence ten times as much.  She swears!  She’s sarcastic!  She’s “awkward”!  (Whatever that actually means.)  She doesn’t know how to answer questions!  She doesn’t know how to walk up a set of stairs!  She gives the middle finger to reporters after winning an Oscar for Best Actress!  And this is all just in a matter of a few hours!

There’s a Tumblr post with 48,000 notes that says, “Jennifer Lawrence is like a Tumblr user who somehow went outside and got famous and now she’s just confused.”  For those of you who aren’t familiar with the terminology, being a Tumblr user means that you’re obsessed with pizza and don’t know how to do adult things.  Or even basic human things–like walking up a set of stairs.  The outpouring of love for JL following her fall continues to be immense.  ”Only Jennifer Lawrence could make that look good!”  ”It’s like if I were at the Oscars!”  And so on.

So basically, Jennifer Lawrence:  It’s Like She’s Me at My Lowest Functioning Level and Somehow Became Successful and Now I Get to Watch All the Dumb Shit I’d Do In That Situation.

This schtick, though (because it is a schtick) does not belong solely to Jennifer Lawrence, though she has a monopoly on it at the moment.  It’s also been embodied by someone who the internet once loved, then hated, and now loves again (I think?).

The backlash against Zooey has been widespread over the past couple of years since her show New Girl first aired.  She’s too quirky!  She’s not really awkward, she’s just pretending to be!  I don’t like the way she sings!  Though the criticism has died off since Zooey has done things like tell everyone more to less to fuck off via Glamour when she pronounced herself a feminist with no qualifier and suggested that those tearing her down for wearing a tiara need to rethink their priorities, there’s one critique of her persona that has stuck with me and can be applied to Jennifer Lawrence’s raunchier-but-still-the-same role.

(Okay, LET’S GET THIS OUT OF THE WAY:  this thing I’m about to quote was written by a dude and really 99.99% of the time, I hate white dudes’ critiques of women because they lack insight and/or depth and are fueled by a desire to tell women how to be more appealing for the white dudes’ sexual consumption, and this piece is still coming from a “how to behave” p.o.v., which I reeeeeaaaalllyyy hate, BUT bear with me.)

A couple years ago on Cracked.com (ugh), there was this article about four pieces of relationship advice movies need to stop giving–whatever, fine.  But right off the bat, with the number 4 piece of advice, the dude, Daniel O’Brien TOTALLY HITS IT ON THE MARK by digging into the Manic Pixie Dream Girl thing (which JL is embodying in her own way–she’s just more the Gillian Flynn Cool Girl “who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2,” but still portraying an archetype that doesn’t exist).  O’Brien writes:

Zooey Deschanel’s character in The New Girl is probably the clearest example of this right now, as that entire show is based around how quirky and eccentric and, as a result, lovable, Zooey’s character (I think her name is “Eyeface”) is. Except she’s not so much “eccentric” as much as she is “bad at being alive and functioning socially, in the present.” One of her main conflicts in the pilot is that she has a date at a fancy restaurant, but doesn’t know what to wear so she puts on overalls! Classic Eyeface! And one of the male characters on the show goes goofy-eyed and clearly starts falling in love with her instead of, say, yelling, “You’re 27 years old, how do you not know how to dress and function yet? Get your shit together.“

I remember when I first read that, I felt really wounded because at that time I was 27 and felt as though I didn’t know how to function yet.  I prided myself on being the embodiment of Hyperbole and a Half’s ”This Is Why I’ll Never Be an Adult” post:  a grown woman who cleaned her apartment twice a year and spent the rest of her life on the internet.  I was hilariously inept!  It was endearing that I was living in my own filth and didn’t know how to behave on a job interview!  And that I didn’t own any matching socks!  I made not wanting to get out of bed in the morning fun and cute!

No.

It’s not cute.  It’s not adorable not to have your shit together to the point where you don’t know how to dress yourself or to act like a child at a grownup event where actual children behave more maturely than you do.

When is the Onion going to apologize, btw?

The question remains, though–why do we love young women who act this way?  Why are we not exasperated by it?  Because it’s infantilizing either way, whether it’s “adorkable” or “Tumblr brought to life” or some other version of this same twentysomething womanchild role.

Updated!

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Did an overhaul on the blog this afternoon–the new theme is more geared towards me as a professional writer person (LOL I know), though I’ll still be ranting about in the newly designated “blahg” section.

Coolest thing is that now there are links to some of my publications!  See, here’s the list & links.  Good luck getting through the long ones.

The reason for the makeover is partly inspired by the fact that I will be returning to school in the fall for my PhD.  Still letting that one sink in.  More details as to where forthcoming, but it is happening.  It’s all happening.

A Follow Up on What’s Emotional Abuse and What’s Probably Just You Being Uncommunicative

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A couple days ago I got an email and saw some Facebook comments about the post I wrote on Valentine’s Day and asking for what you want.  The email and comments were basically saying that it seemed as though I were suggesting that women in abusive relationships are asking to be abused because they’re not speaking up against their abusive partners and that a partner should KNOW to be affectionate and attentive, that you shouldn’t have to tell your boyfriend to be nice to you.

Guys, NO ONE IS ASKING FOR ABUSE.  EVER.  An abuser is going to abuse you whether you tell him what he’s doing is hurting you or not because his entire agenda is to hurt you.  And there’s a HUGE difference between being trapped in an abusive relationship and martyring yourself because your well-intentioned and non-abusive partner doesn’t instinctively know how to meet your emotional needs and you refuse to just bite the bullet and tell him already.

Look, here are two scenarios:

1.  You and your partner have plans to go out to dinner.  You get ready and wait for him to come pick you up but he doesn’t show up and you check your phone and he’s sent you a text saying that he’s at some bar and that you can come meet him there “if you want.”  So you go and he’s half-drunk and with a group of friends and when you have the nerve to be annoyed, angry, or hurt, he explodes at you, calls you a bitch, says that you’re always on his case, that you’re overemotional, that you’re irrational, that it’s not his problem that you’re upset, and that you should just go home.  Which you do–you go home alone and he doesn’t respond to your texts or answer your calls for the next four days because he needs to punish you.  That is ABUSIVE.

2.  You and your partner have plans to go out to dinner.  While you’re getting ready, he calls you and says that one of his good friends from out of town is visiting out of the blue and that he invited your partner out for drinks.  Your partner asks if you’ll come out with him and asks if it’s okay if your plans change.  You are annoyed and don’t want to go out and drink and meet the friend–you feel like this sort of thing has happened too many times, that your partner is ALWAYS changing plans and being inconsiderate but you don’t say anything.  You’ve never said anything about it other than, “Okay, that’s fine.”  So you go out with your partner to meet his friend and you are sulky and withdrawn all night because you want attention from your partner but you don’t want or don’t know how to ask for it, and when he asks you what’s wrong, you said, “Nothing, I’m fine” or “I’m tired” or “The music is too loud” and maybe you make him take you home and you’re still mad but you still don’t say anything.  You think things like, This relationship is never going to get better, he always does this, he always does that, he doesn’t love me, nothing is ever going to change.  But you STILL don’t say anything to him about it, and then when the same thing happens a few months later, you get even MORE upset.  That might be your partner being inconsiderate but it’s also you being UNCOMMUNICATIVE and a BABY.  STOP IT.  SAY WHAT BOTHERS YOU.  NO ONE CAN READ YOUR MIND.

Listen, people have different needs.  It’s just how it works.  Some people need to hear from their significant other every day, some people need to hear from them multiple times a day.  Some people only need to hear from a partner a few times a week.  Some people want to have sex every day, some people want sex once a week.  Some people want to hold hands walking down the street, some people think it feels a little awkward or might never occur to them to do it.  Without getting input from your partner about what she/he needs and wants, you’re probably just going to default to your natural behavior.  That’s just how it is.  It doesn’t mean that your s.o. wouldn’t be willing to do or give you want you want.  IT JUST MEANS YOU NEED TO COMMUNICATE.  REALLY COMMUNICATE, I MEAN.  Don’t sigh and say, “I’m cold”  when you want to have sex and expect your boyfriend to magically understand your weird code speak.  And even if you can’t just SAY it, you can still get your point across loud and clear.  Like the next time your partner is sitting like a big lug, playing video games for a million hours and just grunting in response to everything you say, get up and do something like press your bare butt or boob against his face and I PROMISE HE WILL UNDERSTAND.  I’VE DONE IT AND IT WORKS.


Everyone loves butts

But the point is, you have to speak up.  People aren’t magically on the same level all the time–it just don’t happen that way.  We’re all weird and self-obsessed and living in our own heads and we need to hear from each other in order to know that what we’re doing is okay or not okay.  It would be AMAZING if your partner somehow knew exactly how much affection to give you, when to call you, when to leave you alone, when to initiate sex, when to cook you the exact dinner you want.  I mean, everyone wants that.  But relationships like that do not exist.  They just don’t.  So the sooner you stop believing that your partner should instinctively know how to please you without you lifting a finger, the happier and healthier your relationship is going to be.

BUT if you speak up and your partner shoots you down, or calls you names, or berates you, or hits you, or sexually assaults you–that is not your fault.  That is not you being anything.  That is an abuser being abusive.

Uteruses Before Duderuses, Ovaries Before Brovaries

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Am loving the response to the Valentine’s Day Cool Girl post–but remember that today is an important day.

 via

Go grab a coffee and slice of red velvet cake (or a bottle of clearance sweet tea vodka and leftover pizza if you’re like me) and celebrate Galentine’s Day with yr favorite friend, regardless of gender!  And for fuck’s sake, eat some CANDY.  Those cinnamon red hearts taste the best when you pour twenty of them into your mouth at once, by the way.

Valentine’s Day or How I Stopped Being the “Cool Girl” and Learned to Demand Affection

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Everyone hates valentine’s day, but girls on the internet hate it most of all.  My Tumblr dash has been full of images like the one above, or Feb 14 circled on the calendar with “forever alone” written inside the box, or ramblings on Feb 13/Galentine’s Day (a great Leslie Knope tradition in its own right), and most every other year I’ve been in that mindset, too, because I totally shunned love and I shunned romance and I didn’t need to care about gifts or dinners or affection or ANYTHING, because I was TOO GOOD FOR THAT and I had my DOG and I had my CAT and I had my FRIENDS and things were FINE.  Nevermind the fact that I never received anything from anyone I ever dated, ever, whether it happened on Valentine’s Day or not–no gifts, no dinners, not enough affection to meet my needs.  Nevermind that I spent many a December lovingly making handmade “boyfriend books” or planning day-long birthday adventures or spending ungodly amounts of money on lingerie I would never wear except to please whatever useless sack of shit I’d let into my romantic life.

In short, I decided that I didn’t need anything in return because I was a Cool Girl.  Other girls might need gifts, dinners, and affection but I didn’t because I was COOL.

The Cool Girl thing is well-documented and analysed.  Gillian Flynn had an ok passage about it in Gone Girl but that novel was fucking atrocious and I hated it deeply so I’ll let you look it up yourself.  But to quickly paraphrase the Cool Girl is an archetype young women especially feel the need to fulfill because of internalized misogyny and the instilled belief that our needs are invalid and that we need to be emotionally undemanding and blah blah blah.  It’s like independence gone bad–you believe that you need to be self-sufficient to the point where you don’t ask for anything from anyone because doing so will make you weak and like one of those girls and might make you act like a girl (which is always a bad thing) and you will therefore lose all your Cool Girl credibility.

NO, NO, NO, NO, NO.

Listen.  I’m ancient as far as internet ages go and I’ve been in therapy for, like, ever at this point and that makes me an authority, ok?  ASKING FOR THINGS DOES NOT MAKE YOU WEAK.  IT MAKES YOU STRONG AND AWESOME AND SHOWS THAT YOU WANT THINGS AND YOU KNOW HOW TO ASK FOR THEM.  ERR ON THE SIDE OF BEING A NEEDY ASSHOLE BECAUSE CHANCES ARE YOU’RE GOING TO FALL WAY SHORT AND JUST BE A BADASS BITCH INSTEAD.

Think of Marina, who gets what she wants because she asks for it, whether she deserves it or not:

Isn’t that fun?  Doesn’t that feel good to say?  It does.  And you know what else feels good?  Getting MAD.  Like if your partner does something shitty and hurts your feelings or ruins a night you’d been looking forward to or flakes on you or puts you on the backburner for the millionth time?  And you know how usually you’d just say something like, “That’s fine” in a really really really small voice because that’s what a Cool Girl has to say but it’s really NOT fine so you just end up being covertly angry and trying to communicate your needs by doing everything BUT communicating, like giving the silent treatment or posting something passive aggressive on facebook or sending mopey texts all night or fabricating an emergency as to why you need your partner’s attention RIGHT THAT SECOND?  JUST GET MAD INSTEAD.  IT FEELS BETTER.  AND IT WORKS BETTER.  And if you get mad, that means you’re saying, “Hey this isn’t okay and you need not to do this again” and you know what?  Your partner will probably understand and try not to do it again because, despite whatever the world tells you, relationships are not wars and you are not your partner’s enemy and dating is not a “fight you’re never going to win.”  People are generally kind and not sociopaths but people can start behaving unkindly and maybe even sociopathically if you start treating them that way.

So, take it from me:  a recovering Cool Girl who spent 27 years pretending that I don’t like getting chocolate or being taken out to dinner and pretending that I didn’t care if my texts were answered or if I saw my boyfriend more than once every two weeks.  And maybe you really do hate this holiday and want to ignore it completely, and that’s fine, but regardless know that life is better when you’re assertive.  So if you’re like me and, deep down, you actually LIKE Valentine’s Day and you like corny cards and chocolate and eating a nice dinner in the middle of what is otherwise a cold, dreary, depressing month and you really do want Valentine’s Day plans, ask for them.  Look at your partner and say it.  And it’s okay if in the past with this person, you’ve been a sulky piece of crap who doesn’t ask for things.  Change your style–this is what I did to my impossible ex who I’ve been hemming and hawing over for the past two and a half years.  I looked at him last night and said, “Thursday is Valentine’s Day and I want a GIFT and I want a PLANNED night.  And YOU need to plan it.”

And you know what he did?  This jerkface who has brushed me off for his friends more times than I can count, who has gone days and days without responding to my texts, who treated me like I was a Cool Girl who did not care because that’s what I tried to convince him I was?  HIS EYES GOT ALL BIG AND HE SAID, “OKAY, COOL!”

Happy Valentine’s Day, you badass bitches.

Reading and Waiting and Memoir-ing

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A couple weeks ago, I was able to take part in Word Portland and read from my short story “Aroostook” at one of my favorite Portland bars with some of my favorite people in attendance.  It was a lot of fun and I’m grateful to Emily and Dani, two Farmington BFA alums like me, to starting the event.  Portland, for all its food and art and brick sidewalks, doesn’t have much of a lit community and so anything that brings us sad crew of writers together is A+.

I’m currently in the midst of waiting to hear from PhD programs and it is no fun.  My anxiety is running a little high even though it’s only mid-January and I could easily have a ways to go before I hear anything.  Am also in the process of making peace with the idea of striking out–when applying to programs that accept one or two fiction writers a year, that’s an important step to take.

Speaking of fiction–I haven’t been writing it.  Not since I revised my creative sample for the PhD apps, anyway.  I’ve been very much memoir-oriented lately, which probably has something to do (or everything to do) with my fascination with trauma narratives and Suzette Henke’s scriptotherapy model.  (Take a look at her wonderful book Shattered Subjects if you’re curious about feminist trauma theory and writing as therapy.)  I think I could study trauma narratives forever, try to figure out how they work as pieces of literature and how they work as therapeutic tools.  Especially how dissociation influences (or controls) character and metaphor.  That’s my jam.

But writing a trauma narrative?  That’s hard shit.  I’m taking a go at my own in the form of a memoir with a slightly-disjointed but very unsentimental narrative voice, and it came out incredibly easily for the first two thousand words or so, but now it’s like pulling teeth.  I’m hoping to finish it up in the next few weeks, sit on it for a while, and then submit it to Breadloaf but we’ll see if I’m able to keep my head on the ground because otherwise I’m going to go off the deep end and start typing the same sentences over and over again, something like all work and no play makes Kate a crazy person or whatever Li-Young Lee started chanting during that reading he freaked out on a few years back.  Anyone remember that?

So, because I’m forever music-minded when I write, here’s a little bit of what I’ve been working to lately:

Applications: Submitted

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After what feels like a very long time and what actually was a very long time (come on, I started writing that silly paper in July), I’m done with my PhD applications.  They’re off, gone, careening out into the wild to be judged by admission committees and probably be promptly rejected.  And I don’t say that to be self-deprecating–I say that to be realistic and keeping in mind that most of these programs accept 2 fiction writers a year.  Two!  Who the heck do I think I am, assuming that I could be one of those two?

That said, I worked pretty damn hard on these applications and I feel as confident as possible.  This proved to be a much different experience from my MFA application go-round of 2005 (seven years ago!  mon dieu).  My MFA apps were haphazard, a little manic, very immature, but, I guess, had some sort of potential because I got into a bunch of places.  But I remember feeling as though then that I just tossed my materials out into the Maine winter darkness and blindly hoped that everything would work out.  I never followed up with anyone about all my stuff being in on time or if I’d missed something, and throughout the whole process I just felt like I was alone in a car that was going very fast down a highway but instead of manning the wheel, I had crawled onto the floor in the back and was just hanging out there, on the floor, in the fetal position, hoping that the car would drive itself.  (I have that dream, like, all the damn time, for what it’s worth.)  This time, I’m in control!  I’m at the wheel!  I feel good!  It’s nice.  Nice to know that if I don’t have a successful run this application season, I won’t feel as though I struck out due to a shortcoming on my part.  I think applying to these programs was something I very much needed to do, an itch I needed to attend to in order to get it the hell out of my system, and now I am done and it’s done and let’s see what happens.

In the meantime, I’m going to be submitting an application to an MSW program at a local university to attend to that other itch I’ve got going on.  Needless to say, when this next fall comes around, I better be buying some textbooks and figuring out my course schedule.

Hey, have you guys been listening to Sharon Van Etten?  No?  Well, you should be.

the art of blogging

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Ever notice that the most successful young writers all keep blogs but don’t know how to actually, you know, blog?  Just a post every 3-6 months announcing a new poem or story appearing in this journal or that journal, or maybe you were nominated for a Pushcart or maybe you got a waitership at Breadloaf, throw that in there, too.

I’m always excited to see links to the sites and blogs writers of my age and success level (or lack of success level), but I’m almost always disappointed to see such sad little blogs attached to usually very nicely-designed sites.  (Writers have a lot of trendy code-knowledgable friends, it seems.)  Get with the program, young writers!  Blog about crap.  Any crap!  It doesn’t matter–you already know how to write well, so you can make anything interesting.  Get an instagram.  Get a tumblr.  Think of blogging as brainstorming or writing exercise nonsense.  Join the community.  Throw your shit out into the internet.  It feels good.  You can even make friends!  You can even make money!

Just, please, post something other than your lit journal acceptances.  Something else.  Anything else.