steak, potatoes, and spinach, oh my. I’m becoming a midwesterner.

Tomorrow is the day… a day, another day. Four panel artist/professor folks will critique the the story I gave them awhile ago, a nonfiction story that I want to be nearly done, a story that I’ve been working on for a year, on and off, and certainly not worthy of that kind of time. I feel happy with it though – perhaps because I’m starting to realize some of my interests within it.

What are these interests? The interweaving of story, the merging of nonfiction and dream and storymaking and point of view shifts. It is an initial realization of my twisted fascination with stories that have little narrative. Or small moments, momentitos of narration – not quite poem, but lyrical hippityhop beats of motion. In that story, I learned much about making momentitios come together, and even if it sucks, I’m happy with what I learned, and I think this will help me with my next overambitious endeavor.

Modular lyrical narrative makes me think that one day I might make it in this world.

So, even if I go in tomorrow and everyone is like “what the fuck,” I think I will be okay. I feel cocky and arrogant and I have friends in this world and that matters more. I try and that also matters more. I can find a million things that matter more, and a million things that matter less.

Here’s two little pieces of the overall story (midway, not the beginning), which is called “Start with Layers” and there's another changed piece of it floating around somewhere on this blog:

[zeee prose haz beeeeen removed. drafting, 'n all that.]

Anyhow.

Last nights winenight matters more than a critique-week panel. Whoooooooosh.

You know a party is raring when folks make a beer run after 10 bottles of wine are emptied.

A great ouchy conversation about bikini waxings, always better apparently when delivered by Texan-familiar celestial-doters who loves the women, and “pssssha’s” the men. Ouchy. Strange how that was the second not-initiated-by-me bikini-waxing conversation I’ve had in the past week. Everybody’s out to make me blush these days. Ouchy. This particular conversation didn’t head towards the Hollywood gay-men oral-fixated practices of the other talk, which had me slinking under my covers in an attempt to hide my prudishness from the cellphone. But this conversation was nevertheless sufficiently ouchy.

Next, one friend going to Vietnam, I’m jealous and intrigued. I even allowed myself to be peer-pressured into a Pabst Blue Ribbon, something that hasn’t happened for some time.

Another friend gets the set up from los parentes, who have decided to introduce a “nice boy” to their daughter who is not interested in being introduced to a “nice boy.” What makes that story even better is that it’s not even a blind date, but a gathering of his parents, her parents, and the two love birds themselves. How I laugh and want to recommend the film Saving Face, which was great and sexy too.

Mom: if you ever think about it, remember how I was with the clothes you bought me. If you really thought I’d wear all those skirts and that black/blue 80’s sweater with the V-line, how could you possibly think of setting me up.

Mom: if you really need to set me up, make sure the person is really hot, so I can have a one-night stand and say thanks to you the next day with a little smirk on my face that makes you blush worse than conversations about bikini-waxing makes me blush.

I danced a good one with c2 and j, both of whom swooped and swirled and did that little twirly thing very well. I like dancing on empty dancefloors. I like swoops and drunk folks flirting and meeting strange Andrews and Dales (from Conneticut, not Kentucky like I drunkenly suggested).

Winenight progressed past the party, past the cat scratches on my hands, past the good food, the bikini talks, the heat lusts, the admirations, the word arrangements (mp and j and I had enough fridge letters for: “get pez’d” and more beyond that, which I'm sure ended up being poetry), the americangogothic, the discussion of dead plant starts, the comparison of interview/critique-panels to an elaborate game of flirtation, the newmusic, the picturetakings, the discussion of future dancin’, and many little details I swore I’d remember but didn’t. Yes, winenight lasted to walks on the sidewalk.

Winenight hS me sliding across the ice and laughing and hopping, and oh, and oh. je and I had a wicked-bad scarf fight in the subway station. She is one violent kungfu scarf fighter and I was pleasantly happy that neither of us was forced off the platform onto the tracks as we wove our way around, whipping each other’s eyes with wool and slashing each other’s skin with crochetwounds.

Not to mention the fish that flirted with l and me when we lifted our fingers and waved them in front of the Johnny Cash not-saltwater aquarium.

I got home late, found two emails waiting me, one of which I answered with little semblence of astute case of drunkeness (good since it was my cousin).

Today… um, today. Meat n’ potatoes. I’m fattening myself up for the winter, putting on layers of blubber to float myself through the waves of irony that ask me why I, the person who adores and thrives on heat, ended up in a city known for weather like this, subarctic freezings guarenteed to turn me into a wallowing blubberwhale trying to load up on protective barriers to cushion the wind against these cold-blooded innards. One answer: I am here because of the everything I am finding. The wind is just toughening me up.