mimsy and outgrabe

This week was a strange one, where I've vacillated between periods of extreme productivity and good humor and lower moments of stasis and frustration. To be honest, it feels a little like mania and depression, which is startling, but I'm going to stop just before the point of self-diagnosis and chalk it up instead to a weird mood swing, or bullshit like the full moon and maybe something fun and ridiculous like Mercury in retrograde. ( Is Mercury in retrograde? What does that even mean?) I have been in hiding from so many of my favorite people for weeks, mostly because I'm afraid of spreading my weird bad mood, which honestly has persisted since this spring and seems to be dissipating but then rears its ugly head again. If you're one of those favorite people, please be patient with me.  Anyway, let's focus on the positive, shall we? Some of my little wins this week have been poem-related. Something happened Monday morning and I woke up with ideas for po

Time off in Virginia meant time off the blog, and some time off from writing, too. The car rides down and up the East Coast were long, but Miss New Teen, The Boy, and I listened to the S-Town podcast during the drive. It's just as good as people claim -- and probably just as ethically murky, too, but more like real journalism than anything I've read or watched or listened to in a decade. It was full of profanity but nothing my kids haven't heard spill out of their sweet, innocent mother's mouth before (*eyeroll*), so after I gave them the "remember, don't repeat these words" lecture (and they inwardly rolled their eyes at me), we listened and they asked questions and learned more about the world's ugliness but also about its beauty -- specifically, the beauty we find in love (McLemore's for Tyler Goodson, for example) and intelligence and curiosity (McLemore's -- his was a mad, brilliant mind.) We all learned more than we'd ever thou