Month: October 2013

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“Messy” is the new “Blue”

Shades_Of_Blue_Wallpaper_1ad0gI’ve always wondered where the idea of blue being used to describe a sad emotion came from. Blue can be an incredibly vibrant color when at its best. I remember when I was a kid my “uncle” had this bright blue shirt that he would always wear on Sundays. It was something we could count on whenever we saw him on a Sunday, that bright blue shirt and a smile on his unshaven face. I never asked him about that blue shirt but I always thought about it, and what it might have meant to him. As I got older I realized there actually must have been a number of different shirts all in the same color because just one would have worn out or faded with time. He was always happy in that shirt, so I equated that color with happiness. Back then when anyone would tell me they were feeling blue, I would smile and say, “Great!” never minding their confused expressions.

There are so many different shades of blue, too, something else that didn’t truly resonate as a child. The sky was blue, and I knew it wasn’t the same blue as my uncle’s shirt, but my brain didn’t really process. My uniform for private school was a yellow shirt with navy blue pants. They were so dark they were hard to distinguish from black. I couldn’t reconcile the bright blue of the shirt with the light blue of the sky with the dark blue of the navy pants. That every single one of those things could be blue and yet be so distinguishable from each other was mind boggling. Blue seemed to me to be in just about everything around me, and I looked for it everywhere. Continue reading ““Messy” is the new “Blue””

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Write What You Know?

I’ve heard it more times than I care to admit, those people reading my writing, clucking their tongues and saying, “You write what you know.” And I get exasperated, because they’ve probably just read my treatise on the glory of the socialist state, or my poem about a trip to hell, or the story I wrote from the perspective of a girl who lost her virginity at 13. How would I know anything about any of that, having never lived in a socialist state (that I know of), never having been to hell (although maybe Brooklyn qualifies these days), and never having been a girl (my virginity was intact until I was 21, by the way)? Yet they somehow try to force me into the narrative, into the dialogue somehow, as if there is no other way of writing, as if my imagination isn’t good enough (or perhaps too good) to come up with something like that out of thin air.

Give writers more credit. Or at least give some writers more credit. You know the writer who only writes about their daily lives, their troubles, their issues, and their foibles. And that’s okay. Some of my favorite bloggers are those who write that and only that. It’s what they know, and they’re experts at it. If I can’t live inside their skin, it’s a close second to read through their emotional baggage laid out on the screen. I know, too, for so many of those writers, it’s a therapeutic exercise, to get it all out, like focused breathing. In and out. Repeat. Some writers have that gift, to connect the readers with the experience, just as it happened and nothing else. Continue reading “Write What You Know?”

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That Moment

It’s that moment. You know, the moment just after I’ve composed a lovely text message and sent it off into the ether, and I’m waiting to hear back. And in that pregnant pause between expectation and actuality, I feel truly alive. But then the pause stretches, and I realize it might take a little longer … Continue reading That Moment

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Friday Top 5: Songs of 1998

Nineteen ninety-eight was the year I was supposed to have graduated from college, but that feat didn’t actually happen until 2003. Instead, I was moving to Tennessee that year. That was back before my self-imposed exile from radio, so I was still grooving to N*Sync and Mariah Carey back-to-back every fifteen minutes on EVERY RADIO … Continue reading Friday Top 5: Songs of 1998