i'm still telling you everything

Hello everyone! We made it to Wednesday....I think someone should give us ice cream! Mmmmmm.....ice cream........



Looking at it is almost as good as eating it, right?

Here are the rest of the q & a' s we started yesterday!

*Mikki (with two k's) asked how I picked what to write about for my blog: If you go back in my archives, you can tell I started my blog for the same reason I'm sure a lot of you did---to keep in touch with family and friends and show them cute pictures of my kiddos. Except that just about NO ONE cared. I even sent out 60 Christmas cards with our blog address in them (I think I called it "our family website".....) and only my niece Karli looked! Somewhere along the line, I just decided to stop writing to them and start writing as though I was speaking to a vast audience of unknowns (and also just to myself!). At the same time, I began leaving comments on any and all blogs that caught my eye. And ta-da!--suddenly really intelligent, really funny, really sweet, really insightful and encouraging people started to read my blog. It was a bloggy miracle!

Presently, I still love sharing stories about my family, but I also just love to write. period. About anything, everything, stuff I see outside my window, people I overhear in Wal*Mart, projects I'm taking on around my house,You Tube videos, my new shoes, what I'm cooking, my boyfriend Blake Lewis, my obsession with Alan Rickman and So You Think You Can Dance.... and, of course, my 12 toes and tail!!! I think I have a running notebook in my head all day long about things I could possibly post about. Writing has always been an outlet for me, and is currently doubling as an escape from the sress, and tripling as a form of late night entertainment. I've never thought of myself as especially talented or unique in the writing department, but I'm better than your average bear at it, and so as long as people keep reading....and leaving the best comments ever.....I'll keep writing!


*Miki (with one k) asked what kind of literature style I liked best. And really--if it has words--I'll read it. I read my scriptures daily,a ton of blogs, all kinds of magazines, the Imprimis, and the back of every cereal box and shampoo bottle in my house! I love fiction---especially any book with great character development (that's why I loved Harry Potter so much--each person in that story was so well-defined and unforgettable!)--but my time to read is limited, so for the most part I stick with non-fiction--and continue to neglect my children for other reasons other than not being able to pull myself away from a book :). (But one of these days I WILL read the Twilight series!!!).


*Carrie asked a deep question about whether I would go back in my past and change something I'd done, or go forward to see what mistake I might make and then not make it. The answer is---I've watched waaaaaay too many episodes of Quantum Leap to want to tamper with time at all!
I guess I'd rather have the ability to just stop time. Get to a great point in my life and just freeze everything. I sort of cheated on that question, huh :) ? She also wanted to know what I was afraid of: moths and freeways. I know, I should be committed.


*Adiel asked: Miracle Whip or Mayonnaise?: Yuck. Neither. I eat my sandwiches as plain as can be and always have.


*Summer asked if I still ate my noodles with my fingers. We grew up together, so she's referring to my 14 year old self that use to eat Ramen Noodles, yeah, with my hands. Well, Summer, I am so grown-up and cultured now that I eat PASTA instead of noodles, and I wouldn't dream of eating them with anything other than my fork (unless I'm alone and then I TOTALLY prefer my fingers still! Makes me feel like a caveman :)!).

FINALLY,

*Melissa asked about my poetry. I LOVE poetry. If I could publish anything, it would be my own book of poetry.I've published individual poems in various forums and anthologies, but never a whole book! Writing poetry is like taking an amazing story and whittling it down to only its best words--including working in some irony, a struggle, a smattering of alliteration, and everything else capable of touching a reader in a page or less. And it has to be a joy coming off the tongue when read aloud. (Warning!!! I am now going to toot my own horn, because it's the only one I have to toot!) In the poetry classes I've taken, the professors have told me that there's nothing more they can teach me---one even said I should be teaching the class. They've had a lot of great expectations for, and hope in, me. I use to have it for and in myself, too....

About 1994-1999 I was writing THE MOST amazing poetry! I had found my voice and knew that at the rate I was writing, I would soon have enough to put into a manuscript to send off to Alfred A. Knopf Publishing. And THEN......I discovered Billy Collins.... Who had already wrote practically every poem I had. If I didn't look just like my own father, I would swear Billy must have DNA'd me because we were THAT ALIKE! Same process of a poem starting you in one place and leaving you in another, same humor, same metaphors, even a lot of the same phrases used. Except Billy wasn't an unknown like me. He was a professor. And published a bojillion times. He was even the United States Poet Laureate a few years back. That all the best things I had to say had already been said took a lot of the wind out of my sails, and I haven't written much poetry since. But, one day, I'm going to find my voice again---one that hasn't been used already---and then WHO KNOWS!

I don't want to be plagiarized, so I fear putting my really good stuff up, but here's a short, "so-so" one if you're interested in reading something I wrote. To all the rest of you who have had enough reading for now---Ta-ta :)!

PLANTING MOSS ROSE

The whole sky is streamlined this afternoon
like the top of a T
The clouds pasty smears on blue paper
and air stirred thick with wasps,
folding in around me,
drowning out the buzzing of my day with their own.

My shovel busy slicing at the soil's belly,
lifting and tossing it into a waiting bucket.
Somewhere,
I realize,
wind is now wearing
mountain down to plateau
to mesa
to boulder
to stone or pebble,
Water working those smaller still
to silt and sand
to dust
which hurries now to fill in the hole I have just made.

Like my poems without endings--
dust having filled them halfway through--
the one about the wooden nickels,
the one about the auburn desert,
all those forms
still unnamed.

****And for those of you still reading---Thanks. If, by chance, you want to read MORE--I guest blogged at Today's Creative Blog again today. Having a blast with that!--and managing two blogs is doing a FABUOLOUS job of assuring my bathrooms stay good and dirty!
****Amanda: Your much more serious question deserves an answer post all its own. I'll have it done for tomorrow, k?