blastedgoat

This is a comment I received on a message I sent the University of Northern Iowa where I am currently a student and employee. My original message was about the declining quality of the education at UNI and my personal dissatisfaction with a proposed $100 surcharge for the spring semester (after financial aid has been established potentially causing the extra fee to come out of student’s living, food or transportation budgets with only a few months warning). Feel free to react to anything, I do not discourage people who disagree with me as long as they bring up valid points. I have considered the following and don’t really see eye to eye with the author.

Keeping that in mind, I invite you to read my response to this gentleman named Mark: Our student tuition is still lower than all the other regent universities in Iowa. UNI has an excellent educational program for the amount we are lucky to pay. $100 surcharge is quite small and I was actually shocked to hear they weren’t going to increase tuition by $500 or even $1000. UNI receives less private and federal money than the other two regent universities, and so cuts like these place an added burden on our institution.
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go there for sexy, intolerable, nonsensical and random lists with 23 itmes.

the dead weather show was amazing! better than i could have imagined! we were so close to the stage and it was a small-ish venue. the colorado trip was really fun (a bit stressful) and even though i didn’t see woody creek (or write in my freshly purchased journals) i have some great stories and memories and PICTURES! i will be sure to post them here and detail my trip once i get a chance to update from home. i feel this post is growing dull, why ever would anyone ever come here just to read what i’ve done… as if i live an interesting life… well at least for the moment i have some of you  fooled

we did come home to our house trashed by two irresponcible teenagers (who are in the process of moving out of our house) but let’s not gratify them otherwise than to say that i may have been wrong for my too-quickly offered apology as neither of them seem worth their weight in beans at the moment…)

and we’re not talking magic beans! all in all i dyed my hair, we made tye dye t-shirts, we saw the dead weather, we went to casa bonita, we camped in between two beautiful mountains and for all the worry and wear are soon to be rid of a few pests living in our attic… other than that it has been a crazy summer what with all the storms and stuff… teachers used to forbid us to end a sentance with “stuff” but here… in the real world (or at least a crappy little blog that no one cares about stuff is perfectly understandable and it means a lot)

btw in case you were wondering… yes jack white was amazing and i can die happy now… sort of…

pomegranate thoughts drip from

my mouth to the ears of a provolone-ly

moon-faced man with gaping

wisdom-tooth-sized-cavities

(with roots deep in impracticalities)

like the inevitable nature of  sleep,

and dreams. my pillow sours, a flushed

cheek turns cool wondering at the thing

(the monster lurking near the drinking

glass) a tinge of a dream that singed a lash

as it fluttered fully open…

is it called that because you used to have to hang your laundry over your “lawn” to dry? is this yet another example of the power of folk-etymology on the transformation of slang into language or simply a happy accident? you be the judge (or i could look up the origins of the word) hmm good call,go ahead and let me know what you discover, i’ve already looked it up for myself and i believe the ability to look something up for oneself is an honorable and helpful attribute. you will all thank me in the morning… or something like that!

i think my explaination is  fun i think i should bring you more word origins soon, they are fun!

i am envious of the lens that saw him moments before he died–

he smiled. kids rolled down hills, their screams were the things of dreams…

i tumble and feel wet grass, growing around his gravestone, a place that marks

the letter sealed inside. words eaten long ago by worms–scorched on a sidewalk,

split in half for the world to see what’s inside him and inside me.

nothing feels right

until i watch this tape.

i can’t be sure how many times i have been half expecting to see him

turn a corner.

instead he floats further down river…

i never saw him, i wasn’t there when they pulled him from underneath a bridge

after days of searching and seeing dated photographs

on the channel 7 news. i didn’t see his smile, we never kissed at all…

a picture someone gave me after your funeral makes my fiance jealous,

jealous of bones and a seven-year-old-conversation late in to the night

one summer i spent the night at home alone.

trees bend and wave, flowers remind me of running

through bushes with purple bunches, floral and lush until

the snap–a swing-set unmovable-cemented haphazardly

in the backyard with all its knobby trees and rotten leaves.

apple-core eyes are smokey and coiling under an invisible

chain-link fence for dogs, cutting the bandit’s neck staining

bare feet like crab-apples–ghostly presence in the long

shady patches of lawn… a black cat crosses a toe-headed boy.

he stretches his stubby fat fingers and yawns as a woodpile

splinters, sparks, and burns to the ground.

i am sitting in the basement of the library and i just smashed my left middle finger with a very heavy book. there is a group of irritating girls sitting around laptops surrounded by water bottles. sometimes the monotony of college existence makes me want to shoot myself in the head. i am pretty sure i will go in a way similar to that but i got a lot of years to put in still–can’t let all my future fans down. i have been playing with the idea of writing a novel over the summer but as novels are pretentious and very few people have time for a good long read these days i think a play, script, poetry collection, short story or fan fic would be better (and with the length cut in half i can work on multiple projects!)

i am so excited for the harry potter movie this summer, it has been giving me something to look foward to that is why i thought about writing a hp fan fic to apease my childhood interests (trust me there were far more embarassing candidates for my fan fic project and i am still somewhat considering: sailor moon, freaks and geeks or digimon fics)

i kind of want to stay away from scriptwriting due to the fact that i wrote one this last semester but now i have fun software that makes it really easy to format my work so maybe i will poke around that program and see what happens!

short story ideas will be generated with glee (as i will need to draw from them for my fiction workshop this next semester!) i am at a crossroads in my life when it comes to fiction and non fiction but i have decided that both can be achieved in the same piece if one is creative and honest enough!

in conclusion i am lame and in order to stop being so lame i have decided to do something with my summer besides work and rot in the rod library… wish me luck…

the sun blinds me through a window with no blinds

as i lean over to examine this pale blue afternoon.

a cat yet again sits on a plastic storage bin amid

recently emptied boxes, 7:53 but a bee buzzes still

near a tree, near my window. three large pictures

broken-up with: white window-latches, burgundy curtains,

ripped screens…

i am rambling again!

a pile of duplicate books

from my over-crowded bookshelves to be donated, even those

with the covers ripped off might once again…

a cat licks its tail as the writer spins

her sleepy fingers around misspelled adjectives.

“why oh why, do i feel ever so alone on days like today?”

an ant climbed all the way up my arm

but i threw him down.

zach asked how i would feel:

“if giants were to step on me…

and bend my little legs…

and smash my little head.”

“i might be all the better…”

i replied. i found my answer

odd but only because i heard it

in a dream i had when i was young…

an old man dies in the turn of a page…

no that is not a type-o. no i am not Chinese. Chinese American food is not Chinese. fortune cookies are not Chinese. the children of Chinese immigrants are not Chinese, they are Chinese-American. but i am not Chinese so this is not a matter that concerns me.

what concerns me is simply and feverishly this:

my cat is sleeping on a candy land baby blanket and the black ink that jaggedly-stripes her back is being licked by a surprisingly un-sandpapery tongue.

this is not the element of distraught intentions:

but the sun dwindles in the horizon, ho my hoe approacheth!

(what really concerns me is that i said Chinese in this blog 9 times and I only said American twice. take that you freedom-loving bastards)

j/k my comrades are from a little place called Iowa but they can’t come to the phone because they are alllllll strung out on bathtub concoctions.

Candy is dandy but…

Mandy is better