You live above the TV, high
on the shelf where you watch
a family you’ll never get to truly
know from your perch inside that
cold, pink-metal resting place.

When I look your way, I wonder–
do our gazes lock? Do we share the
same insurmountable look of sadness, of
wishes that’ll never be, dreams never
realized, may-have-beens never being?
Do we both pray for the past to
become a nightmare, to waken
one morning and find that we’re
together again?

On April 30th, at 29 weeks of pregnancy, I realized I hadn’t felt my baby move. I went to the midwives, and they found no heartbeat. An ultrasound confirmed it; my baby was gone.

I was induced on May 1st. I wasn’t given a birth certificate, nor a death certificate. It’s as though our baby only lived in our minds; that she never really existed. She never really was.

We named her Rhiannon Joy, and I will miss her for the rest of my days. She was perfect–beautiful–tiny.

of job hunting.

I have been out of school since June. My student loans are due (some are, anyway) and we are living on unemployment. If it could be termed living. Every technical writing job I find listed in this barren town wants umpteen years of experience, or experience with their software. How would you have experience with their software if you didn’t work there before?

What about teaching? I heard you ask that. There are no English instructor positions anywhere that I can find. Not even adjunct. I feel like I’ve wasted two years of my life. Well, seven if you can my Bachelor of Arts degree, which is also in English, but with Creative Writing as my forte. Everyone I went to school with in that field do not have jobs as creative writers. A couple went on to get a Master of Fine Arts, and I suppose they have been published in some literary journals. They may even have jobs at some small houses, I am not sure. One is working in a pharmacy. One is creating the cutest crocheted creatures I’ve ever seen. One, the last I heard, opened a dog walking business.

As for my RTC comrades who graduated alongside me, one has been applying (but not returning emails!) and the others, though they took the walk, are not really finished yet. A few of the lit majors I knew found jobs, but they moved to other cities. One found an adjunct position (that I didn’t see).

I almost was interviewed for a copy-editing job, but the day before my interview, they’d already hired everyone they needed. It was only until November, anyway, and I am sure it didn’t pay enough to satisfy the demons who own my soul. I just applied for a position at CCS–District Outreach Coordinator–which I think I could do well at. I have taught, I have done presentations, I have a lot of knowledge about college entrance hurdles, and I am a very hard worker. Even when I worked at Hastings, I took pride in the outcome of my job. My husband told me I worked too hard there, but I did not like leaving with tasks unfinished.

So, wish me luck world. I need it.

I always tell people I grew up on a farm. But that isn’t altogether true. It was actually 20 acres of land that was given to us by my grandparents. At times we had pigs, a goat, a cow, chickens, and once we had a horse, though I barely remember it. I see the horse in my mind and remember the fear of its largeness, the looming head, the giant nostrils blowing steamy horse-air at my face, the blackish tongue licking my small four-year-old hand, the straight, scary horse teeth inches away from my vulnerable flesh. I preferred the goat to the horse. The goat’s name was Sally, and she was friendly and playful. She enjoyed playing with one of our pigs, Maxine, who would somehow tunnel out of the pigpen on a daily basis to chase Sally around the house. Once, the goat had to sleep in the doghouse because Maxine wouldn’t let her back in her pen. We had dogs and cats, and a big garden that we were forced to weed during the hot summer months. So it was like a farm, but it wasn’t run like one, and the animals and the garden weren’t always there. Especially after the divorce, but that’s a different story.

I’d go walking in the woods with the dogs, exploring my grandparent’s land and those of our neighbors. I’d ignore the “No Trespassing” signs posted on fences and wander through the forgotten backyards. Once I found an old tree house, and it became a sanctuary until my brothers came upon it one day, having known where it was all along, and kicked me out. Above our house and behind my grandparents house lived a graveyard of old cars and detritus. We would sift through the treasures, run from the hornet and wasp nests that littered the interior of the abandoned cars, pretend to drive those that were bug-free, and as we grew older, break the glass that was still intact enough to make a satisfying crunch when we swung at them. There were pillars of tires that we formed into mazes, and huckleberry bushes to divest of their berries. Our greedy fingers would purple with the juices; the stains would decorate our clothes, adding a summery tint to the dirt and grass that already splashed our jeans and t-shirts.

Everyday a new adventure awaited us in the deep dark woods of my youth. Once we came upon an old log cabin, its roof missing, the old steel stove still sitting in the corner. We marveled at its size, only slightly larger than my bedroom, which could barely hold my twin bed and dresser. As we finished exploring the cabin, making up stories about the residence, we walked to the nearby stream to dunk our hands and drink. Horses appeared, as if by magic, to stand over us. Where they came from, I never knew, but they seemed majestic to me—a nine-year old who had lost her fear of horses and was now entirely in love with the concept. I walked up to the one that I found the most beautiful. He was black with a white stripe down his face—reminiscent of Black Beauty or the horses from The Man from Snowy River. He reared up on his hind legs, his powerful forelegs mere inches from my face. I stood frozen, terrified. One of my brothers threw a rock at it while the other tackled me, carrying me away from danger. The horses reared and ran off into the woods. Trembling, we walked away, trading stories of how scared we were, or in the case of my brothers, weren’t. We crossed through the backyard of a house and a woman stepped out with a shotgun, threatening to kill my brothers who “were there to rape her.” We ran, found the road home, and gladly accepted a ride from my mother who was returning home from work.

Even now, when I think about that memory, I can’t help but wonder if it is a true memory. Maybe it was a dream. I don’t know. That bothers me, because my brothers, who I love, are morons and never remember anything! Silly boys.

Foucault believes that the soul is a reality—it is all around us and it is permanently there. It is produced through our experiences and our knowledge. He writes “The ‘soul’ inhabits him and brings him to existence” and “it is born out of methods of punishment, supervision, and constraints” (177). This concept is fundamental to the newest season of the television show, Supernatural. Through the new season, the viewers can see how being “freed” of a soul can be detrimental to the personality and compassion of a human being, for one who is without a soul does not fear punishment and has only their own best interests in mind.

Fundamentally, Supernatural is about two brothers, Sam and Dean, who have grown up fighting “monsters” from the supernatural mythos of man, and they continue the work of their father, even after he sold his soul to a crossroad’s demon and held a brief sojourn in hell. During the final episode of last season (season 5), Sam was “taken over” by Lucifer, but because he was such a good person, he was able to wrest control away from Lucifer at the last moment, Dean opened a portal into Lucifer’s “cell,” and Sam threw his body into the pit, so both Sam and Lucifer were to share the soul for eternity. However, something happened, and he found himself freed for the next season (season 6). But now, he was different.

His body was returned, but his soul remained in the prison with Lucifer. Sam changed because he no longer had his soul. The “prison” that his body used to be in was open—Sam was truly free (177). The soul could no longer exert its power over Sam’s body, so Sam no longer needed sustenance or sleep. He was a mean-monster-killin’ machine. However, all was not perfect for Sam. Although his body was as it always was, and he retained the memories of his life before the pit, he became apathetic—he no longer felt guilt or sorrow or internal pain or love. He had no connection with the rest of the human race. He knew something was wrong, but he did not know what. A year after being “free” him and his brother were reunited. Dean immediately sensed a strangeness in Sam, and he started looking for the answer to the problem. When an angel, Castiel, checked Sam’s body for his soul and found none, they set about discovering a way to get it back. Sam did not want his soul returned to him. He did not want to feel remorse, pity, hatred, or any feelings that went along with his soul. He did not want to be imprisoned again and took steps to ensure that he would not be. He lost, however, when Death intervened and returned the battered soul to Sam.

After Sam was re-imprisoned by his soul, he felt again. Death had placed a barrier between the time Sam’s soul entered Hell and the time it spent in the darkness with Lucifer, so that the memories the soul had acquired there would not affect the body it now held. However, this made it so he had no memory of the year he spent without one. Castiel, who is ever naïve, answered Sam’s questions about what happened while his soul was away, though Death had warned him not to scratch too hard at the wall he had placed (“Like a Virgin”). Now Sam feels remorse for the innocent lives he took while hunting, for trying to kill a man who is a father figure to them both, and for letting his brother “turn” into a vampire for a short time. He is constantly being punished by the empathy he now feels because of his soul. The constraints have returned, and he will surely face pain throughout the rest of the season as he relearns the boundaries placed on him by the “political anatomy” of his punishing soul (177).

Works Cited

Foucault, Michel. The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. Vintage, 2010. 170-178. Print.

“Like a Virgin.” Supernatural. The CW: 04 Feb. 2011. Television. 5 Feb 2011.

This is written in the style of Helene Cixous

What did I know of writing? What did I know of the written word before the first letter was drawn before me and given a sound and a name? What were these scribbles that people made, and why did they not read my scribbles? They looked the same: connected loops and curly queues with no beginning and no ending. I was a child, but I was fully formed and my mind worked, yet I could not grasp this concept of writing and reading and meaning-making. I was a flower who yearned to know the world beneath my petals, the air inside my veins. That first painstaking letter, followed so closely by others just like it but different. This writing that was new and fresh and old.

Doorways were opened, windows were created into the souls of those around me, where I could see their deepest secrets and desires but I couldn’t know them. I couldn’t understand them. I couldn’t write them. Words flowed from my mouth into the ears of my listeners, but they weren’t hearing me. When the form of the words flowed from my mind, to my mouth, to my stubby pencil, then I was heard. The words on the page were listened to with more interest than the words that were said. The structure made the meaning and the meaning made the form. Sometimes, I would play with the structure; make poetry that was dressed up as a play, or write a story that looked like a poem. These words, these forms, were ignored. I was taught to conform to the forms and the structures people knew. I was the architect who was told that my idea of a building was incorrect. Of course it needs roofs and floors and walls, windows and doors. Who was I to invent something new?

I was merely a girl, a woman-thing who was not yet a woman. A lioness with no claws or teeth or abilities to dream beyond the means made for me by others. I was a writer in a world where women write romance and men write poetry. The words screamed for release, and I could not appease them. I would forgo writing for a time, to live up to the expectations of my mother. I would coddle my baby dolls and change their diapers. But they had stories to tell as well, and I was the one they spoke to. “These are my words.” They would tell me. I would listen. I would write it down. Are these my muses, then? These plastic, dead things? I would write their words with my newfound ability to link symbols together and give them meaning. But who was I? What was the meaning my mind sought to make? Did I ever stop to ask who am I? I did.

I was a Rusho, a child that was looked at differently because of her name. I was a disgusting Rusho; a criminal. “Who are you, little girl?” On the bus, my first day. I proudly say, “I am a Rusho” and they scoff and joke and say, “surely not, you’re too cute!” This slimy name whose history leaves little to love in the eco-geneologist community of Blanchard, ID. Like Cixous, I knew very early on “that there was a carnal bond between name and body” and that was manifested in me, “through the letters” of my name (p. 26). They bruised me with their ideas of who I was, their confusion on the meaning behind the name. Who was I that I thought I could write? A tiny nothing, a piece of nobody. A criminal, a Rusho. This label tore away the one I strove to create for myself, the label of writer, the need and want to write. Stripped barren, like a car parked too long under a freeway. I was down to my frame and ready to be destroyed. A name makes people who they are, the two are combined to create the whole, and my name was a tire filled with murky mosquito laden water, forgotten and unnecessary. Nothing to no one and no one to write.

References

Cixous, H. (1991). Coming to Writing. In H. Cixous, & D. Jenson (Ed.), Coming to Writing and Other Essays. (S. Cornell, D. Jenson, L. Anne, & S. Sellers, Trans., pp. 1-58). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Rhetoric has evolved or attained different meanings throughout its time on this Earth. Aristotle said rhetoric was the ability to find and utilize, in a given situation, the available means of persuasion, and that is the meaning I stick with. I like that some theorists believe it is a way to make meaning, or create change, but I think that is more of an ideal, to be honest, just as Quintilian’s idea of a rhetor as a good man speaking well is. It would be nice if rhetoric was only employed by good men (or women, I mean, come on), but the fact of the matter is that that is not always the case. Hitler is brought up often in conversations about the misuse of rhetoric, and the fact that he was not a good man when he used it. I would like to contend that the use of rhetoric by men or women who use it for unethical reasons or without due regard for the truth are employing sophistry, not rhetoric.

Speaking of sophistry, I am very tired of listening to the radio. It does not matter what channel I have it turned to, be it NPR or AM 590, all the radio voices say over and again, “the rhetoric of the president” or “the rhetoric in China” or “that’s just rhetoric.” I think it has become a catch-all word, and that causes me great vexation. Furthermoreover, there is not anything that is just rhetoric. If it is truly rhetoric—if the rhetor actually spent time, while creating his speech, to employ rhetoric purposely, then what he has written or said is done for a reason—it is not just rhetoric. I am not sure how to explain it further, on paper, except, perhaps, to say that the speech or article is a discourse artifact that has been purposely written or spoken to persuade an audience of the speaker’s point of view while using the available means of persuasion. Saying a speech is just rhetoric is like saying crème brulee is just dessert or New York City is just a city. Saying so little about the artifact in question diminishes the meaning and the time taken to create it.

Rhetoric, to me, then, is a way to get an audience to at least see the orator’s point of view, if not to get that audience to totally agree with it. I also believe, unlike Aristotle, Plato, and Quintilian, that rhetoric is an inborn talent that all humans have an affinity for—it is through the study of rhetoric, however, that rhetoricians are created. Babies learn how to use their available means of persuasion to persuade their parents to pick them up, to feed them, to change them. Toddlers use rhetoric to try to get things they want, and I must say they lurk closer to sophistry than older children tend to. For instance, my three-year old will ask me for a piece of candy right when I am about to serve dinner. I will say no, dinner is almost on the table and she will say, but Daddy said I could. Here, she is using her rhetoric without due regard for the truth, since I know for a fact that Daddy said no such thing. However, it is not until people study rhetoric that they can really find the difference between sophistry and rhetoric, and then they have a choice to make on what they will use to persuade their audiences. This choice is where the ethics of rhetoric comes into play, but that, dear reader, is another topic entirely.

Like the crazy french chef on Disney’s The Little Mermaid, I stare at my firefox toolbar and say, “What, is this?!” “Post to blog” it says. What is this program? I must test it out! It’s called Adobe Contribute, and it was so easy to set up a post without going into my actual website! What a lot of work! Haha, what a load off my back. No more writing my webname (or clicking on my bookmark), laboriously writing in my clever and savvy login name and password, and then clicking tabs and buttons on the admin panel! No! Adobe has made it easier! I just had to fill in a few boxes (and a couple I guessed on) and here I am! Posting! OMG!

Phew, just a minute, I have the vapors.

Ok, I think I’m better now. Let’s see if it works! Bosun! Haul in the anchor! We’re going out with the tide! Heave Ho, Sailors!

*Sings a song from The Little Mermaid (which has strangely merged with the theme song from Spongebob Squarepants) as she pushes the Publish button. Wish me luck!

Quoted from http://www.deviantart.com/?loggedin=1:

deviantART: where ART meets application!

This is kinda cool. I am checking out a new adobe product (well, new to me) and it’s kinda neato. Isn’t this little kitty cute?

Aha! Caught you!

Ok, I found one problem. The tags get posted to the top of the blog entry, which looks really tacky! So I won’t be adding tags, damn it all, anyway. Why isn’t anything perfect?

Interactivity, immersion and the flow theory as seen in the design of the user interfaces of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG)

It’s a working title, but I think I will do my thesis on just such a thing.

Veronica was giggling about boobies today. When asked why she always jokes about boobies, she says, “Because they are silly.” Then, she grabs her shirt and stretches it out. “Imagine if someone’s boobies were this big!” She says, and giggles hysterically. She puts her hands in her shirt, towards her belly. “Or down here!” Laughter ensues, and Yvonne notes that some women do have them down there. “What if they were on your eyes!” Veronica exclaims, putting her hands over her eyes in a cupped manner. “You’d have to feed your baby on your face! That’d be gross.”

On another note, Cassandra just learned the word Vagina from her friends and thinks it is the funniest word, ever.

There’s just something about guns. I don’t know what it is. I can guess, though. Maybe it hearkens back to days of old, back to the time when men were men and women were hit over the head with a club if a man wanted her. Throughout time, men were the breadwinners, the food killers, the hot, hunky, tasty home protectors. They knew what they wanted, and they took it, or killed it. If you read any romance book, any at all, the men resemble that description. They are muscular, strong, and commanding. They only show their softer sides to the ladies they love, and only then when it seems they may be losing them. I could analyze that idea a bit more in-depth as well. How many people have been with a man like that? Sure, he shows his feelings, but not all the time, and not as much as he will if it looks like he may be on the verge of losing you to another piece of man-flesh. MmmmMMm man-flesh.

Anyway, whenever I see Dee cocking his pistol, or when I know he’s carrying, I get a little tingly. I find it sexy and scary. “What if it goes off?” I think. “What if, God forbid, something horrible happens right this minute, and I lose him forever?” There is this urge I get, this wanting to touch him while he’s touching it. Is that, what do those old people call it? TMI? Am I sharing too much? I don’t think so, I’m sure others out there can and will agree with me. I’m sure if he had a hobby of collecting bows and arrows it’d be the same. If I saw him pulling back on a string, all taught and quivering… yeah I can see that.

Now, here is where the title comes in. We’re upstairs, finally, after having forced Yvonne to watch Zombieland. My back is killing me, I’m tired as hell, and all I can think about is how nice it will be to lie down and maybe, perhaps, sleep. He brings up a box of ammo (unbeknownst to me) and takes the gun out of the safe and removes the clip. He recently bought “defensive” ammo (which mostly means the bullet won’t go through a body, therefore killing innocent bystanders) and wanted to change out the non-defensive bullets that were currently in the clip. Let me correct myself. It isn’t a clip, it’s a magazine. A clip is when the bullets are exposed, like in the old machine guns. A magazine is when the bullets are enclosed. I correct Dee all the time for his silly English snafu’s, he can correct me for inane gun-part names.

So, I look over and see him pulling back the slide, after having replaced the magazine. Now and then he forgets his 1911 has a hammer, and so the bullet wouldn’t pop into the chamber. This causes the slide to stay open. All I saw was him, pulling back the slide, looking all sexy and gangsta.

I wanted him. In that moment, the pain in my back, the long-ass day at school, the drive to and from Cheney, all these things were far away from my brain. My libido had kicked in. (This doesn’t happen often, just ask him.) I’d been chattering about something inconsequential when I noticed this, and he was doing his best to ignore me as he tried to figure out why the bullet wouldn’t engage. I ignored his ignoring of me and said, “Hey you know what?” I was going to tell him how sexy he was, and how much I wanted to throw him down and make sweet love to him. (Please don’t vomit, that hurts me.)

Instead, without even looking at me, he said, “What! I’m kinda doing something here!”

Instantly, I felt like weeping. Like crying and bawling like a big old baby, and I knew it was stupid for me to feel that way. I mean, he was holding something that was potentially dangerous, something that could perhaps maim or kill either of us, and I was thinking with my she-dick.

I couldn’t help but wonder if I was being a tad too touchy.

But, he doesn’t know what he missed, because my libido shriveled into its regular tiny, cranky, dried-up husk and went to sleep. I may be too touchy, but now he’s not getting any touchy. Ha! So there.

Now, my back hurts again. I’m going to curl up with my netbook and read some more from Life After Death by Jennifer Adams, and then, maybe sleep. Perhaps to dream. I wonder if I will dream of some hot, hunky, hunter from the great unknown, training his pistol into the distance, telling me, “Stay back, love. Something dark and wicked this way comes.”