Well, the weather here in Seattle has been unseasonably cold and dreary, much the same way I am feeling. I am craving warm drinks all the time now. I guess that’s why Seattle is a coffee capital.
I’ve been worrying over my manuscript lately, not wanting to send it out to any more publishers or contests before I get more feedback on it. The MS has poems written when I was 19, and some I wrote last week, so I’m wondering if its on solid ground, it’s changed a lot over the past 20 months or so, should I abandon it for the new MS I’ve been working on lately, etc. I’ve sent it out to a few friends for feedback, but if anyone else would like to volunteer, I’d be grateful for their thoughts. I’ve been feeling less like sending poems out, wanting to sit on poems longer after they’ve been written. Is this a function of being a little under the weather since the surgery in Feb, a little tired, a little depressed, or something else? I know that being in doctor’s offices just drains the energy right out of me. I’m currently scheming ways to stay out of the doctor’s offices longer, to make the weeks when I don’t have to go sit in some specialist’s offices more frequent. Vitamins, cranio-sacral therapy, more rest, yoga, supplements.
I was also thinking about blogging, the way it reminds me of how, when I was six years old, I would sneak into the basement where Dad kept a herd of TRS-80s, and I would sit and write into the computer (without a word processor, I don’t think we had them yet) and just make up stories or write how I was feeling. There is no record of all the stuff I wrote down there. By the time I was ten I was working on the family’s new little Apple computer in the upstairs spare room, writing poems before school. I can see how some people (that person in the latest issue of Poetry Magazine, for one) can think lots of negative stuff about poet bloggers, but to me, it seems like I’ve been creating solace and space for myself on computers my whole life, and blogging is just an extension of that. And now I can communicate and create with a group of like-minded people. I also thought, how very lucky my Dad always encouraged me to work on computers, how he never said that computers were only for my brothers, only for boys. I probably never would have learned programming otherwise, the fun of making your own little video games or pictures out of code. Since I quit Microsoft back in 2002 I haven’t done much in the way of coding for fun, just the spare technical article or two for $$ every so often. I think I was just totally burned out by a rapid succession of very demanding, 90-hour-a-week jobs. But I may be ready to jump back in sometime soon. You know, unless my poetry career, such as it is, suddenly takes off…