Nancy's Musings

Simon Said D.F.Y.S. Tall laughter, a Champaign flute A leaping assumption of which you repented, Possibly embarrassed at that glimpse I caught of Self-deprecation beneath your black robes.   Self-deprecation, the half-blind third-eye of ego. And mine, suddenly drowning in self-conscious poverty My red shirt is sweaty rags, And I am expendable.   In the Byrne-Jones’s classroom I held the thinnest lifelines With my despairing eyes, muted by an Ignorance and knowledge of my poverty, And the jingling of their academic coinage.   The ivy grows blood-green, the stone crumbles like cheese, And the spires are fists pointed blasphemously. We stood in a lush garden next to my jet-lag. The tune repeated three weeks later,   Me again in my bloody blouse holding orange-juice. The repetition a symbol of poverty filled with fat.   Never content in my ill-made self, Reflected in a mirror who thought itself academic, I taught me the catechism of self-hate That must echo in my chambers seven years.   In...

The second kiss finally awakened my toes. We walked together, he wrapping in his rough hand the three smallest fingers of mine. We laughed, and he taunted me. I called him out and he just nodded and surrendered. We walked smoothly, as if being pulled across the icy sidewalk by a horizontal gravity, me ahead, leading by my three smallest fingers. “May I kiss you?” he asked, and then moved forward, his hand on my face. Two warm seconds. I slept on. We walked down lanes lined with icy pines. Stepping past offices with glass doors like aquamarines. We didn’t laugh. “. . . if I like someone,” I finished lamely, trying to be real, trying to be me and not the gibbering fool inside me who loved only his hands, and his eyes, and the weight of his gaze. He stopped, and I turned when my three smallest fingers did not follow me. His warmth was around my shoulders now, his eyes in mine. “And do you like me?” I cannot see the point in games. I do not now, nor did I in that moment, knowing that to ma...

My roommate thinks I have Asperger's Syndrome. I don't. Nowhere near, but it made me laugh to hear it, and considering me mentally handicapped seems to help her relate. I've gotten as many results for the Meyers-Briggs personality sorter as times I've taken it. The same roommate who thinks I am mentally challenged is also certain I'm an introvert, but I'm not at all sure anymore. Most of the results of my personality tests, and voter-type tests, etc. are skewed by the decisions I've made for what goes on in my head, and generally, they place me near the center - rarely squarely at any end of a dichotomous scale. Except the "which Marvel character are you" test, which swears I'm the Hulk. Apparently I'm too emotional for internet quizzes. And there are abberrations in my personality that are the direct result of personal lifestyle choices. Let me suggest that no matter how scientific, multiple-choice tests cannot capture the complexity ...

I am studying hard for my competency exams, and am not able to take much time to write for myself. All of my novel manuscripts are off the back burners and into tupperware in the freezer until I can thaw them out, probably in several years. It breaks my heart. Fiction keeps my soul alive. I have posted fiction here before, and I'm stalled somewhere near the end of a story at Josephina's Northern Pig, so this will have to do. You will forgive me if I pause here for a moment and pull a strand from my head. Also, my typewriter isn't working. Neither of them are, really, and since one of them is eighty years old, and the other is full of circuit boards, I can't do a thing about it. I have used my typewriter to brainstorm when I didn't want my ideas running around without leashes. Clouds in My Coffee Cheryl watched people, and knew another watcher on sight if not before, when the muscles between her shoulder blades twitched. The sharp, narrow man in the felt, wool, w...

I am awesome. I totally get that. As user karakamos on Youtube expressed it here: I'm a human being, and that's really, really cool. I breathe, and that's just the beginning of my awesomeness. At the moment eight of my fingernails are "deep purple," and both my ability to make that decision and carry it out are pretty amazing. I listed my awesome sometime last year, if you want the whole rundown. But I'm usually only aware of my overwhelming privilege, the unbelievable generosity of God, and the overall spiffiness that is me. Sometimes, though, this horrible thing happens. Somebody points a camera at me and pulls the trigger.  Between my genes and my lifestyle choice, I'll never be any kind of supermodel. I have a striking face, and perfect eyebrows, and a left elbow that people come miles to see, but a camera won't pick up any of that. Or my talent, or humor, or depth, or personality, should I also possess any of those. The camera's a shallow bas...

I read an article somewhere (probably io9, because that's where I live on the internet these days) that when you dream about a real person, you react to that person in real life as if your dream were real. Well, I dreamed about a real person, and now I'm seriously pissed at him. I'm not sure if I'm being irrational, or if my brain figured something out while I slept and I have a good reason to be angry. I'd love to know what you think. So there's this guy, an acquaintance from church, and sometimes he comes and talks to me, or sits next to me. It was nice, at first, because I occasionally get lonely, and it's pleasant to talk to somebody. And he's genuinely funny. But then he started interrupting my conversations with other men, and monopolizing prime social time. When he acknowledges that I exist, he treats me as if I'm his territory, like he's trying to acquire his own peacock tail, and I'm third feather. He shows no interest in being eithe...