Little White Liar

Composition Challenge #12 - Oh my god, guys...

I just remembered the grossest thing that's happened to me since I moved abroad, AND I have a bonus disgusting story from a fellow Masters student. But before all of that comes out, and in honor of Meg (who, after my own heart, flew very many hours to shit her brains out in the name of cultural expansion), I give you this Composition Challenge:

Tell me about a time you either pooped yourself or thought you'd poop yourself, threw up or thought you'd throw up, peed your pants, etc. What I want is bodily functions performed in places where people usually pretend they have no bodies except for drinking and flirting. Tell me more.

Mostly so I can feel better about myself.

Want vs Need

I want a free round-the-world ticket with a week each in: San Francisco, New York, London, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia. I could see Adrienne in the grey fog on a red bridge, my brother grown this year in ways I'll hate myself for not witnessing, Brett in his long soft lashes and thick warm wool, and the stone temples, full rivers, elephants, rich fabrics I've only ever touched paper eyes on. I want to find a hair product that actually eliminates frizz while adding shine, body, and curl. Without the shellack effect. Even in the rain. I want a redheaded and green- or blue-eyed Australian boyfriend who used to be in the military but now runs a ranch or a farm somewhere just beyond the city. Who spends spare time with his dogs and his family, who takes care of his truck, who just shakes his head at my hypochrondriac citygirl ways. I want the perfect pair of jeans: long enough at the bottom that my ankles never show, high enough at the top that my butt crack remains a mysterious piece of property. Somehow light/dark for day/night with just the right amount of stretch. I want to succeed in my Masters program, and to excel at my job just long enough to finish my degree. I want this book to get published. I want adventures, and adventures, and adventures.

I need to keep a better diary of these transformational times.

Other perspectives: Erin | Erin O | Meg | DissolvedGirl | Kelsi | Jenn | Lesley | Jamelah | Lyla Lou

Composition Challenge #11 - Want vs Need

Hi. It's my favorite day, the randomly occurring (once weekly) time in which I impose my fickle will on all my internet friends! Composition Challenge, yes!

If you feel like writing with me this week, I suggest you write this way:

Make a list of 5-10 things you want. Make them things you personally want for you (no Miss America "World Peace" shenanigans). Then think of one thing you need. You can't already have it, because really, who do you think you are? Just rubbing your self-contentment in everyone's gaping life-holes.

Post your response on your blog linking this entry. Then comment here and let us know you participated. Then we can all read each other's wants and needs and either commiserate or judge silently. Away!

Composition Challenge: My One (Thousandth) Word

Composition Challenge: I am adrift.

 

Composition Challenge: One (Thousandth) Word

1) Finish this sentence with precisely one word:

"I am __________."

The word cannot be a name.

2) Illustrate that single word with a photo you took before you ever read this entry.

If the word accurately describes your life, you shouldn't have a problem finding a photo of it laying around.

Composition Challenge: Memoir

You never know when you're making a memory, those greeting cards say. So try to make everything last. Not that it matters, ultimately.

I don't remember my birth. Forming my first word. The phone numbers of boys I "loved" and called hundreds of times, fingers pressing buttons in the dark. My memory bank is small and haphazard. I think, often, of moments that have no place being remembered. Tiny existences that meant nothing. Why do they stick when others (the perfume of a dead grandmother) are gone?

Tell me a memory you don't understand holding onto all these years gone, with things like to-do lists and who it was you promised to call constantly slipping the mind. A little life moment that should have gone by the wayside with the rest. Maybe we can make sense of the formula. Or just each other.

Weakness (Shoop)

I've never passed a shoe sale marked more than 50% off, and I've never met a mixture of chocolate and mint that I didn't like. Left ten minutes without lip balm I begin complain. Bitterly. I want to taste the local cuisine in every locale, and I don't mind dragging my travel companions off their sore heels to find it. I want, then, to be coached through recreating those exotic samplings and I want to take it out on my kitchen when I fail as a basic chef. Fuck you, beignets. But these are surface fixations. If I'm honest...

"Here I go, here I go, here I go again. Girls, what's my weakness?"

Men.

Coming from a proud line of feminists, lesbians, single mothers, and lonely uggos, I realize what a disgrace I have become. But if women are the fair sex that makes menfolk the brutes, and I have a soft spot the size of Marilyn Monroe's vaginal canal for big dumb beasts (see also: any posts on dogs). Don't worry, this isn't an all-inclusive offer on penis-holders. Just like bridges in Minneapolis, I'm weak in certain spots.

I have been late for work because I ride the train purposely past my stop, eye-stalking businessmen as they fidget up and down the aisles. It would be against this woman's personal religion to miss the spectacle of a handsome brute as he either puts on or takes off a good tie, obviously too safari-souled to wear such a (beautiful, designer, Armani?) noose minutes past the prescribed duration. I walk blocks out of my way to follow a delicious cologne and a broad back across Manhattan in high commuter traffic.

Because I lie often and without allegiance, helpless honesty strips me down to the marrow. Country boys only have to confide that they "just can't lie" to earn my unflagging devotion, my rabid protection, my sudden and inexplicable desire to teach them the ways of dishonesty (therefore destroying what is it I love about them). Even dishonesty in men seems so...remedial class. Women invented lying about witchcraft, lying about pregnancy, even lying about orgasms. Men lie to get women into bed, and if those women are over the age of 14, they can see it coming about four drinks away. But how cute is it? No, I know; I'm sick.

If there's a bespectacled fellow with a beard and a book in a four-mile vicinity, you will soon find me at the nearest armchair playing mathematician with mirror angles and half-slash lashes. An accent cultured in the United Kingdom turns my own New Yorker snort into a purr. And don't even get me started on the sort of man who's had to order refills for his passport pages.

Listen, I can't bring myself to date men with brown eyes. It's a (bad) daddy thing. But I have a deep weakness for imp-green eyes, for hazels that fade gray-green at the edges, for blue that sunburst around grass green like summer in a black hole. This fixation does not, I insist, stem from four years of chasing a jungle-eyed ghost through the fog, but rather because green eyes are inarguably (and cruelly) the prettiest when they cry.

Being both a pacifist and a laze, it surprises me just as deeply as it does you that my pelvis tugs toward soldiers and sportsmen; that I'll argue all night over the ethics of warfare in hopes that some battlefield could be recreated in bedrooms further down the road. You can keep your models and musicians, but if there's another guerrilla war, send me in. I can spot a man in camo print two hundred clicks off.

Now you know my kryptonite. Luckily the internet journaling world is only 5% men or else I might have been distracted from writing this very entry. Miss you.

Composition Challenge: Weakling

I'm going to try this Challenge thing one last time. If nobody responds, this will be the last challenge issued. I'm too busy to talk to people who aren't talking back. So, yeah, limited edition y'all.

This Composition Challenge is to write about your weaknesses. I don't care if they're physical, emotional, romantic, culinary, whatever. Just put yourself in the place of the flawed monkey-backed hero and write.

Composition Challenge 7

The prompt for Composition Challenge 7 is now posted on the Challenge sub-site. Come out and play!

Challenge 6: Origins

Let's say babies are blank slates. The slates come in different sizes and colors, but the writing is only after the wrapping comes off. Where do you come from, really? What shaped you? Whether it was nature or nurture, what got into your young bones and shaped them? Tell me about your hometown. Your first best friend. Tell me the fairytale that rocked your soul. What's your origin?

Peter at PeterDeWolf.com
"Is it because Barney has one on 'How I Met Your Mother'?"
"Can you use it to meet girls?
"Have you turned fruit?"
To which I reply:  "Yes."  "Yes."  "I had one first."  "I guess."  "Not that I'm aware of."
(Man, I hope that I answered those in the right order.)

Amanda at LittleWhiteLiar.Typepad.com
...I used to say I was born on the bayou. I liked the image that conjured up: some voodoo baby with twigs in her curly hair, sweat-shiny and wicked-charming, naked in the southern humidity...

Kelsi at ThisCouldTakeAwhile.Blogspot.com
...the comfort of the coffee, and the solitude of the walk, the grim beauty of the pacific ocean and the quaintness of the town all live in the core of me to express how it is that, at the base of it all, i really feel the world should be...

Meg at PuritanJamShort.Blogspot.com
...We were pretty poor, apparently, but I didn't learn that until I was much older. Sometimes, when I talk to people about our vegetable gardens in the side yard, our wee pumpkin patches, our weeklong living room forts and extended backyard camp outs, people look at me like I grew up in a different decade...

Chavie at hicsuntdracones.blogspot.com
...Only after talking at length with me does the lilt in my voice come out, reminiscent of early Woody Allen. It is hard to explain why it is I identify so strongly with a city I left behind in my adolescence - over a decade ago....

Adrian at FearofLanding.Blogspot.com
...The timing worked out and I was on the last flight out, with my mom, in a cardboard carrying box. This would be the beginning of my life of cramped, cost-effective traveling...

Jamelah at Jamelah.net
...One of my longest long-standing jokes is that I am the only Arab redneck you will ever meet. Being an Arab redneck means that I talk a lot and I don’t like wearing shoes. In case you were wondering...

Lesley at HowNowWit.Blogspot.com
...I am, therefore, not the product of any hometown. And I fear sometimes that the ugly secret behind being from everywhere is that where I’m actually from is…well, nowhere...

Liz at TheLFactor.Typepad.com
...I come from traditional parents. Republicans. Don't fight in front of the kids. Go out to dinner 3 nights a week because marriage comes before children. Because I said so, that's why...