happy b'day to me

it's my birthday today. i officially cross today what i have (for reasons i do not quite understand) always considered the threshold of actual adulthood. i'm 25. and i thought i'd take this opportunity to update you, my loyal few readers, on my life as it is shaping out as i cross into adulthood.

i'm still waiting tables for a living, but only for one more week. i got a new job as a customer service representative for Verizon Wireless, and after training i'll be working only about 2 blocks from home, which i am excited about. I was hoping to begin at Marquette this fall, but i didn't feel good enough about my application as is, and i've put it off for now.

i haven't been posting here much because i have sort of shifted my thinking from verse to prose. this is possibly an even bigger shift than it sounds. i started out with very little idea about how to write prose, and i'm trying every day to figure it out. i've begun working on some various short stories and two or three novels all in the hope that i will break through somewhere and be able to write to the finish. as i discovered before, the secret to writing, as the secret to reading very long books or gobs and gobs of research, is simply not to stop. but sometimes i have to, and sometimes i have simply no idea how to go on, and even more often i hate the rough draft so much that i begin trying to redraft it before it's ready and the process comes up short. but as i promised before, i'm working very hard to finish and put something up here as soon as possible.

something i badly needed after living for 2 years in the perpetual summer of Abilene, Texas, was a long, cold, and very snowy winter. and i've gotten it. i love it. i feel at home in the cold. it makes me want to chop wood, build a fire, and write a winter idyll. somehow the winter seems to write itself as a story or a poem (a very concise poem, without superfluity), the feel of which is gently but clearly perceptible. and it is somehow summarized a little at a time in hot chocolate, mittens, scarves, and the feel of stiffening lungs as sub-zero air fills and contracts them. it really is a wonderful thing.