A beautiful car at the local pub, a strange sign on the elevator at work, democracy + beer, a beautiful cake, flying kites, relaxing at home. Not a bad life.

This, though, is the picture I’ve snapped most recently that has me feeling a whole mess of feelings.

What to say here?

I think I always believed that this was the case for Obama, that he would come around. I fully expected that he would wait until after the 2012 election cycle, to have confirmation of his future. I am astonished – pleasantly so – that he chose to stand up earlier than that, though I know it’s due in no small part to Joe Biden’s clumsy effort at doing the same. (I have to say, Joe Biden is a verbal klutz, but I do love him.)

In the wake of Obama’s endorsement, a wave of support has been rising:

Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee announced the state will recognize same-sex marriages performed out of state
Illinois Governor Pat Quinn also endorsed marriage equality
Now even Jay Z is on board

It seems slightly ridiculous that I should care what Jay Z thinks about marriage equality – but I do care, and I think his public support of marriage equality, and of Obama’s move to endorse it, is important. We already know that the American public is changing course, that the split between supports and opponents is narrowing (in favor of). Jay Z’s endorsement signals another cultural shift: one of the most famous names in an industry where homophobia is, at times, seen as a badge of honor has now indicated he thinks gay people are just regular people. That’s kind of a big deal.

I don’t care if Obama’s “evolution” is motivated by politics. I don’t care if Jay Z’s public endorsement is the result of strategic PR planning. I do care that these things are working in the right direction.

ETA: Leave it to ThinkProgress to round up the major political figures who support marriage equality.

We covered a number of drills last night, all of which were excellent and invigorating. I really feel like I know how to use my body in new ways now. The first drill focused on the hammerfist and required the padholders to hold the pads out horizontally in front of the chest (as if carrying a tray) for an overhead strike, or vertically against the body for a side strike. I was partnered with two people: B, a woman I know fairly well from kickboxing, and M, a man I have only said hello to a few times (but I like his energy). I was nervous about working across gender lines in the class, but M seemed like a good candidate for the first experience – he is considerably taller than me, and is a stocky dude, but his demeanor is friendly and relaxed, and I have seen him be positive and encouraging. I am happy to say M is as I hoped he would be, friendly and encouraging and definitely a good partner. However, there is something hugely intimidating about letting a man just wail on your midsection while you stand there, trying to absorb the blows.

This drill was immediately followed by one in which classmates tapped me on the back, at which point I was expected to turn and strike the pads using the hammerfist techniques. This was psychologically exhausting in a different way: even expecting the physical contact, it was still uncomfortable. And it wasn’t just me – I noticed a few people who don’t like the idea of someone creeping up behind them.

The hammerfist drills were followed by some truly brutal elbow techniques (my personal favorite so far) and then a new version of the pluck that I learned a few weeks ago. After that I slipped out to join the kickboxing class.

I still don’t know what to make of the Krav Maga class. It’s definitely a great workout, and I like that aspect of it. I also appreciate that the method of teaching the skills and techniques is to mimic real-life situations (hence the standing with your back to the room). But there are definitely things that are forcing me to challenge my level of comfort. Last night there were two guys in class who were pretty aggressive; I didn’t have to partner with them, though I was certainly close enough to see their techniques and feel their energy. It scattered me a little.

Definitely need to do some more thinking.

Last night I took my first Krav Maga class.

one of several excellent bruises

Taking inventory of my body’s reaction to the class:

• left foot arch is sore and tight, making walking a little painful
• the tops of my right and left feet are bruised from front kicks
• pectoral muscles are sore as all get out from 2 minutes of non-stop sprawls
• random bruising on hands and legs
• soreness in wrists and elbows from holding the pads

Taking inventory of my mind’s reaction to the class:

• A year ago, I could not have kept up with the workout. Last night, I did.
• I am not accustomed to showing the kind of aggression necessary to perform these techniques.
• It is uncomfortable to be choked.
• It is uncomfortable to choke someone else.
• The first time I was choked, it took what felt like a long time to make my body do the right things to break the attack.
• After the third or fourth time, it got easier to make my body do the right things.
• I am still nervous about working across gender lines in this class.
• I am going to get better at this.

My instructor has been talking for a few weeks about the sense of empowerment he feels now, and how his training has been life changing. I can see why that is true for him, and I hope to feel a similar shift.

Do come if you’re in the area (or feel like road-tripping). It’s my first time at a slam, and I’m terribly, terribly nervous. It’ll be fun.

at the summit of Bernal Heights Park, July 2011

This moment (and later, this picture) made me want to change everything.

I upped my kickboxing attendance to 3 classes each week, including the 7 a.m. Saturday morning class that was mostly populated by the instructors. And I found that I could mostly keep up. I was learning other techniques in the classes, too: hapkido, kali (using escrima sticks), hand trapping, pak sao/lop sao. I started running in the winter, and was amazed at how I was able to push myself without the pain I’d previously felt in my leg (due to this fun thing).

I’m now exercising at least 5-6 days a week, have lost 30 pounds, and I’m stronger than I think I have ever been. I can hit hard, I can kick hard, and I can run farther than I thought. All my pants are too big for me, and I can carry bags of mulch and heavy patio pavers around my yard without getting winded. It’s a wonderful thing.

Last week, the owner and main instructor at the studio I go to went for a week-long training in krav maga. Now listen, that dude is fit. He doesn’t look like he could kick your ass if you walked by him on the street, but I have been on the receiving end of his roundhouse kicks and HOLY MOLY THEY HURT. He admitted to us last night that the training last week was hard, and that his body was ready to quit by the end of the week. And he had us practice some krav maga moves in our kickboxing class.

At the end of class, instead of our normal hapkido or trapping drills, he had us practice how to break a choke with the two-handed pluck. In order to demonstrate the real-life application of this move, he put his hands around my neck in a pretty solid choke, with his thumbs pressing on my windpipe and his fingers pressing into my artery. No joke, that shit was scary.

So I’ve been going to classes there for a year and a half. I trust the instructors, all of them, but especially this one. His control is spectacular, he’s a good teacher, and he is careful to teach us the right applications of the right techniques as we are ready for them. So I knew, logically, that he wasn’t actually going to choke me. However, my body sent up all the right distress signals immediately. It is, really, very intimidating to have someone put their hands on you in an aggressive way, even in the safest of spaces.

I couldn’t break his hold. He kept saying “More explosive! More explosive!” I couldn’t get it right. Finally he laughed and said, “Ok, it’s getting better.” I also had trouble being the attacker; I am uncomfortable putting my hands on people in that way. It made me realize that I am not as strong as I think I am.

But I am going to work to change that, too.

A few people have mentioned they have a hard time staying motivated through the month – 30 poems in 30 days is, as you might imagine, kind of absurd. But fortunately there are kind-hearted souls all over Teh Interwebz who want to help by providing prompts for writing. Here’s a collection of places where you can find prompts:

The Original NaPoWriMo website – NaPoWriMo was started by Maureen Thorson in 2003; this website is the official NaPoWriMo footprint. Visit the blog here each day for a new prompt. And, if you are posting your poems online, you can add a link to the list of participating websites.

Robert Lee Brewer’s Poetic Asides – In addition to offering a (kind of vague) prompt every day, Brewer runs a challenge – you can post your poems in the comments and at the end of the month he culls the best of the responses for a chapbook. I’m pretty sure  they have to be in response to his prompt, so keep that in mind.

30/30 Prompts – Not sure who’s behind this Tumblr, but the first week’s prompts are posted already, so if you’re itching to get a head start, you’re in good shape here. It’s a Tumblr, and I am totally not hip enough to really get the whole Tumblr thing, so to me it appears you can’t share your own work. But again, I am not hip. So.

30/30 Poetry – This looks like a publication of some variety. So apparently you sign up for an email list, get a prompt each day, and then return your response via email submission. If they like it, maybe it gets published. Looks like they’re posting the prompts on the website, too.

Apparatus Magazine on Twitter – Adam Hart, the hard-working editor of Apparatus, will be tweeting prompts all month long. I like his prompts. I like him. Check it out.

I also always like to check out the threads at the PFFA – people come up with some totally insane ideas, and it’s usually good fun.

Donna Vorreyer has an whole mess of prompts on her blog – during 2011, she started the Poetry Tow Truck project, which you can read about here. She kindly indexed the archived prompts, which is excellent. And, bonus prompts: for 2012, she is doing a new project, the Poetry Mixtape, for which she has also created an index of archived prompts.

Got more places to get prompts? Leave me a comment, and I’ll add to the list.

Happy writing, everyone!

My only real promise is that I will continue to think about poems.

Meanwhile, things are brewing:

I have decided to shelve the manuscript for awhile – two solid rounds of rejection from major presses and contests takes it toll, and the time required to research presses and contests, and then prep for submission, is just too much for me right now. I am hoping, in the one-week break between semesters (coming at the end of April) to pull some of the stronger poems into a chap manuscript and send them out, but I’m not sure how that’ll pan out.

I am becoming more and more interested in spoken word, slam and performance. Not likely for myself, but definitely as an aspect of poetry that I have never really given much attention to. But at AWP, I attended Patricia Smith’s book release party and had my mind totally blown by some poets from Louder Than a Bomb. In particular, Jamila Woods with her “Pigeon Man” piece freaking rocked my world. And in April, I am being generously hosted by the Pleasantville Poetry Slam, where I will give a featured reading and watch the slam. I am terrified. TERRIFIED. Listen, I don’t slam. I don’t perform. I stand there and read my poems. But you bet your ass I’ll be trying to up my game a bit. (You should come to the slam and make me feel a little better.) And this morning I got a list of names to check out from a friend in Canada who is about to go all Thoreau (the Walden version, not the Civil Disobedience version).

At the same time, I’m thinking about politics. Oh, yeah, of course I am, it’s election year. But that’s not really why. With the whirlwind of anti-woman, anti-feminist activity that’s happening, I can’t help but feel constantly assaulted by the world. And in Chicago (yes, Chicago again) I went to a panel discussion on political poems. There were four panelists, but I was so taken with two of them – Matthea Harvey and Nick Lantz. Harvey talked about her process for writing her Future/Terror poems, and Lantz talked about his exploration of the difference between poets and politicans, using the language of the politicians: essentially, that poets lie to expose truth, and politicians reinterpret truth in confusing ways to obscure some larger truth. And so I’m thinking about both of those talks, and about how the world is changing and not changing, and I’m in research mode. I’m googling, I’m wiki-ing, I’m getting ready to go to the library. I’m taking pictures and planting gardens and watching reruns of Buffy in my downtime (no lie: by “downtime” I mean “the ten minutes each morning after my shower when I get dressed and dry my hair.” That’s right, I’m watching Buffy while that happens).

And while all this is brewing in my brain, I’m still working. And homeworking. Managing to maintain an “A” average in my classes and keep the status of “rock star” in  my new(ish) role at work. I’m running or kickboxing 6-7 days a week, losing weight and making good choices in food (except for last night, when I stress-ate an entire bag of Ritz Toasted Chips–my mouth hurts from the salt). D assures me I have been awesome lately, despite the lack of help I’m offering in cooking and cleaning. Jake tells me I’m a good mom. I suspect there are people in the world who would disagree with both Jake and D; I am learning not to care.

Does that sound terrible? It feels terrible. Still, I am learning not to care.

There is a hole waiting to open beneath me. That’s fine, let it open.

I will not fall in.

(to find out what it means, click here.)

The conference itself was – well, overwhelming. There were close to 10,000 people in attendance, and I felt socially anxious and claustrophobic the whole time. There is a particular kind of loneliness, too, in being surrounded by so many people. I knew only a small handful of people at the conference, and so while everyone else was squealing with excitement at being reunited with friends and former classmates or professors, I spent most of the conference on my own. It was difficult, since I am very accustomed to being able to access the people I know as I need/want to. Donna was a life-saver, though—it was good to have a real, live person to touch base with every few hours and also good to spend some time with her more than once in a year!

The panels were good (more on those tomorrow, probably), and the attendees at the panels were exactly as I expected them to be: eager, during the Q&A sessions, to impress their intelligence upon everyone in the room by not so much asking a question as offering an unsolicited re-interpretation of the panel’s description.

The bookfair was more difficult for me than I anticipated. There were four very large exhibition halls filled with rows of tables at which were seated editors and interns from presses, magazines, literary journals and writing programs. I intended to visit the editors of journals that have published me. I visited Laura at the Weave table, and she was lovely and gracious (and took a super cute picture of us), and I visited Roxane at the [PANK] table, but she had lost her voice and I felt so awkward standing in front of her awesomeness that I basically acted like a dork and then ran away. Good times. I knew that Boxcar and Tuesday would be there, and that Kristy Bowen was having an open studio on Saturday, but I never made it to any of those due to crippling social anxiety and self-doubt. I am still kicking myself. And I should have thought harder about looking to see if Toad, Linebreak or Blood Lotus was there. And talking to editors that haven’t published me? Oh God, forget it. I felt I couldn’t get it together: what do I have to offer you, an editor, if you’re not holding my poem in your hand and deciding whether or not it sucks? I have a hard time taking up space with people that I think probably have more important things to do.

I never realized before how socially awkward I really am.