Glee Drinking Game

No, this is nothing creative. I'll try to post something for the last day of FlaFiOcto. I had E and M over last night (it's been a while since I've used the single initial, god do I feel like I'm in  Gossip Girl), and we played a Glee Drinking Game. I thought I'd post it here for those Glee lovers/haters among us. (Sorry Ada, but you can play too if you want.) The bad thing about this game is I end up getting SO MAD at the writers and cursing at the TV with abandon. Oh well!


Glee Drinking Game

Take a drink when . . .

• Anyone starts singing.
• Sue Sylvester insults Will Schuster.
• Anyone fulfills their stereotype.
• Someone makes a bad decision.
• They use the word "sectionals" or "regionals."
• Santana says something mean.
• Will Schuster patronizes his girlfriend.

Watch Glee responsibly! We all know overexposure to Glee can lead to latent rage syndrome.

Zombie Apocalypse Plan - Part 3

Part 1
_ Incubation _
http://padawansofwriting.blogspot.com/2012/01/zombie-apocalypse-plan-revised.html

Part 2
_ Accumulation _
http://padawansofwriting.blogspot.com/2012/01/zombie-apocalypse-plan-accumulation.html


Part 3

_ Aggravation _

FFOct24 - Flash Fiction 7

Girl Meets Mess

There was this man, and that’s always how the trouble starts. There was this man, and I fell from the edge of space to the bad part of my mind where everything always gets so complicated. There was this man, and I didn’t love him.

Well, not exactly.

Love gives you strength. Love is your rock. Love stands by you when you break down at the grocery store and say that the soup aisle reminds you of everything your mother always said was wrong with you. This was not that.

It started innocently enough. He rear-ended my friend. On his motorcycle. Never seen anyone fly over the hood like that, but he got right back up.

“Fuck,” was the first word I ever heard him utter. “What the hell were you doing?”

Standing still at a red light was the answer to that question. It was mostly the head trauma.

My friend, who is good at this type of thing, calmly informed him that he was as bright as a baboon’s rear end and also offered to drive him to the hospital and asked would he please give us his insurance information. He declined, paying us out of pocket with a mysterious wad of twenties, and then speeding off. I would later run into him at the grocery store and then my anarchist book club. God, what’s a girl to do?

Soon it became obvious to me that he was a little unstable. At my anarchist book club (really we just read dystopian sci-fi that you’d find in any top 100 reading list for the American middle schooler) he got into ridiculous fights. He said that JFK was killed by Russian terrorists. He said that Diet Pepsi caused more cancer than cigarettes and that the FDA was a load of horseshit. He also said that car owners were the worst plague to every blight mankind.

Naturally, I was taken with him. That is until later. We started to go out together, my anarchist book club, and he got into three fist fights in less than a week. One was over a stolen parking spot and the second came at the end of a shouting match during a contentious dart game.

The last was with one of our fellow book club members over whether or not the idea of God could be proven true with empirical data. Telling you which side of the argument he was on will not give you a better idea of anything.

I started sneaking peeks at him. Then I started researching him on the internet. Then I started slowly inserting myself in his life, and it was all well and good until he started to notice my interest.

It turns out that the only thing worse than being spurned by an impossible crush is being intrigued by one. He started to ask me out to movies, shows, and bars. I cleverly dodged, but it was hard to keep it up for long.

Then, one night, I was describing the hardships of my ill-gotten amore to the same friend who was present at the time of the rear ending. She was smoking a joint at the time, but still gave me the single greatest insight I’d ever received.

“Do you think it’s possible that the reason you like him is because you don’t think you deserve any better?”

All that time I thought I was torturing myself for fun, but sometimes stabbing yourself in the thigh is just a way of avoiding the fact that your jeans no longer fit you properly.

There was this man, and that’s always how the trouble starts. Then there was this woman, and, for once, that was me. It was only when I realized how awful I was being to myself that I could finally stop staring at his thighs when we discussed 1984. Which was good, because his musings on A Brave New World were pedestrian at best.

Not FlaFiOcto :(

But I'm sure I'll write something on the eight billion hour train ride I'm about to undertake to visit Allya. Until then, I just wanted to leave you with this insane little ditty I came across in the poetry I've been writing off and on.

Pranked

Darling, have you noticed?

I’ve been wearing your skin,
all day.

What madcap
hijinks we get up to
when I forget
to be
human!

Flash Fiction 6

The first time it hurt. The second time was just confusing. The third, well, by then I was getting used to losing myself.

Rage-ometrics. A half joke and half-truth, neither part amusing or factual. My partner used to say that I was more emotion than woman. Not so much human and much more whirlwind of interpersonal destruction.

He was not wrong, but neither was he kind. That friendship would end badly with one of us wielding an ice pick with intention to harm. Telling you which was which would paint an unfair advantage for the other, so I will not reveal it at this time.

It was never my intention to become super human. Here the prefix “super” is defined very strictly by its Latin origins. Above and beyond. More than. Not just a woman anymore. Too many bits to be quite normal.

Once I knew I was no longer like everyone else though, I wore it with style. There are things you don’t let yourself do when you want to blend it. Haircuts that are shied away from. Leather jackets unbought. Body parts unpierced and untattooed. Once I knew I wasn’t normal, I let it all go. I took up three bad habits, but dropped two of them because hard drugs and sex with strangers wasn’t as much fun as I predicted.

I kept the cigarettes.

My partner always used to say I kept the masses nice and safe and ignorant while shielding them from the truth. Never mind that I stopped mass genocide, he had to fixate on the lie. The harm done by untelling.

He always was a cynic, and arrogant to boot. Hypocrite. I was taking on the sins of humanity, not him. It wasn’t him risking his neck. Unkind. As I said. I almost feel bad for going after him with that ice pick. (And here I said I wasn’t going to tell that story.)

In the end though, hollowing myself out was always the hardest part. As much as he made me crazy, he always called me back. Without him, it became harder to hold on to the me-ness. I started wanting to break things all the time, and not just the things I was supposed to break.

But it’s okay, because it wasn’t long after that I discovered the way to keep doing the indispensable task that was eating away at me. This is a universal trick that will surely help not just the above and beyond humans like myself (saving the world one batch of unfelt emotions at a time) but the ignorant masses as well. As such, I will reveal it here.

Every person has the ability to sacrifice ourselves for the greater good, the selfishness to resist, and the good sense to pick when and where we make our final stand. Pick the hill you die on with care. The one I chose is filled with pests and weevils and ingrates. The only reason I don’t abandon it is because I love it so terribly much.

Every time I go, I get a little closer to losing myself, but every time I return I remember why I can’t. Rage-ometrics. Not funny. Not true. But me. At least, for as long as I can hang onto it.

Code:

Code: blue.  Heart hospital.  Fourth floor.  Room 2071.

It repeats.

I pretend like I can't hear.  Like the quietly playing NCIS on the small TV in the upper corner of the room is much louder and drowns out the sound.

Code: blue.  Heart hospital.  Fourth floor.  Room 2071.  For the third time.

Or like the book in my hand is so interesting, so engaging I can't even hear anything.

But I hear it.

And I'm glad we aren't on the fourth floor.


We are on the first.  Surgery wing.  He's in the bed.  Waiting for a minor procedure.

Sure.  Minor.  Because when they stick this little thing that connects to your blood vessel so that they can administer chemo without poking you, without trying however many times it takes to find a vein, because you'll get chemo every two weeks for six months, when they stick that little triangular thing that is as thick as a stack of quarters called a power port into the muscle in your chest, it's pretty minor.  It'll just be minor sedation.  An IV knockout.  Not the gas.  With anesthetic shots in the area.

It's no big deal.  It's not like a bowel resection using a DaVinci procedure that turns you upside down and uses four small incisions and some huge machine operated by your surgeon to cut out part of your intestine and a tumor and 22 lymph nodes, one of which is cancerous.  That was five weeks ago.


I guess it is fairly minor.  I wait in the prep room with him longer than it takes for the whole thing to be over.  It takes longer in that small room where I hear, maybe twenty minutes after it sounded the first time:

Code: blue.  Heart hospital.  Fourth floor.  Room 2071.

It's only repeated once this time.


I'm finished eating my $5.50 omlette, with spinach and peppers from the hospital cafeteria where I go after he's taken out of the prep room, when the beeper buzzes.  This beeper, that looks like one of those things you get a restaurant like Olive Garden, tells me I need to go speak to the ladies at the desk where we checked in.  I have an update.

I have two conflicting emotions.  One in the pit of my stomach.  Update?  How did it go?  But before that line of thought can go much further, my humor sets in.  I look at the beeper.  How bad could it be? My table is ready.

And there is nothing bad when I get to the desk with the nice ladies in colorful scrubs.  He's going to his recovery room.  I get a slip of paper and instructions.


I arrive as he's wheeled into the room.  The doctor comes in, does some explaining, hands me the script for more pain pills.  Obviously still groggy, he tells the doctor a joke.  What did the driver say to the one-legged hitchhiker?

Hop in!

It takes the doctor a few seconds to get it.  But he laughs.  He must be feeling fine if he's cracking jokes.  Especially the one he got me to tell on joke day in preschool.

The nurse goes over things, and after crackers, water and a percocet, he's ready to be wheeled to my car.  I leave to pull it around.

I'm walking through the automatic sliding doors, when I wonder if the person in room 2071 coded again.

I didn't hear anything after that second time.

But that could be good.

Or worse.

It's October 3rd

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mba4d591GC1qg462ao1_500.gif

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mba4d591GC1qg462ao2_500.gif

Tyrion Lannister is a Big Dumb Poopy Butt Whose Butt Smells Like Poop and is Full of Poop

What's with the title you ask? I'm just checking to make sure our dear Tyrion is reading since he hasn't POSTED ANYTHING!!!!! (Btw, if the fact that he's using his gmail account means that he can't for some reason I don't understand about Blogger, I take that title back in its entirety.)

Now, what was the reason I came on POW again? It wasn't just to talk about Tyrion's poopy butt. Oh yes, that's it.

I propose a writing challenge!

As you know, one of our biggest challenges in writing as a group is, uh, not writing anything. Or posting anything specifically to this blog. The other day my mom was telling me about this flash fiction contest on NPR (which is over now) and I got this idea. Since we all know November is NaNoWriMo, why not utilize October in a similar way?

Ladies and gentlemen(man?), it's time for the October flash fiction writing contest!

Flash Fiction October (FlaFiOcto?)

The rules: Write one piece of flash fiction (let's say between 150-1,000 words, we'll apply a pretty liberal use of the term "flash fiction") per day. It doesn't have to be good, it doesn't have to be spelled correctly, it just has to be often. (The rules can be modified for Cylon who has no time to do anything ever-maybe write flash fiction if you ever feel like you're head is about to explode. Or maybe, write flash fiction once this month. Sorry Cylon, the timing of this contest is not kind. I know.)

The goal: Come out of this month with a few little snippets of great writing. Not to mention the fact that this will push us to write more. I once met a poet from the Writers' Workshop who said she wrote a sonnet every day for a year to tune her ear to rhythm. This can only be a good thing in developing writerly discipline!

The winner: Anyone who writes ANYTHING. Seriously. I mean, this doesn't have to be a real competition unless it looks like a few of us are writing enough to actually compete. I figure it's like NaNoWriMo in that you win if you try. If we want to put a random number on it let's say try to write 15-20 pieces of flash fiction over the course of the month.

The timeframe: Since it's already October and not all of us read POW every day I figure we can make the starting date Friday-Monday and the end date the last day of October.

Stipulations: You can write more than one piece of flash fiction a day, but no more than three. This is about writing regularly, not writing a lot in sudden spurts. We all know that we can do that.

So how about it guys? Any takers? Even if there's not, I think I will undertake my own challenge just because I've felt such a lack of direction in my writing lately. If you have other writer friends (hahaha, none of us have friends, jkjkjk) feel free to encourage them to take the challenge as well. If you want to tweak the rules, I'm open to that as well. Let me know.

And let the flash fiction begin!