this will not be here for long. i will delete it, or this sentence.

what is said here is impermenant, and i will not claim it in conversation ever again. probably.

my aunt and uncle and three little cousins came for good friday supper tonight. and i don't know. oh, also my grandma and sister and brother in law. i don't mind my siblings; i like them quite a lot, actually. but my extended family-- they take more doing, you know?

almost without exception, the relationships i hold day to day are governed by a creed of efficiency; we are friends if and only if it is efficient. we are enemies only as long as it's affordable or preferably cheap to do so. mostly, we just make one another laugh. they are built on thinking and witticism and cleverness and laughing and efficiency and getting things done, and not much more, and not much less. somehow, my extended family is not like this.

they showed up as i was leaving to make a run to the store-- i had stuff to do, you understand. and then i came home, and i had to get oriented, drop off the groceries, make managements. they were not conducive to this. to be fair, that's not what they expected of me, of course. they traveled two hours to get here, and they damn well expected me to have set time aside to talk to them.

but i came up to my room to take care of what i needed to do feeling oppressed and unprepared and impatient. i felt like you do when you're having a waterfight and somebody fixes the hose on your face, and you can't see or breathe or anything, and you just want them to quit it. like that, only not.

i recognize that my position on this is perfectly unfair. but i also recognize that the things we think don't always follow the rules we make for our thoughts, and it's a personal rule of mine not to ignore those things-- often, you know things you don't know yet. you know? i do.

thanks for listening,
Claire

dear grammar nazis,

having until recently been an esteemed member of your respectable and overswollen ranks, i understand the code of honor and dignity that comes with a masterful grasp of the traditional use of this beautiful language we all speak in. at the same time, though, i understand that to purposelessly hold onto arbitrary conventions that would do everyone more good dead is not really a service to anyone. a speaker should be able to use their creativity and god given talent for language to use words in whatever way they find most effective.

ah, to hell with it. every sentence above subtly breaks one prescriptive rule, which was actually pretty hard to do.

so here's the long and short of it: language changes. but who gets to change it? who gets to say what's right and what's wrong? there are basically two camps on this: prescriptive and descriptive. prescriptivists give this authority to people who write manuals, basically. they claim the most educated are the most qualified to make the rules. these are the people who told us to never split infinitives (did you catch that? it was ironic. did you see? right?) or end a sentence in a preposition. then there are descriptivists who say the only measure of what's correct is what's effective. if a native speaker doesn't bat an eye at it, it's correct. so how does language change? individuals mess with it however they see fit. it's not so different from democracy, as opposed to a prescriptive oligarchy.

you can read about this on the internet, if you want to know more.

here's why we're getting into this now: capitalization. you'll notice i'm not using it.

i've thought about it, and there is simply no upside to capitalization except to distinguish proper nouns. when taking notes by hand, i also use all-caps headings because they're easier to pick out when looking back through. and it's a convention. it's like wearing black socks with black shoes, although i do recommend doing that, so i guess it's not like that at all. anyway, if you want to sound formal and respected, you should use capitals, just like you should dress up to get people to respect you. it's a convention. it's symbolic communication.

this blog, though. this is personal, not formal, and personally, i don't like capitals very much. i've decided to stop using them. except maybe i still will-- i don't know. this, though, is my explanation for foregoing capital letters.

enjoy!
claire


(i know, i said proper nouns. but you knew that was proper. and i didn't want to capitalize it, and that's my executive choice as a writer.)

dear [the Name of this letter's sole adressee],

just so you know? i am about a million pounds grateful for you. i've been meaning to mention it to you for a few days, and i have, a few times, but in specific senses. i'm serious, though: thanks for being friends.

thanks for the stuff i learn from you, like how to solve a rubik's cube, and how to use leverage to not get attacked, and how the way a person sets their hands or angles their body tells you about how they're reacting to the situation; thanks for the stuff you've been willing to learn from me, like why poetry isn't dusty and musty but lively and vivid, and bloody prescriptivists are bloody and prescriptivistic.

thanks for doing stupid stuff with me, from getting frighteningly lost to writing a bloody novel in a single month to trying to figure out what in hell kindness and honesty are, to hiding paper cranes in nooks and crannies to remind people not to forget to be awesome. that kind of stuff isn't hardly worth doing alone-- it's exponentially more fun and more interesting to do with someone else. 

thanks for listening to every single new development in my constantly upheavaled relationship with christianity and the nature of human thought and action, but much more than that, thanks for helping me figure it out. for questions. for additions. it occurs to me that outside of books and my family, you are probably the greatest influence on what and how i think and what i will believe in the present and future. 

i enjoy you and the things we do and the jokes we tell and the books we read and the ways we think, and i'm grateful for you.

and of course, i'm afraid of you, too, in that little way that we're all afraid of one another.

but that's fine. 

thanks for yourself and the bits you've lent to me and the bits of me you've rearranged. (is that a good model for interactions? i still don't know.)

sincerely, 

claire 

Dear e. e. cummings,

There's this poem you wrote:

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)

                                    i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant 
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

I think if somebody told me I could save one poem out of all the poetry I've ever read, and the rest would be vaporized, this is the poem I would save. "This is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart." That line just catches me. Have you seen the stars?

But the other thing that catches me is the question of where people begin and end. After someone dies, it's common to hear that they live on in the lives they've touched and the hearts of their loved ones. But why does that only begin to happen when they die? And why do we assume that the venn diagram of two people looks like two untouching circles? And if I read something you wrote, and your thoughts are running through my head, and then they stay there, do they keep being your thoughts? And what if I start to really believe in them? Do they start to become mine?

And what about our experiences? Does the memory of a shared experience belong equally to all involved? Even if it was a trivial encounter to one person but was lifechanging to the other? What if one person forgets? Does it belong only to the one who remembers? Or does the experience belong wholly and completely to each person, regardless of others involved?

And what about the experiences we forget? Do our pasts really belong to us? Does mine belong to me? Can I only claim the bits I remember? What kind of ownership is it if I have no clue what it is I'm owning? Do I even want to own my entire past? And if I don't, how in hell do I get rid of part of it? Up and disown it? Do I have a right to my past, or a responsibility to it, or both, or neither, and can you have one without the other? And how does ownership of something like a memory or a past or a thought or an experience manifest itself? Does it have any practical manifestation? Is the idea of possession even a good model to begin with?

And what are people made of? And can you give yourself away? And if you do, do you stop having yourself? And can you give part of yourself away? Invest it? How do you cash in that investment? If you give part of yourself away, are you less yourself? Is there, then, less of yourself?

I don't know. But the all of the questions lead me to suspect that the model of one person owning all of themselves and nothing more is wrong.

Sincerely,
Claire