I picked up this book of poetry by Alessandra Lynch two summers ago on a whim, browsing through bookstore racks in Hanover, New Hampshire for something to marvel at. I do not regret my decision. Turns out she’s pretty awesome.
Lynch’s poems are like sparks that ignite some part of nature—its memories, colors, abstractions. There is something very odd and rare about these poems, something I can’t always grasp before it floats away and lingers somewhere just out of reach, leaving behind it a parade of images. At times it’s a bit of a tease, but I like that sometimes.
Here’s a taste—a few of my favorites.
_________
Birthday
Some of the wishes were scared of the dark and pink
and blue and the planet at large.
Some had tender feet, slightly barbed
by paper clips and wire,
picked guitars and a violin’s absent string,
lost parades of forks and knives.
So they winged it,
away from ribbons and balloons, spinning
into the sky
like maple-leaf copters,
like bright little wing-bones of ants,
while the candles they’d abandoned sputtered and sank,
and the ghostly flames staggered, flagged
and paused in the wake:
Upon a bucket of rose-skulls
Upon the moon’s lonely talon
Upon the dying man tugged back to life
Upon the dead man strolling into the room
Upon a silver-horned bicycle and a whirring hat
Upon a bell for a dove
Upon the end of fog the sage fields rising
Upon the hook-winged crow wheeling its blackness
Upon city-smoke confounded by the clarity of twig and feather
Upon yellow ribbon against yellow stars
The wishes were not all sublime—some cantankerous—
dirty and grim, sad, and many sweeping by
lost from the original mouth and mind
that hoisted them into the air.
For years I stood watching them while behind me
my house burned and my land and the forests beyond.
_________
A Letter. Like Blazing.
When I rose from the ditch
I left a swift petal
in lieu of presence
& found you in a slink of otter-
damp river, wearing the secret
hinge of a smile
& when you unbuttoned
the stars from navy
midnight & wind fell
cold out of velvet & my
stilled door blew open
& when your hard gold
hook swerved & pressed, the twilight
thistles by my river stiffened
& thrust into the sky that had been hurting
all morning for your purple voice, flecked, glittering
& when we swung through, pirating our private eye-
patched afternoon, the local bees shimmered in their grove with what blazed
between your hips & mine:
maple & pine-tar
& the terrible knowing of going not gone.
_________
Icicles
Those brothers banged them till they fissured,
fell to snow. They used sticks or bats
or stones. Sometimes missed. Sometimes split
the glimmering to a shatter, a cough
of electric dust—the burning stickled
their skins. Those brothers said nothing
was good about them—they damaged the eaves
and dragged the house down—said they were
a poor excuse for rain or any form
of weeping, streaking through their freeze.
But I longed for them to stay, longed
for their elegance to last,
the tiny silver cities and gold
sea illuminating their edges,
the slender bodies hanging
impeccably from the eaves, barely
hanging from anything. They were miracles,
their points dissolving in the smoldering
grip of a hand that could
end it all. Any hand.
_________
Piece by Piece He Went for Bill
First, his blue toe.
Then, his calf up to the hipbone.
He thinned to a frame.
Fireflies faltered, lit into
his bony lattice, the fretted ribs, mating
between collarbone and pelvis
till the whole leg fell off and inside
he was all air and brightness and treefrogs—
(bluethroated crickets struggled through his beard,
a meadow rose from the cave of his stomach)
—we tried to catch their tender bodies,
their thrumming hearts
that longed to be let back
into the wild yellow grass—no matter how
rotten with dew, no matter how
darkened by rain, no matter.
_________
In the Yard,
I am raking through stars—
Their faces, damp and yellow,
won’t pick up.
I smell their tail-smoke
in the red oak, singed.
Its soft, tarnished arms
bothered by wind.
It was how many
pinned? How many stiffly
shot to harrowed dirt, blackly
pitting the earth?
In the pale aftermath,
the rain could not
tap music
into them. The moon could not
calculate, but dimly faced
the fading scarlet outcasts
in skinflint hats,
those wetted and gassed.
Low on the branch, low
on the rack, a few
freezing notices,
colorless maps—
not stars, not leaves—we rake
through—we hang back.
_________
On Balloons That Have Hissed Out
We were having a picnic when we found them.
Like abandoned petals
(pale magnolia choked and flushed, bursting in flustered bloom)
(dogwood petal unpacked from the dark trunk, freed from its floating
act to a yellow blister)
—one a silky blue ear
wilting on the hot-top tar
—one a cut-up cloud
that gave its last white gasp
—one a purple scab softened and bloated
by rain, peeled from its original skin.
These pieces were want-to-be sails
with their tiny muster—now
grounded after such short drifts of purposelessness
wherein they’d pressed up
the air, swell-headed and empirical—nodding
to the elms and helicopters and awnings and swings.
Remember all the air that put them there?
Remember the helium years
that filled their heads to a colorful bouquet
tossed up like giant roses and oversized carnations
at the matador-sky’s cloaked face
at the ballerina-cloud’s waxy poise
at the president of wind that must deadhead
anything thrown, any ecstatically flung thing
bloom or balloon or bomb—
dull shreds
in disarray on the dirt—
how modest their hiss
when all the air fled.
I wanted to take this opportunity to highlight a literary journal I’ve recently discovered. PANK is a magazine out of Michigan which publishes work that, from what I’ve read so far, is edgy and at times nothing short of bizarre. From the website:
PANK comes from the end of the road, the edge of things, a north shore, up country, a place of amalgamation, and unplumbed depths, where things are made and unmade, and unimagined futures are born. An ultima Thule, PANK – no soft pink hands here. We bear old scar and fresh scab, callous, blood and dirt. PANK is serene melancholy, spiritual longing, quirk and anomaly. PANK is progressive, experimental and improvisational. PANK inhabits its contradictions.
Here are a few sample pieces that stand out to me in the current online release (Issue 4, September 2009). There are several, but they’re relatively quick reads, if you can handle the awesomeness.
_________
HARD-TO-REACH PLACES
by Beth Thomas
Jody wakes some days with pieces missing. Small pieces, mostly: an eyebrow, a toenail. Sometimes the things come back, sometimes not. Last month, she woke with a hole through her right hand, a neat hole about the size of a half-dollar coin, big enough to look through. She plays peek-a-boo with kids on the bus when their parents aren’t looking, wondering if this memory will surface later in therapy.
Sometimes, though rarely, there are extra things. An extra finger, which disappeared weeks later. Once, an extra tooth jammed in the back of her jaw, aching. She says to whomever, you can get used to anything. Her mother used to say that.
Every morning, she investigates, fingers nimble in her mouth counting teeth, then down over her breasts and ribs, poking around, feeling for holes. Roger finds this sexy. Roger is missing an entire leg, from the hip down — car accident a dozen years ago. He understands how things that once were there can just be gone. He helps her search her hard-to-reach places, then makes pancakes for breakfast…
She said my color is red,
like bursting cherries and summertime,
like her mother poised on a lawn chair
at noon, hair newly dyed and curled,
and the color of the Mustang
shaking off dust and tree branches
while a man traces his hand up
the porch railway. It’s the color
of lipstick smears on wrists and teeth,
the way the man’s eyes catch
and her mother jumps and she spends
another hour cleaning cherry pie
off the floor. The color of love, even,
smeared with paint all over
the living room walls because the man
said that red calms him.
Her mother smiles but her eyes dart,
and every night the house goes silent
at exactly nine o’clock…
What did I think about before you touched my thigh? Let me say this: I’m going to touch you until my fingers fall off. If my fingers don’t fall off, I will hold your hand even if it’s sweaty. And let me say this: You are lovelier than clouds that look like lovely things. I have only loved a few times and the last time was when you rubbed my neck under the monkey bars. We weren’t much younger than we are now. I still have the same haircut. You still have only one dimple. It’s on your left cheek and it looks like you fell on a pebble. I love that it looks like you fell on a pebble. Let me say this: You taste like candy canes. There was a candy cane tree in my old neighborhood. My neighbor hung candy canes on the branches of the willow and I snatched them in the middle of the night. It was December when I rode my bike the quickest, like I was going somewhere to meet you. I like you more than the candy cane tree. Let me say this: I am uncomfortable in my own skin, so I hold your face. I hold your face and your hips but mostly your face. You have a lovely face. Let me say this: I love you like monsters like scaring little kids. I make a list of words I can use to diagram your body: petite, mellifluous, comely, milk, necessary. Please, forgive the humming; you see I rarely taste candy canes in March. When I don’t taste you I taste sweat. Not good sweat, mind you, sweaty sweat from the men’s locker room. Sometimes I taste pizza, but that’s only because I loved pizza first. Let me say this: My love for pizza was fleeting. I was young and naïve and thought that extra toppings meant something. These are fine days because they end with you. Let me just say this: I’m going to kiss you until my lips fall off. If my lips don’t fall off, I will kiss up your spine until I run out of spine. Then I’ll start over.
She stands on a steel girder, her feet hooked around its ice edge, her hand wrapped tight around a cabled wire, her body, pulsing in the wind.
Rewind.
She leans into the side of the bridge, her nightgown snaps, like lightening, in hard cracks behind her. She places her hands flat along the wall, then looks down.
Rewind.
Nights before Christmas, surrounded by bolts of calico and yards of crimped ribbon, my mother, running flannel and pins under a needle and following chalked lines into small wrists and necklines, made nightgowns for my sister and I. After church on Christmas Eve, we’d come home, brush our teeth, shimmy into our pajamas and sit under the blink, blinking lights of our tree. Then we’d open one gift. It was always a flannel nightgown. Donna got dark blues and yellows. I got pinks and lazy greens. I envied her dark colors, the chance to be wrapped in bold dyes. Sometimes Donna liked my dewy pastels. Sometimes we traded. Our new nightgowns brushed the tops of our feet, the middle of our hands. We smoothed ourselves down, ran our hands along arms, stomachs, our legs. Then we sprinted along our stretch of hallway to feel the gown snap at our feet, to feel it stop us. It was fur against skin. Safe…
a windy November day,
before the snow has spilled its milk
and the leaves still grip the ground in their stiff handshakes,
that while visiting your grandmother’s gravesite,
having cleared away the autumn debris and dew dust,
I wish your grandmother would break the crust
and reach for you,
swirl her knobby, apple-pie baking bones around your ankle
and drag herself out of the trench she has been digging,
staring at you with unblinking, puss-laden eyes
yellow from a lack of sun and birthdays,
moaning from her diaphragm and her throat at once,
baring her teeth after having popped mortician stitches,
aimed at your snot-nosed five-year-old who only
wants to know if you’re going to stop at
McDonald’s on the way home.
I wish that in that mortifying moment you
remember how, while we sat in a theater
and the trailer for yet another zombie movie splayed across
the cinema canvas, you turned to me and said,
“Zombies are awesome.”
And when I said “I am so sick of zombies”,
you tightened your lips and lost
my phone number…
You can visit PANK’s website for more online samples, subscription information, or submission guidelines. From what I can tell, they publish all genres (poetry, fiction, nonfiction, et cetera), although I can’t find this explicitly stated. They have both print and online issues, the former published once a year and the latter released in monthly installments.
If this last release is any indication, I consider it a journal worth keeping in mind.
Toybox is back after a two-week hiatus (courtesy of grad school and other issues). This past week was especially overwhelming and bittersweet, so I’m keeping this brief and including a few of my favorite Smashing Pumpkins videos for old-school, angsty atmosphere. Here’s to sharing our sorrow and wonder.
At sixteen I was so vulnerable to every influence
That the overcast light, making the trash of addicts & sunbathers suddenly clearer
On the paths of the city park, seemed death itself spreading its shade
Over the leaves, the swan boats, the gum wrappers, and the quarreling ducks.
It took nothing more than a few clouds straying over the sun,
And I would begin falling through myself like an anvil or a girl’s comb or a feather
Dropped, tossed, or spiraling by pure chance down the silent air shaft of a warehouse,
The spiderweb in one fourth-floor window catching, in that moment, the sunset…
(read the entire poem here)
And that’s it. Thanks for bearing with me, and please do watch those videos. They are the breath of me right now.
“Because life’s too short to not spend it worrying.”
I got this book for my birthday, and just had to share it with you. It feels all too appropriate given my mental state these last couple days.
This book (incorrectly titled in stock photos–it really does say “Disorders,” not “Illnesses”) is surprisingly thorough and informative. DiClaudio has divided the book into nine classes of mental disorders (Anxiety, Dissociative, Factitious, Impulse-Control, Personality, Psychotic, Sexual, Sleep, and Somatoform), and each has a minimum 2-page listing, complete with symptoms (”Quiz Yourself”), Inner Monologue, Diagnosis, Causality, and Treatment. Also, the material is constantly hilarious. Some favorites:
Hyperexplexia “Because everything, everywhere, is always shocking.”
Susto
“Because you’d lose your soul if it wasn’t attached to your body.”
Capgras Syndrome “Because for all you know, your mother could secretly be a robot.”
Cotard’s Syndrome “Because if you were dead, would anybody even tell you?”
Dissociative Fugue “Because you never know when you might be lying to yourself about everything in your entire life.”
Synesthesia “Because sometimes an apple sounds like a primary color.”
Foreign Accent Syndrome “Because it’s not pretentious if you can’t stop doing it.”
Intermittent Explosive Disorder “Because you have to stay calm, you have to stay calm, you have to…SMASH THAT TABLE!”
Jumping Frenchmen of Maine Disorder “Because you’ll do what you’re told, and you’ll do it now.”
Windigo Psychosis “Because there’s no better cure for a boring winter evening than transforming yourself into a demonic ice spirit and hitting the town in a cannibalistic feeding frenzy.”
Frotteurism “Because a day without grinding your crotch against a random stranger on the subway is like a day without sunshine.”
Penis Panic “Because if there’s one thing that will ruin your day, it’s having your penis stolen.”
Body Integrity Identity Disorder “Because sometimes two legs is 0.7563 legs too many.”
______
Of course, it is much more thorough than that; I’m simply passing out titles. So if this intrigues you at all, get a copy–you won’t be disappointed.
Oh, and for the record, Dennis DiClaudio has also written:
Grad school has just started up again, and I’m finding that I missed it a bit (but not too much). Here are some cool/sexy/nerdy links that have carried me through the week (and will hopefully do the same for you through the weekend).
Remember that post I made about unobtainable shoes? It seems we’re moving toward a solution, for some: if you’re outside the United States, and want something here which you can’t have shipped to you, GIMME GIMME has got you covered.
Created by Andrei Gheorghe of Romania, The Longest Poem in the World is composed entirely of rhyming twitter updates, aggregated in real-time. Growing at over 4,000 verses a day, this behemoth is no fine literary work, but it’s interesting nonetheless. (Thanks, Matthieu!)
Anonymous confessions are mailed in on postcards for your viewing pleasure at Post Secret. Great for voyeurs (or you could mail one in yourself). Some of these are intense.
The Impossible Project is teaming up with Urban Outfitters in a mission to bring back the polaroid. Awesome! You can also support this project with a t-shirt.
Speaking of Urban Outfitters–in the mood for free indie music streaming and downloads? Go have fun listening to strange music (past and present!)–I’m loving this lately.
Happy Friday! I hope your weekend is filled with many adventures and much weirdness.
Welcome to the new Toybox (now free from the constraints of Tuesday). I’m playing around with posting days/methods, so bear with me. Here are some awesome things I’m loving this week.
Luxirare’s last post on an MJ-inspired outfit was jaw-dropping–now check out these homemade potato chips, and tell me she’s not an artist. I love this blog!
Check out this aerial New York alphabet created by British researcher Rachel Young with Google Maps. (Thanks Nubby!)
How great is this fantastically colorful vintage Moschino “Union” jacket at Nasty Gal? I’m green-eyed at whoever buys and pulls that off–j’adore.
Remember the Yellow Bird Project? In addition to their awesome indie rock charity t-shirts, they’ve just released an Indie Rock Coloring Book, “with over 25 hand-illustrated designs dedicated to indie and YBP musicians.” It can be yours for $10, and the proceeds go to YBP and supported charities. Not to mention they’re having an indie rock tour to kick it all off. Definitely check it out!
Joshua Langlais of Denver, CO loves strangers–so much, in fact, that he snaps photos of them and features one every day of the week. Check out his project at I Heart Strangers.
“The Edge” by Bob Hicok:
One day the kid showed up with a tattoo of a stapler
on his shoulder. The others had tattoos of geckos
and fish and the Incredible Hulk, an emerald
Lou Ferrigno against a background of fire. He’d
have been beaten up except they were dazed by it,
not just the precise cursive of the word Swingline
or the luster of the striking plate but the fact
of the stapler itself. He got the last pizza
at lunch and was touched on the wrist by a girl
at the fountain. This made him believe he was real
in a way breathing never had. Over the next
few months he stopped feeling he lived
on the wrong side of the mirror. There
was an election & his name was penciled in
on a few ballots. The guy with the red Camaro
gave him a ride home and let him pick the music.
In second-period French he stood to ask
what Harcourt Brace knew all men wanted to know,
if Monique and Evette would join him Saturday
on the sailboat. First the teacher cried,
then the students sang the Marseillaise
because in four years all he’d ever said
was comment allez-vous? No one questioned the tattoo.
Who’d believe he got up to pee and it was there,
just as the image of the body of Christ
appeared one morning on the thigh
of St. Barthelme of Flours. Otherwise
their stories differ. St. Barthelme was stoned
to death. The kid went to homecoming in a tux
with blue cumulus cuffs and a girl
embarrassed by anything but the slowest dance.
And that’s it! I hope you all have a wonderful weekend. It may take me a while to get into my new posting groove, but I’ll be riding the wave regardless; thanks for coming along. Until next time.
ALL high school students, teachers, and administrators should be aware of this program! Former Poet Laureate Billy Collins–one of America’s most beloved, successful and accessible poets–has spearheaded Poetry 180: a poem for every day of the school year.
The basic idea is that high school students be exposed to one poem (of the 180 poems pre-selected on the website) each day, to make poetry a part of their daily lives. The poems are specifically selected for a younger audience and are meant to be read in a public way (for example, at a school’s end-of-day announcements), to emphasize that poetry is for everyone, not just poets and writers–and teachers are encouraged to select student readers. I also think this might also work in a smaller format–the poems can be read and discussed in classrooms, assigned as course reading, et cetera. Also, it could not be more easy to participate: it’s completely free, all the poems are printable from the website, participation can begin at any time, and the poems can be used in any order. There’s even a page with tips on successful poem-reading!
Personally, I think this is a great idea. While not everyone will be open to the poems at first, it’s a great way to show kids that poems can be cool. I wish I had a program like this in high school–even just in English class. It’s so easy to implement, and the poems are well-written, fun, and easy to “get.” Also, they’re contemporary–which is much more appealing to today’s kids, and much more helpful for those who are actually interested in becoming writers. I can say without question that I would have learned more about being a good writer (not to mention had a much easier time in college, and a more fun time in high school English class) had I been exposed to such great contemporary writing in high school. When I was in high school, almost all we got was Shakespeare–whose plays are great but whose poems are, in today’s literary world, outdated–and much different from the kind of poetry writers are expected to be capable of producing today.
Here are a few sample poems from the website (including one from Collins himself, which would be a good introductory poem for this project).
________
“Introduction to Poetry”
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
–Billy Collins
________
“Grammar”
Maxine, back from a weekend with her boyfriend,
smiles like a big cat and says
that she’s a conjugated verb.
She’s been doing the direct object
with a second person pronoun named Phil,
and when she walks into the room,
everybody turns:
some kind of light is coming from her head.
Even the geraniums look curious,
and the bees, if they were here, would buzz
suspiciously around her hair, looking
for the door in her corona.
We’re all attracted to the perfume
of fermenting joy,
we’ve all tried to start a fire,
and one day maybe it will blaze up on its own.
In the meantime, she is the one today among us
most able to bear the idea of her own beauty,
and when we see it, what we do is natural:
we take our burned hands
out of our pockets,
and clap.
–Tony Hoagland
________
“Do You Have Any Advice For Those of Us Just Starting Out?”
Give up sitting dutifully at your desk. Leave
your house or apartment. Go out into the world.
It’s all right to carry a notebook but a cheap
one is best, with pages the color of weak tea
and on the front a kitten or a space ship.
Avoid any enclosed space where more than
three people are wearing turtlenecks. Beware
any snow-covered chalet with deer tracks
across the muffled tennis courts.
Not surprisingly, libraries are a good place to write.
And the perfect place in a library is near an aisle
where a child a year or two old is playing as his
mother browses the ranks of the dead.
Often he will pull books from the bottom shelf.
The title, the author’s name, the brooding photo
on the flap mean nothing. Red book on black, gray
book on brown, he builds a tower. And the higher
it gets, the wider he grins.
You who asked for advice, listen: When the tower
falls, be like that child. Laugh so loud everybody
in the world frowns and says, “Shhhh.”
Then start again.
–Ron Koertge
________
“Selecting a Reader”
First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
“For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned.” And she will.
–Ted Kooser
________
I sincerely hope more schools will consider implementing this–and to all you high school students who are being deprived of great contemporary poetry, notify your teachers and administrators, and if that doesn’t work, read these poems for yourself! You will learn so much.
To learn more about the program, read the rest of the poems, or get started on this grand idea, check out the website at Library of Congress.
Steve Pavlina seems to have mastered the art of self-help, and this article is no different. Read on for advice on changing your spending habits to create more value in your life.
Fancy yourself a nonfiction writer? For those who don’t know, Creative Nonfiction (the country’s leading journal for the genre) is taking submissions of sorts on Twitter: “Can you tell a true story in 130 characters or less? Prove it. Trend topic #cnftweet, and we’ll RT our fave everyday!” The best tweets may also appear in one of the journal’s upcoming issues. Visit CNF on Twitter to read the cnftweets and submit your own.
Stylelikeu has shared an awesome Michael Jackson tribute fashion editorial (with zoom-able photos) which was created for Italian Vanity Fair last year. The clothes are great, and the model, Anna Davolio, bears a surprising resemblance to MJ–in some of the photos, you’d swear you were looking right at him.
The King of Pop–soda, that is. Check out this image/design proposal for Pepsi–a delightfully clever and stylish commemoration of MJ’s life and impact. (Thanks Nubby)
Some things I do not profess
to understand, perhaps
not wanting to, including
whatever it was they did
with you or you with them
that timeless summer day
when you stumbled out of the wood,
distracted, with your white blouse torn
and a bloodstain on your skirt.
“Do you believe?” you asked.
Between us, through the years,
from bits, from broken clues,
we pieced enough together
to make the story real… (read the rest)
I picked up this book of poetry by Alessandra Lynch two summers ago on a whim, browsing through bookstore racks in Hanover, New Hampshire for something to marvel at. I do not regret my decision. Turns out she’s pretty awesome.
](http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4004/4344568559_13909b8ca6_s.jpg "yyellowbird posted a photo:should i do a 365 thing, guys?i've kindof been thinking about it lately, but i have some reservations. i already have well over 365 pictures of myself, so i'm not sure what i'd need more for, so i'm just thinking about it, and i'd like your opinions, if you have any.i'm not sure i'd have the time to keep up with it, but i'm looking for something to challenge myself with this year. i know taking self-portraits isn't that hard for me, so i'm wondering if there's a way i could make it more interesting. i could do 365 pictures of not-myself, but i'm sure a lot of these will be done in my house when i get home from school/work late at night, so taking pictures of objects around my house might get old. plus, there's usually more options for pictures with people in them.or i could do 365 not-photoshopped pictures, but i <3 photoshop lots and i don't feel like it's that much of a crutch for me (though i assume lots of people might think otherwise). plus the whole bragging about \"sooc\" is kindof lame, ngl.i could also try to write a small something to go along with each picture.so i don't know.also, where would i post them? on this flickr, i imagine, but then where would i post pictures that were not-365 related? i know it's generally better to post as little as possible each day and not bombard flickr, but that's difficult enough for me as it is. i could make another flickr for a 365, i guess.so, yeah, what do you guys think (assuming anyone cares)? any ideas to how i could liven up a 365 project? how do you guys approach it, if you do at all? what are your reasons for doing it? do you think it's kindof a boring/generic thing to do? if i were to do one, do you think i should post it here, or make a new, 365-exclusive flickr/tumblr/something else? i would like to know your thoughts on anything, if you wouldn't mind telling me. :](for the record this picture is a few weeks old, not the beginning of a 365.)")
