ink(from my pen)tober announcement + day 1

this month, i will be attempting an inktober challenge of writing a poem (or piece of short fiction) every day with a list of prompts. i plan to post them every few days, or when i have something i feel is worth sharing. this was inspired by the wonderful createglue, who often motivates me to write, and i'll be using their prompt list. that said, here's day one. associated song: day one by hemlock.

landscape

we read a story in book club last spring about a girl

who turned into a mountain, slowed and calcified,

with rivulets down her back and a treeline blanket.

it wasn't very good, caught fighting

the author's fractured focus and oil-baron aspirations,

but i think it would be nice

to be part of the landscape 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the story mentioned in the poem is "rock jenny" by callum angus from his book "a natural history of transition." i have a pdf if you're interested.

page

 

the air

written saturday evening in blue pen waiting for a play to start.

there's something in the air in montreal that makes me want a cigarette.

i miss a lot of people. i'm happy to be in the city. i'm happy to be seeing the play my friend is directing. the main character is really afraid of getting cucked. the city is beautiful with its careful stonework, mixed colors, twiling metalwork, and tangled vines. i'm not comfortable in the city without a close companion, and while i have a companion i'm in the position of support. i'm unclear if i can or should venture out alone (my phone is broken) but it feels wasteful to stay in. i could get a drink here but it feels out of place. i'm going to get some water.

it's called cigarette smoke. it's called ghosts.

 

studying songwriting

i've been studying songwriting lately. mostly this takes the form of thinking about songs while i listen to them. sometimes while they're stuck in my head.

it's nothing clinical or professional. sometimes i write. false starts, finding what feels right. often, nothing does. often, i write about writing. i'll write about that someday.

some songs are conversational. others are poetic. i look at rhythm and syllables. i find myself starting lines in the same sorts of ways, and i'd like to diversify.

today i was particularly focused on rhyme schemes. there are many classic patterns to be explored. rhymes feel clunky to me, childish. i struggle to write without them. i write a line, and my brain gets stuck on a rhyme (un/intended). some of what i listened to today barely rhymed, but slanted a lot.

sometimes a good melody can substitute for a rhyme scheme. i don't know how to write melodies. a week ago, i worked on it in the shower. i found i went down a lot. i found myself limited by my vocal range and comfort. a piano might help. comfort with a fretboard might help. diversifying is a continuing struggle. vision is another.

i spent a while writing fragments in my notebook in class. i'm not going to transcribe them for you, but you can try and decode my scrawl if you'd like. no promises as to what you find.

 

 

i listened to wayward jane while i wrote this. i didn't think about it too much, but i enjoyed it. youtu.be/7yOOPnNt2Co

cough drops

i've had 2 cough drops in my pocket for the last few days. i was sick and now i'm not. the zippers on my guitar are jingling together and they've never done that before that i've noticed. it's snowy and i have to clean off my car which is cold but kind of nice. it'd been a while. being at school keeps me so far from the labor of snow. it's beautiful sometimes, but other times it goes straight to shoveled slush and i have no part in the matter. when i'm home, snow means shoveling and salting and bringing wood inside and cleaning cars and scraping the roof. it's a pain but i miss it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

written yesterday. i forgot to take my estrogen this morning and that's never happened before in the morning. 

the sidewalk jumps at me.

dying pen + late january music log

 

there's a kind of way

that i tend to write when singing

and it's different than how

thoughts come out when i'm simply sitting

or when i put my pen to paper

stare and lined pages long

i'm sitting here to replicate

the way i write a song

 

sometimes you just have to start singing in the shower

if you write about your writing eventually you'll find the power

to write something meaningful and if it makes you cringe

then that's ok it's good you tried.

my pen is dying

 

music log

i listened to this music over yesterday and today. the first 3 were on vinyl.

- firewatch score chris remo

- the navigator hurray for the riff raff

-  wounded rhymes lykke li

- squeeze + sidney gish w/ robin + aspen

- jenny from thebes the mountain goats in the car with robin

- toddy pond max garcia connover

- ash/aster wickerbird

- long time to be gone nora brown

- vivian girls vivian girls

- a sides adrianne lenker

- bright future adrianne lenker

- seed of a seed haley heynderickx

 

 

state machines

i'm taking a class this semester called computability & complexity. it's one of my favorite classes i've ever taken. it's a computer science math class, and for the first three weeks we've pretty much only been working with state machines. the technical term is (non)deterministic finite automata (nfa/dfa). essentially, they're a way to test if a string follows a particular rule. a string, if you don't know, is a sequence of characters. functionally, dfas and nfas are a little like a flow chart.

scribbles from class today

 

each state (labelled with a number) has some number of edges going to other states depending on the next character in the string. if the automata is deterministic, each state has exactly one edge leaving it for every possible character. if it's nondeterministic, the states don't have to have any particular edges and can also have an edge that you can traverse for free (labeled with epsilon). each automata has a starting state and some number of accept states. if the string ends and the automata is in an accept state, the string passes. otherwise, it fails.

 

the top diagram in my notes from today is kind of complicated as it's a conversion of an nfa into a dfa. because nfas can be in multiple states at once, to convert it to a dfa you have to make states that are hybrids. the bottom middle diagram is an nfa that recognizes strings with 1s in odd positions, and the bottom right diagram is a dfa that recognizes strings that have at least two 0s and no more than one 1. i also wrote some test strings and if they pass or fail.

 

i really like this class. it stretches my brain in fun ways, and everything is a problem i can solve. i think i was a little rude to the people i was working with today because i really got it and i wanted to go go go but they were moving a little slower.

 

on the page, i wrote "i love holding multiple possibilities in my head at once"

today i tried something different

today i tried something different. i carried a notebook. i didn't go on twitter. i listened to the world around me when i walked and sat and waited. i didn't listen to music except from my record player. i only looked at my phone for notifications and to do something purposeful.

there's a lot of space in life if you remember it's there.