"Gullet" - Writing Exercise

   After weeks of working at a dive bar, six months living in a dinky two-bedroom apartment with a chick who goes by Strawberry but is legally named Amanda, and days of alternating between vegetables and take-out, rum and top-shelf bourbon with my roommate’s blues band and a crappy wannabe-musician who works in insurance, I wake up on a Monday in April, feeling very sick with a line of dried drool winding from my mouth to my jaw.

Writing Action

I want to publish something again. Soon. It should be a short story. I'd love to have it be an action piece with gratuitous violence. How often do I write those?
Never.

Verbal Abuse You Don't Fall For

 -If every/almost every time you make a smart decision for yourself, your very insecure boyfriend/girlfriend/just friend is upset, going on and on about you being selfish. Every time.

-You find that they’re carefully editing stories they tell about social interactions they’ve had when you weren’t around, playing underdog or hero in each one.

Being a Shannon

So I looked up my first name in the image section of a search engine, thinking that since, in the past, I found cute-sy graphics reminding me of the laughable fact that my first name is derived from a Gaelic term for "wise one". I was inspired by an older post by the Bloggess (to which I've left a link below) about her adventures looking up the names "Jenny" and her blog name, so I thought maybe this time I'd get a fun screen grab or two with the name 'Shannon' on it, like a still of Jason in his hockey mask, weapon ready, saying, "Whatayou mean, you're out of peas?" or something, but no. No. I got the smiling faces of a bunch of professional-looking pretty strangers,including some insanely ripped, skinny women, one wearing two gold medals, and one of these:


 This treasure is from David Thorne, much to my relief after clicking on it and seeing the words "Shannon the Human Snake. www.27bslash6.com - Due to there being no petty cash left, with which Shannon was planning to buy her lunch, Shannon is now the sole key holder of the petty cash tin...", which made me think, 'Yes, yes, I share a name with this character. Perfection'.

But that can easily be met with another giggle. Check this out! -->


 Haha - Well, I can see how people could get us confused.


 Shannon Noll, a singer-songwriter.





Okay, now it's weird. Not like the Bloggess, but...weird. In reality, I'm sure this image came up because it belongs to a childrens' book author whose surname is Shannon. I didn't look. But of course my imagination kicked in and said, 'Is this, um, the way my inner child appears?' 


 I like imagining myself owning this pillow because it would just be vain in my case, and friends would make fun of it for every opportunity. 


There's my first name in Irish! 'Sionna'!


A couple of people who share my name have posted either amusing things or quotes from literature heavyweights like Mark Twain, and I figure that if we're putting that sort of image of our tastes out into the online world, that's not a bad thing. Plus some of us have good head shots. 

I See Your Holiday Shopping Stress & I Raise It With Holiday Grieving Stress

          It sucks that with love comes loss, but that's unavoidable, I think. When I get emotional about the December 20th passing of one of my loved ones, I repeat to myself a mantra that I've been very lucky to know him, to be influenced by him. He was is was a wonderful person who, along with his wife and son, permeated my outlook on family and community and milking the wonderful, simple moments out of life. 

When a Former Bully Sends You a Friend Request

Dig this: You have a weird, bad social experience as a child, grow to understand it, move on, but still occasionally have the perpetrator pop into your world, and all that comes to mind when you see them is, 'Go away! You're not allowed to be within two miles of me! Didn'tcha read the contract?'
And you're not angry or hurt, just...you enjoy pretending the bully fell off of our flat, flat Earth.

A Letter to the Late, Fantastic Joan Rivers

 Dear Iconic Working Woman Joan Rivers, 

I feel the need to write you a note not as an inappropriate ploy for page views (ick), but as an expression of my gratitude for the gifts you gave us. I've been a fan of yours for years because of your guts - that willingness to sometimes expose your compassion and culture and vulnerability, aside from the fact that you'd "go out and do a talk show and [she'd] come out like a machine gun", as Kathy Griffin put it to Anderson Cooper on CNN.