Let's get personal

So I am taking a creative writing class in University, because, it is a good thing for any aspiring writer to do. Whether you want to....well if you want to write anything, just take the class, you will be glad you did.

So far, I am loving it, the stories, the Professor, structure, exercises etc. Although it is sucking my time from doing other interests...like my HERSTORY project which was resulted in nothing but a stack of books from the library that I have opened.

Oh and then there is the fact that all of our daily (7 days a week) mini-writes seem to be sucking a lot of emotional stories out of me. He wants personal description, and tales and they all seem to leave me in tears or angry or unable to tell a story, because I do not have a story. Like for instance I had nothing to tell about going to an amusement park as a kid...because I never went to one much, at least not with my family, because my dad hated crowds, spending money...and possibly fun. There are memories from being a teenager which meant I had a naturally had attitude when getting sun-burnt or about the annoying younger family friend my mom made me drag along. Maybe that would have been funny...

Anyway, we also have homework of various types. Tuesday's was to take first sentences from two novels (list provided) and start a story. So I did, and here are the results...and guess what they're sad. I'm going to blame a need to work out some stuff from a couple years of a lot of family and pet deaths...

STORY 1

In the middle of the eulogy of my mother’s boring and heartbreaking funeral, I began to think about calling off the wedding.  It began with not only the heartbreak of losing the woman that meant the most to me in the world, but also the coldness of my fiancé. He had hated visiting her in the hospital, reminding me how much it reminded him of his own mother’s death. I thought he would pull through with me though, when we would get the call, when we would have to sign paperwork, when we had to pick out a coffin. Instead, it was just I. I had no siblings and the man I was supposed to spend the rest of my life with flaked out, was useless, he barely held me when I cried at night, petrified of the sobbing mess that was next to him.

It was during the hardest funeral of my life that I realized that I could not marry Nathan, that though this death was awful, it was showing me that I needed to take a different path. I began to cry uncontrollably, and my aunt stroked my back. Yet these were not sobs of complete sadness, instead I felt slightly liberated, free from my mother suffering and free from someone that had made me to go my mother’s funeral alone, he had work.

Why had I not accepted the signs that existed previously? He had been cold since the day we met, he had been more into work, his personal space issues. Nathan was useless in a relationship, someone I was wasting my life on trying to pump some into him.

STORY 2

He lay in his reclining chair, barely awake enough to feel the dream moving just under his thoughts. He was slipping into a dream about Tara, beautiful Tara, long gone and how his heart missed her so. They were supposed to grow old together, and 50 was not old he reminded himself. He missed her smile, the way she giggled, how her hair smelled when she did not wash it.

He was dreaming of the day that they met. That picnic, both were about 30, though he could not remember the day or year, just that it had been summer. They had been at the beach, he was with some work buddies drinking and playing volleyball. She was there, in that pink one piece that she wore, because she was insecure of her stomach, though he always felt she was perfect. The volleyball had gone astray and disrupted her lunch with some girlfriends. She pretended to be angry, marching over to give the men a piece of her mind. Then her eyes met Sam’s and her “anger” melted into giggles and “Hello, how are you?” and “I think you lost something.”

Sam and Tara, that perfect connection, the one that lead to that evening spent at Sam’s which went to them moving in together a year later, and the perfect wedding a year after that. No children for the power couple, but a happy life, summers in the Caribbean or Hawaii, winters in the alps. They had it all, until at 48 Tara was diagnosed with later stage breast cancer and as fast and fast as his perfect dream had come, it had left with the same force.

He woke, with tears running down his eyes, he missed her and hated that daily he ended up like this. Alone in their giant house, sitting in his leather recliner, day after day, secretly wishing she would just come home from France after a week away with friends. 

Let me know what you think!
~Rebecca Lee Robinson

Insomnia and costumes

Here I am, two and a half weeks into the time period where I have been asleep my 9 and up by 5, and only getting 7 hours of sleep, when I'm a 8-9 hours kind of gal. Not sure what is going on there, other than new schedule changes with taking my boyfriend's daughter to school on the bus every other week, the fact that the bed is less appealing when my boyfriend leaves for work at 4:45am, and general over active brain.

Today, as with any new start to a new semester, I am restless because I am panicking about new teachers and expectations and piles of homework and reading and when the hell will I make my lazy ass pull away from watching 30 Rock and write the papers I am supposed to. Oh then let's add the joy and panic over my summer study abroad I am planning, of happiness of new travel experiences and panic of the money, and time away from my "family" (boyfriend, and his daughter) because damn it I will miss my two people I hold so very dear.

Okay, so I'm getting into the "doom mode" where I think everything is going to fall on my head and blow up in my face and...."shut up Rebecca, everything is fine." Because I forget that not only am I on track with my "5 year plan" or whatever you want to call it, but I am doing better than I thought. Like for instance, Ryan (boyfriend) and I just bought a NEW car! Or the fact I have my own radio show, that I have a pretty good part time job, or that regardless I always seem to manage just fine without having to ask mom and dad for money, very often.

Anyhow, with my overactive mind it snowballs to a lot of different places. So at the moment I am thinking a lot about my research on being woman and hitting my ever favorite costume land with fabric, corsets and design. In costume land there are a lot of thoughts floating around on what dress means for being woman. I mean we're looking at a lot of things changing. For instance one can argue that only in the last 50 years or so did women REALLY put their foot down and demand to dress how THEY want. YET, look at all the uncomfortable expectations of make up and heels and dresses, and not to mention being 6' to be considered "beautiful". Or does anyone think that that really is beauty?

So what did the previous humans think? I mean no doubt in the 18th and 19th century a women going about without a corset would be a scandal, and let's face it usually someone has something to say when a modern women goes without a bra. Yet then I think on men's fashion, and that has not always been a cake walk. I mean men were known to wear corsets, garters for socks, high heels, and they had shirts and vests and coats and today much of it remains very akin it it's 19th century forefather. So, maybe as humans were torturing ourselves and not just one sex or another? Oh but a corset is way more painful than some vests and no wonder COCO CHANEL decided to start wearing the outfits.

Not to mention there are centuries of men and women obsessing over boobs. Their size (too big too small) how they should be constrained to pushed out, whether or not it was okay to breast feed. The list goes on. Yet look at the cod pieces of the renaissance, we can definitely say someone was worried about how those male genitalia looked! Oh and men had to have some pretty damn good legs to pull of those tight pants.

So I don't know where I stand. To quote Oscar Wilde:  "Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months."



Maybe that is what it comes down to.

What does clothing say to you? I mean there is no doubt that women enjoyed flouting their wealth in absurd outfits, same as they do today, and no doubt that men have much to say in their clothing choices. So I will attempt to start piecing this together, needless to say, the prehistoric peoples were more worried about survival. Did fashion become part of it all when we became civilized?

Sick to my stomach

After a week of misery, from eating out too much due to family visits and trips and whatever other excuse I made to buy something on the run, I stopped and bought something to cook from instead. I found the most amazing and exciting cookbook possible! My review on good reads is listed below. It's basic and wonderful and frankly a must have for the veggie crowd (with or without allergies like mine). Also I think it will be my companion to Europe this summer so I can learn with regional foods what to make and what to eat to stay healthy.

The book?

Happy Herbivore Abroad: A Travelogue and Over 135 Fat-Free and Low-Fat Vegan Recipes from Around the World

It's awesome, just buy it, trust me on this! :)

This book is AMAZING! Not only am I a pescetarian, but I'm also allergic to gluten, soy and dairy. Guess what this book has almost ALL gluten free recipes, and many that are soy free and of course dairy free (Vegan cookbook). This is the FIRST cookbook I have ever bought that I am actually looking forward to cooking from! All the recipes are easy, delicious and just so fun! It is a must have for any kitchen, maybe you'll have a guest like me for dinner some time? haha
Anyway, all the recipes are VERY affordable and made from COMMON ingredients which make it even easier to cook from. There is nothing too fancy or over complicated, it is just good, homemade classic dishes that taste a hell of a lot like grandma's stew, or mom's goulash.
All in all, I love it, and it is my new recommendation to my friends and family.

I am woman, so what does this mean?

Not to make the title confusing, but hells bells I have a lot of questions. I have so many questions that I woke up at 4:30 this morning obsessing over what seems to be my newest obsession, the story of my kind.

The death of Cleopatra

Our world is patriarchal, argue all you want that women are equals etc. etc. but let us be honest and say that we have a lot of battles to overcome. I am a feminist and bloody proud! I am dating a feminist that is amazing, smart, caring and absolutely wonderful, oh and my partner is a male. Did I mention how passionate I was taking my Women's Study class a year ago? Or how much it changed my view of the world to where I am NOW determined to blog my little heart out about what I want desperately to know.

I love history, or hystory, and herstory. The only problem is where is HERSTORY? We have snippets, the stories of Cleopatra and Elizabeth I, those women that changed the world in one form or another. We have those famous and rich persons that were born into power. What comes to mind when you think of these women though? What message has society given us? Cleopatra is portrayed as if her sexuality was all that mattered, and as the only thing that got her anywhere. Elizabeth I is shown as frigid shrew, one unwilling to let down her guard for a proper male to take over the English thrown. Then of course you dig deeper and those cracked veneers easily fall off and a far more complex and infatuating intelligent being comes into view. So if the veneer comes off so easily for those women, the famous ones, the ones we have records of, the ones in the REALLY complicated stories of their times, what do the others look like?

Elizabeth I, coronation 1559

What about my relatives that were probably very poor and dreadfully average? Or the women that stood behind the scenes of all the men we hear so much about. What did they do? What did they experience?

I want to know these things. I have been dying to know these things since my childhood, yes  I was that five year old that asked questions all the time and drove her parents crazy. Guess what, that kid does not die, and now I have the means to pursue these rabbit trails. I can learn. I can find the answer, and I am going to share it with the world.

So, here is my first step, I brought home books from the library and I am going to begin at the beginning and I am going to begin to know what it means to be woman. I am tired of only hearing about half of the population, I am tired of not getting the rest of the story and I am tired of no one really caring. So here I go, into the unknown, into the land full of shaming, lies, and discomfort. Into the land where maybe I am welcome and often I will want to turn around and into the land that has been calling at me for years.


I am on a new journey. Feel free to join me, and let me know what you think, what you know as we begin to make HERSTORY a real part of our lives.

~Rebecca Lee Robinson