Just Ask

Gleaned from emails over the past month or so--thanks all, for writing!


On your blog, you have the categories "Inappropriately Self-Involved" and "Some Great Lament". Aren't they both essentially the same thing? Some of the posts that are Inappropriately Self-Involved are also Great Laments. Some are not. All Great Laments are essentially just a bunch of whining, but not all Inappropriately Self-Involved posts contain whining.

Is this starting to remind anybody else of those standardized tests they used to give you in school? "Some widgets are green, some are yellow. All yellow widgets are round, but only some of the green widgets are round...."

Anyone? Anyone?


Spammy Doodle? WTF is Spammy Doodle? Uh...that was for Barb. She has this dog named Samson (who we refer to as my boyfriend, to the great confusion of many...), and they call him Sam, of course, or Sammy, and sometimes, she calls him Sammy-Doodle, which I think is funny as hell and I'd give her shit about it if it wasn't a mommy thing...

Anyway...it just made sense to use it for a Spam post.

How often do you talk to inanimate objects, really? This morning, I yelled at ice cream. Yeah...completely freaking bug nuts, BUT, to clarify, I happened to be making ice cream at the time, and the ice cream was not being cooperative. Frelling Bee-yatch.

I also have a longstanding "thing" with the laptop in which I refer to it as a "f*cking worthless piece of sh*t", but, I think we all do that, don't we?


You have the strangest taste in men, ever. Really? Huh.... I'm not exactly sure how to answer that. Its kind of like when you like a particular food and nobody else likes it, so you think, "Cool, more for me..."


Who inspires you? Sometimes I'm inspired by people doing crazy stuff and I think that it might do us ALL some good to talk about it. These are mostly 'everyday' people, not artists or writers. If someone is doing something where you can tell that they weren't thinking of anybody but themselves, that generally inspires me to write because invariably I'll be angry and want to spit it all out and vent.

Other times, the people that inspire are cool people, and I try to make something "for" them--not an ode to them necessarily, but a concept explored in a way that just feels like them, or my perception of them, if that makes any sense. If you know me very, very well, you can generally tell exactly where its coming from or who I'm talking to, but, as a writer you try to make it universal enough so that more than just one person can grasp what you are talking about. I suppose thats where the actual "writing" occurs.

I think of writing as a huge gift, and I know that I am very grateful when I read or hear something that touches me. I'm always very glad that the person saw fit to put it out there, to add a little beauty to the world. (And...we could talk for days and days about where THEY got their inspiration and how its connected to your own inspiration in some way, and blah, blah, blah--those are the grander concepts that I think about but know better than to try to explain--you either feel it or you don't.)


I hear you're a big Sass Jordan fan. Big time...when I grow up, I want to sing like that. Right now I sound kinda like someone from a Lutheran Church choir.

Guilty pleasure song(s) on your MP3 player? Its quite possible one could listen to the entire playlist and consider it a guilty pleasure...but I'll play along... "Feel Good, Inc" by Gorillaz, Nelly Furtado's "Maneater" (I think we already discussed that one), "Since You Been Gone" by Kelly Clarkson and "Love Stoned" by Justin Timberlake. Everything else on the playlist never sold more than six copies, I swear...