How to open a Twitter account

I need participants for my heroic communal writing experiment, and to participate you need a Twitter account. I know a few of you out there are wary of another social networking site, but please, just until the experiment it over. It's easy, and you don't have to get a lot of Tweets from a bunch of people. Just open an account and follow me @catemaire 
HERE'S HOW:

1. Go to http://twitter.com/
2. Follow the directions to open an account (It's easier than facebook). You can use your name or choose a pen name.
3. Scroll down to Find.
4. Search for @catemaire  or Catherine Maire and click Follow.
5. Begin the writing process.

Thank you for being part of my experiment.

Words in Print

The November edition of urbanite is now available and my words are in it. Yay! I fell asleep last night thinking: people are reading my words. It was a weird feeling. This is the biggest print audience I've ever had. So, if you're in the Baltimore area, pick one up. I haven't seen it yet-will get one next week. Look for my essay on sibling rivalry, and remember, it was the seventies !

I was skeptical ...

... but, I just got back from acupuncture and I feel great. I have some serious AOA issues: school stress, projects due, driving an hour each way to school, fibromyalgia, Sjogren's syndrome, a year-old shoulder injury and, truly and adult issue: kids! My daughter dislocated her kneecap, and when I called my son to tell him about it, he had a fever. And, they're both 3000 miles away. STRESS! 
But now I'm better. I've been going to acupuncture since June, for my fibromyalgia. It has decreased the aches and pains, but the reduction in stress is an unexpected benefit. Even when my symptoms are flaring, the acupuncture helps.
As a former scientist, it's hard to wrap my head around the fact that acupuncture does help. Scientists are just beginning to do double blind studies to test the effectiveness of acupuncture and results are promising. For those of you in the Baltimore-Washington area looking for relief, let me recommend my acupuncturist, Lourdes. She is at Tai Sophia  in Columbia and is accepting new patients. I don't know how it works, only that it does.

iMovie Stupidity

For an adolescent I am really technically backward. Last night I spent hours downloading video I had taken with my Nikon Cool Pix (an old model with terrible video quality). The clips downloaded into iPhoto. I opened iMovie and imported the clips (again, it took forever). 
But something was off. The iMovie on my computer was different from the software I had used in class. Mine was really limited. I fooled around for a long time. Then I decided to look at my Applications folder. I noticed I had two iMovie apps. Further investigation revealed that the one I had opened had been installed in 2004. The one I didn't open was installed in 2008. Apparently, when I had the contents of my old computer transfered, all the old apps were transferred, and I had opened the very outdated iMovie. More hours - clips are now loaded into the 2008 version. It looks just like what we used in class. By the time I was finished I was so stiff I could hardly stand up. Do teenagers have this problem when they spend hours on their computers? I don't think so. AOA's need to be smarter and not waste time. Too late. D'oh!

Twitter for Literature

I now have a Twitter account: @catemaire, which I plan to use for my final project in my creative electronic publishing class. I'm still learning the ins and outs of Twitter. On the whole, it seems like a huge waste of time, but I want to do something different: create a literary work with contributions from both writers and non-writers. If my plan gets approved by my professor (are you reading this Jenny?), I will begin the project by Tweeting a line (or lines) and followers will contribute anything from a word to several Tweets in a row to create a text. It's very experimental. I do not plan to create a poem or a narrative. I want to see what develops. I will contribute regularly, but if others create settings, characters, plot, rhymes, enigmas, irony, sarcasm, humor, whatever, then we will all go from there. Every Tweet should be inspired by the Tweet directly before it, so time is a factor in creation. If you see a line you want to respond to, do it quickly, before the text changes. At the end of the project I will publish the text (minus the @'s and #'s) on my website and advertise it here and on facebook.
I found a similar attempt on Twitter, but it was dated 2009 and didn't seem to go anywhere, or else the text was already deleted.
My grade depends on participation, so I am asking people to create Twitter accounts and follow @catemaire now, so I am assured that at least someone will contribute. Who knows? We could make Twitter history. Invite your friends, relatives, neighbors, enemies, anyone! The more diverse the group, the better. Let's experiment. Follow me @catemaire.

iMovie!

It's a good thing iMovie didn't exist during my first adolescence. I would have wasted weeks playing with it. I discovered iMovie in my electronic publishing class. I approached the idea of making my own movie with much trepidation, but ... it's really easy. And fun. The AOA in me wants to play. So, that's what I'll be doing in the next few weeks, along with planning my final project (I'm thinking of discovering Twitter for literature). Stay tuned.

Deer Me!

It's a crazy deer world out there. Maybe the extended mild weather has been driving them wild. I can't remember another season when I have seen so many deer wandering the streets. Last weekend I saw a yearling get clipped by an SUV. It fell to the ground, then staggered into the woods like a panicked Bambi on ice. Last night, I was on the lookout for deer as I drove home, and sure enough, a big six-point buck turned to look at me from the side of the road. I suppose he was old enough to have learned not to cross the street when headlights were approaching. He looked directly at my car as I passed. It was a little creepy, like a Disney animatronic deer. Then, as I drove on, I saw two newly dead deer along the roadside.
I'm not even out all that often at night, so I can only imagine how many bodies and mangled cars are out there this fall. (I think the deer must have a much more exciting social life than mine!) So, heads up and brights on, people. The deer are partying this year.

For Cyril

 ‘There is, disciples, a condition, where there is neither earth
nor water, neither air nor light, neither limitless space,
nor limitless time, neither any kind of being, neither
this world nor that world. There is neither arising nor
passing-away, nor dying, neither cause nor effect,
neither change nor standstill.’  -Buddha

I stumbled upon this quotation while I was looking for karma images. I decided that instead of writing about karma, I would share this with you. The quotation refers to enlightenment, and reminds me of my husband's state of mind when he knew he was dying and on the day he chose to die. He possessed an incredible calm that made me think, not of an anticipation of heaven, but an understanding of the cycle of life and death, and that he would not have to go through this ever again. He was in the condition Buddha describes. And, I suppose, he is still.

Choosing this new path

I was a research chemist. The bulk of my college education was in science and mathematics. I chose the path of creative writing as a way to create life after Cyril. And it's working. I am consistently discovering new aspects of myself.
When I started down this road, I wanted to tell the story of Cyril and suffering and loss. That didn't work out so well. I learned that the way to write about something is to not write about it. I began to write differently.
Now I need to decide if my focus, for graduation, will be fiction (my original choice) or poetry (something new to me).  What I really like to write are experimental works, pieces that play with language and ideas and are sometimes more like poetry and sometimes more like fiction and sometimes not like anything at all.
It's the scientist in me: I like to experiment. But the classification system that is required for my MFA thesis is imprecise: How does one quantify poetry, or fiction, or poetic narrative, or prose poem or essay poem, etc.? Under what heading does experimental writing fall ? I need to decide by the end of this semester, so I can take all the required courses. 
For now, I'm just going to write the way I want to write, the way that makes me lose track of time, the way that feels right, whatever category it turns out to fit, or not fit. The ability to write freely, with abandon and absorption, is well worth the cost of grad school. I only hope I can get a diploma out of it.

Website Time

I have a website! I created it for my Electronic Publishing class midterm. I like it. Everything on it is my own work: the images and the words. While constructing this site I learned a lot about myself: I like a simple style. I'm gray and green and black words on white, not the flashy animated-type site I first imagined. I also have quite a few good photographs. At first I tried to find online images to illustrate my site, but then I realized I have hundreds of images I have taken over the years. Some of them work with my poems and stories. I like having my images work with my words. It was a nice surprise. 


And for those of you who wonder what I've been doing for the last two years, my website contains a poem and a short story, both written during the course of my MFA pursuit. I can only hope that you'll check out the site and pass it alone to everyone you know. Maybe you know a publisher? :) 

Imagine John Lennon

Today, had he lived, John Lennon would be 70 years old.

We've been at war again. The longest the US has ever been at war.

Imagine what Lennon would have written in reaction to all this strife.

Phoenix Rising

I have to admit that I copped out last week on the posts. I caught some grief about the cat pictures, a lazy post indeed. I will explain: I have fibromyalgia. Sometimes it flairs up and I don't have much energy to do more than I absolutely have to. The last few weeks have been especially difficult because I have two friends who are grieving the loss of a spouse, and I feel helpless. (Emotional stress can cause fibro flare-ups.)


This helplessness is especially difficult because I have been in that same bat-shit crazy, curl up on the couch, shut the-door, don't answer the phone, leave me alone, don't want to face the world place. In fact, I stayed there for a very long time. No one told me it would get better, but it did. It took a long time, and I know that my friends will have to endure all sorts of emotional turmoil and work through it in their own ways. But I want to help, even though, right now, they can't accept my help. 


It's a strange thing: when you hurt that badly and someone is kind to you, you cry. I suppose it's because you're so down that you don't feel like you deserve kindness. It hurts. Grief swallows you whole, immerses you in darkness, and the slightest ray of light is painful. It reminds you of how life was. You don't believe life will get better. And it doesn't. Instead, you change. You grow. You learn a new way of living. It's not what you had before, but you build a new life. I'm building one now. You, dear readers, are my witnesses. From ashes rises the Phoenix. I have no wings yet, but I feel the itch in my back where they're trying to poke through. 

The Army of Women

My happy husband

Cancer knows my family. It killed my mother in law and many of her brothers and sisters. Cancer ended my husband's life eight years ago. Cancer plagues his cousins and their children. My children are also in danger. Something in my husband's family's genes makes them prone to cancer. So, I am a soldier in the Army of Women. I am one of 335,000 women who have pledged to do all I can to combat breast cancer. 
Our goal is to become a million strong. And though I have never had breast cancer, I can help. Researchers sometimes need healthy women to act as controls for their research studies. As a member of the Army of Women I receive emails alerting me to studies conducted across the country, some near my home. So far, no studies nearby have needed healthy volunteers, but if scientists need me, I am ready. And if I, or my daughter, should ever find ourselves among the sisters in breast cancer, then the research and resources will be there to help us.
Today, October 1, is the official 'Join the Army of Women'  day. I urge every woman reading this to sign up. Help defeat this one cancer, and maybe other cancers will also fall.