What the Blackbird told the Crow.

It's funny how little you realize about yourself and your quirks until confronted by someone who has the exact same impulses and reactions as you.
Working ourselves into the ground we are.
This pair of us. My sisters and my not-blood twin from another planet person who show me precisely how hard I am throwing myself against the concrete wall by hurling themselves at it with their own perfect intensity.
What are we doing?
We are young, healthy, strong, sexy as hell women, and we are bludgeoning ourselves to shit over things that we really shouldn't let have so much sway over our happiness.
I want to tell you all of the reasons why she is marvelous and capable and brilliant and a gemstone of a person in a world full of gravel, but I would have to say the same things to my own reflection to do so, and I am so very allergic to that.
But it must be.
For I am worried. I am worried because I see in us the volatile, illuminated terror of real creative progress. I see in us the abilities to move and shake and french kiss the world out of blindness.
You are stunning.
I am stunning.
We are taking this year by the ears and throttling it into submission. It may kill us on its way down, if we aren't careful.
Tomorrow could be the last day. Stop putting off all of those words you tell yourself you'll say someday. Do that thing you're so scared of. Get on the plane. Write the goddamn novel. Kiss the girl. Kiss the boy. Wear the dress. Eat the cake. Run the marathon.
Do it, and do it because you want to, and afterward, celebrate how glorious your existence is. Because I think it's bloody amazing.
And quit banging your head against the wall to prove to me I should stop too. I'm stopping. I'm stopping. I'm stopping.

The Unbearable Weight of Lightness

So... this thing happened the other day. Which happened to be my birthday. A bunch of people (spearheaded by the dearest of those) in an impossibly grand gesture of birthdayness (yeah, that happened too), got me a laptop. A real one, with a mousepad and a keyboard and a big pretty screen and programs and software and *gasp* microsoft word and *gasp gasp* access to the interwebs. Needless to say, I wept like a baby bitch baby drunk on cheap champagne and nineteenth century bitters. Which I wasn't. Why do I see you don't believe me? Nevertheless. I doodle around with my new toy, which is inappropriately elephantine in nature and I want to name Clay, after the LTZ character and through some happy accident of the Bretiverse is also a substance artists use to shape the brilliance between thri synapses, which, coincidentally is what this disgustingly light, sexy paperweight is for. It reminds me of the nega-guide, from the Hitchhiker's Trilogy, the super scary one with only one button on it that says PANIC. I think it turns into a dark bird and flies out of a filing cabinet out a highrise office building window at some point in Douglas Adams' opus. I feel like if I don't grip the smooth, ergonomic sides of Clay, he will perform a similiar disappearing act, and I will once again be toddling around the apartment with a two hundred page manuscript in my armpit and a deathwish in my heart. Yet, he remains. And he dares me, with his lopsided, invisible supermodel smile, not to give up. Not to make another excuse about the hoards of spies from the evil Uterati on their bloody warpath to my door and pants. He tells me I am not nearly tired enough, and not reading enough, or doing any bloody thing else for that matter, and his sculpted little mousepad wavers scintillatingly like waves of heat from the hood of a car. He is taunting me...my supermodel, serial killer, pachyderm. I have opened the door I was certain was rusted shut, and I have tested the key to make sure it is mine and mine alone, and shockingly, yes Mary, the garden is still here along with Dicken and Colin is doing backflips through the daffodils screeching wildcats cheers. My laptop...a dark uncle with a sorrowful secret lurking in the foreground. My laptop...a wad of pewter on a workbench next to a clean pail of water. My laptop...an elephant balanced on a beach ball, or flying down a sky scraper on a pair of brand new running shoes, dancing in a janet jackson video with a powdered vogue wig and a cleaver covered in sweet cherry brandy. My laptop is mine...and only the beginning.