Weekly Photo Challenge: Lines

In response to WP Weekly Photo Challenge: Lines.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Prolific

In response to WP Weekly Photo Challenge: Prolific.

The prompt prolific can be interpreted as pro-life. It’s in there: pro-lific and pro-life. Looks like these two might have something in common, right?

I’m not speaking of pro-life in the sense of anti-abortion—let’s not even look in that direction. It’s pro-life more in the sense of obsessively bringing things to life. Regardless of whether said things wish to be alive in the first place or would rather choose not to.

Spring is a quintessentially prolific season, hence my tulip photo. I never post tulips while omitting to quote my pet poet Sylvia Plath. I think I get her, or she gets me, whichever way you put it. She wasn’t particularly pro-life, which we have in common, as manifested by her choice to quit and put her head in the oven. And since we live in an age when you can’t say anything without offending someone, please let it be recorded that I’m not pro-suicide. Which is quite a feat, for a suicidal person.

But now, rest your eyes on the tulips and consider how they feel. That’s how tulips feel to Plath:

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.

Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.

They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down,

Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,

A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

A Square Week

My week wasn’t particularly square. Neither was it round though. I’m just running out of ideas what to call my posts in the challenge which consists of snapping and Instagraming a photo a day and throwing a week’s worth bunch together over on the blog. What would you call it? The lazy challenge? The recycle challenge? The zerofucksgiven challenge?

Here you go. I challenge you to scroll down. Not in one mighty scroll, preferably. You know, I did put some minimum effort into making captions for the pictures. I challenge you to read them. Or not to read them. Whichever you find more challenging. Or less challenging. Wait. I know what to call my challenge. The challenged challenge.

2 April: My windows are so filthy that the cat has difficulty looking out through them. That’s the only thing that may coerce me to clean the windows. Maybe. 

3 April: Feel free to appreciate my cute yoga pants and fancy yoga mat. I also recommend to your attention the commendable fact that I painted my toe nails and shaved my big toes. 

4 April: This is just to deliver a bullet-proof proof that I also painted my finger nails. And that on this day, as on any day, I had coffee. 

5 April: There were blue holes in the late evening sky. Ozone holes visible? The photo turned out more like darkness visible. 

6 April: I have tiles. They are ugly. There are shadows on them. That’s about it.

7 April: I put my as lovely as beloved winter coat (rightmost) to sleep for the upcoming summer. I was surprised to discover I have multiple options of spring coats: blue and yellow (middle and left). How did that happen? What on earth possessed me to buy two versions of one thing and so expose myself to decision paralysis? 

8 April: I read. That’s apparently what people do. Hence, I’m people. Though I have my doubts.

 

Weekly Photo Challenge: Awakening

In response to WP Weekly Photo Challenge: Awakening.

Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden.
—Louis MacNeice

 

Wait, That’s Not Even a Poem

In my past life
When I dropped myself on the bed
Overworked, exhausted & sleep-deprived
After studying English poetry all night
There were snippets of rhymed lines
Waging a war of verses in my mind

Warning me

I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep
Do not go gentle into that good night
Rage, rage against the dying of the light

What a heap of shit
How did I think
Any of that matters

It doesn’t pay the bills

So, flashforward to now
When I drop myself on the bed
Still overworked, exhausted & sleep-deprived
After translating a company website all night
There’s a war of visions going on in my head

A clash of clichés making me wish for brain death
I laugh at the line The extrusion line strikes back
Though there’s nothing funny about that
It’s pathetic, really, just like me

I still don’t pay the bills

But, at least, I’m not buying this shit
Maybe I’m brain-dead already
As I wish
That would be—a happy ending
I think

Not going gentle into that night

Weekly Photo Challenge: Smile (if You Can)

In response to WP Weekly Photo Challenge: Smile.

I colour. Colour is used as a verb here. I do not identify myself with colour, as in I am a colour. Though, if I were a colour, I’d totally be pitch-black.

Another Instaweek

I’m still on Instagram. And still taking pictures of crap. This week I couldn’t have even been bothered to take pictures of proper crap, so I’d just point my phone camera in a random direction and call the result abstract, conceptual and minimalist. That’s a polite way of saying that something is plain dumb and shows zero effort.

26 March: Still traumatised by a blackout that happened forever ago and caught me in the act of not having a torch, I purchased a candle holder. Cheaper than a torch and doesn’t need batteries.

27 March: The Day of the Triffids. That’s another trauma of mine, this time a childhood one. Ever since I read this book, I’ve been wary of plants. Admit it. This plant looks so scary.

28 March: I was forced to sew a button back on my pants so I could wear them and I hated it.

29 March: I unregistered from paying radio broadcast fees and since I now officially must not own a radio, I tossed my unused radio alarm on the shoe rack, ready to take it to the pawn shop. By the shape of its loop aka noose, I assume the device suggests I hang myself.

30 March: You think you’re seeing a night light show? You’ll never believe me but it’s really a picture of bubbles on my coffee shot with flash. Yep.

31 March: That’s not a disused flag but my bed sheets. Changing the bed was the highlight of the day. I so much hate doing it, jumping from one end of the bed to the other and trying to fit the supposedly fitted sheet.

1 April: I’m either twelve or I never grew up because journaling in these super cute notebooks is super idiotic when an adult does it. I apologise if you’re doing it too. I don’t mean you, I mean me.