that voice is not my own
To Whom It May Concern:
(partially inspired by this post by @itskamillaq on Instagram)
Not all of my writing is about me. Even the ones that are might be over-exaggerated or abstracted. For instance, I am not currently a boat. Nor was I when that poem was written.
Continue reading “Realism and Reality: Pen Pal Letter #8”social media, that is. Also, check me out on Substack.
So far, every single social media website or app I have tried has been home to some kind of poetry community. Some of these sites are more conducive to posting and reading poetry than others (Pinterest is not the ideal place for original poems as far as I can tell), and some sites have clear preferences for certain styles, forms, and themes of poems. Longer free verse poems have a lot of success here on blogs, particularly blogs run through WordPress. List poems and very emotional writings do really well on Instagram. Twitter, where brevity is key, tends to be most conducive to haiku, senryu, tanka, and sometimes couplets.
Continue reading “In Media Res”We all end up the same way.
To Whom It May Concern:
My writing always has to have a message. That message most often is “Life is terrible. Be optimistic about it.”
Continue reading “Optimism, Pessimism, and Zac Efron: Pen Pal Letter #7”Going to TACKLE a new subject.
To Whom It May Concern:
How to clickbait? For one, use this title.
As a longtime purveyor of the internet, I have spent quite a lot of time thinking about clickbait as a concept. Up until recently, I approached the topic mostly as a consumer, but over the past few years, I have had to reckon with it as a creator.
I was born at the tail end of the millennial generation, which means I had a childhood before social media was such a large part of life, but my teenage and adult years have been defined by its presence. Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter became widely used in the general population while I was in middle school. Instagram and Snapchat took off while I was in high school. There were so many things to consume online and my peers were creators.
I said my peers there because I didn’t have any social media accounts until I graduated high school. I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing overall. I do know that some of the less-informed beliefs that I held as a teenager were never documented anywhere online, but my consumption of online media was still rather high.
I watched a ton of YouTube, for instance. And I watched YouTube at a time before the site cracked down on clickbait-y titles and thumbnails. It was not only common for video titles not to match their content, it was borderline expected. Honestly, that era of YouTube probably did more than anything else to desensitize me to clickbait. Once again, I am unsure whether I can make a judgement call on if that is a good or a bad thing. All I know is that I have a lot of skepticism when approaching content online, and that I still do sometimes click on things that draw me in with fascinating titles and images as if I am compelled to do so, though I know that I am being clickbaited while I’m doing it.
When it comes to producing content on the internet, each platform has its own method of getting discovered. With Twitter, it is hashtags and participating in prompts and trends. With Instagram, it is hashtags once again and vying to get featured, whether on an account that reposts content or on Instagram’s own Explore Page. With a blog or other type of website, it is SEO.
I’ve read a lot of articles about SEO, but I am far from an expert. Because most of the content I put online is creative writing, I pay little mind to what I have learned from those articles. In a lot of ways, it feels like those articles are suggesting clickbait in order to grow your blog, though I will admit that this is a gut reaction based on a huge oversimplification of what SEO is. Nevertheless, while I would love for as many people as possible to read and enjoy and engage with the things I write, the prospect of writing things in such a way to encourage that feels wrong.
Artistic integrity is a weird concept that I don’t have any stable views about. Each time I think that I have made up my mind about it, something happens or I am presented with new information that causes a shift in the way I think about it.
I have more information and thoughts on all of this than what I am choosing to say here, but I can’t give it all away in a single blog post! I have to milk this type of content for all that it’s worth to keep you coming back for more, right? And that’s neither clickbait or SEO, it’s an entirely different ploy to gain success in online writing. Like a cliffhanger, but with a capitalist intention. So that’s all I’ll say about any of this for now.
Wishing you all the best. I hope the title of this and the last paragraph don’t lead you to doubt my sincerity in that wish.
Sincerely,
Joy
Photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels
new years and resolutions
To Whom It May Concern:
I think the “New year, new me” mindset is rather silly, given the slim chances of sticking with any resolutions longer than just a few weeks. I say it about myself every year regardless.
In fact, I will take any chance I get to have a fresh start. It might be why I like mornings and sunrises so much. Every dawn washes away the dark from the night before and gives light in an unprecedented way. And with that light, we have a chance to right wrongs of the past, look to the future, but most importantly find elation in the moments of that day.
My resolution for 2022 is to document my life, which is just a slightly more complex version of what I already do. I already write in a journal semi-regularly. These “pen pal letters” already kind of read like diary entries. I do take pictures and videos, just not very often. And I save just about every paper scrap that contains evidence of activities, whether that is a map of a museum or a movie ticket or a wristband for a concert.
Specifically, I am going to be documenting my life in a memory keeping “planner” (which is to say that I will be using a planner for more or less the opposite of what its name implies). Each day, I can add any of those pieces of paper that I already keep. I can write. I can print out and glue down pictures to make it like a scrapbook. I don’t care if I make a mess and it looks entirely random by the end, provided that I document at least one thing from each day in there.
I really have to resist the urge to put additional resolutions on my list. I would like to be more active. I want to keep in better contact with family and friends. I have specific goals about writing that I would like to achieve. In a way, though, I think it is dramatically better to just have the one. For one thing, it gives me only one goal to focus on. For another, it will likely be attainable because, as I said, it is just an extension of things I already do. And lastly, I can still incorporate these other ideas into it. If I go on a hike or try a yoga class or something, I can make a note of it in the “planner”. If I have a nice phone call with a friend, I can write about it. If I hit a milestone in my writing, I can show it on the page. And if I don’t do these things as often as I would like, it doesn’t matter. I don’t have keep up any sort of streak. I just have to show pride in the days that I do complete them.
I doubt that I will show the pages of this “planner” anywhere online. With any luck, the contents of it will show a year of intensely personal memories that I want to reflect on with a select few people.
Regardless, this pen pal series is one that I plan to keep up. It’s my way as an intensely private person to show a little bit more of myself to you, and I have a lot of fun doing it.
I truly hope that this new year is treating you well. Wishing you resilience and peace.
Sincerely,
Joy
Photo by freestocks.org from Pexels
seeing things for what they are
To Whom It May Concern:
A picture is worth a thousand words, and I usually record a few hundred of them.
I am never more inspired to write than when I’m looking at things. And by that, I mean really seeing things for what they are. Seeing the longing on the faces of those strangers whose paths I cross on the sidewalk. Seeing the rain speckling my window and the way the blinds divide up that view. Seeing the stardust cascading to the ground as a meteor shoots overhead.
Okay, not all of those sights are true.
I would not claim to be a visual person. Sounds are far more likely to catch my attention than sights, but they don’t inspire me to write the way that images do. So much so that two pen pal letters in a row are all about pictures.
I was scrolling through Pexels once again this morning, and poetic snippets kept coming to me one after another. These snippets have yet to be fleshed out into full poems and there is no guarantee that the final poems that build themselves around those words, phrases, and lines will have anything to do with the pictures that originally inspired them, but they have their roots in those images nonetheless.
I went to an art museum yesterday. I didn’t go there for the art, I went for an event that they were having, but I stayed to look at some of the art anyway. Just three rooms total. I definitely would have liked to see more, but I was so tired or under-caffeinated or both and I really could not see myself being able to give the art the attention that it deserved.
So I left. Got some food. Came home. Spent a tired evening on the couch. And I finally went to bed.
Today, I woke up and found myself inspired by images, but none of that inspiration can fully make up for what I missed out on yesterday. What I miss out on every day when I am too tired or inattentive to really see the world around me.
What I write will never be complete, but then again, neither will any photograph. I can’t see the eyes light up and soften. A video isn’t really complete either. I can’t touch or taste or smell. Nor is an in-person view. I can never know the whole story.
But that doesn’t mean that these things are not worth capturing and worth saving.
I am but a saver of sights. And words are my medium.
Wishing you all the best.
Sincerely,
-Joy
photo by me
on beauty and happiness
To Whom It May Concern:
I don’t know if I have something to say so much as I just wanted an excuse to show that featured image.
The website Pexels has become my favorite free-to-use image site, possibly because of its front page. (Side note: I also like Pixabay and Unsplash if I can’t find what I’m looking for on Pexels.).
On that front page of Pexels, some number of curators have selected several images that users have uploaded to the site and ordered those pictures so that the page appears to be like a color gradient. As I scroll through, I admire that pretty gradient, and I save any of the pictures that really speak to me by clicking on the little heart icons. Which is to say that I save most of the pictures I see there because I am truly in awe of the job that they do curating as well as the level of talent of people who upload images to the site.
Continue reading “Free to Use Images and Inspiration: Pen Pal Letter #3”losing arguments
To Whom It May Concern:
I keep losing arguments with one of the cats.
We have a fundamental disagreement about where she should be allowed to go. I believe that the presence of 4 separate cat trees in the apartment (mind you, only 2 cats live here) should more than make up for the fact that she is not allowed to go certain places where she could be destructive or get hurt. She believes that she should be allowed to go everywhere. She’s very persuasive, but don’t you dare take her side.
She does like to give herself away. For example, she likes to jump on top of the counters (where she is not allowed to go) to yell at me in protest of not being allowed to go on top of the fridge (where she is doubly not allowed to go). “Baby girl,” I’ll reply, “there is absolutely no way that I am going to move stuff off the top of the fridge to give you a space to jump up there, considering that we don’t want you up there whatsoever. Because to get to the fridge, you have to jump on the counter and we don’t want your paws going where we have to do food prep. So get down now.”
She screams again, talking back. I spray her with some water, and she jumps down and runs away.
I don’t like spraying the water at the cats, but I’m 80% sure she understands what I just said to her and she is just being unreasonable and defiant. I’m also 80% sure that her brother does not understand any English beyond one of his nicknames, and I don’t think that should even really count because he doesn’t know his actual name. We’ve stopped using his actual name, in fact, because he has never responded to it. Not once. But he occasionally responds to the nickname. I’m getting distracted. What I meant is that he doesn’t understand any other method of communication than the spray bottle for bad behavior and pets for good behavior.
I’ve taken to making a batch of cold brew about once a week. I keep the coffee canister up on the fridge, since it’s the only thing that can block the space where the cabinets overhang the shelf, and the cats will notice the space and jump onto the counters to get to it if it is not blocked. I must have pushed the canister too far back this time when I put it away, because that argumentative cat did in fact jump up into that space. She screamed in victory, giving herself away. Then she screamed more because she wanted access to the top of the cabinets (where she is triply not allowed to go).
She got sprayed in response and the contents on the fridge got readjusted.
Maybe I ultimately won, but resorting to violence (at least that’s what she feels I did) shouldn’t really count as winning. So I’ll take the defeat. That one was a cat victory, one of many. And now I have to clean the counters.
Wishing you all the best.
Sincerely,
Joy
Photo by Charlotte May from Pexels
That’s not entirely true.
To Whom It May Concern:
So I impulse bought another plant. Two in fact.
That’s not entirely true. I bought grow kits for a thyme plant and a rosemary plant, so I essentially bought pre-plants. And dirt. Dirt that leaked out somehow and got on the jeans that I also impulse bought. What I’m trying to say is that I took a trip to Target.
I do kind of need the jeans, though. I promise that my impulse purchases are measured.
Well, most of them. I don’t need the pre-plants. I will use the pre-plants once they become plants, but I don’t need them. They are more to fulfill my dreams of homesteading, even while I live in this apartment, and also to fill in the gaps of my herb collection, which previously consisted only of basil and mint (if you don’t count the lavender that I killed through negligence before it even flowered). (I promise that I am not as terrible of a plant parent as that previous parenthetical might make it sound. Or maybe I am.)
The other day, I took a walk around my neighborhood. The times I had done it before, I stuck to my secluded little space, but this time I wanted to venture further. There is a crosswalk with traffic signals and everything out on the main road, so I had assumed this meant that there was plenty of sidewalk to be found beyond that point. This is not the case, not even close. It went on for maybe 30 feet and then ended. I walked those 30 feet because I knew that the other side was even worse. I found where the sidewalk ends. Maybe one day, I’ll write a poetry book about it, unless, of course, that has already been done.
After those 30 feet, I turned around. I had taken the dog with me on this little adventure, and he was very confused, as was I. Why put in those crosswalk signs before there is anywhere for them to take you? It would be one thing if they were clearly preparing for sidewalk construction, but that is clearly not true. Not knowing where else to go, I walked the dog through a bit more of the area on my side of the main road and then took him home.
Later, I took a drive down that part of the main road, the direction away from the highway, the direction that I almost never go in. I was looking for sidewalk, to see if it started again anywhere near that crosswalk. What I was really looking for was the hope that my sidewalk issue is a problem that the city would undertake in the near future. That there is just a gap that will be filled shortly.
The sidewalk didn’t start again for a long while. So long, in fact, that I had stopped looking and was surprised when I spotted it. I continued to drive not looking for anything at all, found nothing more, and returned home.
I’m not sure what I’m looking for in life in general; I’m not sure if I’ll ever know, but sometimes I do find it in caring for plants. Confusing dogs can also be fulfilling.
Anyway, wish you all the best!
Sincerly,
Joy
The Yellow Brick Ave 