But a line from Meg Kearney’s poem, “Rum & Coke & A New Apartment,” really spoke to me and justifies this post: Funny how people always find shelter/talking about the weather.”

True, am I right? It’s that neutral, safe topic that anyone can and will talk about. I think it’s quite amusing how much time we spend talking about something completely beyond our control.

So the weather in Chicago… is bumming me out.

A few days ago the sun finally shone and the temperature broke 65 and I decided it was appropriate to wear wedge sandals, ones that have been teasing me in my closet for the past month.

So I did that really typical female thing where I decided I could walk around all day in something really impractical- like three inch high wedges. I walked super slow all day but I didn’t fall!

And then, after my last class of the day- the clouds were rolling in, the sky was darkening. It was becoming apparent the fun was over. Cue my downfall: I walked down some stairs and attempted to send a text at the same time and basically tripped and really twisted my ankle.

So maybe not my literal downfall but pretty close. Enough to hear my mother and father’s “You’ll break your ankle in those things!” to echo from my conscious and enough to make me feel really dumb.

Lessons learned? A) Learn to walk in wedges before I wear them all day OR wear them in places where I am only required to sit or stand and not move. B) I can wait the three seconds to descend a flight of stairs before checking my phone.

A crappy iPhone picture of my precious skyline cut off by clouds.

Alright, so that’s a bit of a dramatic exaggeration. What I did do was share a poem with my creative writing class.

So I’ve been writing my whole life- what’s the big deal? It’s not an issue of not feeling confident in my writing abilities- I usually feel I have a hold on that.

Poetry, however, is very personal to me. Often when I write in my free time I write poems. I do not write them, however, to improve my writing or for the intent of publication. Usually poems are my journal entries, a way for me to write out what I am feeling in

fancy

formatting.

So this year when I decided to take on a creative writing minor, I signed up for Intermediate Poetry in hopes that I might be able to write poems that expressed myself as well as conveyed my writing skills.

It did occur to me I would have to share some of my writing- I just wasn’t prepared for it to be so soon.

In my creative writing classes we do “workshops,” which is probably not a new concept to anyone else except me. Basically, the entire class reads your work and critiques you. While in the same room.

I had written this poem about a week earlier and really thought it might be worth something. So I decided that I would share it because I really wanted to improve it.

Even though the poem is not about me, however, I submitted it to my teacher very apprehensively. When the workshop rolled around yesterday afternoon, I felt nervous to the point of becoming sick. Despite my best efforts to pep-talk myself out of it, my fear of inadequacy or being made fun of completely overwhelmed me. I usually do not get nervous presenting anything in class, but something about sharing a poem truly shook me.

Yet this was not something I could get out of. At 5:30 pm my teacher asked me to read it aloud and I did, with a wavering voice very uncharacteristic of me. And then the class spoke about it.

By 5:45  pm it was all over. My class took mercy on my soul and even expressed many positive things about my piece.

So this is the part where I reflect about how I wasted my nerves and had no real reason to lack confidence in myself. But I’m not going to say that.

What I will say is that sometimes it’s excruciatingly difficult  to be critiqued but it’s wholly necessary. As much as I wanted everyone to like my poetry and praise me, I would rather they would be honest. I believe in strait-shooting, albeit nicely. While I am thankful for the positive comments, I am truly grateful for the negative. I know that I won’t get anywhere as a writer thinking I’m the greatest.

I realize what I knew in my heart all along: sometimes you just have to suck up your nervousness and expose yourself. And it will get easier, but it will never be easy. My first hurdle of many in my life has been overcome.

I have confidence in myself, but not always, and I accept that.

After sharing my poem though, I can enjoy a different feeling altogether that makes the nervousness worthwhile: pride.

However, previewing past diaries, journals, Word documents, and this blog, I noticed that it may seem like I am not committed to the thing I do best: writing.

But I am writing now to defend my lack of postings.

Writing has been a part of my life since about first grade when I joined my elementary school’s writing club. Well, technically writing has been a part of my life since I learned to write…

That aside, writing is such an integral part of my life that I don’t necessarily carve out time for it: I just do. I write if I have an assignment. I write when I have an idea. I write when I need to remember something. I write when I have something to say to someone.

I write everyday yet my last post was a few months ago. Does this mean I am not committed to my craft?

No. What this means is that I spread my writing all over the place. Today I have written thirty texts, five poems, a few scattered thoughts, a page and a half paper, and a memo.

And now I am writing this blog.

I am  a writer, everyday. My writings appear on post-it notes, in love letters, and sometimes in journals, blogs, and on Facebook.

I don’t discriminate against my own mediums. I just write.

How pleasant.

That being said, it very well could be our last year, just as it could be our last week, day, or hour. You never know. I’ve learned that the Universe likes to play tricks on its inhabitants sometimes, be it placing items in direct pathways of clumsy people or teasing you with all the things you can have. So cue the cliches of living every day like it’s your last and here’s to another year (hopefully) of all the wonderful oddities and mishaps that make life interesting.

-L

P.S. If it didn’t come across, I am not a morning person.

The past two Sundays must have been a field day for whoever is playing practical jokes up there.

Last Sunday brought an onslaught of emotional stress. Those details don’t matter- in fact, at the tail end of my day I had only to clean the bathroom before I could collapse and sleep off any lingering negative emotions. Cleaning the bathroom in itself provided a prodcutive way to zone out. I turned out my music and let the bleach fumes distract me.

And then I was standing in a giant puddle of water.

Normally I would attribute this to my general clumsiness; on the first assessment of the situation with my roommates that was the conclusion. So we mopped everything up (except, of course, we didn’t actually have a mop) and I continued on. It was approaching midnight and I couldn’t wait to take a shower in an exceptionally clean shower.

And the water appeared again. In fact, the water kept coming. Was the tub overflowing? No. The floor was… underflooding. In other words, the water from our apparently clogged tub was coming up from the floor rather than draining. The result looked something like this:

Once that crisis was finally resolved at 2 a.m. I finally got to sleep.

So the disasters end there, yes?

Today, this lovely Sunday, seemed pleasant enough. Other than a slight scare on the Red Line when the engineer had to “step off the train” to “fix” something or another, the sun shone for more than a few moments at a time and I didn’t blow away in the wind. Running on this relative pleasantness, I settled in to work on some impending homework thinking Life Would Go On.

And as I typed away suddenly the lights started to fade and in an instant the world was dark.

Okay, so the building lost power.

Now that I am re-settled in again after evacuting for about an hour, I should just be able to laugh this out. And the Universe would join me.

Is it next week yet?

Unfortunately, like most cultural events, the Film Festival does not come without a cost; thus, as much as I would have liked to see multiple films I only attended one. On Tuesday, October 18, I shelled out the cash to go see the American film Jeff, Who Lives at Home.

Due to my aforementioned dysfunctional lifestyle, I assigned the task of picking out a movie to my more organized friends and thus had no idea what to expect from this film. Waiting in line for the theater to open, I learned only that I should anticipate a comedy starring Jason Segel and Ed Helms. Right before the movie began to play, one of the directors present also introduced it as “the funniest film ever.”

Jeff, Who Lives at Home takes place in only the span of a single day and consequently felt like a brief film. The title character, Jeff (Segel), is a thirty-year-old still living at his mother’s house. By the end of the movie I fell in love with him and his unfailing devotion to his brother and unwavering faith in his own fate and destiny, despite all the trouble such tendencies lead him to. His brother, Pat (Helms), at first seems a static, unfriendly character but later proves dynamic and just as loving as his brother. Their quirky mother, played by Susan Sarandon, reveals herself to be almost as dreamy as the supposedly misunderstood Jeff.

Without going into the details of the plot of the film, I found the characters and their unique personalities highly engaging. After the film, the same director, Jay Duplass, helped explain why the movie led me to feel this way.

Duplass, who wrote and directed Jeff, Who Lives at Home, and three other hit feature films with his brother Mark Duplass, described their style of filming as more documentary-like, relying heavily on the improvisation of the actors. “We just let it run,” he stated, and the result is the ability to “capture something real” onscreen. The characters in this movie certainly seemed very real to me, wholesome and loveable, even despite their flaws. Duplass also summarized the movie as one that acknowledges humans’ “great fear about not achieving [their] full potential.” When he described this at length, the movie became even more meaningful to me. Jeff, though described as “desperate,” represents the fear in all of us that we have not yet accomplished everything in our power. Such a feeling is similar to that of our own insignificance in the world.

Jeff, Who Lives at Home not only allowed me to experience something “cultural” but allowed me a moment of humorous reflection into those deep set fears. Because of the movie’s positive ending, however, it left me with a sense of hope that even though I may never fully figure out my destiny, I will undoubtedly have small moments in my life where I fulfill part of it.

Well, actually for now the dysfunction is mostly over after a previous week of sickness. My most recent dysfunction was not due to my own typical clumsiness but rather my lack of an immune system.

Okay, so lack of sleep probably contributed greatly to my immune system’s deficiencies. But no matter.

In the process of recovery I find that now my allergies are acting up, just to make sure my sinuses never rest and I never stop taking medication.

If only they made OTC drugs to help cure my new found Mad Men addiction. I have found that sickness and insomnia lead to lots of hours available for viewing Netflix.

Sniff sniff.

Enter my first Daily Dysfunction. When I was forced to give into this scary trend for a class assignment, I was fortunate enough to have my own domain name. Upon further review, I learned my web hosting site offered a blogging service. Excellent- I did not have to sign up on Blogspot or Blogger or any of those other mainstream free blog sites (because if I must conform, I must do so in a unique manner).

With my first post successfully created I started to feel less hostile about the entire assignment. However, when I went to view my handiwork, I discovered that my one-post-wonder of a blog had replaced the website I worked quite painfully on over the summer. My custom-designed website that included my resume and portfolio.

Sigh.

That’s Life, as the song goes (which, I should mention, is my personal anthem for a life full of dysfunctions).

Technology is so dysfunctional- or rather I am dysfunctional when interacting with technology. I am going to use this as a learning experience—and maybe even post again!

I, personally, am not graceful or lucky. I often find myself obliviously navigating the world just trying not to trip or embarass myself. And thus I dedicate this blog to all those moments.

 The idea behind Daily Disfunctions is not to gain sympathy from readers (although sympathy will always be apppreciated) but rather to bring humor to the many disfunctional situations in my life so that maybe I may learn from them or least not find them so damn discouraging.

Feel free to share your daily disfunction.