Guests

8 Line Challenge – droplets.

posted on 05/16/2012 by Jenni Chiu 1 Comment

My pubic bone was split and left with an 8mm gap.

I began writing in only 8 lines for a month.

The 8 Line Challenge was born.

It’s time for another one.

Boom.

The prompt was – droplets.

Here are my guests:

Danielle Aubenque is an ex-theatrical, a poet, and a priestess. Here’s what came out of her brain:

As So The Rains
Cyclical as the dance of rain
From tears to life to tears again

Globules of liquid flowing
Seeds of change always sowing

Thunderous roar to snuffing hush
Tin-pan crackles to sweaty flush

So like these droplets are we
Spinning through all seasons with ease

Danielle is a mother and not a blogger. She prefers not to link to any online profiles, so you instead must bask in her mystery.

Kim Rullo is a mother, conceptual artist, disco dancer, conceptual transvestite, and lego architect. Her brain streamed this out:

I exhaled towards the mirror as I prepped my station.

Droplets of my spittle lay on the glass a result.

“The third Tuesday of the month, the vilest of days,” I thought.

The last bottle of Black No. 9, she was coming in, and so are her
tiny, annoying roots.

I hate her smugness, her Twilight T-shirts, her pretense, her
condescending conversation based on unspeakable banality and post
pubescent narcissism.

I creak a smile through my pursed lips as she spouted on and on about
Nietzsche, Thom Yorke, Robert Smith, and others as if she had no idea
how boring, blasé, and tired her references were.

Droplets of blood pierced through my dry lips as I bit down, nodded,
and agreed halfheartedly.

Honey chestnut was her color… drip, drip, drip, through the nozzle;
blah, blah, blah, filled the air.

Kim blogs at Motherblue.

Thank you, ladies. My pubic bone loves you.

* You can read the original 8 line series here. Look for another 8 line challenge on the 8th, 16th, and 24th of the month.

posted in Guests, Life tagged with 8 line challenge, guest posts, prompt writing 1 Comment

8 Line Challenge – uphill.

posted on 05/08/2012 by Jenni Chiu 1 Comment

It’s the 8th of the month, folks – so time to honor my split pubic bone with the 8 Line Challenge.

Our challengers today are Christine who writes over at Love, Life, Surf, and Julie who writes at Zero to 140.6.

Here’s some interesting stuff about them:

Christine was a vegetarian until she got pregnant with her second child. Then all she wanted was bacon and fried chicken. She’s allergic to lentils and chick peas, so it’s probably for the best that the whole vegetarian thing didn’t work out. She’s also a smarty pants and got ridiculously high scores on her MCATs. She probably could’ve been a doctor, but she didn’t want to. So there.

Julie started blogging to chronicle her training for an Ironman triathlon (her lifelong dream). Then, last year she actually did it, so now… she just writes to write. She continuously puts challenges in front of herself, and if there were a quadrathalon I’m sure she would be training for it.

Their prompt was: uphill.

Here’s what came out of their brains:

Julie:

Tripod headstand

I’d mastered a new trick in yoga that morning: tripod headstand.

It takes a lot of shoulder and core strength to do it confidently in the center of the room.

So of course I showed everyone at my husband’s birthday party.

“Wow, you are amazing,” he said in a tone only I would understand as sarcasm.

“Wow,” my dad said. “Forty years old and still good at headstands.”

“Actually, I’m forty-one now,” I corrected, shoulders and core engaged.

“Yeah,” said my eleven-year-old. “When she was forty, she was still good at Ironmans.”

So now I don’t know if that’s progress or what.

Go visit her at Zero to 140.6.

Christine:

when i look in front of me, i can’t see the horizon

just a long strip of concrete stretching out in front of me, edging up to the sky

one foot forward but the slippery strip pulls backwards like a moving walkway

goddamn it

i grit my teeth, pull and claw

muscles tense and ache and sweat pours down

at the top, hands and head to the ground, butt up in the air, back arch

tumble tumble head over heels

You can also follow Christine on Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.

Thanks for playing, ladies.

Look for two more challengers on the 16th and 24th of the month.

*You can read the original 8 line series here.

posted in Guests, Life tagged with 8 line challenge, guests 1 Comment

8 line challenge – brought to you by Daddy Runs a Lot.

posted on 04/16/2012 by Jenni Chiu 4 Comments

You know that kid in class who inevitably doesn’t understand the assignment, and then after you look at it again, you realize maybe he understood it after all, is really a genius and just found it too limiting?

Ladies and gentlemen I present to you John Batzer of The Adventures of Daddy Runs a Lot.

John took the 8 line challenge to honor my pubic bone.

He was to write 8 lines/sentences prompted by a title that I picked for him after poking around his website.

*****

TITLE: Musical Mundane

I started playing the piano in kindergarten, because I demanded it of my parents, because my dad would play and I wanted to be more like him (honestly, it may mark the final occasion that I wanted to be more like him) and my mother actually found a piano teacher willing to take on a kindergarten kid

I quit piano lessons in the 8th grade, when I was taking lessons from a fancy-schmancy Russian piano teacher because I managed to be so busy that I couldn’t fit lessons into her schedule on a regular basis. Upon quitting piano lessons, I actually started playing piano a whole lot more

I actually & truly admire Barry Manilow

I’ve written a song with the aid of one of my dogs . . . I was just having a hard time with how to start it, and he would stop acting up whenever I would play a certain passage, in a certain key, so that’s how I started the song

I name all of my musical instruments, except my keyboards. I have no idea why I exclude those, but my very first string teacher (when I started playing ‘cello in the 4th grade) told me that I always needed to name my instruments, so I did.

I get as mad when people write ‘cello without the apostrophe at the beginning as I do when people misused the word enormity (the latter means something immensely evil, not something immense). ’cello is short to violoncello, the full name of the instrument.

I really want a harpsichord, and a sitar. Alas, I barely have enough money to get myself Starbucks once in awhile, and those are freaking expensive instruments

My father has a Steinway upright piano that plays beautifully — when he was young, his mother found it, in parts, in a junkyard and had someone put it back together . . . and when I say it plays beautifully, it really does . . . except if you’re doing a lot of playing in the upper register, where things just seem wonky, This is because I, apparently, at a relatively young age, somehow managed to spill a bloody mary into the instrument while one of my dad’s friends was tuning it. I still can’t put together the string of events as to how a toddler could have knocked a bloody mary into an upright piano, but I like to think that I was trying to drink said drink and decided it needed more Tabasco.

*****

At first I was confused as to why he didn’t stick to the eight line structure. After another look, I saw that he gave me eight quatrains.

I also asked him to tell me three things that he would like people to know about him that they can’t find on his About Page. I wanted to introduce him to you with some personal trivia. He never gave me that information… unless of course he worked it into his 8 lines…

Heh.

Follow him on Twitter – @DaddyRunsALot

Look for more installments of the 8 line challenge on the 8th, 16th, and 24th of the coming months. You can also read my 8 line series that started it all here.

posted in Guests tagged with 8 line challenge, guest posts 4 Comments

One is like one, but two is like ten.

posted on 03/30/2011 by Jenni Chiu 25 Comments

Hello, and welcome to Web Village Wednesday.

What the hell is Web Village Wednesday? Just something I made up again.

I happen to live where we have no support system. Los Angeles is a weird place where it’s hard to make friends, and our relatives are spread out all over the country. So, you, my cyber buddies, have become like my village.

So, sometimes, on Wednesdays, whenever I feel like it, at unequal intervals, I would like to introduce you to members of my “village.”

If you haven’t figured out by reading my post- Somebody give me an infant!, Hot Nerd and I would very much like to have another baby.

I am becoming increasingly curious as to how different it will be to have more than one child. Right now all my focus is on our son, and he takes up all the time and energy I have.

I wanted someone who could answer this question for me and give it to me straight. So, of course I went to Deb (aka Truthful Mommy), over at The Truth About Motherhood. If you’re a mom, and you’ve never been to visit her, you should. She’ll make you cry, pee your pants, and sigh with delight.

Here is a guest post by the lovely, truthful, Debi Cruz-Beck. Welcome to my village, Deb. I hope you stay a very long time.

*****

I was recently asked what it was like to be the parent of two children. What’s really the difference in having one child and two children? Well, one child is like having one child. You know aside from the obvious issue of having another child to love. I am here to tell you the difference. I’m going to give you the truth like no one else will tell you. This article is not for the faint of heart. If you are expecting your second, it’s too late to turn back now in the pregnancy but you may want to revisit this post in a few more months so that you can shake your head in agreement.

So let it be written, so let it be known that having a second child is absolutely wonderful. That being said, having a second child is much like having ten children. For some reason, the second child and the first child are never anything alike as far as nighttime sleep patterns, nap routines, feeding schedules, personalities; this is obviously done to keep us on our toes. You know, no one wants us running around cocky being all ” I got this”. SUCKER! You might “got it” until that second baby actually makes its way into the world then your whole world flips upside down. Forget what you thought you knew. Baby number two is all about teaching you the lesson of letting go. Giving yourself over to a higher something and praying it all comes out alright.

That two or three year old that you had so perfectly trained and in perfect sync with you, will surely regress. And no, not any amount of prepping, practicing or having good intentions will change that. My 2 year old, who was completely potty-trained when her sister was born, completely regressed. She decided that if her sister was going to be all ” look at me, I’m too special to wipe my own ass” and get her diaper changed, then damn it..so was she. Damn you diaper fairy, you reneged and threw me under the bus. An exhausted mommy of a newborn and a toddler can only be strong for so long, choose your battles wisely. And NO…piss in your bed or caca on your carpet is not a battle you want to take chances with. Diaper it up! You can deal with that diaper fairy at a later date, perhaps when your ten children are safely at university.

Sleep, well, you can kiss that good bye. There was a brief 2-day period when I had them on the same sleep schedule but they decided (amongst themselves in some clandestine baby coup meeting) that my life was just too damn easy. Where did that get me? It left me getting about 4 hours of sleep on the regular, running around town not knowing which way was up and I’m convinced that my Mommy brain has evolved into full on sun-downers. Peace and quiet? That is long gone. I catch glimpses of it on certain days, when the fates smile down upon me and the girls are NOT picking on one another. Most days, I feel like I need to be an octopus with a fully functional brain and the patience of Mother Teresa just to wrangle my babies. Unfortunately for the girls, nothing on me is fully functioning these days. I’m still trying to regain full consciousness from the second delivery.

The delivery in which I was in the hospital for less than 24 hours because my 2 year old was completely confused about what was going on and my Mommy guilt was out of control. I felt like I was betraying her by having another child, little lone staying away from her an entire 24 hours while her little head swam with abandonment and bewilderment. Don’t worry baby, Mommy’s coming. She came to see her new baby and looked at me with those big blue eyes like “Mama, why have you forsaken me?” She left, I cried, the doctor came in and I asked to go home. I went home. I am yet to get a nap in since. *Gratuitous warning alert* Please, for the love of all that is good in the world, if you are having your second baby and still reading. Stay in the hospital as long as they will allow you. I have learned. If I EVER have a third, I’m staying in the hospital for as long as I can convince the good doctors and nurses to have me as their guest. Hell, I’ll even pay extra.

What I’m telling you, in terms of children, one is like one but two is like ten. With the birth of each baby, our body suffers, our memory diminishes and we become increasingly exhausted but our love doubles. In return, we receive the most incredible little people to share our lives with and more love than our hearts can handle. I would not trade in random hugs and kisses, “I love you Mommy”s or the way my girl’s head fits perfectly in the space between my shoulder and my ear for any amount of sleep or peace and quiet. I look into the faces of my two girls and there resides all the wonder of the world and life is good. That’s what it’s like having two children.

posted in Guests, Web Village Wednesday 25 Comments

Rock the Pizza Slice? Juice?

posted on 10/14/2010 by Jenni Chiu 29 Comments

A Massachusetts blogger has come to my rescue, and is my second guest for the week.

Momma Kiss writes over here, lives with and loves her hubs and two boys, sometimes makes me spit coffee out my nose, and is adamantly pro- pigtail.

I heart her.

In an effing big way.

*******

Rock the Pizza Slice? With Juice?

My 5 year old son wants to be Batman for Halloween. He’s wanted to be Batman since he was 3. I finally found the right costume, for the right price (ebay) and so this year he’s getting his wish.

We’ve been trying to bribe the little guy into being Robin. And we’d put a cape on the dog. I mean, C’MON! How freakin’ cute would that be??

Well the 3 year old has other plans. I was putting him to bed tonight and again, begged him to be Robin for Halloween.

“Nope. I’m gonna be PIZZA!”

Um, ok, “What kind of pizza?”

“A RED ONE! And I’ll be 2 slices. But no crust.”

I’m envisioning a slab of mushy, red cheese with no crust and how the hell am I supposed to make that?

“Ok, pizza, we’ll work on that.”

“No, wait Momma, I’ll be Buzz Lightyear!”

perfect, we have that costume, which I’m about to remind him of and he says

“WAIT – WAIT – NO, Momma, I’ll be a glass of juice. Your juice. The soda kind that you put raspberries in.”

*owl eyes*

“The juice in the shiny glass that me & my brudder don’t like because it smells funny.”