8 Line Challenge – misplaced hair.

posted on 05/24/2012 by 6 Comments

The prompt is misplaced hair over in the 8 Line Challenge corner.

Who took the challenge this time around?

You probably know them.  You probably love them.

It’s Missy Bedell, known also as Literal Mom, and Jen Mitchell who writes at Buried With Children.

*DING*

 

Dear Misplace Hair.

I know your are there… he says he doesn’t care.

But I know, I’ve studied the area well.

Why are you there? Did you get jealous of the few on my head.

 I hate those too, you know. 

What to do? What to do?

Dye it, pluck it, shave it clean?

Shit! Does this mean more are coming?

Oh misplaced hair, I hate your new home right above my pubic bone.

 

Jen is the mother of triplets plus their big brother, who often feels that she is buried in children. Find her stories from under the pile on her blog Buried with Children  and follow her on Twitter @buriedwithkids.

 

 

***

 

Misplaced Hair

He shakes hands and introduces himself.

He notices that she notices.

They all notice.

Small talk is painful.

He excuses himself to the restroom.

When he walks in, he sees his hair, misplaced, sitting sideways.

What the hell, he thinks, and takes it off.

He goes back out to start over, but she’s already gone.

 

Missy Bedell blogs at Literal Mom, where she uses wit, humor and tears to encourage parents to think about their parenting.  She skydived in college, ran with the bulls after college and bungee jumped a couple of years ago.  You can follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

 

Thanks ladies.  The 8mm gap in my pubic bone is honored by your 8 lines.

 

* You can read the original 8 line series (written in my postpartum haze) here.  Look for more guests taking the 8 Line Challenge on the 8th, 16th, and 24th of the month.
posted in Guests, Life tagged with , , 6 Comments

8 Line Challenge – droplets.

posted on 05/16/2012 by 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 , , 1 Comment

8 Line Challenge – uphill.

posted on 05/08/2012 by 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.

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8 Line Challenge – restructured.

posted on 04/24/2012 by 6 Comments

Today was supposed to be an 8 Line Challenge guest post.  However, for reasons I cannot tell you, I have no guest today.

Not having a guest today has given me time to think about this 8 Line Challenge thing and how I’ve structured it all wrong.  It may have been a little limiting of me to pick the title myself and then have my guest compose 8 lines or sentences that would fit that specific title.  Unless of course, you think without limits like John Batzer did.  I’ve found that I already have an idea of how the eight lines should go when I’ve made up a title, and it then feels weird to give that title to someone else.

So now, I’m now going to do it traditional prompt-style.

Henceforth, whomever is taking the challenge will simply be given a prompt or word.  Then, the title is theirs, the lines are theirs, and brilliance happens.  A poem, stream of consciousness, full sentences – wherever the prompt takes the person.

Also, it will now be more of an actual “challenge”.  There will be two guests at a time instead of one.  Both will have the same prompt – BAM, throw down ensues.

 

Throw Down

Mean what you say.

Say what you mean.

Who will win the throw down?

Did you all throw down for pizza?

Come to the 8 line party and throw down with us.

The DJ will throw down some hot jams.

Slang is ever-morphing.

But throw down is always better than throw up.

PS- To those that have already been chosen to take the challenge, I am still honored that you wish to honor the 8mm gap in my pubic bone.  Look for your email and prompt in the coming weeks.

PPS-  You can read the series of 8 line posts (written in my postpartum haze) that inspired the challenge here.  The challenge is currently booked through the next several months.  Look for the posts on the 8th, 16th, and 24th of the month.

UPDATE:  NO NEW CHALLENGERS ARE BEING TAKEN AT THE MOMENT.

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

posted on 04/16/2012 by 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.

 

 

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