ash rocketship

SPURNED

Rejection. Rejection is stone cold. It is merciless and cruel. It doesn’t care that you’re having a terrible week or that your dog died or that you broke your finger when you fell down the stairs in front of the hot guy from your morning class. It does not care about your motivation, your attitude, your enthusiasm, or your patience. It will crush you whether it’s been a week, a month, or a year of waiting.

Rejection’s a monster.

You’ve been writing since you were a kid and got your creative writing degree and submitted a story to the lit mag at your college and got in and it was joyous and you were like, “Damn, girl, a published writer at twenty-two!” and patted yourself on the back and didn’t submit (nor really write) fuck-all for the next two years. Way to be proactive, Ash!

And then you submit a story a prof you respect said you should submit lo those whole damn two years ago and, since he made mention of it, you submit it to the lit mag he suggested. And you pat yourself on the back again like, “Yeah, I’m the man, being brave!” and you wait.

And you wait.

And you wait some more.

Then you learn that this random-ass lit mag is actually like, the third most competitive in the country and you shit your pants and go, “What the actual fuck was I thinking?” and maybe you freak out and you’re like, “Damn, they’re just hanging on to it to LAUGH AT ME AREN’T THEY!”

And you wait some more anyway.

And four months pass and you feel a tiny little zygote of hope blooming in the uterus of your heart and you’re like, “Nobody can laugh for four months!”

And you wait a little longer.

And then you get a slap so bad the fingerprints mark your face for a month in the form of a form letter.

And it goes something like this:

Thank you, Fuck-Face Amateur, for giving us four months of the hardest laughs you could imagine. Annie Grace pissed her pants twice and Frank Rebo almost had an aneurysm. This piece isn’t right for us. And none of your future ones will be either, but feel free to submit anyway. Shits and giggles don’t come along like that often.

Sincerely,
Bitter Editors Who May or May Not Actually Be Talented

And maybe you cry. And maybe you don’t.

Time passes and you get over it and you start to feel okay again. And in the meantime, you’re plugging away in an MFA program, writing a novel (which you’ve never even tried before) and it’s not going great and another short story gets shredded by classmates and professor alike and it’s like, “FUCK. Writing sucks. What the fuck was I thinking?” and you submit somewhere else because you have to and you pick another mag you know nothing about and you make sure you don’t learn anything about it PERIOD.

And you wait.

And you wait some more.

And four fucking more months pass (god damn if it ain’t your golden number) and you get… a fucking form letter.

Dear Talentless Hack,

Thanks so much for the bozofest that PDF turned out to be! God damn did we have a good time tearing it apart up here. Even printed it out and pinned it up on the hall bulletin board for everyone to see. Please submit again in the future, we run out of toilet paper often.

Sincerely,
Those Who Can’t Write, Edit

And you are bitter as FUCK. And you don’t cry because you have steeled yourself for this moment. But then it rains. And you’re stalled in your novel. And your mid-program check-up is rushing on you and you’re barely at half of what you have to turn in twenty-three days from now and FUCK.

And then you pick a fight with your girlfriend and everything sucks. And you step in cat puke and you leave your car window open in the rain and your parents fight and you run out of milk and some dickbag eats your hot cheetos.

But rejection?

Doesn’t give a shit.

Note: But you go balls out on that rainy night and you submit that rejected story to a writing contest anyway because that’s what writers DO.

Note²: But you at least manage to give yourself a massive boner when the right title finally nails you in the face after it’s spent TWO YEARS with a REALLY REALLY SHITTY ONE.

Note³: And you realize that, truthfully, you haven’t even given this submission shit one one-hundredth of the chance you have to in order to ~make it~ in the industry. And that statistically you’re batting like .300 which isn’t so bad after all.

woof woof

i have the cutest dogs in the world. you can contest it, but you will lose.

muggles

phoebe

casper (idk why i don’t have more of her, she is my secret favorite shhhh)

napoleon

despite what these pictures show, none of these dogs are calm, solemn, serious dogs. they’re all idiots. ESPECIALLY MUGGLES who looks like a god damn professor in these pictures. “the square root of pi times the circumference of my turds is equal to the number of times i will tap tap tap into your bedroom while you sleep JUST TO CHECK THAT YOU ARE STILL THERE AND HAVE NOT ABANDONED ME LIKE YOUR GIRLFRIEND DID.”

you know they’re so cute they make you want to fall over and barf and then choke on your barf and die.

waiting for october

Today, I got an EXTREME hankering for Halloween.

I’m a big fan of the end of the year holidays; Halloween and Christmas have been neck in neck for years and in the last few I’ve realized that I’m never going to be able to choose between costumes and presents and that I’m okay with that.

But today I got all wound up thinking about fall. I love autumn anyway, the way the air smells and the wind and the way southern California cools down in this back-and-forth way, spread between days that are miserably hot and bitingly cool. I like that fall is just a little bit melancholy — the end of the year is coming, summer is over, school is back in session — and that once you’re right into the thick of it, when everything’s yellow and orange and shades of brown, you put on a costume and walk around in the dusk light and get treats! It’s brilliant and thrilling. I’ll never get tired of the anticipation of it, even though I haven’t trick-or-treated in years.

Disney does Halloween right. I haven’t talked about my love of Disneyland yet, but it’s BIG and their treatment of holidays is just one of the reasons why.

I love that each land has it’s own theme for the holiday and I love Frontierland and Main Street the very most.

Disneyland at Halloween feels like everything you imagine Halloween should be.

And I love love love the Halloween Tree.

Since Halloween is… quite far away (210 days!) I’ll settle for perusing flickr for images to live vicariously and listening to my fall playlist.

not an ad, just an endorsement

My skin is stupid and fickle. It breaks out totally irregularly, it’s often dry enough to feel uncomfortable, it’s allergic to everything. It’s rosy and yellow and pale and freckled. It’s a pain in my ass. Add to that my lax skincare routine (What? I’m forgetful. Back off!) and everything above my neck is kind of a mess.

I recently said, “I am so sick of this shit” and threw away every face product I owned. EVERYTHING. Hundreds of dollars of stuff I’d used once or twice, stuff that worked, stuff that kind of seemed like it might have, stuff I ended up being allergic to. I trashed it all and said, “What is the one thing I’ve used that ever worked?”

And I remembered six months of 2006 where I used Clinique’s 3 Step and got tons of compliments on my skin. Every older woman in my college classes offered me unsolicited praise, telling me to keep up whatever I was doing.

So why didn’t I? Because the stuff is expensive! But so totally worth it. Now that I’m using it again, my skin is clearer and less erratic. I have less days where it feels miserably tight every time I frown or scowl in disbelief.

I use the mild liquid soap in the shower, whether it’s morning or night and extra mild bar at the sink the other time. I use Clarifying Lotion 1 and the Dramatically Different Moisturizing Lotion. The salicylic acid spot treatment is working out for the times when I still get zits, though next time I might switch to their benzoyl peroxide spot treatment instead. I’ve yet to figure out which one works better on my temperamental face.

I like that the entire system is simple. I love the clean lines of the packaging. I love that none of it smells weird or chemical. I’m only a third of the way into my first order, but I think it’s a keeper. Way to go, Clinique!

hell hath no fury like a lesbian under-represented or "am i an owl? or a rabbit?"

My girlfriend and I are not engaged, nor do we plan to be married anytime particularly soon. Nonetheless, I am currently infuriated/frustrated/banging-my-head-against-a-wall-repeatedly by/with/because-of the wedding industry.

I am in love with my wonderful girlfriend. I know how I want to propose and I know that, when the stars align and the wind blows right, I will do so. We have discussed marriage. It is something we want to do! And something weâ€™re fairly enthusiastic about. When I realized this was the case, I started collecting bits and pieces of wedding inspiration, following wedding blogs, trying to find places that catered/leaned/considered-the-existence-of our unusual/unconventional/not-white-and-roses-and-parquet-dancefloor tastes.

There are some great blogs (Offbeat Bride and Halloweddings) that bend toward the non-traditional, but it’s still limited. I’m willing to go the extra mile and DIY the shit out of our future nuptial celebrations, but some more inspiration wouldn’t hurt!

But that’s not even the frustrating part, the frustrating part is how wildly hetero-normative the entire industry is! I’m a lady who loves another lady, there are a lot of us in the world, and we should be able to see some more of us out there, getting married, and doing it fabulously! (On a bright note see: So You’re Engayged)

Think of all the gendered aspects of weddings: the clothes, the cake topper, the invitations, the terminology; it’s all steeped in that “well this part is for boys and this part is for girls” attitude. Women are expected to care about the planning and the details, men are expected to shut up, roll over, and show up on time.

In thinking about some of this stuff, I actually found myself thinking, “Hmm, could my girlfriend and I be represented by animals?” so that I could build a theme on pairing two representative species or colors in a way that would suggest we were the same gender, but not identical. What kind of world is that?

All I want is representation.

Okay, that’s not true, all I want is the legal right to commit myself to my partner for the rest of my life, but representation in the industry would be a great second. There are same-sex couples getting married/committed/unioned all over the country, so why aren’t I seeing more of them?

This seems insane to me on a very base capitalist level: why isn’t someone making money off of it? I’m gay! I want to pay exorbitant prices for Jordan almonds and cake too!

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SPURNED

Note: But you go balls out on that rainy night and you submit that rejected story to a writing contest anyway because that’s what writers DO.

Note²: But you at least manage to give yourself a massive boner when the right title finally nails you in the face after it’s spent TWO YEARS with a REALLY REALLY SHITTY ONE.

Note³: And you realize that, truthfully, you haven’t even given this submission shit one one-hundredth of the chance you have to in order to ~make it~ in the industry. And that statistically you’re batting like .300 which isn’t so bad after all.

woof woof

waiting for october

not an ad, just an endorsement

hell hath no fury like a lesbian under-represented or "am i an owl? or a rabbit?"

a s h

recently

categories

SPURNED

Note: But you go balls out on that rainy night and you submit that rejected story to a writing contest anyway because that’s what writers DO.

Note2: But you at least manage to give yourself a massive boner when the right title finally nails you in the face after it’s spent TWO YEARS with a REALLY REALLY SHITTY ONE.

Note3: And you realize that, truthfully, you haven’t even given this submission shit one one-hundredth of the chance you have to in order to ~make it~ in the industry. And that statistically you’re batting like .300 which isn’t so bad after all.

woof woof

waiting for october

not an ad, just an endorsement

hell hath no fury like a lesbian under-represented or "am i an owl? or a rabbit?"

a s h

tags

Note²: But you at least manage to give yourself a massive boner when the right title finally nails you in the face after it’s spent TWO YEARS with a REALLY REALLY SHITTY ONE.

Note³: And you realize that, truthfully, you haven’t even given this submission shit one one-hundredth of the chance you have to in order to ~make it~ in the industry. And that statistically you’re batting like .300 which isn’t so bad after all.