The Mimosa Effect 2

Baked enamel finish. Color: Standard beige. Other colors available.

Cell walls have a number of functions

Attention must be given to the structural nature of the cell

The cell wall provides a porous medium for the circulation and distribution of water, minerals, and other nutrients

A pre-cast concrete cell can withstand extreme physical abuse, clever entry, concealment attempts, and repeated tampering.

The cell wall counters the effects of osmotic pressure, keeping the cell from bursting

Corrosive materials or bodily fluids can deteriorate cell wall systems over time, allowing for corroded areas to be used to hide contraband or be used as a ligature point

The cell wall bestows rigidity to the plant, maintaining the cell’s characteristic shape

The hostel was built in the old military barracks of the old Austro-Hungarian empire;
the doors and windows are still barred, the floors still sloped to accommodate drains

The cell walls of all bacteria are not identical. In fact, cell wall composition is one of the most important factors in bacterial species analysis and differentiation

The dungeon is kept as it once was, although a camera obscura has been placed in the wall so that the shadows of passers-by are turned upside-down

The relative rigidity of the cell wall renders plants sedentary, unlike animals, whose lack of this type of structure allows their cells more flexibility, which is necessary for locomotion.

A suicide prevention cell should
(1) not have joints at the ceiling and between the walls for the purpose of anchoring a
hook through the wall and committing hanging.
(2) Seamless floors should be used instead of tile that has sharp corners.
(3) Floor surface should be nonslip surface that can’t be removed.

“Perspective can be a prison,” say the architects,

The rooms have been transformed by guest artists. Beds hang in mid-air. Poems are scrawled on the walls. Artwork is made from cupboards. Doorways are turned into sundials.

“Too many things have a rational beginning. We need more mystery;
The struggle of man against power
is the struggle of memory against forgetting”

———

This found poetry compilation was inspired by the Poetry Thursday prompt, “If These Walls Could Talk.” For more PT poems visit www.poetrythursday.blogspot.com

The prison/hostel article (and its corresponding quotes) can be found at: www.villagemagazine.ie/article.asp?sid=1&sud=38&aid=3135

Ad copy from companies manufacturing concrete and modular prison cells can be found at:
http://www.opmg.com/e-mail/email2005Bsuicide/1-E-mail%202005BSecurity-Precast.htm
www.pxdirect.com/holding_cell.htm

Information on the biology of plant cell walls can be found by Googling “cell walls”

Drums and trumpets, please.

Yes, the 50,000 word mark has been reached (and verified by the NaNo-bots), and more than four days ahead of time, no less.  To heck with pride being a sin, I’m gong to preen for just a little bit here. 

Okay, done now.  Despite having reached the official goal of NaNoWriMo, I’m going to keep writing every day until the end of the month, just to say, well, that I wrote every day for a month!  And hopefully I’ll keep up, if not quite so insane a pace, a reasonably regular writing habit after this.  I have to properly finish this novel, after all; not only is it not edited (boy, is it ever not edited), but the story still has all sorts of holes in it that need to be filled in.  So you can still keep an eye on my progress over here, as I notch it up past the 100% mark. 

Now, I’m going to go take a break.  I’m going to drop myself down on the couch in front of the mind-numbing boob tube and veg to some mindless drivel until I’m sleepy enough to crawl into bed.  Woohoo!  Yippee!  And other similar relieved and joyful noises. (And in case anyone’s wondering, why?, it’s the same answer to the question why do you climb the mountain; except in this case, it’s to prove to myself that yes, I can write every day and yes, I can write a novel, and if I can, then – why not?)

I’m handing the reins over to Magpie again this week. Inspired by Hemmingway’s famous six-word story (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn”), Wired magazine got a bunch of famous writers to try their hand at a six-word novel, which then inspired us.

Thirteen Novels in Six Words by Mark Harrison

1. A simple wish comes true today.

2. Many wanted to, many didn’t; war.

3. Entire army fails fitness test. Peace.

4. On the way, Alice finds herself.

5. Advanced ideas finally overcome mediocre belief.

6. Misplaced trust destroys a monkeys’ life.

7. Aliens invade; peace becomes a strategy.

8. A drunken sailor finds a box.

9. Made self-aware, lab animals demand ignorance.

10. A plague spreads empathy throughout humanity.

11. Contacting extraterrestrial travelers, we react badly.

12. He would never know his tormentor.

13. Brutally rejected, she killed him. Twice.

To see more creative stuff by Magpie (who also did 13 Pictures of Clouds), visit magpiedesign.net.
You can see the complete collection of 6 word novels on Wired’s site here.

Links to other Thursday Thirteens!

Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!

The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It’s easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!
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I think I can see it now, if I squint – the finish line, shimmering in the fog in the distance.  It’s 2:00 a.m., and I should have gone to bed hours ago, but I just passed the 40k mark (41,226 words to be exact), so it was worth the extra slogging.  That means I’m over 82% of the way there. (More details here). Less than 10 thousand words to go (that’s 20 pages, single spaced), and almost ten days to do it in.  Actually, I plan on hitting 50k by the 25th, and everything after that is gravy.  After Nov. 30th, I promise a moratorium on all the boring novel updates – although probably a little bit of gloating will be in order.  Now, I go to crawl into that thing that calls itself a bed, in the hopes of actually getting something ressembling sleep before the dawn breaks.

Wooh!  Finally past the 70% mark.  For those of you going “huh?”, that’s how far I am towards my goal of 50,000 words, the one I have to reach by the end of this month.

Who said it was hard to write a novel in thirty days?  All you have to do is radically alter your sleep patterns, eat lots of sugar, consume caffeine in many different fun forms, type and write until your hands cramp up, and then look at all the crazy people who are already way further ahead than you are and mutter bitterly about how they must have no life outside of writing, while meanwhile knowing that most of them are probably just as busy as you are. 

For a tiny little peek into just how silly this whole thing is, I’m writing this at 11:15 p.m., even though I have to be up tomorrow at 4:00 a.m. (yes, on a Sunday; blame M’s evil, evil employers who keep making him go to work at strange inhuman hours).  At least, unlike my poor guy, I get to come back home and go back to sleep again; no students on Sunday, thank… well, my schedule, I guess. Smart me! (Make that, temporarily insane me.) Off to find some zzz’s, while I still can.

(For PT; I didn’t really get the prompt until I read some of the poems, and it’s amazing what comes out of it; I’ve been absolutely delighted by each and every one; I thought for sure I’d be too tired to write any more tonight, but I just had to play with this one.)

I woke up drowning yesterday
I’d gone to sleep the night before
turtle-like on the ocean floor

the fruit flies on my computer screen
know the secrets of the universe
hidden in a yellow pencil box

the harp in the corner
was built from the bones of a giant
who shrank in the wash

I woke up drowning yesterday
  – You were there -
But did you push me in
or pull me out?

I eat dandelions for breakfast,
purple tinfoil stars for desert
and patchwork frogs bring me
candied yams on fine linen

I have finished everything I started
and even some things I haven’t
my pet crocodile will swear to this
(and you can’t argue with a crocodile; they’re always right)

I woke up drowning yesterday
and someone saved me
It could have been you.

And just for the heck of it, following Dana’s prompt:

This room is somewhere else turning cartwheels
  The house has already forgotten it
The street is made of spun sugar and is always crooked
  even when you hit it with a hammer
This town has been singing up chrysanthemums out of season
The continent feels left out, and heaves a small sigh
The earth was put here to confuse everyone
  (done a smash-up job, I think)
The sky doesn’t know what it was thinking, but
  it knows which way is up
The stars are thinking it’s time they redecorated
(that wallpaper really has to go)
And the entire universe just popped like a bubble.
  (oops)

- T.H. Nov. 15 ‘06

For more thoroughly delightful “lying” poems, visit Poetry Thursday.

I was worried there for a bit, what with yesterday being far too hectic for me to write more than a few sentences, but I finally cleared 25k this morning; not a moment too soon, considering tomorrow is the halfway point.  Thankfully I have a lot more free time today, which I intend to use to try and regain my former lead.  Just wrote three pages (ss), so it’s time for a break and more java (and maybe a bit of food to wash it down).  Oh yeah – and a shower might be a good idea too.  Gotta keep myself presentable, considering I’ll have to interact with the real world again at some point today.

Oh, and if you’ve ever felt like the world just isn’t fair, check out this excellent video by the Helsinki Complaints Choir.  I guarantee it’ll make you smile.

This week’s Sunday Scribblings prompt is oddly apt: “I don’t want to be a passenger in my own life.” Not only is it something that has kept me awake at night since I can remember having coherent thoughts, it is also kind of a central theme to the novel I’m writing for NaNoWriMo.  It was the subject of one of the first poems I ever wrote, a constant theme in my life; and without any deliberate decision on my part, it has become a unifying motivation for my characters.  Each of them gets to make one wish, that comes true – and each wishes for something that (they believe) will put them more in control of their own lives, their own imagined destiny.  Whether the motivation is to not to have to rely on others anymore, or to be able to do things they were always afraid of or unable to do, or just to fulfill what they believe to have been their truth path, their true self, they are all striving for freedom from passivity, compliance, the status quo. 

I was looking through one of my old journals today, and I came across an entry that to me perfectly captures the passion, confusion, and emotional turmoil of being young; of wanting to be your own person, make your own way, despite a maelstrom of conflicting feelings and realities.  I was surprised at how poetic it was, this pure stream of consciousness, like an open vein, pulling me back to that moment in my life; it says so much about what it’s like to be eighteen. It’s rather long so I’ll just included a short excerpt here (you can click on the link at the end if you want to read the whole thing).

(from my handwritten journal, 1990)

Tension fills me like a silence of songbirds, like a quenched fire without smoke, a frozen river that doesn’t reflect the sky.  I am a tiredness that refuses to sleep, a headache that pulls my face tight.  The skin over my ears burns.  My body feels hot beneath my sparse clothing.  I am an unhealthy flush, like a sunburn.  I want to be angry at something specific.  Taut with frustration, I have no motivation to drink from like a clear pool.  Surrounded by the old, the typical, the faceless people, I hold onto my youth, a stubborn child.  I clutch to me my uniqueness, my unpredictable self, my wild and soaring absolute sense of being young.  I have heard the stories, knowing history repeats itself in me.  My anger points a thin finger of rage, throws itself ceaselessly at my father.  Because I must, I restrain it, rein it in like a frothing horse.   It never reaches him, except a few snowflakes of sullenness that he cannot map, cannot piece together coherently.  To him I must be a puzzle with more missing pieces that he can count.  He is sure he knows me much more than he ever will.  There is so much he doesn’t know. 

I have drawn myself away into some new place.  I change my environment as often as I can.  I cram it full of other youthful, misunderstood, wild-eyed beasts and drown myself in a sea of sympathy.  I miss them today.  I cannot move from the lackluster drag of this week, except in spurts of fleeting contact with one or two of them.  The telephone is a vital vein.  It links us, stretching between the formal and the responsible; it ties invisible threads to our dazzling clouds of secrecy and we can, if we keep our voices low, share through sound.  I lock out the rest of the house with music.  It is funny that it was my father who gave me the very ghetto-blaster I use to hide from him.

I have a lot to be grateful for.  I am a source and receiver of luck, I am whole and symmetrical physically, while spiritually I am like a kaleidoscope vision, fragmented but held together by some bright, straining confident light.  And colour.  Thank God my life is always full of colour.  I live on colour when emotions fail me.  In my unease I try to arrange it on pieces of paper like art, and stare hungrily at it as it floats between my waking and dreaming. 

I run into the night to be alone.  I have to go where my father cannot go.  I cannot sleep while he is still awake.  I sense the world going to sleep around me, while my tension holds, a strong wire. 

…More…

         Sunken Light

         Brushstroke Wind

         Looking Through

         Sepia Flow

         Dorado

         Lunar Diversion

         A Sky Like Cotton

         Rayed Nebula

         Dark Heart

         Night Ceiling

         Easy Turn of Light

         Peaks of Air

         Dusk on the Wing

For more Magpie pictures (Photos by Mark Harrison), visit http://www.magpiedesign.net/

Links to other Thursday Thirteens!

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The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It’s easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!
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Early for Poetry Thursday. A few oldies this week. The first seemed particularly appropriate since it describes the main thing I’m looking at and absorbed by this month, doing the novel writing thing. The others were all jotted down at my writing desk where I used to live in Nepean when I was a teenager. My window looked out over the park – the trees lining the ravine, the baseball diamond and soccer field – and it had a perfect view of the sunset, through all the seasons.

A funny thing about this place
you crumple up one piece of paper
and another appears
Your pen never runs out of ink
although it can get tired, winding down
like the final tired strains of a music box
You can write a straight line
even with your eyes closed
Sounds skitter over you,
but you ride them like the crest of a wave,
or let them fall over you, a dry rain,
and your own voice is silent,
a ghost in the mind,
leaving black tracks like bird’s feet.

I think there’s a hole in the kitchen screen
somehow a moth got in, and some
small green and black bugs that also fly
I think there is a hole in my brain
because I can’t seem to be logical
and I keep staying up late
which doesn’t do me any good.
It’s just that the radio’s on
and I can’t seem to turn it off.

The curtain billows like a sail
in the lukewarm Indian summer wind
while beyond the screen
the sunset blazes a line of clouds
white, like the core of a candle flame
and the air is fresh and free.
If only the Earth could breathe of it
and heal itself.

It was sunny and happy for two days, but the rain is back. The grey always comes back. My favourite shirt is red, in defiance. I have nothing left to hold on to; every branch either bends too far or breaks outright.

Listening
 to snowflakes fall and melt
 on a warm car windshield
Like
  watching soap bubbles pop.

p.s. The war is over.
short war.
(As if.)

- T.H.

1: Freefall to Operman, some time in the 21st century
2: June 27, 12:45 a.m. 1990
3: Oct. 6 1990
4: early 1990’s
5. early 1990’s