lentilsandsoup

Prompt from promptlywriting

Mon, 21 Aug 2006 23:46:12 GMT

The Ties that Bind

Do you really have any idea what you’re talking about? I sit here, wondering when you’ll shut the fuck up with your stuck-up rants, though I know you’ll be gone in your world of the high-and-mighty for at least another half an hour.

You think that there are ties that bind us all together, because we work in a call centre together. I work here so I can pay my rent, not so I can be your buddy. No-one is listening to your crappy speeches, your pathetic musings; you are not going to start a revolution.

Nobody cares, do you realise that? No one gives a fuck anymore. Our hands are bloody. We’re fighting it out for fistfuls of notes, greedy to consume. Let’s climb the social ladder in this shitty company. Promotion! The grass is greener.

You say that you bear responsibility for us all in this office, but we know better. Really, you couldn’t give a fuck whether we live or die, so long as you get your manager of the year or whatever shit they give to you bigwigs in addition to your ever-mounting salary. We’re the key to your success buddy.

Motivation. Well, fuck that. We sell over the phones. We are the bane of a nation sick to death of being called about double glazing over their family dinner, and there you are with a smile and a speech trying to make us feel like we’re making a difference.

Like fuck we are. You try saying that with a smile when another office interrupts your lavish family dinner with your stuck up bitch of a wife and snotty kids with calls about triple or quadruple fuckin’ glazing. No thank you.

The only ties here are the ones around our necks.

Eh, I'm not that keen on it. I could do better.Just messed around for about twenty minutes at most.

Dictionary

Fri, 18 Aug 2006 12:53:04 GMT

trauma noun (traumas or traumata) 1 medicine a a physical injury or wound; b a state of shock that is sometimes brought on by a physical injury or wound and which manifests in a lowering of the body's temperature, confusion, etc.
2 psychiatry & psychoanal a an emotional shock that may have long-term effects on behaviour or personality; b the condition that can result from this type of emotional shock.
3 loosely any event, situation, etc that is stressful, emotionally upsetting, etc.
ETYMOLOGY: 17c: Greek, meaning 'wound'.

You retch regret and ignorance. You don't understand. You're shaking but you don't know why. You're upset and you don't know why, but you feel you should. You want to hit something... and perhaps you do know why but you won't say, not to anyone, because they'll hate you, they won't believe you, they won't care. You're just stupid. Stupid stupid stupid.

shock¹ noun 1 a strong emotional disturbance, especially a feeling of extreme surprise, outrage or disgust.
2 a cause of such a disturbance.
3 a heavy and violent impact, originally of charging warriors.
4 a clashing together.
5 outrage at something regarded as improper or wrong.
6 (in full electric shock) a convulsion caused by the passage of an electric current through the body.
7 a heavy jarring blow or impact.
8 medicine a a state of extreme physical collapse, characterized by lowered blood pressure and body temperature and a sweaty pallid skin, occurring as a result of haemorrhage, coronary thrombosis, severe burns, dehydration, drug overdose, extreme emotional disturbance, etc; b Scots a stroke.
ETYMOLOGY: 16c: from French choc, from choquer.

You're disgusting. The smell, why can't you get rid of the smell? You're filthy, you're unclean, obscene. You stumble. You're not sure where to go next. You keep asking yourself, what just happened? Is that what I think it is? But things like that happen to other people, not you. They're stories you hear in the news, and you feel outrage, but you're safe. It'll never happen to you.

denial noun 1 an act of denying or declaring something not to be true.
2 an act of refusing something to someone.
3 an act of refusing to acknowledge connections with somebody or something.
in denial psychol suffering from a condition which involves the suppression, usually at a subconscious level, of an emotion, truth, etc that is particularly painful or difficult to come to terms with • After the death of his mother, he was in denial for months.
ETYMOLOGY: 16c: from deny.

But of course you're alright! Nothing to worry about, it'll all pass. No need to regail everyone else with the sordid details, they don't even have to know anything happened. Not that you'd be believed, of course, but they don't really need to know. You don't need to be called a liar. You're happy, you're content, you're OK. A-OK in fact. Better than OK. Fantastic. Ecstatic. Hollow.

cry verb (cries, cried, crying) 1 intrans to shed tears; to weep.
2 intrans (often cry out) to shout or shriek, eg in pain or fear, or to get attention or help.
3 (often cry out) to exclaim (words, news, etc).
4 intrans said of an animal or bird: to utter its characteristic noise.
5 old use said of a street trader: to proclaim (one's wares).
ETYMOLOGY: 13c: from French crier, from Latin quiritare to wail.

The tears won't stop. Your eyes are red as you grip your hair in desperation. Just please, someone help? Help me get out of this? Cry, cry, cry, cry, crybaby. You can't stop, you won't stop? You want to scream. It's not your fault, or is it? Are you to blame? Send help.

admit verb (admitted, admitting) 1 tr & intr to agree to the truth of something, especially unwillingly.
2 (also admit to something) to agree that one is responsible for (a deed or action, especially an offence or wrongdoing).
3 to allow someone to enter.
4 (also admit someone to something) to allow them to take part in it; to accept them as a member or patient of it.
5 formal to have the capacity for something • a room admitting forty people.
ETYMOLOGY: 15c: from Latin admittere.

If you tell people, what will they say? When you admit it, will you get their support? Will they become tired of you? Set a time limit on your recovery and scold you for not reaching it? You're a joke. Is that what they'll say?

assault noun 1 a violent physical or verbal attack.
2 law any act that causes someone to feel physically threatened, which is considered reckless or intentional, and which need not necessarily involve any physical contact, eg pointing a gun at someone. Compare assault and battery.
3 euphemistic rape or attempted rape. verb (assaulted, assaulting) to make an assault on someone or something.
ETYMOLOGY: 13c: from French asaut, from Latin saltus leap.

It happened. It didn't last very long. It wasn't overly violent. There were no bruises. It happened. He exists, you exist, and this is what happened. It hurt for a very long time. It will never happen again. You won't let it. Next time, it won't be you crying. Next time, if there's a next time, you'll make sure the asshole will lose any reproductive abilities. You'll ensure that he'll feel pain and that he'll never try that shit again.

hate verb (hated, hating) 1 to dislike intensely.
2 colloq to regret • I hate to bother you.
noun 1 an intense dislike.
2 (especially pet hate) colloq an intensely disliked person or thing.
3 as adj expressing or conveying hatred • hate mail. hatable or hateable adj. hate someone's guts colloq to dislike them intensely.
ETYMOLOGY: Anglo-Saxon hatian.

You're stronger than you seem, and you are not alone.

Experimentation

Tue, 15 Aug 2006 16:43:21 GMT

The Narrator
(that was the title I'd started out with anyway...as for whether it's apt now, I don't know

I breathe thoughts and inhale language.

I don’t always know what to make of myself, or what I think. Sometimes I have difficulty writing it all down… my mind travels quicker than I write, so fast, so quickly, at an unintelligible speed… until they all become one sentence, one word, one letter and I don’t even know what I was trying to say anyway.

Nonsensical? Intelligible? Who knows? I never remember my own tales. Never recorded, never spoken, never told. Meaningless.

Other tales are easier to tell.

Snaking around grammar and spelling, hiding in the houses of full stops and apostrophes, making you wait. Hidden, apparent, flitting past the corner of your eye while you try to catch it. It lives here, between the lines.

Meaning. My words? Flat. Empty. Wordless.

What are words without meaning?

Meaning without words? A slight of hand, a tug of the sleeve, a sardonic smile… a picture painted with your fingers.

So I watch. I listen. I read. I see. I take meaning, and create my own. Or attempt to. It doesn’t always work. How mean. How average. Apt for one who is scenery.
I could write the stories of your lives, because I have none of my own. I could create a spider’s web of the strings tying us together and watch droplets stick to it. I could be a thousand people, but here I am. I am I, I am me, I am myself, no one else, not you, not her, not he, not they, but I.

DELIVER ME FROM SWEDISH FURNITURE

Sat, 29 Jul 2006 15:44:45 GMT

This is your life. Good to the last drop. Doesn't get any better than this. This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.
Tyler Durden, Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

Let's not beat around the bush.

I'm an adolescent, I'm meant to be cynical and moody about life. I'm meant to feel that quotes like the above 'speak volumes' about my current state.

After all, at 17 years old, I still care enough to feel indignant about the possibility that I am not 'a beautiful and unique snowflake'.

I used to be a fairly positive, and naive person. While things weren't clear to me, I could seperate things into black and white, good and bad. When you discover the grey areas, you become confused. When you go beyond grey and realise that there's a whole spectrum of colours you've been ignoring all along... that's a bit of a mindfuck.

Such is life. I'm not the first to say this, and this entire entry is pretty much cliched bullshit, even this sentence. Nevermind.

I met up with an old friend today, who knows about how much writing meant to me, once upon a time. I commented that I wished writing could come as easily to me as it did then; i.e that I would stop writing shit and start writing something good.

I thought maybe I'd 'lost' something, some sort of talent, some sort of ability.

I think perhaps I expect all of this to come easily to me because I've been told that I'm 'good with words'. That I'm a word person, that I'm creative.

When I started karate, I took it for granted that I'd be shit. I still feel like a beginner, and I've been training for just under a year now. I suppose that seems a long time, but it's not really considering that I have the rest of my life to learn these techniques.

The problem with my approach to writing is that I want it to happen NOW. Without experimentation, without trying at all; I expect that story to appear RIGHT THIS MINUTE a la how J.K Rowling once said in an interview that Harry Potter just 'walked' into her head.

It's time I stopped seeing it as being so black and white - that I can or can't write. I may still see myself as a beginner in martial arts, but I can also see myself getting better, so why not make it the same for my writing? It's just another technique that I have the rest of my life to learn, after all.

After all, you can't bore people forever.

Papier Mache

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 22:09:20 GMT

When I made papier mache we used to use a balloon, blow it up and cover it in newspaper and sticky PVA glue which went all over our hands and went everywhere, sometimes even ended up in our hair… and then we’d pop the balloon inside. The shape was hollow.

Hollow. A vessel for nothing; emptiness, and yet not quite. You’re muffled, you’re strangled and you don’t understand why you can’t express this whole array of emotions that should be stirring inside of you. Sometimes you can’t help but wonder if your insides will just shrivel up like a popped balloon; truly making you naught but a walking vessel.

Eventually

Mon, 10 Jul 2006 22:53:30 GMT

Eventually would come, soon, she supposed.

When that would be, she didn't know, but it would be worth it, eventually. That would be nice. Eventuality was something to look forward to.

She was getting old now, and there was nothing else to look forward to. While she wasn't sure what would come eventually, she was sure that it would be better than the present; where walls enclosed her in one room with few visitors. Though it could be worse. The curtains were rather nice, after all.

Something that had long died within her would have yearned for eventually, in the days when you just stretched as far as you could to reach the future before anyone else. Attempts to clasp it in your hand were futile until one day, you succeeded. Then followed disappointment.

Perhaps, she thought, just waiting for eventually to come would make its arrival somehow better. She was calm, she was patient and she could wait. This way, no one was making eventually more than it seemed. No one told you how magical it was, no one told you how fantastic you'd feel and no one would make mountains out of molehills, as people so commonly do.

The long afternoons stretched on as she mused, awaiting eventually but not expecting it anytime soon. It'd be a nice surprise that way.

Bah. I don't like it.

Unfinished

Tue, 30 May 2006 09:13:14 GMT

Response to a word : Oops! (Yeah, I'm not sure why this came from that either)

I’m not particularly enjoying your presence here right now. Frankly, I’d much rather if you fucked off somewhere else. I don’t care for you or your bullshit morals, the ones you happen to be spouting to your company. It seems that you’re to become a youth leader, hence the celebratory meal. Murphy’s Law dictates that you should choose the one place I work.

However, I can see that you’re looking nervous. Your leg twitches, your hands are clenched, and your laughs are high-pitched : unnatural. Are you scared? Good. You used to fucking terrify me every time I saw you.

Does it bother you that I’m here? I hope so, because your presence aggravates the fuck out of me. Naturally, I’ll smile and be nothing less than my employee handbook dictates me to be, guaranteeing me a big fat tip from your blissfully ignorant pastor.

Took about... 10 minutes? Possibly less.

As you can see, I'm still warming up. This is unfinished, and is likely to remain so.

Paranoia

Sun, 28 May 2006 21:37:03 GMT

When your answers are just one or two words, I worry. Silence. Read between the lines. What are you thinking? Why are you turning away? What’s wrong? I can’t help asking questions when you’re saying nothing. Self-conscious, selfish. It’s all about me, because I just want you to talk, re-affirm my self worth. Your approval is pivotal. I need you. Help me to understand what’s going on inside your mind. Do you hate me? Call me paranoid. You hate me don’t you? Why? What have I done wrong? It must be me, it always is. Are you talking about me behind my back? Tell me what’s wrong!

One word prompt, 5 minutes

Hm. A little disappointed that I didn't hold out for as long as I'd wanted. I'm aiming to be able to write for about ten, fifteen minutes.

Fri, 26 May 2006 10:23:37 GMT

TEST