Mark and I celebrate Valentine's Day week every year as a kind of anniversary...

...in part due to a Valentine's Day/anti-Valentine's Day party that a friend hosted 9 years ago. So, yes, we've been together for 9 years.

This picture, which is a picture of a picture in one of our photo albums, is from summer 2001. We're in Washington, DC, of course, and we've just finished playing a softball game and have gone up to the Post Pub for "Office Hours," a regular Wednesday happy hour hang out and talk about poetry. I'm doing a kind of fake swoon, and Mark looks like he usually looks when he's thinking or about to say something funny and/or biting. I love this picture because look like ourselves, and we're in the middle of a very ordinary activity during an ordinary week that was all very happy.

Various New Years Past

1990: I was living in Sedgwick, Maine, and I spend the evening with with my mom and my best friend from middle school, Jocelyn. We stayed up until midnight and then my friend and I gave each other a New Year hug. We joked that it was an "old lady" hug. I don't know why.

1999: Crashed a debutante ball in Nashville. I wore black leather pants and a gray cashmere sweater. Then we went to some club afterwards. The next day, we went over to a friend's house to watch football. At the time, I didn't understand that New Year's Day is a football day. I became very frustrated and bored when I realized that I was going to have to sit around and watch football all day with people I barely knew. I ended up walking to a donut shop down the road just to have something to do.

2000: I was with my Dad in an apartment in Gaithersburg, MD. We'd just returned from Ireland--I'd gone to take care of my sisters while Dad and Mary attended a funeral. Dad and I came home early for reasons I don't remember, and Mary and my sisters stayed through the New Year. I was very, very sick, and spent a feverish night sleeping in my sisters' huge crib. I think that the both of us were too sick to properly celebrate my Dad's 50th birthday on New Year's Day.

2001-2005: Many happy New Year's Eves with Mark

2006: New Year's Eve bash at Dan's house in DC. Most of my friends were there, all in one place, and we toasted to everything, including several obscure colors.

2007: At the Shangri La hotel in Oman.

Happy Birthday to Mark!

who is my favorite and best.

And happy midsommar. I don't have flowers for my pillow, but I have 7 different kinds of herbs and aromatics. I don't believe in marriage, but I think it will all mean something to someone somewhere.

Mark is my favorite because he is not passive aggressive.

He is also the best because he likes animals and watching animal shows with me.

Also, he has a wide-ranging taste in music, and understands that while I like avant-garde jazz very much, I don't always want to listen to Sun Ra at the end of the day.

Mark does not make fun of me for spending an hour in the bathroom applying flash eyelashes which is about how long it takes me--I can never get the knack of those things!

He supported my decision to not look for a regular office job when I moved here, even though I was worried that I wouldn't be able to piece together an income from freelance work. Several times, when I interviewed for perfectly decent full-time jobs that I didn't want, he supported my decision not to take them.

Also, Mark encourages nap-taking in the middle of the day, especially when I've been up late but had to work early.

Quite a few people get to my blog with searches involving teeth and dental floss.

Dear readers, you know that I don't usually weigh in on most poetry conversations going on in blogland, but the comment stream over on Jessica's blog is interesting, so I'll send you there. I think can define flarf fairly precisely, but before I do, I will talk about why Mark is so great.

Mark is so great because he is supportive--he's always telling me that I'm great. This would be boring and dull if he didn't mean it, but I he does. And by telling me I'm great I don't mean that he's always saying I'm intelligent and creative and beautiful and that he loves me, though he says all of those things. I mean that he says them and acts like he believes them, which he does.

It's good to be with someone that wants to be around me because we have shared interests, not because it's an obligation. So Mark and I talk about poetry, and animals, and food, and travel, and music, and exercise, and psychology, and other things with each other because we like these things and we like each other.

Now, as I said, I think I can define flarf fairly precisely:

1. It started in New York, more or less.
2. It is process oriented, and in a tradition of process-oriented work that includes Cage and MacLow.
2. The procedural mechanisms it uses are are different than the ones anyone could have used before, because Google and the internet have not always existed.
3. The source content is also, of course, very different.
4. It is satirical, often.
5. It also shares some concerns with Language Poetry (and procedural texts). There's an interest in how structures create discourses, how manipulation of structure can help change discourses, or at least make us aware of them.