Catvibe Creative

Vesper tagged me and so I’ll cooperate, but in order not to perpetuate this any further than it already has to be, I’m not tagging you! But feel free to just do it if you want to. No strings attached.

Four Movies You Can See Over and Over

Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet
The Wizard of Oz
Jesus Christ Superstar (please stop laughing, it was imprinted on me when I was 12, I can’t help it!)
Passion in the Desert (it’s about a man and a leopard and their cross species love)

Four Places You Have Lived

San Francisco Bay Area, CA
Greater San Diego, CA
Santa Cruz, CA
Asheville, NC

Four TV Shows You Love(d) to Watch

American Idol
Ugly Betty
Gray’s Anatomy
Six Feet Under

Four Places You Have Been on a Vacation

Europe
Thailand
India
Nepal

Four of your favorite foods

Berries off the vine
Peas in the pod, off the vine
Grilled salmon
Maple syrup

Four Websites You Visit Daily

Facebook
Google
Amazon
As many blogs as I can

Four Places You Would Rather Be
(Sorry Vesper, for ripping you off here, but these top three are also true for me)

The seaside
Manhattan
At home, writing
Swimming in a fresh clear lake

Four Things You Hope to Do Before You Die

Successfully write and publish a novel
Live abroad
Have a wonderful love affair that works well and nourishes us both
See the USA successfully adopt a compassionate system of National Health Care

Four Novels You Wish You Were Reading for the First Time

My own yet to be written novel
My blogging friends’ soon to be released novels
Anything not read yet, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht (due out in 2010, the short story in The New Yorker a few weeks ago was awesome, yes, once again it relates to cats).

Dear Friends, it is now time to catch up on the blogging buzzes flying by my ears of late, and which I have avoided participating in until now so that I could have time to clear the hillside of brambles and burn them in a great fire. So that I could go off and dance the kitchen dance, the garden dance, the groceries dance, and the improvisational music dance with my lovely new dance partner (aka boyfriend, yes that’s right), I avoided blogging. It’s not that I have abandoned all of my wonderful invisible friends, it’s just that I have now added one very important friend made of flesh and blood who I am suddenly spending a great deal of time with and have decided that it is actually MORE IMPORTANT THAN BLOGGING. But I digress. I will not abandon you, but I will try to confine my blogging and schedule it in, rather than schedule life around blogging. If I visit you less, I know you will understand.

So to the task at hand, let us get to our chores. Thank you K, for tagging me for my influences. I now have to admit that I am not much of a book reader. It is not that I don’t enjoy reading, or that I don’t read, but I never seem to have time for reading much. Also, I read very slowly it seems. For instance, my mom and sons went with me to Hawaii a few years ago, and it rained a lot so we were forced to stay in. My mom read six books in the time it took me to read one. It is pitiful. However, I have watched a thousand movies to her every one. So movie dialogue has influenced me. And as a singer of just about every genre, I have learned a whole lot of lyrics (most of which I have now forgotten to make room for more), so lyric poetry has influenced me. And there are a few writers that I swallow whole, and they have influenced me. So here we go, I’m now going to really break the rules. Are there rules? My 25 influences.

1) ee cummings-somewhere i have never traveled.
2) Bernie Taupin-Burn Down the Mission (Elton’s cohort you know?)
3) Franco Zefferelli-Movie maker, Romeo and Juliet, Brother Sun Sister Moon, Jesus of Nazereth.
4) Rumi via Coleman Barks
5) Khalil Gibran
6) Gabriel Garcia Marquez (all of his books, especially 100 Years of Solitude)
7) The King James Bible
Joe Frank (Work in Progress radio series)
9) David Sedaris (This American Life writer)
10) Carl Jung
11) Joseph Campbell
12) Mary Stewart (The Arthurian series)
13) Joni Mitchell (the album called Blue)
14) Clarissa Pinkola Estes (Running with Wolves)
15) L. Frank Baum
16) C. S. Lewis
18) William Shakespeare
19) Petrarch
20) Dr. Suess!!
21) Anonymous (an amazing lyricist, I highly recommend him/her)
22) D.H. Lawrence
23) Mary Oliver
24) Dorothy Parker
25) and like Sarah Hina said, YOU! I have made great improvements as a writer by watching all of you great writers and entering into this friendly circle with you. Thank you all for the dance!

And-added late, I just realized that I TOTALLY FORGOT to put down one of the most important influences and I simply can’t change out any of the ones already there so:
26) Hildegard of Bingen-Her entire life and body of works both written and musical and all of her poems which were, as she said ‘Music from the spheres’. I’m pretty sure she was an INFP.

I now tag these three:
Jason Evans of The Clarity of Night (I know you are resisting, but now that I’ve broken the rules, I suggest you give it a try, it’s fun!)
Linda Socha of Psyche Connections
Deb (aka Qualcosa di Bello) of Piacere and Write Away