I don’t know if I am the only one but…

I am a different person when I am doing something that I consider for me only. Take, for example, my afternoon walks (which are actually morning walks that get postponed to the afternoon because of my fun new work schedule.)

Where I normally enjoy being with other people, no one may come with me.

Where I normally need peace and quiet, there is nothing like Indochine (French New Wave).)

Despite the fact that I am a pushover and will do anything for anyone if asked nicely I couldn’t help but hate one of my neighbors for asking me to help look for her lost Pekingese. I mean really, the woman is handicapped, but all I wanted was to run away from her.

I just love that time when it gets so quiet that my head gets full of its own noise.

And of course the ring around my apartment building is no warren walk, labyrinth meditation or canyon hike—but I am clinging desperately to that solitude that settles around four.

I love that after a weekend of rain Monday’s air smells like dirt and too ripe flowers.

Or maybe I just love a weekend of rain.

A summer time (bummer time) update, and the pros and cons of breathing life back into this shabby, pubescent blog:

A summer time (bummer time) update, and the pros and cons of breathing life back into this shabby, pubescent blog:

It’s already half past July, and I can’t say that I’ve accomplished nearly as much as this summer had originally promised. It’s the heat. I must have a bit of Siberia in me because these long stretches of up and above ninety degrees keep renewing old ailments like tension headaches, swollen glands and the wretched lazy-bones.

John and I finally (as of June) killed the cable-bug. That’s right, I said no more to the Top Model epidemic, fuck off to the evening news. And now, when I feel lazy, instead of watching HGTV or Law and Order reruns, I just sit and do nothing until I get too bored of it. I feel like I’ve been cured of some terrible brain draining malady. I feel like I’ve exorcised some long toothed, life sucking, demon right from myself… but also, thank goodness for Netflix. I’ve rediscovered my love of Quincy M.D. & Columbo who were each miles more clever than Gil Grissom, Lenny Briscoe and Jack McCoy. (Well…maybe not Jack.) I’ve also been wolfing down on the BBC’s Planet Earth series.

So while cable might just be the devil, I haven’t given up all mindlessness, yet.

As far as making art goes this summer: nothing. A couple of handmade cards went out, and I did a few watercolors attempting to capture the ferociousness of the waves John and I saw in Newport in March. As people have already pointed out to me, I haven’t finished my hypertext: Matchbooks. At first that was because it took us a month to have our internet reinstalled, (don’t ask me to endorse AT&T, I’d like to send them a box of dried vomit,) but now it’s just that I can’t find that momentum that I had at the end of the semester. Don’t get me wrong, I needed a vacation, my heart and soul were crashing and burning by the end of finals and portfolios and my self portrait for Artist’s Books; but that free falling momentum is just … better than anything. Besides, nothing makes making art more lack luster than the ever pressing art school search. My mother called me early yesterday morning to discuss it some more—she has every right to want to talk about it since my Dad is going to help me financially, but I’m drained. Every school close by doesn’t have enough of what I want, and all the good schools are in big cities, which might kill me. If anyone has any input on Hartford Art, Mass Art, Moore or LACFA—let me hear it.

I did make a double sided 4X7’ painting for work—has everyone seen the new logo?

I’m on a war path with them right now, I suppose I’ll never be happy there, and I should just suck it up and find another job, but I’m so close to finishing at Tunxis and I might be moving as far as Philadelphia in January so I feel like I should just hold out. However, I had two options for the summer: take three summer courses and graduate, OR take no summer classes and open my availability for my supervisor in exchange for a promotion. So I have dedicated my summer to my mindless job, and they seem to be reneging on the promotion because I had a family emergence and called out in June. I should have known by now that they were just going to screw me because they’ve been doing it for years now. I think they are mad because when I first started working there I was just hanging around and doing nothing, and then one day I just decided that I needed to go back to school, and now they can’t have all my time. It’s not like I get choice hours anyways, when they know that I need them I get 17 and when they know that I am working on Midterms or Finals or something else then give me 37. Yuck.

I did however make it to Philadelphia on my one day off last week. My sister and I visited with our grandparents in Port Richmond and then saw Regina Spektor and Ani DiFranco at the Mann Center in Center City. It was truly amazing. I don’t usually do big venues, (not being a people person and all,) but this was huge, and we had orchestra seats just left of center!! Amazing. Amazing. Amazing.

Now I’m working on trying to digest Al Gore’s Assault on Reason and The Romantic Manifesto by Ayn Rand not to mention the stack of fiction I accumulated over the spring semester. (No more books…I am not allowed to purchase any more books until I finish what is on my plate.)

I’m working on trying to get out to Seattle to visit my Aunt and Uncle who are just vacationing out there, and my cousins that live out there. But, we will see.

I also need a shot of Newport but John just got a new job, so it doesn’t look like we’ll be able to take our annual first week in August romp—good thing we went in March.

Oh well. Lots of work to do. And I need to start writing. Lots of love for everyone.

First Workshop

What a great class tonight.  I really enjoyed workshopping everyone tonight.  After going over Jacqueline and Lonnie’s stories I already know what I need to fix about my first story.  Getting to work…now.

(Thanks for the idea, Steve.)

The idea of revising a small group of sentences seems easy, but it truthfully isn’t.  I had the foundation.  I had a wonderful suggestion.  But how should I put it together.  Go back a few posts and tack this on:

A Revision: 
“Oh, she is a book of oxymorons. She is a bundle of contradictions. She is every dream you ever forgot to dream big.”

 She is a book of oxymorons.  She is a chunky sixth-grade collage:  all paste and jagged negative space, rippled and buckled.  She is all of those scraps of papers that she collects but can’t fit together in a cohesive image.  She is every dream you ever forgot to dream big. 

The Process

I am having trouble executing the Alzheimer story I talked about in class last week.  Maybe it was too bold of an idea to spit out.  It is a wonderful idea.  It’s very comforting to think of the disease this way—but also, too disturbing.  Plus I don’t really have all of the elements that I need in the story.

 

I have a great hook, and conflict, and absolutely there is something that Jean wants:  Jean wants to be reunited with Bill, and this means Jean wants to die.

But there isn’t a resolution yet.  There isn’t a flow yet. 

 

I guess the idea needs to incubate a while longer. 

the same meal

“It smells like the inside of a fucking church?  How much did you spend on this?”

At work the Egyptian Sandalwood Soy Candle did not smell like incense and pew polish and old ladies, it was lovely actually.  But now I had to agree, it did smell like an f’ing church.  She was always right, just never in enough time to stop me from doing something stupid like spending twenty bucks for essence of church pew.  I wondered if now would be a good time to explain the overdraft charges my bank was about to slap me with because I didn’t check on my paycheck before I bought dinner last night.  Probably not.  Now was not often a good time. 

Later, however, was fabulous. 

She stretched her fingers out and rocketed her hand toward the carton I’d just taken the candle out of. 

            She made a chain of hmmm, hmmmrummph noises before looking up at me.

            “You’re an idiot, honey.”  She tacks on honey as if it softens the blow.  But she has always thought of me as an idiot.  An idiot for dropping out of school, an idiot for letting my boss shove me around, an idiot for not getting those kids fired from work for sexual harassment, an idiot for bringing home chapel scented soy candles, and an idiot (most of all) for loving her.

            She could never just accept it.  She was always asking questions like “How can you find me beautiful?  How can you bare to look at me?  Aren’t you bored of me yet?”

            The truth is I am terribly bored.  Bored out of my mind with her.  I don’t just fake my orgasms anymore, I fake wanting to have sex.  I pretend I’m interested in her conversation.  I pretend that every time she makes chicken parmesan is just as exciting as the day I learned she could cook—that one meal.    

            It is an ugly fact, but every day with her is like trying to enjoy the same meal day after day after… Eventually you become numb to the spices, the texture is all the same, the flavor, the heat, and the smells are nothing.  Sometimes I find it hard to swallow.  But maybe that means I really do love her since it would break my heart to break her heart by telling her “Yes, Baby, you are right.  I can’t stand the sight of your tits in that sagging red sweater again.  I’m bored of your artsy-fartsy crap.  I can’t bare to sleep with you anymore, because I’m bored.”

            Maybe I’m a coward or maybe I’m not really a lesbian:  but no.  I think I really do love the monotonous, monochrome monopoly she has on me and my idiotness.

observation

I’ve noticed that I love to list when I write. Lists sound so good to me. But it is getting a little stale. Don’t you think?

character sketch

She chews on marker caps but never gets any ink on her face. She draws in the margins and in sketch books, but she never shows anyone anything she’s done. She loves to rip up magazines and newspapers and paste them into collages and poems that look like ransom notes. Mostly she writes—she types, she jots, she scratches, she pontificates—her words on paper—but she hates sharing. But she wants to be a writer, do you find this odd?

She is plain, but her insides scream to be impulsive, erratic, and bold. She chooses to smell like flowers and “spring rain” but she wishes that she smelt citrusy. She wishes that when she walked past you a light odor of tangerines or grapefruits would curl up your nostrils. She chooses to lie in bed and read or dream—but she’d rather be off on some wild adventure; imagine: sunglasses and scarves and convertibles, blaring the Kinks of Indochine. She wishes that she had novel thoughts and when she thought out loud it made people say: where the fuck in the world has this girl been hiding our whole lives.

She wants to see the world—but she is scared of strangers. “Foreigners are really strange.” (Sometimes her thoughts don’t make sense.) She wants to see the Mayan ruins; she wants to go to Chichanietsa—even if she can’t spell it. She wants to make love in hotels in the City O’ Love: Paris. She loves Paris. She wants to go to smelly sooty London, England. She wants to drive through the English countryside. She wants to go to Germany, if only to shop for outrageous punk clothes she’d never ever wear. (More dragon printed stockings perhaps.) She wants to go to Italy to see the art, and the city in the water—Venice. She wants to go to Venice beach California. Hike through Red Wood National Park; San Francisco! Yosemite! The Jersey Shore! She wants to drive around the country someday, perhaps when cars don’t run on gas.

She loves to sing and dance, but not often when people are looking, even her lover. She has such a sweet tooth for female folk singers (a la Joni Mitchell or Ani DiFranco or Shelia Nichols) for crazy Canadian “what the f is this” music, for Spanish guitar, for any song that is about running away from the cops, or has more speaking then singing running through it. She especially loves to sing in French.

She hates things about herself, which most people find revolting, so rarely does she let these people know exactly what is going on in her head. It’s always about being sweet and innocent—sometimes she acts like such a kid…

She used to talk to a younger version of herself that she would imagine sitting in the corner of whichever room she was passing through. She used to consol that child when she felt her own heart breaking. But imagining small versions of herself got her in trouble. Imagining dead geese under her bed—even more so.

Her face is splatter with freckles, but you can only see them close up. Her face turns the color of beets when people catch her off guard, or when she speaks with out thinking. Her face is a round moon with a dull glow—it lets all the other stars shine. And her gloriously plump body is even more difficult to find.

Oh, she is a book of oxymorons. She is a bundle of contradictions. She is every dream you ever forgot to dream big.

This Space, I am

There is just mounds and mounds of paper, enough paper from enough trees to make enough forest to hide all of these dirty secrets—all of this dirt. 

Drawers half open with cords and chargers falling onto the floor, books, sketch pads, shredded up materials for collage work, paint brushes, ink bottles, puzzle pieces, dictionaries, thesauri lay scatter about as if this space were actually in use.  It appears like someone were creating in here, living in here, but the air feels heavy and dead—despite the apparent nip. 

Here, from corner A to corner B a line is drawn, and we are meant to feel like we are in a new room but there are no walls dividing the two spaces.  Now the heaving mess is glossy books of famous paintings, empty plastic cups, mail, controllers, DVD boxes—this mess is angry, this mess is violent, hard, plastic, it’s waste. 

There is never enough light in these rooms, despite the continual hum of a half dozen energy efficient bulbs, the room is a cavern.  There are enough windows to act as a trap for the sun, but she quietly evades them, never venturing near this side of the building.  Cold and dark perpetuate from this mess all day. 

I can remember when my bookshelves were first filled with all of my freshly unpacked, beloved books:  my babies.  I can remember when filing cabinets served purposes.  I can remember when cups and plates never left the kitchen.  Now, I live in this space:  a clash of creative constipation and virtually endless depression.  I live in these rooms and hate them more and more everyday.  I hate them just as I hate each of my neighbors, just for existing.  Just for not being warm and sunny and creative.  Just for not being silent.  Just for taking up space. 

Cliches about Time

Once Upon a Timex

Once up on a clock there were twelve numbers and sixty something little lines, and a name that was forgotten and old and it’s only distinguishable letter was an ‘x.’  The clock’s lower lip was constantly trembling in such a way that it would make anyone who looked upon it sad that time was passing so quickly and uncontrollably; a lost moment there, an hour spent that could never be recovered.  Time wasted, time that flew by, time that went out the window.  Time was in control and this clock was a sad minion of its evil workings.