A peace of mind...

Bone Machine

2012-02-06T08:09:00.000-08:00

Not a cloud in the sky. Scattering light waves are uninterrupted trailing across my window framed picture of city and blue. There's still little else in the city that seems as worth looking at as the sky. When I was on the ocean in Greece I remember looking out at the horizon and for a split second the ocean and sky merged into one thing and suddenly there was nothing and everything all at once. I forgot time and space and I was just in that infinite stretch. I don't know if Greece changed me or that single moment but I remember time felt very different after that trip. Time felt like I was waiting to get back to something rather than to something in the future. Maybe that's just how things change when you aren't a kid any more. Those freudian yearnings that went untapped up until that point are at once solidified and ready to haunt you into adulthood. New York interrupts the sky far too often. From the city smog to the obnoxiously glorious buildings that loom over you like giants from a bad dream. Human "progress" in tangible form. The tower of babble was built on stronger whims and it still fell. What will happen to our flimsy "progress"? Are our hopes and dreams built of strong enough stuff to withstand our projected fears? I really don't know. I'd like to think we're greater than anything we might be afraid of. If history proves reliable then we are and we'll conquer our own self doubts just as we have in the past with enlightenment and progressive thinking.

Big Blue Sky

2012-02-03T11:24:00.000-08:00

The last couple of the night had just sat down. I didn't even offer them coat check knowing that they were Italian and wouldn't tip while also keeping in mind that my roommate would show up at any moment to go out when I got off work - and I can't leave until the coats do. But of course, being obnoxious and foreign they bring their jackets to the front after I seat them planning in their minds the 3 hour meal they're about to consume even though we close in 10 minutes...I hate foreigners. I resist looking sour but I'm sure I snatched the coats with more force than I needed to. By 11 o'clock after 6 hours of classes during the day and a 7 hour shift on no sleep I don't contain my emotions as well as I probably should. My roommate arrives and as soon as the owners leave I clock out and sit down at the bar - now I'm the paying customer. We get a few glasses of wine and some free appetizer because the bartender still thinks he has a chance of sleeping with me and go outside for a cigarette as the restaurant shuts down. Though we planned to go to a bar my coworkers seem determined to get us nice and drunk so they offer to pay for us to get drinks at a chic place close to the restaurant.

Now, as a little back story, I am not a club going person. I like dives. I like raves. I like punk shows thrown in some abandoned office - I do not like clubs. I don't get them. The social dynamics confuse me and I can never really make sense of how people are supposed to interact. I know I'm supposed to be more of a bitch so that guys aren't just tripping over themselves to get at me but I don't know how to do that. Maybe I'm too nice, maybe I like the attention, maybe I'm too scared. But whatever, I ALWAYS end up making stupid decisions.
And tonight was no exception.

We get a couple of rounds from my coworkers of $18 cocktails and I feel like I should dance with them just out of courtesy. Neither of them were any good and after the bartender shoved his tongue down my throat I decided to search for an out. I end up meeting a pretty sexy promoter from Israel and all of a sudden I'm at this table surrounded by attractive foreigners hanging out with some guy who's name I later learn is Crispi - and I'm not making that up as much as I wish I was. It was ok - I guess. I get kind of bored and decide to stroll around after another two rounds of (too strong) cocktails that Crispi made for me and get pulled into a group of black guys one of which thinks I'm drunk enough to start talking shit about how I'm using them for drinks. Well in a drunken fit of bravery I start telling this guy off pulling off a pretty sober demeanor for most of it. He kind of shoos me away and while if I'd been a little more drunk I might have gotten more pissed off my survival instincts kicked in and told me to shut the fuck up. All of this over the course of a couple hours and frankly the whole night just felt like a bust. I went to an "after party" that was really just boring people being boring and when I woke up the next morning spent too much on a cab and came home to crash. All in all my clubbing experienced have been like the aforementioned - some worse, some a little better but all pretty high on the shit-show scale.

Oh and did I mention I left my backpack at the club?
Didn't think so.

So this post is my reminder to my future self that you DO NOT like clubs. You always think you do because everyone tells you they're "Sooo fun" and you "don't have to pay for drinks" well ya know what maybe if I have to pay for them I won't a.) wake up to a stranger, b.) yell at a black guy that could have probably killed me with one finger, or c.) get molested by all the said guys that bought me those "free" drinks. Not worth it babe. Stop doin' this to yourself. You and I both know you don't like clubs so just knock it off.

Crispi was pretty cute though...Too bad I'm a gentile.

A Few Words

2012-01-24T11:53:00.000-08:00

I stumbled through the window to our 5th story apartment. Still drunk. What a way to meet my new roommate. A chubby blonde boy stared at me wide eyed mid spoonful of chinese food from the restaurant run by Mexicans down the street. "Hi" I giggled trying to hide my embarrassment. "Um, funny we have to meet this way". "Ya, that's not really safe, how did you get up here?"
"I climbed, left my key on the bed, sorry," he wasn't amused and I guess had I been sober I wouldn't have been either.
Living in East Harlem makes people less trusting. So does living with strangers. We were doing both.
"Wanna get beer?" I asked. I didn't know what else to say.
"No I'm going to bed..." he stared at me as he walked by and we both went into our rooms. Fuck. Way to make an awesome first impression.
The first few days I hadn't seen him in the apartment. Me and the third roommate had hit it off famously when we both discovered our affinity for illicit drugs. Blonde boy would eventually join us but it was harder to coax him out of his shell. All on a somewhat similar playing field after a month it was shaping up to be a summer that reminded me of home. Whether that was a good or a bad thing, I didn't know. Nor did I care. I had a place to stay and that mattered more than anything.
The weekly ritual was the girl would repay her half of our bar bills with cocaine and I would keep it in my room hoping I could sell it until a drinking night came up and I just resigned myself to finish the bag as quickly as possible so as not to make it a habit. Such is the thinking of a 19 year old with nothing better to do with her time or money.
Sundays were spent drinking wine from 6am to 1 pm, napping until 4 and going to work at 5, out of work by 11, at the bars until 4 am, repeat for the rest of the week. I made good money. I read constantly. Drank too much and did too many drugs. Getting kicked out was more of a blessing than anything. Deep down I wanted out and I knew that. It just takes time to admit that to yourself. To admit that your greatest obstacle is almost always yourself. I don't like to admit that and I often don't. But I know it's true.

Its Been a Long Time

2012-01-23T21:18:00.001-08:00

Standing on the subway platform the symbols reading F to Jamaica Station began to turn into illegible script. I felt dizzy but just stood there staring. What Sarah Said by Death Cab for Cutie is playing on my obnoxiously large headphones and I'm swaying to the mellow piano. I'm sad. My thoughts are trailing to the backpack I left at work, the drink date I set up and will never follow through with, the people I really don't want to talk to tomorrow - and the person I want to talk to but won't.

It's too late and I'm too tired to write more. But I need to start writing again.

I hope people still read this. It makes me feel good to know that someone out there knows me better than most everyone else.

The Mean Reds

2011-11-27T01:18:00.001-08:00

Anyone that knows me relatively well knows that I have bouts where I suffer intense anxiety about death. They're not constant and they seem to come in 3 to 4 month intervals and last for one to two weeks. I lie in bed reflecting on my day and thinking about people I care about or people I don't care enough about and it hits me that all of my thoughts are pointless. Those people are going to die. I'm going to die. The good that I do will only help so much. Those people I love - I can't save. The pleasures of life that I enjoy - are fleeting. My youth, my efforts, my plans all amount to non-existence. Such a small part to be played in the cosmos. Black holes and other planets care nothing of our tiny world in the boonies of our ever expanding/contracting universe. There is no authority to consult that isn't created by man. There is no unchanging law that isn't governed by structural necessity dictated by our earthly confines and neuroscience...And those thoughts don't depress me necessarily...but the lack of ability to learn it all depresses me. The knowledge that we've learned so much and have so much more to learn but can't because of death troubles me so much. I won't be able to know what is found and furthermore I won't be able to experience it or help those I love experience it with me. With my own limited brain capacity I won't even be able to become an expert capable of giving something truly valuable to the world to validate my own existence. I have, and am, nothing. Sure I have people that love me and I have people I love so so deeply but when they're gone...what do I have then? And before I'm gone who will I have? It's just so sad. And I love life so much. And I love the lives of others so much.
And I know it happens to everyone.
And I know it's the same as it is before we were born.
But before we were born we hadn't known life - and now we do - so maybe it's different. And if it isn't different and we just cease to exist, how awful to spend your entire life knowing you just revert back to a stage where you contributed nothing after all this toil. It seems so silly to type out and I'm sorry if anyone is reading this and just becoming depressed or slowly converting to Christianity. My goal is not to lament my own atheism or promote lying to yourself in belief but I have to admit the weakness behind a strictly externalist belief. I know it doesn't feel good but I don't believe truth because it feels good. I believe it because it's what we know to be true. I just wish we knew more. And I know that we can't. And I hope we can come together someday to look for something that resembles a truth we can fight for because as it stands I don't expect to be rallying the troops behind my fears. Until then I'll stand on this side with the other 3% and hope we're taking steps in the right direction. Because if we aren't, that is hopeless indeed.

A Lifetime and Two Weeks

2011-10-27T21:08:00.000-07:00

Where have I gone? Tight cocoon has spun away and I feel half baked. Disintegrated and maybe less of a worm than when the process begun. But I feel...formed? Still? Aware. Somehow. Like a veil has been lifted and the mountain is much taller than I expected - but at least I'm not still lying to myself in believing I'm almost at the top.

When you rock climb, to make things more difficult on a smaller boulder, you set up a course for yourself. Maybe the course I set up was more difficult than it had to be. Maybe I wasn't ready. But it feels like if I fall now, I won't get back on. And that's not really an option...

Earth's stay'd Heart

2011-10-14T07:32:00.000-07:00

Sparkling black earth's stay'd heart
Under fires and a liquid sun,
Built immortal phoenix start
Lone stars rival has't thou won?
Think to taste of heaven's light
Is perchance to dream of thee
As bones to dust immortal fight
In time a star will be.
No other can, than thee doth break
Long last this body's shine.
Sole to crown her light didst make
Born to die in celestial minds.
For in the fiery heart of stars now burned,
From them made and in death returned.

Untitled

2011-10-04T14:04:00.000-07:00

The earth will crush
Twill grind the bones
Dust as to dust
Doth end life's loan
Hold fast the earth
As pressure builds
Its bellies girth
City to country stilled
Save light trapped
Beneath aged dirt
a light still wrapped
Beneath the serf
A walk saved sight to glittering flame,
Immortal pulse of mortal's reign.

When Things Were Still New

2011-10-01T14:59:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite things to feel when I was a kid was the hugs from my dad after he had mowed the lawn. My dad to this day uses patchouli soap and it would dance about in my senses with the salty smell of sweat and newly cut grass. He would always wear a faded soft green t-shirt that we had gotten on vacation in Amelia Island and stained with sweat it would feel cool on my face as I fell into him. He thought I hated it and I always pretended to. But I didn't. He would come in, make a martini and start grilling steaks. When my dad was holding his dry Bombay Sapphire Martini I would know he was someone I wanted as a dad. These memories of sweat were so tangible. A fleshy mandrake root in my arms who slept 8 hours a day, a new sister, pooling sweat on my arms as I just sat and stared at her. Still in awe that this was a life I was supposed to secure a future for. Or the fevered chills when I was often sick, my skin so dewy that the bed was soaked, tossing about as the thermometer rose to 104. Sweat and tears and blood mixing alone in my shower. And as time past, the sweat that would send shivers down my legs and back as I was known by someone I loved for the first time - face flushed and legs wrapped up as if we were one person.
The sweat of performance as I danced across a stage. Hours of practice leading to nothing more than a mediocre performance that no dancer would really be proud of. Then the indiscriminate dancing of a club as my feet contacted the ground and I found a rhythm and a superficial family bonding over nothing but a beat. The shivering sweat of a remix and the following blindness of lasers and neon.
Sweating my body was finding its limits. Once found, I would push harder, and sometimes I would snap. Pulled taught by my own ambition my will got the best of me and I would come out of the blindness to find I had survived but might not again. I'm sweating now I feel. Not physically. But my mind is sweating as it sees the edge of this daunting task. The task of living has never seemed quite so burdensome but there it is right around the corner. And though I never actually meant to, I am certainly at full speed to face it.

To Wear White

2011-08-03T07:18:00.000-07:00

I always meet people at the wrong times. People that I love, or could love, or should love. We all meet across bridges. We made our decisions at the crossroads years before and then at an estranged distance we see the other and realize we could be happy together. But there you are, walking with her, here I am alone, there he is walking with the girl that is perfect for him but not as perfect as I would have been...I don't want to sound conceited...but even he knows it's true. And then there's that one guy that is on a bridge so close he could jump the gap - join me on my bridge - but he doesn't see me because he's too busy looking in a mirror. That's fine, I tell myself. Everyone needs to worry about themselves first. But - if he could see me. He would get it. I just know he would. I hope he would...or at least that's what I've told myself. I'm the best at tricking myself.

It's hot in the apartment. And my roommates have all been acting strange. I keep telling myself I only have a week left. But I want out now. I want to sink into a mud pit and block out everything for that last week. Just disappear into the void. Curl up in the soft cool earth and fill my ears, eyes and mouth with black.

Mama Mango

2011-07-24T01:55:00.000-07:00

It's 4:50 am and my parents leave tomorrow. But I'm not thinking about them. Jealousy is eating away at my stomach like some giant parasite - I feel it like it's real. There is this terrible gnawing that isn't quite anger but isn't completely sadness. It's just this horrible realization that I have to let go of something. I have to let go of feeling loved and loving them back. If I don't this parasite is bound to eat me alive from the inside out. I should have never stepped back into that pink glow. Because it's not real and it's getting me nowhere. In life there are people that make you feel something special and with him it was this pink and yellow lightness when it was good. Like a sunset. But when it was bad that same glow became toxic and burned like it's doing even now - thousands of miles away. I loved him more than I could even say. More than I can even admit. But I'm not there and other people are and I can't understand and other people can so I'm here where people understand and he's there and we're all responsible pawns on the chessboard following our roles in life and I can't fight the feeling that what I want and what I need are completely opposing forces. I want to be in love again. In love with someone else. Someone that I want and need but I can't do that unless I get over him. And I can't get over him. Even now at 5 in the morning. Especially now - at 5 in the morning.

At times I wonder if I've ever even been in love. Love should transcend jealousy and space and physical presence. I should be able to love no matter where I am and I guess I can't. I can't love someone when they aren't here because I need too much reassurance. It's possible I'm just selfish. Selfish and afraid. Afraid of getting hurt again. I used to be so ready for love and now I'm just scared of it. Scared of getting hurt and feeling like I do right now. With this parasite destroying me piece by piece. This constant reminder that no one in this city loves me and if they do I don't love them back.

Love

2011-07-16T10:58:00.000-07:00

You can't love someone that you think is going to hell. It's not possible. I've thought about this for a long time and after much deliberation I've decided 100% that you cannot actually love anyone that you believe is going to hell.

That is all.

Red Hook and those Middle Age Folk

2011-07-03T13:12:00.001-07:00

I spent the weekend with some family friends. I still haven’t looked up the exact location of the place. I know it’s called Red Hook and I know I have to get off the train at Rhinecliff but beyond that I have no idea if it’s in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut…I don’t know. I don’t want to know. I’ve thought of asking or simply looking it up but I haven’t yet. I like the mystery of it all. It makes it a paradise – a magical escape without time or earthly location. A paradise that only I have the key to and can visit any time I want…
Headed back on the train now and the sky has met everything. It feels like we’re riding inside of the clouds and lakes, mountains, trees and houses just happen to have floated up to join the heavens – hidden in an earthy and warm cumulus. The water and sky have blended into a muddy sand of earth and sky and the trees look as if they have aged in an old photograph. We’re riding past towns that look like they haven’t been touched by technology and right behind them are bridges of unprecedented engineering – an American flag nestled and billowing between it’s modern arms. The world here is sepia – as opposed to the saturated city – at times black and white with stark rage and collective angst. I’m alone on this train, but the first person I meet stepping off this train will be the one to solidify my distance from those I left behind. It’s easy, I suppose, to forget people love you and to forget those you love. Easy to forget things: to drink them or drug them or dance them away. It’s hard to remember. So hard to rediscover that vault of cooled memories tucked into drawers and cabinets: unlabeled and cluttered. Grey licks of water are streaking across our windows and a memory from childhood creeps out from the dark recesses. A time when the water droplets were racing to the other side of the car windows and I would name and cheer these fragile tadpoles in an indefinite race to their doom. The playfulness of youth and the ability to laugh in spasms without reason or compromise seem to have been the easiest things to forget and consequently the first to go. Two children were present on this weekend retreat and I couldn’t believe how difficult it was to interact. Arguably I’m the youngest and should therefore be the one capable of drawing in these fragile beasts and yet they scare me. They speak a language that requires untapped sensitivity and warmth. I feel inept and inadequate as they squirm and giggle their time away. Crying when I’m laughing and laughing when I am crying.
Passing by mountains now, a broken castle of sorts lies in ruin on some island and the mountains tops are blanketed with cloud and rain – I can feel their size more than see it. Mist sits lightly on top of the trees like remnants of a cool fire. There is a glaze to this strange place that no map can find, no sun is seen and the only sound is the clicking of my keyboard. I might as well be in another world, surely some trains travel through time.
The denseness of the foliage here rivals islands and European coasts. Scholarly buildings sit comfortably on the sides of rock faces and monuments stand erect on their highest peaks. If I knew where I was maybe I could give a more precise visual but if I were to guess my location I would say colonial era France – I swear I heard the sound of a guillotine and the wails of plague threatening this pristine beauty. But no. This is New York. I am somewhere on the American east coast where beauty and nature come second to progress and modernity. These clouds are product of smog and these lands have been touched and retouched with skillful hands. I keep reminding myself of this. To brush away my awe and try to keep my composure in the face of unexpected triumph of nature over man, but to brush it off is to lose this feeling so I continue to ascertain that there is no other answer to this riddle of beauty other than a chink in time. I feel that I know for fact that I have found a magical train that exposes the reality that we are not alone and takes it’s passengers skipping through the centuries revealing that the reality is there were many before us and many more to come and they hear us when we think of them. When we remember that they were here and expect us to carry on the best we can. After a try at Mrs.Dalloway and a break from writing I hear Virginia in my head and with each page I hear every modern woman I’ve ever met, whether they have read her or not, speaking, crying, laughing. Her voice is so alive in modern America that her suicide seems to have simply been the realization that she would live much more in the lives of women yet to be born – and her impatience got the best of her. To die, for her, was to be certain of a life worth living.

Certainty. What a gift.

The Daily

2011-07-01T12:33:00.000-07:00

Blackout night. Woke up at some apartment. Guess I met two guys in med school. They were super chill and I was just curled up in a comfy chair. I left before 8. I was already pretty wasted before I met them and I guess they asked for a cigarette and got me chatting their ear off until I presumably fell asleep in their chair. Way to go. I'm reevaluating my drinking - maybe I should just smoke pot. But I hate pot. Gah! Why can't choosing a vice be simple? I hate the after affects of alcohol - a lot. But it's absolutely my favorite thing to partake in next to sex. Sex might even come in second. Which is not my proudest thing to admit but when you have as lame a sex streak as I've had in recent months you'd understand and pity me. Then you'd give me your most attractive (straight) guy friends number and hook a sister up. I'm 3/4's joking.

That aside. Yea last night wasn't my best move but so far no serious consequences from these random nights. I like to think I have a good sense for people and that makes the nights somehow go smoothly (ie no rape, murder).

On a lighter note. I'm dying laughing over reddit in a Starbucks and literally everyone at my table is nervously glancing at me like I made a rude comment about the fat chick and no one wants to tell me I'm an asshole but they're all thinking it and are looking way too hard at whatever electronic they can get their hands on. I mean that in itself is sort of funny and honestly is making me laugh harder than I have to. God I would annoy me. I'm glad I am me. So that I don't have to deal with someone else doing this. I pity these poor polite tourists. I'm officially the New York jerk off that I hated when I visited. Movin' on up bitches.

I'm going to get my NY license soon and then I'll be all official asshole and stuff which will be super duper sweet. Now I just have to rid myself of this hangover and everything will be peachy keen.

Ok, off to Red Hook! I know, I'm fickle.

White Wine and Patti Smith

2011-06-22T12:26:00.001-07:00

So 8 hours (a bottle of wine and 4 beers) later at the Lexington Social I got a new best friend and gave a guy I truly do not remember my number. I guess that's about as successful as a night of unprecedented drinking can get. My calendar seems to just fill up on these nights. In the next couple of weeks I'm going to a Patti Smith show and I guess going on a date this Saturday. I want to say that this is a bad thing and that I need to be more careful but I mean - I'm going to a Patti Smith show and I have a date on Saturday, whether or not I remember doesn't really seem to matter. That's boss.

Mr.Deity

2011-06-20T18:42:00.000-07:00

Watching Mr.Deity and eating Tapas. Alone. But it's sort of nice. I don't know. Sometimes that's the best way to go about things.

SemenTree

2011-06-08T10:02:00.000-07:00

The trees outside of our apartments smell like semen. At first I thought it was the carnal indecency of the redneck with the red hat and ponytail whom insists on urinating on our stoop – but then after commenting when walking with my roommate, he pointed out that it was in fact the scent that these particular trees emitted. He explained that they had them all over the place when he was in school in southern California and that they had been endearingly referred to as the “semen trees”. It took a moment for me to consider it might be odd for him to hear his nineteen year old roommate referencing the smell of semen so openly and for a moment I felt embarrassed but I tried to not let it show. And we walked on...

My roommates and I make an odd trio.

Roommate 1 is a small Brazilian girl who strongly resembles a latin Helena Bonham Carter. Her life is very much like a broken record. Every movie she watches, every song she likes, every quote she is inspired by is repeated daily in the same way. I wake up and could swear that it's deja vu - as if I wake up and the same day is starting over but only in this one little part of the world. A perpetual time loop tucked into 500 sq. feet.

My other roommate (Roommate 2) is tall and quiet. He looks a bit like a young, larger Tim Robbins with facial hair. He's nice but I feel that we've lived very very different lives and I find him hard to relate to at times.

And then there's me. Blonde, 5'9" with a seemingly timid personality, wide eyed with a temper neither of them will see because I keep to myself and only express it when tears come in those rare moments when I get too overwhelmed.

Overall the situation is isolating in a way I didn't really expect. I miss home more than I ever have but also realize more than ever why I left...I need this. I know. But it's hard to remember why I chose such a hard path. Before it didn't feel so hard - there was school, I had friends, I had work. I was always busy and there was always something to do and someone to talk to. Now in the quiet and heat of my apartment the emptiness weighs in on me like a metal curtain closing for act II.

My roommate and her mom got in a fight. So roommate 1 left for a time and since she was the one I talked to most I feel more alone now than before. Which I suppose is also for the best. Maybe not. I don't know. I'm ready for school to start. To feel like I have some control again. We'll see when the time comes how that works out. My roommate back at school got a position on the school council which means no drinking - no boys - nothing. I don't want to deny her the opportunity, it's a great one, but I have to admit it's a bummer. I'm sure it won't be too much of an issue, it's NYC. It's a rare thing to not find opportunity here.

Metal Chisel

2011-04-25T21:59:00.000-07:00

They're drilling into the concrete outside my window. That sound. My god. Who makes a sound like that? Is that what it sounds like to hear the earth cry? That grating shrill scratch of concentrated earth on electricity and iron - I imagine unnatural lightning coming up from the ground like the shocks of a nervous system. That feel of a blade on skin and the slow beading of blood that follows behind it...

Nevermind.

New topic.

Ugh but there it IS again! Crying like a metal cat. Gahd I can't take it.

Sounds sounds, think of sounds...Better sounds...

Ok.

Window curtains in the wind before a rain storm.
The sounds of the rainforest.
Waves on a beach.
My sister breathing.
Bunny sounds.
Mike's heartbeat.
My moms laugh.
Mewing kittens.
...think...block it out.

Ugh. It's over.

Thank god.

Telepathy or the Remnants of...

2011-04-09T10:14:00.001-07:00

I know he's going to text before my phone vibrates. I pick it up...Another failed attempt at communication. Not interested the text implicitly reads. Move on. You're not who you thought you were. You aren't good enough for me. Next.

I love all the wrong people. I'm strong, so people seek me out, but I seek out a greater strength, because mine is just a facade. It's this thing that I built to hold together a crumbling past. Layers upon layers of sheet metal and gold leaf to try to hide the ugly scars of a, at times, ruined girl. But everyone is blinded by the shine, and no one approaches. No one sees need in me - or desperation. And any time it shows people attack me. They expect so much more so in my shell I remain. Scared of that outside world where I'm supposed to have all the answers. And really it's only fair that they expect that from me, I act like I have them, I talk like I have them, sometimes I even have them but at the end of the day, I want someone who can give me answers and not just take them away. Strong people feel that they have nothing to contribute to the girl who has "everything". Other people just see what there is to gain to make themselves stronger. But I'm spent and have very little left to give. I crave your strength and the promise it brings and yet you, logically, give it to someone who appears to need it. Who seems like they'll truly appreciate it. Who seems capable of adoration - since I do not. I don't seem to be the type that can or will adore someone else. In most cases I can't. I settle on flaws so quickly and then it's over in my mind. But you seem different. I have yet to find fault with you. And maybe that's all I'm searching for. Maybe once I find it I'll lose interest. But then again. Maybe this is the answer I've been waiting for. To see someone so beautiful, and perfect, and flawed. All at once. Instead of just boxing you away into the recesses of my mind. You deserve better. You deserve to be flawed.

I hate that you don't see me.
I love that you exist.

Atheist says,

2011-04-03T07:57:00.001-07:00

Fuckin' April

2011-04-02T07:09:00.000-07:00

This month is so tough for me. While the world spins itself into a beautiful web of Spring and life I have been stuck, for the last 14 years, in a box. Taking tests. Studying. Writing. Failing. Trying. Struggling. Stressing. Denied. Denying. Denied. Denying. Denied. 14 years. This mass struggle of their power and authority over me.

But. Now I'm in college. Things will change some. A lot. I hope. The exams are more intense - certainly. The papers are longer - ya. Things are different. But I have New York now. I own it. It's my playground, my hunting site, my birth rite. I'm in love and each step is flirting with the internal human struggle for power. It's unfathomable. It's everything I ever expected, and yet I was unprepared. It's nothing like the movies, but every street has had those icon god's walking down it. Stomping these grounds with their powerfully webbed feet. Connected to everything - their face is a key to the city. Mine isn't. But I don't care. I'm part of it. Part of the massive heaving body of progress and life. As dirty and disgusting and harsh as it can be, I really am truly and madly in love with what I feel here. Could I feel this anywhere? I'd venture to say no. No place I've ever been even comes close with the awesome electricity that I tap into when I'm walking down the avenues.

And now, as the skies open to their grand azure canvas - I'm ready to fucking paint.

Train Ride

2011-03-29T06:43:00.000-07:00

Coming back. Just spent the night at the home of my moms ex-boss. A man she's been close with and treated more as my uncle or a brother than as a boss. He's a good man. Genuinely. And those are hard to come by. He lost his wife a while back. She was pregnant. 7 months. I don't deal well with death - so I didn't know what to say. I made dinner for him and we drank some wine...watched a shitty movie and I was able to sleep in one of the most comfortable beds I had ever been in. Why is it that I sleep so much better far from home. Everyone says its so much more difficult for them. Maybe it's because I don't really feel like anywhere is my home at this particular moment.

Oh yea...

2011-02-23T20:19:00.001-08:00

I forgot. This is what being alone feels like. Alone with my thoughts. These torrents of creativity - so limited - this is why I liked having someone. Having a single someone is like having a computer on which to store yourself. A place to reference, filtered through the uniqueness of the person taking in the information. "You remember when we..."
"Ya with those people!"
"Ya!"

Remember? Now the answers always an inevitable no. How can one remember what one never experienced. All these new things. Am I really still that homebody child - deep down. That little girl completely content to spend hours, days, in her room, creating her own perfect world without letting in the outside. Is that what I've always done? Each place I go...Every person I meet...I position them and try to replicate this place that I had in my mind. Or create a place in my mind and then fit the pieces in. But there's less furniture - less building material. I feel like I'm stuck in an empty studio with all this potential and no way of beginning the process. Everything I make, all the pieces I put together, feel sloppy and cheap. Like baking a cake with no instructions and none of the right ingredients. My life has become so hit and miss I can't even take it. Each action is just a shot in the dark.

It reminds me of the first time I drove on my own during break. I was never the kind of person that could pick up on locations. I simply drove forward and if things started to feel familiar, I would turn, and drive around until they felt the most familiar and hope the street signs were correct, if not, I was doomed. I'd call Mike or my mom trying to keep my voice calm but inside I'm absolutely panicked. Questions darting through my head "What if I run out of gas?" "What if I'm late?" "What if I'm miles away?" "What if it's right around the corner and I sound like a retard?"... That's how I feel all the time here. Like I should know how to do all these things, but don't. That my stubbornness and pride might have finally caught up with me, and I could truly be stranded. I could really be lost. Or the answers are there but I never picked up on them, so either way. I fail.

I just need things to improve. I need to feel capable of life again. Because right now, I don't.

Let's Talk About Grace

2011-02-03T23:59:00.000-08:00

I guess because I don't believe, I'm nothing. I have no say on morals. I have no backbone. My own beliefs, my own system, isn't valid because there isn't a thousand year text for me to turn to when something doesn't fit inside my ideologies. I like my flexibility. I enjoy the freedom to draw off of millions of years of human evolution and ancestry. I came from somewhere. I am something. I am. And in that, am I not validated? How can someone tell me that I am less, or understand less, just because I don't have things spelled out. Where am I, as a human if the opinions I draw from my humanity and my experience matter less than the opinions of some dead historical figures whose legitimacy and accuracy is in question from chapter one. How dare you all. How dare anyone tell someone else they're wrong, or their opinions are completely false. Misguided? Maybe. Hurtful? Definitely. But wrong? Or unethical? If the only person you apply them to is yourself? I follow my own rules. But I would never hurt another. Ever. I have, of course, but never intentionally. Or I try not to...I don't know I'm not perfect. I do the best I can everyday and I mean well in every aspect of my life. I love people and I love their stories...So how dare you tell me that I can't talk to you about grace, or forgiveness, because I'm not a Christian. Because I'm not you. I forgive. Better than you. I understand grace...better than you. Otherwise, you would understand what I say, when I say they aren't the same. But you don't. You can't. Because you're painting in black and white, and you're missing out on the details. So step back, and look at the world you're painting. Decide what it needs and realize it needs color to be real, and beautiful, and whole...

Hey There Teddy Bear

2011-01-15T22:58:00.001-08:00

So, I haven't written anything worth reading in awhile. A long, long while. Not that I ever really did. But as inspired as I am by New York, I'm so caught up in it that it's hard to document. It's hard to feel capable of capturing those things that move so fast. You feel like each time you try you just fail miserably. Dallas is easy to capture in a moment, a blog, a photograph, a sound byte. The thirty-minute-city. Everyone and everything so spaced out and separate. Maybe that's why people in the south are nicer; they're just so desperate for company.

I'm happy to be back in New York. Extremely happy. Happier than I thought I would be. Leaving Dallas was harder this time around. I'd gotten so used to the lethargic comfort and hedonistic pleasure cruise that Dallas has become. A vacation with all the amenities right at my finger tips. The best drinks, the best food, the best prices, the best friends, the best boyfriend. Everything. Things in New York don't come like that. Eating out is a once a month thing, if that. Ordering take-out is a once a semester thing. And generally you're lucky to sneak protein and vitamins into a meal. It's like a sea of ramen and carbs. Then drinks are five dollars minimum, where in Dallas a long island ice tea is two dollars and shots are free because the drunk gay guy in the corner thinks your boyfriend is attractive and there's a total of eight people in the bar to send drinks to. Friends, all over in Dallas. Can't hang out with one, there's a slew of others with nothing to do just like me. New York...people are always doing something. Which is great. But, it's lonely, you have to make yourself do something and invite people along. There is no lets hang out and get trashed because it's Tuesday and I'm bored.

But...where Dallas sounds great...and is...it's also so, settled. Chartered waters. I'm not ready for that. Not now. I want to set my own course. I feel so much more in my own skin here. So much closer to the core of things. I feel raw and tired and creative and energetic and scared and hopeful and, and, and...I feel - real.

Not that I don't feel real in Dallas. It's just, I'm so different. Here I'm Rynn. The bright, fresh, wise, stupid, shy, curious, careful, responsible (sometimes), ambitious new girl with everything going for her. In Dallas I'm Hannah, outgoing, experienced, carefree, bored, lazy, fun chick with nothing to do but show up to work for a few, play video games go home and get drunk or mooch food off my parents. I mean, they're both me but eventually, I'm going to have to be Rynn full circle. Or am I destined to always come back to Hannah...

Golden Age

2010-12-09T06:42:00.000-08:00

Everyone talks about the past as if it there was a time when things were good. If absence makes the heart grow fonder then I assume the more time you put between yourself and the past the less you remember how shitty the past was. I haven't forgotten. And a quick glance at a history book will certainly take you even farther back to reinforce how shitty it has always been. I feel that so many people I talk to are living in this "ideal" age. This time that they can't really place, but a time that was simple and everything was cut up into little black and white squares like the landscape of a chessboard. Limited by moves so all you had to do was decide on a letter and number.
A7, D5, F1.
Check mate.
In an argument I had the other day with a student from my college I was asked if I believed that the medieval farmer was really as unhappy as I thought. Not wanting to give him a flat out no, I thought about it, and decided it was certainly possible he could be happy. He would have had a love of God and country, hypothetically enough food and money to live on, and what we would consider today to be a "nuclear" family. Sure, I guess, without knowing that there was such thing as running water and porn, it's certainly possible that the farmer could be happy. But...who cares?
He lived his life in servitude. To a God. To a King. Just a pawn.
I'll take the terrifying discoveries of the atom and hydrogen bombs in exchange for my freedom from dogmas that have been disproved time and time again. I'll take World Wars over cultural ignorance. I'll take the empathy derived from genocide over the apathy accompanied with calling it "God's will". Give me passion. Give me suffering. I'll gladly take this angst over the assured assent to a heaven while I go through the motions on earth. Sleeping, eating, fucking, working, praying. No. Please. Give me hell, so that I might taste heaven on earth.

Background

2010-12-04T17:48:00.000-08:00

For those of you that care.

I don't know who reads this. I assume it's people I know. But just in case...Here's some history.

I'm 18. I live in Manhattan. I'm from Dallas, Texas.
I was born February 14th, 1992 to Tamsen and William Reed. My father couldn't have children, so we turned to AI. My other X chromosome came in a tube from some Californian stranger that used to be in the army. Somewhere in the world I have a brother. I'll never know him - but that's ok I guess.
I lived in a suburb. An ill reputed area that has pockets of really beautiful old houses and some really quaint neighborhoods surrounded by the ghettos. I liked to think of my part of town as a diamond in the rough. The Upper West side afraid to come to our quiet island for fear of being shot. I liked it that way. I lived comfortably in a small tudor on a large circular block. I had four friends on the block all spaced evenly - all characters in my wonderful imaginary world. I had a perfect childhood. My friends were always over, my life was whimsical and untouched by the outside world.

When I was 5, my parents divorced. It wasn't good. Regardless of the people around me, I felt alone for quite some time after the divorce.

My mother and I moved about 10 blocks away, landing us in what most considered the ghettos. That's how close they were to the suburban block I lived on before the divorce. The new neighbors sold drugs, did drugs, shot guns and threw needles into the alley that separated my house from the house next door. I played in that alley for 10 years. My life and outlook changed drastically. My mom was with a woman. My old friend's parents wouldn't let them see me. And I was ignored at school. I made new friends, as children do, but I felt odd. Things were definitely different.

My parents traded me off 3 and 5. Those numbers still dictate my life. I danced in ballet. And I played my parents mailbox.

Things happened. My life wasn't easy. People came and went. My moms jobs were unsteady and my dad was unhappy. At some point he remarried. At another point he and his new wife adopted a child. She wasn't well. My mom had a child too, using AI. I saw that child born. I love both my sisters very much.

My dad and I fought a lot after he adopted my sister. My mom and I fought too, but for different reasons. When I was 15 my dad told me I had to leave. I left on a cold night in November. I'd had a job for a year and a half. I've been working ever since.

Divorce number 2 happened sometime before or after I was kicked out. I was very upset.
My moms new partner was an angel, though, so I couldn't complain much. And I don't. I've never seen my mom happier.

I graduated from high school with some of the best friends anyone could ever have. I love them more than I can say and miss them desperately.

Then I went to college. A Christian college, no less.

Why? Because they offered me money, and because I'm madly in love with lady New York. And now I'm very, very, very alone.

People at this college don't understand who I am. An atheist to them is someone miserable, with no hope, and no joy. That is not me. If they talked to me, ever, I think it would hurt them in some way. It hurts them to see people they might like not have God, so they just ignore them. I'm not there to them. When I am there, they are polite and laugh, but it doesn't matter. Nothing really matters at the moment. As of right now, I just want this religious bigotry to end.

Soon, life will get back to feeling real. And the story will continue.

So that's my life in a nutshell up to this point, dear non-existent readers.

Ta-ta for now.

It's Like...What?

2010-11-19T01:50:00.000-08:00

Just reading again. Always gets me to drawing. Which gets me to thinking. Which makes me write, but I'm not all that good at writing, so it comes out in something like this. Something once readable. Now just me holding back all the things I want to say. Relationships change you. All relationships. With bosses, with lovers, with boyfriends, with best friends, with acquaintances...You can't help it, it's what they do. I care too much about what they think, maybe, or maybe it's not even that I care about their thoughts I just want to look good. Look my best. Gussy up before they see something in me they don't like. The irony of it was when I just gave them my thorny shallow impression of the person I thought I was, they ran with it. They always made this strange persona for me, without me ever giving them the full story. So many of them thought that by 15 I was into heavy hard core sex and drugs, when really, I hadn't done much of anything...I just talked big.

I remember being 15.

The workplace was this weird fucking thing to me. People were paying attention to me, real people, with jobs and lives, who had been places. More than paying attention, they were fucking listening to me. What I had to say. Looking back, they were probably humoring me, I don't know. You lose confidence with age I guess, back then I thought I was hot shit. I was just so excited to be laid back - to be part of something. I thought that's how it would always be. The most laid back of the group were the guys, and that's who I liked to be around. I liked the guys. They were a little strange but they were interesting, and they were treating me like one of them, and I liked that. I liked to pretend they thought I was tough, and I'd talk shit to make them think that. I didn't realize that there could be motives to their niceness. I just liked that they thought about things, and made jokes I could understand, and listened to music I liked. Maybe they had liked me for me, I don't know, that's never really what we ended up talking about. Maybe I got it from my mom, but I rarely thought people were in it for sex. She gave me this weird perspective that people were genuine, and sex was just this weird thing some people did sometimes that had no real bearing on life...Its been kind of a rude awakening over the last year or so to find that most people are ONLY in it for sex. Now I'm not 15 any more...and guys that I should be talking to, won't talk to me, because I'm "experienced". And older guys won't talk to me because it will ruin their reputation. I guess when you're 15 it's ok because it's forbidden, but when you're 18 it isn't ok because "they can do better"...I feel like I'm 13 again. Angsty and ready to get past the awkwardness of being too young but too old. Now I'm trying to get past the awkwardness of being too old, but too young...and it's horrible. I can't live in these inbetweens all the time. I always feel like I'm in the wrong age at the wrong time.

Maybe it's New York.
Maybe it's me.
Maybe it's a comedown. The mean reds. Those things that I go through...Whatever they are. Maybe I'm just, wrong.

Lady

2010-11-10T14:54:00.000-08:00

Maybe he does this to everyone you keep telling yourself. There's no way someone can stay in your head so long without a schtick, some reason that they stay there like the sticky tape to the wall that you know you'll have to peel off at the end of the month. It won't be easy. Or even possible. You've changed because of this asshole. You're being has shifted just from knowing he's around and if you didn't love him so much, you'd hate him. Get out of my life you want to say. I'm not in your life, he responds.

Oh right.

Who are you again?

Sitting Here Now

2010-09-26T23:58:00.000-07:00

I hate everything about this. I don't want to worry. I don't want to think anyone cares. Or doesn't care. Just careless. But I'm too afraid. To chicken shit to let myself be alone, and afraid. Too afraid to be afraid. That's ironic. Just kill me now why don't you...

Happy Phantom

2010-09-18T13:39:00.000-07:00

In New York there's little chance for sympathy. Sick and useless I've been doing everything for myself, and honestly it feels great. Painful, annoying, humbling, but it feels good to not be hounded by the concerns of those adults and caregivers that were once so close and now - aren't. I'm happy here. Truly, truly happy. In Dallas there was always this feeling of suffocation, a waiting to die, for everything to end. I don't feel that here. I feel like a whole person. Free. Weightless. I'm free to fail, succeed, grow, shrink, die, live... it's all on me. No one else will make my decisions for me.
Go to a concert. Study for hours. Go to a party. I don't have to ask my mom, or boyfriend, or best friend, I just have to go.
It's all on me.
I've felt caged for so long. I'm ready for the world.

There are some things I'm struggling with, however...
The crippling obsession with death and the hereafter that seems to plague King's is definitely an adjustment. But I have found the people here willing to answer my questions, admit to those things that can't be answered and generally accept me with open arms and honest curiosity rather than hostility. I love breaking my preconceived notions. I hope I break theirs in some ways, too.

New York, New York

2010-08-26T14:53:00.001-07:00

Most of the time so far, has been spent wandering around the city lost, relying on different people for advice on the subway, the street, in a building. I get the feeling of standing on a pile of sand...the less you struggle, the easier it is to stand but to stand at the top of the pile you have to constantly steady yourself at the top...and even if you're able to stay up for a time, you're still sinking. It's just the realization of choice. Every choice you make at every corner determines the next 30 minutes to the next 30 year of your life. Your decisions have to be approached with caution and a level of trust. It's exhilarating, it's exhausting. I met a photographer today, he got a picture of my eye. It was beautiful. A portal he called it. Not creepy in anyway, just some guy with an idea for an art show. I researched him when I got home and he's shot for several prominent magazines. We'll see I guess, if I'm in it when the show rolls around, under the name Rynn now. Funny huh? A new person I guess. Looking for a style. A place. A home. A unit. Friends...I know they're coming. I know it takes time. I'm just so excited...

I love it here. I've never been so in awe of a place. Of its power to change and move and inspire. To make you feel like you're sinking, to make you feel like you're on top of the world. It really is wonderful that a place like this can exist. Despite having a dark side, this is the only place where people can live in some sort of harmony with a level of pride and spirit.

Deus Ex Machina

2010-07-23T13:06:00.000-07:00

My tattoo, and what it means...
(Because there was no way it was going to be on my body permanently without having some meaning behind it)

Literal translation: A deus ex machina (pronounced /ˈdeɪ.əs ɛks ˈmɑːkiːnə/ or /ˈdiː.əs ɛks ˈmækɨnə/,[1], DAY-əs eks MAH-kee-nə) (Latin for "god from the machine"; plural: dei ex machina) is a plot device whereby a seemingly inextricable problem is suddenly and abruptly solved with the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new character, ability, or object.

Ex can be translated to in, from or of in Latin.

For me, there's a heavy irony in the saying. A god from a machine, isn't a god at all. It's god sent happening that happens to be man made because it comes from the machine. These constant surprises, are essentially what we live by and for everyday. It is everything we do and it encapsulates everyone we meet. The unextricably hard problem is our lives and they are "solved" in the end by the constance of a god in the machine, the man made chance encouters that we choose to initiate, or choose not to. Solved in the sense that your decision brought you that much closer to a final product, whatever that may be. The choice, the machine, works to make things the way they are.

It was my first tattoo, and it holds universal signifcance for that reason. I made a promise to myself to not write a book about my tattoos, so this is about as lengthy an explanations as they will get. Hope people understand, if not, well it looks awesome :].

Yesterday

2010-07-21T06:23:00.000-07:00

Got a nose piercing. A tattoo. And drove on the highway for the first time. I'd say all and all it was a successful evening.

The Polyartist

2010-07-19T16:05:00.001-07:00

I was spending the day doing what I most frequently do as a young adult, wondering what I should be doing to better define who I thought I was and plan to be, when the thought hit me, I am no one. To anyone. And it was the why part that got me the most. The reason why I was no one. The reason why is that I have no ONE thing. Everyone seems to have the ONE thing that they believe in, or are good at, or at least focus on and I do not. I want so desperately, when I go to concerts, when I attend art festivals, when I watch a ballet, when I listen to poetry being read, when I see someones photos, to be a part of all those things- but to be a part of it, to be accepted as one of them, you have to choose. Artists no longer paint, play an instrument, dance and write novels, they have to choose one thing that they can do and god forbid they stray, for if they do they'll be shunned by each community instead of accepted into the one. Where artist was once a label in and of itself, we now find ourselves needing to find a label within the label of artist. To find a niche within a niche. I find myself constantly shying away from telling anyone that I consider myself an artist just for the sheer daunting task of having to choose just one of my passions as a focus. How could I possibly? Why do I have to? Isn't artist enough to join the many? Why is it that I find myself so left out of what are referred to as "artists" groups? I feel that the reason is artists groups are now groups of photographers, or painters, or sculptures, or musicians and even beyond that, if you're a painter, what KIND of painter are you? If you're a musician, what instrument have you chosen to play? And then you have a niche within a niche within a niche. But I'm not that one thing. Or even two. Or three. I choose to dabble in so much...and I find myself spread thin. Unable to claim the title artist because I can't narrow myself down to any smaller a cluster. Once upon a time artists were the fringe, now they're just as neat and boxed up as any business man or politician. Doctors of lawyers. Why would the passion of creative expression ever have to be narrowed down to be appreciated?
Sometimes there are collaborations, but at the end of the day, we each go home to the ONE. And for me, there's no one. And I hope, someday, I find a group of someones, with no one, too.

Doomsday

2010-06-28T21:14:00.001-07:00

When the rich survive the end of the world,
With their fancy bomb shelters and frozen clones and biodomes;
That protect them from muslims, global warming, poverty, homosexuals,
Aids and orphans.
They'll live in paradise.
They'll create the world they've dreamed of,
By paying the immigrant corpses to mow their lawns,
By keeping their guns close at hand
They'll be safe from the nothing that is left.
When the rich survive the end of the world,
The lawyers, the CEO's and the politicians,
Businesses big and small
Will flourish from the millions of millionaires that will be left.
Saks and Barneys and Marcus' stocks will skyrocket
Like the earths climate and the nukes the rich paid for.
They'll find the world a perfect place
When the cancers are cut away.
They'll live and thrive
Without the cries of millions asking for a small percent
Of their yachts,
Their mansions,
Their Mercedes.
How dare they?
What use are those people to society?
Those bums should have gotten the many jobs their businesses supplied.
(Regardless of where those jobs were outsourced to)
At the end of the world, the rich will survive
And find the world,
A perfect place.

Mushrooms and Anime Conventions

2010-06-04T08:09:00.000-07:00

"I wonder if I've been changed in the night? Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is 'Who in the world am I?' Ah, that's the great puzzle!" -Alice in Wonderland

I never fail to find a quote from Alice in Wonderland that doesn't accurately capture the underworld that some of us find ourselves cautiously wading about in times of great distress or even of immense happiness. I'd always believed that my mind wasn't meant for visual hallucinations. That I was too grounded and set in my ways to completely relinquish control of my mind, but like with most things, I was wrong. To see a chair grow and inflate into itself as it spins away only to be spinning closer towards you while ever so slightly changing tints of green and orange and pink, is an experience all too often taken for granted for those whose minds float easily. I wanted to cry. To hug the chair, to feel convinced that my mind was what kept me here and what would some day release me from this concrete world, and maybe, if I can alter this reality, I can alter the abstract one too. Maybe my panics about life after death and its inevitable darkness and finality aren't so definite. And I know how this sounds- I know what I would be thinking if I read this- but I also know how wonderfully peaceful I felt when I recognized the power of my own mind and my own soul. My limited perception, my limited senses of intuition, sight, sound, taste, touch, aren't accurate. They are merely temporary measurements for something so much more vast. Measurements only for this plane, but not for any other. And for whatever reason, that thought comforts me and I felt so alone, but I knew it wouldn't be forever.

Think Tank

2010-04-18T09:17:00.000-07:00

There's this idea that I use to comfort myself when I feel like I've fucked up. Usually I only feel like I've fucked up because people judge for doing things that feel natural or when I let curiosity get the best of me, and because of this, it's easy to sit back and wonder what they would have done if they had had your life. If every breath and moment you lived through and by, they could live too, what would there choices have been? Would they have really been so different? Aren't we all just victims of circumstance in the end? I'm not saying this as an excuse, because we all have to take responsibility for things, but really, unless you're the creator, what right do you have to judge? What qualifies you to decide what is truly immoral? Of course there are those things that are against the law but at some point the law has to just be guidelines. If you're smart about it, you can pick and choose which laws are going to cause harm to others and avoid them, because in the end that's all laws are for, order. They're there to keep one person from affecting another person negatively. The way I see it, my religion is one of taking chances and not regretting missed opportunities, a belief that tomorrow might be bad but right now doesn't have to be, and I have the freedom to practice that.

Just a thought.
Fin.

Dead Butterflies

2010-04-15T14:54:00.000-07:00

The ground is a place to stare
When the stares are all on you
All eyes watching your every move
Of your faults they're all aware.

The way you carry the burden of shoulders
The broken face that opens when you split a yawn
The lumpy shadows across the ground you walk on
The face that your heart beat colors.

For these things, no patience is found
Always mockingly uncontrolled.
As they take their walking toll
You are harvesting from the ground

The dead things that you see there
Beneath your feet they're crunched and rotting
By their creator somehow forgotten
And "oh", you wonder, "the rank places we stare".

Sunlight

2010-04-04T22:21:00.000-07:00

I woke up to cool sweat beading on the sides of my head and forehead. The sweat that accumulates when your air conditioning shuts off for a few hours before kicking back on when it realizes that the house has been too hot for its roommates. His body was warm, cool and sticky next to mine. It crosses my mind that the light should mean I have more time to sleep, but the dream logic fails and the sunlight reminds me I have at least a few hours to get things done before my mom and sister are home. It's about six, which means this nap wasn't the kind that sabotages your day with a promise of infinite comfort, just the kind that makes your day that much easier, the kind you took for granted in kindergarten. Light's coming in at just the right afternoon angle and everything, even the smothering heat of the city, my clothes and hair, feels welcome and comfortable.
This day drew upon itself. A day where good things just happened expectantly. A day that feels like it won't be so rare when the workloads are lighter and life gets easier. A day that may or may not come later on, but you hope for anyways.

Poem for Carlita

2010-03-11T17:50:00.001-08:00

I still can't grasp it,
The image it places there,
In my soul,
Ripping my emotions,
To find something celestial,
And magical,
In this cynics body.
Where I have been convinced
That I was stone
And immovable
Into these notes,
This song written for someone else,
I melt.
Completely unaware of my existence
The tightening grasp
It would have on my heart,
Were I the one to receive
This
I could die.
Were I the one to play
This
I could die.
Were I the one to hear
This
I could die.
I've never been so moved by something
Wood,
Metal,
Hair,
Motion
And I'm shaken
To the core.

Talking

2010-02-25T08:09:00.000-08:00

I don't know if I've let this much time lapse without calling. I miss him. You. Yes, you, even though I know you don't read this.
It has been such a long few weeks. Work went from 12, to 20, to 30 hours. I'm exhausted, haven't completed any of my assignments. I haven't eaten since yesterday afternoon and I would like nothing more than to curl up in my bed and sleep for a week. It's just one of those days where the world seems to be flying past. Tripping along while I watch unable to keep up. Something of the past ringing in my ears making me think that maybe success is even less possible than I expected. Impossible even. Even if I know it's not. Or just think it's not. Or know it is. Or want to know, what I can't about the future. Biggest worry, besides my listlessness, is money.
I need money. My job doesn't pay enough and I feel that I should be saving. I don't know what for, but something more than this, that feeling wiggles around in my stomach like a parasite, gnawing at it and causing moments where I'm certain that I won't survive the fight between us, me and this poisonous entity. This state of being feels wrong. I need to be closer to independence, not farther away. I had a better savings account as a freshman than I do now. In the real world you don't get hired by people who care about you, I just have to get used to that fact.

Joseph Stack

2010-02-19T15:03:00.001-08:00

If you don't address the grievances of terrorists, the deaths of the innocent are in vain. The time to listen is before someone reaches their breaking point, not after, but sometimes it can't be avoided. People should read what this man wrote, not in support of his actions, but in defense of our freedom to acknowledge ...those who feel so strongly about their cause that they are willing to die for it. God willing, we will never feel that our passions are so stifled that we must resort to violence. To prevent people from not being heard, we must start to listen.

Joseph Stacks Manifesto

Valenirthday

2010-02-14T06:40:00.000-08:00

It's my birthday. I'm finally 18! Going to get something pierced, buy some cigarettes, get registered to vote, get a tattoo, go to a club, buy some porn, buy something from an infomercial, stay out past curfew, get my license, take nude photos, go to a strip club, buy a gun, go gambling in Oklahoma, get drunk in Mexico.

FIN!

Religion

2010-02-04T04:29:00.000-08:00

Ok. So often in my spare time I read up on the muslim faith. After a research project I did on the psychology of suicide terrorism I became extremely interested in the topic. One article I came across was about Muslim extremists and the fact that if they were moderate it meant that there was something inherently wrong with their religion. A bunch of Christians blasted this saying that now the Muslims were admitting to being extreme. As an objective observer I can safely say that both Christian and Muslim extremist are dangerous. Being extreme about your faith is one thing. Buddhist are extreme about their faiths, but they have nothing in their religion that states those who don't believe similarly are doomed for hell or should be murdered because they're infidels. No one is saying christians and Muslims shouldn't be adamant in what they believe but when people use the term
"extreme" Muslim or Christian they are referring to those who inflict their religions onto others using force. Moderate simply means you allow others to live as they choose without implementing the word of Allah or god completely because you aren't spreading it to all the corners of the globe. Peope will always look for faith and they will find it in the religion that feels right, not because a Christian shot an abortion doctor or because a Muslim blew up a plane. Those things don't help anyone, all they do is hinder peoples ability to find peace in religion. All we find now is hate. Even as an atheist I find it hard to swallow the concept that murder guarantees you a place in heaven. Muslims and christians really need a heart to heart. Just sit them down and let them work it out. I
think people would find they have a lot more in common than they realize.

Scaffolding

2010-01-31T21:03:00.000-08:00

It's amazing; the toll life takes on us. One minute we're born and the next the cells in our body have worn their bonds and we slowly shut down and fall apart. Death always comes from this thing. This steady decline. Sometimes we're even lucky enough to witness it. Then and now we become part of a persons break down, watch them fall from the twenty fourth story to a plot of dirt and rock below. Just five feet from a construction site trash can. Large and industrial, shielding them from curious onlookers and a seventeen year old girl who has never been cursed with such a blessing.

Never been graced by the vision of a flailing figure who gracelessly steadied himself in his last moments, remembering the feeling of free fall from some distant childhood memory but realizing this time, there are no tracks to catch him. This is it. In this moment, this man, making a living from true manual labor and little pay, with fate speaking to him in the form of snapping wires and the weight of falling bricks, died in an instant and I played witness.
These are the thoughts; these are the moments. This was a moment. His moment that I was rewarded without application or request. We all face it eventually. A fall from life. Some just seem faster than others. His was three seconds. I could count it on one hand. Helplessly watching in the moments that he and I both realized simultaneously what came next. Waiting for his story to unfold and become mine.

Are all deaths subject to that eternity between living and dying? Does eternity only exist in death? Who will suffer the relentless torment of seeing us all perish? Who is capable of being fully aware that there was once life in that person whose existence is now untraceable. When seconds before I could have asked him his history I must now ask a coroner, or his grieving family. His stories will be botched and told to the benefit of others entertainment. His things will be cherished, then sold when memories fade and pain is bearably dulled. This corpses mind is meat. Edible to those beings who see no difference between us and food and useless to those who do. A completely wasted capacity rather than only a wasted ten percent. The ten percent that I chose to use a portion of for him. To write this. This record. Of whatever it was that I witnessed. Blessing or a curse irrelevant to the feelings it evoked, because it was both, and neither. It was tragic and even now I tremble at the thought but even still, in the following hour I knew I had to live my life. Every cell in my body wanted to drink in life and take with it what it could. Death was right in front of me in the form of a broken construction worker and now, for the first time I chose not to turn away from the memory and responded instead.

Paciugo is Italian for Messy Concoction

2010-01-25T12:54:00.000-08:00

I got a job working at Paciguo's!
This is exciting. It's fulfillment of my love of ice cream with 70% less fat. They serve gelato and coffee drinks and I do believe my readers (if you are even out there) should come visit.

General

2010-01-12T18:06:00.001-08:00

I was walking home. I'm always on my way home when my mind wonders. The only time I have to myself. The rarest moments of my day. They used to be welcome, now they're just empty. It's like someone blew the yolk out of its shell; my shell. This shell on my head. Wasn't there a time when it was filled with things. Stories. Worlds. Dancing ponies and seahorses? Yes. I believe there was a time when that was the case. Now I don't know what's there. Sometimes it slips onto paper, those bits of yolk and egg white, but generally it's all gone or maybe hidden. Light, hollow. Leaving me with a vapid expression and a half-assed attempt at feeling something, anything. Usually anger, occasionally frustration...sometimes I just get really sad, but even still it's empty. Egg shell empty. Egg white empty. The color of walls that house the most boring individual you could ever hope to meet.
Yep, that's me.
Vapid.
Boring.
Blonde to the core.

House of Leaves

2009-12-17T09:18:00.000-08:00

Listening to Death Cab for Cutie in art, becaus I'm predicatble and 17.
I've been reading House of Leaves for about a week now and I think it might be playing a part in my torrential mood swings. Anyone who absorbs books like I do might know what I'm talking about.
I find it impossible to read a good book without eventually being consumed by the character. Creating dialogues in my head that sound more and more like someone elses thoughts and narrations. I don't think I'm crazy, because generally it stops after I finish reading, but it does make reading a rather precarious venture. If you have to consider whether or not your mental state can handle a book before you read it, reading becomes somewhat less enjoyable. Especially when you realize that in order to get your life back to normal you're going to have to isolate yourself in a room for two days and plow through the last 300 pages before you'll be able to stop muttering to yourself or having mild hallucinations when you're up at night wondering if the walls are changing shape and size. At this point I'm just hoping my social life holds out until I finish.
I imagine it will.

You should read this book...

Miracles

2009-12-16T15:47:00.000-08:00

I'm finding time to update again. I forget how much free time I actually have. Without Michael around and without Tillman's devouring my weekends I have time to focus on myself; and I must say, it's depressing. I'm sitting and listening to the cranberries in the dark of my apartment. So many things I could be doing, and this is what I remember how to do best. Not even the shades are up because I get too nervous that the Willie Nelson look alike in the building next door is getting his jollies from seeing me in my PJ's.
I like the dark better anyway I guess, low lighting from the Christmas tree making patterns on the wall makes it feel sort of homey, even if it is surrounded by the sterile white that accompanies all apartments built within the last four years. Something is always better than nothing.
I have so little to say nowadays.
What happened to me? Do we all get boring as we get older, or am I just losing myself? To school, to relationships, to anxiety...Don't know, maybe I'm imagining it. Maybe I'm just realizing what I've always been. It's hard to say.
God.
Someone.
Please.
Get rid of this feeling of uselessness.
I need a hobby.
Maybe I'll start knitting, smoking, watching game shows and brushing invisible cats.
That's satisfied my grandmother for 60 something years.
Genetically it's bound to soothe my frayed nerves...
Right?

The Trip Home

2009-12-15T16:11:00.000-08:00

Dallas is cold in a way that I find difficult to describe. Each time I find myself walking home after school in a Dallas winter, the brisk wind does more than fully numb my noes and ears. It always does much more. It chills my thoughts and freezes any warmth inside of me. My goals seem frozen and stuck, the pleasant thoughts of all those people that care about me turn to bitter thoughts of betrayal and loss, the warm feelings I accumulated throughout the day from overcoming tiny obstacles like making it successfully through a cello piece or managing even the glimmer of a smile from my calculus teacher, all whipped away with each step that I take closer to the last remaining students at the station. I don't know any of them. Most of my friends have cars, or are at least driving. I'm still walking. Begging change from teachers and never paying them back.
I know I'm bitching, and I realize that if I hadn't given my father the cold shoulder through my angsty teenage years I might even have that car that I now so desperately want but will have no need for in New York. I know I'm bitching, but my fingers are still aching from the cold and they feel warmed by the tapping of the keys on each letter that make up my laments.
They're pointless, though. I do realize that. Lamenting on about the agonizing time it takes to graduate...To live life at all. How is it that I'm so aware of the end of my life when my "life" has yet to begin? I can't say that it feels close, death that is, doesn't feel close, it just feels, real. As real as that cold breaking the thin layers I so foolishly believe will keep me warm. As real as the calculus homework I have, but can't, or won't, finish. It's a reliable constant, maybe my only constant; for what else is as reliable?
I've been able to ease my angst and depression some. Able to come to terms with my fears bit by bit. The same way one would eat an elephant I suppose. It's not easy, but it's filling. Focusing on healing seems to be a much better past-time than focusing on those things that tear me up inside. I find myself more numb than anything nowadays though. Just trying to ignore or suppress what hurts, or what bothers, or what provokes any sort of feeling at all. It turns me to stone, to ash. Turns me into something fragile just waiting for an excuse to break into a million pieces. I know it drives those I care about crazy. I know I'm difficult. I know these things, and I know them very well. I'm trying to change. I'm trying to fix what might, or might not, be broken.
I just have to stop walking home without a jacket.

Leave for New York on a Wednesday

2009-11-20T05:22:00.000-08:00

In the last few weeks my life has taken on a mind of its own. Dodging obstacles in a way I would have never thought of and crashing in places I've always known to avoid. For two weeks it felt like I wasn't in control at all.

Wednesday, after I got back from New York, I found out that the photography mentor ship I'd been pouring all my time into, was falling through. They weren't going to renew their lease, so I was left without a mentor.

Friday, I got fired from my job of two and a half years. Without so much as a hug. Yea, I'm sentimental like that.

Sunday, I got offered a chance to model for a Ft. Worth photographer. He wants to help me get some shots and maybe do some professional work.

Tuesday, I got accepted to Kings, the college in New York City that I went to visit.

Maybe New York does that to you; follows you home in the folds of your clothes and the strange hint of something new happening that you can feel over your entire body; maybe it changes your life completely just from having seen it.

Metal

2009-10-20T00:47:00.000-07:00

The buildings were falling down around us. My sister and I stared in horror as the construction machines mindlessly tore at buildings with people still in them. All of the city was metal, and all of it was to be destroyed. No one could stop them. We drove through narrow roads avoiding debris as best we could. I covered my sister with my body and tried to keep my wits; but all I could think about was the sounds of crushing metal.

Gonna Leave

2009-10-04T18:28:00.001-07:00

Don't take my word for it.
You can see it in every step.
Farther from the place you'd expect.
Closer to some poorly placed lighthouse,
Beckoning a weary sailor on.
Towards shores he'll only see
As a means to the end
Of his cruel life at sea.

School

2009-10-01T07:37:00.000-07:00

The building smells like urine...Whether from the wild dogs or homeless men standing outside the gas station, I don't know. Nothing about this school is appealing. I can picture myself as a kid wondering why I put up with this shit. Asking why I still don't have a car and what ever happened to Sunday afternoons when I woke up early because I was excited about the day. Whatever happend to day dreaming? When school was a prison that could be escaped, when it was exciting to think about ways out, or to meet my friends and make up playground games. It's just become something I choose to go to as a means to an end. I want to hate it, and so does that kid that's still somewhere inside my head, but it's a choice now. A urine drenched choice...

Dart

2009-09-22T17:39:00.000-07:00

Ketchup cups and red pipe balls
Taken in by simple calls.
Hands posessed by greedy minds,
Not unlike the hands of time,
Waiting for the hand to stall.
I listen play and turn a blind.
Black and white like checkerboards
Trains where people patiently board
Each against a pillar lean
Gamblers, each a hopeless scene.
Memories all over time
Replaced.
Grass and trees and rainy days
Forgotten, remain beneath the tree.
Of high rise.
Low rent.
Catastrophes.

Dandy Sandman

2009-09-17T06:29:00.000-07:00

Taken at the Dandy Warhols Concert! The Sandman himself :]

Stairs and things

2009-09-17T00:59:00.000-07:00

I curse the days up till now,
Baffled in conceit of how
You stole the thing most dear to me;
Caged until you set it free.
Long collided hearts did bleed
In retrospect and effigy.
So worth the time you took from me,
Ticking away you let it be.
Simple love made timely notes
Long awaited chords we wrote
With masks removed and words revoked
I knew you well, before you spoke.
And I asked from then how could it be?
That I felt caged...
But was so free.

New York City

2009-09-15T21:37:00.001-07:00

A Christian college?
Not exactly the seat I expected, but the destination stays the same.

Evangelicals?
I'm strong minded, no side of brainwashing for me thank you, I'll stick to the seedy underbelly.

Scholarship?
Yes, please.

No parents for hundreds of miles?
Yes. PLEASE.

Miss my friends?
Always, but still just a phone call away.

Excited?
Immeasurably.

Fuck

2009-09-06T11:13:00.000-07:00

Stinted memories,
Are growing behind my back,
Biting my exposed hand,
After spending the time
On those obligated days,
Obliviously carrying about
What I meant to mean
But couldn't say.

Writers Block

2009-08-25T16:11:00.000-07:00

For almost a month now nothing has come.
I've had no desire to describe the way the city looks, or the look I imagined on his face when I saw him fall off a building, or the way his hand feels holding my cheek when I try to turn away and he brings me back in for a kiss, or the pride I get when I show up to after school tutoring and leave knowing more than when I arrived. These things have found a place in my memory; and have found no need for record. These things are so experienced in the moment that I have no need to relive them. My writing lately has been so paled by reality that there seems to be little good in relating my experiences. I'm not necessarily thrilled with my life right now, school is tough already (two days in) and it's very obviously going to be a difficult year but the idea of letting go of my thoughts and putting them into words that inadequately describe my feelings seems contrived. I can't say what I want with words, and I can't mean what I say without them...
I want to write. Write about everything. I just feel like I keep losing the words.

Flagpole

2009-07-27T07:53:00.001-07:00

It's raining.
People are busy upholding their American dream, following an overglorified primates orders and filling out paperwork day after day. Living a life I can only hope to live in the future by going to a prestigious college. Fully aware that the paperwork I'll be filling out thanks to my college education is only helping me to pay off loans that I had to use to pay for college in the first place.
Trapped in time.
Always a ticking clock. Like the crocodile.
Tick tock. Tick tock.
Times up.
And so we escape into ourselves. We rely on emotion. The gentle stirrings of the one thing we can control and more often than not choose not to. The subtle ebb and flow of tides that fill you from the center and find their release through slamming your fist into a concrete wall, through crying yourself to sleep, through drinking, through sex, over a passage of time. The quivering of excitement that pulls at the corners of your skin and makes your knees weak, head dizzy, jello. These emotions help us to escape ourselves, our primate ways, our concrete lives. But with those emotions comes the shudder of fear that lays over you when death stares you in the face. Too many times have I escaped in hopes of honing these emotions and allowing them to be understood only to see that what I feel and what I see are one in the same. What should be in my mind to comfort me is only frightening me more. The feeling of mental calm is lost. So jammed with information and shit are the recesses of our minds that we don't know what it is to escape from the world and essentially from each other. We find it impossible to be alone. Constantly unsure of ourselves without the approval of our best friends, our lovers, the homeless man that we refused to give change to. Where we could once know ourselves we now allow others to know for us. There's no place in our minds for escape and contemplation.

Moonshine

2009-07-13T07:31:00.001-07:00

Time elapsing in false collapses
Memories recorded
Through rose tinted glasses.
Twenty-twenty hindsight
Confined to stagnant rewinds
We find ourselves calling
Into warped circles of time.
Times we conquered lost lands
And created new ones,
A child's anxious awaiting of the days
That would reduce their world to reruns.
Conquering annual candles,
Unaware of the flickering wax's position
In waning their world to this.

Going Up

2009-06-26T09:43:00.001-07:00

Pay for the ticket
Step in the box
Go for a ride
In the dark.
Forget about screws
And what holds it together
Rusted metal pipes
And a byzantine
Of eaten wood.
Nourishing
And changing you
As you're held to a place
By gravity.
Allowing the hold
of the uncontrolled
Uncontrollables
That have a tendency
Of making you,
You.

Quick Sand

2009-06-18T08:38:00.000-07:00

Every step forward means lifting up these concrete slabs and placing them recklessly in a direction that may or may not lead me where I want to go. Everything that felt right has turned to ash. Incinerated on stubbornness. Destroyed from holding onto it so tightly that it broke irreparably.
I'm falling.
Sinking.
Solid ground is distant.
It's unforgivable and it's just starting.
It's irreplaceable and it's bullshit that life works like this.
Brought on by early mornings and intensely dark nights there is nothing to salvage because in the eye of the beholder everything is perfect. Neurotic and strung up on lightning rods I'm constantly seeing farther than anyone else but not as a choice.
As a burden.
Worrying. Unable to enjoy the right now, the right there. Constantly wondering, who is this girl?
I don't know her at all. Once she was care free and wild, able to flirt with and run away and hide from the world. Now she's exposed as a fraud, just someone who wanted to find something that was lost, and lost again, and found but found broken.

Huddle-ing

2009-06-05T11:52:00.000-07:00

My interest in film has always been short lived. I love watching films, I love critiquing them and soon I will have the means of exploring the process!
Huddle Productions is a small corporation that is trying to move promotions from television to the wonderful world wide web, and I will very possibly be intern #2!

This isn't necessarily a promo ad for Huddle, but I do think their concept is where advertisement and all of the commercial world is heading and I'm psyched about being a part of it.

Negra Modelo

2009-06-01T05:30:00.000-07:00

You tell me to relax, it's so simple, I remind you that nothing is and all you can do is disappear in witty retort.
Why is this getting so convoluted? When did it get so much harder to trust people, to love someone, to move on from those things that insist on keeping us in the dark.

Forgetting What You Had

2009-05-13T21:00:00.001-07:00

Texts dwindle to nothing, calls are rare and the day gets slower as you keep checking your phone and seeing that the person who once texted you every day as much as they could, isn't thinking about you the way you're thinking about them. Avoiding it from the beginning would have at least kept me from nights like tonight.

You're Not Listening

2009-05-09T11:30:00.000-07:00

I found that you cry more
When you're happy.
So much farther to fall when you stand with a straight back.
Back straight,
Chin up, eyes straight ahead,
And you aren't looking where you're going.
You're falling,
You thought you had one foot in front of the other,
But there are no more balancing acts; the wires are gone.
You're dealing with it the best you can
But without it you're nothing,
So what are you really?
All of you ask and want and need,
All of me needs and wants and asks.
We're taking back what we never needed,
And we're lying about it.
Doing so much more.
To get so much less.

I-Pod

2009-05-09T10:25:00.000-07:00

It was sitting on the counter when I came home from school. Some ipod my mom found in a storage unit. A piece of a person that I will never meet. Simple gel blue cover, just something for them to listen to on the train or walking to work. I've been through the songs a couple of times and have found little redeeming about their taste in music, but the few surprises have kept me looking through it. I gathered that it's a guy, his playlist made for only women, girls, Madeleine and Abigail. Abigail's playlist is playful. Songs like Coin-Operated Boy and Barbie Girl. Abigail was probably a distraction, Be My Escape was her first song, something fun and easy. It seems that Madeleine was different; the song titles forming a letter to her that he couldn't bring himself to write. He's a Christian, maybe he met one of them at church, Abigail has How Great is Our God, maybe Madeleine was an Atheist who couldn't bring herself to be blinded. She has two songs asking her to stay with him, and one telling her that he'll stay if she does. Maybe he proposed, and she told him he'd never grow up. He does have an entire playlist of disney songs...Maybe he has kids.
It's painful to go through this and find that the best artists have the least amount of songs, just major hits or songs that he knew would get him laid. Iron & Wine has two songs, Dandy Warhols has one. Queen has five.
He seems to enjoy musicals, there are four songs from Chicago and three songs from Moulin Rouge. Vanessa Carlton 1000 miles came on when I hit "now playing"...no joke. Anna Nalick, Avril Lavigne, Dixie Chicks, Allison Krauss. Maybe I was wrong, could be a woman, but Kiss is on there, so I doubt it. I'm having trouble getting this guy, right when I think I have him pinned as a closet gay, The Raconteurs come on and I feel like I owe him more search time. Showtunes, Disney songs, B.Y.O.B by System of a Down without an artist or song name. Something so small can tell you so much. He has horrible taste in music, but isn't afraid to expand. Most likely a white guy. Just enough of the songs pretentiously placed so people can see. Songs that he'll never listen to but feels he "should" have on his ipod if he is to join the ranks of "intellectuals". He seems to just be scratching the surface of something. Finding more than his frat house in the big bad world. Might have just gotten a big time office job downtown. Probably trying to figure out what exactly it is that his life means now that he doesn't have Madeleine in it anymore. He's moving on. Growing up. And I'm wondering how much I can get if I pawn his ipod.

Anxiety

2009-04-23T22:17:00.000-07:00

Despite what many people believe, my recent panic attacks have nothing to do with stress or irrational fear. My panic attacks are brought on when something goes off in my head that makes me obsess about the fact that I have one life to live and that's it, that there is nothing after death (Christians, back off of this one,it's what I believe and that will not change) and there's nothing I can do about it. It's a mid-life crisis, it's scary as hell and it makes me feel crazy. When you're having a panic attack from fear of dying it's not like someone can say, "It's ok" or "Don't worry about it". How can you not? How can people not think about this on a day to day basis? Maybe I'm just obsessive, I don't know, but the fear is very real and I'm sick and tired of people acting like my fears aren't warranted. As an atheist I have no false comforting thoughts of an afterlife, I have death, plain and simple, and to process that thought, I mean really process it, takes a lot of balls. I'm not saying I'm brave or better than someone who feels that we die and go to heaven, but accepting one is a lot easier than accepting the other. I feel weak for not being able to cope with it, but I don't know how anyone else would react better. It's not something I can just "think" away. It's a process.

Good Ole' US of A

2009-04-20T15:49:00.000-07:00

"We live in a land that you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage and, you know what, in my country and my family I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anyone out there, but that's how I was raised and that's how I think it should be between a man and a woman."

-Carrie Prejean, Miss USA runner-up

The first time I heard this on a youtube video, I assumed the idiot statement spoke for itself, and that it was obvious why she lost. But, after all the conservatives got up in arms, I decided it needed to be posted and someone needed to read the passage to them by screaming in their ear with a microphone. She didn't lose the pageant because she was against gay rights, the woman couldn't even make a coherent sentence.

Seriously?

2009-04-15T10:39:00.000-07:00

The internet provides an alter ego, a personality change that can be excused as a misinterpretation or misunderstanding.
Online I'm romantic, passionate, and never afraid to tell people what I think. In reality I'm cold and uptight, afraid to be involved with anyone because everything dealing with emotions is such a tedious balancing act.
It's so frustrating to see these two different sides so clearly in the people you love. How do you diffrentiate the person they want to be from the person they really are?
Would you even want to?
I have to remind myself that I will never completely understand anyone, but vulnerability can blur the lines between knowing and understanding and just when you think you understand, that you have it all figured out, you just know, and that's...frustrating.

Vast

2009-04-06T09:01:00.000-07:00

Summer is so close I can taste it. Carried in on the un-characteristically brutal winds that we have had the last few days, instead of simply being close it feels close. And with that sweet irresponsibility comes the bitter taste of senior year, and college, and losing everything that I bitched about for so long. I'm not afraid of growing up but I am afraid of waking up and not being expected.
Whereas my days have always been planned out for me, 9:00 to 4:00, lunch at 12:00 first, second, third and fourth, I'll make my schedule the way I believe it should be made. It seems like their is a wide margin of error, so many chances to screw it up. What's keeping everyone from falling off what seems like a rather daunting precipice?
So many people make things work for them almost effortlessly, but nothing guarantees success. Doesn't guarantee failure either. Just wait, make plans, follow them, break them, follow them again... That easy.

Pick Up Where We Left Off

2009-03-23T16:24:00.001-07:00

listening to: The Last // Little Dragon

Nostalgia is a dangerous thing. It results in a dark cloud over the present whether you're missing someone who has yet to leave, or remembering someone you'll never get back. Something about the permanence of having to remember happiness rather than live in the moment that has passed you by coupled with the idealism that you place on memories that you know are irreplaceable leaves you feeling empty and slightly comatose; trapped between what was and what could have been.
Unlike many "in the moment" people, my moments don't exclude past and future, I simply enjoy good moments when they come and choose to worry about those things that I tuck away when it doesn't interfere with things that are special. I worry about them when I'm writing, smoking, at work, watching tv, or suffering insomnia. Times that won't be ruined because my mind wanders off into a horrible assumed future or a bad childhood memory.
Too few people understand the concept of living in the moment. It doesn't mean you completely ignore consequences or responsibilities, it simply means you don't let those things interfere with every single decision you make, it's a freeing philosophy only when you're willing to accept the consequences. I'm usually very considerate of my decisions, just seems that one of the best decisions I've made recently has turned into one with greater repercussions than I anticipated. I knew living in the moment had it's downsides, but I didn't realize it could hurt this much.

Spring Break

2009-03-18T21:31:00.000-07:00

No complaints.
This weeks been fantastic.
I don't know why I keep this thing up, just out of habit at this point.
May stop soon, don't know, it's kind of addicting.

It's really strange to have someone that is jealous of my past. I've never had a whole lot of friends, the ones I do make are more like acquaintances than anything else. I guess Jo and I are what you'd consider "best friends" but even then I always figured you had to work at a friendship, and my friendship with her has never seemed like anything difficult to maintain. I think of best friends as a mutual pet project. If my friend and I find time to chill every now and then, the friendship is sustained, kind of like watering a plant or keeping a goldfish alive... Although I've had much better luck with friends than I have with goldfish.
I don't care enough about people to make friends out of them, I'm too critical to keep them around. I just find one person who can put up with my bullshit and I choose them to spend time with if an occasion for spending time comes up, other than that, I don't really make it a concern. I'm going to be a bit of a lost cause without Jordan, seems like few people can deal with only an occasional call to maintain a friendship.
I wonder if that makes me better or worse in relationships. Is a calloused attitude attractive? I'd imagine being in a relationship with me is very similar to playing with a roly-poly. It's intriguing at first to see a prehistoric insect crawling around on your fingertips, but once they roll up, they tend to lose their appeal; becoming good only for a miniature game of bowling or a life/death game of pick up sticks.

Afterlife

2009-03-02T17:16:00.000-08:00

I'm most ultimately lit in neon projections.
Shoes stained with fuzzy light.
Comets in the heat of dark walls,
Cement driven rooms for the shoes of dancing clowns.
Yellow dragonflies tinting my eyes wide and black,
Wings fluttering in the stop and start;
Lights and a heart beat.
Race and the car heat.
Brilliance in a toxic city.
Time controlled by gentle hands,
Unaware of the human condition.
Mortal.
The hourglass is caught tonight,
Sandman found something better than to allow
A night like this one to age.
I'd thank God if he had taken part,
But this was a strike for the race
Who, made in His image of hate and rejection,
Found love reflected
In mortal eyes.

Revision

2009-02-26T20:20:00.001-08:00

So, I wasn't clear with my last entry and I would just like to explain some things. I don't think society should compromise with me on the things like drinking ages, or ages of consent, those things I can understand and at least sort of accept. What I was referring to are the things in society that NEED changing.
I was simply trying to bring attention to the fact that we live in a place where changing things is a very real possibility. No one gives themselves enough credit, but it's amazing what can get done if we take some initiative.

It's true that I don't believe it's right that because I'm under 18 my car (if I had one) can be searched without a warrant, it's true that I don't believe people should limit a persons relationship because of their age, I mean there's a lot I don't agree with regarding age but because I know teenagers and know how incredibly stupid we can be I don't fight for those allowances. I'm very aware that they will be taken advantage of without regard for consequence. Age and maturity do, in a general sense, go hand in hand and it makes sense that limits would be set up accordingly. Ignoring the fact that generalization leaves many people out, it is necessary, I get it.

These generalizations leave out those adults who should never have been let into bars, or teenagers who are completely capable of taking their life into their own hands. Unfortunately these teens find no solace in the system because the voting age is 18. At the very least a capable teenager should have the ability to vote. Hell, even if it's just for school board members. Am I not a person because I'm under 18? Can the government tell me I'm not capable of love? Or choice? Especially considering those laws are not only gender biased but are based on biblical morality rather than rational consequence.

I have aspirations, independence, responsibility, understanding, intelligence. I'm more than willing to accept an adults responsibility if it would warrant the ability to be heard. People wonder why we feel invisible, why schools are shot up, why suicide rates among teens are so high. Who is listening to them? To us? To me?
Who cares what we think until we get attention from people through acts of violence or promiscuity? I don't expect special treatment, I realize that everyone has had to "wait their turn", but I also realize that someday (god forbid) I might bring a child up in this world, and I believe there will be nothing more stifling than for them to grow up without a voice, with feelings of hopelessness, and the dreaded "teenage angst" that is a direct result of being ignored.

I think that is what people in society need to consider, and I hope someday they do, but until I'm 18, the only people who are going to hear me are the ones that can't see me and are reading this through their computer screen.

Fall in Line

2009-02-25T20:07:00.001-08:00

I don't know if I can actually follow the rules of a society that seems hell bent on keeping me from the things that I'm happiest doing. What the fuck is wrong with this picture? I'm here, therefore I belong, and if I belong I'm going to do what I want within the boundaries that I agree with. I'm not one to push the limits of the law. I don't steal, I have no desire to kill anyone, I don't mind holding down a job, those are parts of society that make sense and keep everyone from going mad...but social limits on who you can date, when you can date, when you can drive, when you can live on your own, what you learn in school past the age of 13? There's no incentive to be obedient when I'm being stripped of the "pursuit of happiness/property" that is a guarantee of our constitution. I'm frustrated with my own happiness because I know that it's happiness I have to struggle to maintain against all social norms. I want to say screw society, but I'm a part of it, and we're going to have to compromise.

Decicated to the Kitchen

2009-02-20T13:34:00.000-08:00

This is from stuffwhitepeoplelike.com #119, thought of the kitchen guys at work when I read it.

Regardless of how much a white person cooks or how long they have lived in their current home, they all have a tube of sea salt in their pantry. In fact, it’s one of the few foodstuffs that white people will actually bring with them when they move. This is because sea salt is expensive and while white people have money, they didn’t get that way by throwing away $7 packages of salt.

When white people think about regular salt, all they can think about sodium and poor health. When they think about Sea Salt they think about France. So it’s no surprise that it has become so popular.

But Sea Salt is like Trader Joes, Banksy, or The Shins-entry level to their respective field. Therefore, it is important that you learn about other more expensive salts so that you can complain about not having them. To a white person, this shows that you know and love expensive things but feel sad that you can’t yet afford them.

From here you can fill up an entire evening by making the same complaints about art, real estate or Europe.

Birthdays + Valentines

2009-02-14T06:43:00.000-08:00

I'm a bit more excited about turning 17 today than I was yesterday, maybe because it's already here, I don't know. I'm legal in the state of Texas now, which is exciting, and I can officially see rated R movies, always cool...umm, and I don't have a curfew technically...Also cool.

More freedom is sweet.

Monster

2009-01-31T13:41:00.001-08:00

The rush of caffeine and cigarettes can't be beat on days like today. My leg is bouncing up and down like I'm itching for a bump while I'm waiting for Jordan to bring me a monster, it's crazy that an energy drink can do this to people. She won't be here for another 30 minutes so in the meantime I'm stuck rejecting reservations on the phone and listening to random songs on my ipod...
While I was pausing and thinking about what to write, I remembered a news story I was watching yesterday on the Octuplets that some woman was having through invirto fertilization. Six kids originally, now she's having eight. 14 in all and this woman is raising them all on her own...Why? Why would you do that to yourself? Where's the sense of responsibility for mothers? Granted it's a woman's right to have children, but when do we begin to recognize physical limits? These kids have no chance in hell at a normal life.
There's no responsibility any more, people that have that many children expect the children to bring them the attention that they couldn't find on their own.

Yes We Can (?)

2009-01-20T15:23:00.000-08:00

Today was a series of contradictions. Moving between guilt, hurt, anger, nausea and complete satisfaction. Last night was incredible. I saw the epitome of contact and enjoying of peoples company, and I saw the depths of how far down my age puts me on the totem pole. I assume these responsibilities with the expectation that with it will come privilege. That is unfortunately not the case, and despite what I've been conditioned to think, it never has been. With great responsibility comes respect, not privilege, and with that respect, all you really get is recognition, a pat on the head, people that are impressed but still feel the need to exercise their authority whenever they feel you've taken more privilege than your age allows. I'm so tired of being told to treasure being young. There is no treasure in not having enough experience to know anything, and being reminded of it every day because adults are insecure.
People shouldn't feel threatened by a persons maturity. I'm not a threat and I'm not trying to push boundaries, I'm just trying to be comfortable. I'm not comfortable at pizza parties, I'm not comfortable at highschool birthday parties where people are either doing way too many drugs, or not doing enough. I don't like school functions. I hate the Jonas Brothers, Highschool Musical and Twilight...I feel most comfortable around adults and babies. Individuals who are too young and too old to be influenced by anything except what they decide to take in. That's where I belong, none of this "in-the-middle" bullshit.

Untitled

2009-01-11T11:07:00.000-08:00

My view from the computer is of four layers of building. In the foreground there are the offices of people that I've watched for a year and a half. Living out the lives that aren't meant to define them, but do. Behind that is a building that says shaftway up one side and the way the light hits it around 1 o'clock in the afternoon makes it look like it's tilting too far to one side. Leaning behind that is a white building that looks like a modern artist's idea of sex. Blocks that lay across each other to intermingle and play off of the light, moving your eye back and forth in rhythm until you reach a solid blue sky. An uneventful climax compared to the country, where there aren't buildings obstructing the sky that takes so long for the eye to reach when man interjects.

A New Year

2009-01-02T00:15:00.000-08:00

It seems to me that when you are sad to the point of heart break, sadness takes on a new meaning. Sadness on steroids with side effects that will ensure reaching an all time low.. You feel sick, scared, angry, disgusting, lonely... Every bad feeling you could possibly have hits you at one moment to produce a crippling sensation that I would compare to the feeling you get when you recognize your own mortality. Might even compare it to clockwork orange; the wave of awful feelings he gets when he does "bad" things only my sickness is triggered by simple reminders. I cant even listen to my iPod because there are too many song associations that produce the feeling. I've felt this way before, but it has been long time since any emotion has been this consuming. I don't know why this is happening. I don't know how to adapt to this. Me, the person who can mold herself to fit any situation finally found where she doesn't belong. I've found that despite my many mistakes I have no real regrets, and yet, in a time where I actually felt useful and happy because of my decisions I find myself regretting everything. I want to take it all back, pull out the root of the problem and stop hurting. I've never felt so foolish. I've never felt so desperately alone.

This blog is really the only company I have right now, because it's 2:30 and sane people have taken vallum and are getting sleep. That's my my best attempt at reasoning my need to express every thought and feeling I have to total strangers and friends alike. Granted my reasoning is flawed but self pity works better when you don't have someone to remind you how pathetic you and your justifications of self induced misery are.

Ugh. I am pathetic. Damn.

Malbec

2008-12-24T12:15:00.001-08:00

w00t.
headaches gone.
come celebrate.

Dreamer

2008-12-24T06:42:00.000-08:00

My bareback is cold outside of the covers and even in my dreams I'm shivering. Since last week I've only dreamt of one person. When you dream, sometimes you wake up and the dream is still playing out, you feel that whoever was with you in your dream is still next to you. In and out of what was real and what wasn't I've confused my waking life with ridiculous fantasies that weren't so ridiculous a month ago. I hate when I see things changing, when I feel the need to prepare myself for the future even if I'm not done living out the present. It's like cupping water in your hands, no matter how tight you hold onto it, it seeps between your fingers and is gone before you taste it.

I've had a constant headache for two weeks.
Not sure what's causing it.
I just wish it would go away.

Today is Christmas Eve, hope everyone enjoys.

How to Buy Weed in PG

2008-12-22T08:21:00.000-08:00

Disclaimer: Only to be used when no other options are available:

Step 1: Know and understand why being in PG is normally a bad idea, then accept and clench your teeth.
Step 2: Bribe the only friend with a car using liquor and $20.
Step 3: Use the friends you're picking up for the liquor needed in step 2.
Step 4: Keep about $60 on you. $40 for the weed, $20 for emergency cigarettes so you keep your cool even if you're completely sketched out.
Step 5: Stay optimistic, you're already desperate, no point in being miserable.
Step 6: Comfort scared friends by explaining you lived in OC for 14 years and have been in much sketchier situations (even if you haven't). It'll make things easier.
Step 7: Don't be freaked out if the driver is playing bass through residential neighborhoods, it's PG...follow step 5.
Step 8: Smile and flirt if necessary with the gangbangers you're buying from so they don't get angry when you say you aren't paying for anything until you see it.
Step 9: Know at least 4 people. 2 should be in the car with you, and 2 should be in PG, if this step isn't followed, at least carry some kind of protection or bribe.
Step 10: These are the most helpful steps to follow if you find yourself in this situation. Especially when the occupants of the car being used are 3 white kids and a gay black guy playing rap music way too loud.
Step 11: If they offer you harder drugs (coke, heroine, meth etc.) politely decline. Even if they say it's aspirin, just remember what you came for, where you are and understand that this is probably a good time to implement the emergency cigarettes from step 4.
Step 12: Don't forget steps 1-11.

Um...ok?

2008-12-20T13:37:00.000-08:00

I'm not a confrontational person by nature, unless I'm dealing with parents. With my parents it seems that any excuse I have to be a bitch I'll take with no hesitation. This lack of confrontation among my friends has made me a bit bitter because I never say what I'm thinking about and I just let things build up until I'm not answering theirs calls and avoiding them at all costs. I'm equally bad at knowing what to say when someone is talking to me about how they feel. How do you describe an emotion? It's like colors or elements. You can't tell someone how water feels if they've never felt it. You can't tell a blind person what blue looks like. It's just frustrating to not understand what someone is thinking or how they're feeling. I like to be able to help people, understand their point, but it's impossible to empathize with someone when you've never felt what they're going through. I'm frustrated I guess, who isn't...

Whatever, it'll be a great winter break. I'm excited about being off despite being extremely frustrated with almost all my relationships.

Memory Wipe

2008-12-10T18:55:00.001-08:00

I finally got my camera back. Over 200 photos. Great ones. Beautiful photos.
More than just photos. My memories. Ways of remembering this summer.

At least...they were.

I just lost them, all of them. I apologize to those of you that might have been looking forward to new photos, they're completely erased.
I was trying to figure out why my memory card wasn't working so I took it out, plugged it in, tried again and on the second try they were all gone.

I haven't cried this hard since my grandfather died.
An entire collection of memories from this summer deleted from one stupid mistake.
I know I'm way too attached to my photos and my camera, but taking photos is a part of what I do, it's embedded in me, it's my way of completely connecting to everything around me. Everything seems more real when I can capture it in a photograph.

I belong behind cameras...
And technology like the little piece of crap that just wiped away all of my moments, belong in the trash.

My Moon, My Man

2008-12-05T22:22:00.000-08:00

So. I'm just going to recount my day. Because I'm on adderall, and I can't sleep, and really I just have a lot to talk about. Well, nothing interesting, just, a lot.

So my week sort of started after 8th period on Tuesday, because I have advanced physics and to be honest that class makes me want to blow my brains out. I was sitting in the back of the room and all I could do was imagine my teacher disappearing. I sat there for a solid thirty minutes staring a the man wondering why he was ruining my life. I understand that ruining my life is a melodramatic and typically a teenage response to stress, but this man, is truly, making me hate my life. He crams everything in my life into equations and math, robbing me of the chance to see even the slightest beauty in something that I once thought free of any sort of logic. A sunrise can be ruined in a single instance, because light has a speed, and the sun has a radius, and my eyes see it backwards so what does it really matter? I step outside the room and everything remains a god damn equation and it's driving me insane. So much so that I have honestly had a drink with every physics assignment, just so I might be able to tolerate it for even a moment. I'm sure you're laughing because I drink when I do my homework and expect that to help me get it, but it's not so much because of a desire to understand the homework that I drink, I just want the homework to disappear, and amazingly enough (though it doesn't work on my teacher) if I drink enough my worries about the homework are soothed, and there might as well not be any homework at all.

All of this angst about physics has sunk me into a severe depression. So yesterday, after my relatively sane A day schedule, I decided to forget that I would again have physics the next day, and I drank some more. This was right before an after school performance so I made the silly attempt to buy cigarettes at a nearby gas station, reeking of alcohol, and was denied, for obvious reasons. The rest of that night (it's wednesday now) went smoothly, though I found it in poor taste for the gentleman to deny us those cigarettes. Especially considering I was already drunk.

Next day was Thursday, date night for my mom. Which really translates into I get the house to myself for an hour or two, and with that I decided to invite over friends. They came, we drank, we smoked, we were merry and then my mom decides to rain on our parade and arrives home early, sending me text after text about all the crap I didn't do around the house, despite my labors that morning of waking her and my sister up, making coffee, walking the dog, taking out trash, cleaning the bathroom and finding time to get myself ready. I realize that all of those things are really standard, but when you aren't appreciated for at least one, you lose interest in doing any at all. I know, I'm spoiled, but a thank you is always appreciated.

Next day, Friday. Ah, Friday. While many highschool students plan what they'll wear to the movies, I'm dressed for work, ready to go save the 6 hours of sleep I should have gotten, had it not been for the drinking/smoking. So I'm dead to the world and decide I need a pick me up, and I need it fast. I tried food at lunch with no luck, smoked a clove, again, dog tired and come 3 or 4 o'clock I run into a friend that recognizes my dilemma and he slips me his adderall. I take it, and decide to skip my last period and spend an hour and a half playing Penguin Diner, the spaz game of all time meant only for those people who got no sleep and drink way too much coffee when they've already taken an amphetamine. This was me.

I was as happy as I could possibly be at work. Sure I was all over the place and I was talking a mile a minute but I've never felt that good when I was working, ever. It was a fantastic feeling. At one point I was moving so quickly I slid down the stairs in the back and was laughing so hard I couldn't get up. As I helped myself up I failed to notice the cuts and bruises on my fingers and legs from trying to right myself as my hand slid through the splinters of a wooden railing and my heels clumsily hit each step with a hard thud. I went to the office to laugh with someone about what had happened and I instead realize my finger is bleeding and there seems to be a wet spot on my jeans that shouldn't have been there. Sure enough the scrape right under my ass had started to bleed and now the jean material had made the scrape look infected and gross. I still couldn't stop moving or laughing, but now I was moving too fast and laughing too hard to not feel the bruises with every step so I downed 4 tylenol and suddenly, life was perfect. I couldn't feel much from my neck down, and my body was all over the place because sitting still felt wrong.
I spent almost the entire night at work in that state, and eventually I got home, sat at my computer, and thought about writing a blog. I finally got around to it at 3 in the morning, even though I got home at 12.

I procrastinate too much.
This post had no rhyme or reason except to vent, I'm done.
Promise.

Cold

2008-11-28T14:04:00.000-08:00

There's a part of the cold that implies the ability to be warm. To be held and safe and warmed by another persons body. I love that about winter. It feels like you won't be alone again, but at the same time, when you are alone and cold, you can't feel any worse. It's by far the most isolated feeling you can experience, and it's numbing. You feel as if you're the only person on earth, and that will never change. Winter is all about extremes, but I guess I'm pretty extreme most of the time...That's probably why I like it.

Thanksgiving

2008-11-27T10:14:00.000-08:00

Hate this holiday. Hate it with a passion. But on my moms side of the family, any holiday that incorporates champagne is a holiday worth celebrating. It's been a good day so far. I've had an excellent week, got to spend it with some of my favorite people, family and otherwise. Hope everyone's Turkey Day goes alright, mine will be celebrated free of turkey, we've substituted turkey with tamales and pate.

Wait...What?

2008-11-16T08:18:00.000-08:00

So, this weekend is slowly becoming the second weirdest weekend of my life. The first is a tie of three, and this takes honorary place number one on the list of second weirdest. That's how I keep track of time, and that works for me. Working the weekends and then partying afterwards always makes things feel out of place. It makes time last longer than it should and somehow things end before you even realized they started. Friday I was out until around 1 and up till about 2 and spent almost all Saturday sick as a dog, trying my best to focus on work and failing pretty miserably. After work I got home and everyone was pretty off. No one in my family seemed happy. I tried to find people to talk to, succeeded, sort of...and I eventually passed out around 3 or 4. Woke up at 7:30 to get coffee, and am officially back. Exhausted, frustrated, excited, confused, the usual feelings associated with the Sunday morning after a really long weekend. I know this might sound like a typical weekend and really it was, just something about the feeling of being in all the wrong places at all the right times separated it from the typical and made it very very atypical. So much so that I can barely remember events in any kind of order. It's just a blob of weekend, a huge, ominous, ridiculous, crazy, stupid, drunken, scary, terrible, awesome weekend blob. A blob that without documentation, will only be remembered when it shows up 50 years from now as a fuzzy spot on a cat scan, and the doctor will tell me something about being a crazy teen and about the possible terminal illness that was a result of all of my "weekend blobs", and I'll just laugh, because I'll remember.

Overdose

2008-11-11T15:58:00.000-08:00

It seems like the last few weeks have been filled with excess. Too much drinking, too many meds, too much homework, too many hours at work, too much time not spent at tutoring, too much smoking, too much of just about everything that's harmful to my education and body. I would cut back if it didn't seem to be improving my incredibly stressful situation. Something about being home is stressful, mainly because my mom seems so miserable, and on top of that we have had so much homework that I haven't been able to keep track of anything and for whatever reason, giving myself distractions seems to be the only solution to keep me from going insane.
This is another one of those bitching/self pity blogs that I'm sure people love to read, but I always feel a little better when I can let anyone interested know what's been up and why I might have been acting strange the last few weeks.

Now you know, and now I need to start my procrastination of all the shit that's due tomorrow.

Possession

2008-11-05T15:23:00.000-08:00

I've found that the light from the sunset is different here. It hits the building's blue shadows with a dash of flesh color, the windows standing out from the contrast with their bright bruised reflections, lined with ugly window shades. There's a bonsai tree on the window sill of the building across from us, a potted tree sitting against a background of cement. Downtown is beautiful for now. The noises are what they should be, the only music playing is my own, no clubs are blaring mainstream rap, my mind is going through its list of objectives and random realizations slow enough to where I can keep up, yet fast enough to keep me sane. It's windy, and my cigarette keeps going out, and for whatever reason, I continue to light it. Light, drag, smoke, out, light, drag, smoke, out...It's my mini-anthem. These things help my body fall into rhythm. They help my fingers hit the right keys and turn monotony into a kind of poetry. Nothing fancy, just a romanticized documentation of the things around me, and how amazing they make me feel when I take note of them.

Obama

2008-11-04T21:38:00.000-08:00

I'm in love with the idea.
I'm in love with this feeling.
I'm in love with the change in the air.
The standards of past presidencies have finally been reached and exceeded. Obama might not meet your political views, you might not even like him, but his drive and his desire to help America, and not just himself, are an inspiration to political parties around the globe. I couldn't be happier to have him as our president and to shamelessly say I'm an American. A working part of a nation that might finally be moving forward.

Words of Wisdom

2008-10-30T21:52:00.000-07:00

I was finishing the last sentence of my essay on Gender Roles throughout history when my mom finally came home an hour later than she said without the groceries I told her we needed, but with a convenient pack of capones. "I'm going to kill my entire family," she stated.
"Why's that?" I asked completely uninterested. Turns out my great aunt called and didn't know where my tutu was and was freaking out because she was just diagnosed with lung cancer and could kick at any moment. So my mom calls the local cops of that area and my mom starts panicking and calling other family members, none of whom she can reach, and an hour later gets a call from her sister saying that my tutu's been in the hospital all day and everyone knew about it except for her and my great aunt. Hardly a family tragedy (it was only a check up and they kept her overnight to keep an eye on her) but my mom is confused as to why she didn't get a call, which I guess is understandable.
I went outside to walk the dog and she follows so she can talk off all her pent up anger. There's an awkward silence and my mom informs me of what she calls the "only truth". "You're expendable, Hannah, don't forget that".
"Thanks mom, I won't."
This is what my mom leaves me to take into the world, the knowledge that I will always be replaceable. And to be perfectly honest, that's probably the best advice I'll ever get.

Dissolving

2008-10-29T17:21:00.001-07:00

The train rides home are miserable when they're silent. 6 passengers sitting in one cart, all spread out, and not saying a word. A baby cried, a cellphone went off and then, again, silence. I waited for a homeless person to get on and bum change, next stop, still nothing. I wanted to call someone, but I had nothing to say. The man sitting behind me on my left kept trying to get a look at the sketchbook in my lap and for whatever reason I felt violated and immediately covered it with my jacket. The man sitting in front of me on the right side was immersed in a book and I was jealous. Every time I see someone reading a book I feel a twinge of jealousy because they're in a world that I will never know, a world that I can't relate to, they're lost and I'm stuck hiding my art from a curious man behind me. And for what reason? He wanted to see my art, shouldn't I be flattered? What is that makes us so embarrassed by what we create? If he didn't like it, fuck him, what does it matter?
It reminded me of this time on the train when a man sat next to me, asked to see my sketchbook, and literally fell asleep on my shoulder looking through it. Was that experience enough of an embarrassment to make me never want another person to see my art? The guy on the train could have been drugged out of his mind, or maybe he hadn't slept in days, I can't be sure, so why would I let it bother me so much that after almost a year, I'm still reminded of it?
Silent trains just create an ample amount of time to think about the idiosyncrasies of the people around you. Things like the band-aid on the left hand of the reading man, the two tattoos on the neck and arm of the woman with the baby, the folds in the man's head sitting one seat ahead of me but on the right side in front of the woman with the baby girl. It made me tired to think about these people, and the lives they might be leading, so I tried looking out the window, but the first thing I saw was a running man with thin legs and huge stomach. "He must have stomach cancer", was the first thought that ran through my mind, so I gave up on watching, and closed my eyes.

A peace of mind...

Bone Machine

Big Blue Sky

A Few Words

Its Been a Long Time

The Mean Reds

A Lifetime and Two Weeks

Earth's stay'd Heart

Untitled

When Things Were Still New

To Wear White

Mama Mango

Love

Red Hook and those Middle Age Folk

The Daily

White Wine and Patti Smith

Mr.Deity

SemenTree

Metal Chisel

Telepathy or the Remnants of...

Atheist says,

Fuckin' April

Train Ride

Oh yea...

Let's Talk About Grace

Hey There Teddy Bear

Golden Age

Background

It's Like...What?

Lady

Sitting Here Now

Happy Phantom

New York, New York

Deus Ex Machina

Yesterday

The Polyartist

Doomsday

Mushrooms and Anime Conventions

Think Tank

Dead Butterflies

Sunlight

Poem for Carlita

Talking

Joseph Stack

Valenirthday

Religion

Scaffolding

Paciugo is Italian for Messy Concoction

General

House of Leaves

Miracles

The Trip Home

Leave for New York on a Wednesday

Metal

Gonna Leave

School

Dart

Dandy Sandman

Stairs and things

New York City

Fuck

Writers Block

Flagpole

Moonshine

Going Up

Quick Sand

Huddle-ing

Negra Modelo

Forgetting What You Had

You're Not Listening

I-Pod

Anxiety

Good Ole' US of A

Seriously?

Vast

Pick Up Where We Left Off

Spring Break

Popular

Afterlife

Revision