Enlightenment is so transient
I’m not feeling as meditative as I’d hoped. Nevermind.
Grasping and Pushing
My cousin writes letters like he’s dying
Today is the last day we will see each other
Today he is moving far enough away
Even our cell phones will not meet at any point
On one end the map he stands a tall dark figure in some quiet windy field
On the other end I drown in some foreign sea, a tiny writhing wordless little thing
In these letters he is grasping and pushing all at once
His fingers dig deep into the earth only to toss soil over his broad shoulders
I have his letter tucked in this book and that
But nobody reads anymore
Which is to say I don’t read anymore
I don’t have the eyes for it
I don’t have the mind for it
Yet I write in this book and that
What have I to fill such things?
I am only a series of repetitions
A series of binary choices
Every morning I:
A. wake up, or
B. don’t wake up
Every afternoon I:
A. eat lunch, or
B. don’t eat lunch
Every night I:
A. go to sleep, or
B. don’t go to sleep
All of my binary choices leading to
A. tomorrow, or
B. not tomorrow
C. there is no C
D. there is no D
Today I am sitting and drinking tea
Yesterday I was carrying giant boxes and bags on my shoulders like Atlas
Trembling knees stepping down and down
The lengthy stairs from where I live at the top
To the bottom where I do not live
Supplanting my tufts of dirt to more fertile earth
My shoes kept scraping my ankles
I call these battle scars in jest
Because I am the only soldier
I am the only combatant
I am passive in my aggression as I am now
Sipping my tea across from the one man I need to talk to
Because I am tired of being lazy
And having nowhere to go
And having no one to answer to
But myself
And I am infinitely full of questions
The most constant brutal interrogation of nothing at all
Comparatively a simple question to the man
The Mike
Should be easy, but
I cannot get to that point
And I let my tea steep for too long
And I wore Jorts
(jean shorts)
On perhaps the last day when slacks are appropriate
And I’m not the only pretty girl looking to taste work but not swallow
So I will spend this summer as cowards do
Roaming burning pavements hoping to be seen
Hoping to be wanted
Hoping to be given a reason for doing something
How is it I spend so much time pining for summer
Only to be suffocated when I am only ankle deep?
You would think I could convince my body to swim
Or float
Or stand at this point of ankle deep tide
But I am flopped face down in it
And I refuse to breathe for the effort
I am grasping and pushing all at once
My fingers digging deep into the earth only to toss soil over my broad shoulders.
WOOF
If all of my innards are all wound up inside me
If I am a woman with no claim to dangling bits
How is it I am castrated?
What is there to take away?
Do I not already have the constant pangs of penis envy?
I am not male so the world is not mine
I am not white so I am not mine
I suppose I should be happy for my many given gifts
My many un-earned items
Every day I apologize
Every day I thank profusely
I sit and stay and beg for my meat
Woof.
I only write here when I’m in Oklahoma
It is really not as late as it seems in this time zone. I haven’t done very much today. I woke up. I ate. I napped. I ate more. I exercised. I played music. I ate. I baked bread for further eating. I don’t know what to do with all of my free time. I have so much of it all of a sudden. I get to wake up when I’m not tired. I get to leave the house when I don’t feel like being inside. I need to get a job, but chances are I won’t get a lot of hours regardless of where I end up (ideally I’ll end up somewhere, but you never know). I have nearly four straight months to sit and think about what I want to do with my life. What will I do?
I have two paintings in my room. One is finished, the other could easily be finished, but I am lazy. Right now I am lazy and I don’t want to touch it because it’s old and I feel as though I’ve closed that chapter in my artistic experiments. I have a lot of projects I’ve been wanting to attempt, but I don’t think I’ll be able to force myself to work on many of them. Tomorrow I might hem a dress. I might walk to campus and submit my resume to places that are hiring. It’s such a catch 22, getting hired for a job without experience. I need to work to gain experience, but I can’t get hired because I don’t have experience. It’s all tiring. It’s all too many circles for me.
I feel as though I’ve remained a fixture here. I visited once a month through the entire school year. I didn’t really give anyone space to miss me or forget me, for the most part. I’ve been noticing lines around my mouth. It doesn’t take long for things to stick, for scowling to stain your skin. For stretch marks to fade. I’ve never felt so adult. I guess I wasn’t one until recently.
Bella and I baked purple bread. It does not have blue berries in it. It does not have any blue fruits, dry or otherwise. It is just blue because we wanted it to be blue.
I have not written in a while
I’m going to the Sweetlife Festival one way or another. I need to find a group to tag along with. I don’t know how this will work out, but I spent way too much money on this to not figure something out. It is stressing me out a little. You think you live in a place rampant with accessible public transit, but of course there are limits and the Merriweather Post Pavilion is apparently the limit. I feel as though I’m a pretty awkward person a lot of times, but I guess I’m about as awkward as most other people. At least I’m not creepy. I’m excited to see the Shins. I’ve wanted to see them since junior high. I have so many fond memories connected their music. One day I want to be like them. I want to play at the Merriweather Post Pavilion, and I promise it will happen. I have as much of a chance as any other musician. This summer I’ll be recording something of an EP if not a full length CD thanks to the wonderful Ben. I’m so excited because I have all of this potential. Sometimes it all gets to be too much. I just want to run everywhere and shout about it all. I want to tell people to pay attention to me because I will be something to remember. I will be something. Everything is happening so quickly now. In a year I’ve assembled a pretty dependable band. I’ve accumulated like 8 songs. I’ve started developing a web presence. We’ll release the CD or EP by the end of the summer. This coming Autumn we will be playing at local coffee shops and generally at local venues. It’s all happening. It feels slow, but it’s not. I’m a young upstart.
Fuck, I sound so conceited, but this is my dream, and I believe in self-fulfilling prophecy. None of the things I’m hoping for is absurd. I feel like water about to boil. Little bubbles are collecting at the bottom of the pot, gradually gathering at the surface.
As a note, I don’t like selling music for the most part. Maybe initially if someone wants good album art and the whole feel of it, but I’d rather keep things as free as possible. Whatever I release will be free for download. The more access the better in my opinion, but perhaps I’m naive. Fuck, I don’t care if I’m naive. I’m young. I’ll learn me good one day.
Gradient Project?
I need to come up with a game plan for my gradient project. What I want to do is have a series of 10 people step into a pair of black fishnet stockings, all of increasingly lightening color. I won’t be able to do this since I have just two days to work on it. Hmm, so what to do now? My project needs to incorporate 11 changes. I think I might do something with video. Maybe I could have 11 takes of me getting into bed. First with just the mattress. Then with the mattress on the bed frame. I’d gradually include more and more furniture then stuff. Hmmmmmm. I mean, it wouldn’t be that difficult, but I don’t know.
What can I do with stockings? I like the way it contrasts my skin when I put them on. It really makes reducing people to simple colors seem ludicrous.
Let’s think of words…
Stretch ——> Compress
Remember ——> Forget
Lucid ——> Unresponsive
Alive ——> Dead
Straight ——> Curved
Weak ——> Powerful
Yin ——> Yang
Obstruction ——> Clarity
I don’t know. My brain isn’t thinking right now. I think I will meditate on it, then return to my question later.
Vivid Dreams Life etc.
I had this dream that followed two Afghan women. They live in a city. They each have a heterosexual lover. One day they and their lovers are showering together (each in their own separate homes), and they are both killed. One of the men throws acid in his lover’s face, the other shoots her in the forehead. The authorities in the city pursue the crimes, and the men are executed. In death the sets of lovers meet again, and the women are forgiving. They take the men back and continue to pursue their relationships. It was a weird dream. I don’t know where my mind has been going lately. I just can’t focus. I’m really burnt out. Is it burned or burnt? I don’t know. Maybe it can be either.
I’m really angry with my school. I am paying a gratuitous amount of money, and in spite of this I have to pay $40 + dollars per field trip. I mean, out of the $40,000 in my tuition, you would think they could extract $40. It’s that, and they don’t give us any supplies. They don’t even allow us access to all of their equipment for free. They don’t even give us free black and white printing. It is absurd. I should start going to the SVA meetings to find out what all is sucking away my grandparents’ savings.
I don’t like being taken for a ride, yet I’m allowing myself to be the sucker. I could transfer. I could be more realistic and less hopeful for nonexistent scholarships. I can’t believe tuition increases every year. I do not understand how I am being allowed to do this. I wish I’d taken time to think and decompress from all of those years of elementary school, junior high, and high school. I don’t think I stopped resenting learning yet. I want to have time to do nothing, but all I can do is continue— follow the path.
I’m really spacey right now. Thinking in a straight line is giving me a headache. I’m getting off my medicine. It makes me irritable. It gives me migraines. It makes me hate people, or maybe I just never really cared for many people. I don’t want to seem angry. I just enjoy solitude. I can’t remember the last time I was alone. I don’t know what it means to be alone, actually. There’s alone in a crowd, and there’s alone with people in the rooms adjacent to your own, and there’s alone in a house in a place that is any place anywhere. I can’t say I’ve ever been unable to hear breathing through the walls next to mine. I can’t say I’ve been the only light on in the house. I sleep across from Nicole in her bed. She sleeps soundly, wrapped in a comforter with crescent moons and planets. Her wall is not nearly as white as mine. Her bed is not nearly as high as mine. It does not have as many boxes or suitcases as mine. She does not run away as often as I do.
My journal has been growing. It grows about an inch every week. I cut and glue and tape and tie so many things to its pages. It is living. It has smells. I polished its pages with silver polish. I dripped candle wax on thick thread. It does not leave me, though it’s been less encompassing lately. I guess I just have too many things to think about right now. I don’t know what writing here means. I need to post photographs. Ugh.
Emily
Theresa. I am listening to the Joanna Newsom song Emily, and it just makes me think of that night at Leighton’s house when we smoked until everything was so beautiful and Joanna’s voice pierced the air and made everything glow and I wanted to cry I was so happy and alive.
I miss you and that. I am so glad everything happened as it did.
Day in the life
I am exhausted. I can hardly think or hold heat. I’ve been yawning and gradually covering myself in more layers. It snowed a little today, but nothing stuck. The snow became rain. The day became night. Outside it is dark and I can see my breath.
I am in the planning process of a story I will be writing over this next month. I’m hoping to produce at least a paragraph per day. The requirement is that it must focus on the Uncanny Valley, that is the level at which a robot imitating an animal (usually humans) is just shy of believability, to the point of being creepy. We see it and feel discomfort in how at once lifelike and dead it seems. An example would be Big Dog. In case you haven’t already seen the infamous videos— it slipping in an icy parking lot and regaining balance, it being kicked— I’d suggest you look it up. Anyway, I’m wanting to write a story where the line between human and un-human is questioned. I want to parallel the slightly off humanoid robot with a slightly off human, perhaps one who moves oddly— one with epilepsy, one who cannot speak without a voice box, one with muscular dystrophy. I don’t know. I want there to be a question of which is sick and which is a robot. I want to play with people’s ability to detect the difference between a manufactured smell and a natural smell. I don’t know how I want these things to interact. If you have any ideas, I’d be interested. I need a setting. I need two characters since it will be a short story. I need a conflict.
I thought that I would have some free time tonight, but I have to write a paper. How fantastic? Fuck. I also need to take a picture for a class. I should probably bring my laptop tomorrow. Hm.
Also, Tomorrow is Day 1 of the Vagina Monologues at MICA. I’m stoked. Everyone should come. Everyone should cum. But really. Really. Really.
Chiseled People
I got out of life drawing class today in a good mood. I got a positive critique. I did my homework on time and correctly. I’m hopeful. We had two models. One was a middle aged man, petite, thin, and muscular. He had a striking face. He wore his salt and pepper hair in a ponytail. The other was a young woman, probably a MICA student. She was curvy yet petite. I thought she was very pretty. It’s fun drawing people who look likable.
Last night I had trouble falling asleep. I tossed and turned and my legs were too warm and my back was too stiff and my head kept processing and reprocessing how to get my work done on time so that I can leave next weekend to see my boyfriend who I love and miss, though who I forget to miss sometimes.
I’ve been trying to keep myself distracted. Baltimore is becoming home very quickly. It’s all familiar and MICA is familiar, and I see the same people so frequently. I will never have a class of more than 30 people. It’s nice. My teachers know my face and ask me if I’ve changed my hair when I wear it up and call my by name usually.
There is charcoal under my fingernails. I keep them so short but little granules creep in. Creep into my nose. Creep onto my clothes.
I want a Black model. I’ve never seen one around here. There aren’t many Black people at MICA. It’s whatever, I guess. I’m preoccupied. I’m taking a break I don’t deserve yet.
