Yoga

Right now I’m supposed to be teaching yoga to Indian Princesses, but nobody’s here so I’m stretching and now writing. I’ve just witnessed a fragile moment. I was doing the clock thing with my eyes. The one where you pretend you are inside a huge clock and you look at all the times slowly, then a little faster then far away, then up close and the room becomes very saturated with life and interesting things.

Well, at about 8 o’clock, I saw a little ant walking toward the center of the room and when I got back to 8, he wasn’t there anymore. He seemed so beautiful at the time but I knew I’d forget him if I didn’t write him down. I have witnessed many ants in commute before and not a one is particularly memorable. This bothers me. I want to remember them all.

Last night I dreamed LP had a new girl. She had the same hair as the bangy blond Kelly had picked out of Lucky magazine for her new hairdo. Her name was Erin and while I couldn’t quite make out here face, I knew she was beautiful and fun, definitely more fun than me because among other things, I’m really boring. Nicer words- still, peaceful, mad chill. I’m practicing being nicer to myself.

Anyhoo, there was a door in my dream that LP and his new girl were cryptically tallying some sort of love points on in chalk. The markings were very small but I recognized them for what they were, the beginning of falling in love. My name was at the bottom of the door in fleshed out blue and gold capital letters with all kinds of markings around it. While I was in the bathroom, I heard someone scratching at the love door. It was LP trying to erase me. This made me very sad and I felt like I was disappearing and I began to see everything from birds eye.

I just figured out how to get to AdeleStreet comments without going through all my old entries. Thank you. I don’t know what to say. I have said things to you and erased them because you are all so different I can’t clump you to in to compliments and to single you out here might run you off. You’re like a sly little cat that sneaks into the horse barn. If I pretend I don’t see you, you stay with me. If I come towards you, you run or else think the toast I put out is all I’ve got when really, I’ve got steak. Don’t run away before the steak! But do know that I love you very much and I appreciate you being with me here.

Marie Laure de Noailles watched as 500 soldiers marched through Paris and sighed, “There go 500 romances.” My little magpie, love will work out for you. I have faith in you always and if you try, and if you mean well it has to work. Don’t fear the journey and the boys that don’t match your future.

Feels strange you can hear me

Lately I’ve been pulling pictures and inspiring papers from the walls of my cabin. I’m cataloguing them now so I’m not overwhelmed when I have to leave Frost Valley in six weeks. Tonight my Dad asked me if I’m looking forward to the summer even if it means leaving my new friends and even LP. I was very sure when I said, yes. I just need new things to do, more freedom and I need to find my true home and work so that I can fully pursue my creative dreams. As cool as High Trails in Cali might seem, I can’t go another year in isolation. I have no idea what I’ll do after OMEGA.

NYC

just got back from the big city- feeling like i’ve met my match. the 1st song on the latest john legend is where i’m at. went to the brooklyn musem and zoo, also china town. stayed at 6 columbus… sorry for the shorthand- got drunk at mc cabes, where everyone hugs each other when they come inside.

Working out the kinks

I break up with LP about every other day. It’s exhausting. Sometimes it’s because he says I’m scathing or that I think I know everything. Today it was because our friend who lacks any sort of social grace was an asshole to me and I felt like LP was being too OK with the whole thing. Living and working together is all sorts of stress. Where can I go, I can’t run like I normally do. And since I can’t run, is this it? Annoying or not, is this for keeps? Cause he doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

He really is brilliant and so interesting and kind. I’d rather argue with him all day than not see him at all. This has been the worst start of things I’ve ever experienced… but all the best of starts never amounted to much. Maybe this makes sense. Maybe we argue and freak out because we care. I do care. Oh geez.

The other 6

“Rocky’s Revenge” acrylic on canvas, 36”x36”, 2008

“Color Me Bad” acrylic on canvas, 36”x36”, 2008

“Room at Madison” acrylic on canvas, 36”x25”, 2008

“Smokin’ a Ciggy See” , acrylic and oil on canvas, 3’x5′, 2008

“Bluebird Lites” acrylic on canvas, 36″x36”, 2008

“Mind If I Cut In?” acrylic on canvas, 36”x36”, 2008
*this guy no longer exists. He’s now covered in oils and called “The Black Part of Me”

8 of 14 Fleshy but Dead

“X Furniture” acrylic on wood, 24”x36”, 2007

“Dumbass” oil and acrylic on canvas, 5’x3′, 2008

“Brendan” acrylic on canvas, 36″x36”, 2008

“Mom/Frida Khalo Meets Michael Jackson” acrylic on wood, 36”x24”, 2007

“Isabo and Gilboa” acrylic on wood, 36″x24″, 2007

“Dream Mansion” acrylic on wood, 36″x24″, 2007

“Mother Earth in Chanel” acrylic on wood, 24″x36″, 2007

“Mask” acrylic on wood, 24″x36″, 2007

My Garden

Last night I was skimming an Allure magazine at NIMS while the new Liz watched an episode of Scrubs (the one where Elliot gets engaged to the wrong man) when I came across an article about blogging. The writer said that blogs are a place for publicists to find fresh writing and new perspectives. She mentioned a blog about fashion and another that was very crude. Instead of feeling like a part of a blogging community I felt like I should just stop blogging altogether. My blog began to feel like the line for American Idol auditions, impersonal and hopeless- and like someone else owns my destiny (the same way I already feel about my painting). I don’t like the idea of my blog escaping this ethereal land of the unspoken. I don’t like this Allure writer telling me that if I’m lucky, I might be found. I feel like fashionable America is encroaching on my dreamworld, like they want to steal my oil or poach my furry friends. I need to keep something creative that is just for me… not that I can’t share, but that I don’t have to try to sell. I don’t want to have to dwell on my marketability. I need a place where I can experiment, take risks in a way that isn’t smart or savy. I want to be heard but I don’t want to do or say things just so that I can be heard more.

I’m being so redundant. Yes, we all want to be liked and I want that but I just don’t want to let my creative spirit stagnate because I’m a people-pleaser. In my art I am too much of a people pleaser– people don’t even like my art. LP doesn’t. He told me that. But I still feel like I need to push more. I feel too easy-like-Sunday-morning. I want to get out my grit but I can’t find it and when I do, I know it won’t be pretty enough for even me to look at for too long. I don’t want to live with the ugly when it comes out.

I’m cynical when it comes to my real anger or sadness. For example, I smoke when I’m feeling like an asshole if I’m not drunk. If I feel like an asshole or if I hear a really good song and I want to take it all the way in. Either way, when I smoke I’m grown-up and serious. In my paintings, cigarettes are like candy or toys. All I can paint are my masks. I don’t have anything real to offer. I don’t know when I’ll ever be able to get it out… but I know it won’t happen in the guise of some fucking magazine writer. Thanks dumb bitch.

As far as paintings go, I’m currently empty. I have nothing else to paint and I feel like I never will. It will probably be another 6 months before I use my brushes again. I have 14 pieces in my cabin now. Completely painted. Unstretched. Unframed. I’m not going to show them because I don’t think they’re a part of me anymore. I have nothing to say about them. I loved them once and now I resent them. I’ll sell or save them but I’m not going to wander in a sea of strangers that think they know a great deal about me for all the colors and narratives. They don’t know. You kind of know and when I can dig out my little turd of a soul you can know that and maybe I’ll paint about it and we can have a real show.

“Ben and the Theater”

It’s a strange sensation when a dream finishes itself, even more strange when it calls on a dream from before or a movie you didn’t see until the next day.

Mom went into the store to get a tattoo for me. She came back to the car, held up a mirror and said, “Well, what do you think?” I had two dolphins, the kind with floppy dog legs, tattooed to my right cheek. I was mortified.

Mom and I went into a department store. Mom disappeared and Ben took her place. He was reading our review on a joint assignment out loud. The professor loved what we had to say about adult education in the surrounding area. I had no recollection of working on the project and had a hard time feeling good about the praise.

Ben and I went to Stella’s where Less and Aumaine were repainting the salmon color again- this time to an off-white instead of a mint green. They asked me what I thought and not hearing the question, I said the walls looked bare, or else thought it and they looked very disappointed.

Ben and I took a shuttle back into the city, not any city in particular but an established one nonetheless. My tattoo had finally faded and Ben was looking over our research again when we noticed something falling from the sky. It was a missile. I recognized the missile first but we noticed the 3 planes smoldering on the ground together.

Ben and I got off the shuttle at the very next stop because the shuttle was heading toward the debris. No one, including myself was freaking out. It seemed like we weren’t afraid because we were still in suburbia, not yet amongst the skyscrapers.

I saw a glass building to our left, similar to the Saturn store in the commercials. I took Ben’s hand and we ran inside and then downstairs into a sort of basement where a lady, a man and a boy were hiding. I scanned the room to see if there was anyway to get further underground where the planes and missiles couldn’t reach us. I found a large vent in the floor and began to pry it open. I asked the onlookers not to follow me. They looked disgusted.

When the vent finally pulled free a bat flew out so I let the onlookers go ahead of me while I looked for Ben who had wandered off.

I found Ben and we went down the ladder that was behind the vent in the floor only to end up in another glassed in room, still at ground level. But this room was very familiar to me and it made me feel very calm and at home. I saw an escalator and called for Ben to follow me up. The onlookers stayed by the vent we came from which was on the floor.

At the top of the escalator there were big steel double doors and a doorman in a blue suit. I was wearing my orange dress and Ben was wearing a khaki polo and white pants. When the doorman pulled the door open, we saw a large carpeted theater, maroon and gold, with wings at either side of the double doors. Etta James was playing and as I began ballroom dancing with myself I cried, “This is the beautiful place from my dream,” and with less enthusiasm, “I’m going to die tonight.”
Ben never spoke but he followed as I explored the theater. I danced into the right wing expecting to find my never-ending mansion but it was just a junkie little blue-carpeted room with some cheap broken furniture. I tried the wing to the left and it was more like a closet.

Ben and I heard a loud rumble and ran to the stage looking behind us to see the nose of a plane jutting in from the ceiling of the theater. When we crossed to the other side of the curtain, we were in another theater only the carpet was the blue of the right wing. There was no music playing, just an eerie stillness and it wasn’t right so we ran out the double doors of the blue theater and found ourselves inside the same glassed room as before. We held hands and watched as planes crashed into buildings outside.

Watching the buildings fall was exactly like the final scene from fight club (which I hadn’t seen in years until the day after having this dream) except in my dream, it was daytime.

“My Garden is my own Garden. I will allow nobody to play in it but myself.” – Oscar Wilde from his fairytale, “Selfish Giant”

Sex 403: dscrpt- So over it.

It’s been a while since I’ve written but I assure you, I’ve been very alive feeling all too familiar feelings. I began an entry a couple of days ago but considered it too private to post. Now I’m over the whole thing so I don’t care to share it. My little bird, I think even you might relate to this partial rant. Please don’t talk to me about this. Let’s keep this on the Street.

[My most recent journal entries (not blog entries) have been awkwardly personal, so much that I’m having difficulty paraphrasing them here. They’re about my sex-drive… or lack there of and the problems it creates in my relationships.

First, does everyone else really have sex all the time? At age 25, I still have no real concept of what’s normal. Is there a normal or am I just being compared to ex-girlfriends? The person I’m seeing now is a newly ex so I often feel like he’s thinking, “Damn, I should have stuck with what I had before,” even though the reason for the breakup wasn’t sexual intimacy. Honestly, the only times I feel really comfortable with sex are when it’s with someone new, or someone I don’t know that well, or that I don’t like that much. New is preferable because there’s the notion that when the endorphins come, what I might be feeling is love. What I don’t like is the every day. Normal or not, it isn’t good for me but it’s what I’m working with and if I don’t feel like having sex, I’m not gonna do it.]

*Though I prefaced the statement with honestly, I don’t actually only enjoy intimacy with strangers or people I don’t like. I’m just painfully cynical sometimes. Very intense. In tents.

There’s just so much shame in not being able to be physically present with someone I care about. When Griffin broke up with me he said it was partly because he wasn’t physically attracted to me. I immediately felt dirty and lazy, and assumed that I wasn’t good at sex or that I didn’t do it nearly enough. I should have been able to accept what he said without getting upset with myself but even in knowing I have this tendency, I still do. Is it really for reasons as cliche as fashion or marketing? Do I really view myself as a sex object?

I’m somewhere in between. Sometimes I feel bad about it but sometimes I say, “Fuck off now. I’m tryin’ to sleep,” and in a few days I’m back to not having to think about it one way or another. It was just such a BIG deal for me a few days ago, but yeah, now it’s over.

So I’ve been lost from you for a while. There’s the sex thing and also the internet’s been down. I miss writing to you my bluest-feathered friend. You give my life an exciting balance of public and private, sacred and even more-so. I’m always wondering what’s safe to say, safe to be, and on a brave day, I can divulge most anything to my friend that always listens but never speaks.

Today is beautiful, if I didn’t miss you so much, I’d be outside right now chasing a frisbee. This afternoon all of the program instructors were instructed to pick up trash around camp which meant wandering the fields solo for a little over an hour. I found a mood ring beside the cable bridge, a locket at arts-and-crafts and a frisbee on Hayden Soccer Field. I also found one of the last piles of snow at Frost Valley slowly melting next to an old shed. The snow in it’s aberrant climate made me miss my friends at Frost Valley even though we’re not gone from each other yet. We’ve had quite a year together. The snow in all it’s withering majesty is what we came here for, what we learned, taught, and played in. It’s the time we spent hibernating and evaluating ourselves and it’s also the time when we struggled. Now life is sunny and easy and our time together will be over soon.