| Public Announcement |
[Mar. 28th, 2018|10:20 am] |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 14th, 2007|04:32 pm] |
i finished my book today, waiting in union station: the world without us, by alan weisman. i recommend it. weisman takes an admirably innovative, playful, and rigorous approach to sweeping and often terrifying questions. and he writes excellently.
reading it has kept me up nights.
it has consolidated my desire to devote myself to conservation efforts, in some capacity or other, once i graduate from reed.
i like to be alive, i do! i like to be conscious!
i want to take pride in my humanity, dammit. in being a breathing thinking dreaming straining organism. i want to pour myself out into this perplexing, agonizing, rhapsodic endeavor--remorselessly, resourcefully, without reserve. |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 13th, 2007|11:39 pm] |
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i don't know what to say to you. i often feel that none of this has any point... unable to write, i... drift and drift. i don't know how to enjoy my consciousness, right now, without my paper journal as all-suffusing company. (because of my broken arm, you know.) i feel deadly lonesome. it's silly. |
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| appetite |
[Nov. 7th, 2007|10:21 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | hungry and slightly crazed | ] |
I need to talk to Sam, and to go grocery shopping.
Oh how hungry I am! The cold makes it worse.
This weekend my parents and I are going on a trip, to see my cousin Kelly in a musical at her school-- Grinnell College in Iowa. It's a five hour drive each way, and two nights in a bed and breakfast. I've been looking forward to it all month. Now, I am especially looking forward to the series of large regular meals it harbingers.
I ate some honey earlier; the stickiness is pernicious!
I'm hyperbolizing. I know I'm not starving really.
I miss Reed desperately--went to the Reed website earlier, just to moon over the pictures.
I miss Sam too.
I'd like to kidnap three or four boys and run away into the mountains with them, only all of them are busy and none of them would consent. Readily. But surely with some coaxing, and some ether...?
No no. They'd just sympathetically shake their heads and try to talk me down.
And I'm afraid the nearest appropriate mountain range is a long long way from Chicago. |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 24th, 2007|11:13 pm] |
I've been talking to my paper journal a blue streak lately, which means that you, poor dear, are shunned. Nothing much to tell now, either, but because I rarely interact with much of your readership outside your auspices, I wanted to drop in and let it (my readership) know that I'm still alive and kicking.
I am.
I was miserable after leaving Portland-- I missed Sam wildly, frantically, and felt briefly that life was meaningless without him-- but today I'm somewhat more cheerful. |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 12th, 2007|02:55 pm] |
Elsewhere in the loop, some sort of concert is going on. The voices echo weirdly down the canyons of streets...
Tomorrow, at this time: I will be in Portland.
I've been ill this week, head aches and running nose. Still don't feel my best.
There's lots to frame--shadowboxes, damn them!-- but I'm alone here, and in the back I can't notice people entering the gallery.
After work I have my third French lesson, and after that my parents and I will go to dinner and a movie.
Shall I buy eyeliner?
Shall I paint my nails?
I do yearn for Sam's admiration, his--
oh I don't know what.
I'd like to please myself. |
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| watch the knife |
[Oct. 4th, 2007|05:28 pm] |
It's been a nice, lazy sort of day at work. Karen gave me a mocha and then a milkshake, so I'm kinda wild feeling. She and Chelcie left early-- "going to get hammered"-- so I'm here alone for the last hour. They spent a while in the afternoon on the internet together, exclaiming over the relative hotness of various actors, singers, and celebrities. I kept scurrying up front to peer over their shoulders. I kinda wanted to contribute to the discussion, but I suspected that neither of them would appreciate pictures of rope bondage or giant squid. So I kept my mouth shut.
A week from Saturday I am visiting Portland!
I've been missing Reed keenly.
Also, that man of mine.
After swearing the stuff off for five weeks, I've been drinking coffee again. I like what caffeine does to my mind. A gilded ephemeral glitter, a giddy scaffolding at high voltage. Something molten and glinting and strange; blue gold and black.
But then the aches and panics follow.
I would like to be less CAREFUL, always, I would like to be more ravening and fanged. I always got to watch my hands, got to watch the knife. |
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| firm, prehensile thumbs |
[Sep. 29th, 2007|11:46 pm] |
This has been a difficult month. Mark stayed up late talking with me Tuesday night, and I have felt more myself since then. In the interval between Mark's admittance to the mental hospital and this Tuesday's conversation, I was more miserable and more deranged than I'd been in a long time.
The swoons and shrieks, the suicidal ideations. The dissociated trajectory of razor to wrist, tenuously averted.
I collapsed in the street a week ago Thursday. It was after work, right in the loop, at rush hour. People were startlingly nice to me; they gave me food and water, and a hotel doorman helped me inside to a chair, where I sat until the tingling faded from my face and hands and the sensation returned to my fingertips.
Today I had my first French lesson! It went well, better than I'd anticipated. Afterwards I looked for books on cephalopods, on octopi and squid. Lately Mark and I finished reading aloud Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. This evening we began The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
Sam and I haven't talked in several days; we haven't been capable of holding a conversation in weeks. Strange, to compare this to the year we were seventeen-- our four, five, EIGHT hour gluts of intimation by telephone. It nags me like a bad knee. |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 23rd, 2007|07:44 pm] |
I heard--I think I heard-- the
thump
when he hit the ground, and I heard him moan.
I saw him on the ground, his brother repeating his name, and
I thought detatchedly that he would be
dead
by the time I reached him.
He wasn't.
Isn't.
He will be okay.
I called Suzie that night--
Mark is paralyzed?
No, no.
He'll be okay.
Called Sam.
Awkward as ever, of late.
Alone now, I feel idiotically bereft. |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 21st, 2007|08:34 am] |
I want to have a solid familiarity with local animals and plants.
I want to nurture my age-old though oft ignored passion for zoology.
I want to learn all I can about squid and octopi.
I want to seriously take up my oft abandoned study of human anatomy.
I want to dissect things.
I want to witness a dissection of a human cadaver.
I want to take cross-country trips with Mark someday, hunting down specimens of all the trees native to this vast nation.
I want to spend several months, sometime in the next decade, engaged in hard physical labor aboard a ship.
I want to take biology at Reed next year.
I want to learn calculus.
I want to become a polyglot. |
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| Wednesday Morning |
[Sep. 12th, 2007|09:01 am] |
As autumn burgeons, these past few days (coats and slippers and scarves!), I realize how much my life now resembles the some of the lives I daydreamed for myself while in high school.
My wild, scholarly, and oft-tormented friends.
My apartment, shared with one of them.
All the apparatus of cleaning and grocery shopping and paying bills; the steady reasonable routine of work I more or less enjoy.
My fine careful habits, tea and novels and long walks.
Even, strangely: my awful scars.
I am at the Clark Street gallery today, and there's a new picture on the wall. "The Affirmation," it's called. A child leans forward on bluish pale arms, with a fixed look in his eyes and his lips parted. His hair is curly and dark, and a spot of red flames in his cheek. It's rather lovely, I think, rather mysterious and suggestive.
What it's doing among our drab pastoral oils, I don't know. |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 10th, 2007|09:36 am] |
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Quick steady hands, I know you know these secrets. |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 6th, 2007|10:31 am] |
We have a new assistant manager here at Franklin Street! She listens to jazz! (Or at least, there's jazz on now, and Karen never put on jazz before.)
I can think about the next day or two, and I can think about--next summer say, or visiting Sam in October, or going back to Reed truly a year from now. But intermediate intervals of time give me trouble. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 29th, 2007|03:46 pm] |
Busy day at work, and I have NOT been framing well.
Papa stopped by this morning. Sam and I went out to dinner with him last week, but we brought home one another's leftovers; Papa's had fish, which neither Mark nor Sam nor I eat, so I brought the stuff to the gallery today where Papa could come retrieve it. In exchange, he brought me a delicious peach! Also a cookie, a calendar, and some stamps. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 27th, 2007|08:40 am] |
At work, blank exhausted aching. After Mark left this morning I put on Franck while preparing my lunch. As the piece culminated (that awful slamming shift into minor key) I fell to my knees in front of the refrigerator and sobbed.
I keep doing that.
I've had a strange sense of double vision over this past week. (Only a week? One little week?) I watch my own actions at lyrical remove, describing them as a poetical third party might; framing events, as they occur, in terms of how I may look back on them years hence.
This frightens me, the coldness of it. I fear that, in this way, I could icily take actions I would soon regret. But I don't want to fear my own hands.
I miss Reed. Classes begin there today.
I am really doing this. |
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| sassafras and pistachios |
[Aug. 24th, 2007|09:33 am] |
This morning: getting from asleep in bed with Sam to rushing through the gallery doors in fifteen minutes flat. I wouldn't have thought it possible.
Last night: staying up past dawn in conversation with him, three cups of black iced tea with milk. Padding about the kitchen in the nude, sprawling on the couch with limbs entwined.
The earnestly posed question: What's a girl like me to do?
My loose hair licking or feathering my shoulder blades, my breasts; my narrowing eyes sly and glistering.
Lately they've looked so narrow and worn.
On the bus I composed an odd little poem:
My lover departs tomorrow,
My comrade arrives today.
My lover shall nurse his sorrow,
My comrade keep his at bay
With a whip and a chair, and mustachios
Curled round like butterflies' tongues.
He shall eat sassafras and pistachios,
He shall dine on livers and lungs. |
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| chambers of the sea |
[Aug. 23rd, 2007|09:27 am] |
This week I have aged quickly. I noticed this on the bus Tuesday night, glimpsing my reflection against the night outside. I want to write a sonnet (Petrarchan) with the rhymes: steam gleam dream scream.
I.
I.
It was I.
"Brutality is among the services we offer." |
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| inhalation |
[Aug. 17th, 2007|02:26 pm] |
Having taken the past two days off work, I am all the more struck by how wonderful working here is for me. I feel more calm, more competent, more myself than I have--well, since I was last working. Which isn't to say that I reject the company of my loved ones (Sam, Mark, my lovely sister), but which is to suggest that I'm not as good at interacting with them as I might be.
"Be brutal," Mark says.
Brutality is among the services we offer.
I prefer awe to disgust.
I would rather exalt than revile.
"You're so fuckin' sturdy," Sam exclaims, and punches my shoulder. I have known nothing more voluptuous than this strength of mine, that sighs into my ringing ears, that springs up at the pressure.
Nourish it.
This afternoon I took my first ever frame order! It was an adorable baby picture, and the gentleman who brought it (the infant's distinguished grandfather) was friendly and patient when I was slow. Usually, you see, I just work in back.
I have hickeys on my throat, and the ribbon ain't doing much good hiding them. I feel rather--disreputable, in my hand-me-down jeans, my blue ribbon and surly eyes. Scuffed shoes, capable hands.
It's nice.
"You didn't waste any time," Karen commented with a grin, this morning when I arrived at work.
(Karen being my wonderful boss, whom I like more with every passing day. There's so much, journal love, that I haven't told you. Despite the obvious differences--your audience here, your secrecy there--I consider you, this livejournal, and you, my paper journal, to be a single entity. (I didn't for a long time.) We need to spend more time together, darling. Catch me up, darling; catch me up do. Let us admire one another. Let us hone one another into creatures of power and grace--make these, not passing flickers, but defining qualities. I would like us to be definitive, to be polished sinewy gentle unrelenting.) |
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| a brief and only half-coherent commentary |
[Aug. 13th, 2007|02:26 pm] |
A young woman of means and connections...
I continue to miss Reed College--a sadness that gladdens.
Shaky lately; a flicker of stupid unreasonable plans. Last night helped to alleviate them, however.
Thirty hours from now
I will be
caught up in those arms that I love best--
those teeth bones fingers,
that animal warmth.
I will never leave my bedroom...
Tonight I'm going to go grocery shopping, as though preparing for a siege--only with more frivolous delicacies, more delicious perishables. Fewer sacks of rice and dried beans. I'd buy vodka if I could, but the lack doesn't really matter.
I intend o-such-breadths of obscenity and intimacy.
I've been reading The Golden Bowl.
James' prose seems startlingly modern to me, because I had forgotten how much it influences mine. |
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eyes_that_snow's journal