Mais le lendemain matin...

eyes_that_snow @ 2007-12-21T13:35:00

2007-12-21T19:35:15Z

Find Ultrasound technician schools near you

eyes_that_snow @ 2007-12-14T16:32:00

2007-12-14T23:04:27Z

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.

eyes_that_snow @ 2007-12-13T23:39:00

2007-12-14T05:38:24Z

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.

appetite

2007-11-08T04:33:47Z

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.

eyes_that_snow @ 2007-10-24T23:13:00

2007-10-25T04:18:47Z

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.

eyes_that_snow @ 2007-10-12T14:55:00

2007-10-12T20:05:23Z

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.

watch the knife

2007-10-04T23:01:45Z

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.

firm, prehensile thumbs

2007-09-30T05:31:08Z

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.

eyes_that_snow @ 2007-09-23T19:44:00

2007-09-24T00:52:24Z

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.

eyes_that_snow @ 2007-09-21T08:34:00

2007-09-21T14:01:25Z

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.

Wednesday Morning

2007-09-12T14:23:00Z

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.

eyes_that_snow @ 2007-09-10T09:36:00

2007-09-10T14:38:13Z

Quick steady hands, I know you know these secrets.

eyes_that_snow @ 2007-09-06T10:31:00

2007-09-06T15:35:51Z

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.

eyes_that_snow @ 2007-08-29T15:46:00

2007-08-29T20:53:53Z

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.

eyes_that_snow @ 2007-08-27T08:40:00

2007-08-27T13:59:32Z

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.

sassafras and pistachios

2007-08-24T15:16:54Z

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.

chambers of the sea

2007-08-23T14:37:55Z

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."

inhalation

2007-08-17T20:02:51Z

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.)

a brief and only half-coherent commentary

2007-08-13T19:47:50Z

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.

Chicago

2007-08-10T16:01:44Z

What shall I illustrate for you, o journal of mine? My love for this city? The crystalline beauty of it, looking over my shoulder on the walk home; or walking towards it, on my way to the bus stop in the mornings, the towers hazy and gilded like-- o Lord, what are they like? Like a lover's face, at certain angles of glass-like perfection. And then the GRIT and GRIME and CACOPHONY of its teeming center as seen from within, the skyscrapers too tall to realize, the winds off the lake over which it perpetually gazes. The river that shares its name, twisted and reversed. (How I feel like a queen here, here as nowhere else, striding to work in my steel-toed shoes, my dark-spangled eyes so telling, so keenly entertained.) The sense of groundedness, of psychological security, of my own reality, beautifically combined--complimented, facilitated by--my pragmatic watchfulness. How I feel simultaneously gentle and dangerous; like being in the company of a close-held friend.

Love me just the same

2007-08-03T20:09:22Z

Of course I'm not good all through. How hideous, how deformed, if I were! It's a matter of embracing this violence, willfullness, this capacity for treachery--stroking back its hair and looking it straight in the eyes. I think the part of me that you might call evil loves me, loves me like a star loves to burn. A while back it became something close to evil, because its desires were so consistently thrawted. (Desires? Satiation, self-preservation. I want them too.) Yet that evil was a pollution, a poison that suffused me-- something outside, something perniciously foreign. I have been burned clean since, and I don't ever want it back. It's a poison that kills slow, convulsions and cold sweats. Rats in the viscera.

Now that I'm standing bright in my own bones again, I got to work hard and close to ensure the old cracks don't burgeon. I got to keep on the right side of my own hellcat fury; got to keep the nerve to stare it down when it's in the wrong.

I want an ethic to guide this blood-thirst, this brutal force of will; this iron intention to protect my own beating heart.

I get that, I can do better in protecting you.

But really:
that's beside the point.

Retort to the Second Fig

2007-07-31T15:29:41Z

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!
--Edna St. Vincent Millay

I want a LOGIC to my delicate rhapsodies, damnit, and I don't just mean equivocations with logical pretensions. (Rob is a pest. The exterminator kills pests. Therefore, the exterminator will kill Rob.) I want my palaces rooted in the world-weary rock, the solid ugly uncompromising rock, each spire and cupola hewn and blueprinted--ironhearted and weatherbeaten and staring down the sun. After forty days and forty nights of rain, I want to feel minnows swirl around my turret roofs, anemones blossom in the courtyards; I want sharks to lurk in my benighted corridors, and barnacles clinging to my every crenelation. I want to luxuriate in high noon sunshine, be it blued and gilded through a hundred feet of water. And when the flood recedes, when the first sea bird comes to rest on my highest spire, I want to sigh in slow-grown joy.

I aspire to shining endurance.

Moonshine

2007-07-25T22:34:55Z

I spend a lot of time thinking about what I can only call ethics.

I think about Sam, but more than think of him I imagine him, grope the delicate fingers of my mind's eye along his limbs face feet hands chest back spine-- other lovely unmentionables. I search out the bones of his face, the manifold fine glints of his honey-red eyes. (Honey-red, wine-blue.) My dreams help me in these pursuits. Never stories, plots: heightened fragments.

I think of Sue, speeding I don't know where, outside my range of vision. Gleaming fragments, though speaking practically she and I so close (a casual walk down familiar streets). Here, yes, I think and think, grope to fathom--but lord, girl, your corridors are full of twists. I would like a pocket full of white pebbles, and a moon to shine paley upon them. To lead me back, to tell me where I've erred.

I consider food, work, and sleep with contentment, with stubborn care.
My well-ordered life is a novelty to me.

I struggle to put words to the precious ache in Brady's photographs. I page through them, missing her and probing some sense of unspeakable loss. (Remember that first visit in September, the listless stray cat days; the black tea; the midnight rushes. The childishness of her sleeping face, three long years ago. Coming apart at the seams, she murmured. Or she sang while making macaroni and cheese.)

Whenever I'm at home alone I talk at length, confidentially, to the bluish walls.

I feel safe within my skin muscle fat bone blood. My delectable marrow. Note that the intensity of my old terror--my loathing, disbelief--pervades me still, now utterly transmuted. Take this as an index of my comfort.

(He kissed the soles of my feet: Sacred. Sacred.)

my sorrow

2007-07-24T14:09:32Z

I ain't gonna nurse you; no, I know this sorry trap.

weird half-moon scars

2007-07-19T22:32:59Z

Whenever I'm alone at work I put on the Rolling Stones. I'm alone at work! Therefore, I am listening to the Rolling Stones. This makes me glad.

Also! It's sunny out! And almost Friday! (And there's still a slim chance that Chip will stop in to visit.)

Bring bring!
Thank you for calling Picture US.
...
Print on hold? Your last name please?
...
Measuring tape!
...
Why yes, 28 by 40.
Have a good night.

Customer successfully helped!

Even if Chip doesn't visit, I'm going to see my mother tonight. And tomorrow night Mark will come home for a companionable weekend, over the course of which, God help us, we shall procure a couch.

Yesterday evening was eerie.

I got the idea that I knew how to do it, how to be solitary: make myself waif-like, shadowy, and commune with the shadows. There was a thunderstorm, and I when I got home I left all the lights off to admire the lightning. Before the sky broke I lay in the grass for a while, watching it roil, and watching the bats wheel wild and low--listening to that leathery flicking of wings that birds never make. Dragonflies whipped low over the ground, and a great swarm of gnats gyrated in the wind. Rare fireflies blinked.

It was night when I got home, raining hard. I showered in the dark, the lightning brilliant white-blue on my fresh scrubbed tiles, the sound of the tap water mixing with that of the rain outside. The water and light sluiced off my raw bare limbs, and I thought, I could survive a solitude like this.

Though there's rapture to evenings like this, I'm grateful I shan't be alone for the next few nights.

I cut myself this afternoon, the worst cut I've had since I was doing such things intentionally. While putting away a piece of glass, I felt a bright lick of pain on the ring finger of my left hand. I set down the sheet that I was handling and looked at the scrape; dismissed it at first glance--no blood--before realizing that the scrape had taken a divet of flesh. The underlayers of skin gleamed bluish white for a few long moments. Then I bled copiously.

Careid (my manager) commented in passing that she's done the same thing several time. "Gives you weird half-moon scars."

There are customers here, so I'm going to go look more productive (...though this may increase my risk of their asking me questions I can't answer).

No, we don't carry vintage movie posters.
Yes, 30 percent off.