The last couple of nights, driving home in the pouring rain on the dark northern bound highway, feeling like I'm at the end of the earth, it’s been good. In a weird, sometimes sad way. For thinking. Really dramatic weather lately for a really dramatic life moment.
Not dramatic. Cinematic. Beautiful.
Beautiful perfect weather, especially for just trying to figure stuff out within yourself. 65 degrees and pouring rain.
And tonight I drove home after Ira Glass listening to the mix I made back in late august when I was thinking about him. Just thinking about what I might want, and what could happen. Funny to hear it now.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
appreciating good conversation
I kind of fell apart a bit earlier this week, and for some reason right now I'm pretty ok, and that's really pretty cool.
I had a pretty insanely bad night on thursday, so bad that friday morning at 5:45am before work, was an "ok, no more" moment, and I think I am now doing a bit better than I was even before everything started really collapsing. I think I've been going downhill for a little while now, and that night was the last straw, and maybe now I can figure some things out.
In the past two days it's just worked out for some reason that I've had a lot of time to just have really good conversations with lots of different people I don't talk to enough. Like kind of a crazy amount of nice conservation for a couple of days, but it was really needed.
It reminded me that that's a real reason that Greg and I aren't together anymore, apart from all the other stuff, because I missed this.
Yesterday, friday, I woke up in the worst way possible, after a pretty shitty night, and then work was ok, I buddy rang with shane and we has some pleasant conversations about food and movies and tom waits, and I left and had my self reflecting target experience previously mentioned here, and then I met angie and danielle and vanessa for coffee and hot chocolate and tea and wine and beer at amherst coffee and then met rin and em for pizzas and then went to hugos. and somehow still made it back to greenfield to read in bed before sleep.
Getting to crochet and talk for that long was kind of wonderful, and with wine and hot chocolate too, and while it was raining outside and slowly getting dark in a november way. Then walking in the rain and mist for pizza and talking about art along the way was wonderful. My pizza was wonderful: prosciutto, black pepper, caremelized onions, and Parmesan cream sauce.
And today, I met Beth and Sarah and Sarah's boyfriend who was cool at thai garden and we went into roz's for a while and saw Ali, and then had spicy coconuty lemongrassy food, and then Beth and I went to look at frivolous pretty things which was delightful, especially those sparkly particularly masculine reindeer, and then Ira Glass at the Calvin and god I needed to hear someone just talk about stuff like narrative structure for a while.
I like people. I've missed them. Although I'm amazingly socially awkward still, it's very nice to spend time with good people when I can get out of myself enough to do it.
I had a pretty insanely bad night on thursday, so bad that friday morning at 5:45am before work, was an "ok, no more" moment, and I think I am now doing a bit better than I was even before everything started really collapsing. I think I've been going downhill for a little while now, and that night was the last straw, and maybe now I can figure some things out.
In the past two days it's just worked out for some reason that I've had a lot of time to just have really good conversations with lots of different people I don't talk to enough. Like kind of a crazy amount of nice conservation for a couple of days, but it was really needed.
It reminded me that that's a real reason that Greg and I aren't together anymore, apart from all the other stuff, because I missed this.
Yesterday, friday, I woke up in the worst way possible, after a pretty shitty night, and then work was ok, I buddy rang with shane and we has some pleasant conversations about food and movies and tom waits, and I left and had my self reflecting target experience previously mentioned here, and then I met angie and danielle and vanessa for coffee and hot chocolate and tea and wine and beer at amherst coffee and then met rin and em for pizzas and then went to hugos. and somehow still made it back to greenfield to read in bed before sleep.
Getting to crochet and talk for that long was kind of wonderful, and with wine and hot chocolate too, and while it was raining outside and slowly getting dark in a november way. Then walking in the rain and mist for pizza and talking about art along the way was wonderful. My pizza was wonderful: prosciutto, black pepper, caremelized onions, and Parmesan cream sauce.
And today, I met Beth and Sarah and Sarah's boyfriend who was cool at thai garden and we went into roz's for a while and saw Ali, and then had spicy coconuty lemongrassy food, and then Beth and I went to look at frivolous pretty things which was delightful, especially those sparkly particularly masculine reindeer, and then Ira Glass at the Calvin and god I needed to hear someone just talk about stuff like narrative structure for a while.
I like people. I've missed them. Although I'm amazingly socially awkward still, it's very nice to spend time with good people when I can get out of myself enough to do it.
corporate america explaining me to myself
yesterday I was killing time before meeting danielle and vanessa and angie to knit, and I went to target and bought the following objects:
blue sparkly mini christmas tree with blue lights in that perfect dark aqua blue I love, and I've always loved blue lights anyway, they remind me of maia and her room in providence
discount dvd copy of Breakfast at Tiffanys
sparkly gold and white thermal footless tights
copy of Star magazine with "HOW COULD YOU?" as the giant yellow headline for my next painting
metallic shiny hair elastics in earth tones
This is just connected to my recent thing of really enjoying the grouping of random objects together. All summer I've been enjoying the combinations of things I've found at yard sales or on a particular thrift shopping day and such.
Like the saturday morning before work right before I moved where I found two great nautical pictures in frames, the kentucky jigger whiskey glass(which I just remembered is still at dustin's house from halloween which makes me annoyed again that I forgot it there) and the small brass pony.
Or when vanessa and I went on the salvation army tour of franklin county and I got the awesome brown leather belt, the perfect vintage levis jacket, the ship made of shells, the complete asian cookbook, and the ceramic deer.
Or I can't even talk about the most amazing trip ever to the Deerfield antiques center or whatever it's called, on rte 5 & 10 driving home that sunday early afternoon when I bought all the most amazing stuff ever all at once. The falcon picture! The brass crab!
I kind of want all these objects to get to live together forever.
And as a kind of sequel to my last post, the other thing my artwork is about (as if everyone was dying to know) is stuff overlapping with other stuff. if that makes any sense at all.
and that particular bag of stuff from the target in the hampshire mall of all places, that really actually perfectly describes me as a person. Those particular objects combined. That's a nice self portrait.
blue sparkly mini christmas tree with blue lights in that perfect dark aqua blue I love, and I've always loved blue lights anyway, they remind me of maia and her room in providence
discount dvd copy of Breakfast at Tiffanys
sparkly gold and white thermal footless tights
copy of Star magazine with "HOW COULD YOU?" as the giant yellow headline for my next painting
metallic shiny hair elastics in earth tones
This is just connected to my recent thing of really enjoying the grouping of random objects together. All summer I've been enjoying the combinations of things I've found at yard sales or on a particular thrift shopping day and such.
Like the saturday morning before work right before I moved where I found two great nautical pictures in frames, the kentucky jigger whiskey glass(which I just remembered is still at dustin's house from halloween which makes me annoyed again that I forgot it there) and the small brass pony.
Or when vanessa and I went on the salvation army tour of franklin county and I got the awesome brown leather belt, the perfect vintage levis jacket, the ship made of shells, the complete asian cookbook, and the ceramic deer.
Or I can't even talk about the most amazing trip ever to the Deerfield antiques center or whatever it's called, on rte 5 & 10 driving home that sunday early afternoon when I bought all the most amazing stuff ever all at once. The falcon picture! The brass crab!
I kind of want all these objects to get to live together forever.
And as a kind of sequel to my last post, the other thing my artwork is about (as if everyone was dying to know) is stuff overlapping with other stuff. if that makes any sense at all.
and that particular bag of stuff from the target in the hampshire mall of all places, that really actually perfectly describes me as a person. Those particular objects combined. That's a nice self portrait.
communcation & heartbreak & my return
I haven’t used this blog at all since I moved, since the end of august, since right before everything happened...for all these reasons…huge amounts of life turmoil takes up a lot of time, quiet time like right now where I'm getting to sit alone in my house with a glass of wine and write at the kitchen table, with no one needing me or caring that I'm hanging out drinking and doing this. Right after I got this apartment I had also no internet for a long time, so I couldn't even if I wanted to, and there were a lot of things going on which were very private, and which didn’t belong on the internet. Both because they were very intense and personal, and because they were secret, too.
In moments of crisis I tend to not be very contemplative, I just move ahead very very fast, and don’t stop to think. I just don't breathe, I just push ahead. Not that this is a good thing, at all. But sometimes it's the only was I know to survive.
As I’ve been calming down, and spending a more reasonable amount of alone time, I've been just writing in my sketchbook a lot, more then I have in years, and I haven’t felt any need to write here.
First I was in a period where I was with people all the time, because I had nowhere to live, and was staying with friends, and life became constantly social. Any self reflection at all had to be done in these brief stolen moments, on breaks at work, trying to find private space, and so my sketchbook become really really important, like it was the only private space I had.
I think one of the memories I will always retain from september and early october of 2008 is me on the bench by the bike trail out back at work, writing, trying so hard to make sense of it all. It always seemed to be incredibly beautiful and clear and blue and gold and perfectly fall, and I was always so confused.
I think also, if you spend no time alone, you really really don't need a blog, because sometimes a person really needs to stop communicating and be alone.
This still has a lot to do with then stuff that’s private that’s been going on, because that’s what I really feel the need to write about. I was thinking that I wouldn’t do this anymore. Because in order to make it through the past few weeks, I've really needed to write constantly, and it's not anything I would ever want anyone to read. Except for some of the art stuff. Which also doesn't belong here, I don't think.
One of the reasons that I always did like to do this was my obsessive need to document things like objects I find and see, and meals and tastes I create, views from windows and the way light looks at certain times of day. And maybe some of that stuff is different from my more personal weird writing, and certainly separate from how I’m feeling.
Real importance of ordinary, tiny specific concrete details to any creative medium.
The other night, in the midst of a horrible, horrible, completely heartbreaking and soul shattering phone conversation, I was drunkenly ranting and raving about communication, and how it was fundamentally the thing my work was about. Even in the midst of all the ridiculousnesss and anger and sadness that was going on in the conversation, I recognized something I was saying as really really true and important.
"horrible, horrible, completely heartbreaking and soul shattering phone conversation" makes me embarrassed to write because it's so over the top, but it was bad enough to really shake me up, and although I've been sad ever since it happened, in some ways I've been better than I've been in a while, because it was bad enough to make me really pause and think about what I've been doing recently.
I've been thinking about communication ever since. rin and I talked about it last night. It is what my work is about.
In moments of crisis I tend to not be very contemplative, I just move ahead very very fast, and don’t stop to think. I just don't breathe, I just push ahead. Not that this is a good thing, at all. But sometimes it's the only was I know to survive.
As I’ve been calming down, and spending a more reasonable amount of alone time, I've been just writing in my sketchbook a lot, more then I have in years, and I haven’t felt any need to write here.
First I was in a period where I was with people all the time, because I had nowhere to live, and was staying with friends, and life became constantly social. Any self reflection at all had to be done in these brief stolen moments, on breaks at work, trying to find private space, and so my sketchbook become really really important, like it was the only private space I had.
I think one of the memories I will always retain from september and early october of 2008 is me on the bench by the bike trail out back at work, writing, trying so hard to make sense of it all. It always seemed to be incredibly beautiful and clear and blue and gold and perfectly fall, and I was always so confused.
I think also, if you spend no time alone, you really really don't need a blog, because sometimes a person really needs to stop communicating and be alone.
This still has a lot to do with then stuff that’s private that’s been going on, because that’s what I really feel the need to write about. I was thinking that I wouldn’t do this anymore. Because in order to make it through the past few weeks, I've really needed to write constantly, and it's not anything I would ever want anyone to read. Except for some of the art stuff. Which also doesn't belong here, I don't think.
One of the reasons that I always did like to do this was my obsessive need to document things like objects I find and see, and meals and tastes I create, views from windows and the way light looks at certain times of day. And maybe some of that stuff is different from my more personal weird writing, and certainly separate from how I’m feeling.
Real importance of ordinary, tiny specific concrete details to any creative medium.
The other night, in the midst of a horrible, horrible, completely heartbreaking and soul shattering phone conversation, I was drunkenly ranting and raving about communication, and how it was fundamentally the thing my work was about. Even in the midst of all the ridiculousnesss and anger and sadness that was going on in the conversation, I recognized something I was saying as really really true and important.
"horrible, horrible, completely heartbreaking and soul shattering phone conversation" makes me embarrassed to write because it's so over the top, but it was bad enough to really shake me up, and although I've been sad ever since it happened, in some ways I've been better than I've been in a while, because it was bad enough to make me really pause and think about what I've been doing recently.
I've been thinking about communication ever since. rin and I talked about it last night. It is what my work is about.
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