work in progress 2.0

this is the beginning of the second painting in the series.



and here's the fireplace that i spent all wednesday night making instead of writing my spanish essay, my art history essay, my gender essay, doing my race reading, or working on one of three paintings i have due soon. it was totally worth it.



in other news: we ran out of orange juice a week ago and now i'm sick. i don't think that's a coincidence. actually, we ran out of food a week ago so i ate stale pretzels all weekend, which may or may not have something to do with me being sick.

i heard from someone you're still pretty

do you remember when we used to talk? we’d sit in that empty parking lot and roll the windows down and let the dew from the night collect on our skin, making us shiver even in the warmth. we were exploring because we wanted to feel infinite. but then, we were so safe in our little beds—anything could be shut out if it got too big or too scary. every time, we would stretch the clock to the last minute then rush you back to your house and hope we made it in time. you remind me of home.

remember how we used to sit around for hours and hours, and how your mum worried, and how we just laughed?

and then when things got thick. i was trying to figure it out and it was summer. the heat boiled everything out of me until i was one tiny core of fury. i got so angry with you and i pushed away because you didn’t pull at me. were you afraid or did i just want you to be? i’m good at imagining thoughts into places where they don’t exist. and remember when i made you cry? maybe i was right.

i hope that you remember me [happily]. sometimes i catch glimpses of things that remind me of you, but not often. it doesn’t make me sad that i don’t think of you, but when i do, it’s warm.

now i’m 500 miles from home but blankets are still impenetrable armor for sleeping. you hear a sound in the night, in the dark, and pull the covers up over your head, knowing that if something really is coming after you, somehow you’ll be safe, small, invisible. and maybe you’ll remember our stolen ideas, hidden deep and uncovered later, when you know you won’t get caught.

i just want to be comfortable. wrapped up but free.

i’ve got manners that i’ve smuggled away and memories that aren’t quite right but i rest on them.

it's about how unfamiliar even the familiar can become

homemade oreos aka black maureens aka will you marry me? want a cookie? how about now? how about now?

these are hands down the best cookies in the world. hands. down. they're kind of magic, too, because everyone who eats them instantly falls in love with you. you could cut the recipe in half, but that would be stupid because then you'd make half as many friends.

for the cookies

+2 boxes of devils food cake mix

+4 eggs

+2/3 cup of vegetable oil

the dough ends up being really really thick and hard to mix, so either use an electric mixer or your hands. when you make it into balls to cook, make them smaller than normal because otherwise you'll end up with like 5 gigantic cookies instead of 40 normal ones. cook them at 350 degrees for 6-8 minutes but more on the 6 side of things because no one likes hard cookies.

for the icing

+a stick of butter [that's 1/2 cup]

+a block of cream cheese [i don't know how much that is]

+3-4 cups of powdered sugar [that's 1 pound: YUM]

when the cookies are cool, ice half of them [of the flat side, obvs] and them stick them together with un-iced ones. sometimes, you get lucky and have an extra cookie that you get to eat. or, if you count before you bake them, you end up with an extra ball of dough to eat, which is soooo much better. they're also 800 times more moist and delicious the day after you make them, so put them in a baggie and wait.

four lists and a comic

a playlist

also, i love youtube with my whole entire heart.  whoever thought to put a song by a lesbian about sex and luuuurve with clips from "life with derek" is a genius.  

+ bloc party: the prayer

+ iron and wine: faded from the winter

+ casiotone for the painfully alone: new year's kiss

+ the early november: i want to hear you sad

+ counting crows: anna begins

+ owl city: saltwater room

+ mirah: la familia

+ the national: slow show

+ sigur rós: vaka

+ lydia: hospital

+ third eye blind: forget myself

i am smarter than a 5th grader [especially is these were categories]

+ 38957194668521 reasons to put off things you should be doing

+ cleaning obsessively when you're upset, anxious, excited, or just having a lot of feelings

+ correct and incorrect use of apostrophes

+ clever things to say to the cashier who asks about your son when you're actually buying little boys' clothes for yourself

+ alternate routes to avoid the mean [and criminally insane] homeless man on 15th and chestnut

+ inappropriate things to say to your ex-girlfriend

+ excuses for wearing a helmet when biking [that make you sound tragically hip and not just really really lame] 

+ diy hairstyles that, in retrospect, were absolutely not stylish

nice surprises from yesterday

+ soft ice in restaurants

+ waking up in the middle of the night and going back to sleep

+ real mail

+ seeing stars in the city

 + "veinte poemas de amor y una canción desperada"

texts from my mum and dad

+ "the proverbial shit has hit the fan."

+ "well, i went to drop some of my old clothes off today at goodwill and moseyed [sp?!] on in and found the DEAL OF THE YEAR...and it's yours if you want it!"

+ "WTG!"

+ "just got huge ladder to install new chandelier...yea!!"

+ "did you get the power cord yet? suppose if not then the battery's dead and you can't read this. oh well...LOOOOOOOVE YOOOOOOOU SOOOOOOO MUCH, dad"

the earth is not a cold dead place

E|-------0-----|-------0-----|-------0-----|-------0-----
B|-----9---9---|-----7---7---|-----8---8---|-----8---8---
G|---9-------9-|---9-------9-|---7-------7-|---7-------7-
D|-------------|-------------|-------------|-------------
A|-------------|-------------|-------------|-------------
e|-9-----------|-0-----------|-7-----------|-7-----------

-----0-------|-------------|---0---------|--0-------0--|
-------4---0-|-------0-----|-------0---0-|------0------|
---6-----6---|-----4---4---|-----8---8---|----8---8----|
-------------|---6-------6-|-------------|-------------|
-0-----------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
-------------|-0-----------|-7-----------|-7-----------|

work in progress

in the beginning, sometimes i left messages in the street

but you wanted her to look through your memories and feel like she owned a part of them simply because you were hers. you wanted her to wish she possessed some old part of you. you wanted her to love your family and your bed and the streets you drove on and not want to leave ever. with her, you weren't okay with rain, you wanted a storm--an unstoppable, torrential downpour. instead, you had clouds and clouds, threatening to let everything pour out but she gave up before even the littlest one could break. she likes possibility but she won't give herself over to it and she can't be happy.

give it time and it'll fix itself, but right now you're not sure if you want it to. you have this obsession with feeling and you can't shake it.

in the beginning it was uninviting, but it's quickly becoming devastating. you're continually doing maintenance when all you need is something new but you can't give up because you're too attached to memories. and your nostalgia is this particular kind, a kind that belongs to experiences that haven't been lived yet and things that you want to wake up tangled in and then woven into the sheets of. your shoes are always the same and don't travel very far.

lately, your life has faded to black and white and your dreams, once fantastic, play out the small things you crave when you're awake. you're distracted and worried that you're losing your imagination and innocence and everything else that you gave away so easily and so willingly because you thought you would never run out of things to give. what you once thought was tying you down has turned into your safety net for when you walk on tightropes [which seems like every day now] and it's moving farther and father away, making you fall longer every time. you wake up with bruises you can't explain and a longing you can't articulate.

it's almost winter and you want to be warm. you miss the familiar and think about how strange it is that everything you used to recognize has become foreign. telephone lines are too thin to travel. the static is too loud and your words move too fast to span the distance.

so how will you handle the discontent? this aggravation is hostile to your nature, which is overly sensitive but impassive. you'll look for brilliance in your ordinary background, like the inviting coolness of your pillow, and lay away at night hoping they don't run out of good songs. you could wait for it to come, but instead you'll be after it all night. you've got time to make.