The Decade Dominated by Denim

More from the great basement cleanout of 2009! I found a whole box of these “INFashion” magazines, and though they were heavy and smell like basement, I could not resist hauling them home to have a look through them. They are all circa 1987-89, and the following images are from the September/October 1987 issue (Lisa Bonet and Matt Dillon on the cover – oh so dreamy!) There was so much to observe and ridicule that I was spoiled for choice, so I focused mostly on denim ads in this one, as they are truly horrendous.

Here are some ladies in the ubiquitous blue fabric:

Apparently in 1987, women were allowed to cover their bodies quite completely, as well as look androgynous in general.

Unless you're one of them-there super feminine women, and then you pose in the most unnaturally ass-proffering position in the history of contortion. All the better to feature how exactly matching your jacket and pants are.

So we’ve determined that women wore a lot of clothing, and most of that was denim: Continue reading »

Years Gone By and Still

Brought a huge pile of old crap home from my parents’ house yesterday. My Mom is sure that it’s my old papers that are cluttering up her basement, and I am going to let her maintain that delusion. Anyway, since I didn’t ever manage to leave the house today… (vodka = bad, apparently. At least +vodka -dinner = bad.) I thought going through some of this old stuff might be a good brainless thing to do while I munched veggie pizza and watched Chronicles of Riddick for the 179th time.

Tons of things I’d forgotten about in this first pile. Creative writing from high school and early college – typed on a typewriter even. Old pictures, cards, journals and artwork. Very interesting to read in the voice of my 20-year old self, especially. So many of the things I struggled with back then (in terms of the ways I relate to the world) are still things I struggle with today. It seems my view of them was much clearer back then, now it’s all covered in grimy layers of nuance and experience. Back then I was much more blunt, especially with myself.

Yeah, my hair pretty much looked the same back then. And yes, I still wear that exact style of shoe.

My favorite thing I’ve found so far was this little book that my first really serious boyfriend made for me. He was an amazing guy in a lot of ways, and reading his old letters lets me put a rosier glow on the relationship than it perhaps deserves. See, he was just the type that my stupid broken brain still picks out for me today—artistic, talented, emotionally needy and super-controlling. Such a delightful combo of traits! So that was not going to work out, of course. But there were good parts, like in any relationship, and looking through this makes me remember his insane sense of humor and how he always made me laugh. I actually think that he hated everything even more than I did, and that’s an impressive feat indeed. Looking back, I think part of my attraction to him was being the one thing he loved in the world. Or at least the one thing he didn’t despise. Being the center of that kind of attention was compelling, and the two of us together were an amazing asshole misanthropic duo.

When we couldn’t be together he was always making me things, sending me stuff like this. (Part of our relationship was long-distance, when we were both in college, so we did a lot of mailing.) I think I am part of the last generation to ever carry out love-affairs via postal mail. That’s sad. You can’t sketch crazy characters in the margin of an email. The feeling of getting a new mixtape in the mail from someone you weren’t going to see for two months carried an emotional intensity that you can’t really match in a world with on-demand video chat. We could only talk on the phone twice a week because long distance was so expensive. And I had to trade off phone time with my roommate, because of course we shared the same phone in our apartment and he wanted to be using it to talk to HIS girlfriend. No cell phones with text messaging and free long distance. I had to make lists of things that I wanted to remember to tell him when I talked to him. No instant messaging! No email! Having to go buy stamps at the post office! Writing so much that your letter was over the limit and having to add more stamps! It was insanity, I tell you! OK now I sound like someone’s grandmother, so I am going to stop there before I take to walloping people with my cane.

Anyway, here’s part of one of the little books he put together for me. Seeing it made me smile.

Continue reading »

Liars and the SOTD – Tracy Chapman “Tell it Like it is”

This album, along with Poe’s “Haunted” and more recently F+TM’s “Lungs” is on my list of all-time favorite albums. The ones where every song you listen to you think “OK, I am totally going to replay this song when it’s over.” and then the next song comes on and it’s so amazing that you have to listen to that one instead of re-listening to the first one.

Most of these albums come from places of brokenness and disenchantment with the world, which is why I identify with them. But to me they’re also cries for understanding and calls to do better with yourself, be a better sort of person. They’re from people who are heartbroken and disillusioned, and they point out how the world and people surrounding them have failed them—yet they also hold a sort of yearning for a world that’s not like this, where the people are good to each other, and good to them.

I feel like lately I have been dealing with way too many liars. Whether they’re lying inadvertently because they don’t understand themselves or lying blatantly because they’re assholes with shit to cover up, I am not always sure. Why they do it isn’t important, the net effect is that I don’t really trust anyone lately to tell the truth about anything. And I hate that. I hate that because my natural state is to believe people when they tell me things. I rarely lie. I will either tell you the truth or change the subject, and I assume most other people are the same. And I can’t assume that as much as I do. I don’t really know how to be super selective about it either. With me it’s either “honesty filter 100% on” or “you dirty motherfuckers, stop talking to me with your lying bullshit mouths.” And these are people who not only lie about what they’re doing, they lie about who they are. And that’s the most disappointing kind to discover, the kind where someone you thought was one kind of person – someone who took the time and trouble to paint that picture of themselves for you – is really not that kind of person at all. It makes me feel stupid and naive, it disappoints me, it makes me feel all alone in the world with a bunch of people wearing carnival masks.

I know that there’s no solution to this. People are how they are, and a lot of people need to lie to themselves and each other,  just in order to survive and maintain their internal images of themselves. I get it.  I am glad in some ways I am not one of them, but I am also lonely for other people who tell the truth, even when it’s harsh and ugly. I would rather hear about and deal with what’s really happening around me than have to sift through a huge pile of someone else’s horseshit to find the kernel of reality in there.

People give me grief for my negativity, but honest negativity will always be preferable to me than rosy-cheeked bullshit optimism and self-delusion. And I refuse to apologize for that, because no matter how it pains me, mine is the more authentic reality and I will not give it up.

Tracy Chapman “Tell it Like it is”

Say it say it say it
Tell it like it is
Say it say it say it
Tell it like it is

What breaks your heart
What keeps you awake at night
What makes you want to break down and cry

But say you’ll never turn your back
Say you’ll never harden to the world
Say you’ll never try to still the rhythms in your breast
Say you’ll never look at the evil among us and try to forget
Say you’ll tell it like it is

Say it say it say it so everyone can hear
Say it say it say it tell it like it is

What breaks your heart
What keeps you awake at night
How your anger and grief
Make you want to cry out
Oh and tell it like it is

But say you’ll never close your eyes
Or pretend that it’s a rosy world
Say you’ll never try to paint
What is rotten with a sugarcoat
Say you’ll talk about the horrors you’ve seen and the torment you know
And tell it like it is

Say it say it say it
So no one can forget
Say it say it say it
Tell it like it is

What breaks your heart
What keeps you awake at night
What makes you want to break the ties that silence and bind
And tell it like it is

Say you’ll never cover your ears and close your mouth
And live in a silent world
Say you’ll only run as far or as fast as you need to be secure
Say that then you’ll tell the truth
When a lie could cross your lips
And tell it like it is

Say it say it say it – Say it say it say it
Say it say it say it – Say it say it say it
Say it say it say it – Say it say it say it
Say it say it say it – Say it say it say it

Here’s the song, but ignore the video which seems to be just a bunch of weird birds.

Anniversaries

So today is ten years to the day since I moved back home from Amsterdam.

I cannot even begin to know how to process that fact. Ten years. In a heartbeat, in an eyeblink, ten years. That makes me feel incredibly old, as if this is a story I should be telling a youngster while I rock on a front porch and churn some butter.

I’ve been back here in St. Louis more than twice as long as I was gone. They say that your four years of high school have an everlasting impact on your life, but I think my four years in Holland had a much larger one on mine. I still remember how it felt ten years ago today, to wake up in a city where everyone spoke my language, and look around and see all these strangely unfamiliar things from my childhood. I remember making my bed that first morning and wondering how I was going to put my life back together. I was listening to Nina Simone “Ain’t Got No, I Got Life” on my old CD player, and I heard my Dad talking to my Mom, right through my closed bedroom door. He said “Listen to that. It’s like she was never gone.”

The thought of that panicked me to no end, like all my personhood had just been stripped away, along with my job and my home and my friends. Like everything I was and the person I had become was going to be lost somehow, was going to slip out of me and slide between the cracks of the hardwood floor in my childhood bedroom and disappear forever, leaving me blank and helpless and completely unreal.

The first thing I did that day was go buy a computer. The second was to get online and do something, anything to distract me from my newly bizarre reality. I don’t think I’ve every really stopped that part.

I had no way of knowing, of course, where my life would go. That I would still be in this city ten years later. I had no idea who I would meet, or who I would love and who would love me. I didn’t know where I would work, or what I would spend my time on, or how indeed one builds a new life out of nothing but one’s own knowledge and strength of will. I had no idea where I was going. But of course none of us do. From minute to minute our lives are infinitely unpredictable, completely out of our control, careening wildly in some direction we can’t ever see until we run into it full speed. In some ways I feel like I have something to show for the last ten years, and in other ways I think I have only the same exact thing I had before – myself.

I don’t have any great philosophical insight on this anniversary, which is momentous to no one but me. I don’t even really know how I feel about it. Happy or sad or numb or indifferent, I am not really sure. But I felt that I should make a note of it – if only because life passes very quickly and you will never notice it as it goes. Everything is very uncertain and ephemeral, and you cannot predict where you are going to be one minute from now, much less years later. But you can remember where you’ve been—and for ten years, I’ve been here.

And what have I got?
Why am I alive anyway?
Yeah what have I got?
Nobody can take away..?

Nina Simone – Ain’t Got No, I Got Life

Comfort Yourself with the Savings

So on and off for the last ten years I have drunk Aveda comforting tea—because it tastes good and I like it. I always bought the apothecary-style jar of loose tea leaves, and I had a little strainer I could use to make one cup at a time. I am not sure how much I paid for it, probably too much because everything at Aveda is ridiculously overpriced, but it wasn’t expensive enough to stop me buying it. I don’t often drink coffee and I don’t really like hot drinks at all, so I don’t own a coffeepot, but this summer I got myself an iced tea maker from Target. You can use loose tea or tea in bags, and it’s pretty awesome, having a nice pitcher of tea in the fridge when I want something other than water or tequila shots to drink.

I stopped in Aveda a few weeks ago to replace my tea stocks, since I’d recently gotten back on the Comforting Tea kick and finished off all my stash of it here and at the office. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that they’d not only redesigned the packaging and introduced a tea-bag form of the tea, but they’d also raised the price to $24.00. For tea. For a jar of loose tea. Seriously. I mean, I have been known to spend stupid amounts of money on stupid things, but I know for damn sure I never spent $24 on a fucking jar of tea. I want to say it was $14 last year. Max. They had a box of 20 tea bags for $14.99 too (bargain! not.)

So I thought that they could keep that fucking tea, and comfort themselves up the ass with it, if the mood struck them. I knew from reading the label that it was basically a mix of peppermint and licorice teas, and yesterday at Dierberg’s I picked up some Stash Licorice Spice Tea for about $5 for 30 tea bags, and some Celestial Seasoning’s Peppermint Tea for about $3 for 20 bags. Last night I made a pitcher of tea using 3 bags of each type – and guess what? It tastes exactly the same as Aveda’s Comforting Tea, at what… 1/4 of the price or less? So fuck a bunch of overpriced mall tea made by a company that purports to be all earth-friendly and natural (and used to be, and was founded on those principles) but is actually owned by L’Oreal now and has drastically jacked up their prices and who knows what their business principles are now? Profit at any cost I would imagine. Anyway, if you don’t want to spend $24 for fucking loose tea, here’s an alternative for you. Comfort yourself with your spare change.

And Dear Aveda, No – I have not yet forgiven you for discontinuing Deep Penetrating Hair Revitalizer. You suck.

Where the Wild Things Are

Finally saw this movie Tuesday night and really enjoyed it. It actually tied into some themes I’ve been musing on myself lately, which made it more interesting. (Or perhaps these themes reached out and slapped themselves into the plotline just because they were tired of being in my brain – not the first time that’s happened.)

Not at all a kids movie from what I could see, I would think young children especially would find it confusing, dull or disturbing. But then again it’s been a long time since I was a young child, so maybe they’d see something different in it than an adult would. The monsters were pretty amazing, all fur and snot and a plodding kind of fierceness. That in itself must be enchanting to children.

The movie dealt with themes of wildness, relationships, loving someone so much you push them away, loving someone but being unable to tolerate them, loving someone and having them mistreat you, conflict resolution and rage and loss. And several of those things have been on my mind quite a bit lately—especially the idea of wildness, and whether we have space in our civilized adult lives to be loud and wild anymore. I know I don’t have much. Between my home with shared walls and my office and other public spaces, the need to be respectful of other people’s right to peace is usually paramount. Only in my car do I experience some level of freedom to sing or scream or just listen to music that gets as loud as I need it to drown out my own thoughts. Which is why I look like a total nutbag, belting out angry songs at the top of my lungs as I listen to my iPod on my way to work. But I don’t care. In terms of things I owe other drivers on the road, the ability not to see me singing  like a freak is not high on my priority list.

As far as love and rage and loss, all those things have been very heavy on my mind. Love is very hard. Families are hard. People are hard. Love can be destructive as easily as it can be nurturing. Obsession walks hand and hand with love sometimes, and obsession and wildness are the themes that came out in my writing for The Grand Conspiracy this week. What do you do when you love someone and they don’t love you, and those feelings can’t be made to go away? Do you ignore them, accept them, or do you rebel? Do you demand what you want from people, take it when they won’t give it? It’s our instinct to take what we want, what we can’t stop thinking of. But of course that isn’t permitted when what we want and can’t have is another person. But the instinct remains all the same. This piece is about someone whose obsessive desire for someone else rips through every polite barrier that society has constructed—and I feel sympathy for her, no matter how much she scares me.

Anyway, that’s what’s on my mind lately. I do not wonder why I can’t sleep.

Things that only happen to me

So, here’s what I get for trying to be responsible and organized.

Not actually my bedroom, but the armoire looks mostly like this. It matches nothing else in my home decor, other than a table that I am keeping in the closet and want to get rid of except I feel it's too expensive of a table to pitch in the dumpster. Does anyone need a Queen-Anne style coffee table?

Lately I have been on an organization-in-the-house kick. I think it’s because I have been staying in a lot more this month, due to the rain, or the darkness, or my friends being sick and broke, or me being unpopular or something. So while I am at home and it’s pouring down rain in the inky black of the outside, I organize things on the inside. I fixed my closet and noticed that I have a ton of clothes that I hate and need to dispose of. I made a pile of things on the floor that I intend to sort through and then throw away. Then I collected all my massive piles of random jewelry from the downstairs bathroom and the kitchen, and carted them all upstairs. I have a jewelry armoire in my bedroom, but I haven’t really been using it because I usually don’t think about what jewelry I want to wear until I am leaving the house, and I leave the house via the first floor, rather than the third. Generally.

So anyway, part of the whole organization kick involved getting all those necklaces out of the bathroom, and getting all those earrings and bracelets off the tray on the kitchen counter. And so I carted them all upstairs and arranged them in the armoire and now the kitchen looks much tidier. As I was arranging things in the armoire I naturally discovered lots of stuff I hadn’t worn in ages, and forgot that I had. One of the things I found was this Cycladic head pendant that I

This is not my actual pendant, but is remarkably similar. Sadly, I have no such beautiful backdrop bark or stone or other natural or man-made material in the vicinity of my house.

bought when I was in Athens. Now, that pendant is special to me for many reasons.

1) Because I like to buy a piece of jewelry from every place I travel to, to remind me of where I’ve been

2) Because I have a long-held fascination with all things Cycladic

3) Because when I was in Athens I actually bought this at a market and bargained the woman down. If you know me, you know this is not my nature and 10 years later I am still very proud of myself, even though she most likely still overcharged me. I bargained, dammit!

4) When I wear it people tend to comment on it, and then I can say “Oh yes, I bought this when I was vacationing in Greece.” in a very breezy and off-hand manner, thus satisfying my need for being a pretentious asshole

Anyway, I love this necklace

So I saw it hanging in the armoire and decided to wear it Tuesday night. Being  a person of a rather forthright and immediate nature in regards to my own personal wishes, I put it on and wandered downstairs. I played on the computer for a while, then went to brush my teeth because I had company coming over and I think it’s polite to expose my company to minty-fresh breath rather than whatever-I-had-for-dinner breath. As I gazed into the mirror while brushing my teeth I thought “Why, what is that shadow on my neck there?” and then I craned my neck for a better view and thought “What is that substance on my neck there?” and then as I wiped at it with ineffectively with my hand I thought “What the motherfucking fuck happened to my NECK?”

Then I realized that whatever (elasticated? wax-covered thread?) type of cord this pendant had been hanging from had been in the armoire undisturbed long enough to have experienced some sort of elemental breakdown, and was now comprised mostly of a sticky, tar-like substance that was currently coating my neck in a horrible black horse-shoe shape. I took the necklace off and set it gingerly on the counter. I noticed my hands were now coated in black sludge. I picked up a washcloth and scrubbed at my neck, to absolutely no effect whatsoever. I squirted soap on the washcloth and scrubbed at my neck quite viciously, to very little effect. At this point I began to panic, as my company was going to be there in 10 minutes and  A) I have an aversion to greeting company whilst coated in tar and B) This was not the kind of company to whom one might reasonably appeal for help in the scrubbing of one’s neck. ( i.e. it was not my mother.)

So I opened a drawer and found some eye makeup remover and poured that on the washcloth and scrubbed more at my neck with it. Finally some of the goop began to come off, promptly ruining my washcloth. I scrubbed and scrubbed, removing most of the gunk, and then I had to put my hair up and use a hand-held mirror to look at the back of my neck while I scrubbed that too. It took a really long time, and I got tar-like crap all over my hands and under my fingernails. It was gross.

The other thing you should know is that I have had a mystery neck-rash that flares up periodically ever since July. (the doctors tell me it’s Not Serious but they don’t know what’s causing it. I <3 me some doctors, for serious.) Of course this scrubbing in that area irritated my rash and then I looked like I had some kind of pox on my neck. So basically I was sitting there, eyeballing the clock and trying to get cleaned up before my company arrived and watching lovely itchy red bumps appearing all over it, all the while thinking that these are really the sorts of things that happen only to me. Really. I mean, I woke up in the morning with a significant pack of troubles already on my back, and then I ended the day inadvertently covered in tar.

I lead a very, very special life kids. I am not sure what the moral of this tale is, other than “Try not to be me, whatever you do.”

Look at my giant sad

It seems to me that unhappiness is an inefficient, cumbersome thing to have to deal with. There’s nothing you can really do about it when you have it, as long as the thing causing the unhappiness doesn’t change. It’s not like:

“Oh shit, look at this giant fucking sad on my face – better pop that sucker before it gets any bigger.”

or

“Dude, I am feeling really maudlin today, but I made myself barf it up and now I am feeling much better.”

OK there’s a little bit of:

“I was so unhappy, but I took this medicine and now I am better!”

but that’s only temporary and cannot cure you. Sometimes you just have a sad, and it won’t go away, and you can’t fix it and you can’t do anything with it sitting there staring at you. You’re just fucking stuck with it.

Perhaps it’s better to just wallow around in it until your fingers get all pruney. Perhaps you just have to let it absorb you, and then it will be satisfied and go away on its own. Or perhaps you just incorporate it into the whole of who you are and in some ways it stays with you forever. I don’t know, I don’t understand it, I don’t like it.

All I know is that it seems like a stupid waste of time, and it interferes in what I want to be doing, and how I want to be feeling. I resent its intrusion into my days and nights. I resent it poking at me when I do find five minutes of distraction. I resent it crashing down on my head every time I wake up. I don’t want to share my life with this sad, or any sad. I arrange my business to avoid feeling sad. I contort my whole world to avoid feeling sad. But sometimes sad comes barreling in anyway. It’s a huge pile of bullshit it what it is.

Also – Why hasn’t the gene for sadness and depression been Darwinned out of us by now? You’d think sad people are more likely to stay home not procreating, and also more likely to off themselves, so why does the tendency toward melancholy persist in our human gene pool?

Why, why, blah, why, all academic questions to distract myself momentarily from the big giant sad. And it worked. For ten minutes at least.

Me and the Plastic Wrap

You know how sometimes something so bad and traumatic happens to you that you can’t believe the rest of the world is still carrying on with their business? When your life has been so unimaginably, possibly irrevocably, altered and everyone else tra-la-las around as if there’s nothing going on? I have that right now. I am not even sure the rest of you are real. You are certainly making a lot of noise, and doing a lot of things, but it’s all just buzzing.

Lack of Sleep Finally Catching up With Me

Sunday’s late-night plus drinking*, Monday’s late night plus raging insomnia at 3:00 a.m. and last night’s late night plus drinking have finally caught up with me it seems. I would have paid hot cash money to stay in bed this morning. Especially since it was cold in my room and my blankets were so warm. Hate getting up in weather like this. And I also can’t resist jumping back in bed for three minutes when I go back upstairs to get dressed after I have my tea and check my email. It feels like I am stealing time from the world.

But I will say this for being a girl. Although there are many, many shitty things** involved in being female in our world, the fact that I was able to come to work this morning wearing the functional/comfort equivalent of pajamas is a pretty awesome feature for my sex. Floor-length cozy skirt, cotton camisole and baggy cotton hoodie sweater are about as comfortable as it gets while still imitating appropriate office wear. And since I knew all of today was going to be hiding out in my office down here in the catacombs, avoiding morons, I feel pretty comfortable in my slob-tastic attire.

Bought some discount liquors yesterday at the alcoholic warehouse at 44/Jefferson. One of the things I picked up was Cafe Boheme, which turned out to be just a really, really inexpensive ($8.99!) yet tasty knock-off of Bailey’s, in a pretty, French-looking bottle. Anyway I was sipping on a glass or two of that during the evening, and imagine my surprise when I left the room only to return to Jake having his snout buried in my glass, happily lapping away at my coffee-flavored-liqueur goodness. Moron dog.

I don’t think he drank too much of it, apparently not enough to hurt him, but still it was startling to see, because you know I love to worry.

Anyway, overall life-status is devastatingly horrific bordering on colossally depressing with a dash of heart-pounding, middle-of-the-night panic, somewhat ameliorated by an absorbing creative project I am working on for a friend and a 6-week (probably fantastical) time-line for health improvements proffered by my doctor***. Just when I think one more thing can’t go wrong in my body or my world, it does. And almost none of the other wrong things have gotten any better, so it really is a lot to deal with. And it leaves me just sitting around looking at the two or three things that AREN’T wrong in my world, and wondering how long it will be until they also go totally fuckwire. And probably when the next thing goes wrong it won’t even be one of the things I am dreading, it’s going to be some other bizarre thing that I thought was safe that turns around and bites me in the face.

But fuck it, right? Nothing I can do about anything, so no point caring.

*RevCo concert at the Firebird  – still pissed Al wasn’t with the band AND they didn’t play Attack Ships on Fire. Bastards.

**cramps, PMS and other hormonal surges, eyebrow plucking, bleached wads of cotton shoved up your ladyparts, leg shaving, pantyhose, high heels and underwire bras, to name just a few.

*** I am now on two medications and FOUR supplements, one of which requires I take 8 pills of it per day! It’s the awesome.

Great Article on the Anxious Mind

Whether you call us “Highly Sensitive People” as Elaine Aron does or “Highly Reactive” people as this researcher does, some of us are born to worry and fret more than others. Great article on someone researching those of us who were pretty much designed for high-anxiety, especially for someone like me who (as my Mom reports with grim detachment) screamed every time I was taken out of the house for the first two years of my life. I screamed until they brought me home. Every time. Imagine how joyous that was for them. But also imagine how overwhelming I must have found the world back then, and how scared I must have been to react in that way every single time they took me out. That’s why I totally get this:

But the 19th baby was different. She was distressed by novelty — new sounds, new voices, new toys, new smells — and showed it by flailing her legs, arching her back and crying. Here was what Kagan was looking for but was not sure he would find: a baby who essentially fell apart when exposed to anything new.

Baby 19 grew up true to her temperament…

The interviewer asks Baby 19 what she worries about.

“I don’t know,” Baby 19 says after a long pause, twirling her hair faster, touching her face, her knee. She smiles a little, shrugs. Another pause. And then the list of troubles spills out: “When I don’t quite know what to do and it’s really frustrating and I feel really uncomfortable, especially if other people around me know what they’re doing. I’m always thinking, Should I go here? Should I go there? Am I in someone’s way? … I worry about things like getting projects done… I think, Will I get it done? How am I going to do it? … If I’m going to be in a big crowd, it makes me nervous about what I’m going to do and say and what other people are going to do and say.” Baby 19 is wringing her hands now. “How I’m going to deal with the world when I’m grown. Or if I’m going to sort of do anything that really means anything.”

Her voice trails off. She wants to make a difference, she says, and worries about whether she will. “I can’t stop thinking about that.”

via Magazine Preview – Understanding the Anxious Mind – NYTimes.com.

That last paragraph there? It’s hard for me to understand that that’s NOT the dialogue that’s going on in everyone’s head all the time. It must be quiet in there for the rest of you.

Mount Rainier

Mount Rainier

Originally uploaded by rasone

This image has been the background on my pretty pink Vaio laptop almost since I got it – and I don’t know if I will ever change it. It’s just a beautiful, perfect image, and I wish I lived inside it.

Absurdity & Understanding

Pondering my love of the absurd lately. Nothing delights me more than intelligent (or even quasi-intelligent) nonsense. I love a puzzle that can’t be solved, a random delightful quirk to tease my brain. I like it in language, I like it in imagery and I like it in people.

I don’t think things should be easy to understand. If they’re easy to understand, they bore me. Sometimes I like things dark and obscure, and sometimes I like things that are just plain bizarre.

An image from one of my favorite photographers, then and now, Jerry Uelsmann. (http://www.uelsmann.net) Of course he was and is the master of darkroom technique, unlike my rebellious know-it-all self.

When I was a photography major, I remember being very adamantly opposed to using proper darkroom techniques. I had my own grand 19 year-old’s artistic vision, and it did definitely not include 359,000 Ansel Adams shades of gray. At yet another critique my professor said she enjoyed my work, but it wasn’t showing technical competence, since she wanted to see that I could produce something that didn’t look like a Xerox copy. I was arguing with her that I had no interest in photographing mountains and trees and other bullshit and then reproducing them in perfect grayscale. I remember so disinctly the “Aha!” moment that followed what she said to me next.

“When you use proper darkroom technique and have images with a full range of white, black and gray, what you are saying to your viewer is that the world you are presenting to them is an understandable place.”

I couldn’t believe our level of disconnect when I replied to her “But, what if that’s not what I am trying to say?”

Why would I ever say that? Why would I even make that representation, in my art, in my writing, or anywhere else?

I don’t believe that for one minute, that the world is an understandable place. There’s no bigger lie than cleaning things up to present to people as some sort of reassurance that they’re meaningful and simple and can be fathomed. I firmly believe that the world is complex and strange, and the more whimsical things there are in it to confound and delight me, the better. I don’t want simple. I don’t want easily understood. I want the absurd and will be satisfied with nothing less.

Anyway, I’ve written a rather absurd thing that will be up at The Grand Conspiracy tomorrow, and I hope that you enjoy the nonsense with me when you read it.

It’s Not

It’s not that there’s nothing going on – it’s just that I don’t, for once, have much to say about it. Silent rumination is my current mode.

Bruiser is doing well, off diuretics and on only the one heart medication. That one’s probably for life.

My house is clean. Mostly.

The yard is tamed. Mostly.

Work is boring, but not soul-scorching.

I’m smiling. But I’m sure it’s only temporary – don’t get alarmed.

Musings on Maturity

Just thinking tonight that it’s important to distinguish between keeping your heart young, and refusing to grow up.

Since I’ve never had a young heart, even when I was young, I have never worried about retaining any form of youthful exuberance. I don’t think people who ponder and fret the way that I do ever get to really experience the carefree times that we typically equate with youth. Worriers don’t take many chances. We don’t act spontaneously, we plan and we consider and then we do. So I’ve never been what you’d really call young at heart, or in spirit. I can perhaps lay claim to a rather juvenile sense of humor, and that’s about it.

But recently, in interacting with someone who is desperate not to lose this ephemeral “youth” thing I’ve heard tell of, I am coming to understand that – like everything else – you have to find a balance. A balance between feeling young, alive and carefree, and in finding your way to being an actual adult. You can’t give up maturity and consideration for other people in the mistaken belief that refusing to be responsible keeps you youthful. That doesn’t keep you young, that just makes you a middle-aged dipshit.

Being irresponsible, insisting that life is (or should be) a non-stop party, that’s not youth. Refusing to make future plans or consider other people, remaining unable to empathize with emotions that aren’t your own and behave accordingly – that’s not youth. It’s a self-involved perpetual adolescence. People shouldn’t live that way. You have to be able to find your happy in a way that ensures your own future and doesn’t disregard the happiness of the people you care about, and who care for you.

Claiming that the things you do are all in an effort to stay young isn’t some magical cop-out that makes you an exciting, more interesting person. It’s just an excuse to do whatever you want, whenever you want and to remain unable to form mature attachments, or care for yourself. And that’s not at all fun, that’s sad.

So maybe I am not the funnest chick in the world, and maybe I don’t act like I am fifteen. Maybe I don’t think that being irresponsible and doing dangerous things is hilarious. I don’t often act without consideration of the possible outcomes of my decisions, and my ability to experience spontaneity suffers for it, I know.  But then again, I have my shit together, I maintain my own home and care for myself, I pay my bills on time and I try my best to form meaningful relationships with other people. It’s not exciting or glamorous, but it’s got some integrity. Life is not a perpetual party. Maybe it should be. It would be nice to never have to think about anything, or consider consequences. But that’s not reality. My world sucks quite a bit of the time, but refusing to see it the way it is and respond to it on its own level, that’s not the answer.

Accept that you will never have 100% of the benefits of youth and 100% of the benefits of maturity all at the same time. And then go ahead and grow up. It hurts, but you can take it.