Friday, July 31, 2009

Eating cherries and spitting out the pits

I was eating cherries and the phrase "eating cherries and spitting out the pits" kept on running through my mind, just as it always does whenever I eat cherries, when I started thinking about how neat it is that somebody thought up those words and wrote them in a book and now I can't eat cherries without thinking them. I guess I just realized what it is to publish stuff and have other people know it. And I think it's pretty cool. Like...people create things that they then make public and other people love. I think everyone else already knew about this phenomenon. But I don't think I ever realized how much other people were people too enough to understand.


In other news, I'm really into this apocalypse rainstorm going on out there. As I was writing this darkness fell and the wind picked up like crazy and now it is raining like the middle of the end of the world jungle. Yum.

Thursday, July 30, 2009

Family Night

Mmmmmmmmmmmm today was great. I think I'm finally my normal level of happiness. My happiness levels have been low for the past while and I've been still having fun and all but having fun is more fun with full happiness. So I am ready to live August up.

Today I went with K and J for a delightful swim in the lake. The water was warm and deep and the lake bottom was sandy and the company was thoroughly enjoyable. J and I helped K overcome her fear of swimming and realize her true swimming abilities. And like...I'm not sure I can express how great being in that water felt, floating around and being surrounded by cooling yet not too cold liquid. It felt like we were swimming in a lake of molten happiness. That may sound dumb in words but I swear that's what it was.

On the drive home I was in a great mood and the sun roof was open on the van and the breeze was coming in the windows and I was listening to all the songs I wanted to be listening to and I couldn't contain my dancing or singing, so I was driving along dancing and singing and feeling so young and happy and summery. I always forget that other cars can see me when I'm driving so I didn't feel self conscious about driving in my bikini and flailing my arms around to the music even though I probably should have. But oh well.

Then we went to Father's birthday dinner at Doyle's in JP. It was just so family night and so nice and my parents and J's parents bonded and K's brother showed up out of nowhere with free pizza and starbursts. After dinner K and A and J and Sister and I all went for a little exploration around my old neighborhood and saw my old house and old school and old food co-op. I saw so many things that I liked on that walk, including a bunch of great murals, some black eyed susans growing through a picket fence, a really pleasant looking side porch, and some flower boxes. I liked them.

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

BIKING BIKING

Yesterday I was driving home from dropping of A after work and I saw an old man walking with two canes down the sidewalk wearing a large cowboy hat, a big fluffy mustache, and an unbuttoned button down denim shirt. And pants. And we made eye contact as I drove by and he smiled at me and I smiled at him and it was a beautiful moment.

Today I decided to go for a bike ride. I hadn't ridden a bike in years, probably about five, but I thought I might give it a try. I always thought I hated biking but as it turns out I was very wrong. Well I was right once, back when I hated biking, but that apparently was just a phase. Turns out these days I love biking. Who knew! I raised the seat on my old bike and started biking and it was just so much fun. I listened to my 70's music and felt like I was flying and biked down all the roads I used to bike on when I was little. The sky was beautiful and the breeze felt great and I loved that I was the power behind my transportation and how fast I could go and how much distance I could cover. Biking! It's great!

I biked past so many houses and looked into so many windows and lawns and thought a lot about life. It isn't/wasn't in my control that I live here, but here I am anyway because children end up living where their parents live, but pretty soon I will reach that age where I go off and live in a place that I choose. All the adults who live in the houses that I passed were once nineteen year old kids on bikes wondering how their lives would turn out, and then they got jobs and bought houses in the suburbs and that was their life. I'm here because my life started here and I guess my life is still starting because I'm still here. But it just really won't be long before I'm someplace else.

Monday, July 27, 2009

Have I got a story for you

It all starts with me painting blackberries hanging over the stone wall in my backyard. I found this really nice branch of blackberry bush propped up on the other spiky plant that grows on the wall and the black blackberries and the red blackberries and all the different greens in front of the wall looked so nice that I really wanted to paint it. So I packed up my paints and my turpentine and a little canvass and pallet and sat down and started painting the blackberries and it wasn't long before I discovered the serious flaw in my plan. Painting in the garden on a hot summer evening in not enough clothes sounds glamorous until you factor in the mosquitoes. And those mosquitoes were all about my upper thighs. I don't know why, but I ended up with nine mosquito bites on the outside of my left upper thigh and three on the inside. The right had two on the inside and seven on the outside. I look diseased. And they hurt like the dickens. I smashed a bunch of mosquitoes but I kept on forgetting that I was holding paintbrushes and my hands were all painty and all the attempted mosquito killing ended up getting a lot of paint on me and my clothes. One dead mosquito dropped onto my pallet, and without really thinking what I was doing I mushed it up and mixed its blood onto my paint, and then I thought oh god I just KILLED AN ANIMAL and now I am PAINTING WITH ITS BLOOD. And I creeped myself out a little. I seriously do not know what compelled me to do that. But ANYWAY I didn't want to take a picture of the blackberries and paint from the picture since I like painting from life much more, but I have kind of a race against time in this painting since the red blackberries will ripen and I really like the red.

So I went back inside and I got out my camera to document the blackberries. I hope to get out there again tomorrow afternoon and paint more from life but if time and tide end up doing what they do it is nice to know that I have the picture. After I took the picture of the blackberries I took a picture of the sky behind my house since I had been watching it while I painted. My issue with pictures is that I can never get them to look as good as things look in real life. I know people who are good at taking pictures can get things to look better in the pictures than in real life but I always end up disappointed with mine. So I took a few more pictures of wildflowers that I were disappointed in and then moved on to eating blueberries. I started out reaching through the net that Mother put around the blueberries this morning to keep out the birds and picking the good ones and eating them and having a great time, and then I noticed a bit of commotion back behind the bushes. So I looked over closer and found two birds tangled in the net flapping to try to get free.


I don't know what the proper protocol is for saving trapped birds. I know what to do when a baby bird falls out of its nest but I had never before heard of this issue. I was singing sort of quietly to them to try to calm them down and I told them I was helping but I'm not sure they understood. When I saw how badly tangled they were I ran inside and got Father and Grandfather to come help.



Grandfather ended up holding the birds still while I cut away the net with scissors. The first bird died in Grandfather's hands but the second one flew away after I cut it free. It was all pretty intense. But now I have this memory of Grandfather and I working together to try to save birds. I like all my memories of Grandfather, but I feel like this one will really stick. He's so great.

That's my story.

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Farmer Boy

I was reading my book in my room when I started thinking. Once I started thinking I realized that though I was reading through all the words I wasn't thinking about them anymore, and then I gave up reading and lay down and thought so much that I ended up falling asleep. I didn't plan to fall asleep and I didn't notice that I had slept until Mother woke me up to go eat Father's homemade Indian food. But that's another story. My story is just about all the thinking.

I started thinking about how much I would enjoy having a farm of my own when I grow up. I could have a big solar greenhouse that I would grow food in all through the year. I'd have a chicken coop in the greenhouse and rabbit pens and the body heat of the chickens and rabbits would help heat the greenhouse and I would harvest eggs and meat from the chickens and fur from the rabbits. It would be modeled after the greenhouse of my youth. It's weird to think that the greenhouse of my youth doesn't exist in real life anymore. Our old farm lady friend couldn't manage it anymore and couldn't stand to see it operating in shambles under the control of other people, so she sold the land and now a huge mansion is in its place. I could bring it back, though, if I had some land of my own. I could take all the lessons that I learned growing up with that solar powered super sustainable farm and combine then with everything I learn in farm class and make something that actually works.

I really think I could do it. Our old farm lady friend has so much stuff figured out and I know she would be excited to coach me through making my own farm. All she wants is for somebody young and spirited to make all her ideas happen. I could do that. She has so much information online about how to make a sustainable farm work, and she always says that her farm plans can make $500,000 per year. I don't know if that is true in practice, but I could do that!

I would have a little pond on my farm with ducks and turtles. I could eat the duck eggs and turtles are just cool. I would have a bunch of sheep and a big field for them but instead of letting them graze wherever they want in the field I would make a little collapsible sheep pen and only let them eat in certain areas. That way I would make sure they weren't princesses about the grass. I would help with the lambing in the spring and then there would be lambs in my life. I would milk my dairy cows and learn how to make my own cheese. I could get into beekeeping and have fresh honey and bees to pollinate all my plants. Maybe I'd have an apple orchard and blueberry bushes. And of course there would be all of the vegetables growing in the greenhouse and in the fields in the summertime.

It would be a lot of hard work but it would be my life so I would have all day to do it. I wouldn't have to be shut inside. I would live every day taking care of my plants and my animals and helping them grow. My hands would get rough from all the digging in the soil and it would take a lot of physical effort but I would get strong. I'd have to wake up with the sunrise and go to sleep early, but it wouldn't matter because that would just be me synchronizing to the sleep schedule of a farm, which is the same as the sleep schedule of the sun. I could live like that.

When I had my one farm child I would have to cut back a bunch from all the long working hours, but maybe by then I would have a few farmhands to help and then in a few years when the farm child was old enough I could go back to working as usual. And the kid would get to grow up with so many farm animals as pets and learn about life from the farm perspective and always have dirty feet and fingernails. I think that would be a great way to raise a child.

When Father was falling in love with Mother she was living on the farm lady friend's farm before the farm lady friend was the old farm lady friend. Father called the farm the Goddess's garden. Mother has her garden now, and it's a pretty nice garden, but she very much is not living in a shack just big enough for a bed on an organic farm. I thought about how that was sad, and then I realized that Father is still doing soul healing and traveling the world and trying to make a life from what he is passionate about even though it doesn't really make money or sense from the normal perspective. So I guess I don't mind that he doesn't have a real job, since new clothes and jewelery and objects are all unnecessary, and I just think I want to buy them sometimes since all the industries have so much power that they've wormed their way into my consciousness. And if all my current clothes continue to fall apart until they rip to shreds, I can just sew new ones because who needs fashion anyway. Or I could just be a naked farm girl. Worse things have happened.

So I think in conclusion screw the establishment I want to be a farmer.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

You look like my face

I really like this picture that Father and Sister took in Paris.


I also finished my self portrait!

Saturday, July 18, 2009

Doing the Karen Cheng

I MADE A DRESS GUYS!



I mean not to take blurry poorly lit pictures of myself in the bathroom mirror or anything. But yesterday I just ended up making this dress and K made a beautiful pink one and we didn't even have a sewing machine or patterns or knowledge. We just set out with the old sheets and our needles and thread and ended up with dresses we made ourselves. So I figure I should document it before it rips to shreds.

If I get my hands on a sewing machine who knows what could happen!

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

An email from sister about Berlin

hi look what i can do:
é à ç è ù § µ £ ¤

heres whqt ze did in berlin:
ze took q bus from the qirport but the directions zere zrong so ze got off the bus in q rqndom, plqce then it stqrted rqining qnd father didnt hqve q cell phone: he zqnted to go into q store to borroz q phone; until he noticed the store zqs q XXX video store so he zent to qnother store qnd borrozed q phone qnd ceciliq sqid she zould meet us there zith her friend: he sqid ze zould be zqiting infront of the video store: then he noticed q second video store on the opposite corner: so he left me zith the luggqge infront of the XXX video store: thqt was awkward for me:

later we went somewhere to buy a cellphone and buy dinner: we went to a turkish restaraunt and i ordered chicken shiskabob but i got viel and chicken qnd beef: i only ate the chicken parts: i broke a glass on cobblestones becquse ze zere outside: i was ashamed so i picked up all the little pieces: then i hid behind a phone booth because i did not want a turk to get mad at me: that was friday night:

the best thing i did in berlin was listen to father and cecilia talk about constellations for hours: JUST KIDDING!

the best thing i did in berlin was play with the scottish girls! we went out for italian and went for a walk in the park qnd climbed up a waterfall and played cards and truth or dare and learned the hoedown throwdown (youtube this if your curious)

once we were outside qnd it was smoky: So ze szitched to the other side: Then the zind chqnged directions qnd it zqs snoky qgqin:

I was lazy: And my kne hurt becquse i sprqined it: So father and I had a long conversation about wheelchairs, because I wanted a wheelchair: We were walking around so much because we wanted a hotel to get a internet connection: The we went to a hotel that ws full of men inwheelchairs with no legs or pqrts of legs: We stopped talking about wheelchairs right away: There was no connection there anyway:

Monday, July 13, 2009

Here are a few things about Roxaboxen

“Marian called it Roxaboxen,” began the picture book found on my first grade classroom’s blue bookshelf. I also called it Roxaboxen. Alice McLerran’s Roxaboxen was set in the Arizona desert, while mine was nestled under New England pine trees. I wasn’t discouraged by these regional differences; instead, I drew inspiration from the children in Roxaboxen and created my own adaptations when necessary. Marian never laid eyes on my Roxaboxen, but I liked to believe she would be proud.

Though I spent my first years in Boston, my most vivid childhood memories take place in the suburb to which we moved when I was four. The transition from a city environment walking-distance from the Arnold Arboretum to a town filled with manicured lawns and fences was difficult for both my Manhattan-raised father and me. In the suburb, grass was not for running through; it was for decoration, pesticide-sprayed and marked with little yellow signs warning of poison. Wandering into a neighbor’s yard was not socializing, instead, it was trespassing. My yard was different. The crabgrass-spotted lawn was downright pathetic compared to the one next door but it was perfectly suited for childhood exploration. My curiosity led me beyond the rickety green chain-link fence lining the back of our property. A row of tall pines reached up a small hill bordering the backyards of the houses on my road. At the top of this hill under the shelter of the pines I found my Roxaboxen.

Before I go too far assuming all are familiar with Roxaboxen I figure some explanation is in order. In her book, Alice McLerran writes of the half-imagined, half-real play world of a group of friends. With rocks, old broken bottles, cactus, sticks, and boxes, the Arizonian youth construct an elaborate miniature town complete with a jailhouse and a graveyard. Their Roxaboxen includes a mayor, shops with storekeepers, and all the staples of a grown-up town. Barbara Cooney’s illustrations depict unbridled boys and girls utilizing their surroundings to create an almost magical community. To a child like me, such an existence was irresistible.

I wasn’t the first child to use this place. A rusted chain ladder hanging from a thick bough silently spoke of past children. I never learned any further identifying details of their story. From the top of the hill I could peer down into the yards beneath me and over to the large white house to which property lines had granted claim of Roxaboxen. I met the woman who lived in that house only once when a friend of mine tried to build a house with tall walls of logs. The commotion attracted the woman’s attention and violated one of my personal rules of Roxaboxen. I was allowed to shape the fallen pine needles into subtle house boundaries but I could not create too much of a disturbance in the natural way of the land. Unlike the more sculpted Roxaboxen of the picture book, my imagined town was to be mostly just that: imagined.

From Roxaboxen I borrowed the idea of a town in the wilderness, but I played more in solitude than my fictional counterparts. The occasional friend would join me in my woodsy getaway, but for the most part company existed within my head. I didn’t long for others, though. I wasn’t an anti-social child, but I found that my friends didn’t imagine Roxaboxen in the same way as I, nor could they find amusement in pine needles and rocks for as long as I could. My attention span allowed for hours spent sculpting my needled roads and mentally assigning names to the tree trunks and bushes that surrounded me.

Like any plucky New England girl I did not balk at cold weather, snow, or brisk winds. Roxaboxen existed in all four seasons, with each season bringing new projects. I’d bury acorns in the fall hoping to see tall oak trees come springtime. When spring finally arrived, I’d attempt to transplant crocuses from my garden into the rocky soil. Though winter snows buried most of my accomplishments, they gave allowance to snow-walls and snow-roads. Summer left me with endless expanses of free time to be filled by cultivating my imagined neighborhood. These seasonal changes only prolonged my entertainment. I imagine a Roxaboxen in Arizona would lack the variety given by my Massachusetts climate.

Consistent to Roxaboxen was the scent of pine, both the sharp smell of needles fresh off the trees and the earthy musk of the fallen ones rejoining with the soil. Mocking birds cooed in the juniper trees below the hill and blue jays cawed in the overhanging branches. A local cat would occasionally prowl through my village, stealthy and calico, seemingly oblivious to the jingling of its belled collar. Some days I would find Roxaboxen permeated with the distinctive smell of skunk, though I managed to escape any more personal encounters. When I envision Roxaboxen, my mind fixates on the color orange: orange pine needles, orange maple leaves, and deep rusty-orange bark on the evergreen trees. Thinking of Roxaboxen brings back the feeling of a comforting, peaceful seclusion. There, I was free to let the forces of my mind meet the forces of nature, to let them combine to create my joy.

la la la la la the end

This is nice

Having a Coke with you

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian partly because of my love for you partly because of your love for yoghurt partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary it is hard to believe when I'm with you that there can be anything as still as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it in the warm New York 4 o'clock light we are drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it's in the Frick which thank heavens you haven't gone to yet so we can go together the first time and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn't pick the rider as carefully as the horse

it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it

by Frank O'Hara

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Not blogging about work

Once upon a time a counselor was reading to some campers about frogs and asked the campers what they knew about frogs and one boy raised his hand and said, "My mommy kissed a frog and it turned into my daddy!"