summer update

this post is for my mother. she says i've been neglectful of this blog and since i privatized my twitter account she has even fewer things to do on the internet. hi mom! miss you and home. please send cafe bustelo.


i found this dead bug in my dollar-a-head haymarket celery a few days ago. i was going to throw away the whole bunch but then i reevaluated the decision and thought about my financial situation, which is somewhere between market basket and total despair. and then i thought about how many bugs had hatched and crawled and died on that very celery plant as it grew, and i was no longer grossed out, so i cut off the section where the dead bug had laid (it was resting conveniently on the bitter white bottom part of the stalk) and washed the rest of the stalk and cut it into sticks and tossed them with yellow bell pepper and raw zucchini and fig-infused vinegar.

here's a close-up of the bug. i don't know what kind of bug it is except that it's exactly what i always imagined gregor samsa to look like in his transmogrified body. and doesn't his mother or gretchen pull one of his legs off?


not much else is going on. it's been raining for about a month and it doesn't look like it's going to stop anytime soon.

o l i v e / u

sara made dinner tonight while i bit the pits from spanish olives and spelled love notes on the kitchen table. i think we are very happy here. honeymoon stage, i guess: she is to my left now, arms all full of bracelets, reading another book from my queer identity class last fall. i like school and i sort of wish summer didn't mean no classes, but it's been nice to breathe air and curl around my coffee cup for a while. i have been rummaging through my art supplies and dabbling, the past few nights, with ink, watercolor, copper wire, bits 'n' scraps. the result has been a handful of very small things; some abandoned, some crumbled, some mildly pleasing:

miniature ink drawings with watercolor, colored pencil, thread and pastel crayon.

sartre takes a smoke break in the tuileries. i don't have pliers in my new place yet so playing with this resulted in bloody fingers. the petals are recycled from a lit mag i don't care about.

i started reading Ulysses today between calls at work. it's about time, i think. at page 43, so far i have learned a great deal of greek and latin and laughed out loud probably a dozen times. will report back in a week or two. fleshier summer reading list to follow, as well.

the wind, again

yesterday i finished reading richard brautigan's "in watermelon sugar." it is now my favorite book of all time. not to get cosmic or anything--in the past i have expressed a desire to, one day, write a book myself, but after reading "in watermelon sugar" i no longer feel the need to write a book. i may, however, write a supremely presumptuous and overtly psychoanalytical scholarly article about "in watermelon sugar" and submit it for publication in the oxford journals. for the first thirty pages or so, i was convinced the watermelon fields were acres and acres of color-changing buttocks.

anyway.

when i was a freshman i made this dashti out of an old coathanger, some scrounged supplies and a nazar bonjuk. for a while it chased the bad spirits away from my bedroom in my parents' house but i think it has really found its home here: at six o'clock the sun comes in and scatters jewels all over the walls of my new room.


tonight we are having (mostly) cupcakes and wine for dinner. the wine is white and almost gone and the cupcakes are yellow cake with pink sugary tofu cream frosting, sprigs of mint and fresh raspberries. sara and i made them together.

new bachelorette apartment

freezer contents: carrot cake rice milk ice cream, soy protein links, gordon's london dry gin. i love our new life

this week

tonight i finished my chapbook, "Buying Lube at Whole Foods." you can't buy a copy because i only made one, and it's my final project for my gender and performance studies class and will be in the hands of my professor (who is very very very very cool) tomorrow. still, now i can say that i am the author of an original chapbook, kind of, i guess.



newish destruction/addition to an oldish painting. i kind of like it, although spending so much time around Serious Artists the past few months has got me feeling a little silly thinking i can paint at all.


i have a story in the new emerson review, which is chock full of delightful words and pictures by a whole mess of talented americans. (they even published charles bukowski once! let's tell that story again!) pick up your ***free*** copy today

today i continue to exist in the universe

i was up with the dawn and went running, which is something i have not done in too long a time. boston is beautiful the past few days, coming all alive and languid instead of disappearing completely, at night, outside my window. i feel very transcendental and microcosmic and shit, like the inside of me is an echo of everything on the outside, everything hearkening and winking stars at each other through endless floating webs. for right now it's a nice way to feel.


(evidence here)

i climbed the hill to whole foods this afternoon but they didn't even have plantains, so i couldn't make tostones for the vegan food festival like i wanted to. what kind of organic grocery store doesn't have plantains? but i bought chanterelles, to cook tonight in olive oil, and an apology avocado.

in four days i will pack up all my things and move somewhere else. our new home is four steep flights of stair creak up, beside the gourmet cheese shop. almost one hundred years ago, in our neighborhood, a molasses tank burst and a tidal wave of molasses rushed from the distillery into the streets, killing 21 people. they say that on warm days your feet still stick to something dark and viscous that seeps up from between the cobblestones, and ghosts with crushed lungs hack up sugar crystals that scatter about your ankles.

things i made this weekend

this scarf (two skeins)


this oil painting, "curmudgeon with diminutive meatloaf" (close-up; meatloaf not shown). it is never going to dry


i feel productive and generally good, nourished, placable