wonderful haberdashery

i love maira kalman and i just found her blog. i love her because she is in her sixties and still has the same issues that i do, except she is not teenagery about it (when will we stop being teenagery. do i have to get preggo or get an internship. do i have to pay off my $30,000 in stafford loans.) so it is somehow fresh and reassuring in a paradoxical way. maybe my issues will never be rectified or rescinded from whence they came and i will be 65 and still writing letters to put in the translucent pink paper bag on my desk and never show anyone. but that is ok if i am going to be a little like her.

if you are sad, buy this book. it is full of wonderful loping limps and wonderful hats and gigantic question marks like hanging birdcage chairs that you can tack to your ceiling and sit in and mull over. she even goes to visit louise bourgeois!



there is a girl in my poetry seminar who is like a hunched-up baby finch with candy-cornflower blue eyes. she wrote something funny and sad that has been repeating in my head. it is delightful to finally sit in a room full of brilliant poets. her reading voice is small and honest and could probably dub the lines for a nervous cartoon forest pixie.

it is very cold in boston tonight.

i have a question

why do humans have toenails

why
why


there are dead things growing out of your feet and you have to like
maintain them

and girls paint them

small oceans

yesterday i went to the new england aquarium. have you ever been looked straight in the eye by an 80-year-old sea turtle that weighs more than you do, i have


i no longer feel like i did when i made the last post. i wrote a poem about a gooey duck. it is actually spelled "geoduck" and pronounced gooey duck but i will never look at "geoduck" and instinctively think "gooey duck." people have been talking about geoducks a lot around here, lately. i switched out of my fiction workshop and into another poetry seminar, which i guess isn't fulfilling any sort of requirement at this point but is a nice comforting place to be. i have heard good things about the professor and a lot of my friends are in the workshop. i am looking forward to it.

everyone is being weird in the world today. in africa a goat was arrested on a double charge of bank robbery and black magic, malika told us this morning while i made coffee.

here is a video i did of a jellyfish in gatorade-blue water



i recommend everyone go find a book by kenneth patchen and read it, he is definitely invited to my dinner party.

(this entire post should be in parentheses)

i have been thinking more and more about the things that propelled me to throw everything away while i was on the island for christmas, because it wasn't just moving. i guess i have been thinking that maybe i can gradually destroy all evidence of my detailed existence in any physical past, i can go to the bedrooms and mailboxes of all the people i have known and quietly take all the letters i have written and pictures i am lurking in the background of and just put them somewhere. or get rid of them, but when you put things in the trash they do not stop existing. i don't think that the average person considers things like this when they toss away grapefruit rinds and credit card solicitations. "matter cannot be created or destroyed or created be cannot matter." at the same time i want to knit myself behind a wall of white yarn in a garage filled with crystal teardrops on toothfloss and pale feathers shellacked to the walls. i want to cover my hands in glue or gloss medium or wax and then peel it off when it dries into a translucent glove. i want to fold mythical animals out of tissue paper and line up glasses filled with water to all different points and lick my fingers and run them along the edges of the glass and find different tones and then rearrange them, and then maybe i will just stop existing and if i had destroyed all the letters and pictures and sharpied my face out of your yearbook (which i did not sign) i wonder if anyone would notice and maybe it would be nice if they would not.

pour your body out

we saw pipilotti rist's pour your body out at moma on sunday and it was great. a bit of an overload on the giant feet, but otherwise, absolutely great.


from the fourth or fifth level balcony (my photograph).

i have been knitting, even though i'm a sloppy knitter so far. i have knit (knitted?) a scarf and a half, and alecia and i are going to do stitch 'n' bitch when we get back to boston. lately my hands are feeling itchy and limber and they want to do things. i have a saw that kevin is going to teach me how to make beautiful strange music on, and i bought new oil paints and commandeered my deceased grandmother's button collection. i want to make things.

treasure beyond measure

bored to tears in my childhood home, i have taken to pillaging our magical attic and the darkest depths of my parents' closet and adopting all the duds i find. maybe i have been spending too much time reading fashion blogs written by twelve-year-olds, and i should probably be embarrassed, but witness exhibit a:
    
my dad used to make and sell these calico patterned shirts, in the style of turn-of-the-century seminole ceremonial jackets, when he lived on the bowery in the 1960s. he says this one is "crude" but i think it is "way fucking cool" so i took a leopard print belt and voila, instant minidress. the leather jacket is brain-tanned moosehide, hand-embellished, and was bartered for from a cree chief in northern quebec. it was then reconstructed by my father over the course of twelve hours by firelight at a sewing machine inside a teepee in north carolina. then he wore it all the time to get seated at elaine's because the maître d' thought he was some kind of rock star.

in my last post i talked about one of my dad's many fantastical adventures in the hippie days of yore. excavating the closet, obviously, prompted a slew of fresh fables. we have been getting along well since i have been home so i figured i will blog a little more about his life, which both fills me with joy at the stories that lie waiting to unravel in my future and makes me think he cannot possibly be honest. look at all the cool things that have happened to him:

1. he ran away from home when he was like 16 and hitchhiked to florida on a watermelon truck and never came back
2. he saw a rollerskating chimpanzee at a steakhouse
3. he got drunk with evil kaneval
4. he had a job making seashell ice cream on a navy ship in the north atlantic
5. he took a nap with 25 iguanas on some ancient ruins in puerto rico
6. he got drunk with princess leia
7. at woodstock he camped in the mud for three days and subsisted only on a can of spam which he bummed of off a hell's angel gang member
8. he drove off a mountain and broke his spine in half

hardly anything cool has ever happened to me in my life, ever:

1. paloma picasso told me she liked my dress at a dinner party (when i was 3)
2. the one and only time i ever went skiing i was stranded at the top of a black diamond trail, abandoned by my friends, and had to be saved by a polish man with a prosthetic leg
3. this halloween i shook hands with john kerry while i was wearing a flamingo costume
4. once i ate nothing but carrots for many weeks and my hands and feet turned fluorescent orange

THAT'S IT! my life is a joke. almost nineteen and a half and nothing to show for it. i just sit here. bloggin'.

tomorrow kallie is coming to visit and we are going to pet some sea creatures and cook delicious meals and create filmographic brilliance (maybe) so i am at least excited for that.

"the wall"

this british guy did an interesting project, i've been watching all the footage even though none of it is particularly moving or purposeful (which is kind of nice):
"The Wall was composed by 54 people over a period of 12 months. In 2006 I stopped throwing stuff away. The kitchen got full of plastic milk cartons. And the green tops. Eventually the council put a plastic recycle bin outside my flat so the cartons went into that. From 1st January - 31st December 2007 every visitor to the flat put a green bottle top up on the wall - postman, alsatian dog or whomsoever - they got their bit of blue tac and a bottle top and hummed and hahed and made a decision. February 2008 I drew the stave on, over and within the dots, and since then various folk have been interpreting this."

there are clarinetists, synths, banjo, tambourine, i can't tell how seriously any of them are taking it.

thinking about being a human being makes me feel really weird and uncomfortable

my dad told me a story about how he met wavy gravy from the hog farm commune at a yale party in 1970 and wavy gravy asked him to make a balloon in the shape of a pig, so my dad did, then the hog farm people ritual-sacrificed the balloon pig. jefferson starship was there too and then wavy gravy kidnapped my dad's friend julio to tibet and they made a movie called red ball or red orb or something. the movie is about hog farm hippies doing drugs and looking for a maharaja in tibet and nepal. i couldn't find it on imdb