i looked up this morning and saw a sliver of light

when left to my own devices i'm drawn to the following: quietness, white space, constancy.

where lovers have wings

on my walk today i saw two shopping carts engaging in what seemed to be a furtive love act. the pure kind, not the dirty kind.

other than that i have been listening to the black keys all day, making candles and nursing my growing fascination with topology. robert smithson, the jesus and mary chain, and berndt and hila becher are all figures coming back to haunt me.

i, linguist

i went to the local libe today to pick up some educational materials. i say that rather ironically because my so called education consists of the following:

• mexican textiles
  
• mexican paper cutting
  
• art 21: the book (ed. note: when will i stop being a nerd about art21? never?)
  
• php/mysql programming for absolute beginners
  
• web style guide
  
• conversational tagalog

en foco

diptych of the photos that occur when setting up my camera, 2010

questions and their answers

where have i been for the last week? san francisco.



who was i with? le boyfriend.


(note our masterful command of the 180 degree rule)

what did we feast upon? piet mondrian cake.



what am i going to do with myself now? make some art!

hypnos part 1

what kept me awake in bed last night was a strange determination to be able to describe my college eateries to someone who had never been to school in upstate new york. my mind wandered over the art student cafe and paused for a sweet moment at the cafeteria in the basement of the humanities building. it was run by a tibetan couple, and attracted tortured humanities grad students as well as senior undergrads aspiring to be tortured grad students. emily and i used to line up for soup every day -- by noon because the line would become absurdly long afterwards. we would always opt for the vegan soup option with a pumpernickel roll. there were about 8 or 9 different soups in rotation, and we speculated daily about the day's soup. the hours spent reminiscing about groundnut and thai carrot, the two clear favorites!

in ithaca, a bleak wintry town with very little amenities, one looked forward to alcohol, sex, and soup -- in other words, things that kept one's body warm. alcohol always resulted in vomiting, headache and regret, and the sex never occurred as frequently as one would have liked. soup remained our one constant source of comfort.

life summary

december was hectic for me. my schedule ran like this: art, travel to parents' house, art, mild social life, art, travel to boyfriend's parents' house, art, travel to nyc to install art, come back home, start working 2 jobs again. i have arrived at the last part of that sentence, stumbling into significant other's darkened bed at midnight last night mumbling jet-lagged thoughts on judy chicago's the dinner party (me: and man was susan b. anthony's vagina plate huge! she had the biggest vagina of them all! he: mmmmf.). a whole new slew of things awaits me on my to-do list, but for the most part, free time is in my life again. this is new to me.

thoughts and drawings and videos and stuff once i rest a bit.

p.s. is this how every young artist feels at the beginning of her twenties? fame and fortune, come soon.

also, a proposal

that we begin changing our gmail labels (do you use those? i do. obsessively.) to reference geographic formations. having the option to move your mail to the 'black hole of hell' folder just feels so cathartic.

the weather (part 2)

it's almost october. a shock to think about. i have been out of school and living in los angeles for four months--which is just long enough for me to stop using the 'i just moved here and don't know anything' excuse. i feel as if some great epiphany should be around the corner, but none seems imminent. growing up in colorado i always associated october with the height of autumn putrefaction and flux, the treetops bursting into flames and then disappearing in a river of rot down the sewer drain. but here it feels like everyone is immersed in a sunny mausoleum whose demand on its residents never changes, because the climate never changes. it is still as hot as ever.

one certain colorado october it snowed the day before halloween. i was a witch that year. my mother made my costume out of black satin, as well as my halloween bag which always made my candy stash look deceptively small and my neighbors consequently more generous. that year, and most years from age 4-9, no inclement weather could stand in the way of me and free candy. i crunched through the snow in black pumps and no socks, slush seeping in under the arches of my feet, for 2 hours knocking on my neighbors' doors. i returned with my feet red, almost frostbitten, and, among other things, three whole hershey's bars.

seen on the way to work today

directions to the land of booyah, fig. 1

re: playlists about 'love'

compiling a playlist of songs containing the word 'love' is expansive and daunting because, well, all rock music tends to be a running meditation on love--its highs, its lows, its bittersweet remains. a more contained project would be creating conversations out of song titles about 'love', with results often seeming like a scene out of a melancholy new wave film. imagine:

person A: hello, i love you (1). do you love me (2)?
person B: i love you (3).
person A: it's true that we love one another (4).
person B: love will tear us apart (5).

artists featured:
1. the doors 2. kiss cover, nirvana 3. the dandy warhols 4. the white stripes 5. joy division

combination of factors

i had just come back from a day trip to san diego. i lounged about the apartment, watching top chef and then reading an experimental food blog from one of my favorites. i had lettuce, tomatoes, and burnt cashews with homemade lemon-tahini dressing for dinner. i thought a lot about how i became date-able material during my post-dinner walk. somehow, this confluence of events led me to purchase the following when i went to my corner armenian grocer:



which, in belarussian (the birchful country of origin), is spelled like:



it tastes like the water runoff from the sweet fermented rice my mother used to make back in the day, but intentional. ethnic grocers--your prime go-to destination for food and fascination under $20!