looking into sloth adoption

Meet the sloths from Amphibian Avenger on Vimeo.

In religious terms, the human narrative — birth, life, death and rebirth — has for millennia been relatively straightforward in the West. You were born. You lived. You died. After a judgment you went to heaven (or hell) forever and ever. Eternity was the end: no appeals allowed.

But nearly a billion Hindus and a half-billion Buddhists — not to mention the ancient Greeks, certain Jews and a few Christians — have for thousands of years believed something entirely different. Theirs is, as the theologians say, a cyclical view. You are born. You live. You die. And because nobody’s perfect, your soul is born again — not in another location or sphere, and not in any metaphorical sense, but right here on earth.

I liked Buddy Cianci's brand of entertainment better...

MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON from Dean Fleischer-Camp on Vimeo.

Amazing

Help my friend Jo edit her documentary on asexuality!

Kanye West's tweets are egocentric, whiny, and use a lot of exclamation points. They also make great captions for New Yorker cartoons.

Let’s say you see a kitten. Fine, make it two kittens. Let’s say you see two kittens. One’s nimble and fast and cute. The other one is dead. My experience is that people—and by people I mean children—by nature go for the live kitten. They see strength in the live kitten. Also, who wants a dead kitten?

To say that I haven't been writing wouldn't be the truth, because I have been. Just not blogging.

The truth is, I have been in a metaphorical cave, investigating the dark, and silence. This is initially not a pleasant place to be, when you first get here; but after some time the dark isn't so bad anymore.

Words can be a terrible compulsion to live with; the worst kind of addiction. In caves, you don't have to narrativize anything, particularly your own experiences. You don't have to investigate various characters and their motivations. You don't feel compelled to draw out the map of your life, and everyone elses, in order to construct a whole. You can nap in caves, become a part of some sort of organic whole. In the English Patient, Katharine Clifton died in a cave. And if you haven't read that book, you really should because it's far better than the movie. I think about Katharine Clifton a lot. Also about death. Sometimes when I am in my cave, I fear that I will die there, that I will be engulfed in silence. But after a while, even this isn't so bad, the idea of being forgotten in a cave. Even hyper-awareness of your own mortality can become exhausting.

I grew up reading an absurd amount of new age-y self-help books. I did this as a child, which I now understand was somewhat precocious, but not necessarily in a good way. I was interested in dreams and analyzing them, in Buddhism, in mediation, in the middle way, in cause and effect, in excavating layer after layer to find some sort of truth. These ideologies still frame my way of thinking, of narrativizing. But sometimes I wish I was free of even all of this, unfettered, unimprinted, unmarked.

This alchemy of personality with environment - I understand that there is something perfect and whole about it. It is a process that unfolds and continues, ad infinitum. So I don't have anything new to say. I am still (unfortunately) the same person I always was. Maybe this isn't so bad. And ultimately, it doesn't really matter.

oh Radiolab, I can't get enough of your cheesy promo videos

‎Everything in excess is opposed to nature.

-Hippocrates

The girls of my generation were raised to be perfect. Our high-achieving baby-boomer mothers had labored mightily to raise us in a world where our potential would be unfettered. We were supposed to grow up to be physicists and judges and CEOs. Failing grades, ill-advised sexual encounters, or as, I did, running penniless to Europe for two years to get away from an expectation of success no less restrictive than one of Betty Draper’s iron girdles (not to mention falling into a painful and destructive relationship with a man who already had a girlfriend): these were more than simply personal failings. These were an affront to the sisterhood, all the battles that had been waged a generation ago in our name. If we screwed up, we were letting the team down.

Of course people still have hangovers and affairs, but what dominates the wholesome vista is a sense that everything we do should be productive, should be moving toward a sane and balanced end. The idea that you would do something just for the momentary blissful escape of it, for intensity, for strong feeling, is out of fashion.

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.


-Frank O'Hara

Tips for Starting an Illustrious Career as a Songwriter!
(or, how I got enough material lodged in my brain to torture me til the end of my days)

Go temporarily insane.
Make a tearful confession to a priest.
Get thrown out of your parents’ house.
Go broke.
Apply for several credit cards using different names; have them all cancelled and each of your fake identities reported to a collection agency.
Sleep 10 hours in one week.
Sleep 24 hours in one day.
Drink lots of whiskey (non-alcoholic for those under 21).
Fall in love with somebody completely wrong for you.
Have your heart broken. Have your heart broken again. And again.
Watch your friends change into people you don’t recognize, either because of some fundamental change in their personality, or plastic surgery, or both.
Give away all your possessions.
Return to the thrift store later and try to get your possessions.
Shave your head and move to Alaska.
Endure the questioning disdain of your friends, family, and mentors.
Worry about things that don’t matter.
Forget to worry about things that do matter.
Sleep through college and wake up with a diploma.
Wonder how that vomit got on your shoes.
Work for somebody who literally blows a whistle to keep the pizzas delivered on time.
Deliver a pizza to Michael Bolton.
Get fired for setting the xerox machine on fire.
Move someplace far away from anybody you know, grow very lonely,
and give your television a nickname.
Experience glorious success in front of thousands of people, let it go to
your head, and experience a rapid change of fortune.
Get booed off a stage.
Get in a fistfight in the alley outside Emo’s.

I can't believe how sad this made me.

A little saccharine, particularly the cliched music. But still kind of cool. Watch it while listening to something else.

I've always liked movies about imagined realities, particularly collectively imagined. You know, in the vein of Matrix or Thirteenth Floor or Dark City. Between the Inception viewing, the Radiolab episode about perceptions of time and various weird events that that keep occurring the past few weeks, I feel like I'm on the brink of formulating some sort of idea about something. But I'm not there yet. It is a consolation that it took Christopher Nolan nearly ten years to work out the screenplay for Inception. I am envious of those people who have razor-sharp reasoning or analytical abilities. It is highly inconvenient having a mind that sometimes feels like mush.

post-inception question

why does the dark metropolis exist as an iconographic landscape of everyone's (sometimes) dream-subconscious?

Is this a collective memory of an unnameable past?

What is the crumbling urban landscape an archetype for?

Does it represent the limits of our perceived notions of time and space? The end of the x and y axis of our collective mind?

Is our greatest fear a landscape (both geographic and psychic) that is wholly created and destroyed by man? Therefore, I suppose, by ourselves?

Why is it so sinister?

Scale of the Universe

Color Hue IQ Test. This is fun!

-Via R

Best Headline Ever...

Recent sighting: Zack de la Rocha, riding his bike through Highland Park.

It is a Proust-Madeleine moment. With Zack de la Rocha serving as the madeleine.

A glimpse of the younger me.

A door opening into lost time.

thinking of upcoming trips...

-via M
"Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.

Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path and that will make all the difference."

-Steve Jobs

it was kind of like this

slow. or slower than i am used to.

and stuck in time.

or stuck in several times. collective and personal.

heavy with dry heat and landscapes.

flies at a diner. staying up late and talking.

tacos and date cake.

all in all, perfect.

away

for a few days.

now back.

and dreaming still

of blue skies and mountains.

Separation

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

-W.S. Merwin

What happens when you realize that all your subconscious notions of relationships and love through most of your twenties were predicated on a misread of approximately 200 viewings of this movie when you were five?

I'm not talking about myself. Just other people I know.

Also, these subtitles are somewhat problematic. My favorite one is "With your vision, this is the complaint. Even flowers create a distance!"

What does that mean? It's like in code or something.

No wonder I misunderstood this movie.

Say not, "I have found the truth," but rather, "I have found a truth." Say not, "I have found the path of the soul." Say rather, "I have met the soul walking upon my path." For the soul walks upon all paths. The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed. The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.

~Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, 1923

songs I've had stuck in my head all day part II

songs I've had stuck in my head all day part I

Lost Half

On Echo Park Boulevard, outside an art gallery, I lost an earring. This was years ago, and that's the thing about jewelry; sometimes it just disappears. There's something about earrings though, or an earring. A mitten, a sock. Losing one half of a pair feels like the worst thing. And even now, years later, when I walk by that gallery, I still look for the glint of my lost earring, in the cracks of the sidewalk around the shrubs, by the doorway, in the planters; this restless hope that all lost things can somehow, at some point, be re-found, reunited, complete.

Hammamet, Tunisia

Sidi Bou Said, Tunisia

Pervy Optmetrist

My optometrist's name is Ira. He dresses like he works at Sterling Cooper. He's 70. He doesn't understand why anyone actually pays to eat lunch out when you can just bring a sandwich from home.

The first time I went to see him, while checking my eyes, he informed me that his 98-year old father has the same eyeglass prescription as me.

"But it took him a long time to get up there," he said, as though I had just won the blindness Olympics. Then he made me read another chart.

"No, sorry, your eyesight is actually worse than his," he nodded.

"In my day, a girl with eyesight like that - blind as a bat, you'd have trouble finding someone to marry you. But times have changed. We now value girls based on their intelligence. And we have contact lenses. But, pretty girl like you, I think you'll find someone to marry you." He looked skeptical for a minute. We both looked at each other in silence. I think he was waiting to see if I would react in some way. I think I was waiting to see if I would react in some way. Then I started laughing, kind of more in shock than anything. And then he started laughing too, except I think he was laughing out of discomfort because he didn't get what was funny.

"I'll have to special order your contacts," he informed me. "We don't usually keep prescriptions that high in the store," he shrugged.

Outside on the sidewalk, I stopped to think about that exchange. My optometrist called me blind as a bat! Amongst other things.

'Hungarian Gypsies all of whom were deported' in The New York Times, Sunday Feb. 12, 1905

Clive Grylls, Gypsy Girl, Pushkar, India

Ansel Adams, Freeway Interchange, Los Angeles, 1967

conversation with my lungs this morning (featuring a cameo from my ass. also featuring my brain)

Me: Should we do outdoor yoga or indoor yoga today? Outdoor yoga!

Lungs: Why don't we just smoke a pack of cigarettes and move to Mexico City?

Me: Oh come on, lungs! The smog isn't that bad!

Lungs: Not if you bring an oxygen tank.

Me: I can almost see the Franklin Hills!

Lungs: How about we skip yoga altogether and sleep in?

Me: Lungs! You are so unmotivated! It's a beautiful LA Day!

Ass: How about we spend all day on this incredibly comfy tempurpedic mattress with incredibly comfy washed linen sheets and incredibly comfy down comforter and read?

Me: Look ass, you're the entire reason I'm going to yoga in the first place. Besides, we can't stay in bed. I can't write in bed.

Brain: Isn't that what a laptop is for? Duh!

Me: Okay you guys. I'm in.

Symmetry

question:

Was that one Battlestar Galactica reference too many?

conundrum

Sometimes you have a brilliant idea in a dream, but upon waking it simply doesn't make sense. Like the dream I had of four interconnected books that could be read forwards and backwards and revealed different stories about the same person, but different dimensions of who they are. In the dream, this was a brilliant idea. In real life, I wondered how I could actually do that. I don't inhabit enough dimensions. Or I'm not able to consciously register other dimensions. It was like that really talky episode of Battlestar Galactica that everyone hated, but that I loved because it was all about the limits of human perception. And then I got all depressed and didn't know what to do with myself. Because I didn't know how to write a book that would speak, like directly speak, maybe even without the reading of it, despite it's four parts and backwards-and-forwards narrative, to the part of a person that's more expansive than just this, what we have. So I guess the blog'll do just fine for now.

-William Eggleston

Kabul, Afghanistan, Bill Podlich

Cadillac, William Eggleston

Vintage Misogyny

Over Denver. In a Cuba kind of mood...

Maybe I really do need to move to Denver, where the air is clean and the landscape looks like scaled Lego village and odd and magical and serendipitous things happen (don't laugh).

I can live in Denver if I want. This is the thing about falling in love with places and people and things and ideas that don't mesh with your own notions of what your life should be. This sloughing away metaphorical dead skin, so to speak reveals a handful of compelling possibilities.

Maybe this is what happens when you're just tired of the cacophony, the distress of decisions, the abundance of choices. You can't make them go away, and you're frightened of making choices from the wrong place and being enveloped by the ceaseless tide of things.

The only option seems to be finding your own true North and letting your life organize itself around it. This is what I've consciously been trying to do the past few weeks and it's been a compelling exercise.

Order within I guess. T was telling me about swimming in the ocean, which I don't really do because I'm small and the ocean is big and it's scary. And she said that the most important thing she learned was that you'll get where you need to, generally, and most people do (she was speaking about this within the context of her triathlon). She said that the hardest thing she learned as a swimmer was to not fight the ocean, which is what she started out doing. She'd still win races because she was good at it, and fast, but she emerged from the water exhausted, spent, anxious, frightened. But if she was still, she could find the tide and move with it. It would carry her where she needed to go if she worked with it. But she had to start by dropping her fear of the ocean. Being still, finding the tide. And when she told me this, my mouth literally dropped open because I realized that she was the most brilliant person on Earth.

Also, I totally get the Zen/surfing thing now. I kind of want to take up surfing.

ThinkGeek published the letter and offered this apology on its Web site to the board: “We’d like to publicly apologize to the N.P.B. for the confusion over unicorn and pork — and for their awkward extended pause on the phone after we had explained our unicorn meat doesn’t actually exist.”

via C. I had forgotten how disturbing and fascinating this opening was. I need to watch Magnolia again, particularly since I live in LA now.

Lewis Hine, Ellis Island, 1905

I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

-F. Scott Fitzgerald

Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!

-F. Scott Fitzgerald

The River

In one day the Amazon discharges into the Atlantic the equivalent of New York City's water supply for nine years.

-New York Times

Just because I was born
precisely here or there,
in some cold city or other,
don't think I don't remember
how I came along like a grain
carried by the flood

on one of the weedy threads that pour
toward a muddy lightning,
surging east, past
monkeys and parrots, past
trees with their branches in the clouds, until
I was spilled forth

and slept under the blue lung
of the Caribbean.

Nobody
told me this. But little by little
the smell of mud and leaves returned to me,
and in dreams I began to turn,
to sense the current.

Do dreams lie? Once I was a fish
crying for my sisters in the sprawling
crossroads of the delta.
Once among the reeds I found
a boat, as thin and lonely
as a young tree. Nearby
the forest sizzled with the afternoon rain.

Home, I said
In every language there is a word for it.
In the body itself, climbing
those walls of white thunder, past those green
temples, there is also
a word for it.
I said, home.

-Mary Oliver

this week's conversation snippets about the limits of cultural signifiers

Me: Why were these DVRs recalled? I like my Moxie.

Time Warner Cable Guy: Because one of them overheated and caught on fire and caused a TV to explode.

Me: Oh, okay. You can switch it out, no problem


* * *

E: So ___ was at the reunion and he was wearing a polo shirt with the collar popped up and sunglasses on the back of his neck.

Me: I think that's the official uniform of douches everywhere. especially pastel polo shirts.

E: Yeah, Ed Hardy's the other one.


* * *

D: Sometimes when I stretch in the morning I get Charlie Horses.

Me: I don't know what that is, I've never had one. Am I missing out?

D: How is it possible you've never had a Charlie Horse?

Me: I don't have a potassium deficiency like you.

D: So you never stretch and then feel like this --eeee-- Charlie Horse?

Me: Make that sound again.

D: --eeee--

Me: What was it again?

D: ...

Me: No, I'm serious.

D: --eee--

Me: No, I've never experienced that.

* * *

Very young random person: I don't like that old guy.

Me: Harrison Ford?

Very young random person: I don't know his name. But I don't like him.

Me: You don't know who Harrison Ford is?

Very young random person: No.

Me: How old are you?

Very young random person: 18.

Me: Oh. Okay.

Grllzonmlnchlltyhill - For more amazing video clips, click here

It is the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.

-Aristotle

i like this room. so i thought i'd share it with you.

This is how a human being can change.
There's a worm addicted to eating
grape leaves.
Suddenly, he wakes up,
call it grace, whatever, something
wakes him, and he's no longer
a worm.
He's the entire vineyard,
and the orchard too,
the fruit, the trunks,
a growing wisdom and joy
that doesn't need to devour.

-Rumi

Things that happened/are happening

For over a year, you see her everywhere, the woman with the black Mercedes. You see her on Abbott Kinney, outside of LA Mill, at M Cafe. You see her at intersections and traffic lights. Once you saw her in the parking lot of the Arclight. For some reason, you are curious about her. Synchronicity is a mesmerizing bread crumb trail, but truthfully, you are curious about everyone. You snoop in on conversations people are having at restaurants and cafes. At the Silverlake Library, you pretend you are reading, but really you are watching the homeless man who is reading Ulysses and talking to the pug that he managed to sneak past the librarian in change. Because you have free time and an excess of imagination, you invent lives for strangers. The woman with the black Mercedes becomes a harbinger for good luck. If you see her, you know you will have a good day. She starts to appear in stories that you write. In writing, or in your imagined version of her, she is grim, and asks pointed questions. She always has a cigarette in hand. She laughs when you think of her as cynical. She points out that she is only part real, mostly, she is a figment of your imagination, as everyone is, to some extent.

Then one day, you are in a different city, far from home. Okay, you are in Denver. For a very particular reason. Strange thing happen to you in Denver. You are in a high-rise looking out over the city, waiting for the evening to begin, waiting for a client to show up, and when she does, you realize it is her, the woman in the black Mercedes. She tells you she is excited to meet you, she has already heard all about you. She gives you a hug, tells you she'd love to talk when you get back to LA. Then the woman in the black Mercedes (sans Mercedes on this day) tells you she is going back downstairs to smoke a cigarette. This event, occurring in a strange city, should surprise you, but it doesn't. The only thing that surprises you is how boisterous she is. And friendly.

It is like a moment from a dream, where the lines of reality are so blurred that your only option is to accept the absurdity of this moment. Should you tell her that all these months, you've been chronicling her imaginary life? That in your head, she is grim and calculated? No, this would deem you a crazy person or a stalker. Which you wholly admit you are, but still. You generally let this cat out of the bag later, after you've known someone a few months.

These things happen, are happening all the time. They will probably continue to happen. And you will unwrap them slowly, like small gifts left for you in different cities, on street corners and cafes, in intersections and parking lots. You will follow them wherever they wish to take you because this life is a long process of unwrapping things that come your way. It is best to take your time with these things, and see. For years you asked what these kinds of things meant. And then one day you realized: it is best to not ask exactly what they mean till you are ready, really ready for some kind of answer.

Foods that always look more appealing than they actually are

* Salt Water Taffy

* Jell-o

* homemade marshmallows

Foods people will eat in the future that sound equally appealing. But for different reasons.

* Astronaut ice cream (neapolitan)

* Algae chips

* mini freeze-wrapped pizza that expands to full-size in an oven-like contraption (Thanks, Back to the Future!)

Foods eaten in the Bible or other old-timey texts by humans and/or Gods that sound enticing

* Ambrosia

*Figs

*Manna

*Elixir of Life

no relation to the flotilla situation

But I've been listening to this album non-stop. It's appropriate seasonal malaise music.

I can't believe I just discovered this blog. So up my alley...

Saturday account

An hour of yoga. Drive to Venice. Consumption of vegan brunch. Meditation on a smoggy hilltop in Mount Washington. Making of strawberry jam. Writing of two pages. Editing of twelve. Cringing at pictures of gulf coast pelicans, sea turtles, dolphins. Nap to assuage anxiety over state of the world. Argument about the merits of digital distortion vs. analog distortion. Hike in the hills. Glass of Lillet Blanc with a curl of orange in the backyard. Late dinner. Glass of Albarino.

Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.

-Edward Albee

My Jo is Director of the Media that Matters Film Fest in NY! If you're in NY, you should go to the premiere. Like immediately. or tomorrow night. Details here.

I want my money back for the Arular album and the 2005 show at the Echoplex, please.


In one of many contradictions that seem to provide the narrative for Maya’s life and art, Ikhyd was not, as she had repeatedly announced he would be, born at home in a pool of water. As usual, she wanted to transform her personal life into a political statement. “You gotta embrace the pain, embrace the struggle,” she proclaimed weeks before Ikhyd was born. “And my giving birth is nothing when I think about all the people in Sri Lanka that have to give birth in a concentration camp.”

As it happened, Maya, who is 34, gave birth in a private room in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. “Ben’s family insisted,” she told me a year later, when we met in March for drinks at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, in nearby Beverly Hills. Before the Grammys, Maya and Bronfman moved to Los Angeles from New York, buying a house in very white, very wealthy Brentwood, an isolated and bucolic section of the city with a minimal history of trauma and violent uprisings. “L.A. is a lovely place to have a baby,” Maya said.

“We went to the Grammys, we had the baby and we bought the house,” Maya said as she studied the menu, deciding on a glass of wine and French fries. “A month later, all this stuff was happening in Sri Lanka” — the Tamil insurgency was being defeated amid reports of thousands of civilian casualties — “and I started speaking up against it. And then, within a month, I found out my house was being bugged, my phones were being tapped and my e-mails were being hacked into. I was getting death threats, like ‘hope your baby dies.’ The biggest Sinhalese community is in Santa Monica, people who are sworn enemies of the Tamils, which is me.” She paused. “I live around the corner from Beverly Hills, and I feel semiprotected by Ben and, if anything happens to me, then Ben’s family will not take it. Jimmy Iovine, who runs Interscope, my record company, said, ‘Pick your battles carefully — don’t put your life at risk,’ but at the end of the day, I don’t see how you can shut up and just enjoy success when other people who don’t have the fame or the luxury to rent security guards are suffering. What the hell do they do? They just die.”

Maya’s tirade, typical in the way it moved from the political to the personal and back again, was interrupted by a waiter, who offered her a variety of rolls. She chose the olive bread.

Unity holds no allure for Maya — she thrives on conflict, real or imagined. “I kind of want to be an outsider,” she said, eating a truffle-flavored French fry. “I don’t want to make the same music, sing about the same stuff, talk about the same things. If that makes me a terrorist, then I’m a terrorist.”

AFTER BUYING THEIR home in Brentwood, Maya and Bronfman, whom she met in New York shortly after the breakup of his band, the Exit, decided to build a recording studio in the house. “It was very grown-up,” Maya recalled when we were in L.A. Bronfman, who is tall, soft-spoken and protective of his fiancée, now works with Global Thermostat, a technology company that is working on ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere, and is a founder of Green Owl, an environmentally conscious record label and sustainable-clothing line. “Everyone got so freaked out when they heard we bought the house,” Maya continued. “When we moved in, we imported all our English friends. Suddenly, everyone was living with us — eight people at once. For the first time, I had something called the comfort of your own house, and it turned into a commune: they all came for two days, and they never left. My producer, Blaqstarr, was living there. And then Cherry, who sings with me, was staying with us. And Rusko, who was also producing, was there all the time. My brother arrived. And in the end, we had three people to a room. We ended up buying a second house for everyone to live in.”

Here is a picture of a fig tart. I eated this tart. Well, not this one. But one like it. Once.

This fig tart is a present for you. It is a bribe. Because I am sorry I haven't posted in a long time.

I thought I was done with having things to say. But then I realized that will never happen.

Also, I have been working on a side project. And it is demanding, like an annoying child.

Also, things happened. Lots of things. That kept me from writing. Little things, big things.

My hub cap fell off my car for one. And then I had to run down the street and get it and then also, get on my hands and knees and put it back on.

After, my hands were black. And then I had to find a place to wash them.

Also, my cell phone started oozing a radioactive...ooze. I think it was gel from the screen. And I thought I had ear cancer from the ooze. It got in my hair! Gross.

Also, my kidney was hurting one day. So I thought I had kidney failure. Then I remembered the Bodyworks exhibit. The healthy kidney was pretty and bluish pink. And tiny! Cute kidney!

The diseased kidney didn't even look like a kidney. Just vomit on a kidney-shaped thing.

Then I imagined my kidney looking sad and vomit-like. I couldn't write about this, do you understand?

Also, I was busy judging myself and beating myself up for being wrong.

Then I read the NYT article about MIA and had someone else to judge so that took the pressure off for a while.

I will post it for you to see. My favorite part is when she talks about people dying in Sri Lanka while eating truffled french fries! Also, she lives in Brentwood. What kind of person does that, even?

I saw Daljit Dhaliwal throw a chair at someone once. And now whenever I see her on TV I have to change the channel. Or I ask whoever has the remote "change the channel! change the channel!" while I cover my ears. I don't want to catch what she has. And you can catch things with your ears. Like ear cancer.

Also, I have been reading.

There is so much good writing in the world!

It makes me laugh. It makes me happy. It makes me sad.

It makes me feel not alone. Then it makes me depressed about not posting on my blog.

Thank you for reading my blog!

Yesterday incapable of writing even one word. Today no better. Who will save me? And the turmoil in me, deep down, scarcely visible; I am like a living lattice-work, a lattice that is solidly planted and would like to tumble down.

-Franz Kafka

Silverlake

Stores with names like "Rags," and "Rubbish." Stores that sell offendingly expensive handbags, vintage retro-modern chairs, hand-blown contorted glass bowls. These pieces arrange themselves on bamboo floors, prim coffee tables, severe shelves, looking bored, effete, a little pained.

This is the worst kind of purgatory; the offhand cruelty of being labeled with the distinct purpose of invoking the meanness of irony (I feel for you, Pilot Inspektor).

And to spend your life feeling like less than what you really are. Until, I suppose, it is all over. And to realize that you were never rags or rubbish all along, but quite the opposite.

This is inanimate Greek tragedy on the eastside of LA.

Via M

In a mathematically perfect universe, we would be less than dead; we would never have existed. According to the basic precepts of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created in the Big Bang and then immediately annihilated each other in a blaze of lethal energy, leaving a big fat goose egg with which to make stars, galaxies and us. And yet we exist, and physicists (among others) would dearly like to know why.

“ ‘Metropolis’ is the most iconic silent picture of its day, mainly because of the visual ambition and virtuosity of the film itself,” said Noah Isenberg, editor of “Weimar Cinema,” a book about early German films, and a professor of film and literary studies at the New School. But until now, we didn’t have the full story. These additions are really essential to understanding the full arc of the narrative.”

Flight 01 from Nickolas Peter on Vimeo.

via Nick

I think we ought to read only the kinds of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

-Franz Kafka

Finite

adj.

1.

a. Having bounds; limited: a finite list of choices; our finite fossil fuel reserves.

b. Existing, persisting, or enduring for a limited time only; impermanent.

2. Mathematics

a. Being neither infinite nor infinitesimal.

b. Having a positive or negative numerical value; not zero.

c. Possible to reach or exceed by counting. Used of a number.

d. Having a limited number of elements. Used of a set.

3. Grammar Of or relating to any of the forms of a verb that can occur on their own in a main clause and that can formally express distinctions in person, number, tense, mood, and voice, often by means of conjugation, as the verb sees in She sees the sign.

4. (Mathematics) bounded in magnitude or spatial or temporal extent a finite difference

5. (Mathematics) Maths logic having a number of elements that is a natural number; able to be counted using the natural numbers less than some natural number.

6.

a. limited or restricted in nature human existence is finite

b. (as noun) the finite

7. (Linguistics / Grammar) denoting any form or occurrence of a verb inflected for grammatical features such as person, number, and tense

I have a tendency towards overreaction. Over-enthusiasm, over-excitement, over-expression, exaggerated hand gestures. There's a video someone made of me in college where I am talking about something lame like grass, but I am gesticulating wildly.

Quiet people know things quietly. In their bones. Occasionally, I feel this way, and I shake the feeling off. It is uncomfortable to be ruled by something larger than you, calling all the shots.

It is like those precious emo bands, where the lead singer sounds like he's on your shoulder, singing in your ear. And you just want to hold your hand up and say, "Stop. Stop it, please. Please get off my shoulder. Please get out of my ear."

Because externalized pseudo-hysteria is preferable to the quiet contentment of knowing, perhaps, how the narrative actually resolves. That is to say, in the midst of your own unpreparedness for life to reveal itself, there is a satisfaction to the the tension of resisting, or at least pretending to resist certain truths.

Agency

To approximate, in words, strange and contorted longings feels impossible. I am not as articulate as I hope to one day be (when I am old). And even then, I suspect I will be misunderstood because people will only communicate in texts in the future.

T once told me that I need to stop seeing everything I do as entirely purposeless. Which is ironic, given the sheer volume of things I do. If we met, over coffee, or dinner, you would never know how cynical I am capable of being. I don't even know where it came from, given the number of peace rallies I have attended, the number of times I have had tear gas sprayed in my eyes. We exist in our own solipsistic bubbles of mental real estate. We pass each other by as if in cars at an intersection. Perhaps we even recall moments when it wasn't such. We can't be read as easily as we'd like.

How did the spaces between us become so vast when once upon a time it simply wasn't so?

That episode of Battlestar Galactica

Where there's a food shortage and Athena goes on an exploratory mission and finds a planet that has algae, but the planet is located on the far side of a star cluster that would take too long to go around, because the fleet would starve to death in that time, so the only option is to go through it. But the cluster is saturated with radiation and the ships aren't protected against exposure.

Spoiler alert: Kat dies. Because she's the only one who stays inside the ring of radiation for too long. It's sad even though we don't much like Kat. And she was an apt character to get caught on the inside too long and die as a result of it.

I think about the ring of radiation quite a bit. This inexorable need to journey right into the center of things, and the uncertain thresholds that require crossing to get within. This is in part because predictably, I like on-the-nose metaphors. But this particular one feels personal, tailored to my own psyche. I dream of the ring of radiation. To get caught within the ring, on the journey in, or out, is life-threatening. But the crossing over is unavoidable. To stay within means a certain insanity, an inability to acknowledge the material reality of the world. It is entrapment within yourself, within your own mind. But to stay on the outside is another kind of death altogether, the death of something deeper within you. So I make this journey often, sometimes several times a day. We all do. Does this make us interlopers on the various parts of our lives or migrants with dual homes?

This reminds me of a Jewish tradition that a college roommate told me about - to give someone a dollar everytime they are about to embark on a journey. The dollar is to be handed to someone in need once the person arrives at his or her destination. The idea that you are protected as long as you are doing God's work.

To expand, or maybe merely restate the metaphor - it is our own work, but I can't say I don't worry about the journey. I worry about the threshold of radiation and hope that I can seamlessly make it in and out as many times as my life can hold.

Question

What happens to the contorted desire for magic (contorted by age and time) if you can't directly meet its gaze?

I was up till 1:00 AM last night, making jams, processing jars. The kitchen is sticky with marmalade and honey. The jars are sealed and sterilized, labeled. In my fridge, or in care packages being handled by the postal service.

If writing is an imagined connection, or any art really, once outside of it, you must train yourself to stop thinking in webs. The effort to gains ratio is skewed here. I can't escape the spiderweb, as much as I've tried. Better to just give into it.

I dreamt that someone who had died came back from the dead. He showed up at the miracle berry party at my house and made a joke about his own death that we all laughed at. It was funny because he wasn't really dead anymore. Then I woke up, and it wasn't funny. Context determines everything.

I dream of death a lot. Endings. A couple of times I dreamt I was pregnant. This wasn't as anxiety-inducing as one might imagine.

I've been spending a lot of time in Mount Washington. I stole a bagful of loquats from someone's tree in their yard. D watched, but wouldn't participate. We all live by our own code of ethics. Mine has emerged as oblique over the years. Like this: sometimes you'll wake up in the morning after the jam has been made, thrown in jars, sealed and labeled and realize that it never really set.

This is how I learned myself.

How many things lie incomplete? Truth requires a kind of painstaking patience. So does art. Or jam. Kumquat marmalade, for example, is a serious bitch to make. You have to slice the kumquats really thin and reserve the seeds to put in a bouquet garni for pectin. And even then, it sometimes ends up tasting sort of cloying.

My sister once said that she comes up with ideas, sees them through in her head, so then she doesn't have to actually live them. I told her I used to do this with relationships.

When jars arrive at an equilibrium, air pressure within and without the same, they make a popping sound. There's something satisfying about this sound. It's a process complete. I wonder if there is a similar popping sound that occurs when your interior life matches your exterior life in some way. Like there is an equal amount of mass on both sides to balance the equation.

It's odd running into a person who doesn't know they were your boyfriend in your head, so many years ago. That you considered the entirety of a relationship with them and then arrived at conclusions about the whole thing yourself, without any necessary consultation on their part. Have you violated them in some way? No need to explain such things.

It's not that I didn't have the vocabulary to explain what happened, or even a lack of understanding of it. Just that, the pop that I wasn't waiting for hadn't occurred and you can't force it. It happens in its own time, and the only thing required of you is patience. And a kind of gentle care for your own creation. Whether it's good or bad or loaded with consequence.

What I'm listening to right now...

Birthday, 2010, Megan Curran

A tree is a wonderful living organism which gives shelter, food, warmth and protection to all living things. It even gives shade to those who wield an axe to cut it down.

– Gautam Buddha