a few of my favorite things...
7 interests chosen by red_eyed_soul. if you want to play, comment and i'll pick 7 of your interests for you to write about. good exercise, at least.


deadly sea creatures.
Generally I'm fascinated by the ocean community as a whole, but certain creatures appeal to me particularly for the absurd nature of their basic existence--the fact that such strange animals can fit in perfectly to their ecosystem gives me a feeling of universal comfort; everything has its place. When I was little there was a library book on deep-sea creatures which I would check out religiously; the fish of the abyssal zone (the part of the ocean that receives no sunlight), like the gulper eel and the anglerfish, were an early favorite. Of course there's also the humorous side to gawking at these awkward specimens: squid, cuttlefish, etc. make for excellent LOLs. But beyond printing witty octopus imagery on t-shirts, I have a lot of metaphors attached to various bits of information on my favorite underwater animals. The Portugese Man-o-War is considered the deadliest jellyfish, but in fact it's not a jellyfish at all, but a community of tiny organisms which make up the tentacles; some tentacles capture food, others are used for reproduction, others release waste--it's, like, symbolic of communal living, man. The shark--like many of my favorite restlessly neurotic artists--needs to keep moving or else it will die; it must always circulate fresh oxygen through its gills. The Giant Squid is admired for its mysterious, solitary lifestyle--we know very little about it except for rare terrifying glimpses at sea or the occasional washed-up carcass. Still other creatures I am simply enamored of their beauty: the inky glide of the octopus, and the haunting sentience of the cuttlefish's gaze. It's rather difficult to explain what these creatures mean to me; usually I just prefer to let the imagery speak for itself. Mostly I just feel a sense of awe at the strange and perfect interaction of life with itself--how can these things even exist? But they do, and gracefully.

escape plans.
there always has to be a way out. experience has taught me that even the most comfortable living situation can go to hell without a moment's warning, so these days i always have a backup plan. change-of-address forms tucked into the back of a filing cabinet, a few hundred dollars socked away for a bus ticket, and the knowledge that if i really had to i could pick up and go with my journal and a camera. in the past i made my escape plans in desperation, believing that Things Could Be Better if only i lived in a different house, or another city. usually, it was Fear that kept me rooted in one spot. diner late-nights were spent discussing with friends how i could get myself to my dream-city of New Orleans--and i knew it was possible, so close i could taste it.... just save some money, pack a steamer trunk, get on a train and go. couch-surf, find a job, rent a shotgun shack, be happy. each time i visited New Orleans i was so very tempted to stay, but each time i returned to the safety of home, too scared that i could wreck my life by tossing the security of my job & rent to the wind. i would like to be the kind of person who can feel stable in constantly shifting situations, who can find a sense of calm within, but i have yet to reach that point. so i just scheme and dream and make lists, deriving a small sense of accomplishment in the organization of thoughts onto paper, an easy step-by-step Escape Plan That Just Might Work. i've left a trail of failed plans and missed opportunities. each trip to New Orleans leaves me yearning. in highschool, Nikki & I vowed to spend a summer trainhopping with only our journals and an ample supply of menstrual tools. we concealed our nervousness by making jokes about how we're going to have to piss in jars; we practiced jumping on slow trains down by the river, but we never left. we dreamed of starting up a punkhouse in a rundown old structure on the South Side Slopes, but when we were old enough we just got our own apartments. at thirteen, Susan and I saved spare change to fund our escape to London where we could live together and start a band. and even earlier, in gradeschool, i was making lists of ways to escape myself--insecure "self-improvement" lists about wearing makeup and losing weight so that boys would pay attention to me (relationships being an escape of sorts, mind you). writing this fills me with inspiration, excitement, and guilt--because i haven't reconciled my wanderlust just yet. today, right now, with my future laid out before me--a future i chose, a plan that makes me happy, two+ more years of college and then anything goes--i still want to run. i still want to see so much. i can find adventure in the place i currently call home, but i wish i had the resources to get out. materially, i wish i had the money to travel comfortably; or barring that, i wish i was spiritually-together enough to not even need material comforts. i'm constantly flip-flopping. i make elaborate plans even though i am secretly aware that i really do have all the resources i need right in front of me. but the good thing is, these plans stand the test of time, for the most part. they are all still valid, waiting for my decision. i can still make it to New Orleans. i could probably still call up Nikki and hop trains. Susan would be willing to make time for a road trip. it's all up to me.

gypsypunk.
i met my first honest-to-god gypsypunks at the Cumberland House in Asheville during my Hitchhiking Summer '05. by that time i was exhausted and pissed-off and wanting to go home, but not ready to admit that i wasn't enjoying the Kerouackian lifestyle i'd chosen. i got food poisoning from eating dumpstered apples and spent the morning puking into a greywater toilet i couldn't figure out how to flush. i was sober on the road and getting frustrated with the endless stream of drunkpunks befriending us in every city. but looking back, there was a lot of beauty in this particular punkhouse. the basement was covered in amazing spraypainted artwork and a homebrew contraption lurked in the dark. at night, Sparrow and her friends played accordion, banjo, and fiddle upstairs and the music echoed throughout the house. everyone wore rag-tag stitched-up outfits: stripey stockings, pinstriped vests, flouncy skirts, dapper hats, dirty bedraggled hair. i didn't know to call gypsypunk by its name when i saw it, just kind of fell into an attraction to the olde-tymey bluegrass revival sounds, or the culture-clash of bands like The World/Inferno Friendship Society and Gogol Bordello. despite my interest in this subculture, it's an interest i keep at a distance because i feel that ideas get ruined easily when one starts clinging too adamantly to strict definitions of the idea (like with dresscodes, musical genres, art styles, etc.) i like to feel that i can observe and record aspects of culture that interest me without immersing myself totally in the ideology. (see also: my teenage infatuation with "what it means to be punk" when i wasn't actually punk). part of this, i admit, is a result of feeling left out. i would like to feel as though i belong to a particular culture or subculture, but mostly i feel like i'm all mashed-up, all bits and pieces. it's appealing to belong to a group because within the group everything's spelled out--your likes and dislikes, style of dress, mode of living. but this is also a put-off for me, because my joining one group i'm excluding myself from many others. i sort of went through this identity crisis as a teenager, getting obsessed with one musical genre after another and getting flak for being a "poseur" because i couldn't stick to just one thing--goth, rave, punk, whatever. especially punk, with its claims of acceptance and unity and anarchy, seems hypocritical in its attachment to a particular musical style or type of clothing. punk (diy) as a style has nothing to do with punk (diy) as an ideology. all very confusing for a teenager trying to define her identity. so, basically, i am enamoured of the gypsypunk look, its music, and what these things try to stand for--a life of freedom, travelling, living hand-to-mouth but adventurously not in desperation--but i'm not so quick to define my ownself as such, because a self is fluid and can't be pinned down. i rather enjoy being a cultural tourist, as such.

manipulating clock-time.
once i read a book called The Geography of Time which set out to explain how and why different cultures/locales perceive time differently--for example, why the Northern United States feels more fast-paced and businesslike while the South feels laid-back like an endless evening on the front porch. the most riveting concept i got out of the book was that one's own perception of time has everything to do with the way time operates--like if you're angry about being at work for five hours those five hours will drag, but if you get yourself into a mindset of being okay with the way you spend your time at work, or feeling productive about it, those hours won't seem so torturous. i enjoy having a schedule to my day, but i like that schedule to have some leeway here and there. i am never on time, and i used to feel really bad about it, like it was a horrible character flaw that i couldn't just get it together and do what i'm supposed to do when i'm supposed to do it. but i feel better about allowing life to get in the way of things a little bit. i don't feel like it's possible to measure out our days so precisely, to switch activities and modes of thinking as soon as the bell goes off. time is malleable; it's a human construct, it isn't static. the way we feel about time means everything about the way time passes. clock-time is a measurement; event-time is how we feel that time passes during a particular activity. i'm striving to exist more in event-time: sleep when i'm tired, wake when i'm wakeful. write for as long as i feel like writing. with a set schedule for work and school, i can't really live like this all the time, but i try to manipulate how i feel about clock-time to avoid feeling like i'm wasting time at work when i could be doing something else. there will be time, there will be time...

new orleans.
my favorite city, my dream-city, my city that eats itself, city of death & decay smelling of trash and magnolias, city of creation & abundance bleeding music and sweating song. i fell in love with New Orleans before i was even within the city limits--crossing the Ponchartrain Causeway at sunset in earlysummer, trying to climb out the window and grasp at its unrelenting beauty. i've dreamed of that bridge, those rundown houses on streets named after muses. a city that lives under death's watchful eye and celebrates as if each day might be its last. an impossible city built on a swamp and threatened by hurricanes, a city constantly rebuilding, reincarnating itself. i want to live there as an artist, i want to walk its streets cracked by thick roots and photosynthesize its inspiration. i'm still waiting for the right moment, though. i'm afraid of the city, afraid that if i'm not prepared, if i'm not strong enough it will swallow me whole, spit me out all skin & bones and wild eyes. i've seen it happen. truly i've read the most beautiful words written by lovers of New Orleans. it pulls and tugs my heart's tides, waxing and waning; it teases and cajoles and i flirt, "not yet, not yet..." i daydream of a tiny shotgun shack, i work in the darkroom all night and make my living comfortably enough. it's so beautiful, do you really have to worry about having enough to eat? there, i think, i could live frugally and yet never hunger spiritually. but i'm not ready to give up yet; i'm not ready to throw myself into the storm. sometimes i feel like New Orleans will always exist as an idea for me, the one that got away, constantly shaping my thoughts even from a distance--and i'm okay with that, even, i'm okay with having had my glimpses in weekends and roadtrips and layovers, i'm okay with just the memory of that thick swampy atmosphere, my tattoos of remembrance, my haunted photographs, my drunken memories. still it would be nice; maybe one day i'll live the dream.

sychronicity.
the right things happening at the right time. philosophically, according to WikiPedia, "synchronicity is the experience of two or more events which occur in a meaningful manner, but which are causally unrelated." we make our own metaphors, construct our own meaning. i find magic in the observation of simple natural occurrences--a full moon, a rainstorm--and i make sense of my life in this way, gathering details which form a more romantic, poetic, and meaningful existence. the full moon, for example, may not actually cause me to be more adventurous, nonetheless i make the association. when you start looking for meaning, it shows up everywhere--obsessively adding license plate numbers to equal 10, reading your life into a horoscope, sharing a first kiss as the skies open up in a cleansing New Year's Eve downpour--we create the meaning of our own lives.

typography.
another topic i don't know much factual information about, but regardless feel an ambiguous sense of importance attached to it. when Susan was going to school for graphic design, she learned a lot about the use of typefaces and layouts--basically how the appearance of a piece of art, or a brochure, or an advertisement can change the way we react to it, right down to the minute details such as how closely lines of text are spaced. i'm fascinated by this process and although i don't have a formal education in design & layout i'm still aware of how appearance affects understanding. Nikki & i, working on our first zine in highskool, used to have ongoing heated discussions about font style and column size--how dare you use Comic Sans?! i stick to what i know--serif fonts for long passages of literary text, sans serif and a lot of white space for blogs and websites--just the basics. when i make flyers i like to pretend like i know what i'm doing, tweaking the positioning of text until it "just looks right," knowing nothing about the actual principles of design. in nearly 10 years of doing zines i've gone from the typical confusing jumble of cut-n-paste collaged text and random imagery to a more minimal look, simple text and vast expanses of negative space. makes sense, i suppose. as a teenager my writing was a messy thought-spew, so much to express and i just needed to get it all out. these days i've learned the hard way (hat tip to My Tortured Artist, ahem) the value of editing, cutting down to get to the meat of an idea, and presenting that choice portion free of clutter and distraction. something of a double-edged sword, because it helps me get better at expressing ideas, but my insecurity can reach maddening levels during those sessions when i write pages and pages only to realize that i haven't said fuck about shit.




& for old time's sake: