melmo mishmash

4.16.13 1.30

I’m sitting on a couch again. My eyes are closed for a moment and I perform 4.33.
There is a wooly cotton noise, and a cricket noise that is not from a cricket.
A lawn mower noise reminds me of airports.
Cars move by like on the golden gate bridge.
I hear the excitement of a different house. I can hear the house breathing and it is not strange, only unfamiliar. But all sounds are relatively unfamiliar to me right now.
Someone is packing upstairs in the loft, moving the metallic fabric of a duffle.
I hear the vignettes of teeth brushing before bed, like a rectangle of yellow and a silhouette that is achingly beautiful.
The cars zooming by here are like men in suits, all in a row, going somewhere important. The cars from last night were like cats slinking by in a neighborhood.
Neuman coughs and it echoes off the high ceiling. They whisper because I am here. I hear the clicking of tongues and lips.
The tapping of keys is comfortable, like markers.

today i performed 4.33 for the first time. 

i’m tired and sitting on this red couch.

the second hands from the melting clock (higher pitch) and the kitchen clock (lower pitch) keep strange syncopated time, strange limping time.

airplane’s grainy rumble comes just as suddenly as it goes.

two guys talk loudly on the streets, there is a bike clicking beside them.

a car rolls by, a car rolls by, like different volumes of air rushing through a tube.

the second hands echo steady, the space in between them is like regular stitches, like limping. 

the vibration of my phone is a gigantic noise that startles me, and irritates me with its irregular repeating, but somehow it takes its place in the night too.

a girl and guy walk by. sounds are loud in the vacuum of the night. 

dawning coughs.

done. 

Lol the Bart driver announced we got an overtime win and the Bart is full of yellow and blue people who cheered… Which sport is this??

damngruchy:

supermassiveasshole:

i was teaching my grandma to use computer so we can talk on skype and such but today she went kinda mad at me because “i didnt show her the knitting programme” and i was like what

and it comes out she accidentally opened ms excel and found out its a great way to create knitting patterns

my grandma is 82

(via allthedaylong)

bubble wrap popping party

we stand around the table and all pop bubbles on the same sheet of bubble wrap. that really brings people together.

another cool party idea is a

hair accessory making party. in highschool one of my art friends wanted to have a christmas party. when i got to his house, he had these woven baskets of all sorts of exquisite and charming little decorational pieces. gold leaves, small painted wooden birds, beads, feathers. we all sat on the rug on the floor near the fireplace and ate cookies that his mom baked and hot glue gunned headbands and hair clips and hair pins and fascinators. 

another cool party idea is a

poetry reading party. my freshman year english class did this for the last day of the semester. we sat around in a big circle and ate christmas yums and each of us went up to the podium one by one to read our favorite poem. i thought it would be stressful, but it was actually really wonderful.

gingerbread house making party! we had a gingerbread house making party with my sg last semester. it turned out to be justin bieber’s summer getaway home. the frosting was super nasty, but at least it was industrial strength. for some reason, everyone was super hilarious that night. 

dawning says a murder mystery party would be fun, except for the person who gets murdered. and also a parakeet scavenger hunt party. one time her dad bought her parakeets for her birthday and hid them in cages in the backyard (one of them died when they fed it 250mg of tylenol).

i can’t think of any other cool party ideas, but dressing up strangely is always fun. that used to be a thing that wasn’t just for parties though. 

any other ideas? 

Lot’s Wife

Sometime soon after the embers cooled, 
after dust clouds settled, after the last strings 
of smoke, hoisted by desert breezes, cleared the air,

they must have come, people of those three cities 
remaining, to pick among the charred bones, 
the rubble of what was once temple and house,

stable and brothel; to kick at stones; to tug 
at handles of buckets, blades of shovels and spades. 
Later, raising ash plumes in the scorched plain,

cloths at their mouths and noses, eyes burning, 
neither fearful nor repentant but full of wonder, 
full of the scavenger’s overabundant hope,

they would have found her—even as now 
some men encounter the woman of their dreams 
(beauty of the movie screen, princess they capture

with a camera’s flash, girl whose finger brushes theirs 
when she takes their card at the market register)—
found her, that is, not as the person she was

but as whom they needed her to be, and, man or woman, 
each of them would have wanted a piece of her. 
Standing in that wasted landscape,

she must have seemed a statue erected there 
as a tribute to human frailty, white, crystallized, 
her head turned back as if in longing to be the girl

she had been in the city she had known. 
And they must have stood there, as we do, 
a bit awestruck, taking her in for a time,

and then, with chisel and knife, spike and buckle, 
chipped at her violently and stuffed their leathern 
pouches full of her common salt, salt with which

to season for a while their meat, their daily bread.

- Gary J. Whitehead

glamingo

today i was painting my sister’s portrait. she is in this flamingo room and her body is suspended in this fantastically awkward position and i was going to title the painting glamingo. all the colors i mixed were just right. but when i got to her face, which is the most crucial, careful, conscious part, i suddenly realized how much i hate (hate hate hate) my new brushes. the bristles did not go where i wanted them to go, they did not move the way i tried to make them move. i felt like someone chopped off my hand and screwed on another one. which is ok for things like buttoning buttons and cooking fried eggs and brushing your teeth, but then fine-tuned and beloved motions like writing in your penmanship or moving paint on a surface the way you are used to… they become foreign and strange and difficult in a really really ugly way. this semester has been the greatest period of artistic growth i have experienced since my senior year in high school. but it has also been the period with the most lamest lam-o setbacks. like getting $80+ worth of paintbrushes stolen (i had been collecting them slowly for over 4 years. and i knew them all, i knew how they moved and what kind of pressure to apply to them, which brushes were good for doing which things. and in one moment all of that was gone. i cried while i stood in line at blicks to buy a cheapo pack of new brushes to get by finals and crits). or JUST missing huge opportunities, being so close to them that i could smell their armpits!! but then just limply watching them go by (illustrating book cover for a poli sci prof —-timing is killer, guys, and nomination for honors studio—-again, timing is killer). i;m so brittle and non-resilient. this morning i was like… i think my career is over. and my roommate talked some sense into me. but… don’t you feel that way sometimes? like you’re going nowhere and tremendous things are passing you by and everything feels like a punch in the stomach.

i have been thinking about embryos a lot, and emergence. it is so clumsy. and humility is not this beautiful thing that you bask in. humility is not glorious. humility is low and close to the ground, it finds its roots quietly, privately in the soil, maybe in a place of liminality. 

liminality and lost-ness, wandering, alienation from others and mostly from myself… is this normal? maybe this is normal, but just for now. i will not always have many hours to sit alone and make an orderly narrative of everything/find connective meaning in the contents of my life, like i did before. but is that so wrong to ask for? for some time to do that?

i am debating about slicing the apple open. anyone for the slicing of the apple? i can use it to make some apple prints. unless it is rotting in the belly, which is quite possible, because it is so sweaty and seasick on the outside. that’s one of the things that i learned, that apples sweat. it’s weird. the apple has taken on such a life of its own that i would not be surprised, when i slice it open, to find that it was a womb all this time, and some embryo sleeps inside, the stem being a twiggy umbilical cord. 

today i received my first check for missions!!! and i was so overjoyed but i didn’t really know how to show it at the moment because i was trying to make a milk tea and i was spilling everywhere. but i am so overjoyed!!! and so thankful that someone believes in me and God’s work in me, enough to sow financially into this part of my life.

while i was making support letters i had this thought that no one would really want to support me. but now…it’s funny what hope can do. 

so, true story, i accidentally dropped the check into the toilet afterwards…and i was yelling oh no oh no oh no oh no oh no oh no as i fished it out and smothered it in paper towels. but good job for using waterproof ink!