April 25th Journal Project

When someone describes a Christian rock CD as “seriously anointed,” I kinda get a little furious inside, and I want to make them examine their phraseology. So they just throw these words around, and I’m pretty sure actual biblical anointing is more serious than a bitchin post-production on an album.

Also, I think about couples when I hang out with them because they go home and are together and I go home to livejournal. It doesn’t suck. It’s just at this particular moment, I wish things were different, but only for tonight, or this weekend, or for a limited time. I always want everything on my terms. But really I just want someone whose terms are almost exactly the same as mine.

I think we’re all pretty isolated. Not in a self-indulgent depressive way. We’re just alone more than we’re together. It never seems like the exact right moment to fix it though, but I also think I’ve never had an exact right moment for anything, though I’ve had a few that I think come close. There was that church in the rain that one time, but I’m not sure if it was right. It was kinda poetic or cinematic though, and it was fun, and I liked feeling for an hour that I was living in a montage and my life was kicking ass and interesting enough to be written on a page by someone who cared about who would play the parts.

Sometimes I feel like we’re forever typecast by God.

Looks like my sweet gig with Victor Carranza was too good to be true. We had a meeting last Friday where we mostly discussed his forthcoming Monroe project. Despite his previous claims, I learned that his contract for this project was not quite settled. At the end of the meeting I brought up the architecture jewelry project and provided him with a packet of photocopied sketches representing the 40 hours of work we had agreed on. Victor seemed mildly interested in my designs and picked out a few pieces he liked. He alluded to future development of the project, but made it clear that the project was going to take a backseat to the Monroe work. When I asked him for payment he said he was unable to write me a check because he had yet to receive any money from the Monroe project. He then said he was getting paid Monday, and assured me that I would get my money on Tuesday, when I picked up the Monroe pictures. After leaving his office I became increasingly worried about my financial state. I called Victor back and pressured him for a check. He made no concessions. Instead he acted sympathetic and promised to call me on Monday with an update. That call never came and now I am feeling like I am getting ripped off. Victor had seemed mildly unconvinced at first when I said my drawings represented 40 hours of work. Now I am sensing that he is trying to back out of our contract. I wrote him an email yesterday politely demanding my pay. If he doesn’t respond to my invoice then I will not be doing any more work for him. In addition, if he wants to get the architecture images I used, he will need to pay me for my design work thus far. He knows that I desperately need the money. If this job does indeed fall through, then I will not only have lost $1,200 worth of my time, but also two weeks of job searching. Now I am busy applying for gallery assistant and art handling jobs off of the postings on NYFA and Craigslist.

In other news, I am busy getting ready for my Visionary Crosswalks project at Pocket Utopia. Austin is sending out my press release while I am still working on a 4″x6″ card. I still need to do the intersection/street maps and send out my promo stuff. After meeting with my planner friend I decided to add the map element as a way to potentially get feedback from pedestrians. I really enjoyed my discussion with Jen and we may collaborate for Conflux. In addition to the installations and maps I am doing a video night as part of Austin’s “Social Saturdays” event series. I plan on screening various videos, including documentation of my work, potential work by Mary featuring my crosswalks as subject matter, and movie/internet clips dealing with crosswalks in some way. I am doing this in lieu of some sort of panel discussion in an attempt to cut out any unintended pretension or seriousness. I just basically want to have a fun get-together where we talk about the pedestrian experience in Bushwick.

I am getting more and more excited about going to MICA this fall. The US News and World Report just released their annual grad school rankings and MICA’s overall MFA program cam in 4th nationally(!), following Yale, RISD, and SAIC. I knew MICA was good, but I didn’t realize it was 4th in the country! This means that including all the disciplines, MICA is better than Columbia, Hunter, and VCU – my other top picks. The rankings are apparently based off of surveys by all of the MFA deans in the country. I am now feeling a lot better about taking out $50,000 in loans for this program. Plus I am going to have a shit load of fun making art in Baltimore and hanging out with Robby.

It’s over. He just came up to me while I was waiting in line for the bathroom at some kid’s house party. I was so drunk I don’t even remember what he said exactly. But he told me to get my stuff from his house, and then he walked away.

I think I started crying a little bit but then I pulled myself together. I dragged Chris into the bathroom with me… probably made a fool out of myself, I know I was blabbering about how I missed him, and then we made out for a minute until somebody got impatient and starting banging on the door.

The hardest thing is sleeping alone again.

At least he didn’t ruin any good songs for me. When guys play music while we’re fucking, I associate it with them forever. And after we break up I usually can’t stand to listen to it anymore, even if it used to be one of my favorite songs. Like mark with the blower’s daughter. David with avril 14th. Philip with anthem for a seventeen year old girl. Brent with anything by the fucking strokes.

I hated all his music to begin with.

7:30 am 6tbsp cornflakes, semi skimmed milk

1 pm 2 flat bread, 2 slices cooked turkey, 200ml smoothie

7 pm 4oz chicken in honey mustard sauce, cauliflower, carrots, peas, salad, 4 oz baked potato

Day 34 of 138

Doing okay, concerned about eating out, but found a pub that did home cooked rather than fried and/or with chips. Rang the surgeon’s secretary, no cancellations so Aug 7th is still the date.

Went to silverlink with Michael to watch In Brugge, really good film. Loved Brendon Gleeson, but Colin Farrell and Ralph Fiennes excellent too. Michael fell asleep towards the end and had to fill him in on how we arrived at the end of the story.

Bob home when I got in. He was fine for a little while but then started hurling. Luckily it was mainly liquid, he obviously drank on an empty stomach. I held his head and kissed him and told him it was all right over and over. Love this man so very much, but I wish he didn’t drink.

Gary is formally accused of bullying Dianne (by Dianne) meeting on Tuesday to discuss the accusations. My support with Gary obviously. Dianne unhinged and desperate for attention. A difference of opinion or an argument does not constitute bullying. I think the threat that she may piss in your drink if you upset her a little more of a problem.

Auspice marks the day, though it probably shouldn’t. I’m realizing more and more that I seek significance in the mundane all too often—perhaps as a way of reifying that my life has meaning or that the decisions that I make are validated. It is getting harder and harder to figure out when something is actually meaningful or if I’m imposing or superimposing it—and then there is the eternal question as to whether these are the same thing? Do things have autonomous meaning? Maybe? Or is meaning only derived when meaning is shared beyond oneself?

Anyway, here’s what happened: I had thought that I was completely done with my thesis last Monday, but after showing it to Uzi it was clear that a few things still needed to be sorted out. I worked it out, got an awful computer virus, and when I fixed it found I had lost a good deal of progress. Re-fixed the thesis, sent it back to Uzi and waited for approval. And yet this morning, when I woke up, I knew it would be done, that I would get the go-ahead from Uzi, because—here’s the thing—somehow I knew that it was exactly a year ago TODAY that my thesis fieldwork explicitly began. It wasn’t that hard to figure out—it was basically signified through an email I received during the afternoon of April 25, 2007. So that was that. Uzi approved my thesis exactly one year after it began.

It wasn’t like I had some divine revelation saying APRIL 25TH IS A MOMENTOUS DAY or anything. Basically, I had to look up that email sometime last week to cite it properly in my thesis, and it was probably tucked away somewhere in my brain that it happened on the 25th.

Q: Is this momentous/meaningful/auspicious/sacrosanct?

A: Probably not. I look for signifiers in everything. When the official tally for #of pages of my thesis came out as 103, even that felt significant because 103.1 was the radio station I used to listen to in WPB and my thesis is about radio so it seemed apt. But then it shrunk to 102 (thesis, not radio station). I realized the fallacy of my logic.

This is hardly the first time this has happened, and it’s hardly the first time I’ve caught it and wondered if it was unhealthy. Example: In my first middle school my favorite class was taught in room 201. After a semester I had to switch schools despite how much I loved it. Then in CMMS (new school) I again had a class in a rm. 201, and I knew that it was a good omen for the class. And that was my favorite class, if only by comparison to how much everything else sucked. (I also lived in Pei 201 during my first yr of college). Anyway: the fact that I still remember rm 201 seems weird.

I undoubtedly get this at least a little from my grampa. The famous story involves him and my mom sitting in the car, about to drive to then-16-year-old-mom-before-she-was-mom’s school. It was an awards ceremony for some kind of writing competition that my mom had placed in but wasn’t sure which place. Another important part of this story is that my grampa’s car (probably a buick, he only ever drove buicks) had funny windshield wipers—you could never tell if they would work on the first try or not. So: pre-me mom and grampa get into the car [buick]. My grampa says, “Donna, if the windshield wipers start on the first try, it means you won. Otherwise, I’m sorry, but you got 2nd or 3rd prize.” Engine starts. Windshield wipers switch on. Nothing. Grampa says, “well, I’m sorry, but it looks like…” and then all of a sudden the windwhield wipers come on in full force.

They get to awards ceremony. 1st place announced: not mom. But after a moment, woman whispers into announcer’s ear, he says, “there’s been a mistake, the winner is Donna McKible!”

So maybe what I’m really trying to do here is signify on my grampa. I miss him. He used to pick up a deck of playing cards and announce “Queen of Spades!” or “Two of Clubs!” and every now and then when he turned the top card over he’d get lucky.

Back to the 4/25 question: the weird thing is I don’t even believe in cyclical time. Maybe it’s like a straight line, but in a continually upward curve so you can look back and see the bottom but never see the top or even where you’re going next. The important thing, in the end, is that I finished my thesis. That today is 4/25, I think it best to think, is trivial.

I had to stay up late because of a surprise upon coming home from work at 10 pm. I have been attempting to breed ball pythons for the past several months. Initially I was very optimistic, but towards the end very pessimistic. I had been pairing up 3 different females with one male. 1 of the females was very fat to begin with. I could safely assume the others didn’t become pregnant, but with this particular one I couldn’t tell because of her girth. Well, just when I figured the chances of 1 out of 3 were too slim, I did a routine cage cleaning and when I opened hers, my heart skipped a beat to see 2 big eggs. Immediately I rushed to set up the incubator (which they must be in A.S.A.P). Before discovering this, I had been gone for 2 days, so they could have been laid any time since then.

The urgency I felt was unreal. But also, I was scared to make any mistakes. At 11.30, I felt that the incubator was at the right temperature and humidity to move the eggs. I removed the female (who was coiled around 5 more) and moved the eggs one at a time into the incubator. 2 of the eggs were dented, which means that they were not properly humid. I panicked and got a spray bottle of water and sprayed them. The water was room temperature, but even so it dropped the temperature in their container from 90 degrees to 80. This is about 9 degrees too cold, and if they stayed in those conditions they’d be stillborn. I turned the thermostat up very high to compensate. After only a few minutes the temperature was 99. I decided to slowly drop it instead of panicking again and making it too low. Over a period of about a half an hour, I brought it down to 89, where it should be. The eggs became undented almost instantaneously. Things evened out and stopped swinging back and forth so much.

At this point, there’s no way to tell if they’ll go full term but I can only hope so. 2 thoughts occurred to me during this ordeal that surprised me. One was simply how much concern I had for the well-being of a species that wasn’t my own. There certainly was a monetary investment to this project that was at stake, but in that moment I wasn’t thinking about that, only that I didn’t want to be responsible for the non-birth of these snakes. I thought about how if these were spider eggs, most people would be happy to step on them. If these were turtle eggs, someone might coddle them only to make soup. And if these were copperhead rattlesnake eggs, someone would be chopping them up with a shovel right now. Sad that we only show empathy and care when the thing belongs to us.

The second major thought that occurred was even more troubling. I thought, ‘if humans laid eggs, abortion would be like throwing these eggs in the trash’. Now, you don’t have to point out to me all the problems with this. One, humans don’t lay eggs, and the womb of a real person with rights is different than a machine plugged into an outlet. But the general concern for the propagation of life was pretty foreign to me until that thought. Although I still keep a pro-choice outlook, it quickly wiped away my dark sense of humor about it and total disregard for those with the opposite view.

All in all, this was a humbling experience. I feel like a big pussy. If anyone could be emotionally detached from this experience, it would be me; and I’m not.

I just had a really bad dream. In my old house my dad had a den with two huge lazyboy chairs that he would go into and watch his gigantic collection of dvds and vhs. In the beginning of my life, they were my dad and mom’s chairs. Then they became his and my chairs.

In my dream I knew my dad was dead but I was at my old house and I walked into the kitchen and opened the door to the den. Inside I had a giant blanket of mine and a bunch of pillows and there was nothing in my dad’s chair. Apparently I had gone in there at some point and been with my dad but then it occurred to me in the dream that he was really dead and I could never go in there again and I could never watch movies with him. Then I left the room and looked around the kitchen for some food. After I made something, I opened the door slowly to take one last peek inside, and I saw him sitting there in the chair, but looking dead. So I turned around, rubbed my eyes, looked back inside and he was still there.

I took a nap at like 6 pm when I got home from work and that’s what I woke up to.

What else that’s bothering me is that all this week Drew was all excited about going to the beach, couldn’t wait to go to the beach, blah blah blah. Even this morning before I went to work he was going to find out if his mom was going to the beach or not, and we decided that we were gonna go regardless cause I have enough money for gas. So he calls me at 3 pm (because I have yelled at him so much recently for not telling me where he’s going while I’m at work because he doesn’t have a cellphone so if he doesn’t tell me, I don’t feel like calling around to all of my friends trying to figure out where the hell he is) to tell me he’s going to go listen to Ben Waldman jam with Segway. So I asked if he still wanted to go to the beach and he goes “uhhhh…. no. I just want male bonding time.”

So I tried to find something to do but realized I was too tired to really care, and fell asleep around 6 pm. I wake up to no call from Drew, no texts, anything 9 hours after we’ve talked. And this bothers me because he should be sleeping with me and all I wanna do is get a hug and have someone tell me that it’s okay.

That dream was the most fucked up one I’ve had in a long time, and I keep randomly crying for like 2-3 minutes then stopping. UGH.

It’s 5:30 p.m. and I am listening to Jose Gonzales’ Heartbeats on repeat because it is a comforting song and it is comforting to know what comes next. I am tired because my day started yesterday with the promise of sobriety broken, with all the alcohol that my body could not process from last night still coursing through my veins. I met LA and DK at the dive bar and then we press on for the house. They meet me there. I beat them biking it. We hang and DK tells me about growing up one girl with four boys in Philly. I get wasted and chain smoke and tell her that indesign is underused and underappreciated, and that I love LBB because LBB is funny and has two front teeth precisely half a pica longer than mine and because LBB finds me to be perfectly correct in a certain physical way that embarrasses me to be proud of, but man sometimes it is nice to be appreciated for things that are completely accidental and beyond your control, as though you had anything to do with them whatsoever.

So of course the first thing I do upon waking is email LBB back and try to act cool which just leads to the delivery of a stilted, crap email, but I hit send already: what’s done is done. As better writers have already said, cross winds may exist. Or something. Walk home, stop for donuts, shower up, do the dishes, call DK call DK call DK (you will probably have to shake me, I really like to sleep in) call DK brag that I don’t have work today to TS, make crit. mass plans (broken), bike to grocery store, help old lady find sauerkraut, smile about LBB, smile about LBB, buy groceries, sing sawdust & diamonds (1st verse only, and summat altered) all the way there and all the way back, obeying all traffic signals (mostly).

DK calls! Down yummy veggie brat quickquickquick. Meet at the train, but ohfuck I left the farecard at home and have my laptop and this sweaty little succulent and crap DK is doing me a favor and I can’t make DK wait. Here is the friendship plant that was for another friend, that is now for you, but you knew that already, and the point is that it’s yours now and even if you kill it, I have faith that this new friendship won’t be dead. And anyway sometimes things just die. And I really just can’t take care of it, and what’s more, it’s a wound torn open again. I just can’t look at it anymore. BUT OH! it’s so warm and nice. You have to go to work though. Boo. And then uninstall uninstall and must turn off the internet to save to disk and plans plans plans for swimmin’ & shootin’ & oh you’re a doll, a delight, you’re pure pepperoni in a good way.

Cool ranch doritos. Roosevelt. Check work mail. Fuck I am tired and LBB is brilliant and I’ve not picked any more fights today, and talked with MB for hours and MB will be here Monday. Crap I have a lot of work to do and shit to install. AS will visit by summer’s end. I am tired I am soso tired and still drunk. Time for a nap and then back to the grind.

Sometimes I feel unappreciated by the person to whom I’ve given my heart. It’s a hopeless, hollow feeling that makes me wince and bite my tongue in a feeble attempt to fend off the tears.

The depth is there—the love is there—but I miss the newness, the flutter of hope. And sometimes, it’s not clear that what I miss should even be absent.

Does being together for such a long time mean that you no longer value what you have? Does dependability replace that subtle, starry-eyed lust?

Is it petty to crave a compliment or a brief suggestion of continued interest? Am I missing the point? Is the appreciation there, beneath the surface, merely waiting to be perceived? I wish that I could sense it…I wish I knew it existed.

And, there it is again, in the back of my brain, weighing on my conscience and my heavy, frightened heart…can two people be wrong for each other, even when they are truly in love?

Today I made myself wake up at 10 am in order to get my eight-page paper turned into my professor on time. I drank copious amounts of wine and vodka the night before and woke up with a miserable hangover, wearing only a pair of briefs and an ugly tie-dye shirt. I then put on some shorts and sunglasses and hobbled over to the building, climbing four stories of stairs to put my paper in my teacher’s office. As soon as I managed to get all the way to the fourth floor I realized my paper had a typo, so I ran back to print out another copy. I could barely function and reeked of alcohol. After this paper escapade, I went back to my room and lied in bed for a few more hours. I eventually managed to go get some lunch and eat outside on the lawn with some friends. I had fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, beans, and a salad. Everything sat pretty well. Then one of our friends came and sat down by us. This boy and I are friends, but we bicker like none other. I have a big secret crush on him but nothing will ever come of it. After lunch I decided to head to the outdoor pool. I sat with three of my girl friends and lied out in the sun for a while, listening to some Enrique Iglesias and Bob Marley on my iPod. These girls are seriously beautiful and make me a little self-conscious about how I look and act. I know it’s stupid. Eventually, I got into the pool, floated around in a tube, and then did some laps. Following the pool session, I journeyed back to my dorm room, took a shower, put on a more respectable outfit and went to a picnic for the International Studies department. I ate some delicious barbecue and talked to different professors and some weird IS majors. I felt awkward and really didn’t know anyone. I did play a mad round of volleyball though. After the picnic, I went back to my room, still having a headache from my hangover, and watched the movie Atonement on my computer while doing laundry. The movie was so devastating and is still affecting me. I thought it was so crazy how a silly and insignificant letter led to the couple’s extremely dismal future. So sad. I want to be in love. I thought about going out tonight, being Friday and all, but decided to take it easy instead. I went to this weird event on campus sponsored by the non-drinking advocation group. I just ate a bunch of pizza and now feel extremely fat. I have finals next week and am thinking about watching Legally Blonde as a motivator. I’m so gay sometimes.

Part of me grows. Part of me stays the same. The bigger part, I think. I feel so much calmer tonight than I did last night. Maybe it is time, perspective, or just exhaustion. I wish I could extricate this constant and persistent thought of him. It is always present, no matter what. It isn’t even really of him because it has been there much longer than he has. Since the beginning. The hims change and get replaced but thoughts just continue. What would my mind look like without them? This year has been a turning point for so many things. I just hope that I continue to push myself and try my hardest to resist the idea that nothing can really change. Patterns have not yet been broken but that doesn’t mean they can’t be. My roommate’s dog is barking. I can’t help but feel bad for it. I don’t want to get so attached to it, but I can’t help it. Maybe I just need to embrace my ability to love things and try to make it a positive thing.