Here's another Web site idea I'm working on for my Generative Design class. In the processing of converting these to jpgs though, the quality went down and the colors are a little off. Please excuse that!

Layers upon layers upon layers...

I've been thinking a lot about layers recently and how important they are in trying to visualize different time periods or different modes of time simultaneously. I used to layer pictures on top of one another in PhotoShop for fun when I was bored just to see what would happen because I love happy "mistakes". Here are a couple I really like because the sense of movement and time passing and small little pockets of time all happening on top of one another in the same image. There's a lot packed into one image.

Does Time Really Exist?

Thanks to Tom for this link. I may have to mull it over for a few days:

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jun/in-no-time

Here's the prototype for an interactive Web piece I'm working out using Processing (processing.org) for my Generative Art + Design (http://uic.edu/~dsauter7/ad406_S07/) class this summer. It focuses on layers of time based on the three major parts of the day: morning, afternoon and night.

Designing Time

Here is a link from the AIGA website about a group of student designers who redesigned a calendar for the Wixárika people in central Mexico.

From the site, "As many Wixáritari (plural of Wixárika) understand western practices and values, they increasingly migrate to urban centers in the states of Jalisco and Nayarit to study and work, often finding their cultural traditions and practices devalued and misunderstood. This is particularly evident in issues that relate to time. In contrast to the fixed western calendar, Wixáritari's beliefs and practices are aligned with nature's continuous cycle and careful observation of natural signs. As each culture's conception of time is based on different values, tensions develop (Maria Rogal, 2006)."

Thanks to Dori Tunstall for the link.


Also, on another note, here's a revisit to an older poster I did last year: Photos of Photos. I think it's worth looking at again because they're old photos and there's a lot to study here about the nostalgia aspect of time, and the idea of subjective memory when thinking of time.

sloooooooooooowwwww

apatheticfaucet
retardedice
creepingbuglegs
dreamysnail
loiteringobscenities
phlegmaticgrass
quietmistakes
stagnantlavalamp
idlepolaroids
tardyboil
bigyawnsmalltalk
hohumhummer
tamebubblebath
lingeringfuneral
simplealgebra
chokedivorce
relaxingdeath
winddownencyclopedia
dullmemories

A few weeks ago I was out having a cigarette with my friend from work who just so happens to be a comic book artist. i was telling him about the "time" thesis idea and he began telling me about how he deals with time in terms of comic panels, and how different sizes/placement of panels can denote different speeds or passage of time. this seems like such an obvious way to think about time, but i had never really applied to graphic design before.

It wasn't until I came across this image by artist Christa Donner (I've been a big fan of the artist Christa Donner for a few years now. I think I first read about her work in Venus Magazine), that the idea of panels as a way of showing time passing made real sense to me. Isn't it gorgeous? It really reminds me of the span of a lifetime in these really short little visual bits:


Another artist that is amazing and is worth checking out is Deb Sokolow. She does these great treasure hunt type maps that allow you try travel through and make connections and find secrets. Last year she had an exhibit at the MCA featuring a map that involved pirate ships and Mayor Daley and all kinds of kooky stuff. This stuff has been in the back of my mind as an inspiration for thesis stuff, but I'm not quite sure what the exact connection is yet. I like the idea of being able to travel around a page, through space and time, etc.

Speaking of movement and time not being able to exist without it, here are some short films that have been inspiring me lately:

Marcel Duchamp and John Cage

Duchamp is one of the big reasons I got interested in time in the first place. I took a class last year on the history of animation and we watched a few clips featuring his rotoscopes. A big chunk of my final paper for the class was about how Duchamp sought to create movement and a sense of time through his films and paintings, especially in his most famous painting, Nude Descending a Staircase. This was very early Cubist experimentation which paints a woman from different points of view and different points in time/space as she descends a staircase.



Here's another (sort of crappy quality) video montage of the work of Eadward Muybridge, who was the inventor of the zoopraxiscope, a precursor to modern day cinema. He was a photographer who compiled his image to make the first frame by frame films.


Finally, here's part 2 of a gorgeous film made by Norman McLaren. This is exactly what I'm trying to achieve with layers of image and information, and being able to "concretize" each second of time in a simple movement. This is my favorite video so far. Enjoy

I found this image when I was looking through Flickr and I did a keyword search of the word "time" just to see what would come up. I like this image because it contains different levels of information. It contains the past and the present. Right now I'm just trying to build up a sort of visual library of things that hit me on a very intuitive level (which is my favorite way to work) about ideas of time. This one really inspires me because it has so much to do with movement and I've come to realize that you can't really talk about time without movement. Time does not exist without space, or in a vacuum. It's subject to outside influences and factors just like everything else in the world.

After looking at this photo, I started thinking about layers of information and layers of images when trying to visualize time. Ideally, you're putting two, three or more layer of information down on the page when you try and visualize time--the past, present and future--or different versions of the future--or a stream of consciousness recollection of the past, something like that. It's never a flat, cut and dry image. This picture of the rear view window got me thinking about different ways I could achieve this idea. Mirrors are perfect for it I think.

The past: picture of a person walking down a long road, street, etc. holding a mirror at their back so that it reflects the path they have just traveled.

The present: picture of a person looking directly into a mirror

The future: picture of a person holding a mirror in front of them so that it reflects the path that they are about to travel

Or maybe it's something like this picture:

and less of a defined path and more of a circular one (sorry, I found this image on Flickr as well and cannot find who it is attributed to. I did not take either of these, just to clarify)

So, some of you may know this (and others may not) but I've decided to do my MFA design thesis on the idea of objective and subjective time. It's still very much a nebulous mess right now but what I'm leaning towards is trying to figure out ways to visualize time. This idea was very much inspired by Edward Tufte and especially The Quantitative Display of Visual Information but to go beyond that data-visualizing stuff (which is fascinating but can get a little dry) I wanted to introduce the idea of subjective notions of time, or the way time feels, in an attempt to visualize a more realistic or more human idea of the feeling of time, rather than the numbers of time.

I've done some research and really at this point, I'm just trying to organize everything I've found. The sources run the gamut from anthropological essays, novels, images, websites, and case studies. I think I'm going to use this blog as a way to organize my sources and discuss any thoughts I have and ask for feedback. So if anyone is interested in this type of discussion, let me know. It would really help me out a lot. Thanks!

This is one of the first web sites I've come across in my research. It's a website called Icastic where designers asked people to sketch on a piece of paper their own visualizations of time. I wish I had thought of this! Here are some of my favorites:

A String of Lies
It wasn’t me.I fell asleep.I was on the other line.My car wouldn’t start.I told a group of girls in college that I did a shot of booze with River Phoenix.Mom, I’m gonna sleep over with Kim tonight.Oh, I fell asleep.I weigh 120 pounds.I tell people at Starbucks my name is Bob when I order my coffee.I am sick today.I don’t care about him anymore. I didn’t use my credit card, I saved for it.I would never get married in Vegas. I used to pencil in my eyebrows.I often ask people for directions and as they are telling me I don’t listen and then when they finish speaking I say, “I got it.” I’ve been telling people for over a decade that I’m Jewish.I prank called an old woman and pretended to be her grandson.Every time I call in sick for work, it’s because I have a hangover.After 14 years, my mom still doesn’t know I smoke.I once skipped school to buy pot.I used to tell people I hated Nirvana.My best friend wanted us to dress up as Milli Vanilli for Halloween and I was too embarrassed so I told her I lost my wig.I used to go around parties telling people Ronald Reagan had just died.I peed my pants and told everyone I had spilled lemonade on myself.I used to pencil in my eyebrows.I lied about my weight on my driver’s license.

nuevo projecto

snowy morning

Best Things of 2006 (in no particular order)



the pumps. my bestest friends in the world. i love making stuff with you guys and i don't think i could live without our "circle times." it amazes me how patient you all are listening to me bitch about the same things over and over and over again, yet you never tire of it and your advice is always right on.


grad school. just when i was neck-deep in my quarter life crisis, i started grad school at uic and a whole new world opened up to me. i can say without any doubt at all that this is the best thing i've ever done. i've met 12 other interesting, funny, motivated, supportive people and it's wonderful company to be in. and don't even get me started on the professors.


my ipod on shuffle. a lot of people talk shit about shuffle but i'm here to say it's music at its best. i'm really into randomness and chance occurences and the shuff never disappoints.

my most played songs. she smiled sweetly by the rolling stones, tell him that i love him by the shangri-las, love is the drug by roxy music, pizza party by johnny and the limelites, kites are fun by the free design, looking for a road by baby teeth, heart love by albert ayler, history lesson part 2 by the minutemen


going iceskating with my 8-year old sister over christmas. i haven't been ice skating in 10 years or more but it was the epitome of freedom and feelin' young. very underappreciated by the older, urban, bargoing set. why don't we all just get together and skate on a friday night? whaddya say?


driving to boston for thanksgiving with the big b. i know we bickered about directions and got lost every time we left the house pretty much, but it was awesome showing him where i came from and experiencing his innocent awe and brand new eyes. it was like seeing boston again for the first time.


the freeeks reunion shows at o'briens and the august spies house. best weekend of my year by far. a bunch of drunk 20-somethings jumping around, trying to relive our teenage years...and we succeeded pretty well. lots of smiles, hugs, laughing, reminding me that we're still pretty young despite all the bullshit.


reading "in cold blood" for the first time. you can never get that experience twice. wonderful, captivating book. reading "henry and june" for the first time. if that doesn't make you feel alive, i don't know what will.

favorite movies (not all released this year). the legend of leigh bowery, all the cool shit i saw in my animation class: stan brakhage, jan svankmajer, marcel duchamp, fischinger, lye, that one russian dude whose name i can't remember, a streetcar named desire (marlon brando was the sexiest man alive in his prime), william eggleston documentary, grey gardens, inside deep throat, we jam econo, the squid and the whale, umbrellas of cherbourg

and everything else i forgot. sorry, thought i would remember more! anyone want to throw some more at me i didn't include?

bad medicine

Yay, my job took away my health insurance today. So I'm gonna go out and buy something pretty.

I also have a lot to update about Xmas. Maybe tomorrow. 'Til then. Mwah.

The Fruits of My Labor, or School's Out Forever (but really just a month)

Cut + Paste Poems

I haven't really been that interested in poetry since high school, mostly because I read so much of it then that I just burnt out on it. And now, I'm much much more interested in visual things rather than written ones.

But despite all that, sometimes I get bored and go through my diary and randomly pick groups of words of put them together to see what happens. I think this is a more visual way of writing because it forces/slams ideas together in really unexpected ways. This is the most exciting thing about art/writing to me really, is to smash things together and either go with what's created and flesh it out or abandon it completely. It's all about free association.

Here's some, I guess you could call them poems, but more like word smashes taken from my diary. See if you can figure out my life! Ha, I can't even do that...
I took liberties with a couple of them, but only to smooth out the narrative part of it.

He sat and waited for it to ring again
and opened the window a crack, only enough
and put on his father's old, moth-eaten peacoat
and thought of the words sensuality, enamored, crimson, aorta, orgasm, menaige-a-trois
*

Not that I don't want to talk to him,
I just feel like I don't

*

I want to sleep when I want to and read and drink tea,
Walk up a steep, long, green hill as part of the procession and
buy a bunch of summer dresses


whenever i get jealous of anyone i have to stop myself
because everything is green

not hide behind fetish or porn or any of that.
that's boring.
It is too self-indulgent and dull.
i want to make something visual that mixes...
it's numbing to even think about

All I really want is peace and quiet,
To dress in beautiful evening gowns.
Everyone gets really worn from the climb.

here's a new thing i made for my friend (ex-boyfriend) john. i love drawing birds.

The Farnsworth House

Yesterday, I went on a field trip with my fellow MFA-ers to Plano, Illinois to visit the Mies van der Rohe-designed Farnsworth House. You have to visit to get the full effect but I just wanted to share how beautiful the fall colors were up against the stark white of the house.

Despite the rain, it really was a great day and I'm glad I got to see such a cool piece of architecture/history in the flesh (errr, in the steel).

Here's some pics from the Web site. I would have taken my own but I'm lazy and didn't want to lug my camera around all day. If you have a car, just visit. It's only an hour and a half away and well worth the trip.

The Color of Chicago

I feel like I haven't posted in ages, so here's something. Not terribly exciting, just something I've been working on for school. I had to come up with a color pallette for Chicago for a poster project, so I decided to create one based on a bunch of rocks I found on Lake Michigan. I know it's not urban enough, but it was just an experiment and I'm obsessed with these rocks lately. I just wanted to try it out and see what happened. I made another one with more traditional colors, but I like this one better...



Here's the more traditional one, based mostly on lakefront colors.

Would ya like some more cheesy pattycakes, then?

Whoa! Check out these new awesome Victorian masks I found at the party store on Western yesterday. They were only $2 each. I am so in love with masks. I want to start a collection. I love how photographing people with masks on adds this whole new complex dimension to their personalities. They still look like themselves but another version, a slightly off version, cartoonish. B and had to drop off our (late!) rent check at the realty office in Roscoe Village and while we were waiting for the bus, B suggested we run over to the party store to look for costumes for our new wacky band. Brian found this awesome green jacket with gold lame $$$$ signs all over it but sadly, it was $40 (boohoo). It looked like something Rodney Dangerfield would wear if he was working in a casino. I told Brian I'd try to make him one for a lot cheaper, so that's my next project.

But back to the masks...we went back to the bus stop and tried on our masks and immediately started talking like little british schoolchildren with cockney accents. I even came up with a new cockney word for pizza (according to schoolchildren, of course), cheesy pattycakes! Haha, endless amusement.

Here's some mask pics. See what I mean about the weird extra dimension the mask adds to the portrait?

first ever Pumps set list...

hands hands hands hands hands hands hands hands hands hands

More on the Belles Lettres Project

So the more research I do on this, the more interesting it gets. I went to the library yesterday and found literally 25 or more sources to research on the topic. I'm breaking it down into some different categories:

The history of letter writing
The history of mail art
Letter writing as a teaching/social tool
Images of Mail art
Images of my own/friends personal letters
Interviews with friends/others and their firsthand relationships with letters

This may seem like a lot, but it's better to have too much than too little. Eventually, I'll pare all this down to the bare essentials and make a rad book. Maybe I can even do the typesetting on the letterpress (or is that a little too ambitious?) Remains to be seen, I suppose.

Life right now is pretty much school, school, school, drool. But it's the best thing that has happened to me since...well, ever, I guess. You might think I'm exaggerating but really, I've never felt so totally immersed in schoolwork and creating before. It's wonderful.

Oh yeah, if anyone has any letter stories/cool images, hit me up. And if you don't now, expect and e-mail/survey/somethingsomething from me in the near future.

Belles Lettres

To Whom It May Concern,
Anyone interested in this? I'm thinking of making a zine for one of my design classes called Belles Lettres involving letter writing--kind of a spin-off of that Letters I Never Sent idea I had a few months ago. I've been really interested in the ways letters look, especially old ones and was thinking of putting something together that combines some really cool pictures of letters. I also need to interview people about their letter writing experiences and take pictures of their letters (all anonymous of course). Would anyone be interested in helping me with this?

Forever Your Most Humble Servant,
Bebe Gun


Here's my proposal for my teacher:
My project will address the issue of letter writing, and specifically the visual nature of it. My format will be a ‘zine exploring how people visually express themselves when writing letters. It will be a parallel study between the visual nature of the letters and my interviewees personal connection with letter making. My main question here is: “How is letter writing a unique form of communication in comparison with speaking, or any other form of communication?”
My assumption is that letter writing as a form of expression has become more obsolete since the advent of the Internet and e-mailing, and I’m hoping to research more about people’s relationships to letters they have written in the past, if they still write letters, ways they have adorned their letters, and if they store their letters as special keepsakes—basically, what their relationships to their old letters are.
I plan to interview a wide range of people about their personal experiences with writing letters, receiving letters, saving them as keepsakes, etc. I also plan on taking a lot of photos of letters to convey their unique visual nature.

devil boy


angel boy

Here's some more doodles I did...

Red Heart Lady



Blue Heart

white cat/red cat/black cat




My dream two nights ago...

I was stuck in the middle of a brawl between a white cat, a red cat and a black cat. They were screeching and sratching and I just kept trying to push them away and not get scratched. I attribute it to the fact that we slept with our windows open and our neighbor's cat must be in heat, because it wails all night long.

Today I splurged on new school/fall clothes. I got some stuff I really needed (good fitting jeans) but also bought a couple of too-cute-to-pass-up dresses and a pair of yellow shoes (yellow shoes are replacing my obsession with red shoes lately). I always feel guilty when I spend money on clothes, or money on anything really when I should be saving or spending it on school stuff but I'm too weak to say no. I've actually been really good all summer long about money, so I decided to treat myself.

Grad school starts on Monday. I'm apprehensive and have even had a few weird dreams about class--showing up late, getting lost, being in the wrong class--but for the most part, I'm so ready for it and can't wait to get my fingers dirty, so to speak. This will mean, sadly, that my blog posting will be more scarce but hopefully I'll have a lot more to say when I do post and might even be able to share some of my projects now and again. So if you're not a design nerd (which I'm sure to become) sorry!

Ma Vie en Vert








Hello. Long time, no write. Apologies. B and I are in the process of painting our bedroom an deep, rich emerald green color. At first, I was a little apprehensive about such a bold color but so far, it looks great. It reminds me of the color of a private library with old wooden furniture and lush oil paintings with ornate golden frames. I have a few gold frames I picked up at the thrift store, so I'm on a search to find the perfect pictures/paintings to go inside them to top off our decor. Check out this pic of the Green Room in the White House. I had no idea they even had a green room. Our room is a little darker green than this, more the color of grass.




This is what I'm picturing for our bedroom (a lot more subdued and wholly supplied by the thrift store, of course).

We were going to get our paint/supplies at Home Depot like the rest of the world, but instead we went to this really old, cluttered hardware shop across the street on Western Ave. It was stuffed full of tools, paint, boxes and boxes of whoknowswhat stacked willy-nilly everywhere. I even saw a random red tea kettle tossed on its side in a pile of junk. The owner had to be at least 85 and has probably been working there for 40 years or more. They didn't have a huge selection of paint but he gave us a pretty good deal on rollers, paint, tarps, etc. It was sort of like that scene in Harry Potter when he goes into that magician's shop for his magic wand and gets lost in a heap of magic junk--just like that except it was just the regular kind of junk, none of it magic (I don't think).

B suggested that when the winter comes and we can't find the tiniest speck of green anywhere in the city, our bedroom will be like a spring pasture, bursting with green. How lovely!

I am obsessed with color. Lately I've been thinking what a cool job it would be to just be an expert on color. Can you do that? I read this book over the winter called Color: A Natural History of the Palette. It's about the history of natural pigments and their origins. It also goes into the history of trade and the societal reprucussions of finding and producing these pigments for artists. Some colors were so rare that artists would purposely not use them in their paintings, and others were so poisonous that artists would get ill or even die from using them. Still others were made from beetles, minerals, saffron, and complex boiling practices.

LITMUS TEST
steak silkwaterfall blue balls
sunny bloodocean popsicle
corpuscle toenailsmoon lips
bittersweet miscarriagevelvet veins
bloodshot wineshady factory worker
brick blushsmutty eyeball
cardinal licoricewicked bruise
cherry fleshazure peacoat
beef needlecobalt monkeybite
crimson annienavy pants
sore point heartroyal drink
flaming pimplesthe deep dead
flushed gutsdignified black eye
fuchsia tamponboo-boo dungarees
garnet hot dogsmopey superman
glowing rosejoyless blemish
ruby soresultramarine sea
terra cotta meatballgloomy soap
copper pennytranslucent skin




Yup, you guessed it. Today's word is litmus. I'm thinking of going back and making beefedup vignettes out of all of these word smash-ups. I just love throwing words together to create new ideas. Maybe tomorrow they'll all get fleshedout.

a boy and a girl


and a bottle of wine

Broken hearts, bones and homes

Some really good friends of mine had a fire in their apartment yesterday morning and lost everything, even their cat Graffin. Luckily, neither of them were hurt. They've been going through some really hard times recently (actually, I lot of my friends have). My other friend Lady M hit by a car on her bike this weekend. She's a bit banged up, but OK too. Just makes you realize how breakable everything is--our bodies, homes, pets, belongings, relationships, lives. I don't want to get too heavy but it's been on my mind all day. If you could keep all of them in your thoughts or (if you pray) prayers, it would be much appreciated.

When I was 12, the apartment my family lived in had a fire and we lost a lot, mostly to water rather than fire damage from the hoses. We were jolted out of sleep by the sound of neighbors banging at our doors and screaming for us to get out (my brother had a friend spending the night, unfortunate for him). I ignored the screaming for awhile, drifting in and out of sleep, assuming it was the neighbors fighting or some drunk disturbance in the neighborhood). My mom's boyfriend rushed into my room and told me to get out. We ran out the door so fast that I didn't even have time to grab anything or register what was really happening. As soon as I hit the street and looked back at my house, it all hit me at once and I started crying (I never cried in front of my family after the age of 10 or so, so it was very awkward). I cried for about two minutes and then became numb and it felt like I was outside of myself in a way, like a movie was being shot about my life and my family.

My mom held on to my shoulder and tried to calm me but I'm sure she was just as shaken as I was. We spent the rest of the night at the neighbor woman's house. She gave my brother and I snacks and put on Lady and the Tramp to distract us, but it didn't really work. The next morning, we hopped in the car and headed over to my grandmother's house and declared we were moving in. Two of my aunts still lived at home at that point, so there were 8 people and a dog living together on good old Newburg St. My brother and I spent all that Sunday jumping on my grandmother's bed and pretending to be superheroes, hoping, hoping that my mom and her boyfriend wouldn't make us go to school on Monday. They did anyway.

This was at the height of puberty for me and being without my favorite clothes, makeup and hair spray was devastating (sorry, all 12 year olds are assholes). Later on in the week, we went back to the apartment to salvage anything we could. All of the mattresses were soaked and sagging from hose water and everything in the place stunk of stale smoke and soot--a smell I'll never forget, it's inseparable from my memories of this time. The Red Cross told us specifically not to use any makeup we found in the house, as it was contaminated with smoke, but I pocketed a couple of my favorites anyway (kiwi strawberry and butterscotch lip gloss that I couldn't live without).

And we were all fine. Everyone in the building was fine. The Russian family that lived upstairs who were our landlords rebuilt the place and got new tenants and we all moved on, relatively unscathed--except for the constant feeling I have that keeps telling me nothing is permanent and to never get too comfortable. But that feeling will pass. Right, guys??? Right???

On Friday, strangely enough, I was feeling very uninspired (well, that's not strange but what I'm about to tell you) and I decided to go back to the ol' dictionary and pick a word. The word I picked was Joshua, no lyin'. I happen to have a friend named Joshua who lives right down the street from me and also works with me. I decided to just throw five words at Josh (he's a creative fellow) and see what he comes up with. His five words were: anti-art, invention, support, unsound and lethal gene. Here's the result of this madness. Thanks to Joshua, friend and neighbor.

p.s. the dictionary definition of Joshua was 1. the divinely commissioned successor of moses and military leader of the israelites during the conquest of canaan according to the account in the book of joshua. 2. a mainly narrative book of canonical jewish and christian scripture--in case you were curious.

It's not that I am anti-art per se. It's just that so much art these days buys into the philosophy of postmodernism which is an invention of academic elites and their followers who look to make a name for themselves by pure word play, contradictory and unsound theories, and a mess of writing that lends itself to nothing but the support of their own kind with the complete neglect of class struggle or any kind of praxis that could help foster change in the capitalist world. With that said, postmodern art is usually as delusional as postmodern theory (are they not one and the same?) and thus creates a world within a world that is only known to those within this elitist world which rests like storm clouds above mankind. Therefore I support real art, real theory and real practice that has the aim of speaking to the people and not raining/reigning above them. And, thus, I must declare that the lethal gene of the 21st century is undoubtedly postmodernism. If the likes of Foccault and Derrida were still around I would kick them in the balls. Or as Marx used to say, "bash their ears in." My name is Joshua and I am an independent socialist. Thank you for your time.

I've been really slacking on the original intent of this blog, to pick a word and riff on it. On Friday, I picked the word toposphere. Jeez. I'm not really sure what to say about that. It's about the earth's atmosphere, which honestly, I haven't really given much thought. Maybe I should. Maybe we should all think more about what's intangible--invisible things and ideas-- like breathing, air and smoke or love, shelter and friendship (equally as invisible).



This Place Has Atmosphere or Taking Notice of the Invisible

Breathing/ Love
Does this ever happen to any of you? Right before you go to sleep, you become so aware of your own breathing that you can't fall asleep? You stay up counting your breaths and feeling air moving in and out of your chest. This also happens to me a lot when I'm sleeping with another person. I become super aware of my breaths in and their breaths out and the rhythm it creates. Sometimes the rhythm is perfect and makes you feel whole and other times it's a little off and both of you are trying to keep up with each other, or you're both really self-concious about it and make efforts to not breath in and out at the same time because it unites you in a way you're not comfortable with. Then it feels like there's no separation between the two of you at all.

Air/Shelter
There was a blackout just on our side of the street that lasted about four hours. B and I are so used to our central air, we almost take it for granted (but not quite). No other apartment of mine has had central air and it's still a luxury to me. As soon as everything buzzed off last night, B and I hoofed on over to Thai Village and scarfed down some Noodle Kee Mow and Thai Iced Teas. We came back to the apartment and it was pitch black and the air was blanket thick and B was getting uptight about it. I tried to make him relax and just enjoy it. I lit some candles and opened up all the windows and we laid on the couch together taking in the quietness and watching the lights from the candles dance all over the apartment and each other's faces.

Some people are frightened by blackouts but I've always loved them. They are a reason to do something you don't normally do. They are a reason to be quiet or tell stories or light candles and watch them flicker, get out the Ouija board, slow down, have hot sweaty sex, sit outside and drink wine, play hide and seek, get naked and eat an ice cream cone, or make up songs about the dark on your guitar. I wish we had blackouts more often.

Smoke/Friendship
I smoked a whole pack on Friday night. Had to work a party for my job at this gallery in Lakeview. There wasn't very much to eat, so I started drinking instead. I only really had to two glasses of wine, but it was enough to get me going. After the party, the gallery owner locked the doors and let us all smoke indoors and drink wine with him. He had a grand piano and we sat and laughed and listened as everyone (except me, I ain't no player really) took turns playing for us. I talked a lot my friend K about life and about taking chances and doing things that make you feel happy. I tried to convince him to try out for my band.

B was playing a show with the Functional Blackouts at the Big Horse, so after my last puff, I hopped into a cab and jetted on over there minutes before the show started. Drank two beers, ran into my friend TT and did a show of Jaeger with her, told my friend E she had the cutest voice ever and didn't feel embarrassed by saying it at all. Watched B's band, finished off about 7 smokes during it, jumped up and down and yelled ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-kamikaze along with the crowd and felt good. After B played, he was dripping sweat. Grabbed him anyway and kisskisskissed him and said good job. Had to jet again to a birthday party down the street so said byebyebaby and hopped into another cab over there. Was especially chatty with the cabbie (so unlike me) but had had some beers and was feeling particularly brave. Got to the party, saw friends, danced to the Monkees, sang songs with John H, lost an earring somewhere in the mix, pretended I was a Born-Again Christian while JP took pictures of it (don't I look just like one?). Finished off the pack.

B came over with friends post-show and brought the Sneaky Pinks with him. Sang "ohyeahohyeahohyeahohyeahohyeahoyeahohyeah" to them. Did a shot of seagrams with B. Made up a rap about Sydney and how she donated me a kidney. Listened to Mac (decked out in awesome short shorts) tell a story about the Batman traction holes in his legs. Got honorably (or horribly?) discharged from the party and started a caravan over to my place. Drank a beer on the way. Had R and R roll one of their cigarettes for me because I was out, but it fell apart on me. Woops. Declared to everyone that it was now OK to smoke in my apartment and then tried bumming smokes off of everyone there. Too bad. No one really had any. Shit outta luck for the rest of the night so just kept drinking instead. Finally fell alseep after making out with B for an hour or so, which ended in incoherent mumbling and somesuch kookiness. Sleep sleep sleep.

The Big B Has Landed

Big B is back and yesterday we went to the Newberry Library Book Fair. I got 6 sweet books for $33.

The Book of Kells: And Illustrated Introduction
Magritte
William Blake
Book of rare Art Nouveau posters
He Said, She Said
and an another illustrated book about birds to add to my collection

And B got Gargantua and Pantagrue

Nothing quite like good, cheap books. I've been wanting to start a good art book collection for awhile now and I have 5 new ones to add to the collection, so I'm really bulking it up. Think I'll need a new bookshelf soon. B's books pretty much take over 3 bookcases we have in the living room and my books are all in my spare room on a little built in wall shelf. When I moved to Chicago, we had very limited space in the car and I was only able to bring my most favorite books with me (which was only about a quarter of them) and leave the rest at my mom's. Over the past 5 years of living here, I've acquired a good number of new books but it's nothing looking my old collection, which is either collecting dust in her basement or has been donated to a library somewhere (boohoo).

birds of a feather

a girl and her guitar

A Day of Many Penises

Today I had the day off from work, so I treated myself to an art day.
My doctor has been an avid art collector since the age of 14 and today she gave me an invitation to an art show she curated at the Loyola University Museum of Art. It's called "The Gods as We Shape Them". It's her personal collection of ancient and modern artifacts from cultures all over the world and includes likenesses of deities and gods, objects used in rituals, icons and attempts of different cultures to represent sprituality concretely. Check it out here. It's free on Tuesdays or if you have a student ID, or $6 every other day.

The three things I was most drawn to in this exhibit were firstly, a wooden sculpture of a Mexican mermaid hanging from the ceiling. Accompanying the sculpture was a pamphlet on the history of mermaids as spiritual icons across cultures and the history of how that iconography was carried from culture to culture through water trade routes over hundreds of years.

There was also a whole section of a room devoted to the use of devil imagery in Mexican folkloric culture. Many depictions were of devils practicing everyday tasks of humans. One favorite was the ceramic statues of a posse of devils "hanging out" together and getting drunk, but the coolest one by far was the ceramic sculpture of two devils dressed in doctor's clothing performing surgery.

Last, but certainly not least (that's for sure), was the collection of wooden phalluses. There were about 10 of them in total and they came from all different regions throughout the world--just big wooden penises that looked like large tree stumps with anatomically correct penis heads on top of them.

Next to the garden of pee-pees stood a carved wooden tree, and all of its branches were penises. It was great.

Maybe it's because my boyfriend has been out of town for a week and a half and I miss him terribly and his....ahem, well, you know...but I just really immensely enjoyed this part of the exhibit (tee hee).

And if you thought that was enough cheekiness for the day, oh no, kids. There's more.

Since the LUMA is a hop, skip and a jump away from the MCA, I decided to keep searching. And guess what I found? Yup, you guessed it, more penises. I stumbled into a photo exhibit by the amazing Woflgang Tillmans. He had a huge amount of work hung and some of his photos were blown up to 30x30 or more and others were small 3x5 snapshots. He even had a portrait of the modern day Penis King himself (and I mean that in a good way, of course) the man, the icon: MORRISSEY.

The photos that really stood out (and again, maybe I just need to get laid) were the nudes. He had this great series of couples in the woods without any pants on and the female in the couple would be holding her lover's penis in her hand in a very intimate and almost nonchalant kind of way. Not nonchalant in a way that she didn't care, nonchalant in a way that she was extremely comfortable and very familiar with it.

I know my words aren't doing his photos justice and I can't really find that many good images on google either. Here's one:
I like this one

Enjoy!

Today's word is mature.
The older I get, the less mature I want to be. And I don't mean that in a naive, punk rock sort of way. Maturity is for the birds (tweet tweet) and apparently my sub-conscious thinks so too.

What follows is a little tongue-in-cheek but also something that has been on my mind a lot in the past year: MARRIAGE AND BABIES. Yowsa. If that doesn't scare you, I don't know what will. Here's a list of dreams I've had in the past year involving both. Just try and pick these apart, you armchair shrinks!!!


Red is the Color of Love and Babies

• I had just rented my own studio apartment. It was really big and everything was connected in one big room, loft style. I wasn’t completely moved in yet, as there were still piles of someone else’s old junk and a whole “library” room of their old books stacked around. While B and I were in bed, I commented on how great it was that the kitchen and the bedroom were in the same room because now we could have breakfast in bed all the time and I could serve him hot coffee whenever he wanted it. He responded, “You are the cutest and most generous girl I’ve ever met.” Then we had sex. We got up afterward to go to the bathroom, fix our clothes and whatnot and came back to the bed to find it already made (and I never make my bed). I check in the messy “library” room and find a tiny little girl who looks like a baby but has graying hair. She's really frail and brittle, almost like she’s made of dust or going to break. She has a scabby gray dog by her side. I realize they are ghosts haunting my new place.

• My brother and I were at a public event in a hall, like a craft show of sorts. I had S (my sister) with me, or it was more like a little boy who was supposed to represent S. He was dressed in white, which denoted special treatment from others or an extra ability or something. With all the shuffling about, I lost the S-boy in the crowd and became frantic. The bulk of the dream was spent with me spastically running about and screaming the little boy's name over and over again. We went outside and into a neighborhood, which coincidentally was Ma's (my grandmother) old neighborhood in Roslindale, mixed with some sort of hilly, rural farm type of area. Whenever I asked someone if they had seen the little boy, I told them to report him back to Ma's old house. I had a vision that this little boy was standing in the middle of a hilly field getting harassed and pushed around by a group of older bullies. The dream ended with me calling 9-1-1 and screaming hopelessly into the phone. I never found the little boy.

• I was taking care of a premature baby. It was tiny-tiny-tiny, like the size of my hand. I took it swimming in a pool. Its head went under and it couldn't breathe for a couple minutes. The baby turned blue and green and stopped breathing altogether. I took it out of the water and tried to do CPR. Every time I blew into the baby's mouth, its head would turn pink and inflate a little, but it never started breathing again.

• I was at work and had to take care of a baby mouse that was really really small and fragile. Y gave me a little wooden box to put the mouse in so it wouldn't run all over the office. I went out to lunch or something and left the mouse. I came back and it was dead

• I was with the girls in my band and we were all dressed in beautiful evening gowns. We stumbled upon this new neighborhood in Chicago that was really affluent and beautiful. We went into this banquet hall type place with gorgeous hardwood and lush carpets. The architecture was beautiful and very old and ornate. The building was one long, long hallway that we kept walking through, moving into different rooms, each more beautiful than the next. A member of the staff came by and commented on the popularity of weddings at this place and I inquired about the cost of such a wedding.
  
  We eventually reached the end of the long hallway and stepped outside. There was a huge green hill and in the distance I spotted some people and what looked like a funeral procession on the hill. I pointed and said, "Look, it's a funeral" and L said, "No actually, it's a wedding procession." What was peculiar about the procession was that all of the members of the party had to walk up a steep, long, green hill as part of the procession. Everyone was really worn from the climb.

• It was my wedding day and I lost my dress and was hiding naked behind bush, looking for anything I could cover myself up with.
  

• It was my wedding day and our cake was the biggest one I had ever seen and was made out of chocolate and peanut butter. Big B and I both grabbed huge chunks of it and started throwing it at each other and smearing it on our faces and laughing.
  

images of images

OK, sorry. I've been on a picture kick lately. I have one more installment for the word image today. It's images of images, pictures of pictures. I'm getting all meta on you. Sorry, you all might think this is really boring but I'm really having fun looking through my old stuff and it really makes you realize what you find "important" and how some pieces of paper are thrown away and others are guarded like heirlooms.

letter images

Today's word is image. To start y'all off, I'm gonna link to a bunch of art I've been really into lately. I've found most of this stuff from reading other blogs. Hopefully looking at this stuff inspires you like it inspires me. I'll be back with a story or a little something tomorrow most likely. I know promises, promises (sigh).

Charles Harper here, here and here

Amy Cutler (Oh, man. She is fantastic) here, here, here, and here

The Black Apple here, here, here


And Sabrina Ward Harrison, check out her site here

BAD BLOGGER! BAD BLOGGER! SO SO SO SO BAD!

Sorry, I've been really shirking my blogging repsonsiblities. I've actually been pretty busy at work lately and haven't had time to wander too much.
Recap of the past week: Last Thursday The Big B and I went to dinner with his parents. They were only in town for one night. They are always so refreshingly nice and welcoming to me, and they love to play games. We played this awesome game with them in the hotel called The Name Game. It was great. Friday night I stayed in with the b-fri and ordered Chinese food and Saturday I went to the breakfast and then the beach with Lady M. It felt so great to be in the sun (but I did get a little burnt, ouch). Saturday night we had a little last minute get-together at our apartment as a going away party for the Big B (he's away on tour for 2 weeks). It was sad to see him go but I'm actually doing pretty well on my own and have been surprisingly busy.

Last night I went to the Gene Siskel Film Center and saw a great documentary called Stolen (I would link here, but I'm lazy today. Google it, fools). It was about this art heist in Boston at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (which is a gorgeous museum if you ever get the chance to go) about 10 years ago where some priceless Vermeers (seen in the pic above) and Rembrandts were stolen, and the theives have yet to be caught. Some theories point to a couple famous Boston area art theives and another theory is that it was connected to Whitey Bulger and the IRA. If you don't know who Whitey Bulger is (I know all my Boston friends do and my Chicago friend Bryan H. definitely does too) look him up. He was basically THE premier Irish crime boss in Boston for years. He's wanted by the FBI for 18 murders and suspected in about 80. He went missing a few years ago and nobody will say where he is. He's very well protected in the city.

On another note, I'm going to see Journey tonight! Woo-woo! It's ridiculous that we're going, but I'm really looking forward to it. I mean, when's the last time I went to an actual concert? And we have lawn seats. Perfect. So in honor of that and because I'm a big sleepyhead today, I'm going to post something I wrote in my journal about the last time I saw Journey 2 years ago in Rockford, IL. Enjoy, pals.

7/7/04
Went to Rockford, saw Journey, got drunk, screamed at the lead singer and told him to take off his pants. Stood next to a biker dude and his girlfriend. She had fake nails. They stood in an embrace for the entire show. After show, hopped over a security fence, hid in the bushes by the tour buses, got shooed away by a security guard. Went over by the tour buses behind a fence, ripped down the plastic blocking the view. Met a woman who owns a bottle of Evian water that Steve Perry drank out of ten years ago. Shook hands with the drummer and got the lead singer's (not Steve Perry, new guy, Steve Aguieri) autograph. Got stuck in the parking lot for awhile trying to get out after the show and really, really had to pee. Jumped out of the car and found the perfect spot in some bushes.

After Journey went to a shitty metal club in Rockford called Elixir. It was a "battle of the bands." Ha, I haven't been to one of those since the days of Xaverian High School with E when we tried to pick up (or just ogle) metal boys. The bands were awwww-ful, but I was drunk and got up and started to dance by the stage. The bass player had a cordless bass and jumped down from the stage to play "at" us. I couldn't stop laughing. 21 year old lost suburban kids moshed all around us.

Drove to Denny's after the bar closed and inhaled a Moons Over My Hammy without the Hammy and some fries. Some local guy walked by our table and saw us giggling about something so he asked us if we wanted to hear a joke. Sure. "What's pink and smells like pussy?" "Salmon!" L yelled out. No. The guy stuck out his tongue. That was the punchline of the joke. His tongue smells like pussy. Ah, the wit. Somehow this fits in perfectly with my Rockford experience.

Boy, was I stupid as a high school freshman and so dour about everything. This will be humbling.

Letter I Never Sent #2

******,
Hello! Are you having fun? I hope so because I'm not. I feel like shit and my nose is running oceans of slimy snot. Yuck. You see what you did? You made me sick, you jerk, and I'm stuck in school. Yikes! I asked my mom if I could stay home but she said no. That sucks.

I'm starving to death. My stupid stomach is grooooooowling again.

So do you miss *****? I miss *****. I haven't seen him in a week for chrissake. He lives down the street too! God.
And now I'm sick so I can't kiss him or anything. What a drag.

Well, it is last period and I am in the dumb library. I have to take the bus home. Shit. Oh well. You missed the fire drill we had today. It was pretty stupid though. I wanna go to sleep. I think I'll just daydream about *****. That sounds like fun. Right?

Anyway, guess what?

SHE FOUND THE BEEBEES! HAHAHAHAHA!
BYE BYE. BE BE. YOU LOVE *****! I LOVE *****! SCABIES BABIES RULE!

Two posts in one day. Woo-woo. I'm on fire. I'm going to do something a little different today and interrupt the regularly scheduled picking-a-word-from-the-dictionary thing. I had this idea for a zine a long time ago that never came to fruition mostly because I'm lazy and also because I wasn't sure if there would be much interest in it. See, I used to have this really bad habit of writing letters to people and then never sending them. I wanted to start a zine called "Letters I Never Sent" and recruit other people to include their letters as well (all anonymously, of course). With the advent of e-mail, this problem has kind of dwindled away but I still think a lot about letters I have gotten from people, letters I have sent but mostly, the ones that never made it. I have a box in my closet full of letters, birthday cards, love notes, show fliers, etc. In that box are about 5 or 6 wingless letters just sitting there. I'm going to post them all in the next week. I wrote this one awhile back. Don't worry, they're not all love letters.

Letter I Never Sent #1

Dear ****,
You said you don’t remember anything you said or did the other night at ******* so I’m not really sure how to go about asking this. But I think you said you loved me, and you were probably drunk so you probably don’t remember saying it or you do remember and wish it never happened and that you could take it back. Or maybe I just misheard you…or maybe you just meant that you really like me a lot. I’m not really sure. So if you want to take it back, go ahead. I know you tend to be a lot more affectionate with me when you get drunk and you may not feel the same way when sober. That’s understandable. I just really want to clear this up so that I don’t make an ass out of myself or anything.

It’s OK if you take it back. I overthink everything and it’s driving me nuts. You make me very very very bashful, so this is really hard to write. I’ve been obsessing over this all day and it’s really helping me to write it down and get it all out of my system. This is really dramatic and life/death type thinking here, I know, but I’m really starting to like you and I’m so afraid and I just want you to feel the same way about me so I don’t get hurt. I’ve always wanted to share with someone, I’m really giving and plunge headfirst into stuff like this. I can’t help it. And I always end up getting hurt. I have no way of protecting myself. I want to find a best friend and all that sappy bullshit. I’ve gone through all of this before numerous times and I never learn my lesson. So if you don’t love me, please don’t say you do. Because if you do, I’ll fall completely.
--Me

In my previous post I lied and told you I would make two lists pertaining to the word fall: one of all the times I've fallen in love and one of weird stories I've heard or witnessed of people falling down. Screw the falling in love part. Looking back, at least half of 'em weren't "real love" anyway. Boooorrr-rrring. I really don't want to think about past loves right now anyway. The current one is just fine, thank you very much. Plus, people falling down is way funnier than a laundry list of stale crushes anyway. Above is a picture of the back porch stairs in my old apartment, which I've more than probably taken a spill on before. See, I have a reputation as being a bit of a klutz. Get me near some stairs and watch out!

Oh yeah, and if any of you have any great stories to share about falling down, post them in my comments section.

Catch Me Now I'm Falling

• When my Aunt L was a little girl, she climbed the tree in the backyard of my grandmother's house and fell out and got knocked unconscious. My family used to tell me this story probably to thwart any ideas I had about climbing up onto things. Whenever they said "knocked unconscious" I heard "knocked un-conscience" and for years afterward everytime I fell down or bumped my head on something, I would check to see that I still felt guilty when I thought about doing "bad stuff" like stealing or lying.

• When my brother was a wee baby and I was about 4 years old, he crawled up the staircase at my grandmother's house and tumbled back down and bumped his head. He had a bump on his head the size of a large egg and everyone ran around the house frantically and then out the door to take him to the hospital. I just stood there and watched, amazed about how huge the bump was.

• My good friend K from college got really drunk one night and was gallavanting around campus with her friends. They were all practicing how to jump up in the air and click their heels together in mid-air, a buncha regular Gene Kellys. She jumped up really high and almost got it just right but then crashed back down on her foot and sprained her ankle and had to get a cast.

• I was about 3 or 4 and at the beach with my mom. While she was sunbathing, I was busy building sandcastles in the sand. I got really excited and ran to show my mom something I had done, without looking where I was running. I fell into a hole about 3 feet wide and 3 feet deep that someone had dug right in the middle of the damn beach. I was only about 2 feet tall myself at the time. My mother figured out what happened soon enough and came to rescue me from the hole. The whole time I screamed, "Mommy, I don't want to go to China!"

• My best friend E was climbing a fence in the 6th grade and slipped and fell and got de-virginized by it. I still don't know if this is the complete truth, but I don't think she would lie to me about it.
  

• I was at a cool girl's birthday party in elementary school. The theme of the party was that everyone had to come dressed in pink. I didn't know the girl that well and was only really invited because her mom made her invite every girl in the class. After we opened the presents and had some cake, her mom took all the girls aside and told us a story about how her sister had died at her own birthday party when she was a child. She was playing on a porch with all of her friends and somehow flipped over the side of the porch. All of the other girls at the party were too afraid to say what happened, so they all left the party. The girl's mother found her dead after all of the girls had gone. Is this true or some sort of weird parable about taking care of your friends? Ha, I have no idea.

• My mother was involved with an alcoholic for a few years when I was very young. One night he was particularly drunk and self-hating and proclaimed that he was going to kill himself by jumping off of our 3rd floor front porch. He clenched onto the metal bars that held the porch up and hung there, shouting about how he was going to end it all and how sorry we'd be. The thing is, and I don't think he was aware of this, the drop was definitely not high enough to be fatal. The most damage he could have done is maybe break an arm or a leg. My mother called the police while he hung there. They came and forced him to climb back up onto the porch, and then they took him away for the night.

• Around age 9, my brother and I decided to pretend I was blind. We tied a blindfold over my eyes and my brother led me around the living room like a seeing eye dog. I was having so much fun that I decided to break free from my brother and flop down onto our couch. What I thought was our couch was really a coffee table. I landed on it face first and knocked out my two front teeth. Luckily, they were still my baby teeth and started to grow back soon after.

• I was at a school rollerskating trip in junior high and was good at rollerskating but had a little trouble when it came to stopping. The floor was pretty packed and I was rollerskating behind a mother and father with their toddler between them. I started to pick up a little speed and got dangerously close to the skaters in front of me. I lost control and couldn't slow down enough to stop bumping into them or falling down. To steady myself and prevent falling, I reached out my hand and grabbed the first thing I could that was in front of me, which was the toddler's head.
  

• My other friend J has a friend from high school who was a house painter for awhile. While up on some scaffolding, he slipped and fell and caught his scrotum on something and RIPPED IT OPEN! He had to wear big grown-up diapers for the rest of the summer and had to keep his legs apart at all times.

It doesn't get much worse than that, so I'm going to end it there. Enjoy!

Sorry for the big, big delay. Had a pretty eventful weekend. Starting on Thursday, my band played a really fun show at SubT and it was the last one for our keyboardist, Lara Hollywood. It was a good farewell and afterward, we enjoyed fine drinks at the fine establishment next door, Estelle's. Bebe Gun stayed out a little too late (boo-hoo) and was very, very tired on Friday but it was well worth it.

Friday night, I had to work at this singles party for work at the Irish American Heritage Center. There were so many Irish people there, I felt like I was at a family reunion. Seriously, it is weird how Irish aunts and grandmothers look and act exactly the same as Irish aunts and grandmothers in Boston. I had also never been to the Mayfair neighborhood. It's always so fun to find a new nook in this huge city. Chicago is a harsh city at times but never boring, that's for sure.

Saturday, woke up and headed straight to the movie theater to meet up with a friend from out of town. I had movie theater nachos and a diet coke for breakfast. We saw that Pirates of the Caribbean sequel thingy and it was awful (much to be expected) but Johnny Depp is a fox. And I'm not huge into the whole celebrity worship thing either. There are very few celebrities (John Cusack is one, Matt Dillon is another) that I really melt over. So here's a tip for you all, the movie sucked but if you need some hot pirate masturbation fodder, see this movie!

OK, so back to word at hand. It's fall. For a little cross-referencing, you can check out The Big B's recent post on Mark E. Smith. Fall, fall, fall.

Here's two lists. One is a chronicle of times that I have fallen in love in my life and the other is times I have fallen down or witnessed people falling down. Work is mucho busy so this will be a work in many parts today.

Today's word is fall. I'm not sure if I have the inspiration today to come up with anything. Two days worth of Fourth of July festivities have left me a little worn out. I'll try but I ain't promising anything. I'm such a bad Kenny Bloggins!

Here's a little diversion for all the people that have to work today. This is a really neat and innovative "mini-movie" (haha, OK, that's a reference to an Upright Citizen's Brigade episode if you've seen it).

It's actually a music video for a song called Don't Fuck with Love and frankly, I think the song isn't that good and a little trite (but my tastes in music are too discriminating for my own good, so don't listen to me). The video for the song is as cute as a button though. Check it out here and happy Independence Day, fools.

Let's forget that polygamy thing ever happened, shall we? (I picture a drunk Burt Reynold's-type slurring that to a weathered, pill-popping Lonnie Anderson-type). Today's word is psalm.

Psalm has two definitions really. One means a sacred song or a hymn and the other means a prayer in the Book of Psalms in the Old Testament.


Boys and Lights, or Bebe Gun is an Unintentional Racist

From the age of 6 until the age of 13, every first Friday of the month, my classes were postponed and I had to go to mass. The whole class would line up, one line of boys and one line of girls, and were herded across the street to the church. Most of the time (and maybe it's just my sentimental memory) it was raining on those days and very dark outside. The streetlights outside of the church walkway were always lit up so that if you squinted your eyes, everything would look blurry and glowing.

Churches (especially Holy Name where I went to school) always make me think of lights. The streetlights on the way to church, wet and blurry, and the lights and candles inside the church. Once we filed in and were seated in the pews boy/girl/boy/girl/boy/girl, I'd look up at the ceiling, orantely decorated with gorgeous bas relief carving and bright Roman colors--my own little miniature Michelangelo. I was mesmerized by the lights and would spend most of the time staring up and squinting to make the tiny lights way at the top of the ceiling next to the angels and the lambs and the frills seem twinkling like stars.

When I wasn't staring at tiny lights at church, I was talking to boys. I still have a soft spot in my heart for funny boys and I think this is why. The boys who sat next to me always knew they could make me laugh very easily and would relentlessly push me over the edge until a teacher scolded us or separated us into different rows.

From age 11 on, all of the boys in my class were metalheads. My best friend E and I started listening to heavy metal around that same time too, partly because we were feeling disenchanted with the whole popularity game going on over in the girls' half of the recess yard and partly because we had crippling crushes on all of the metalhead boys. We decided to ditch our Paula Abdul and MC Hammer tapes and replace them with Slayer, Black Sabbath, Anthrax and Guns N' Roses tapes. It was around that time that E and I started referring to ourselves as "psycho metal chicks" or "PMCs" which in hindsight is nothing short of full-on retarded but it was really cool at the time.

The great part about liking "real" music as all the metalheads so aptly put it was that it gave you such an upper hand on all of the other girls. Once E and I realized the easiest way to win the popularity game was to bow out of it, we were free. Now weird was good and freaking people out was our ultimate goal. It also gave us a lot to talk about with the boys. Most of them still thought we were dorks and even went so far as to call us (gasp!) lesbians (haha, good one, dudes) but occasionally one of them would break away from the crowd and discuss with us why Cliff Burton was a better bassist than Jason Newstead or how we kinda like Public Enemy now that they did that collaboration with Anthrax.

A couple years earlier, when I was about 9 or 10, one of those metalhead boys inadvertantly turned me into an Anti-Semite. I know, I know, it sounds crazy but it's true. Right before first Friday mass on a typically rainy and blurry day, we were all sitting in class waiting to be herded over to the church. Our teacher handed out photocopies of the psalms we would be singing that day. The class was restless and buzzing, just waiting to get the hell out of the classroom. I looked over at ****, a boy who always looked a little older than the rest of us. He was always getting into trouble and talking to me in church and teasing me about everything, but in a nice way that made me blush.

**** wasn't paying any attention to the rest of the class but was instead doodling on the back of his psalm sheet with his yes, left hand. I strained my neck forward to see what he was drawing but without seeming to obvious about it. He was drawing some type of symbol which I know I had seen before but I didn't really understand. I just thought it looked cool. I would find out later that day that it was not cool at all. What I had been watching him draw was a swastika on the back of his psalm sheet. Holy moly. He probably saw it on the back of a Deicide album or something. I guess I was an unusually innocent 10 year old.

But that's not the worst part. After I saw his drawing, I decided to try to do one myself on the back of my psalm sheet. It took my all of 3 minutes to complete and the it was time for church.

We lined up, one line of boys and one line of girls, and started the walk over. After we were seated in our pews, I pulled out my psalm sheet and started reading from it, the symbol on the back in clear view to anyone who looked back at me from a seat in front of me. I have no idea why no one in the entire church saw it. I just sang away, psalm after psalm, innocent as the day I was born, holding a freakin' swastika in my hand, unaware of its meaning.

Later on that day, when I got home from school, I sat down at the kitchen table and emptied the contents of my backpack. The psalm sheet fell out onto a mound of books. My mother's boyfriend was cooking dinner and saw the paper flop out of my bag. "Sara, what is this?" he said. "Oh, nothing. I just saw this kid in my class draw it and I thought it looked cool." But the way he said it, I knew I had done something wrong and I think deep down, I knew there was something bad about that symbol but I wasn't really sure what or maybe that the bad part of it had faded away over time.

My mother's boyfriend sat me down that night and lectured my on the holocaust and genocide and all of those big words that a 10 year old is just beginning to understand. I wonder if **** understood them or if anyone sat him down and talked to him about his psalm sheet.

Whenever I think of it now, I feel extremely guilty but also I'm amazed at how much meaning a tiny symbol or a tiny word can hold and how they're bad independent of who uses them or in what context. Now when I see that symbol, I feel scared, guilty, and ashamed of what it means instead of feeling curious and wondering if I could draw it myself. I'll never be that innocent again, to see a symbol as an empty vessel devoid of its meaning.

By the time I turned 12 and started listening to metal exclusively and kissing a lot of those same metal boys in the back of busses, innocence became a much rarer thing to find.

here's one more take on polygamy and that's it for me.

The Day Polly Gamy Married the Whole World

Polly’s lips are naturally red. She doesn’t need to wear lipstick because she kisses all the time.
She kisses boys, girls, dogs, brick walls, ice cubes, radiators, fingernails, hot coffee, newspapers, pencils, dolls, birthday cakes. Polly doesn’t really love anyone more than a brick wall, not her parents or her dog or her little brother or her nana. She loves the brick wall most of all because it kisses back by making your lips tingle.

One day when Polly especially bored, she decided to marry everything. She ran up into her bedroom, took of her shoes and put on her long, white nightgown. She grabbed her little brother by the scruff of his neck and dragged him down the front stairs of the house and into their front yard. She ripped a ripe patch of grass out of the blinding green lawn, kissed it and stuffed it into her brother’s hand. “Hold this!” she said. She ripped another patch out, kissed that and put it on her head.

“This is what you have to say,” she told him.

“Do you, Polly, take this lawn to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

“I don’t wanna say that, Polly. You’re stupid.”

Polly curled up her fist like a little red rock and pointed it in the direction of her brother’s tiny nose.
“Say it!” she ordered.

He whimpered a little and recited, “Do you Polly take this lawn to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

“I do.”

“Now say this. Do you Polly take Mom and Dad and me and Nanna to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

“Do you Polly take Mom and Dad and me and Nanna to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

“I do.”

“Do you Polly take boys, girls, dogs, brick walls, ice cubes, radiators, fingernails, hot coffee, newspapers, pencils, dolls and birthday cakes to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

“Do you Polly take boys, girls, dogs, brick walls, ice cubes, radiators, fingernails, hot coffee, newspapers, pencils, dolls and birthday cakes to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

“I do, I do, I do.”

Getting a little giddy from the supposed game, her brother, with a smirk added, “Do you Polly take the dog’s poo to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

“Of course I do,” she answered.

“1 million fire ants?”

“I do.”

“The fattest man alive?”

“I do.”

“Boogers.”

“I do. I do. I do. Now shut up and take this!”

She ripped another patch of grass out of the lawn and handed it over to her brother. Repeat after me and hold this up to my lips, “You may now kiss the bride.”

“You may now kiss the bride.”

Polly leaned over and put her lips to the soft grass and kissed her most deepest kiss.
THE END

At home sick today. Yuck. But that's besides the point right now. Today's word is polygamy. What a doozie. I'm not even really sure what to say about it, or maybe I have too much to say about it. The ironic part of this (this thing seems to be filled to the brim with irony) is that I just spent an hour on the couch reading Charles Bukowski and Henry Miller, who really are the quintessential (sp?) polygamists, or the quintessential literary polygamists, I suppose. Let me whip something up. This is going to be hard.

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I'm back after my day of yuck sickness. Apparently, I was wrong yesterday when I referred to Bukowski and Miller as literary polygamists. According to Wikipedia, "Polygamy is usually used to refer to multiple marriage, while polyamory implies a relationship defined by negotiation between its members rather than cultural norms." Literary polyamorists is more like it. It's funny how monogamy is used to describe married and non-married relationships with two committed people. Should we be referring to them as monogamorists instead? I like it, just because the root wood is amor. Makes it sound a little more romantic.

Last night while thinking of polygamy, I ended up just posting a picture of a pen and ink drawing I did of two scantily clad lovers in bed. There's only two of them though. So I guess that doesn't work. I also thought up a character named Polly Gamy who's sort of an updated version of Polly Styrene except with a lot of husbands. Maybe her husbands can all have quirky/obnoxious names too like Tux Edo and she can have a female lover name Jela See. Eeer, that's lame

I also sat down with a pencil and paper last night and tried to draw polygamy. It's harder than it sounds, believe me. I got sidetracked and drew a picture of a creature with a woman's body and an alligator's head spitting a heart out her mouth. Next to her I wrote, "Bouncy, bouncy bally. Lost the head of my dolly." Any ideas on how this may relate to polygamy (because it beats the shit outta me)?

Tux Edo: Polly, do you want a cracker?
Polly Gamy: I do, I do, I do.
Jela See: Polly, do you want to be my wife?
Polly Gamy: I do, I do, I do.
Tux Edo: Polly, do you want a nice house?
Polly Gamy: I do. Can I have two?
Jela See: Isn't one enough?
Polly Gamy: No.
Tux Edo: How about three?
Polly Gamy: I do, I do, I do.

--what little Mormon girls sing when they play jump rope.

Friday, finally. Woo-hoo. Luckily, I don't think I'll be too busy today at work and I'm in the mood to write, so look forward to another long entry today. My band has a show tonight and I'm pretty psyched for it. It's a very bittersweet psyched though since our keyboardist is leaving and it will be one of her last shows. It's always sad to see someone go, especially from a creative project that you hold so near and dear, but we'll get on. We'll just have to play even harder for these last two shows to make it count.

On another note, completely (or maybe on a similar) I'm going to pick my word for today. Cross your fingers and hope it's not warthog. Yow!

Today's word is: type.

Well, my first thought is typography. Hmmm...let me think about this. Be back soon. Maybe a story where the characters are actual characters, as in letters? Hmmm, that really gives new meaning to the phrase "A-B dialogue." Stay tuned, dudes.

OK, I'm back but I guess I had more work to do today than I thought I would. Yuck. I have been thinking about type all day though, and here's what I have to say about it. Not really about typography, more about just playing with letters and words and it's actually strangely inspired by the classic Peter Sellers movie The Party:

What Should I Wear to the Alphabet Party?

A. aching dress, cracked shoes--stand in the corner and glare
B. bug dress, loud shoes--drink grasshoppers and make passes at everyone
C. cunty dress, stopped shoes--pee pants and laugh
D. drive-by dress, humble shoes--pretend you don't recognize anyone there
E. easy dress, damned shoes--lavishly compliment the host while talking shit behind his back
F. frou-frou dress, captain shoes--elegently save a nerd from drowning in punch bowl
G. gidget dress, milky shoes--start a surf party in the hot tub
H. heirloom dress, mudslide shoes--wear lots of jewelry
I. it's-too-late-for-that-dress, ruffle shoes--dance the way your ex-boyfriend fucks
J. Jackie O. dress, fat shoes--put a tiara on the dog
K. kamikaze dress, eyes shoes--burn a couple people (accidentally) with your cigarette
L. lovely dress, cookie shoes--bring gifts
M. my mother lives here dress , blizzard shoes--freak out and tell everyone they need to leave
N. no way jose dress, penny shoes--tell the eager beaver dancer you're not interested
O. oh, 1234 dress, wooden shoes--start a Ramones sing-a-long and stomp on the floor
P. political dress, spanked shoes--start an iron fist revolution
Q. queer dress, robot shoes--sit down and watch "The Man Who Fell to Earth"
R. rubber beak dress, runny shoes--dance the chicken dance
S. smelly dress, half-full shoes--go naked
T. turn around and look at me dress, paper shoes--make nametags
U. ugly wallpaper dress, dusty shoes--tell everyone the attic is haunted
V. virgin dress, right on shoes--experiment
W. walkabout dress, tissue shoes--cry on the back porch
X. xtina dress, empty shoes--pretend you're beautiful
Y. ya-ya dress, pink shoes--only talk in french
Z. zap dress, octopus shoes--come dressed like an astronaut

So heres the basic idea. I've been wanting to create a blog for awhile now. I've even been practicing in private. The only problem is: my personal life is pretty mundane for the most part. I've decided, to make things more interesting for myself and for any possible readers, I'd come up with a gimmick. Gimmicks always win, right? Every post/story/musing/photo/doodle/joke/rant I make in this blog will be inspired/influenced/directly/indirectly related to a word I pick at random out of the Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary sitting on my desk at work. There's no cheating, I swear.

Ironically enough, I picked my first word yesterday for my first blog ever and it's farewell. It does give me hope though that this will be a cool project and I'm psyched to have landed on such a provocative word on my first go around. Thanks, finger!

Anyhoo, the following is a short story of sorts. Yesterday on my day off, since it was so rainy and muggy, I spent most of the day on the couch flipping through Big B's copy of

Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion : An Anthropological Study of the Supernatural
by Arthur Lehmann, James Myers, Pamela Moro.

It's a textbook he had on the bookshelf at home from an anthropology class he took in college. I was reading this article about death rituals and how different cultures treat their newly dead as opposed to their ancestral dead. One tidbit I was especially tickled by (well, I guess tickled isn't the right word but it got my creative juices flowing) was a paragraph on this mother and daughter in a native African culture (I'll have to look it up again to be more specific) who's father/husband had died and instead of burying his body, they took his skull and hung it over the doorway in their kitchen. They would talk to the skull, ask for advice, all the while addressing it as "Sir Ghost."

Farewell, And Please Pass the Butter, Sir Ghost

Sir Ghost died 6 months and 8 days ago. He was 58 when he died. First he had Stroke #1 and lived. Then he had Stroke #2. Stroke #2 was the end of Sir Ghost. We found him on the kitchen floor by the sink. He had been chopping onions and a thin layer of onion tears covered his closed eyes. Ms. Ghost and I had been out in the garden picking peppers for dinner. She was holding the peppers in a bunch, using the front of her purple apron as a sack. I tiptoed in behind her with the rest of the peppers, careful not to let the kitchen door smack me in the face. When she saw him laying there, Ms. Ghost gave a yelp that sounded like our dog when you accidentally step on one of his paws. She dropped the corners of her apron and let the peppers fly. She grabbed onto Sir Ghost's face and her pepper tears fell and mixed with his onion tears.

His name is not really Sir Ghost. Ms. Ghost and I started calling him that soon after that day in the kitchen. We had a small ceremony and buried him out in the backyard next to the garden so as to avoid any fuss. After five months of pensive waiting, we dug him up again, carefully removed his head and hung it on the wall above the swinging door in our kitchen. Ms. Ghost told me this is what sonless mothers should do when their husbands die, to protect the household and her daughters from harm and neurosis.

Yesterday morning, I was at the sink and I heard a soft rustling sound. I looked up at Sir Ghost and he was struggling to move his jaw. I ran over to the kitchen door to his skull and looked up. He kept rustling and struggling to move his jaw. Nervously, I put my left hand over the doorknob of the kitchen door and held it shut, fearing that Ms. Ghost would walk in at any moment and start yelping again at the sight of me communicating with an assumed dead Sir Ghost.

I heard a creak like a pair of rusty scissors opening up and a soft voice coming from the cracking jaw in Sir Ghost's skull.

“Farewell,” he said.
“Farewell Farewell Farewell Farewell Farewell Farewell Farewell Farewell Farewell Farewell Farewell Farewell Farewell.”

He just kept saying it over and over, waiting for something. My response?

"What is it, Sir Ghost?" I said.

"It is lonely," he said.

"What is?"

"Being dead."

"What does it feel like?"

"You just hang there and watch them eat breakfast, watch them sit in silence, watch them cry when no one else is around. They forget you're there and sometimes they wish you weren't there."

"Do you want me to take you down then?"

"No."

"OK then. Would you rather I pretend you're here or not here?"

"Both, I suppose."

"Well, in that case, farewell. And please pass the butter, Sir Ghost."