Recurring Thought

I just had this moment, staring at my computer. I felt completely and utterly overwhelmed by all of the things which I have to do and those that I want to do and how I am completely incapable of completing a book-sized project, at least a good one, anyone can write 160 pages of crap, but I want it to be wonderful. It's not going to be wonderful. I don't have a job for the summer/rest of my life, but I don't want one. I want to travel and I hope I don't prevent myself from doing so. I have this huge fear of holding myself back, and that fear of doing it itself, holds me back. I feel completely disenchanted and immobile in my writing and creativity and life right now because of busy work from other classes. I shouldn't have to fill my time with a certain amount of credits while trying to write a book that is required for me to graduate! How rude.

So in doing all this thinking and being immobilized by myself in my creative circle, I thought (actually I said it out loud because no one's here to think I'm crazy for talking to myself) "you don't have time to freak out" and it hit me - I had a dream about saying that about a character. Which, of course, led me to think that I am a character, this life is the story. Blah blah blah, but I am a character in one of my stories, kind of, but it's not really me, it's the me that I'm afraid to be I think, but she's a much scarier me anyway, not a lively happy me, but a dark and edgy me. I'm not even sure what I'm talking about anymore. The point is, I have this recurring thought of not being able to freak out because of a time limit, my characters not having enough time to freak out because I don't have enough pages. I don't have enough time to get things done because as a human being, I require sleep. All I do is read, stare at my computer, and go to work and class, I do not do anything for myself anymore. Yesterday I went running. I hate running. I despise running. But I did it for some reason unknown to me and I did feel good, I felt better, but it's not creative. Or is running creative? Could it be? I wrote in my journal once, after a professor told me he hated personification of inanimate objects: "Could a tree be seductive or curvy if I want it to be?" Why couldn't a tree be seductive, and is that personification? The tree isn't talking, it's just seducing.

I could drive myself crazy with my thoughts.

Just a minute ago when I said that out loud to myself, "you don't have time to freak out," I began to realize why writers, artists, tend to go crazy. There's so much to be done, your story is never told, or never told properly and how can one be satisfied if it is out just that it is out? It has to be the right way.

I think that's why I've really been into performing my work lately, there isn't much of a venue for this for short story writers though. Maybe I'll make one. Yes, that's right Laura, take one more thing on, you don't have enough on your plate as it is! Create a venue!

Ah to be five years old again and laying in my bed, tracing the outline of the brown and blue flowers on the wallpaper in my bedroom, day-dreaming about how one day I'll be great. When will that day come? Can I just have that wallpaper back, please?

Camera

I have a beautiful Canon Rebel XT 35 mm SLR, and I barely use it ever. I really want to start taking more photos. I want to do portraits and self portraits, I think I'm going to open a flickr account. I'd like to do the 365 day sp challenge, I think. Jake and I once went to the photo gallery in Buffalo (that I'm completely blanking on the name for at the moment) and saw this woman's self-portraits for a full year. It was awesome. She didn't just do one every day, I think she did three every day and they were almost all in the same place - her bed. It was bizarre but beautiful and reminded me a lot of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's bed protest "bed peace" "hair peace" I love that, I love the photos from that too. Yoko Ono did a lot of performance art, which I'm not sure if a lot of people know about, I only know because I took an art class at Denison and these two performance artists joined our class for a week to teach us and collaborate with us on a performance piece. The woman performance artist did this piece once where she laid completely naked on a table, covered with tiny little plastic babies, like the ones found in "kings cakes" for Mardi Gras? She said she had little plastic babies everywhere for a couple years and just had them in her purse because she had purchased so many. Well, back to Yoko, she did this performance where she sat on stage and invited people to come up to the stage and cut a piece off of her clothing. Apparently at first people were conservative and then started taking larger and larger pieces. I guess it was to see how far people would take it, and which gender would take it the farthest and what that would mean for women and sexuality and whatnot.

I have completely forgotten the purpose of this post.

Oh right, I want to start a Flicker.

I'm starting a lot of projects lately so I think a Flickr would be a good addition. I've moved on from painting to more textile art. I have two old pairs of Jake's jeans that he said I could draw/paint/sew on whatever I want. So I'm going to draw on a bunch of designs and then sew over them - I just need a sewing kit now and a bunch of cool colored threads and some buttons and beads. He said he'll wear them when I'm done, I hope so, that would be cool - like walking art. Other than that, I'm trying to create a book, like an artist's book, but I'm going to turn it into a cook book/story book. We'll see where that goes. Life just seems so much more apparently important than school work at the moment.

Sophomoric

I am so utterly confused by how people act sometimes. Earlier today I felt like that 10 year old person, with her soft belly and parted hair and bangs, walking onto the playground looking for someone who would want to hang out until recess was over and finding that everyone had paired up. I was blissfully unaware, or tried to keep myself that way. I think I always knew though. Regardless, that's how I felt this morning. Like everyone else had paired up and left my standing in the small-stone gravel looking from right to left and deciding on a swing, only to be told that that swing had been "called" by someone. It takes me a while to trust people. I have a hard time letting parts of myself go to other people and showing them who I am, but in the spirit of making new friends last semester, I allowed someone to be my close friend and see inside my deepest thoughts. We had, what I thought, was a mutual agreement about confidence and secrets. Today I found out that I was sorely mistaken. This is all about me, "I, I I," after looking at those three above lines I saw how self-centered this is, but that's what a blog is isn't it? Or can be? Whatever. I am upset and hurt because someone that I thought was a new best friend hurt me deeply, cut me to the core, by telling a secret of mine to one person and then to ten, and knowing that somehow of course it would get back to me - took a month, but it did. It's just immature to think that even if someone thought there was an issue between me and someone else, that that person wouldn't just come to be to begin with, instead they chose to spread rumors about me. How hurtful, how immature and how insensitive. Jake kept telling me this morning to just not tell these people anything about myself anymore and that these are only a small representative of humanity and that not all people deserve to be doubted. But that's how I feel, no one deserves my trust unless they've proven it and it was clearly my fault for allowing myself to trust this person with my secrets and self. It's stupid and cynical and doesn't feel good, but it feels self-preserving. Too many people have hurt me. All I can really trust is myself, I guess. And in reality, the only person that I will have forever, for sure, is myself, this body, this person. I guess that's the reality of humanity. I'm in a really low cynical mood right now and this is quite melodramatic, I realize, but it's how I feel and sometimes you just have to get to that bottom point to get to the top and it's just venting right now, which is the purpose of a blog.

I'm writing some new poetry and stories for my project, maybe I'll post them soon.

Two Dollar Radio

I have a tendency to find something I want to do and to ensure I actually do it, I don't tell anyone about it until after I apply or contact or do whatever necessary to get that thing. I did it with the Bullsheet, I didn't tell anyone I was applying and it was just my thing and I got it, and now I'm Managing Editor. I didn't tell anyone about Two Dollar Radio, I just applied and then I got it and tonight at some point I will receive my first assignment. I've got an internship with a publishing house. I tend to play these accomplishments down to myself, I'm not sure why, but I make it out to be not a big deal but it's pretty cool. Well, regardless, check out www.twodollardradio.blogspot.com pretty soon I'll be doing posts for them in addition to reading manuscripts!

Things I like and dislike

Like:
-brisk weather
-apples, but not sour ones
-cappucinos
-italian, everything italian
-houses that are converted to businesses
-writing with someone else and being separated by our ear buds but still sitting together and working
-dancing alone
-incense and candles
-windows open and wind coming through
-showers
-stickers
-really good comfy jeans
-hugs
-the artist James who sings the song "Sometimes"
-"Treehouse" by I'm from Barcelona
-Making mixed CDs for people, even if it is "over"

Dislike:
-sundresses when it's supposed to be fall
-heavy walkers
-loud generators outside my window
-not being able to find my own place
-ripping my favorite jeans
-hot and humid weather in september when it should rain and be chilly
-Using a phone that has a cord attached.
-itchy eyes, even though I took my allergy medicine

Today I'm content but also really unhappy. I would really really love some Fall weather, I shouldn't be complaining but I really dislike this hot weather, it's humid and awful and it's FALL. Also, I really dislike the pressure to dress up for class as though I am about to be in a J.Crew catalog.

But I'm content because I had a cappucino and it was prepared perfectly, proper amount of foam, even though they say it can't be done with skim milk. And, I'm sitting in a coffee shop in Granville writing pages and found that Granville has a Two Dollar Radio publishing house here... maybe I'll get published after all? Who knows.

I know summer's almost over

but...
I want bubbles, and fluffies to blow off into the air and a tutu to wear and someone to dance around with.

I guess it's just because I've been so alone lately. I'm not too into this apartment by myself thing. I need people around and I have never before given it so much credit.

Moving Prompt from "Juicy Pens and Thirsty Paper"

When I was two and a half years old we moved into a new house. Norwood Avenue would belong to someone else with its pear tree in the yard that fed us succulent fruit and its porch swing that rocked me to sleep in the cradle of my mother’s arms and voice singing “you are my sunshine.” The moving men came in their large truck. The men lumbered like rhinos, their tanned skin taut across their bodies – it looked as though it would tear if they strained too much lifting our furniture. I thought they were stealing my belongings. My clown lamp with balloons for light bulbs in red, blue, yellow and green and my rocking chair with purple flowers parenthetically around my name on the dark wood. They loaded my crib into the rumbling and angry truck as it chugged down the street I sank inside with loss. My identity was in my bedroom, the room that now was only four empty walls with a crumpled piece of paper in one corner and dust in the other. I clung to my Nana’s shoulder – her soft paper-thin skin comforted my cheek and her arm wrapped around me like a seat belt.

My mother and her mother took the car to the new house. On the street with trees like a forest top, reaching together and creating a canopy, a harbor of home. When I get on my first bus ride to school, coming down the street and seeing the safety of the trees ahead, it feels more like home than my clown lamp did when I was two. The pair raced home before Nana and I and even the movers, they all set my room together like it was on Norwood. When I walked into the bedroom it looked just like my room but instead of one window I had two and my rocking chair was next to the closet. I found a magical door in the wall and there was a radiator emanating heat in winter. I had a lamp on the ceiling.

When I was six I thought the magical door could never be opened, it was sealed shut. I thought if it ever could be opened it would lead to a magical world outside my bedroom. That year my father opened it and the excitement ate my vocal chords while I stood there anticipating the other side. He cut the seal with a knife and used a crow bar to pry the door off. There were no hinges, only a wooden plank. He opened the door because the bathtub had stopped working. I didn’t understand how the magic door could help until I saw, there was no world inside the door. There were no magical people or new friends. There were pipes and dripping water. Disappointed and angry at my father for showing me reality, I began to loathe my room. It once was a mystical place and turned into a harsh cold room with pipes and bright lamps just like every other room.

I turned fourteen and decided to give my room a second chance. I reclaimed the mystery for myself. Instead of having a stark white ceiling and pink walls I wanted colors and statements. Dad refused to allow me to paint on the walls. Instead I plastered magazine clippings to the ceiling around the bright lamp in the center. It took weeks to find clippings worthy of my bedroom. I stood on my bed and moved it steadily throughout the room to give me height.


Before we moved into the house the people who lived there were named the Claytons. There is a toyshop in Williamsville, the village next to the town where my house is in. I don’t think they owned it though. The girl who lived in my room was the oldest just like me and she had Scarlet O’Hara wallpaper on her walls. It wasn’t on the walls when I moved in, the wallpaper when I moved in was flowery with blue and brown and pink flowers on a white background. I know she had Scarlet O’Hara wallpaper because her brother came to see the house when he was in Buffalo one winter. He walked around the house telling us stories about when they lived there, like they used to play elevator in the pantry under the stairs that we use to store pots and pans that we don’t use every day. He also told us about the wallpaper in my bedroom and showed us how there is some in the wood ceiling of the attic. On our attic door are flowers painted in neon green and yellow and orange. It says “attics are fun” and the man said that his family didn’t put that there, but that it was there when they moved in. We liked it and so we kept it too. Ever since that time he writes us a Christmas card updating us on his family and their lives and tells us he misses the house and neighborhood. Other people’s houses are not gross like that woman from the Real Housewives of New Jersey says they are, they are in fact rich with history and stories similar to our own and give us glimpses into the house’s life before us. I love living in someone else’s house, it becomes our own home and is my house but still has the life of another family inside it.