revelation

I have come to a realization.

I have been living my life life it was broken.

Some days, I really feel pretty broken...

I think I have pretty legitimate reasons for some of that business.

But in equal measure, I have legitimate reasons to feel whole.

I am starting to see that I have closed my heart and it has blocked me from a lot of good things.

So I am calling my own bluff.

My life isn't actually broken- it's human. 

And so, I am done with the broken schtick. 

It's pretty boring and like, SUPER draining.

I am done putting conditions on the way that I love and give. I am done demanding the most specific and probably impossible requirements from situations and people. Especially from people.

I'm not making any huge promises, but I am committing to be aware and to at least try. I am going to try to live with an open and full damn heart. I am going to show up and belong and be present and make mistakes and allow myself to feel loved. I block that last one the very most. It's really tiring.

I think this is probably the beginning of a very good season.

Can you help me?

Friday Night Lights

 

It's a Waning Gibbous Moon tonight. This happens after the moon is "Full", and has just begun to turn its face away from the Earth's in its rotation, relative to ours. Sometimes the Waning Gibbous is mistaken for a "Full" moon because of how large and tangible it appears in the night sky. I feel like I am a Waning Gibbous tonight: tangible and big, but not really filled.

  

   There are kids outside playing night games right now. I saw them on my drive home, catching fireflies and holding them like secrets, close to their bantam, pounding chests. It's 1:16 on a Friday night in June, and their older cousins are still in the bars two miles away, hoping that someone will think they are worth some heightened breathing. 

    I almost convinced myself, today, to purchase two things: A beautiful Schwinn Varsity bicycle in space-age sparkle green (you know the type that looks like it's brand new, even though it's probably older than my own parents). The other thing was a baby's high chair. It was wooden and obviously had seen the feedings of many, many children over the years, most of whom are now wizened old timers themselves. What a heritage. Neither of these two items would actually fit my (financial or emotional) budget, and neither of them was a real match for my life, but I spent a substantial time talking myself down from the nerves of walking away from them. I'm still thinking about them at 1:19 on a Friday night. They seem, somehow, to represent more to me than just objects.

..................................................................................

    There is a house up the block from mine where very fat women live. They wear boldly colored frocks and seem incredibly sweaty and full. They aren't particularly smart or friendly, except with one another. There are probably eight of them crammed into that tiny space that was built by and for small, malnourished German refugee immigrants in the early 1910's. That's what this place looks like with its history. 

     

    Every day, the fat women come out to their porch and sit for a few hours in the late morning. They always get hungry around 1:30, and they always convene in the shade of their fledgeling Chinese Maple that grows in the patch of grass between the road (which ends as a dead end at the railroad tracks two houses down). They have a picnic table set up there for their lunches. They are never outside after 3:00, unless it is after 6:30. They are usually back by then, all sitting around again, wondering aloud about the moon and their old stuffed animals. I have heard them. They seem to be extravagant women whose lives revolve around one thing: joy. It is remarkable to see such a gathering, really. I used to hate them for their bonds. Tonight, though, as I drove past the fat women's street, I saw those firefly gatherers on the other side of the road, and felt happy for them all. I looked down to the fat ladies' table, hoping (as I always do when I pass their street) to catch a glimpse of their clown-car life. They had apparently all gone to bed (afterall, it was 1:04 on a Friday night). But set up and gleaming on the table was a single, long candle set in a candlestick. It was miraculously lit, and blowing gently in the constant breeze that seems to be pregnant with impending storm. I was reminded of the advice that I was given about buying candlesticks, and then was forced (again) to re-revisit my thoughts about that baby chair and the bicycle. A professor told me before I went to Europe, to invest some substantial money into some fine Italian silver candlesticks, and that I would thank myself when I was an old lady with children who needed something to remember me by.

  

    But I don't want to be remembered for candlesticks. I want to be remembered for chasing fireflies at 1:16 on Friday nights in June with little legs, and for that well-worn chair, and for wanting to bike everywhere I could desire to travel.

    And then I let myself cry for the first time in too long to this song. I wasn't really sad, just sort of whelmed and needing to let something go. At 1:10 on a Friday night in June.

    And the crickets and cicadas have begun their music again for the summer.

Помогите! Pomogite! [pama'gi:te]

Once upon a time, I lived with an amazing woman.

Now she is in Russia.

This is a video about the project she made... Care to help?

Go here for more infos.

Break.

Thanksgiving break begins in five minutes.
I haven't really thoroughly decided yet how I feel about that  fact. Mostly I feel unprepared for it.
I also feel like it will not really be a break at all. Hopefully I will be able to let you know about my projects throughout the week. There are a lot of them, and SOME of them are actually sort of exciting. Sort of.

Anyways, Here is the question:
Do I
a. Spend Thanksgiving at home with the 3/8 of the Brown siblingdom
b. Go up to Ogden to be fought over by adoring fans, or
c. Go to Heber with dear friend Jeff to have sup with his family.

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Any one of the options might be immeasurably awkward. I guess it all depends on what I wear.

why I did it

I submitted my thesis for publication this week.
I got an email (so much less classy than a letter) that confirmed receipt of my "manuscript".

I would like to review the events that led up to this event in hopes to assuage the sudden and immense sense of dread that I am presently feeling about the whole debacle.

Since I got back from Europe, I haven't really done much of anything except attempt to recover my

a. sanity and 

b. regular pace. 

Now that I have finally gotten those back, it seems that my last semester is begging for me to loose them again. A grad seminar class (there used to be two of them, but I realized I was in over my head), three undergrad classes, a brand new (sort of intimidating) calling in church, a position in a presidency at school,  prepping for the GRE and praying with all of prayer parts to get into a good grad school, a baby brother leaving on a mission, the garden, and any attempt at a social-life-outlet are all semi-huge demands. Oh. And my family is crazy, in case you forgot that little detail.

Fortunately, It's fall. For me, fall is a time of total rejuvenation and preparation. I feel the best in the fall. Maybe because it's the last vestiges of summer, and maybe because I was born in the fall. I take a lot of cues from trees (it seems to be sort of a theme for me on this here blog thingy...). In the fall, trees drop all that stuff that's not super important for their survival (fact: trees drop their leaves because if they didn't, the dead weight would tip them over. That is neat: also a fact.) I like the way fall shakes things up. I want to shake too.

So there I was, talking with kb about nothing in particular. I love that girl. We were laughing, and I felt a sudden sense of urgency, like, I hadn't done enough yet, and if I didn't act RIGHT THEN, my opportunity would be lost.

I came in my room and for an hour (1am-2am...) figured out what to do to submit, tidied up an abstract I'd been mulling over, and sent them away into the void of the internets. Goodbye, forever? Maybe...

To be totally honest, I didn't think about it. I just went and brushed my teeth and went to bed. It wasn't until I got this stupid email confirming that my "manuscript" had been received that I began to freak out. Talk about inopportune timing, universe. Jeeze. I was having a really good evening too!

Anyways, now I am feeling really nervous and self-conscious about everything.  I guess I don't really ever put myself into situations where there's a slight chance that I could be rejected. This was probably a good step for me. But for the moment, it sucks.

ps. Doesn't the term "manuscript" usually connote something a little more like this:

than this:

 

yeah...

Why the world is falling apart:

via

This semester was intended to be fun and enlightening. Instead it is basically shattering my worldview and challenging everything I've been socialized and raised to believe. I don't really know where I stand in relation to so so many things, and I feel like there's a whole lot of security that's being exposed and taken away from me... I guess it means I'm learning? Anyways, I feel like I don't have a philosophical and educational and theoretical home right now- I'm becoming a post structuralist snob that can't settle on anything.
I question everything.
I feel inadequate to write any sort of history because I want to explode traditional notion and I want to look at every *other* point of view...I watched a film about this woman, Angie Debo today:



She said something that melted my heart and inspired and intimidated me:
"Tell the truth so that other people can use it."

I liked that. I need to find the drive, the passion, the resolve and the grace Debo had. She's my new idol.

In completely unrelated news, how do you guys feel about setting people up/being set up?? Have you done it/ been victim to it?? What was it like? I need advice.

CONSTANT Procrasination

In honor of the title of this post, I'd like the internets (that's YOU!) to be aware that I have not done ANY homework this semester. That's right. ZERO. All of the reading I've done thus far is purely for pleasure. I feel great and a twinge sicky about it... I mean... maybe it's just burnout, but I maybe should get busy. I have to:
-write my thesis (which so far is AWFUL... i mean AWFUL, AWFUL).
-decide what to write about re: the Northern Baroque (tossing around ideas about costume in paintings like this one - [yes the girl's face IS creepy] or this one... just thinking.)
-do ANYTHING for my other three classes. I have no idea where to start. Maybe the syllabi.

This is great, considering that I MUST do well this semester in order to get into grad school. Read that MUST... meaning no fudging it this year. It's mandatory quality this time. I have to get busy. But first, I have to throw a birthday party and clean my room.

Adventuretime 2010

This will be a dedication piece combined with confessional. Get ready.
In my last post, I promised to write more about my darling baby bro. Well here it is. This is dedicated to him.


Last night I called him after my film meeting. He told me he was headed to the Utah Symphony. I figured he was going with some friends who are taking a music class with him, but no... It turns out he was going alone, because he thought it was awesome. He was right. I have a secret love/admiration/ appreciation/ jealousy of people who are brazen enough to adamantly do things by themselves. I do my own thing a lot, but it seems like there's always some safety in numbers behind a lot of my activities, and I always seems to be able to find someone interested in whatever I'm doing. Maybe I'm too mainstream, boring, or not committed enough to my own self. These feelings about perfectly content lone wolves leads me to a deep seated desire to accompany them on EVERYTHING they do.
So I went and bought a ticket, and after a little finagling, I got a seat right next to him.



It was fantastic to say the least. The program was a beautiful rendition of two early (and underperformed in the long run) Beethoven pieces and an hour long Rachmaninoff. I was beside myself when the Rachmaninoff began, and for the subsequent hour of delight.
Confessional time. I secretly form inappropriate bonds and relationships with the unwitting performers on occasions such as this. I spent a lot of time imagining what the bald first chair violinist was like as a kid, and why the rotund tympani decided to get into percussion as a professional choice. I had a whole thing going with the Asian violist having secret rendezvous with the dashing bass clarinetist who was a guest at this performance. I know that it's inappropriate to imagine hanging out with the entire orchestra on a casual level, but I really can't help but wonder if the shockingly white haired granny makes delicious soup and knits.

So, thank you, baby bro. It was an excellent evening by any measure.

Afterward, I went over to my friend Joey's place and made preliminary plans and decisions for an upcoming project. Be ready to have your minds blown outta your heads (By which I mean, it's gonna [I can barely believe that 'gonna' is a real word...] be really good).