crippled digestion

i went to my naturopath today about my stomach problems and i don't know if i feel better or worse. i told her i was cold all the time and that i was gaining weight and she took a bunch of my blood to test for food allergies and my blood was warm instead of hot. she told me i needed to go to another doctor and have them check for a bacteria in my stomach and to also have them stick a camera down my throat. then she gave me acupuncture and apparently my intestines are inflamed and my small intestine is holding the most tension and i might have an ulcer in it. which might be causing my thyroid to be having problems. hence the cold blood and the tight pants. which is fun.

tis the season

i was really hoping that making my gifts for people this year would alleviate a lot of stress for me. what i didn't take into consideration is that everything i ever make ever is a kind of complicated that makes my brain hurt in a good massage-the-knot-out-of-a-muscle kind of way when there is a manageable amount of it, but in a bad skull-not-big-enough-for-its-contents kind of way when i have too much to do. like right now. which is completely defeating the purpose.

its weird, now that i'm drawing again i feel like i don't have anything to write.

new

old

almost a real-live digital person

DEVONKELLEY-YURDIN.COM !!!!
a very special thanks to mr. bolesta.

also, this is what i do at work,
which is hilarious.

wintry mix

its snowed last night. i'm excited to leave the house to enjoy it before it gets deflowered by freezing rain and general new york uncleanliness. which probably means i've got an hour or so.


i'm selling things at a craft fair today and am really not sure if anyone is going to buy anything. also, i can't decide how much anything is worth. a professor of mine said once that pricing is awful because you always end up feeling like both a greedy bastard and a sucker. we'll see.

edible art

a really big dilemma

my mom asked me if i want another spiritual reading for christmas this year. i can't decide if i want one because i'm worried it will make the actual real decisions i've been thinking about seem even more confusing and the answers even more unclear. then again, who better to ask that some spirits. besides asking myself, of course. but who wants to actually take on that kind of responsibility? and who actually knows how they feel about anything other than the fact that they have feelings about everything? for now i guess i'm happy having my big dilemma NOT be whether or not i should move across the country and instead have it be whether or not i should ask my spirit guides whether or not i should move across the country. its a welcome change.

i wish i was the moon tonight

justforfun.tiff

here's what i don't understand

so i always here things like "lots of people live on less than a dollar a day," and what i'm wondering is if 100 years ago, when someone who had a million dollars was considered really wealthy, were those poor people people living on like 5 cents a day? and also where did all the new money come from? did one day the money makers just decided to start making more money or instead its just that there is more virtual money that doesn't exist in real spacetime? if that's the case and there's just all this fake money floating around can't someone just give it to all those people so they can have a few more 'dollars' a day and everyone would be happy? and can i have some?

obviously i know a lot about finances. people should listen to me.

my digestive system hurts most of the time

and i would just really love it if it would stop.

piece by piece

about a month ago i made myself go to imaging to scan some old work that was too big for normal scanners and ended up still having to scan my kite in 6 pieces. i decided yesterday that i should finally tile the stupid thing.


this is how far i got because i realized that i don't have the file for the bottom piece. so annoying. especially considering i don't even really like it anymore.

today i got paid to organize little royal icing flowers (by color) and construct gingerbread houses. tomorrow i'm getting paid to ice cupcakes and carve a pumpkin. who knew? i'm finally starting to feel creative again, and i've been staying up really late these days. by 'these days' i mean the past three. i had always said in school that i have trouble getting work done when the sun is up. i hope that's not still the way i function because going to bed at eleven pretty much rules.

Drafts (1)

she said i had a busy mind

i sort of love and hate having pains in my body. i guess i just feel like it brings attention to something you wouldn't necessarily be paying attention to. something that is inside of your body doing it's little job all the time that you never even think about paying attention to until it starts hurting. but it's always there. somehow it feels good to me to be aware, for a short time, of it's active existence. its also a really nice thing when it stops hurting and you had forgotten that it was hurting because it feels normal for it to not be hurting and then all of a sudden you think, "when did that stop?" sort of like when you're thinking about something all the time and you don't really notice when you're not thinking about it because when you're not, you're not instead thinking "i'm not thinking about this". because if you were thinking that then you are.

i told my mom that my new life goal is that, one day, i'd like to be able to afford a cleaning lady.

three hours is a lot of hours at 11pm

are you a tourist if you've already lived somewhere and you're going back to visit but don't have any of the real life 'home' stuff to do? still feeling daring enough to inspect people's faces on the bus seems outsider-like until you recognize one of them and then it doesn't. it's funny and fun to feel like a visitor but to not need directions. it's also nice to feel comfortable.

i'm in my old room in seattle and it still smells the same. i didn't even know it had a specific scent until it instantly turned into memory. it's so stupid and sad how easy it is to be stupid and sad. its nice to create new positive experiences and feelings to attach to a place that deserves it. this city feels good on me.


its strange when you realize your feelings about something or someone have become disconnected from thing itself. but i still sleep with my phone by my head.

manhattan is so weird.

tonight when i was walking home from c.s.a. the sun was setting and turned the sky the color pink that somehow makes bricks seem redder than they do in the daytime. now i'm home eating a giant piece of toasted baguette with olive oil AND butter and am about to go over to jen's to finish drawing a crocheted table cloth and catch up on some email correspondence. yesssssssssssssss.

edit: five minutes after writing i started feeling so incredibly sleepy and decided to be a flakey old woman and stay home and go to bed early instead. oh well.

it is really baffling to me that people have trouble finding babysitters. tonight, i walked into a beautiful fort greene apartment to hang out with an almost one-year-old for 25 minutes before he fell asleep in that cute kid way with his legs tucked under and his butt in the air. then i ate nutella and watched television. after a half hour about poor britney i watched kinsey on ifc and then an episode of sex and the city on-demand. then i read miranda july. then i got paid $65 in cash and took a cab home. it's like being thirteen except you don't feel guilty about eating their food and now there are really great cable packages.

everyone i know is here right now on this sphere

mom: yeah, you look like shit.
me: fuck you
*both laugh*

i'm in vermont. this morning i woke up to the men who are painting my mom's condo standing directly outside my window clunking around heavy ladders and speaking in even heavier vermont accents. (no 't's, long vowels). to remedy my grump i watched cinderella on vhs. after that i found myself looking through the dresser that has three drawers full of all the stuff i couldn't throw away when i moved out after high school, which, for obvious reasons, means its actually just a dresser full of high school. pictures, yearbooks, knick knacks, journals. the sketchbook is my favorite. it's basically just a bunch of squiggly lines and one drawing of a man throwing up flowers. its nice to know things haven't changed that much.

it's been weird realizing that somewhere along the line 'going home' and 'going on vacation' became the same thing. one night when joan and freddie were here we pulled the car over too look at all the stars before the moon rose. they're really the kind of amazing that doesn't even feel worth trying to understand because it just can't possibly make sense. sort of like choosing to live in a place where you can't even see them can't possibly make sense. in the daytime the sun hangs more to the south than it did in may, i can tell by how the light hits my dad's porch. fall is approaching in a serious way. the chimes, though, they always sound the same. its just so beautiful here and i can't help but keep thinking about those stars. for some reason it breaks my heart a little to know that some things are just so far away.

i have no idea where the cord is for the scanner.

that's actually all i wanted to say.

<3

yesterday

devon: oh my god i'm such a genius i'm really glad i just thought of that.
joan: that's how i felt this morning when i got finished cutting out all the letters of the alphabet.


camera obscura: thank you very much!
caitlin: you're welcome!

this was my room the night we moved in:


and this is the majestic beauty it is about to become:


who's ready? i am.

also, i'm going to try really hard to stop being ridiculous. it wastes beautiful days.

its been a while, says jen

every other year at this time we've been gearing up to go back to school and even though that's not happening i still feel like there's a very specific air of preparation but have no idea what it's for. what's going on? i know who has that answer. fall. i've decided to step down and put all my eggs in one basket by taking away all personal responsibility for anything in my life and am blaming all moods and decisions on the seasons. everything will be figured out for me because fall has a way of bringing all that stuff that was floating around all summer long back to the ground and all i'll have to do is wear more clothing. i'm off the hook.

hmm... i'm doing a drawing with a farm scene and have been doing google image searches and this is what's at the top of my screen right now:


it was strange last night to walk home and have one layer on my arms not be enough. it was refreshing. i was walking quickly and it was dark and an attractive man reading a magazine on a brownstone stoop smiled at me and i smiled back because why does no one ever do that? on monday at the waterfront in boston i was looking up at all the buildings and removing the ones in my mind that i didn't think belonged there. the only ones left were the beautiful old rows that i don't know how to describe except that there were really good fire escapes and the old one with the pointy top that was dwarfed by all the giant glass guys even though you can tell that, at one time, people must have been baffled by it's height. and there was a old couple on the pier with matching sneakers. they probably have been in love forever.

today at work i was showing off to my coworkers pictures of a kid that's not even mine. i'm going to be the worst kind of parent.

yesterday, when i got off the subway, i started walking on the platform between the pillars and the train. the train started pulling away and, because we were moving in the same direction, it felt like i was walking really slow, almost being pulled backwards. as soon as the train passed the weight was gone and i felt normal. it reminded me of the exercise in gymnastics we used to have to do which involved running down the vault runway with a giant landing mat dragging behind us so that once we took it off and ran regular it felt like we were flying. it would be pretty convenient if things were actually like that. that when something happens that's hard and makes you feel really slow there's a definite moment that you are released and you can fly again, or at least feel normal (whatever that means). jen, joan, and i were talking the other day about how we tend to draw about the things we love and write about the things we hate. i'd like for that not to be the case.

tin ceilings and bar stools and sleepovers and two year olds who speak their own languages and a beach that has the ability to make your brain go dumb and those beautiful vines that grow on the sides of those beautiful houses that still reach for the sun even when it's dark out.

http://aa.usno.navy.mil/graphics/Moon_movie.gif

"small universal child morning star purple flower of love"

when things are going really terribly its so easy to find yourself feeling like nothing's going to ever be right even though you know very well that that's not at all true. my mom always says that the world has a way of taking care of us. i know she's right but things falling apart and feeling awful always make everything fall apart more because of how awful you feel. and its so hard to see what you're letting yourself do because somehow feelings always get in the way of ever being able to be rational. and you don't know that you're actually driving yourself out of your mind until someone comes and says, "hey, you're driving yourself out of your mind," and then you know and can stop.

replace "you" with "i".

the past few days have been infinitely better and right now i'm sitting in my room with my new bike helmet next to me and my new apartment's keys hanging on a rubber key chain the shape of a sneaker and i'm realizing that this is it: my big fat "i told you so" from the universe, and from my mom.

i wish that people were better at dealing with change.


actually, maybe i just wish that i was better dealing with change.

this one's for jen

today was really exciting because i bought my first .005 micron that will never be used for a homework assignment. i'm not sure exactly why that feels like a big deal to me, but there is something that just feels nice about existing outside of school but utilizing the tools that were acquired there. somehow i've managed to tell myself that the approaches i took while in school are no longer valid or smart enough. maybe my brand new .005 micron will prove me wrong. maybe it will be what helps me see that i can work outside of the strict deadlines of finals and still have it's .005 line draw something that makes me say, 'yessss'.

i was talking to jen about the fact that i hadn't updated in a while and how i just don't want this blog to become more about 'this is what i did today' than 'this is what i'm working on'. but i guess since very little is being worked on (and, lets be honest, who knows when that's going to get back underway) for now the everyday whatevers are just going to have to do. i mean, in the end, it's the everyday whatevers that are going to influence the stuff anyway.

i found out yesterday that my (former) professor's son, tyler, who i was planning on babysitting for two days a week this summer got into daycare. jean offered to give me the names of other mommies but i'm really not interested in being a babysitter. i just wanted to hang out with tyler who's pretty much awesome although not very good at playing with others. at the playground on monday i taught him how to shoo away a pigeon and he proceeded to shoo away the next kid who came over to play with his toy truck.
"only with birds, tyler."
maybe daycare isn't such a bad idea.

this is so emo. i'm really sorry.

lazy sunday

today i made a really amazing lunch for myself of eggs with garlic and thyme and pecans and vermont cheddar cheese on a baguette with drizzled balsamic vinegar. and i had some cherries, which i love but always forget exist fresh until summer comes and then i remember and am happy because it means that the season is here that we seem to always be waiting for. the idea of summer is so strange, like how things seemingly become okay even when they're not. i just still feel so tired. also, i've been spending the afternoon looking online at maira kalman's the principles of uncertainty and she makes me feel so crazy and excited and scared that i'll never ever in my life be able to make something so wonderful.

this is the third night i've heard fireworks down by the waterfront and i really wish i knew what they were for. i really love fireworks.

i like how when you clean your room you're sort of also cleaning out your head.

one more thing...

caitlin and i saw this today at the museum of arts and design and i basically peed my pants.

cleaning and making more messes

i've (finally) begun the process of seriously cleaning and reorganizing my room which of course means hours of distraction and funny memories and plenty of frustration. then i started going through old emails and iphoto and decided that maybe it wasn't the best use of time and that i should just try to go to bed or something but decided to do this instead. who's to say what's a good use of time, anyway.


i bought this yarn today and the clasp is from a bunch of jewels that caitlin's mom was throwing away and laura is going to (re)teach me how to knit and i'm going to make a bag. i've been feeling sort of stuck and scared to make things (shocking) but have been having all these ideas. i'm thinking that when i actually start my jobs and have a regular schedule i'll feel less like i'm just floating around and more like i'm being a productive human. after all, babysitting and selling muffins are very productive and essential parts of any post-graduate attempt to ignore real life for as long as possible.

tuesday

two-two: me and you (guys)

i recently told a special friend that i think everyone deserves to be adored. a few days later, and under very different circumstances, i can't help but think about that. about the fortune of just having it there, right in front of me, flowing freely without effort or question, from people who have found me. people who i have found. birthdays always feel so hopeful. thanks, friends.

the moooon

i've decided that for the month of june the only real thing i'm going to be doing is sketchbooking. i kept trying to think of a good project to start myself off with but i can't imagine doing anything with much structure or commitment these days. i can't even get myself to apply for a job even though i really really need one. i've made the summer goal of drawing trees better because right now when i draw geometric things they look like they come to life but when i draw actual living things they just look floppy.
yesterday at 7 pm we took an 'impromptu' trip to coney island that we planned at noon. maybe for some spontaneity needs to be worked up to. who knows, by the end of the summer we could be making sandwiches and suggest that they be eaten on the beach and then just leave instead of planning the trip to the beach then making sandwiches to bring with us.
tonight, at the animal collective show, i could hardly see anything accept the backs of some very trendy and unkempt hairstyles. i kept closing my eyes. sometimes it feels really nice to imagine that the bass is replacing your heartbeat. it's cloudy tonight so you can't see the moon that last night was full and orange and perfect. i guess it's just comforting to know that things are there even when you can't see them.

what's happened has happened, what's coming is already on it's way...

i don't know why now more than ever, but lately i've been having really strong reactions to music. i tried listening to cat power and i swear i was on the train in florence wearing my mom's blue coat with my ipod on trying to decipher the exact differences between the trees there and here, confused and anxious about the person who introduced me to cd but who i didn't like anymore because there was someone else who i couldn't stop thinking about. joanna newsom makes it winter and nighttime and vermont. i had listened to that album every time i drove when i was home last january. the strongest, probably because it was the most recent, was last week when i put on sera cahoone, who i listened to for the entire month of august. i actually had to turn it off and ended up pacing around the living room for a few minutes for my stomach to settle.
i'm thinking this happens because of how i've come to listen to music. i can never just listen to a variety of things depending on my mood, it has to be one or two or three specific albums at a time that, when they're on, i know how to think. i get so accustom to having them on that i don't have to think about them anymore and that's when they become part of the memory and feeling of that specific time period. they become ingrained in the portion of that moment that is just intuitive. so everything thought or felt at that time is affected by that music because the music is what's helping the thinking in the first place. and maybe that's the strongest part of memories anyway, the parts that you weren't meaning to formulate or feel or even know were happening.
in the past i've had to condition myself to not feel a certain way about music that i've done this with. it took me years to start listening again to my favorite natalie merchant album that got me through my parents divorce. years before i could put it on and not be sobbing on the floor of my empty bedroom on the day we moved out of my house. i wonder what it's going to be like in a few months when i put on mirah, or oneida, or oakley hall's second album only (i can't listen to the third right now, it's too seattle). it will be weird to feel then some unidentifiable feeling that i'm having right now even though right now it doesn't seem weird at all. because right now is actually the only time that this exact feeling that i don't know i'm having makes sense.


because i want this project to be a lot about my sketchbook, i thought it would be a good idea to go through my old sketchbooks and pick out a few gems to post. above is something i started last fall in a sketchbook, then typed, then emailed, now edited and posted. its sort of amazing how many little ideas come from just writing or drawing in a little book. sitting on the floor of my living room this morning going through a year and a half's worth of my own brain's blabber made me feel really weird, sort of like the music thing. it felt so strange to involuntarily recall where i was sitting and what i was doing and how i was feeling. and i found it way too difficult to pick and chose because how do you edit memories? so, in chronological order, i scanned a lot. i just had to.