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.

running up and down the stars

i was talking to mercedes the other day about the way we process things. how when she looks at something she'll often try craft in her head how she would put it in writing. and how i look at things and think of them as drawings or how they could be drawn. it's sort of great to think of everyone just walking around thinking the way that they think.

sometimes we just have to get unstuck

i'm really bad at starting things. i've been thinking seriously about this blog for a week but keep feeling too anxious to write the first entry. it's like the first page of the sketchbook: always the hardest to fill. actually, i usually leave the first page completely blank. followed by a page that just has my contact information on it with maybe a little doodle on the facing page but nothing that requires too much commitment. i can't do that with this so i just haven't written anything. it's not like i didn't have time. i was home doing nothing. well, not nothing. actually, yeah, it was nothing, but in a very purposeful "let's do nothing together" sort of way (with people i'm completely obsessed with, no less). after school ended i think i leaped as fast as possible at the opportunity to get myself far away (geographically and mentally) from new york. a perfect trip to tennessee, north carolina, and vermont for just long enough to remember that life outside of pratt can exist in a way that doesn't just make you not want to pull your hair out but actually makes you remember how beautiful everything is and how much there is to be excited about. this morning i realized (after walking in to a serious post-finals house frozen since we all left over a week ago and decided, instead of cleaning, to lay in my bed with a fan on me then tend to the plants then write this entry) that taking it easy and enjoying small moments exists here too as long as you allow it. which is a good thing to remember when it comes to starting projects instead of being scared of them.

everyone keeps asking how it feels to be a graduate and i keep telling them to ask me again in september. my hesitation to start things and my tendency to be a deadline worker worries me when i think of post-graduate life. i wanted to start this blog as a way of setting up for myself some kind of project. hopefully it will serve as some record of creative discipline that i'm pretty sure that i have but am terrified i don't. it doesn't matter if you're good at what you do if you can't do it without a deadline, and today, i realized that i was relying on the same habits to start my e-life outside of facebook and gmail that is being created with the sole purpose of breaking those habits. silly me. i realized that all i needed to do was just fill that first page so i can get on with the rest of it which i know is the good stuff anyway. that being scared to start an entry is as silly as being scared to start a drawing. and that i need to chill the freak out.

i just wanna start sharing things with the world because i feel like it shares a lot with me.