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.