rest my chemistry

The new Interpol is good. It cannot ever match the particular feeling of wandering Campbell at 2am listening to Turn On the Bright Lights, but hey. You can't have everything.

My memory is bad lately. I forget who I've told what to, and repeat myself, like a sad old woman. Particularly zombie-like, the lack of short term memory.

I read Neil Gaiman's "Vampire Sestina" out loud to Snow last night. I enjoy reading aloud a lot - and I've been told I do it well. It occurred to me it'd be fun for me to find Project Gutenberg stuff and read it for podcasts. Someone surely somewhere wants it.

I'm feeling happy about photo stuff even though no one is buying anything. That's ok.

And now, what I really want is a nap.

Zzz.

Photolography

I want to write a long rambling post about my trip to San Diego, but I haven't been in the right mood. Maybe soonlater.

I did however set up an Etsy shop for my photos.

sevenbridges.etsy.com

If you haven't checked out etsy before, you should. It's like a portal for crafts and creators who sell their work. I've bought lots of cool stuff from there.

new good thing

ergo proxy

is pino pino?
is pino supposed to be pino?

also, paranoid android as credits out music. much good.

getting serious

My whole life, I feel sometimes, has been unfocused. First, literally - my eyesight sucks, and it wasn't identified until I was something like 8 years old. My formative years were spent looking at the world through vaseline glass, never quite knowing what was happening.

Once I could see (my god, trees have individual leaves you can see from afar!) the rest of the unfocus set in. There was never anything I cared much about. Depression and anhedonia probably didn't help.

Now I'm getting serious. I am taking art seriously. I'm setting up to be commercial about it - but that's just a proof of a pudding I am certain I have already tasted.

http://www.sevenbridgesstudio.com

But it's more than that. My body has been making me unhappy for many years. Now I feel like I have a focus for fixing it. I want to be small. Not small like weak, not small like petite, but small and fierce. I want to be sharp, to be crisp. I want to function like a small machine.

In the past I've let failure distract me. I've let life blur my focus and keep me from even seeing what I want. Now, still at times dizzy and confused, still not functioning every day, I have this small amount of burning focus. Fiercely, I will refuse to fail.



Next week I am going to San Diego with my father, to deliver my daughter to her paternal grandparents for a week. My father and I will do some stuff then go home. I hope the weather is beautiful. Berkeley is foggy, and I have summer dresses.

question:

which has a higher ld50
clonopin
or glue stix?

consumption of each seems to be reaching a plateau, so i won't worry.

ra.di.o.ac.ti.vi.ty

I think there was a time, when I was a teenager, that I was intentionally eccentric. It was all affectation, to some degree or another, lacking any real identity or emergent traits. Like most people, I didn't know what I liked.

I've gotten a lot weirder since then, I think.

My current list of "huh?" eccentricitices includes:

Being on over 5 psych meds
Being afraid of lobsters
Wearing tshirts which are so far past worn as to be classified as rags by my mother
Fascination with disaster, risk, and the human factors thereof
A disassociation with my fascination with the purely macabre, and a greater fascination with the oddly ironic
I watch Deadliest Catch, Lost, House, Hell's Kitchen, and Gordon's Kitchen Nightmares with a freaksih regularity.
God bless Tivo.
I've begun to read young adult scifi novels. They're less pretentious than the adult ones, and an easier read. See above about psych meds.

Some that haven't changed:

I still want to be a writer.
I still want to be an artist, and I'm working on a portfolio to some yet unsaid purpose.
I still like to dye my hair and it gives me a sense of control over my life.

I expect to only get weirder as I get older. I live in Berkeley. I see what happens when people just stop giving a fuck. It's not a bad thing. They seem pretty happy, really.

Your search - "i want to drown in saffron" - did not match any documents.

somaholiday

I've brought candles and music and books and medications and beverages into my room and I am staying here in this sanctuary until I feel a lot better.

Which'll be soon, I think. These things heal.

Glory

I don't normally post videos, but:

Thou Shalt Always Kill



Yes. Glory.

I rediscovered a song while seeking a cd (which I still haven't found)... "Mild Child", a b-side to the Shins "So Says I" single. It has this beautiful, harmonic reverberation that makes me feel like I'm listening to it in a much larger room.

It's lovely.

Revision to previous prinny-based allegations:

Odin Sphere is the best game ever.

I mean, any game where you stomp around and try to catch onions on the loose so you can turn them into napalm to kill giant teddy bears who regen health from their honey pots...


Yes. good.

Downtown

It's kind of funny to me, really. I'm not really one to take things in tv shows as personal anthems, or to recite things from movies. I occasionally quote from books, but even then, I always feel like I'm appropriating.

But in the case of one particular passage from Lost, I think back to it on a regular basis. It's the scene where Juliet is trying to compose herself before her book club meeting, just before the plane crashes. She puts on a CD, the song "Downtown", and slowly through the first few lines pulls her head up, wipes her tears, and gets ready to face life, and her group. She fakes it, pretends it's working, until it actually doesw.

I don't know why I think of this so often. There's something really universal about it, a song that makes things mostly okay, that allows you to get back to enough of a semblance of normal to go on with life. That's my life, on some days anyway. On a near constant basis other times.

When you're alone, and life is making you lonely

You can always go

Downtown

rereading

I read books like some people watch movies - which is to say, quickly and repetitively. And sometimes not with a lot of retention, but that's not here and it's not there either. An old teacher of mine said I read books like a cartoon cat eating a fish, sucking off the meat and leaving only the bones - but that's a bit graphic. Any way, fish and cat or mobie and film, I read when I can't do anything else, when my brain is too bent to multitask.



I recently re-read Philip K Dick's A Scanner Darkly, which I enjoyed, again. I mainly meant to read it before seeing the movie, but I haven't gotten around to the latter.

Then, I re-read The Penultimate Truth, which has always appealed to me in the way that tricking large numbers of people into anything always appeals to me. Then I read Jonathan Lethem's Girl in Landscape, which I liked, but which didn't thrill me the way I remembered it doing. Maybe I was closer to adolescence then - that would make sense.


It doesn't bother me to know how it ends. Travelling the path is enough. I chew through books and I go back for seconds. I hit rewind and watch a dozen more times before the thing falls apart.

somnolence and anorexia may result

In my more coherent moments I'm working on a new project. I'm kind of excited when I'm not completely somnolent from the medication or irritated from the lack of it. The warning label also said "anorexia" as a side effect, but no one could look at me and honestly say I'm not getting enough calories so I'm not going to worry about the appetite loss much.

The project actually requires more focus than I have right now but I did get a domain name for it and started filtering and sorting, so I suppose that's on the right track. A very wide track, hopefully narrowing to a useful and sustainable conclusion.

In other news, Disgaea 2 is the best game ever. Prinny, dood!




<3 <3 <3

these comforting sounds you make

I went to see Mew last night at the Fillmore with Snow. I hadn't been to a live show since I saw Dead Can Dance in Seattle... and that was well over a year ago. I used to see live music on a monthly, if not weekly basis - am I an old person now? I forgot how happy it makes me.

The opener was a band from Austin called Oh My, Oh No (or was it Oh No, Oh My?). I liked them, but didn't think I'd like them outside of a live venue. I wondered if Nate knew them, just because you know, Texas. Not that Texas isn't a giant huge wasteland with a few loosely interconnected bands or anything.

Mew were fantastic. Truly wonderful. Their visuals were eerie and appealing at the same time, and unlike most things I've seen projected behind bands, actually really added to the experience. The crowd was good, and by the end I actually saw more than a few people moving their bodies - we are NOT New York, SF people. You can dance if you want to. (If your friends don't dance, they're no friends of mine).

They didn't talk much, but a line which cracked me up - "Is Lars Ulrich here? No? Because he's kind of a hero, the guy who went to America and made it big..."

Seeing live music does something really good to my brain, something akin to exercise or sex. Endorphins and emotional satisfaction, which I guess makes it closer to the latter than the former. I feel really good, I feel like I'm coming out of this period of utter and total mental breakage. I slept when I got home, and I woke at a good hour. It's cold and rainy out and I'm optomistic that I can return to the real world this week.