LUCIDITY, DRAGGING, AND MEMORIES

I've reached a certain place of lucidity about what happens in the next stage of my life. The time for my few acres, giant garden, and possibly some goats––I don't know why goats, it just seems like a thing that would be character building––has not yet come. (That will come though, right? In Montana or even still my brow-beaten North Dakota?) But I know some things that are next. And I'm surprised, but not surprised, to find the clarity has come through fire, through the perpetual forcing of this introvert out into the world until she loses much of her sense of terror, past the fields of breathless anxiety. I am surprised at the amount of discomfort this has taken. Before I supposed I would work through discomfort to a place of comfort and then triumph! Now I'm learning to fall in love with the sense of falling. Are you aware of that team-building practice of letting yourself fall backwards trusting the person behind you will catch you? Forget the team-building part for the moment, and the person to catch––I'm falling in love with the sense of falling and trusting. Trusting without knowing when I'll stop falling, what will be there to catch me, or even if there is an end. Even if I fall flat on my face, break my nose and several ribs...

I've reached a certain place of lucidity about what happens in the next stage of my life. I don't much want to speak of, or define things yet. There are these sprouts coming out of the ground and we'll all have to wait to see what arrives.

The empty feeling still drags at me regularly. This is just a thing I think I must accept. A part of me that will greet me on many mornings, lay me down to sleep many nights, and haunt me through long afternoons. "I'm in Paris!" I tell it. "Go away! I just toured three different countries, did well on a French test, and ate all my fruits and vegetables!" "I just went to the Louvre! Can't we be delighted and exalted? What is wrong?! How can I feel empty after that?" It spurs me on in it's own way. Writing has become a lifeline, not to keep me living but to keep me healthy. I certainly am excited and grateful for this opportunity, for these people I'm meeting, the things I'm seeing and doing. For all the hollowness in my heart there is a fullness and wonder that breaks forth and eats up this world with joy. Accepting joy comes easily though, while it is hard to not greet the empty feeling with guilt. Guilt that I can't shake this stain of sourceless sorrow. Guilt that I must be doing something wrong, I must be sinning, I must be failing to cause this emptiness. It is the guilt that must be shaken off, it is the true devil here.

Let me take you back to a wonderful place, though. Let me lift you up out of the murky recesses you may have slipped into, and let me share with you a few brilliant things. 

A FEW BRILLIANT THINGS:
As recommended by my sister:


This song:


And two last, most important things: 

Memory One: A memory of my mom, I was probably in high school and she was probably in the middle of making bread, and she stopped what she was doing, drew me into the kitchen to listen to Camelot with her and to explain the significance of the song.

Memory Two: Enjoying a sunny Sunday lunch with a French family and friends, gathered around the table singing Beatles songs together. At one point assuring them that "a hard day's night" is really a sort of nonsense phrase. 

Do you have dear musical memories? Have you ever tried on Shaq's coat? When's the last time you had horchata? 

no counting

There was this great family dinner moment yesterday where my grandma (really my aunt's mom who only says a few words in English: thank you and potato) says (in Spanish) to my Uncle, "The meat is really good today, what happened?!" A highlight of our Sunday family dinners.

Last week a friend asked me how many family dinners I had left before I moved. "I don't know, I haven't started a countdown."

And I don't want to know.

I want to pretend this will keep going on for always until the day before I move and then I will say goodbye and hug and kiss you all and maybe cry when I'm all by myself (all by myseee-ee-eelf). It's strange to feel so torn, to feel like I'm missing something by leaving in July instead of late August when most of my friends have already moved, and most of the rest–ok one, one friend is moving the week after. I won't be missing any midnight skinny dipping in Mona, or front porch sitting, face yoga, or discussions about returning to an agrarian lifestyle. They'll happen for others probably, but not for the people I've grown accustomed to. This time is passing. The diaspora has already begun, the time is growing near to jump ship.


The reality of my decision to move to North Dakota is hovering around me like some strange dreamlike fog tinged with feelings of excitement, determination, and horror. I don't think I know yet how it will feel to say goodbye to this place I've lived in for six years (and loved for four). This time is passing extremely quickly.

Theory: diaspora pushes you into adulthood

eventually i need to make a list for today.

Things I plan on doing when I move back to North Dakota for a bit:

Raiding my dad's vinyl collection (as I do every time I go home) and most particularly playing this album a few times as loud as I please:

making a kokedama string garden

Getting my documentarian on/conquering the world.



Now for today's conquering.

swimvation continued

Because this is what I'm like:

Friday night some friends are over so I pull out the quilt I've been piecing together for months (you know, the one where if people ask me "Are you making a quilt?" I say, " Uhhhh.....yeah.....kind of...." because I feel embarrassed?). It's mostly pieced together and looking at this Alicia (I think it was you) says, "You've done a lot, are you proud of yourself when you see this?" And I, who had just been feeling overwhelmed thinking of all that's left to do and can't seem to narrow my focus to these last few stitches that are needed to perfect one section, I say, "Sometimes I can't feel that."

And we hear as film students all the time (mostly from people who are NOT in the filmmaking trade themselves) that obviously we're not all going to be that filmmaker we admire, there's a lot of us, we can't all be that filmmaker who gets screened in theatres, even limited-run art house cinema kinds of theatres. And as I'm an average human I think, Oh, I can't be, I shouldn't even try to make a feature length documentary. 

But at least for the moment at this point I can remember Werner Herzog's funny voice I heard on NPR this morning saying, "You have no excuse not to make a feature film. People can make a feature film these days for $10,000." Which is really, extraordinarily cheap if you weren't aware. (DON'T WORRY MOM, I'm not planning on anything like that.) And Werner sometimes eats his shoe if someone (Errol Morris) makes their first feature length.

Maybe you can see, though, why I'm doing this to myself if you understand that I LOVE FILM. I can't help myself, I don't want to watch movies all the time, but if you want to see me get excited, ask me a nerdy film question and if I don't know the answer I'll spend hours trying to figure it out. Poke my eyes out and make me blind: I still love film, I'll just listen to it. The beauty of the innovation and history and effect and humanity of it all makes me cry. Poke my eyes and cut out my ear drums and I'll learn braille to read about it and find some way to tell you about it.


This is what I uncontrollably want.

swim for all salvation*

AHEM: I'm-going-to-officially-no-holds-barred-take-the-plunge-into-following-my-intuition-passion-and-dreams-and-become-a-starving-artist.

Oh, how is that any different than what I'm already doing?

I'm going to consciously embrace it and not shy away anymore. No more shooting myself in the foot, this will be more like shooting myself in the head. No. No, bad attitude. That's what can't happen anymore. I've already told you (probably) that I'm going to move home and make a series of short documentaries about North Dakota. I've had this on my mind for months so I figured I should tentatively plan for this and hesitantly tell people, and look in the mirror and ask myself why the H I'm not a dynamic, wildly-employed, talented person, who do I think I am?

If anything ever falls under the category of a stupid question, those might be some of them. And if the questions aren't, whatever answers you come up with will make you feel stupid.

I can do this. (yes?) I'm jumping in, praying the sound equipment I don't need anymore will sell on Amazon, people will buy my postcards on Etsy (more on that later), and maybe this other web project I'm working on will get underway and I'll be able to face all the inner dragons I'll find on my sojourn on the Great Plains and I'll come out with a web site and documentary work that I can be pleased with and some festival audiences that like it too.

And maybe even some distribution please?

I long to dive back into that isolated prairie but I'm afraid of drowning.

Oh, world, please, just love me. Is that too much to ask?


*line from song I like giants by Kimya Dawson. 

how do you know what a wasp is thinking?

In my bathroom on a window ledge is a large envelope that has "DON'T MOVE AT ANY COST" scrawled on it in sharpie. Because on this envelope is a wasp, trapped under a small glass jar, trapped under a brick. I feel guilty that it's slowly suffocating (I hope). I hope and I feel guilty?

This is me as your protector: kicking washing machines, beating spiders until they have been dead for minutes, and leaving wasps in jars. It's just, what do I do? Let the wasp out to sting me multiple times? Or to build a nest in my backyard to sting someone many multiples of times? No. So it stays in it's glass prison.

Sometimes I feel like I'm in a glass prison. Frosted glass because I have only mild ruminations and intuitions about what my future should hold.

What is this wasp thinking right now?

sans school, I want to...

...make things like this:
(More New York Times. Note: I need to start reading multiple newspapers because I don't understand Republicans at all.)

Literary Underground

from sketchbook by Amy Goldwasser and Peter Arkle
One Sunday afternoon this holiday season, as the literary professionals were putting finishing touches on their year-end lists of best books, citizen critics were busy just reading. On a No. 6 train between Astor Place and 125th Street full of shopping bags and bundled-up passengers lost in books analog and digital, we asked underground readers for their reviews. (continue reading and viewing pleasurely here.)

What do you think about me waking up at 5:30 yesterday morning, laying in bed daydreaming about how I could get my PhD by the time I'm 32?

January is beginning to take shape

There once was a lady named Marge
Whose indirection weighed on her like a barge.
On the cusp of graduation,
waiting patiently for some intimation (of the future),
She inched her way towards being at large.

assertive, ascertain, a certain ummm...

We are now five inches away from the crossroads of my transition from student to graduate. If you would really like to know I'm looking for work as a researcher. A lot of films, be they fiction or non, require researchers. Just to know things. When you make a film you've got to know things and I like to be the person who's searching for that knowledge. I dress the part, you know it: unwieldy sweaters, vintage and/or chunky shoes, and I push my glasses up by the bridge which will forever drive my mom batty.

So I'm dressed for success, I have a good resume to start with...

The world suddenly seems very large and I am very fish-like in a floundering kind of way. Does anyone else feel like they've been pushed onto a big city street that's full of the hustle and bustle of people taking care of themselves? And you're going to have to be extremely assertive to catch anyone's eye?

Hmmm.... 

ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

also, it has been seeming like a good decision to....oh gosh, say it out loud, use words, type, type, type...

it kind of still seems like a good idea to move home for the month of january.

it also seems so permanent.
so different.
so much of an end to lovely things.
but my documentary heart is longing, longing, longing to be a lonely girl set loose on the world. and i've never been able to deny my documentary heart.

quizical

Sometimes I can't fall asleep at night because my impending schoollessness and otherwise uncertain future bears down on me. What, dear world, am I going to do?

Tonight I am reminding myself that I will not forget (ha) that I can do anything I set my mind to. I haven't lost the "American"* or anyone else's dream. Particularly not my dreams, I haven't lost those. Unfortunately. What I mean to say is, that since I'm not shaking this feeling of anxiety, I've been dreaming a lot more. Everyone I know and even everyone I don't know regularly parades through my nocturnal conscious. None of these spectrals listen when I tell them this is not what Carl Jung meant by collective unconscious and would they please leave me alone.

My waking dreams are great. And like I've been reminding myself to not forget: I can conquer any one of them. I just can't settle on any one of them.

It all works out, I know. I know, I know, I know.

But right now I am in the dark and as far as I can see (ha) there are two options for what comes next:

a) I will remain in the dark, walking towards this abyss, and I will remain in the dark until I reach the edge. At which point someone will hit the light switch and I'll see the bridge that will lead me over to the other side. "Phew," will be my reaction at that point. And "What a nice bridge," I'll think, as well as, "How provident!"

b) I will remain in the dark, I will arrive at the cliff still in the dark, and I will have to leap into the dark, hoping I will land in a place I like. Exhilarating to fly like that, but hard and scary.

All I need to know right now is if it's A or B.




*Calling something American, while vernacularly means one thing, actually references two continents and something like 23 different countries. It may be more, I don't really know how to count some of those islands. In other words, roughly half the globe. While I may be pretentious to refuse the popular usage of the word, I just can't see it in an un-ironical light (hence the quotation marks). In high school when I would see the "I am an American" commercials I desperately wanted to see one that said, "Soy una Americana."  

DON'T FORGET TOMORROW!!

I did imagine I would have a desk covered in a beautiful Iranian mat, spilling forth with books, strange trinkets I've collected like broken Kerr jars and pieces of animal bone, and gifts from other people like old photo slides, Franz Muscha prints, intricately embroidered quilt squares, and drawings.

I didn't quite foresee all of the nooks and crannies being stuffed with mini DV tapes, external hard drives, and film equipment.

What I never in a million years would have thought possible would be me, sitting here, at the afore mentioned desk, adding "moving back home–in the wintertime–to make a documentary" to my list of options post-graduation.

NOT THAT I'M NECESSARILY DOING ANYTHING ON THIS LIST (like getting one of those aboriginal-type piercings ((totally politically correct)) where there's a stick through my nose). 

{imagine annoying gameshow voice here:} WWWWelllllllll folks, is this just some temporary insanity, orrrrr is thiiii-iiissss the REEEEEEAAAAALLLLL DEEEEEAAAAALLLLLL?
only time will tell.
Purchase necessary. Prices and participating organizations may vary. Not intended for pregnant mothers. But not just for men. Not all supplies included in this box. 

the city i'm in

I dreamed of looking like this when I was a child.
I don't, by the way.

My attitude towards what I do post-graduation is a combination of shooting for the furthest galaxy and despondency. When an idea pops into my head I say, "Why not?" Except that in my current outlook it sounds more like "Why not."

I'm applying for a job at the Sundance Film Festival.
The National Film Board of Canada's job listings page is now in my folder of websites I check just about everyday.
I'm planning on spending a couple of months in Hawaii.
A week to a month in Seattle. Or move there entirely. I want a big city.
Study Spanish and live in Spain for a month. Imagine Spain in May.
Work with troubled youth in Australia.

I really am seriously considering all of these things.

Because what do people like me do in my position? People who are passionate about and fascinated by everything but are dipping into morose-osity because they lack direction. People like me move to Israel and work on a kibbutz (something I've thought about doing since I was 19). I research my future by checking one-way ticket prices to places all over the globe. Right now my future is affordable because it's months away and I have no deadlines. I am completely and utterly flexible.

I don't promise I'll do all these things. In a way, I hope I don't. Not like this. I will see the world, but I'd hate to be a wanderer trying to find their way out of morose-osity. The way life comes to me I can never find my future. It's not until the present is ending that I suddenly find my new purpose. I dream up plans and purposes because why should I sit around for something to be handed to me on a plate, but it's like throwing weak magnets at a fridge and watching them slide slowly down.


I know it will work out.


But.

This time it's a big deal.
This time it's more stressful.
I'd like to have a purpose.

Did you know this is who I am inside?

I fill your head with my inner thought process

Or the one in which my blog turns into a boring thing which I never planned to make it.

Australia's email address is faulty. I went for it this morning, I pulled the draft out of the inbox, sent the email and got the return of "faulty." I can do more digging on this and find a way to contact him but it's his old stuff I want to study and make not what populates his current Youtube channel. So many dissolves, bland music, and comic sans font. Do I really want that?

I wish there was a Craigslist for Bruges. There probably is but with my language abilities I'd find myself involved in something disagreeable.

I've had a documentary idea for a while, something sustainable that I know I could get grants for, but I've been commissioned to my eyeballs for the last couple of years. Could I spend the first six months after graduation setting it up and then going wherever I please? It's travel friendly. And where is I please?

This is the man I would give the world to talk to: Chris Marker. He just turned 89 is there any hope? Sans Soleil, my beacon, is on Netflix instaplay.... Just kidding, is NOT. But La Jetée is.
Just look at this! I belong there!

tonight...

...as I discussed profound things with a friend as I sat on a rock with my feet being splashed by lake water (and that was why my feet were so cold we had to cuddle them in foot duvets and you had to sit on them) I thought about nature.

My thought about living in nature: I've always dreamed of it.

I would like to move to Australia after I graduate. Because I can.
Then at some point live in a house boat in Greece. For a month. Or some length of time. Anytime it gets stormy I'll watch Jaws. Because I love that movie.
Then back to some place North American. In a backwoods cabin. That is between a quarter of a mile to three miles out of town (so I can bicycle in and out). Because I would be the best backwoods wife ever.

Except for I'd miss people watching from my front porch.


Well, I don't know if I really would miss that, actually.

apollo can smell that girl's couscous

Sometimes I look at our youth (as in the youth we possess and not an age group of people) and I think we've become renaissance men. I don't mean in aristotelian or neo-platonistic ways, I'm bored by those ideas right now. I mean we're becoming jack-of-all-trades-like. I was talking to a friend the other day who has at least six jobs. They relate to Twitter, illegal french fries, socks, and stuffed animals. KB is working on the start-up of an Esty shop because she restores antiques and paints furniture (as well as being the cutest usher you ever did see). She says, "Why not make money doing what we like?"
Of course, the fact that we all have a million jobs may have something to do with the economy.
But before economy, when I was only sweat-shop-work aged, I dreamed of hanging my artwork up outside and selling them to people. It seemed much more appealing than selling lemonade. I figured out I could clothes pin my drawings to hangers and string them up across the front yard. I chickened out.

I plan on all-trading-it for a lot of my life. I like it.

remind me later to tell you my story about the kites.