early birthday

communal dreaming

On school trips, going uptown, I used to dream of owning a building with all of my friends. When I was older, maybe highschool and beyond, I still felt the same way. I dreamed of buying an entire city block and demolishing the fences between the gardens, building a shared courtyard between all the buildings. blocking off all the doors, growing our own food, watching our own movies, doing our own thing. It was a seriously separatist dream, before I had any conception of lesbian separatism, wing nut libertarians, artist colonies, all that shit. God, it's such a good fucking dream. I wish I could corral all the darlings from across the universe and squeeze them into the same city block-sized shared apartment and never miss anyone anymore. I'm so sick of missing people. It gets in the way of not missing people and that is a horrible truth to face. We could all quit our jobs and smile at each other and I'd cook everyone dinner for the rest of time.

all I want for christmas and my birthday is for someone to hold my hand through figuring out how I can take art classes at the city college of san francisco. and maybe pay for them..?

san francisco! san francisco! san francisco!

I'm moving closer to the sun, to smile at babies and grapefruit. God damnit, I am terrified of the entire future!

goodbye Doris

today just didn't feel right.

sometimes when I'm too tired to feel motivated, it feels like I'm too tired to be happy.

Ollie, are you reading my blog?

And now I'm going running in Forest Park and then going to Fubonn to get everything I want.

In really cool news, I had great dreams last night that were all about me having friendships with people that, in my waking life, I didn't think I would want to be friends with.


and there's going to be a David Hockney exhibition in San Francisco while I'm there and I spent all day reading my heart out in the library.

sometimes you get a horoscope that just cuts to the root of it all

time rules.

Evasive maneuvers

During this time it may well be that you hide yourself away somewhere to avoid having to deal with the tension between your desires and your anxieties. Or perhaps you give in to your desire, but only half-heartedly, so that you get only half of something in the end, which is not what you actually wanted. This quality of time can indicate where your difficulties lie, i.e. in acknowledging your desires and completely giving yourself up to certain experiences. You will perhaps ascertain that this has to do with an insecurity or feeling of inadequacy of yours. That is why you should find out which experiences you actually avoid - then you can make a conscious effort to share these experiences with an understanding, sympathetic person who will not injure you anew.

broken brain

SAGITTARIUS (November 22-December 21): This is the week to put any pessimistic, poor-me tales confidently behind you, Sagittarius… and to radically insist that your new life-story is about to surprise you with twists-and-turns you'll actually thrive from meeting. I don't mean to make too much of Venus's landing in your sign on Monday (Oct 7), since she won't magically part the Red Sea or resolve all of your problems with one wave of her wand. That said, with her beauteous blessedness sprucing up your solar 1st-house over this month ahead, you can expect to enjoy a more noticeably-appealing outward presentation… with immediate benefit across different zones of life, in terms of being received with a warmer welcome and/or the proverbial upper-hand. Initiatives or interactions which might've fallen short of their fuller potential just a few short weeks ago will now be better-suited for (re-)introduction. Even your physical appearance may experience a ravishing rebirth. Yet, even still, you possess the emotional capacity to spoil this softly auspicious astro-influence: If you allow a continuing stream of feelings about recent months' unsettling developments to follow you here, uncontained or underprocessed, it'll be really hard to rewrite your tale with a happier chapter-ending.

last year

something I learned yesterday

Even if I thought that someone was a total babe, I would never strike up conversation with another person shopping at the goodwill.

what I do

I go to the gym, I turn on the sauna, I run on the treadmill, I sit in the sauna and read flannery o'conner.

ceej is watchin' over

all I wanna do is get the fuck outta dodge.

game plan:
save money
learn to drive
leave

i'd go anywhere, where should i go?

things that don't actually distract you from heartbreak
-avoiding the completion of your graduate thesis.
-working on your graduate thesis.
-devouring news of human rights violations and governmental fraud and deceit to remind yourself that you're being selfish. god, that one is so fucked up and gross and twisted.
-looking at photos on social networking sites.
-not looking at photos on social networking sites, but remembering what they look like.
-wearing the same shirt that you've worn for the past four days, even though it smells terrible.


it does actually help to leave the house, exercise often, spend time with friends, go to sleep when you're tired, and oddly enough, talk about your feelings with everyone until you become a little desensitized to them.

psych. i feel sick to my stomach. maybe the only modern cure is to stay off the internet.

new mantra

one more month. maybe i won't find a job. who cares. i'll be done with school.

bye

Today is so sad and I can't get San Francisco off my mind. Tomorrow is Queer Rock Camp all week long. I've gotta pack. fuck.

I wanna dedicate this post to the person reading this blog who found it searching for "dog turd bud olympia." Runner up to "real fucking bummer," I think you'll find you've really got a home here. Thanks, google, for creepin' on people and telling me about it.

my only human interaction today lasted for less than a minute. I am finding the end of this semester to be deeply disturbing. 

and my eyes are tired.

The depths of my procrastination

I've spent the morning procrastinating from writing my thesis. Haven't watched a single youtube video. What I HAVE done is 1. compile a wishlist/reading list of books on America culture in the 1930s 2. Look up authors that I'm reading a lot of and see where the teach/ if they're chairing any graduate programs.

http://www.andrewroth.com/publications/killed-rejected-images-of-the-farm-security-administration/

my life is fucked.

just gotta purge it

Saturday to Saturday, I can safely say that this week fucking sucked. not every moment. not without moments of respite and relief, but it very fully and significantly was a real fucking bummer. I didn't cry, I didn't throw anything, or storm out of anywhere, or yell or shriek or howl, but I did feel: sad, insecure, scared, exhausted, overworked, disempowered, unprepared, misunderstood, lonely, isolated, boring, inarticulate, stupid, paralyzed, hopeless, and foolish.

a feeling's just a feeling, and i just feel that shit hard. this week is fucking over and good riddance.

new month, new marks.

9:30am: have had enough coffee to render myself incapable of complex thought, human interaction, or maintaining the dryness of my palms.


better blog about it!!!!

oh wow, 13 hours of staring at my computer and i'm pretty sick of this.

at least i'm good at something

make me sound important

Hannah Horovitz was raised in New York City and moved to the Pacific Northwest to work at Kill Rockstars, a record label in Olympia, WA. She received her BA in American Culture from Vassar College in 2007, with an emphasis on Sociology and Urban Studies. While at Vassar, Hannah served as the Music Director of WVKR. Her thesis, “Eating Our Way Out: Locating Agency and Resistance Within the Consumer Cooperative Movement,” was awarded the grade of “distinction.” Hannah was the winner of the Helen D. Lockwood Prize for excellence in the study of American Culture and graduated with departmental honors. Since 2009, Hannah has collaborated with artist Bridget Irish to co-produce the critically acclaimed Hair Zine. She is currently a development intern and event planner at the Independent Publishing Resource Center in Portland, Oregon, where she is also pursuing a certificate in creative and nonfiction writing. Her academic interests include critical race theory, feminism, and American studies.

april

Today, I was sitting in a park downtown, reading next to a little fountain. A sparrow flew up and started splashing around in the fountain and I watched it for a moment, and noticed how tiny it was, and how its little feathers were all rumpled up from the water. I thought how nice it was that the sparrow was so small and so unafraid as to splash around so close to a human. It flew right by me, almost grazing my leg, up into the tree overhead. I continued to sit, reading. I heard a sound overhead. A hawk flew out of the tree with the sparrow in its claws and landed on the grass. It spread out its wing, so the sparrow was blocked from sight, and sat there for a moment, then it picked up the sparrow in its tallons and flew away. 

that felt really fucked up.

nothing to report

i'm in love with boston, massachusetts, and i'm never going to stop feeling that love. long ago, it seeped into the cracks and crevices of my heart. the slab and the stairs by the fens, the kitchen at lawn street, the practice space next to stevies, the final miles of the chinatown bus route from new york city...that shit sticks like tar. I never want to scrape it off.


maybe i'm so tired, maybe it's too close too home, maybe whatever...but I can't seem to move past the sinking in my stomach at the names of those familiar streets or the flashes of places i've biked and walked through a million trillion zillion times, pooled with blood and fear.

I'm having a really hard time working through to the big picture, having a really hard time thinking relatively.

In the library. Again.

I'm sitting in the library at Concordia University. The sun has left us again, the clouds are back. Before I begin thesis revisions, I'm looking through a magnificent coffee table book called Gulag: Life and Death Inside the Soviet Concentration Camps. All I can think about is the relative arbitrariness of temporal vocabularies used to describe state domination, national domination, human domination. Invasion and domination and colonialism all bleed into each other somehow. How can we claim post-coloniality when we live in an age of cultural and social colonialism and control? De facto colonialism.  How can we make that distinction and still honor the experiences and histories of those living in the aftermath of structured colonialism? How can we make sense of our places on each side of the equation, which is not so much an equation as a jumbled mess of contradictory truths?

The USSR was massive. It took up a lot of space, it swallowed up a lot of space, it spread over a vast amount of space. Is size it? Can we ascertain the effect of a thing by the size of it's influence? How can you measure the size of horror? It's not just big, it's something different. Or happiness? Or do feelings exist separately from spatial quantification? Where's the overlap?

Back to the photos, back to the revisions.

Is this gauche? it's not really advertising...

My friend, Carrot, is trying to raise money for their book-writing adventure on kickstarter. They've written a train hopping novella is astounding-- not only is it a million times better than 'off the map' and other punk traveling stories, but it's a million times better than any other travel narrative out there. It's right up there with "Miles From Nowhere."

Carrot's writing lodged itself in my heart with this, one of the most heart stoppingly evocative, hopeful, wonderous piece of writing out there. Seriously, this is why writing is so fucking important.

You can pour your heart and hope into these words that remain after the feeling has passed, after you've sunk back into the regular drudgery of life. You don't need to be an inspiring magical conjurer all the time, and it would be pretty insuffereable if you were, but if you can figure out how to pin down that feeling of elation and hope and belief in possibility, then you've done it. Maybe it doesn't work on you anymore, but it's a charm out there in the world. I am also such a sucker for 2nd person narration, but only when it's memoir-y.

Here is a link to Carrot's kickstarter. I know that no one really reads this blog, but please donate if you can. I promise it's worth it.

still fucking HOMESICK

i'm on spring break and i wish i was in olympia.

to study

I finished my readings this morning at a laundromat, washing my disgusting gym clothes that have been mildewing in my locker at school for weeks, months, years. My advice to anyone: study at the laundromat. it's warm. It always smells of clean clothing, it sometimes smells of unwashed humans. The music is rebroadcast, song for song, of the hits of 1996. No one else is in there reading, not at 9am. Fuck the coffee shops and fuck the libraries, I love a laundromat.

the little things

1. free 40s at the Critical Art Ensemble's Block Party, plus orange juice on my food stamps.
2. I finally figured out how to important citations directly from zotero to open office...
3. 6 pages of bullshit into the infographics chapter of my thesis.
4. it's springtime.

I don't want to go back to school this week, I want to stay home and work on my paper.

too scared to check my bank account balance and I keep procrastinating from my real thesis by day dreaming about a fake thesis. the fake one is a critique of riot porn, arguing that the fetishization of dissent is truly disempowering and objectifying in a way that pornography isn't. this is the new friday night.

It's raining in Portland, OR and I'm too tired to think of it any way except drumming on the roof. i am always so tired now because i am trying to do so many things. exciting and exhausting and damn there's a lot of cracks for everything to slip through. every tuesday the sun rises and sets upon my empty little room. how's that for sentimental?

goodnight.

when I graduate I would like to go on a grand tour, visiting everyone I haven't seen this year. caution and money to the wind. massachusetts, san francisco, panama, england, india, new york. There. I said it, now I can go to school and present my my research.

A new library

Today, I discovered the library at the University a BLOCK from my house. Goodbye, coffeeshops. This is the greatest discovery I may have ever made. There are couches, tables and three floors. I will never try to work at school again, this place is a fucking HEAVEN.

I also found my soulmate, this is him: 

I really want facebook to stop telling me when people get engaged. It's fucking with my head.

Perfect morning

I spent the morning reading Vanessa Davis' Make Me a Woman and it's fucking amazing! I checked it out of the North Portland library the other day when I was picking up books to cram for the Graham Harman lecture that happened at school last night. My favorite part about the public library is the graphic novels section. That's where I found Special Exits, at the Lacey Library when I was living in Olympia.

Make Me a Woman is a bunch of diary comics, a lot of them are set in New York, some in Florida, some in California....Alexis, I think you'd really love them....they're about being jewish and they're so funny.


I also painted my nasty little claws.

Paid my tuition.
In it for another goddamned semester.
Administrators think I'm an undergrad, always.
My hair is turning grey.

The best part about having recurring nightmares about someone fucking with my bike is that I wake up and it was a dream. The worst part is exploring the myriad ways that my dream self can experience devastation and anger. It's different every time.

How could you not LOVE THIS?!?!

"If the demand for theory was, in Iris Murdoch's words, a cry for a house that could provide shelter from empiricism, it was also a political demand born of the realization that theories are never politically innocent. They express political prejudices and reproduce them, even when they deny it. To reveal those prejudices in order to neutralize them was the great ambition of the Frankfurt school, of the Barthes who unmasked 'mythologies' with such sardonic glee, and of the feminist critics and historians who refused to go on being hidden from history."

-- David Macey, from The Penguin dictionary of critical theory. 

last night i dreamt that I fell in love.

that moment when you realize you're $1 short for bus fair tomorrow morning and it's too cold to go out to an atm, so you just hope it'll work out.

(it worked out! GOTTA KEEP POSI KEEP POSI KEEP POSI! gotta write a song called 'postmodern pot party'! Gotta apply for jobs and shit that makes me feel like I can drop out of school if I wanna!)

goodbye 2012

I've spent the last few months hating on this year, wishing it were over. I'm glad it's over, and I'm glad it happened. This year was hard, but every year is hard. This was the first year that passed without heartbreak. It was a year of heavy introspection and personal shit. It was the first year that I felt adult. It was a year of feeling lonely and disconnected, of feeling like I was on the other side of something. This year, I applied to grad school, was accepted and moved to Portland to attend school. I traveled by myself through Central America. I made out with one person. I cooked at Queer Rock Camp and played in a band at Queer Adult Rock Camp. I've felt ecstatically happy and horrendously sad. This past year began on a good note and ended on a good note, though the last six months have been challenging and miserable.

This coming year, I hope to make out with more than one person, to graduate or drop out, to go somewhere warm and to be somewhat positive.