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.

christmas sucks

first installment of loneliness

Of the houses I’ve lived in, the cities and towns I’ve known my way around, the jobs I’ve worked, the habits I’ve formed and broken, there’s a particularly insidious thread that quietly tucks itself away and brushes over its own tiny footprints. Biding its time, it lies unnoticed until a certain shift of the wind and then, all of a sudden, it’s upon me, and i’m utterly smothered by loneliness. It’s only then that I can look back and truly understand that my entire life is nothing more than a swamp of misery, dotted with pathetic tufts of delusional bliss. All else is stripped away and the grim landscape of solitude is laid bare in a way that only the hindsight of the slightly unhinged and depressed can seriously appreciate. In a matter of time, I know, this thread will stitch itself back into the fabric of my normal existence and the bleak fog will roll off to some gloomy perimeter of my brain, to be summoned once a month for my period, or when I’m going through a particularly painful breakup. Until then, I will catalogue the expanses of loneliness that have until now lain dusty and forgotten.

The first week or so of college, at the end of the summer when I was 17, was the first time I remember feeling loneliness as a real ACHE. I remember feeling a rising panic of loneliness, like the itchiness that  compels me up out of bed in the morning, this inescapable sensation of unease and discomfort. I wonder if everyone feels it that way. Probably not, as I've known plenty of people (for example: every single person i've ever dated) who can bask amidst the covers for hours, slipping in and out of lazy slumber like a fucking cat in the dusty sun. I wonder if that's what loneliness is to some--a pleasant warmth and comfort to, at worst, snuggle your head into the pillow to escape from.

At 17, towards end of august, I made a deliberate switch from casual smoker to the kind of desperate nicotine junkie as is so gracefully depicted by Janeane Garofalo in "Romy and Michelle's Highschool Reunion". It was not, in any way, a gradual shift. Living with two other girls in one big room, smoking was the only excuse I could think of to give myself some change of scenery, to escape the dorm room, and to look like i had something to do. I would walk outside, tracing the quad and school grounds with my cell phone-- cruelly blinking zero bars of service. so, sorry mom and dad, but that's how I started smoking a pack a day.¹ 

In Poughkeepsie, NY, I felt an immense rift from my life of months before. I was acutely homesick-- for the freedom of the Chinatown bus to Boston; getting fucked up with friends at the Fens, hanging out on the slab in front of Little Stevies; Ariel and Cara and our matching haircuts and mean jokes; smoking out my bedroom window in the middle of the night, terrified of being discovered, surprised and toppling out onto the street below². The most mundane moments and passing annoyances dripped with glorious significance, saturated in cloying nostalgia: the tiles of the christopher st. subway station, The garbled delay announcements on the F train³, the graffiti on the mail box half way up 11th street, the hot air from the subway vents, the grime that coats your flip flopped feet, the stench of rotting ginkgo fruit.

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1In full disclosure, i also used my fake ID to buy cigarettes at the discount tobacco store at the end of Raymond ave. The lady that worked there consistantly turned a blind eye to  my "legal non government issued ID" that made me 23 and visiting from Massachusetts. So did every guy working at the liquor stores in lower manhattan, who slid bottles of bacardi limon under the bullet proof plexiglass to me and amanda or paola, or the guys that sold me 40s of country club on the lower east side at the bodega off of st. marks when i was 16. did you know me at 16? i barely even passed for my actual age. 

2 I Often wondered what people walking down 11th street at 3am would have thought at a teenager wedged out a 3rd story window, neck craned to ensure that no smoke blew back inside. I would also wonder if people were dying in the hospital across the street, and if they were watching me change my clothes.

3 Always at that desperate teenage hour when the decision must be made: wait for the train, or try to run home to make it back before curfew. I blame this double bind (you’re always late, no matter which you pick) for my disinterest in gambling.

i'm in olympia RIGHT NOW

So I deleted my facebook account in favor of this:




I haven't written in it yet, because I'm in olympia and i'm fucking holed up in Colleen's apartment using her computer like a serious fiend (hi Colleen!). I've been reading sneaker blogs 'cause Keds x playcloths are coming out with cameo keds that i wanna get. (like I need another pair of sneakers, even?!)

 I moved to Portland and am not feeling as lonely as I was before, though I am avoiding the part where I check my bank account balance and freak out because I don't have a job. I'm in Olympia right now, helping Sarah Adams and Ryan McClain fix up their apartment. It feels seriously weird to not actually live here and walk around hanging out.

Drummer, Allie and I went to the Japanther vs. Nightshade shadow puppet show at Disjecta and it looked so rad. I'd biked through the torrential rain to get there, though, so I felt super distracted and spazzed out.

Damn, it feels so good to not be able to be on facebook right now, that shit makes me feel so sad and panicky. I felt like all I was ever doing was stirring my anxiety around: imagining how much fun everyone else is having and getting weird and stressy about whether anyone cared about me in some fucked up, twisted passive way 'cause who the fuck uses facebook as their primary way of showing friendship or affection or whatever? Whatever. It was feeding my loneliness, and at least now I can write in my facebook journal, go windowshopping on the internet and watch the olympia pride parade. and I can fucking do that all by my fucking self and be fucking ecstatic.


oh shit! the hair zine 2 is gunna be a featured local zine at red and black!

Ohmygod, I forgot how awful it feels to be so hopelessly LONELY. It's in my fucking bones!

all i do is eat food, go running, watch youtube videos and remember the times in my life when i hung out with friends. let's go drink beer in the afternoon and pump the jams get funky.

booking at trip to olympia for june 9th through june 19th. i've been feeling overwhelmed and overworked recently. i've got a job that i'll be starting on sunday, selling essential oils at brooklyn flea. Warm weather, I want you. I spend so much time by myself and I like it that way, mostly.

THEME FOR THE SUMMER: "SPRITZERS ON ICE IN NEW YORK CITY"

Marble Rye
Queen's Park Swizzle
Mint Julep
Garden Party
Limoncello Spritzer

just imagine everything with club soda and ice and a pair of old shorts and that's what i want. camping on the weekends, late night bike rides, i love it.

calder's (steamin')circus

lately: bowled over by waves of sentimental horseshit and nostalgia. spending money on books that make my heart seize up. listening to Alex Chilton and left of the dial on repeat. Gawd, I can barely even stand it! Spend a few days in Providence, totally into it. Don't have time to figure it out, gotta get to the farmers market

on one hand, i am staying up too late eating candy, and on the other hand, i am processing my past and future. i've been temping all week, stuffing envelopes and gossiping with the other temps. tonight, walking home, someone was playing sentimental spanish music really loudly and I thought about abandoned buildings and things that ended a long time ago and how i eat too much sugar. it was a pretty obvious sort of logic-- self involvement tinged with nostalgia and a touch of corny bullshit. still, it feels nice to walk home after an evening of sitting on the floor smoking cigarettes, eating and making plans. sometimes i feel like my whole entire life is a mess of plans that I use to comfort myself and shape my identity, but that never reach fruition. it's time to follow through, to realize these ideas and step out from the shadow of what could have been. it's a really good thing that i don't have a job, because i don't have enough time for anything. i wish that Pascale Boucicaut, Cole Callahan, Max Roseglass, Erika Rumbley, Mark Strain, Gina Sarti, Kennedy Holmes, Caroline Goldsmith, Ashley and Anjelica Freeman would call me up, send me letters and be around.

i have been thinking about how nice it would be to bake and sell cookies for extra money. I need to get better at gluten free baking, but i've got vegan and regz down pat. i'm looking at bulk supplies on dutchvalleyfoods.com. If someone happens to have some weird bulk flour hookup, lemme know?

i just finished reading salman rushdie's shame, released 2 years before I was born. i'm not feeling eloquent enough to express my opinion at the moment, so i won't.

new york city food cooperatives:

south bronx food coop
flatbush food coop
east 4th st. food coop
park slope food coop

otherwise, i am lonely and sad and perhaps it is because i need to eat better food and maybe go running a few times a week.

1. just made vegan rugelach for erika's going away party
2. all i do is listen to academy fight song

an i hate new york day

this morning I went to dreamland exhibit at the MoMA with Oliver. By the way (and Oliver, I

hope that this doesn't embarrass you), one of the things I love most in the world about my twin brother is hearing him play Benny and the Jets on the piano whenever we're at our parents house. Anyway, this dreamland exhibition was so rad. It was super small, which bummed me out a little-- I wanted it to be gigantic and lose-yourself expansive. It brought me back to the feeling I had the first time I looked through Delirious New York, realizing how mystical and magical an imagination of a city could really be. It was so different from any kind of urban theory I'd ever known before. I remembered that I bought Collage City by Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter right before I left Olympia, so I pulled it out from the jumbled mess of books I've got going, and that shit is tttiiiiiigghhhhttt! Here's some superstudio pictures from the internet:


ps: just to keep this thing legit, online journal style, I'm feeling super lonely and finicky today and I just can't seem to shake this crazy funk. Someone sent me flowers today , but I'm feeling too down and out to let my spirits get lifted. Sleep it off and be pumped tomorrow.