Me writing at Deception Pass State Park, in the Puget Sound (Washington State)
Please Write, Don’t Phone, by Robert Watson
While there is mail there is hope.
After we have hung up I can’t recall
Your words, and your voice sounds strange
Whether from a distance, a bad cold, deceit I don’t know.
When you call I’m asleep
Or bathing or my mouth is full of toast
I can’t think of what to say.
“We have rain?” “We have snow?”
Let us write instead: surely our fingers spread out
With pen and paper touch more of mind’s flesh
Than the sound waves moving from throat to lips
To phone, through wire, to one ear.
I can touch the paper you touch.
I can see you undress in your calligraphy.
I can read you over and over.
I can read you day after day.
I can wait at the mailbox with my hair combed,
In my best suit.
I hang up. What did you say?
What did I say? Your phone call is gone.
I hold the envelope you addressed in my hand.
I hold the skin that covers you.
He said Hey yo, fat ass, yo, biggie mcfatfat, yo, you so fat, I'm gonna blow all the motherfucking fat people up on one island and make a big ass bowl of chunky soup.
He said you so black you gotta eat oreos with some white gloves.
He said you so fat it look like you got two midgets in a headlock.
Oh he said you ain't have no nipples.
She said, I mean, Carvens, I mean like, you're handsome and everything but like I mean like, you're like my brother, we can't...
She said OMG how did you get your skin that color?
She said
She said
You know what? This is what she said.
I swear to god this is what she said.
She was like Carvens, you're so ugly you should kill yourself.
He said how do you stop black people from coming to your house? You hang one in the front.
He said yo fatass I want you to have a stroke from you running up those steps.
She said you should kill yourself.
And when I was in the fifth grade, I wrote a suicide note.
That was the first time, I believe, someone loved my writing.
In the fourth grade, my valentine told me that I couldn't be seen with her because all the kids might actually think she liked me.
In third grade I ate lunch by myself
every day.
In the second grade
a kid punched me in my mouth at the end of recess.
Two of my teeth fell to the pavement
I laid on the ground, blood spilling from my lips for fifteen minutes before anyone asked if I was okay.
In the first grade, a white girl at snack time told me that my skin looked I never took a shower, she's never seen something so black.
In kindergarten, I was the only student who stood awake
during nap time.
You know, feeling alone is not foreign to me.
In the classroom, children spoke the harsh language of tear gas
I cried in more bathroom stalls than I can remember learning
My bullies were swastickas dressed in Catholic school uniforms
The machete eyes,
the machete eyes of my peers would carve smiles out of my face like a jack-o-lantern
They always needed an overweight, dark-skinned target to dart through,
a pinata to hang in the nucleus of the playground while each kid took a swing.
I learned how to hate myself
at such an early age.
I wrote "God doesn't love me" on the inside of all of my notebooks
I would pray, every night, to be a superhero, asking anyone who watched over me
if they could grant me the power of invisibility
so I could vanish off the face of humanity
each time my confidence was steamrolled to the concrete
You know
My freshman year of high school
my stomach and muffin top was so big I could barely see my feet
I used to breathe like a coughing motor cycle
My sophomore year
I wanted a girlfriend so bad
I used to practice making out with the mirror
just so it would be perfect when I finally fell in love
My junior year
I grew a foot taller,
I lost 30 pounds but still was heavy with self-consciousness
My senior year I was the most popular kid in school but still saw a sea of faces cackling at me whenever I turned my back
My freshman year of college I started having sex with women in the hopes to find
myself in the museum of their pelvis
so gyrate my hips under the bodies of their sweat and of temples crashing
I used to pound bodies into the spine of mattress
screaming at the top of my lungs
what's my name
just so they could remind me who I was
Depression
Depression
Depression
can drive humans to very hollow places
Places where flocks of vultures lurked in the things I found beautiful
and I often asked myself
Am I beautiful?
Am I worth glancing at twice?
Can anyone love me as much as I love God?
Does everything really happen for a reason
or am I just some laughing stock
of this inside joke the whole world is in on but me.
It took almost two decades of living on this earth
to finally love myself.
If you only knew,
If you only knew how hard is was to write this poem
How hard it is to embrace every stretch mark like a life line when I feel dead inside
To say, to say that my skin color is a shade of armour that can never be bruised
to say, to say that my smile is a page of the bible
that my face is a halo that spent its entire life basking in the sun
I learned how to love my weakness
I wear my insecurities like a good suit to a job interview
I'm awkward, I'm awkward, I'm awkward, I'm awkward
And I love it
I make a fool of myself
I make a fool of myself
but still have the confidence of a firefly buzzing in the gut of a cave
I cry
I cry
and I fight and I cry and I fight and I cry, I cry and I fail and I fall and I get the fuck back up.
I,
I'm no longer afraid to stumble,
to fall flat on my face and look around like nothing happened
to turn the center stage into a playground
Have you all looked at me, lived in my own skin, and wake up every morning
look deep into the mirror and say you know what,
you know what Carvens, I love you
I love you so much
And you are beautiful.
"They do read [your] site, they just don't know it by name. And why would they? This is the Internet, where we're all information junkies. We want the facts, and we want them delivered in the most efficient way possible, maybe with some jokes thrown in. If someone is clicking on an article called "Six Farts That Changed the World (And Four That Didn't)," they're not clicking to see a byline or the personal theories of some author; they're clicking to see if the time Gerald Ford non-sexually farted into Rita Hayworth's open hand made the list (it didn't)."
Have you heard of SOPA - the Stop Online Piracy Act? It *sounds* like a good idea -- piracy bad! -- but a closer look at this act reveals something terrifying that may change the Internet as we know it.
Google (this includes blogger!), Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, Wordpress, Reddit, The Wikipedia, The Cheezeburger Network, Boing Boing, Twitter, Ebay, LinkedIn & some other major players are considering going dark to take a stand against SOPA because the wording of this proposed bill is so vague & penalties so steep that there may be potential for much abuse. Like, just *linking* to something might be enough to get you in trouble.
Right now the bill looks like it's going to be approved as the majority of senators are in favor of it. We need to reach 41 more senators to make a difference. The senate votes Jan. 24. Here's what you can do:
This page lets you put in a zip code and click a button to notify your local senators.
"The key is every day focus.... To be focused on goals. To not be tempted by seduction to move forward. It’s like the image [above]. It’s an optical illusion. The circles are all diversion and appear to be constantly moving. The black dots are your goals. Focus on any one dot and all of the circles will slowly stop moving. Every time things start to move around you, taking you off the road, think about these black dots you can focus on."
I took this photo in Arizona and then turned it into a digital watercolor.
"Sometimes I try to write about you, about us, and the words just crumble. Ashes, dead petals. I go aphasic, although I'm supposed to be skillful with words. I sit here broken. I make a move to put it all down, and a million marbles skitter across the floor and into crevices and down vents. I can't whip our story into some tidy, domesticated thing, so it lives in the wild and scratches at the window when I dream. I can't make it come here when I call it, or be what I want. I never could do that." -- Christie Chapman
Christie Chapman, on her quote above:
"Here's what I guess I am trying to say. Let's say you lived some big, poignant story with a person. You shared some adventure with someone. Then it ended. It lives in the past, for all sorts of very good (if painful to think about) reasons. Yet the memories creep into your mind and even into your dreams all the time. It feels like this great, meaningful story... and you feel that if you could just somehow weave these experiences into a coherent piece of writing that resonates with others, you would not only do the story justice but finally move past it a little. You would have tamed it, or at least translated it into words. You would have won out, at least a little, against its tyranny over your emotions.
"Only, you can't put this big, amazing story into words. It's elusive; it lives in the ether and won't let you translate it (put it into a labeled jar). So the story is this wild, untameable force. And for that reason, you worry it will always have power over you. Sometimes domestication is a good thing, dammit."
I started taking an intro to drawing class around this time last year -- here are the sketches from my year of experimenting with learning to draw.
I ROCKED a pear, yo.
We did a lot of still life studies in class. This is pen & ink, not charcoal/pencil like the others.
It's harder to capture the white balance than I thought.
The best thing in class was seeing how many different ways people drew what they saw.
No drawings were even remotely similar. Angles & shading can change the entire picture.
Experimenting with different ways to shade.
Here I was trying to draw a body that contained a bit of a belly to see about different physical forms.
Another pen & ink.
I enjoyed trying to draw Edvard Munch's Madonna but it's on the flat side.
I need to learn good shading techniques to add dimension.
I struggled with the face here (and you can tell) but I was mostly concentrating on the body since
it was one of the first times I was branching out to a whole figure.
Here, experimenting with different postures.
Heart-shaped face.
I drew this after I came home from class itching to draw more. We'd been doing freeforms
all night and I drove home seeing lines and shadows in everything. It only took me 15 minutes
to sketch this out but only because I'd spent two hours "warming up" with freeform drills.
A quick 5-minute sketch of my hand.
Eyes are extremely difficult for me -- getting the right proportions is a huge challenge.
Charcoal drawing of fruit on a cloth setting. Capturing wrinkles in cloth is also extremely difficult.
Here I introduced color to add dimension.
I didn't intend for this to resemble Julia Roberts -- if I TRIED, I'm pretty sure it would have failed!
But kind of neat that it turned out that way.
Mug shot! Not really, but that's what this looks like.
This reminds me, in retrospect, of Mad Magazine's Spy vs. Spy series, for the outfit and rushing inference.
Quotes on happiness
(because what better way to reflect on our blessings than at year's end?)
"The Constitution only guarantees the American people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself." ~Benjamin Franklin
"What a wonderful life I've had! I only wish I'd realized it sooner." ~Colette
"People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they're not on your road doesn't mean they've gotten lost." ~H. Jackson Browne
"There are two things to aim at in life: first, to get what you want; and after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second." ~Logan Pearsall Smith
"We tend to forget that happiness doesn't come as a result of getting something we don't have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have." ~Frederick Keonig
"Happiness held is the seed; happiness shared is the flower." ~Author Unknown
"We are seldom happy with what we now have, but would go to pieces if we lost any part of it." ~Mignon McLaughlin
"One joy scatters a hundred griefs." ~Chinese Proverb
"Unquestionably, it is possible to do without happiness; it is done involuntarily by nineteen-twentieths of mankind." ~John Stuart Mill
"Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for." ~Joseph Addison
"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony." ~Mahatma Gandhi
"Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length." ~Robert Frost
This little girl is incredible -- see her cover of Lady Gaga's Born this Way (also listen to the words and know you're beautiful the way you are). Thank you, Maria Aragon, for reminding us of this and for showcasing it with your amazing talent:
My mama told me when I was young
We are all born superstars
She rolled my hair and put my lipstick on
In the glass of her boudoir
There's nothin' wrong with lovin' who you are
She said, 'cause He made you perfect, babe
So hold your head up and you you'll go far
Listen to me when I say
I'm beautiful in my way
'Cause God makes no mistakes
I'm on the right track, baby I was born this way
Don't hide yourself in regret
Just love yourself and you're set
I'm on the right track, baby I was born this way, born this way
Ooh, there ain't no other way, baby, I was born this way
Baby, I was born this way
Ooh, there ain't no other way, baby, I was born this way
I'm on the right track, baby, I was born this way
Give yourself prudence and love your friends so we can rejoice the truth
In the religion of the insecure I must be myself, respect my youth
A different lover is not a sin
Believe capital H-I-M
I love my life, I love this record and Mi amore vole fe yah
Don't be drag, just be a queen
Whether you're broke or evergreen
You're black, white, beige, chola descent
You're Lebanese, you're orient
Whether life's disabilities
Left you outcast, bullied or teased
Rejoice and love yourself today
'Cause baby, you were born this way
'Cause you're beautiful in you're way
'Cause God makes no mistakes
You're on the right track, baby you were born this way
Don't hide yourself in regret
Just love yourself and you're set
I'm on the right track, baby I was born this way
Ooh, there ain't no other way, baby, I was born this way
Baby I was born this way
Ooh, there ain't no other way, baby, I was
I'm on the right track, baby I was born this way
My mama told me when I was young
We are all born superstars
"Every night I woke up in dread, terrified of yet one more insecure tomorrow.... The agony that youth was gone, and for the rest of my tomorrows I was finished, through, crushed by my responsibilities and the carved out hole of loss inside of me. I’m still afraid of slipping back into that crevice.... Once you’ve seen the darkness in the center of the Earth, the heat that can burn your brain to cinders, you know it’s always there, an open invitation to come back.
"But the important thing is that right around the middle of all of this, I started planting seeds.... The key is to plant the seeds. And never stop, even if weather, even if animals, even if mutations, look as if they are going to damage the garden and destroy it. Seeds take time to grow. A long time. And they need to be loved with patience, just like children. And there are seeds designed for every season. The key is to go out there, dig up dirt, and plant. Every day.... What seed will you plant today?"
"Do not assume that she who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. Her life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, she would never have been able to find these words." -Rainer Maria Rilke
