Allsorts

Dream: You had whiskey, I washed my hair with it, tiny dry flowers grew in my hair. That's adultery, you said. Don't you mean vanity? I said. No, adultery.

My friend Camilla told me today, "You look really fancy and yet really scandalous." I was touched. Also, when I was pleading with her to try the wheat berry porridge, I said, "It's weird but good," she said, "Umm, kind of like you?"

(I do take note of cool things that people say about me. We all do the same with insults anyways; why not?)

I really do think Tumblr is my favorite thing on the internet. If the internet were food, then Tumblr would be chocolate.

I got back some pictures from my Holga, including these two. I took a couple portraits of my Hannah with which I am really pleased.

I'm through with my midterms and will be going home for spring break on Wednesday. After home, I will be making my first ever foray into the American South to visit my esteemed pen pal and bloggy friend PinkAppleCore. A few more things to finish up here, but life looks pretty good.

What's on your mind? How is your now looking?

What is your name right now?

In no order [walking free-write]

Today I crushed a snowflake between my fingertips

No

Tonight I stood in the lights outside the church, whispering profanities because I could see snowflakes on my scarf and they had six points, they had feathers and were more complicated than paper snowflakes, and so small even my super-macro setting couldn't focus on the best one, crying profanities because I have been a good evangelical and those are the words left to me when there are no words left

This is me having no answers, me not knowing anything but what happened. Paint can stroke with no answers, can I write this way? Will you allow this?

Striding in a fury of wonder to the library at night
Retching in glory, my heart seizing with you and with me-ness
But "it is ever so easy to go"
But I wanted to follow no one
This storm of words in my skull
Vitamins and a vial of lavender oil in my coat pocket,
where there was a brownie where I hallucinate its grease

Stop, stop looking at yourself
No, that's not it
Stop, what is the wonder of a snowflake compared to a human?
Would you thrust your fingers down your best friend's throat?

I was dishonest. Age thirteen, I wrote about eyes meeting in the rain, water in eyelashes
Am. Age twenty, I sketch in my head about my bloody wool-stockinged heels, my eyes in love, my swallowing throat.
Nineteen, I dreamt a girl vomiting blood and that I said nothing
Last night — no, the night before, there was a girl vomiting. I couldn't see her face and I laid the back of my hand on her bare shoulder blade.

Read in January 2010

1. The Definitive Book of Body Language, by Barbara Pease and Allan Pease
Wow, so illuminating. Not particularly well written, but whatever; it's easy to read and conveys the information, and the information is enough of a draw on its own.

2. Incantation, by Alice Hoffman
A small YA historical novel, set in the time of the Spanish Inquisition. But with this surrealist tinge that I loved -- she'll say things like "And after they took her away, the plaza was littered with strands of her long hair, and the birds wove it into their nests" which are not really...real, or at least not probable, but it makes it so perfect.

3. Seven Little Australians, by Ethel Turner
Oh, an enjoyable escapist read. Kind of reminded me of Little Women, but they're younger, not all girls, and more ragamuffin-y. Thank you for the loan, minteva!

Reckon

Lately now that the only constant for me is sleepiness
(pressing desire to stop walking around in time)
(in the lights so bright I had to hide my head, I confessed to my old roommate, When you would cry, I sleep)

I could ask you not just at five-thirty in the morning
Why are you awake?
But also at noon, at five-thirty in the evening
Why are you awake?

Why it is best not to be down on yourself about your weight (hint: not just because it's not nice)

Hello, here is something true:

Feeling bad about your weight does not help you lose weight.

Letting go of my anger with my weight has been a massive self-fight on several occasions because it felt like doing so would mean giving up any chance at losing weight. (I'm assuming right now that this theoretical "you" is above her set weight, as I was. Thank you, freshman twenty.)

Actually, it is much, much harder to to lose weight if you feel guilty or angry with yourself about your current weight.

It is much, much harder to make positive change of any kind in your life if you are harsh with yourself.

You have to achieve a modicum of self-acceptance before you can successfully change what makes you unhappy.

Does it sound counterintuitive? Well, it's true.

Confidence and positive motivation are prequisites for making changes in your life. Escaping being beaten up by yourself is not positive motivation.

If you don't have good energy in your system, and belief in your ability to effect change, you will not be able to achieve what you want. You will probably self-sabotage, go through cycles of extremes, and ultimately be too low on energy from beating yourself up.

Before you attempt to make a change in your life, see if you are able to say this to yourself first:

I am okay with how I am. I am not perfect, but I am acceptable to myself. I am doing the best I know, and I am learning how to do better. Just as I am in part responsible for the presence of things I don't like in my life, I have the ability to get rid of them and replace them with better things.

Am I making sense?

Update on Jeanima (kinda)

Click for big.

Winter. Winter.

"No history but"

Bones to me used to mean jutting bones. Too-skinny. I wished my bones (hipcollarribschest, wristspineshoulderblades) would jut. To say...? I would guess: "I have anger in my belly like emptiness; I don't believe any of this is ever going to be okay."

I lay in bed with my thumbs on my hipbones listening to minutes pass(thumbs left scars, not many still to see).

Bones mean different for me now. I want skin and fat around them, but I want to know where they are too. Bones are: memory, things that don't hurt anymore. My center, the parts of me which are inalienable. "To the bones." What holds me up and together. My Ellie and I lined two of our prettier bones with stars—me to remind my fingers of her and of strength(our strength).

I have this odd habit now of pounding my hipbones lightly with the fleshy end of a fist when I'm thinking hard. You can echolocate your way around a waist this way: flesh, flesh, flesh, bone. There is one point which if you hit just on, it thumps down to your marrow.

A little bruise there....I don't know why, but it reassures me.

"But I guess we just deal with it how it comes, deal with the humps, take the jumps..."

Empty lot with the snow swirled as wind did it
the bokeh of streetlights when I
let my eyes slide out of focus.
I tap my forehead against the screen.
After every car that pauses at the intersection,
there is without a gap another one with exactly the same cadence:
pull up, pause, drive through.
I am pleased to have this old sweater held
together by ugly stitches
less so to have the same done to me.

***

I am tired. Not just "I need to sleep more" tired, but "want to collapse on the sidewalk, forget everything, and fall into a headphones coma" tired. I'm discouraged to have a paper to write, to not be able to find a copy of Nicomachean Ethics when I need it, to be going back to therapy yet again. My heart could use some rest, but I guess that's what it was getting for much of the last year.

Insisting and listening and waving farewell to my idea that I Have It Together. I'm okay and I will keep being okay, but also? A messy girl with a messy heart, still. It's okay; I'm okay; it'll be okay.

Soundtrack: First Aid Kit, Crystal Castles, and The Middle East.

I will end with a wish for you other tired people, that you will rest well tonight and that tomorrow will bring some things to put some light back in your heart.

Etsy [listen up, you]

Why hello!

Do you know what New Year's resolution I have recently crossed off my list?

[Do tell, which one?]

The one about opening an Etsy shop, of course, hence post title. Yay!

What that means at present is that you can now buy prints of some of my favorite Diana pictures, like the ones below.

My storefront is here.

If you're interested in buying a print but would rather mail me a check or something else, let me know. I'm flexible.

Same goes for if you want a print that I haven't listed. Basically anything I've blogged or put on my flickr I'd be happy to list; just ask.

Days

I'm worried to have caffeine again, but I'm so tired of sleeping. Days are blurring together and I'm spending more time in bed than out of it.

Notes from Old Testament

Last year scars across a tangle of limbs
sweet and all the same in pales and palers
a wild-riding yell in my throat in my
face in the wind I want to call for you
thirty, some thousands of miles away I
your crazy virgin on the pedestal nobility
of mind, blah blah, blah blah "ice cream
cones and microphones" and home alones,
sweetly sewn, love thy own, o hone
thy bones, low be shone      be shone

***

I'm a slave to politsophy and Plato this week. Think I found my thesis at lunch — rolling hard and fast.