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Jun. 2nd, 2005
I eventually ended up buying the same model of double deck tape player/recorder that one of my best friends had, a Sony bullet of a boombox that I finally got rid of a couple of years ago - cassette windows scratched up a bit, a small square of glow tape on the play button from when it'd been used as our sound system for the play I directed in college. I'd had that deck far longer than I ever expected to, so when I received a small CD player, the Sony box fell into disuse. I was making mixes recording from flawless digital audio over to analog now, removing at least one layer of increased treble and hiss from my painstaking selection and process. Nowadays, I'm locked into burning discs on a computer, not really able to take audio clips of friends talking, or crossfading television noise between the tracks like I used to. The knack I had for filling up that 45 minutes-to-a-side to almost the very last second became a dinosaur skill in no time. When you place the tracks, plop plop, it does all the work for you.
Ho hum, yeah? I still like to make those mixes, though. Making the labels, hoping they'll align correctly with the pre-cut sticky paper, wishing I knew colors well enough to translate from screen to ink. It's a quiet thing, for me, focused and quick and intuitive. I miss the chunk and click and delicate release of the record button (to reduce the blip between songs, yeah?), but giving sequences of my life in the form of pop and angst is still one of my specialties, an excuse for solitude and reflection.
I've talked about cooking a little bit in this journal. It's a very soothing process, very satisfying, and a little bit lonely when there's no one there to help with some of the odd tasks - whisking eggs or grabbing something out of the pantry, or drinking all your wine so your head is clearer when boiling potatoes and flipping eggs and watching the timer for the oven so that the asparagus doesn't burst into flames.
Eggplant parmesan is one of my favorites, because there is so much care and stuff that goes into it, and you end up with this glorious, sort of homogenous garlicky mess in a blue Pyrex dish that steams up and make a rainy day a little bit warmer.
I'm good at throwing odds and ends together, I think. I am good at the really basic stuff. I absolutely do not make enough time to cook for myself, I mean, really cook for myself, and I really oughta. I suppose it's just not well-trod enough of a path in my routine. When I was younger, my mom cooked, or I scrambled for something quick between school and rehearsals, or speech team and going out with friends. Sometimes, we didn't have so much on-hand, and so we made do with sandwiches a lot, or co-op foods stored in the freezer. Later, when we moved to my mom's husband's house, the insane sets of rules crowding us like gadflies prevented me from truly living there in any meaningful sense of the word. Even when I escaped with Scott to an apartment in the city, I was generally considered Not the Chef, and even told once or twice not to use particular pans to cook fish, or to use certain implements for various dishes. At that stage in my life, I just sort of lost interest in cooking.
I'm working on changing that. It's fun when it works.
There are two places books reside in my home. There's three large bookshelves from IKEA, in varying states of solidity, all full to the brim with fiction and children's books, stage plays and historical biographies. Those hulking monoliths of insta-shelving and coated particle board reside in my office. There's also a secretary up against a short bit of wall in my living room, stately and pretty and dusty and tall, its top half a glass-shuttered set of shelves which house my most favorite childrens' literature.
I don't buy a lot of books any more, and I really don't read as many as I think I'd like to, but I do really love to revisit books that have captured my imagination. Some of the pages are as familiar to me as anything, and I can sometimes feel the cool, misty edges of my former self, from the last time I read that particular title, hovering there alongside of me. Sometimes, because I have changed so much in the interim, the books themselves seem completely new. They are alien stories, viewed at from the other side of heartbreak and disillusionment and contentment and joy.
Maybe a lot of people do this, so it's not such a silly confession, but I even like to read aloud to myself, occasionally. Not whole books, mind you, but a few paragraphs here and there, or bits of dialogue, or a really meaty and decadent descriptive passage.
Each spine is a piece of me, making up my skeletal frame of reference.
There are three large plastic bins to the left of my desk in my office. They're fairly new - I bought them from the Container Store maybe a little more than a year ago. I remember I ran into Jessamyn and Geoff there, and I was completely sloppy in trousers several sizes too big, and an old coat, and my hair sort of a wild mess. Jessamyn was several months along in her pregnancy, and Geoff looked so content, you know? It was a strange, cool moment, and we made noises about hanging out sometime. It seemed a bit ... resonant that the plastic bins were actually meant to house not only my paper journals, but also the ones that belonged to my grandmother on my father's side. People's histories, colliding. People's histories and futures, stored neatly in cubes and drawers and folders and lined books.
I remember the day Gma Wells sat with me at the dining room table in her house at 421 Oak, and asked me what I wanted when she was "gone," and I remember her extremely satisfied smile when I told her I wanted nothing but her journals.
So there they are - notebooks of the adventures she and my Grandpa took with their hitched Seehorse, a trailer they camped in as they drove all over these United States, making stops to see their kids and various state and national parks. There's page after page of mileage logs and small interactions with various folk they'd encounter along the way. There's audio letters my own mother and father sent to her the year before and the year after I was born. Those are really weird: hearing my mom's voice spooled out, second by second, sounding so, so young, and so idealistic and hopeful and full of love and bellbottoms and dashikis, and on those tapes she is younger than I am now.
There are also autograph books from the 1930's, from Gma's school. Her friends wrote silly poems and clever phrases to mark the passing of another year, their writing almost faded, the ink Parker penmanship scrawling and juvenile and grown-up, all at the same time.
I like to drown in her world every now and again, to maybe touch the loveliness she saw all around her, in nature, and science, and dreams given up in order to raise a family, and ultimately, lose track of their names and placement in her life.
I like to write in my own paper journals. Things you will likely never see, and don't really need to. Silly, drawn-out dramas, places in my head that I don't even visit too often because I've already done so: in this red Mead spiral, in that silk-bound lined pocket-sized, revisited and re-analyzed in the chemistry lab book -- blue and hardbound and greenlined and perfect for doodling in.
I use Pilot v-ball fine point ink pens; it is my preferred way to let my distinctive and slightly wild script flow across a page. There are older journals, in Bic blue ballpoint, and I've ripped through the page in anger, "I HATE YOU!!!" "MY BROTHER IS A JERK!!!" I'd like to think I'm more dignified now, but going back, you can see the tilt of the letters shift a little, and you can see the loops closing up, the indentation in the page nearly nonexistent, when life was a little too hard to look at straight on.
The pages go unread for months and even years after I've filled one whole book. They are time-released, they are time capsules, they are letters to my future self, encrypted so tightly that the rotors must spin and burn out and rebuild before I can even begin to attempt to gain that last bit of crystallized something-or-other, the enlightenment.
Each word is there, though, encased in each line, each page, each book, and laid into a plastic container with a snappable lid. A strange, hermetic chamber of all my foibles, with lies of omission.
Ho hum, yeah? I still like to make those mixes, though. Making the labels, hoping they'll align correctly with the pre-cut sticky paper, wishing I knew colors well enough to translate from screen to ink. It's a quiet thing, for me, focused and quick and intuitive. I miss the chunk and click and delicate release of the record button (to reduce the blip between songs, yeah?), but giving sequences of my life in the form of pop and angst is still one of my specialties, an excuse for solitude and reflection.
+++
I've talked about cooking a little bit in this journal. It's a very soothing process, very satisfying, and a little bit lonely when there's no one there to help with some of the odd tasks - whisking eggs or grabbing something out of the pantry, or drinking all your wine so your head is clearer when boiling potatoes and flipping eggs and watching the timer for the oven so that the asparagus doesn't burst into flames.
Eggplant parmesan is one of my favorites, because there is so much care and stuff that goes into it, and you end up with this glorious, sort of homogenous garlicky mess in a blue Pyrex dish that steams up and make a rainy day a little bit warmer.
I'm good at throwing odds and ends together, I think. I am good at the really basic stuff. I absolutely do not make enough time to cook for myself, I mean, really cook for myself, and I really oughta. I suppose it's just not well-trod enough of a path in my routine. When I was younger, my mom cooked, or I scrambled for something quick between school and rehearsals, or speech team and going out with friends. Sometimes, we didn't have so much on-hand, and so we made do with sandwiches a lot, or co-op foods stored in the freezer. Later, when we moved to my mom's husband's house, the insane sets of rules crowding us like gadflies prevented me from truly living there in any meaningful sense of the word. Even when I escaped with Scott to an apartment in the city, I was generally considered Not the Chef, and even told once or twice not to use particular pans to cook fish, or to use certain implements for various dishes. At that stage in my life, I just sort of lost interest in cooking.
I'm working on changing that. It's fun when it works.
+++
There are two places books reside in my home. There's three large bookshelves from IKEA, in varying states of solidity, all full to the brim with fiction and children's books, stage plays and historical biographies. Those hulking monoliths of insta-shelving and coated particle board reside in my office. There's also a secretary up against a short bit of wall in my living room, stately and pretty and dusty and tall, its top half a glass-shuttered set of shelves which house my most favorite childrens' literature.
I don't buy a lot of books any more, and I really don't read as many as I think I'd like to, but I do really love to revisit books that have captured my imagination. Some of the pages are as familiar to me as anything, and I can sometimes feel the cool, misty edges of my former self, from the last time I read that particular title, hovering there alongside of me. Sometimes, because I have changed so much in the interim, the books themselves seem completely new. They are alien stories, viewed at from the other side of heartbreak and disillusionment and contentment and joy.
Maybe a lot of people do this, so it's not such a silly confession, but I even like to read aloud to myself, occasionally. Not whole books, mind you, but a few paragraphs here and there, or bits of dialogue, or a really meaty and decadent descriptive passage.
Each spine is a piece of me, making up my skeletal frame of reference.
+++
There are three large plastic bins to the left of my desk in my office. They're fairly new - I bought them from the Container Store maybe a little more than a year ago. I remember I ran into Jessamyn and Geoff there, and I was completely sloppy in trousers several sizes too big, and an old coat, and my hair sort of a wild mess. Jessamyn was several months along in her pregnancy, and Geoff looked so content, you know? It was a strange, cool moment, and we made noises about hanging out sometime. It seemed a bit ... resonant that the plastic bins were actually meant to house not only my paper journals, but also the ones that belonged to my grandmother on my father's side. People's histories, colliding. People's histories and futures, stored neatly in cubes and drawers and folders and lined books.
I remember the day Gma Wells sat with me at the dining room table in her house at 421 Oak, and asked me what I wanted when she was "gone," and I remember her extremely satisfied smile when I told her I wanted nothing but her journals.
So there they are - notebooks of the adventures she and my Grandpa took with their hitched Seehorse, a trailer they camped in as they drove all over these United States, making stops to see their kids and various state and national parks. There's page after page of mileage logs and small interactions with various folk they'd encounter along the way. There's audio letters my own mother and father sent to her the year before and the year after I was born. Those are really weird: hearing my mom's voice spooled out, second by second, sounding so, so young, and so idealistic and hopeful and full of love and bellbottoms and dashikis, and on those tapes she is younger than I am now.
There are also autograph books from the 1930's, from Gma's school. Her friends wrote silly poems and clever phrases to mark the passing of another year, their writing almost faded, the ink Parker penmanship scrawling and juvenile and grown-up, all at the same time.
I like to drown in her world every now and again, to maybe touch the loveliness she saw all around her, in nature, and science, and dreams given up in order to raise a family, and ultimately, lose track of their names and placement in her life.
+++
I like to write in my own paper journals. Things you will likely never see, and don't really need to. Silly, drawn-out dramas, places in my head that I don't even visit too often because I've already done so: in this red Mead spiral, in that silk-bound lined pocket-sized, revisited and re-analyzed in the chemistry lab book -- blue and hardbound and greenlined and perfect for doodling in.
I use Pilot v-ball fine point ink pens; it is my preferred way to let my distinctive and slightly wild script flow across a page. There are older journals, in Bic blue ballpoint, and I've ripped through the page in anger, "I HATE YOU!!!" "MY BROTHER IS A JERK!!!" I'd like to think I'm more dignified now, but going back, you can see the tilt of the letters shift a little, and you can see the loops closing up, the indentation in the page nearly nonexistent, when life was a little too hard to look at straight on.
The pages go unread for months and even years after I've filled one whole book. They are time-released, they are time capsules, they are letters to my future self, encrypted so tightly that the rotors must spin and burn out and rebuild before I can even begin to attempt to gain that last bit of crystallized something-or-other, the enlightenment.
Each word is there, though, encased in each line, each page, each book, and laid into a plastic container with a snappable lid. A strange, hermetic chamber of all my foibles, with lies of omission.