self-portrait

I have so much stuff to do but all I want to do is to look at myself naked in the mirror, twist and contort myself around until I can see all of me, endless and infinite skin and spine and what little muscle I have. Sometimes I look around my own mouth so I remember what teeth look like from close up, but I know I am just one case study, no one else would let me do it, I can’t form a general understanding. Some days I have the unending urge to dissect, I want to know everything at least the barest shallowest bit. I am not afraid of looking at bad things or ugly things or stupid things. I like them in that they are, and I know them and I can store them away in my understanding, decide where they fit in my worldview. Sometimes I am afraid I talk too much and I am too invasive. 

Sometimes I am worried I will never see my own bones. I am never brave enough to make myself a cross-section of muscle fascia tendons and tissue but I imagine my arm, split ends chopped off, a cauterized cylinder, perfect like a textbook diagram... Sometimes I wish I didn’t feel pain, only temperature, but then I push on a bruise and I love it again. I own one bone outside of my body, a sharp jaw with teeth I found on Dexter’s front porch over the summer, bleached white under the Connecticut sun. Fearing for my own life I mourn the hoards* of the elderly and dying, I despise their adult children who don’t understand, who can’t sort the necessary from the wanted and extraneous. What is important to you? I am terrified, I am really terrified… 

I am not afraid of death or dying alone. I am afraid in 60 years they will put me in the earth fully formed, painted and powdery and cold, no one will see my insides, no one will feel them red and warm and dripping… No one will recognize me as I am fully what I make myself in the morning. I have a fantasy I’m just empty skin like canvas stretched over a wooden frame. I think of myself as wide eyes in a skull and everything from there is a product of my own making-- I can put on my glasses and makeup and go to the gym and become a real person, a full person, a person worth understanding; I can gain a personality, train myself to be kind and open, to take people at their word. Most of the time I worry that I am too intense and that I never get it. Sometimes I'm scared most people don't have to try this hard.

Everything in me is similar to others. I know that and it comforts me, that gaping center everyone has, the pit where your uterus would be, where your stomach goes when you see faces removed from context, hear voices removed from bodies. I am a normal, happy person, I am exploratory, I want, I desire… Sometimes I’m scared that my curiosity is wasted on myself, the least interesting topic in the world, my own bones and teeth and skin-- I think I am afraid of things that are too grand, concepts that are too big and heavy and important, I have enough difficulty with the niche and insignificant. I am just one case study, a manageable workload. I am like a girl who paints only self portraits, the one thing I know best but I can’t understand or accurately reproduce, such a 21st-century fear-- it is so frustrating, you don’t even know yourself, how can you even start to know anything else? In my bitterest thoughts, I imagine I can see you better than you can, and then won’t you feel stupid when I’m right? But it never lasts longer than a second before I remember I’m projecting, in my own head I am a little bit of everyone on earth.

*not hordes I mean actually hoards like when people are hoarders/collectors and their kids have to go through their stuff. just bc i was reading this back and was like wait im not afraid of groups of old people even though it sounds like that kinda.

November 18 2023--November 27 2024, ongoing

On November 18 2023 a little girl gave me a Palestine flag at this protest in Brooklyn. I was holding the sign Winnie made in her old apartment. The girl's mom had to encourage her to go up to me, a stranger, to give me the extra flag she had because I guess she was so shy. She was wearing plastic glasses and a Kuromi backpack I think I remember complimenting earlier while we were walking. After she handed the flag to me I tried to thank her but she had immediately turned around and run back to her mom across the street, but she smiled at me from there and her mom looked so proud of her. The flag lives in my closet in the US, it is now over a year old. I think about her all the time and then I think about the children like her whose kindnesses and shynesses and generosities and plastic glasses and proud mothers are still being taken from the world for absolutely no reason. And I don't know what else to say really only that I was thinking about her.

 

wrote in college listening to In Rainbows

      Scoliosis

          As I stretch
      my spine protrudes,
        sharp and vestigial,
   unfurling and cracking from
               disuse,
        a hollow, sun-dried
            amphibian,
         a string of open-faced
              barnacles
          competing for space
             on a jagged beach-rock.

                My purple fingertips
              sink into the
                  deep,
               past glass-skinned
                   glowing reefs,
               white-covered toenails
               and mottled indigo
                  knees,
            swollen-eyed fishes and
               their mindless
             prey,

            reaching,
          searching
       for something, for
         anything

     endless, solid,
     perfect, warm.

wrote in college about Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton Does Her Makeup Backstage
Before the First 2016 Presidential Debate

She leans over the table, the halos in her irises reflecting
the ring light,
being careful not to stretch her eyelids
as she delicately smudges the soft rounded wing of her eyeliner.
She is thinking about
Obamacare and the Southern border, of course,
but mostly,
she’s thinking about September 26, 1960
and Richard Nixon,
the sweaty, tweaking, twitchy fool,
outclassed and out-contrasted,
the gray-ash shambling
son of nobody in particular,
and the sweat trickling down his forehead as he spoke:

Thank God for Estée Lauder and Bobbi Brown
and Blue Mercury and Lancôme
and Charlotte Tilbury Airbrush Flawless Finish Setting Powder
and color TV
and The Jazz Singer and Il Duce Mussolini
and Columbia Pictures and Comcast
and Dallas and Lady Bird and Chanel two-piece sets
and flashcards
and low doses of dextroamphetamine
and Lester Holt’s long ass face
and Votre Vu Champs-ÉLipsée Lip Crayon in shade Spark –

She thinks how silly he will look next to her,
the big buffoon, the doofus, the Hindenburg,
unreddened, unlined, uncontrasted, unfiltered
and she’s not sure if she’s ever loved a man this much in her life.

Yoko Ono's circle survey

From GRAPEFRUIT: A book of instructions + drawings by Yoko Ono (1970)

I think about this piece pretty often, I'm not really sure why. I like the way her mind works. I admire how her art is? willing to open herself to "knowing" everybody (who wants to know her) at least a little bit (as an aggregate, not necessarily close), and at least in theory. I think not everything has to be deep. But there is something I can't really describe but really like that this piece reminds me of, the experience of watching someone (anyone, a friend) draw and write and type and walk and think and drive and pick out eggs at the grocery store and take the last sip of water and look through their pockets for their keys -- when they are ok with you watching, when they want you around, without being strange and without wasting living time, closer to understanding. Life is not a spectator sport, according to Jackie Robinson. I imagine it's valuable information so I don't have to think about missing out on other things. But it's ok because there's so much else to see.

*Ono, Yoko. GRAPEFRUIT: A book of instructions + drawings by Yoko Ono. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

practicing for my papers coming up :)

every coin has a human soul in it--and id like to get to know you better, always--really, you

My dad had a plastic 70qt bucket of coins he didn't sort for 30 years. When we finally sorted them in the basement we wore blue vinyl gloves like surgeons, dismantling decades of grime--iron oxides and copper alloys. Here I keep finding pennies on my floor; I leave them there, because I don’t know where they came from, and because where else are they going to go? And besides every coin has a human soul in it. At some point, Andrea and I will be reincarnated into Anna May Wong quarters. The first coin I ever wanted I stole from a wishing fountain at Stew Leonard’s. It was a bright new 2009 memorial penny, the log cabin one. That was right before they changed the back from the Lincoln monument to the shield of the union. The penny was on the ledge when i took it, not quite in the fountain, but still wet and cold in my hand from the spray. My stomach dropped leaving Stew Leonard's. I didn't make my own money when I was 7, how could I explain my new income to my mom if she found it-- That was someone else's wish I took-- but what can you wish for that will come true in Norwalk, Connecticut? And the sorry truth is that I wanted it more than I could ever feel guilty. Your soul in a coin-- you, interesting you, wooden you, indeterminate you, centuries of you; though I can’t imagine you at all--we (you and I) could be in my pocket for eternity, too sentimental to live--you in your small cost-ineffective copper carving--2 cents for every one--and me, if only in my love for you. (this one doesn't make any sense sorry)

idioms

outside the library-- the sun was still out, and it was raining so lightly the black fence looked like it was glittering. my old coworker from south carolina would have said "the devil is beating his wife." it seems the phrase most likely could have come from french (and german?) immigrants? in europe (according to wikipedia) this kind of weather was often interpreted as a kind of struggle between the sun and rain.

in most places im familiar with (i remember learning about it in florida when i was a kid) it is just called a sunshower, though i think it's funny that people felt sun shining on their shoulders and their faces and hair lightly moistened by rain and saw a biblical act of violence. god europe (continental..)was miserable in the 17th century. in many parts of asia it seems like they saw a wedding (specifically between foxes?) if i were in charge of idioms i would probably agree more with that, though i cant even imagine why foxes. but they all have in common the idea of a strange or difficult union. i think that makes perfect sense.

when i took this picture i was on the phone with dan, who was sick and eating soup his mom very kindly brought to his house. in russia the phenomenon is apparently sometimes called "mushroom rain," because it would be good conditions to grow mushrooms in. i like that this is the most pragmatic one. i think they did a good job.