Sneezing Anythings

I got a job at an ice cream shop to save money for the summer. I don’t eat all THAT much of it, if you’re willing to believe me. Saving money is good, and scooping ice cream is easy. I feel silly though, because I do consider myself a professional, or at least in a professional business (that of audio) and to be doing something I’d be doing in high school is a little strange. I guess it’s the perspective that matters. It’s lightheartedly enjoyable, right? I usually leave in a good mood. And I like watching the money go into the tip jar. I like that I can save without having to NOT buy things. I just put what I make into a jar or envelope, or bank, or something and don’t touch it otherwise.

I need some mountains. It’s Banff or Aspen this summer. I thought about applying for Tanglewood and maybe I should have, but I didn’t because, well by the time I looked the deadline had passed, ha. They seem to get earlier and earlier each year.

I want to live in another country or a really really big city. I’m tired of isolated cultures. Small-town people, beach-people, rich-people, poor-people, jerks, ignorantly blissful, they all seem to label as one the manner of their town. But in a big city at least you have all of them. The top and the bottom and everything in between.

That reminds me, I kept laughing at myself yesterday when I’d be scooping a two-scoop ice cream cone and I’d ask which flavor they’d like to be on the bottom, but what I was really thinking was, “Do you want it on the top or on the bottom *snort snort.*” Ahh those good ol’ sexual inuendos (in case you didn’t know it was one).

I don’t seem to feel as much passion as I usually do lately. Where’d it go, anyway? Am I doing the right thing being here? Should I be playing music instead? I need to compose more. Because the thing that makes me disappear from life temporarily is when my ears are full of sound, whether it be Pinback on headphones or Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich, I want to be in that, and if I make it myself, and I really like it, I have the most wonderful sensation of correctness. Self-sufficiency. Beauty that doesn’t even really seem to have come from me, but that I’ve taken part in, alone. When you listen to something else, there’s always someone out there that loves it as much as you do. That’s frustrating, because, well, who knows where they are, and if it matters that they love it as much. But if it’s only you, if you made it and you are listening to it and loving it, then, well, it’s your beauty, pure and there for you to love. I’m babbling, but I don’t feel like editing it.

It doesn’t feel right here, but, I still think it is very valuable for whatever it is, whatever I’m learning, whatever I’m going through. The symphony is great, but Florida, I never knew I could feel so apart from a place. Where is the spirituality? Where is the life?

Okay, enough babbling.

Lunch, and then dessert, while I work, of course.

Wait - I am remembering something great. Hiking up a mountain in Aspen. Seeing two routes. The dirt road AKA the trail, and the ski slope that looked insanely steep. I took the ski slope. It took me probably just as long because I basically had to climb. Not without the most concentrated balance could I release my hands from the ground to stand alone on my two feet. I was scraped, bruised, covered in dirt and mud, exhausted, but when I reached the top I was the happiest, most triumphant girl ever.

Okay, so I’m reading, or trying to read, for the third time perhaps, "The Artist’s Way."  I like some of it, and object to other parts of it, but figure it has been recommended enough that I’ll do it (it’s a 10 week program for opening up creativity).  Yeah it’s embarrassing, being all froo froo and wispy and encouraged to shout out loud your creativity as if you were in some creativity cult.  Oh, well, what good is it really going to do to bash it, I mean really?  Anyway - it certainly has some good points - one being about sort of adding images to your head by getting out into new environments.  Or not really into new environments, but into getting out at all.  Your not going to find as much inspiration sitting in your room as you will sitting anywhere outside, or anywhere in public.  I think I’ve always had this in my head, but I thought of it from a different perspective than filling my mind with images to fuel my art.  Am I spelling "fuel" wrong?  Feul.  Fuel.  No it’s definitely "fuel."

Today I went to the beach around 5:45pm, when the sun was no longer on the sand.  It was cold but I was bundled, and I brought a little book of Sylvia Plath poems, and decided to just start from the beginning and read.  What did I expect from that excursion?  Well, some fresh air, a view of the beach, and some poems in my head.  But in addition, I saw what must have been all of Miami Beach’s seagulls fighting over god knows what by one of the trash cans.  I thought if I was in my poetic element I might write something about the death-match that appeared to be happening, but instead I just looked awhile, watched them flock away and then back into the beach.  Then I read some more (I don’t like her older stuff that much), and saw some guy run after a girl to catch up, saying to her as she walked along the tide "It’s beautiful isn’t it?" - he didn’t know her.  He was hitting on her.  I read some more, and all of a sudden the guy comes up to me and says he must look like an asshole hitting on me now - so I say, "Why, because I just saw you hit on that girl?  Yeah."  I don’t think I said it entirely rudely, but one must be wary - so I was polite and patient because he wasn’t nasty and he commented on poetry.  I lied and said my name was Kathryn, and asked him his name.  He thought about it, scratched his head, and then said "Alexander," and laughed about being forgetful - I don’t know what he was addicted to but it was certainly something.  As he crossed his legs to sit, I told him that I appreciate his offering of company but this was my one hour a day where I get to be alone and I really cherish my alone-time.  This also wasn’t true, but he shrugged, called it my perogative, and walked away.  I didn’t look back, but soon my stomach felt awful all of a sudden so I got up to go home.  On the way I was stopped by an old Spanish-speaking bum and I then proceeded to hold a conversation with him in my dusty Spanish about sun-tanning lotion, beautiful sunrises, jet-skis, and the cold weather.  Huh.

I really had to shake my head and smile as I walked home about how true it is that even a half-an-hour on the beach can fill your head with all sorts of unexpected images and experiences.  And I agree that it is fuel for art.  And it can be endless.  And hey - I don’t mind the fact that such a perspective allows me to be much more receptive to the world around me.  On another day I might have been quite rude to the high young gentlemen and much more short with the Spanish-speaking bum.  Instead, it was somewhat refreshing.

I wish I read faster only to counteract my impatience with gathering new information so slowly.  I like reading, but if it’s not captivating, I can only read in short spurts.  And I want to know more about politics, and science, and stuff like that but it just doesn’t enter my head quickly enough when I read slow.  But the world really does open up when you read more.  Maybe I’ll try to learn to speed read.  Is having too many goals good or bad?  Or neither?

Alright - I’m chatty. 

I’m going to read now I think.

A thought hit me profoundly today. One that came during a wave of emotion while watching a student’s graphic design project, in QuickTime format, I’ll post the link.

It is only through the creation of art that humanity is truly (purely) beautiful.

http://www.beam.tv/beamreels/reel_player.php?reel=PdnyzcDdVK&reel_file=wKWdt

"I find it incredibly empowering," he said.  And it is.  About being
completely, totally, ultimately responsible for yourself.  It feels
great.  My father calls it crossing the bridge into adulthood.
Religion calls it free will.  I call it living my world to the infinite
fullest, I call it the recognition of at least as many worlds here as
there are people (at least), which is also called Standing in Someone
Else’s Shoes.

I think about it, and I become a little fearful of
forgetting it.  Because it feels like the pathway to peace, to
something more right than if I didn’t think or feel that way.  So I
long to write it down.  That’s what I’m doing here by the way.  To
write it down to preserve it so that I have the chance to read it again
later and remember.  I want post-it notes all over my walls reminding
me of these things.  I don’t put them there both because I am lazy and
because I do not want the pathway to peace to be a chore, or a
reminder.  I want it to be learning.

There are some things I have
fallen upon in life that scream at me truth beneath the fabric.  What
can I care whether or not it is actually the truth?  Either way I’ll
call it the truth, follow it, and I’ll grow always and be content
within its beauty, its change, its way of superceding the everyday, the
regular, and the things I think make me not want to live here.  Really,
I may call everything whatever I like it to be.  And how would it ever
matter if I were "wrong?"  Perception tells me it is what I make it.
Proven practically (where proof actually can’t exist, sorry, we’ll call
it proof for the ease of explanation) - again, proven practically by
the fact that one other perceives it different.  That’s a beautiful
affirmation of our unknowing.  Each individual’s unknowing.

Our thoughts come from inside, always.  Everything originates from inside.

Phone call: My lovely sister. 

That’s enough for now, then.

Okay, pretty book.  Fine, pretty.

So I’m eating peanut butter off a knife.

So I thought this was pretty:

"What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly."

There is, in the very least, a bit to learn from spirituality, no matter your own stance on it.

Ooooh I can’t wait to go skydiving!  I had a dream about it last night.  I was to be dragged by a plane taking off, running behind until it lifted me, and I all of a sudden didn’t want to do it until I realized that, wait a minute, I’m supposed to jump OUT of the plane, not be dragged behind it, and as if my dream changed right there to being able to jump out instead, I was filled with the greatest sense of beauty and peace, and I know that’s what it will be when I do it in real life. 

Everybody wants to fly, right?  Okay, but let me personalize this for myself.  I stare out the airplane window at the clouds all of the time, drinking it up and visualize myself soaring through them - I imagine it as if it were an impossibility that I am treating my mind to.  Part of me believes that is where I really should be, not down here.  If I die and become the earth, the air, the atmosphere, everything, I am happy, just put me into a part of that cloud.  Maybe I was there before, regardless of ideas of reincarnation and so forth — when a child is born the mass, the energy must come from some where, and it probably comes from this world, so hey, there is nothing going against even known science to say that energy/mass is never created or destroyed, but it can go through many phases, or be converted from one to the other, so isn’t it then quite possible for a molecule of moisture up in a cloud to become an energy that could become somehow part of a child?  Seems so.  If not, I’m going to think that anyway.

So if I didn’t know better that I am not indeed going to gloriously disintegrate into a cloud while skydiving, I’m as excited about it as if I were.  To break that impossibility, I am sure I will cry.  To know what it is like up there!  Very high up where I stare with longing out the airplane window.  I think I may fall into a parallel universe.

Ah, anyway - I am excited.

Why do people like to say they don’t like something.  I’m guilty of it too.  You feel more confident of a positive, shared return when rudely bashing an idea or object, perhaps more than when you say you DO like something.  In high school it made us feel cool to do that - is it still?  I try not to do that but I will not say that I don’t sometimes.  I will try to do it less now, because I don’t think so highly of it when someone else does it. 

Literally. Driving out to the darkest field on the side of a mountain. Driving into the darkest canyon. The fastest shooting stars ever. My peace. My love filling up my little car, humid with heater heat. Only me. And watching. How these things fill up your life like a drop of blue dye - it hits you so richly and becomes a part of your state of being ever day after. I must become the universe when I go, how else could I take so much in other to than explode back into it at the end?

Or is it Hos?  Not sure.  Either way - who gets off on new dictionary terms?  (That’s rhetorical, please).  Today’s Word of the Day was "Pandiculation."  Definition: "Stretching the body and extremities when drowsy or tired, usually accompanied by
yawning, especially when going to bed or waking; also, around the office, a
pastime for those who work at a computer."

……..

Alright - ready for ultimate geekiness in the realm of music-loving slobbery blah-ness?  Okay good, because here goes, because I can never, ever express what music does to me (I know I’m not alone) but I feel the need to try sometimes.

Okay, so it makes me want to die, literally, when it is that good, but this is one of those it makes me so aware of life that I think the only proper thing for me to be doing, if this world were completely right, is to be flying.  Not like, arms all spread out yay I’m like a sweet bird, yo - but more like disintegration into the air, but with the desintegrated-into-air equivalent of a big smile on my face.  Ah, how I used to hate myself for feeling this cheesy, but who cares, eh?  Feeling all rotten and craving the darkest of all places is the equivalent of cheesy, just on the flip side.  So yeah, that big smile, my chest seems to be on fire and I can’t even scream because I know it wouldn’t release enough of the love and at the same time it’d probably disturb my neighbors.

I yelled loudly yesterday, or rather the day before, when hot oil popped in the frying pan and landing on my arm.  My window was open, so was my neighbor’s.  I remembered that I don’t exactly "live alone" here like I used to in college.  Letting out hot oil rage or singing bad made-up country tunes or babbling after having too much coffee isn’t kept within my own sweet little isolated environment anymore.  If I were really cool I’d do it all anyway, but, I’m a little shy of exposing "the girl who lives alone" to everyone on the third floor, so I’ll be not that cool, and wait a year or two or maybe three from now when I live totally alone again (or don’t know ALL of my neighbors) to be all retarded like that.

Yeah so yay music.  Besides disintegration, I could also be driving in my car right now.  It IS as glamorous as I imagine it to be.  It is no less wonderful.  I love long road trips.

Okay I’m done now.