misc ramblings of a girl
I redid my website just in time for the spring show here, theres been lots of coverage on bikejus, just google it and soon I'll be on CNN.
more coming soon.
May 17, 2007
April 29, 2007
sweet home.. oregon?
I made it to oregon this afternoon in one piece. The mountains still have snow on them, enough I think I could probably hike up a few and ski.. the season is late this year. The snow is still good, I can see even from 15,000 feet above them.
I feel out of place, just like I always have, I'm not sure why I always expect this time to be different. I considered driving up to Smith just now to sit under the stars and hear the clipping of carbiners in the canyons at night but 2 hours of sleep suggest better things to be doing.
I know what you're probably thinking, I used to be so good at this lack of stability. Moving every 6 months for 10 years will do that to you. I was looking for a reason to stay, I just never found one, so I kept drifting. But we always don't say what we really want to say the most: I've found my reason to stay.
April 27, 2007
what is this..
I thought I discovered a new species of animal but then Tim posted this on his flickr account the next day..
anyone know what these things are called?
PS subject change: I officially survived year 1 (pending grades).
2 semesters to go!
April 20, 2007
leaving only artifacts
Isn't it funny how the people we love the most are often the ones to dissapoint us the most?
I didn't expect much, it was my birthday, but maybe expecting at all is what gets me in trouble. I guess I'm not good at this sort of thing.
There's a man I won't talk about, not because he is a secret but because he is here. His past relationships have all been deep, I think, he doesn't say, I don't ask. It was my turn. So, I took his hand, and cautiously walked him into the depths of real. He tried to look comfortable but I could tell it was a foreign place; for us both.
Scared- nothing is black and white here, no amount of control can control the outcome of someone else.
He found himself looking at me camouflaged in grey between himself and my fears.
He is strong in his heart and I have scars that run deep with stories that would break anyones heart.
He has never written me a love letter but I imagine if he did, he would address them by anything other than my name and signs them with the first letter of his first name. I always hope for one, or even just for a moment of knowing exactly what he feels.
I hope for answers for questions I do not dare to ask.
Really though, there is only one thing to be told: On our fourth date, after the only part of him I will ever hold collapsed inside me he said, "you are so incredible." It was the closet I have ever come to touching true love.
I'm afraid what you might be thinking. That I am a certain person, and that you are the kind of person who knows more about my story than me. But you should know this: I love him, in an instant and with every piece of my heart.
And so I move between myself, on snowy highways and crowded subways...
I was there this morning and if you come close you can smell him in my hair.
April 17, 2007
Divorce, its what for dinner.
I've decided to file for divorce from object oriented programming, citing irreconcilable differences.
April 12, 2007
just saying..
April 09, 2007
reaction to interview with Tikva
I've been thinking a lot since our interview about the first question you asked, (about the most important people in my life), for me I think this is a rather dynamic question. Sure there are people who are deeply and always will be important to me: my family, my life long friends, my boyfriend etc... however I think the list is always slightly shifting after them.
There is a concept of urban tribalism and how our nuclear families are being replaced with our 'urban tribe' family, as less and less of us urban-ites have children, we have to create our own concepts of home and place. As a result, I see us all traveling in tribes. Example: I have my cycling tribe, I have my ITP tribe, I have my NYC tribe, I have my female-ITP-NYC-tribe, and so on and so fourth. Each is different yet each is totally essential to my way of living.
"Koyaanisqatsi" is a Hopi Indian word. It means "life out of balance."
I think a lot about how life is out of balance in the city, I think a lot about how we deal with living in such an unnatural environment- how many more people use substances to soothe and numb, how many more people are alone- living or literally, how many more people here are successful financially yet miserable emotionally. I think a lot about how we ignore beauty and love and fleeting moments, I think about how much time we loose not being with the people we want to really really be with because we have long hours at the office or classroom.. I don't think it has anything to do with the fact people don't have the capacity to understand those things or do them, but because it was irrelevant to them or they are all too busy to be not busy and just stop to (re)think.
If the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind the most little moments in life-- then what else are we missing?
I think about how often I have my ipod on me, sometimes I keep my headphones on but don't have any music on. I listen to the sounds as I walk down the street.. car, people, birds, trash. I keep my headphones on, it offers me some sort of protection in a way- - from others. Men don't try to talk to me when I have my headphones on, they don't cat call because they assume I can't hear it. I can walk safely.
Although, I wonder if the explosion in technology has extremely limited our exposure to new experiences? Increasingly, we get our news from sources that think as we already do- blogs, friends, listserves. . . and with iPods, we hear what we already know; we program our own play lists- literally. Everything is familiar. We create a sense of familiarity and we control what we hear almost to a fault and how much of life are we losing out on as a result?
There is some sort of tragic emotional disconnect technology as bestowed upon us. .... have you ever heard that song, I think its called "just like heaven" its sort of an emo song about a man has found the woman of his dreams but can't express the depth of his feeling for her until she's gone. It's about failing to see the beauty of what's plainly in front of your eyes and I think technology does exactly that.
April 01, 2007
I think the worst feeling in the world has to be feeling homesick and not having a home.
I called my friends voice mail tonight on my way back from the floor: "Hi, Its me. you're not going to believe this; I'm so homesick that I went onto the internet to check for airfare, then I realized I don't know where home is, so I just sat there looking at the screen not sure where to go...
I just wanted to hear your voice in hopes of finding something familiar for a moment. . ."
March 30, 2007
the last time my life got thrown up in the air and I got to watch it fall all to the ground was when I moved to New York.
I sold it all, I left everything I swear I'd never leave and started all over again in a place I had many more bad memories then good.
I got here, I settled- it took months, but I did, I found a place I could be happy. I started to replace all those bad memories with good. I committed my life to this place as much as you can commit to a place and now I see things in the horizon and I'm beginning to fear the whole process might have to start over all over again. You know, I hate planning, I hate hate hate asking questions of people when I'm not sure they really know the answers; or maybe I'm afraid of their answers..
The last two or so years I've started to feel a shift, the moving every 6 months like I've done every 6 months since I was 16 isn't so glamorous anymore, I find myself craving a sense of home and I find myself craving a partner to share it all, I find my definitions shifting in ways I never could of anticipated.
Something has changed in my fearless emotionless life, and I'm finding I crave meaning so I can find purpose.
I keep trying to let go, blah blah live in the moment blah blah, repeating to myself something ryan said to me months ago, 'someday...its going to work out...and all the bad experiences will be meaningless'
March 27, 2007
against the darkness, I walked by, just as he whispered in her ear "i love you"
ever catch a glimpse into someone else's life and mourn for something you've never had?
March 26, 2007
the wind is telling secrets
its officially spring, I slept with the windows open last night, awoke to look out my window at a bird with a mouth full of nesting supplies and I'm about to go on a bike ride with nothing but spring weight riding gear on.
climbing, cycling, running, kayaking, hiking season is almost here, I can feel it.
March 21, 2007
I'm doing fine, and thanks for asking.
As humans are most naked vulnerabilities are often exposed when we are ill.
Today there was nothing I wanted more then my mom, or at least someone who can pretend to take care of me.
I remember the first time I got really sick away from home, ironically it was in New York, I think I was 16 maybe just 17, I got some sort of UTI and I thought the world was going to collapse on me, it was one of those pinnacle moments I felt like an adult because no one was there to coddle me anymore, I remember so clearly feeling alone and grown up.
I remember taking myself to the hospital in the taxi and explaining to them how I thought I was going to die from the pain. I couldn't stand up straight. I remember getting a shot of antibiotics and not having any ones hand to hold. The nurse must of known I was scared, he put his hand out for me and I squeezed for dear life.
I remember last summer when I was in France, it was just a day or two before the tour was coming through Alpe d'Huez, I had been out on my bike all day and just got back in time to cook some pasta when my mom called to tell me she had cancer and was going into her second surgery the next day. I remember the same sensation then, feeling alone and trying to cry so quietly that no one would see or hear that anything was wrong.
I remember the terrible feeling I had of guilt, I remember starting the what ifs, I remember when she said the C word I automatically thought about every other person I've loved and lost that year. I started to think about how badly my mom wanted grandchildren and that even if I tried she would maybe never get to see them if things got worse. I remember feeling helpless there as much as I did when I was in that ER room ten years ago. Is this what being an adult means, feeling vulnerability yet going forward anyway?
I have always had some theory about illness in nature, there are humans who are 'public bleeders' and there are the ones who hide the problems so well you'd never know anything was wrong. Birds do that too, that's why they die so quickly sometimes, they try to hide weakness and illness from their flock and by the time you notice something is wrong, they're gone. I always wonder if that's where I get my ideas about survival, from the birds. I guess it somehow makes sense in a logical manner.
Never say you're not ok.
Never say you need help.
Never show you're weak.
And the irony in all of that is that I have realized that the ones who ask for love or help the least often are often the ones who need it the most.
How do you begin to ask for what you need when you've spent you're whole life hiding?
fuckity.
at what point does a fever cause brain damage?
March 12, 2007
Mountains and Rivers.
The Buddhists believe that before they begin the life-changing work of their Zen practice, the world is exactly how it appears. Mountains are mountains, they are famous for saying, and rivers are rivers.
Once they start to meditate, though, to lose themselves in the change that must occur, mountains cease to be mountains and rivers cease to be rivers. The Zen student loses the points of reference he has always relied upon; mountains overlap and dissolve into rivers, rivers break their barriers and rise up like mountains, and the student becomes less and less sure about who and what he is, dissolving his sense of self within a dissolving world.
With enough understanding and practice, things click back into place; mountains go back to being mountains and rivers go back to being rivers. But meditation has moved the student to a place where he can see that the mountains exist in relationship to the rivers and that they make each other possible. He has opened his eyes to the interrelatedness of everything, including the world and himself.
In the last few years, all my mountains became rivers and all my rivers became mountains. In the most literal sense, I found myself negotiating rivers when they fell down rapids as steep as the sides of mountains, and I learned that rather than climbing to the top of mountains, I preferred to walk around them, to encircle them, the way a river would. I also lost every reference point that had kept me grounded in my fearless and emotionless life. The next thing I knew all the big words had started to shift on me: Adventure, Success, Friendship, Marriage, Feminism, Love, Morality, Home, Safety – before long I wasn’t able to make anything stand still. Everything that was a mountain in me turned into a river.
I don’t know how long it will take until I’m part mountain again.
As humans, our most naked vulnerability is our capacity to fear; we learn to run from what is right, accepting instead what is safe or appears easy. We learn how not to risk ourselves, to protect, to be selfish, to avoid love but in doing so, we forget what it really is to live.
March 09, 2007
Anomalous phenomenon
i've always preferred it when things get a little complicated, a little hard to explain. that's when you know it's yours, when you're the only one who understands even though it might not make a lot of sense on paper.
i remember the first time where i felt i had control of my life. it was a day that i developed an unwaivering belief that the world owes me nothing, that nothing would ever be given to me, and most importantly, that i cannot do everything, that i would eventually be forced to pick sides, make choices, and occasionally fuck up in a really big way. i was sixteen. junior year in high school. a week before christmas. i sat in the front row, right beside the door because i knew things were not going to go well.
in front of me sat a six page calculus exam. questions on matrices, on factoring, on derivatives. none of which i knew anything about because i preferred hanging out in the dark room developing film than going to math class. i stared for about 20 minutes. questions like "what is the derivative of x^3-3x+4/ 2x^2+3x-2" drawing only blanks in my head. i didn't understand what any of the symbols meant anymore. i put random numbers and variables and equal signs in the spaces provided.
i got about half way down the first page before it occured to me that i was stressing out over something i didn't care about, will never care about, and will never have to think about again after walking out that door. then it hit me like a punch to the back of the head. i crossed out the last half of the page. then crossed out page two. three. four. five. six.
it was my first "i don't give a shit" moment, the first one that would change the direction of my life, the first of many that would follow.
handing in the exam, i said, 'this is not what i want to do.'
he nodded. i knew he was disappointed. he knew me well. he was my soccer coach. he was the first person who ever put me in a leadership position by naming me captain of the 96-97 team. i knew he knew. he never gave me any shit about never attending class.
since then, i've felt like a pinball, going where ever the bumps seem to take me, colliding against bright lights, rolling into dark corners, drowning between two flippers waving frantically, occasionally hitting the jackpot, and sometimes going to the bonus round. i feel as directionless now as i did on that december day, but as i continue to make the choices that smooth out the pavement, things are starting to make a little more sense, albeit very metaphysically. i still don't have any answers, but i feel better prepared to handle the questions.
i guess this explains why i get caught up in the moment. the moment is all there is. i can't live in the future anymore, and while sometimes i'd like to change the past, that's just wishful thinking for wistful early mornings. everything is now, everything is transitory and always shifting, definitions change, everything goes away eventually, and i've been shocked too many times by how short now can be.
March 04, 2007
I'll tell you that i feel like i've been chasing a ghost too for the last little while. seeing things that aren't there. distracted by spectacle and smoke signals. solid from a distance, empty and waivering up close. and i can say that when you do it to yourself enough, see what you want to see for long enough, it sort of becomes impossible to discern what's actually there. so eventually, you find yourself taking what you can get, when you can get it.
and that's the problem with ghosts. the feelings are real. but they're for nothing.
March 02, 2007
i hate how he can keep me up without saying a word.
February 27, 2007
juxtaposition of contradictions
"there's something about me that makes me forgettable." she purred this out, sullen and indifferent. "we're born alone and we die alone. maybe I just remind people that."
he shakes his head, disagreeing like a complaint.
she could tell him about the routine of life, how she glides a few inches above it. she could tell him about the African coast, how it turns orange at the end of the summer or how she is never in any of her dreams.
he wouldn't remember any of it.
'if time is immeasurable, then how do you know when you're finished? how do you know when it’s over?'
she wanted to ask.
maybe he would say that time is only immovable, flawed yet thorough. but he felt her pushing it against his eyes like the landscape - peninsulas with lonely fingers, extra letters.
she sighs, "i have this home, but I’m still homesick."
February 14, 2007
happy valentines day.
one of my favorite cards from this weeks postsecrets.
February 12, 2007
breathe me.
Across the swan-bearing lake a wedding has just reached its completion. The groom is managing to look utterly solemn and completely delirious with joy at the same time. Adam and I watch the kiss, and I snap the shutter just as the kiss ends and the wedding party bursts into applause.
“Sucker,” Adam says.
“Oh, right,” I say. “Like you wouldn’t trade your life for his right this minute.”
“I don’t know anything about his life,” Adam says.
“You know he remembered to do all the things you forgot.”
“I think I prefer it,” Adam says, “when you reserve that particular lecture for yourself.” He points back across the lake where the bride has just leaped into her maid of honor’s arms, and I snap the shutter again.
“Or for one of your commitment-phobic boyfriends,” Adam adds.
“I guess the truth is, I can’t blame them,” I say. “I mean if I saw me coming down the street with all my stuff hanging out I’m not so sure I’d pick myself up and go happily ever after.”
“Of course you would,” Adam says. “And it’s because you would, and because the chance of that happening is so slim, and because you hold out hope anyway that it might . . . that’s what makes you a great photographer.”
“Greatness is nice,” I tell him. “I want contact. I want someone’s warm breath on my face.” I say it as if it’s a dare, which we both know it isn’t. The flower girl across the lake is throwing handfuls of rose petals straight up in the air.
I came to this city near the Hudson over a half year ago because I recently spent a long time under the dark naked water of the Smith River and I took it as a sign that the river wanted me away. I had taken so many pictures by then of the chaos of heaved-up rock and climbing trips and endless sky that I’d lost my balance and fallen into them. I couldn’t keep separate any more what was the mountain and what was me.
I thought there might be an order to the city: straight lines, shiny surfaces and right angles that would give myself back to me, take my work somewhere different, maybe to a safer place. Solitude was a straight line too, and I believed it was what I wanted, so I packed whatever I could get into two bags, left behind everything I couldn’t carry including three pairs of skis, a whole darkroom full of photo equipment, my bikes, and the mountains I’d sworn again and again I couldn’t live without.
I pointed myself east up into the endless air —all the way across the mountains and flats to this shining city on the Hudson...
You might forget, for example, that you live in a city where people have so many choices they throw words away, or so few they will bleed in your car for a hundred dollars. You might forget eleven or maybe twelve of the sixteen-in-a-row totaled cars. You might forget that you never expected to be alone at twenty-seven or that a crazy man might be waiting for you with a gun when you get home tonight or that all the people you know without exception all have their hearts all wrapped around someone who won’t ever love them back.
“I’m scared,” I say to Adam and this time his eyes come to meet mine. The fog is sitting in the center of the river like it’s endless and we’re about to enter it.
“I can’t help you,’ Adam says, and squints his eyes against the mist in the air. "I have man problems too." he adds.
When I was two years old my father took me down to the beach in Hawaii, carried me into the surf until the waves were crashing onto his chest and then threw me, I suppose, whether I would sink or float.
By the time the lifeguards arrived at my father’s side I had passed the flotation test, had swam as hard and fast as my limbs would carry me, and my father had me up on his shoulders, smiling and smug and a little surprised.
I make Adam drive back by Ground Zero on the way home, though the bridge is faster. The fog has moved in there too, and the last of the brides are worrying their hair-dos while the grooms help them into big dark cars that will whisk them away to the Honeymoon Suite at the Four Seasons, or to the airport to board planes bound for Paris or Rio.
Adam stays in the car while I walk back. The sidewalk is littered with rose petals and that artificial rice that dissolves in the rain. Even the swans have paired off and are swimming that way, the feathers of their inside wings barely touching, their long necks bent slightly toward each other, the tips of their beaks almost closing the “M.”
I take the swans’ picture, and a picture of the rose petals bleeding onto the sidewalk. I step up under the tallest of the arches and bow to my imaginary husband. He takes my hand and we turn to the minister, who bows to us and we bow again.
“I’m scared,” I say again, but this time it comes out stronger, almost like singing, as though it might be the first step—in fifty-five or a thousand—toward something like a real life, the very first step toward something that will last.
"Maybe this is the beginning" I breathe, "the beginning of the beginning of understanding."
February 10, 2007
she says, 'i can't sleep.' as if it is a history of tonight.
her blue-eyed frusteration, mocks the dark. she wants something from you.
"you want to know me; no one knows anyone, anyways. maybe you should forget that, and you won't be as unsatisified." he says.
she hopes for answers but doesn't ask questions.
she sings to herself when you turn your back. wrapped in skin she sings, "i believe the world, it spins for you."
the chai is cold. i can make more, but i like it better this way. i don't get burned.
February 08, 2007
only the good die young.
a friend died tonight of breast cancer, she was 29.
it's weird how stuff like that happens and it makes me really realize how wrong things are in my life.
how the things I really want and value seem so distant in this moment.
all this waiting to live instead of living to live.. its just so... wrong.
February 07, 2007
....And maybe it's because you came over even in this freezing cold or the way your hair moves in the stale air. maybe it was the residual fragments in my brain, leeking through to my delirious dreams that fester an hour before i have to wake. and possibly maybe, it was because i told myself time and time again not to consider.
Pluto
In 2003, astronomers discovered a shiny red planet-like world orbiting
the sun beyond Pluto. They called it Sedna, a name they said was derived
from the Inuit deity that created the Arctic's sea creatures.
But the truth about the myth of Sedna is more complicated. She is the
Dark Nurturer, embodiment of the wild female potencies that are feared
yet sorely needed by cultures in which the masculine perspective
dominates. Dwelling on the edge of life and death in her home at the
bottom of the sea, Sedna is both a daunting freak and a primal source of
abundance. Shamans from the world above swim down to sing her songs
and comb her long black hair. If they win her favor, she gives them magic
to heal their suffering patients.
What do you need magic in order to heal?
January 17, 2007
first day of the real thing.
I hate the first day of classes.
I guess I'm a shy person by nature and the idea I have to introduce myself to a large group of people, most who i don't know is kinda of scarey.
I don't feel worthy of being here and maybe thats really most of the problem. Or maybe I feel like now I'm really in graduate school, since I get to take classes that I want to take, it feels different when they are assigned, ya know?
It was nice to walk onto the floor today and have people recognize me, I was sort of afraid I'd get there today and no one would remember who I was.