1/4-LIFE CRISIS

I'm sifting through everything I've ever made, hoping to find the things I have let slip through the cracks (that is, slip out of my portfolio and into pathetically well-organized folders) that will somehow impress the person I may or may have not already allowed to form an impression of me.  I'm reorganizing and post-rationalizing and relearning and redrawing the things I've already done.  I've already told these bedtime tales and I don't feel like revisiting the old monsters I no longer believe in.  I now know it was all just allegory anyway, told to keep the kids in bed, keep the kids at home, keep the kids from being dismally boring.

And what a job.

Drink beer and coffee and stay up way too late wrangling files because it's easier when you're numb and your brain is making wild connections here to there, then to now.   Because in this state, you are no longer physically immobilized by the embarrassment of having defended these things. Go to work and face questions about "what's next" and fill in spreadsheets and organize archived boxes of drawings and try to finish it all before you leave (which well, intended co-workers remind you is "on Monday already?!").  Nice + tidy.

Buy organizational products online and then back out at the last minute because shipping is more than the cost of the CD sleeve you wanted to properly represent your design aesthetic... no, your design ethic.... no, your design ETHOS.  Because this document.  This thing you bring with you but don't leave behind because it is yours. This collection of drawings (representing ideas that at one time were real but will never be real, just the communication of a remembered reality) will outweigh your personality.  It will outweigh your clothes, your references, your experience, your ability to make eye contact.

BULLSHIT.

SENSORY MEMORY.

I'm squeezing time out of these lost last days and I have a little over a month to:

rescue my school work

take a bike trip weekend in Poland

visit a small town or two
savor friendships
go photo-taking
attend a concert at the philharmonie
see all of those great architecture pieces one simply must see
buy kitschgo to as many galleries as possible

THERE ISN'T ENOUGH TIME TO ENJOY IT.

THERE IS TOO MUCH TIME TO WAIT.

I keep having quick flashes of intense sensory memories that make me feel like I am in Kansas City or Lawrence. They make me feel as though, at least mentally, I am living two places at once.

SMELL: storm through a dusty window screen
SMELL: mattress cover stored under my bed
SOUND: cicadas

TASTE: air on a drive past a prescribed burn

TASTE: clover honey and sourdough

Because when these things happen, things which are so place-specific, I can't ignore them. They say that smells conjure memory, but no one ever talks about the influence of memories on smell. Because when your brain actually re-creates a smell, it creates an irrational longing, and I can no longer passively keep tabs on what's going on back home. I'm struck for the first time since july with this feeling of being left out, of not knowing what's coming, of surely leaving an unmade bed behind me. This is the farthest north I've ever been for a summer solstice; the sun rises around 4:30 and sets around 21:30, but there just couldn't possibly be enough time in these long days for all of the things which clearly must be done.

I CANNOT AFFORD TO SPEND HOURS

LOST IN MY OWN INACCESSIBLE CITY.

There are drawings and friends to be made. It's like being on the regional train, except that after an hour of staring out the window, I get off right where I got on.

PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT

In Delphi, I took a self-timed photo of "Me + Ruins In Delphi." I tried to make myself feel like I was visiting the Oracle. I always ask myself if the Greeks vividly understood religion as a human construct and just kept it around 'cause it's fun. The stories are just too wild. How could you make yourself believe that was real life?

...

Eating on dumpsters in a crowd of East End hipsters, we congratulated ourselves on our ability to not appear just like eachother.

...

Dear Dean Gaunt, I liked it a lot when you really listened to what I had to say. We were in Germany, I was talking about braided grass, and you looked me in the eye.

...

I was completely unable to feel what Copenhagen is like, but I could have explored this dorm complex for years and still had more to discover.

...

At our awkward table in our front hallway, are Atypical Actions and Typical Fixtures, alongside a sizable shoe collection. Sarah Studer's pretty good at all of these things. Endless curiosity. (Come home soon.)

...

I can't stop thinking about Willa Cather. "She laughed her mellow, easy laugh, that was either very artless or very comprehending, one never quite knew which." I hope that someone will describe me one day like this.

I wasn't there when they took this photo.



...

Jo and I sat on benches in a cultural center in London and were quite puzzled by this book on Afghanistan. The project was to show the wisdom and flexibility of words. Ask a question, close your eyes, pick a book, open and point. Read the sentence. This is your answer.

Camels in a Datsun.



...

Charlie, seller of maps and globes, stands in Haus am Checkpoint Charlie.

...

Before I rearranged the furniture, this room was still Terry's.

...

To give me a time machine would be lonely. To give me a teleporter would be cruel. When I pick out photos and phrases and stories, all of the dead time disappears. All of the non-activities and non-places fade out. Before and after this coffee pouring, there was couch sitting. The front door was open. We mixed fresca and pbr and cooked corned beef. It made a stew that fed lots of people. Looking at this picture feels like eating candy. It's a house slowly waking up and wandering into the kitchen, rubbing their scalps. I can't remake this. Who would want to?

I MISS IT SO MUCH. But then I remember the mice and never being able to find things and the way the house sucked me in and my funny futon and the war of attrition that was the kitchen table.

...

These things are all so small. These things are so big.

I don't get you, wall at the elementary school in Slovenia.

TODAY ON THE TRAIN:

kids playing rock paper scissors, in which scissors can beat both paper AND rock.

reading AHBWOSG

man missed the door by just a second

listening to a mix from kenny

girl next to me listening to Big Band.

THINGS I USED TO DO (but have since ceased doing)

make friendship bracelets and wear them myself

also used to make: paper flowers, collages, posters, knitting needles, flibbertyjibs, treasure maps, believe

play basketball, soccer, piano

dream about

want to be margaret bourke-white

read about how we define the sounds we make

put on crazy clothes and dance

stay up late surrounded by scraps of paper and pens

drink peppermint tea, ginger beer, milk

protest

calculus

drive

be changed by what I read or saw

forget what time it was sitting in that blue armchair

use up one pair of shoes in two years

jigsaw puzzles

invent projects

THINGS I DO NOW (that I never did so often before)

walk

ride trains

make diagrams

put on normal clothes and wish people were dancing

cut my own hair

eat things made out of pumpkin

worry about

drink beer, coffee, water

write letters, send packages

be changed by what I write or say

use power tools

have nostalgia

regard language with respect

use up a pair of shoes in one year

find projects

go to privately-owned galleries

think about america as a whole of parts

BUT. even so, I always have this sinking feeling that I'm not doing enough. I'm not talking enough. I'm not reading enough. I'm not occupying public space enough. I'm not engaged enough. I'm not focused enough.

I think this is okay. It's like approaching infinity. We're never gonna get there, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have numbers with elegant names like duodecillion, googol, one thousand septillion.

But I've always had this problem with doing, finishing, accomplishing, documenting, cataloguing, finding, where I feel that these verbs are all independent of each other, instead of slipping past one another, pulling at each other.

I will never be a part of the mobile generation. I have too much nostalgia. I like keeping scraps of newspaper and tin cups and sewing machines around. I know that I inherited this nostalgia (probably the only way to acquire it) from my father. And I get nostalgic about things that happened yesterday, about things that happened 60 years ago, wanting to somehow capture and relive these things, trying to squeeze everything I can out of them and into this life. I look at the photos of the flint hills and I can't believe how black and blond and brown your hair is. I can't believe how the fields are that color. I can't explain that color. I want to have that color somewhere and sink into it.

I still think that the only way we're gonna make this life livable is through acting human. I met someone yesterday who was dreaming about Tel Aviv. His girlfriend is there. He would lean back into the couch cushion, breathe his smoke into the lampshade, run his middle finger in arcs around the rim of his glass. He told me that in Jerusalem everything is very heavy, but in Tel Aviv, you float around the city, gravity like on the moon.

This accomplishes nothing, but it's nice to be around.

"cutting your own hair is healthy"

New while-I'm-away, travel-musings blog:

flugelfenster.blogspot.com

don't leave a comment unless you want my entire extended family reading your blogger.

tonight on the news hour, there was a lot of talk about coughing.

there was also a poet wearing a black mock turtleneck with a half-bald half-long head of hair. The scenery changed behind him as he read his poem about what it is to be unemployed. He is an automechanic.

GOATS.

"The second part of this work is a performance involving two live goats. Over the course of a week, goats will “perform” consumption on the front lawn of the Spencer. Tethered to a pole, the goats will eat a radius of grass, thus creating embodied representations of consumption. Together, the installation and performance will create an incised landscape visible from the adjacent Student Union. "

Tethered with a rope, eating in a radius.

I've never owned a one-way ticket before.

MY FAVORITE THING ABOUT THE EARTH.

svalbard doomsday seed vault.

nibbling inflation briefly unstrung cradle
diabolic unwarmed unwashed
auroroa crests matricide kilowatt systems
comparatively nightfall attitude

remembering

Ryan Larkin "Walking"
Uploaded by vibliographer

small things.

FINDING.

I think this may change completely with this new discovery.

The other day, I got a splinter in my eye and found out that my life is worth approximately as much as my high school education.

a moment: Catching one straggling piece of hair in front of my dresser mirror, looking at the colors (I forget they're there until I'm inevitably reminded by the person cutting my hair, this time, Leandra), cutting that small chunk (20 strands at the most), the day and afternoon seem like an entire solid in that one small motion.

have a round of words (on the house):

soundless skurried practice boyish inglese despect unexpected tunable oblation placing graveolent immerge ambidextral pauperis cobalt tantalization deportation

freizeitgeist

I guess I’ve been thinking about (free) time (of day, month, year, life) a lot recently.

Things never quite fall into place at the right time, and I’ve been doing too much waiting. Not every moment can be the set of a play: a flat surface, conveniently lit to imply the time and situation of your choosing.

That point made, though, there are some moments that feel this way.

An afternoon in Argentine, KS. Two women are planting a garden (salsa ingredients). It is the first day of spring-turning-to-summer and a Sunday afternoon. We’ve met an new/old friend just came from a courtyard next to a junkyard, eating soup. Two men (one of which is the new/old friend) are playing guitars on a bench (buckets of rain) while a neighbor hands a chunk of cedar over the fence because he knows how much the girls like the smell for their bonfires. Just inside is a whitewashed fresh house. Everyone has pantlegs rolled up. It is turning to evening and it is time to go back to Lawrence.

A morning in September. Daisy Hill won’t roll out of bed for at least another three hours. My roommate is at K-State visiting her boyfriend and my window is open. I’m sitting on the windowsill, listening to Nico, reading, one leg hanging off the ledge, half-written letter in my lap. Later that day (sunset), there are couches on the front porch and Tiny Dancer blares into the street.

Twilight into night. We’ve built the fire. The fish gets caught as the last remainder of light turns into stars. By the time it’s time to clean that fish, it’s full-on night.

It’s four a.m. and we know we should probably be going to sleep, but right now there’s just too much to be said.

Could these things happen at different times? Would they? Would you notice them?
Most of my favorite times are early mornings and late afternoons. Why would I feel any differently about these time and the activities that happen during them than I would about other times? Can we completely disconnect the rightness of a moment from the time in which it happens?

Time makes these things happen. Getting timing right is something that happens without your influence and out of your control, but is so key to the way it is happening. It changes the colors and the clothes and the music and the headaches and the sleepiness and the courage. Right now, things haven't quite been lining up. I think this is not Time's fault.

p.s. dunno how, but I stumbled across a full page of words.  

twitter postulate macilency endear grudgingly unphilosphical wigging oregano francophone cocotte upstarting doutel impetuosity battledore gascon fiddle whittle heterogeneity technicolor retaliative acquaintend abstinent background rosicrucian amplified curing wiggled bartering fedaiyin elmira amusement curios fideli wrongful shahbomin garish bloodletting curled override sespuipedalia executioner liveless listless archdeacon emotional fickle curist upwards curles fidget ranking curlew garlic suggests ellops elobey curley slubberdegullion cushat overseas sidesman endeth enclin buttress driest anteposition livelier befuddle passengers fibres shorebirds overseer coetanian fibril unavailing adjoining experimentation orismology arrangement garner enclos drifts garnet unstinted acquainting downie encode garoeb laertes

...way more where that came from.

that was just a taste.

secret message?

this blog is being relocated to the wall behind my desk, 105 marvin studios until further notice.

unexpected side effect of the green revolution:

no free raw corrugated cardboard for unemployed architecture students.

(Most companies now compact it on site before sending it to the recycling center.)

MY ANTONIA.

Although I admired scholarship so much in Cleric, I was not deceived about myself; I knew that I should never be a scholar, I could never lose myself for long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was apt to send me with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it. While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found myself thinking of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past. They stood out strengthened and simplified now, like the image of the plough against the sun. They were all I had for an answer to the new appeal. I begrudged the room that Jake and Otto and Russian Peter took up in my memory, which I wanted to crowd with other things. But whenever my consciousness was quickened, all those early friends were quickened within it, and in some strange way they accompanied me through all my new experiences. They were so much alive in me that I scarcely stopped to wonder whether they were alive anywhere else, or how.

She laughed her mellow, easy laugh, that was either very artless or very comprehending, one never quite knew which.

I liked to watch a play with Lena; everything was wonderful to her, and everything was true. It was like going to revival tent with some one who was always being converted.

You'll always remember me when you think about old times won't you? And I guess everybody thinks about old times, even the happiest people.






Walker Evans - roadside stand in Birmingham AL



























Dorothea Lange

from one year ago

resurfaced due to a series of conversations.

concerning a car stuck in the ice.
It is stephen and joan. She is driving.
But she has a guest. and a bad front tire. It would have been very difficult without his contribution.

but you say that you're in there alone.
and that ice.
and that tire!
and what of the brakes? They've not been so hot recently... so what if you get going and are incapable of stopping?

do not worry about this now.

right now, your wheels are spinning and you must get a push.
I know you are in there alone, so there is no one to get out and push.

one time, there was a car of us. We were four. One would not have been enough, but four! four got the job done. We were strangers and his wheels were spinning. He took the help.

But what if you are in an unfriendly neighborhood and there are not four to come off the street and push?

You are stuck in the ice.... trying to go uphill to no avail.

well. check your inventory. kitty litter? sand? icemelt?
can you back up to get a running start?
can you possibly put it in neutral and run?
this takes a lot of strength and you have been so tired.

please remember that this modern age which has caused so much trouble with cars and ice also contains cell phones.

I will find three others. and we will come push. For unknown, reasons, I have been blessed with a heavy car and thick tires.

------

I now have a little Kia.  I think she'll make it through the winter, though.

LAUNDRY DAY.

Someone once told me that, more often than not, the easy way is hard enough.  He, on a separate occasion, accused me of biting his fern.

another one said to me, "I see you fretting over there, Sarah.  Be brave." Later, she would put a large red circle in the corner of the painting I was fretting over to prove a point I've now forgotten.

I'm waiting for the dryer to buzz so that I can go to sleep tonight and wake up tomorrow morning and have another dayfull.  Right now, though, the shaking of it and the train on its tracks are harmonizing in a low, unobtrusive tone.  And then the train whistles, and it always sounds so urgent and unnoticed, except by the farther away train in reply; the way it enters my windows seems like whale song.

How do they sound where you are sitting?

"BAD NEWS.

Well I have tried them all, spent countless dollars and time until I found the one that works and this ONE IS IT.  Simply cal my Infoline to hear what I am talking about.  I sure hope to hear from you.

877+347+1551"

loveliest piece of spam I've gotten in a while.

Where are my glasses?  We all do small circles and pick up a few items, looking underneath them.  AH FUCK!  busted.  Woah woah woah.  slow down.  you've got to bend them back slowly!  They don't need more than three people to fit a lens back into a frame, so amid the co-motion, without saying goodnight, I slowly go down the spiral stairs.

This was a series of events taken out of some other time and rearranged, only vaguely resembling their original contexts.

Making bread is good for the soul,

unless it's too cold in your house for the dough to rise properly.

But even then, there's still the process of slowly convincing a substance which likes asking the proud question, "do I really need that flour, anyway!?" that it could take just a little more.

what am I doing with my life? 

(is it healthy to ask this question about once a day?)