forest spirits

Uggg I'm going to try to make a comeback from my recent period of silence. The uncertainty of my life has been feeling sort of demotivating. I recently discovered that the key to enjoying the weekend is to do as little as possible. When you spend most of it lying around, it feels like it lasted a hearty length of time. If you go galavanting around, it feels like it never happened at all.

This morning I woke up unnecessarily early, so I visited the nature preserve by my house for the first time. It was really serene walking on a flat, easy trail guarded on both sides by saw palmetto. With every step I scared away unseen animals in the bushes, sent scrabbling with terror at the sound of my approach. I could never see them; I could only hear their violent thrashing and it felt like I was in a Miyazaki forest.

A person I know took this delightful photo of a perhaps perfect weekend spent on a platform boat in Venice, CA

chinoiserie day

this morning i was riding in a limo when i realized my leg was covered in tiny tiny spiders. i was clutching a large branch of rosemary that, unbeknownst to me, was covered in tiny tiny spiders. i rolled down the window and let them crawl on my fingers and shook them out the window and then tossed the branch out.

last night my mom's texan cousins picked me up and we had italian food and then they insisted on taking me to a bar even though they don't drink. i had a beer and they had root beer.

tonight bagel's great-aunt's ex-husband was the most entertaining man at the dinner table. he is an eight-year-old old-school dallas texan with a thick thick drawl who talked about the time he caught a five-and-a-half-foot catfish, being out of the house and supporting himself at age fifteen, and about different ethnicities moving in to dallas and making different kinds of foods that he's never seen before and ... "yeah ... I like it!" He called bagel's brother-in-law "a fine specimen" and asked if there was a brain to go with that physique.

apricot impression

wonderful news. i thought my tulip bulbs would never grow and that i'd been watering a dead bucket of dirt/fish graveyard for weeks. but it seems otherwise. i'm really excited about them. apricot impressions.

hurricane cabin fever

reporting from swallow cafe. the subway is still down, school is cancelled for the week, and the internet in our apartment went out today. and it is official that the front door to our building no longer unlocks. you can't get in unless someone already inside buzzes you in. therefore, i enjoyed a myriad of indoor activities today. i planted tulip bulbs in a pot and then buried the dead fish in our aquarium with the tulips. i turned on the kitchen faucet and let trouble drink the running water, which he enjoyed. i finished Tinkers, which was good, and I walked around on the rooftop of our building. bushwick was crisp cold and gray today. i had a coffee and a beer and a coffee, in that order. i felt bored, which i enjoy in theory, but felt bored by in practice.

the lives of perfect creatures

take me stargazing, please

tomorrow is going to be a so-so-bad day and it's only thirty-five minutes away.

i will also settle for a trip to the outdoors with a metal detector

green grass grows

grass is so much more fascinating when it grows in a cuppy on your desk

my jolly giant

Dinnerplates

Diminutive

the odyssey

The reality of things is that you will inevitably leave your home for two weeks and return to find that everyone thinks you are dead and the sunflowers you lovingly raised from seed have gone and bloomed withoutyou.

i have a very special place in my heart for the smell of sunflowers. it is very subtle and few people know it.

bummed about perseid

bummed about not being able to see the meteor shower tonight. i laid out in the backyard rolled in a blanket and kept my eyes open until my contacts dried out and i saw things wiggling and every star seemed to move sort of a little if you stared at it long enough. and i got a mosquito bite on my toe.

green thumb

fourteen of my sunflowers have sprouted.

fremtidsplaner

in my garden i would like to have a fragrant cherry blossom tree, a gingko tree, a magnolia, a shaded foxglove grove, a patch of giant nodding sunflowers.