now & then

(source)

I've always wanted a tree house.  Now that it's actually sunny and warm, of course i'm cooped up in the library with an essay mountain and 0.00 motivation and my feet itching for my birks and the feeling of pedals underneath them.  I just want to lie on a blanket by the water, passing a bottle of wine back and forth.  I want to put my hair in a french braid, walk around in shorts, and occasionally step into stores only for the air conditioning.  I want to sip on a cold fountain soda, gingerly place it onto a flat part of an upper branch, and climb up the wooden planks to my tree house.  I want my bracelets (friendship, hemp, boondoggle, bead) shaking with each inch upward.

the f word (not feminism)

Dear Professor:
I'm submitting this references list, APA-style. I hope that by reading through all these works, you can come to a relatively accurate conclusion of what my essay would have been about, had i written it. I've left out works which i read but ultimately deemed irrelevant to my hypothetical thesis.
See you in class for the exam!


I dare you not to fall in love with this story about Mayo Thompson. And i dare you not to fall in love with Sean Michaels by extension.


photo credit: George Krause, whose work was in Designing for Human Behavior: Architecture and the Behavioral Sciences (1974) -- cool beans!

Something That Is Weird

Here is something that is weird: faxes. How are they sent? How are they received? How does this all happen? How can someone send and/or receive a fax nonchalantly without sitting down to wonder about this? I have done this myself but I don't remember how. I once worked as a receptionist and in between reading novels and looking at the internet (which is another very weird thing) I would send and receive faxes. And I did it nonchalantly, without wondering how. When I was a kid, I thought the way faxes were sent was like this: the paper would roll itself up very tightly and then fly through the fax machine's cord, right into the electrical outlet. And inside the electrical outlet were a bunch of other cords, linking to other electrical outlets which connected to other fax machines. And in this way, all fax machines were connected. But now I know it is not like this, although I wish it were because a) I wouldn't spend so much time wondering about faxes, and b) I would know that we were all connected and this would make me feel less lonely sometimes.


art credit: Shannon Rankin, whose art freezes up my limbs for a little bit -- you can find her on flickr and etsy.

My Romanticization of the Kingston Summer

Okay, so i have a bike and it has a little basket in the front of it (preferably pink) and i ride this bike in the warm summer sun to Pan Chancho's, where i pick up a French baguette and place it in my bike basket. Then i ride to the lake, the baguette smell wafting through the air as i cruise, a breeze blowing the hair out of my face. When i get to the lake, there are others there and a picnic blanket laid out. I throw my bike down beside the other bikes (metal clashing noise!) on the grass, so green and alive, and sit down with my friends, one of which brought the picnic blanket and a knife, another the butter. And we sit and lie near the lake, eating buttered pieces of baguette with buskers and/or town troubadours playing guitar and harmonica nearby. We laugh at jokes and talk about our weddings and who will be invited and we gossip and make plans to have a seance and squint up at one another because of the sun. Then it starts to get kind of chilly and dark and we decide to call it a day and go home. We're only wearing t-shirts and shorts, after all. So we gather our things and one friend wraps the picnic blanket around his/her shoulders and arms and someone else catches a glimpse of the sky, which is full of stars and so vast, and points it out to the others and we all stand there staring up.

(photo by El Andariego)