not I'm bitter or anything.

So there are these flyers everywhere for some kind of sermon series a local church is doing on Song of Solomon, the words of which I love, even though the entire erotica part kind of went over my head as a kid. Lush verse, beautiful words. Me and a friend of mine concluded one night over a dish of pomegranate seeds in an apartment that's served as a crash pad for Indian medical students for the past three years that this book would make a fantastic Bollywood movie, what with all the daughters of Jerusalem chorusing Athenian in the background, love and poetry, dream sequences through cities and gardens, "One blink of your eye, one jewel of your necklace..."

As I get older I find I've gotten more liberal about everything else, and less so about religion. Not in a fundamentalist kind of way, but in the sense that I get really irritated with something with an essence so beautiful and inscrutable and sacred is marketed like a club flyer or a brand of perfume, attempting to tap into the confusion about love and all that icky cootie stuff.



I tried to explain to my coworker and great Pagan of Distinction (whose snarky Naked Gun commentary is on the side) why this kind of thing irritates me. It's hard to explain. Part of it's the graphic designer in me that knows how much full color printing on cardstock costs and thinks the money could have been better spent helping people or something, and the whole marketing to my demographic of white angsty suburban questioning Christians by appealing to the need for love and the desire to be around people my age cuts a little too close in a way that hits a nerve.

The closest analogy I could come to was the packaging of classical music as a commodity to be background music for a dinner party, to make your baby smarter, or to relax to something innocuous. Maybe someone will fall in love with Beethoven after hearing it on a compilation. Bach for Babies, Mozart for Modern Romantics. Whatever. Maybe something like this will be the first step to trigger a spiritual reawakening for some fellow traveling soul like yours truly discovering underground tuneage through a K-Tel indie rock compilation that included the Minutemen and the Melvins. It's not necessarily that the end is so bad, it's just the means and manner in which it comes. And I hate the feeling of being marketed to.

The blatant marketing to the 18-30 demographic, those of us who are on the spiritual kick, and possibly looking for love. What better way, perhaps? Easier to meet someone at church than the bar, gives you a good story later on, maybe you have some mutual friends. Maybe you'll like the same generic indie bands with vaguely spiritual overtones and that new book by whoever's cool this week.

I snark, but there's a little bitter in here too. It's hard for everyone, but it's especially difficult for quirky religious like yours truly who relate to neither the America&Guns&ValuesWhenIt'sConvenient or the Trying-To-Hard-To-Be-Cool-And-Relevant binary. The similar spiritual perspective thing is the prerequisite for anything serious, and even that seems hard to come by. I know there's way more nuance and I'm being harsh, but this is more or less what I come across. If there isn't an astounding lack of intellectual depth, the opposite extreme is to be so philosophical and esoteric that there's no room for life.

slow suicide's no way to go

A routine morning at the family leads to finding out that one relative has a week to live, that another one much closer is veering closer and closer to a total collapse and there's nothing any of us can do. I don't know what to say, and leave, not knowing what to do.

But it's so beautiful out, and how many more days like this will there be, so I go to the nature preserve that's open twice a year, take my camera and shoot pictures of leaves and trees, of reeds taller than me, of spiderwebs and deadwood, basking in the sun filtering through the green and the first red colors of fall, having awkward small talk with senior citizen birdwatchers, walking ahead so I can be alone with God and immerse myself in the sound of crickets and cicadas.

I want more green and flowers, but the botanical garden has some big event so I wander through the art museum looking at photos of the midwest and its broken dreams, ancient sculptures from Persia and Greece and Byzantium, the bright colors of oil paintings. I know that this is only temporary solace, but it is solace nonetheless.

I need sleep, need so many intangible things and wish for things that will never happen in this all too short life. I don't know what to say, what to do to make anything better. I don't know if any of us really does.

we could drive around all night / we wouldn't have to go too far

The single life is good to me, and it's so strangely liberating to be solely responsible for everything, to paint all night, to come home and not worry about waking anyone up. It's so quiet where I'm at that I feel like I live in the country even though I'm in what some of my relatives call "the ghetto," though it's a mix of insanely affluent yuppies, mental cases who live on the street, seemingly infinite ethnic groups and everyone in between.

While me and a good friend are planning on living together this spring, I like knowing that I can handle this and that I enjoy it because one can't live with housemates forever and I don't count on having a life partner someday.

So much of our cultural identity gets tied up in the idea of getting married or finding your soulmate and/or buying a house and/or having a lucrative career and honestly all that doesn't mean much to me. I don't know if it ever did, because I would have planned my life out differently back then.

I couldn't afford to buy a home even though they're about the price of a new Kia in my city, and I'm deeply satisfied with my work even though I know I'll never make a whole lot of money, and the life partner thing is something that either happens or it doesn't.

Now that I know that I am not afraid to come home to an empty place, that I don't feel powerless or completely vulnerable, that doesn't bother me, and most of the time, I like being able to be by myself. I'm content with where I'm at especially not having to work around someone else and everything that it brings.



Of course I say this and end up going out on something very much like a date that involved coffee and stargazing and talking til early in the morning. I'm not sure what all that means but I'll just see where it goes, see what I get to know. And in the meantime, I'm surrounded by a beautiful community with some wonderful neighbors and friends who invite me over for pizza and sitting outside next to the fire pit, or to watch football and learn how to throw knives and ninja stars at the pumpkins we carved a few weeks ago. I'm meeting up with my eastsiders tonight for dinner and more hanging out.

When God said that He gave life, and life abundantly, it seems to have less to do with material gain and more with the beauty that comes from unity and a sense of wonder at this beautiful world and a reason for living. At this point, despite a lot of hard things, there is so much beauty that I just can't even totally understand it.

don't talk of love, I've heard the word before...

I don't mind being alone when I know that life is not total solitude.

I came home last night, took a nap, made curry for dinner from the leftover staff party shrimp that I cam home with, worked through Sunday's music, and worked on art projects til midnight. I've got a stack of CDs next to the boombox, the red candles from the corner store burning, I'm comfortable in an old tank top from my first year of college and paint-stained jeans, mixing paints, laying down layers of gel, rearranging.

I'm in the same mode I've been in since high school, when everyone else was out drinking or doing whatever People My Age do, I was creating.

I've never felt confident in the art that I do until the last year or so. When I was in my teens, I had no car and couldn't afford art supplies so I cut up old National Geographics and collaged with them. Some of them looked amazing and some of them didn't, but it helped me learn about color and aesthetics. My first year away from home in the middle of nowhere was spent mixing oil paints and listening to the Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana, walking back to the dorm at night with smears of paint on my face, in an oversized black hoodie looking like I'd gone crazy. I had to throw out all my clothes that year when I moved home because the oil paint destroyed them all.

And then in Kent, I gave up on being an art student, wrote papers about Jane Austen and Chaucer, and spent my weekends playing old U2 and Pixies records and 'London Calling" countless times, covering the walls in pieces painted in gouache on brown paper, doodled with Sharpie, scrawled poetry and longings. It was here when I discovered that people actually liked what I made, and I made birthday gifts on illustration board, rendering abstract designs and fragments of my favorite poems with Prismacolor pencils, magic markers, and collage.

Now all these years of consistent practice to free myself of mediocrity are behind me and I wish there were more hours late at night when I didn't need to sleep and I could transpose the Cafe Caribe-induced visions in my head onto canvas and paper, use the knowledge I've gained in photography and painting to finally actualize.

I finally feel okay with being 'an artist' in the sense that I see more and more that I have the ability to create what I want to make, and because I continue to seek out and learn how to hone my craft and soak in all the goodness I can.

I've got my books and poetry to protect me, and because that wasn't enough to hide behind, I've got my art and my music. I can't sing unless I have a guitar in my hands. The guitar was my first liberation into finding a niche in the complicated world of social interaction, and it's also a crutch and a shield for those times when I talk with my hands too much.

The painting fills up my time, and lets all the colors and thoughts in my imagination out into something that I can touch, that brings pleasure to my eyes. I got over the fear of messing up when I realized that gesso spraypaint works wonders to cover up the bad spots. The paint is the place of loneliness, while photography is the window to the world, an interaction and a fresh encounter.

But it's a scary place to be in at the same time, because this is always where I'm been at and what others have defined me by. It's easy to hide behind the creative process to make the nights alone hurt less, to say "I don't need anyone," to pretend that it doesn't bother me when the phone doesn't ring because I'm already doing something, to wonder if things will ever change, and if I even want them to.

It's easy to be "that artsy girl" or "that girl who knows a lot," but it's hard for others to get beyond that and see that what we do so often is only a part of and not the complete picture of who we are.

gone on too long.

I couldn't find matching gloves this morning. I was shivering at the bus stop with two scarves wrapped around me but still thankful that I didn't have to drive through all the mess.

They say we're the worst city for winter weather, but I don't think that's true. This isn't Siberia, where it's -26 and your breath freezes when you exhale.

It does feel good to come home on days like this, and my routine hasn't changed much from my college days, come home and change out of work clothes into grungy comfortableness and drink infinite cups of tea while digging for lazy leftovers in the kitchen.

My roommate and I were going to pack more last night but we were both feeling so slackerish so we were nostalgia tripping on Youtube instead and wondering whatever happened to Lauryn Hill and remembering the awesomeness of Sesame Street back in the day.



This one is priceless.



When going through all my stuff with the move, I thought I was pretty good about getting things back to people and I found all these CDs that people loaned me waaaay back in the day. A burned copy of Aceyalone/Freestyle Fellowship? I had all good intentions but I never saw her again after that first week at Kent State. That Can album? I don't even know where that guy lives anymore. I haven't seen him in three years.

And some of these books! I'll probably never get around to reading Kierkegaard's 'Fear and Trembling' or 'Gravity's Rainbow,' but most of these are coming with me. I have the Quran and the Satanic Verses side by side in a cardboard box. I'll miss having built-in bookshelves to stack CDs and paperbacks on and forgot how much poetry I own. I was a fiend for library booksales and would come home with bags of books about anything that looked interesting or that I didn't know about. I'm kind of nerdy that way.

I loan books out without expecting them to return home. It's my inner librarian that just wants to see knowledge go everywhere and does so without any kind of profit-making agenda.

I go through cycles where I read tons of poetry and then other years when poets totally irritate me. But recently the power of words has been resonating more, and I find myself re-reading old favorites, marveling at T.S. Eliot, swooning over Pablo Neruda, loving that new Gil Scott-Heron record and hoping that I can stumble across a print volume of his works too, since OhioLINK wanted that back.



I used to hate Valentine's Day when I was in college because everyone acted so darn smug and the one year I was supposed to go see Henry Rollins but my ride fell through and so I was all angsty in my dorm blasting 70s punk and trying to pretend I didn't care.



I can't be bothered now. I haven't done anything in years and it's become almost just another day, especially since. All that candy is nasty anyway. Last Valentine's weekend I was the only white girl dancing at Caribbean Flavor and I used my Monday off to go on a photo adventure where I got some great shots, almost got my car stolen, and chilled at the West Side Market.

A lot has changed since then... the guy I went dancing with I don't see much of anymore and the photography day turned out to be the first in a whole series of Cleveland-related adventures that took us to the Metroparks, various abandoned buildings, and so on. I'm not going to ramble about my issues with the whole love thing and how I don't understand it, but I'm sure a lot will change in the coming year too the way things are going already.

Also, all you Cleveland people need to get outside and hang out on the lake... it's awesome.

love is noise

I have to tutor my kids tonight and I can't get my printouts to download. I feel like one of those weirdos at the library using a public computer because I'm off today and I'm a bit scruffy.

Like most things that happen to me, this weekend was almost entirely unplanned. I had planned on chilling out Friday night but ended up catching up with some old friends at a birthday party and me and the roommate meeting up with a friend after he got off work at Caribbean Flavor.

I somehow initially thought this would involve getting late dinner but instead was dancing away the stress of the weekend to pulsing dancehall and reggae, getting some weird looks because I definitely do not look Jamaican and was not dressed to impress. The past week has turned so many things upside-down that everything almost felt normal and it's to the point where I feel good being out of my element.

We did our lesson with the kids on Saturday about Valentine's Day and had them make paper hearts with words that rhyme on them. One of the babies was sick so I wrapped him in my hoodie and was holding him, trying to get him to calm down and we played blocks with the little girls and I totally felt like I was 5 in the best way giving them the plastic dinosaurs and letting them go all Godzilla on their block city.

As usual, the kids love getting pictures taken. Muk showed me how to play with some settings on my camera a little bit and that's how these turned out.





I didn't want to do anything on Valentine's Day but we got invited over to a friend's place for dinner and it just felt so good to laugh and chill even though I went back early to crash and get some sleep.

I picked up the most recent Verve album at the library and it made me remember why I like anthemic sweeping britpop so much.