Morning bird bake

They're waiting to be lovely little rings.

Byo pony

Ponies will not be provided.

Holy hell

Youngest in the room.

i've never completed a sketchbook.

It is so hard for me to do one thing
More than a handful of times
When there are so many things to do
So very many types of things and actions and sounds I can make, ways to speak, books to draw in...
It's hard to excuse repeating.

It is clear to me that this is a fault as much as it is a strength.

After 17 hours of traveling west through the night, the sun rose in my rearview mirror for the first time in my life, passing through Santa Claus, Indiana. I love the first times of my life.

from the archives. which is archies, but with a v .

She is floating, it seems.

The distance between the soles of her shoes
and the cracked asphalt is so small really that
even ants detour around her flip-flops,
seeing no hope of continuing
forward in their original direction.

So no one can tell, but she is floating.
And the days are flying by
while she laughs them off as temporal things
With a linger aftertaste of salt
and ink.

For all of the times she has stood,
black-mouthed in front of a press and laughing
For late night faulterings that deposit ink or paint into the mouth
When two hands weren't enough to hold everything
and the wrong end of the brush was held between the teeth.

For all of those times, the taste was stronger today,
As she locked her studio door and her eyes lingered
over her own clean hands
Busy with other things, and the worse for it.

--

I wrote this in 2006, as my time as a professional art student was coming to an end, and I remember so clearly the fear that I was about to end my life as an artist out of necessity: entering the real world, having bills to pay and no time to be what i pretended during college years I could be.

As I clean and pack up my workspace at my art center job and prepare to travel to St. Louis to sell the things I make to people, making a living at being a creative person and an artist, I am so amazed and thankful.

NY Times on facebook

The Way We Live Now-- NY TIMES

Growing Up on Facebook

By PEGGY ORENSTEIN

Published: March 15, 2009

Can you forge your future self when you never leave the present?

Read it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/magazine/15wwln-lede-t.html

I posted this obnoxiously long comment on Michael's facebook when he posted this article, and then realized I'd like to see what other people think so I am posting it here, too, with some added stuff at the end:

Here's what I think: The lady who wrote this article is a mom, and the moms in our life got on Facebook with a different understanding of what it's purpose was. When I first started on Facebook, the only people I was friends with on it were friends from my current life, college. It was an umbrella communication tool. Back then it was like, once every couple of months someone you remembered from somewhere else would friend you, and it was a huge surprise and a little weird.

Once my mom's generation got on it, they had to understand it in the context of their life, a much less digital existence, and so the shape it took was not social networking, but connecting with the past. I sort of think it probably had a lot to do with the constant pop-up ads for years that everyone got from classmates.com, telling you to reconnect with people you went to high school with. That was way more palatable to someone who didn't grow up on AIM chat.

So while I don't disagree that Facebook may change the way people reminisce, I also think that it's not necessary to be lonely to grow, and it's not necessarily healthy reinforce the old idea that you need to keep growing and changing into different versions of yourself while no one is watching...Wouldn't it actually be refreshing if we just evolved in front of each other and learned to understand each other as self-improving humans? Or no?

I just feel like every generation we fall into this same trap of looking at the younger generation as "doing it wrong" or messing up growing up, or whatever. All I know is, I'm in the group they are talking about but I am happy, thoughtful, and feel like I'm doing it right. Even updated my Facebook status with mangled syntax such as "Jackie is indie craft show."

What do you think?

Mmmmhm.

Got a new hairdo.

Spring is here!

Last year the softening of skin, and this one the loosening of ground.

Pete made those cedar boxes for me, and now the rest is up to me.

Whaddya know!

Snow in the dirty south!

Car embroidery

On the way to ikea!

Lunch with Joyce Scott

Oh, my job gets better and weirder every day.

There are worse ways to spend a Wednesday night

Even though I am sitting at deep run highschool at a camp fair until
8:30 tonight, I ain't mad atcha, life. At least my table is covered
in nonsense, and I have a giant rag horse as my...main...display?
Everyone here is looking at me like I am crazy because I don't have a
booth made out of a kayak or a Jesus fish in my logo. I don't think
this is my demographic, per se.

Saturday fires.

Pictured: my mother (and me, in carriage) in 1984 on the Brooklyn Bridge, she was 31 years old.

I made the frame from burned kitchen matches, which Alice and I spent the better part of an hour outside lighting (8 at a time) and yelling more than necessary. The yelling was due in part to the whiskey-- but mostly just proximity to each other.

Puppies have work to do.

Gramps is at work with me today. Beat that, cute-overload!

Thankful

Every week I help run a mentorship program for preteen girls called SOHO, which stands for space of her own. The girls come every week for a year and eat dinner together and then spend the evening working on projects geared towards a year-end renovation of their room, a la trading spaces. Tonight we had a dinner talk about friends + what makes a good friend. We took pieces of paper and wrote words that described a good friends, which also turned out to be words that we all hoped would describe us too. Earlier in the evening I had put tape on everyone's foreheads, and after we all shared our words and then got to work sewing pillows for their rooms, I walked around and put the words on each girl's forehead.

Amidst the exhaustion and the lack of free time...The piles of unfinished things all over my house and my life, I can tell you one thing for sure. I am thankful.

What a day

I am so excited for the future!

Pretty silly...rings?

The beginnings of a new line!

A Rickety day.

As a Sheepshead Bay Brooklyn baby, Astroland wasn't an amusement park to me, but rather a daily part of life. If we went anywhere, we surely passed the park, and Saturdays were often spent on the boardwalk of Coney Island. It is strange, to be a beach-community child in the biggest, loudest city in America. It doesn't make sense, that I grew up in Brooklyn, but most times in a bathing suit, body caked in sand like a veal cutlet, feet slapping as I ran across the boardwalk's storm-worn wooden planks.

My first hot dog was a Nathan's hot dog. My grandfather, now deceased, helped to build the Parachute Jump when he was young, living in a colorful and exciting New York that makes me jealous to imagine. Whenever traveling on the Belt Parkway I see the parachute jump from the road and laugh at what a powerful mark my family seems to leave on everything it touches, on the landscape of the world itself. The good and the bad.

The Wonder Wheel, I was sure was the center of the universe. When I sat on the rickety old, colorful metal seats, soaring above the beach next to mom or as the case may be, Dad, I imagined that it was the place where my divorced family by some miracle might be able to mend itself. It was there, high above Brooklyn that I felt my world connected. Mom and Dad were both allowed on the Wonder Wheel. Goodbye, Astroland.

Excuse me miss, but it is time to get up.

Why I could only ever love a northern boy

My boyfriend knows how to make bagels from scratch. And yes, he boils
them first.