Hoping that this will be better formatted than the last post. I'm on my mon/tue weekend and I've been exploring. I have been stressed out and contemplating choices that will change my life, though most things change your life in some ways.
I have been pretty proud of my successes but rather ashamed of my failures. I have been reading alot, I've finished three books this week, soon to be four because I am going to re-read Breakfast at Tiffany's. As a movie fan I also think it is also a good movie but that is a different piece of media trying to say its own thing. But Holly will always be Audrey to me.
The lastest book I finished was Iain Pear's The Titian Committee which was very fun but made me feel like my parents. UNlike the mysteries my parents had me read, I liked how the characters were sometimes stupid or awkward or just didn't have knowledge of every single thing that has ever happened in art ever. It felt like the historians were smart but they weren't supernatural, they didn't know everything and sometimes art distracts them enough that they fall in a canal.
It also made me miss my time in Florence. I miss wandering anround an ancient place. Nothing here has that feeling of being somewhere that has been used for centuries except maybe Taos, but it is a different kind of ancient place with a history I haven't studied. I did feel a similar awe there, I find history so incomprehensible in scale no matter where I am.
In the present, spring is here. And with spring comes the fucking pear that I hate. I have counted and there are 12 between my house and the grocery store and two on the way to my mailbox.
The smell of these things clogs my nose and throat. Its not like a smell that is repulsive, its one that feels bad. That on top of the fact that smell is the scent that makes you regress the most and think of the past, I am thinking about different times and places. I'm think of the school yard and lying on asphalt and going home to do my homework and eat steamed broccoli. Spring can be hard.
But I really hate having an even harder time breathing when the dry air clogs my nose and the thin air makes me gasp. This stupid pear tree doesn't even look nearly as nice as other decorative trees and I am personally offended that all the nice trees around my house were secretly Bradford pears.
I think, in order to keep the formatting somewhat stable, I am going to continue with a bit of an old fashioned photo diary.
On monday I wore a dress I hate with a ribbon for a belt and the whole thing was trasnformed. I also put some buttons on some bobby pins and I've worn them almost every day since I made it. The people loved this look!!! Many compliments!!!!!!
Here is my bag stuffed with stuff to do after volunteering. I even got my computer in it along with my books, notebooks, jar of liquid, cords, pouches, pens, etc.
Drinking water will take you to many interesting places. The Santa Fe Public Library staff bathroom which has a shower and lockers and is huge but only has one stall is one example of many such places.
My jade plant which is shedding leaves and scaring me. Though its also growing a new branch. I sent this picture to The Boyfriend who is also The Tree Expert and he said he doesn't actually know what's healthy. Just what it is. Behind it is the best card I've ever recieved in the mail.
I went grocery shopping and only spent 53$ bc I forgot milk and had to buy it from the gas station. I am now the girl version of a yogurt male. Also this yogurt is really bad do not get it.
Here is a bit of my other weekend outfit which was also a hit! More compliments!! I have this blouse I rarely wear because I am scared. It is a blouse that I adore and will never get rid of but I only seem to wear it when I won't see anyone I know.
Someone signed me up for promotional messages for hair transplants. This text I got was march madness themed.
I packaged some things for a (kind far from now) upcoming trip for my lovely friends!! I am feeling very powerful and yes I did use trash from work to package them lol
worm in stem
Okay one last note before I finish this little piece, I have some creative plans for the recipe book that's been on pause for a while. I think because I only wanna work on it on call but everyone wants to stream or watch tv in call with me. That's fine! I love it! Just means no recipe time. So I am going to just go and make that page I wanna make myself!!
We also have TWO more days until baseball and my dad has been sharing lots of baseball quotes and facts for me that have only made me more excited!!
My teams are the Mets, the Bluejays and the Red Sox, but I am always open to new teams. I love baseball for the story.
I will be watching and checking the sports app and maybe even I'll start posting! I think this will be the first of many #Sports posts on the blog. Really hoping its not another year of the Dodgers winning, I wanna see everyone have fun not just the billion dollar team.....
Anyways that's all! I have to clean my house and spray it down (for bugs...) and eat some gnocchi to celebrate and hopefully I'll be ready for work in the morning.
I was going through some of my older blog posts and realized I've changed the way I blog. And I didn't mean to. I used to post long ramblings about my favorite icicles and the cat-neighbor and now all I do is dump pieces of my art projects. Which I will not stop doing or anything, but I want to make some actual posts. Ones that make me think "wow, that's what I thought like and acted like and cared about." I made a whole post about a tiny lighthouse and the loss of my dear, giant, life-threatening icicle. So here are some mundane things I probably forgot to mention in my diary because my diary is like 4x5 in and covered in stickers and straight up trash on at least half of every page. Which is how I like it.
I have titled this post with a song title. Shadowy men on a Shadowy Planet's Having and Average Weekend which is a song I play at work whenever I have been truly left alone. It calms me and the people do not care.
This is the offical background to this post. If you are a slow reader, play it twice, obviously.
My method is to take a bunch of pictures I recently took, some for this post and others just for fun, and then just ramble based on them. Very photo diary, but I am not very artsy about it like I am with the Spyware. Some of these are Sporcle screenshots. Let's begin:
the asbestos house where the crows live
This is the asbestos house where the crows live. It's across the street from my bus stop and the trees are always full of 5-8 crows who sometimes are friends and sometimes are fighting over one guy with a chunk of food. This is my bus stop entertainment because I am consistently 20 min early to the bus. I am too scared of missing it and being late to work because They Kill You for That, ya know.
I learned it was the asbestos house. Which isn't that weird for a house to be. Many houses have asbestos including my last apartment, which had asbestos ceilings so I couldn't hang scarves from the ceiling and that was really the only fault besides all the other stuff.
This is a picture of John Edgar Hoover, the first director of the F.B.I., that I have been using as a reaction image. I can't remember why I decided I had to use this image of him or even why I was looking him up. I am a little obsessed with him in the same way I am obsessed with Robert Moses. Cranky white men who were Evil. I made him into a sticker so I could also react to messages with his face but its really small so you can't really tell who it is. But that's okay, most people don't even know what J. looked like in the first place. They just know about the overgrown brutalism with his name on it. And that's okay.
The next image is just the doorstop at the public library. I thought it was funny. I don't want to explain why it's funny, that ruins the joke, but I feel like I need to say something about it because I want to include it.
I have really enjoyed waking up to volunteer at the library despite it forcing me to get up early. I like being downtown before all the tourists come and make me claustrophobic, but by 9:30, there's always at least one family who is trying to find something to do in Santa Fe before 10. Good luck, I guess.
I am forced to be downtown for at least some of the day which means I haven't spent an entire day inside since New Year's and that's pretty impressive for me. When you live alone and love your house enough, you can waste a whole day at the computer and in bed very easily.
This next image is a poster for what I assume is the worst music festival I can imagine. I have only seen one jelly roll music video and it is so strange. It is an important piece of pop culture artifact to me because it is the strangest thing.
I have since learned (when finding the link so that I can share this with the world) that this is a Snoop Dog song. It is done in some sort of collage format that is reminiscent of other, better music videos. I also realize I have never seen the whole thing, just the jelly roll part and maybe one day, if there is nothing else left in the world, I will watch the full five minutes and 44 seconds. But you can watch it if you like, I won't judge. I only bring this up because this is the one piece of jelly roll media I even know about. Other than the fact that he is technically country? And so is Post Malone now, I guess. If Loretta Lynn isn't there, then I do not care about country music all that much. Luckily, she's no longer with us so she doesn't have to see modern country like we do.
Here are a few little images that I do not think I could write much about, but are a part of the days I have been having. One must find joy in little things, even if they don't have a million things to say about them; they are still important. But you probably know this unless you're like five or something. Which you're not, I don't know any children anymore and my only readers are the people I meet that I know well enough to share these secrets of my soul with. The first image is me showing someone that Wordle is by a man named what I thought was "John Wordle" and I was kind of close. The next is my little elephant who is wearing an ugly outfit. The last image is a croissant I just ate half of like a few hours ago and is now flat in my bag.
Now I am going to talk about my mail. I have received dispatches from the coasts. My PDT friend sent me this beautiful envelope with tons of fish-themed scraps that filled my heart with light. He wrote his letter on a very long piece of tracing paper that is hanging off my fridge now, where all my recent letters are kept, and it catches the breeze when the stove fan is on.
My darling friends know that I am a hoarder of scrap paper and I gleefully will glue anything they give me into that tiny journal of mine, or, if it's too big, the junk journal that is just a book I found on the street filled with disgusting stickers and pieces of library mail.
Anyways, the people know what I want and they feed me mail. And I like to think we delight the postmasters who normally deliver auto scams to me and the rest of the world.
This next piece is a drawing I did of what I assumed my coworker's new dog would look like. She wants to name the beautiful creature Bruce Lee, even better if the creature is a girl, but either way, Bruce Lee will prevail.
Do you think Bruce Lee is wearing clothes with a pocket or She/Him has one on their person? Like a tree kangaroo.
We drew this to test out some sort of strange drawing software that isn't Paint 3D (rip?).
I had the idea to start blogging one day of my life (which has now evolved to whatever this is) when I saw this chair on the street immediately followed by that ad for the lamest music festival ever. There isn't much to say about this kinda ugly little chair, but it felt so New York to see something like this.
It was a pretty nice chair, even though it would look horrible in my apartment. I also wish people would find a better way to put out the trash so that it doesn't take up half or even all of the sidewalk bc there is at least one person (me!) who is walking down that street every day...
Don't ask me how I feel about drivers.
Here is one of the actors from the free Monday movie who just has a very interesting face. He also kinda acted like both that one Selena Gomez pic or a toddler through the whole thing. It was a great time.
I also saw this lovely looking book heading to Buffalo, NY that felt lovingly designed for no reason. I miss beautiful books from before I was born. All books now look bad.
Also turns out this is kinda the Bible but for fly fishing and you can find it on the Internet Archive.
I also got this other letter from The Roommate that was very fun. I received it last night and hair was poking out from the bottom. I have put the hair in my magic box and hopefully this will strengthen our bond and the Magic will help us stay connected. I would love to send my hair to The People, but I am growing it out and I have received too many requests for a lock. I don't think I can only send hair to some and not all, thus no one is getting any of my blonde.
Another thing I wish to share is that a new goal of mine is to master all the world's countries on Sporcle. I was able to get 151 countries during a sleepy attempt at 11:58 pm a bit ago.
I've decided that I must go continent by continent. First, I did Europe, which was pretty easy for me. Europe has a few island nations but several just tiny countries, and I was able to get those down. I am practicing with the "Find the Countries" quizzes, which is why knowing the locations of these tiny countries matters.
I've moved on to Africa, which I have also mastered. Next will be either North America or Oceania. They have fewer countries than the others but they have a lot of islands and that's what I'm bad at. But I am determined. This will happen!
Some more images. My nightstand, a meme a Coworker got on Instagram, and the wound my poor alien keychain has. The poor thing's brains are spilling out!
The last thing I will rant about are these amazing cookies that I made that were the color of spam but tasted amazing. I made them with cake mix. You mix the cake mix as normal, but you must also add 1/4 cup of flour and then put them on a baking sheet like cookies. I made white cake and the dough had the consistency of slime. That did not make me feel good. I thought I had made something weird like when I made yogurt cookies.
Anyways, they came out great but nothing like the Pinterest recipe pics I had seen. They were not too sweet and still soft out of the oven and when I brought them to work the next day, they were nice and crumbly. I felt like a master baker. Maybe I am a master baker. I will be making these again, for myself and maybe for the people at Work if I am feeling nice. But who's to say that I will? I am a little burnt out and also tired of working at all. I need roommates to bake for...
Anyways, that is the end of my check-in post. If you have left this post without new knowledge, you are lying and I hate you.
I hope to make more posts like this, though smaller, so that I have something to look back on a year or more into the future. I guess you, if you are not me, can enjoy this as well. Posting like this helps me not convince myself I have never done anything ever, which is the default state of being. Maybe this is why I keep journals and billions of photos.
Now that this is over, it would be super cool if maybe, just maybe, they would stop doing loud construction next door, or under me, or above me? or wherever all this noise in my house is coming from. I have no one to plead with except you, in the future, who hopefully exist in a world where no one's hammering and dropping metal things. Please say yes...
In a moment of boredom, I made a little zine with the free software given to me by god himself. I have been really tired lately, so making has been really hard. I compromised by using the Electronic Zine maker to make something weird and small and by limiting myself to a medium I know very well, my files.
Here it is:
according to this back cover, I was celebrating getting my pto approved by making this
from the zine maker
I did not limit myself on what I could use. I have things from past zines, photos I took while studying abroad, and assets used for my blog. I hope you enjoy this little zine. As a special treat I will include the full zine image and you can print it out for yourself if you really want. The paper is US letter sized because you know I love mail.
