The blogs, they are a movin'

Having realized that I can only force myself into one or 2 internet medias a week, I've moved all the arty news blog life stuff here:
http://beastwares.tumblr.com/

I didn't forget you, I've just... moved on. Come with!

Back in the saddle...

...And covered in fake fur! New stuff soon! New BeastWares! New New New! AIEEEEE!


I have no pictures for you yet.

I love you!

not quite the same...

swing at the point.

point!

tree tunnel.

part deux.

night...

I am having a sensitive day and kind of hiding from everyone, lest I burst into tears and make a scene. On the plus side, I inherited a real mattress from a departing frenchman and my sleeping life just got exponentially better.

If I hear one more thing today about how one's aching back, bug bites and broken clock are the universe telling one something, I may scream.

Up early for kundalini yoga, which, as it turns out, involves lots of fast breathing and choreographed flapping of arms. It's amazing how hard that can be. My mood for the past 2 days has been hovering between lonely and just sort of sick of listening to my own head, but yoga seems to help (as irritating and Boulder a sentence as that is.) Made friends with one of the guests, a 50-some woman here for a current yoga retreat and had a nice lunch with her, talking about life and finding your way and all that. Feeling a little better, though also like a damn hippie.

It's weird to have nothing to do. Time moves differently. I'm craving projects, but simple ones, like a popsicle stick house or something. Beads. Friendship bracelets.

First morning shift. Started out sensitive and cranky and spending most of my internal monologue explaining to myself why being sensitive and cranky was pointless and unhelpful. I hate being the new kid in the kitchen, but at least it will only be a day or two until there's someone newer than me. Constant turnover isn't all bad. Had a surprisingly deep conversation in 30 minutes or less out on the point during break, perked up, and generally survived. Serving people buffet-style food is somewhat unfortunate...people are so very particular about their food and really don't want to be served that way; you can see them itching to snatch the spoon out of your grasp.

It's been two days of too much self-questioning and navel-gazing, and I'm sick of myself and my tiresome issues and concerns.

Time for a shower and a good kick in the head.

It's a cold and grey day, meaning only in the high 60's. Everyone is grousing about how cold it is. Love it. I had such a nice birthday... I expected to let it pass without much notice or hoopla, but the whole breakfast table burst out in song when I got there. Everyone, even people I hadn't met yet, bombarded me with well-wishes all day. Barcus and Jonathan, an amazing set of old-marrieds, took me out to thai dinner in Pahoa. Corey came along, and we rode the 20 minute or so trip to Pahoa in the back of Jonathan's pickup, watching the lonely country road wind out behind us. Pahoa is a tiny little town that reminds me a bit of Glenwood Springs with a rustic clapboard main street and, apparently, a meth problem. I guess meth is the drug of choice in these parts, owing to the ability to make it out of things already available on-island. Jonathan looked resplendent in a gauzy shirt and a billowy scarf, and the two of them told stories about their dog show days. When we got back, we rumbled over to the Field of Dreams, where the ag crew had built a huge bonfire. A few hours of chatting and I walked home under the explosion of stars, Orion sailing right overhead.

The day before, I wandered down the road about a mile and half to Kehena, the hidden black sand beach. The ocean is literally across the street, but we're up on these vicious black-rock cliffs, so you can only gaze longingly at it. Kehena is at the bottom of a winding, rocky descent, and is a beautiful little cove of black sand with a friendly warning sign near the entrance alerting one to the great numbers of people who have met their end there. Yay. The waves are strong, the undertow intense, and black volcanic rocks are likely to be thrown into the surf... so I don't think I'll be doing much swimming. Mind you, the owner of Kalani and a few other hardy, tanned, very naked souls marched in with flippers and snorkels and trekked out to some rocks a mile or so away...impressive.

This afternoon I start my kitchen duties, wish me luck.

Hawaiiiiiii!

It's amazing how tired I get, and how fast. But it's this weird, outdoor, energized tired. I arrived
yesterday afternoon in a haze of sun and shock at being warm for once. Since then I've been in an exhausting whirlwind of adjusting and trying to hide my general wide-eyed-awkward terror. Everyone has been amazingly friendly, but of course there's a period of feeling like the new kid at summer camp. My tent, predictably, doesn't fit my tent area. We get an 8'x8' wooden platform with a 16'x16' carport-style awning over it...everyone else has some variation on your basic dome or room tents, but noooooo, I had to get the cool one that looks like a damn teepee...and... it's too tall. So I've McGyvered it together, tying the top to the awning poles and guy wiring it out, but it still looks like a menacing jellyfish perching in the grass, breathing in sinister billows. Ah well. Some of the volunteers stay in these tiny little A-frames...I admit I'm rampantly jealous. More reason to come back as a "seasoned veteran" I suppose.

I'm not sure how to begin to describe this place. It's so different from where I just left that it's overwhelming. All the buildings are "rustic", made largely of screen walls and windows. The stars are INSANE. It's darker than dark at night. It's SO INCREDIBLY WET. I've been warned that my clothes, even if I haven't worn them, are likely to mold. Nothing really dries, ever. It rains in violent, drenching bursts. The trees in the center areas are draped in lights and look like they are glowing from within. I thought California was fertile and covered in growing things, but this place puts it to shame. Agriculture is constantly fighting back the rampant growth, and everything is just walls of dense green pocked with swollen flowers. It is NEVER quiet. There are frogs that sing day and night. They sound like birds and crickets combined, but not frogs...They have several different songs, but they never, ever stop. It sounds grating, but isn't.

Today I woke up feeling overwhelmed. Overly overwhelmed, and I had to retreat into my jelly-tent and nap it off. But... this afternoon I made a bracelet woven of leaves. I couldn't tell you the name of the tree or the style of weaving because it all had fantastic Hawaiian names that careened in and out of my head as fast as most of the names of people I've been meeting. Anyway, I sat on a patio-couch with a few friendly people and listened to Auntie Lynda teach me to make something. Barefoot in cut-offs and a tank top and at perfect body temperature, watching a bright green gecko climb the wall, listening to the sound of waves smashing into black-lava cliffs right behind me. Then a yoga class in a huge, domed room: wood floors, lit by colored upshot lights, trees inside and out and open to the sea. I mean, come ON. That's pretty great. Maybe I don't want to go home yet.

This doesn't look like much, since it's, you know, dark, but I'm in a grove of lit-up trees.
Just LISTEN!

I tried to upload a picture of the beast-tent, but blogger doesn't want to play along. Maybe later, if you're good.

Lordy...

This is (almost) everything I've made since quitting my day job, meaning since 1 November...not counting a couple hats and 3 pairs of pants that have no photos. 2 weekends craft shows, an art show up and down, and another one-night group show event.
Can haz go to Hawaii now?

Holiday Show Fun

I'll be at the Bazaar Bizaare at Fort Mason Center all weekend. New stuff! New Prints! Awesome vendors! Cocktails! Why WOULDN'T you go?

Details here: http://www.bazaarbizarre.org/sanfrancisco/shows/

Holiday Show Fun

I'll be at the Bazaar Bizaare at Fort Mason Center all weekend. New stuff! New Prints! Awesome vendors! Cocktails! Why WOULDN'T you go?

Details here: http://www.bazaarbizarre.org/sanfrancisco/shows/

Holiday Show Fun

I'll be at the Bazaar Bizaare at Fort Mason Center all weekend. New stuff! New Prints! Awesome vendors! Cocktails! Why WOULDN'T you go?

Details here: http://www.bazaarbizarre.org/sanfrancisco/shows/

Holiday Show Fun

I'll be at the Bazaar Bizaare at Fort Mason Center all weekend. New stuff! New Prints! Awesome vendors! Cocktails! Why WOULDN'T you go?

Details here: http://www.bazaarbizarre.org/sanfrancisco/shows/

Help a puppy!

My good friend's dog is in a hell of a lot of pain and needs $4000 of

mouth surgery. They've taken out a line of credit they absolutely cannot afford to cover it. If you can find it in your heart and wallet, will you help him out?PLUS, everyone who donates $20 or more gets an 8"x10" print of an original portrait of Mr. Burrito himself... by ME! OMG!

The Patient.


The Print!

What I did today... Fishy Business...

Working on a tattoo design for Lisa. Here's ze sketch... fantastique, non?
I think I may kill the flowers. Anyway.

The Chillin' Productions Holiday shindig was pretty amazing, except I never know what to do in those situations. I feel an overwhelming pressure to make PROGRESS. NETWORK. ADVANCE CAREER. But I don't know who the hell anyone is and they don't know me from every other San Francisco chick in a dress and shit-kicker boots. And I am NOT a friendly-in-crowds type... more a stand in a corner until I can politely get the hell out type. So I wasn't really sure what to do with myself and walked in circles a lot. BUT. There was some seriously awesome work. Also some seriously stunted, overpriced, smeared-out-of-the-tube shit. Ah well. AND I may have sold a piece to the owner of 111 Minna, which would be, in truth, pretty awesome. Not to mention that the piece in question is a self-portrait, so I shall hang in his house and STARE AT HIM until he realizes how PROFOUNDLY AWESOME I am, and that his gallery simply MUST have my work!
My plan cannot fail!

That is what I did today.

What I did today... DINOSAURS!

yay!

From my 6:30 sunrise walk this morning.
It's so cold here I almost feel like I live in a place with seasons again.


moon getting shoved off the sky.

streetlight and star.

pretty pretty.

Morning Walk Awesomeness

When I actually manage to stumble outside first thing after getting up, I'm always glad I did. It reminds me why the city is worth living in. The houses rise in waves, bathed in pink-gold morning light. The air is crisp, smelling of wood smoke, dead leaves, and stubborn plants still growing green. The bums are still sleeping in their little bum-burritos. Bliss.

You really have to blow this up to appreciate it. Alamo Square at 7 am this morning, sunrise creeping over the chilly city.


Sutro Tower (aka Devil Tower) presiding...


My eyes tend to edit out how many wires are strung all over this city. When I stop and take notice of them, I'm astounded by how MANY there are.
I think they're sort of beautiful in an urban-lace sort of way.


Beautiful House of the Day. The early morning iphone photo doesn't do it justice... the pale olive green with turquoise, mauve and gold. Hell yes.


And just to top it all off: FUCKING BLUE GUARD LIONS. Win.

10 years?!

updates...well, I'm not working...I mean I AM, but just for me right now. So far it's not as freeing as I'd hoped. turns out i have lots and lots of patterns and habits and hangups and not all of them are good. Turns out it's really hard to get me out of the house, for one. But there are moments of joy and clarity and bliss...and lots of worry and stress and feeling of gaping discontent... and then it all starts over again. So, par for the course, I guess. I realized I've been in CA over 2 years now, and I can definitely feel it in my itchy feet. I haven't lived anywhere consecutively for more than 2 years since I got out of high school, and it's become a habit of its own. The first year is mostly figuring my shit out...meeting people, building a group of friends, figuring out where to get groceries, get my hair cut, exercise, etc...where's the DAMN GROCERY STORE? Then the second year is sort of hitting my stride, getting comfortable, getting a routine, settling in, then...I guess I start to get bored. Strangely, I often want to leave for places I've been before; I often want to go home to Boulder. I STILL want that, but I feel like I can't do it until I have enough money or career or plan to do it, lest I end up in the same pattern--subsistence day-job and roomates. Guh.

Growing up there, you are always seeing these ridiculous houses people have, right out in the open spaces. Architecturally beautiful beasts of glass and A-frame majesty; hand-carved doors and river-rock fountains... I always wanted to live in one, imagining some fictitious fantasy life where I'd wake up at sunrise and have a quiet morning of, I don't know. Something Bouldery. Coffee and Yoga and Running and Meditation and Generally Being At Peace With It All. Nights of cooking in my gorgeous granite kitchen and sitting on the porch watching the sun set with a glass of wine, listening to the hummingbirds and mourning doves and crickets, being a part of things somehow. I know that's completely fantastical, but it doesn't stop me from wanting it. Sometimes I think I am made up entirely of polar opposites and my major driving force is fantasy, and a sense of longing, a sense of incompletion, but not knowing what for. This is all besides the point, and in this day and age of self-indulgent bloggery I feel ashamed of allowing myself such angsty and self-involved diatribes, but there you are. It's too late now.

I'm missing my 10 year high school reunion tonight and it's got me feeling low. Nostalgic, sad, frustrated and profoundly human. Reprise sad and frustrated. I talked online to a high school friend tonight that I'd lost touch with for 4+ years. He's married, has a kid, is getting a divorce. His dad, a much loved history teacher of ours, died this year, and he's a medic in Iraq, bored and waiting to go home. This is the kid who passed cartooned notes with me on notebook paper during geometry. The kid that I met because I liked his Cure shirt, who listened to Morphine and Patti Smith and REM with me, speeding through Colorado suburbian nights in somebody's parents' SUV. The kid who wore beat up army pants and funny white undershirts with his own sayings printed on them in sharpie. My favorite was his halloween edition: same outfit as always, but the shirt: "i am madonna." He gave it to me on my 17th birthday. This kid who wrote beat poetry on the back of gum wrappers and slipped them into my notebooks.
We seemed so brilliant then, so flaming, astrally bright. Everything was the knife's edge, and we were all waiting for greatness. It's cliche to say I'm disappointed, and ungrateful to insinuate that my life isn't wonderful, but I admit I was still living in that childhood mindset that magic is going to just happen to you. That you will be beset with wonders without having to lift a finger; that you are a rising star just waiting for the chains to be thrown off; that your life will suddenly feel like...not your life I suppose. Fuck, I'm still waiting for my letter from Hogwarts!

I find it so hard to sit still. I know that if you uproot and change direction every 2 years, nothing big will ever get built, and I'll be feeling pretty "square one"-like forever, but at the same time... I just want to GO. I don't even know what that MEANS, or what I'd DO, but I want SO much. I'm so full of love and fear and life that it seems tragic to be sitting still in repetition.

In high school, we'd go driving. On lunch break, or after school, with Randy or Scott or Brice... we'd go get ice cream, or go to the mall on some made-up mission, or just... drive. Once we drove to Kansas on a Saturday. I remember I had an assignment due in English, so I read "Two Gentlemen of Verona" while we drove, bare feet up on the dash of Randy's huge boat of an Audi. We drove to Kansas, took pictures at the border, bought $2 truck stop T-shirts that we'd made our holy grail and went home. We didn't really care about Kansas, we just needed a destination. We just wanted to drive, to feel free.

I'd like to be able to get back to that sort of profound sense of freedom in the simplest things.

Anyway, that was hardly an update, but it is what's occupying my head. Nostalgia and memories and missing home and trying to decide what to do next and hoping I'm not screwing it all up.

this is what i did today. be fascinated.

It was such a ridiculously pretty morning today. Post-massive thunderstorm (in SF? WTF!?) and crisp, clean, scrubbed of filth for a brief moment...then I took Pekoe out to pee on it. Sigh. Bliss is so transient...

Look how freaking pretty. PRETTY!!! LOOK AT IT!!


This is me waving at myself. I think I wanted to prove I left the house.


Dog.


DOG!!


This is my spy-cam photo of this house across the street from me. It's all windows and always clean and lit up with really lovely cozy lighting. It always looks like the most comforting sanctuary-in-the-city house. I want to elope with it.