that body of yours, that i leave all alone (ex 4)

two people come out of a building. she's upset, her posture curled. she's trying to protect herself. the fingers on her right hand are circled around her left wrist. her eyebrows are pointing down, her mouth is set in a straight line and she's looking at the ground. he's talking, moving his eyebrows too much, shrugging shoulders. they are in the middle of something. as they walk down the street you can tell that he's saying something important. she holds her left wrist, her elbows jutting against her waist, her messenger bag hitting her hip. his hands are in the air, the steps he is taking are far apart. a man with a stroller comes down the street and she moves to right and he follows behind her single file. when the stroller is past them she keeps the same pace, walking with her shoulders hunched, and he has to quicken his pace for two steps to catch up. but his rhythm hasn't actually changed, he is still talking and moving his hands.
this is the problem with young people. they fall in love and make plans with each other but they are supposed to be selfish. she is supposed to go to graduate school for biochemics, he is supposed to move across the country for an architecture internship. but still his hands are moving and her mouth is closed in a thin straight line and their hearts are both beating a little quicker. they walk down the street trying to find a place in the sidewalk where they can both have what they want. the sun catches on her hair, the wind presses his t-shirt to the muscles in his chest.

young lovers with their legs tied up in knots

there's not a lot i wouldn't do. watch her tiptoe through the hallways, rustling fabrics and knocking against woodwork while hiding candy-coloured easter eggs. rest my elbows on the counter while i lean against the bar and watch her move and twirl with her friends, faces dewy and hair stuck with sweat. i know there was this one time she told jella that she didn't want to go to prince edward island with me. said if she wanted to sit in a wood-paneled shit hole she could visit her parents. there's not a lot i wouldn't have done with her. prince edward island was supposed to be a place for us transplant our roots, to push into the red soil and be those functional young adults we always knew we had to turn into. it was my plan, it was mine. she didn't have to agree, she didn't have to echo my soft ambition. lying between cool sheets in the dark, planning out our lives in whispers. now my mental road map, a highlighted migration east, seems too spacious for one. visions of myself, conversation-starved and manic, falling out the window of my pick-up truck, or driving in a sleep-deprived trance and slamming into the fiery eyes of deer. she didn't have to agree to me. i think i'll move north instead.

summer book list

- Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
- The Adventures of Tintin Volumes 1-8 by Herge
- When You Are Engulfed by Flames by David Sedaris
- Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabreil Marquez
- apparently 10 plays for night class by William Shakespeare
- Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
- The Handmaiden's Tale by Margaret Atwood
- Payback: debt and the shadow side of wealth by Margaret Atwood\
- The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
- I'm down: a memoir by Mishna Wolff
- Skim by Jillian Tamaki

I have already read:
- Paul Goes Fishing by Michel Rabagliati
- Dar by Erika Moen
- French Milk by Lucy Knisley
- Hamlet by William Shakespeare
- 1/2 Richard III by William Shakespeare
- various zines

I was a little ambitious last summer so we'll see how this goes. If you want, book club with me!

may 1

We’re still trying to escape the lion’s breath. Hot air on the back of our necks, damp and clouded. Getting away was the hard part. Coming through cold, harsh waters to emerge into the cool air, the sun rising behind silhouetted buildings and trees. It’s a solitary journey, it’s different on the inside. Building a new life, moving into a clapboard house on the escarpment. The house needed a new life too. Fresh paint, ripping up carpet to reveal dusty curving hardwood floors, scraping the dirt off of grey windowsills. My mother standing over the sink, eating a tuna fish sandwich, paint flecked sweatpants. The marks of progress. Pictures of our faces put in glass frames on the wall, our old furniture settling into new corners. Fog clinging around the house, I always think of that time in terms of mornings. Walking hunched and lonely to school, cars growling by while I walked steadily through dark grey mist, footsteps on wet pavement, hands in my pockets. I always forgot gloves. That was when dinnertime forgot it’s name, eating meals after ten o’clock, eating frozen food. Nothing like in my childhood of homemade, wholesome family time. Mashed potatoes, pork tenderloin, corn on the cob. My mother moved up steadily, from minimum waged part-time jobs with managers ten years younger than she was, to better work environments and staggered hours, to better bosses and steady hours. The work clothes she hated, pin-striped pants and turtle necks, cardigans and trousers. I would make dinner so that it was ready the moment she walked in the door. But the hot wind lingers and blows through cracks and crevices in the wall. Overturned lamps, broken-down stovetops and leaky eaves troughs.

lessons in productivity no. 1

this is a writing blog. but i feel the need to post anything that i've done lately in order to feel productive. here is something i made for my friend medina for her birthday:
the original picture: post-absinthe one night, june 2008



the card: medina's twenty-first birthday, may 2009

slice is my vice

you should not seek solace in craisins. while it might be the sweetest way to eat a cranberry, craisins are not comfort food. when someone asks you how your day was, replying that you drowned your sorrows with a bag full of craisins does not conjure up the same sympathy that admitting that you lost yourself in a tub of ben and jerry’s does. it only makes you seem like you have a problem.

character sketch.

Audrey is this cool punk rocker self righteous feminist woman, who has tattoos all over her biceps and is an active activist, she sits at bake sale tables and sells her free trade brownies just after her advocacy meeting. At least she used to, at twenty-nine it’s a little hard to be the disenfranchised youth. She stands and sways to heavy grungy angry girl music, female Kurt Cobains, male Ani Difrancos, gender-fucking performance artists, she stands on the hardwood and sways and moves and bucks her hips and wants to fight the power, shove fists in the air. but she’s twenty-nine now and they expect her to dress professionally at the work place, but her tattoos peek out and give away her true identity. She is a children’s librarian. She reads these books to little kids and she can see traditional gender roles in these harmless little story books, she sees sexism and racism and heteronormativity but she can’t fight the power here, surrounded by runny noses and grubby hands and protective parents. Why don’t parents want to protect against the most harmful of lies? Women can drive tractors, that’s a given now in any case. Why can’t a man wear a purse or knit or make babies? Opening the minds of seven year olds. She goes home buys concert tickets online and buys some kitchen appliance off of her friends wedding registry because she’s getting married and moving on and Audrey isn’t. Audrey wants to go back to school so she can be one of the thinkers and doers, the movers and shakers.