AVON calling!

last night i dreamt that i worked for Anne Slowey in a secret upscale office complex across from the Bomber's parking lot.

i was her personal assistant - the other person in her Albany office was a receptionist that reminded me of Luna Lovegood.

in my dream, Anne asked me to do was to take care of AVON orders she had collected at a party the night before from 2 of her close friends/colleagues.
the forms had a name and a list of everything the person wanted, but no delivery address, billing information or signature.

the AVON of my subconscious was incredibly more bureaucratic than i've ever experienced in real life, so i spent a good portion of my dream running around asking for advice (Luna was, as expected, absolutely no help at all).

i did eventually manage to pull the whole thing off with some help from a lovely, matronly AVON expert from the secret office complex next door.
then Lola woke me up and scared the bejeesus out of me- just to make sure i was really awake.

"the mound"

if you knew me (and my design work) in college, then you should see some serious echoes from my 2nd year projects in this photo.

true, Renzo Piano has added layers of functionality, aestheticism and viability to his design for the California Academy of Sciences that i could never have achieved in my naive and sophomoric academic exercises.

but keep in mind...

that was before "GREEN" architecture.

that was before there was a language of sustainability.

maybe i would have been good at this after all?

pink hearts

while eating a bowl of chocolate Lucky Charms this morning (yup- they "chocolatized" them!) and staring at the floating marshmallow shapes, i realized that only the pink heart has been with me since the beginning.

i remember when they added the blue diamonds (which are now blue moons- when did that happen?).

i remember the purple horseshoes.
i think i even vaguely recall the red balloons and rainbows (although i think i may have been in college at that point).

but when did the green clovers become leprechaun hats?

when did the orange stars become shooting stars?

when did the yellow moons become hourglasses?

o woe is me. i can't help but (overdramatize?) feel that when the pink hearts go, i shall follow them!

Prop 8

i'm sad (and embarassed) to say that i have trouble imagining myself taking a politically active stand on this issue.

i love love love the fact that people are starting to use the correct rhetoric for the situation — putting this in the context of the civil liberties movement of (a mere!) 30 years ago — but i just can't personally convince myself that i'm a second class American citizen because i'm not allowed to legally marry a man.

i don't see the institution of marriage as having anything to do with love, so i don't feel particularly deprived of anything meaningful. i've yet to encounter one single real life example of love between a married couple (straight or otherwise, legal or not).

i feel like if i jumped on this particular bandwagon, i'd have to acknowledge the "sanctity" of marriage as an institution.
i'd have to give up my complete lack of interest in what i see as an empty, formal, failing institution to say that i feel like less of a person because i can't get married.

currently, i don't want what "they" have.

i do hold out the slightest hope that should the federal government ever decide to uphold my constitutional rights and allow marriage between homosexual couples, perhaps then i will find deep within myself some belief in love, the way that i found a long forgotten sense of patriotism when Barack Obama was elected.

all that said, any time i am given the chance to vote to keep or abolish any of my, or anyone elses, constitutional rights, i will vote to keep them.

shame on every single person in this country who has ever done otherwise.

grommets?

she's got to go- Susie Smith has to get voted off Survivor.

i thought for sure she was going last week; when she somehow squeaked by i thought she would definitely get voted off last night.

nope.

she's still there.

it's not that i dislike her personality (a bit high-strung) or her playing style (erratic).

it's those damn double smears on the front of her dusty pink blouse.

it's like she wipes all the filth of the island onto her breasts- every week they get blacker and shinier.

i shudder every time i look at them.

it's like she's blacktating!

please send Susie home... please send Susie home... please send Susie home...

i remember the days just before christmas 2002, after finding out that Mike had died on the bus from Vermont to Albany to spend thanksgiving with me.
i kept going into work, because i didn't know what else to do.
i sat at my desk and stared at my computer listening to "When It's Cold I'd Like to Die" by Moby.
i moved files around, pretending to organize myself when all i was really doing was trying to keep from being swallowed by the darkness inside me.

there is no such thing as "Grief" - it's not like "Love" (the capital "L" refers to the universal concept of idealized Love on the personal level and not the "i love butter" meaning).

Love is something that is inherently shared.
grief cannot ever be.

Love can go away.
grief is always there.

controlling it is like trying to submerge a Styrofoam flotation device. it's possible- with careful and constant attention.
and then a wave sneaks up on you and upsets the delicate balance; leaving you disoriented, clinging to the flotation device, looking at the drivers of every white boxy white car that passes, hoping it was all a bad dream.

76 Days

I woke up this morning feeling as though things might be returning to normal, at least for the country.
Obama will take office on January 20th.
I'm relieved, and proud to have cast my vote to end the Bush Dynasty.

I think I'll celebrate by going out for Chinese.