Saturday, October 20, 2001
I am a faerie
I am Gossamer Beamfly.
Behaviour:
A light bringer and enlightener.
Seen When:
Only at midday under a quiet, cloudless sky.
Habitat:
In spiderwebbed wonderlands and crystal grottos.
At least, that's according to the faerie name generator. Right now, I feel like Drippy lePew. But I guess that's not really a faerie name. More of a goblin or a troll. Which is apt at the moment, as well.
------e
still sick, and bored.
Posted by beth @ 08:18 AM PST [Link]
Friday, October 19, 2001
eeeergh...
I'bm sigggck. By dose ids all sduffed up.
It's H's fault. He brings home the most bizarre, mutated forms of cold viruses from the unwashed masses that filter through the store. How they manage to give all this to H, and how he manages to bring it home and transfer it to me, despite all the antibacterial soap and Lysol disinfectant sprays, I'll never know.
Whine, whine, whine. I know. But I'm so tired and icky right now that whining is all I want to do. And, of course, because of the Xenadrine, I don't want to sleep. I want to curl up with the pack of zines I got from pander and just read, drink hot tea, and whine. Just sitting here by the irradiated light of the monitor feels like too much.
So if you don't hear from me for a few days, or you're expecting an email -- it might be a while. I'm not gone, I don't have Anthrax (I think), and I haven't run off to join the French Foreign Legion. Chances are, I'm curled up in a mucoid-encrusted ball on the bed, zine in one hand and spearmint Hall's (mentholyptus!) in the other, wishing for someone to put as much effort into fixing the common cold as they do into developing weapons of mass destruction.
Unrelated sidenote (I'm delirius. Sue me.): On NPR's Talk of the Nation today, they had some moron on there talking about ground troops in Afghanistan. Now, the fact that he was talking about the strategies of modern warfare doesn't make him an idiot. What makes him a dunderhead is that he went on and on for FIVE MINUTES about what our troops are WEARING. I'm not kidding. I realize that warfare in an Afghan winter requires special training, and likely a good winter coat and pair of wool socks, but good lord -- there are much more important things to think about than what an American G.I. is going to be wearing. Jeez.
Off I go to cough and wheeze, snuffle and sneeze. *sigh*
--------e
who has absolutely *no* resistance to
anything that H drags home with him.
Posted by beth @ 09:15 PM PST [Link]
Thursday, October 18, 2001
surrealist world -- the theme park day
As I left the new Barnes and Noble, after being there for three hours, camped out in the Women's Studies section (and the art section, and the writing section, and the fiction section, and the blank journals section, and the...well...you get the idea.), it ocurred to me that I felt pretty good. The setting sun was in my eyes, giving the whole world a kind of golden glow that I've only seen here in the desert.
I drove through the drive-thru at Arby's, not minding the horrendous wait and the long lines, and I noticed a baseball, chewed up and dirty, lodged in one of the bushes. I had to resist the urge to pick it up, and for the second time today, I lamented that my camera's out of batteries.
It just looked so sad there, disconnected from some boy's glove or some dog's toy pile. Watching the cars go by probably distracts it from existential angst, I thought.
Yesterday, H and I had a long talk about why I'm always busy. I had to admit that it's not so much that I'm always busy, as much as it is that I surround myself with distractions. (Something our talk obviously did nothing to remedy, as I brought home four MORE books for the to-read pile that's taller than the average human, and my zines from Pander arrived, as well as my review materials this month from Rambles.net, which are fab, too.) Even with a long to-do list, I still sign up for more things -- still give myself things to do that I might not even be that much "in love with", so to speak.
I thought about this on the way home. Why -do- I surround myself with so much to do? The thought that I had briefly as I merged onto the 91 East, past a bright yellow Volvo with Oklahoma plates, of possibly paring everything down to essentials -- of doing absolutely -nothing- for a half-hour -- terrified me. Am I that afraid of being alone with my own thoughts, or is this something else?
My brain wraps around what seems like two identities, sometimes. I have the ME that's in here, inside this body -- and then there's the ME that's in here, inside this box that you're looking at. In some places, the two bisect, and in other places, they've totally diverged. What I used to love was amplified here, in text and graphics and email, and I'm tied to it by this larger-than-me self that I've put so much energy into.
But I'm still here, this core of flesh and neurotransmitters, that has to live a life when the email's gone and the computer's off. I read the zines, I watch the movies, and I make the art. And sometimes, I wonder how much of it my online me loves that I can't stand. If I'm being honest with myself, it depends which Self I'm feeding.
I'm afraid I'm feeding the wrong one, too often. And with that realization, I feel like I've got a roadmap to integration of the two.
---------e
calling it splittsville with
her too-large monitor-bound
Self. Finally. It's just Me now.
Posted by beth @ 07:34 PM PST [Link]
Wednesday, October 17, 2001
bookmarks, oh my
Just a note: I'm finally taking some time to organize my bookmarks. Since most of them have a lot to do with art and weirdness, I'm posting them on my out of hand pages at pitas.com, which, up until recently, I hadn't been updating at all.
I've got so much nervous energy today that I'm handbinding a bunch of japanese stab-bound booklets to use as decos. I'm thinking about making some stab-bound journals, too, to sell on the site somewhere.
I've got to pay for my art supply/book addiction somehow, after all.
Oh -- and if I owe you a letter (or two, or three), I'm writing some of those intermittently today, too. I got another silver pen from the sanrio store in Ontario (the mall there is just f-ing HUGE, I found out last night....), so I'm writing in my favorite notebook. It's strange how the littlest things -- a new pen, great stationery, really REALLY big news -- can inspire a flurry of correspondence from me.
H brought home the demos for "Crazy/Beautiful", "Freddy Got Fingered", and "Osmosis Jones" last night. I'm not sure if I want to watch any of them. Tom Green annoys the living hell out of me, but I know we'll get questions from customers at the store, so it's a good idea to at least be familiar with the products you're carrying, if you want to hawk them to passers-by. I just have a feeling that it's going to be almost physically painful to sit through an hour and a half of his juvenalia. What Drew sees in him, I'll never understand.
Ah...here come the door-to-door Jesus salesmen from the local Baptist church.
The joy of suburbia.
------e
back to binding.
p.s.: Any interest in movie reviews? I'm thinking of popping up a video movie guide around here somewhere, kind of webloggy, linked to the official sites, etc. Is that too cheesy?
Posted by beth @ 10:27 AM PST [Link]
Tuesday, October 16, 2001
blink...blinkblink...
Oh. My. God.
There's a company that just contacted me about making my artwork into rubber stamps.
No shit.
Not only that, they asked if I teach classes (for a big convention they put on), AND about carrying my zine at their store.
I'm in shock. Totally.
---e
Posted by beth @ 09:33 PM PST [Link]
Sunday, October 14, 2001
music geek
On a tip from Dreama, I just downloaded limewire from cnet.com.
Oh, good lord. Like I'm EVER going to get anything done again. Ever.
Right now, for instance, i'm sitting here downloading ABBA songs and dancing around the house. The dog is looking at me like I have completely lost my friggin' mind. He would be right, of course, but to see condescension from a dog is disconcerting.
---e
I do, I do, I do.....
Posted by beth @ 12:37 PM PST [Link]
