A wonderful New Year's on top of the world
dirt enthusiast
noise dept.
YOU ARE THE REASON

Andulka

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PR's Tumblrdome
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her

if i look back, i am lost
AnasAbdin
TVSTRANGERTHINGS

oozey mess
almost home

★

ellievsbear
Sweet Seals For You, Always
RMH
One Nice Bug Per Day

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he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Monterey Bay Aquarium
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@coveruncover
A wonderful New Year's on top of the world
I am finally approaching the end of the Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931-1934), which I have been reading sporadically since January. Goodreads tells me I am 11 books behind my goal this year and it isn't surprising. Each year I say I will read one every week and be transported, vary my material between fiction that offers me a new way of thinking, memoir that shows me what is possible, science and self help and instruction.
Instead I get lost in earthly distraction and ruminate on my thoughts. I love the way Anaïs writes but the book was tainted for me a few months ago when I mentioned it to a former lover who then let me know […] had read passages to him and I descended into an old wound.
Anaïs talks about her home in Louveciennes, and I imagine what an artist's house in the early 1930s would look and feel like. I bought a sample of Mitsouko by Guerlain because I read that she wore it, and wear it while I read her, imagining the bottle captured in the sunbeam of a dusty, drafty corner.
I have my own home with an affectionate name I only tell to friends. It's small but spacious, high ceilings, white walls. In all my time here I still haven't hung any art, but paintings and framed prints and photographs lean against various surfaces while I try to make up my mind.
The Le Labo limited City Exclusive scent for Paris is called Vanille 44. Le Labo are notorious for naming the scents after a note that isn't notable. This one to me smells like a dusty cathedral with an ambivalent incense that is half intoxicating and half headache. I wore it out one day and wished I hadn't, and only wear it now around the house when I want to dream.
My partner took me on a surprise dinner date to a restaurant named after an ingredient I kept failing to find at the markets. He is thoughtful and cheeky in a way that reminds me of the best parts of myself. We ate rectangles of fried polenta in aromatic coconut curry sauce, roti with colourful relishes and dips, Sri Lankan mushroom gnocchi with prawns and slow cooked peppery pork with truffled mashed potato. I had an orange, ginger, coconut cocktail I soon regretted because I'm midway through the waves of period cramps. I count myself lucky I only feel this for a day every month. It is a time of ruminating and gratitude, some spiked hormones brushing on savage creativity. I appreciate the feeling because it snaps me out of my usual comforts.
I have a thousand stories in my head that I never make flesh, about a life of hiding and passivity as self protection, of painful alienation and rejection, childhood conflict that rears its head in adult dynamics on occasion, some exploration of a creative friendship I've never been able to find. Anaïs talks about her father as her twin, double, soulmate, she reconnects with him in her 20s after he abandoned their family and left her haunted. She sees the ways they mirror each other in creativity and deception. I see the way some of my stories are ways to create this soulmate, in all its prisms of friendship or romance but mostly the friendship. The love I have in my life is real, my friendships are few and deeply important. I wonder if this supposed void is a reflection of regret from my younger days of hiding away and not grasping all that was possible for me.
I am writing from the big bed of my white bedroom, dusty blue natural cotton sheets and dusty green blanket, crisp and cold white pillowcases with dove grey stripes, a soft teal bathrobe tangled at the foot of the bed with the navy wrap sundress (delicate white flowers) I wore on my date last night. Anaïs laid open beside me next to my phone and a pair of glasses. One of my grandmother's dark wood tables to my right, its surface a pane of greyed glass, covered in my clutter of coffee cup, jewelery (mostly silver, pearls and one of a kind dendritic agate pendants and rings), a moth shaped wooden brooch made by a Ukrainian artist, lavender coconut body lotion, medication, notebooks, unread books, a daily calendar with self love affirmations.
My life is very beautiful and in this I find frustration. With all the time and money in the world, I am still not creating. That is maybe the fundamental concept I need to properly label and understand. A lid I place over my self voluntarily, but don't know why. Whether fear, protection, habit, stubbornness, lack of confidence, lingering depression and fatigue. I don't know. I am grateful for the life I have both found and built, hard-won after so many years of hiding. I am grateful for the person that I am.
Look through any window, Paloma Salgado Díaz
No better time than 7:08 am on a Saturday at the peak of a virus to type my thoughts into the ether.
I came to look at my page here to find a Kathleen Hanna quote about doing things anyway even if it's the worst time. I thought of it because I wanted to create a new self portrait, because I have changed, because there is some relief in capturing myself wherever I'm at.
Of course right now is the worst time for a selfie. Sick and stuck in bed for two days with a heater and a humidifier flanking the bed in stereo. Being sick is a meditative time because everything else drops away, "... a sick person has only one wish."
I've been reading the Diaries of Anaïs Nin, a modern Māori cookbook, a self help book about being a more effective person that a former employer left copies of on everyone's desks once without saying why and it felt like a hilarious burn.
Life is calm amidst chaos. I am in love and it's a dream. My home has nurtured me even though I neglect it, putting off roof cleaning and wood sealing because nothing has collapsed yet. The self help book talks about maintaining both production and production capability and turns all of life's challenges into metaphors about golden eggs and the goose that lays them. I'm not sure if I am the goose, or my house is, but in desperation to find meaning I take it as a sign I need to throw money at someone to tell me everything's fine.
I enjoy my life, even when I'm sick I feel safe and nurtured. Isn't that incredible? How do I begin to give that peace to other people? I'm trying to work out how. Did you roll your eyes at that? I know all about good intentions without action.
Of course I lost my sense of taste before a weekend I'd planned to bake. Bagels and black and white cookies that may need to wait til I can tell if they were successful. My house nurtures my cooking with its spacious lightwood kitchen and a marble island as big as a bed that I still manage to cover, in a good way. The clutter of creation.
I wrote in here a couple of years ago in the midst of some great rejection and it's nice to reflect on how I don't feel it anymore. "Because that is what always happens," resonates as ever.
Leonard Misonne “Les forces du bien , les forces du mal” 1925, tirage mediobrome
I once bought a book called Coming and Crying, a collection of essays ruminating on sex and connection. It must have been 2010 or 2011, because I had it with me on my last trip to New York (and second last trip to the States) to read in the big white bed of the modest sun drenched yellow master bedroom of my Park Slope sublet.
I don’t know if I have any diary entries from that time, but I think I was still using the dark green Icelandic horse skin bound journal, so physically I should. Many of my digital records have been lost over time in carelessness between new laptops, and in one instance, at gunpoint.
I never finished reading the essays then, but I marvelled that a couple of them mentioned the very neighbourhood I was in at that time, of Prospect Park which was only minutes away. I didn’t spend nearly enough time venturing anywhere on my own and I regret that. I do remember reading the book and thinking to myself, I could be doing this back home, in my bed back home. “Wherever you go, there you are.” I knew it then even as I wasted the days away in my head.
Nevertheless, that trip did have its moments of drama and adventure. I reunited with someone I thought I had loved, for the span of a couple of days. We had met a few years previously at my friend’s lake in New Jersey. I had been naked with the rest of my friends, swimming in the oblivion of Everclear and Fuze mixers. He had arrived with his girlfriend, a talented artist I knew of peripherally through mutual friends, and we’d laughed through our introductions. I have no clear image of meeting them, just the laughter in the dark between the water and the dock.
I reunited with him in Brooklyn and we spent a night together but only sleeping. He told me later in a handwritten letter, making amends, that he was trying to kick opiates at the time, in his letter he said he was in withdrawal during our time together and relapsed on arriving home to find his dealer in the driveway. I don't know if it's a trait innate in him or something some addicts acquire, but he was and remains to be a very natural liar, something I observe now with neutrality rather than cruelty. He could lie about anything like he breathed. I was probably using him too in my own way.
After our little reunion, he turned cagey and evasive and I never saw him again, though during the trip I kept trying to make plans and lure him back to me. He got angry that I wouldn’t take the train to come see him, “you’re acting like I’m some dangerous dirtbag,” or something to that effect. In hindsight, at that time, I think he was, and I think I knew it.
Through the days of making plans that would fizzle at the last second, I would sit on the stoop of my apartment smoking and pretending to read a French translation of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, probably hoping I looked cool, definitely feeling rejected.
One day a handsome man with shoulder length blonde hair tied back, a natural tan and aquiline profile, sat casually close by to roll his own cigarette. As he got up to leave, he spoke to me, said some now forgotten compliment and asked me out. I was embarrassed and off guard, and said thank you but I’m seeing someone, and he was smilingly respectful and left.
A day or two later, I wrote a missed connection on Craigslist and he responded, and we tried again, and I found my quiet little romance for that summer. We took trips to my rooftop, to the Natural History museum and his apartment on Ditmas Ave where I met his cat and weathered a hurricane. He was a sociology professor and showed me the funny reviews his students left about him on an ethically questionable website that rated the hotness of professors, his reviews usually adorned with five out of five red chillies. He bought me a shiny black jacketed hardcover copy of H.P. Lovecraft's Tales that I still haven’t read. I cried in his courtyard, smoking together, knowing we wouldn’t see each other again after that night. We kept up friendly contact via Facebook across the seas until sometime when he quietly and diplomatically removed me from his friends list and I didn’t notice or mind. I am grateful for that little found connection at a time I felt so small and forgotten.
I am halfway through my now second attempt reading Coming and Crying, this time in the modest sun drenched master bedroom of the home I bought two years ago, in a neighbourhood you don't read about in published essays. Towering gum trees out the window and winter air are a welcome contrast to that summer on the other side of the world with its blinding hot streets and so much cigarette smoke.
I have experienced many more connections since my first read of that book. I hesitate writing sometimes at the idea of someone I loved seeing it and feeling forgotten. I’m trying to find the best ways to express myself without fear because I believe we get to own our own stories and I have spent a lot of my life hiding.
Right now I am in love, and the sweetness and freedom I feel is a gift. He says, “hello, gorgeous,” as though it’s my name, he says, “I love you,” with sparkling eyes, he says, “I love this,” as we hold each other tight in a pretzel of limbs on my big white couch, in my big white bed.
In stitches, Jessica So Ren Tang
I made a version of this a couple of years ago but thought at the time it was too tidy. This is a more realistic portrayal of how my desk usually looks.
Head in ruins, Tania Font (because)
Fucking RIP
𝕮𝖔𝖌𝖎𝖙𝖔 𝖊𝖗𝖌𝖔 𝖓𝖔𝖓 𝖘𝖚𝖒
Kind of blue, Christopher Bucklow
Objectification is inescapable, Jeanette Spicer (because)
Maybe she turned them to stone so they would stay
The Unseen, Saul Leiter
requisite reminder that I’m alive, and happy. x