ladyparts

Familiar Strangers

Public space is composed of many elements. Among components such as objects or environment is the familiar stranger.

By definition a Familiar Stranger (1) must be observed, (2) repeatedly, and (3) without any interaction. An example of this would be people you ride the bus with and would notice if they were not there. They are the cushion between strangers that you see once and people with whom you have social reciprocity.

The familiar stranger plays a very significant role in our lives. They move us, play roles in fictitious stories, encourage us even. They are sometimes the sole reason we are able to bear public spaces when we are lonely, not requiring anything from us while providing familiarity.

(Enter technology, specifically, the Internet)

Surely the definition of public space must now be altered when considering the Internet. Who/what would the familiar stranger on the Internet be? Who can you not know? What would the measurements be altered to? Maybe it just does not apply.

You can observe many things, repeatedly but what would interaction be defined as? Does it depend on the content?

It’s definitely something to think about.

A little something

Adam Philips remarked

“[Sebald’s] is a longing for truthfulness that redeems nothing. He doesn’t believe the truth will save us, he believes that the truth is the only thing that we have got to work with.”1

Using the reflexive property, this means that all we have got to work with is the truth. That just bent my mind.

Today I feel sincerely aware of this amazing fact. I feel like what I have to work with is beaming admiration. I am in a great mood.

Matthew and I watched Groundhog Day. awesome. It was the perfect culmination to perhaps the greatest 24 hours of my life. Oh, my god, what am I that these stunning people are pulsing and dancing in my life. I am humbled by their faces and your words, you know who you are. Yeah, you.

e v e r y o n e

I’m in such a good mood that I don’t even care that this entry is nauseatingly sentimental. and short. Some might also add weird or annoying. Hey, that’s alright, I agree.

1. “The Truth, The Whole Truth,” the Observer, February 23, 2003.

Flapjack Shot

I sort of feel like this

Flapjack Shot

Submitted by Jacy Wojcik

A hearty mixture of Jack Daniel’s whiskey and maple syrup. It tastes like when my grandpa used to make us pancakes when he was drunk. Only now I’m the one getting drunk. And there aren’t any pancakes.

The deep absence of pancakes.

Pancakes are so warm.

I worked in a commercial kitchen last summer dish-washing, I got to handle some very large and thick pancakes. When we were busing the tables we would tear large stacks in between our gloved fingers. I felt really guilty. There was so much waste.

When I was a little girl my dad would make us pancakes on Saturday mornings. He would make them in bazaar shapes that were somehow attached to the strange mythologies of my childhood. Martians and crickets. Sometimes they contained smashed candy bars when we didn’t have any chocolate chips, I never ate them but I loved to tell my friends about how weird and fantastic my dad was. When I think of it, I think of instructing my dad that my pancake was ready (I liked them sort of uncooked). I was sitting on the title counter. It was in the shape of a butterfly.

I do not think this has anything to do with the absence I feel. It is just a really nice memory. It is sort of making me feel better to think about.

Thanks for this. Really. Thanks.

Nice

Battle Wounds

I know that it is a terrible thing to feel good, really good, and to be told that there may be something wrong with your body. This was the kind of good that makes mind-blowing art shows and writes stories and wears uni-tards. The good that feels inspired and radiant, fascinated and alive.

I know that you cannot sustain that kind of ecstasy when you are the kind of animal who sees their soul through their body. I wish I had an answer for you. You have been so insulted.

I think it might feel like losing custody of your children. I know that neither of us have experienced this. But we both know that the person who is taking your children may want to take care of them, but that person does not love them. It is sort of impossible, even if they want to.

Or like Leah’s parents in The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, you are in a foreign country and you can’t read the labels on the medicine (not to mention understand what it is or if it’s legit), but the state takes your baby away and you’re not even allowed to see her. Is it your fault? Are you a bad person for thinking seizures are divine? This is such a real question. Especially when they are the ones who eventually turn her into a fucking vegetable. And you love her so much you bath her little body and sew her colorful clothes and strap her grown self to your back as you tend the fields.
I am not sure what we are talking about anymore; I was getting worked-up.

But I do know that you do feel deeply sorry
and fucking pissed.

It’s okay Travis, it’s not your fault.

Rickshaws and Riders

Verbal comic

By Dan Liebert

Rickshaw.

I could never ride in a rickshaw—it’s so degrading. I’d rather watch a man slowly starve to death than pull me in a rickshaw.

This lead me to a search on flickr

Although I do not think the new “auto” rickshaws produce the same degree of shame and degradation, I completely sympathize with this verbal satire. I have never been in a rickshaw, but I have never been given the chance. Still, when I see people being pulled by cyclists in dowtown urban settings, I sort of hate them.

It is really strange to see. I can’t watch it for very long because I am not sure how to process the whole situation. The driver/rider is always radiating with this Virtuosity, the people inside are both patronizing and pitiable, and then there I am, just standing by.

The Face

It is a terrible thing to know that people are terrified to look you in the face. And when they finally do, you can feel the axis of the earth, perhaps the entire universe, spinning in your eyes. And in that grief, you hold it. It is all that is.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay on “The Face” notes how

The face “creates its own time within universal time… Against [that] stagnant background, the time of living bodies stands out because it is oriented… In the midst of these stalactites hanging in the present, the face, alert and inquisitive, is always ahead of the look I direct upon it… A bit of future has now entered the room: a mist of futurity surrounds the face: its future.”

How can we expect everyone to be prepared for this sort of confrontation? Human connection itself is terrifying. I wonder how many times people have gotten a glipse of a face and put down their weapon (litteral and metaphorical)?

The face, Sartre goes on to insist, “is not merely the upper part of the body… It is corporeal still and yet different from a belly or a thigh: what it has in addition is voracity; it is pierced with greedy holes.” The greediest and most ravenous of those holes, of course, being the eyes. For “now the two spheres are turning in their orbits: now the eyes are becoming a look.”

Sometimes I am acutely aware of this greed, the look. I think it is the most fierce when given the permission to view the future of another world, an orbit, a face. But Perhaps our redemption, our saving grace is this thought:

“If we call transcendence that ability of the mind to pass beyond itself and all other things as well, to escape from itself that it may lose itself elsewhere; then to be visible transcendence is the meaning of a face.”

Isn’t that the heart of everything we are after? Is not why we continue to enter the pain of the face, the pure hope that it is possible to transcend? And perhaps in transcendence we are no longer separate, but joined.

Transitions

You have come so far to get here,
through inadequacies and dissapointments. Hope and failure.
Too much love and care to speak so you hurt people. You break their hearts.

Sorry, did that sound like I was accusing you? I don’t think I was. Even if it was your fault, I know that you meant well. You really did. And I thank you for that.

I am in a really weird place right now. My mind and body are trying to process the past few weeks.

I went to this girl’s wedding and consequently I can’t stop thinking about the idea of childhood friendships, girlhood itself. Or what it means to sleep in a twin bed next to someone nearly everyday for two years straight, talk until 3 or 4am, and be so utterly insulted by your parents coming to pick you up at 1pm. “We just woke up!” But more than this, I am really trying to figure out why I know her soul without knowing a thing about her. Before this wedding buisness we hadn’t had a real conversation in years. But there is something about that age in a girls life, sixth and seventh grade, when your best friend is everything to you but everything you say is trivial. Maybe it’s all code. Because we have always been sincere with eachother, it feels more real than when I run into many of my friends from high school. Maybe it is in the silences and knowing someone’s physical presence so well. You feel eachother. It’s weird. You protect eachother somehow. As you lose your innocent and are impeded with so many things you never asked for, you sleep next to eachother and create space with your trivial conversation. It is so beautiful. I just felt like crying over and over as I met eyes with her on her wedding day. God, she looked amazing.

It is the end of an era. Many of my friends and my brother graduated on Saturday. New life will unfold its petals before us, but something also dies. Did you want it to? Were you ready? Maybe you could do without the cockroaches. But even that seems sort of strange, like stuffing cotton in your ears.

I just bought this sexy new computer that is bending my mind. I have stepped into infinity.

I am starting my senior thesis and planing my senior art show, which includes research, inspiration, and productivity to the max.

I keep reacting poorly on the phone with my mom. I can be so short and irritable. This makes me feel lonely and sad (or like driving home just to hold her heart).

But this made me feel better. And this.
And the thought of sending this into the atomosphere.

Correspondence

Can we trust him?

Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise

this + this = this

I forgot what happens when I want something really bad.

But now I remember.