building stories.

i can't believe it's been six months since the hurricanes. it's funny how my personal circumstances sometimes run into world events, like i just happened to be in Houston when a pair of enormous hurricanes laid waste to the Gulf Coast. when my Dad and i were driving down here, i wanted to stop in New Orleans and just see things, i wanted to eat a po boy and walk around the French Quarter. Dad said no, we must press on to Houston. and so we did, and i never got to see the New Orleans that no longer exists. i've never been there, but it remains like a phantom of a memory, something i can reconstruct from pictures. like the time John took me down to lower Manhattan to see the towers a few months before they disappeared.

Koba is New Orleans this week, he called me today, a bit shaken, and tried to describe what he saw. i can't even imagine.

there's some part of me that hasn't dealt with what happened when Rita hit. i guess this is what people in crisis situations do, their brain shuts down and they just act and don't think too much. that's what i did, and i don't think i've thought about what happened yet. the way the civility of society frayed and broke down, sitting and watching the TV after sitting in traffic for six hours and moving eight miles, and becoming more and more frightened by the lack of information coming from it and starting to realize that there may be no way out of this city. no options. no control. my brain shut down to keep me from freaking out, and i think it worked fantastically well.

this have been strange here in Houston since the hurricanes. i wish i could have something to compare it to, but the pre-hurricane Houston is something i was living in for only a month, and now all i know is a city with a collective trauma and an undercurrent of chaos ready to bubble to the surface. everything here is out of whack, and i wonder if it will ever be back to normal, or this is the new normal. it makes me want to leave, to get out of this hurt, and so i am.

Jeanine said shortly after Rita that she was curious to see how this experience would appear in my work. to be honest, i had been thinking about building houses out of porcelain from the moment i set foot in Houston, but seeing the images from the hurricane, just the sheer scale of destruction, twisted what i was planning to do into something else. now i look at the work that i've made, and it just seems sad and ephemeral, fragile and ready to fall apart.

the semester after the 11th, i also built a tall white skyscraper. it was enormous, and i built it almost without planning. it grew more reckless the higher it got and the proportions made no sense.

re-forming.

one night last week, i awoke to Mark playing music. the door to my room is a pocket door, and at that point, it had not been fixed by Mark (that happened night before last), and so the door was slightly ajar, and i could hear him very well. i listened to him for about 20 minutes, in and out of sleep, before i finally came out of my room. Mark appeared at his door with a slightly sheepish look on his face. "i didn't realize you were home."

"your songs break my heart. you know that, right?" this words had been percolating somewhere in the back of my brain for a while, and they came out of my mouth suddenly and unexpectedly. i hadn't meant to say it. not like that. usually it was, "i don't mind, i'm a heavy sleeper, no bother."

he's been practicing a lot, since tomorrow night he has a gig. i've gotten used to the strange acoustics of the pink house, the way the sound filters through it, how i can hear him amazingly clearly when i'm on the front porch and in the downstairs bathroom next to the kitchen. as i sit in the dining room or living room, the sound pours down around me like liquid. the songs i've heard over and over again, in different permutations, blending into one another, with strange little riffs and ideas between them, connecting them loosely like the net stitch i've been toiling over. his singing voice is high, much higher than his speaking voice, with a sweet, reedy quality that gets pleasantly off key when it goes into the upper registers.

he just practiced introducing his band, which i think means he doesn't know i'm home.

"i think i might be moving into a place in Philly that has a recording studio." i said to him a few nights ago. "this might finally be my chance."

get a tape recorder, is what he advised, if you think of a little phrase or melody. record into it again and again until you get it right.

i'm convinced that once i get my studio practice ironed out, all will be well. based on how and what i've worked on near the end of college until the present, my "studio practice" tends to be fuck around until the last minute and then work like mad to produce a shitload of work that everyone around me praises but, deep in my gut, i know is probably crap. i think it is this practice, my particular practice of making, is what has kept me from ever writing songs like i have always wanted to. it's as if i expect them to spring fully formed from my head, like my visual art does. when i sit at the piano, i see something that is as alien to me as it is deeply familiar and comforting. it is a person, an entity i know, but we speak different languages and we can't communicate. so i bang around on it a bit but hear nothing in return.

this breaks my heart.

Mark is one of the most unusual people i've ever met. i've met a lot of unusual people in Houston, way more than i thought i would. i don't necessary believe things happen for a reason, because ridiculous and dumb and terrible things happen to people all the time that make no sense. so i don't believe in destiny. but i believe this: people come into your life for a reason.

i don't know what led me to answer that ad on craigslist last June, but i did. i don't know what made me instantly comfortable with him and with this house, but it was. he has a strange sort of reserve that i haven't seen too often in people. his reserve combined with my reserve has ended in me not knowing him directly, but almost indirectly, through his music, through the scribbled recipes on scraps of paper on the fridge, and the pictures he takes that are up on the wall in the dining room. they are all of people, friends and relatives he misses. i don't know who most of them are, he never talks about them, and i've never asked. so i've made up stories about most of them. it pains me in some sort of weird way that i will just be a blip on his radar, but that's really all he'll be to me. whenever i leave someone, i never think that i'll never see them again. i don't think life works that way. or maybe it just makes leaving less painful.

shut up, bethany.

i got my work shot last week. that sentence sounds utterly pretentious, but it also sounds really cool. like i am one of those people who nonchalantly says "i met with the photographer today", as if i was being photographed for Vogue. but, at any rate, after handing over an arm and leg's worth of cash, i got my slides back and they just sing. they look wonderful. it's amazing how a photograph can change a piece of art for the better (or worse). my stuff looks good, so good that i almost regret not applying to graduate school this year. i put it off, like the chicken i am, for next year, because i still don't feel like i'm ready. i will likely never feel that i am ready. but keeping in mind my goal, which is to be in graduate school by the time i am 27, i should be fine. but i really want to go to Yale, which may be stupid and kind of scary, which i why i put it all of until next year.

ages, yes. i have ages. i have to be in graduate school by the time i'm 27. i have to buy a house by the time i'm 33 or 34. i have to have a full time job and/or be tenured by the time i'm 40. i don't have any dates for marriage or children, which is good, i think. ages. ages are good, i guess.

god. this is what my head has been sounding like for the past few days.

and i am trying to fight down the rising panic of no job and no place to live, and i wonder, was this moving back to Philly a bad idea? not in and of itself a bad idea, but the moving part. i hate moving, but i keep doing it. at the same time, i feel like i have absolutely nothing left to do here in Houston. i've exhausted this place, and i want out. talking to my friends and acquaintances here, Houston just seems like a place to get out of. a place to escape from, not to go to.

what the hell is wrong with me? when i am not sitting, staring at this screen, i have 101 witty ideas for entries, but now that i am here, all i can manage is a brain dump.

leaving.

last week i moved out of my studio, and it ended up being a lot less upsetting than i thought it would be. my life is certainly less stressful having to deal with the presence of That Bitch on a daily basis. That Bitch tried to make nice with me several times in my last weeks at the Center, but i really didn't let her. i've had my fill of pyschotic people and i'm kind of done.

on THAT happy note, all i have been doing is working like mad at the Buck and trying to plot my life back in Philadelphia. i have a couple places in mind to live, including one in Frankford right next to the El. i have always wanted to live next to a train - ambient noise like that doesn't bother me at all, considering i've spent the last seven months sleeping with my head fifty feet away from Highway 59. i've also applied for about a million jobs and have only heard back from two (one no, and one "thanks for your app and we'll call you back after March 1st").

so. life continues on. desperately trying to cram all the Texas things i want to do into the next few weeks. i'm going to Galveston next week with Shawna, and Jeanine is flying down on the 2nd, and then i am out. i can sort of feel that awful trauma of leaving creeping up on me now, i'm so sick of it and i just want it to not happen again for a long time.

i. have. nothing.

tired. so tired. st*rbucks. nothing but. here is what the kids call a meme, but only cause Cabell tagged me.

Four jobs I’ve had:
seasonal worker at an un-air conditioned computer warehouse during the summer (hell on earth)
book/music/cafe bitch at Borders (3 years of my life down the drain)
ceramics teacher to a bunch of goth 16 year olds (worst paying job i've ever had)
coffee whore (ongoing)

Four movies I can watch over and over:
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Showgirls
Secretary
Ghost Dog

Four books I can read over and over:
Immediate Family, Sally Mann (not really read, but look at)
Woman, Natalie Angier
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Boundaries, Maya Lin

Four places I’ve lived:
Lebanon, PA
Glenside, PA
Philadelphia, PA
Houston, TX

Four TV shows I love:
The Sopranos
(um....don't really watch tv anymore)

Four places I’ve vacationed:
Florida (with the family)
Austin, TX (escape from Hurricane Rita)
London, England
Glasgow, Scotland


Four favorite places I’ve been in the world:
the North Sea, the eastern shore of Scotland
Isle of Skye, minus the midges
IKEA (shut up)
the highway

Four of my favorite foods:
sushi
hot wings and tons and tons of bleu cheese
blue bell blueberry cheesecake ice cream
any kind of spreadable cheese

Four sites I visit daily:
myspace
slate.com
nytimes.com
go fug yourself

Four places I would rather be right now:
eating Chick-Fil-A with Niner
riding NJ Transit to New York
fish and chips overlooking the Skye bridge
MY BED

Four bloggers I am tagging:
Alexis
Riley
the other Bethany
Violet