Fluff

Because not every day is a Chrysalis kinda day (despite efforts to the contrary), this blog has temporarily been renamed My Cotton Thoughts Day. I will now pull thin, wavy strands of airy brain candy from my skull and deposit them on this blank e-page where they will live to grow furry with inconsequential blog mold in the internet concsiousness for eternity.

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Okay, so first things fuckin' last. What's the deal with my Facebook page being slammed by friend requests from platinum-haired LA starlets looking to add my name to their growing roll of F-lister friends like Criss Angel? They lure me in, see, and take advantage of the fact that in my old age names and faces are beginning to gel into one giant personality conglomerate making it now nearly impossible to catalog the gory details of everyone I've gotten drunk with in the last twenty years. So these Facebook marketing co-opters know I'll likely see the request, think I might know the person and perhaps peruse their profile to jog the old memory for an image of the two of us wearing sombreros at someone's birthday party in 1995. They hope, of course, that I'll be so impressed by the fact that this person's friend list includes the likes of Justine Bateman that I'll sign my fucking firstborn away to the Facebook promo devil so I can be overwhelmed for life with notices about this girl's every appearance on NCIS. Nice try, Facebook, if that's your real name.

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I spent Good Friday wandering through the Union Square farmer's market. I bought a hand drawn rendering of the Chelsea Hotel silkscreened onto a canvas of hot pink satin. It is now my favorite thing ever. The side of the building sort of fades off the canvas into a fog of black ink. It looks like it was left out overnight on 23rd Street and corrupted by smog--the hotel straining to come through the haze into being. I met a man, "Joe", who had a little table set up near the subway entrance featuring a potted flower, a jar for donations and a professionally-lettered sign that read: "CREATIVE APPROACHES TO WHAT YOU HAVE BEEN THINKING ABOUT". Feeling "in the flow", as my mother would put it, I asked him for a creative approach to the NY/LA conundrum. When I laid out the conflict that's pulling me apart like a Rolfing machine, he told me that I may love New York but I haven't been able to enjoy it. I'm still trying to figure out why that made sense to me at the time. He also suggested I begin thinking about what it means to let go of what I think I know about staying here. He illustrated the suggestion by having me hold a stack of paper in my hand until it became uncomfortable, asking me to note how I had made physical adjustments to accomodate and accept the pain (touche!). Then he asked me to drop it. When I let go, the papers scattered into an abstract arrangement on the ground. As he was picking them up, he said "See what happens? When you let go, it turns into something else." I got it. The conflict had taken a new shape. There was possibility in the burden when I let it go and it spread artfully across the pavement. But I couldn't see that as long as I kept holding on to it, accomodating its weight. As I was leaving I told him about the Chelsea satin. He said I was collecting memorabilia. I cried all the way through a cinnamon toast frozen yogurt.

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I've registered for fall classes. I'm having trouble digesting the passing of time. Only a moment ago I was eating grilled cheese in January, awaiting a student loan refund. I've decided that each semester I'll take something terrifying. In the fall it'll be fiction. The last time I told a story on paper the lines on the page were an inch wide and we were writing about Halloween witches in crayon. Scary, indeed.

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While I still have papers and finals to feast on, all thoughts lead to that, up there. That's Pula, Istria, Croatia, site of my first bona fide summer vacation since going to Indianapolis to visit my grandma in 1992. Now, given that the photo comes from Wikimedia, it could be a beach on the coast of Libya for all we know. But I'd go there too.