celestial body conflict

So I’m trying not to feel weird and bummed about my internship and my attempts at avoidance are not going particularly well (and I will explain regardless of the outcome once I actually know what the outcome is) so I’m going to BLOG. The internet is millennial therapy, NO JOKE.

So my girlfriend has been trying to get me to watch the original Star Wars trilogy for… the entire four years I have known her? Because she was legitimately horrified that I hadn’t seen it. (I saw the third prequel in theaters, that counts for… absolutely nothing.) But I get sooooooooooooo impatient with sci-fi and fantasy that I can’t sit through anything. ANYTHING. Name a fantasy or sci-fi movie or series and there is an almost-certainty that I will not have seen it. Lord of the Rings? No. The Matrix? No. OG Star Trek? No. Battlestar Galactica? No. Jesus Chronicles of Narnia? No. The Neverending Story? No. Labyrinth? No. If I list anymore you’ll assume I grew up in a cave and I did not, I swear.

But ANYWAY, I finally gave in and started watching the Star Wars thing with her a couple of weeks ago and it was pretty okay! I think. I don’t know because I could only watch like 40 minutes at a time before I would have to take a break for three or four days. Or a week. Or two. But we’re done now! And whatever, I like the one with all the muppets! What’s wrong with you people. Ewoks, cute as fuck. Ewoks dancing. So many joyful, tiny dog-bears.

But there is something we have to talk about now. And no, that thing is not 1. Han Solo the babeatron or 2. Princess Leia the BOSS or 3. fuuuuuuuck Yoda sucks. It is this:

WHAT WHAT WHAT. HOW CAN ANYONE DEAL WITH THIS. I CAN’T DEAL WITH IT. I CAN’T. Why is everyone just walking around pretending that Yoda doesn’t sound EXACTLY LIKE MISS PIGGY?! I know Frank Oz did both, I KNEW THAT, but COME ON. I can’t, I just can’t, internet. I JUST CANNOT.

It’s like if Miss Piggy and Kermit had a real old baby. I tried to morph that on the internet, but it did not go well.

Muppets are clearly not meant for morph.

ANYWAY WHATEVER. Life-changer:

flawless

I just want to hug him and squeeze him and love him for life, you guys. I just want a Wicket of my own that lives with me and rubs my feet and lets me feed him starfruit while we watch British sitcoms. This is my ideal life, just give it to me.

This life does not include sex with a small, cute bear-dog Ewok creature. Just starfruit, okay.

NOT SEX WITH STARFRUIT EITHER OKAY. Stop it.


September 4th, 2011 | Tags: , | Category: babble | Comments are closed

on anxiety and dining room tables

Lately I have been experiencing an increased amount of anxiety.

I’m not talking like, clinical, medical, diagnosed anxiety which is somehow at a level higher than normal. I am talking about the actual feeling of anxiety that all people experience at one point or another. Granted, I’ve had panic attacks for most of my life and I should probably be diagnosed and medicated, but since I have not and am not, I am more comfortable talking about it as an emotional reaction. Even if my emotions are reacting to nothing.

So, again, for the past week I’ve been experiencing some heightened anxiety levels. I haven’t had a panic attack thus far, but my sleep patterns are more screwed up than they normally are (I keep a weird schedule during the summer, usually staying up until 3-5am and then sleeping ’til noon-ish). I have been napping during the day or evening or sleeping for two or three hours at a reasonable time (10 0r 11pm) and then getting up and staying up for many hours, then sleeping in midday. I either sleep fitfully or like the dead, no in between, and I can’t figure out how to eat in a way that doesn’t make me miserable. I’ve been crying (at stupid things! LIKE SAD CATS) and having some problems regulating my breathing and just generally not feeling well at all.

Something is clearly up.

The other day, I was lying in bed watching some… Homes of the Rich and Tasteless style show and they were showing this HUGE house in Malibu overlooking PCH and it was enormous and so… empty. And I started legitimately panicking at the thought of trying to fill up that space with my life. And how I don’t have very many friends and how a house that big would be so wasteful. And while talking to my girlfriend about it, I realized that there’s an emotional connection between being unable to physically fill a home and emotionally fill a home and blah blah blah it all makes sense, but still. I had to fend off a panic attack over some house on TV that I have no desire nor ability to ever live in. That’s the epitome of crazy, right there.

Tonight I was working my way through my Google Reader load and I had about three dozen tabs open beside it (I read through the whole set of posts, then clear through the tabs one by one, usually compiling blog/tumblr posts and emails for my girlfriend/dad/sister.) and I just started panicking intensely about all of these THINGS in front of me and I started shaking and I had to go splash my face with water and sit on the toilet to calm down.

I’ve talked about it briefly before, but I have a truly awful, unstable memory. I cannot retain more than three ideas at a time (not joking. at all.) and I have to take lots and lots of notes just to be able to function through bullshit daily tasks like internetting and blogging, let alone primary needs and work (my novel) and school. My memory plays an enormous role in my issues with anxiety. I am constantly freaking out about forgetting even simple, unimportant things and being unable to remember what I wanted to do, sometimes from one moment to the next, is… It’s embarrassing. And miserable. And depressing. And frustrating and exhausting and STRESSFUL.

I forget whether I’ve accomplished tasks. I forget what tasks I am supposed to do. My mom or dad or sister or girlfriend can ask me to do something for them, something as simple as grabbing a glass of water or checking something on the internet, and I will, in just a matter of moments (usually the ones I am using to complete a task before I can turn to theirs) forget ENTIRELY that they asked me to do something for them.

I cannot remember shit.

Compounding my memory issues and exascerbating my anxiety is multi-tasking. I am CONSTANTLY multi-tasking. I cannot remember the last time I only had one tab open in Firefox and even when it’s down to two or three, I am rapidly moving from site to site, tab to tab, trying to stay up to the minute on all of the ~social media~ feeds I follow. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, GReader, Flickr, boards, blogs. My email is always set to pop immediately upon receipt of a message. Texts are frequent, instant, constant. Phone calls, follows, mentions.

I love the internet and I love the availability and speed at which it brings even the most inane information straight to my eyeballs, but it’s making me insane. It’s making me anxious.

Since I made this bed for myself, I am trying to find more survivable ways to lie in it.

STEPS FOR MY INTERNET SURVIVAL:

1. Chill out. The information isn’t going to go away.
2. You are not at a place in your internet presence where you have deadlines. Appreciate that.
3. TAKE NOTES. You keep papers and pens around you at all times, use them. TextEdit and Word are always open, USE THEM.
4. Stop forsaking your book (YOUR REAL JOB) for the internet.
5. It is always okay to step away for awhile.

My anxiety is manageable. I learned a trick from my dad when I was just a kid that still works: NINTENDO. NES used to do magical things for him when his anxiety was unchecked and Wii does the same unbelievably simple job. MarioKart requires zero brain cells. And if I just keep remembering to CALM THE FUCK DOWN, I’ll probably make it out of my twenties alive.

ANYWAY. Now that I talked all serious-like about my anxiety, I can talk about what I really want to and that is:

The idea of buying real furniture, like the kind that doesn’t require significant assembly, but does require delivery by people in large trucks, freaks me the FUCK OUT.

The idea that, at some point in the relatively near future, people are going to expect me to go into a store and pick out some SERIOUS FURNITURE that I am going to have to live with for… years that is going to cost me a whole bunch of money and require a place in which to put it? That’s fucked up! Dining rooms?! How is that a thing? How do adults do this shit? I am only TWENTY-FIVE. Ikea and milk crates and paying for concert tickets instead of putting money into a savings account. THOSE ARE THINGS I UNDERSTAND. Adulthood and mortgages and OH GOD I AM GOING TO HAVE TO FIND A JOB.

This is some serious bullshit.

Not ready, world. YOU HEAR THAT. I AM NOT READY.


August 12th, 2010 | Tags: , , , | Category: babble, rant | Comments are closed - (Comments are closed)

get off my lawn of hoarded/frozen slide film and glass negatives

SOURCE!

I just started screwing around with film again (I don’t think I’d shot a single roll since my first quarter of college in 2003) and since 120 is SO EXPENSIVE for such hit-or-miss shots with the Holga, I thought, “Dang, I’ll buy twenty bucks of 35mm and dig out my Pentax!” So I did. And I shot a couple of rolls, including some old ass film that was buried with that Pentax! SCORE. And then I started wondering if Costco still developed film because it used to be super cheap! So I started googling. Then I came across that nutjob up there.

Like, look, man, I understand that your comfort bubble was busted wide open with the advent of digital cameras, but they’ve been around since like… 1991 basically. It’s 2010 now, CALM DOWN. If you are THIS UPSET about the idea of digital photography and the accompanying digital files, you should probably just quit the real world and live like a hermit. And if you are ALREADY living like a hermit, it’s time to give up the internet too.

1. Who is leaving all of their digital files on flash storage or SD or whatever? The majority of digital shots are at least getting moved to hard drives and shuffled forward through technological advances.

2. I love “DISPOSABLE SOCIETY”!! So much damnation in two words!

3. I had to google “basura” before I realized he was using the Spanish word for garbage. Dude misspelled so much shit in there, I could not even tell he was using another language.

4. “Now” we can just “click a button,” he says. What kind of fucked up camera rig has he been using all these years with his film? Does he Rube Goldberg every shot so that he can feel like he fucking earned that picture of his cat?

5. What the fuck is going to happen to our DISPOSABLE SOCIETY in 100 years that’s going to require we be DUG UP?

6. “IT TAKES NO MICROPROCESSOR TO INTERPRET, OTHER THAN THE ONE THAT EACH OF US HAS BEEN ENDOWED WITH BY THE CREATOR OF OUR BEINGS.” FILM IS BETTER BECAUSE MY GOD-BRAIN NEEDS NO COMPUTER TO SEEEEEEEE ITTTTTTTTTTTTTTT.

7. Dude? Is intense.

I can tell with 70-80% accuracy whether or not a picture is to my liking on my dSLR’s screen and if it isn’t, I pop off a few more, sometimes a couple dozen if it’s a hard shot. That luxury is basically non-existent with film unless you’re insanely wealthy. I am not, nor have I ever been, so I only shot the same thing twice if I was at least 90% sure that I’d just fucked up my first attempt and I’d still consider it pretty thoroughly, weighing whether I could really afford to waste the frame. I like film still because I like surprise. It’s FUN to pick up prints and flip through seeing what came out and what didn’t. THAT IS THE JOY OF FILM. The joy of digital is the joy of experimentation and repetition and adventure and trying new things.

Look, Patrick Lewis, I hate that every teenager with a Canon Rebel thinks they’re a photographer too, but that doesn’t mean I think Canon should be demonized for making it possible.

July 21st, 2010 | Tags: , , , | Category: babble, rant, rave | Comments are closed - (Comments are closed)

on eve 6 and the enormity of the universe

I have most of my brilliant ideas/thoughts/words/sentences in the two most inconvenient places for someone who has a memory terrible enough that if she has three thoughts in her head she has to write them down IMMEDIATELY because the instant a fourth one pops into existence one of those three turds of brilliance will be GONE FOREVER: the car and the shower.

Like, I am a good driver and all, but I am not good enough to just knock off some detailed notes in the middle of the 210 freeway while I am driving 85 miles an hour on my way to my afternoon class that I almost overslept. (It’s an evening class, if I’m honest, but I’m not, so…) Generally, I unlock my phone, fumble around blindly trying to remember which god damn page (folder now, THANKS STEVE JOBS!) I put the voice recorder on/in (OH I NEVER USE THAT, LET’S HIDE IT) while trying not to crash the car AND keep track of whatever idea prompted the suicide recording mission in the first place. IT NEVER GOES WELL.

Having a brilliant idea in the shower is like suddenly having to shit while you’re in there. You either admit defeat and get out, sit down on the toilet soaking wet and get toilet paper stuck all over your damp ass (writing equivalent: finding a notebook and pen while running naked through the house, then dripping all over it) or you finish the shower and shit when you’re done, basically defeating the entire purpose of the fucking shower (writing: lose the thought somewhere between getting shampoo in your eyes and accidentally douching with Dial). There is no in between, but 90% of the time I opt for the naked sprint. The other 10% of the time I just convince myself that the idea was fucking stupid anyway and should immediately be forgotten.

I also get excessively emotional in these two places way more often than should be even remotely possible. Like, sometimes I’m just showering and it’s a pleasant enough experience and I am suddenly like, “DAMN, no one is ever going to hire me for even a menial position after I’ve invested all this money and time into getting my MFA. GOD DAMN I FUCKED UP.” and then I start crying a lot and it’s gross and basically looks like one of those awful post-regrettable-sexual-experience scenes in bad movies. Not cute.

my actual real life

ACTUAL REAL LIFE EXPERIENCE.

And then in the car it’s always because I am all wrapped up in some bullshit song like “The Ice Is Getting Thinner” by Death Cab for Cutie (BULLSHIT SONG) or like, “Twilight” or “Miss Misery” by Elliott Smith which is so cliché it’s EMBARRASSING.

But then one time I was twenty years old and driving home from college for the weekend and I was REALLY INTO LED ZEPPELIN at the time and I was jamming and then “Stairway to Heaven” came on and look, okay, this is my mom’s FAVORITE SONG OF ALL TIME since she was like… sixteen or some shit and I grew up hearing it ALL THE TIME and I know that someday when my mom dies she wants this god damn song played at her FUNERAL she loves it that much, but I had this moment where it was like I heard it for the first time and I started SOBBING UNCONTROLLABLY and there was snot and it was so bad I had to pull to the side of the freeway and have a panic attack.

I BET I LOOKED WAY WORSE

I WAS THIS FUCKING MOVED OKAY.

And that’s some serious bullshit! No one should ever cry at Led Zeppelin unless Zeppelin IV was playing while you watched your entire family murdered. It’s just unacceptable.

So whatever, anyway, my car and my shower are basically my two most important creative outlets and I spend a lot of time thinking in those places and sometimes some brilliant shit comes from it like some of my favorite lines/moments from the in-progress first novel and the idea for the second novel which I am not even allowed to think about until the first one is done and a couple of pretty boss academic papers and a poem or two and a short story and a lot of really great music mixes… and whatever.

I think about a lot of stuff while I am occupied by menial, ordinary tasks. THAT’S HOW THE HUMAN BRAIN WORKS. And it’s probably one of the only normal ways in which my short-circuited mass of brain cells does work.

So anyway, I’ve been like this for my whole life, essentially, and at some point (I think in college, but this revelation has become so much a part of me that I can’t even remember when it happened. It was like realizing my body breathes without me telling to do it!) I was in the shower and I was washing my hair and I was like, “DANG, someone in the world’s favorite band is Eve 6! That shit is crazy!”

I know that doesn’t seem like a big deal and it’s not even really interesting and it was a fucking long road to sow to get to this point and it’s a weak point, I admit, but COME ON. There is someone out there in the world who is REALLY into Eve 6. There are probably multiple people who, when asked “What kind of music are you into?” actually say, “Well, I listen to everything, but my favorite band is Eve 6.”

I think it really boils down to like, the world is SO FUCKING BIG and there are SO MANY PEOPLE LIVING IN IT, that SOMEWHERE OUT THERE is a person whose FAVORITE BAND IN THAT GIANT WORLD is EVE 6.

How is your mind not blown right now?

Bob Dylan or the Beatles or the Ramones or Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber or Elliott Smith or Tom Waits or Black Eyed Peas or the Black Keys I can accept, but somehow EVE 6 is the one that blows my mind.

My in-depth research for this post (lurking this message board, basically) I even found the one thing that could further blow my mind.

dedicationAN EVE 6 TATTOO.

This dude HAD an Eve 6 tattoo, possibly one that he got when they were marginally popular on modern rock stations in 1998 and then he got a great big angry jester tattoo many years later in a place that would allow for a PERFECT COVER-UP of that Eve 6 tattoo, but instead, his love for Eve 6 is still so strong that he instead incorporated it into his new piece. That’s love, guys.

FOR REAL, in the world RIGHT NOW in 2010 there are people walking around in the world with Eve 6 ephemera indelibly inked into their human meat! There are enough people to keep an Eve 6 internet message board semi-active! THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO FREELY AND PROUDLY ADMIT THAT EVE 6 IS THEIR FAVORITE BAND IN THE WHOLE WORLD! STILL! NOW! IN 2010!

Anyway, I am NOT mocking these people. Korn was my favorite band for like eight years. And, had my parents let me have my way, I would have an ugly, faded reminder of that fandom somewhere on my back to mock me EVERY SINGLE DAY OF MY LIFE.

NO REALLY UGH

Ugh, I am so glad I will only have been a teenager once.

So, seriously, not mocking, it is just mind-breaking to me in the way that the size of the universe and the infinity of space is.

Anyway, FINALLY, I would just like to point out:

“I would swallow my pride, I would choke on the rinds, but the lack thereof would leave me empty inside. Swallow my doubt, turn it inside out, find nothing but faith in nothing. Want to put my tender heart in a blender, watch it spin around to a beautiful oblivion. Rendezvous then I’m through with you.”

Lyrics to Eve 6’s “Inside Out”. The song which launched them to temporary stardom in the late spring of 1998. All typed straight from my memory. The same shitty memory that cannot keep track of birthdates, the locations of my keys or wallet, more than three thoughts at the same time, or whether or not I put on deodorant before I left the house.

They must’ve done something right.

July 7th, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , | Category: babble, rant, rave | Comments are closed - (Comments are closed)
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