Traveling eating and working a lot. DC thanksgiving was fun.

happy diwali

i feel really lucky lately. precious, secret.

its just been a crazy month of firsts.
two natural disasters, trying new things, my first screen test.
teddy's the best boyfriend.

walking around the aftermath of hurricane sandy with teddy, we came across these abandoned vehicles.

ate my favorite, duck.

and celebrated diwali.

1. this is the bar where i work. 

2. my apartment, and sometimes the people in it. 

4. and who I want to talk too.

life wouldn't make sense without fridays with shirley faison.

hurricane sandy

teddy.

design job, bartending, auditions.

life is like sitting in a doctors office waiting to go in.
(just want the doc to tell me what's wrong with me. how to fix it. what to do with myself).

frank ocean wrote this:

polaroids

comiccon

http://www.amazon.com/Illusions-The-Adventures-Reluctant-Messiah/dp/0440204887 

I think i know why everyone is so obsessed with love, and will prioritize the person they think deserves it over anyone or anything else.
I think it ties into our fear of death, and if you think about how it's the only way to (that we know of for sure) live forever. makes sense.
I've been working pretty hard. Makin friends. spending time with some old girlfriends I havent seen in a while.

old felicity episodes. janeane garofalo says "is it easier to count on someone. or be the person being counted on"

my desk

"The Cider House Rules"

I was reading "The Cider House Rules" description on wiki, and what I do not want is the wiki description of the book about how Wilbur, before falling in love with someone else's woman for 15 years, had a 'relationship of circumstance' with a girl at the orphanage growing up.

I love the part in the movie when they burn the rules. The same scene applies to so much outside the movie. The 'rules' are written by people who don't live in the Cider House.

my thoughts from this weekend

Love wouldn't be precious, if it worked out for everyone.
Walking through NY lately reminds me of my affinity for swinging as a child. That feeling of being pushed through the crisp air, to somewhere better. Everyone beside you doing the same thing.

Stories I've been telling my friends lately.
1) Shirley and I were walking through a deli near Columbus Circle. A woman walks by, talking to her dog, a little yappy thing that looks up to me with crazy eyes. "Remember that turkey I got you here? Didn't you like that?"
I quietly mention it. The woman walks by us again, says "Those asians. Never say anything". Shirley expresses her disbelief. I say that I'm honored to have been part of her dialogue with her dog, I just wish it wasn't inaccurate (the asian was saying something- about her) and borderline racist.
2) Daffy's was closing, so I bought a box of random office supplies, fingertip moistener padss, counterfeit detector pens, etc. for $4.
3) A dress store in Chelsea was moving, so I bought a mannequin for $8. The owner asked if it was because I was an art student. I say, well I went to art school. But for graphic design. I just wanted the mannequin, to dress my next days outfit up.
4) There are often neighborhood tours in the west village where I live. But yesterday, a group of people, were led by own overzealous guide, to lift up a pothole in the sidewalk, and stare into it. I stopped my walk home for a second, to listen to them talk about the waterbugs.

if someone would ask me what my life is like right now.
i'd say im focusing on my work and friends.

starting to drink coffee black. 

that part in 'shame' when brandon's outside the hospital in the rain

'tropic of capricorn' henry miller quotes

http://www.1stdibs.com/furniture_item_detail.php?id=683154 

"In this age, which believes that there is a short-cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way, in the long run, is the easiest."

“Things happen or they don't happen, that's all. Nothing is accomplished by sweat and struggle. Nearly everything which we call life is just insomnia, an agony because we've lost the habit of falling asleep. We don't know how to let go. We're like a Jack-in-the-box perched on top of a spring and the more we struggle the harder it is to get back in the box.”

“I am thinking of one woman and the rest is blotto. I say I am thinking of her, but the truth is I am dying a stellar death. I am lying there like a sick star waiting for the light to go out.
Years ago I lay on this same bed and I waited and waited to be born. Nothing happened. Except that my mother, in her Lutheran rage, threw a bucket of water over me. My mother, poor imbecile that she was, thought I was lazy.
She didn't know that I had gotten caught in the stellar drift, that I was being pulverized to a black extinction out there in the farthest rim of the universe.”

"Many is the mirage I chased. Always I was overreaching myself. The oftener I touched reality, the harder I bounced back to the world of illusion, which is the name for everyday life. 'Experience! More experience!' I clamored. In a frantic effort to arrive at some kind of order, some tentative working program, I would sit down quietly now and then and spend long, long hours mapping out a plan of procedure. Plans, such as architects and engineers sweat over, were never my forte. But I could always visualize my dreams in a cosmogonic pattern. Though I could never formulate a plot I could balance and weigh opposing forces, characters, situations, events, distribute them in a sort of heavenly lay-out, always with plenty of space between, always with the certitude that there is no end, only worlds within worlds ad infinitum, and that wherever one left off one had created a world, a world finite, total, complete."

"Let me hear you promise again all those sunny things you carry inside you. Let me try to believe for one day, while I rest in the open, that the sun brings good tidings. Let me rot in splendor while the sun bursts in your womb. I believe all your lies implicitly. I take you as the personification of evil, as the destroyer of the soul, as the maharanee of the night. Tack your womb up on my wall, so that I may remember you. We must get going. Tomorrow, tomorrow.."

"I'm a nice guy, but sometimes I lose all my senses and become nasty. Doesn't make me evil, just confused." -Charles Bronson

Hamptons/ LA/ Chicago

   Spent a week at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and when off-set not filming, at a beach house in the Hamptons. Bonded with the cast and crew.
   I went to LA for a week and hung out with my high school friends. Gloria for the weekend in Culver City, where she's workin at Tom's Shoes, kicking ass. We went sailing, to the farmer's market, some nice restaurants (esp Galbi King) Vivian who I stayed with at a hotel on Manhattan Beach and lay out. Niall came out too, saw his family's house in San Diego.
   Was in town for a night, then in Chicago for another week of filming. Really beautiful mansion we stayed at. Pool, hot tub, steam room. The Ferm National Accelerator Lab was bigger than Brookhaven, there were bison, egrets, lots of nature. Walked through fields.

LA PICS:

CHICAGO PICS:

Glad to be back in New York. feeling like the world is so open to me. But also, to see the cat and my neighbor, the bar and design job again.

 Oh you got a fire and it's burning in the rain
Thought that it went out, but it's burning just the same 
And you don't look back, not for anything
'Cause if you love someone, you love them all the same

celia took photos of my new haircut for the film

I dont want to be a ball and chain. and I just want to know what's mine.

last night. before/after

Babylon

the gateway of God. means 'confusion', like the tower of babel, when people tried to reach Heaven.

i'm happy. there's a time for everything i think.
sometimes you'll get it and sometimes you won't. both times, you have to be okay.
"Sometimes you will find it and other times you won't find it and the times you don't find it are the times when you have got to be careful. Those are the times when you have got to remember that other times you will find it, not this time but the next time, or the time after that, and then you've got to be able to go home without it" tenessee williams

rehearsing the new film, gonna cut all my hair off. start shooting in a week.
according to my aura photo i need to do more and think less, so the red grows brighter and the blue grows dimmer. balance.

my aura photo

http://www.villagevoice.com/bestof/2010/award/best-aura-reading-2167711/

Every now and then the things I lean on lose their meaning, and I find myself careening...
She has the power to go where no one else can find me,
yes and to silently remind me,
of the happiness and good times that I know.
But I said I've just got to know that...
It isn't what she's got to say,
or how she thinks or where she's been.
To me the words are nice the way they sound.
I like to hear them best that way,
it doesn't much matter what they mean.
Well she says them mostly just to calm me down.

And I feel fine any time she's around me now,
she's around me now,
almost all the time.
And if I'm well you can tell that she's been with me now, she's been with me now,
quite a long, long time.
Yes and I feel fine.

Life so far as been like different tableaux, pictures presented one after the other, some i dont expect, often ones that you wouldnt think would go together. but we only know what we've been told, and are presented with. I look for similarities in the colors and feel of them, trying to find links in the situations and people. And all I'm sure of is one day the pictures will stop.

good month so far.

i turned 24, i'm shooting a lead role in 'ninastiko' soon; i'll be playing a boy and i'm really excited to fly to chicago and montana for it. and i'm visiting LA with a friend.

twenty four

excerpts from an email to a friend

i think i'm learning lately, the value of time. when i was a kid i always thought it was slipping away. after graduation i wanted all the dating and stuff i'd missed out on in college. like an unguided missile, is how my thesis teacher put it. now its been a few years. keeping a steady job and friends... vacations... no phone... gardening.. reading.. i just wanna give everything time and love. like these stupid plants in my window lol they wont grow faster just cuz i want them too. i bought miracle gro. but nature's still what it is.

I've been thinking on this memory. A friend brought me with her parents to climb Mt. Monadnock in New Hampshire. We ate the most delicious apricots in the car. When I think of a forest, I always think of that. I remember how amazing everything smelled, the mulch, the rain.
Emerson wrote:

“Monadnock is a mountain strong,
Tall and good my kind among;
But well I know, no mountain can,
Zion or Meru, measure with man.	85
For it is on zodiacs writ,
Adamant is soft to wit:
And when the greater comes again
With my secret in his brain,
I shall pass, as glides my shadow	90
Daily over hill and meadow.

For a 1stdibs.com editorial next week. I think it's cool that my design job wanted a photo, and i got to wear the hoodie my mom gave me. Last month I wore her old purse to Tribeca Film Fest. lol. this photo looks like a painting I did for someone once.

Now its Saturday night. I keep watching this on repeat, even though it was just released tonight. Kind of creates its own world that isnt just black or white or thai or indian... (or chinese)