"Dirt Road Anthem" Cover

history of sadness from the film "beginners"



dougie fresh accepting an award at nbt's teer spirit awards yesterday

"you know when you meet someone and they just have this soul and it understands you? thats how we were"
(she leans over to me and whispers smiling)
"that's you, to me"

http://www.newyorker.com/online/podcasts/fiction/ these arent bad to listen too tonight.
http://altscreen.com/ want to take myself to one of these movies
http://store.americanapparel.net/ want to send $100 here on fall/winter clothes because it all fits so well and i'm cold and lazy and want to only go to one store.
half filling out applications to summer art residencies to paint or take photos and get away from the city and being single and acting and designing.
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Work week over, want sleep more lately. I feel like a kid at a sleepover who just wants to go home. I want to rest, and be around people who love unconditionally. who look and smell like me. and I dont have to try and be pretty or interesting around. who dont substitute other people for me.
Also i learned how to use google calender tonight. and 'how i met your mother' is a really funny show, and on netflix instant watch. the new korean building looks definitely like the twin towers being attacked, 'cloud' my ass.

I had the craziest dream last night that I was super broke and only had 0.554 cents in my account and was trying to figure out where I could eat for fifty cens.
Then it went into a recurring dream I've been having where we (my family) all live in a big beautiful house I just bought and we're having so much fun getting settled. We finally put a tv in the livin room but it's really thin like a frame flat panel. There's a part of the ceiling that juts down so it's put there, in the ceiling and you (my dad) spend all your time lying down staring up at it and I'm constantly trying to tell you we should move it because it's too close to the floor/ your eyes and also it could fall on you.

i took this a little while ago on the Diana. totally how the city feels sometimes staring through a grate

nothing between us but air

'i ask, why are you putting that pillow between us, he said oh i like how it feels on me like a blanket, and i said you have a real girl here, and he moves it and says ok, there, nothing between us. It's weird to hear you say that. out of context. nothing between us.'

my brother and i were pretty awful kids. I picked on him a bit, as the oldest. But mostly we were a team when it came to babysitters, grandparents, and superiors in general.

We could answer the phone in the same voice, pre-puberty, and in fact looked pretty similar too. When we were in a car, there was a game where whenever the car stopped (for a traffic light, stop sign, dog in the road, etc), we'd unbuckle, and with difficulty, move as quickly as possible to the other's side of the backseat. Also, in stores, we'd like to hide from whoever'd brought us, inside the round clothes racks especially.

My grandmother used to have 'kiddie leashes' she'd bought, so we couldn't keep running away. I have this small scene I remember of using my whole weight to drag away from the captured arm, tugging against the leash, while walking along this sidewalk on a bridge with my grandmother. I understood that I shouldn't, but didn't know why. The essential difference between discipline and punishment, or I didn't care. But there was a little yellow flower in the cracks in the pavement just a little too far from the path my grandma had chosen, and I was resentful and longed to stretch a little farther to see it; it was very important.

In my two previous posts I describe pranks we'd participate in related to memory-keeping because keeping diaries and this blog makes me want to write about the idea of remembering more.

seasons as children / honey bunny

When we were little, my brother, sister and i used to spend a lot of time in the backyard of our house in Framingham MA. It must have been around 4th grade.. I had one very good friend named Lauren Graurer-Gray and we would bike to the library together. She insisted we walk around her prickly crab-grassy backyard with no shoes on, which my mom said later could give someone lyme disease.

In our Chen backyard, there were three gardens. My brother had a vegetable and fruit patch; I was envious most of the strawberries. I had a neighboring plot of 'springtime' little flowers that were mostly pastel and blue hued blooms. My little sister had the 'summer' flowers, big and bold and colorful, sunflowers and tulips.
A note: these 'seasons' are mostly what they looked like visually as a kid, not actual blooming time of year.
It was behind this house that we also had a shed where I wanted to house a family horse, and there was an opening to an aquaduct that our family would walk along behind the houses in our neighborhood and stroll together. Usually my brother had a big stick he would wave around.
One of our neighbors upon moving away gave our family our first real pet (besides when we were babies and had two dogs, good stories for another time.); Honey Bunny. She, like the house, couldn't be taken with us when we moved and lives among the memories we had there. One afternoon my brother and I were standing in the front yard with Honey Bunny. We had a little harness for her, almost like a ferret leash, though she was a fat Rex rabbit. Suddenly, and I ragged on my brother for a while because of this, she bolted, and the leash tugged so fast we saw her bolt off into a neighboring yard which we were pretty sure had large dogs. It was a strange coincidence that soon after, we had to move. Right before we left, my brother and I stood again in that yard and did a strange thing. I dont remember who's idea it was, but we started making a little dirt pile there where we'd lost Honey Bunny. I've always had sweaty hands, and I tried to mix as much sweat as possible into the handfuls of dirt, and we spit a little I think. That way Honey Bunny would know we'd remembered her, if she ever came back. It was very important, as we drove away, that the dirt pile was still there.
Later as a family we'd have at one time, four parakeets. and another bunny. But she was the first.

oh ps. happy thanksgiving
(i think what i mean is. in other words. time is sensory rather than linear. and your first loss doesn't get replaced, even if its just a mound of crap that remains.)