twins vs the tiger

My 25 birthday is looming. A little more than a week away. To celebrate (in the way all adult birthdays are celebrated), I’ve decided to try to push back feelings of unaccomplishment by thinking of what careers I’ve wanted at different stages in my life.

1-5: What is a job?

6: Drawer of stuff, someone that gets paid to draw stuff.

7: Artist (not very specific but slightly more refined than drawer of stuff).

8: Animator/illustrator for Disney-esque company.*  Also, a veterinarian.

9-11: Director/filmmaker.

12-13: Architect**

14: Photographer.

15: Director of Photography.

16: Cinematographer.

17: Teacher of English as a foreign language.

18: “Undeclared.”

19: College radio forever / future queen of WFMU / would have settled for college radio PR job.

20: Letterpress owner / silkscreener / Graphic designer – freelance.

21-24 (and into 25): Film/media/moving image archivist.

So that’s where I’m at.

* My second choice was ‘teacher’ apparently, according to a poll conducted by a drama class teacher. I didn’t get my first choice, artist, which made me cry and the teacher worked something out. After that I learned to just put my #1 choice for all three choices to avoid getting something I didn’t really want.

** I begrudgingly gave up on this dream when I was told that architecture requires a lot of math, and that girls are naturally not good at math, despite being in the advanced 3rd grade math class. Alas!

As the weather starts warming up (somehow, it’s still high 60′s and low 70′s here in un-sunny Massachusetts), I think I might have to name my apartment The Interzone because bugs are suddenly finding it as a new place to hang out. For a while, I had some tiny flies but they went away when my kumquat tree was taken away by the US Government. I’ve seen some spiders hanging around. A bee dropped in for a visit a few days ago. And tonight, the worst bug ever, a house centipede, ran between my feet and under a heating vent.

This apartment has already been trouble / worst place I have lived in / yes, worse than an apartment in Brooklyn with no windows, so I’m sure it’ll give me even more reasons to not-miss it in the next two months before I leave it.

I decided to visit Brattleboro, Vermont today and I have been thinking about places and what they/that concept mean/means to me. In two months, I’m moving, back to a place I thought I disliked, but after living or visiting elsewhere (in the US), I am realizing that it’s an all right place to live. Although I’m still not sure where I’d ultimately like to be.

And — most towns/cities (keeping level of urbanization in mind) aren’t very different from each other, especially not anymore, due to chain stores overtaking physical places and with the internet making everything so accessible. It’s more important to have people you like, a job you are excited about, and weather you can live with. Well, I don’t think weather affects other people as much as it affects me — seeing snow fall really has caused me to cry before. And not “snow as a metaphor for some horrible life sadness” but snow just as it is.

I agree and disagree with what I just said. I don’t know, I am just talking.

Anyway, Brattleboro was nice, but very small. There were a lot of folk dancers walking around, jingling with lots of little bells attached to boots. I bought a ring with a dancing bear on it from a huge commissioned antique/vintage store and ate a veggie sandwich. I brought home a miniature rhubarb pie.

I found this draft while in a little frustration-frenzy trying to make sense of a not-cooperating website. I’ve never experienced frustration like I have trying to get something that I feel like I should be very capable of doing — making a suuuper basic webpage — and have it just totally, totally not work.

Anyway, this is about my DREAM VACATION that I am not going to get to do this year, but hope to do ONE DAY. It involves the summer, a log cabin (faux camping), waterfalls, a fake alpine town called Helen, Georgia, and an annual hot air balloon race. I would explain more, but I and my web host fixed that frustrating problem and now I have to fix other webpage-making frustrations on my own.

Spring! Oops, I meant to say that a month ago, but I’ve been busy. And I think that’s totally okay. Also, it snowed last week. (And I think that’s totally not okay.)

I have new glasses.

I made the longest to-do list in my life yesterday, so I am working on scratching some of those things off, learning things, doing things. I don’t have much to say right now, but hello, maybe after I focus on organizing this a little bit.

Here’s a list of my primary activites and interests between the ages of 6-11.

Developing and recording television shows using a home video camera, with scripts and set configuration.

Melting/burning action figures.

Lighting fireworks, accidentally lighting a field on fire with fireworks.

Go-Kart racing.

Go-Kart racing and running over Cabbage Patch Kids dolls, then painting them and sacrificing them to gods by burying, melting, drowning.

Throwing Power Rangers into a lake, or burying them, or sacrifice them to various gods. (Sensing a pattern?)

Staying up all night marathons, usually a combination of watching MTV and swimming in a pool.

Ditching Sunday School and sneaking around a church.

Nature adventure walks, mashing up wild onions, finding the best bamboo stick.

Helping cats through various rites of passage, such as tea parties or weddings. (And one gerbil funeral.)

Pretending to be a dinosaur.

Making the weirdest possible milkshake and trying to get someone to drink it.

Trying to catch bats with a tennis ball in a sock or catching fireflies in my hands.

Screaming frequently and for no reason.

Setting up a home surveillance system to catch a glimpse of cryptozoological creatures.

Writing letters, attaching them to balloons, and sending them off, hoping they would reach the right person. (This sounds much more romantic than it was, I think the notes were primarily insulting my brother’s teacher.)

Today, I:

sorta matched,

watched a large pile of Christmas trees burn on a beach,

drank cocoa (and spilled it all over my arm),

ate green curry,

ordered copies of my college transcripts,

started preparing my taxes,

wondered if my ambivalence of Boston Creme Pie has anything to do with my ambivalence of Boston

and about how I use ambivalent when I want to use another word.

Today, I: ate a chedder & apple scone,

booked a flight to South Carolina in April*,

dyed my hair (sort of),

bought a dinosaur-shaped toothbrush holder,

wore floral leggings,

read the Wikipedia article on tuques,

was told by my mother that a mysterious gentlemen claming to be my friend called their house looking for me,

made a missed connection as a joke**,

read a missed connection that was possibly about me,

downloaded and uploaded the Waffle House Jukebox album***.

* This means I have committed myself to my current location for the duration.

** I’m sure this means something re: me, romance, and gimmicks, especially considering my history of jokes.

*** This is unfortunately only volume 1 and does not contain many of my old favorites.

2010, it wasn’t very good. It was kinda terrible, actually. I did a lot of unfolding, refolding. Lessons learned, the difficult way. But have managed to come out of the year better than I was going in.

I’m also dealing with snow much better.

I think it’s best to not look back on 2010, but instead focus on the many things to look forward to in 2011.

Let’s chat.

October was a reboot month. Sort of like a fresh start, although during the month of October was also the season finale of Mad Men which lightly screamed “There is no such thing as a fresh start!” But! This was comforting to hear mid-month, since it let me accept that although there are a million things I want to change and did change, there are a million additional things that take more time.

One of them, apparently, is blogging and website-building. Listen, I have some sort of mini-phobia based around public writing, which I think stems from some turbulent cusp-of-21st-century LiveJournal years that started with painful-to-read adolescent rambling about daily events and ended with tiny half-sentences from self-conscious embarrassed hyper-editing. So here I am, once again, giving it another go, properly, and accepting of my own imperfections.