so today i accepted a job but felt kinda pressured into it. they were all like, you want the twenty hour lab tech position right, and i was all like, sure, i guess, and then they were like, so of course you want to teach a nine week class on dreamweaver fireworks and flash starting in april and i was like uhhhhh... but i felt like i couldn't say no and that it was part of the position. i guess i should be relieved because now i will have a way to pay the bills once school and my assistantship is over, but now i'm looking at planning a nine week class, finishing this semester (including two independent studies i haven't done squat for, a pain-in-the-ass class where the proff totally hates me, and oh yeah, an incomplete from last semester still...) all while working 20 hours at my current job. really i just want to say fuck it all and paint all day, or watch buffy, or just be generally fucking independent and not have to sell my soul to pay the bills. i guess that's juz life in this capitalist purgatory... anyone know any rich old men i can whore myself out to? oh wait, i guess that's work too. as my dad always said, if you marry for money you earn it!

along those lines, here is something my mom once told me and i told it to matthew today and he said it was really smart and i agree:

only boring people get bored.

but there's the rub, brothers and sisters. i'm perfectly capable of entertaining myself with all manner of projects and prospects, but instead i waste my life energy working for someone else. i know it doesn't help any of us to say this, and that were all basically in the same fix, and actually better off than most of the people on this god fersakin planet but... wah!

in order to nurture my inner moppet i went to hyatt's today and bought $50 worth of art supplies, including stuff to do a plaster cast of matthew's face in honor of his birthday. so to end on an up note, hyatt's rocks, the people there are awesome and it's way cheaper than michael's, those corporate shill hounds. and matthew rocks! we bought tree frogs today and it's his birthday so now i will put aside my petty foibles for now and say happy happy wacky matty!! let's party (not)!

Kotensky settlement figurine, 23,000-21,000 BC

Last night I dreamed I was this woman. I only vaguely remember it. I realized that the reason I have trouble remembering my dreams these days is that I snooze too long. You gotta wake right up cause if you doze off again then it gets all muddled or you forget it entirely. I used to be really into lucid dreaming and I could remember dreams as if they were happening right in front of me, but these days I don't recall so much, just sensations and fragments. maybe because its so freakin' cold all the time I never want to get out of bed, so I hit that snooze button like 4 or 5 times before i finally get up.

anyways, I do remember that in my dream I was this paleolithic woman. my skin was even kind of stone textured, and i had these massive pendulous boobs, the "overlarge breasts and belly" that the Hermitage museum uses to describe this icon. I felt like she looks like she feels: nurturing, sensual, modest, peaceful, loving. it was pretty cool.

the weird thing is that my mother looks almost exactly like this figurine. would she be a goddess if we still wanted our women to look like her?

Considering how accurate paleolithic artists were in portraying animals, is it possible that their women did look like her?

Chauvet Cave Images, 30,000 B.C.

"Women Rivet Heaters and Passers on"
By an unknown photographer, Puget Sound Navy Yard, Washington, May 29, 1919



Okay so maybe it's a minority view amongst us these days, but I love this friggin' country. if you want to love this god fer sakin' country too, take a look at this awesome site (again from the national archives) called picturing the century: .
it's got all kinds of pictures of immigrants, teenage soldiers, suffragettes, and civil rights marchers. oh, plus a too funny picuture of the six living first ladies. aw shit, here it is too:

"First Ladies Nancy Reagan, Ladybird Johnson, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Rosalyn Carter, Betty Ford, and Barbara Bush sit together at the National Garden Gala, 'A Tribute to America's First Ladies.'"
By Barbara Kinney, Washington, DC, May 11, 1994



doesn't it look like hillary clinton is making a pass at ladybird!?

so, with evil biddies like these and their patriotic patriarchs running the country, how, you may ask, can i still love it?

because the "rivet heaters and passers on" are my first ladies! look at how tough these broads are! could you be that tough?

yeah the rich and powerful have always tried to steal our freedom and our money from us and work us to death, but they don't know how strong we are. this nation is run by the wealthy, but its built by the poor; the ambitious immigrants, rebellious slaves, hungry share croppers, striking factory workers and yeah, even the teenage soldiers who don't know any better but weep when their buddies get killed. the hidden history of these people, who are really, to use a historian's $10 word, indomitable, is what makes me "proud to be an american". they seemed to understand that freedom must be fought for. even if the myth of liberty is a farce, people make it true by believing it and living it. just ask your grandparents...

(this post is really an addendum to "everything makes me cry". maybe it should be subtitled "my creeping conservatism"...)

here is the new painting I just finished this weekend. there are some funny spots from the digital camera and a level adjust, but it's still pretty much what it looks like.

this painting is like a dream for me. i can almost feel how cold the air would be on my skin as i look out over the tiny world with clouds in my hair. i think next i will paint myself as a planet floating in outerspace. i feel so little and insignificant in real life, so this painting is a way to "work it out" i guess. it's cool that you can make an image of something you can only see in your head. its way more exciting than trying to explain in words what a dream is like, how totally different we can imagine ourselves in the world.

oh, the teeny little brown splotch in the corral behind the barn is a horse the size of a flea. for scale. :)

well it's saint patricks day and we've been drunk since about 4 o'clock for me, maybe earlier for the others. but i love the new green green green colors of the site (and the awesome maps.) i mean we're all a little green on the inside aren't we?

the parade was pretty crazy. there were a gagillion people, including drunken high school kids. i wanna go downtown tomorrow and see the aftermath, broken glass and green glitter everywhere.

my new question i'm asking is why don't we bring out the pagan in the european myths, the hard core priestesses and shamans? "westerners" seem to have modeled themselves after roma and greece, instead of their own tribal pasts. in that honor, here is an image of celtic goddess of fertility shelia-na gig, she's way B.C.:

Some of you have already seen this but here is my first self-portrait done in oil paints. Don't sell your Rembrandts just yet! (That's the joke I keep making.) I realize I look really serious and even kinda depressed, but actually I was just concentrating so friggin hard because oil paint is so friggin hard. Sheesh! Anyways these weekend I plan to work on a larger painting of myself, nude of course, as is required for oil painting. Tonight I'm going to "Michael's" craft emporium with Matthew so that he can get paper for collages, and I think I will get some linseed oil, which Robin said makes it easier to spread the paint. Let's hope so, cause this is an expensive habit and I gotta make that $3 tube of cerulean blue last!

Everything makes me cry these days, but not in a bad way, and not in a way that is me feeling sorry for myself, like I used to when I was young. My personal angst bores me so much now it never really gets a rise out of me. No, now I cry because, well, the Universe and everything in it.

1) Pai makes me cry, from Whale Rider. This is honestly one of the saddest, truest, films I've ever seen. It's too real for me to even understand, since I know nothing of the "real" Maori except what I can read, and now see. But it is real on a human level. And what it says about the past and the future coming into conflict in the present breaks my heart, although I'm just a privileged Euro freed from the burden of "history", especially ethnic history, which for me is as blank as my white white skin. But this movie also told me something that I've felt and haven't been able to express. That the reign of men is ending, or should be. The traditional male has no place in society anymore, the righteous warriors are dead, and in so many ways, good riddance, but still for them its tragic, and I feel that. But what is left? Bitter old men bent on revenging their irrelevance, or worse, ignorant boys, permanent children, concerned only with their own self-indulgent needs. And still they lead our societies. By now, as far as I can tell, no one knows how to be a real man anymore, unless she is a woman.

2) William Sloane Coffin. Freedom-bus rider, anti-war protester, progressive Christian. Maybe this is the man we're missing, but he's dying. What a heart, what a mind, even after a stroke. Everything he says is measured by compassion and consideration. You can read the interview I saw with him on Now . Here are a few gems though (and by gems I mean jewels, like the teachings of the Buddha):

"MOYERS: I once heard you speak in which you said, "We must always press the socialist questions. But be careful and dubious about the socialist answers."

COFFIN: Well, the socialist questions are questions about justice. And it's, you can say, with prophet Amos, let justice roll down like mighty waters, but figuring out the irrigation system is complicated. So that justice issue at the heart of socialism. But what's the best irrigation system..."

And this, much truer than I could ever say it: "And my understanding of Christianity is that it underlies all progressive moves to implement more justice. Get higher degree of peace in the world, you know? And although people don't see it, that's what I mean by politically-committed spirituality.

You know, the impulse to love God and neighbor, that impulse is at the heart of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. No question about it. We have much more in common than we have in conflict."

3) Spaulding Gray's body washed ashore. Some say he jumped off the Staten Island ferry. There's poetry in that. This one goes out to all my neurotic, self-involved, self-destructive, dead-pan delivery, dead homies.

4) The Universe. What you're really seeing here is time, remember, the moment when the universe was only 440 million years old. It's there right now just as we are here, but relative to it we don't exist yet. Every higher human endeavour asks the same question in one way or another, and no one can answer it: if the Universe is expanding, what is it expanding into? Is there a set of all things and if so how could it contain itself? If God is everything then what contains God? What is really "outside" the limits if everything is included?

Another gem from the National Archive:
by Weimer Pursell, 1943
Printed by the Government Printing Office for the Office of Price Administration

Oh, and I've figured out a new plan, I'm moving to Turkey to teach English! That's "out", right?

Oh! Apostrophes!
What would I have without you!
Nothing could be Holly's
if not for your well placed possession.

And what about contractions!
Imagine the space I could not use
if you did not chose
to bring us close where other punctuation
can't

But Apostrophe!
Still you hide from me
the mystery of the ages,
it's not to say its rule is hard
to follow but
its is

here's some humor to lessens anyone's nervousness. today i woke up thinking okay so now we have a candidate, but guess who has $180 million for the fight?

but, i fear no chimp. for more tension releasing funniness, you must check out bushorchimp:

also, for further relief, watch bush's new ads, which he plans to unveil tomorrow: . they are soooo bland, but i guess he only plans to convince those who are already convinced, you know, that other half of the country...

eeeek! how am i gonna make it to november without having a heartattack or a hernia or a hemorrhage or something horrible!