My Friend Maria has been missing for a week today. She just disappeared into thin air last Thursday morning. I found out about it while I was in Montreal presenting at a conference. Apparently the police thought that she was with me when they couldn't get in touch with me.

So I've been totally out of it, trying to think where she could be, whether she's been kidnapped or wandered off... I don't know. I understand now how that's the worst part.

So, I have so much else to say... about Montreal and other things, but for now all I can think is "Maria, where are you?"

"(Port Colborne, ON, Canada, October 22, 2004) - - Rescue crews across the border are resuming their search for a missing Western New York woman.

Niagara Regional Police say relatives reported 40 year old Maria Repec missing Thursday morning.

Police say Repec is vacationing at her family's Port Colborne cottage and is an avid walker.

Rescue workers, volunteers, and a search dog spent much of Thursday combing the woods in and around Port Colborne.

Rick Geady of the Niagara Regional Police said, "She has since left the area, she's walking somewhere in this area we believe. She's commonly doing long walks."

If you've seen Repec, you're asked to contact Niagara Regional Police at 905-735-7811."

I'm realizing more and more how this journal actually helps me to remember what's going on in my life. It prolly isn't interesting for the rest of you to read (well, except my mom), but sometimes I just gotta make a list of what's been happening. Otherwise I honestly forget. They say people who keep lifelong journals are less likely to get Alzheimers. Here are my attempts to prevent it.

Sunday- Killed time at Medaille with Brian, reading Times, waiting for editing computer to open up so we could work on the Swan documentary. It didn't. Saw Sky Captain with Maria. Followed by sky party on the roof of Emily's boyfriend Graham's loft. Met interesting Argentinian horse trainer-turned high school teacher.

Monday- Columbus day. Classes were cancelled at Medaille, so I didn't have to teach. Drawing class in the afternoon. Stopped by my sister Wendy's house for dinner. Played with goat. Can't remember what I did after. TV maybe? Talked to Sebastian? Dozed on couch? Definately dreamed a strange dream of being a little Indian girl running away from a blonde brother and sister while also being the brother and sister. It was all a mix up, you see.

Tuesday- Gallery trip to see Bruce Jackson's photos of photos of 1930's Arkansas prisoners. Hated it. Kinda told him so. What a wind bag. Work meeting, helped set up for Naples/Higgins debate. Totally blanked (e:southernyankee) and (e:tina) party. Sorry gals. You know if my mind weren't such swiss cheese I would have partied down with you. Asked someone to John Cale concert at Mohawk Place, got turned down for a plumber. Went to hear John Cale with buddy anyways. Didn't sleep at home anyways... doh! Ambivalent feelings about buddy sex in the cold grey morning-after morning of...

Wednesday- something like: dawn-drive home, work, teach, draw, then spend four hours on video lighting excercise with (e:paulnotpaul) and others for class. Lots of work, but lots of fun. Exhausted by the end. Merciful sleep.

Thursday- Work. Sleep. Didn't go to see Stelarc. Sleep.

Friday- School, teach, work. Sleep. Party at Paul V's house with (e:soyeon), (e:robin), (e:liz), other sundry u-b-ers (that's you-bee-ers, not ubers) and assorted Medaille folks. Fun time. Tried on Paul's invention, the security bra. Didn't make out with anyone, especially not the beautiful opera teacher with the cupid bow lips. Sigh. Now if only he were a pervert, he could cure me of my hysteria. See, let me explain, hysterics don't want buddies, they want perverts. Oh, never mind. Ended up at Robin's with Soyeon til 5 am. Had to work...

Saturday- 10 am arrived at work on time can you believe it. And then I actually worked. Well, except for this part where I'm writing in my journal.

It's strange how much I actually remembered as I was going along writing this. Back, back fierce alzheimer's! You won't get this blogger's mind!

the giant bride and groom amid the fall foliage. your wedding was beauti-fall (e:trish) and (e:paulnotpaul)! it couldn't have been better. the peeps, as you can learn from (e:matthew), (e:terry), (e:paul), and I'm sure others to come ((e:southernyankee), (e:tina), (e:lilho), (e:flaccidness), (e:springfairie)) partied in style, as usual. hopefully we can all be there to help celebrate the happy couple's 1st, 10th, 50th wedding anniversaries... which will all take place on our collectively owned sheep (and goat) farm, of course. although trisha's family told me of her plans to have twelve sons and one daughter! i'm all for collective living and "it takes a village" child rearing, but i'm trying to imagine a room full of a baker's-dozen kordos-lehnen babies! seeing as trish and paul are some of the happiest and funniest people i know, i think it'd be a good time.

I'm becoming a postmodern conceptual artist. Last night I took digital photographs of my TV, which I have made a little slide show out of. I realize I was in part inspired by (e:matthew) 's Lucy pictures. Please take a look at the whole thing and tell me if it works, Medaille's servers are really slow. You can view them all by following this

Update on my progress in figure drawing class. This woman may seem strange but really this is what she looks like. She has the most beautiful medieval face with a high round forehead. My cat Roshi is a tough critic:

My friend Anna and I went to Forest Lawn cemetery on Sunday to make some grave rubbings. We were looking for names that were also common words, which we recombined into new phrases. Anna had some really good ones, including, and I'm not kidding, "Twitty Valentine Love." Here are some of my results. I'm going to write a very French kind of artist statment about what I think these are about: monumentality, the symbolic register, the proper name as collective category, urban density, self-destroying practices in the buddhist sense as a prerequisite for collaboration and compassion. But first here are the pictures:

"As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death." -- Leonardo da Vinci

Not because I want to, but because I've had to, I've been experimenting with what's called a polyphasic sleep cycle. Basically it means that you sleep several times a day in small increments, and in the end you actually sleep less overall, but still feel rested. Leonardo da Vinci, crazy genius that he was, supposedly slept only fifteen minutes every 4 hours. No wonder he managed to become one of the world's greatest artists, engineers, and scientists.

My aspirations are not quite so noble. Mostly it's about being able to party while still maintaining my roles as a student, teacher, researcher, and lab monkey. Here's how it works. I come home from my daily duties about 6pm, sleep till 8 or 9. Then I go out with people who actually have free time, which means that the evening begins around 11 or 12, since they can all sleep in the next day. Okay, so, party till about 3 or 4am, then home again. Sleep from 4-8. Get up, rub red eyes, drag deadweight body to car, proceed through day's responsibilites. Repeat.

How long can I keep this up? My sister worked nights for years, and she actually split her sleep in two. Some at 7am when she came home, some before she had to go in at 11. She maintains it nearly killed her, and thinks she accrued a sleep deficit she'll never quite replenish. She did kinda wander around in a haze in those days.

But this method has allowed me to do all I need to do: plan for class, finish projects, drink prodigeously. Oh, and avoid dreaming (see previous journals). It also gave me the opportunity to join in the Girl Power (plus Steve) Midnight Normal Ave Robin Move on Thursday night. And last night I was able to act like a petulant child watching a man I was attracted to nuzzle his girlfriend, while at the same time rebuffing the advances of subpar dive-bar y-chromos who think if you're wearing a little eyeliner you'll fuck anyone who's mostly upright. It was a full night.

So here's my question, if da Vinci never slept, then how could he believe that a well-spent day brings happy sleep? And what in this world or the next is a happy death?

I'll hopefully find out tomorrow in the cemetery. I'll go rub graves, since nobody rubs me.

John Kerry! Too funny. Bush's home town newspaper says "You're Fired!" Okay, so maybe its a little scary that a conservative paper that endorsed W. in 2000 finds Kerry acceptable, but we all know our doubts already. It's just that when I heard this on the radio this morning, it gave me a hearty cackle! You gotta read the article, it's righteously indignant:

Here's an excerpt:

When examined based on all the facts, Kerry’s voting record is enviable and echoes that of many Bush allies who are aghast at how the Bush administration has destroyed the American economy. Compared to Bush on economic issues, Kerry would be an arch-conservative, providing for Americans first. He has what it takes to right our wronged economy.
The re-election of George W. Bush would be a mandate to continue on our present course of chaos. We cannot afford to double the debt that we already have. We need to be moving in the opposite direction.
John Kerry has 30 years of experience looking out for the American people and can navigate our country back to prosperity and re-instill in America the dignity she so craves and deserves. He has served us well as a highly decorated Vietnam veteran and has had a successful career as a district attorney, lieutenant governor, and senator.
Kerry has a positive vision for America, plus the proven intelligence, good sense, and guts to make it happen.
That’s why The Iconoclast urges Texans not to rate the candidate by his hometown or even his political party, but instead by where he intends to take the country.
The Iconoclast wholeheartedly endorses John Kerry.

(e:terry), your dream of my momma is spot on [inlink]terry,322[/inlink]. She would ride a snowmobile across a frozen pond, face death, and still come out cacklin'. It was a dream right? I miss my family. Now that school has started and my weekends have been full I haven't gotten to see them. I want to run to my momma and bury my face in her generous snowy bosom. I turned down a trip to visit them all in Ellicottville last weekend to lick my wounds. It would have been better to have gone.

Soon we will crosscountry ski to the moon, you and me (e:terry). and (e:matthew). and (e:southernyankee). and (e:flaccidness). And anyone else who wants to strap some plastic slides to your feet and face death on terror mountain. Really, it's more fun than it sounds, facing death.

It's funny that Terry wrote about dreams, since in lieu of having something else I want to write about here, I was going to write about mine. (It's actually my homework to write about my dreams, for my purgatorial Seminar in the Image class.) Basically, here's what's been weird in my dream life right now. I keep dreaming very literal dreams that are almost scenes from my real life, which I guess is currently dramatic and surreal enough to qualify for dream logic. Usually there is little real world correspondance in my dreams, but lately, it's like I'm continuing waking events.

But here is what is really weird. My dreams insist on being optimistic. In real life I'm realizing once again that pessimism is the safest route. Intensity from containment, and all. But my dreams stubbornly continue to hope. It's almost cruel. To demonstrate, I will tell you my dreams in a Munch and a Chagall:

How my dreams see my world:



How waking me sees it:



Usually we go about our day, burying our frustrations and fears, which then emerge in anxious dreams. I'm scuttering about during the day like a starved brown leaf, while my dreams are full of laughter and warm sun and the fuzzy hairs on the nape of the neck. Perhaps what I'm repressing is my tragic capacity to wish...

So I spent the day hung over, depressed, and unable to do any of the five million firggin' things I should have done today. So instead I watched movies. I saw Dogville, the newest Lars Von Trier movie, and a documentary on the Weather Underground, which I realized I had seen part of on PBS. Both were really great, I highly reccommend them, and both were also critiques of American culture, which we all heart.

Dogville, if you've seen any Lars Von Trier movies before, was in the same stream as Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark, with an important difference at the end. Both Waves and Dancer are about vulnerable women who fall prey to the cruel desires and demands of society, and particularly men. The movies aren't critical so much as documentary, I've always thought they were about human necessity and frailty. In Dogville, same thing, a woman in need is subjected to every human degradation you can imagine. But she gets her revenge in the end. Oh yeah does she. Bingo, Grace, bingo. Nicole Kidman was as usual delicioso as the beleagured heroine. You gotta see, basically.

Then, the Weather Underground documentary is a must see for anyone interested in radical politcs and the history of revolutionary acts in the seventies. I think few people know that there was a faction of the Student Democratic Society, the largest youth anti-war group in the country during Vietnam, that broke off and bombed stuff. Like for example, the Capitol. They luckily never killed anyone. And none of them really went to jail since the FBI Cointelpro infiltration tactics had rendered all the evidence inadmissable. They are mostly now professors and political organizers. One guy owns a bar and won $23,000 on Jeapordy. It's amazing to hear them talk about it now, 30 years later, some of them still conflicted about their actions, some of them still ardently committed to the struggle for social justice. If you ever wanted to throw a brick through Starbuck's window, this is the movie for you.