Well, for the first time since I moved to Buffalo, I'm moving to a new apartment. It will be sad to leave the little closet I've lived in for 3 years, but it will be an improvement. The new place is on the corner of Parkside and Hertel. Hertel is my favorite street in Buffalo, no offence to Elmwood intended. But Hertel is more diverse and less commercial. You get as many people out walking the streets and sitting at sidewalk cafes, but not all of them are yuppie moms in birkenstock clogs, or student hippies, also in birkenstock clogs, come to think of it. You know, middleclass types who think they're environmentalist just because they wear fleece and forego those cardboard coffecup insulators. Hertel is more like a real urban neighborhood, with the old established Italian retaurants shouldering up with Halaal butchers. It encapsulates my little hopeful vision for Buffalo: a city that preserves its everyday gems (the Northpark theater) along with the bustling changes of a cosmopolitan community. It will be nice to look out on the corner from my 2nd floor porch and watch the neighborhood ebb and flow, come and go.

I'm also going to be moving in with my boyfriend, which is scary, but at this point it just seems practical. I mean, why keep paying for two places when we are only ever in one at a time, together. I really care about Matt in like a romantic way, obviously, but the more level-headed part of me just thinks its so much more practical to be in a dedicated relatinship than it is to be alone. There's no poem about how much money it saves you, or how someday you'll get to be on his health insurance, but hey, when you get to be my age, nothing is more thrilling than saving a ton of money. Not even sex maybe. Unless you have some kind of hooker coupon that gets you a reduced rate or something. Then you'd be both sexy AND frugal.

Of course, we have to move on May 1st, and I have major school projects due April 28th and May 2. But I have like the worst senioritis ever. Fuck school. I've like cut like every class I could for like the past month. I just can't sit through anymore of it, even if it is good for me. Forget it! I just want to do my own projects and read what I want and just go to work and shit. But then again I did spend a couple of hours today googling current Berkeley Rhetoric PhD students to see how I hold up against their stellar CVs, but apparently they're too busy being geniuses to learn some HTML, since I can't find anything good on any of them... Me, on the other hand, I've already had an illustrious career as a pop star. Just go to www.hollyjohnson.com and see.

So for my first effort in my new life of independent work, I'm off to a conference at the University at Iowa, called the "Collage as Cultural Practice Conference" . I'm pretty excited about it, but I'm still trying to whittle my 28 page paper down to a 20 minute presentation. That means I have to cut so much! By Thursday night! Plus I still have to get a new pair of pants, and a new brassiere so that I don't look like the floppy-booby frayed-kneed hippy grad student that I really am. But the University of Iowa is a mecca for writers and poets, so I'm psyched to go to a famous bookstore there, Prarie Lights, and maybe see their poetry collection, although it prolly isn't as cool as the one at UB! Luckily too my Matt is coming with me so I don't have to be all alone during the social hours, when I find it hard to be social. And we can have hotel sex! Yeah!

So, should be a feather in my cap, right, (going to a big conference, not the hotel part) but of course I got another talking to for missing this first year MFA review thang that I didn't even think I had to do since I'm a transfer, not really a first year. A proffessor told me I was a "fuck up", and I quote, for missing it. That's such a laugh. Why oh why do I have to fight all the time? I know I'm a very proud and haughty person, and I'll be the first to admit that I barrel into my fair share of head butts. But honestly now I don't try to bring it on. I'm just sick of being talked to like a snot-nosed undergrad. I can't get no respect. I'm so very close to just dropping out of society and gnawing on branches for the rest of my life. Not really. Instead I'm making a video in which I do. I wrapped myself in deer skin and ran through the waist-deep snow. Gnawed some branches. Very satisfying... life imitates art imitates life imitates art imitates wing-nut drop-outs who can't manage to get along with anyone!! :(

The Swan is Dead!



Long Live The Swan!



Well, after nearly 3 years of being used, abused, degraded and confused by a boss who shall remain nameless, except for those who know who I'm talking about, yesterday I finally had the semi-satisfaction of resigning for good. I say semi-satisfaction because when I walked into the room she looked and me and said "you're resigning." She denied me even the pleasure of getting to say it myself! Always has to have the upper hand. What an ugly duckling, eh? But I don't even care at this point. No skin off my nose, as they say. Sure she gets away with my idea, and she'll get a book out of it, and her hardscrabble climb to the top of her hallucinatory ladder will once again be boosted by the lift she got from my shoulders, but what do I care. The one thing I wish I had gotten to say to her is "I hope I'm never anything like you." She couldn't seem to grasp the fact that someone who is smart and talented is not also plagued by unbridled ambition. I just want to live, man, and I don't need to be dragged into my overseer's office every week for a dressing down, especially when I was 90% of the project. The saddest thing is that she is still convinced somehow that I'm lazy and insolent, that I don't manage my time well, and deserved to be fired. She almost even mananged to convince me of it. If I didn't believe so wholeheartedly in the wheel of karma, I'd be so pissed off right now. Well, okay, I am pretty pissed off right now. I'm no guru, alright!?

So now that I have time to live and breathe, I'll stop having nightmares and anxiety attacks, start sleeping, start eating, start, you know, doing it, again. I might even start keeping this journal again! Ha ha! At the very least I can start hanging out with my old firends again. Now if they'd only get over themselves and call me (hint hint...)

I never thought I'd say it, but jeez I wish it would snow more. Today is okay, but it doesn't seem like it will last. My friend Sebastian is coming tonight from Philadelphia for a visit, and the least we could do is have a blizzard in his honor. Last year, or was it two years ago, when he was here there was a lot of snow and he wanted to take my picture atop a parking lot mountain of plowed gritty snow, and I said, nah, next time you're here. But now there are no parking lot mountains! Only slushy white stuff.

On Sunday I went cross country skiing in Delaware park: around Hoyt lake, up by the David and the expressway, down the hill and back around to the dog park. It was icy, muddy, and blades of grass were showing through. But it was still fun, and I didn't die the next day from painful thighitis. But the next morning all the snow was gone again. Since skiing is about the only excercise I get all year, it's becoming an (in)convenient excuse that you can't ski without snow.

I was in Ellicottville on New Years and I wanted to go to Allegheny to ski with my boy Matt. I called the park to see if they were renting skis on New Years day and the lady said "There's no snow on the mountain" and I said, well can you rent snow shoes at least and she was all like, "There's no snow" as if to say, what part of that didn't you understand? So instead of skiing on dirt, and due to the nervousness from Matt meet the fam, I got ripping drunk in a house full of twelve-steppers and puked in my sister's guest room. Fun! See, if there had just been snow we could have avoided a very embarrassing situtation. Luckily twelve-steppers are the best people for nursing a hang-over-- plenty of experience.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, I'll be screening my short movie at Squeaky Wheel. That's part of why Sebastian is coming up. That and because at Christmas time he sent me a 144-page letter! He spent a month filling a blank book with his adventures, observations, and memories of our friendship-- journal entries just for me. So we have a lot to talk about. Plus he wants to support my forays into movie making. Anyone is welcome to come too to see the final results of my Keys Train Brain, I mean, Brian, movie, called "Duplicates". It should start around 8 pm.

I've been working with my friend Brian on this trains project. We made a cool video that partly involved trains for the Mole People cabaret show. And I edited some train sounds into a strange TrainScape song. Now we're back down there again. This time for a couple of projects, my Lost Keys video and Brian is working on some installation stuff. Basically we're getting entranced by the sounds and glows and slow high pitched flute music the rails make. We go down in around 10 to midnight, when it's practically deserted. It's like a whole other world down there then.

Here are some still shots from the video we made. I would put up a Quicktime movie, but alas, no Quicktime. And I can't get the mp3 of the sounds small enough right now. 100K!?