820 camino corto

this was our summer apartment. also my last taste of freedom before my current jobless destituteness.










we both aced GIS without opening that book

my 1983 eggplant

i am learning new things about my bicycle everyday.

back in sb, i would just take him to the campus bike shop for those dudes to take care of him. but now that i live in la, it is really difficult to get to a bike shop. i took a homage to a bicycle workshop a few weeks back - it took an hour each way with bus and rail. the place was called "bicycle kitchen" and the dudes were pretty damn fine. but to my dismay, the next morning i got another flat tire - the tube had imploded from the bus ride back! though i wanted to see the fine dudes again, i didn't want to pay another $7 for the public trans.

so i asked my dad to help me with the tire. he busted out his binder of tools and fixed eggplant's rear tire. he was a great teach too. now i am a pro with the tools and i can:

take off tires with 2 screw drivers
install inner tubes and then but tires back on
pump my tubes without them imploding - (found the right pressure!)
thread and put into place the brake wires
properly slide the chain into the rear derailleur

for a toothpick-legged man - as cleare would say - these skills are natural like his leg hairz. ah but for me these things have to accumulate like oilz on his hairz and then the oil gets too oily so the hairz fall out.

what i learned in class

i remember sitting next to him that day a year ago. it was winter and it felt like winter. but i looked around and it didn't look like winter. especially with him next to me. he was from california and a bit foreign i guess. he spoke slowly and gently. i had just met up with him earlier - when he got off his red bike he didn't look at me, instead he pulled the rubberband from his wet hair. he kept his sunglasses on for a while and looked at me through them. he stood tall next to me, but when we sat down we were eye-to-eye. he showed me some sketches in pen, which he drew at the back of the room during class, where it was dark. that was the day that i learned his eyes were grey.

ralph nader

for people like him winning does not happen every 4 years. it comes about everyday. and today is 1 day closer to a truly democratic election day.

here's 10+ victories i'm really proud of:

http://www.votenader.org/blog/2008/11/05/-hold-your-heads-up-high/

end of the world

quality of life:

(highest)
10
9 santa barbara
8 philadelphia, dc, etc
7
6
5
4
3
2
1 los angeles
(lowest)

la belle jane

chez elle




avec sa fille Lou

let's have sax

pen and ink
2004

old lancaster road

two hours away from home: a fulfilling and simple life

in my previous life,

i attended fashion illustration classes at the local women's art college and enjoyed printmaking. i put together an amateur fashion show for my senior project.

i remember once driving to upstate new york during a blizzard with my art portfolio under my armpit. i had spent the previous night filling it with anything that seemed presentable. the interview that day was long and i didn't know why i was there.

but after high school, i moved out to santa barbara and started life #3. i studied the environment and fell in love with mother nature. now that's over and i don't know why i'm here.

currently i'm living life #4. i'm writing now. strange thing - this has tied me back to my high school years' goals.

la vie en solitude

les belles femmes

a few of my favorite isla vista spots

go here:
http://maps.google.com/

type into search box:
http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~amy_claie/AmyLiu.kml

today Amy was happily constipated.

My favorite short stories:

Der Sandmann
William Wilson
Fall of the House of Usher
The Childhood of a Leader

queen of the fishermen

She sailed ship and landed in the most perfect place in the world. She sat down and watched the trees sing. And she learned that love is like the guitar you teach yourself to play. She bent down to collect the horn-shaped flowers that could not keep up with the rhythm of the dancing trees. From her palms, they flew away with the wind, blowing their own melody like the French Horn in the Orchestra. She falls asleep to their song, and in her dream, she begins to board her ship, but sees a landbridge North of the mountains.

mark ronson is one of the best-looking men alive

Dear S

Hear me write with the plume from my vest
Not with my pen but with my hands
Those that gave birth to the child in your chest
And fingers that paint your face with sand
With nails that scratch away at the glazing of my breast
All to tell you to come back to land

je vais et je viens

I found a Serge Gainsbourg CD at the second-handed store today. It made my slow-paced day even more delightful. Sitting on the 24sex, I experienced what I have experienced hundreds of times before. You open your mouth to breathe it in and your mind closes off. We have been living in paradise for the past half decade. The closest thing to this four years ago was the white-trash Jersey shore. I would have gone crazy living near the Jersey shore.

On some days, my mind trails far off as I bike around and my eyes pick up on the aroma of wind and sunshine. Then I set my body down to watch the leaves sleep.

At age 220, I am a tired old woman about to leave sb.

maps

Niam Niam: the Cannibal Map of the World




The Surrealist Map of the World

bord de mer

j'habite au bord de mer aussi. c'est l'histoire de ma vie aussi. mais le fin, cela sera pas un fin joyeux comme lequel de marie.

after seeing this film i now have more existential holes to fall into like a blind woman. i harbour an overall nausea toward life and other people. my daily activities bore me to death and i wonder if i'd enjoy what other isla vistans do - seems like a lot of fun. but i already know that i'd just end up on a 2x2 platform surrounded by the ocean and watching everyone else. and i do thoroughly enjoy my quotidian activities. everyone i encounter i want to look him/her in the eyes and say "hey fuck you." yet it's pretty human to want to continously meet people such as this nonetheless.

with age, this nausea grows and pours into your body ounce by gallon. it becomes more intricate and different illnesses tie together delicately yet boldly like a web.

we all wait and think we'll get our three lemons someday. it's theoretically possible - but we'll all die before we can get those three lemons.

that week i had another blond on my mind

i was eating lunch at the DLG when I first noticed him. i was dressed like i had just fought a war in west philly. strangely, he decided to smile at me. each time he passed our table with grace, he had spotted another table to wipe down. i could tell from the sensible wiping motions he made that he was at peace.

from that day on, i'd get to the DLG at 5 for dinner and leave around 7. i learned new things about him every night - from how he handled different food stations - pizzas, hot foods, and glasses. we pummeled a few awkward words out of each other sometimes. most of the time i'd just look into his droopy blue eyes.

sometimes your brain leaves you and you don't even know it. it may be weeks until you realise but by then you've already become a very different person. and when i realised what i had done to bryan that november, i wanted to jump off campus point into the cold ocean and maybe my corpse would float back to the atlantic and boil.

one night, i smiled at him in apology but he looked at me through my own vacant eyes. it was like the tom petty song "don't do me like that." except not as jazzy.

i saw him again 4 years later through a window. getting a pedicure at his girlfriend's nail salon. his soft blonde hair had began to recede and he had bags under his eyes. it was only 4 years but he looked like he had aged 20 years.

today i know that he was once good for me. but not anymore and he's having a great life. all b/c of my decision that november, which turned out to be good for him. when i think about him now i always remember seeing him skate past DLG, his hair flying like soft hay, and my wanting tell him that he is a free spirit. it's like the tom petty song "learning to fly."

better to have stayed and hurled polite sarcasms at him

"...she realized that the weapon which she had chosen had been a boomerang, for she herself had felt the keen disappointment of the denial..." -nl

cela, c'est la raison que bo n'obtient jamais l'homme de sa vie

nous avons écoutés le son de votre amour

i want to share my art with you, friend. i call this one "bonjour jeune fille."

shredder

some exciting things that's happened this past week: (!)

- i was on the 24sex bus and this guy kept looking at everyone's shoes from the corners of this eyes. he didn't look anywhere else - just everyone's shoes. then this girl gets on the bus and sits down across from him. she proceeds to look at his shoes from the corners of her eyes. he sees this from the corners of his eyes and decides to stop looking around and concentrate on enjoying the ride across goleta beach.

- cleare and i went to place x downtown. this guy that does x there is super fine and we even got to see him dance like a swan. we saw him again tonight in iv and he was looking SUPER fine. downtown nights are for unrefined pplz. but we go once in a while b/c there's like two places we can go. it's funny to see ppl there whom you'd never expect to see. then they see you and they ask themselves the same question, "what the heck are these pplz doing here?"

- i'm at davidson library right now writing the four papers i need to finish. there's this italian-looking man a row in front of me typing. i decided that he's not the philly-looking white trash italian because he looks real-italian, aka european-italian. he has amber-colored skin and a nice nose (which he is picking + smelling) like dean potter and defined cheekbones. his shirt, which could be from patagonia, is unbuttoned just enough at the top. while he's typing he's running his hands through his curly brown locks. it is so stimulating for him that he has typed a full page already. next to him is a knit sac full of books - something you don't see stateside. he's scoping the library scene for good-looking quality women. but he won't find any. he's standing up to get a better look and re-shuffling his hair. he puts his hand into his tighty whities and re-adjusts. he takes it out and smells his hand and flinches a bit. he stands up and reads a cool book in the middle of first floor while everyone is sitting and fingers his hair more while smelling is hand after each stroke. now i just made eye contact with the dude who sat behind us at anisy'qoyo park during earth day.


look at all the things going on in this pic. i could explore for hours.

he puffs, "i hate this part..."

right before i woke up this morning i had a sensual dream about this man, whom before i met in sb, i didn't know could exist. i sat next to him behind the counter and my face touched his face. kinda like the holden caulfield-type of contact. and then he stood up to watch me react.

point is - men are all assholes. i am asexual. but it was a damn good dream.


c'est un jeux d'enfants

art / middle school

ma vie en rose

J’agrandissais à un petit village, formée quand le chemin de fer a été construit. Mes amis habitaient plus bas de la rue ou dans le village prochain. Notre ville était une promenade de cinq minutes de chez moi. Les magasins qui alignent la rue principale sont des entreprises de familles. Le marché du fermier était à l'intérieur et quotidien ; mes copains et moi, nous manquions la classe pour acheter la pizza fraîche et le jus sucré. En l’hiver, j’étais content d’entendre que la classe était annulée à cause de la neige. Il y avait toujours deux mois, pendant le printemps, quand il faisait beau et les tulipes fleurissaient. J'aimais bien d’habiter à notre village par le chemin de fer. Mais quand j'ai atteint l'âge 18, j'ai décidé de déménager à Californie. J'ai eu besoin d'un changement ; si je restais dans la côte de l’est pour l'université, cela ne m'exposerait rien de nouveau.

Je suis satisfaite d’avoir déménager à un des plus jolis endroits en Californie. A Santa Barbara, nous sommes entourés de l'Océan Pacifique, froid et nettoie. Il nous envoie une brise qui est robuste et frais. Les arbres ont des formes et des odeurs différentes. Les gens ont des cheveux blonds et la peau bronzée. Pendant ma première année, j’étais surpris qu’il n'y ait eu pas des saisons ; il devient un peu plus venteux pendant l'hiver. Le temps passe lentement à Santa Barbara ; je suis contente que mes amies et moi, nous puissions asseoir sur le balcon en regardant le jour qui passe.