2012

January began ambiguously, with lots of confusion and question marks hovering in my mind; I can confidently say "ambiguous" was the operative word of the year for me (and some, if not many others...). 

February was stranger still - my position at a small design-build firm slowly dissolved and I found myself working more frequent hours at Trader Joe's and wondering what to do next.

In March I ran away for several days to the Pacific Northwest with J, and the change of environment helped clear my mind of the fog that had accumulated over the past 6+ months. Viewing awe-inspiring architecture while traversing Seattle and Portland, eating richly with a lady with fine taste, and being out of Los Angeles for a bit gave me a renewed sense of vitality upon the return home. 

April was a time for new beginnings, though to be fair new beginnings are constantly rumbling, shifting, and appearing and are not by any means a static mass that drop out of nowhere to surprise/delight/shock you. I made a point to travel to local sights that had been on my list of "places to visit" for a LONG time. I also won my dream road bike off of eBay and started riding my bike to work and all around town. 

In May my friendship with A grew and deepened, and when not working at TJ's, we'd ride our bikes, go on hikes, have impromptu picnics, and lots of food adventures. It felt great to connect with a person on so many different levels; how wonderful it is to be so similar yet so different from somebody! 

In June I went to Wyoming with L, saw some of the most amazing things I have seen in nature thus far, and upon trip's end, hit the ground running at a new job. I said goodbye to Trader Joe's, which even now I still miss. 

In July, construction of a big project at work started, and I began heavily documenting every movement of the job site. Being paid to take photos is really a wonderful thing... 

August was mostly about overcoming the learning curve at work and finally having the ability to contribute more to the team. I visited A in Berkeley. 

September - I made a new friend who serendipitously became one to make art with, and started drawing more to keep away the empty feelings and confusion. 

October was the month my sister and I moved out together. I didn't take very many pictures of anything during this time. I scoured flea markets, Craigslist, and thrift stores to equip our apartment and quickly settled into "new home." 

November the cranes went up, and though I planned on scaling one to see Hollywood/Los Angeles from 150 feet up in the air, I will save that goal for next year. Sister and I adventured more on our own, when time permitted. 

December has been how last January started - ambiguous in ways, though now things are startlingly clear. I have been writing, dreaming, pacing, ruminating and trying to make sense of events that have unfolded. I can only say that for every dozen bad or unsavory things that occur, it is possible to have something good ensue, and that is enough to fuel me on through the utter absurdity of life.

hibernation/growth

I planted some rosemary cuttings and succulents I had gathered/been gifted, and so have started what I hope becomes a well-rounded out container garden. Last night I made several whiskey sours with the juiciest, most perfect-tasting lemons I've ever had (from a tree at A's house), that were slowly and perfectly chilled with an ice ball (from a set of molds my dear sees gave to me for Christmas).

I think in the past several months I've gotten to know myself better, on several levels. And through this withdrawal, or at least in pulling away from people, and being selfish/self-reflective, I can better organize how I think and interact with others. I definitely act more like a hermit during the 'colder' months - call it a hibernation of sorts, if you will. But I hope that, for what I lack in consistency of appearances and correspondences, I am able to make up for in content.

merry christmas (& a retraction)

"Write hard and clear about what hurts.

Don't avoid it. It has all the energy."

- Ernest Hemingway

The good thing about outpourings of emotion is that their remnants can definitely provide perspective after their initial release. And although they can be mortifying, they ought not to be swept under the rug and denied that they ever happened, given that a lesson can be learned from them. In my previous entry I may have spoken too soon, but at the time I believed I was ready to say goodbye to ambiguity, fueled by my frustration in wanting too much at an inopportune point in time.

I don't have all the answers right now, but I can say my questions are less frantic, my confusion less crippling, my impatience quieted. I feel like we are two halves to a whole that are still very much separate entities, with tendrils linked and slowly growing. I understand that there are some things that take a very long time to grow, and I love this enough to see how things go.

I hope you are all having a wonderful Christmas/holiday. I'm munching on roasted chestnuts and taking nibbles of bacon as I wait for the Christmas roast to finish up at my mother's house, and on occasion running around with the Westies as they take in the scents and sounds of the day. I will go join them, now :).

so it goes

It is a surreal experience to play the part of the fool - how delusional and oblivious can one be before the illusion shatters and one is left to blankly gather the pieces and try to make sense of the chaos that was once held together with blind hope and naive optimism. The innocence that surrounded your first true love is no more now that you have felt your first real heartbreak, she says, and you will love again, but from this point on you will trust and love with caution. I regret nothing, I'm not sorry that I worked to keep up what I think was an undeniably deep mutual bond, but with the unfortunate timing and pacing I am sorry that it may have shaken you in the wrong way. I never intended to pressure you, so I've tried to make my exit as gracefully as possible, to leave no wounds, no scars, to remove myself completely and leave just a memory of what I'm convinced was a beautiful dream.

rainbowarriors

Last weekend I spent some time back at my mother's house, and noticed pretty prismatic washes of light all over the living room floor as my dogs padded back and forth across the room. Rainbows show up very beautifully on tousled white fur!

greetings, december

This past weekend was a mostly rainy one, and I spent it catching up on errands and meeting up with an old, old friend. To explain the images - a fiery bloom I spotted on Saturday through a dreary misting of rain; paint spots on a palette - remnants of art sessions I've been having with my sister all last month; a handful of maps I got at the flea market, and a magnificent sunset that hung above the hills west of our house after several hours of rain on Sunday afternoon.

through hazy eyes

Some phone snaps taken over the past two months:

1. The Eastern Columbia Building downtown on Broadway - this looks so gorgeous lit up at night and is easily the best example of Art Deco architecture in downtown Los Angeles.
2. I passed by this booth of vintage industrial furniture without regarding it too closely, then did a double take upon noticing this marker-scrawled folding chair. Andy and H (and maybe an abstract fish?), wow :3.
3. A handful of translucent, waxy mystery seeds that I WOULD know the name of had I harvested them myself. But they were in the hands of an art professor that I had met a mere 15 minutes before. (edit: they're amaryllis seeds!)
4. Semi-crepuscular rays in Highland Park, mid-October. When the sky looks this way, it elevates even the most tedious drive...
5. A deliciously soft, sweet and chewy hachiya persimmon, courtesy of our family mechanic! I so wish I had more of these to munch on throughout the winter months, they are like candy.
6. Mushrooms fit for a hobbit! (except for the fact these are of the toxic lawn kind).

salvation mountain

Y and I have had Salvation Mountain on our list of places to visit for years now, and two weeks ago on a whim we decided to make the drive out to Slab City, where it sits on the fringes of. It was about three hours each way - I drove, and Y snoozed as she had been up at an ungodly hour the night before. When we arrived I felt an eerie sense of excitement, and the bright adobe/painted hill welcomed us with crazy, earnest declarations of love for God, along with other Christian sayings and verses from the Bible. I admired the intensity and passion that must have filled Leonard Knight to compel him to create this art installation, though my own days of piety and prayers for salvation are a thing of the past. When the colors and sayings became too much, I focused instead on the construction of the piece - eyeing bales of hay, rolls of chicken wire and branches and imagining how the project would have been pieced together. We walked back to the car, but not after pocketing a few rocks, and started the drive back.

But who drives all the way out to Niland, CA from Los Angeles and skips a visit to the Salton Sea? Not us! We stopped at Bombay Beach, which was eerily quiet. It didn't have that fresh salty smell of a saline body of water - more of a rank, tired odor, and there were dried up skeletons of fish strewn all over the shore, as well as decrepit remains of houses and shacks sadly leaning over on their last breaths. It was weird and beautiful.

On the last leg of the trip, we made a point to view the Cabazon dinosaurs, but didn't feel up to paying $8 each to see what we assumed would be kitschy life-size dioramas of said dinosaurs in semi-realistic settings. We were happy enough to see the T-Rex and Brontosaurus at the entrance. As we left the heat of the desert and the swooping wind turbines, heading back to (at the time) rainy L.A., I exhaled a silent sigh - happy with the small adventure we had, and grateful for the freedom and panache we possessed to make it happen.

the light returns

Thanksgiving was almost a week ago, and the days following it for the long weekend were days of utter bliss. For hours at a time I did literally nothing, which at the time made me feel a little guilty, but looking back, the idleness equaled precious decompression time. Not at all do I regret the lazy hours spent with my sister on our freshly cleaned red couch, munching on two different types of Trader Joe's cookies, exchanging idle chatter/profound ideas, watching multiple episodes of Breaking Bad, then switching to Jim Jarmusch's 'Dead Man' when I got too stressed out about the former. Interspersed with visits from A, who came back down for a quick Thanksgiving break, as well as a long adventurous bike ride with my sister, it was a satisfying, languid long weekend.

A sorted out this multi-tool (you can see me in the spoon!) that my sister had picked up for me at a flea market over the summer, and now that all the components are unfolded I can clean it up real nicely. I handed him all my recent rock finds and listened intently as he patiently studied and identified them. The two close-ups are a really roughed-up quartz that I found on a hike in Griffith Park, and another dark quartz-ish chunk I found at the construction site in Hollywood. You all probably know this, but the translucent quality of both are the most obvious indicators of the presence of quartz in the rock. I like how they glow when the light hits them.

One more month until the year is over! Let us finish it strong.

construction details

I am really thankful for my job for the close proximity it affords me to have to such a large and busy construction site! I walk the site maybe once a week, but I am going to have to up it to three times or so to accurately document the flurry of activity that is ongoing. Much of my job has lacked a creative slant to it, it has really just been documentation, observation, and interpretation of information/ideas (which is...slightly creative) but the good thing is that the past several months have been much BUSIER, and I have gotten a better sense of my duties and how I can be useful to the office.

I feel like I haven't had much to say the past few weeks, but those lulls in life are inevitable, so it isn't a big point of 'crisis' like I've made of such silences in the past. And I have been reading again! And generally I've found some more time for myself, which feels like a giant breath of cold, fresh air...so, no complaints here.

new home

My sister and I moved out of the San Gabriel suburbs, out of our mother's house, to a new place of our own. A few days ago I met another occupant of our quadplex, and she asked me, with a teasing smile 'How are you liking it here - how d'you like the noise.' And though yes, there's the obvious presence of rambunctious little neighbor kids and a lot more street traffic/noise, the price of freedom is well worth it. The commute to work is shorter, even if by a fraction, the neighborhood is super-walkable, fairly bike-able, and there's lots to explore. Yesterday evening, we walked to our local polling location and dropped off our ballots, then got pizza at a tasty Italian joint and headed back home - to new home.