Sunday, December 28, 2008

The argument.

Today I slipped in and out of consciousness for over 12 hours...was rather unprofessionally ditched on photographing a band's promotional shots (when they'd sought me out to do it? so silly.), and knitted 6 inches of a scarf.

but in all honesty, that isn't what I did today. I physically did those things but my head has been somewhere entirely different since well into mid-day yesterday. This has happened too much recently. My body is in a single physical location but my head is in another. Last night ended with a breakdown into a show of vulnerability that was not only uncalled for, but devastatingly exposing. I've developed this habit of holding things inside of my chest, catching them with my breath until the pressure builds and I have to let it out. Usually this release is at far more controlled and convenient moments, but last night was a mistake. I haven't cried in front of anyone except my father and mother in years.

Yesterday I was thinking about people, about friendships, about love. I was thinking about peace and quiet and order and the lack of all three inside of my life. I was thinking about the past and how relationships failed and friendships faltered. How I spent years searching endlessly, wildly, for someone to love and be loved by and ended up breaking off the most important pieces of myself into individuals who don't remember my name or hold any importance to me. How lately I have everything I wanted beating down my door but it's only a ghost from the past want to love a fellow ghost and not a girl. How I feel heavy like granite but fragile as porcelain and my nerves are shot to loud noises and caffeine overdoses. I was thinking about disappearing inside of crowds of people and never coming back. What it would feel like to dissolve into the background and go about my business. About being forgotten. About abandoning and abandonment. About how I've become incapable of trust. About mistakes.

I was thinking about wanting hope, but how all I've got left are empty pages and words wispered to empty walls.

Friday, December 26, 2008

I wish so badly that it would snow.

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

photos of rachel from about two months ago. They're nothing I'm wildly crazy about, I've done better. But I know she'll appreciate having them now :) She did a great job. it was freezing and she was half-naked.






Understanding the seperation.

I hate people, I just want to know everything about them. I hate people. I just love a good story.

Monday, December 15, 2008

Cleaning

Today I began what will most likely be an excruciatingly tedious process-that of disassembling, rearranging, and repainting my room. I'm lucky to have friends who are all for helping me, or else I feel I'd never achieve my goal. It's going smoothly, I emptied out a lot of junk, put away laundry, took apart my old desk and moved my computer to an even older one that was once my father's. I picked out paint swatches today. Sunflower Yellow is my color. I'm hoping the change will bring some warmth back into me, and help me leave a great deal of things behind me. I want to be nothing but who I am currently, and living within walls decorated by a 14-year old Lin felt as if I were living inside a time capsule.

However, this process spurred a rather unexpected (and just as unnecessary) confrontation with my mother. The context of the argument isn't of import. It's more the fact that there was one. My relationship with her has never been easy, and over the past few months I've developed a lot of respect for her purely because she survived me through my phases of adolescence. But there's a great deal lacking between her and I. Too much resentment and disrespect lays in an ocean of distrust and misunderstanding between us. The most I can muster anymore is to be as short as possible and avoid conversations, because my grades and my future and my faults are generally the only subjects called upon. I wish I understood her. I wish I could go to her with my fears and joys and tears and heartache. I wish my highest walls weren't to shut her out. I wish I had her acceptance, her support, and her understanding. I have so many wishes where she's involved.

I don't want to leave in a few months glad to go. Our family has become nothing but emptiness, and that is because we never go deeper than the surface on any subject worth pressing. I'll love you always, anyway, of course. But I feel like a stranger in my own home all too much.

Sunday, December 14, 2008

To be honest would mean vulnerability. And you and I, we don't give into that tempation.

Friday, December 12, 2008

Robinson Jeffers- Ave Caesar

No bitterness: our ancestors did it.
They were only ignorant and hopeful, they wanted freedom but wealth too.
Their children will learn to hope for a Caesar.
Or rather--for we are not aquiline Romans but soft mixed colonists--
Some kindly Sicilian tyrant who'll keep
Poverty and Carthage off until the Romans arrive,
We are easy to manage, a gregarious people,
Full of sentiment, clever at mechanics, and we love our luxuries.

Thursday, December 11, 2008

coming back

More and More recently I can feel the color creeping back into my skin and the blood flow returning to my heart. Maybe it's the warmth of the last few days, however rainy it's been. I am organizing and refurbishing my heart.

Tonight I saw friends I hadn't in years and felt as if I'd come home from an extraordinarily long trip. I'm heading to Charlottesville on saturday to take photos for We Know, Plato's radio show. Apparently I'm going to get a free dinner and all the band members are lots of fun. They want a photographer to work with them on conceptual ideas instead of just average promos. I like that. It's like a breath of fresh air to get to work with people again, and feel confident about my craft. It feels like it's been so long.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

clementines

hmmmm

I've never really had a blog before. I used to fiddle with a live journal account but never to much success past a little ranting and fruitless updating.

perhaps this next endeavor will be more successful. if so, I am excited.

My day was excellent. Full of warm weather and bright colors and a ruined shirt thanks to acrylic paints and Marshall oils. A day where outside of everything I felt singularly myself at all times, and I smiled a great deal for small reasons.

I've been thinking much of people. Everyone around me seems alien sometimes, and it's great fun to start picking them to pieces and try to insert myself inside their head, understand their thought process and motivations. Speculate at their aspirations, their wildest dreams. Their fantasies. Worded incorrectly I'm sure that sounds terribly creepy but I find it fantastic and quite fun. Truthfully that's why, when I'm awake and aware enough to do it, I love working somewhere where people come to sit and interact. I like seeing how they do it. I still don't understand it, for most of my social activity feels forced and uncomfortable, like I'm overplaying a part that was meant for a subtler actor. The more I learn to stay quiet until I can really think of what it is I am trying to say the happier I am.

There's another thing about everyone around me...it's the proximity. All these lives, these hearts, these dreams, these failures. They exist so closely smashed together that it's astounding society has room for more of any. I get the urge to interrogate my teachers and coworkers occasionally, ask them who they are, what they want, what they used to want, who they loved, who broke them, who built them, their favorite color, their darkest secrets. I have this rampant desire to know and understand absolutely everyone, for no one person is the same as the next. However similar the patterns our lives take the tiny details skew the graph indefinitely.

But these questions cannot be asked freely. So I watch and gather information on my own. And believe it or not, I'm becoming able not to judge. I truly have no desire to share with these people, I just want them to share with me. I find I only truly feel affection when my desire to know is coupled equally with the desire to tell.

Humanity, I love you.