I can't just leave it at that - how boring. I'll make a list:

• For about six hours last night, I experienced Vertigo. It seemed familiar, so it must not have been the first time I've felt it, but I can't remember another time. Once, at it's worst, I fell into the wall after getting up fast. It felt silly.
• When I woke up today it was gone.
• I love reading.
• I have to pee but I don't feel like going.
• I'm going to play soccer tomorrow night. I love playing soccer. Last week I had a beautiful, maybe even perfect assist. I patted myself on the back.
• I still like my job.
• I haven't been exercising since early October and I'm lazy to start again but my body feels it. Stagnated. Too much unused energy.
• I bought a pair of jeans for $a-lot-of-fucking-$. They're a little big on me. I don't know if I should keep them. But I don't really have any other good jeans. What to do...what to do...
• They are really long - the jeans - they hit the ground even with 3" heels. This is a pro.
• I have to go back to work. I'll come out with something better next time. it's been months since I've sat still and just observed.

The Road

I just finished reading a book, The Road. It's really good. I almost put it down in the first 20 pages. It took a while to get into, but turned out reallly good. That's all.

Dedicated to Juweleriettalessa

I just finished a book that has exactly 500 pages, which is pretty cool, and after the last period on the last page, the author dated and addressed it, as though the whole book had been a journal entry, which I liked.

It's called The Famished Road by Ben Okri, a Nigerian author.

Right away when I started reading the story, it reminded me of my baby sister, Jweeleurietta, and if any part of it can be true, then she is also an abiku. I'm going to copy an excerpt: Section Two, Book Seven, Chapter eleven: (Julia, I'll bring you the book when I visit soooooon)

The spirit-child is an unwilling adventurer into chaos and sunlight, into the dreams of the living and the dead. Things that are not ready, not willing to be born or to become , things for which adequate perparations have not been made to sustain their momentous births, things that are not resolved, things bound up with failure and with fear of being, they all keep recurring, keep coming back, and in themselves partake of the spirit-child's condition. they keep coming and going till their time is right. History itself fully demonstrates how things of the world partake of the condition of the spirit-child.

There are many who are of this condition and do not know it. There are many nations, civilisations, ideas, half-discoveries, revolutions, loves, art forms, experiments, and historical events that are of this condition and do not know it. There are many people too. They do not all ave the marks of their recurrence. Often they seem normal. Often they are perceived of as new. Often they are serenewith the familiarity of death's embrace. They all carry strange gifts in their souls. They are all part-time dwellers in their own secret moonlight. They all yearn to make of themselves a beautiful sacrifice, within this life, setting the matter ready for their true beginnings to cry into being, scorched by the strange ecstasy of the will ascending to say yes to destiny and illumination.

I was a spirit-child rebelling against the spirits, wanting to live the earth's life and contradictions. Ade wanted to leave, to become a spirit again, free in the captivity of freedom. I wanted the liberty of limitations, to have to find or create new roads fromthis one which is so hungry, this road of our refusal to be. I was not necessarily the stronger one; it may be easier to live with the earth's boundaries than to be free in infinity.

Given the fact of the immortality of spirits, could these be the reason why I wanted to be born - these paradoxes of things, the eternal changes, the riddle of living while one is alive, the mystery of being, of births within births, death within births, birhts within dying, the challenge of giving birth to one's true self, to one's new spirit, till the conditions are right for the new immutable star within one's universe to come into existence; the challenge to grow and learn and love, to master one's self; the possibilities of a new pact with one's spirit; the probability that no injustice lasts for ever, no love ever dies, that no light is ever really extinguished, that no true road is ever complete, that no way is ever definitive, no truth ever final, and that there are never really any beginnings or endings? It may be that, in the land of origins, when many of us were birds, even all these reasons had nothing to do with why I wanted to live.

Anything is possible, one way or another. There are many riddles amongst us that neither the living nor the dead can answer.

Post

Lyds told me she looks forward to reading these so I'm going to keep posting.

I spent Thanksgiving with a random collection of local yocal jugos. We cooked a turkey with two red unpeeled potatoes inside instead of stuffing. We had guacamole and delicious feta cheese instead of cranberry and pie. We were all kind of sick - some flu flew through Oahu's air and snapped pieces of most of us. Some worse than others.

By the way, can you believe it's already December 2008! That's ten and a half years since I graduated high school. Gooolllleeee.

So, we had the huuuge teli on most of the evening, watching this and that. I really wanted to sink deep into the couch and watch holiday movies like Miracle on 34th or White Chritmas or Charlie Brown's Christmas or the Snowman, but other people wanted to watch news and sports. Oh well.

A little later on in the evening, the two elders in our party of ten or so turned on some folk jugo music top volume (I mean, I think the whole 40 floor apt building heard us) and started dancing and singing and shouting and whisltling and yelling. Neither of them even had a touch of alkeehaul on their tongues. They just went at this music with lust and relish and without caring what anyone else thought.

There were five people sitting around the table, before all this, the teli dinning a quite background, when all of a sudden (in a pretty small apt room with hardwood floors and cement walls, mostly empty, vvvurry echo-ey) our white -haired large-breasted tetka turned on her folk music full blast and started jumping around the room old school. I was still sunk in the couch, no longer zoomed on the teli, feeling a little ill. I watched her and it was easy to imagine her 55 years ago in her early 20s, the best dancer at the party, beautiful, fun. I smiled a lot. B and D got up and tried to learn some of her steps.

Anyway....

Back to vrk.

Listening to blues these days... Ah if this ain't the blues, then I don't know what the hell the blues would be...

Must change this

It's sad not writing much anymore.... Notes from Vegas:

Nov 10, 08
Going on the end of the year again, I'm sitting at Raffle's Cafe in the Mandalay Bay Hotel alone. was flown here to learn the secrets of our new system-in-progress. Switch over date: Jan 1, 2009. Saw our new corporate building - something else - even had hardwood ceilings - what -. Wandered through the crowds tonight on my way to buy smokes, water, and a treasure for my B.

Cheers.

I think I've heard more foreign languages and accented English here than American - at least in the streets. They've given me a tiny dark table in the backest section of the restaurant, up next to a huge window overlooking glass that reflects the restaurant back to me, but in the daytime would overlook some bushes on the garden level.

Everybody bailed tonight. E got sick, the fckr and A works too hard - eh.

The Alfredo Chicken pasta isn't bad. The wine is hitting me fast. Slick.

B told me we should elope to Vegas. Maybe we can spend our honeymoon in the red rock mountains. I wouldn't mind eloping, I think. Having Elvis as our witness. Maybe we can arrange to elope simultaneously with Kriki and her E. That might be terribly fun.

Just finished reading The Awakening by Kate Chopin. She didn't start writing till she was in her forties I think. Pretty cool.

My belly's filling up and still I can't quench the sting of the wine. Hmm...

That's all. It's sad not writing much anymore. I must change this.

Lalala

Music I love these days:

• Slightly Stoopid
• Sierra Leone Refugee Allstars
• LL's Radiohead Mix
• St. German, Tourist
• Martha Wainwright, a song or two
• DJ Shadow

Not Dead, Just Hibernating

It's been almost a six months since my last entry, so I thought why not today? Plus, I'm grumps this morning and don't feel like working with people - I just might bite somebody's upper arm. So here goes an update, instead:

• Working as an office person - especially the lone office person - suits me and I am still very content with my job in general.
• I like some of the people I work with, so that's good.
• Last Sunday and then this past Saturday and Sunday, B worked, so I went out to Fort DeRussy Beach Park with a picnic and coffee and found a herd of palm trees making peaceful undulating sunshade on the grassy lawn bordering the beach, laid out a blanket, and read a great book, The Road Home. My only company, the staccato of clapping palms, the dull roar and suck of the ocean, and the distant cacophony of gathered groups of humans enjoying themselves.
• Still living in Honolulu for now; still looking at homes in Atlanta.
• My baby sister Jules is moving to Maui in just over a month and my Lyds may be moving to Big Island which means Christmas is going to be happy this year.

I think that's all for now. I'll come back to this later.

Guess who got a new job

yep. me.

yeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaahhhhhh.

I'm going to kick arse at this new company and learn a hellalot and enjoy my new concrete block of an office and my new staff of 8 men. Oooooeeeeee.

Ill be a book keeper (a keeper of the books) starting monday. Experience-less but who cares, I'm smart and a fast learner.

And I'll be getting nearly double the paycheck which is another main thing.

yippy skippy.

I totally missed Valentine's day

We figured it out, me and B, after we turned on the teli in the morning and then he turned to me and said "Happy Valentine's Day" and I said "Oh!" and "Happy Valentine's Day too." And that's all we did until dinner when we stuffed yummy cakes into our bellies, oded to V-Day.

So, I've got my eyes peeled for a new job. I had two intereviews this weekend and totally killed one. I mean I left my interviewer reeling from how good I was (despite my lack of experience). Then he asked me to come meet the artist at their show last night and I so I came and stood around a gallery, reading every book and magazine and wall information and looking at every photograph, waiting for an hour and a half for this guy to introduce me to the artist (because I still haven't been offered the job, so I can't just go introduce myself as Anna, the new employee). He never did and I started to get really cold and sleepy and bored, needless to say, so I told this guy I'm out, looks like he's really busy and I hope to hear back from him. So--drumrole--we'll see in the next two days what happens.

happy good joy love peace nice cool strong confident love

I can't leave my blog on such a negative note. Everything is great. I'm happy because:

• Today the sun is shining except when the occasional cloud wanders through and sprinkles its tinkle onto the tourists. Then then come in my gallery with a smile and when I ask how they are doing today, they say "trying to stay dry."

• Today isn't yesterday.

• My friend just gave me a compliment that I can't seem to shake. yay.

• I'm eating a cheese and spinach pastry that I made yesterday with Raspberry fruit spread on top. And it's delicious. And I made it. And it's finger-likkin good.

• I'm working with my favorite work person.

So.

Oh the humiliation

It's amazing how just a few simple words or a few simple nonwords can make a person shrivel right up in this business. This morning a woman with long dark hair, middle-age, made me think of the word "towering," marched into the gallery. Usually someone who marches in and past me without looking around or saying anything is either on a mission to find a lost family member and doesn't give a sh#t about the art or knows exactly what they are looking at.

So I'm sitting at my desk this morning and just found out that a close family friend just lost his youngest son and I feel horrible and I'm trying not to cry and I definitely don't give a whatever if I talk to this woman or not. But this is my work, this is "my house" and I at least have to greet everyone. So I get up, even though I don't want to, and go around the massive marble column that divides our gallery in two, and I smile and say "hello" and "how are you this morning." And she says, "I just came back for a look" and I say "Oh, is there a painting you're considering buying?" (purely curious). And she looks right at me, says, "not today" (or: you're a slimy sales person, filthy, get away from me, I hate you) and marches right past me, brushing my shoulder with her searing air bubble and marches out the store. Just like that I had the value of an untouchable. God, I nearly said "fuck you." I nearly did cry after that. I don't even know why I felt so horrible about it. It was all in her body language. It was as though she pissed on my face in front of her friends or something. Fuck her anyway.

And all those horrible people who just want the rest of the world to feel bad just because they are little shits.

Ok, I'm over it. I got it out. Back to work with a smile.
Shewsh.

NOOOOOOO PATRIOTS

Sad day. Sad moment for a nearly "wow" and "that's my team" but then in the last 2 f-ing minutes. I had just finished a beer after work. Was catching the last quarter and then, the touch. down. downer with 39 seconds to go. And my stomach dropped and I thought of my brother and I nearly cried. Fancy that. Def the beer speaking but it took me a good 20 minutes after the game to suck in my feathery emotions waving messily out from my head (like if I had really whispy wispy feathers sticking out the top of my head) tickling B's face so that he nearly picked up some of the negative and told myself it's only a damn game and I didn't even keep up with the season and its def nothing personal to me so get a grip. Humans are strange is all I can say.

Let's all take a moment of silence for the Pats and their fans.






Thank you.

GOOOO PATRIOTS!!!!

YEAH.

a new job?

So I just got my tax forms in the mail. I now know that I need to find a new job. I've felt this for sometime but never wanted to look closely at my numbers. I started working full time for this company in June (end of). From then till Dec. 31, I made $9.5 thousand dollars. That is a big, fat joke. Ok, maybe not big and fat but common, I'm a college grad and I'm making less than $20,000 a year living in one of the most expensive places in the US to live. Aiai.

alligators in Yamoussoukro

I remember this one summer, way back…. This was in the very beginning, maybe in the late eighties. Every summer we lived in Abidjan we went to the beach for three weeks with the whole mission—the Ames and the Danylaks. We’d drive to a town down the coast, San-Pedro, and stay in the Guest House. In the beginning there wasn’t a coastal highway so we had to drive four hours north-west and then four hours south-west. And right about the half way point we would stop at this creepy resort in the middle of nowhere, desolate and probably haunted. We would buy lunch here—icy cokes and grilled meat and steaming salty fries—and sit out on the patio, a deck three stories up above sprawling grassy lawns surrounded on all sides by dark and close, towering, vine-y jungle. The kind that is nearly as dark in full sunlight as it is at night; the kind that makes you feel like you have to protect your front because somehow and with relentless persistence it tries to grab you by the wrist or around your middle and drag-suck you into its monstrous mouth of oblivion and unknown horror, its heart of darkness, where you’d be all alone forever.

The cracked marble and grimy halls of the hotel between the main lobby and the patio were lined with glass cages. Most of them were vacant of animal life although they carried signs, shadows and echoes and trampled earth floors, of what might have once lived under the planted rocks, on the trees and logs, and around other carefully placed props. In our imaginations these empty glass cells were frequented by the smells and hoots and howls and faces of Africa’s wildest wild—a monkey with one-hand swinging on a vine, the other grabbing an armpit, hooting and staring at us, daring us; a big cat lounging half under the fat log chunk with about a hundred rings I’d have said, yawning and ignoring everything especially us, feeling only the sun streaming in dusty streaks down from the sunroof above onto its pallid yellow once golden mane. There was one cage, however, that still had life in it. As you entered the narrow passage leading to the open restaurant and patio, on the right, a glass wall looked down four feet onto three huge alligators, almost invisible in their apathy, lying under logs near a dirty green scum fake lagoon.

After lunch, after eleven sets of little legs run wild, explore and breathe, and six sets of adult legs lounge, stretch in the open air free of the enclosed child noises that large full cars on long rides magnify to the nearly unbearable, we all pile back into our caravan of three once white old station wagons and off we go, anticipation brimming at its boiling point until post-lunch slumber silently picks us off one by one. Once again, mom and dad in the front seat get to quietly and with secret relish pull out the book they’d been reading together and let their imaginations unfurl on the open road before and around them; the story, passing as the countryside beyond the car windows, enhanced inside by the drone cruise zone warm sleeping bodies and a humming car create together.

I remember I always wanted to ride in the car with mom and dad, no matter who else was there with me. I didn’t care if my friends or sisters rode in another car, I only wanted to be in our 7-seater Peugeot 504. The front two seats were normal, the middle seats were three individual chairs like maybe miniature van chairs with lap belts, and the back seat was a bench where two of us would sit, we could stretch a little more and usually we didn’t wear seat belts if we could get away without my dad noticing. I liked this car the best because mom always packed snacks. Not just a bag of popcorn or something, but a huge bag of popcorn heavily salted to perfection, MnMs if we happened to have any on hand from a package some church or other sent us, apples and oranges, ham and mayo and mustard French bread sandwiches (my favorite), a glass bottle of African-salted peanuts, bags of onion-fried banana chips we got from the Doumbouyas (no one else’s compared), water, kool-aid (yick), and any other treat my mom could fit into her plastic shopping basket she always packed for long road trips. But it wasn’t only the food either. My mom loved to read to us out loud. We were usually halfway through some book we had been reading at home out loud together and so if I opted to ride in another car I’d miss some of the story. And then there was the simple mom and dad part. I liked to be with them on the road more than anyone else. I guess all parents get antsy, anxious, impatient and I didn’t like dealing with the trips and histories and baggage of other families, even if they were like second families. Plus, mom and dad knew me and they were warm and home.

I think in all the years we drove out to San-Pedro, whether the trip took us eight hours or four after they built the coastal highway, there was only one year we did not have a flat tire and/or break down on the way there. Somehow I have no memory of the way home, but the trip there always seemed endless and the inevitable flat tire eventually over the years made me feel unbalanced feelings of rage, as though I were the brunt of someone’s cruel conspiracy. So, about an hour out of San-Pedro, usually, the car would start to click and hiss and wobble and that was the telltale sign that my dad’d better pull over fast. We’d all pile out of the car and hover along the side of the pot-holed road cutting a gash through the plantations farther out, the red-dirt jungle closer in to San-Pedro. Luckily my dad usually led the caravans and so the Ames and Danylaks would pop into view behind us on the winding remote road, slow to a crawl, then stop a car length or two back. And their cars would all dump their contents onto the pavement also. All the kids would reconnect, tell whatever stories there might be to tell during the two-three hours of separation, or run in circles or punch or pinch each other or whine at the general trees and sky. Once, even, we had a temporary teacher, young and naïve and crazy fun Stephanie, with us and she and the kids all took off on this path through the jungle. It went straight up and in, red dirt packed under a layer of dust, roots and rocks making the climb feel more treacherous, the adventure more serious. The farther we got from the cars, the more afraid I felt. Of jungle demons, I think. And then we heard a buzzing. We all stopped to listen, strewn along the trail with our ears pricked upward. The buzz grew louder and louder till I started to stutter about the killer bees from Africa I’d heard of and maybe we stumbled on one of their domains and god knows what the others thought. Finally, as the buzzing reached a height that made my knees start to knock, through the folliage very close to us and slightly to the right we saw the whitish square box of a semi-truck lumber by. How disappointing…that we weren’t deep in the wild jungle and that the bees were just a truck.

To be continued…

I have a question, please

This is serious. How come, after the fact, I feel so strange...almost a feeling of pity for a customer who came through the gallery with his wife and informed me that this painting, called "Peaceful Moments," was his favorite in the gallery. I think of this painting as a little girl painting, lisa frank-ish. But why would I feel that way about this man after the fact? Who cares what one person likes and another doesn't. Why does it feel confused with pity... I don't even remember what he or his wife look like anymore for pete's sake. I stood in front of the painting and studied it trying to answer my question but I came up with nothing.

Tant pis.

I had a dream

This morning and I won't go into too much detail because most of the dream has already slipped away anyway. But in the span of 2 hours, I gave birth to a baby boy (even felt my overlarge breasts--hurray!--all crispy and sore and sagging with milk), planned and almost got married to Bojan (the dream switched scenes before we could complete the deed but it was the day of and I had been battling cold feet for days), and finally I was mauled to death by rabid white wolves as I dodged a helicopter set to kill me and 7 other south american boys while we were training to become soldiers (three boys jumped into a gazebo which was blown up my missiles dropped from the helicopter, three boys tried to hide in tall grass on a hillside and were killed by the helicopter picking up the already dead seventh boy [chubby redhead] and dropping him on them and then shooting them all; i made it to a small forest and as I dove inside, a large rabid white wolf who was in the process of killing a rhino in a stream with his partner turned on me. I held him off for a while, had him by the jaw, pulling top and bottom apart as hard as I could, but his partner saw and turned on me and that's when I woke up.)

It was quite intense, the whole experience.

welcome 2008

It's 11:33 a.m. right now. I got to work about 30 minutes ago (was supposed to get here 2 hours and 30 minutes ago). Happy New Year. opa. We didn't get home till 5 am. I haven't partied that hard in years. Had a great time. I think. heh. I'm guessing my phone alarm (I use everyday to wake me up) probably went off this morning, I just didn't hear it. Eh, what can you do...

On the whole and considering, I don't feel too bad. I might still be drunk though. I enjoyed dancing. It has been a while since I danced hard. Not since my sister visited me, and before that, I couldn't tell you.

So, I'm no good for nothing now. But welcome 2008. Bless those I know and love (me too).