school's out for the winter

edward and jenny on our roof / manhattan 2.10




TODAY IS GREAT
SNOW IS GREAT
LUV U GLOBAL WARMING SEVERE STORMS
COME ON BEBE LETS FROLIC
AND THEN DRY OUR BOOTS BY THE RADIATOR
AND HAVE A NICE NIGHT IN YOU AND I ON THE LOVE SEAT.

summerhot madness

this summer's tomatoes on the fire escape august 2009



went over to cara's new apartment last night, she's got exposed brick walls and a back porch with broken down chairs. i read a psychological study years ago that stated a high correlation between cityfolks with exposed brick in their apartments and overall feelings of contentedness. but correlation aint causation.

still, though, she's got a back porch with a sky in it, places for us to all sun our bones when this place starts to thaw (and it will)

after dinner we all started watching music videos with high school party scenes, feeling happy and like we had a past, and eventually we came upon will smith and dj jazzy jeff's "summertime"

that song makes me want to wear belly shirts and hang out on stoops and on cara's new back porch with the BBQ going all smoky and arnold palmer in my glass.

i'm realizing a function of my switching from digital to film: all my summer photos are coming back now, and i can't write about anything recent anymore. i look through my boxes and get pictures of tomatoes and tan faces and beaches.

so let me tell you a little something about my winter

it's cold, it's good, it's a little nervous. someone said the theme of this year should be decadence and i agree. i want to sit with all of you in warm rooms and revel in it. drink hot drinks out of nice glasses and wear impractically fuzzy socks that you can't even put shoes over, that's what i want.

i like winter best, i'm a winter creature, i like wearing more clothes and i hate sweat. i like seeing my breath. wearing big coats makes me feel tough and eastern european, i like to think of everything in cyrillic and all us humans just crazy enough to brave it these few months. i like how awake the cold makes me feel. i like how the city smells clean this once each year. i like the dry sidewalks like we're in the tundra, in a cold desert where everything just rattles and everything is hard surfaces. cities are meant for the winter and so am I.

i even like when the cold drives people inside, like any other condition new yorkers can't handle, like any time before 8 am. the streets get desolate like morning and walking around in my two pairs of pants and hood and black jacket, boots and flannel, long johns and blanket, i'm alright.

three cheers for winter shivers &
three chills for winter cheers

oh god now i'm making animated gifs for fun like a hermit

jarvis yawns eternally @ the apartment



in addition to becoming one of those people who takes pictures of their cat i guess i've also become one of those people who makes GIF animations

gif + cat + elise = casualty of the internet

real post probably in 5 minutes
love elise

ripe youth

valentines day, manhattan 2009



this is exactly how i feel right now

hüzün

hudson river, manhattan 1.09.




somehow there seems to be a word in every language for that feeling no one has quite the right word for



hüzün in turkish
ennui in french or college



i want to know every word for that particular feeling we just can't understand
if you know,
please,tell me

sixth and shevchenko

cara, manhattan. december 2008


work jumped on me like those hungry dogs in cartoons. i've been sleeping with the window open by my pillow, so my face always feels the cold and being awake isn't so much of a change.

every day is a new day here, which you can say for anywhere, but new york just makes it so easy. it isn't a question. it is immediately the elephant in the corner of the room, every morning staring at you as you sip coffee with it and all of the other ones you've met before.

yesterday was too warm to do anything real. sometimes i forget that there's as much difference between 15 and 30 degrees as there is between 65 and 80. after a while my cold hands just stop discerning, and it all is just simple cold. but the 45 degrees of yesterday was really something, and i walked to tompkins square park to listen to the pigeons coming closer as they forgot that i wasn't part of the park bench; i scared them away every time i turned a page. four different children said hello to me. but the thing that made me warmest was hearing the birds; i forgot that you need a park for that, here. you don't have that quiet bus stop wait before school on the corner of nothing road and nothing road.

leaner love

alpharetta public park, GA. 12.08



for how much noise is in the city, it's wonderful how quiet i feel

empty lot blues

manhattan, 12.16.08



it's looking like i left the city in a snowstorm and that's how i'll come back to it. i'm so busy with all of the dissatisfying events that come before moving. things that feel like they were for nothing because you just end up where you were before.

but wow will i miss new england. i already am. i can't even look at photographs i took a day ago.

ghost town

alpharetta, georgia. january 2009




the whole world works together at the end of january to make everywhere as empty as possible. every year it resurprises me when winter cleans the woods. the sky is ground colored. the ground is sky colored. it's so cold that the streets are dry.

and caught in limbo between the old and the new homes the mass exodus begins leaving in their dust the few of us going back later, myself and a couple others with no one to fill our passenger seats left with the road salt they tracked in just a few long days before. it is four and almost dark, i have fewer people i still need to see than days left in this state, and that kind of blue i'm feeling is the one they discontinued a few years back: crayola's "cadet blue." it was a gray blue. winter is one of my favorite things in hindsight but in the now it just can get so so sad

maybe she will if you ask her

milford, massachusetts. 12.08



i took this picture out the window of my car, killing the end of the roll before the trip that took the last two weeks. i'm finally back home and i've been greeted with a night of old friends in a dimly lit room, and a foot of snow, and food poisoning. i'm homebound now. my father is shoveling the stairs and it sounds like an avalanche.

i have no idea what to feel homesick towards anymore. i miss the morning light through my window in the city and waking up to find that i kicked my windowsill herbs in the night, and the room smells like peppermint; i miss having fewer things around me. my room here has become a depot, sedimentary rock of my entire life. i've never not lived in this room. there is dust from me that is as old as me. there are books older than me. i found a notebook today that chronicled my thoughts when my hamster died; each letter is an inch tall and the paper is wrinkled by kid-tears.

the pilgrimage south was more than i could have ever imagined it to be. expect photos soon, as soon as i can leave the house to get some film processed. but two things:

1. i love america
2. america makes me love massachusetts so much more.

back soon. my sickness is channeling the weather gods and keeping me inside.

this was the last warm day i felt

sequoya's fake keds, manhattan. 12.08




and i don't even know what date this was- and as much as i love the cold- it's good, that i'm heading south.
a fifteen hour drive to experience what i've always made fun of as the mid-country lukewarm unwinter.
it is going to be great

i love new england more than places i haven't even been yet

massachusetts, 12.21.08



because times like these happen so often it's as if massachusetts thinks it's normal

the first night

nate, massachusetts. 12.22.08




it was dusk and we
knew at that moment that we
would survive, twig us



because nate was a snow centaur, the head and hands of the entire earth