voxygen.net » This is my life?

Self-storage

~LS~ — Wed, 02 May 2012 14:34:23 +0000

Usually when I pass the self-storage places in the strip malls as I drive to work, I ignore them. They are part of the mundane aspects of my daily life that blend in with the roadside trivia like payday loan shops, Payless shoes, the Mall, and Office Depot, McDonalds, the homeless panhandler, the gas station, and people waiting for the bus. None of these things stand out until I need them or they disrupt me. Selective perception, and all.

Lately I’ve observed the large amount of self-storage places all around me. I started tracking them during my trip to New York City, where they seemed out of place because the city has no strip malls. Given that space is a premium in the city, they make more sense there than in suburbia.

With occupy Wall Street dominating the discursive and political field, the need for somewhere to store our [...]

A bare etching and the intimacy of touch

~LS~ — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 01:58:02 +0000

I bought several Jack Bilander etchings lately. Bilander was an artist in Chelsea, my neighborhood growing up in New York City. Lately I’ve had this urge to go there. I’ve built up an obsession, really, to return to my Grandmother’s apartment, to be in her space, to see the cheap 1960s parquet floors of Penn South, smell the esoteric scent of Jewish working class intelligentsia, and view a wall full of images still strikingly memorable forty years later. I don’t know why I became obsessed with Jack Bilander, but when I found his suite of pictures on Picasa, I sighed audibly, repeatedly, at how many of them I remembered vividly. So indelible and powerful. Clearly it’s a need formed because of where I am in my life at this precise moment. But precise moments are the entire point.

[...]

Tattoo 2

~LS~ — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 06:07:10 +0000

From session #2 with Kristen at Art Addictions

The session lasted three hours. Kristen filled in most of the color except for one corner. She also still needs to do the leaves on the tree and the rest of the ripping skin. This one hurt like a bitch. My limit was definitely two and a half hours and I gritted my teeth during the last thirty minutes. There’s conflicting opinions on aftercare but I can say that icing my arm down made a huge difference reducing the pain and swelling. By the next morning, most of the tenderness was gone. I still have two smaller pieces planned for the other side of my arm. Now that I see how large and bright the tattoo is I have developed a little bit of uncertainty. Just a little bit. It’s so visible. I can’t hide it unless I wear a long sleeved [...]

Beneath the circuits, the tree of life

~LS~ — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 21:53:29 +0000

I am in the process of getting a new tattoo. The image is a “bio-mech” tattoo in which the skin is ripping open to reveal a circuit board beneath it. The skin is tearing because the tree of life, which is growing behind the circuit board, is bursting through. I think it’s an especially splendid idea.

The design reflects a nearly life-long fascination with the dualism of nature vs. technology. I’m not sure when this particular fascination began. Probably with Star Trek and nurtured through old sci fi like Andre Norton, Robert Heinlein, Ursula LeGuin. Of course, when I started learning about feminism, I discovered the gendering of this dualism (along with the gendering of the nature/culture divide, hard/soft sci fi, and pretty much everything else). All of this culminated with me turning into a Donna Haraway fan girl with a little bit of the [...]

A Splendora Tale

~LS~ — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 21:40:24 +0000

I spent my high school years in a small Texas town named Splendora. Splendora, Texas. You have to say it that way when you refer to a small town in Texas. The whole thing, town and state. Humble, Texas. Conroe, Texas. I don’t know why, you just have to.

Moving to Texas from New York City was a traumatic thing for me. For a myriad of reasons, I never fit in. No need to go into that now. I’m sure you can imagine.

Here is one tale that encapsulates the quality of my daily life in Splendora.

I didn’t cut classes that often. Mostly because there wasn’t much to do in the neighborhood, I didn’t have a car, and even if I did, the closest civilization was half an hour’s drive. On occasion I would wrangle a good friend into going somewhere and great adventures were to be [...]

Suzuki Beane

~LS~ — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 03:05:53 +0000

When I was a child, my nickname was Binie. This is a huge confession on my part. Still, the net has become everyone’s confessional, so I have permission to do so. Binie was short for my middle name, which I will in no way repeat out loud to any living soul. In addition, according to family stories, I somewhat resembled the character “Suzuki Beane” (1961). Apparently, I wore jeans with the cuffs turned up and I had an attitude somewhat similar to hers. So the nickname stuck. Suzuki Beane, who lived on Bleeker Street in Greenwich Village, was the child of hipster parents. She befriended a square named Henry and the two of them ditched school to adventure far and wide through New York City. It’s a charming book. In a fit of reminiscence, I searched for it and discovered it’s going for $100-200 these days. I [...]

My family culture

~LS~ — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 06:43:22 +0000

Families have cultures. Rules and roles, beliefs and values, habits and customs, these things form the unique reality of a family. One of the ways that families express their culture is through little communication rituals and idioms, phrases that make sense only in the context of the family, and perhaps close friends who get to observe the family in the wild. I often reflect on my family idioms (from my current family, not the clusterfuck of my family of origin). I find them charming and endearing and overwhelmingly cutesy. Of course, those dark idioms exist as well, but let’s not go there.

Most of our idioms revolve on the cats and my niece, Willow. Some are shared in the dyadic coalitions that form among the three of us. Many come in and out of fashion from time to time, and some die off, never to return, except during bittersweet recollections.

[...]

My grandmother and her family

~LS~ — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 03:08:11 +0000

Generation Y documents everything about itself. Facebook, youtube, myspace, flickr, the repositories of that generation are endless. My generation has some documentation; we’ve got home movies, videos, pictures, but nothing close to what the children of Gen Y will have as they age. Most people of my generation are lucky if they know anything about more than their grandparents and maybe their great grandparents. My family did a poor job of documenting us. I have very few pictures of myself as a child growing up. I have very few pictures of my parents at any age. I have almost no pictures of my grandparents. There were no home movies or videos. Compared to most families, there is not much of Willow either.

I got in the mail today from my mother a handful of pictures of my grandmother. I don’t know anyone in the pictures other than her. I can [...]

The Hole Poem

~LS~ — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:33:56 +0000

In my first days of recovery, I found the hole poem incredibly helpful and meaningful as a metaphor for rearranging how I wanted to move through the world. I had a conversation with Willow last night about the difference between being a victim and a survivor. I hadn’t had that conversation in a long time. It provided a nice opportunity to take stock of the changes I’ve made. I would say that at this point in my life I drift between chapters three, four, and five. There are some holes that I fall into out of habits that are very hard to change, negotiating the holes on the street has become easier, and for the most part I do take a different street. Still, there are those difficult “what the fuck?” times that I fall into a hole. Moreover, sometimes I wonder if avoiding certain streets is a good thing, [...]

10 Crazy Things about my Husband

~LS~ — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 13:35:55 +0000

Everybody has their quirks, some of which can be funny and some of which can be annoying. My husband has some strange ones. I’m most definitely sure he’d say the same about me. In all, I find most of them completely charming. Here are some of his more curious behaviors:

1. He likes to take pictures of me while I’m sleeping. I don’t really understand this. They are all the same, a big blob of me with my head sticking out of the covers. On occasion, the cat is above my head. After years of telling him to stop, he finally has. My fear is he will post a whole gallery of strange sleeping pictures of me on facebook. One day I asked him why he keeps taking the same picture. His answer was one of the sweetest things. He said no two are the same. They are like snowflakes. [...]