extra credit

My career is landscape management and design began with the training I received from my grandmother, who watched over three-year-old me as I overwatered her begonias and underwatered her petunias. I remember so clearly to this day, putting too much water in one plant, and, when told that it was too much, trying to compensate with the next plant, by putting in only a bit of water from the plastic watering can, and being instructed to add more, and more, and a little bit more, as I rationed out the water drop by drop so as to avoid flooding this plant as i had the other. It seemed so completely arbitrary; that plant needed less water than I had given it, and this plant kept needing more and more and more and more! I spent the next sixteen years of my life frustrated about the varying needs of plants - how do you know?! - through countless doomed violets as an undergrad, wandering through my school's greenhouse and matching the foliage with my envy, and finally met the money tree who I have successfully neglected off and on for nearly six years. I think it continues to live out of gratitude for the night there was a fire in my apartment building, when I grabbed it before running out into the cold darkness.

Michael Jackson would love it, too.

I'm loving the new black-on-white damask print that is popping
up in so many editorial photos lately. I've noticed it at least three times in the past week, and, most recently, on cokemachineglow.com, in this promo shot for some rihannawannabe. Like I said, I love the background - I just hope the pattern and color scheme don't get too overplayed, or my current idea for the car I will get once I get a (real) job (off white VW beetle with black leather and all black trim) won't seem so snazzy.

so tired...

This semster has been overwhelming! So much so, that - I never finished this post. I am so glad that the fall '08 semester is over. edit, jan.11, 09

I am not great at writing but find it useful yet; hold up every time tempted; yes so tempted, to continue a thought yet finish one, giving pause to the forementioned thought.
-Kemper

Tonight I will paint. Next week I will get my camera fixed. The week after I will post a photograph, and you will know that I have not been idle.

Reading Bachelard makes me hyper-aware of space

For the past year, I've spent my days and weeks divided between my partner's home and my own. One day here, two days there, four here, and three there, and so on and so forth. This constant uprooting is... unsteadying. Without my own space, or at least one consistent set of walls in which to surround myself, I feel more vulnerable to the world, much like I did in my adolescence: the world can affect me; I am more highly suggestible, sensitive, and strung.

edited

The summer reading list has finally taken shape:
L'etranger, Albert Camus
The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus (he and I share the same birthday, November 7 - how cool is that?)
The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard
Literary Theory (An Introduction), Terry Eagleton
and I'll also make my first serious foray into the realm of Derrida and Heidegger.
Additions to the list:
100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Slowness, Milan Kundera
On Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera
the entire 8-book series of Anne of Green Gables, Lucy Maud Montgomery

Since I can't afford to travel this summer, I've happily settled for the provincial image of myself under a tree in rec park, wearing a skirt, probably eating an apple, with a very good book in my hand. In this image, I also am probably not listening to music (in order to keep intact its quaintness), and probably ignoring my book at intervals in order to lazily watch tennis balls and long legs as they arc to and fro on the courts. I'll probably also try tennis once again, but only once (my legs are short).