happy in new york city…

I am so happy here right now.

I am going to Cairo and then Gaza to film the Gaza Freedom March from the 27th to the 4th of January. CODEPINK is sponsoring me.

I am also going to be there with Alex Shams!

Al Jerrari, an incredible guy who volunteers at Alwan as well, will be lending me his small 3ccd-Panasonic camera, extra batteries, and mic. I will be thinking of a project to do, perhaps in collaboration with Alex.

I am working with DeeDee Halleck on her Waves of Change project, which profiles a bunch of different grassroots media activists from around the world, including Radio Victoria, which I got to visit when I was in El Salvador!

I will be leaving this Saturday morning for Colorado, where I spend a week, and which will be amazing…

I am making a delicious dinner of quinoa with honey-sauteed carrots and yams with sage.

I am high

photoshop sprouts

I’ve been living in New York City for a turbulent two months (exactly). It’s been really hard to find a place where I feel like I belong, not to mention a place where I can feel peaceful. I feel really beaten down sometimes, and lonely, a lot.

There are little sprouts of happiness throughout my days though, and I’m discovering them more and more lately. These are the times when I feel inspired, excited to be here, and enthusiastic about exploring. 

One of these little sprouts is Adobe Photoshop. At Deep Dish TV, where I have been volunteering since I’ve been here (and hopefully will be moderately employed as a grant writer… and helping the amazing DeeDee Halleck with her Waves of Change project), I have for some reason become the graphic designer, even though I had never used photoshop before.

My first project was making a program for a screening and panel discussion we held at the Labowitz Theatre at NYU, on November 20. The event was called Behind Bars: Exposing and Transforming the Prison Industrial complex. The screening consisted of clips from the archive of programs we have – everything from a piece on Mumia Abu Jamal to one about the last graduation and end of college programs in prison. After the screening, a really interesting panel of people spoke about their experiences as activists working to end the prison-industrial complex. Pilar Maschi, who I was really moved by, talked about how she was running from the cops when she was pregnant with her first daughter, and now she works as an organizer in the South Bronx for an organization called Critical Resistance. Her daughter, who she calls her “safety blanket” sat on her lap the whole time, and I got to sit across from her at dinner afterward and talk to her more about her story… Here is the program cover that I designed for the event

Starting yesterday, Brian (the director of DDTV) asked me to make a logo for our DIY Media Series: Movement Perspectives on Critical Moments. This is a DVD series that looks at grassroots movements that have developed in response to injustices – there are DVDs on the rise of ACT-UP about AIDS, the environmental justice movement, the protesters of corporate globalization, and the movements that arose to combat US government intervention in Latin America. Anyway, here is the logo that I designed for that all day today. 

Anyway, creating keeps my spirits up – need to do it more consistently.

homesick

a continent’s width away 

 

and my body lunges –

day dreams, flirtatious messages,

a silky orange dress 

 

i see your face on my screen 

but the invisible film is stubborn,

and elastic

 

it lets me stretch toward you

momentarily

and pulls me back 

 

i try to stabilize the innermost 

of the concentric circles.

my nail-biter identity

I paint my nails so I don’t bite them –

I developed the tactic when the bitter nail polish my grandma forced me to put on

countless times a day one summer

wouldn’t work.

I guess the sight of chipped nail polish was more of a deterrent

than the bitterness that would dissolve away after sucking

on a finger for a couple of seconds.

I get defensive about it,

because I’m pretty sure it goes deeper than most people think.

“I paint them so I don’t bite them,” I say,

It’s not very sustainable though.

I like bright red – but I’ve been through lots of colors –

all shades of pink, yellow, dark purples,

black when I went to metal shows with Brian, sparkles and iridescents,

and multiple colors at once on alternating fingers, or in stripes.

I really liked the highlighter colors that were popular for awhile,

but I’ve never actually tried them.

And I love the smell of it – especially nail polish remover.

I like to use cotton pads to take it off,

and put my face really close to my fingers while I’m doing it

so I can catch the fumes.

I can get my nails to grow out, but I have to keep painting them regularly –

usually every two days –

otherwise, a couple of chips, and it’s over.

I like how long nails look and feel,

but I hate getting gunk under them –

and even on clean days you still get some brown under the white tips.

They suck for popping zits too,

but they’re fun to drum on hard surfaces like an intimidating school principal.

My identity as a nail-biter goes back pretty far.

I think mom told me once that they had ultrasounds of me sucking my thumb

already in her belly.

When the dentist told me when I was 5

that if I kept sucking my thumb my front teeth would stick out like a rabbit,

I turned to nail biting,

and I haven’t stopped since.

I wonder what it will take to stop me,

because the nail painting is just a quick (unsustainable) fix.

the horizontal sun plane

one of my favorite times of the day is when the sun gets to the place in the sky where it’s shining horizontally in at your eye level if you take it head-on. It gives everything a hard one-sided glow and long shadow, and if you’re looking at forms in between you and the sun, it’s even better – the detail disappears and you get a silhouette.

The sun was reaching at me from the horizon across the vertical bars of the fence around the swimming pool. The fast I walked, the quicker the blinks of light between the black bars, and the more dizzying the effect.

The thing is that you have to be in a flat place without too many high buildings around or else the sun is blocked. I remember thinking that was something really true that I had never thought about before with Manhattan and its skyscrapers – that you are usually in the shade because the buildings are so tall around that they block the sun.  You get sunshine for the little window of time each day, between the tops of the buildings, if the light is even able to seep through the sky.

It was disappointing to me, because it kills a lot of my enthusiasm for New York or and wanting to live there someday. I just don’t know if I could really stay sane in a shadow box of shielded suns.