Here’s the thing: this morning, I woke up at 7:30 to go to work. And to get to work I take the G train all the way to court square and I get in a van filled with some of my favorite people in the world. I throw my things in and run across the street to get coffee, and then we barrel down or up or across one or many highways in a rattling 15-passenger tin box to get to someone’s house where we make a t.v. show and a really big mess. I take pictures. It’s what I do.

And I am so happy. After work I run home and take a nap, and as soon as my alarm goes off for my second job of the day, Misty my roommate also tells me she is doing acupuncture in the living room for some of her lovely friends. So i tip toe around them as I try to get ready and then I go to work, which is an event in a hip place in the West Village and everyone is wearing suits and trying to impress one another. I am there for two hours. I leave.

As I am leaving I desperately try to light a cigarette before I meet my boss to discuss my life plans and what the hell is wrong with me. I have it half lit and am walking so as to evade all the people I was harassing all night to let me take their picture. It is like fleeing the scene of a crime. As I round the corner I see my boss, who thinks that smoking is the last thing I would ever do, so I have a minor panic attack. I immediately stub out my cigarette on a lamppost and throw it into the street. He hasn’t seen me yet because I cut all my hair off and he walked past me like I was a stranger.

The thing with smoking is that I know it is bad for me. I know it is bad for everyone. I know that we should all just start cutting holes in our throats so we can breathe out of them already because god knows in twenty years we won’t be able to, with all the shit we suck into our lungs. And I don’t even like it. But I want one. I want one because I know I’m going to die someday, and why not throw a penny in the hat, why should I pretend like it’s not all going to end someday? And I want to see my breath actualized in mid-air, i want to watch it float away from me. It is all my existential anxiety in a neat little roll of tobacco. And I can’t explain why, but sometimes, it’s comforting. It feels like you’re doing something. It helps to qualm that nagging nervousness that creeps up from idle hands. So, I do it sometimes. I talk like this cause I can back it up.

It’s strange to go from an event where no one knows who you are or why you’re really there to a meeting with one person who knows exactly (or tries to anyway) what you’re all about and what you’re trying to do without ever saying you’re trying to do it. Should I say it?
I’m trying to save the world.
And the world is a very big place and I am very small, and this, I know, rationally, is not possible. But why can’t it be possible? Why can’t we make tiny, tiny changes, so small you could hardly see them, that eventually add up to a monumental accomplishment? I think after college I found that many people have a very skewed idea of accomplishment. I don’t know how to quantify success because I feel like I’ve never achieved it. It remains some kind of distant ideal, like the horizon, that only exists if you remain far away from it. Dave tries to get all this out of me. WHAT DO YOU WANT SANDY? DEFINE YOURSELF. REALLY. Don’t you think it’s important? He asked me. and I do. But the issue here is I don’t think that I am very important. I don’t think that I am important at all. And I can’t distinguish between myself and the things that I want to do without thinking that, well, I’m getting a very big head about them.

I went home this weekend and it reminded me why I moved away. And then I started re-reading East of Eden and remembered why i love that book so much. It lends credence to the pursuit of big ideas. If you are not going to pursue the big idea then why bother? You can’t stomach it. You might as well just lay down and die. There are the kinds of people who don’t want anything to do with anything new, or anything “fancy” or anything strange or excessive or bold. These people keep us grounded sometimes. And I don’t deny that, that I sometimes need someone to remind me of the ground beneath my feet, but I think there are too many of these people and they can’t all keep telling us what to do. If it were up to them, we would never have invented anything. And the world would be a colorless, un-fascinating place.

So, Dave and I sat in the weird cozy haven of the Tavern on Jane Street hashed all this out for a long time and when it came down to it, my issues were mostly with my sister. And being at home. I think I have this very rigid idea of what my home-life should be like: i want it to be cozy and warm and open, I want it to invite strangers in and make a fire, and I want to just tell everyone everything that’s been happening since it’s been so long and there’s never enough time. But then I go home and it’s not like this at all. It’s cold and dark in my house, and my brother only watches television, and my sister only gets mad, and I am mostly just bored. And it’s sad to me. It’s sad to me also that my sister is the one person in the world I think I should be closest to, and still we remain so far apart. But what can you do? We’ve been through all these difficult things together, but we’ll never talk about them, we are mostly scared. I think that’s all anyone ever is when they’re mad, they’re just scared and misunderstanding, and it’s easy to get mad at everyone, to take everything defensively, but who do you become that way? I think you just become a monster. But you could also become someone like me, who believes almost anything, so you walk around half the time thinking you’re a sweetheart and a genius and then the other half of the time you think you’re the most awful person in the world, selfish and dumb and immature and horrible. And it doesn’t get you anywhere. It doesn’t get me anywhere. I need some middle ground, which is my ground, which is the part where I say: I’m really not all that bad, I think I’m kind of smart sometimes, and if I just set my mind to it, I think I could do something really amazing and maybe even help someone. Somewhere. Somehow.

So after all of this, Dave and I finish our meal with a really disgusting version of Bananas Foster which was really just bananas covered in caramel and ice cream. It was yummy in a gross, I-shouldn’t-be-eating-this kind of way. He walks me to the subway, where I miss the F by about four seconds, and I stand there bopping to beyonce until another train comes to take me home. I rise above ground. I light a cigarette against all odds with a single match on a breezy night and walk home. When i get home, I pry my stiff shoes off my frozen bleeding feet. I wash my face. I get in bed.

I’m ready for tomorrow.

I’ve been watching a lot of MADMEN on netflix. It’s juicy and maybe is built off of mysterious and nostalgic stereotypes that we all have of the 50′s. Since we didn’t know them. I think the rose colored pictures of photographs of that time indicate how we feel about them. Everything is hazy and romantic, it makes me miss feeling like you could go out with just a roll of film and make something beautiful.

I feel like there used to be miracles. Maybe this too is a romanticization. But there used to be mishaps of exposure and light and sometimes you could catch the focus just right, and the timing was spot on, and it became some kind of miracle at the end of the day to hold that print in your hand after watching it come to life under an amber colored dark room light.

Maybe I am sad in the weirdest way. I’m moving back down the street at the end of this week, and I’m excited it about it, so excited that I painted: one bright orange wall and three khaki neutral walls with green undertones. The people at benjamin moore tried to talk me out of it. That will look olive green at night, they said, but let’s be honest here, green and orange are my favorite colors and that hay colored khaki just never would have done it for me.

My favorite picture at the elliot erwitt exhibit was the one of Robert Frank and his wife, kissing in a kitchen. I don’t know why! I guess I have a soft heart and easy bones. But I did appreciate his recognition of the absurdity in daily life. I did! I swear I did.

Please don’t walk into my room late at night and tell me I’ve done nothing all day. I really don’t appreciate it.

I had a mouse situation last week. As in, a mouse was trapped in my tiny room with me and scratching the shit out of my door because I (quite thoughtlessly) never made a mouse-sized hole in my door for his convenience. He was trying to make one on his own and I’m pretty sure he would have succeeded had I not woken up and interrupted the process which consisted of using tiny claws and making them sound huge by rapping on the door and scaring the shit out of me at 2am. SCRATCHSCRATCHSCRATCHSCRATCH and I woke up sweating, convinced that I had a ghost or a possum desperately trying to get in my bed with me. I am familiar with small animals and the fact that they respond to sounds and light, so I banged on my bed a few times and it stopped, and I tried to go back to sleep.

The problem here was that I thought this mouse was on the OUTSIDE of my room like a considerate rodent. He is meant to quietly roam our apartment’s common spaces looking for crumbs during the wee morning hours while my roommates and I sleep ignorantly in our respective rooms. I am okay with that. But no, this mouse got lost in my cozy nest-room with me and was probably nibbling on a fallen piece of chocolate that I dropped on the floor and didn’t pick up because I am a sloppy mess. Anyway. This mouse was not going to be defeated by a dumb wooden door so he waited until I quieted down to keep going. The problem was, laying there, in the dark, refusing to look at this itty bitty infestation, I allowed him to become way bigger than he actually was. I gave him a rabid personality, with teeth and claws and in the dark the sounds he made were much more akin to something raccoon-sized, or some kind of prehistoric mouse with fangs and claws the size of kitchen knives.

I texted Evan, who called me to tell me I was being crazy, until he heard the sounds of this phantom animal through the phone. Is that it? He asked, that incessant tapping?
YES. DUH.
Okay, well turn on your light and look at it.
OHMYGOD NO
You have to! Make sure it’s not a raccoon.
EW!
Sandy!
Okay okay okay.

There is something about pests that makes me a completely irrational human being. I can’t face them. But I tried. I turned on my light and peeked over the side of my lofted bed. He was gone. Disappeared to some nook directly beneath where I was supposed to be sleeping. Well. Great.

He’s gone, I said.
What do you mean he’s gone? said evan
I mean he disappeared and is probably crouching right under my bed waiting to attack me while I’m sleeping and make a nest in my hair full of babies.
That doesn’t make any sense and why don’t you open your door and let him out?
Okay.
Okay. Call me back if it keeps happening and I’ll come over, but I don’t think we could really catch it. Unless one of us chased it out and the other had a broom with a bag and…
No. No that’s not necessary. I will try to sleep and pretend he’s not here.

I opened my door for five minutes and kept my eyes closed the whole time, hoping that Mickey had taken this brief opportunity on his own to achieve his freedom. Very doubtful. To a rational person, at least. Which I was not at the time. I laid in my bed with the lights on and I was surprised when the scratching started again, and again in my mind he morphed from a little animal into a feral super-rodent. I peeked over the side of my bed and saw him run away, and I screamed involuntarily. And then I laid there trying to reason with myself: He is just a little mouse! What is the problem! Just leave your door open and he’ll leave you alone and you can co-habitate in peace.

But I was already sweating profusely, partly because I was scared and partly because my room becomes a tropic zone at night without the fan on. The mouse had already won. I called evan. I am coming over I can’t sleep here and no amount of reasoning will let me do otherwise.

So I left and left my door open for little mousey to come and go as he pleased. I might as well have put out a water bowl for him and a little bucket of cheese. If we were going to be roommates I should at least try to make friends. During my walk I realized that this tiny animal was surely as scared of me as I was of it. And I laughed out loud at how silly I looked, this silly giant, screaming involuntarily at the sight of a tiny mouse. It was funny. But I still wasn’t going back there. I still wasn’t keen on sharing small spaces with rodents.

So, the week went on and we set up a trap, and this morning the trap was flipped and little mickey had been snapped to death by his love of peanut butter. Life is tough for rodents. But it is tougher for those who catch rodents whose roommates refuse to do the dirty work for them, and I had to scoop up little ex-roomie and put him in a plastic bag and dispose of him. And it’s really just the weight of mice that makes me unable to handle killing them. They’re much bigger than bugs. People have pets that small, which they keep in cages and feed regularly and are entertained by the way their little legs run on a relentless wheel. So I squealed over it with a plastic bag for ten minutes before Nick said, What’s the problem??? You’re such a baby! He stood behind me, directing: pick it up by that little metal piece you dummy, see?

I picked him up and put him in the bag and then I screamed.
Oh give me peace, Nick said. And went back to making his breakfast.

I know, I know, re: last week. Haven’t you gotten over all this already? Isn’t Mercury out of retrograde or whatever bullshit excuse you’re using to cover up the fact that you’re cowardly when it comes to real conversation and confrontations? I think I’ve been finding myself doing a lot of the things I used to do back when I was a real coward. I won’t speak up. I will walk twenty blocks to avoid having to change trains. I really just don’t like it. This is not unlike the way I will leave a job before ever having to admit to having real responsibilities. Or avoid calling someone back who wants to hire me for a regular position. Or I will fall into this role unknowingly, and kind of ease my way along, the whole while trying to convince my anxious self that this is all going to be alright: it’s still part-time, it’s still not a real job, nobody’s counting on you for anything.

What is wrong with me? I think it’s mostly that I am twenty-three, and this is more or less completely normal. But what is normal, anyway? I’ve convinced myself so far away from normal that in my head I fall right between adorably neurotic and batshit insane. Maybe this is because of things I’ve experienced recently. Maybe this is because I need to simplify my life, and get it all down to an easy one or two or three steady jobs instead of six or seven sometimes-maybe jobs.

I think I need to write more. There are so many terrible books. I don’t know when I got so intimidated by the world. Probably when I left the cozy womb of high school. It’s not really rocket science. And some people never go back. Maybe this is all about the idea in the pit of my stomach, which is that I’m relatively certain I’m going to die alone. Like, really alone. I look out at my life as one big desert of relationships. Or a string of non-relationships with mostly imaginary men. Take Kyle, for example. Or anyone else. I think about my romantic history and I mostly think, Oops.

I like to think that I always come through in the end. If I’m not coming through, then maybe it’s because I am dying, and, let’s be honest, that’s a valid excuse. I thought that moving would help me lay to rest this un-ignorable urge to have my life “sum-up” a certain way, to be perfect, to have birthed something valuable and beautiful and strange. It’s like having something constantly on the tip of your tongue and you just can’t spit it out, because you’re not quite sure what it is yet. Imagine feeling this way for years. I’ve been trying to contain and maintain and express this anxiety for a while now and it still hasn’t come out just right.

Maybe I’ve been too busy asking people for permission to express it. I want every green light. I want everybody around me to be ready to catch me when I finally get the words out and I want them to tell me that I nailed every single one. I want to know the ending already and I haven’t even started.

So. What I’m trying to say is that I’d like to write a novel, and I’m having some issues with this endeavor. This is not a pretty side of me.

But I’m ready.

Let’s get rich and give everybody nice sweaters and teach them how to dance!
Let’s get rich and build our house in the mountains making everybody look like ants,
from way up there, you and i, you and i.

Anyways. Good morning. Mercury is in retrograde so last week I spent a week in the most inarticulate funk I’ve been in in a while. I am still fumbling for words. I had to thesaurus “ineloquent” which didn’t work, so I thesaurus-ed eloquent, to find that the antonym is inarticulate. Exactly.

I think some of our greatest moments occur during periods of brief insanity. In this crazy secret story of mine, I was in love with a mormon in Colorado and we talked on the phone for nearly a decade. He’s married now, and I can’t even fathom being in a relationship that lasts more than three months. But there are plenty of other things I have tried to not talk about for months and days and years. How else do you get over them? It’s like giving up ghosts. You have to admit to having them first, recognize them for what they are and were, and let them go. Goodbye, goodbye.

Last week I sunk into this strange depression that left me feeling like I was a fundamentally horrible person. I couldn’t get out from under this cloud that told me that I deserved a, b and c tragic factors of my life situation, that this would always happen, because something at the core of me is wretched and rotten, some kind of ancient, festering wound. This had something to do with not doing yoga for a few weeks, working too much and then not working at all, and falling into this understanding that nothing ever changes.

“You just wait a hundred years and try to tell me nothing changes,” says Pema Chodron.

“We use the word hurt when talking about things like this because when these things go wrong it can feel as if you were hit in the sternum by a huge animal that’s run for miles just to strike you.” says Dave Eggers.

The train is pulling in under my apartment. It feels like it’s been pulling in for hours, a constant trembling. I think that hearing about other people’s depressions pulls me out of my own. How do we get so sad about things we were never guaranteed in the first place? Nobody ever promised you anything. I am lucky because I am still able to find joy. I’ve been blessed with dozens of beautiful cousins. And I am happy when I make rent. I am happy when I eat tacos. I am happy when I think it’s getting warm out. I am happy that I can wake up early and sit cross-legged on my bed in my little room and look up through my sky light hatch. I am the luckiest unluckiest girl in the world.

Pieces of poems sometimes stick to my heart and this is one of them:

And then you will come to a river.
And then you will wash your face.

How could we deny ourselves this simplicity?

If yes, then we are the same.

Let’s just not talk for a while. We like to believe in the spring that things are blooming, that we’re not losing anything but cold days and heartache. With spring comes the need to feel alive and experiencing loss in sunshine is at once comforting and baffling. You can go outside and know the sun will warm you. But this only makes your drafty insides feel that much colder.

I miss Lizzie. I’m reading a book called Death in Spring and it’s probably making me think poetic thoughts like this. It’s a beautiful (!) sad coming of age story that is some kind of allegory for fascism in Spain. A boy last week asked me if I knew who Nietzsche was. Maira Kalman said:

we could speak about the meaning of life vis-a-vis non-consequential/deontological theories, apodictic transformation schemata, the incoherence of exemplification, metaphysical realism, cartesian interactive dualism, revised non reductive dualism, postmodernist grammatology and dicey dichotomies. But we would still be left with Nietzsche’s preposterous mustache.

Who has the time to be bogged down by all that anyway? Yesterday I bought 50 dollars worth of groceries. I feel like I haven’t been grocery shopping in three weeks. Unfortunately it’s mostly perishable. I am hoping to get paid this week. I worked for twelve hours on Friday in a swanky SoHo hotel. We photographed the VIP lounge, which was a surreal space reminiscent of the Alice In Wonderland white rabbit if he were to enter the Matrix in Asia.
During our shoot one of the hotel managers tied up her french bulldog at the bar while our photographer wasn’t looking. He turned around and said, I want a light here, here and here… Whose dog is that?
The whole day was strange. I apologized to Marcello at the end of the day for not being more helpful.

What are you talking about? he said. You are one of the strongest girls I know.

What bothers me about this is that this woman (note: yes, a woman, though she dressed like a high school girl and had the babyface of a teenager) went on some frou frou cross country road trip, documenting her own pretty face and intact body the whole way, soliciting weird things from ugly men at truck stops and in their own pathetic apartments. She was always taking off her clothes, what little she had on. One video had her “acting out” the motions of sex with an imaginary lover. This was all as if we could examine loneliness alone. As if it could possibly be a meditation.

But the endless proliferation of her face, the string of photographs that showed her sending her frilly underwear out onto abandoned landscapes from train windows, were all so unfortunately uninteresting. I asked Nate what he thought and he said he liked that she was demonstrating the sexual power women have over men. And I thought… interesting. What?

I guess this is true: she had these fat slobs removing their clothing and twirling in circles while she watched. Men followed her through empty gas station parking lots. She taught them the choreography for Oops I did it again. But I am tired of people endlessly mistaking the “power of female sexuality” for any real power at all. It’s not like she wasn’t naked too, in all these pictures. I hate that we think being beautiful has any kind of real currency in the world: as if all this beauty could be translated into an influential torrent of ideas that sweep over the nation in waves of egalitarian experiences for everyone. But this has not happened. I don’t think women are taken as seriously as men and this gallery seemed to prove as much. I am tired of people trying to touch upon the tragic comedy of the female experience; I am tired of watching it all played out over and over again in various forms of media.

I look at these pictures and I don’t think they’re far removed from what Cindy Sherman did thirty years ago: dressing herself up as so many beaten versions of herself, though perhaps this one woman isn’t disguising anything. And if this is a reality, this “lonely” reality of a beautiful, sad girl, then I don’t think we’ve come very far at all. Maybe we’re going backwards.I want something new. I want someone to give me a female experience in film or fiction that isn’t heartbreaking, that isn’t exposed, exploited, left for dead. I don’t want the “exposed” the naked truth of women to be revealed anymore, as this beautiful powerless thing. It’s as if there is just one trope for us, and that is to join up and exploit yourself or exist forever in the tragic, lonely world of women who won’t just get down, get naked and give it all away.

is my new official photo blog. While I work on making my “professional” photography site available, this one will have to do. Also, birds and fish is a concept that I can stick to, somehow, when it seems I am otherwise unable to commit to anything.

Yesterday I met Mary at four and twenty blackbirds, (here) where I dumped all these things on her. I was still under the piano. But I think it was also a quiet, over-caffeinated morning and maybe things look worse after a weekend of heavy drinking. I just got to thinking about how nothing about this weekend was really different than many other weekends I have had throughout college. Except me. When you are different the things you do are different even when they’re the same.

My roommate just burst out of the bathroom with come on eileen playing out of his phone and dancing. haha.

And the difference is, also, that I’m in love with this city. And like any great love sometimes it sucks. But then I had hot chocolate in a pie shop that felt like it was perched on the end of the world, and when that didn’t completely cure me I had this pie:

I really think there was something magical in this pie. And then I went to yoga and watched Barack talk about fixing the world, and then this morning it was snowing.

And I think I’m further along than I thought I was yesterday, somehow.

The trouble with contentment is that it must end somewhere:
with me waking up, the radio turns off,  and all those sounds disappear.

This is the childhood complication of loss: I can’t understand it,
am unable to wrap my heart around the singing strings of grief,
some endless echo reverberating into space
that turns over and over in the air, unending–
when the reality is his heart stopped one cool morning in july,
slowed to a quiet surrender in a losing battle against an invisible enemy.
A battle I’d won only ten years before.
And I can’t fathom outliving him, the way I can’t fathom losing him,
still, I can’t fathom stillness in a body I was so fully connected to.
A breath that was in some primal sense my own.
This might just be a problem of my imagination.

It’s just me. I’m the one who can’t let go.
These events didn’t just happen in my life–
they happened to me, in the way cartoon pianos
fall from the sky and land on unknowing victims
who always seem to walk away afterwards.

Maybe I never walked away.
I can’t peel myself out from under the weight of this old piano,
I was crushed underneath its pedals and keys, its steel core and hammers,
and there was nothing I could do to re-inflate. We are not as resilient
as imaginary creatures even though we all like to believe it’s possible.

The problem is that I keep waking up under this piano.

And every day I hope will be different but in many ways it’s quite the same.

The same cockeyed notes flattened into noise, my pile of a body crushed into its great depression and I don’t know myself anymore: I have no eyes,
no bones, no muscles or skin. I imagine I have melted into the ground to be with him again. But I have to walk away. How do you walk without legs?

Words lost their meaning for me.

I would sit on the chair in their closet and remember how his body bent there, sitting as if for the first time each day, after he’d taken off his suit and peeled off his socks he sat here in this chair, pulling on sweats, pushing back his hair.

There are days where I pull him from memories as if he’s a child drowning in the water of my mind. As if I could resuscitate him just by thinking, make him real again.

Not every day. Hasn’t it passed? One year, six months, eighteen days. I have been this woman for eighteen months and eighteen days now.

It is my first instinct to say that I don’t know how I feel. But, the truth is, I feel completely alive.

It’s funny how death can bring a life back to you. In ways you never thought possible.

The problem with me is that I am the kind of person who thinks nothing is stable, I close my eyes and I don’t expect the world to still be there when I open them.

I’m not quite sure how to fix this.

Yet.