I have a desktop littered with half-blogs that I’ve never managed to post.
Lately it feels more fun and more easy to read what other people have written.
So far, in 2008, I’ve gotten through:

Left To Tell - Immaculee Ilibagiza (an autobiography of a woman who lived through the Rwandad genocide of 1995.)
The Buccaneers - Edith Wharton
Recovery - John Berryman (only the first five chapters)
five issues of The New Yorker
a lot of weekly gazettes

While writing the list I got the urge to finish a few more books before posting this blog. Maybe Proust. But why would I bother trying to compete with Art Garfunkel. Have you ever seen his reading list?

I’ve also watched the first three seasons of Project Runway. Watching that show really makes me feel like I’m getting something done.

My friend came over and played a bunch of cool music for me last night. It was the kind of cool stuff that makes you feel like everyone in the world is off together, having the coolest party and making up the coolest things. And in my mind I certainly wasn’t invited to the party. Art Garfunkel was, of course, invited. He is over there in the corner sipping on a wine cooler, telling Kid Sister what all he read in 1971.

Other days my mom just calls to see if I have been checking my myspace account.

What I mostly actually do with most of my time is yoga. I saw a picture of a piece of art somewhere, which was a huge sign in the windows of an office building, and the sign read, FUCK YOGA. That sign makes me pretty happy. So does doing yoga.

I think that if my mom had a list of things she doesn’t like, that I do, it would go:
1. When Khaela uses the F-word.
2. When Khaela doesn’t check her myspace account.
3. When Khaela’s hair looks careless.

I don’t know if she would say that my not making a new album is something that she doesn’t like, necessarily. I think it’s more just something that she doesn’t understand. Usually, when she calls to check if I have written a new song yet, she is calling me from her office, where she goes to do her work, and so I guess it’s a camaraderie sort of thing; she just wants to know if I am also doing my work. It took a long time to get to the place where she respects that my work is making things, and that it’s a reasonable profession, as well as a valuable service to offer to the world. She likes the recent songs a lot. It seems like she doesn’t understand why I don’t just sit myself down at a desk and write ten more new songs, just like the old ones.

I’ve have only half heartedly tried to explain that the actual process of coming up with something that is worth offering out to the world is significantly more complicated. I don’t think she’s terribly interested in hearing how it is actually valuable work for me to lay in bed until 10:30 talking to myself. There are many hours which I spent engaged in various leisure activities, which all added up to getting my heart severely broken, which I could punch onto a time-clock as relevant research for making my last record.

But the thing is, I already got my heart broken once, that way. Nobody needs to hear another song about how it felt to get overwhelmed with love and get dumped and get over it. So there is some other kind of prep work to be done, at this point, for whatever it is that I am going to make next. Since I’m not in any mood to get my heart broken, it’ll just have to stick to the small tasks for now- babysitting the old songs, washing dishes and filing old papers, reading about the American civil rights movement, trying to get my feet right in the mountain pose.

Dear Blog,

it’s hard to even know how to begin this, it has been so long since I have written you. It’s turning into one of those cases where, the longer I hesitate, the more difficult it becomes to make even the most humble attempt at communication. So, in the effort to not lose touch completely, here goes nothing.

A few nights ago I decided I was absolutely going to write you, no more hesitation, but before I could even open the text program, I had to spend about five straight hours surfing You Tube. I was looking up videos of that band Gnarls Barkley. In the back of my mind I really was thinking about what to say to you, but, Oh my god, that band is so amazing! They are totally the hottest thing! From a year and a half ago. I remember hearing that one song of theirs in passing last summer, and thinking, “hm, it almost sounds like the guy is actually singing about the experience of going insane. Too bad he isn’t, it would be so cool if someone made a mega-hit pop song about something intense and sincere like that.”

That might put things in perspective for you a little bit, blog, as to where my head has been. I guess I have been in a pretty tight cocoon, somewhere where the biggest song of the year couldn’t seep through. I think I’ve just been programmed into output mode, as opposed to intake. You have to get streamlined, in order to be able to put a lot of yourself out into the world.

There is a lovely little piece of irony and humor in the fact that I was unable to notice the overwhelming success of the “Crazy” song during its climax, because I was too busy trying to do what they had already brilliantly accomplished. The image of me, sitting alone in my house, finally finding myself in a pause between tours that is long enough to leave me hungry, for once, for the taste of new information, discovering Gnarls Barkley and freaking out about how effective they were at conveying deep weird heavy information in mega-popular music, is hilarious.
I am really into getting it late, right now.

Some people are hyper-fashionable and up on the coolest thing right when it is happening. They have the right hair at the right time.
You can be fashionable with yesterday’s hair, but you have to be careful about which yesterday. Early 90’s hair isn’t quite in yet, but I am guessing it is right on the verge, and kids in London and maybe Brooklyn must already be doing big bangs and triangle shaped perms. The nasty taste of something being still just a little bit ugly is what the superhip are after, I think. And you have to be so careful, because if you get there too late, then you are a follower. But if you get there too early then you just look dumb. Getting there right on time is what’s called “fashionably late”, I think. Like, wearing metal aviator nerd glasses four years ago: right on the money.

But there is the kind of timing, which is just loser late. It’s mom late. My mom would get into Gnarls Barkley now, from having heard a song at a wedding. “Honey, do you know these Gnarls Barkley guys?” That is what I am into right now. Just claiming time as my own. That song is amazing, and so are the other ones I’ve heard by them. Like the weird deep voice saying,”Who Cares?”
In that song of theirs.

It feels relaxing to me at this moment to focus on the quality of things, as opposed to the glittering significance of their timing. And my mom is rad, so, case in point.

I’m also really enjoying reading about Andy Warhol. Especially the book he wrote, “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol.” But maybe he is always fashionable?

I am so glad that I can still talk to you like this, Blog. I guess I’m gonna go to bed now.
See ya soon, I hope.

love,
khaela

Today was the day to seriously get down to business, and that meant standing in my underwear next to the front door, making a nest out of the twigs from my dead ficus tree. I had to stand there, because that’s where the bag full of dead ficus branches was, right by the door, ready to be thrown away. I have been paying rent on this new apartment for about twenty-two days, and last night was the second time I slept here. These hours here today were my first time being here alone.

The ficus tree is the first item I moved into the apartment. For the first week or so, it was the only thing here, aside from the refrigerator and the stove. But those aren’t mine. My ficus died alone here in the apartment, with only the attention of the large appliances. Eventually I had to move everything else in. I’ve been hesitating significantly with the last, most vital item, that being my physical presence.

For weeks I have felt strongly compelled to make mini houses. These weeks might possibly the exact span of time in which I have not been moving into my new house. The other night, I spastically declared to my friends at a dinner party, right before we were about to eat dinner, that I wanted to make a dollhouse, and proceeded to gather all the necessary cardboard and tape and toilet paper for making bed spreads, and started making a miniature bedroom on the dinner table while everyone else tended to preparing the dinner. I think my friends were a little annoyed, and who wouldn’t be? They were taking care of the needs of the real world, making adult sized food which I was going to eat to keep my adult sized body going. Meanwhile I was engrossed in assembling a tiny room which could at best only accommodate a hamster. I don’t know any hamsters.

An optimist might offer the consideration that I have been practicing homemaking. At a scale which I can tolerate. A tiny room is perfect for housing my tiny attention span for spending any time there at all.

The truth is that I am just plain scared. If I were someone else, listening to me describe my fears, I would definitely come to the conclusion that the person who is afraid to move into her apartment is exhibiting hesitation in the face of taking responsibility for herself. “The house is such a literal metaphor for one’s own spirit, this person is no doubt a little bit afraid of looking at herself, and of growing into the greatest version of herself possible.” All this is probably true about me. I probably need to inspire myself by thinking about people who have challenged themselves to really inspiring levels such as Ghandhi or Nelson Mandela. Was Nelson Mandela afraid when he first moved into the prison cell where he spent the next twenty five years of his life? What is more pressing to me right now, however, is that I am literally almost too scared to spend the night alone in this apartment. Last night was scary enough, and I had someone here with me.

I am scared of the dark.
I am scared of having to get up to go to the bathroom in the night, and that while walking through the kitchen I will look at one of my belongings, and I will see it morph into something that I don’t recognize.
I am scared that my mind will let go of control, and spin into a vertigo of terror.
I make an exception for the monsters though: of them, I am not scared. Back when I first got this place, a friend investigated the basement with me. It sits directly below my unit, and it’s the kind of basement that you’d go to pains to avoid visiting. Unless you like dark low ceilinged rooms filled with strange shit, holding oddly shaped doorways that lead to more dark rooms and more weird shit. The part of the basement that sits right below my bedroom is a sealed off room, that has a glass window visible from the front of the building, but no doorway into it. I guess it’s just a crawl space filled with old pieces of wood and dirt which raises close up to the ceilings and renders the space pretty unusable. I peeked in through an inconvenient window from a corner of one of the basement rooms. It was too dark to really see anything inside of there. I was starting to work up a good freak out about the fact that this room HAD NO DOOR, until my friend told me that about all the monsters who lived in there and how they are going to do a really good job looking out for me.

me: “so, you are saying that they are really nice guys, right?”
jacob: “oh yeah, you can definitely trust them.”
me: “They stay down there and take care of anything that might actually be scary?”
jacob: “exactly.”

Thinking of the nice monsters down there makes me feel actually safer. They are really different from me, but we respect each other.

Walking around the new rooms of my apartment, I can feel the awkwardness of myself being here. The spaces aren’t used to me yet. So far they don’t seem to care whether or not I stay.

And I therefore consider possibly not. My things are all here now, but they are sitting in a pile of boxes and at this point they could just as easily be moved elsewhere.

I hadn’t owned the ficus tree very long before it died. I had seen it over at my friends’ house, where they had put it out on a porch that didn’t have any heat. Ficus trees grow outdoors in places like L.A. They can’t take the cold. If I were in the mood to consider total paranoia, I could draw sketchy parallels, and tell myself that the tree trustingly let itself be moved into a new place, and just look what happened to it!! But his move was simply doomed by a lack of heat in the new place (the porch). My place is nice and toasty. The odds look a little better for me.

My friends who have lived in the same town as me for years are well acquainted with the dramas that surround my moving in procedures. But, why me? Why am I the one who is bad at moving in? Aren’t I limber and fluid and mobile? I guess it’s the process of getting my fluidity to slow down and pool up for a while in one place, which can be a challenge.

I moved into a studio apartment in Olympia, and immediately tore out the carpets and refinished the wood floors. It made the place feel more like my own. A big stack of boxes which hadn’t been unpacked sat in the middle of my kitchen floor there for three months after I moved in. One day my best friend came over from her apartment next door and with a burst of energy started heaving the boxes out of the center of the room, pulling out the contents and sending them towards where they belonged.

In the past, I guess I must have felt less lucidly aware of the difficulty of the process. It might be a sign of my maturity and current clarity that I notice the effects of each little gesture that I make towards actually living here. I notice how little I feel at home in these rooms, and wonder if I could ever actually feel calm and rooted in them– considering being at home in such a strange place, in these moments, can seem almost vulgar. It feels like a widow considering a new affair. From that thought, I usually flirt for about 45 seconds with the idea of just moving out asap, and then I remember that I signed a six month lease and that I have to live somewhere, at which point my attention wanders to something tangible like wondering where the garbage cans are so that I can dispose of the dead ficus limbs. It’s just change. Change happens all the time.

Each little word I write here is a pixel of change. They pile up as I lay here on my bed, typing, threatening to multiply themselves into a sensation of cosiness.

And thank goodness, because at some point, I’d like to get over these mini dramas, totally trust hat the monsters are on my side, and get busy working my way up to that more noble Nelson Mandela stuff.

(((All the photos above are of artwork by Dan Flavin. Some are from an exhibit in Chelsea, and the others are from his permanent installation at The Chinati Institute in Marfa, Texas.)))

There is a Christmas tree across the room, and through my snuffles I can smell it.
There are white lights on the tree, and I want to write a great sentence about the way that the lights on the tree play with the lights in the office buildings of Portland’s skyline, which I can see through the window here, but it keeps coming out all awkward and intentional and stupid sounding, and I am leaving it anyway.

You can’t expect to make it the best fucking thing every single time. Lots of people spend their entire careers making nothing that way.

I am really bored, laying here. I have been home from my tour to Australia now for over a week.
Australia was proceeded by one week at home,
which was proceeded by New York,
which was proceeded by a tour through the Southwest,
which was proceeded by two weeks at home,
which was proceeded by another tour through the Southwest,
which was proceeded by five weeks of wild preparations,
which was proceeded by eastern Canada,
which was proceeded by I don’t remember what,
and none of this is probably holds much interest to anyone else, but for me this trajectory is a duffelbag full of medium sized gravel that I have been slinging along as I hurl myself from one place to the next. As a manner of surviving, at each location I am required to pack more samples into the bag and just keep on heaving. When do I get to stop and unpack the gravels? I guess I get to stop once the cold that has been swirling around town manages to get inside of me and tackle me down onto the bed.

Here I am, pinned, and bored! I find myself too restless and bratty to be interested in sorting through everything I’ve gathered in the last months. Maybe tomorrow I will wake up with the right kind of mindstate for really healing myself. It’s a special kind of mood where you resign myself to your fatigue (give up on making phone calls and surfing the internet), and let the invisible parts of you do all the work, a team of gnomes sorting and filing and making little notes, like,
“Khaela travelled through a total of seven different time zones in the last five months, and one of them was only a half hour earlier than the one next to it! Fifteen and one half hours ahead of Pacific Coast time!”
These invisible workers stitch a person back together, after too much living in too many timezones. They aid with the cohesion.

Until that happens, I can’t form sentences about much of anything else.
Alternately distracting myself, and clinging to the right now smell of the Christmas tree.

Photographic relics, above:
1. Trees made by Isobel Knowles
2. Hanging Rock
3. Trees made by Victoria, Australia
4. Dominic Maricich

If summer is a floating barge, drifting slowly, splayed with friends and picnics and sunshine and nothing much,
autumn is what happens when that barge hits the edge of the planet, and all of the fun and friends go sliding right off the edge.
Into what are we now sliding, if we have hit the edge of the planet??
This is exactly the horrible question that makes fall’s approach so terrifying.

Like the inevitable descent of two stars into a predictable hollywood movie romance.
There is so much gravity pulling us into the seasons every year. We can’t decide to just avoid having fall in the Northwest this year, because we feel like it might be intimidating. It is just going to happen.

WAIT:
could it be possible that the phenomenon of global warming is actually an unconscious attempt by earthlings to have a sense of control over our environment? If one could interview the collective unconscious minds of the bulk of people who are responsible for emissions of greenhouse gases, would they collectively shout,
“WE ARE JUST SICK OF BEING BULLIED ABOUT BY THIS PLANET!
IT CALLS ALL THE SHOTS! PULLS US WHEREVER IT WANTS TO,
KEEPS US IN THIS SAME OLD RUT GOING AROUND AND AROUND
AND AROUND IN THE SAME PATH FOR A KAJILLION YEARS.
GETS TO JUST LAY OUT THE LANDSCAPE THAT WE HAVE TO LIVE IN!
IT’S TIME WE HAD A DEMOCRATIC SAY IN WHAT GOES ON HERE!
WE’VE DECIDED TO ACT UP!”
(Unconscious minds begin chanting) “NO MORE WINTER! NO MORE WINTER! NO MORE WINTER!”

And would this collective unconscious be choosing to do away with winter because, like me, it is terrified of the fall? (Presumably, we could do away with autumn, if we no longer needed a stairway to get from the glow of the summer down into the darker months of frost.)

Someone should get some bumper stickers made that say ETERNAL SUMMER.
Ultimately, if I really weigh it out, I am more scared of the thought of mountains that don’t have any snow on them, than I am of the feeling of autumn. I believe, though, that if one is required to rank fears in order of potency, a fear of something that one has already experienced will trump a fear of something imagined. So in my file, I am more likely to respond to my fear of fall, which I have known before, than my fear of an eternal summer, which is something that scientists tell me is going to occur, but which I still haven’t ever really known.

And why does the fall even make me feel scared. I wonder if anyone else even feels the same way. To me, the air just feels kind of unsafe. I get a sense that anything could happen, and might, and that I don’t even have the imagination for how scary it could be. The sky seems to be yawning open more widely in the fall than at any other time.
I guess it’s just death. Everything dies in the fall, and I can feel it.

I have had this idea of myself, alone.
In it I am cool.  I carry a bag that I have packed very well, and I listen to my ipod often, because it has a lot of interesting and inspiring music, which makes me feel both comforted and adventurous. I take trains by myself, and I amuse myself with my thoughts.
I party by myself, and take pictures of myself.  I am serious. I ride my bike to a club and get drunk alone and check out strangers, and move around the dance floor thinking about how much physical space there is between the continent that I am on and another continent like Europe. When I am in the bathroom I take a picture of myself on the toilet, to show myself later. Is the picture secretly to show to someone else later, when I am telling them about how cool it was to be by myself all night?
In the vision of cool me alone, the answer is no.  The picture is absolutely for me, because I think it is funny.

I am putting this vision of myself to the test in my current trip to Canada. I am writing from the middle of the experiment. My job as the subject of the experiment is to report honestly on how the various factors are making me feel.
I can report, that reporting on my actual feelings about being alone makes me feel a little bit embarrassed by the results.

Here is the thing about being alone: It’s really easy to end up feeling like you’re all alone. I look around and notice that there is no one here with me. This could form a mathematic equation, suggesting that out of all the people in the world (5.5 billion?) none of them are with me right now, meaning that all of them have chosen to not be with me right now, and well, why wouldn’t any of them want to be with me? Not even one of them?

The math behind this statement is pretty subjective.
It ignores the fact that I am choosing to be alone because I want to.
But it’s pretty accurate about how it actually feels sometimes.
I end up feeling a little nerdy and exposed.

I jaywalked while crossing the street in Toronto today, trying to catch a streetcar. A car came careening around the corner and I kind of skittered and tripped across the street, avoiding the car, josltling my stupid rolling suitcase behind me and getting it a little bit stuck in the streetcar tracks. I was very aware of how dorky I must have looked, and I started laughing.
I will admit to you here that part of my laughing was probably a sort of protection. If anyone else had seen that I looked stupid, then they could look at my face and know that I was aware of it too.
Admitting something as dumb as that entire train of thought, is kind of how it feels to me to be alone these days.

I have been amusing myself today by thinking about my body as meat on a stick. Here is the set up: you start out as a tiny piece of meat on a stick, turning in the sun, and slowly you get bigger and bigger and bigger until eventually you stop getting bigger. Somewhere after the point where you stop getting bigger, you begin to slump, little by little, off of the stick, until eventually you drop right off the stick and die. You slump onto the dirt, and stay there, until someone fills you with formaldehyde, and sticks you in a box, or disposes of you otherwise.

And in between, during that process, is when you have as many adventures as a piece of meat on a stick can manage to have.
Spending much time thinking about the slumping process is one of the more boring adventures one may choose to have.

The teddy bear above is not my teddy bear, and the body in the photo above is not my piece of meat on a stick. I don’t put photos of myself on my blog because I am running from the authorities. I don’t put photos of my teddy bear on my blog because he has some trouble with his ego. He was featured last year in a major motion picture, and since then has been riding the rocky wake that follows such a bout of nationwide attention. I am not kidding.
He really was in a movie, and he really has been having a bit of trouble with his self image.

My bear did the shooting for the movie two years ago, and in the time since then he has aged noticeably. I don’t know exactly what brought about the changes so quickly. It’s clear, though, that compared with how he looked in the footage, his nose is deteriorating significantly and he has a pretty big rip under his right eye. The rip is spreading.
It has been an emotional two years, and I think maybe all the work that he has put in with me (in private, far from show-business) had really taken its toll on his physique. Maybe I have been asking too much of him?

But these last two years have been a real adventure. I couldn’t have survived them without him.

Ok, ok, let’s see a picture of the bear. He deserves it.

It appears that, in an effort to process the complicated emotions brought on by realizing that he is just a piece of cotton on a stick (wait, no stick, just cotton!), my bear decided to go out on an adventure of his own. A vision quest, of sorts.

I came out of the house, after sleeping over at my parents’ a few months ago, and found my bear exactly where he is in the above photo. He had spent the night outside, alone. In the city. In the street! His genteel posture made it obvious to me that he had chosen to be out there of his own accord, as opposed to having been dragged out or left there by someone else.
He seemed to really need the time out on his own, to get some perspective.

The house in the photo above is not my parents house. It is across the street and two doors down from my parents’ house. From where he was sitting, my bear had a perfect view of the house where he and I both lived since 1975, when I was an infant (and he a fresh new piece of cotton), and the street where I played and came and went until I was 18 years old.

It takes a lot of bravery to be able to do what he did, to step out and look at the big picture. It’s a pretty weird picture, if you ask me. I can worry if I look good in a swim suit (multiply that worry by one hundred thousand other potential pieces of physical despair), and then I can step out to get a wider view, and realize that what I am feeling, more acutely, is the awareness that I am definitely one day closer to my death.

Gravity is doing its treatment on me, pulling me down. In Hollywood moments, this can feel like the absolute worst thing that could happen. Luckily there are the blessed occasional nano-seconds, felt elsewhere, where I feel some awareness of what gravity really means.

“Listen Khaela, gravity is the force of the center of the planet, pulling inwards towards its hot metal mass. Pulling pulling pulling! You can’t imagine how big that planet is, can you? Hardly! Gravity is what made our giant planet, and what make us able to stay here in this earthly paradise, swimming in an ocean that doesn’t just evaporate away. Isn’t that WEIRD!? Weird on about exactly the same scale as how weird it is to get to be alive at all. It’s so mother f—ing weird! So swim while you can, Khaela! Don’t waste your time on boring bullshit like worrying if you look cute enough in the bikini, oh my GOD!! And this planet is so beautiful, and that might not last, either! You really don’t have much time!”

I think the above is what the night-time sky might have been saying to my bear, on his sleep-out.
Just a guess.

NOTE: Thank you to Alyse Emdur, for posing for the top photos, and to Yuri Ono’s bear, whose name I have forgotten, for posing for the middle photo, and to my own little man, for giving it all up for love.

The question of what movie it was, in which my bear had a role (there are no small parts, just small actors), is a trivia secret!

There is a rumor going around that I might have left my items in Dub Narcotic for several more years, if the rent on the studio hadn’t gotten raised, and we weren’t all required to move out. I don’t know. I was beginning to miss a lot of my belongings, having been apart from them for two years. But somehow, the state of being separated into several pieces feels natural to me.
I strive every day to reassemble myself. I guess that yesterday was a big day for that endeavor.

The new pieces (which are technically the old pieces) are all sitting stoically here in my apartment now. They aren’t moving a muscle. They don’t seem to be completely aware of how much havoc they are creating in the order of all the things that had already been living here with me. They don’t know that the carpet feels oppressed and that my little make-shift desk is terrified of what is to come. One little chair, which I brought down to Portland with me when I first came, is forging an optimistic outlook, thinking of the new arrivals as potential best friends, and imagining the games that they’ll all be able to play with so many participants. But the pieces from Olympia don’t look ready to be playing any games. They really look like they wish they could have stayed back where they were in Dub Narcotic.

Nobody calls the place Dub Narcotic. Everybody refers to it as the Big Room. It is really big. Big enough that I could have this much stuff in there, in a little mini-studio of my own, and that it didn’t even begin to make a dent in the space. The room is also big in regards to the things that have happened in there. Big records have been recorded there, big huge sounds. Before anyone had moved anything into the space, I got the chance to do a series of drawings in there, and those were big, as far as drawings go. People have fallen in and out of love in there. And then made albums of music documenting the process. In the same room! The pile is intense!

One of my more heavily utilized belongings decided to make serious problems for me during the moving procedure. It seems pretty obvious that the motives were political: my cell phone mysteriously “disappeared” during the move. I cannot find it anywhere. Fishy, right?

I have little doubt that my disgruntled items, (I think they are calling themselves The Refugees) got together while being packed into the van and convinced my impressionable cell phone to cause some sort of a disturbance. Clearly, their intention was to make me aware of how unhappy they are about the relocation. “No justice, no peace”, might be the statement on a bumper sticker applied to the backside of one of my old boxes of notebooks. And what can I do? My cell phone is gone, either willfully having been a part of a protest, or, horrors, having been the victim of a terror tactic executed by my miserable belongings.

I now have no cellphone.

The tragedy of it is that none of my things really possess the vision to realize that I am executing this procedure as an intended improvement. I am trying to be a better person. An integrated person, who knows what she owns, and owns those things for a reason: to have them handy and to use them frequently. They call them tools.

Little babies, I know that the light in my apartment in Portland is nowhere near as nice as the light in the Big Room. There is no saltwater breeze. I know this. You will never again be witness to the sounds of Mirah recording a song with Phil, here in my room. You won’t hear Calvin drinking a hot beverage. But guys, you will hear me, doing the things I do all day long, everyday. We’ll get to know each other again, I hope. I think we will all probably grow from the experience. Grow, in the fun way, like a beard made of moss. LIke a city build of sand. I think it’s going to be good.

Soooooooo, could you maybe bring my phone back?
(No response.)
(Certainly, they don’t appreciate the tender nuance in my calling them “babies.”)

Hey guys (you, the real people who actually talk and listen, as opposed to the personified piles of things overtaking my apartment right now), if by chance anyone out there happens to have an old Verizon phone laying around that they don’t use, and would want to give to me, I would be really psyched and definitely graciously accept.

And in the meantime, while I enjoy the silence created by my unresolved telephone problem, I pledge to go out and shake the hand of each one of my new and old belongings, welcoming each one, equally, to help me build a sculpture that we can call home.