Re-post from a Craft Magazine .

I'm very much into a crafting magazine, if only just to look at all the fun crafts they do. I found one craft in it that I can actually do! --Provided I have friends to join me :D

I actually found the page online, so I figure it's okay to repost what they said:
Zine Round Robin Page

"Zine Round Robin:

Start your own publishing empire by making a zine with your friends!
Make a stack of blank, stapled booklets in advance (one for each person) 4.25" X 5.5" is a good size. Have a supply of drawing, writing, and collage materials on hand.
Give each person one blank booklet. Set atimer, giving everyone 10-15 minutes to decorate one page. Working quickly like this adds excitement and keeps everyone loose. When the timer goes off, everyone hands the booklet off to someone else. Set the timer for another 10-15 minutes for everyone to decorate a page of the next booklet. Repeat this process until all the booklets have been in everyone's hands once, and all the pages are filled. Everyone gets to keep an original art zine, made by the whole group."

Art, Music--where do I fit in?

As I'm procrastinating doing my homework, I thought I might update a musing. I can't really call it a "rant" as I'm not angry about anything, just observing.

Art is a very weird concept. Lots of times I really abhor it; sometimes it seems hedonistic, people self-indulging in expensive drawings or sculptures that don't say anything about the human condition, that don't reflect much thought, that represent time and money that could have been spent helping dig people out of the poverty hole.

And yet I myself am a very creative person. I love to draw, I enjoy writing and creating things that really have very little overarching social value--sometimes it even digs into my homework, and I wonder if I am adhering to or betraying my ideals. Does drawing really improve the quality of my life or that of others?

One thing that has been bothering me recently is that I have been extremely unfocused on all my classes--I hardly take anything in, seem to be doing the bare minimum to get an A. One aspect of this doesn't bother me so much--I remember having set goals for myself to "be so involved in other things that I would have to get a B in something"--but still getting A's. I think part of this problem is that for a long time I described myself as a person who is good at school, who works hard and gets A's--but only in those terms. My whole formulation as a person has been based on doing things because I have to do them, not necessarily because I enjoy them.

I was in Band for many years, and while I certainly was exposed to many good experiences as a French Horn player, part of me is filled with regret: I hated practicing; I'm not sure if I'll really maintain contact with the people I met; there are so many people who I wanted to get to know better and things to do but I couldn't do because I had to do band--and I wonder if it's too late for me to redefine myself.

In any case, I relate this back to my current state of senioritis: Yes, I'm not trying as hard in classes, and supposedly in doing this I'm fulfilling the goal I had set for myself to have my life centered around other things. The problem arises in that I'm not actually having my life centered around things that are more important to me--my lack of attention to my classes is not upswept by a perponderance of productivity in areas of more importance to me--I am merely being unfocused in everything. To what do I owe this lack of focus?

Sadly enough I think this has to do with recent shifts in my self-identity. I identify as an ex-anorexic, meaning that for a long time my days were completely structured around my food intake. I no longer structure my days around this, but now my days simply have NO structure, and I don't get anything done. Part of this also has to do with my time in Spain: it was very hard to set my own goals and agenda, because there were different expectations of time there, so I gave up structuring my days--and I've still not been able to recuperate that.

Hm. This post began as talking about music, but my daily ruminations have leaked into it. Alright then. So music.

There are times when I wonder if I actually am a musical person. Sure, I can sing...well, sortof; and certainly I used to be very good at playing French Horn, but my relationship with music is very much different today. There are people I know who claim music is what keeps them sane, and they are always on the lookout for new music that makes their heart soar. I'm not really that kind of person. When I listen to music (which is more often than in prior years, due to a feeling of inadequacy--I've sort of been forcing myself to listen to more music to feel like I fit into this human world) it's not mainly to revel in the sonorous quality of the song, but to have a relatively familiar and unobtrusive series of noises going through my head so as to not be distracted by the random noises that occur around me. I'm not that interested in the new songs--I just want a similar, soft series of noises to parade through my brain so that I can focus on my reading.

Part of me wonders if it's the music, being constantly in my brain, that has made it more difficult for me to get anything done. I have been listening to a lot of new music recently...Oddly enough, however, listening to music doesn't stall me from writing blogs--only from focusing on homework.

I wonder if it's just part of human nature to seek out hedonism.

~Homily Concerned with the Practice of Sarcasm in the Ebullient Community~

It’s a long time since I was cognizant of never knowing
what was knowing and what wasn’t.

Feeling
like a lollipop singing in the shower
no one watching
not one critique
reveling in reflexive self-expression while
melting
till there’s nothing left
but a lumpy center
that no one wants to eat.

Except for the rats:
when they took chunks of lolly,
they sucked it in, lapped it up, like
capitalist jackals
but
by the time they reached the core,
it was inedible,
having experienced the sewer system.

They died when it
hit the soil in their stomachs
like loaded grenades.

Soundbytes explode in my ears, little
shells of sausage fat
hissing plattitudes on a stove.
I threw them away because my ears
burned
like plastic
and I was sick from the fumes.

Plastic was never good for picnics anyway,
smooth, cold elegant forks
in the rainy day sunshine
clamber on checkered textile veneers
self-important,
loaning this natural experience
a hint of posh
and magnanimity.

While the dishes poster-posed,
we squirted ketchup
laughing at the blood

we made

splurt on each others clothes and faces.

But what if my blood was mustard?

Yellow, salty, chunky and viscous,

it would stain my toungue with sweet sacrifice,

not the empty bitter tone of
red blood,
metal cold
blanching my teeth when I
bite my arms
licking the scab from my wounded heart and

swallow it
with the gangrene and flaky dead ex-patriots.

I should have spat it at the one who held the knife.

Then I’d affix it to his face,
and from then on the knife-bearer would wear
my scab on
his face;
not a battle scar but a
scarlet letter.

Could it rid the world of wounds?
of scabs or pain?
Or would every scabby-faced
villain simply
look around,
seeking their own kind and
organize,
forming their own little deformed community and
hunt like

Vampires,
those beautiful creatures,
death personified.

I see death on-screen gorgeous,
Sunken eyes
Sucked out soul
orgy of splattered arms, legs and
homes.

Beautiful.
Like the premise of the big bang,
or the theory of chaosà
self-destruction glorified in
bombs and laxatives
perpetuated by machinations
of a corporate
death-selling factory.

But I don’t see the suicides.

I guess they’re just not pretty enough
to merit harbingers of the
news media’s attention span.

I was a sadist once

or twice.

I watched someone slip on a banana peel,

hit the ground and

I laughed.

or was it three times,

that I saw someone kicked in the groin and I

popped,

titillating with mirth

at their writhing.

it must have been three times, a

special sanctified number, or else I

wouldn’t have remembered it at all.

Watching screens

I see the shows, the

vertisments and think

what an asshole I am,

but news makes me think I’m a saint.

Needing to be watching inbetween the lines

but

Which lines

Whose lines

What color are they?

red blue white black pink yellow brown

pictures looking like mixed message smoothie

Research

someone rather than

know them is reading an

online profile,

but at least when you stalk them there’s no

threat of

physical proximity.

No chance for pretense of fake intimacy.

It’s the irony of first name basis:

first name is the first level,

name on the surface.

If you actually meet the reason for a

last name (less important appellation)

you cross the boundary,

the sympathy borderline

touching.

So many times I wish I had touched.

What is just a hug is arms

suffusing bodies enclosing hearts, frightening minds into

believing that perhaps this

person means more than a mind in a body,

that we’re not trapped in

prisons,

but

temples

of corporeal prayer.

I was reading my student planner, and it told me that communication is

7% words,

40%

tone and

53%

body language.

Being tone deaf and physically illiterate

I suppose I’m drawn to pages

like cold feet to a worn-out blanket

as the one last

pretense of

warmth

in this iceberg-people planet

Its not falling that I’m afraid of.

Its hitting the bottom.

Sing. Sang. Song,

a praise to some feudal title and

peasant-like we bow to earth,

burying ourselves

to a man with a

crown.

And why be arranged in levels?

It makes going down to someone’s else’s level difficult,

Implicating some kind of transparency

We don’t want to accept.

Their level.

It’s a palindrome?

equal looking on each side, but its soul barks

differences.

Difference of level.

Different equalities.

Arranged by levels, not faces

we efface

the memory of what its like to be human.

But it doesn’t matter—

we can keep them

written forever

in

Rich Richard’s Almanac.

After all,

Who would love a face like this?

Who would love a face?

What if I’m already

nothing

but a face?

What if I already am faceless?

\

But being jaded is overrated.

If being cool means being unhappy,

I’d rather just be

show off how much

I suck at dancing

with the boom-box music raging,

feel the pulse pump the heart and

stirr up dregs of immortality at the bottom of the

loose-leaf tea cup.

You go fishing for compliments.

Deep-diving for sympathy,

Because things like compliments and sympathy are

slippery, scaly, they’re

Smelly and edible,

breathing on the existence of others and the

vision of some light in their brain.

Flick the switch

and the mind turns on,

burning on something like

a candle,

etching its way over a bridge

eating candy corn

Like some matterhorn

I wanted something fresh one day, so I

Walked

Away

From

The immortality of Death,

for just for 30.3 minutes.

Dying in your sleep sounds peaceful though

every day you’re already dying when you’re

awake

doing nothing, never doing,

always never doing, because its always

around the block and

in the stars,

at least until you find some other way out

to pretend you knew what it

meant to be

alive.

Daydream.

Nightmare.

not nightdream, daymare, because

dreams ephemeral and effervescent

chronically happen at night,

but the scary shit we associate with

nonplussed

triviality of

routine

I was drudging over to Thursday, just like any other day.

Dark was clouding over, so I started running.

àthunk

àthunk

àpantàsnap!

The lights fligckering brightly danger teasing me

what did I do

to deserve

nothing

What is the sound of one atom splitting?

I suppose it depends on the context, sonny.

If it’s a micro-organism reproducing, it sounds like nothing.

But a nuclear bomb?

Well I suppose that’s a sound sortof like nothing too.

Like a tree falling in an empty forest.

We sailed through woods, and peaches like

cream with onions, splattered on the potting wheel,

molding,

spinning for ages until it gets out of control and

someone loses an

I.

He. She. It.

You would never understand the

perspective from the other side,

not at least if you were looking

through my limited point of view

Mother’s day. Father’s day. Valentine’s

D. A. Y.

isolated incidence of favoritism.

I sang to you like a sweet dream, listen to the

purple eating away your heart like a fish taco.

Crunchy and juicy fine.

We always walked to the same place, different ways.

I didn’t give a damn about your cotton candy machine,

or the rubber-coated socks between your spine and your

dream.

I just wanted you but you weren’t

really listening to me,

were you?

See, walking to a different drummer’s beat don’t satisfy,

you want your everyone to walk your walk with you,

so your hearts all be inline beating

in time and

something worth it

might actually get your attention for once.

But dreaming inbetween the lines—

dreams are only

unreality compressed in forty winks,

where the sweet heart pleads, drops

drips into a tea cup and I sip you like chicken noodle soup,

slurping and smacking you against my lips.

You taste like envy