Lemonade, Grass Stains and My Arms Around You: A Mid-Summer Reflection

Here is to having manifested and continuing to manifest almost the exact summer I have wanted for this year.  Travel and visitors and food and quasi-filth and the night and good, good people and music to experience it all with.

I.

Last night I met up with Sadie and we went to a different waterfront with soft serve and caught up on the goings-on of the past month.  She loves and supports folks in her life so well.  It always feels good to hear what's going on with her.  The balance of support and love not only feels good, but I feel like I learn a lot from her each time we hang out.  I like how she has my back. It always feels measured, with integrity, and then just straight out raw as fuck when someone is doing me wrong. If *she* is ever mad about some shit going on, you *know* something is wrong.  Integrit-ied love is where it's at.

II.

Last night I finished registering for classes and ordered the textbooks through the library via the sneaky ways that most people are too lazy to look into.  I love it. It saves money, but also gives an injection of library savagery that I love.  I can't wait to start.  The classes look incredible and the content endlessly exciting. It feels good to have supportive folks in my life around this, and definitely folks who are in the same wobbly boat as me in it.  Onward we go, us scholarly misfits and dream having hooligans.

III.

Michi and I are talking about going to LA together and going to tiki bars because, well of course we are. Plus, Casey is already coming up with an agenda for us (which will include the most absurd and glorious things ever). It is summertime, life is short, and there are so many reasons to go. (The shared adventure, Bradly, food, sun, that theater that I really want to go to, more food...)

For now, however, I find myself in air conditioning about to get down to business. There is a time for work and for play and, lately, I find myself smiling widely doing both.






Be well; be loved,

k.
(image RED #1 styled and shot by J. Quazi King via quazimottoonwax tumblr)

When I Was Growing Up, One of My Brothers Referred to Me as Sir

I just saw The Field Guide to Evil, which is a bunch of shorts from really great film makers from around the globe that were asked to make a film based on folklore or a fairy tale.

Here's the thing.

The last film is Peter Strickland's The Cobbler's Lot and I CAN'T STOP FLIPPING OUT ABOUT HOW GOOD IT IS.

It has everything:

Shoe fetish, men with eyeliner, a woman with a trained raven, a toppy king (also in eyeliner) who pulls the most fucked and amazing toppy death couture I've ever seen in my life, blood on a quasi-wedding dress, jizz, women in these weird body stockings that are supposed to make them look naked, young men kneeling in front of an older man in a throne, two brothers who look like young/weird Robert Smiths, a forest, embroidered stockings, a princess, murder, ghosts...  It is a visual and thematic orgasm. Someone *please go and see this so that we can talk about it*.


(image: Man Ray, Legs)

Walk With Me a While: The Art of Convincing

That perfume you had on your wrist: I wouldn't mind smelling it again.

I never know how to respond to shit like this. There's something about blatant flirtations that are inherently uncomfortable unless there's something already established. There is the expression "feeling embarrassed for someone", but this kind of thing makes me daydream that embarrassment was something you could physically hand to someone and say, "Here. You should put this on."

It's not about shaming a person - we all know how it can be a risk-take to flirt- but just something to turn the volume down a bit when it isn't reciprocated.

What I have learned over the years is that unwanted flirting makes me studious. It makes me turn into a little owl in a three piece suit that wants to arrange his monocle tighter into his eye and march off in the direction of the library stacks.

(pause)

Lately I have been having good conversations with people about art and about literature and about the world around us.

This afternoon I met up with a good friend who is in town who has worked for decades in the domestic violence and/or sexual assault fields.  She was telling me about a grant that has just been received for specific training for nurses who conduct rape kits on people who have just been raped. I live in such a bubble that I was unaware that there are many hospitals that simply don't have the capacity to do rape kits.  That one could conceivably go to the hospital right after a sexual assault and have them say they didn't/couldn't do that here, and sorry.

(pause)

I wrote something earlier today while in between jobs. I like it much better than what I have written, here.  It is the night, whereas, this is daytime on the couch in the sun of an empty suburban living room.

What I wrote that is not here is a bit too confessional. A bit too sexual.

Things are evolving and ending and changing and starting and growing in my life.

Even I need a bit of a pause before such announcements.

I love it as a piece, but am going to hold off on posting it.

For now, I am going to ruffle my feathers and get back into the short stories I am reading a bit before meeting up with a friend. I have two books for each story. One in each language I would like to read the story in.


Something about me:  If I share a short story with you, it will always be a form of love.

be well; be loved,

k.

(image via fitzpunk tumblr)