ART.IS.KEY

Cheesus crust

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 20:50:00 +0000

Cheesus crust

new self portrait

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 02:12:00 +0000

new self portrait

running up that hill

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 20:36:00 +0000

Cigar box setup

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 22:18:00 +0000

Cigar box setup

Just Kids

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 17:00:00 +0000

I am currently reading this book and it is absolutely beautiful - I cannot put it down. I was not into Patti Smith's work before, and even knowing nothing about her, I am 100% in love with this memoir of love and life and New York City in the 1960's and 70's. Definitely get your hands on it, as it is truly inspirational and it now comes in paper back...

Also I haven't updated in forever, and I also haven't drawn anything in forever. I moved back to Chicago but am not yet living in my new apartment, so, y'know. More drawings will come soon.

.LMB.

helplessness blues

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 23:40:00 +0000

I was raised up believing
I was somehow unique
Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes
Unique in each way you can see

And now after some thinking
I'd say I'd rather be
A functioning cog in some great machinery
Serving something beyond me

But I don't, I don't know what that will be
I'll get back to you someday soon you will see

What's my name, what's my station
Oh just tell me what I should do
I don't need to be kind to the armies of night
That would do such injustice to you

Or bow down and be grateful
And say "Sure take all that you see"
To the men who move only in dimly-lit halls
And determine my future for me

And I don't, I don't know who to believe
I'll get back to you someday soon you will see

If I know only one thing
It's that every thing that I see
Of the world outside is so inconceivable
Often I barely can speak

Yeah I'm tongue tied and dizzy
And I can't keep it to myself
What good is it to sing helplessness blues?
Why should I wait for anyone else?

And I know, I know you will keep me on the shelf
I'll come back to you someday soon myself

If I had an orchard
I'd work till I'm raw
If i had an orchard
I'd work till I'm sore

And you would wait tables
And soon run the store

Gold hair in the sunlight
My light in the dawn
If I had an orchard
I'd work till I'm sore

If I had an orchard
I'd work till I'm sore

Someday I'll be
Like the man on the screen

Do what you said the words she said left out

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 05:33:00 +0000

The N train never moves fast enough to get above ground and you can never see the zoetrope artwork on the way to the bridge. It just chugs and chugs and chugs so that the colors are individual frames and shapes, not a motion picture piece. Then before you even know it you are above ground rushing over the Manhattan Bridge while gazing out graffiti'ed windows over the East River at the Brooklyn Bridge and Williamsburg Bridge...staring at city lights and staring at the sky scrapers and staring at these islands of unmatchable love and beauty and extreme loneliness and everything feels raw raw raw and it's gone in a flash.

Sharon van Etten is the best music for running up the stairs of the 8th St. NYU stop on a day like this...trudging through the slush and snow and dirty water. Standing on the corner of Broadway and Astor Place and just feeling the cold kiss my neck, brush my hair for me...watch the steam come out of my mouth, watch the boots and hats and black coats and taxi cabs and headphones rush by me and see the city sludge all around with the buildings just gaping open mouthed with their enormous windows down on me as I just stand there. Look around. Be in the moment. Feel how I feel at this moment. Try not to think of before or after. Be in it, feel everything to its full extent, and try to not get too hard on myself. How can you help but love this enormity? Love even the good and bad? Be overwhelmed in everything...the good and the bad of something.

good-bye

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 16:20:00 +0000

I drew this a while back, probably about last winter. My teeth had been really sensitive due to a cavity filled too deep (eesh) and were hurting like I can't even explain. There was a point where I thought I was also going to have to get my wisdom teeth out (decision still pending...), so I drew this. Oddly enough I still have all my teeth and nothing has been removed and nothing hurts anymore. Art! Miracles!

Drawn with Micron archival ink pens in Second Stop Cafe, Brooklyn, NY.

Too Much [from the arTchives]

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 02:09:00 +0000

i fear the image might be a little busy, but that's what happens when you are carried away eavesdropping on the barista's coffee-chatter and dont want to leave the cafe to run the rest of your day's errands....

drawn in Gimme! Coffee, Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

40% & 80% warm grey prismacolor markers (permanent ink illustration markers), micron pigma pens (archival ink), graphite pencil.

Welcome Home

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 19:50:00 +0000

As promised, I will be updating more, including things that are not just pictures of random stuff I've drawn. Also, I have a ton of new stuff I have to put on my Flickr page...but you know, when you're traveling, scanning your recent random sketches isn't really a priority. Upon my return to Brooklyn there will most likely be a huge influx of updates.

I spent the last two weeks in Wisconsin doing so, so, so many things. Floating around on pontoon boats and drinking beers around campfires in northern Wisconsin, roller skating every day (yes, really) and remembering how to drive a car in my home town, going to ironic rock concerts and drinking gin and tonics with my mom (yes, really, again), having a very nice home grilled summer dinner at my dad's, enjoying the sounds of the pond very loud outside of my window at night, going through a lot of my old hand-written journals and belongings in the basement (hoooo boy), taking my little brother to tour art school in Milwaukee (and him loving it), hanging out at Alterra and meandering around Riverwest in all of the old places I hung out in high school...it was just a very good time. A good time to collect myself over the last year, a good time to just be "by myself" and re-evaluate some of the many many things that I have been mentally caught up in, a good time to just relax in all senses of that word. I have remembered a lot about myself that I kind of put away for a while.

And now...I am in Chicago. And oh wow, does it feel good.

Normally I bounce around from apartment to apartment or stay at F.'s house while I am in town (thanks buddy), but this time I am house/cat-sitting for a friend and staying at his place. He and his girlfriend live in a one bedroom in Andersonville/Uptown, and it is really, really wonderful. I am so grateful to have a place to put all of my stuff and stay that is so cute and home-y...it's funny that they last minute needed someone, and this all just kind of worked out, and works for both parties really well. Even though I had not been to their place before three days ago, it feels very comfortable and is just so nice to just be able to have a home-base. Although, that said, Chicago feels like a comfortable home-base nomatterwhat every time I come back.

It's funny that I don't think there's a place I feel so emotional about as Chicago...and why wouldn't I? This is the city I really "grew up" in...learned the most about myself and learned so many other things about the rest of the world in. Every year I spent here was so brilliantly different than the one before. It's the place that I have had the absolute best times in, and some of the hardest, as well (these things sometimes are not mutually exclusive).

It's funny also that in coming back somewhere that I realize what it is that I have missed. I miss back porches, I miss window sills. I miss rent that is still not cheap, but doable every month instead of cringing every time I pay for my Brooklyn apartment. I miss 75 degree days in August. I miss the lake front path, I miss riding a bike every single place (alright, I do this in Brooklyn, just not as comfortably), I miss running into people on the street (it's already happened). I could go on forever...but I'm sure all of you already know how much I love Chicago and I would just be driving home a point unnecessarily.

I'm just not sure, though. On this day, a year ago, I arrived in New York City in a truck in front of my Brooklyn apartment, filled with both anxiety and relief and possibility and "ohgod what have I just done". It doesn't feel like an entire year has passed...and yet, if I look back and really slow down and page through everything that has happened in the last year...wow. So much has changed, so much has occurred. I could go into great detail...but yeah. I'm sure that once my time in Brooklyn is done, as well, I will know all the things about NYC that I miss, as well. Maybe I'll be all nostalgic and in love with it the same way I am about Chicago...looking back and seeing more good parts than bad. Maybe one day I will be visiting Brooklyn in the same way that I am visiting Chicago right now, and will feel as comfortable as I do when I come back here to visit...but all I know right now is that I've never felt so "at home" as when I am back in the Windy City, and I feel it every time.

Website doodles

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 17:34:00 +0000

WOW, long time no updates. I am done with my first year of grad school which was both extremely gratifying and extremely exhausting, and have been in the throes of both the longest summer of my life (in a good way!) and the most relaxing summer ever, too. I have no plans, except for my part time work doing bike valet. Yep. You read that right. It rules, and I get to draw all the time this summer. I have been trying to figure out how to incorporate comic press into my website, but I'm failing and generally have no idea how, so if you're a nerd and can help a girl out, holler at me. The goal is to re-do the website by the end of summer.... I have a lot of newish art work and sketches to update so I'll keep the updates coming until I'm caught up.

In the mean time, here's some stuff I drew a while ago for the remodel of my website (still not done, amazing) but that I don't think I'm going to use anymore:

Both are drawn with micron pigma graphic ink and prismacolor illustration markers. ZING!

.LMB.

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Mon, 31 May 2010 20:56:00 +0000

McCarren Park, Memorial Day.

Perfect Medicine

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 00:53:00 +0000

This entry was started on 3-31-2010, and finished 4-2-2010.

"I am in Seattle, sitting in BauHaus (a cafe) while I write this. You know how you know you miss some place (or something), and you think you remember how great it is, and then you get there and you actually are reminded that it's 2398423947 TIMES MORE AWESOME than you remembered it!? Right. That would be what's happening with me and the North West right now.

I have never been to Seattle before, but I have no idea why, seeing as so many of the things I love came from here. A few weeks ago on a beautiful Tuesday in Brooklyn, A. and I were sitting outside drinking some coffee at Atlas and talking about our upcoming spring break. We both are doing our fieldwork in elementary/middle schools, so we have a different spring break than the people who have placements at non-school agencies. Anyway, I mentioned how I thought I might be going to Chicago and then how I would be going to Portland for most of the trip instead, and A. said she'd be in Seattle. They're only about 3 hours from each other that it really just made sense...spend half the time here, half the time in Portland. Well no, an extra day in Portland. But still.

E. was here for the weekend before leaving, which was absolutely great. I love her so much, and she is very serious about moving out here, so there's a good chance I'll be able to see her more often. I also like when my friends get to come out and meet my other friends and just see the slices of my new life out in NY...it's just really comforting. It also helps that out of the 5 interviews E. had here while visiting, she got offered one to start ASAP and is moving to NY. I love this. The people I love will always be the people I love, and I just keep meeting more people to love.

We flew out last night, out of LaGuardia. Took a tiny plane from LGA to Philadelphia, which was easily one of the scariest plane rides of my life. I have never flown that small of an aircraft, and the fact that it was thunder storming definitely didn't help whatsoever. A. had bought a crappy gossip magazine so we were sharing headphones listening to Lady GaGa (obviously what you SHOULD listen to while reading a crappy gossip magazine), and I just realized...A. has become one of my closest New York friends, and I am so so so happy about that.

It's interesting to me how people meet. Had A. not said that she wanted and needed and couldn't find friends during Practice I class last semester, we never would have started talking. I would have never known she was lonely the same way I was; I would have never started hanging out with her, or B., and really, truly gaining my own friend group outside of N. Being in Seattle with her and seeing her life and just plain experiencing her life before she moved to New York is just so telling. The love she had here; the support and history, etc...it must have just been so hard to leave. She has said it was, actually – and I totally feel that. I remember feeling like I was leaving everything good in my life back in Chicago; unable to see the future. And I still love that history, just like A. loves her Seattle history. She has mentioned wanting to come to Chicago, too – I want to bring her and show her everything and everyone I love about that place; a place I can not ever forget or remove from the whole of my heart even if I tried. And you know, I think I really tried when I was first moving. I held on for dear life and then started to reject it in an attempt to assimilate to New York. Who needs history? I'll just make my life exactly as I want it.

To my fault, I had pictured life in Brooklyn as something so different than it is now. It has some of the same qualities; I get a lot of the same feelings when I walk through certain areas and such...but...I don't know. The life I had pictured was life in a brownstone. Thirty-something year old friends with long black well-done hair and tasteful clothes. Solid colors; dinner parties. Bay windows with silhouettes to be seen from the street. Pea coats; small fat dogs with skinny legs. Macaroons and eating them with ease. Put-together friends who had great connections; running through Central Park on sunny days “just for fun”. I also pictured another life that I would like; a really grimy, artist life. Jeff Buckley-esque men who are in fifty bands and artists who hang out on the Lower East Side and have small and pretentious gallery openings. Tiny wood-floor apartments with old handles on their sink faucets far, far up in Manhattan. Ripped jeans. Anarchist friends in ABC No-Rio. No showers for 2 weeks. Trash sitting on the streets; light hanging in the air. Passion, passion, passion.

I didn't picture this life out in Brooklyn. The life of a student; being mildly concerned about money and spending all of my free time drawing in coffee shops. The secrets of love...but yet learning to throw some inhibitions to the curb. Drawing comics that keep getting rejected from the publications I want, and drawing sketches that keep getting accepted and praised even though they aren't what I'm passionate about. Still not doing most of the readings and somehow still pulling off all the papers “once I set my mind to it”. Still feeling “not good enough”. Still comparing myself. Finding that my life is still extremely similar to my Chicago life, only with different names and different faces and different locations. Still trying to just feel normal in a place where I feel every single thing except for normal. Repetition repetition repetition.

Don't get me wrong. I love Brooklyn and incredible amount. I have such emotional ties to it just as I do to Chicago – it's been seeing some of the best and the worst of me; slowly ingraining itself in my heart. But I think it's fair to say you can love something more than words but just have it not be “right”. Not saying that's what my relationship is with Brooklyn...but..I dont know...just as I felt the first time I visited this part of the country - the lovely North West - I just feel so comfortable and regular out here. I don't have to try for it's gift of comfort the way I did in Chicago and the way I am in Brooklyn. It just handed it to me the moment I got off the plane. Sehr bequem, ich denke.

~*~

And now, here I am – in Portland, Oregon. I got off the Amtrak, got chatted up by a local and promptly invited to a bar (which I declined, because that particular bar happens to be a strip club...), and then made a bee-line to my favorite coffee house on Burnside and chatted for a bit with the barista. In about 10 minutes I'm being picked up by friends that I have here and we're getting a beer – then at 9:30, N. is picking me up. Ah, yes.

I had never felt so comfortable in my own skin as I did when I was in Portland in 2008; couch surfing and staying in a hostel in NW and then staying in an old house functioning as a series of artists' studios in SE...drinking beers on old couches while we could see our breath as we laughed. Not wearing makeup; not caring that I wore the same thing for an entire week. Getting a taxi ride from an amazing female taxi driver who gave me an entire tour of Portland for no extra charge before dropping me off at my destination. Just basking in the “now”-ness of the week...and drinking as much espresso and smelling as many flowers as my body could handle. I was in it that week...and I feel it again, right now.

And now that I'm back, two years later, I feel it all over again. I've been making a list of everything I've been doing since getting off the plane in Seattle, but it's not comparing to just what I am FEELING since being up here. It's like...There are many people I've been extremely infatuated with to a point that there are things and memories and places that I just can't be around without thinking of them. It's funny how people develop such a complex history. And how that history, for the most part, is internal and only brought up in ones' own mind. These little songs; these little feelings of joy and pain that just bubble up and burst with certain lyrics and smells and long drives down country roads. You feel them – you are in it, for a minute – good, or bad. But you don't stay in it. Chicago does this for me; it's my longest term relationship I have had with a city. Everything is familiar – the curves around Lake Shore Drive; the diagonal intersections everywhere Milwaukee avenue permeates. The extremely hot summers that made me hate the sweat rolling down my back but were so appreciated; the excruciatingly long and terrible winters that made you thank your lucky stars for radiators and whiskey. But then there are those people that I have loved, and love – the ones that I can just be myself around; just fall into. These relationships are perfect to me; perfectly comfortable and beautiful. I don't have to try; I just am. Portland is my perfect relationship with a city...my perfect medicine and if this is where I feel comfortable...perfect, even...why the hell am I not out here all the time?"

SO yes. My little trip to the NW was perfect...and I am so grateful I could stay with A. and N.'s families...but I think it is totally worth saying that when I walked into my house in Brooklyn, put down my bag, pet my cat, and just fell into my bed...I felt like I was home. And that was really, really nice.

.LMB.

Perfect Example

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 13:39:00 +0000

I picked this up at Word the other day just because it was $5 and was related to Illinois/Chicago. It was simple, beautiful, telling, and relatable. It's an extremely fast read (I read it to and from my commute to work and finished it), I highly recommend, and I want to buy it for my brother who has recently just gotten into comics.

Also, +5 because I love books that include drawings of some of my favorite places in Chicago and Wisconsin. Yay!

I'm going to Seattle and Portland; see you in a week or whatever.

.LMB.

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 04:33:00 +0000

Summershoes!

July Flame

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:02:00 +0000

what are you waiting for

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 04:54:00 +0000

what are you waiting for? 2010.

40% & 80% warm grey prismacolor markers (permanent ink illustration markers), micron pigma pens (archival ink), graphite pencil.

Drawn in Second Stop Café, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY

Eating Animals

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 03:16:00 +0000

I have been vegetarian for 6 years now (and eating vegan for about 6 months), and have always been extremely interested in sustainability, agriculture, and the processes/policies/politics that surround these topics. However...I am usually extremely apprehensive to read large works on the topic of meat and eating it, because almost always the book is backboned by some kind of agenda. While I don't think this is a bad thing at all (writing does need a "point" and if your "point" is to convince someone of something, by all means do it), it usually turns me off to finishing the author's book. In most books that try to convince the reader to become/why not to become a vegetarian, or even in books about sustainable eating/living, there's some kind of "attitude" in which the reader feels belittled (see: my experience in reading The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Polan). However...I saw a book by one of my favorite authors, on one of my favorite topics, and I just had to snatch it up.

I started reading Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer about three weeks ago when I purchased it in hardcover from a local bookstore (Word in Greenpoint, Brooklyn). I absolutely love Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer - it's easily one of my favorite books I've ever read - but I couldn't really picture him writing a non-fiction book about...well, animals, and eating them. Now, however, I want to give every single person I know a copy of this book.

Jonathan Safran Foer has again summed up everything I wanted to say about being a vegetarian into much more eloquent words, and taught me many new things in the process. There is humor, honesty, opinions on both sides of the fence, hard facts, experience, narratives, and love - of food, of family, of nature - all rolled up into this glorious work of absolute beauty. He leaves it up to the reader to make their own choices, because the purpose of this book is not to convince, but merely to share and educate in an extremely accessible and sensible manner. The book just flows; it reads more like a novel than a research topic, but yet it is chock full of gems of knowledge and questions for the reader to consider and mull around. Even the most versed foodie will feel touched by this book upon turning the last page.

I love this book...and I promise it's not because of the snazzy tubor-esque cover ;-) If you can pick up a copy (I recommend hardcover, because I always do), definitely DEFINITELY get your hands on it and nose in it - carnivores and vegans alike.

.LMB.

from No More Games

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 22:45:00 +0000

One of the final pages from the story that I'm illustrating. The story has been submitted in comic form to Smoke Signal #4, so maybe in a month this will be printed (crossing my fingers, but trying not to get my hopes up!)

40% & 80% warm grey prismacolor markers (permanent ink illustration markers), micron pigma pens (archival ink), graphite pencil.

Drawn in Second Stop Café, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY

from No More Games

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 22:22:00 +0000

40% & 80% warm grey prismacolor markers (permanent ink illustration markers), micron pigma pens (archival ink), graphite pencil.

Drawn in Second Stop Café, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY

Scornfully Rejected

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 05:08:00 +0000

Another page from the story Nick wrote that I'm illustrating. HOPEFULLY I'll be done soon!!!

40% & 80% warm grey prismacolor markers (permanent ink illustration markers), micron pigma pens (archival ink), graphite pencil.

Drawn in Gimme! Coffee, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY (hands down the best latte milk I've ever had. So good!!!)

Christmas Presents

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 16:08:00 +0000

I illustrated some memories I have of my parents for Christmas and framed them in gallery frames. I'm regretting not finishing them earlier because then I would have been able to scan them...

This story reads:

"ONCE UPON A TIME ...Mrs. Kochi's 5th grade class was taking a field trip to Wisconsin's CAVE OF THE MOUNDS. However this was different than any other field trip - this time we were allowed to bring PORTABLE ELECTRONIC DEVICES. Because this was the 1990's, that meant we were allowed to bring our SONY DISC MAN-s and CD collections! A privilege almost never granted!

However, there was one problem - I did not OWN a Sony Discman, and also didn't have another music player. I asked my mom for one, got denied, got angry, and then decided I was doomed to be the most UNDESIRABLE kid in the WHOLE CLASS.

HOWEVER, because my mother was young once, she owned her own collection of music and gave me a replacement music player. "Here, use my old tapes!" she said, as she offered up LED ZEPPELIN'S In Through the Out Door and WINGS' GREATEST HITS. "Ew Mom, what ARE these?" was all I said in reply and shoved the tapes and Walkman into my bag.

THE NEXT DAY we boarded the bus towards Cave of the Mounds. ALL of my classmates were wearing their headphones and listening to CDs, and I was INSANELY jealous. It was just so unfair! I furtively loaded WINGS GREATEST HITS into the tape player and hoped NO ONE saw.

But someone DID see, and it was my biggest crush - Peter L***. "IS THAT WINGS!?" Peter asked me. "Oh...yeah." "THAT IS SO COOL! I love PAUL MC CARTNEY!" said Peter.

My mom's tapes had not only granted me the ABILITY to talk to Peter the whole rest of the ride, but showed me just how RIGHT parents can be - even when you don't want to believe it. Cassettes never sounded SO GOOD. <3 Leanne"

This one was for my dad:

This story reads:
"Dudette and Old Dude were driving down HWY 83 in a 1970's suburban from one farm to another. In the darkness of the road, Old Dude changed the station to WKLH after Dudettes many complaints of NPR being "TOO BORING." As the static cleared and the music was audible, Old Dude "Ooh THIS SONG!" and cranked up the volume. "THIS IS WHAT GOOD MUSIC SOUNDS LIKE."

"You Can't Always Get What You Want" was the first song on the station. "How interesting," thought Dudette. She had never considered her father's history, or that he had been young once, or that he was even a ROLLING STONES fan.

Next was JETHRO TULL'S AQUALUNG, and again, Old Dude knew every word.

The final song and most important moment was Norman Greenbaum's "SPIRIT IN THE SKY". Dudette had never seen her father in such an element; lost in the beauty of a song. She silently wished she saw him like this more often as a smile cracked across her face.

There they were, riding together in the country, DUDETTE'S HAIR ripping in the summer night air, and Old Dude's hand out the window, crooning.

LITTLE DID HE KNOW that this little glimpse into her father's "other side"; this view of his true personality - would impact not only her musical tastes, but the way she saw Old Dude from then on - as not only her dad, but as someone she could relate to more than she had previously assumed. <3>

These were both done in my sketch book, with Prismacolor markers, Micron Pigma black ink pens, Staedtler graphic ink pens, and colored pencils. I hope I make more of these; they were fun!

.LMB.

Concrete Jungle Where Dreams Are Made Of

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 04:46:00 +0000

So I'm in Chicago again, for the first time since August, and I have never felt so complacent and warm and cozy in a place....Not even after I moved back here after living in NY the first time.

As my train rolled in down the familiar tracks from Milwaukee to Chicago, I didn't read, I didn't draw, I didn't sleep. I just looked out the window with some headphones on. I was too excited - I couldn't miss a thing. The sun setting over the snow, the way the cold was coming through the door every stop we made. The snow was rushing past the salty windows and the train had it's usual meltdown between Sturtevant and Glenview. But then...we were approaching my true home and the lights were visible through the snow-fog and I just felt that same familiar feeling. The ripping of my heart down the middle and the pouring-out of all the gooey goodness of my memories and loves, back into my veins and arteries again. Top to bottom, into my nerve endings and into my tear ducts, swelling and subsiding and release and a great big exhale that transformed my entire face into a smile. With teeth. After staring at the lights on Lake Shore Drive, soon enough I found myself in Froilan's apartment with Erik.just warming up and settling down and in. Then he walked in from riding his bike in the cold...and despite the snow on his facemask and coat and Smartwools, I recieved the biggest, warmest, best hug I have gotten since I left. It took all I had to not physically tackle him when he walked into the room, let alone burst into happytears.

The past few days have been amazing. Cooking vegan dinners at Jen's with Erin and Froilan and new friends, Morrissey cover bands with Chicago locals and late night visits to my favorite Chicago haunts with Kristen. Feeling sick and watching crappy movies in bed with my best girlfriend; eating at my favorite brunch spot and reconnecting with people I never really lost it with. Riding the bus and train and walking in the cold and actually loving every single second of it. Sitting in Dollop, where so much as happened and not happened, and just feeling like I never left.

I don't know if it's because Chicago is where I truly changed, where I truly "grew up" and where I learned most everything about myself, but I have yet to find a place that fills me with that irreplaceable joy I always have of being here. I am going to blame it on my school-less year I spent here, but I never feel like I want to leave when I'm here and nothing else makes me feel like here.

But let's talk about New York. Wow, New York City is my new home. Every single day I have to remind myself of that, because it still doesn't feel real or true or anything. I have only lived in NY for 5 months (not counting the first time I moved there), but I just really don't know if it will ever feel like "home". Chicago felt like home after about a year, like...I didn't want to leave after that...so...I don't want to say for sure that I'll move back to Chicago after school's over, but I definitely will if I don't feel like Brooklyn is my home by the time I'm done.

I was trying to explain this last night, when Jen and Froilan and I were sitting around watching videos of Chicago's FootworKings and super old Usher videos...we started watching the music video for that Jay-Z / Alicia Keys song, because Froilan had never seen it. Laugh all you want, but I see the skyline and get that grandiose feeling, and I feel like I know Brooklyn and find it extremely intriguing and interesting and constantly satiating my need for urban beauty and decay....and I explore all these new places and see extreme beauty, and every day is new new new and ready to be figured out. NYC is a city where you wouldn't have to repeat yourself one single day if you didn't want to - there's enough stuff and people and places within the city and borough limits to entertain anyone for the rest of their life. You essentially don't have to leave, ever, for anything. Not for the country, not for the ocean, not for a difference in culture, not for anything. The weather is more doable than the midwest and people are generally more accepting of just being 100%totallyfreaky-YOU no matter what that is, but New York City is just too much all the time.

I don't want to sound too negative about my new city (and I have to start calling it that because I fucking LOVE Brooklyn) - I have had some of the best nights in my entire life in Brooklyn and Manhattan; some even in the Bronx and SURPRISINGLY one in Jersey City. I am meeting and have met some incredibly amazing people so far. Everything is very real and upfront and visceral...which is precisely what I signed up for. So on that side, I am getting everything I want. I have a great living situation, and for that I am grateful because my roommate Nick is one of my closest friends in the city, but even so I still feel like it is so impossible to get into a niche in Brooklyn...I have these friends now, which I was so afraid I wasn't going to be able to make, and I run into people in the weirdest places kind of like I've been here longer than I actually have, but I miss knowing a place like the back of my hand. I miss knowing a city and having an extreme pride for it and just feeling like it truly IS the best city in the whole wide wide world, hey.

You know, I decided to move to Brooklyn and applied to NYU because I wanted nothing more than to have a fresh start; one where my past made me who I was but didn't matter as much as the here and now. Isn't it funny now, that I miss being non-anonymous? That I miss my connections and everything that I had that on one hand I realized I had and love with all of my heart...but on the other hand, didn't even fully realize until it wasn't there? New York City and Chicago aren'tthat much different in size for the difference I feel in community.

And maybe that's just it; maybe I haven't given it enough time or space or let it thaw out enough before I can get warm to it. No matter how many free vegan activist community dinners I attend and no matter how many subway rides over the bridges and no matter how many spur of the moment urban exploration trips and no matter how many countless hours in my classes and field work I have spent learning and taking everything in, I probably just haven't given myself the time and care to settle down and really settle in, the way I did in Chicago. To make those friends without thinking they are temporary; to stop thinking about "what if what if what if" and what I'm missing, constantly. Clearly my friends here in Chicago aren't going anywhere - I'm back after almost half a year it's like basically nothing life-altering has changed...including those that I love. Their arms - my friends' and the city's - are always going to be flung wide open, and I'm always going to have the option and support of going wherever I go. I know I will feel so homesick after this week-long stint in my favorite place in the universe, but it is a reminder that it is still here and is exactly how I want it...and that is so invaluable.

I guess in my first quarter of getting my MSW I have really learned what it is to completely and totally bust-ass at school. This was definitely the hardest semester I have ever endured...not just the turmoil and excitement of a new place and people and discovering all that I didn't know before, both good and bad, but just extremely tough events that have happened through this fall and winter. Friends dying. Family members dying. My parents' marriage dying. Learning to navigate a complex and gigantic and extremely trying university system instead of having it work for me constantly. Learning to be okay with letting myself cry to my best friends on the phone instead of just being okay with the vice versa. Learning that those friends aren't going anywhere, no matter where they are located; learning that it is in fact possible to find new ones in a place where it previously wasn't - without forgetting or replacing those sewn into my heart.

I am coming out of the last 5 months with amazing stamina and pride...with a lot of ambition and hope.With a sense of the resiliency that I have been learning about in all of my classes that I am just now realizing I actually possess. With a lot of plans and a lot of desire toreally get it good this time. To not just get my foot in the door but to open that door wide open and move it on into my spot in the big city. I feel like I can do it, and I feel like I'm okay with feeling the desire for Chicago as long as it isn't going to inhibit me in my current New York City life.

There's nothin' you can't do...
And I think I actually believe that now.

.LMB.

Bust Holiday Craftacular

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 05:26:00 +0000

...I am hoping that it is like walking through a real-life version of Etsy, because that's what the website makes it seem like!

If you're in Manhattan come check it out :) Sorry updates have been so sparse, I am in the throes of finals...in 2 weeks, I'll be 1/4 done with my MSW!

.LMB.
I'm going to this tomorrow with my friend Shane:

No More Games.

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 02:09:00 +0000

One of the pages from a cute little story Nick basically wrote and I basically am drawing. Still a little rough, and the story isn't finished yet because I am drowning in procrastinating on school work.