eating a tangerine

I am not a vlogger.

2010-07-29T18:25:00.000-07:00

But I do like talking to cameras. Slash, people who can't hear me yet.

Swimming days are coming

2010-07-28T22:59:00.000-07:00

I'm housesitting this week and finishing up my philosophy class. The final's tomorrow, but I think it's non-cumulative. Yay. Yay.

As per usual, The Puppy who comes along with the house (she's not a puppy anymore, but she still acts like one) is a bit of a trial for my nerves and temper in these concentrated doses. I'm trying to remind myself that taking care of her is, in the moments when I'm with her, the only thing I need to concentrate on. Trying to be present and viewing the time and energy I spend on her as time and energy spent for me, à la Thich Nhat Hanh.

I was feeling sluggish this afternoon. I took a nap and then walked back to my house (perfect sunsetting sky, perfect sunsetting air) for dinner, which was a nice salad. Did twenty minutes or so of yoga, and then cut up some strawberries to have with yogurt. And a bunch of water. And I feel much better now.

This house has a really marvelous view from the living room. We're up on a hill, big picture windows, the neighborhood all lit up until the line of the ocean. That's where I'm sitting now. Puppy's gnawing on a piece of something that used to be alive. I'm typing to you. Domestic bliss.

(That is how Puppy watches me when I leave the house. My mom said, "Ohh, that's so cute!" My dad said, "I don't think it's that cute. She looks like a teddy bear." ?)

Invisibility

2010-07-27T19:11:00.000-07:00

"An art, like everything else."

Historical lulz

2010-07-27T00:47:00.000-07:00

"In the late ninth century, the monks at Conques, having no special remains of their own, stole the body of a young female martyr from a rival neighboring monastery."

- my art history textbook

That is all.

Guest Post: Journal

2010-07-26T12:16:00.000-07:00

[credit]

This post comes to us from another very old blogger friend, Heather of Grab Shell Dude. I love her blog because I love the way she thinks and writes, and her blog is a perfect window into her head.

***

I go back and read through my old journals sometimes. There is a big shelf of them, in random assortments: one with Winnie the Pooh on the front, and in it the markings of a gel pen from junior high. One with Peter Rabbit that I'm pretty sure I picked up on vacation along with some colored pencils. My first journal, the spine falling apart, filled with my parent's writing and pages of crayon scribbles. There is the journal with no lines and thick, wonderful paper that I wrote on with a calligraphy pen. There are even computer printouts when I decided I would try journaling with a word processor.

Now, I'm slowly working my way through an ordinary, black, lined book, with nothing on the cover. I've written mostly in ballpoint in this one, though my handwriting experiments have been quite extreme: alternating between cursive and print, between neat large letters and tiny curly, and, sometimes, between scribbles and even faster scribbles. I still haven't chosen between cursive and print, though usually my print shows up more. (My normal handwriting hasn't changed, sadly, since sixth grade. I know. I have the journal to prove it.)

For a while, I wrote occasionally. Then I wrote about once a week. Then I was inspired to write everyday. I've done it for around two years now. Sometimes in the evening, but lately, I mostly journal in the morning, when I'm not so tried and I can get some hindsight on the previous day.

Everyday? Really? To some people, this would be a huge, daunting task. For some, they would stare at the blank page and have nothing to write about, or, they would think, nothing interesting.

But I have never come up with a loss of things to write. Sure, there has been the occasion day where I wrote, "Non-eventful." But those have happened very rarely. More common are entries of multiple paragraphs, day after day. What do I have to write about, anyway?

Life, of course. How I feel. What I do. The people around me. My goals and dreams. My struggles. Those secret things that only my journal can understand. Sometimes it's the dark doldrums of discouragement, but most of the time, I try to instead write positively: I can't ignore the hard things of life, but I can see what I am learning from them. I can be honest, and honesty usually leads me to the conclusion that I have been given a lot and that I'm getting better at this whole living thing.

Read in June (part two)

2010-07-25T15:51:00.000-07:00

9. The Awakening, by Kate Chopin
Sentence by sentence, the prose isn't exactly my taste, but it builds a good story. I definitely had to wrestle with the main character and the ending, just to decide...what I thought of her.

10. Black and White Photography [Manifest Visions], ed. by James Luciana
Not really an aesthetic that interest me or speaks to me. A bit too...theatrical? There were some gems in there, though.

11. 50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food, by Susan Albers
This book could have been called 50 Healthy Coping Mechanisms or 50 Healthy Ways to Soothe Yourself. While it's aimed at addressing emotional eating, the destressing/soothing techniques they present are quite universally applicable

12. Charles Sheeler: The Photographs, ed. by Theodore E. Stebbins
What a wonderfully spare aesthetic he has. One of the old master photographers.

13. A Geisha's Journey: My Life as a Kyoto Apprentice, by Naoyuki Ogino
Brief, interesting, and pretty to look at. [Photographs + interviews with the geisha in question.] For a while back in high school, I used to read everything geisha that I could get my hands on. Old habits die hard, I guess. :)

14. Photographs: Annie Leibovitz, 1970-1990, by Annie Leibovitz
She's so flippin' talented; her pictures just light the inside of my head up. In some of her pictures, you just KNOW that she's captured more of her subjects than they meant to show of themselves. Just brilliant. You gotta check out her book Women too.

15. Adam: God's Beloved, by Henri Nouwen
I love this writer, but this one didn't communicate that much to me. Possibly because he died before it was completely through the publishing process? Anyways, it's about the author's time (he's a theologian) living in a community for mentally disabled people. The main thing I took from it is the idea that because God's love for us depends on nothing, we are freed to simply and peacefully be.

16. Journalution: Journaling to Awaken Your Inner Voice, Heal Your Life and Manifest Your Dreams, by Sandy Grason
Excellent prompts hung on a self-improvement framework You just gotta barrel through the self-help language, because her ideas for how to use journaling to do internal work on yourself are quite solid.

Crocodiles cry for the love of the crowd

2010-07-25T00:17:00.000-07:00

It's never felt so urgent to be creating and listening so much of the time. Or so natural. It's a summer of reflection for me. Quiet. Mostly reading and looking.

Ideas: you keep them, they grow leaves, they are existing on light and air.

Things that are making me happy

2010-07-23T23:22:00.000-07:00

the macarena.

my mom said, "you were made for the time when people went grocery shopping every day."

one of my friends told me that sometimes when a really insistent guy gives her his phone to put her number in, she uses it to text a donation to Haiti instead.

Susan calling me Tangerine Mama.

Q made up the term "sister-out-law" for me to use for my sister's husband's sister. I luff it. much catchier than "my sister's husband's sister" or "my sister's sister-in-law" or "my sister-in-law-in-law."

watching video tutorials by even-voiced makeup artists at bedtime. good speaking + the fact that I don't care what they're talking about puts me in a TRANCE. bedtime perfect.

freeway singing.

MY LAPTOP BEING REPAIRED!

writing letters during lecture.

my new camera. so, so much.

having the cousin of my first roomie come stay with us while she visited San Francisco.

when you come in from the cold and wash your hands, and you keep your hands under the running water even after they're clean because the hot water feels so good.

Ruins

2010-07-22T21:23:00.000-07:00

At the northern end of my beach, tucked in a little cove between some cliffs, near a posh seafood restaurant with a view to kill for...

There was once a palatial indoor swimming complex. It was built around the turn of the nineteenth century, back when swimming pools were actually for bathing (i.e. getting clean). At the time, it was the largest swimming pool in the world. It was fed with saltwater, I think, and you had to wear a woolen bathing suit.

It burned down in '66. Pieces of it still remain. I'm not sure what they used to be; it's hard for me to see how to superimpose what used to be over what's left. It now belongs to spiders, ducks, and seagulls.

One time last year when I was clambering around them, I met an old man who told me that during the Summer of Love ('69), he used to come to these ruins sometimes to get some quiet, to get away from the streets.

Here's a Flickr group with more pictures, since I don't have any showing the whole thing.

And a few more from another day when I only had my phone with me:

Read in June (part one)

2010-07-22T16:08:00.000-07:00

Super late, because the list was so long it intimidated me every time I looked at it...

1. As the World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Stay in Denial, by Derrick Jensen and Stephanie McMillan
What are you supposed to take from this book? A conviction to become an eco-terrorist? No, seriously. It does make the good point that most environmental problems are caused not by people taking showers that last too long, but by corporations.

2. He's a Stud, She's a Slut, and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know, by Jessica Valenti
Pretty light in tone and structure. A good primer on those itching day-to-day sexisms that you aren't supposed to take issue with.

3. Feminist Perspectives on Eating Disorders, ed. by Patricia Fallon, Melanie A. Katzman, and Susan C. Wooley
BRILLIANT interdisciplinary anthology. It's no secret that my own framework for understanding eating disorders is heavily influenced by feminism, and if you're curious why or what that means, this is an excellent and engaging work. It does get off to a somewhat slow start, and there are one or two chapters that are very dense and academic.

4. Model: A Memoir, by Cheryl Diamond
Entertaining, doesn't take itself too seriously. She seems like a likable and unique person, and narrates through eyes clear enough to be amused/surprised/etc. by her industry.

5. Revolutionary Letters, by Diane di Prima
This is originally from the seventies, with letters (poems) added on up into the noughties, so it gets to talk about The Man without the phrase being historically flavored. I find that pretty amazing. There's also some dated stuff about sticking it to said Man by doing drugs, but most of it, even if you don't agree with all of the ideas, kind of put my brain on fire. In the good way.

6. A Room of One's Own, by Virginia Woolf
Feminist classic, of course. I highly recommend it for her ideas about art and creation, fiction specifically. Though she's quite earnest, she has some lovely humor too.

7. The Reason for God, by Timothy Keller
Highly logical, and maintains a respectful, fair tone throughout. A good intellectual apologetic.

8. The Business of Fancydancing: Stories and Poems, by Sherman Alexie
I actually liked this better than The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Poems and short prose-poem pieces. Captivating.

Ache and grey

2010-07-21T16:42:00.000-07:00

Dreary sky. I read the last 300 pages of The Ghosts of Ashbury High (Jaclyn Moriarty) sitting on my floor after lunch after class. It's a brilliant book, so good and so tangley and a bit heartbreaking, and I just read something from my astronaut sister that also made my heart hurt. Both in that vicarious sort of way. So I think now I might watch a movie down here in my room and deal with those in my head later. I have V for Vendetta, The Triplets of Belleville, and Inglourious Basterds out from the library.

Last week was exhausting. I did an inordinate amount of socializing with new people this week, even some mingling, and it took its TOLL. All cool people, mind, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm an introvert who reaches sensory overload very quickly. I climbed in the shower and turned the water on and covered my face with my hands. Take away the people pls. I thought maybe I would spend the weekend with my eyes covered up and noise-blocking headphones on, lying on my bed listening to my thoughts bounce off the fabric of the blindfold? Instead I just slurked about the house, slept, and declined all unnecessary conversation. Gotta do what you gotta do.

Some more pictures from Muir Woods:

I had a scare with my new camera the other day, the shutter wasn't firing and I thought it was broken, but it turns out it's just some wrongheaded safety mechanism to prevent double exposures which went to work because I wasn't advancing the film quite far enough after each shot. I did lose most of a roll from the beach, but I went back and retook a bunch of the shots yesterday after class.

Everything feels right when I've got my feet in the Pacific.

[prints for sale here]

Answers

2010-07-20T22:36:00.000-07:00

[see the ask/tell box here]

How is a raven like a writing desk?
Shoot, I've already heard a really good answer to this. ["Poe wrote on both."] Um. Depending on their age, both may contain feathers? Haha. It's a stretch.

how many countries have you been to?
Four outside of the US: Germany, Switzerland, Iceland, Australia. Technically Austria and Liechtenstein too, but that was only half an hour or so and we didn't get out of the car.

what's your favorite romance in a novel?
Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth's in Persuasion.

what is your best cure(s) for unhappiness?
I like this question. I think I will give its answer a post of its own, in fact.

Will you record yourself singing a song and post it? Please?
I cracked up when I read this. (I have a very weak singing voice.) I'm really curious what prompted this request, though. Come back to the question box and tell me.

Summer under the fog [mixtape]

2010-07-20T05:11:00.000-07:00

Summer here tastes like cold chamomile. Drink up and have a lovely Tuesday.

p.s. surveysurveysurvey

Survey

2010-07-19T18:40:00.000-07:00

I have made a survey for YOU about the content here on Eating a Tangerine. Please click on over; it'll take less than a minute and your responses will be really helpful for me.

Takk takk.

All you have to do

2010-07-18T19:06:00.000-07:00

"All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know."
- Ernest Hemingway

Read that at the head of a chapter in Writing Away and had to try to do so.

What is the truest sentence you know?

Sediment

2010-07-17T17:57:00.000-07:00

Baby deer in Muir Woods.

I have a herd of glow-in-the-dark sheep on my ceiling since seventh grade.

Koala from the Perth Zoo has lost his "I <3 Australia" vest and his arm's a bit dislocated but he's still there.

A girl in a rabbit hat playing wine glasses. Yes, of course!

Hipster tracks in the line for the bathroom.

A sculpture at my summer college that I liked.

Waking up from a delicious, too-long afternoon nap.

This wall was really high on one side. Too scary to walk out any farther with a camera in my face.

My space heater is one of my favorite non-persons.

Community college looks like my high school, basically.

I like bicycle shadows.

Long summer evenings...sometimes the fog even goes away. [Help me with the developing costs; buy prints here!]

Fogflowers

2010-07-16T17:17:00.000-07:00

[Help me with the developing costs; buy prints here!]

Guest Post: On being an auntie

2010-07-15T14:49:00.000-07:00

This post comes from my long-time blogger friend, Debbie of Writing Soup. She's only a few weeks older than me, but already basically a pro at the auntie thing, as you'll see, so she obliged me (soon-to-be first-time aunt that I am) with this brief introduction to the joys of aunting. <3 Takk fyrir, Debbie.

I became an Aunt when I was nine. Since then my sisters (we've tended to marry pretty young in my family) have produced a new niece or nephew roughly every year. Sometimes there are multiple cute babies in one year, other times we'll go a couple without any. Right now I have five nieces, four nephews, and one little gender-unkown fetus. I dearly love being an aunt. Each time a new baby is born into the family it's just as exciting as the first, with a new little life and personality joining our ever expanding family.

Let's face it, one of the best parts of being an Aunt or an Uncle is the spoiling/bragging that comes with it. You can love that little person as much as you want, but when it comes to diapers or discipline, you can just hand them off to their parents. That's not to say you should never help out with that stuff, but the pressure to Be A Good Parent is significantly less. Particularly because you're not a parent. Bragging is also a big perk of being an Aunt. I know for a fact that my nieces and nephews are the cutest on the planet. Sorry to everyone else, that's just the way it is. You'd never find 9.5 cuter little munchkins anywhere. We've got some good genes in our family.

What I think I love the most, though, is getting the chance to be a part of the lives of these kids. I love to watch them play together, and see the ways their lives are unfolding. It reminds me of my own interactions with my siblings and cousins. Children are so imaginative, and in ways that adults would never think of. For example, when my husband and I moved out of our old place, my sister and brother-in-law came to help. Their two kids would have been totally bored except I had a box of legos and a box of beanie babies. My niece took the beanie babies, my nephew the legos, and they played together for several hours while we moved boxes around and cleaned up my apartment. I loved that they each took their interests and made a fun pretend game that kept them happy in what would have normally been a boring situation.

I love to share my own interests with my nieces and nephews as well. I always want to be a cool aunt, so it's super fun to play with them, talk about books together (it helps that I adore children's books) and all around have a fun time. It helps me experience those things for the first time again, like when I took my oldest niece to go see my favorite author, Shannon Hale. My niece was shy and excited, much like I was the first time I met Shannon. It was a special experience for both of us, and I'm excited to share other stories with her and her cousins.

Being an Aunt is great. Little nieces and nephews are full of fun, imagination, chaos, and noise. They're wonderful, crazy, sometimes a pain, oftentimes sweet. I may not get to see them as much as I want to, but that makes their visits and funny quirks all the more fun.

Loved him like a winter bird

2010-07-14T20:25:00.000-07:00

Answers

2010-07-14T15:08:00.000-07:00

[see the ask/tell box here. for those of you who shared rather than asking...I am hearing you.]

Shopping: WhoWhatWhereWhenWhy?
Clothes shopping I do alone or with my little sister, mostly secondhand except for H&M or the occasional Etsy purchase. Usually only when I've been feeling a pinch in my wardrobe week, or when a staple has worn out or whatever.

I do like to do the produce shopping for our house sometimes, too. Haha. My neighborhood has the best produce stores.

If you could live out one fairytale, well-known or obscure, which would it be?
"The Little Mermaid" but in reverse. The Little Human who becomes a mermaid! And with the happy Disney ending, pls.

How did you make this nifty question box?
*points here*

Recommend a weirdly cool or coolly weird blog!
Well, spider is weird and cool. And Em's writing is weird and brilliant. Will that do?

Favorite color?
No favorites, just whatever I'm in the mood for. But I think a lot of my outfits are neutrals + a deep blue or purple.

What's a happy memory of yours?
Sitting on the terrace in the backyard of my German host family's house, in the late afternoon when the temperature was comfortable. It looked out onto the beginning of a forest; their house was at the edge of their little town. We'd drink cold tea and eat some sweet baked thing and just talk and relax. It's always what I think of when I read something about Europeans having a slower pace of life.

Echo come back out of tune

2010-07-13T14:37:00.000-07:00

Peaceful beaver

2010-07-12T22:18:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it's not possible to know exactly what a person means without knowing where they're coming from and who they're addressing. A reminder for me to give the benefit of the doubt, which I did not do in the case of [recent blogger drama].

For those still interested in the content of the argument, I explained to Kristy Eléna that I interpreted the section of her post I quoted as saying that women have body image issues because they have not been strong enough. Kristy clarified her intent in writing that section:

"my excerpt was not meant to be a blame or to ignore the historical factors that have brought us to this point. that paragraph is meant for a very specific type of woman - one who unfortunately exists in abundance and whom i've had the bad fortune of running into far too often. the woman whose first reaction is to say something horrible and demeaning about another woman for her weight/looks but then turn around and play the 'men make women feel bad' card and 'why aren't we equal yet' and 'why am i not being respected by men.' the woman who is constantly saying 'i'm fat' but not because she actually IS struggling with a weight issue, but because she wants to put down her heavier friends. and though deep down she knows that's a really f-cked up mentality, she keeps doing it because it makes her feel better about herself, and she relies on that instead of actually looking inside and fixing whatever problem is causing it. she blames the models she sees in magazines for her problems when in reality it's HER. it's a 'tough love' paragraph for sure, but i've run out of ways to try and reason with people like that. maybe tough love is the only thing that's left."

You won't catch me writing like that, but I am writing to different people than Kristy Eléna is. Perhaps it's a needed message for some of her audience. I can't say.

I suspect we still disagree in some places, but no more ugly fighting. Yay clarity, yay agenda-free communication.

If the drama made you uneasy, my apologies, friend! It kind of made me yikes too and it's not exactly something I want to cultivate more of. Though you are quite welcome to disagree with me or one another in the comments.

I like you for bearing with me as I get wiser.

as ever,
Holly.

Linkage

2010-07-10T11:31:00.000-07:00

These photos they got hiding in closets in Ikea, waiting for people to look inside, are too awesome.

Lol theory: utterly true.

Star Trek and Ke$ha combine shockingly well.

Diagram Prize for Oddest (Book) Title.

Feminist summer reading list.

Scary chemicals are in American cosmetics.

I flipping love this music video! Coolest concept, and so pretty.

Steph sounds off on guys and body image. Thoughts?

We all know it's rampant in gymnastics, but...all of these famous Olympians suffered from eating disorders? Sobering.

"Wear Everything All The Time" from my new favorite fashion blog, Already Pretty.

Some hands and faces

2010-07-09T21:20:00.000-07:00

Would you find it irresponsible of me to post pictures from my first roll on my new camera instead of continuing to respond to (below) drama? Truly, I just want to let my thoughts steep and settle a bit.

Anyhoo. Pictures from the Zenit. Enjoy. I haven't gotten the batteries for the light meter yet, so I was guessing on the exposure for these.

Men don't have body image issues, therefore women have no excuse?

2010-07-09T00:02:00.000-07:00

Excerpted from a much longer post on fashion models and body image:

"we all struggle with insecurities and low confidence at times. and that's normal. but we should be more resilient overall, don't you think? throughout history people with extraordinary bodies have been admired. the ancient greeks carved statues of them. how many guys do you know who look like hercules? but i don't see many men complaining endlessly about their bodies, even though men in advertisements are very fit and muscular. we women want the world to treat us as equals, but in the mean time we fall short of acting like equals ourselves. i'm going to be brutally honest with you right here - when a girl starts bitching about her weight and how she hates all these 'skinny models' she loses credibility in my eyes. she comes off as not being smart enough to understand how damaging her words truly are, and that looks aren't everything. i wouldn't hire a girl who spoke that way for a job and if i was a guy i wouldn't date a girl like that unless i was planning on promptly discarding her."

Comparing men and women in this respect is just plain wrong-headed. It only takes a little sociology and history to see that for a very long time, maybe always, there has been A REALLY BIG DIFFERENCE in the ways that the female body and the male body have been treated and perceived. The female body does not mean the same thing as the male body and I'm not sure it ever has.

So all that background, but you look at the fact that women in our time have issues around their bodies more often than men do, and you want to attribute that to the women themselves? Not even a consideration of the radically different economic, religious, and social realities that have been attached to the female body for centuries?

Quite simply, you're missing the significant variable.

***

I would really like to address the writer's mention of classical art, as well as offer an overview of what I mean by "radically different economic, religious, and social realities." To do it properly would basically entail outlining a research paper, but...I do have a good amount of free time this summer. We shall see. I kind of feel I owe it to you.

Tonight I just needed to make a quick venting response, though