the world forgetting by the world forgot

i tried to avoid watching eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, but couldn't help myself. Watching little clips of it on YouTube, bawling my eyes out, which hurts extra much because I was in a bike accident today, flipped over my handle bars because I only got a set of front brakes, and hit my eye socket real hard on the handle bar on my way down.

Watching clips made me realize the process of forgetting, viciously forcing my brain to try to forget how much this hurts, trying to forget how angry and sad I feel in the wake of things. I realized the process has begun, we are forgotten to each other. Memories pushed away. It made me so sad, the thought of all these stories we piled up over the years, now disappeared to where? Two strangers who fell in love, now strangers again. Worse than strangers, because we are actively purposefully trying to remove ourselves from each other. It feels like killing someone, removing the evidence of their existence, the act of forgetting them like stabbing them in the heart until their heart stops and you can make them disappear.

I'm lying in bed crying, my throat sore from a cold, my head throbbing from being bonked. I can't help thinking for a moment I'm back in L.A., in our old apartment, Ben lying next to me in the dark, comforting me thru all the pain. Remembering how it felt to have all that pain and aching washed away from you by someone you loved, who loved you. How we once were that for each other.

I made the mistake of calling him to try to tell him this, how I'm scared of losing all of it, of letting go of the happy memories, because so much of life is tied up with it. Days spent on the beach, by the sea, in the sun, so many memories of being happy and young and feeling unafraid. I'm afraid to forget completely, even though I feel it happening. I want to forget, but am scared to lose it all.

life is too short to waste any more of it on you

i finally told my parents about what happened. they were amazingly supportive, clear-headed and wise. i don't know why i expected any differently.

the best advice they could have given me was this: life is too short to be unhappy and life is too precious to let bad people break you down and make you feel less worthy of happiness than you are. forget it like a bad dream and move on. you owe it to yourself to fight for what's yours, for the happiness you deserve.

god, i love them.

and they are so right. onward! upward! the past is behind me and i'm not looking back.

security blanket:home :: ex-boyfriend's t-shirt:love

this series of portraits documents women wearing their ex-lovers' shirts and talking about the experience of love (and love lost). i feel like i'm looking into a mirror on my own experience. it helps to know i'm not alone and i'm not a weirdo for doing this too. so much comfort in the feel of that soft fabric against my cheek, even if there isn't a person behind it any more.

i sleep with my ex-partner's shirt beside my pillow. i nuzzle into it at night when i start to feel sad, when my awareness shakes me awake and reminds me again that i'm alone. for some reason just the smell of him helps me feel better, puts me in a place of calm and comfort, makes me think of being in california with nothing but his old shirt in bed with me. he started it; the first time he went away to Turkey, he hid it under my pillow for me to find later, and i slept in bed every night with it wrapped around me, the sleeves around my waist or draped over my shoulders, and somehow through all of that it never stopped smelling like ben, maybe it smelled even better over time because it smelled like us. even though the shirt i have isn't one he left for me, i keep it close by as a reminder: you weren't dreaming, he loved you once, he lived here with you and now he's gone. you were a we once. you loved each other. this is all that remains.

"It feels like a flag I can’t stop flying. It comforts me in the meantime between the spaces. It’s just a rag I turned into a promise that he would never leave. Some sort of common thread between us. Part of me wants to rip it off. So many what-ifs and could’ve-beens and should’ve-beens and never-weres. It’s just a shirt. It’s been there for me when people haven’t. It makes me feel childish and taken care of. It makes me look a little stronger than I am. As long as I hold onto the shirt she is never completely out of my life. I’d wear it every day if I could. As much as you build a house around it or put a ring on it it’s all still temporary and dissolving so all you can do is love it. Even if it’s painful we need to hold onto something. Proof that we did it. That we went through it. That we learned something. That our hearts were broken. That we were loved. That we weren’t loved enough. For someone I won’t be something that will be so easily shed."

(if only i could) sleep all summer

i saw Neko Case perform at the Egg in Albany with some good friends last night: a college friend, a friend from my recent graduate program, and one of my best friends, my partner of 7 years (he turned 30 yesterday).

Neko came out to perform this song for her encore. just her and a guitarist. i was in tears by the end of it. something about sitting with all these people who i loved so much, people i've needed in different ways at different stages of my life, some who i've gotten much closer to over the years and others who i know time and distance will eventually pull us apart, not knowing the future of things, not understanding the past, and wanting so much to pull it all in tight and protect it from the erosion of time ever-marching onward. i've never been so afraid for a moment to end.

so i'm just gonna put this video here, and some lyrics that particularly spoke to me, like a little fragile time capsule for me to come back to another day and remember how i felt in this particular moment, tears streaming down my face in a dark spaceship-like concert venue, afraid for the lights to turn back on again.

"I would change for you but, babe, that doesn't mean I'm gonna be a better man

Give the ocean what I took from you so one day you could find it in the sand
And hold it in your hands again

Cold ways kill cool lovers
Strange ways we used each other
Why won't you fall back in love with me?"

back to the future

have i mentioned, i love time travel!

i found this wonderful photography project by a woman in Brazil by the name of Irina Werning, who has been collecting old photos from her friends in Buenos Ares and having them "go back in time" to re-enact moments from their past.

at first i thought she had just found old photos and then procured models who could be dressed up and posed in a way resembling the photographs, but about halfway thru the gallery it occurred to me that these past and future people are actually the same people. once you realize the photos are actually juxtaposing real past with real present, with decades in between, you're humbled by the human ability to transcend change. or to put it another way, humans wear change very well. babies become adults, brunettes become blondes, sprinkles of chest hair grow, trees grow, crooked teeth straighten, beards are grown, laugh lines appear – there are acute superficial differences, but the characters beneath the surface (one can imagine) are still relatively the same, albeit with some insane tattoos accrued along the way.

it's been quieting to look at these photographs and feel reassured of the constancy with which time grips us all. lately i have been perceiving myself as a stranger, so different from who i was yesterday, the year before, and ten years ago. to think of an image of myself when i was eleven and contrast it to how i feel now feels alienating and weird, like wearing the wrong shoe on the wrong foot. but i am reminded that perhaps life moves more in ripples than seismic waves. most of the time, anyway.

transatlanticism

do you ever think you know a song, listen to it for an entire period of your life, put it on playlists or put it on before you go to bed, hum it while walking to work or school or etc., but for years you don't listen to it and it gets buried under new music and podcasts and you feel like you kinda outgrew it. and then one day, you remember something about the lyrics, one haunting phrase ("i need you so much closer"), and then you are compelled to re-excavate it, whereupon you discover what you may have known before but had forgotten, your new circumstances giving you new cause – or perhaps reminding you why – you liked it in the first place.

it's like falling in love all over again.

today, it was this:

the atlantic was born today and i'll tell you how:
the clouds above opened up and let it out.

I was standing on the surface of a perforated sphere
when the water filled every hole.
and thousands upon thousands made an ocean,
making islands where no island should go.
oh no.

those people were overjoyed; they took to their boats.
I thought it less like a lake and more like a moat.
the rhythm of my footsteps crossing flood lands to your door have been silenced forever more.
the distance is quite simply much too far for me to row
it seems farther than ever before
oh no.

I need you so much closer

-Death Cab for Cutie, "Transatlanticism"

proposition: blogging as life preserver

i've had a lot of conversations lately in which my motives for blogging were called into question. and though i find it hard, usually, to think so metacognitively about the reasons for my writing, i realized today that it's a tree in the forest kinda thing.

if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound?

i remembered this post i wrote in the beginning of my foray into blogging, and how i was thinking about death and the ability of the internet to preserve experience and writing.

this digital age is a mausoleum, which is a word i love, because it sounds like what it means: "death museum." we produce so many artifacts of our lives, but at the same time these artifacts exist mostly in the ether. we write emails, dozens a day, these all go into mailboxes, each of us with mailboxes thousands of emails full. there's a permanence but also an invisibility to this kind of production. while it exists and accumulates, it so easily disappears. someone dies, their email address and inbox goes with them. all those MB's of virtual space and productivity and creation lost, irrecoverable. and here, i hesitate again, because this virtual medium has the capacity to recover and revive, just as easily as it can be erased.

i want to remember things clearly, i don't want things to fade!

the wonderful thing about this is that digital technologies are allowing us to preserve little mummies of ourselves all over the interwebs (which sounds kind of gross, but admit it, you're fascinated!) snapshots of life and moments. and the complexities and details of our lives will read, in retrospect, so much clearer than any other materials of the past or present. just as the clarity with which we see things has improved with the emergence of digital imaging and hi-res photography, our understanding of the past will be significantly clearer because of the details we are writing now. we are constantly writing and re-writing our own autobiographies, from the moment we self-publish.

and isn't that such a beautiful thing?

-stephan!e

(written sunday, 3.22.09, 9pm PST)

future past

i had a dream that i was back on Miami's campus, and it was the future because everything was so old looking: the brick streets had cracks in them, little wiry grass blades growing up through the fissures. the bell towers looked dilapidated, rusted, verging on collapse. everything was gray and sepia-toned.

the other futuristic thing was that they had erected a huge saloon/ movie theatre on the edge of campus – a center for tawdry activities. men in britches and high hats, with unruly facial hair and mean swaggers. i was walking over treacherously uneven sidewalk to meet a friend at the theatre and buy a ticket for whatever was showing. and it occured to me how funny it was that no matter how "future"-like the future can be, there always remains some connection to the past, some nostalgia or fetishism. and it doesn't seem odd, these lingering glimpses of past, but right, so very right.

the last of 2008

i woke up this morning and lay in bed thinking about 2008...

i taught my first class(es) in 2008. i wrote my first thesis in 2008. i moved away from home and into my first apartment in 2008. i started my first job in 2008.

i met Grizzly Bear in 2008.
i built a bookpress and hand-bound books in 2008. this blog reached 20,000 readers in 2008!

i've learned to appreciate home and my family in new ways, and i learned what it's like to fall completely in love with someone in 2008.

...and now, in the dark, on the floor of my parents' living room in the house of my childhood, next to a dying fire, with the miserable tv on in the background, i'm thinking about 2008 again. it really has been a great year.

and 2009 is going to be even better, i know it.

with love,
stephan!e


post-script: my half-hearted and last-minute attempts to live twitter new year's eve. could have been fun if longer-lasting. alas, noted for next year!

idealist

i joined Idealist.org about a year ago, when graduation was pending and "the future" we'd always talked about but never really pondered was looming, no, was here. i was terrified i would collect my diploma in May and then have nowhere to go and nothing to do. after 16 years comfortably riding out the formal education system and its strongly set paths, the idea of the track suddenly ending and launching me forward with no idea of what lay ahead was worrisome.

i think this fear of the unknown is dangerous; rather than explore the possibilities and potentials of the unknown and undecided, we are swept into fates we don't want b/c of fear of failure. i think this is particularly true among the freakishly driven and busy, those whose schedules drive them to the point of burnout and leave them with hardly any sense of what "free time" means. suddenly the idea of not having something to pour all yr energy and time into feels like failure. why?

the point of this post is this: i felt that after struggling with the process of writing my undergraduate thesis, i needed a break from higher ed, wanted to put off grad school, and avoid law school. i figured working a job in the meantime while i sorted out my feelings for formal ed was a good idea. and so i signed up for Idealist to look for jobs, something to fall back on in the next year.

that was a year ago, and i still get the emails. i can't bring myself to unsubscribe from their email list b/c, admittedly, i guess i'm still looking. i check their emails, every day, to see what alternate lives i could be living: lead filmmaker in Venice, community organizer in Chicago, youth media coordinator in NYC, and lament the disparity between my current job and the work i could be doing instead. every time i read about a new job, a different salary, a different locale, i imagine completely different lives and wish i had been more comfortable with uncertainty.

-stephan!e

a change is gonna come

i am so nervous and excited about tomorrow's election results that i am having trouble doing anything but reminiscing and imagining the future. for the whole of my political and social consciousness, i've only known a world of disappointing Bush policies and political farce. i can almost hardly imagine living in an america i am proud of, where i trust and believe in my government and my president. but, i am ready for a change.

it's been hard for me in the past months to watch all the election coverage and read the news about the grassroots efforts to support Obama and have to remain removed from it. hard for me to feel like teaching my little classes of 6th graders california math and science standards was a better use of my time and energy than campaigning to ensure fair elections. it was hard for me to understand how best to take part in achieving the ideal of america i wanted to see. admittedly, i was never really a huge fan of Obama, but i like the energy and enthusiasm he's breathed into the political process (eventhough i think his stances on policies are kinda lackluster and stale). i think Obama's significance is his function as a symbol of hope, change, and youthful energy, and that is sadly all i'm looking for right now from my political system. the thought of his possible loss is just too tragic to imagine. i get sick to my stomach thinking of the possible repurcussions. i think that if Obama loses this election, millions of young ppl will be forever removed and distrustful of the political process, will lose their belief in that great dream called Democracy.

so here i am: a middle school teacher in south central LA, close enough to one of the few remaining battleground states (Nevada) that skipping work to do political work has been tempting, discussing the main issues (abortion, gun control, same-sex marriage, immigration) with my 6th graders and hoping they take my political excitement home to their parents, incapable of planning a math lesson tonight b/c i keep thinkingabout tomorrow and how our lives might change, and the futures of my 6th graders could change, starting Wednesday, but wondering if, wishing, i could have done more.

it's funny: in the past four years, i think i always imagined things differently. as a freshman in college, having organized and canvassed for Election 04 ("anything but Bush") in ohio and being devastated and heartbroken by the results of those efforts, i was disenchanted and confused and vowed that wherever i was in 08, i'd be working even harder for election and campaign efforts. i imagined myself as a grad student, going door-to-door, leafletting, helping voters with registrations and absentee ballots, educating citizens about the issues and getting ppl excited. basically, insert a slightly more grown-up me onto a generic college campus doing almost the same thing i was doing in undergrad. it's just so funny to think back on that and see where i actually ended up, and how laidback and immobile the actual future-me ended up being.

and now, with only about 24 hours before the results of the election will be revealed, i'm remembering the same feeling i felt four years ago: the terrific electricity of knowing that possibly, in the space of a few hours, a new president will be in office, and potentially great things could begin to happen again. this moment is bringing back memories of me as a freshman in college, of waiting in the writing center late at night watching the results slowly coming in, tired from a day's hard work at the polls in the pouring rain. everyone abuzz with energy and excitement as we held on to our hopes that our work had paid off, replaced by negativity and disbelief when the results eventually revealed a Bush win. i'm hoping and praying to the cosmos that i don't see a tragic repeat of that 2004 election day, because my lack of action this time around will have me even more devastated and angry at myself for the loss.

so, for the sake of memories and posterity, a song for change, and a flashback (a blog post written November 3, 2004 – the eve of election night):

"A Change Is Gonna Come" by Sam Cooke [mp3]

-stef

she lives!

(that's me with the "proof" of my finished senior project! alt. title reads: "Idiots and Jackasses: How American Public Education Fails to Meet Its Democratic Ideals." you like?)

hello everyone!

yes, this is stephanie, returning to you from the edge of death and emotional/psychological/existential despair, to say that

1) I AM DONE!
i finished the project after much duress, at noon on Monday, April 14th, 2008. i had to haul a lot of ass to get there, and it was certainly not the easiest thing i've ever done (i slept 10 minutes on Sunday night, 2 hours on Saturday, 3 hours on Friday, ate maybe 4 meals in that expanse of time), nor the easiest to understand (i wrote 25 pages in one night!), nor the most believable (i wrote 25 pages! in one night! with only 10 minutes of sleep!). but i did it! I AM SET TO GRADUATE! (*fist pump and hip thrust!* *yeah!* let's have a party now, pls?)

2) there's still so much to do...
i am presenting my thesis at the undergraduate research forum in 4 hours, and i have nothing in the way of visual aids or even mental preparation. i hope to just show up and be able to garble something remotely intelligible.
the "dress rehearsal" for my big thesis defense in May is coming up on Thursday, which is also a little too early for my taste. i don't think i can whip up a powerpoint and a formal presentation in one night, especially since i still haven't slept more than 5 hours since i finished.
(my body is def taking a toll from all this. on Monday, when i wrapped up writing, my face looked like i'd been chainsmoking 2 packs a day since i was 14. i was so haggard, i couldn't believe i was still alive. and sadly, i still haven't gotten a chance to completely rest up, i've been editing and formatting the project, and working on SFS stuff again, and bouncing around meetings. i can't wait until next week, when i will hopefully be able to sleep and eat to my heart's content and maybe even read a good book again!)
AND, there's still another chapter i want to write, because it just doesn't feel done yet, but i don't know if i have the patience/time/energy/will-power to do it. i'm telling you, i have a disease! i need to just put it aside, let it wait for the dissertation!

3) THANK YOU!
thru all of the trials and tribulations, this blog has really been a huge source of relief for me. it's been a place to informally write what i'm thinking, and a nice opportunity to step away from the project, remember that i can write, i just need to be less editorial about it and let it flow.

and, to know that there are ppl who read it, who enjoy it (don't you?) and who care, well, it really puts the sunshine in my (as of late) dark and dismal existence. (i can't tell you how glad it made me, as sick as this sounds, to know that ppl were worried and wondering if i had died. i'm so glad you care that i live! shucks, yo... thanks!)

and, i wanted to thank the blog itself, as odd as that sounds, because it literally saved me. when i lost all the data on my computer (all my writing from college, all my photos), i didn't know how the fuck i was going to finish my thesis. there were diagrams, little nuggets that i'd written in little .rtf files, little things that i couldn't possibly think to recover. some were screen shots of websites long lost and forgotten. some were passing thoughts that i couldn't reconstruct or re-place.

but then i remembered that i had posted most, if not all, of these things on the blog! and sure enough, there they all were, neatly labeled and organized, even showing me which dates i'd created them, so i could make accurate notations in my citations list! hahaha, what a beautiful thing!

anyway, i should really get back to work. i'm running around to meetings and presentations and interviews all day, and then i'm teaching class until 10 pm (which i really need to prepare for), and then i gotta find time to put a powerpoint together for tomorrow... oh geez, it's looking like another all-nighter week...

when everything is said and done, i hope there will be copious imbibing and heavy snuggling.

until then, yours in life and virtual death,
stephanie

you can still be happy about shrill, annoying things!

my new year's resolution is: NO DRAMA.

there's no room in my life for it. in other words, simplicity, serenity, finding happiness in everything, b/c there's no time for sadness any more. i'm 22 now, goddammit!, and i will not stand for any more of my time being spent on lamentation or regret.

i can't wait for 2007 to be over. it's been a year of drama, for sure, and there have been too many trifles and worries that distract me from what's real (this is real. not this.)

i intend to fill my next year with as much positive thinking and fun as possible, even endeavoring to make the most unpleasant of experiences into an opportunity for learning and self-discovery. i am, of course, speaking of senior project, a Frankenstein beast of a project that has gotten away from me, multiplying grievances like a water-logged gremlin.

despite the dedication of my primary oppressor to making the thesis-writing process absolute hell, i am committing myself to writing a clever thesis, and by god, i am going to finish it and graduate, with my dignity and integrity intact, thank you very much.

and what's more, there will be dancing! and hell, even some flesh-hungry hamsters if it comes to it!

video found at the Positive Energy Vibe Zone.

i'm pumped full of good vibes, and i intend to keep them!

to 2008! - a much better time than now.
-stephanie

Jens Lekman concert videos

from my dreamy trip to chicago. oh how i wish i could travel back in time, to this night, rather than live the sad present (i was told i wasn't going to graduate...)

sipping on the sweet nectar of my memories,
stephanie

the naming of things + 80's popculture + Chinese culture

[written 7/9/07, ~2 am]

my mother and i go for a walk in our neighborhood. it's just after 9, and on this mid-summer evening, the sun has only just set. everywhere, tinted blue and violet, but the humid stickiness of the July heat lingers in the air.

we walk in silence. i'm cranky with sleep, my jet lag and summer restlessness manifesting itself as unjustified moodiness, worsened by my frustration at the lack of conversation. my mother walks briskly, bumping into me on the awkwardly narrow sidewalk as we try to walk abreast of one another, the overgrown bushes nudging us into each other every twenty paces.

the tension is thicker than the summer humidity. i watch her bite her nails, wondering too why she can't carry on a conversation with her own daughter.

so tonight, i ask my mother about names, and how she and my father chose mine.

while the name i intend is actually my english name [Stephanie], my mother jumps immediately to my Mandarin name - Hsiao Jing (this disparity makes me flush slightly), explaining that my paternal grandmother chose my name. she then explains the Chinese naming process, a kind of "poetry."

she describes a poem, epically wrapping back in time, mapping generations and tracing family trees by stanzas and refrains. each branch of family history signaled by a line of poetry. i imagine an endless scroll, unwinding to reveal the flash of character that is my name.

"American names," she says, "are easy."

"They're just sounds. You just pick what sounds best."

my American name: purely 80's. my parents were deciding between 2 names - Connie and Stephanie. why those names? "because Connie Chung was well-known at that time," my mother explains, "everyone knew who Connie Chung was." and Stephanie? "after Princess Stephanie" (of Monaco). finally, they chose Stephanie because "Stephanie Lee" sounded better than "Connie Lee" (and thank heavens they did).

my brother's name is a similar story. Kevin was a popular name at the time (i can't help but wonder if this is at all a credit to Kevin Bacon's 80s fame), and Calvin Klein was hitting it big in the 80s. they thought Calvin Lee sounded better (little did they know that as a kid my brother would go around introducing himself as "Calvin, as in Calvin and Hobbes").

my mom then goes back to a day long before i was born, she is a beautiful young school teacher, accompanying my father as they move to Kentucky for his new job at the university. i imagine her face in the passenger seat window, gazing out, pondering names during the long drive before she arrives at the new home, stepping out of the car, suddenly "Angela" (b/c Americans never pronounce her given name with the beauty and delicacy it requires: Hsiao Hwa, like a fragile flower. it has the effect of dissociation, disconnect: "I never know if they're talking to me or not").

she goes back further still, to a day long before she married my father, she is a beautiful young university student, studying German, and she goes by Sabrina, Karinne, Sonya. a different name for every teacher.

as we come up to our driveway, i try Sabrina on my tongue, and try to remember the feeling of it, to store it in my mind in case i ever have a daughter... Sabrina.

---
memories like mohair sweaters,
Stephanie Lee / Li Hsiao Jing

all tomorrow's parties

i'm going to sleep early 2nite b/c i'm gettin up early for this:

BIKE LEXINGTON 2007!!

i'm really excited b/c if there's one thing i regret about my hometown it's that there's not enuf room for bike culture. i see more Hummers here than i see in Hummer dealerships (i kid u not - i see at least one every day! and trust me, i'm not lookin!)

i'm really excited to go on a ride on my bike thru the town i grew up in and see it anew. the world seems really different when u're on your bike. it seems more vibrant and fresh. must be all the wind blowing in your hair... aaaah i'm so excited already!

all day i've been thinking about how i miss the Critical Masses i rode in Chicago.

us in Daley Plaza every last Friday of the month. oh, what glorious days those were...

i miss having that to look forward to every month. i've been thinking of starting one in Oxford next school year, but i kinda wonder how successful it would be. i bet i could get a lot of ppl out, but the available routes are few and far between. but even just a monthly ride thru uptown and campus then to Hueston Woods would be something beautiful to see. hm, perhaps...

sweet dreams and an exciting 2moro!
-stephan!e

where did young stephanie go?

growing-up stephanie is brooding at home, wistfully remembering the past, anxiously dreading the future. particularly the immediate future, which holds much packing, re-sorting, reorganizing, and reordering of her life. and much driving, which she despises.

so let's take a comfy seat in the past instead.
-stephanie

stephanie lee, the famous writer:
playing with my dad:
working with my mom:
in the kitchen with baby Cal:
the young parents:

with such a beautiful family, is it any wonder i resist going back to school?

time travel is easy

yesterday, i showed you pictures from travel books i found from my childhood.

today, i share more intimate glimpses into the past.

first, pictures from this book i made in Montessori school*:
the scribbled "copyright" on the inside cover indicates that i made this in 1995. that was a full 12 years ago. the book is a delicate creation titled "Grown-ups always do everything!" and features 20 unique pages of pencil drawings paired with different privileges of the older class i envied as a 9-year-old imprisoned in the educational system.
it is handbound: as i remember, i drew the pictures in sequence in a booklet of salvaged computer paper, then folded the pages together, made holes in the crease and threaded them together. i then glued the end pages to the covers, which were cardboard pieces i covered in a soft fabric (you can see this detail in the photo).
(for those interested in the art of self-binding, this is a simplified version of case-binding.)

what i find most interesting was the "about the author" on the back inside cover:
notice how i mis-typed my own birthday (Dec 26, not 29) and how my goal "is to someday be a famous writer." where did that young girl go?

---

finding this treasure brings back fond memories of elementary school, and being left to my own devices, i recall spending recesses and afterschools playing with paper materials, making countless notebooks and sketchbooks of various sizes and colors, giving them to friends and family, keeping some for myself for later writing. i determined to use every book i made for a story or novel (as i said, i had dreams of being a writer. and evidently, a self-published one.)

i once gave a boyfriend a hand-bound book i made in 8th grade, a unique gift because i had marbleized paper for the covers, and bound it in japanese style, with a beaded tassle bookmark.

---

seriously, where did that young dreamer go?

finding these relics from childhood makes me feel sad for dreams i've let go. but it also gives me renewed faith in the person i am. and a sense of duty to the past.

but the past is merely a distant present. and the future is the present is the past. why leave book-binding in the past? why allow self-publication to be a left-behind childhood dream. i'm self-binding my senior thesis. let's call it a tribute to the dreamers.

tomorrow: more pictures from the past.

to the past, and its presents,
stephanie


*note to self: research the Montessori method for your senior project. according to Webster's, the Montessori method emphasizes developing children's "natural" interests, rather than following a strict formal curriculum. this has interesting developmental implications, and is as close a method to facilitated autodidacticism that i can think of in an extant institutional setting.

treasures from the past

while looking for a book earlier tonight, i rediscovered these hidden gifts from the past:

picture books my family got in our travels to western europe! they are, clockwise from top left: a picture guide to Stockholm, Sweden; Madurodam in pictures; a map/guide of the Hohensalzburg Fortress; guide book for Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau; sightseeing in Vienna; and a biography of King Ludwig II ("His Life - His End").

my favorites are the first two:
Stockholm b/c of my fond memories of living in endless swedish summer sunlight and holding my mother's dress hem in one hand, and my brother's stroller in the other, walking to the markets for smoked hams/cheeses and apples, then going to ancient magistrate buildings and museums. and the hot-air balloons that festooned the sky. i remember the boats and the endless water, and stone lions.
and Madurodam, because my dad remembers how my brother and i spent the whole day chasing the toy trains around and around, screaming and laughing, like miniature godzillas terrorizing even more miniature cityscapes around us. the thought of my brother and i being so small, that we delighted in an hour or so in being "big kids" made me smile.

tomorrow, some real snapshots of my childhood.
-stephanie

let's give peace a chance!

if you're reading this, you are probably sitting in the comfort of your home, having just eaten a warm meal with your loved ones, might have just finished watching a movie, might even be well on your way to getting completely drunk to welcome the new year.

outside, there's probably fireworks and people screaming and cheering. somewhere near you people are dancing, having fun, forgetting that somewhere else in the world, there is complete darkness, save for the flash of bombs and missile fire.

it is so easy for us to forget, in our nests of warmth and comfort, that there are other people dying from disease, starvation, cold, heat, neglect, melancholy. have we forgotten them? just because we cannot see them, does not mean we cannot feel their sadness creeping up to us when we become still in the night.

have we forgotten to love our fellow man/woman/child? were we really put on this earth to hate one another and destroy our precious environment?

giving your old unwanted clothes during the Christmas season is not enough to keep the billions of homeless people in the world warm, and eating organic will not change the fact that many millions of other people will never even see a piece of your unwanted food that day. buying RED is not going to change the fact that america remains the most wasteful nation in the world, and corporate social responsibility still remains the exceptionality, when it should be the rule.

indeed, as RED reminds us, we have the POWER to make a difference. (by buying their product...?) but do we, as they want us to believe, have a choice?

surely not. otherwise, why would millions of children and elderly be dying of malnutrition all over the world? why else would the millions in Africa in dire need of AIDS medication require US consumers to buy additional amounts of Gap jeans they don't need, while giving them false cause to pat themselves on the back for their consumer-based philanthropy?

if we really wanted to make a difference, surely we would find the resources and energy and good will to do it? (after all, we are spending so much money on an admittedly useless war, one that is costing the lives of thousands of innocent civilians' and American soldiers' lives.

and as the RED ad reminds us, "we don't want them to die."

do we really believe that? if we were really so kind-hearted, would we allow this to happen? take a look at the things we are easily allowing ourselves to accept.



then tell me this does not make you sick:

and what are your expensive designer tees gonna do to change that?

---

as you sip your champagne tonight and then crawl into your warm bed, try to remember that all over the world there are countless untracked landmines, children who will never live to early adolescence because of disease and lack of food, young men and women (merely children themselves) in the military, generations of people who will never know a world of peace, who will be the victims of ceaseless, unnecessary war -- and for what?! because we can close our eyes, turn away, can slip into our material comforts and forsake the suffering of those we've never met. how easily we forget our brethren on the other side of the world. how easily we forget!

---

we can do better. now let's actually try.

to a better 2007. (may this be the beginning of the future...)
-stephanie


how you can help:
donate to UNICEF.
tell George to Save Darfur.
help The Global Fund directly, rather than buy from RED.