Whatever it is, we are all the same.

Happy Sunday, bbs.

My dad has been asking me what is happening for Thanksgiving since before Halloween. I feel like it's obvious that we're going to eat turkey and mashed potatoes and gravy somewhere. Maybe at my messy house or at the Amish buffet down in Logan, Ohio where he likes to go. I don't know, last year I took everyone including my ex to a fancy Italian restaurant just to prove everything is cool. I am so cool with life. Insert laughter.

It's weird how holidays feel so much different now that my mother is dead, they feel like something I less look forward to and more like something I have to manage. I'm trying to tell him or make him understand that I will eventually get excited about Thanksgiving. But I just need to get right up to it. I need to get right up to the edge of Thanksgiving to be able to think about it. And I am thankful. Thankful that even in these strange family dynamics that I have, that there is love. All around us. Like, top shelf love. But Finn may not be home until Christmas eve this year and that freaks me out. And my dad sorta has a new lady friend and that is different. The truth is I’d like to include more people in my family this year—not less. The truth is that time keeps moving so fast that I feel like I can’t hold on. How do we change and evolve our families? I want to just throw my hands up. But I am the one to make it all work out. I have magic to make.

Tell me about your traditions. What are they? What do you wish they were?

Sunday Prompts:

Poetic Directions:

Send walking directions to your house to a potential lover. They are a 5-minute walk from you. What do they see, hear. smell. Be as specific as possible. Make it the best set of directions they ever got. 

I love rock and roll

Write a poem with the first line of the poem a lyric that you steal from an 80s song.

Color writing:
Use this as a first line and carry the color through the piece. Please don’t use red. Even if you’re angry, give another color a chance to fight.

I see (insert a color) when I think of you.

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Here are cool things:

Last week I had the amazing honor of sitting at the Wexner Center’s soundboard with my partner recording sound for Brian Harnetty’s newest piece, Words and Silences.
I don't really know a lot about monks, but my friend Brian made an amazing piece of work from archival tapes of Thomas Merton.

In the spring of 1967, the Cistercian monk Thomas Merton (1915-68) was given a reel-to-reel tape recorder to use in his hermitage. The recordings he made are intimate, ranging from thoughts on Samuel Beckett to Sufi mystics to the 1967 Louisville racial protests to Michel Foucault. He also managed to immediately use the tape recorder both as a contemplative tool and a medium for self-discovery.

During the show (or what feels almost like a play) there are visuals of the hermitage where the monk lived and scenic pictures of the countryside and then there are his voice recordings filling up the room and at the same time you are watching a performance that Brian composed. You are watching talented musicians tell stories through time and space with music. His score is so hauntingly beautiful. I sat there with a busted-up heart in all the best ways that can happen. Please check it out. It makes you want to speak into your voice recorder. To make archives for the future. To be truly yourself.

The New York Times was goods today. I loved reading about the movie Tar ( LOVED IT) and how Mahler’s 120-year-old Symphony #5 is now kind of hot again. I don't know if it was ever hot outside of the classical music arena but it's hot now and I listened to it this morning really loud throughout my house and I was like YES. Cate Blanchett. Yes. God, she is hot.

Another thing that I noticed in the Times was an article about how couples’ text-fight now. It's very weird and very true. What about you? Do you do that?

I think I'm going to make my hair red. It could be because I’ve been watching the complete Mad Men series for the last few months, and I am completely in love with Joan, but it also could be that I feel bored of my looks and my hair, and I think hell-I-am-aging-life-is-moving-here-we-go.
why not why not  why not why not  why not why not? Should I?

Fun fact:

5 years ago, I took all of the scraps from the art department area at work and made a shrine to Peter Gabriel. I felt like not seeing him in concert was a miss in my life and all I wanted was to see him tour again. I made this shrine and everyone at work thought I was nuts. When we opened secret studio I took Peter with me and I put him in my office and I looked at him every day and I still said the same things please tour again please tour again  please tour again please tour again please tour again like a spell…and then COVID happened and it was inside of my brain that maybe just maybe because he was also trapped inside of his own brain for a long time hanging out in Bath, England that maybe he was making a new record.

Maybe things were coming to him slowly and quietly and loudly and wildly just like they were coming to all of the artists and so I just kept hoping. And just this past week he announced his tour for 2023 and just this last week we bought tickets and just today I thought about how I don’t know a thing about Bordeaux. So, I guess I'll find out what it's like there next summer with Peter Gabriel singing softly to me.

Yeah, life is good. It's just weird.

ilysm xo