Don't you wish you could be in your bathrobe at noon?

This morning, the brand new used coffee maker I bought yesterday at Goodwill kicked off at 7am. T’s alarm started going off soon after, every five minutes. At 9am, the jackhammer started. I think the universe was trying to tell me something.

Yesterday I spent all day feeling guilty that I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to be doing. I’m not good at getting things done when I don’t have that much to do and I’m working with vague deadlines. I need pressure, a deadline, fear of God or something like that to get things done.

I ended up torturing myself most of the day until the afternoon, when I said to myself. Self, if you’re not going to do it, just don’t do it. Why do you gotta be a martyr about it? Why don’t you just do whatever you want all the time?

Whatever I want all the time is my prime motivation in life. When I grow up, I want to be able to do that. Flow easily through most things, have sparkles come out of my fingertips and leave a trail of pretty flowers and magic blooming in my wake, like in Fern Gully when the forest starts healing itself or some shit.

I think the only thing that’s really blocking me is my thoughts. My thoughts tell me I have to be really awesome and amazing and smart and beautiful to do anything. It says I can’t to anything I want until I do all the things I have to do, like becoming really awesome and amazing and smart and beautiful.

But I have found a solution! Shut those thoughts down! Just stop thinking them. Just think… I’m thinking evil thoughts.. don’t think about that anymore! Think about what’s for dinner and what delicious cocktails you will make and listen to some music and dance around.

Yesterday, after I killed those thoughts, I went to the farmer’s market, got a coffee maker, found some cheese, made some delicious dinner that was lit by candlelight, made some muffins, and listened to music. It was fuckin’ bad ass. Life is more fun if you’re not berating yourself in your head and feeling guilty all the time.

And I’m starting to realize that if I just shut up those thoughts in my head pressuring me to be really cool and awesome (and successful and rich and popular), I can finally have the breathing room to be really cool and awesome, because that’s what I am naturally. COOL AND AWESOME. And hot. Yeah.

Also, I’m starting a salon (not like hair, like intellectuals and booze), because I want to feel like I’m in France all the time. ALL THE TIME. If you miss living in Europe you may know what I’m talking about: late nights, consuming things that are bad for you, long walks, and philosophical conversations over 3-6 hour drinking and eating sessions. It’s going to be fun and you wish you could be part of it.

dream house

Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a big city that was full of houses that looked like this? There would be little secret cafes hidden behind giant ferns and big swimming holes with waterfalls. Tree house venues with shows and secret passageways. Like the Ewok village, or Pandora in Avatar, but more urban. I would like to live there. Have dance parties every night, make fruit salad for breakfast and add wine for sangria in the evening. And it would be a totally normal place to live, not some paradise you run away to because you can’t stand the real world, where everyone is cultish or lost or both, and there are only the sharks and the vulnerable. The kind of utopian communal lifestyle appeals to me, but often turn into this and I wish it wasn’t so. Why can’t utopia be normative?

Ahem. I’m feeling unusually chipper today after some iced coffee and the first good night’s sleep of the week. I get my best dreams when I sleep in. I usually have very vivid dreams, involving a bunch of different people and traveling around different imaginary cities. Last night I was walking around a neighborhood where the streets were very narrow and there were one story houses all places very close together. It kind of reminded me of Seattle, the Mission and LA melded together. I went to this old movie theater.. one of those tiny ones that show weird movies at weird times and have tons of colorful paint all over the walls and outside. They played independent/experimental/artsy films and I just happened to show up right when a good one was going to play.

The thing I like best about dreams like this is exploring all these new places. There is a whole nother world out there. Sometimes I like to think that my dreams are partially seeing the future. Sometime they’re like an alternate reality I can access through a sleep portal through spacetime. I always go to new places in my dreams, but when I wake up I’m still here, doing the same thing I did yesterday. The change is much more gradual.

Dream City by Jay Gazley

I wish my dreams were real. Not the ones where I’m being chased or something bad is happening, but even the ones that don’t make a ton of sense take place in really awesome places. Once I couldn’t find my passport trying to get back home from some major city. The airport was a big mall with carnival games that looked like the Guggenheim Museum, and I was already late to meet the group I was with. I guess it was some class trip. I met these guys who I made friends with and they took me to their really cool apartment with tall ceilings, white walls, and pink lights, and we hung out and smoked and I was having a really good time until I remembered I woudn’t be able to get home and had to run and catch a bus back to the airport.

The thing I like most about my dreams, besides exploring the worlds within them, is that all these places get created in my head. And damn, if my brain could project my dreams onto a screen, I’d make millions. Maybe in a past life I was a bad ass architect and urban planner, or maybe I just watch a lot of movies, but the world in my dreams is so cool.

Last night in a different dream I went to this neighborhood that had this long street where every house was a big artist studio with awesome artists living there, and some big warehouse spaces for parties and shows and things. It was a very open community and you could apply to get one of the studios, and I was trying to convince the organizers that I belonged there. I kept running into artists I knew.

Dream City by Paul Klee

It’s especially nice to have dreams like this after spending all week working on paperwork well into the night and watching bad movies. Sometimes when I’m awake it feels like my little room is the whole world. The only part of my real life that resembles those dreams is the part that I can only imagine, the future. I don’t think that’s what people mean when they say “follow your dreams” but I hope someday my life gets closer to looking like what my dreams look like. New and dark and mysterious and dramatic where there’s something different just around the corner and I can still get lost and meet new people. If nothing else, it would be exciting.

I am sitting in bed and eating ice cream that makes me teeth hurt. Last night I saw Charlene Yi perform. She’s a young comic/musician/performer who wrote Paper Heart, a sweet fictional documentary about whether love exists. She dropped out of school and lived in her car to get to LA and follow her dream. Her work is funny and honest and seems to come from her gooey chocolatey center.

Lately I’ve been thinking about what it is I want to do. A lot of the time I think about what I don’t want to do, or what’s stopping me from doing what I want, or how I can’t do anything and have no talent or passion, or how the whole world is fucked up and I just want to run away and live in a cave and eat berries like the guy in the book Hatchet I read when I was 10.

Some people make Bucket Lists of things they want to do before they die. Some people have lofty goals and ambitions that motivates them to do things like go to Law School, or climb a ladder of business hierarchy, or work 12 hours a day making food for people for very little money.

I don’t know what it is I want to do. When I was a kid I had these vague ideas of travel and adventure, being a poor hobo and relying on the kindness of strangers to get me where I need to be, and letting life carry me through good times in bad.

I haven’t gone for this lifestyle because it’s full of worried relatives and sketchy situations and being homeless and not getting what I need to eat, poop, and sleep safely. It’s not ambitious enough in the “I’m gonna be somebody” kind of sense, and there is no end goal except for exploring and seeing what is out there for me to see. I don’t know when a trip like this will end, or what I should do when I’m done. I always thought something would just happen.

The other thing, is money. I don’t want to have to rely on people for money, but I don’t want to work 40 hours a week for a paycheck, either. I wish I didn’t have to have money to live. Right now I’ve been working a lot at a temporary job where I get paid $23.50 an hour, but I’m always disappointed. I calculate pay during work and then am horrified when $200 gets deducted each week for taxes. When I didn’t have a job a month ago, I was always worried, but it seemed like I went out to eat a lot more, made more art, read more books, and wasn’t so angry. I seem to have a very short fuse and money lights it all the time.

The thing about this vague traveling trip I keep/kept thinking about what this: I don’t have any other plans. I seriously don’t think I ever imagined myself as old as I am now, and my plans were never definite enough to seem like something I should actually make a plan to do.

So I’m trying to make a list of things that I would like to do. People always say we never make time to just do the things that mean so much to us because we’re too busy with jobs and kids and things. Well, my job is temporary, and I’m not very fond of money and I don’t want kids until I’m done fooling around, so I thought I might as well make a list of things that I want to have happen at some point in my life and then just go from there. I hope I can think of something. I hope they aren’t impossible.

1. Have a studio that is all mine.

I want a place to go with big windows and tall ceilings that is my place. I want to be able to go there and be alone and work or dance or sing or record things or draw or paint of make prints. I want a big counter with a sink and an electric kettle and a hot plate and a refrigerator and I want to be the only one with a key. I like company, but this is a place I can go if I want to be completely alone. I work best when I’m completely alone and I never quite feel like that. Sometimes I would like a whole week of just being alone so I could get into it and get the voices out of my head. I want time to do whatever I want and I want to take all the pressure off of myself so that I don’t have to worry about how what I will do will impress people or how it will effect my future. And I don’t want this to be in a place where I am scared of getting shot walking out of my building, but I don’t want this place to be in the middle of nowhere either.

2. I want to work part time at a mindless job.

When I was in Seattle I worked at this frame shop/gift shop. I worked from 11-5pm four days a week, I got foodstamps, my work was two blocks away, and mostly I put price tags on things, made stuff pretty, and kept it all dust-free. It left me a lot of brain space to thing about things like what I was going to do or make outside of it. Sometimes I wish I had never left Seattle. The weather was bad, but that’s all I can think of that was bad. My best friend and I had our own radio show, I lived in an awesome house, I met really cool people who were doing amazing things, and I got to go see live music and eat for practically nothing all the time. I couldn’t afford cheese or meat or wine, but I was really healthy and cooked all my meals from scratch and spent like $100 on groceries for two people every month. I want to live somewhere where that’s possible. I’m tired of being cramped into one room. But I can’t think of anywhere I want to move either, not even Seattle. I like the sun too much.

3. I want summer in the country.

Freshwater creeks to live in, gardening to do, bonfires, learning to play an instrument. I want to do all these things. I was thinking about the ukulele or maybe making stuff electronically. But I want to make songs and sing them at night on the back porch after a day of baking chocolate cake and swimming and drinking minted lemonade.

So those are three things for now. Maybe I’ll think of some other things later. I wonder if the place in my head that I want to exist is real or if it’s just the amalgam of everything I like about all the places I’ve been so far. Either way, I feel compelled to travel until I find it.

When I was in school, I was always excited for what I would do when I got out. Free from all the restrictions and requirements of education, I would be finally free to do what I wanted, and become the person I was meant to be. Then I got out and figured out that I have to pay rent and feed myself, which can be a little dream-crushy at times. Sometimes it’s hard to get back aspirations when you still have to get the everyday stuff handled. For a little while now, I’ve been trying to remember what or who I was striving for all those years I dreamed of graduation.

When I was really little, I wanted to be a talent agent. My mom was a producer and media trainer, and my sister was an actress, so it felt like a good fit. Little but fierce, I’d be able to haggle the most money and the best jobs with my quick wit, charm, and manipulative tactics. I’d take care of people who couldn’t do it by themselves.

Then there was the torch singer idea. I wanted to lie around on pianos and be treated like a princess and admired by all for my sweet, smokey, sultry voice. I’d hypnotize everyone with my satin dresses draping over the piano. My world would be slick, rainy cityscapes lit by streetlights, walking home on the arm of a tall man in a big coat. I’d drink manhattans and smoke with a long cigarette holder and basically live in the 1930s. I’d break hearts.

I thought it would be fun to be a diplomat’s wife. I wouldn’t have to deal with the boring aspects of being a real diplomat. I’d just get to travel a lot and wear fancy clothes and speak tons of languages and be super classy. I’d throw the best dinner parties and bring the best out of everyone and have an amazing place for entertaining. Everyone would adore me and I’d be like a slightly lower level, less famous, but more interesting and artsy Jackie O.

When I got to high school, I did this awesome after school arts program where I met a bunch of practicing artists. I’d visit their studios and go to their shows and that was when I first realize that there were people who actually made art for a living. I remember this moment, because I always loved to make art. It was my favorite thing to do, but I thought it was too fun to be something you could make a career out of. After that, I was hooked. My mantra was “Do what you love, and things will happen.” It led me to major in art in college, where I learned not only about making art, but I also learned how cut-throat and shmoozy the art world supposedly was. It was a big turn-off, one that I haven’t worked through fully yet. Plus, I became more interested in making events and parties than static sculptures or paintings.

When I really think about what I want to do, and who I want to be, I keep coming back to the same thing: anyone/anything I want all the time. I used to think that I could just do whatever I thought was really cool, but lately I’ve been a little blocked on the coolness front. My vision is a little blurred. But the fact remains that I just want to be amazing. I want to be that person whose presence changes a room when I enter. I want to be confident without being cocky, effortlessly beautiful, truly authentic, trusting, and candid. I want to make everyone I meet feel comfortable, like they are already my friend, and like they don’t have to pose or posture at all. I want to have so many good ideas that I give most of them away and inspire art and culture and projects and good deeds. I want to make magic happen, and glide through life, crushing obstacles and worry and troubles underneath me, as though they were nothing. I want to make art, make events, make dinner, make lemonade stands, and get people to stop and think about how lovely and beautiful thing moment is right here. I want to turn reality into a place that people think must be a a dream from which they never want to wake.

Yes, I want to be a faith healer. An artist. An organizer, a planner, a carouser. I want to sing in the street and give everything I am to everyone around me and get it right back. I want to dream and break the rules. I want to do everything, because I can. And I want to give people this perspective, that they can do anything too. And then maybe together, we will.

Since moving to the city, I’ve been working on cultivating possibilities. I feel like the more seeds I plant, the more chances stuff will happen. In the last couple weeks I have joined a ton of event mailing lists, found tons of calendars with things to do, researched the cheapest happy hours in the city, and thought of a ton of ways (read: art projects) to make new friends in this place. I might get a job with the census, I’m working on buttering up this bakery I really want to work at, I’ve applied to volunteer at the botanical gardens, and figured out when the collective bookstore has their monthly meetings to introduce new volunteers. I’ve even figured out what permits to get to become a street artist and started experimenting with making things to sell out of my supply stash. I also found a baking and pastry program at the community college that’s free. Though my next few months are still veiled in mystery, it’s nice to think about all the things that could happen as a result of all the seeds I’m planting. I hope something sprouts.

In addition to the now future, I’ve also been thinking about the future down the road. I try to remember what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wanted to be a talent agent, a torch singer, an artist. I wanted to travel around the country, sit in the sun, find swimming holes, make forts, and live like an indian. Nothing has changed much. I envision myself learning to play the ukelele and sing on the street corner for passersby. Sometimes when things get tough I imagine just running away, walking out of town and just trying to keep going and see what happens. I went to a show for the first time in a long while on Friday, and listening to the music reminded me of how much pleasure music-making gives me. I thought about being at house shows in Seattle, and letting visions of art and sculpture float through my head inspired by the sounds going on around me. I want to sing loud, without fear, my own words with a strong voice.

Sometimes I dream of moving to the country, into a big wooden house in a meadow not far from the forest. I’d plant a garden, learn how to keep goats, make cheese, bake bread, build a greenhouse, and find somewhere good to go swimming in fresh water. At night we’d light a fire outside and sing and play music and look at the stars and hear the crickets. I would cook, make art, read and write. I’d invite people over to make things, eat, drink, dance, and make music. I’d take long walks and bring home wild flowers. I’d have special places to go for picnics, make forts, and hang birdhouses in the forest.

I am trying to get there. Guide my life in the direction that will lead me to this place, this time. Sometime the path seems invisible, blocked by lack of money and obstacles in my way. Sometimes I feel like I have to be able to trick society in some way to get this. Sometimes I just want to run away because that’s the only way I will get to where I want to be. Sometimes I feel like I need to sacrifice something to get to this place, but I’m not sure what it is.

Sometimes I wish there was a set, known path I was on. Where I could just follow the directions and go along the conveyor belt, not having to thing about how I spend each day, each hour. Just doing what they tell me and not having to think about it outside the hours of 9-5pm, and be able to have money to pay my bills and buy my groceries and go out and have a good time.

So I’m figuring out how to ignore the obstacles. How to think of what I want to do and just do it. How to stop waiting around for the right time or the right resources and just go for it. Get some failures under my belt. Learn. Be active. Stop feeling anxious or scared. Dance, sing, be good to those people around me. And maybe one day I’ll look up and realize that I’m already on the right path.

Cindy Crabb's desk

I don’t remember when I got my first issue of Doris zine. I was in high school, and had started going to punk shows at Gilman St. with my sister’s best friend from high school. There were ripped up couches and graffiti all over the walls and people yelling and dancing and smashing into each other. There were little booklets in the shop and my surrogate older sister gave me a bunch of zines, these magazines that real people like me wrote and glued together and photocopied late at night at Kinko’s. I started reading about all these people who did things differently with their lives. They didn’t grow up and buy a house and have kids in the suburbs. They traveled on cheap greyhound bus tickets, putting their fate in the hands of strangers, doing things you weren’t supposed to do like jumping trains and living in tree houses and reading books and planting gardens instead of working. I learned to dance like those kids in the clubs. I learned to yell my heart out and make out on the sidewalk. I learned to cut my own hair and I learned that I didn’t need anyone to tell me that I was good at something to do it. This is what I liked most about punks: they just did what they wanted and made art and music and culture themselves without waiting for permission or approval from anyone.

Somewhere along this path I found Doris zine at the anarchist bookstore by my school. I’d read it on the bus, and it was like I had a new secret best friend. Cindy, who started writing Doris in the early 90s spoke about her adventures. Traveling, running away, reading and trying to teach herself how to do things. She built boats that sank and danced in the rain and bailed water from her flooded tents. She taught me about things I never thought or knew about before, like herbal abortion, learning about your body, questioning society, living outside of meritocracy, anarchism, learning on your own, and doing things for for the sake of doing them instead of waiting or working for praise. Her writing reaches directly from her heart to mine, as she works through all the things good and bad and heartbreaking that happen when you live. She is my greatest role model. I want to be like her, making things with my own two hands, trying to learn even when I think it’s impossible, have courage against any fear to create and make things grow and learn about truth and community and being yourself and healing yourself and understanding other people. Cindy sees the world I see and her writings are a window into this universe I’m always trying to find.

By now, I’ve been reading this zine for 10 years and she has managed still to write in a way that’s so close to my heart I sometimes mistake her for myself.

“I used to worry about – what does it mean to be a real writer? Was I one? Was it good or did it suck? What if I didn’t spend enough time writing? Was I a fake? What if I was stuck? What was the point? I thought there had to be an answer, a key. I read books about writing and books about creating a writer’s life … and I couldn’t figure out, was I real. Was I a real writer or just a fake. Eventually I figured out that the whole question was bullshit. The question “was I a real writer” was part of the competative system I wanted to destroy, where everyone is suppose to strive to do something brand new that’s never been done, to make a mark on history, to be better than everyone else. I didn’t want that shit, so why was I looking to those models for legitimacy. I had to ask questions like – why did I write. and then hold myself accountable to my own reasons and standards.” excerpt from Doris #27 “Writing”

Her words have had such unknowable impact on my growing brain. I probably wouldn’t be who I am today if I hadn’t found her zine. You should read it to, it may change you’re life. Get Doris zines and Anthology here. Buy some for your friends too. And she makes cute skirts you can buy too. And read her blog. She is amazing and has tons of awesome stuff she does.

I have always been a really vivid dreamer. Sometimes a week will go by when my dreams will hold just as much weight as my reality, and I’ll feel like I’m living in alternate dimensions. The things my brain dreams up are incredible. There are foreign nations, complete cities and transportation systems, a huge cast of characters, and tons of insane action sequences. My dreams seem so real. Sometimes I realize I’m dreaming in them, and I’ll pinch myself and it won’t hurt. Then I can control a little of what happens. Usually, though, once I realize I’m dreaming I start traveling back toward consciousness, no matter how much I want to stay there.

Once I’m awake, my dream sometimes stays with me all day. I’ll have little flashbacks. I’ll think about what happened, I’ll remember it like it was the event of yesterday. My dreams become a part of my life. Sometimes I can’t remember if a memory is real or if I dreamed it (or if I read it in a book). I used to try to find meaning in my dreams, picking apart all the specifics and assign symbols and try to decode the secret message. Now I just view it as a reflection of the state of my mind at any given moment. I don’t very often have really happy dreams, or maybe those are the ones I don’t remember as much. What stays with me most is the feeling that I’m running from something, or trying to find someone, usually in an unknown place. Maybe I’m late, or trying to catch a plane, or just trying to avoid someone, but there is always that heightened awareness and that feeling that something needs to be done that isn’t being done.

Last night I had a dream that all of my worst fears were realized suddenly as I walked along on a beautiful spring day admiring the scenery. Wham bam. I woke up totally freaked out. When that happens, it’s good to go back to sleep and change the ending of your dream so that it’s better. It’s so crazy how powerful your brain is, and how it can play tricks on you, awake or asleep. The best part about nightmares is that you get to wake up, but it’s easy to forget to not let your thoughts or your dreams control you. You are not your thoughts or your dreams. You can choose what to act on and what to believe. You can go back to sleep and revise. And you can get up and know that your worst fears will never happen in reality. Dreams are where they will stay.