I heard this song in the trailer right when the movie was about to come out and I loved it, used to listen to it all the time; the chorus is wonderful, wonderful:

After having finally watched the movie, I am in love with this song from it:

I’m embarrassed to say, but I’ve been really into a Radiohead song, Everything in It’s Right Place, lately.

I listened to the whole Kid A album with a friend the other day just laying on a couch, lights off, eyes closed.

I sound very pretentious.

Lol, but it was wonderful and this song stood out to me and led to its cycling in my brain the last few days.

And this is wonderful:
whiteraven27282 (4 days ago) This song kinda creeps me out…
My math teacher gave me a CD of their songs and I’m really tempted to say to him that they sound high…but I’d get in trouble! XD
thedelta88 (3 days ago) ur math teacher wants to touch u

Oh dear, I would be so weirded out if my math teacher gave me a Radiohead mix, definitely could take that as a sign of longing lol.

I additionally rediscovered my love for this song this week :

I remember having it stuckkkk in my head when I was taking my physics final and I kept on telling myself stop singing that song in your head, you need to focus!

But it was a good song to make me feel like I could kick ass on that test; it’s a good attitude-y/ pretend-your-a-celebrity-walking-down-the-street song :).

Amen….

We lived in several houses in Gig Harbor, all approached with this same air, carrying a sense of impermanence making Gig Harbor not seem as my hometown. I’ve viewed it as the place that I moved to and never really got settled in, but Maple Valley which I moved from after spending 9 years in doesn’t feel like my hometown either. My houses there have seemed horribly foreign everytime I’ve driven by them and I even have a hard time visiting Maple Valley altogether. It is more of a place I want to forget, not for any particularly glaring reasons, but that I feel thoroughly detached from as if it was the setting of another life.
Ultimately though I never have been truly without a home, I just have yet to find a place that makes me feel really at home. Living in Seattle is the closest I’ve ever gotten to this feeling, perhaps I just need to experience living here outside the dorms. I feel that I am a true product of Seattle culture when I really think about it, so I do feel at peace with my surroundings when wandering, something I haven’t experienced anywhere else I’ve lived.

Perhaps I won’t feel this sense of home even when I move outside the dorms and find a home or apartment in Seattle and perhaps the idea of a place that makes you truly feel at home is merrily an elusive notion. Then again, I have heard of people discovering places that click for them which consequently provides the feeling of comfort one is to get while “home,” so I’m not going to completely abandon my hopes of finding such a place. I think in the meantime I find a sense of home in my mother. As well as my sister. Once I talked to my mom about how I felt I was missing a sense of home and she said reflexively, “You’re home is with me,” later adding, “Wherever I am is your home” and that completely made sense to me. I think that people completely hold the potential of emitting a feeling of home to the right people and this is something I definitely seek more than an actual place.

Living in Seattle has led to a lot more regular of encounters with genuinely homeless people. There seems to be a group of young people who are always together and presumably live on the streets who sing under the overhang of a building on the Ave to seek money. They at least exude a contentedness, which I sense when I see them casually standing around talking and laughing as if in someone’s living room. I think perhaps these people are each other’s home which encourages me to not worry about what I have felt to be an absence of a physical place of comfort.

I’m not too sure of the direction I am heading with all this, so I shall move to the reason these thoughts have been stirring in my head this morning. Last night I received a message from my dad that I didn’t have the chance to listen to until this morning. Having just finished my final…final, feeling free from my main stressors and aimlessly wandering the campus, I decided to figure out what his message was about. His voice immediately makes me regret having chosen to listen to it, particularly at such a time. He doesn’t tip-toe around that which is causing the sound of worry in his voice and informs me that the funding my sister and I, on top of him, were relying on and with which my sister and I made an effort to trust in despite too frequent past disappointments, fell through as feared. At first I was just like, ok, shouldn’t have believed him, but it’s ok mom is reliable and I’ll just have to have another really lean quarter as far as expenses outside of my scholarship allowance. Then he says that he is packing up his place and I am reminded of the times when he told me of sleeping in his new car in church parking lots or when I visited him in his room his brother, my uncle Dave, let him stay at which was adjacent to Dave’s children’s rooms. Both times he had been homeless, an interesting, fairly unnoticeable homelessness. I guess my dad is staying at his pastor’s for a week and then he will need to find another place, whic. This temporary dwelling I’m sure will provide anything but the hoped for comforts of a home because the glaring end of his stay and the scramble to find another place will be too distracting. I hope that one day he does infact find a place that he feels is his home that provides comfort rather than worry.

Initially when I heard this message I just wanted to ignore it, to pull my ear away from the phone and instead just enjoy my feelings of accomplishment for having completed my finals. However, I had/have too many emotions circulating in my head. I am sad that he has to experience that again and the disappointment in his voice for himself is heartbreaking. I know that this situation is badly bruising his ego, as well as badly weakening our trust of that which he says. I’m put in a weird situation where I have to be persistently understanding of his situations and send him any words of encouragement I think that may help; however, I at times am too frustrated to accept his circumstances. Whereas for many homelessness and other such difficult situations is something out of their control, I feel that there is just a disregard that my dad carries that brings him into these situations because of their frequency. His apartment that he is getting kicked out of has a waterfront view and beach access; he has another new car that he traded for his other car about a year ago; I’ve always noted his simple luxuries that suggest his extravagence (from the eyes of a frugal person) such as paper towels and napkins, gun; he most likely continues to tithe to his church using borrowed money from his mother despite not contributing child support to aid with my sister’s college and my miscellaneous expenses. I feel these frustrations are valid, yet I feel unable to access that irritation because of the borderline pathetic circumstance he is in and his awareness of it.

I think despite his probable shelter provided by family and friends and his own car, I see him as definitely being homeless, without the sense of a place. During his previous stints of being homeless I tried to offer him a comfort similar to that which my mom provides for me that makes the presence of a physical home largely irrelevant, yet I feel I would be somewhat sacrificing myself if I was to do it again. This has proven to be a cycle which he cannot escape and perhaps is unwilling to do the work to escape. He stubbornly has a vision of his life that he tries to establish using the resources of others because of his lack of personal resources. I don’t want to enable his abuse of the generosity of others and his refusal of growth, I don’t want to be a cruel figure that indirectly inclines him to hopelessly dwell in his current circumstance, and I’m finally learning that I also don’t want to be manipulated by him anymore.

Out of my system and much better. Today is sunny, I may call him in a bit to check on him, I just need to make sure that I don’t let him affect me as much as he once did or else I will be tied down to the rollercoaster ride consequent of his irresponsible and reckless lifestyle.

Right now I really want to enjoy my situation also, I feel this all may be an example of the positives of living according to sound beliefs and the harshness karma for those who choose to live otherwise.

Almost forgot, music:
Max Avery Lichtenstein’s-Broken Home
His music from The King with Gael Garcia Bernal is wonderful and you can’t get it anywhere :/ I need to watch the movie one of these days. That also reminds me, I definitely need to see the movie that Gael and Diego Luna directed.
(I kinda love making cheesily obvious because of their titles music choices to pair with my posts :) )
Oh and additional song: Yeasayer’s Tightrope which will be a great song for an outdoor nap at Green Lake :)

I’ve come to a realization of one of my biggest flaws: my insatiable need for a feeling of being loved. That’s not TOO bad of a flaw, but I have found it to be distracting and primitive.
The last several months I’ve noticed a drop in my motivation and focus. I’ve been having a hard time being productive, whereas I used to be proud of my willpower to get things done. I’ll try to focus on something and end up just going in circles and circles waiting for some sign of affection. I feel like I need to clear my brain because right now it’s so muddled in comparison to what it used to be, I’m too focused on waiting.

Hm, music to contrast this mood and to make me realize that I often overcomplicate things:
Just a Ride-Jem

Way too literal of a message, but such good memories of cleaning up at Indochine at the end of the night infront of a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. Clean the host station, gelato cases, express tables, blow out the candles, put the flowers in the fridge, clear up reservations for tomorrow, bring in the “Open” sign, get tipped out, change clothes, drink a green drink with Ly, walk through the UW Tacoma campus and look at the sky, walk by the bar blaring Top 40 music, go up the fenced hill with weeds poking out, stumble into my cold car, put in a cd, turn the volume up but not be able to get it loud enough, drive home. The understated beauty of occasional routine and simplicity.

Fiona Apple
Diem Chau
Kathy Liao
Arianna Page Russell
Chan Marshal
Emily Haines
Frida Kahlo
Erykah Badu
Bianca Leilani
Li Lykke Timotej Zachrisson
Karen O
Ladies of Le Tigre
Francesca Woodman
Sofia Coppola
Kate Winslet
Renee Zellweger
Ellen Kuras
Adrienne Rich
Angela Dawn
Catinca Untaru
Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn
Kristin Allen-Zito
JoAnn Verburg
Inga Muscio
Yoko Ono
Safiye Amajan
Jane Goodall
Angela Davis
Maxine Hong Kingston

Thanks ladies.

In kindergarten “my” animal was the Blue Jay and an image of one was on my laminated name tag taped to my desk, I still remember the exact image. I miss just learning about toucans in school. My Uncle Emmett picked up on my like for birds when I was visiting him in Cape Cod, Massachusetts when I mentioned the birds chirping and then eagerly showed me his illustrated book about birds (Plateau by Nirvana instantly popped in my head when I saw it) and led me to the telescope in his bedroom that he used to see the birds on the beach. This summer when working on Tracings in Utah, there was a nest with baby birds in the overgrown house we filmed in that was regularly visited by a very protective mother that would circle the perimeter of the room frantically (we tried to be as respectful as possible). I just have all these memories of birds that stand out to me and by collecting them I have a beautiful feeling of connectedness in my life.

I used to have two cockatiels when I lived in Maple Valley. I remember loving having them sit on my shoulder, chewing on my earrings and hair as I worked, burried close to my neck. I didn’t realize until I got a bird, but it is suggested that you clip their wings to prevent them from flying away, which limits their ability to fly altogether. I thought it was cruel, flying is something that distinguishes birds from other animals and to strip them of that felt like I was crippling them, and ultimately that’s what it really is. We let our birds grow their wings out and left their cages open, with some exceptions, so that they could fly around. Luckily my cat had a relaxed nature and would hardly react when one would perch on his back and my dog was just scared shitless of them.

My first bird ended up flying away one day when I was at school. I later saw him up in a tree in my backyard and he looked down at me and then swooped down and I thought he was coming back, but then he steadily kept flying, as if with a destination in mind.

A few years ago, I saw a man driving right outside of Seattle on I-5 in a car with all the windows down, a gentle smile on his face and a large, white cockatoo on his shoulder flapping her wings which reminded me of when I had my bird. It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

Birds are just cool.

I’m always excited for winter to end so that I can open my window at night to hear the crickets and frogs ( :( won’t be able to hear that in the dorms anymore), but mostly so that I can wake up to the birds chirping in the morning. I will bear the freezing cold night air allllll night just to hear that sound in the morning. It’s one of the most refreshing sounds to me, it awakens me and makes me feel connected to my body and conscious of myself.

I started consciously making an effort to do this when I moved to Whitley Hills in Gig Harbor. The rainy day we moved into our house there my mom played Nelly Furtado’s new cd and would take breaks to enthusiastically squeeze out “I’m Like a Bird” in front of the fireplace. This is also the time she started collecting feathers and putting them on our fireplace mantle. They seemed to always show up at appropriate times, so she took them as a sign of good luck. I’ve noticed her shared interest in birds and how when we’d see birds she’d just want to sit and stare at them and later would get online and research them and try to figure out what type of bird they were.

One day we were walking on the beach accessible from the bridge viewing park in Gig Harbor that you can walk a long distance on. After walking for awhile we decided to stop on a stretch of sand to read and sit in the sun. I don’t remember if it was my mom or I that noticed, but to our left not too far was an immature bald eagle resting on a washed up log. It looked HUGE. My mom, of course curious, kept trying to get closer and closer, so pretty soon it flew off and we watched it above us. It then landed on a different log a bit further down the beach, so my mom followed it and I was now trying to convince her to allow it some space. It eventually took off again, circled around and dive bombed my mom, getting scarily close to her head. I was standing closeby ducking and flinching, but my mom was unfazed and just laughing. We spent the whole walk back to the car analyzing the situation and she still brings it up.

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of crows, which are interesting birds that I don’t particularly like. My shoes look like crows. They also kind of look like duck’s webbed feet.

Ever since doing weekly current event assignments during my sophomore year of high school that encouraged making connections between the history we were learning and current events, I’ve loved making connections and stringing things together, and I do this with birds. It’s almost a form of collecting, hoarding. I hope I hear birds tomorrow morning.