Friday, December 20, 2002

STELLA WAS A DIVER AND SHE WAS ALWAYS DOWN
I've spent most of the last few days working on the gift for my Secret Santa on the Pander Zine Distro message board. My Secret Santa (and thus also my giftee) is Jill, with whom I traded zines earlier last semester. We have very similar taste in music and movies, so it was really fun to get her things. I sent out the package today right before the post office closed and it contained a black knitted wrist cuff with her name embroidered on it in pink thread, a bass pick, some buttons, a mixtape (one of the better I've made recently), a 1950s field guide to insects, a book on Radiohead, a flowered hair cap, and a toy tiger. Also a letter and one of those super nerdy "this is how I feel about every song on this tape" letters.

I find myself looking at all of this extra time as a logical time to really work on a zine; the last one was completed over summer, anyway. It would seem to make sense to follow a quarterly schedule (as much as nobody expects zines to follow any kind of schedule at all). But in spite of that, and in spite of the fact that I have distribution set up through about ten distros, I don't know where I'm going to go with anything. I mentioned this to Dave the other day when we went to Jerry's, and he kind of gently made fun of me for being all "I have so much success but what to do, what to do?" and he's totally right. But Dave is always working on something; I mean, he's prolific in music and poetry, so I wonder if he ever experiences these grand thrusts of artistic/productive LACK.

Wednesday, December 18, 2002

SOMETIMES YOU SULK, SOMETIMES YOU BURN
Being home is a constant reminder of that Ray Bradbury story about the rocket pilot: every time he's getting ready to count down and fly into outer space he starts to miss his wife, and every time he's breaking through the atmosphere he starts to miss space. By the time he's entirely back on Earth or entirely back in space he's full-on sick for whatever he doesn't have. I think the comparisons that a college student like me would most likely draw from that image are obvious, so I'll leave them to you.

But it isn't as if I'm totally homesick for here or for Pittsburgh; whichever place I'm calling "home" shifts even within sentences. Maybe home is just the place furthest away from me. Home is where I'm not.

I try to see the familiar things around me with the eyes of my peers and friends from Pittsburgh. Would they see the farms and huge dark sky and think it was beautiful, or think about Deliverance and try to jump from the car? Hard to say. I can only romanticize it for so long, anyway.