213 to 212


semi-autobiographical
creative writing 
new york and los angeles.
isolation, identity, autonomy, globalism.

Monday, October 29, 2007

wonderland abyss

we’re floating and falling
beauty queens and Barbie dolls with
bouncy curls and tiny pinkie toes
stuffed into fuck me heels.
I was born a girl a fairy princess
I still don’t know
you probably think I’m a ho
I don’t care I dare you to try anyway
and if I let you in does that mean you're right?
this night won’t last its been a hundred nights
and dancing princesses twirl away into the cloudy abyss below
the fantasy land of morbid dreams
and queens rule the streets with their sculpted calves
want everything you could ever have? it's here
it's los angeles
the most intense city I’ve found
long ago I grew up and then down again
couldn’t ever really escape these prison streets
I'm here, pounding on the car window
screaming let me in
you begin and then the sun rises
the night is over and I disappear
the fantasy became a dream and went
where all dreams go

what it's really like

check the sky:
cotton candy pink
fades to a bruised purple.
a helicopter casts a golden light
over the grey sea.
these days zip by at lightning speed,
moody clouds and post-sunset haze
mask the piercing impact.
I wake up empty.
I go to sleep and it's alluring and terrifyiing.
your eyes haunt me when I rise.
if i'm lucky the most sense I can make
of it all is to lose myself in the right place:
the milky grey clouds
at dusk.
the city becomes a carnival in the summers.
I run from
ride to ride, chasing the exhiliration
from being upside down and
inside out. I was scared.
I still am. It was supposed to be
the turning point.

I want to make this moment last
It disappears too fast
and then i'm on a plane
watching the sun set,
thinking of you in the pouring rain,
dancing in grass as soft as earth.
I lost my gaze in the canteloupe colored horizon.
Lost myself in a skyscraper
enveloped by clouds.
Lost my best friend when
I slept with her man.
I can die but it won’t be the same
without you.

I wake up in a daze with a vague
jumbled sense of the night before
did we have fun?
I don’t even remember at first – I
think so.
I shipped 10 boxes home and headed out to the country
my existence is about to switch.
my existence is about to switch and I
want to reflect on the good and the bad before I take the plunge.
6 hours on a plane is impossibly long yet I always need more time
to embrace the transition.
dream to dream without waking up in between
sunlight spilling through the window of my corner apartment
then it’s the beach, the sand
the beats and my man.
who knows where we are
could be anywhere, wish I was
anywhere.

I want to redefine myself
starting with this salty air,
the soft sand, the gentle
waves like a lullaby.
the carnival glitters in the distance
it's always there
but I want to get off
reorient myself along the coast
in time with the tides
set my watch by the sun
the gritty clean scent is so natural
I almost can’t smell it until I’m gone.

Sunday, October 28, 2007

nobody likes an heiress on a shoestring budget

houses with turrets lined the alley. the wind blew his hair into a rock and roll stylist's dream. i like to think I could feel the tension, but really I just felt unsure, and the only certainty was the fleeting nature of the moment.

death by jewelry

the bracelet pinched at my skin, leaving red welts that seared into the white wrist-flesh below the antiqued metal. I refused to let go. like the old lady on the train who couldn’t remember where she was going, I would die wearing my dior knockoffs that only cost $10 in new york’s Chinatown. the bracelets used to hide red scars which had since faded. I refused to let go, like a small child or baby who doesn’t believe in object permanency. they weighed me down and made shopping bags more difficult to collect. they pinched and pulled and scraped and made my skin dry and eventually bloody, causing more damage than the wounds they were originally meant to hide.

I swear to god it really wasn’t that bad. more like bad and good intertwined until I couldn’t tell them apart anymore. my sisters and i danced and screamed and shrieked and put on plays and talent shows. I wrote poetry and dreamed of being a ballerina and president at the same time. my camera was the map to my heart. in second grade i quit poetry to be a rockstar and started a band so I could spend hours cutting and pasting my photos into posters advertising our concert, in theory to earn a girl scout badge. I knew I wasn’t the strongest singer, even at age 7, my strength lay in event planning and promition. I talked mom into color Xeroxing the flyers and dutifully sold handmade tickets for 5 cents apiece at our cookie table outside Vons.

a.m.

she woke up with a start. sunlight streamed through the corner window and kids played in the street below. it was already two o'clock, she realized and she turned over to savor the warm bedsheets another minute or two before facing the day and its responsibilities. the blue sky outside chirped and hummed with excitement and intangible promise, however, making sleep impossible, so she sat up and rubbed her eyes and reached for the cell phone. missed calls and email and IMs overwhelmed her undercaffinated brain so she threw it across the room and wandered barefoot down the hall to the kitchen . fuck mornings she muttered as she dumped water and four times too much ground Folgers into the machine. it gurgled and belched steam before filling the cracked pot with brewed coffee. the dirty grime on the prison style counter became a little less noticable as she sippped it slowly, black with sugar. the day might be survivable after all. the blue sky shone brightly but she wouldn’t leave without at least a shower and some makeup, which put her back two hours or so when she included her lazy morning newspaper ritual that she indugled in on her days off. FUCK FUCK FUCK the day was gone, eaten up by some useless party the night before. blue skies turned brown and then black.

i don't know

what good to own the kate spade ipod case if they stopped making ipods in that size? what good to live a life that looks good to others if what's inside doesn’t work?

evolution/getting over rave

claudia and i chased neon butterflies and danced to hip hop versions of beowolf to survive high school. i cropped photos for yearbook and dreaded running a mile a day to please the cheer coach. Claudia drew the most amazing Edies and didn't give a fuck about sports. by junior year we began to crave the attention of the city. some kids smoked weed, most drank, but Claudia and I threw ourselves into the inherent contradictions of los angeles. at sixteen we graduated from nights of pseudo-flirting with Dave from never-to-be-heard-of TLD outside the Whisky to three story costume balls where spikes and leashes were de rigeur. we twirled endlessly to garbage on the dancefloor while a dominatrix whipped overweight, middle aged men in leather g strings. senior year brought weekends backstage in san francisco with blonde new wave surfers who had traded local credibilty for several world tours and nightly backstage hordes of barely-legal punk goddesses. that year we rolled in late to science class hollow-eyed and hungover and tried to escape to the bathroom to blot out the shadowy traces of last night's eyeliner with MAC studio fix and pick flecks of glitter off each other's faded tshirts.

Claudia turned 18 four days after me. After the dinner party she gave for 20, we slipped away to test run our completely legal 18 year old IDs. Spring break brought us closer to the punk-blond suburban surfers-turned-rockstars that we adored when we hit up four of their shows in four days. I got the scoop for my website, but beyond that, no one ever said a thing except with eyes. School resumed as the last weeks of May faded into another scorching Valley summer

At graduation, our parents caressed the leather bound diplomas while we tossed off our white, billowy robes and reapplied waterproof black eyeliner. The next night, we carefully filled in our lips with black pigment and picked out each other's outfits. I wore combat boots, striped stockings, and a lace black mini with a faux PVC corset. Claudia, a PCV halter dress, pumps and black tights. piles of silver jewelry weighed down her tiny neck.

Traffic crawled from Santa Monica to West Hollywood. Eventually the silver statuette appeared on the corner of LA Brea. Inside the Ruby, strobe lights and filters hid the scruff marks on the aged furniture. DJ Amanda spun VNV Nation and Skinny Puppy. We bathed in the heat of the crowd and let our mascara bled down our cheekbones as we danced. We believed in the night’s power to redeem years of confusion. We hadn’t seen enough to know otherwise.

Vegas changed everything. I chased the party and it responded. if I can't write the music, I want to be it, be in it, dance it, live it before it exists. and I knew it would happen but I didn’t know it would feel this empty, like nothing ever really happened. none of us would ever forget it and not because the rockstar's wife was so sweet or so many girls were passed out on the couch. not because his email account was left open and I saw the tiny words on the screen. it wasn’t because i discussed feng shui all night with one of them and forgot the name of the other or because i was on that many drugs or particularly drunk, I was as in control as any of us ever are at 18. it was the turning point because I realized i would always be empty, and that rave died in the end of the story. i thought i wanted to be rave, or write her again, rewrite her for the masses who loved her. but rave died at the end of the story and that’s no ending for a girl like her, a real girl who used to be able to be without hurting others and who can't tell her friends from her enemies anymore.

Tonight I realized what they mean when they say you get sucked in.

blast from the past

every day a new beginning tainted with the transgressions of the night before
not four hours earlier we poured our hearts out but the plexiglass filter never really left the conversation.

There is always a rock star and there are always too many girls. She was on a billboard looming over santa monica and Beverly. She looked drugged. All the girls copied her look. Dresses and high heels and pouty lips. Big eyelashes to hide the sleepy eyes. Purses packed with pipes and pills.

I push myself out the door in the nick of time, faking the confidence to carry my look: summer dress, loose waves and smoky eyes. The night's excitement mounts with every curve in the coastal highway. Anticipation sweetened with smoke and the piercing ocean breeze wafts across the road.

Our high heels stride across a sidewalk strewn with sand. Tan legs and painted toenails and half smoked cigarettes lead us into the bar. The music is visceral and I almost start crying. Shrieks of joy compete with wailing guitar solos. I'm pounded and propelled forward into the song, compelled to move.

Flash forward three zip codes and my heart is breaking. I want to say asshole but I know it's just not meant to be. I want to remember enjoying him. I want to lay my cheek on his shoulder and close my eyes and breathe. Instead I pretend he thinks I'm beautiful. I pretend I just didn’t dress right.

Scrapey scrapey scrape the skin crumbles off. bones underneath poke through soft scratched skin. I tug at my jeans and they still don’t fit right, they fight my body's natural contour so I scrape a little more and eat a little less, fuck the guy I hate and imagine the guy i love fucking other girls instead of me, I pretend I can be more perfect and he’ll change his mind but really he won't. He doesn’t need me. I pretend I represent truth, it makes him uncomfortable. I'm the girl who never knows what she wants, instead invites everyone to crash my world and relive my favorite story.

Songs are everywhere, their words stick themselves to the people I think about. I can't keep my words straight when the radio comes on. the songs hypnotize me. I can't resist. like booze I'm drunk on the idea of living my own music video and I give into the emptiness of a fantasy even as it resurfaces hours later when I silently carve his name into my flesh.

and the aftermath: aka
today: 7/32/06

did he earn back his ringtone?

oh yeah

Complicated and homeless, front and center. Shallow at the airport. Peace below the girl, Paris Hilton veiled in pink. Lenny Kravitz wearing sunglasses. A guy who looks like a cross between kurt cobain and the 70s. Oh yeah, and Carmen and Dave. Right before the divorce. Paul McCartney, Riverside Church, a one-person Revolutionary War battle reenactment.

Saturday, October 27, 2007

my new york

my new york is 3000 miles of distance from the west coast set of exes, who i secretly miss. it is exactly two strips of veggie bacon for dinner because I am believe i am failing art history and science. it is paying $40000 a year to feel bad about myself and going out every weekend to get that confidence back. it's meeting a lame dj and going home with him anyway because everyone knows djs get the best drugs. it's meeting a 2L in a moment of vulnerability and finding out he’s never heard of carlos casteneda and that he just wants a blow job while he spouts dreams of becoming a corporate law-whore. it's sneaking off to the lower east side on a Sunday night to avoid my ex and instead finding him locked out of his apartment. its hanging out with NY other best friend and trying to decide if her elusive roommate is gay, selling drugs or just weird.

my new york is heels on the sidewalk in the rain because it's fashion week and there are no taxis. it's going to the west end at midnight for free drinks with my roommate cuz I’ve just been dumped and randomly meeting a bunch of electricians who invite us in their limo to crobar where we drink free dom and dance on tables. it's learning to say no politely, learning how to dress for cold, actually checking the weather. giving up smoking and starting again during spring finals. getting up every day at 3 am to host a radio show that six people listen to.

my new york is taking country music history and meeting my mentor if only I was brave enough to send her some of my work. it's mailing photoshopped watercolors all over the country and making $75 at a student vendor fair in macintosh while trying to get my jewelry line off the ground.it's my LA best friend flying in bimonthly to keep tabs on her east coast cohorts. it's not having a dog and learning to drink coffee while I walk quickly to the subway. my new york is talking to my friends in California who have real projects going on in their lives and realizing that if I was home I wouldn’t be going anywhere. It's trying to remember that college will open doors.

it’s also the haunted memory of the quad before I was hospitalized for severe depression in 2000 because the only way I used to handle stress was to rip open my veins over and over. it’s the aching feeling of knowing that the only way out is through and that school will never be as painful as another empty suicide attempt. it’s the hope that I will finish before I collapse and the promise of the biggest motherfucking graduation party ever. it’s the reality that i would like to get a college degree at some point and the gratitude I have for my family for giving me another chance. it's never ever giving up my love for the lakers. it's getting lost in queens while driving to the city for the very first time, watching a fiery sun descend into the pink haze above new jersey from my 10th floor apartment, counting bacteria in hudson river water samples and staying up all night talking to my cousin about numerology and why investment in haiti is so difficult. it's standing in a piss-filled elevator in the projects and scoring awesome chanel knockoffs down in chinatown. it's water towers on buildings and fire escapes and lots and lots of bricks but no earthquakes.

out for nothing

NO ONE does theme nights like me and J. Sadly, J could not make it out to Naughty Schoolgirl night at the monthly club and I was left to theme it on my own. K and I made a special trip to the 2.99 store where I found a gothic wife beater and a pink and green plaid miniskirt that barely covered my ass. purple lizard heels made the outfit complete. Claudia staunchly refused to stray from her standard cocktail dress but still accompanied me to the club which was held in a sushi restaurant that also featured punk-rock karaoke. On our way over we learned that E would not see the hand picked slut outfit.
Maybe it was better that way.

We rolled in about half an hour before the dancing started. N stopped by to say hi and not much else. The dancers exploded on to the floor with an androgynous catholic school cheerleader mania. after the show the crowd dispersed to the dancefloor and smoking area. we finished a joint in the bathroom and decided to move on, viewing our $5 cover as yet another contribution to the scene. Whatever. We made the gesture of getting N's number incase either of our nights fizzled and then we booked over to the next best club Claudia could think of.

A glossy stone exterior radiated warmth. Inside, slick wood floors inside led to a huge balcony. Somehow we ran into A before we even made it up to the bar. he ed us to the dance floor where T moved to the music in a ray of moonlight. I joined him, exclaiming hello as I danced among my friends and his. He smiled. Live drums and the built-up energy of the dance show we just saw pushed me just lose it, I mean, really go crazy under the moonroof and the stars and drums. I guess some people think that’s cute.

We all ended up on the patio watching A try to number close a chick using palmisty. I detected a hint of resentment in his friend's running commentary. Apparantly his technique always works. Claudia snuggled against her boyfriend's arms as we smoked the rest of a spliff. Later, outside the club, T would not let me go. I had to pry myself out of his embrace, which A made a point to follow. I deferred Al’s request for my number, explaining he could get it from T, and we left.

mistaken identity

Ethereal blonde wisps frame her angel face. She looks up, filtering her fake surpise through wide eyed naïveté. You smile and her eyes shift from your gaze. You haven’t seen her in weeks and still she can’t trust you enough to look in your eyes since you left. I was never really there, you argue silently, and she half smiles like she can hear you. You know what she’s thinking and you don’t want to be reminded of her, not the way she laughed nor the way she looked curled up in your crumpled sheets fast asleep in the late morning sunlight. You smile again, forcing the memory out of your head, and then you’re both acting like you’re BFF that never talk, or two people that haven’t met. You’re about to drown in the agony of the moment when she disappears inside the club. You forgot she always smelled like honeysuckle.

The night ends on a quiet note and you stop off at the bar on the corner to grab a beer before heading home. You can’t stop thinking about those fragile shoulders, the tiny midriff encircled by blue fabric, the bony hips dancing in a gauzy, floor sweeping skirt. Her face is all too clear in your mind and you approach the memory tentatively, afraid of what it might do to your already wrecked mind and limbs exhausted with self restraint.

Another beer and you’re gone, back, reliving the first night you meet her. She’s dressed in black, all porcelain skin and red lips and that wispy blonde hair that floats down her back. She tastes like cotton candy mixed with THC and her eyes dance like the twinkling lights that dot the Hollywood hills at night. Tonight she’s laughing and full of love, not the painful kind but the friendly warm kind that you find in a stranger’s eyes on the subway. She never knows what’s going on, but she gets up every day and tries to make sense of the buildings and sky and people. Red lips, dewy skin.

10 drunken text messages later and you never want to see her again. She’s not there, she’s everywhere. She’s the girl who left you for the TV star, times a hundred. She’s silent, content to play any role you create for her, alive in your bed but waiting conspicuously for you to make the next move. You wonder if she’s like this with all the guys she meets and that weakens the moment considerably.

If only you knew. We fall in love daily and get our hearts stomped on, but we get up and keep dancing on tables, downing peach vodka and kicking up our platform heels. We rock the miniskirts so you know what you’re missing and we never stop flirting to remind you of what you almost had. You are always surprised at how easily we move in and out of your life. You drop the act for a second, in a moment of vulnerability, but when we respond you’re gone. And we always move on, smiling softly to mask the empty pain of waking up alone.

K's story

I remember being a little girl and going to the beach with Mom. I was glad to leave the desert for the water. The summer heat was unbeareable unless I was near water. Pools don’t count. I don’t care if I ever see a pool again after last summer. I can still feel the sting of the chlorine. The summers become more frenzied each year. I’m not sure how much longer I can live from season to season. People look at me and see luxury and elegance. Inside I want to scream, I’m still that scrappy girl who threw sand in my sister’s eyes and pulled her hair.

I hate their assumptions about me but I hate missing out even more and that's what keeps me in the game. Showing up at glossy hotel lobbies and running through the hills all night in heels is now routine. When I can fill my days with work and nights with magic I feel alive. Scenes from rooftops and art openings and treehouses sear my memory with a tingling, almost painful pleasure. I drip elegance on camera but after the makeup comes off I laugh and dance and become my gawky goofy self again. I miss my siblings now. My brother is in a band and he never comes home anymore. My sister sticks around to share some important moments but never without drugs or a new boyfriend tagging along. I miss the sandy beach days where it was okay to get all messy and the worst that would happen was that Mom would forget her cell phone and shrug her shoulders as if to say, oops, I guess we have the day all to ourselves. We would dig holes to China and smear wet sand on our noses before diving into tide pools as warm as bubble baths to emerge shiny clean before getting dirty all over again.

I breathe in the salty air. The sun and the wind beat down on me until I can no longer keep my eyes open. I think about what I might do that evening and then I think about what I could do differently this summer to slow the chaos. I crave the energy of the city in the heat but I don’t know how to get a read on my own emotions in that setting. The energy drips and melts from one night to another with barely a moment to reflect. I’m sick of planning my life in five second increments of found time. Miami, Los Angeles, Tokyo. I keep all my jewelry in little ziplock bags and am ready to travel at a moment's notice. Sometimes I forget if I’m going across town or across the ocean. City grids snap in and out of my memory before I can remember where I've woken up. I have survived a few years of this lifestyle but plane rides are still long as hell without Ambien and yet too brief to feel like I have actually gone anywhere.

I give up and embrace the chaos that the summer brings, inviting it into my fragmented head. How do you know if you're okay when your basis for reality hinges on appearance and artificiality?? I muse and then the relative importance of the sharp, pierecing summer energy becomes apparent.

venice

we want red bull candy and febreze on our keychains.

we love poptarts with frosting, unheated.

we want glam beats and dirty disko.

we get our picture taken by sketchy photographers who ride motercycles and think they have immortalized us with the camera's flash. (they are too late.)

we want to go back to the 90s but with cell phones that take video.

we expertly apply lipstick in darkened car backseats.

we cover the smell of pot smoke with island-scented body spray and too many parliament lights.

we get our movies on dvd, before the release date.
(we never pay retail.)

the story of our life plays out on screen and online,

via dirty texts and secret emails, in pixels and ringtones.

we define ourselves through itunes playlists and facebook status.

we play chess with two boards, on a chalky cliff overlooking the sea,

we believe in up to 10 possible dimensions.

we have art wars with digital cameras in real time, on cement, in darkness.

we pour champagne on rooftops while fireworks rain down at new years.

we kiss on dirty beaches at four am. while trying to google the sunrise.

we live on Mexican food and sushi.

lost:exhilaration&panic

can’t catch up, it passes
disappears into the night
its 3rd and 120 and 2 am and
a rusty fence leads to fourth,
just walk a little west
coats pulled tight around the dress
shock me, alone and grieving
faces melt into the rain
endless messages turn blue
I walk the streets
past garage doors and parking
spots to the place where I find solace
staring at the eyes of strangers

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Thanks, 212

I hate los angeles street. I want to cry when I think about it. Fuck those bull shit parties, man, that shit is so last year. Standing around holding drinks, trying to look cooler than the crowd. I mean HELLO. We would never stay at a party like that, except we wanted to see Trip. Correction: I wanted to see Trip. And I said so, almost even texted him while we waited in line for the bathroom but I had no signal.

Strangely, however, on the topic of Trip's return to LA four days after dumping his latest girlfriend, Elisa remained quiet. There’s Alex, she said. Let’s call Theo. Was that him over there? She went to find out.

Jaz and I ambled about through the crowd of eastside rock chicks and underage boys in skinny jeans, trying to get into the music. An ice cream truck parked outside to serve snacks. I picked up free energy drinks and smoked a couple cigarettes. At 1:30 am, forty-five minutes after we should have left that lame party, we sprawled out on a vinyl couch and waited. Trip is being a nerd, Elisa said. It was the first time she had mentioned him on her own the whole night.

When he did walk in, with Theo at his side, Elisa sent me to go say hi. I touched Theo lightly on the shoulder. He hugged me and l ooked quickly in his eyes. He smiled. The five of us left the party and headed north on the 5 to Trip's. Jaz had to pee when we got there so she dashed off to the bathroom and spent the rest of the night texting her ex-boyfriend. Trip found clean cups even though we all had waterbottles of vodka in our handbags and we headed into the living room.

Elisa sat on the couch and stared defiantly into Trip's eyes. Theo and I sucked down a joint and he led me over to the corner of the room to show me some new vinyl. I could feel fire in my head as I bent over to examine the records. I selected some downtempo house and we all kicked off our shoes and danced in the middle of the room.

Later Theo gave me a tour of the rest of the apartment while Elisa and Trip remained on the couch. I started to stumble on a step. We grabbed each other instinctively and I caught myself shooting a quick, longing glance at the full-size guest bed. After one second too long I reluctantly left his embrace and went back to the living room to check on Jaz.

In the car, Elisa explained the situation.
“Theo is such a team player. Winging Trip like that? Taking you away so we could talk? They totally planned it.”
I fell silent for a few minutes, thinking about her words.
“You have to hit that,” Jaz slurred. “Why aren’t you hooking up with him?”

I stayed silent a minute longer before speaking. "We're better as friends. He’s not in my city.”

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

thank god i moved

call me old fashioned, call me spoiled, call me ocd but im starting to need tranquilizers to enter the shower. really strong ones too not that clonopin shit that the doctors think will solve all your anxiety, but xanax and valium and stuff that precludes driving and operating heavy machinery. I need the squinty haze of the pills to navigate the horrendously gross truck-stop inspired Hewitt bathrooms because I am ocd, or spoiled, or old fashioned, and I find the entire process of bathing in such filth to be a farce. The fact that everyone wears shoes in the shower, to rise above the two inch foamy sea that forms in every shower stall, ought to be an indication of a problem. sure, the experts recommend shoes to head off althletes foot. isn’t that kind of gross that you can actually get a disease from the SHOWER? I only wonder what other diseases they aren’t telling us about. I’m sure the lurking bacteria are just dying to impart their hepatitis or aids onto my dewy little skin. my skin turns red and scaly now that I live back east, and I am certain that it is the shower.

when I first moved into hewitt I thought no big deal. well, no, actually I was terrified of of the showers but I figured that if the freshman could emerge totally fuckable from such squalid conditions that I could too. living amonst the bright eyed underclassmen however has changed my mind entirely. this in depth case study on the bathing habits of barnard women has taught me that most of us try to get as clean as possible in the quickest amount of time and that the rest are just grubby. I fall into the former of the two groups. each morning, with exactly 6 minues to spare, I climb onto four inch platform flip flops, wrap myself in an oversized towel and grab my scented-product laden blue shower basket. I savor my last breath of clean air as I near the smelly radius that encompasses the bathroom door. once insiide I try not to look at anything, lest the image of someone elses hair or leftover food or worse lodge itself permanently inside my sensitive brain. I spent three years working at a perfume company for this? I wonder as I lather up with as much overscented bath gel as possible. I alternate between fragrances. KAI contains a heady, overpowering, frantically floral fusion of jasmine, tea rose and gardenia. the perfume itself is sickeningly strong and old lady-ish but as a bath gel it infuses the steam with a cloud heavy enough to transport my mind. scent is the strongest sense tied to memory, I used to tell my customers, and the KAI acts as a tranquilizer in its own way by knocking the nasty bathroom reality in and out of my mind as I scrub down. the other fragrance I use is a blend of my favorite essential oils: eucalyptus, chamomile, bergamot, lavender, peppermint and rosemary. individually each oil functions to clear my sinuses, calm me down, wake me up, calm me down some more, sooth my stomach and eliminate headaches, in that order, and collectively they too help me forget for a brief millisecond where exactly I am forced to bathe.

for the times when I am forced to touch the industrial shower curtain or the silver bacteria masking metal of the stall door I immediately pump a large pouf of my shea butter hand wash to eliminate anything infectious. if my elbow hits the wall in the tiny shower stall (at 125 pounds I can barely sqeeze inside) I scoot forward on my oversized platforms and try not to think about when it was last squeegeed. in addition to taking up valuable real estate, the tiny soap dish protuding from one tiled wall only offers enough space for one product, so I swing the shower curtain open and closed several times to swap face wash for shower gel for shampoo. I debate on pumping another pouf of shea butter wash onto my chafed hands but usually I don’t have time and instead try to touch the shower curtain (or shower head or handle) with as the problem is not the friendly, hardworking cleaning staff that invades daily between 1 and 2 pm. nor is it really the residents, who for the most part try to pick up after themselves. the main reason the hewit bathrom sucks is that it is just shared by about 25 people too many. sharing is all right in kindergarten and its required when your roommate gets a free bottle of champagne, but when it comes to bathrooms it should be outlawed. no one, not roommates, not moms and dads and siblings, not boyfriends and especially not 25 random strangers can be expected to religiously clean up their own bacteria and dead skin upon leaving the bathroom, yet without such strict measures the rest of the occupants are forced to literally bathe in their hallmates' excrements. there is a reason why any two bedroom apartment outside of new york city has two bathrooms as well: people’s sanitary well being depends on the peace of mind that the spots on the mirror and dust on the counter came from their carelessness and not someone elses

About Me

My photo
Influences besides NY&LA: Francesca Lia Block, Mary, Courtney Love, Janet Fitch, Casey & Nick, Lindsay, My sisters, Rachel, Jessica, Melina, Gabe, Annie, Peggy Ellsberg & the Ells Girls aka Meli Julie & Sherrie, Jenny, Bob Dylan, Suede, Shirley Manson, Heidi Sigmund Cuda, Gwen Stefani, Bad Religion, Beyond Scents, thrift stores, JetBlue & the Airtrain, Telluride, Faith Hill, Peeps, Pete Wentz