Leave-taking

I’m buzzed on cheap white wine and the heady smell of wood smoke drifting in from a bonfire two or three houses down. This is essential.

I am a person invested in ritual; in the deliberate gestures (both small and great) that allow us to make meaning for ourselves in the world. I considered carefully how I might mark the end of my time in this small city. I would be on my own, as I was when I arrived. This too, seems essential.

The first summer we were here, we were the only tenants in the building. We ran wild, charging up and down the stairs, sliding down the banisters, and wandering out to the parking lot to dance under the moon. Moody made origami sunflowers for me, and we walked along the river, pointing out muskrats and herons to one another. It was hot—like this summer has been—and we slept on the porch, searching for a breeze, trying to keep cool. In the two weeks I spent alone after moving in (before Moody arrived) I felt like an intruder, sleeping on the sofa when our bed felt too big for me alone. Together we were at home, and when I am old and grey, I will remember the first summer.

In many ways, this summer has been a strange echo of that one. Since Moody went ahead to Manhattan, I’ve wandered around like a ghost, spackling and sanding, packing and painting. Nothing is sufficient. So I sit on our sun porch, searching for a breeze in the hot night, watching the lights turn on and off in the cell-like rooms of the hotel across the way. They reflect in the slow black river, trembling gold and orange—the night’s only stars.

Somewhere (in rooms inside of rooms inside of rooms inside me) there is a 12-year-old girl, howling for another home left behind. This is the longest I’ve lived in one place since I was six years old, and that is something. Onward.

The (End of) Summer Self

Everything and nothing happened this summer. I turned 25 and I taught a summer class at my university, but mostly I just struggled with my dissertation and felt guilty for every moment not spent struggling on it. Amanda Ann Klein said it best in her essay for Judgmental Observer: Academia conditions us to feel that when we’re not working, we don’t exist. It’s maddening and saddening, but perhaps the natural byproduct of a community of people driven enough to seek PhDs. My problem is that I’ve never been a particularly ambitious person. People who have known me a long time will probably laugh at this claim, but it’s the truth. I simply love learning (though less now than I used to).

Summer is a strange time for me. When the characters and rhythms of the university aren’t present, immediate, and ordering my life, I find it trickier to maintain the illusion that those characters and rhythms make sense in my life. They really don’t, but I have no plans to let that stop me.

I recently read a personal essay on The Hairpin (if you’ve never visited, you really ought to) that has stuck with me. In it, Taisia Kitaiskaia writes about the summer-self that withdraws from world, creating a kind of social vacuum where it may then grow large, swollen with its own intensity:

It’s like slipping outside of time—societal, human time. It’s in these slack summers that I feel most immortal, as unknown and useless as a god, unseen by any mortal eye and somehow full of a vain and hopeless majesty. I fill up more space in the room. Strange thoughts grow unimpeded.

Strange thoughts indeed. Here are some photos from this summer:

Summer's End

It's unfortunate that I've come to measure the usefulness of time spent strictly by CFPs answered and syllabuses tweaked. This summer has been productive in so many other ways, as I must remind myself. I did my fair share of work, but there was also...(drum roll)...painting!  Running and novel-reading! Cooking and music! Largely fruitless dissertation plotting! Swimming in the sea! A birthday! It was much like last summer....and that's alright by me.

On my last day by the ocean, a pair of little girls was watching me draw mermaids and dinosaurs and planets and sunflowers in the sand. They were too shy to come up to me, but as soon as I went back down to the water, they started to draw; first copies of my own scribbles, and then their own fantastic creations. It was one of my favorite moments of the summer, not only because I got to watch somebody very small create something very great, but also because it's been a while since I've had the pure pleasure of creating something lovely, or useful, or something that makes me feel productive in a way having nothing at all to do with scholarly texts, or dissertation chapters, or the perfect flow of a good syllabus.

It's a feeling I forget too easily once fall creeps up again. It's my last semester of coursework, however, so hopefully (despite the looming dissertation), more such moments and good feelings lie ahead.

On Holiday

Life Updates

Laser tag! Dirty board games! Fire pit! Copious amounts of liquor! All of these things made Christmas with my family in Wadesboro, North Carolina, oodles and oodles of fun. I brought Moody home with me this year, and he managed to take all of the zaniness in stride (although, as it turns out, he is not very good at laser tag).

To top it all off, I received the very good news that an essay I wrote about Chiharu Shiota (about whom I've blogged before) will be published in a Casa Asia book to coincide with the end of the artist’s first solo exhibition in Barcelona! I can’t wait to get my hands on it in March. More updates on this to come!

Overall, this winter break has been extremely restorative, and there are more good things coming up soon. In February, I’ll be returning to NYC for the first time since I interned for Ralph Lauren back in 2010, and I can’t wait to have adventures in my favorite city. There will definitely be reunions with a few beloved Vassar pals, and plenty of arty goodness at the CAA conference. As soon as I get back to Rochester, Moody and I will be goofing off at a Passion Pit concert, and celebrating our second (belated) Valentine’s Day together. So much good!

Walk it Off: The Photography of Nick Hance McElroy

Untitled photograph from the Thirteenth Month series.

You know those marvelously itinerant people who go to Iceland or Thailand after college and aren't afraid to ride a chicken bus around a mountain with no guardrails? Those people fascinate me. If I wasn't so PhD-student-broke and so prone to motion sickness, maybe I’d wake up one day feeling particularly ballsy and then I’d be one of them, boarding a train and a plane and a fishing boat and then riding a grizzly bear into the Alaskan tundra in search of Bob Ross's friendly ghost. But until that day, I'll continue to love photographers like Vancouver-based Nick Hance McElroy, who takes pictures the way I would on a tremendous adventure (whether or not he's on a tremendous adventure himself).

Untitled photograph from the Thirteenth Month series.

Most of his photographs are human-less, and the ones that aren't never allow more than a single road-trip companion or new-found friend to enter the frame. Dogs and ponies and snow-covered sheep populate his pictures, which are imperative or instructional, ordering us to "walk it off" or showing us "how to be alone."

Untitled photograph from the Thirteenth Month series.

Untitled photograph from the Great Divide series.

The photographs aren't always beautiful. A metal pail full of severed doe heads becomes the aesthetic equal of a tiny white house with red flowers and a red roof, or a blue car on a snow-blown hill. Each friend, vista, and carcass is treated with the same loving, unhurried attention. 

Untitled photograph from the Great Divide series.

Untitled photograph from the Thirteenth Month series

Untitled photograph from the How to Be Alone series.

Untitled photograph from the Great Divide series.

A Rochester Update

There’s nothing like brand new Moleskine notebooks and the promise of daily purpose. I love the first few weeks of school; I don’t have any papers to write (YET) and I don’t have any papers to grade (YET). I’m just soaking up all that good book-learnin’ and soaking up the warm weather while it lasts. Also, I enjoy that bi-monthly paycheck. Oh yes. I do.

This semester, things might be a little bit different, since I’m TAing in a few studio photography classes. All of the classes I’ve previously taught or assisted with have been hard-core theoretical ones, so this will be quite a change. I’ll admit, I don’t know a whole lot about practical photography. In fact, even my art historical background has very little photography in it, so this is probably going to be either a fascinating introduction to the subject, or three months in which I demonstrate, flamboyantly, how little I know about it. Adventure!

I had my birthday about a week ago, and I can honestly say it was the loveliest one yet. Fruit, flowers, Italian food, balloons, cheesecake, AND kisses? I am a very spoiled 23-year-old. That being said, 23 is closer to 25 than it is to 20, and I think I hear my bones creaking.

Despite having a prettttttty lazy summer, I remembered a couple of important things that I always seem to forget during stressful semesters:

• Reading for pleasure is da best. Literally da best. 
• Having time for exercise will KEEP YOU SANE. 
• Sunshine exists, and you can have it. 
• I really, really, really love school.

Inked, At Long Last

So I finally gave in and got my first tattoo. It's just a little feather along my collarbone, but I'm really happy with it. If you've been reading from Little Houses all along, you know that I'm fascinated with tattoos, and with human-as-canvas, and it was probably only a matter of time until I settled on something permanent.



A friend in my grad program told me not to try and pick a design with a ton of personal meaning. He said I'd never be entirely happy with something so loaded, and that tattoos should be whims. He's got full sleeves on both arms, and they're awesome, so I listened to his advice.


Here's what I can say about my first tattoo experience:

1.) Don't get tattooed in a place where you're sun-burnt. It will sting more than it needs to, and your surly tattoo artist will make fun of you.
2.) Tattoos do not hurt nearly as much as nose piercings. Nose piercings require determination, and a post-piercing shot of whiskey.
3.) There's something really hilarious about being four tattoos behind your mother.

That Time I Went to A Wrestling Event...

Moody loves wrestling, Kelly loves Moody…..Kelly loves wrestling?

Not exactly.

A couple of months ago, I started panicking about what I was going to get Moody for our one-year anniversary. I was resigned to getting him a lovely (but boring) Fossil watch when, BEHOLD, the holy grail of Ticketmaster alerts appeared in my inbox. WWE RAW. Coming to Rochester.

It was fate. Anybody who knows Moody knows that he has more than one strange love in his life: convenient store coffee cake, Jackie Chan movies, Charlotte Gainsbourg, blue soda, me….and professional wrestling.  I splurged and bought two ringside seats, blacking out for a moment on the fact that, with this ticket purchase, I was basically volunteering to go with him.

I’m not going to lie, I had a blast.  Imagine endless beer, a comfy chair, adorable kids running around in floor-skimming t-shirts and sweat bands, and muscly men in what amounts to underwear, jumping around in a well-lit central location. Not to mention the goofy grin on my sweetie’s face. These are all good things.

Definitely glad I didn’t go with the watch.

Don't be fooled by his stoic expression. Moody had a blast.

Ode To Moody

Exactly one year ago today, Moody and I smooshed our faces together and decided to date. It’s been the best year of my life, and in honor of my sassy, snazzy, magnificent man, I have prepared……(drumroll)……

A brief and selected list of things I love about him:

1.) That he likes to gauge the (un)acceptability of his outfits by the facial expressions of the UPS man.

2.) His positively girlish long eye-lashes

3.) His shameless love of pro-wrestling

4.) The fact that he lets me steal all of his favorite clothes, and doesn’t complain that I leave the sleeves rolled up when I put them back in his closet.

5.) That he bought me an espresso machine for Valentine’s Day. Boy knows who he’s dating.

6.) That he goes into our serial-killer-hideout-of-a-basement to switch my laundry from the washer to the dryer when I complain that there’s a serial killer down there. Hiding out.

7.) He lets me put up as many Christmas decorations as I want, and doesn’t complain when they start to encroach on his head-space.

8.) How, when he goes outside to take out the trash and I’m wolf-whistling at him from our second-floor apartment, he pretends he can’t hear me, but walks with a little more bounce in his step.

9.) He shaves his soul-patch for me. Because soul-patches are just the beginning of a slippery slope into rat-tail and mullet territory.

10.) When he’s on the night-shift at work, he spends hours and hours making me origami sunflowers.

11.) How, one time, when I was out of canvasses, he let me do a painting on his back.

12.) His very fine tooshie.

Happy anniversary baby. You are the bee’s knees.