mood indigo

it was andrew's birthday yesterday.
happy birthday baby dad.
last night: park slope, brooklyn
saw dale earnhardt jr. jr.

i wish i could live like this everyday.
until then, i'll live music to music.

tuesday tunes: sandro perri - "family tree"

happy mamas day!

we didn't make any plans for today. then we had all kinds of plans, but we didn't even end up doing what we planned...

this morning when sofia got up from bed, she tells me, "mommy i'll be back. i have a surprise for you. paper and drawing." she then went to the living room, but completely forgot about it. it was a sweet gesture though and that was enough. i don't think she had any idea what mothers day is all about, but i'm sure she had intuited something special about today. she's seriously intuitive like that. when she was only 8 months old and meeting her new jersey family for the first time, she didn't cry. but if it was a person who was not family, she would immediately cry. she's really good with the vibes.

so today adrienne, baby leila and audrey spent the day with us. we initially planned to have a picnic. couldn't decide what to eat though. then decided it was too hot. so i said, let's go to the beach, half joking. then adrienne suggested coney island! so here we are driving towards coney island and thought, man, that's kind of far. so we switched it up to the aquarium instead. turns out the aquarium is located in coney island. so we continued on our merry way. then, sofia said her stomach was hurting, so we decide to take the first exit we see. we didn't know where to find a bathroom though and we kept seeing signs to the staten island zoo. so we ended up at the zoo.

sorry for the tmi. i just thought it was kind of funny. the zoo turned out to be pretty awesome. i saw a lot of animals i haven't seen before, most especially a llama! and they were sooo adorable. there were peacocks just roaming about and we got to feed donkeys, goats, sheep, ponies and the llamas. even though the zoo was small and didn't have lions and bears and tigers, i really liked that people were allowed to interact with most of the animals there.

oh, hello may day

my mind is like an orchard
clustered in frozen portraits
blossoms that blooms so fine
just to drop from the vine
i've seen it all tonight.

spring always looks so nice with all the blooming flowers and greens and warmth of the sunshine.
i wish it felt as good as it looks. but lately i've just been feeling so weary and tired and can't do much but watch movies. i was under the impression that spring was supposed to give you that jolt of energy and make you feel rejuvenated, all young and fresh like the flowers. so while wondering what was wrong with me, i decided to look up spring fever. lo and behold, there it is "frühjahrsmüdigkeit". so funny, because i recognized this word from sewon's recent blog entry. it is a german word that is translated to something like "spring tiredness". my joints have been aching as well as my hips, and i decided to go to yoga with adrienne last night. it actually felt good despite looking pretty ridiculous trying my best to balance on one foot.



this morning was really nice. the sun was out, the sky was blue with white fluffy clouds. a man was mowing the lawn and the cool breeze smelled of fresh cut grass. even though it sounds like such a cliche spring day, it made me feel so good.

so i went and bought myself the gift of an iphone and i was going to chalk it up to spring fever... but whatever, i have made so much justification for this splurge but in the end i am happy that i did. all of these images were taken with it and i have been so addicted to the instagram app, that i have not picked up a real camera for a month. i guess i won't be purchasing a new digital camera.

subliminal

It has been a while since my last real update. I have been sick for what feels like three months now. On and off every 2-3 weeks and even during my trip to Chicago. I haven't fully recovered, but today I just felt the need to write something down, despite feeling like my head is full of clouds. And such is my style, I write when I am slightly delirious and only then can I actually form words to purge these thoughts.

These images weren't intentional. I took these pictures with my mind set on documenting how things are now over there to update my memory bank. And well, memories are a funny thing. It is always interesting for me to come back home, or to any familiar place, only to find that though things are different certain feelings remain the same.

Then you realize, memories come back in the form of what they have grown to become. And you meet them again and again and again, spiraling into a rabbit hole you try to avoid falling into. But I digress..

Though I arrive thinking I have new eyes to see with, there is always a greater gravitational pull (perhaps from my mother's couch) that makes me want to just lay there with my eyes closed while bathing in the sunlight. Possibly wishing I was someplace else and nevertheless, comforted all at once. But that is all I have to say about that.

So I have come to accept and love how the images turned out. I believe it was meant to come out distorted or abstracted because truthfully, it comes closest to conveying what my memories and thoughts are made of (with the exception of the last two photographs).

Finally, I will just leave you with this quote, which may or may not further explain/distort what I am trying to say:

"We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost."
— Gaston Bachelard (The Poetics of Space)

~*~

ps.
100dBs finally dropped a mix today!!
40 minutes to freedom

click the image ^ and listen.

let's just say I'm dancing in my seat at work right now.