North to Alaska!

Hey everybody! I realize I haven't written in this blog for over two years, but I thought I'd take it up again. I'm spending the Summer in Homer, AK working/living at a Bed and Breakfast and also working at an Art gallery on the Homer Spit. Last Sunday, I flew into Anchorage at 8:30pm, (11:30pm my time) and was pretty exhausted. My Mom's friend's sister and her husband were nice enough to let me collapse at their house. I had planned to take the Homer Stageline bus the next day from Anchorage to Homer because it was cheaper than a flight. Monday morning, I called probably 7 or 8 times and no one at the bus station answered. When they called me back, they were surprised that I didn't know they weren't running because it was a holiday (Memorial Day). Of course I didn't know because it wasn't on their website. When I pointed this out to him, he laughed like someone lazily trying to breathe while gargling water and said, "Oh...yeah. It's probably not on our website." So I booked a flight for that afternoon. After checking my bag, Barb walked me to my gate. We both expected to say goodbye at security so were obviously surprised when security never happened and we ended up at the gate unfrisked. After the initial shock, I settled into the fact that I was about to board a no-security 40-person plane with a handful of strangers, one of which was a jolly old man who had a shotgun as his carry-on.

Obviously, it turned out okay. The view was beautiful and the flight was short and sweet. The Homer Airport was a bit smaller than the main room of the VFW in Canby, MN (those of you who have been there are nodding your heads and smiling...everyone else, just picture a really small airport). I called a cab. A few minutes later, a man in carhartt overalls showed up driving a cab with no mileage counter. Nevertheless, he dropped me off, I handed him some crumpled bills and went on my way.

The view is beautiful. I'm a block off the beach of Kachemak Bay. My apartment is larger than expected and the light yellow cupboards, big rugs, and 1950's stove feel summery and cozy at the same time.

The first morning I was there, I walked to the beach. Growing up around lakes (well, growing up around friends who had lake cabins...), I was in awe by the low tide. It was calm, the sky was clear, and the water disappeared into the thick fog, leaving ocean floor paths between tide pools. I wandered out and realized the low tide stretched much farther than I thought. I met a local named Jason, who was walking with his dog. He said this time of year the tides are extremely low, but today was one of the lowest. The ground looked like a sparkly washboard. The sun shined patchy rays through the thick wisps of fog. It was so beautiful and so eerie.

 

 So far, I've spent most of my days wandering around the town, gaping at the beach like a fool, and reading at the library. Business hasn't quite picked up yet at the B&B but it will and I'm enjoying some time by myself. Up until yesterday, it has been pretty much sunny all the time. It rained off and on today so the ravens and crows were in full force, hunting for worms. Aside from buying a basil plant at the farmer's market, I've stayed at home most of the day. It's cozy in here with the rain at the window :)

Mikey comes here on June 10 and I'm so excited. He'll be working remotely in Homer for his Minneapolis job, so that works out great. Plus, it's harder for me to explore a town, its restaurants, etc. by myself than with someone else. And he'll love it here! Who wouldn't?

I'll leave you with a photo of a raven teasing an eagle.

Love,

Breezy

Foer is a genius

I read "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" by Jonathan Safran Foer last year and loved it. I'm reading it again for class and I forgot how beautiful and sad this book is. Here are some of my favorite quotes from it.

"What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone's heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don't really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn't have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war."

"She wants to know if I love her, that's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet."

"I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live."

"I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can't tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone."

"Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living"

"So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!"

"In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weatherman could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York is in heavy boots."

"When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calender that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from the chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.
I spent my life learning to feel less.
Every day I felt less.
Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness."

"Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn't have to invent a thing."

"She laughed enough to migrate an entire flock of birds. That was how she said yes."

"Do you have any coffee?...It stunts my growth, and I'm afraid of death."

"Mom told me, “It probably gets pretty lonely to be Grandma, don’t you think?” I told her, “It probably gets pretty lonely to be anyone"

There's a Shark in the Swimming Pool

This was my final essay for an online English class I took this summer. It was supposed to be a causal analysis essay in which you analyze the cause and effect of something. In this case, I'm analyzing my irrational fear of water, fish, and sharks. Feel free to critique. Enjoy :)


All of my friends know how to swim. I’m the only one who doesn’t. Swimming in pools as a kid meant that I sat on the steps or only waded where I could touch the floor. I love boat rides and being on the lake, but I’m terrified of fish and being in lake water makes me feel vulnerable. Therefore, going to the lakes consists mostly of my friends doing water sports and swimming in the middle of the lake while I stay safely sprawled out on the boat. My irrational fear of fish and being in lakes was caused by growing up with holes in my eardrums and not knowing how to swim.
When I was a baby, I had tubes in my ears. As a toddler, I took swimming lessons in the baby pool like most kids do, learning to float and doggy paddle. After the tubes fell out, they left holes in my eardrums. I couldn’t go underwater and didn’t like how earplugs felt, so I convinced my mom to take me out of swimming lessons right before graduating to the big pool. One time, as I clung to the side of a hotel pool, kicking my feet behind me, I lost my grip and slipped underwater. The deafening sound of silence terrified me and I had never felt more vulnerable. Even though I could have touched the pool floor, my panic held me underwater, trying to find the surface or even the wall. When I finally grabbed hold of the side, my ears had filled with water. The rest of my day was spent avoiding the pool and trying to shake the water from my ears. I thought for sure I should have drowned. My 5-year-old self was traumatized.
My fear of being underwater caused my even more irrational fear that if water wasn’t going to kill me, sharks were. I have a vivid memory of being in the public pool across the street from my childhood home with two neighbor kids. It was a hot, slow day and we were some of the only people there. I sat on the pool steps, away from the threat of drowning in the shallow end or of fish suddenly appearing and eating my feet. I splashed my feet around in the shallow water while my two friends swam freely in the deep end. Suddenly, I heard their 7-year-old voices singing the theme song to “Jaws” as they swam over and pretended to be sharks, laughing and nipping at my feet with their hands. I screamed and ran out of the pool onto the hot, dry cement. Embarrassed, I laughed it off, but didn’t go back in the pool for the rest of the day. After that day, I spent the better part of my childhood believing that sharks were lurking in the shadowy parts of the pool. Even into my teenage years, the image of a shark would drift into my mind and I would instinctively lift my feet off the floor in a panic until I realized I was in a public pool in North Dakota and nowhere even near the ocean.
Even more unreasonable than a shark showing up in a pool, I grew up afraid that a shark would attack me in my shower. I used to have these ridiculous images in my head of a shark emerging through the bathtub floor and gobbling me up. I’m mostly over that fear because of its obvious impossibility. However, I was recently at a friend’s lake cabin when this fear unexpectedly resurfaced. I was showering and had my eyes closed while I was washing soap off of my face. I suddenly felt vulnerable. When I opened my eyes I realized that the color of the walls were the color of the ocean. The color of the shower curtain became a shark’s back and the white of the bathtub his belly. I panicked and had to stop and tell myself that there was no way a shark could be in the upstairs of a lake cabin in Bemidji, MN.
One would assume after the holes in my eardrums closed up around age 13 that I would overcome my fears. This was not the case. My fear of sharks in pools and showers caused me to fear sharks in lakes. If I open my eyes underwater in a pool, I can see pretty clearly to the other side. However, in a lake, all I see is murky shadows. My feeling of vulnerability underwater is amplified in a lake because I can’t see what’s in the water around me. While my illogical fear of lake sharks isn’t as big as it used to be, my fear of killer fish is. Even when I let my feet hang off the boat at any friend’s lake, I imagine what my feet look like from the view of a fish. Then, I picture the fish maliciously attacking me from the depths of the water. I still can’t even sit near a fish that’s mounted on someone’s wall because I think it will come to life for the sole purpose of harming me.
If I would have learned to swim at a young age I probably wouldn’t have these irrational fears. Innocent things like neighbor kids goofing off in the pool or me unexpectedly going underwater have culminated in me believing that giant fish are out to get me and sharks are lurking in showers. I wish I wasn’t so afraid of what’s living in water. My goal is to learn how to swim, but I keep putting it off because of my fears. However, if I knew how to swim, I may not feel so helpless in water and probably wouldn’t be as afraid. Whether or not I learn how to in the near future, I know for sure that I’m making my kids learn how to swim.

Stuck In A Rut

Well, the semester's over and now I'm on a (seemingly) never-ending job hunt. Oddly enough, the movie "It's Complicated" got me thinking about what I'm going to do with my art major. No, the movie has nothing to do with art-related jobs. However, she has this big yard with a huge, beautiful garden and I suddenly realized that my art degree is not going to pay for that. So I starting thinking about other things I like to do that I could tack on as a minor. I came up with writing and singing, both of which would make me no more money than Art. For a brief period, I found myself panicking about the choices I've made so far and how they may effect my long-term future. Naturally, I texted Taylor and consulted facebook, both of whom assured me that I'd find a job. There are a lot of options for me. I'm still browsing the minors page on the U's website and will have to get some advice from my advisor though. Maybe I'll teach, open a gallery, be a curator, design and build theater sets, sing, or throw everybody for a loop and become a pastry chef. Who knows!? All I know is that I'll love what I'm doing. And I can deal with a small garden.

On a side note, I stumped a guy friend when I proved to him that I know more about tools than he does! He didn't know the difference between an angle grinder and a die grinder...and who says tools are for boys?

Hullabaloo

Lately I've been working my butt off in the sculpture studio starting and finishing projects and writing/editing papers for my never-ending writing intensive classes. My (diabetic) friend Erica and I hadn't seen eachother in a week or two because she's been so busy as well. So today we ventured out to Target and Menards in search of cake-making ingredients and sculpture supplies. We each filled a bag at Target, then schlepped them over to Menards. Some people consider Menard's a man's store and all the areas we found ourselves in (building supplies, screws, etc.) were like a guy's hangout. And there we were, two girls with a cart full of groceries and a laundry list of supplies. Naturally, I forced them all to be friends with us as they led us to what we were looking for. After telling them we didn't have a car and that we would in fact be carrying these giant sheets of foam on the public bus, we ended up in the employees only section of the warehouse, maneuvering between forklifts as "Jerrick" led the way to the yard. In the end, we loaded up four 2ft x 4ft sheets of polystyrene foam onto the metro bus. Myself and the foam took up four seats. People were not happy. I then dragged the foam, an oak board, and another bag with a few supplies in it across campus to my dorm. It was a big hullabalo. And now I'm off to the studio to cut the wood and make the foam into something cool. That's all for now.

Breezy

Spring Break in FARGO

It was so nice to be home :) I got to hang out with my family and see old friends. Everyone thought we were gonna have some huge flood like we did last year, but we definitely didn't. Which was good! But it was cloudy and menacing most of the week, which I feel led people to believe their houses were going under. But Fargo did it again! We had over a million sandbags!

Ladies and Gentlemen, I turned 21. Two years ago I thought this day would never come, and suddenly it has come and gone and it was fun! The elegant HoDo, bros at Rooters and Irish fun at Dempsey's. It was really fun. So I hadn't gone out since my birthday on friday until St. Patrick's day and didn't even go to the bars then- I couldn't get myself to brave the frat guys and drunk girls at Dempsey's. Anyway, I'm happy to be of age- now I can sing karaoke and go to shows with my brothers!

Last week I had an interview at Red Lobster. This was a terrible idea considering my irrational fear of underwater creatures. I walked in for my interview and found myself waiting on a bench next to a tank of lobsters looking all sad with their pinchers tied up. Forcing myself to look away, I nearly screamed when I saw a life-size stingray and had to face a different way to avoid its beady eyes. The rest of the interview consisted of me trying not to stutter over questions about teamwork while my eyes darted away from nautical-patterned wallpaper, all the while with the tag still in my cardigan. I should stay away from sea-themed restaurants.

I started watching Mad Men. It's fantastic. I was avoiding watching it because I knew I'd love it and really don't have time in my life to follow another show. However, I'm committed now. I love Mad Men. Their clothes, the music, even their voices. It's too late to turn back now.

And now, a turn:
I was feeling sentimental today. Maybe that's not the right word, but I was feeling something.
When I was a kid, I would go about my day without even considering that someone could be judging me, categorizing me. Even dancing, in the crazy way kids do, I never thought about it. Things were more fun before we learned about our insecurities. But we taught one other to be afraid. When I was a kid, I put on certain clothes just because they were comfortable or the colors made me smile. Now, before I put on clothes, I stand in front of the mirror forever, asking myself if I look ok. And now, when I dance, I assume people are watching and judging. “Carefree” goes by a different definition after a certain age. When you're 4, it literally means you don't have a care. When you're 21, it means that you care a little bit less than everybody else. In the fall, I stomped grapes in Cortona, Italy. A local woman's 4-year-old girl named Marguerita was there. After the stomping, we all started dancing to Italian music and she joined in. And the minute she did, we all let go. Even Gino, the 72-year-old gardener, was a child again. We danced for what seemed like hours, and I didn't for a moment feel judged. People grew tired and, eventually, only Ari, me, and Marguerita remained. We followed her lead, imitated her dance. She taught us what we had forgotten, before we learned how to be insecure.

Aluminum schluminum

I realized on Saturday night that my aluminum foundry chop (a sort of "stamp" for marking which mold is yours) was due on monday and not wednesday. My anxieties were heightened when I remembered that the studio is closed on Sundays. So monday morning, bright and early (8:30...not that early to most people), I went to the studio and got to work. Then, not having a handle for my foundry chop, I had to take the metro to Menards to buy a miniature table leg. I rode it there (the bus driver insisted I explain to him what I was making that required supplies from Menards), got my table leg, went back to campus, and ate lunch, all the while with my face, neck, and hands covered in dirt and sand and my jaw aching for God knows why. I was quite the sight. I kept working on my piece and, after asking for help from an upper-level student working in the tool shop, he broke the news to me that we had the right size bit for tapping, but no tap-handle, which is apparently necessary. THEN, he told me to walk to Waylon's hardware store 4 blocks away that I didn't know existed. Eventually, I got the tap handle and finished my project. (WOO!) To top it off, I figured out the pain in my jaw is my wisdom teeth coming in. Guess I should have gotten them out 3 years ago like my dentist told me to..

Some good things today and this week:
1. It's finally warm enough to wear my red moccasins. My feet feel so good in them.
2. The weather is cloudy, but the temperature is perfect.
3. My birthday AND spring break are in 3 days!!
4. I have "Tourist Trap" by Bright Eyes playing in my headphones
5. My peacocktopus (originally to be made in bronze) will be made in iron for $200 dollars cheaper!

Time for my "Geology and Cinema" class. Yes. That class exists.
Breezy