I want to be Your Shoebox

By Catherine Bowman

I want to be your shoebox

I want to be your Fort Knox

I want to be your equinox

I want to be your paradox

I want to be your pair of socks

I want to be your paradise

I want to be your pack of lies

I want to be your snake eyes

I want to be your Mac with fries

I want to be your moonlit estuary

I want to be your day missing in February

I want to be your floating dock dairy

I want to be your pocket handkerchief

I want to be your mischief

I want to be your slow pitch

I want to be your fable without a moral

Under a table of black elm I want to be your Indiana morel

Casserole. Your drum roll. Your trompe l'oeil

I want to be your biscuits

I want to be your business

I want to be your beeswax

I want to be your milk money

I want to be your Texas Apiary honey

I want to be your Texas. Honey

I want to be your cheap hotel

I want to be your lipstick by Chanel

I want to be your secret passage

All written in Braille. I want to be

All the words you can't spell 

I want to be your International

House of Pancakes. I want to be your reel after reel

Of rough takes. I want to be your Ouija board

I want to be your slum-lord. Hell

I want to be your made-to-order smorgasbord

I want to be your autobahn

I want to be your Audubon

I want to be your Chinese bug radical

I want to be your brand new set of radials

I want to be your old-time radio

I want to be your pro and your con

I want to be your Sunday morning ritual

(Demons be gone!) Your constitutional

Your habitual—

I want to be your Tinkertoy

Man, I want to be your best boy

I want to be your chauffeur

I want to be your chauf-

feur, your shofar, I want to be your go for

Your go far, your offer, your counter-offer

your two-by-four

I want to be your out and in door

I want to be your song: daily, nocturnal—

I want to be your nightingale

I want to be your dog's tail

5 Things that made my day today

5. Having a relaxing lunch with a magazine in a shady spot
4. Finding a cool website with swim workouts--and then doing one (0 to 1 mile in 6 weeks)
3. Listening to Dave Matthews Band on the walk home from the pool-->the idea of a modern/post modern dance party. Perhaps for my birthday. It would be so much fun!!!
2. Enjoying dinner and Taboo with friends
1. Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Along Came Polly. Pure comedic genius.
 

What is this thing called Simple Living?

Lately I've had a strong desire to go shopping. To put together outfits, and try on clothes, and purchase large amounts of stuff. For what? So I can sift through it in a few years and give it away to Good Will. There's such a pull to consume things in this country. And especially in L.A. And let's be real, it's not that I feel preassured to "look" a certain way and that's why I'm so interested in having new things. There's genuinely something inside of me that lights up when I buy something new.

In theory I want to be a person who lives simply--unattached to possesions. Ready to sell all that I have and move if God calls me somewhere. Or, even just ready to move without needing a full day to pack up my belongings. In my mind I think, if it really really came to it I would give everything away, and I probably would, but that's not really the point of living simply is it? To be willing to give up stuff if your life depended on it.

I do not lead a materially simple lifestyle. My DVD collection says it all. It's nearly doubled since graduation.

On a different note, I have come to really enjoy the magazine Real Simple.

Now that's a different type of simple living all together. In fact, it actually fuels my drive to consume things, but under the guise of actually distilling my chaotic life down to some more pure essence of being.

Recently I saw an exhibition of Andrea Zittel's work. She's a new tenure-track faculty person at the USC Roski School of Fine Arts. I don't konw anything about her spiritual background, but she is definitely a proponent of simplicity in every aspect of her life. It's kind of amazing to see the way she creates these comprehensive living units


I could work with the desk (middle image), but would I be up for sleeping, eating, bathing, and working in the same 10ft square space?

11:30pm

I read this great article on sparkpeople.com the other day about procrastination. It was an anti-procrastination piece for people like me. At one point the writer actually asks the reader to stop reading and do something that they've been putting off for a long time. That's what I need. A little kick in the butt. For real. It's been good, the past few days. I've been doing the things I've put off. DISCIPLINE. YAY! I'm actually becoming a more disciplined person. I just have to keep on doing the things I don't want to do that much.
Continuing to go to the gym is actually paying off finally. I'm a little more than halfway to my 10% weight loss goal. The crazy thing is I'm actually enjoying the exercise. I love the way I feel after a really hard work out. Who would of thunk it. I still can't imagine running though. Mostly because of the knee thing. I'm visiting a friend in San Diego in a few weeks and I'm looking forward to going hiking! I've never looked forward to hiking! That is a testimony.

alas sweet romance

Having a crush can be no fun at all. at all. I've officially dropped the hankerchief--tossed it in a certain someone's direction so to speak. And so far nothing has happened. What a bummer! Everyone keeps telling me that they're proud of me for putting myself out there. I don't want to be out there anymore. Out there is cold, and vulnerable. This is just a part of growing up though. Seriously I can't imagine being in this place over and over again by choice. It just seems so unwise, and damaging. There's no taking the handkerchief back. Reaching out with my foot and just quietly sliding it under my chair. Honestly I don't think I've been this honest about my feelings with a guy since high school. My relationship in college doesn't really count, because I didn't do any of the initiating. But in highschool. Man, I'll never really understand what prompted me to send that letter to Grant, a boy I had never even had a conversation with. And we never really did have a REAL conversation. But that one gesture set the tone for my entire junior year. It was all very Wonder Years. I'm not sure what I learned from it all. I guess it strengthened something in me. It's hard to find that again. It was easier then because I really didn't even know the boy. We weren't even acquaintances. This situation is a bit different. I might actually see him again before he responds (if he does at all) to my e-mail. That my friends, makes for an incredibly awkward situation. Awkward turtle.