ladyparts

Vortex

YOU GUYS!
My self-adhesive sweat saved my life!

I was just rid­ing down Santa Mon­ica Blvd. on my way to work as usual, passed the 405 but her before Bundy, and stopped at a light. (The right lane varies in width through­out this stretch, some­times the shoul­der is real nice and big or you get lucky with some parked cars in the lane–minimizing the song and dance of try­ing to make your­self as obvi­ous as pos­si­ble to the other cars. This area had a smaller shoulder.)

So I was keep­ing an eye on the car in front of me, giv­ing it some breath­ing room at the light in case it was going to turn. The light turns green, there is a cyclist tak­ing up the lane in front of it, so even though I am going slow, I start to move beside the large SUV. With no turn sig­nal on, I assumed I could pass it on the shoulder.

Well, right as I am pass­ing the right rear tire the car begins to turn and I try to stop and let it pass but the car was too close. I start turn­ing with the car and my arm gets stuck to the side of the car and it begins to cart me up the road. I scream (and I am not a screamer). These two guys get the dri­vers atten­tion. He stops. I am able to stay on the bike and ride for­ward with­out los­ing bal­ance, get off the bike, and walk back to the road.
I talked to the dri­ver. But I was shak­ing and pretty spooked.

On Fri­day Matthew just missed get­ting in an acci­dent. The car next to him was hit and the win­dows shat­tered and he was able to get out of the way because it was in an inter­sec­tion. There was glass every­where. He stopped for a sec, but then went to his appt. at the DMV.
We just found out that one of his old co-workers was killed in a car accident.

Rid­ing bikes on the west side of LA makes you want to ride on the side­walk (i.e. break the law and lose your dignity).

There is no shar­ing the road in these parts. I wish the bike lane extended past the 405… I mostly wish that I could just ride my bike and not be scared any­more. There are so many close calls everyday…

I want things to move slower.
I want to enjoy the ride every time. Not just when I get lucky and the air is less thick and cars are a bit nicer.
I know that there are no babies allowed.
But some­times I won­der what it’s like not to feel like a lit­tle bitch every time you want a break.

There are no breaks in Los Ange­les. On your down time* you get hit by a car. WTF. And on your Old Man’s birth­day. It ain’t right.

*com­mut­ing

720-Santa Monica

1.
On the bus I hold my hel­met
It is offen­sive if you do not
set things down

You stand your guard

A seat opens

You keep read­ing because you can­not bear
the choice one seat over
another

we hold our breaths

2.
The weight of edu­ca­tion
Even now
I am so very light
My thoughts
F l a k e
I sweat, I move

I am so much weaker than I ever –wanted
Brit­tle and sad
The ground-up s(n)ack
Seated in my mother’s car
Between the folds in the backseat

The smell of our old apart­ment
–7 AM light
How the fog in the morn­ing held the night in the wind

3.
In West LA
I make bread
I make but­ter
I knead or I no-knead
I For­get what I have to say

No mat­ter

Crab on the counter stuffed from the front
eyes wide open
force­ful index and pointer
stuf­fin’ it real good with a piece of their mind

Goodnight hug

I can­not remem­ber the last time I grabbed a “slice of pie” from the cen­ter of a table. Most pizza pies that I encounter are tiny and home­made and, of course, there is always the indi­vid­u­ally pur­chased slice. So I was out to lunch with my co-workers today, eatin’ said slices from the cen­ter of a table and tak­ing in the vibes.

Today felt apocalyptic.

And not just because of the pizza eating.

Today, good vibes just weren’t in the cards. Or stars for that mat­ter (accord­ing to one of our (Capessa’s) blog­gers you can tell those kind of things (“pre­dict­ing rela­tion­ship rage” I believe is how she says it)).

…

The other morn­ing I woke up to fog. The Big 5 park­ing lot was filled with crows. When I walked back upstairs a few min­utes later there was a sin­gle crow star­ing at me through the window.

I wish I would have got­ten closer. I think it would have given me a task. Per­haps a tiny roll of paper to carry in a locket read­ing, “I am the tongue in the bell ring­ing you.”

Or the clock­works. I mostly kept pic­tur­ing this image.

oxox

Meanwhile, someone serves Michael Phelps an apple pie

While peo­ple are build­ing urban homesteads–reclaiming the lost art of giv­ing chil­dren the oppor­tu­nity to see where car­rots come from and why we need but­ter­flies –the coun­try is wish­ing they were Michael Phelps. I had a dream last night about my cousin get­ting ready for her wed­ding. I was wear­ing paja­mas and she del­i­cately formed breasts from choco­late chip cookie dough to wear for her regal debut. Her mother did not under­stand this, but she felt pow­er­ful and coy with her deli­ciously hid­den per­sonal touch. I blame this entirely on Mr. Phelps for the fol­low­ing rea­sons.


Fuel for Phelps — video pow­ered by Meta­cafe
There are peo­ple who use their sta­tus and power to mock the rest of us. At least that’s how it feels to me. “Oh look, I eat all day and I am an olympic ath­lete, what did you ever do? Bet you wish you could have peo­ple pat you on the head and hand you stacks of pan­cakes! SUCKAS.”

What if he made the food him­self, like Kate Ziegler?

A) He wouldn’t need to eat as much because his body would get the nutri­ents it craves
B) He would be fos­ter­ing a con­nec­tion to his body and art
C) He would be an adult
D) He would know what hap­pens “in the meadow at dust,” or the magic of prepar­ing a meal for yourself.

There was a man on NPR this morn­ing talk­ing about get­ting up at 4 a.m. on sat­ur­days to bake bread, exchang­ing par­ty­ing on Fri­day night for an early morn­ing, as he sees it, act of prayer. He sets out in the silence of those early hours to con­nect with the impos­si­bil­ity of mak­ing some­thing from noth­ing, using local grains and wild yeasts to nour­ish the body. The qual­ity of food is all in the love going into it. I almost started cry­ing in the shower while I thought about the dev­as­tat­ing jux­ta­po­si­tion, Phelps and this hum­ble man.

Let us make gar­dens on our win­dowsills and rooftops and in our yards. Let us cul­ti­vate and con­nect our­selves to each other and what we choose to make our­selves out of. It is impor­tant, it is beautiful–it is all we can do.

P.S. If Phelps was a woman in this video, peo­ple would think she was gross and wouldn’t give a damn… But that’s a whole dif­fer­ent issue. So come and talk about it with us here.

P.P.S. Come ride bikes with us tomor­row to sup­port sus­tain­able stuff in LA, dance and eat salsa made from plants grown in medi­ans, and get tips from local urban home­stead gurus.

Window Who?

Would you call time vis­i­ble language?

It’s just a question.

If vis­i­ble lan­guage is “a trans­for­ma­tion of the phys­i­o­log­i­cal impulse towards syn­tax into a final prod­uct, speech, which is not heard with the ears, but beheld with the eyes… This means that at the organ­is­mic level we asso­ciate a higher sig­nal clar­ity with visual input, and on DMT and other trypt­a­mine psy­che­delics you actu­ally expe­ri­ence the field of lan­guage both heard and self gen­er­ated as some­thing that is vis­i­bly beheld. It’s almost as though the project of com­mu­ni­ca­tion becomes high-speed sculp­ture in a con­cep­tual dimen­sion made of light and intentionality.”

“To My Teenage Self”

I’ve been talk­ing to this blog­ger for many rea­sons. One of them is because of my job. The oth­ers are obvi­ous. When I asked her who she most wanted to reach with her blog, she said:

“The answer to this is easy: teenage girls. I’ve said on sev­eral occa­sions that I’m writ­ing the blog for my teenage self, and in so many ways, that’s true. I wish she had under­stood how amaz­ing and strong and full of poten­tial she was. I wish she’d been more out­go­ing, pur­sued her secret dreams, tried out for cheer­lead­ing, acted in the school play, and done sports even if she wasn’t the best at it. I wish she’d believed that peo­ple thought she was pretty–and that if they didn’t, it was their prob­lem, not hers. I wish she hadn’t been gov­erned so much by fear and self-loathing, had been a lit­tle braver and a whole lot more con­fi­dent. I wish she’d known how beau­ti­ful she was. And there are armies and armies of teenage girls out there who feel that same par­a­lyz­ing inse­cu­rity. And those are the girls I’m talk­ing to when I say beauty stan­dards are impos­si­ble. Self-loathing is a waste of time. You should do all you can to under­stand the cul­tural forces that are try­ing to con­trol you. You are so, so beau­ti­ful. Love yourself.”

Time. Metaphor. Lan­guage. Clar­ity. (Non)Sense.

How much of our real­ity our lan­guage do we write and build and shape for our “self” of “another time”? If time is visual lan­guage, if it is a prod­uct of our syn­tax of sight, time is one of the most heart­break­ing (yes, that com­plex emo­tion, dare I say it again, heart­break­ing) col­lec­tive art pieces of all time. Would you dare!

If the build­ing blocks/pixels/cells of lan­guage is words, what then, my dear­est reader, is time? Is it a words counter part, it’s other? No. I don’t think so. If it is itself a syn­tax, influ­enc­ing syn­tax, but a cre­ation thereof, could it then be… yes, that is what I am get­ting at, just words. It is lan­guages teenage self, mak­ing her regret even though she (time) is a com­plete cre­ation of the present (and there is no past), always self. Maybe.

I guess what I’m say­ing is, I was think­ing about how often that idea resur­faces, “What I wish some­one would have said to me,” and that per­son makes a point of being that per­son that says those words. This desire we have has every­thing to do with regret and con­se­quently time. But time is full of incon­sis­ten­cies. “I am say­ing this to myself.”

Any­ways.

The Con­tainer Store on the Avenue of the Stars is the worst place in the world. Just TRY and make a deci­sion in there. I dare you. Actu­ally, I do not wish that hor­ror on any­one. It is a mock­ery. I am sorry for ever think­ing it would improve my life or sooth my anxiety.

Knock Knock.

Who’s there?

Win­dow.

Win­dow who?

Win­dow we Ketchup?

She Does it HERSELF

Since we last talked here in (my) Lady Parts I got mar­ried, gained much more respon­si­bil­ity at the old J-O-B, and I cut my hair short. Ergo, I am really into orga­ni­za­tion right now. My whole body vio­lently pants and wear pants for order. I think about order­ing things and make folder after folder all day long. I can­not get enough of cre­at­ing those glo­ri­ously neat lit­tle hold­ers of spe­cific (insert a per­son­ally sig­nif­i­cant noun). Life seems so huge that if you could just break it up, no, smooth it onto clean, flat, thin, or only-sometimes-visible-because-it’s-on-a-screen sur­faces and put those flat sur­faces in more flat sur­faces (you guessed it! FOLDERS) that each piece could lay it’s lithe shape-body on the next and they would ((( cop­u­late ))). Or just cud­dle. Both are nice ideas, wouldn’t you agree?

But I am also read­ing very charged books. Books that make me cry. (So? Try again). Books that keep me from writ­ing thank you cards for wed­ding gifts because I know that it will take me an hour to find the right words for each one. (You could have said that bet­ter). The books make me lay on the floor, sus­pended in air–from school, choked up and sob­bing in Sex and the City. (Ha!) It’s those books doin’ that to you and you know it. Don’t ask me to extrap­o­late again. You know how I feel about lan­guage. It’s MAGIC.

MAGIC knows what I’m talk­ing about with this “order” busi­ness. It knows that it can lay out its shapely black lines on waifs of page after page, screen after screen. It can be uni­form and con­sis­tent, chaotic and ter­ri­fy­ing, sexy and wet. MAGIC.

I am begin­ing to think that order is a suducer of MAGIC. Or of me.

*BLAST*

We’re back on the air, lovely.

It’s been a long time.

Web Videos and The Other

I have been watch­ing a great deal of web-exclusive videos lately to famil­iar­ize myself with the con­tent and vision of my new employer.

As I edit dif­fer­ent inter­faces on the web­site, the videos begin to play before I press the edit but­ton to edit the post. I keep think­ing about the psy­cho­log­i­cal trans­for­ma­tion that takes place as the web page morphs from a sta­tic win­dow to a con­tainer of time and expe­ri­ence as a human begins to move on the screen. It is as if an actual human is present, shar­ing a story with the viewer. This makes me feel guilty press­ing edit to leave the page, thereby qui­et­ing the person.

What makes us love so much? I am begin­ning to think it comes from spurts of des­per­a­tion, regret from being too crit­i­cal to the peo­ple we love. These regrets cause us to grate­fully cry at the site of poppy-covered hill-lined free­ways, have visions of bathing our par­ents in small kitchen sinks, or over­whelm­ing grat­i­tude for the young man at the cof­fee shop for mak­ing flaw­less warm scones every morn­ing (no, I won’t let that one go).

Were I to com­mu­ni­cate prop­erly, as my best self, I do not think I would be as shocked by the motion and pres­ence of the awak­ened web page human.

Yes, I am say­ing that an inabil­ity to move from inside out, from our inter­nal archi­tec­ture to com­mon space, causes a per­son to become more and more shocked by every­thing that moves out­side of the mind, that uses and builds upon, even changes our lan­guage and con­text. These kind of changes often dis­man­tle our logic and cre­ate a sense of panic and stress.

I would not trade these intense, full-body cli­maxes of ten­der­ness to avoid the (some­times ter­ri­ble) shocks of the other. Not even for con­sis­tency, sta­bil­ity, and what could be con­sid­ered great­ness. I think those virtues might relieve us of the heavy feel­ing, the beau­ti­ful weight of existence.

May we embrace inter­sec­tion, even when it tears us apart.

Shine Your Shoes

I spent a total of nine hours in traf­fic yes­ter­day. Alone.

I can­not tell you that I hated the expe­ri­ence. There is some­thing about dri­ving alone that is very nur­tur­ing, sit­ting very still and being car­ried for long peri­ods of time with­out hav­ing to look into another human face. But rather, like look­ing into your own eyes in the mir­ror, it is this neu­tral brain-space that allows a kind of brain detox. (And by detox I mean every part, includ­ing bad symptoms.)

Don’t get me wrong, that amount of time doing one thing seri­ously wear away at this pos­i­tiv­ity. By the last hour I thought I might be dri­ving for­ever and that I would no longer have a phys­i­cal body or a des­ti­na­tion. I felt like I would never be able to do any­thing ever again because my body may have for­got­ten how. I might have to jump start my sys­tem (fol­low­ing the detox com­par­i­son) and slowly intro­duce inter­ac­tions and just plan old actions back into my life. I could hardly keep up con­ver­sa­tions at work after the first four hour block, let alone after adding the one and a half hour lunch block. But get­ting home after the last stint was just too much.

The rea­son I am telling you this is because of what greeted my arrival.

But first, some con­text. My par­ents went away for the week­end on a mar­ried cou­ples retreat. I am watch­ing my younger brother who is ten. One of my Dad’s stu­dents, we’ll name them Josh, picked my brother up from school and hung out with him until I got there at 9:45 p.m.

So I pulled up, beat and zoned out, not look­ing for­ward to hav­ing to appear coher­ent and talk to a stranger. YOU GUYS! He was the kind­est, most gen­uine stu­dent I have ever met from the school where my Dad is teach­ing right now. I brewed us some tea and we had won­der­ful con­ver­sa­tion lit­tered with inter­ludes of laugh­ing at the movie my brother was watch­ing. Later I found out that he had made break­fast for din­ner (i.e. pan­cakes) for the two of them.

It was too much for me. It was all I could do to crawl under the cov­ers with a big fat smile on my face and sleep like a baby (please excuse the unabashed lit­er­ary ref­er­ence). These kind of crip­pling expe­ri­ences that keep me up at night all jit­tery and con­fused. Peo­ple like the young french guy who makes world class crois­sants and scones every morn­ing and whis­tles to him­self, or this guy. They may as well ask if they can bring me a tangerine.

How can you pre­pare your heart for some­thing like that? Peo­ple are just too beautiful.

What Would You Grow

We are like the corn, what we put into our bod­ies is what we become.

How do you become the best per­son ever? Accord­ing to some peo­ple you make a rain­bow (includ­ing almost every color in the spec­trum) smoothie out of:
1. young coconut (water and flesh) for your blood
2. cacao nibs, cacao but­ter, cacao pow­der (all three make a more com­plete and rounded taste) for bliss
3. Maca for bal­ance
4. Berries for antiox­i­dants
5. Cashews (no need to soak because of high fat con­tent) for sweet creami­ness
6. AçaÃ

(x(Syntax)) + Consumption = Vices/Sabotage

Two things that control/influence what we are able to per­ceive through our expe­ri­ences in life: SYNTAX and CONSUMPTION.

The archi­tec­ture and struc­tures that we cre­ate with lan­guage vary depend­ing on the place­ment of words in a sen­tence. For exam­ple, or per­cep­tion of real­ity may vary depend­ing on the place­ment of the direct object in a sen­tence. Accord­ingly our per­cep­tion of the phys­i­cal object, where we “place” it, exists within the view­ers visual and cul­tural syn­tax, which is depen­dent upon the lin­guis­tic syn­tax. And what’s more, a listener/viewer/reader will take your syn­tax and inter­pret it within their syn­tax which is most likely made up of a very dif­fer­ent archi­tec­ture and the two par­ties may never be able to con­nect. This lack of con­nec­tion is no fault of their own, they lit­er­ally do not posses the struc­tures to trans­late. This is par­tic­u­larly rel­e­vant to the parent/child rela­tion­ship.

I think that per­haps music can sur­pass some forms of syn­tax that can­not be access through lan­guage or ges­ture or image. This may explain the mag­i­cal pow­ers of music to pen­e­trate mem­ory. For exam­ple, when my father, brother, and I lis­ten to Neil Young or Joni Mitchell there is a level of real­ity that is com­pletely inac­ces­si­ble oth­er­wise. The space between my father and his chil­dren is com­pletely irrel­e­vant, we all just sit and mourn the pos­si­bil­ity of human honesty.

Sim­i­larly, what we con­sume could be con­sid­ered another form of archi­tec­ture. What we eat influ­ences our chem­i­cal make up, phys­i­cal form, men­tal capac­ity, etc. Or what we con­sume through pur­chase, cre­ates phys­i­cal struc­tures that cre­ate our placement.

The Doc­trine of Sig­na­tures con­tends that every whole food has a pat­tern that resem­bles a body organ or phys­i­o­log­i­cal func­tion and that this pat­tern acts as a sig­nal or sign as to the ben­e­fit the food pro­vides the eater. This blows my mind. Here is just a short list of exam­ples of Whole Food Sig­na­tures that were posted on this forum:

• “A sliced Car­rot looks like the human eye. The pupil, iris and radi­at­ing lines look just like the human eye…and sci­ence shows that car­rots greatly enhance blood flow to and func­tion of the eyes.
• A Tomato has four cham­bers and is red. The heart is red and has four cham­bers. All of the research shows toma­toes are indeed pure heart and blood food.
• Grapes hang in a clus­ter that has the shape of the heart. Each grape looks like a blood cell and all of the research today shows that grapes are also pro­found heart and blood vital­iz­ing food.
• A Wal­nut looks like a lit­tle brain, a left and right hemi­sphere, upper cere­brums and lower cere­bel­lums. Even the wrin­kles or folds are on the nut just like the neo-cortex. We now know that wal­nuts help develop over 3 dozen neuron-transmitters for brain function.
• Kid­ney Beans actu­ally heal and help main­tain kid­ney func­tion and yes, they look exactly like the human kidneys.
• Cel­ery, Bok Choy, Rhubarb and more look just like bones. These foods specif­i­cally tar­get bone strength. Bones are 23% sodium and these foods are 23% sodium. If you don’t have enough sodium in your diet the body pulls it from the bones, mak­ing them weak. These foods replen­ish the skele­tal needs of the body.
• Egg­plant, Avo­ca­does and Pears tar­get the health and func­tion of the womb and cervix of the female — they look just like these organs. Today’s research shows that when a woman eats 1 avo­cado a week, it bal­ances hor­mones, sheds unwanted birth weight and pre­vents cer­vi­cal can­cers. And how pro­found is this? .… It takes exactly 9 months to grow an avo­cado from blos­som to ripened fruit. There are over 14,000 pho­tolytic chem­i­cal con­stituents of nutri­tion in each one of these foods (mod­ern sci­ence has only stud­ied and named about 141 of them).
• Figs are full of seeds and hang in twos when they grow. Figs increase the motil­ity of male sperm and increase the num­bers of sperm as well to over­come male sterility.
• Sweet Pota­toes look like the pan­creas and actu­ally bal­ance the glycemic index of diabetics.
• Olives assist the health and func­tion of the ovaries.
• Grape­fruits, Oranges, and other cit­rus fruits look just like the mam­mary glands of the female and actu­ally assist the health of the breasts and the move­ment of lymph in and out of the breasts.
• Onions look like body cells. Today’s research shows that onions help clear waste mate­ri­als from all of the body cells They even pro­duce tears which wash the epithe­lial lay­ers of the eyes.”

It’s so sim­ple, I love it! Why would this not be true?

There is at least two ways that you could per­cieve this based on your syntax.

1. As the rad­i­cal vision­ary Jakob Böhme per­ceived it, evi­dence of the nat­ural world vibrant with the numi­nous images of the Deity, or “as above, so below,” an expres­sion of the rela­tion­ship between macro­cosm and micro­cosm; the prin­ci­ple is ren­dered sicut in terra.
2. Evi­dence of egocentrism.

Do you see the difference?

What sep­a­rates us from each other is the place­ment of the object.

I often sab­o­tage my own ten­den­cies toward syn­tax that will keep me from you. This bleeds into other parts of my life. Parts like deci­sion mak­ing. I want to be a raw food­ist, but it will give me a syn­tax which cre­ates not only feel­ings of supe­ri­or­ity in terms of nutri­tion, but also influ­ences my phys­i­cal archi­tec­ture which will lit­er­ally become unable to have cer­tain foods with­out becom­ing ill. What is inter­est­ing about this is that I am not sure if it would make me more ill than I might be now, but I would become hun­dreds of times more aware of it because I would have for­got­ten what it was like to feel inner tur­moil from foods.

I think this is a metaphor for why some of us can­not make deci­sions of what place is the best place to move to or what project is the best project to invest in. Or even whether I should have cof­fee today. Every form of syn­tax influ­ences each other. It seems like we could be miss­ing out on the entire pic­ture by sub­scrib­ing to some­thing. Is being in the best phys­i­cal chem­istry pos­si­ble worth feel­ing like I should con­vert every­one to my new way of life in order to be able to eat with them? No.

Would giv­ing up my vices to become per­fect be worth the iso­la­tion? No, so I sabotage.

More on this later.