it's 6pm here and it is already dark. it feels like it is 9pm. i look out my window and all the tiny squares are lit up windows, like boxes that other people are inhabiting. and for the first time all quarter, i feel so profoundly alone.

and i want to tell you i'm so sorry, but i don't know how and i wish i didn't feel this way.


tan cerca que tu mano sobre mi pecho es mía,
tan cerca que se cierran tus ojos con mi sueño.

i'm sorry, i think i might have lost it.

+ posted by M @ 8:08 AM

...	Thursday, November 05, 2009

it never occurs to you how much you need something until it's broken.
of course.

which is why here i am eating cold spaghetti (a usually wonderful kind of food that has been butchered by american popularization in general). no, i'm not xenophobic, there are some things about american culture i truly don't understand. perhaps specifically american middle class culture. but that's another topic for another day.

also this happened a few days in the summer when i was out of power because my roommate didn't pay the electricity bill for 9 months and i realized just how essential lights were. i mean, really. also, we have been living without heat in our apartment for a few weeks now because we want to save money, and it is actually kind of killing me. our microwave is broken, in case you haven't figured it out, and i haven't had time to cook for two weeks and i kind of hate myself for it.

i've received certain messages of alarm from people RE: my last blog post. it's so weird that you friends still check this place considering exactly how sporadic my posts are. i'm trying to make the promise to continue again, but we know how that always goes.

no, i don't dislike theater. and i don't always dislike that it's my life now, basically. but sometimes i really wonder if i'm going down the right path, and sometimes i don't think so. i'm drawn to costumes because i don't have to be in the rehearsal room and deal with actors, but i like thinking about characters and clothing them and people and the choices they are making when they wear a certain shoe or tie. i'm pretty open, as a designer, to talking to the actors about their feelings when they try on a costume. i like to get any hint of 'yes, this makes me feel powerful' or 'this makes me feel _ like my character' so that i feel i've actually contributed to their performances.

there is a whole ritual that i've created when i start costuming a show. everything must go in a certain order, of course, because i like to know exactly what i'm doing at a certain time ... but more than that there's the ritual that happens when i'm starting to build a piece of clothing. i think i've built more than any other student costumer at UT has attempted in the past two years, simply because it's so much easier to pull from stock. but it's in my personality to want things to be exactly a certain way and the only way i can get that is if i create it myself. even then it doesn't always turn out how i've planned.

i lay out the fabric, i put pushpins on all four corners and sometimes in between, i pin the pattern pieces to it, i make sure everything is smooth. i look at it over and over again, checking for mistakes. i take a deep breath - and then i cut.

+ posted by M @ 1:12 AM

...	Wednesday, November 04, 2009

I'm not sure what it is, about being sixteen or seventeen, and how everything you feel is so intense and beautiful and scary at the same time and how it seems like your world will end or begin with one single gesture.
I wish I could feel that way again.
Now my life is just theater, and cutting fabric, and talking to actors about how tight their costumes fit, pinning things, sewing things, sitting on a couch in a room and discussing matters I mostly don't care about anymore, trying to do my work and failing miserably at it, thinking about people and thinking about when I was younger and everything seemed so frightening and new and wonderful.
I want to take a year off, go to Barcelona and sketch cathedrals with charcoal. I want to sell portraits on the street, I've learned what I've always known about myself - that I truly enjoy sketching and that more than that I enjoy sketching portraits. There's something so intimate and vulnerable about creating portraits of people, and I love studying peoples' faces, noticing the way their lips curve when they speak or the colours of their eyes, and people are so expressive without even knowing they are.
I just want to fall in love again, and be complete. I try to think about the last time I felt that way, and it is so painful and so beautiful at the same time. I don't talk about enough, but I'm writing about it so I don't forget. At least I'm trying.

+ posted by M @ 11:24 AM