In 45 minutes I have to take off to studio for our final crit.  Last night was the end of semester show and it was great! It was, as would generally be the norm, a mad dash to getting to the end.  I have a feeling tonight will be more sad, I’ve made good connections with these kids, and it’s over. Disperse back to whence we came.  I fly out of here on Friday morning, leaving tonight and tomorrow to finish things up, have my words with New York.  I was on the Brooklyn Bridge last night after the show and Angela was trying to give a big hug to the skyline.  It’s like you can say it’s yours, even though it’s not one tiny bit yours.  You own it in your mind, even though you still get on the train in the wrong direction every once in a while.

I’m down to rice a roni, dried cranberries, and a jar of peanut butter…it will be nice to be in Minnesota for a few days I’m glad I can see my mom on mother’s day.  I hope crits go well today, it always seems backwards to have it after the one-night-only show though.  oh well.  I think we get free lunch again.  We got pizza like 3 times last weeks it was crazy.  It’s been good.  I know I need to go back home, Kansas City home, but I’m really gonna try and stretch these next two days out.

I’m entering the last week of my time here.  It’s totally hard to believe that it’s over, in fact I probably won’t actually have the realization until it’s too late, and I wake up in Kansas City ready to get on a train to studio.

My mom left Tuesday; we had a great time running around and at my grandma’s house.  I think she really enjoyed herself, and the city, so that goal was met.  We shipped ninety dollars worth of supplies out of my studio, leaving it basically empty except for what I’m showing next week.  She also took a big suitcase full of clothes and whatever else back with her so I will have one less bag to have to manage when I leave.  Luckily, the girl moving into the room after me isn’t coming until this weekend, so I have an extra two nights here before I’m kicked to the couch.

At the program we’ve all just been mad cleaning and setting up, and having food parties.  On Tuesday the wife of the owner of our building opened up this space housing a fully restored carousel right in dumbo- which we got to ride! She also brought cheese and sparkling juice stuff and it was a really good time.  Later that night we all had pizza in studio with Glenn and Pam and they went around to give consultations about show set up.

Yesterday Dominique walked around as well, he gave some good suggestions, but now that all my stuff is gone, I really can’t do much tweaking.  I have one more project I want to finish up, it’s small, but really time consuming so we’ll see what happens.  It’s gonna be a heck of a weekend.

If New York and I were the two kids on the playground who threw rocks at each other and couldn’t cross the monkey bars into the other’s territory, then springtime came out from the hills with see-saws, double dutch, swinging in unison, and flowers for our hair.  This weather can’t possibly last much longer. It’s beautiful out, and has been for the past 4 consecutive sandal wearing days.  It’s too good to be true.

My time left here is really counting down.  I’m so ready to go back, I pretty much miss Zach more than is comfortable anymore, yet at the same time I’m like finally having the relationship with New York I always wanted to have.  Tough times- life right? Well lets break down the details of the week:

Tuesday I met with Glenn and Pam, and I’ve resolved how I’m going to show the crocheted army of barnacle-looking things. (!) We all agreed that if I were to hang them on a wall or “do” something more with them, it’d be demeaning and would turn into “bean art.” Brilliant.

Wednesday we had a double header visiting artist day,  bringing us two wonderful women with wildly different art, but both of which I really enjoyed seeing and hearing about.

Thursday marked my easiest internship day ever, 2.5 hours of data entry, and then I sat there for the next hour and a half because no one was there, and I think they assumed the data entry would have taken me longer.  1 oclock rolled around, and I left.  I think I laughed down the elevator (I just got paid to do nothing!)

I built a table Thursday/Friday and am still working on covering it, and making it pretty.  Friday I helped with the KCAI alumni thing that was held at the studio.   This actually ended up being pretty cool, and I met some interesting people who for the most part seemed genuinely interested in what I was doing, where I was going, and wanted to keep in touch. cool.  At times I felt like a first grader in show and tell walking everyone through the studio, but that’s where the wine came in and turned the would-be awkwardness into giggles and care-nots.

Now I’m going to meet Angela for a day outside. First stop: Falafel!

A Friday night ending in rain, a week ending in rain and not much to highlight. Production turns to counter-production, no one sees it, no one gets it, no one cares. My favorite quotes of the week are “mediocre” and “you take yourself too seriously” between job and school and dying dying connections fading away with the distance back home. Thirty days seemed too short, they are far too long, and too short. I keep saying tomorrow will be better, I know one of these days will. The trees are flowering, the flowers are flowering, the patchy grass is getting greener despite the gallons of dog piss rained on it…spring is here, I guess. Today was cold.

Now is the time of tension headaches, heart burn, and nightmares as the stress level pumps its way to the top anticipating the end, the show, the crit, the move. Glimmers of the light at the end fade like the stars in the city, but they are: end of Dorothy devil boss coming near, quickly followed by mom visiting, and another trip to grandma’s. Then it’s install, show, and fly home. Minnesota home, then Kansas City. Then who knows. Spring is hard here, it’s really lonely…and the wait for, or the sprint to the end doesn’t help.

So somehow between the last time I sat down to do this and now, we advanced into April.  This means, that I have something like exactly 34 days until I’m on a plane back to Minneapolis.  Oh man.  I can’t believe how fast this is going.  I have to stop myself sometimes and just say like: you’re in New York!  It’s not as hard as it may seem to just get in the groove of living here.  I’d like to maintain the perspective of insider/outsider, which is probably good for anywhere. I think you notice things more.  I’m really excited about coming back, but I have a feeling that after I see sky and get used to paying 1-2 dollars less for everything I’ll actually miss New York. (That looks incredibly sarcastic, but I really mean it sincerely) but yes, I do anticipate some serious nostalgia.

I finally convinced my mom to come out.  She isn’t going to make it to the show, but will be arriving near the end of April.  After a mere day in the city we’ll both hop the bus to grandma’s and stay there for the long weekend.  Until then, I have to get my act together in studio.  I guess that’s how the last few weeks of school go anyway. I’m going through with my “project.”  It might become installation, maybe performative, I don’t really know (?)

I had my first celebrity sighting two weeks ago in Chelsea.  I was at an opening and you know who else was at this opening?  Yea, Chuck Close. I stood like 4 feet away from the guy, drinking the same free wine (I’m romanticizing this, I don’t know if he was drinking to be honest) but yea, how awesome is that? Better than a Tom Cruise encounter that’s for sure.  I went to the Armory at Pier 94 last weekend and got a good dose of the most expensive art fair one could experience.  I’m completely disgusted with market bullshit.  New York will do it.  I’ve been reading a book called The Re-enchantment of Art, and it’s just fueling the disgust, but I can’t do anything about it, so that’s that.

I’ve gotta run to the library and return a book I’ve neglected to get further than 50 pages in.  Then I meet up with Angela for New York weekend adventures. Will report back soon, I hope.

Sometimes scheduling works out for the better after a week of winging it.  Easter weekend turned out to be relaxing and fresh air-filled out at my grandma’s in Pennsylvania.  I had to work yesterday, so my stay was short.  I think I’ve experienced the last of the wrath of crazy boss.  (Of course now I’ve jinxed myself).  But looking at the calender shrinking down by the week…I’ve only got about four weeks left there.  We had our first meeting today in studio about the end of semester show.  Talk about planning in advance! But we really only have 4 more production weeks which means hella overtime from now on.  Good thing I’ve figured things out.  Sort of.

I met with Glenn tonight.  Thinking out loud with him drew me to some conclusions about work and work ethic and machines and bodies and being happy organizing.  I don’t need to make art, I just need to make and keep my hands busy.  And that’s ok.

A week ago today I was running around helping rich ladies buy expensive clothes for their 3-year-olds.  Adam and Brent (2 indas) flew into the city last Thursday before Zach got in.  The three of us met up and had pizza near my apartment.  I didn’t have much time before I had to hit the train to get Zach from JFK.  His flight was on time, and we’ve been running around since.  Highlights have been:  Mark Dion show in Chelsea, the Chelsea Markets, all night dance party/classic horror film watching at the Armory show, walking through Chinatown,  Grimmauldi’s pizza, making food, Museum of Natural History, watching movies, Barcade, sleeping in.  We were going to hit the Guggenheim and the Moma today, but the Guggenheim is closed on Thursday (who new?) so it’s just the Moma today.  Zach leaves tomorrow, which I’m not ready for, but after he gets to the airport I’m going to take a bus to visit my grandma in Easton, PA.  So hopefully that will distract me a little, after Sunday, it’s back to the grind.

Saturday Angela and I thought it’d be a brilliant idea to trek out to Montauk.  It was sort of rainy from the get go, but we figured it’d be fine by the time we got out there.  There was an hour subway ride to -get this- Jamaica, and then we bought tickets and transferred to the real passenger train (!) for the 3 hour trip to Montauk.  It was really a wonderful train ride, getting to ride by houses and houses with yards, and woods and trees and did I mention any high-rises? NOPE!

Alright so we get there, and much to our surprise, there is just a platform, no station, no nothing as far as the eye can see.  (So how did the folks in Eternal Sunshine get to a diner? yea that’s what we were wondering too…) There was a taxi taking the few passengers to town, but we asked how far it was to walk, and he said like a mile and a half.  We should have known something was up when he said “oh, they’re adventurous!”  Turns out, we were on the ocean, and for this trip, ocean did not mean sandy beaches and suntanning.  As we were walking we managed to simultaneously break both of our umbrellas due to the gail force winds (I’ve always wanted to use “gail force winds”), get soaked, frozen, and we never did find town. We stopped at three places along the way, and each one was a disappointing closed for the season.

Finally we arrived at O’Murphy’s Pub, walked in no questions asked.  And began the process of defrosting and drying off (this would ultimately take about 5 hours).  So we order lunch, which ended up being pretty disgusting and extremely over priced. We decided on calling the cab dude to take us to the platform to catch an earlier train back.

Turns out, this cab dude, Peter, was pretty much crazy.  He gave us a quick bio about how he’s writing a screenplay about a modern revolution, and quickly went into conspiracy theories and studying history and claiming everyone that doesn’t believe in conspiracy doesn’t know history la la la I’m tuning out…Then, he breaks up the conversation (though this is really more lecture) by commenting on the energy between the three of us, and asked if I could feel it too.  No. We are at the platform, in the parking lot, for a good ten minutes, and I’m beginning to wonder hmm, when is he gonna drive off with us and murder us??  I get the door handle, and we are outa there! But as a final top-off to the adventure gone wrong, he stops Angela and says that he’s madly in love with her.  Yep no big deal.

So the train back was long and cold (we’re still quite damp) but we finally made it back.  Moral of the story, don’t go to Montauk, unless it’s summer, and sunny, and when you do get there, don’t take the cab.

Everything goes by so fast, that I forget to write, and I just plain forget because it’s usually coming at me faster than I can take.

I think my boss approves of me, I had to start wearing my wrist braces to work so my hands don’t hurt at the end of the day.  I think that gave her some indication that I mean business, seriously…one that works so much, her body is messed up because of it.    So work is going relatively smoothly, just busy.

I met last week with my teacher Glenn, native New Yorker, pretty burly guy, great accent.  He mostly just looked around my studio and nodded a lot. Honestly the only thing I remember of the conversation was that I offered him some orange, even though it wasn’t very good, and he said that oranges were a mysterious fruit; some are good and some are bad.

This weekend I made a trip to the Frick collection, and was definitely drooling over the Holbeins and Rembrandts and basically everything else.  For the first time I had some weird sense of repulsion from the work though- I had never associated it with wealth and social hierarchy before- just history.  I guess it was the dude’s house (yea museum-house) that did it, or I don’t know, I’m having more and more issues with wealth and class and prestige, mostly because its so slap-in-the-face apparent here.   But maybe more on that later?…

So this week.

I met with Pam, the final teacher of the bunch that I hadn’t already met with.  It was a good meeting, but kind of a downer because she through me off by her being so appalled with my work ethic.  She figured that my sense of body was “body as machine” and because I couldn’t really find a reason for working so much other than to work, I guess I was hit with a reality check of sorts.  I can’t help it though.  No matter what I do, I’m going to feel better getting something productively done, that’s how I’ve always been. With surgery number two coming up this summer, it really is something to think about, just not something I want to think about. Who would?

Today went somewhat better, I talked to Dominique again, he made me play a game about what anomalous eyes would be (yea, I didn’t know what was going on either) and then he wrote down a bunch of names I need to look up, and asked me if I was interested in doing some sewing thing with his fancy French girlfriend…I may have to look into that.

As I was walking home from studio I noticed orion in the sky.  As the winters are long and dark in Minnesota I would always see orion, so it was some nice nostalgia or something seeing it tonight- a lot fainter.

I got a new roommate today, she’s a student from Florida State doing a two month internship for a magazine here.  She friendly, invited me to dinner with her and her dad, but I wasn’t really ready for that step in our relationship. ha.

I had my internship today.  I figured it’d be about the same, cut some swatches, make some labels, nothing hard, but you know, generally busy.  It started out that way.  Turns out my boss is crazy. She didn’t like that David (another guy that works there, obviously) had told me to start working on something without her there, so she insisted that if that happened again, I would in fact have to sit and wait for her (yea that would have been a good hour and a half of sitting today) rather than do anything that’s “wasting time.”  I thought I had the in, that I was o.k.  But oh, I hadn’t had her schpeel yet!  (Now keep in mind I really hadn’t done anything remotely wrong at this point…or ever for that matter…) So I follow her into her office, after grabbing a notepad and pencil that she insisted I needed in order to take notes.  She then says something about what I was to do the rest of the day, but immediately after tells me how she’s a 38-yr-old multimillionaire and that if I wanted to make it in the fashion business (I’m thinking to myself no, I’ve never had the remotest desire to be in the fashion business because of people like you, and I took the job because you responded to me on craigslist) so if I wanted to make it in the fashion business I had to be smart and not fuck-up, and beat everyone else.  She also added that if I turned out to be stupid, or that I did ever fuck up that she would fire me.  Then I went on my merry way, thinking well I could leave and never come back, but also thought that might give her power-trip the full pleasure she wanted.  So I stayed and boxed little girls clothes all day, but at the end she said I did a good job and that she’ll see me on Thursday.

The train was so packed today on the way home.  At one point I went two stops without having anything to hold onto, practically squatting for balance, and wishing I could just get off my feet.  It was a blast, really.  Luckily Angela (friend from Nebraska attending the French Culinary Institute here and just got into town for it) was feeling a need for Castro’s Mexican restaurant after her long first day of class so we went.

Now I’ve had some pretty odd Mexican cuisine (I am half Mexican after all) but I ordered a veggie burrito, and I think they just put like half of a bag of the frozen vegetable medley in it: green beans, peas, crinkle cut carrots, broccoli, lima beans (yea this is all in the burrito!) and of course beans, rice, and cheese. But come on! crinkle cut carrots!! Magical.

I had some other magical food experiences with Angela this weekend.  We had an adventure to Polish land in Greenpoint (I’m just calling it Polish land…it’s not really) We ate at a genuine Polish restaurant (did I mention I’m a quarter Polish too?) We had pirogies and beets.  The pirogies were delicious, but the beets tasted sort of pickled, sort of rotten, and sort of like dirt.

I’ve been working away in studio too (can you believe it!) I hung up some funny “curtains” but I’m likin’ them.  I’m adding some more photos too, whoa long blog today…oh the Brooklyn Public Library was pretty fantastic too.  Notice in the picture that there is a crown waiting to get in. I have an official New York Public Library card.  I’m for real. Anyway here are some pics.