howcouldiknow

My Mother recently scanned this and sent it to me.  I have no idea when this is from or what I am saying but it’s pretty weird.

Translation:

Chicken

Once upon a time their lived a chicken

it’s feathers looked green.

it was the biggest chicken i’ve seen.  Isn’t it.

This one is weird as it skips along the grass it stops to rub it’s foot ache.

It says I’m going to make a plan I’ll grab the walking stick and I’ll hug the dog.

and drag it away.  I’ll have it as a pet.

Who cares if it doesn’t like me

Who cares if I have to clean up it’s mess

Who cares if I have to scrub it

Who cares if I have to go swimming with it

Who cares at all

I’ll call it runner i’ll make a building for it we’ll be living happily

we’ll be famous, all sorts of special people will visit us.

Beautiful ladies will come.

“Mind the step” I’ll be saying all the time.

I’ll beg them to marry me.

I’ll drip on their dress.

I’ll slip on the step.

I’ll buy a horse so I can trot.

I’ll rob other people.

but remember I only come out on September, October and November.

Date: March 18th 2004

Age: 17

Location: University of Cincinnati

Condition: Depression?

I haven’t been comfortable this last week

I haven’t fit inside my skin quite right

my sleeves rub me the wrong way and the strings around my wrists

suddenly appear to be too constricting

my hair will not settle in one place

the strands seem as impatient as my submerged brain

pull up my hair strong and tight, rearrange my sleeping limbs

try to figure out why

nothing feels quite right

I have always written, privately.  I have notebook after notebook squirreled away in my room starting from eight or nine.  I was never really one for drawing but I liked words.  I still like words, hell I like books and libraries and authors and still words.  And yes, I am writing right now, but writing a conversational blog post does not count in my mind as a creative work.  So I continue writing and I continue showing no one, even those closest to me.  I have no idea how to disconnect myself and become an audience to my own work.  With photography I have a gut instinct that tells me, “this is crap” or “hell yes, you have a winner”.  I want to fix this,  maybe I can not think critically about my own writing because I do not try hard enough and have not figured out how to disconnect my emotions from it.  I am going to start delving into my archive of writing and trying to post it here.  Maybe no one cares and that is ok.  It is kind of more a therapeutic action than anything else.  Maybe I can dig up some of my poetry by nine year old Jessica (I was REALLY into rhyming, haha).  Here goes.

November of last year,  things were not going that well apparently.

November 11, 2008

The plants my mother gave me are dead.

I stopped watering them.

It’s unfair that they had to get caught in the middle.

There is a watermelon rotting in my kitchen cabinet.

I bought it to take to a party.

I put it in with my dishes.

I had my windows open all summer.

The wind would whip through and tear the blinds down.

Eventually I gave up and stopped hanging

them back up again.

My pillow looks like it belongs to a child.  It does.

It belongs to me seven years ago.

I guess I don’t know how to let go.

When I first moved here I went through a phase.

There was a time that I always slept fully clothed.

Recently my toaster began burning everything, I swear I didn’t turn the knob.

I started giving up on the little things.  That make life more pleasant.

I know a small amount of html mostly based on trial and error and the help of w3schools.  This makes updating and tweaking my website layout very time consuming and usually frustrating.  But the exciting part is I FINALLY made the images from my new series a click-thru gallery instead of a side-scroll.  This gives you (the hypothetical reader/viewer) more of a chance to focus on individual images and for the images to be a little bit larger.  I am continuing this series this winter quarter and will be adding and subtracting images so it is very much a work in progress based around the libraries of Monroe County in Rochester, NY.   Go.  Look.  cheers to me on the shocking amount of time it takes me to do something so simple.