whew! after three days of severe solitude, spent reading straight through Stein’s Tender Buttons, and Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary and Recyclopedia (which is actually a reprinting of Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge,) and about 300 pages of my own notes, then rewriting/reorganizing words and ideas, i wrote 6.5! new poems. oh happy day! i’m finally feeling right about this project. i have an approach. i have something to work with. i thought the day would never come. good golly.

my goal is 50 poems before 2009. only 44.5 to go!

and that 1/2 poem, in case you were wondering, for now is just a jumbled list of words waiting to find their places. it’s saturating, steeping in my mind, if you will.

hope you all are finding places where you want to be.

til next time,
aichlee

me circa 1986

somehow i always manage to be fascinated by these silly time machine websites: yearbook yourself. 

been meaning to post this brazilian short documentary for you all…

ilha das flores by jorge furtado, 1989.

so friends, my tide of bad luck continues…on wednesday, i discovered that my ATM card was cloned and that over $3000 were stolen from my bank account. i should get the money back but i’m still pretty freaked out and annoyed that someone robbed me blind like that. until i realized what happened i had been on this whole i’m-so-glad-i-haven’t-been-robbed-yet tip, which i’m still happy about, not having to deal with the trauma of actually being assaulted, but not having a visible ladrão desgraçado to place the blame on is just frustrating. anyway, i’ve been trying not to stress, and maintain positive energy around the whole situation until it gets resolved.

however while i was stressing, boopiece took me to this secluded bunch of rocks by the ocean, where he goes when he’s sad or wants to be alone. we sat down and watched the water, and prayed for it to wash away the negative energy. i sat concentrating on yemanjá moving there in the swirling waves as they crashed against the rocks, and a thought came to mind that this amount of bad luck can only be balanced by an equal amount of good luck. and so i began to name, in my mind, the good luck that i’ve had, and hope for the good luck to come. as i began to speak about this to boopiece, a beautiful yellow bird came and perched low on the rocks, where the water was hitting and as her footing was flooded, she just flew up and perched higher. i’m trying to be that bird.

so, dear friends, here i am at 2:15am alone in the dark of my bedroom. the street outside is silent and i am jumping in between streaming videos of chung king express and jerry maguire. somewhere hidden on my computer screen is a word document 286 pages in length of notes, words, ideas, phrases for my thesis. i do not know where to begin. this process is quite different from anything i’ve ever done before and, for that reason, i think the final piece will also be severely new and uncharacteristic. it seems like a big nonsensical mess right now. hopefully that will change. i am excited though to take some poetic risks…

speaking of poetic risks…ugh, i’m having a bit of a mini-crisis about what i’m going to do with my life. i have decided not to apply for a fulbright nor to graduate school. i am going to try my hand at real life. i am nervous about it but i’m also looking forward to it.

in other news, i lost my cell phone last week, which was annoying, but enlightening, sort of…i have noticed that in the process of being disconnected and then getting a new phone (which i have done several times now), i tend to realign/reorganize/rethink myself. in losing the phone, i instantly get rid of all the phone numbers of people who i don’t need to be in touch with (ex-lovers and unhealthy food delivery mostly) and this cleansing often pushes me to purify and/or reconfigure other aspects of my life. i already know what needs to go this time. and i think know, too, what it is that is waiting to flood into the new space that will be created. i’m ready.

i posted some pics on flickr. check ‘em out!