Summer, to me, was always more like a new year than January 1st. The time when everything seems to get its mojo back, when everything resets. But that could also just do with my innate love for the sun. But either way, I 'm finally here. It's been so long since I've been able to really sit down and spend my time writing something that I want to write.

What good does water do
  for a fire that burns without flames?

Saturday night found her sitting on the floor, next to a box of letters.

This plate is Want. Want is a beautiful feeling. I spent time with people I love. They demanded me to Want, so they could Want with me. I think that's love.

I've missed writing. I wish I could explain to you how wonderful it is to me to feel like this.
Writing is an oddly narcissistic thing, isn't it? The recording of one's own thoughts... talking to myself. It's enough to bring that ever brewing pot of self-loathing to a raging boil. But I guess that's fine. It's actually sort of a comforting feeling; like the pain of a pinch that tells me I'm awake.

My heart awakens at midnight. When I'm alone. When every other mind is busy with another world.
I can finally think clearly. During the day I feel like I'm living in a fish tank where people are banging and tapping on the glass all day. I can't remember, I can't think.

I feel like I'm waking up without memories everyday. I wake up willing myself back to sleep; my dreams don't scare me anymore, vivid and cruel as they sometimes are. At least I know that world. I know exactly what I'm supposed to be doing there.

Here, everything seems so far away, like seeing and hearing everything underwater.
I eat. Constantly. Smell and taste; the two things that my dreams can't contain. It grounds me.

Sitting still and writing is one of the best and most horrifying things I've done to myself.
To sit and look back and realize.
The terror I've been running away from
is the blank space where I should be.
devoid of thought, devoid of feeling, devoid of opinion.
There's nothing wrong. Nothing happened. There's just nothing.
Where am I?

I feel like stone. It's so hard for me to remember the reasons why I need to move, it's almost painful.

Want. Want is a beautiful feeling. It's such a relief to truly want something. We are alive because we Need. But we live because we Want. How do I Want again?

This one was strange in the sense that it didn't feel like a dream. When I woke up this morning to live my life, I felt like i'd left reality behind in that dream. I drove in my car feeling so detached, but at the same time being glad to be in this life rather than the one I left behind.

This piece is sort of a self portrait... maybe of my brain or my heart. This combination of slightly strange, slightly bright, slightly broken.

Today, or I guess...yesterday was one of the hardest days in a while. I opened my eyes in the morning with that same dark thing in my chest that I used to feel. And that was weird. After all, I'm a new person now, or so I thought. I was determined to make it a good day. I got up, early. Did what I needed to get done, took my time getting ready, went to class. I did everything right. But when I got there, for some reason, it all started to crumble. I couldn't hold onto my silver linings, they just kept fading away from me. I couldn't grasp them long enough to understand them.

This whole time I'm just wondering what the hell is wrong with me? Is it the meds? Everything was going so well. So why is it that my heart and mind are saying there's something wrong? It's the feeling of sadness and anger and fear all at the same time. Fear, more fear. A hard anxiety that makes me feel like I need to whimper and groan to release some of the tension in my chest. The day was too bright today, the light too harsh. Everything was sharp steel grey.

I smiled, I laughed. I did everything that I usually do to try to trick myself into having a good day. I went to coffee club. I love coffee club, it's an awkward setting but the people are great. They were so nice, I stayed involved. It should have made me happy. But I walked home with the pit still in my chest, I knew I couldn't stay alone tonight so I did what I always used to, and went to the safehouse downstairs. We talk light, we play games.

Safehouse is the right word for it. I can't think of a safer place, safe from the world; safe from me.
Safe even though every sentence drops off a precipice. Safe even though the dark thing is still inside. I'm safe. I'm so lucky. It helps me remember.

Tonight I'll go to sleep unafraid of waking up. We fight through.

I don't really feel compelled to share this with all who see the piece, as I hope they relate to it in their own conglomeration of ways. But this is just one of the stories I have for those who might be interested.

In truth, I didn't know exactly how this piece was going to turn out. I just knew there was a feeling I was trying to get out, to express, but I didn't understand exactly what it was yet.

I had this idea of Apple Hearts in my head, for some reason I was enamored with the idea. Hands and food have been a common thread in my work, for a lot of reasons. And I knew they went together in this piece, I kept whizzing through different permutations of what the combination might be, and none of them were what actually came out.

I knew the apple was broken, and that I wanted to do stitches, but not in the ways I did stitches before (red thread). I loved the look of the clear hot glue, almost like tears. My original cast was actually a pretty perfect apple with a crack in it, but my plaster started to deteriorate, and so my future casts did as well. And I thought, how apt, that mimesis after mimesis is inferior to the original just as in the creation stories, we humans inferior are inferior to the creator whom we were created to be like.


The hands are made out of soap, and are small and incredibly detailed thanks to a well created original piece I found at a trinket shop. I had the idea of soap hands a loong time ago. But the idea didn't work out the first time. It was one of those lines that was just stuck in my head
"Do hands made of soap stay clean?"
To me it refers to hypocrisy or a false sense of self-righteousness and I knew that the hands couldn't stay clean.



I actually presented my piece with the title "Tiny hands touch Big apples" because I felt like it left a lot more room for people to grow their own ideas. There's a playful, childlike quality to the sound of the title, like the title of a children's book but there's also a strange sort of perverseness to it, that taints the impression and lingers uneasily in the mind.

Pho and Viet Coffee, Somewhere in between lunch and dinner.

It's Saturday afternoon. I wouldn't have gotten out of bed if I hadn't made plans earlier in the morning. But plans finished quickly and I found myself determined to make this a day better than all the shitty, shitty days of this past week.

Some people call it courageous...
To be able to walk into a restaurant, smile warmly at the maitre d' when he looks at you questioningly and say "Just one, thanks. Can I take the seat by the window?"
I remember looking at the people sitting alone in the middle of the restaurant calmly eating their food and staring at their phones.
I remember wondering whether I should pity them or admire them.
Now I wonder how they are looking at me.

This isn't really the type of place people come to laptop camp. It's the only pho joint in this little college town and people usually come here for dates and/or hangovers. But I've been craving pho for a while and I needed to get some work done. It's strange, but being here alone... it's the most peace I've felt all week.

I've been meaning to write about this for a while, eating alone, that is. I only just realized I never wrote about my third day in New York, which was probably the most uneventful day as well as the most important day. It was the day I spent entirely alone. (It's all related I promise)

What do you do when you're alone in New York? There are probably lots of things. But all I wanted to do was just walk around. I went into every single store that looked interesting, ate every bit of food I wanted and could feasibly fit into my stomach at the time. But there was one thing I knew I especially wanted to do: have dinner at a nice restaurant that I would never even have thought about going into if I was with someone else.

 "Just one, thanks. Chef's bar? Yes, that's perfect."


I don't think I could have even gotten into this place if I wasn't by myself, it seemed like all their tables were booked out. There's a poem by Stanley Elkin, The Peculiar Dignity of Men Seen Eating Alone at Restaurants... could use a better title, maybe. But he captures the strange aura of these moments.

I dreamed about a woman who had a set of priceless figurines that contained a secret. I followed their journey as they were stolen and smuggled throughout history and met the people who were trying to protect them. Turns out the figurines are linked to people, each a protector of Earth, or something, they're immortal unless their figurines are somehow destroyed. I'm scouted by the government... but I'm pretty sure all the members of "the government" are SHIELD agents.... which I'm not complaining about. I have a partner, who is male but I can't remember if I know who he is in real life... it might have been Jeremy Renner? aka Hawkeye... again, not complaining.

Follow some ancient train track in China to a cave.
... I think I actually end up fighting a dragon at some point??? Nvm.
We escape the cave and block it up behind us. My perceptions of scale are wildly distorted, or the world is distorted as we come out of the cave. Bottom Line mission accomplished.

I wake up and go back to sleep. Life continues as normal, but "normal life" is considerably more stereotypically Asian that it ever has been or will be. Something important happens like some sort of magic ritual or something... i'm pretty sure we're a witch family. We're at some family friend's Asian Tea House/Apothecary (witch homebase) when I get the call again. Only I'm supposed to recruit one other person and I'm just supposed to know who it is. And I do, because I'm awesome. It's my friend. (lel Bola...)

We're in the Gov car trying to figure out what to bring and what to leave behind before we get flown to some obscure part of Canada... Even though it's warm and sunny outside of the car, my mind remembers its snowing in real life and I think about how cold its going to be in Canada and I'm super excited by the awesome gear I'm sure we're going to get.
I'm embarrassed at the copious amount of receipts I pull out in front of Phil aka Agent Coulson... i just look at him and shrug "finances". We're just about done when I wake up.

**There was a lot more to the dream but those are pretty personal and pretty unrelated to the story line so...**

I wake up distinctly disappointed that I won't be able to carry out my bad ass mission, whatever it's going to be. And strangely enough, disappointed that my chances of dying doing some awesome thing has been greatly decreased.

As usual.... I've slept past most of my alarms. And I won't be sleeping tonight.

Proposal for my ART 497 Breakaway Class.


Their story will be told in a series of photographs.


Lily is childlike. She lives off of the thoughts and opinions of others. She cries for those in pain. Her happiness is tied to the happiness of the people she loves. She must keep them happy. It is her purpose and she serves it well.


Her mother told her stories and she became afraid of the world. Love or hide?



Inara is a warrior. She is strong for those who are afraid. But she's no saint.

In the beginning, a lot of me wanted to demonize her for her lack of innocence. But then I realized that Inara isn't evil. She's just responding to the horrors of the world in a different way. Rather than hiding away and being afraid, Inara embraces the horrors as worthy opponents, She respects them only insofar as to get what she needs from them, and then tears them down. Inara's name mean's "light of heaven" she was named after a Hittite Goddess equal to Artemis.




Neither one of them speaks.
*Yeah. idk if this is going to stay.... too cheesy? Maybe it'll be scarred rather than sewn shut.
** Already bought liquid latex and rigid collodium.
***... should they speak?

We all lived in the Garden of Eden.
Our hearts lived on trees.
We chose to leave
and they died in our hands.

You knew it was wrong.
I was three
I wonder if it eats you
like it eats me.

We have apple hearts, sickly sweet and afraid of rotting away.
We were selling them on the streets.
You picked them from the stands
like you grew them yourself.



Is it strange that you're still everywhere in my life?
in the sweater you gave me, the blankets that keep me warm.
the people I talk to, the books I read
Your hands were the most beautiful I've seen.

You were supposed to love me
I suppose you do
sometimes I feel it
but it leaves so easily.

We all lived in the Garden of Eden.
Our hearts lived on trees.
We chose to leave
and they died in our hands.

So, you might have noticed a change in the blog... this may or may not come out coherently...

I went through a strange thought process of learning to try and express my thoughts and the most recent events and confusions in my life. I've been struggling with my identity for a while, always defining myself in relation to others. But over a short span of 2 weeks my life changed astronomically... or at least it did in my head.

I learned that I can love unconditionally, I also learned that I often love very conditionally.
I learned that the scars in my mind are only there because I keep them there.
I learned that God will answer prayers, you just have to know what to ask Him for.

I said goodbye to a relationship of 3 years, the only romantic relationship I've ever been in, as well as the future I thought it would lead to.

I am learning to be myself, alone, just me. Whoever I may be. Unaffected by anyone or anything else.
I'm learning to accept the right that God gave me to create, and call myself a creator.
I'm learning to not be afraid of expressing myself and the things that I truly enjoy.

And so... this blog is something that I'm truly passionate about. I know this because I usually can't ever keep up with anything for this long of a time period. And the fact that I keep coming back and posting on this blog really means A LOT.

But I realized that it wasn't really true to my expression and who I am right now as... ME

A SICKLY EATER is sort of how I see myself... both literally and metaphorically. It's my crime and my conviction. I went through a period of time where I was so lost and so afraid of everything. And for some reason, food was how I would deal with it. I would always be eating, always feeding myself, always feeling sick but never stopping. I was trying to fill myself up, but it was like stuffing a scarecrow full of straw.

I feel like we often do things like that, not just with food, but with anything. We fill voids with useless things without substance, like strange creatures always consuming but never feeling full.

But there's a sort of humor in it, being a sickly eater, like No Face in Spirited Away? Because, I think, in reality we're all sickly eaters. And we're all trying to find the things that fill us up.

For me, it's the empathy and sharing of perspectives that comes with the creation of art. It makes me full. This blog is as much my creation and my art piece as any of my paintings or sculptures, it's the documentation of my life and my own search for what makes me, me.

It's my homing beacon, from one SICKLY EATER to all others. Hi, we're not alone.