What I have been doing is writing a lot in regular old paper journals I carry around in my purse.
I will be 25 in January of this coming year which seems hard to belive but at the same time is sort of a relief.
My early twenties were pretty turbulant and I was wrecked emotionally much of the time... mostly due to all of my own bad decisions, and not due to circumstances surrounding me.
This year an awful lot happened. At the beginning of the year I got my heart broken but I'm not even going to go into how it happened. I haven't talked about it with very many people because I feel like they will all think I'm being pathetic and silly, but the pain was very real to me.
So a little bit after this happened I decided, to quote The Who, "I won't be fooled again".
I brought in a picture of Cherie Currie to my hairdresser and cut off my hair into a shag haircut. About a month later I was having a horrible day and decided I would only feel better if I didn't have red hair anymore so I immedietly went to wal-mart and found a box of hair color with the description "soft dark brown".
I remember just feeling better as soon as I picked up the box of dye and walked towards the massive check out line. The cashier yelled something along the lines of "MY REGISTER IS CLOSED AS SOON AS I CHECK OUT MISS CLAIROL HERE." It's funny how you remember little things like that.
I went straight home and colored my hair which did not come out "soft dark brown", but came out pitch black. I had Joan Jett hair which I thought was very ironic considering I brought in a picture of Cherie originally.
As summer approached I started feeling better. I locked myself in my room a lot but I wasn't depressed at all. I just played around on instruments(a lot of guitar), wrote, read countless books, and watched a lot of my favorite old movies and rock docs. It was the strangest thing but I realized for the first time that I'm an introvert. I never knew I was, because I'm not shy or afraid of people. I definitely need an awful lot of time alone though and after a short time I get drained socializing. Painting was something else I learned that I enjoyed. I got the ideas for what to paint from weird places. Three of them that are currently hung up on my wall, I based on three songs from David Bowie's album "Low". I wanted to make a visual of what the song sounded like, or what mood the songs put me in. So I went for mood instead of anything else in painting, because really I am not a professional and don't know any technique at all.
I started buying all these weirdo science magazines about outer space and trying to paint pictures of nebulas too. In one of those magaizines, I read an article about how there is a job (might be with Nasa, I really don't remember the specifics) but the jist of the job was that you were stationed in the Nevada or Arizona deserts at night. You worked alone and your job would begin after the sun set. You stayed awake all night and counted and kept track of how many meteors went by through a telescope. This entire job of counting meteors was they said, to be aware of any large meteors coming towards earth. Evidently if there is a large enough one, say one that could wipe out an entire city, you would be able to see it coming for years perhaps decades even before it hit.
At the time I was reading this, I envied the position of that job. Staying up all night to look at the dark sky in the desert. You don't have to always be "on" socially for a job like that. Looking at expansive skies makes my tiny problems seem like just that, tiny.
My three paintings to go with three songs from Bowie's "Low" album. Top left is based on "Art Decade", top right "Weeping Wall", bottom is "Speed of Life". All tracks or instrumental.
My friend Ashley and her husband gave me this free stringless guitar three years ago and told me if I put strings on it I could keep it. So I not only put strings on in but girly stickers. I'm very thankful for this guitar.
A pencil sketch I did in my journal late one Friday night.
