love is a dangerous angel

tomorrow i will be heading home again. funny how when i'm there home is here, when i'm here home is there. i am mixed up right now, i know.

on the plane i will be re-reading one of the most wonderful books ever: dangerous angels by francisca lia block. i can (and have) read this book over and over and over.

the picture above is from the 1998 edition. why do they change? here's the current one:

people are strange

remember those doors lyrics, people are strange when you're a stranger? love that song.

but if you ask me: people are stranger once you really know them. much stranger.

or maybe it is just my people?

new old things

i finally took some pictures of where did the baby go?, my favorite book when i was a baby. my mom picked it up for me from a garage sale, but my neice wanted to keep it so i let her. this book is so sweet, the little girl finds a picture of a baby then looks around the house for her until she realizes it was her own baby picture. sweetly illustrated too.

back home means reminiscing on my childhood. i spent a lot of time yesterday watching retrojunk with my niece, showing her all of the cartoons that i liked when i was little. her favorites were popples and wuzzles. she wanted to watch the intro over and over. retrojunk is great - it's got all the shows i remember, and all the ones my boyfriend watched as a child and he is quite a bit older than i am (to put it nicely).

i looked up some other toys that i loved too, oh, these toys on ghost of the doll make my heart glow! you have to have a look. (great). ooh, poochie and charmkins, oh, how i loved those...

these were a few of my very favorite toys in the world:





i even came across a my child resoration site. i guess i should have pulled my beloved my child out of our little katrina trash pile friday instead of my old kimberly clark doll:



back home also always means trips to wal-mart. this time i bought new makeup, which i haven't done in a long time. for a while i've been paring down on everything, but i think i'm ready to start having stuff around me again. i've been actually wanting stuff again, which sounds funny, but for a while i just didn't want anything.

i was in a little funk last week, i have been for a while, and i'm ready to be out of it. i've been trying to put on makeup and get dressed every day, which sounds like it should be a given, but, i'll admit it's not always. i always equate putting on makeup with feeling better, and apparently it's not just me... i read an article last week on being happy and it agreed that putting on makeup is a good start. makeup makes you and others feel better, and just the act of putting it on prepares you for positive social interaction. and it said that the act of buying new lipstick (which i did) makes you feel happier (which it did). something about the novelty of the new, which is what shopping high is all about, right?

randomness

after a lifetime of hating heart on anything, period, i find that i now not only can i tolerate them, i sometimes really like them. especially these wax paper and crayon hearts that my boyfriend's kids made for v-day:



i am going to learn how to draw, or try at least. i think, like most things, the trick is to just start trying, so today i did:



and lastly, don't order cds after more than three drinks:

portraits of loss, my own

a plastic heart-charm from an '80s childhood, fallen through the missing ceiling and onto the missing hallway floor.

i went back the first real time yesterday. i walked through the house -- the house my dad has spent every spare second for a year clawing through, cleaning, and trying to preserve. hardly anything is worth preseving, but when this is your life molding and rotting away, you do what you can.



the keys, rusty but still hanging in the keep-safe spot on the wrought-iron entryway to the living room. how did they survive when the doors they opened are gone?

the house was so strange. i lived for twenty-one years in this house, and yet, i couldn't place myself in it. i couldn't get oriented. i had difficulty telling where i was. this is the kitchen? this is the living room? this was my bedroom? my mind still sees it like it was and i couldn't put that together with what is there. i could see straight through the house, through beams and joints and joists.

i could see into the attic, through all of the rooms. everything looked so tiny. tiny, tiny, dwarfed even by the tiny fema trailor on the lawn. i don't know how or why, but the roof felt like it was right on top of my head. the backyard -- birthday and fourth of july parties, and endless summer nights in high school -- and i couldn't imagine all those people fitting there even though i knew they did.



and currently in the trash pile in front of the house: my childhood. preserved in the attic for twenty-five years for future grandkids, i suppose. now waiting for garbage pickup under the styrofoam container from someone's lunch. and i see it all around, but i still can't imagine a whole city collectively sorting through and burying their lives.



for a year, i've been saying my dad should let it go, to start over. why try to save a toolbox or refinish a coffee table that's been through this mess? why waste time going back home, when it will never be home again? but i think i understand: right before i left, i pulled my old kimberly clark doll out of that trash pile and took her with me.