New Home.

Pedal

Pedal.

http://artconstellation.blogspot.com/2009/08/biking-42-miles-map-practice-i-love-you.html

(the end.)

A Parting Present for the People: (Happiness)

A poem by Susanne Parker

When we are well
We will do all the things that normal people do.

We'll wear modest, stylish attire
Befitting our age. I'll have a silver chain
With a pendant made from some exotic stone,
And you'll admire it when we meet at the cafe
For a catch up chat.

I'll talk about my husband
(I'll have one of those by then)
And you will, too. And you'll tell me
How he bought a dog for your little boy.
And you'll buy my coffee but I'll leave the tip
In nickels on the glass top table. Boring little things.

I'll still remember that there are scissor
scars on your stomach, but I won't look there. And if
You glance at my jaw and it is swollen,
You won't mention the screws.
Noone will think it strange that you order only cold drinks-
After all, it's a hot day.

Before we get up to leave
Our eyes will meet across the table.
We'll only smile. Only go back
To those normal, normal
normal deeds.

Strangers will wonder how we discover so much joy
At merely being alive.

(the sister would kill us)

consumption of women; global epidemic.

Prayer by Marie Howe

Someone or something is leaning close to me now
trying to tell me the one true story of my life:

one note,
low as a bass drum, beaten over and over:

It’s beginning summer,
and the man I love has forgotten my smell

the cries I made when he touched me, and my laughter
when he picked me up

and carried me, still laughing, and laid me down,
among the scattered daffodils on the dining room table.

And Jane is dead,
and I want to go where she went,
where my brother went,

and whoever it is that whispered to me

when I was a child in my father’s bed is come back now:
and I can’t stop hearing
This is the way it is,
the way it always was and will be

—beaten over and over—panicking in street comers,
or crouched in the back of taxicabs,

afraid I’ll cry out in jammed traffic, and no one will know me
or know where to bring me

There it is, I almost remember,
another story:

It runs along this one like a brook beside a train.
The sparrow knows it, the grass rises with it.

The wind moves through the highest tree branches without
seeming to hurt them.

Tell me.
Who was I when I used to call your name?

[Reprinted from What the Living Do (W. W. Norton & Company, 1999)]

Sick day and a poem by Arda Collins

Garden Apartments by Arda Collins

It was raining a little.

I wondered if I were outside

if I would get wet.

I was in the car.

I passed a school.

I didn't really know where I was.

I had lived near here for a while.

It was a quiet, residential neighborhood,

garden apartments in the back of the town.

I parked near a driveway and turned the car off.

They were basically ugly.

It's no one's fault though.

I wondered what I would do the rest of the day.

People were running their lives from here.

They had a coffee table and mugs with writing on them.

They had the rest of their lives. It was just like the other day.

The weather was warm for the first time.

I was out walking.

A young couple came out of a house.

She had just taken a shower,

blow-dried her hair and put make up on,

and put on light-colored pants and a t-shirt.

I smelled her shampoo

when they passed, and I felt afraid of the day.

The rest of the walk was better.

It smelled like rain in the car. There was no one around.

I heard my jacket when I moved.

I thought how god loves this place;

the grass was coming in, and the crocuses.

What if someone died, or got fired,

or vomited alone in the middle of the night?

The apartments were wood on the outside.

They were stained red like the color of a picnic table.

I was so ugly, I wasn't sure I'd even be able to drive.

Pillow Talk, T-shirt and Shaking Hands: One More Reason I'm Attending Bennington

In exactly one month I will be arriving at Bennington. This morning I spoke a woman who helped me set up my college e-mail account. I successfully logged-in only to find an email reminding me that my health forms were due last week (yeah- about that-). This exact email also included a link to the following:

(From Bennington College's website)

For your listening pleasure: a collection of music composed and performed by current Bennington students and recent alumni. Spanning the genres from indie rock to Celtic to classical, it's a lively (but by no means exhaustive!) sample of what we're playing and listening to right now. The list was compiled by Sarah McAbee, Bennington College Class of 2007.

Needless to say, I'm pretty happy right about now.

What stumbling taught me (after therapy).

1. "I told a kid in kindergarten that candy canes were the bones of reject elves."

2. "You really shouldn't say 'I love you' unless you mean it. But if you mean it, you should say it a lot. People forget." - (Jessica, age 8)

3. See feeling chart above.

4. My four new favorite words to describe touch and texture: polished, knobbed, grity, and biting.

5. All dogs go to heaven.

The Constellation and The People

Please read about it here.

Scissors

Note to Self, plural, and other things:

We need this book. Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination.

And Lloyd, the Magician and myself in perfect union.

Night Poem

by Margaret Atwood

There is nothing to be afraid of,
it is only the wind
changing to the east, it is only
your father the thunder
your mother the rain

In this country of water
with its beige moon damp as a mushroom,
its drowned stumps and long birds
that swim, where the moss grows
on all sides of the trees
and your shadow is not your shadow
but your reflection,

your true parents disappear
when the curtain covers your door.
We are the others,
the ones from under the lake
who stand silently beside your bed
with our heads of darkness.
We have come to cover you
with red wool,
with our tears and distant whispers.

You rock in the rain's arms,
the chilly ark of your sleep,
while we wait, your night
father and mother,
with our cold hands and dead flashlight,
knowing we are only
the wavering shadows thrown
by one candle, in this echo
you will hear twenty years later.

"Night Poem" by Margaret Atwood, from Selected Poems II: Poems Selected & New 1976-1986. © Houghton Mifflin Co., 1987.

Follow the adventure

I am in DC with my dear friend Jenny.
Follow the adventure here.

I have graduated from school.

I will write more soon.

I am off to Bennington in the fall.

love, jessieh

probably wondering where we've been

I am trying not to document much of the "Oh, Jessieh is going to college next year" information here and until I am sure which school I am going to I do not want to write about college at all and to be quite frank college decisions and admissions things are taking up about 68% of my life right now, the other approximate 32% is consumed by the following:

• The Comedy of Errors, which opens on Shakespeare's birthday; April 23rd.
• Directing a scene-study from David Rabe's In the Boom Boom Room
• Directing a reading of a play I wrote called Page Numbers as a continuation to our (Sam and I) Humanities Project and as a benefit reading for RAINN
• Directing a reading of A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant and A Prayer as a benefit reading for V-DAY. Both Page Numbers and MMRP will be presented on the same night.
• Thinking about going to see Jenny on May 24th in Washington DC and almost jumping out of my skin with excitement.
• Being thrilled for her about the completion of the wall-drawing project.
• Trying to both win my school's science fair with my project on Dissociative Experiences and the Artistic Temperament and make straight As my last 9 weeks of school. I want to end with a bang!
• The Existential Crisis and Trusting In God.
• (Trying not to think about the Holocaust.)
• Struggling with food.
• Getting my beautiful little sister, Jordan (Jourdan), ready to go to prom with me in a few weeks.
• Trying to cope with the fact that my dress for Luciana in The Comedy of Errors does not have sleeves, meaning that my arms will show- which let me tell you- hasn't quite happened in a public manner in what seems to be years.
• Thinking about leaving my Studio in just 7 weeks.
• Missing Patty and looking forward to his return.
• Wanting to go to Bennington so badly but knowing that money will play a huge huge role in whether or not I can.
• Needing a vehicle and a job for summer, both of which seem to get in the way of each other. I can't get a job without a reliable way to and from work and I can't get a vehicle without having money from a job. Not to mention-the unemployment rate in SC is rising with each passing moment and last I checked it was almost 11% which is terrifying considering I will be 18 with no "real" work experience and fresh out of a high school that isn't exactly a high school. The other problem is we refuse to work around food. I cannot work with food. Ideally, I would love to be a receptionist or a book store clerk or work in a library or maybe even a department store but not food.

There is more, of course, and I will write more soon, very soon. The College decision will have to be made by May 1st.

love, jessieh

Thank you Cy Twombly

Crowded

Things at this season in my life are extremely busy and crowded.

As soon as the decision about where I am going to college is made I will be back to writing.

I recently recieved an email asking, "Where have you been?".

I have been busy and crowded. Things are difficult to communicate these days because of all the happenings. I shall return soon to at-least-once-a-week blogging.

love, jessieh

PS: Obama is President. :) Yippy.

Where we have been.

A small, rather pointless list:
1. Applying to more than twenty colleges. I should be slapped.
2. I have been out of touch for more than a few days.
3. I ate organic yogurt last night with pineapple and white chocolate chips and I don’t feel the least bit guilty about it.
4. I am trying to lose weight.
5. Standardized Testing says nothing about a person’s true intelligence.
6. I have decided that I belong at a Women’s College.
7. Sam and I presented our project on Tuesday.
8. Now the real work begins, with V-DAY and RAINN and the original play we are writing.
9. Christmas is coming soon.
10. I am going to Chicago to audition for schools in February.
11. We will be there the 3rd , 4th , and 5th. Scary.
12. Thanksgiving was surprisingly borderline painless.
13. I drove a good thirty miles to speak to my father’s father- who I haven’t spoken to in some good number of years. He is dying. We said goodbye.
14. My life is being ruled by college applications.
15. I haven’t been having real human conversations with people about anything meaningful.
16. I am stressed to a maximum stress point over the everyday, common experience of a person my age for one of the first times in my life and I must say, it is a relief in some ways.
17. The brain has been on fire for the last two or three weeks.
18. The Greek Shows are over and I miss Andromache and Adonica very much.
19. Children everywhere are being hurt in unimaginable ways.
20. There is a God.

Loaded Words

Stay away from the treehouse
don't separate the two words, tree and house, they
are both together, in whole, forbidden
synonym to swimmingpool, but pull those apart;
constantly waiting to see what it is that you are
waiting for.
zero. hit zero, my pants were made in Russia
husband and wife in trashcan, missing legs
a dancer, can you believe that?

and she dies but we can't remember which
one, if any, lived
you didn't flush the toilet. How many times have I
told you about that, there is no soap and you
read about fixing things.
I can not speak but I do function properly.
Monsters are in that room with you.
I called your dentist, knew the teacher
was a real thought, and there are so many pictures
for the time at Christmas

with cards ripped open from the top
perforated edges and bedtime
defense attorneys push invisible buttons
on the floor, near paper cut outs of who we
used to be.
Take a swig from the brown and let it slide back
through into the bad places where Vachss said,
"talking doesn't get things fixed"

and I wonder what would have happened had I told you something
other than, penciled in another response more like
there goes your phone, it rings
and you still reach for it, and my head repeats words that now
Icanneversay, stuck in the place where
they gave me water in a morphine drip and even I
want so badly to just believe, but the water isn't fixing anything.