the (b)log at kaystarr

Sa je pa wè, kè pa santi.
What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t feel. (Haitian proverb)

… okay, after reading about the corporate jargon bingo game on gigglesugar i’ve been mentally tallying all the words/phrases/monstrosities of language that irk me and for some reason, the new-ish term ’swag’ is grating on me hardest. i know, the problems of the young and overly-pop sensible. i’m not sure when or where the term got popular, but when i kept hearing in on brian lehrer’s segment on corporate sponsorship and all the free t-shirt folks give out i had to get rid of some of the annoyance and post about it. urban dictionary, as usual, has some of the best ‘definitions’ of swag out there:

1. swag (s.w.a.g.)
Stuff We All Get (S.W.A.G.)
I went to the trade show and scored a ton of swag (s.w.a.g.) from the vendors like t-shirts, coffee mugs, bumper stickers, blah blah.

3. swag (s.w.a.g.)
Sista with a gun. Refers to an African-American female who is “packin’ heat”, or carries a firearm on her person.

“History is not a procession of illustrious people. It’s about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.”
- James Baldwin

it’s mid-august and i’m running out of three days weekends! i have the fortunate pleasure of getting four full weeks off during the summer, and this year i decided to break up my vacation time and have long weekends every week. it’s been awesome and excitingly ordinary. the usual rotation is that friday is the action day where i venture out of the neighborhood. saturday is chore day with our regular routine of starting the day off at the green market and moving around the hood… then sunday gps goes kayaking and i get alone time with tigerlilli and i usually craft or read or just be lazy.

this weekend i was un-usually productive and crafty. i stitched up my first ever dress using the infinity dress pattern over at rostichery; i finished the laundry started earlier this week (hey, small victories, people!); and i finished my very first quilt which i started nearly two years ago. i also made some slip covers for the bolsters on our daybed/couch and thus completed my lagging project of ‘decorating’ the living room. gps had the latest radio lab podcast playing in the background, so as i was sewing the binding on the quilt i got to listen to physics guru brian greene get annoyed and exaserbated my dear dear pod-crush robert krulwich while explaining the ‘infinite universe’ theory/mindfuck/thang. woot!

yet another sign that i’m getting old. i’ve known about second life for as long it’s been around, but i only just broke down and signed up for an account. well, really, i created my avatar ‘Kreyoli C.’ about three weeks ago. i’m both happy and sad to admit that after fiddling around with it for about two hours i was totally over it. i’d barely decided on what my avatar would look like and had started ‘walking around’ the place and i’d had enough.

i guess i should’ve known i didn’t need or want a second life. all of my social networking profiles are lagging and haven’t been logged into, let alone updated, for oh, let’s say a year now. don’t get me wrong, i still love the connectivity and instant gratification that is part of the greatness of the web, but i dunno. something about joining a site just to troll for new people to meet or wait for strangers to ‘freind’ me seems… so 2002. ack, now i sound all anti-social, huh? well, just another sign of getting old. or maybe it’s just a sign of being okay with my first life.

i’m that much closer to retiring kaystarr.com. i bought the domain ‘kreyoli.com’ earlier this year after toying with the idea of a new domain for the past three years. i’ve owned kaystarr.com sine 2003, and after finding out about the real Kay Starr (who’s music I now own and love) i’ve had mixed feelings about my original domain name. i’m sure i’ll post a fitting change-over message to the index of kaystarr once i’ve moved everything over to kreyoli.com, but for now suffice it to say that it’s been a fun, if at times infrequently updated, experience being at kaystarr.com.

i’ve been reading, oh, let’s call it five books simultaneously. in the summer i tend to pick up quick and light reads to tote on my commute and to help keep me occupied when i get to lie in the grass and veg out. this summer, though i haven’t been able to stick to my normal routine. at the beginning of my trip to germany, i bought $3 paperback copies (amazing, you can still get a new book for $3!) of alice in wonderland/through the looking glass and moll flanders at the airport. i made it through wonderland and most of looking glass during my trip, but since i’ve come back to nyc i just can’t get back into poor little alice’s world enough to finish the book… so i switched to moll flanders. side note: way long ago when i had a television i watched a british production of moll flanders on some public television channel and to this day it’s one of my favorite movies - along with anne of the thousand days and the animated version of charlotte’s web - so while i love the story of moll flanders, the text of the book itself is falling a bit flat for me. Defoe’s writing style is just too ‘old english author’ and i keep feeling like reading moll is more of a summer assignment from middle school than something i’m doing for fun. so here come a few books borrowed from the teachers lounge library, which were non-fiction social anthropology/ personal politics fare: “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And other conversations about race. A Psychologist Explains the Development of Racial Identity” and “MoveOn’s 50 Ways to Love Your Country: How to Find Your Political Voice and Become a Catalyst for Change”. Just looking at the titles gets me way too in the ’summer book report’ mode, and while i’m interested in the topics, i’ll probably leave them on the bookshelf till later. what next, then? luckily i came across gps’ copy of the house of spirits in our newly shared bookshelves. i’ve been happily reading isabel allende’s book since last wednesday and plan to finish up the novel before the fourth. maybe i’ll get to read the last pages while i’m on the beach this weekend - sweet!

before i get on a plane and what am i doing last minute? looking for LYS’s in dusseldorf. why didn’t i ask the german knitters on ravelry for this info months ago?? i managed to find four shops in town, two on the left side of the rhein and two on the same side as the messe (the huge convention center where drupa will be held). so on the plane, i’m so plotting out directions from my hotel to the shops. yay for international trade and shopping on vacation!

and so peaceful until… i get on a plane this coming Monday and head off to germany. yee! so i’ve been thinking about this trip since march, but have done notsomuch prepping for it until recently. i’m going to be an intern for Muller Martini (maker of big huge commercial print machines) at drupa 2008 (big huge graphic arts conference that happens every 4 years) in dusseldorf (comparatively small city on the eastern bank - Östlich bank - of the rhine. i’m beyond excited (and if you know me, you’d probably expect shorter sentences and more exclamation points in this post, huh?) and am actually a bit nervous. i’ll be surrounded by machines and commercial systems that are larger than my apartment! what if i slip and fall into a display binder or collating machine? ha! it should be a blast - my head is sure to explode with all of the new things i’ll learn about printing/binding/ink/paper/finishing/data management but that’s the whole point of being a grad student right? $70K to have your head pop off with too much damned information about one subject. whoo!

some folks have regular morning commuting routines revolving around getting the paper, or grabbing a cuppa or even just turning down the same exact corners every day. i’m usually not one of those folks - i purposefully try and make each two-minute morning walk to the train different each day. but about three weeks ago, when it started to really be ‘nice and bright’ in the mornings, i decided to start a morning food routine around my favorite fruit: bananas. i guess it’s a small way for me to start feeling like a part of my new neighborhood. the good thing about having banana’s as my favorite fruit is the proliferation of bodega’s in my hood. there are maybe 15 bodegas within 5 minutes of my apartment - sweet! and they all have bananas and malta (another favorite, though less healthy snack). i’ve got three options for buying my morning banana on my two usual routes. there’s the white bodega on my block which sells them for 40 cents. the red bodega happens to be the midpoint of my morning walk and they’ve got the cheapest (but usually grungiest) bananas for 35 cents. the blue bodega is technically right across from the train station, but i hardly ever go in. it’s go the potential to be my favorite - the banana’s are usually fresher and they’ve got a resident cat in the shop and the bananas there are 30 cents… but it’s under an construction awning and i just never think to make the turn down that side of the street. i usually run into the red bodega, slide my quarter and dime across the counter while snatching a banana. the process takes about 15 seconds and i always mumble a ‘buenos dias. gracias’ to the counter guy who mutters a ‘de nada’ back at me. we never make eye contact b/c he’s usually watching the morning news in spanish. somehow i manage to finish the entire banana before i start walking down the subway steps - it’s a good feeling to have recently finished my favorite fruit as i settle in for a nap on the train on my way to work every morning.

no more teachers, no more books! school’s pretty much over (save one paper that i have to - gasp - revise) and you know what that means! summer vacation is officially upon me! while, yes, i’ve technically still got to check in at the nine-to-five, i have mentally begun my three and half month mental reprieve.

so, naturally i’ve got ‘project ideas’ planned for days! first up, the three baby quilts i volunteered to make/organize/oversee. there are a gaggle of four lovely pregnant teachers at school that my co-workers and i are plotting to make quilts for. two will be crochet/knit sampler afghans and the other two will be patchwork quilts. i’m going to make one of the patchworks - i bought the fun ‘monkeyin around’ fabric months ago from fatquartershop.com. now i get to dive in and quilt. looking for inspiration to work with the 4″ charm packs and jelly rolls i have, i found these four fun stripped/squared examples. while my patches are turning out to be over simplified log cabin-esque squares, i really liked all the color/direction/gradation action happening in the examples below…

i was in the mood for scribbling and doodling yesterday before class, and i’d forgotten my regular sketchbook at home. i also had some time to kill so i popped into my newly-discovered-favorite japanese ‘culture’ shop, kinokuniya, to browse and buy cheap fun paper things. i found these ‘tattoo girls’ magazines filled with obviously girly and suprisingly good looking pieces …

Last week I got some paint jar samples - sweet spring green, glistening gold and soft serenity blue - to finally decide what colors, if any, we were gonna paint the kitchen and bathroom.

i’m really liking the stripes in the kitchen! the fact that i’m not sure if i’ll be here for a year or two means that i’m hesitating to paint an entire room if i’ll have to re-paint it white less than a year later… i think the spring green is nice, and gps thinks that the yellow would be just too much with the light wood cabinets.

it was an obvious choice to use blue in the bathroom, but it makes me happy to walk into such a tiny space and have everything be blue and white. the blue isn’t exactly what i was thinking - i’ve been obsessed with turquoise blue since the new year - so i think i’ll hold off till i find a really nice true slightly greenish-blue.

but the cat…

lots of fun things going on - gps is all moved in. we’ve put art up on our walls. i won a contest to go to a print conference in germany this summer. i got my partnership ring. getting my taxes did. gps and i are going to start a book club. the usual small happy things, but the thing that’s making me happiest is this chubby orange fur-ball…

(ps. the audio sucks! it’s my first upload to youtube and i don’t have time to layer some track of little children singing a funny song in a foreign language to cover up my horrible kitty-baby-talk. sue me!)

yay spring break! i have the entire week entirely off - no school, no work! so i get to stay home, start decorating the apartment and write 3 term papers! whoo! yesterday i managed to finally put up some of the fabric hoop wall art things that i made. i’ve seen these kinds of things hanging in the purl patchwork shop for ages, and while i must be the seven-hundreth crafty kid to adopt the idea, i still their awesome. a craft after my own heart - colorful, cheap, instantly gratifying and totally non-committal. if and when i hate them in two month i can re-do them or totally get rid of them. ok, i should stop saying ‘totally’ now, huh? but yea, i think i’m going to have to keep bringing crafty elements into the kitchen.