ad astra!

I realized I never really expounded on the significance of my tattoo. (I’m getting a matching one that’s a little easier to understand).

First off, the center of it is a wheel with eight spokes—a dharma wheel (dharmachakra). The wheel represents the noble eightfold path as well as the cyclical nature of the world.

The wheel is set inside a lotus blossom. The lotus grows in the mud, but the flower rises above to blossom. Which is a trope for overcoming adversity, etc.

I looked online and found lots of dharma wheels and lots of dharma wheel tattoos, and I didn’t want one that looked like someone else’s. It had to be something I put together myself, as it’s kind of a personal thing, and I wanted to be the only person with this tattoo. The design I came up with is pretty unique and most importantly it’s very very simple, which is what I wanted. Eventually I may add color once I have both pieces but I haven’t made my mind up on that yet.

Yes I am going to get this one on my other arm in the corresponding place, cuz it’s pretty awesome.

I really do—and this part bothers some people—hope to some day have sleeves on both arms, so this is sort of the starting point. But for the time being I’m embracing the simplicity. My brother didn’t like where I put it, but what’s the point of having a tattoo that no one can see?

Aside from all this, I really enjoy (on the philosophical level) the play that comes from having a tattoo, which most people consider to be “permanent,” placed on something so impermanent as my body. Which within seventy years or so will be… something else…

Today’s lesson: Practice looking deeply by finding the sunshine within a piece of paper.

had a little spam problem… working on getting all of that shit cleared up. whoops.

something happened with my MySQL database, but it’s back. I lost a few posts, but for a minute there I thought I’d lost 6 years of everything. Well, I have the first 4 backed up but not really the last two (well, I do now!) and I was just about to download a backup… funny how that happens.

Anyhow, I guess I can’t really remember everything I posted (that’s why I put it here…) so oh well. Things have been… interesting lately.

Last night I returned the case to the DVD Josh and I rented over the weekend and tonight I returned the actual DVD… ha. Then I went to Fourth Coast to work on the fuckton of pictures I had in my camera. All ready. Josh came with me to my Dad’s on Sunday and everyone thought he was my boyfriend which was… funny but awfully damned presumptuous on their part. If I have a boyfriend and I’m bringing him to meet my family I’m going to introduce him as “my boyfriend” and not just “this is my friend…” So whatever. Str8 people are really dumb sometimes.

Oh, I do remember one thing: Whose idea was it to give me all that bourbon the other night?

Find these guys here. Totally going back Friday night.

At Union again after a 20 day absence… wonderful live music-kinda folky singer-songwriter indie stuff. Girl on piano sings, guy harmonizes and accompanies on guitar. great stuff! (live from my phone)

Inked!

Originally uploaded by Paul Pellerito.

I got another tattoo today. Patrick took tons of pictures while I was getting it and they are of course on flickr.

It didn’t hurt as much as I thought it was going to, but yeah of course it hurts.

Here’s the finished product:

This is the design:

It’s a dharma wheel enclosed in a lotus flower.

I plan to do some color/shading later on.

Let’s see… things have been keeping interesting lately. Monday was Bach Around The Block, an event of the Kalamazoo Bach Festival, which I never knew existed until a month ago. Glenn was one of six performers. It’s always great to hear him play.

Other than that, things are steady. I started this entry thinking I had something to say, but I guess at this point in the evening I really don’t.

porque también somos lo que hemos perdido

Alejandro González Iñárritu

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life…You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.”

Oh my fuck was that awful and weird… woke up too soon out of REM and couldn’t move or talk… finally I just shouted. Happened twice tonight, now I can’t sleep. WTF is wrong with me?

the words won’t come out
my eyes can’t focus on the same thing for more than a few seconds
my hands aren’t working right

this is the awesome chris ware animation for TAL:

I have two tickets for nine inch nails in Auburn Hills.
Glenn’s coming with me! They’re very good (and overpriced) seats.

Rock on.

h a l o
t w e n t y s e v e n

as a thank you to our fans for your continued support, we are giving away the new nine inch nails album one hundred percent free, exclusively via nin.com.

i left this weekend feel em-ot-ion-ally drained
it got worse saturday night

but i’m home now and i feel a little bit better

just a little bit.

THIS AMERICAN LIFE LIVE!

Originally uploaded by Paul Pellerito.

So how awesome was tonight?

Some of you probably don’t know about it so…

Stealing an idea from the Metropolitan Opera, who does live shows in movie theatres across the company, The folks at This American Life (which is indubitably the best radio show in the entire universe) did a live event, on the big screen in movie theatres across the country.

The concept was sort of a bridge between the radio show and the television show on Showtime, Ira Glass sat at a mixing board and introduced the show, then they did two hours of segments: some were radio stories, some were TV stories, a lot of it was material that was cut from either format because it didn’t work for that particular show. David Rakhoff showed us his social grace, but other than that there were a lot of TAL regulars missing (no Sara Vowell or David Sedaris), but it was great nonetheless.

For this event, however, everyone at TAL did such a great job at producing a funny and memorable night. The parts I liked best where the Chris Ware animation of a Jackie-O story from the radio show, and a piece Jonathan Goldstein did about being funny, with middle school kids at a sort of stand-up summer camp for middle school kids.

Great great great great stuff. I hope it ends up on DVD or iTunes or something. It was the best $20 I’ve spent yet this year!