thursday night bar fights in hollywood while charlie chaplain stole hat tricks and houdini disappeared.

(This is a Hat)

these are our ideas in our hat:

buy donut holes and throw them at passerby while hiding behind bushes.

Buy slingshots for previously mentioned donut holes.

Go for runs. Multiple runs all at once. Around tracks and around lakes and through parks and over hills and by swing sets.

Go to a park and swing on swings while pretending to be astronauts.

Have dance parties in the back of Janae’s truck.

Have dance parties in Josie’s bedroom loft.

Watch Harry Potter movies.

Have a tea party with little tiny cupcakes that we’ve baked and pretty tablecloths and candles that DON’T smell like anything.

go to the spunky monkey for Janae to sing karaoke.

Buy bouncy balls and play the bouncy ball game in empty parking lots after midnight.

Blow bubbles and shoot people with squirt guns.

Make macaroni faces on paper plates.

Cover our hands in elmers glue and peel it off when it dries.

Jump a rope.

Bring people pancakes for breakfast.

Play on the train tracks and take pictures.

Gross each other out with nasty popping noises.

Play scrabble or monopoly.

write love letters to anonymous recipients who live on nicely named streets like irving or klickitat. 

make prank phone calls like we used to.

oh no you just did not

but i did! I set up a flickr account!

check it: www.flickr.com/photos/ciancaandbjord

 

and Janae's and my website will be up and running hopefully sometime soon, so save the address:

www.ciancaandbjord.com

in the meantime watch this:

love letters and eraser fights

I collect ridiculous items, both tangibly and imaginarily ("imaginarily" belongs to my collection of useful made-up words). This morning around 8:49 I began a mental list of eraser shapes I would make if I were an eraser manufacturer or a rubber mechanic for Archie McPhee's. 

top 2 eraser ideas

(actually they were the only 2 I had before I got distracted)

a no. 2 pencil, authentically sized, shaped and colored, already sharpened

a chinese take-out box with white grains of rice-sized erasers

otherwise, in other words, speaking of exacerbated explorers

Marian is back, after a two-month distraction to someplace I wasn't invited. This time the weather has changed and she hasn't exploded into a million calico pieces yet. Instead, she is sitting curbside on an empty road because no one drives on the pavement in this city. Round water babies slide down her green umbrella, aging with gravity and dying in silent crystal firework splashes all around the rubber soles of her shoes as if they had been stars of silent films. (partial excerpt of a partial paragraph)

I wrote the last chapter before I had the beginning...and this is more or less somewhere in the middleish...so the glimmer train submission department will have to wait just a little longer for Marian to be bundled into their mailbox, courtesy of the U.S. Postal service.

chapter of fascinations

water bodies, especially ones with crashing waves that wish

 they were dragons and wolves and scream with magical starvation

 until i am coerced into martyrdom and leave soaking wet. 

case in point: camping on the Northwest coastline of Scotland.

beach storms in Lincoln City, when Nell can't sleep 

and the ocean tries to spit her body onto shore

but she can't stop diving for the shipwreck she doesn't want to find. 

mcrae ghosts and secrets and quirks and the intricacies of the general insanity 

my clan is adept at theatrically flaunting

pistols

revolvers

cowboys

bedtime stories: bartleby the scrivener

graveyard haikus

lithography in the dark:

i would like to haunt something.

maliciously.

(poltergeist)

this word was made for me

my head:
it's that scene from Pride and Prejudice (the new one) where they are dancing and everyone else just disappears, only in this version the room is soaked with red, and taciturn and sociable have become synonymous.

stubborn:

–adjective

1.	unreasonably obstinate; obstinately unmoving: a stubborn child.

2.	fixed or set in purpose or opinion; resolute: a stubborn opponent of foreign aid.

3.	obstinately maintained, as a course of action: a stubborn resistance.

4.	difficult to manage or suppress: a stubborn horse; a stubborn pain.

5.	hard, tough, or stiff, as stone or wood; difficult to shape or work.

---

[Origin: 1350–1400; ME stiborn(e), styborne, stuborn < ?]

—Related forms

stub·born·ly, adverb

stub·born·ness, noun



As in: "She stubbornly refuses to participate in this farce out of turn--and it has been his turn for quite some time."

As in: "Her stubbornness will not prove an asset."

i discovered treasure

underwater reclining

Portland, Oregon

I forgot to bring a camera so here are some adventure images courtesy of google



the best place in the world





saturday morning

this guy was there, right next to the fountain





"we are dropping off the 3 musketeers"

i have a twin and johnny is 21 now--and we were left unattended in the alphabet district. We asked a girl in a vintage shop on 21st:
"do you know any good bars?"
"no, i don't drink around here."
10 minutes later she was hitting up happy hour ($4 martinis) at Virgo and Pisces.





classic mcrae






end of awake? possibly not. I've been drawing robots and writing about umbrellas for the last three hours, and now it sounds like a thunderstorm outside and inside. CocoRosie keeps my eyes open in a good way and Portland is a good place for girls who ride purple street bikes so I'll be moving next week.

this is what the moon looks like right now



Alcott in the 100s:
"josie, what do you want for your birthday?"
"a puppy"
"ok. what kind?"

you need to stop speed dialing

i want a face stamp

and an elephant.

new writings: a guy who blows himself up with fireworks on a balcony. based on a true story. no joke, a few more nights of insomnia and it will be ready for print.

new (best) news: I might not have to go back to pullman.I'm writing in small small text so I don't get too excited in case it doesn't come true.

also

rock candy
soap boxes
xylophones
vibraphones
francophones
any phones but real phones

last
you can officially call me flaky; i'm no good at returning phone calls or emails
but i like snail mail, and i have nice handwriting.

staring awkward red

I SAW U

all the time.

next time

who does smile then

plus second title: blake is a spanish cowboy

i'm moving.

moderate agnostic

Can I just make this a picture post? Yes.

grandma/larry


my new toys: boss rc-2 loop station and tuning pedals.


list of experiments and corrected grammatical issues:

i hate talking on the phone and learning pinochle should be mandatory in elementary school.
i like talking about mixers and microphones and synthesizers like this one:


i would make a stellar secret agent.

rebel in a campfire cookout

I want to go back to this please:

we dance when

Flies buzz louder than organ notes
drawn from a honeycomb of strings and pedals
at the place where your fingers begin to bleed
milk and seeds, dropping roots between ivory keys.

Buttercup buds fall in heavy hail piles until the field
we stand in can hardly keep from dropping down,
plummeting to the core, an even fall
with a bowling ball hanging from each corner.

When wicker chairs come down from the attic
and our bagpipe bones drop down with rhythmic squeals
we’ll remember a steep climb, heat searing our holding hands
as we left hell fires that held no warmth.

quarter note shaped holes in the wall

innocent syllable riddle (bye bye beautiful)

…is a pair of sunglasses perched on a steep nose

covering sixteen freckles that you can’t see anyway,

since it is already midnight.

…is a traffic cone triplet, born in a hand clap

on an abandoned road framed by snipers hiding in window frames.

…is a sea of unpacked gravel bodies waiting for weight

to push their edges into each other

the way your hipbone peaks bruise mine.

…is a pair of eyes shining flashlight beams into mine

shattering black pupils until the pieces are permanently missing.

…is a tumble dryer under the hood, spinning into sparks

with outstretched arms and ecstatic child cries.

…is a glass pane that didn’t shatter, but became a polka-dot landscape,

a Pollack painting in red splatters and air-shaped nighttime holes.

…is a silence painted on a dead end road.

some stuff I have been confused about or have thought about lately:

-where did the "create an event" button on Facebook go? I have an event! I want to create it! I can't find the button...
-How does Morrissey still look good?
-Phil Collins, in general.
-is knitting an instinct that lays dormant until after menopause? I feel like every woman over 50 I see is knitting.
-would I clone myself?

good vs. not so good:

-boondock saints vs. homework
-green vs. blue
-animal collective vs. the ants in my kitchen
-scooters vs. minivans
-the lady skipping around the track today vs. the idiots who walk in the runners lanes.

just not good at all:
-insects
-dancing a hoedown ashley simpson style
-creepers and creepy dancers and just freak dancing in general
-procrastination.

ten tiny secret bubbles popped, splat!

I was thinking today, writing children's lit might be fun, but then I realized stories about brothers and sisters who turn into polar bears and eat each other might give little kids nightmares. Instead I wrote a story about Edinburgh. It's sort of a memoir-y-ish thing, with some fictional elements. Actually, I don't even believe in memoirs. Everything is fiction. I'll post the completed version soon but for now here is a teaser:

This was before Hunter and I shared a room, two mattresses spread across a threadbare blue carpet; before we spent our Saturdays watching Bergman films until the world didn’t have any color left, followed by watery soup at the “Restaurant and Café” on the very last corner of Lothian road just before it became Home street. This was when we bought a two-man pup tent and convinced Kat it would be easy to rent a car, it would be easy to remember to drive on the other side of the road.
Every Edinburgh Saturday pretended to threaten a monsoon or hurricane with clouds gathering in sky piles at speeds that could make you dizzy if you stared up, but just before the sun went down the cloud quilt would decide that the joke was over and disappear suddenly, leaving behind a sunset of fluorescent yellow, a million smashed lightbulbs across the skyline.

...and another part:

A curved gravel bay off the edge of the pavement came up at the pristine second and with just enough time Hunter swerved the wheel hard, smashing the brake pedal until the engine relented and shivered to still and silent.
To the left of our car was dense brush, overgrown and condensed until it appeared as a solid shade of muted green, but up to our right, that was why we had pulled over: a climbable-sized hill, mint green and lavender quaking against a heavy growling sky.
“Go! Go!” I wanted out, now, out of the car, out and up, and if the window would have opened far enough I would have squeezed my body through that way, but instead I tied my muscles down to wait until Kat had gotten out of her passenger seat and flipped the backrest forward.
“I’m climbing it, are you coming…” Everything excited in my head and my bones wouldn’t wait any longer and I don’t remember looking down the highway for traffic before flying across and then farther, over the boulders lining the road.
Without waiting for anyone else, I scampered up a little ways, but once I had made it over those boulders and into what had been a carpet of skin-soft vibrant purple and pine-tree greens I was soaked in seconds, wet all the way to my waist and pieces of the Scottish Highlands clung to my jeans as I pushed through thick grasses as close together and finely wired as the fur on a golden retriever.

...mehhh i'm not particularly ecstatic about how its going so far, but we'll see what happens in the next few hours.

list! list!
-5 weeks until school is over
-4 days until the weekend
-3 little pigs
-2 bands to interview for wednesday
-1 day without a cellular telephone

random stuff for Monday:

-I've officially worn through my favorite pair of boots and they no longer keep my feet dry in the rain which is a bummer. I'm thinking I probably just won't go outside when it rains now.
-Phil Collins.
-a playground where I pretended to be an astronaut and how amazing tennis is when you play it at midnight in July.

something in the deli aisle makes me cry

newest hobbies: watching The Blow videos on youtube, and making a number scroll that counts down the days to summer.
writing stories about cannibalistic kid circus performers.

reading about polar bears.

finding creepy faces

fake cake bones

This evening's update isn't really much of an update; it's more of a quick "I am so excited!" list and a blip of a new piece of work.

so, here are the "I am so excited!" parts:

1. I got a box from moooom today!!! the outside was polka-dotted and the inside was a song in the middle of a desert. It was such a sweet piece of today.
2. I MADE GOOD PASTA!!!! FROM SCRATCH! I guess that item should be in a list by itself: "whoah. did I really do that? that's amazing!"
seriously, guys, I can't cook to save my life so the fact that a) I didn't burn anything (like the house) and b) it tasted GOOD! are both pretty incredible by themselves.

There is no sound when Marian wakes up with her forehead on the table. She doesn’t disturb the moon-curved shape of her spine that sprouts from the junction of her hipbones, resting against the longitude of the oak chair, up to the first chapter of her skull.

The uneven table legs wobbled when the weight of her dreams changed shape, and the vibrations from her nightmares shook the room until the glass of water danced to the edge of the table and dived all the way down to the floorboards. It shattered and every mouse scattered; now Marian owns a small lake-puddle.

She is awake, still her eyes stay closed and she stares at the table through transparent eyelids. Oxygen molecules continue to be recycled, leaving a faint imprint a few centimeters below her lower lip.

The table knows everything about Marian; in his skeleton there are eight hundred and sixty-seven bruises that she has inflicted; his red linoleum belly carries her name, branded in the corner where her right palm bleeds perspiration the width of a quarter. He has measured her hands several times. They are smaller than her mother’s and grandmother’s hands, with distinct knuckles and joints and a thin white scar running up the inside of her index finger. He admires her hands and so does she. When Marian punches the keys of her typewriter she watches closely while her skin reveals the muscles and bones that make each finger tighten and release. She likes the shape of bones, the ones in her own body, and the ones she notices inside everyone else.

Noise refuses to perforate the navy silence that is swimming around the apartment. Marian's ears begin to ache and she is fully awake now, still alone with a mouse in the kitchen. He shifts his ears in her direction: he is familiar with her still frame. He begins to gnaw on something sharp, and she worries that it might be her ankle bone, but her brain is unable to sever itself from the cool comfort of her favorite animation.

“Es la una y media.” Her voice isn’t loud enough to reach her own ears but the mouse hears each syllable as a bell and a chime and pauses for three seconds to find Marian’s bell tower. It is still buried, but by now his optimism has expired and he runs around the shores of the new Great Lake, a conductor on his own track headed East.
He disappears and Marian’s eyeballs surface above the floral pattern on the sleeves belonging to her dress. Where each pupil used to be there is a button with four holes and when the weather is nice each one lets in a silky strand of sunlight.

I almost left without posting a picture, but I couldn't do it. So, here is my favorite other Josie: the goddess of comedy, Josie Long.

blizzard

I feel guilty for not going to class today. Or yesterday. However, the guilt is kind of unnecessary since if I had gone no one would have even been there. School has been cancelled for the last two days due to the MASSIVE amounts of snow all over Pullman. Seriously, it snowed eight feet Thursday night. Actually I'm kidding, it was more like one foot, but it was enough to warrant a state of emergency for eastern Washington.

...So instead of going to class, I decided to be productive with my Friday afternoon. I made a list of: red.

algae!

a red fox

lothian bus on princes street in edinburgh

llamar por telefono

red velvet cAke

and with that said and done, my plan is to walk home and make an irish cream coffee, eat tomato soup and watch my roomates play beer pong:

(just in case anyone would like clarification on the exact details of beer pong, courtesy of wikipedia:

Beer pong (also called Beirut, Ruit, Lob pong and other names) is a drinking game in which players throw a ping pong ball across a table with the intent of landing the ball in one of several cups of beer on the other end. The game typically consists of two two-player teams, one on each side of a table, and a number of cups set up on each side. There are no official rules, so rules may vary widely, though usually there are six, ten or 15 plastic cups arranged in a triangle on each side.[1] The number of players on a team can vary as well, from one to three or more.
When a ball lands in a cup, the defending team must consume that cup's beer. The game is won by eliminating all the other team's cups before one's own cups are eliminated. The losing team must then consume all the beer remaining in the winning team's cups.[1] The order of play varies – both players on one team shoot followed by both players on the other team, or players on opposite teams can alternate back and forth.[2] If two balls land in the same cup during the same round of play, play continues normally.
Today, beer pong is played at a multitude of North American colleges and universities and elsewhere. )

paint yellow sponge light

happy birthday brother!!!! i love you.

Excited?
(exclamation point automatically included at the end of each "excited" item)
I got a package from Lynn today
I'm going home tomrrow, for the weekend
Rocky Votolato
cupcake letters

also, something new:

They hold hands and they walk slow, through blazing magnetic tunnels of appliances.
-If you let go of my hand you’ll fly away and stick to the door of that refrigerator forever. I won’t be able to unglue you, and if you let go I’ll stick too, right to this other door and we’ll be stuck until our oldest birthday.
He is watching her watching, they follow, the fluorescent reflection on commercial linoleum.
-Don’t let go and don’t step on the seams between the tiles either, if you do, the floor will make a hole that only someone who is you could fit through.
Her eyes are blue and his eyes are green and their eyes are serious together.
-Where would you go? Would you have to die forever? No, but you would have to swim for 86 days through an ocean just full of mirrors that only show someone else’s life-someone you don’t know and can never know now; and this ocean isn’t crystalline and salty-dense like our own great shell-maker, where we grow wings and see all the gold topped mountains with Christmas tree forests, the ones that have all their lights on all the time. This ocean isn’t the liquid insides of something we love. It is everything from your nightmares and my nightmares and everyone else’s all lit on fire and melted into a sticky puddle you have to swim through for 86 days.
She has nightmares in the afternoon. He has nightmares at 3 a.m.
-What happens when you get to that other side? Nothing is soft or satin and we would always be trying to find each other, like a game of hide and seek in the snow when you don’t know that there is no one is hiding, because no one exists on this side of your inky ocean; it’s only yours. Everyone else in our whole history, yours and mine, they all have their own melted nightmare coastlines and inlets and tsunamis.
She is sure his words are all true, more than anything else she’s ever heard.
-On your shore? What else happens there? Purple pipe organs use their lips to mouth the saddest songs you can’t hear, but all your tears fall through your skin anyway, until a stream grows and grows around your ankles, trying to float you back to your ocean. You can only see things someone else thinks are real. If they tell you colors don’t happen, you forget what blue or yellow ever was, and kaleidoscopes will have to become spoons and your eyes wouldn’t see the green of the Ferris wheel or my red devotion.

something, important.

My roomates have been cooking and baking for the last few days and it smells incredibly delicious. Last night we had meatloaf and potatoes for dinner then today Jessica made cinnamon rolls and Amanda manufactored some rice krispy treats. I think this is the motivation I need to try my hand in the kitchen. I'm not sure what I'll make but here are some of my ideas:

sicilian market pasta:

asparagus pesto salad:

mac and cheese:



I found them all on my new favorite food site: http://www.blog.fatfreevegan.com/.

I think Fridays are my favorite day now, not because it is the last day of the school week (well, kind of) but because it is one of the only two days that the neat little thrift shop i discovered is open. It's also open on Thursdays but I'm in class all day so that doesn't work. The shop is the basement of a church and they have everything you could ever want in a thrift store for $2 per item. This Friday I am buying a sewing machine. yay.

ps. here is something new:

She is the muted three dimensional wallpaper
and the honeyed oak floors
that shine like a new ship deck.
She is the serving spoon in the sweet potatoes
and she is every single miniature marshmallow on top
that has been puffed to perfection in the oven
that is not her but will be soon.
She is the pastel peach carpet
that the vacuum cleaner inspects every afternoon.
She is all the tiles in the tile rummy game
we play after every Holiday dinner
and she is the front door that stays open
until we are out of sight.
She is the way he survives diabetes.
She is the pacemaker
the doctors inserted into his chest
(they don't know that she is there,
inside his blood pump).

Banshee at the Disco

Here are two photos from the shoot that BKay and I did (I'm still working on getting the rest onto a website, along with the stuff I did of Alex and Tony wearing Cheap Monday for Urban Outfitters. More updates on that as soon as I figure out how to write in HTML):

I'm at the Daily Grind so often that I'm starting to recognize people by their hairstyles now--I was standing in line, about to order my drink and the guy in front of me looked really familiar for a second (from the back anyway) and I almost said "hi" and then realized that I actually didn't know him at all, I've just seen him here for the last three nights, sitting at the same white table. His hair is kind of amazing though, really. The length is probably about an inch longer than mine, nearly the same color too, and slicked straight back into a super-smooth ponytail.

Speaking of the Daily Grind, this is the coffee shop that inspired the name of my blog, Coffee and Bricks. The "Coffee" part relates to the college student staple: caffeine

and the "Bricks" part was inspired by the brick interior of the coffee shop (brick people not included):

So I know how exciting pictures of bricks can be, but I have another photo that is even more fun and relates to some of my homework. In my English 351 class (creative writing: poetry) we had to choose a question from Pablo Neruda's Book of Questions and write our own poems. Here is my poem and the corresponding photo:

Are all fours equal? Are all sevens the same?

Four-eyed fish in every seventh sea
Swim between converging cello strings,
Thirty-two octaves below sixteen Anableps
Who keep forty-nine tempos in minuets.

Fourteen species gather every fifth century
In a mass of didactic symphonies
To compare in groups of two’s and three’s
All the sights each four-eye has seen.

During these meetings I am not in the room,
But mathematically, wouldn't one assume
Anything equal to our double eyes’ view
Could be twice as intriguing when noticed times two?

The poem received a fairly good review in class by Professor Boyd, which put me on top of the world for the rest of the day. Not only that, but I also splurged and bought a brand new blank composition book to write new stories. The excitement is almost overwhelming.

So tomorrow is Friday and apparently there is some sort of cocktail shindig at my house. It's always a good idea to start the weekend off with a bang.

coffee and bricks

I was going to start with introductions, but that feels way too much like the first day of school (yes, we still do that in college) and whoever is reading this probably knows me (hopefully), which makes introductions sort of pointless. Unless! I do them in Spanish! By utilizing everything I've learned in the first two weeks of my Spanish 101 class I might be able to tell you something you never knew before...



Here goes:



Vivo en Pullman con cuarto chicas y uno chico.

(I live in Pullman with four girls and one boy).



And on to bigger and better things...like lists!



Just in case anyone wasn't already aware, I have an obsession with lists; I make them for everything. Colors, textures, disgusting words, multi-syllable words describing grass, sunflowers, different kinds of bouncy balls, breakfast foods, bridges, homework, things I can do, things I would like to do, things I shouldn't do, things I should do, things I will do, things I shouldn't have done...there are about a million more but today's list doesn't have to do with any of those.

The title is: banana

Josephine baker, queen of the banana dance

banana split

banana spider

banana boat

banana man

My procrastination has been pretty successful so far (the banana split looks really good), but I have a Spanish test tomorrow to study for and creative writing pieces to critique as well as one of my own to write (which will be posted when it's done, critiques always welcome).

I'm thinking about just bringing a sleeping bag to the Daily Grind with me next time since I am here so often. I like being at my house but when I try and study there I either fall asleep or get distracted talking to people. It's fun, but not a good way to ace a Spanish test.

Oh! I almost forgot my most exciting news of all. My snow boots from Urban Outfitters arrived yesterday and now I am invincible. I could scale a vertical ice wall with these things, its completely exhilarating.
I purposely walked over all the icy spots where I've had altercations in the last two weeks and gave the ground a dirty look, 'take that sucka'.

Here is a photo of the magic: