Idiosyncrasies

Perfect Albums

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 04:46:57 +0000

A list of my favorite albums in no particular order, except #1

1. Graceland -Paul Simon

2. Blood on the Tracks -Bob Dylan

3. Sigh No More -Mumford and Sons

4. Boxer -The National

5. The Midnight Organ Fight -Frightened Rabbit

6. Parachutes -Coldplay

7. Kid A -Radiohead

8. I and Love and You -The Avett Brothers

9. City of Black and White -Mat Kerney

10. Where the Light is -John Mayer

11. Thicker Than Water -Jack Johnson and The Malloys

12. Gavin Degraw -Gavin Degraw
(I keep buying his CDs hoping that he will top his debute album but it has yet to happen.)

13. Traveling Willburys Vol. 1 – Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne and Roy Orbison

14. Full Moon Fever -Tom Petty
(I love every Tom Petty album ever, each one has a gem, but this is the one I remember singing in the car with my mom)

15. Elizabethtown Soundtrack -Various Artists

16. The Very Best of The Eagles – The Eagles
(None of their albums ever hit it out of the park, but this compilation is perfection)

To be continued

Uggg

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 01:38:44 +0000

Today driving away from the prison after picking up my check for when I worked there. The thing is… it was a lot of money. I was making a lot of money. But I hated that job more than anything I have done with my life.

So I have come to this line in my life where I can do what I love for very little, or serve as a cog in a system for a lot, but doesn’t that seem wrong? My utopian society includes high pay for creative types like myself.

I am forever thankful for the job I have now. I get to come up with ideas and follow through on them, I get to make things happen. But these last few weeks have been anything but easy, because there is an individual at the college who desires to ruin my life. Why? You know, I’m not really sure. I have been unfailingly kind to her. I give her the benefit of the doubt, I forgive, forgive, and then forgive again; yet it would still seem that she desires my demise. So much so that she had her son write a nasty threat filled letter of things that I supposedly said. Except I didn’t. Having someone lie about me is one of the hardest situations I have ever dealt with. It seems like this person isn’t just trying to ruin me, but she is trying to assassinate my character and I find that unacceptable. To the point where I avoid said person at all cost, I have rearranged my life to accommodate her comings and goings. I feel like I am walking around with a target on my back. While I understand that not everyone will like me, I never expected someone to hate me. I have spent a good portion of my life trying to extinguish hate wherever possible. I have given my life to loving people, to hospitality and outright positivity until you believe it, and then some. I believe in the creative power of people, I believe that in every person there is passion and power just waiting to be pulled out and put to use.

I suppose that at the root of what I am feeling is disappointment. I want someone to stick up for me, to testify to my character. I have to believe that there is a higher opinion to seek, but it’s hard sometimes. Because when you are sitting in a room with three people who barely know you and you are accused of something that you would never say, never do, and no one says “Toni would never say that” it’s hard. And I cried. And it was good. Good to cry, good to be vulnerable with these people, because vulnerability is the key to healthy relationships. But perhaps I was the only person in the room who understood that. Perhaps they all see me as weak and fallible.

I assemble words to express my emotions. Remember who you are, Toni. You have everything you need, Toni. Move on, Toni. But those words don’t undo the hurt I feel, or the fear.

Once, on a picnic table in the forest, I swore to myself that I wouldn’t let fear drive my life.
I would stop making decisions out of fear, stop hiding from the world.
I desired to be true and vulnerable and courageous.
At 22 I am young enough to be an idealist, yet everyday is a struggle to maintain,
kindness is not always easy.

Fear is not the enemy, but a life driven by fear is.
To top all of this off, a friend who deals with mental illness recently wrote me on Facebook after months with out hearing a word. And while I have no idea how to start that dialog, I know that the best response I can find is “I’m good, how are you?” Is this enough? Does it span the canyon that has grown between us?
Of course not. But it’s a start.

And nobody knows.

Sat, 07 Aug 2010 21:33:20 +0000

Relay for Life took place on my mom’s birthday. Timing truly is everything.

So yesterday, when I saw a doctor for the first time in four years, he asked me
“Was Relay for Life a healing experience for you?”
I couldn’t say yes.
“I am not ready to get on the Ra Ra Let’s Beat Cancer train” I told him.
I need to win the battle for my own life before I can fight for others.
I don’t yet believe that I have any power to fight back against this force that has ravaged my life
so completely.
I still find myself wandering around amazed that life just keeps
going on.
Six months goes by and when I look back I realize how thinly veiled my grief has been.
I could have kept working, I could have done better in that Philosophy class.
I could have taken all this emotion and channeled it,
into art, into life, into raising money for research and treatment.
But I didn’t, and I can’t.
Because I am depressed.
And as it turns out, the first step towards fighting depression is not getting more exercise,
or eating healthy.
It is not drinking or smoking
or trying new, stronger things to stay emotionless.

The first step towards fighting depression is talking to a doctor. And I did.

And now I am on an antidepressant that I have no faith in but I am going to try it because if it works then I will get my life back.

And that’s all I really want right now.

Life list #21 – #32

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 17:29:37 +0000

I love lists, this part of the list is mostly about recreational activities, which I really suck at.

campfire

22. Canoe (Is it really so different from kayaking?)

23. Heimlich Maneuver

24. CPR/ First Aid

25. A good magic trick

26. A neat card trick

27. A great bar trick

28. Flip a coin with ease

29. Play Ping Pong well

30. Play Foosball well

31. Play Pool well

32. Set a fishing hook

Shelter from the storm

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 07:25:22 +0000

There are some things that I never knew that I would miss about my mom, but I stumble over them everyday. Today I was sitting on the floor of the thrift store sorting through records, and only one of the hundreds fell into the “good music” category. I came home tired and dirty and decide to do something that I didn’t even know I was avoiding until I did it. I opened her record cabinet. I pulled out every record that she owned and I flipped through them one by one. Marshal Tucker, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Grateful Dead, Charlie Daniels. LP after LP stacked up as evidence that my mother only bought perfect albums. And I didn’t know, I wasn’t aware that you could miss not just a person but a quality in a person that makes you ache because it so reflects your own soul.

My sister and her friends were getting ready in the bath room tonight while listening to Top 2o on the satellite. They left and I muted Eminem to put on Bob Dylan: Blood on the Tracks

“I was in another lifetime one of toil and blood
When blackness was a virtue and the road was full of mud
I came in from the wilderness a creature void of form
“Come in” she said
“I’ll give you shelter from the storm”.”

Normally I look up a song I want to hear on Youtube and play it through my Macbook speakers. It felt so good to hear something authentic the way it was meant to be heard, it even skipped once.
My mom taught me to appreciate the good stuff, and to stay fully engaged in life and the world around me. I blame her for leaving me completely powerless when I find a copy of Paul Simon’s Graceland, I buy every one. I credit her with my sense of what makes great music: powerful lyrics, visible souls, the kind anyone can dance to. I regret that she isn’t here to listen to Bob or Paul with me.

“And she says losing love
Is like a window in your heart,
Everybody sees you’re blown apart,
Everybody feels the wind blow”

Life list # 11- #20

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 20:09:41 +0000

11. Change a tire

12. Jump start a car

13. Change my oil

14. Check oil and tire pressure

15. Put on Snow Chains by myself

16. Make a signature cocktail

17. Hang a picture frame

18. Skip a rock

19. Speak basic Spanish

20. Speak basic French

Our tragedy today…

Mon, 24 May 2010 08:18:32 +0000

“…Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed–love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”

William Faulkner

Down with the system

Wed, 19 May 2010 08:28:39 +0000

I am so tired of processing photos. I am done. No more. I quit. Here, look, these are pictures I took of some awesome people playing fantastic music. If you think they need processing then maybe the whole WORLD needs processing, and I just dont have time for that.

Mighty Life List #1 – #10

Sat, 08 May 2010 20:40:12 +0000

Breakin’ it down because the only way to eat an elephant is ten bites at a time!

Toni’s Mighty Life List

(Inspired by Maggie Mason)

1-10 From the list of Fifty Nifty Skills I want to learn

1. Simple Mending

2. Quilting

3. How to Knit

4. How to Crochet

5. Organic Gardening

6. Double Dutch

7. How to Play Crystal Glasses

(My new friend Adam, whom I met in LA gave me a good lesson, I need a lot more practice)

8. How to Bake Bread

9. How to use a Compass

10. How to Trap a mouse

It is Sara’s birthday today! Happy 17th Birthday Sara Joy, I love you with my whole heart, my lungs, and my limbic system too.

On Memorials

Sat, 08 May 2010 08:36:16 +0000

me·mo·ri·al

–noun

Something designed to preserve the memory of a person, event, etc., as a monument or a holiday.

As silly as it sounds, Iron Man is a memorial. I can tell you that I saw Iron Man in the Vallejo theater on a Thursday. My sister was visiting for her birthday and she begged me to go with a bunch of boys from Master’s. This was right after Ken’s mom died. I remember bringing left overs from Olive Garden to the movie and sharing them with the boys, my incessant need to feed people alive and well. I sat in my room that week and planed my great escape from Master’s Commission. I was going to move to Redding, and I did. I wrote out a budget that is laughable now, I had a plan! Sara turned 15. I sent my mom a card for Mother’s Day. We didn’t understand each other then, I was 20 years old and full of hope; she was struggling with addiction.

Today, Sara is 17. Two years and a lifetime of struggle, and we are repairing. I sat in the theater at midnight watching Iron Man 2, wondering why I felt so melancholy. I watched Aladdin in this theater when I was four, it was my first movie. Mother’s Day is Sunday and I will go and pick lilacs from her favorite bushes and gather them in a vase. The house will be filled with that beautiful smell for a week or two, my mom’s favorite smell. I am 22 and full of hope, she is gone, but at least we understood each other.