Janna Ireland

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

This move is ingeniously timed to coincide with my 21st birthday.  I’ve been haunting the Ikea website, assessing sofas and butcher blocks, scrutinizing cutlery and shelves.  When I move this time it will be the real thing, no more futons or dorm lamps or shitty found furniture.  No more Playskool apartments.  From then on, Ill be a grown-up.  How about that?

Is it perverse for a modern woman to find joy in domestic activities?  I love cleaning the bathroom and folding the linens and getting up and making him scrambled eggs.  Inside this new body beats an old-fashioned heart.

Wrote this not long after I met Joe, as we prepared to move from the apartment we met in into the apartment that would become the last place we lived in New York. Four years later, the Ikea sofa I chose so carefully is gone, as is the butcher block, and the two of us are two thousand miles away from Brooklyn. My love affair with cleaning and folding has ended, and I’m too tired to feed myself most mornings, let alone make eggs for someone else.

A couple days late, but I just found it now and I don’t want to wait another year to post it. At the time I wrote this entry I was fresh out of college. Usually, these entries come from much further back in time, and I’m sort of poking fun at the goofy, mixed-up kid I used to be. It’s strange to be posting one written such a short time ago, by which time I sounded like the me that I am now.

Tuesday, September 18, 2007 

A lot has happened in the last month and a half—since the day I met Lyle Ashton Harris—but I get distracted every time I start to write things down. Here is a quick summary: I read a lot of good books, I went to Fire Island, I had a lot of crazy dreams, I went to Governor’s Island, I was (am) in an art show, I turned 22, and someone I went to high school with died. I had a lot to say on that last subject in particular, but nothing I wrote down sounded right. More has happened but these incidents, recorded here in no particular order, are the first things that came to mind.

I’ve been taking pictures. Lots and lots of pictures—about a thousand in the month and a half I just recapped for you. I am excited about a lot of them, and relieved to find myself able to work independently. Finishing school did not mean the end of my taking photographs, but it did mean the end of thoughtful, weekly discussions about how I am improving and/or what I am doing wrong. It was only in my last year of school that I came to value critiques, and now I am in desperate need of people to show my work to. I miss getting and giving feedback, and seeing other people’s work in progress. I might try to start some kind of Photography and Imaging alumni critique group, if I didn’t feel alienated from and awkward around most members of that particular group (my own fault). There has to be some kind of club I can join, right? All I want is someone to tell me whether or not the work I’m doing now is shit, and to help me do some editing.

Also in this last month and a half—and I never thought I’d say this—I’ve gotten really excited about the prospect of leaving New York. I’ve started trolling the Craigslist apartment listings in the cities Joe and I are considering schools in. For what we pay to live in our little apartment in Brooklyn, we could be living like kings in Providence, RI or Chicago or just about anywhere else. Ideally we’d just get really rich and stay here and live like kings, but when it comes down to it that’s not much of a plan.

Who knew that two years later we would be married and living in Eugene, Oregon, indeed like kings?

Past Blasts: August 13, 2002, September 18, 2002, December 3, 2005, Friday, January 11, 2003/Wednesday, January 12, 2005, July 17, 2004, May 18 2003/2004/2007, July 14, 2002

Nerdy summer art camp edition.

When I was 16 I got into this crazy five-week summer arts program to study photography. I met some incredible people and took hundreds of photographs and ate a Belgian waffle with ice cream on it for breakfast nearly every day but somehow lost three pounds. It was one of the best experiences of my life up to that point (and remains so today, and that’s really saying something because I’ve had some good times), and I dreaded going home and spending another year in Philly before I could go away to college. Once a week or so I would slink off to the computer lab to chronicle my anxiety:

July 14, 2002 5:59 p.m. bunny

among other things, i got a polaroid camera for $2.79 from the salvation army on sassafras street yesterday. we took a cab there and came back with almost too much to be carried. i spent too much money on polaroid film and now i’m wasting it. i took a picture of a rabbit with the camera on the way here, to the library, that’s just about dry now. the rabbit looks far away in the picture, but it was so close…

things are good up here, and i don’t miss anything. i can already feel how hard it’s going to be coming back. going back.

maybe i do miss things. rather, i would if i stopped to think about all that i’m away from. but i’m too busy to stop. there’s the fear that too much contact will contaminate this place with that place and that place with here. and i want them apart. i have letters to write.

later. i have to go now.

When I got home I was miserable for weeks and mean to everyone, and my senior year in high school turned out to be just as painful and difficult as I’d expected it to be.

Past Blasts: August 13, 2002, September 18, 2002, December 3, 2005, Friday, January 11, 2003/Wednesday, January 12, 2005, July 17, 2004, May 18 2003/2004/2007

Triple feature today, folks. May has always been a time of excitement and change for me, so it makes sense that I happen to have made online journal entries on this date in three separate years, long before I fell in love with Tumblr and started posting every day. The first entry was written when I was 18 years old, and the third when I was 21.

From my Diaryland account, gone but not forgotten:

Sunday, May 18, 2003

Everything is happening NOW. I graduate in less than a month. My final projects are due this week. My last Rock School show—the benefit, at the Troc, no less—is in a couple weeks. All the people that I will miss are finalizing their plans for next year, and in shock over still being in high school. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
Everyone is filled with this weird energy. Everything I touch is charged. It’s like every minute is one before an electrical storm.

From my long-dead LiveJournal, a year to the day later:

Tuesday, May 18th, 2004 

Math Club Homestead, Day 12

You know what’s awesome?
The way every issue of Black Hole fits perfectly in the plastic comic sleeves.
Not having internet access at the homestead ain’t so bad. Means I read and clean and stuff.
Haley left this morning. And then there was one. Me all alone in the apartment, curled up in my fort reading Roald Dahl short stories. It’s fantastic. I ought to call Garrett, though.
Work is dead dead dead today. The calm before the storm.

MySpace, three years later:

Friday, May 18th, 2007

My job is difficult and not at all rewarding. Today, I cried a little in an elevator. Shed actual tears. Three of them, all from my right eye. I’ve developed a stress-related eye twitch, and, the other night, I had a dream about screwing up at work. When I’m there, I forget I have a life outside of the office. It is all consuming.

But enough about that. How about my life on the outside?

I’m trying to do constructive things with all this free time I suddenly have. I’m going to pick up where I left off with the non-profit art organization I did some work with last year. I’ve been taking pictures. This is a small edit from a huge group of dance photographs that I’m pretty psyched about (once again, I recommend slideshow mode). There are books I’ve been meaning to read. I’m working on consolidating my ridiculous loans, and when they are one, I will begin the repayment process. We’ve got to finish cleaning—Joe’s mom is coming next week. I’m itching for a new art project.

Past Blasts: August 13, 2002, September 18, 2002, December 3, 2005, Friday, January 11, 2003/Wednesday, January 12, 2005, July 17, 2004