i was having a low week last week.  my life is non-existent.  school is everything and at the same time means nothing if i’m slightly miserable.
but on a particularly blue day i received a square brown envelope with an ‘air mail’ ink stamp and opened it to find your beautiful zine.
it’s reassuring.  the colours, content and layout.  the smell of the ink is amazing too.  i have to close my eyes every time i breathe it in; the smell of ink is something i love deeply and reminds me of the wrapping paper from japanese department stores.
i love it.  it is really the perfect thing for me.  it’s just perfect, really.
it says a lot without saying anything in particular.  it doesn’t try too hard.
really nice job, kara.

i’m homesick for familiarity, for being able to navigate through dealings in my own language, the endless possibility of north america.  i feel constantly faced with having to make something extraordinary, something beyond what i love,  to imbue everything with stories and to always have to answer, ‘why?’  why can’t something simply be ordinary and beautiful?

i do a lot of what’s going on in the book and reminds me that i’m not alone in it.  thank you.  i kind of want to carry it around wherever i go.

From here.

I had an assignment to create my own version of ‘mesa’ by dutch artist herman de vries.  His work consisted of a collection of items he had accumulated over the years, arranged in a graphical manner.  As a way of documenting time and one’s relationship with objects, shoes were for me a way of expressing time and history.  When I put the collection together, I was reminded of the time and place I acquired each pair, what I did in them.  They made me reflect on why I bought them, who I felt I was or what character I was trying to embody -it became a self-reflexive exercise that made me critical of certain choices I had made.  Among them why I regularly buy two of the same shoe but in different colours, why had I gone on a hunt for nicer running shoes when I decided to start running when I had a perfectly decent pair already, why did I allow a Berlin haze to influence my purchase of some extremely loud chainmail looking ankle boots in the summer of 2006 (three rows from the top, far right)and despite rarely wearing them since, why do I insist on keeping them.  Makes me think.  I don’t keep a journal and am shit at regularly using my agenda, I never do status updates on facebook nor use twitter (the purpose still eludes me), my email and written correspondence is deplorable and yet my collection of shoes (and those let go over the years) remains a concise diary of my adult history.

And as I’m always trying to grow in some way, I hope to add these adorable hiking boots from Hayashi to the shoe diary come fall.

Whenever I fly back from a visit in Vancouver, my mom always makes me a bento lunch to bring on the plane.  I flew to Amsterdam yesterday and in my bento I found among many inari, a green onion omelette and genmai matcha teabags, carrots that were cut by hand to resemble cherry blossoms.  I remembered she had gotten up a bit early to make prepare it for me and as I ate those carrots I was filled with so much love for this perfect bento box and the extraordinary person who made it.

Go blonde as least once in my lifetime.  And perhaps have really curly hair -though not at the same time.  Nature gave me the opposite of both and I want to try the other side.

Photo from here.

I can watch this Norman McLaren piece a million times over and still think it’s totally breathtaking.  Same goes for the Chris Cunningham Gucci ad.

Happy Cinco de Mayo.

Perhaps it’s just me, but it seems as though wedges are a hard sell with boys. Not that it really matters but I found it curious that a pair of wedge oxfords I got from H&M made my closest male counterparts cringe and label ‘disgusting’ while girlfriends were all ‘loves it.’ The negative sentiment was transmitted from an instinctual place for most, but only one was able to elaborate beyond pure emotional response and told me they made feet look not human, like hoofs or clunky robot feet. I think hoofs and robots are interesting.

(I returned the H&M wedges; not because of dissenting opinion but because they were horribly uncomfortable).

New spring love from Minimarket c/o Tres Bien Shop.