i am sitting in my room, listening to music i shouldn't be listening to, putting copies of my newest zine together. all the while wondering what i am doing, how i feel about what i am doing, and blah blah blah. in the fashion of one of my favorite zines by Kaitlin i decided to interview myself. the topic: my newest zine... here we gowhats the new zine called?
-its called 1000
which means...?
-basically its a play off the saying "a picture is worth 1000 words". my favorite pictures, when i look at them, overwhelm me with thoughts, thousands of words, feelings, it becomes this cluster of emotion. some better left in the suitcase of which they live.
so this is your second zine, how do you feel about it in comparison to your first?
-reading it now, its a lot like the first, people may be bored reading it, thinking "ugg shes not over it yet", but its not for people, its for me. its some of my favorite pictures that i have taken and a small piece of what they mean to me, what they remind me of, why i love them. i have a real bad memory and one day i think i will forget all my memories. so i write cliche things on them that will always remind me of why they were once important. i hope one day they will still make me feel how they do today.
so does that mean you like this one better than the last?
-right now i hate it, i'm sick of reading it, i don't want to send them out. but i did that last time too; in a month i will pick it up and love it. overall i am proud, i think its better than the last, and it give me hope that the next one will be even better.
a lot of the photos seem to be about love. why does that seem to be a theme?
-i guess it is. i guess its because of where i am now. alone, and learning to be ok with it. that i wont let myself be with someone until i am ok with being alone. my mind tricks me often with love, well the idea of it. i have been there before, what i thought to be many times, turns out it was only once or twice. i worry that i convince myself i feel things that it turns out i don't. some of the pages are about feelings that i never thought could exist. i wrote a few to remind me that i really did feel those ways and that the situation was real.
recently i got as close to love as i thought possible, and then it was gone. i don't want to lose hope that i will find someone to love that much again, but i'm honestly not very hopeful right now. so instead of looking, instead of crying all the time, i work, i work really hard at the rest of my life. you may say i try to stay distracted, i have been told i am a work-aholic, but i don't think either are bad things to be. i just have to wait it out. one day i will stop feeling empty and have the feelings in those pages again.
so the boy(s) in the zine...?
-one i would just sum up as complicated. it was a few years of intensity; so much intensity that i don't think we let ourselves enjoy so much of it. now that it is over i have a hard time understanding what it really was, and what it is that i miss. after it was over, i always meant to try to have him in my life, but i never did try, it just went away. i still care about him, i miss him, but it is so clouded now that its just a bunch of random memories and not much feeling.
the other is the opposite. it was intense in my mind, but overall it was so laid back and easy that it made me freak out. i made things bigger than they were, i think i was just use to there being an issue, drama, that i couldn't just let it be amazing. there are parts of him that i know i will never find again and it scares me. i have the reasons i tell myself it didn't work out, but it comes down to either me screwing it up or him not wanting me like i did him. i go back and forth daily on which is true. if i never have him again, it was worth the things i learnt. it is a bunch of amazing memories of times spent doing nothing and feelings that i don't see ever fading.
the other theme seems to be death, is this something you fear?
-i don't think i fear it, maybe it makes me a little anxious, but i know it happens to us all. i worry a lot about not being finished in time, not saying what i need to say, doing what i want to do. i have had a few friends leave without me saying what i needed. its a hard thing to live with, but i know everyone has the same stories as i do.
the picture of the baseball field; she wasn't there, but it was a time when she was in my life. there are a lot of pictures and memories that remind me of her just because of the time in my life it was. i miss her a lot, i miss those days a lot, but i always seem to miss something.
overall i think i fear other peoples death more than my own. i fear my dog dying and hating myself for not spending enough time making his life great. i fear my parents dying and me regretting not being nicer to them. i fear the boy i love dying and never getting to hug him again. for me, i guess if i go i go, so i try to live a life i want so i wont regret it.
the last page, the one about reno, seems sort of out of place, thrown in there. how do you feel about it?
-i put it in, took it out, rewrote it, lather, rinse, repeat... reading it now it had to be there. reno is huge part of me right now, it means a lot to me. i feel the last page ties the whole thing back together. it started and ended here. it has made me who i am, it made me a photographer.
but i thought you say you are not a photographer in the zine?
-i just like pictures. i like cliche words. i like them together. i like my stuff and how it makes me feel inside. how it can make me sit here and cry, when i haven't been able to for months. photos, art, whatever, it is my sanity.
"the days that make me" had a pretty touching dedication. why is there no dedication on this one?
-there doesn't need to be; the person its for knows its for them.
so overall, how do you feel about it?
-i feel good. i think it is important for where i am right now, how i am feeling. i feel it gives me hope and inspiration to move onto whatever my next project is.
any idea of what the next one will be about?
-i have notes that i have written twice without realizing it, about "love" and my history with it. also i want to write about songs that remind me of specific moments in my life. the ones that you hear and you picture exactly where you were and what you were doing. but i don't know, we will see.
