it is the second day of my vacation and I am sitting in a park. a punk is playing acoustic guitar and singing about a girl he misses. a saxophone player is playing 500 feet away. there are 50 different people having 50 conversations with my earshot, plus a baby wailing, two dogs barking and the dull roar of traffic just beyond the green edge of ( Read more... )

My birthday is always a complicated time for me. I do not like these rather arbitrary checkpoints, times when we are conditioned to look back and judge our own progress. As if my life on May 30th, 2010 can be related to my life on May 30, 2009 in neat list form:

Beth is
(check all that apply)Happier ( Read more... )

I love my new apartment, but I still don't sleep much. I had this feeling that moving, having space for my energy to expand and breathe, would somehow stop the raging insomnia that hit me in my middle twenties and won't let up ( Read more... )

So. Some of my work (including a few never-before-seen prints) will be included in The Girleye Show at A Gathering of the Tribes here in NYC ( Read more... )

I have lived in NYC for a little over four years. For three and a half of those years, starting in May of 2006, I've lived in a yellow brownstone on the nicest block of Bed-Stuy. In that time I've shared the building, which is set up like a rooming house, with Amanda the marine, Amanda the nurse, Ronie the fashion designer, KT the actor, Andy the ( Read more... )

It is hard to sum up a person with something as limited as words. If only I could give you a feeling, hand it to you across the table and say, "This. This is what she was like," and you would nod your head and understand.

On Thursday, a woman died.

( A long goodbye. )

These things are always strange. Everyone who's on a certain list gets a little badge and then after the show we all get herded to a cattle holding area to pay our respects. It's like a receiving line at a wedding, an exercise in giving homage to someone who will hug so many people they won't remember who was there anyway. But you do it, because ( Read more... )

My fever broke yesterday. It had been a year ( Read more... )

They say that of all the senses, smell has the greatest ability to make us nostalgic. Musty, dying smells conjure up forgotten afternoons of playing in abandoned barns. I keep smelling "new toy" and remembering sitting in the front seat of my mom's Volkswagon Rabbit, tearing open the package of the She-Ra doll who had wings. I walked into David' ( Read more... )