Birthday paint

MINIATURE PAINTING

I just finished this little tiny rendition of my magnolia paintings for my coworker Maria for her birthday, which is tomorrow, same as Jordan's. The size is about 3 by 5. That's in inches. The color didn't come through that well. It is more turquoise in the background than that dull blue. But oh! the magesty of the scanner! Instant gratification!
i came to the city
and lived like old Crusoe
on an island of noise
in a cobblestone sea....
That's what the background writing says. Joni Mitchell, if anyone was wondering. It just sort of popped into my head today, because I was thinking of living in this city, and being made joyous and revulsed by it every single day. I've been reading Summer's blog and she just moved to scary Brooklyn and is going through a lot of the fears and joys I first had *and still have* since i moved here. The lyrics pertain to how I see things:
And the beaches were concrete and the stars paid a light bill and the blossoms hung false in their store-window trees....
In other news:
My parents just bought a plot of land in a rural Canadian suburb (!) so now we will have somewhere to run to when this whole shithouse (aka America) goes up in flames.
hah.
Reading: a scary large novel called "The Historian" by Elizabeth Kostova (a NEW book! wow!) on 1970's historians' search for the ancient Dracula, Vlad the Impaler, Vlad Tempes, or whatever you call him. It's ok, engrossing at least and seemingly translated from some other language, which gives the writing a precise beauty. I'll have to check on which language if any it's translated from. I remove the jackets when reading books "borrowed" from work, so I don't muss them.
I just finished an even scarier book about Mormon fundamenalists by John Krakauer called "Under the Banner of Heaven". I've always been a sympathetic athiest, I think, with even a bit of religon-envy (because of all the passionate art that has been inspired by religion) at times, with a general belief that relgion is a tool- like drugs or therapy- and can be a helpful or a very dangerous thing. Mostly the latter, not the former...but this book left me with a very bad taste in my mouth. People are pretty amazing when it comes to the stuff they will believe. Faith is something maybe i won't ever understand fully...then again,........ as I said to Mykle at dinner tonight,"I don't believe in mystical stuff or esoteric stuff except for dreams that tell the future and worlds beyond this one that exist on the same plane, and magical love hexes, and faerys, and unicorns."