seven...

Blog features my photo!

2009-10-29T11:56:00.000-07:00

Just a short post here to share the good news!

This kinda made my day! :)

http://www.slwbicycle.blogspot.com/

Etsy store!!

2009-10-27T22:32:00.000-07:00

My fabulous photos can now be found for sale on Etsy at www.Se7enMitchell.etsy.com

Please check it out and pick something up!

Note: this is but a fraction of the photos I have for sale. If you are looking for something particular, I can see what I have, and I am also accepting commission work.

Two days: The Aerospoke saga

2009-10-26T20:21:00.000-07:00

To use a cliché, today was a good day. I spoke with the manager at Apple who assured me he would place my name on the invite list for the next 'job event.' Apple has so many cute names for things. I am not sure when the 'event' will occur, but all I can do now I wait for the invite. While I was in Palestine I received an invite to a 'job event' at Apple, which, obviously I was unable to attend.

Also, my new amazing friend Jeffrey (the instructor of nude yoga in Pinellas Park that I go to every Wednesday at 6:30 (plug)) contacted me with a job lead at the Metropolitan Charities. Apparently his partner works there and told him they were hiring for a position. It has something to do with determining whether or not an applicant qualifies for what I think is some sort of grant, or scholarship, or assistance. I really have no idea, but I'll take it. I called and left messages with the contacts he passed along, so fingers crossed there.

My attempts to sell my Aerospoke have resulted in an unexpected amount of emotions and exposed feelings of attachment. To someone not in the bike scene, the concept must seem foolish, but to a fixed gear head, an Aerospoke is... in the sense of social capital, it would be like owning a house on Bayshore. It kind of makes you the shit. So obviously there would be some emotions involved when one decides to sell their "house on Bayshore." Also, my bike looks sad without it. I designed my bike around the Aerospoke. A Buddhist would be ashamed of such attachment; good thing I'm not a Buddhist.

I have had a few offers: $130 + another front wheel as replacement and $164. I paid $350 brand-new and I just can't let it go for less than $200.

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That was yesterday - today I sold my Aerospoke for $180, took a twenty-minute pout face down on my bed and the issue was over.

Also, I received my invitation to the 'job event' on the first of November. Light at the end, possibly, though I am also very interested to see where the Metro Center job goes.

Ramblings of a food extremist.

2009-10-24T22:54:00.000-07:00

Tonight I bought crack. Ice cream actually, but essentially crack cocaine.

I have a distain for food that requires you to savor them. Those foods I find dangerous. If a person were to consume ice cream with the same absentminded, survival-driven disposition associated with eating a bowl of rice it would seem indicative of some deep seeded psychological issue, or, in the least, emotional distress. People around them would worry.

It's because of this that I avoid certain things. I find sugar comparable to crack in American society. The same is true (and the comparison is actually stronger) for caffeine. The affects of these substances go unnoticed in a Starbucks and Dunk'n Donuts addicted society.

So why did I buy ice cream? Couldn't say. I don't even want it. Was it a bit of extravagance in sparse times? Was I challenging my own puritan-like approach to consumption? Had my commitment to a thirty-one inch waist momentarily waned?

Whatever the reason, I walked home with it swinging in the CVS bag at my side wondering whether or not I would consume the whole pint tonight or, since I now have a freezer capable of keeping ice cream solid, if I would save some, make it last.

It's interesting, this relationship to food. I'm not exactly sure where it comes from. My family never had any perverted concepts of food. We ate typically, nothing exceptionally indulgent nor austere. Of course not all issues are rooted in familiar development. I remember being interested at a rather predictable age with my body. I used to walk the halls of my high school with a constantly constricted abdomen. I recall very clearly enjoying the relief of the weekends simply because they meant a relaxed stomach. I was constantly thinking about sucking in my stomach. It should be mentioned that I was extremely thin; have been my whole life, actually, and yet, this preoccupation. It was then that I started to notice what I was eating, putting the diet = body equation together. Of course, as my eleventh grade social science teacher informed me, I am a person of extremes. Thus my solution was dietary restriction. For reasons not entirely vain I became a vegetarian at the celebratory dinner of my seventeenth birthday. Initially I told myself that it would be a challenge. I wanted simply to see if I could do it. However, as a teenager newly entrusted with purchasing my own food and increasingly responsible for its preparation as well, I noticed my habits taking a turn for worse. Pop-tarts are totally vegetarian (though not vegan due to the gelatin - a restriction to come), and so are French fries and frozen bean burritos. My attention was not aimed at vegetables, but rather prepackaged, frozen, frosted, preserved, jelly filled animal free foods. Fortunately, one can only eat so much of these things, and I proceeded, from my already low BMI to further waste.

The summer after I turned eighteen, 1999, was a summer of love for me. Gay bars, gay boys, gay parties, gay, gay, gay! I was awakened to a world of beautiful possibilities. One Sunday morning my father awoke to find me, a man I had met at a club named VaShaun, and my scantily clad girlfriend Kristin steaming asparagus in the kitchen. Another weekend, Sined and I decided to go to a different gay club every night for as long as we could. We went from Thursday to Sunday, and since Monday is gay rest day, we had to stop there. My friends and I threw "roll-a-thons," hotel parties whose main attraction was ecstasy and occasionally special K. I never partook of either, but rather contented myself with wine coolers and beer and the ever-entertaining recreation of 'blowing-up' those under the influence. What a strange time.

The waif look was in, heroine chic to use the cliché. And we all had it. Jutting hipbones, shallow faces, and a few too many visible ribs. It was the time of techno and raves, candy ravers, glow sticks, bass, pacifiers from the dollar store, Jnco's and Kik Wear. We had just finished high school and we had no fucking clue.

These times nurtured my sense of smallness, a need to waste away into near nothingness. If I could buy Jnco's whose leg circumference equaled the waist, and I did, I was happy. None of us took the time to step back and see what was really in the mirror, or rather, what wasn't. We just covered it with glitter and called it sex.

I never wanted to die. I was never anorexic to the point of suicide. I never felt that indifference towards life characteristic of chronic anorexics. I was just terrified of gaining fat.

I remember my relationship with the hunger most of all. It was almost comforting. I had learned to manage it. It had become a reminder that I was doing something right. I remember routinely missing meals to compensate for something "incredibly too fattening" that I had eaten earlier. This was no big deal; I just wouldn't eat. The hunger would come, and I would be used to it. It was an expected symptom and a sign that my body was eating my fat (or at least that's what I thought at the time).

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I didn't expect this post to become about eating disorders, nor had I planned to expose such an unexplored aspect of myself. I had hoped for a light-hearted anecdote. Something to counter my first post...

I guess that's the thing about these issues, one leads into another like spoonfuls of chocolate cookies and cream ice cream, one right after another. Hardly enough time to swallow before you're thinking about the next one. There's urgency in both cases, a need for more. This is life often, these spoonfuls. Always looking for the cookie chunks, the taste hardly savored before the search for another begins.

Except for tonight. Tonight I only had two bites of ice cream. I felt the flare of craving between the two bites though; my pupils dilated as if in pursuit of prey. I sensed the beginning of that habit that bifurcates the brain, allowing a person to eat an entire pint of ice cream with no recollection of its taste once it’s gone. Usually when these things happen people joke about them as just a fact of life. But I don't find them so simple. Those foods I find dangerous. And so I type, digging deep into this thing called me, these things called memories. Maybe I do take things too seriously. Undoubtedly Ms. Feliciani is reveling in her ability to pinpoint an extremist.

The art of change and defeat.

2009-10-24T16:39:00.000-07:00

If it were so easy, to translate one's thoughts into words, the world would cease to exist. Our interactions would consist of reading each others' thoughts on big screens. Every time we had an original thought, or made a decision, we would run to these screens and share them with others. If it were so easy, we would have access to free sites dedicated to hosting the thoughts of the commoner. Eventually we would spend the majority of our days attached to these screens, reading and posting, blogging, refreshing, reposting, sharing, copy-pasting, refreshing, linking, connecting, communicating; easy. Here I am, and it's still not easy.

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Today I woke up later than I expected, although with my recent illness and nightly use of a cough medicine considered a controlled substance, I can't even honestly say that I had expectations. I need to find a job. Badly. I've been "looking" for a number of weeks, ever since I got back from my Europe trip actually. Rent is about a week away, and, although I have enough to cover it, it will leave me hurting, big time. I've had leads, even one interview, but nothing's panned out. I keep hoping one day I'll wake up to an e-mail or a phone call, but that hasn't happened. I never really thought I would be in this position. I had my life figured out, in a non-commited, freeform type of way, but still. I was working on my Master's, headed towards a PhD. But like so many things in life, that changed.

Now I am stuck somewhere in-between two unknown places. Too buoyant to sink to the bottom just yet, but still not above water. I feel I should connect this feeling to some other thing, some depression maybe. And that may be true; there may be some truth to that. But what I find as more true is I don't know how to relate to "the world." Business, suits, memos, cubicles, meetings, pens and pads and the latest personal calendar for the year... these things are foreign to me. And yet, each time I find myself gasping for air I put on my pretend face and go running towards the safety of a world I don't understand. I cuddle up next to strangers whose lives have been so different than mine and pantomime professionalism. I succumb to the fact that we will never inherit the earth. And our attempts to remake it have resulted in fuck all in the end. I liked it when we all felt we could create our own ways of life. I would look around at my beautiful queer tribe and feel safe and complete. "We have this," we would say. And that was enough. But enough is never enough, and eventually it faded. Where did it go? Where did they go? Why am I suddenly alone, taking a typing test in a small room in a building built for business, hiding my beliefs and tattoos under a thin layer of defeat?