I AM FINALLY after six years of insane crazytown apartments/roommates/neighborhoods in SEVEN different apartments in NYC, am moving into my very own studio apartment!
YAY!!!!! With that said, I have a lot of purging to do to fit comfortably.
Some bitchin’ boots, yo.
The vintage scene, as I am sure you know, has really quadrupled in the past eight or so years. One of my regrets in life is not buying it up before it’s price tag become like antique furniture. I went to college in upstate NY and am from Pennsylvania AND often went on family vacations either up north in New Hampshire or Maine or down South in South Carolina or Tennessee. Why in the hell did I not buy it up? Stock up? Shit. I’ve been a vintage whore since I was probably 14 and used to adore California for the same loves– vintage cars, vintage furniture, and good old-fashioned vintage frocks!
Man, I used to daydream about moving to Cali and driving my 1965 Mustang Fastback to and fro furniture shops, fillling my 1930′s bungalow with treasures. I used to fill my last college house with some really fantastic vintage finds as well. I wish I still had some pictures. Actually, let me dig:
a-ha! Found some, thanks Facebook!
A vintage find that inspired a painting
My Last Apartment in Upstate NY's Living Room
Feigned Discomfort at a College Party in Vintage Pinks & Earrings
The Only Time I've Lived Alone: My Sitting Room With Vintage Finds
A Crazy Outfit, But Probably Cost $10
My College Bedroom, Somewhat Homeless-Looking, But Hey! It Was College!
Over-the-top, yet Vintage
It’s my first day off in three weeks and I am going to take full advantage! I submitted to my bed last night at 9:45 and awoke at 10:20am, recalling dreams about new apartments, riding on waterslides with dolphins, and parties with friends. Oh brain!
I also realized this morning that I have tomorrow and Friday off too, so rather than dig myself an early grave and continue doing work, I’m going to the woods! I’m hopping on a bus to my parents house and I can’t wait to play with our dog and watch movies and run through the woods at 100mph, falling in holes and climbing trees…. if my weary body can handle that.
So I teach sewing lessons at this great play in Chelsea in Manhattan and I had a two hour break in between classes yesterday and decided to go to the gym. It had been a little while and I was tired, but I thought, oh man, energy’s a comin’! After running and cycling, I felt worse. My body was like, okay girl, this is it! When I got back to the sewing studio to teach, I decided to tell my students that English was my second language because I was making no sense. I kept using grammatical endings incorrectly. I was dog tired. The gym was not my savior.
I had a really erratic sleeping schedule these last few weeks, having to be at some jobs on set at 6am and then having to work at other jobs til 1am, this created a wonderful dose of insomnia, my body confused as to when it should wake up. Last night I caught up! Sleep has always been a thing of mystery for me. It sometimes escapes me for multiple nights of lying in bed for 9 hours with no dozing. I aim to create rhythm and repetition in my schedule to doctor this. Sleep is important, man!
On a happy and healthy note, I have been writing a new play and it’s been really fun. I have been doing a lot of research to develop the characters by watching a lot of rock n’ roll documentaries and I cannot wait to perform it for my theatre company soon.
On that note, we are having a show at the end of this month in NYC for five consecutive weeks!! Here are the deets and the new promo video we filmed two weeks ago: Me amo rock n’ roll and me amo acting/theater/my company!
This morning my alarm went off and finished my nutty dream. It was the nuttiest one I’ve had in a while and I must say that I wish I could synopsize all of the details. I can draw it probably, but then I will be late for work!
I had a dream that I was riding a motorcycle really really fast up an endless escalating parking garage ramp for an hour and then wound up at a garage guest house where my friends Tygar & Delaney lived. Tygar greeted me into the kitchen and I kept trying to leave because I thought she didn’t want me there. Then I wandered into Delaney’s bedroom, which was “the big bedroom” and the size of a Kmart. To the right, she had at least ten giant ornate antique wooden beds in strange shapes (one was triangular and reminiscent of the Addams Family. She also had brass beds to the far right and I commented on the fact that I always wanted one, which I do. Delaney also had tons of grand giant furniture & she said that she had had to buy a dumptruck to get all this furniture from PA. I thought to myself, oh she’s a furniture conneisseur. I followed her over to the left where there was a loft above us and a tight space below. She started smoking a cigarette and I turned to look at what was beyond the loft and saw a giant projector screen, which was screening a video on bugs atop very very green vegetation.
The weird thing is that I can pinpoint exactly what in my day yesterday spawned this dream. For instance, after work, I passed a garden supply store, which had green green grass and plants. I also went to my friend’s house for the first time and he has very large grand antique wooden furniture. I also saw Tygar last night and walked home with her. Before I fell asleep last night, I thought about how I should make a fabric covered faux headboard for my bed, and lastly, I saw an amazing motorcycle two days ago and almost wanted to get on it.
It’s so incredible how the brain then creates a map between these things and thus, a story. High five, brain! I was thoroughly entertained.
I grew up in the woods.
And I moved to the city so when it snows here, I first get very very excited like any kid at heart and then in the rapid succession of minutes afterwards, the snow turns to grey slush and then disappears with the salt trucks that come barreling through the urban streets. This leaves us all barely enough time to finish our morning coffee before the ability to sled has become nil for anyone living near modern roadways. On Sunday, I awoke, stretched, and had a feeling.
I had a feeling that it had snowed and boy was I right. I threw open the blinds that obscure my nearby neighbors from spying on me and beheld a glorious site: SNOW SNOW SNOW!
I had lots to do, oh boy, but I could not and would not wait until the sun went down to go outside. No one was around so i went out alone. I live on the edge of Brooklyn where it meets Queens and walked towered Queens where I knew there would be more of a suburban feel and thus more snow to traverse. I walked with no goal in mind and everything is obscured when it’s covered in snow anyway. I passed a McDonalds and a Dairy Queen and kept walking. As I approached a very high hill, I saw a huge scary building up ahead and decided to check it out.
That scary building turned out to be a “crematory”, where they cremate people. AUGH!!!
Scary! This building was right across from a massive cemetery and to be honest I really enjoy going to cemeteries in the city no matter how weird that may seem because it’s the closest thing to woods i can find without spending an hour on the train to get to Central Park or Prospect Park. Sigh. I wound up walking four miles that day. I went really far out coming upon a giant mall with a BJ’s. I love walking long distances and do it often. That must have been why it wasn’t ok for me to live in LA. You really can’t walk there. It’s dangerous. I did though and I got stared at and honked at and overall it was mildly unpleasant because when no one else walks, it’s no fun. I don’t know where I was going with the post other than sharing my weird and long and nice walk in the snow and also that frankly I miss the suburbs sometimes.
Saw some cool stuff though:
You know one of those days that is like 18 hours long and you can’t remember if this morning was indeed this morning?
That was today. Now, it is over and I am drinking wine and eating popcorn and clipping coupons from Whole Foods, grandma style. It was a good day and yet I am glad it is over. I worked on the tv show, Smash!, for the fourth time and was 3′ from Anjelica Huston, who is amazing and has amazed me since The Witches, The Addams Family, Buffalo ’66, Royal Tennenbaums, and Alexander Calder’s jewelry model and others that I have forgotten to name in my tired stupor. YAY!
This is a good ending song to the day and it’s playing on shuffle right now anyway:
Oh man, I want to go on a trip soon. I like traveling too much to be sedentary. I guess I can always watch Planet Earth…
Godspeed, goodnight, Gute Nacht
I was just published today in the great storytelling blog, Loop. I wrote a story corresponding to the theme of “running away”. Originally, I was going to write the gory tale of getting myself lost in NYC alone at 9 or 10 but seeing as it’s holidaytime, I opted for something more bittersweet.
Here it is and then a link to the rest:
Run, Child
by Desira Pesta
Growing up an outcast in Scranton, Pennsylvania, I’d often dreamed of running away and being someone else. I ran away often. My family owned a suburban home in our large town and sandwiched between other homes belonging to people we couldn’t stand, I felt trapped.
At school, I traversed the halls with my head down, picking it up only to answer questions in class, to be engaged with my studies and nearly nothing else. I ran away constantly to the minds and bodies of others in works of fiction and non, burying my head in books, sometimes laying out in the sun and finishing a whole novel in one sitting. I also ran away through my own works of fiction, by the time I reached sixth grade, I would complete one nearly full-length novel with characters who were on physical journeys, the journeys I would take with them. I played other people in my spare time as well. Years and years before Twilight and Harry Potter would debut, I hunted and escaped bites from my vampire neighbor who kept a garlic wreath on his door; and used my amulets and amethyst stones to procure magic in my neighbors yard. I was constantly bobbing up and down between fantasy and reality, tying real life into the dreams and fictions I lived out in my head. I sometimes had accomplices in my journeys, a best friend named Michael who was equally in need of escapism. I once ruined a brand new outfit after dunking myself in a pool of mud as I was tried as a witch in Salem and found guilty, my mother ready to punish me as I emerged from my dream.
The beautiful thing about my hippie family was our large property in the woods just a few miles from our home. We planned to build there one day, but until then, we just spent 2-4 days a week in the woods. It was here that I lived out my greatest escapes. I ran blindly through the fields of trees I knew as well as the back of my hand; and took off at lightning speed escaping imaginary captors, wicked warlocks, and sometimes just a life as an orphan. My parents let us roam far and wide in this woods, knowing we knew our way, but once, I went too far. For hours I walked and walked, weaving in and out of paths, following no clear direction and after the sun was lowering in the sky, I knew I was lost. Weaving this reality into my tale du jour, I decided that I would sleep in a burrow I would carve out, eat some of the plentiful teaberries and raspberries I knew the woods grew, and drink from the cool clear creek that undulated and turned through the length of the acreage we had. I was not afraid, I was an experienced warrior in the forests of my ancestors and I would emerge a hero at journey’s end. As the sun was setting, I grew not scared, but despondent, the thought that my parents would freak out broke my excitement and fervor for my adventure. I wasn’t afraid of the dark, or so I thought. Taking up screaming “hello!??” for a while, while walking in what I felt was the direction towards the car, I somehow reunited with my parents and made my way to my home, my fantastic journey thwarted by stoplights and radio banter.
A few months later, during the summertime, my sister, her friend and I set off on an epic adventure, following the creek that ran northward through our property and up to the next. We forged the creek, which sometimes poured down rocks and sometimes merely trickled. We climbed up steep embankments, braving the 90 degree angles using all fours to continue. At one point, the path grew perilous and the steep walls that we would have to cover to continue following were very difficult to cross. As I groped and footed my way across the wall, I started to slip.
Grasping for leaves and roots around me, I found no savior and tumbled into the cold pool of water below. Fully under and splashing, I emerged to hear my sister screaming for my help above, despite the fact that I had already reached the place she was afraid of heading. Her friend grabbed her and helped her to safety further on the bank and I made my way out. Fully drenched from head to toe, my thirteen-year-old self declared that I would get frostbite and I removed my pants. We decided that in efforts to save my life, we should head back. An hour later, we caught site of my father up ahead, chopping wood. Seeing my pants-less legs, he yelled “What’s wrong with you?” Weird people were living in the woods and I would be an easy target for foul play.
I proudly declared that I didn’t want to get frostbite and he brashly replied, “you can’t get frostbite in 50 degrees”.
I hated my town and left for college as soon as I could, but over the years, I have gotten a pain and it’s deepened as time goes by. Since leaving, I have found myself, found “my people” and ideologies and adventures in real life; and as much as I wanted to escape the place I found to be so unbearable as a young person, I come back to it. I miss it. I miss the things that plagued me as a child, that I wanted to replace. Our shabby chic home, I wished was more grand, the tractor I had to drive to cut the grass or the two ton duel wheel pickup truck of my dad’s that I drove to high school when everyone else drove BMWs, Mercedes, and Lexus’. We were different, I was different and it took running away from this place to make me come to a realization that this is just fine, in fact, it is awesome.
HAPPY NEW YEARS EVE!!!! I don’t know what everyone has planned, but I hope it’s a great night for all. Here’s a moment I love from a hell of movie:
Drew Ratfink for my dad for his present.
Dolly Parton Tshirt!
I got a DREMEL!!
HAPPY HOLIDAYS EVERYONE!!
If you celebrate Christmas, it’s almost time. Last week, some of my theater friends and I visited the professionally lit Christmas lights of the wealthy Brooklyn neighborhood, Dyker Heights. Blocks were ablaze and aflutter with gargantuan displays of larger-than-life Santas, nutcrackers, reindeer, carolers, and other fine blow-ups and statues. We frolicked to and fro each house’s display, each more ridiculous and more successful than the last. It was midnight, yet houses were still doubling their electrical bills by the minute, gleaming, glowing, shooting primary colored lights into the atmosphere.
If you’ve been to Brooklyn, you know that each section of it, or neighborhood, looks drastically different from the next. They range from breathtaking and regal (Brooklyn Heights) to eclectic and seafaring (Red Hook) to dystopian and ramshackle (Bushwick), yet one thing seems to tie them and the rest of NYC property together, houses are small and tightly woven. With that said, Dyker Heights is an exception. Reminiscent of the suburbs where I grew up in Pennsylvania, houses span 3,000-4,000 sq. ft., they measure at least 2 stories tall and unlike almost every building in NYC, they are single family.
I’ve lived in NYC for the last six years and so my expectations for and requirements of my living situations have changed drastically since leaving my parents three story home with yard ten years ago. I no longer want to take the tudor mansion when playing the game of LIFE. What would I put in it’s cavernous walls? What would I do with all of those closets, kitchen cabinets, bathrooms, and multiple garages? I do not know.
LIFE! Who didn't love it.
I now crave the tiny intimate quarters of the bungalow offered, or even the hurricane hideaway. I no longer need three to four bathrooms nor a bedroom big enough to roller skate in with a walk-in closet (actually, I take that back, I will accept a walk-in in place of an office) Anyway, living in New York, as opposed to say, Texas, gives us a much greater appreciation for space and a much decreased need for a heck of a lot of it.
In Dyker Heights, or should I say, Metropolitan Mansion Heights, they sure have a lot [of space]. What would have seemed normal seeing ten years ago, I now was prompted to scream out things like, “Holy shit!”, “single family??!!”, or “whata-whata-whata is that!?” when driving by.
Big Ole Mess
Growing up, and unbeknownest to me because of the size of other local homes, my parents house was masssive. We had three floors to live on plus a basement and garage and yard and acres and acres of woods. With that, came a large collection and amassing of stuff. We, like goldfish, grow within the confines of the space we have. I had chairs and tables I bought from antique stores, clothing, shoes, snowsuits, dance shoes, soccer/basketball/sporting good items, games, drawings, paintings, art supplies, sewing machines, fabric, many many blankets and bed linens for different seasons, tools, ephemera, dishes… stuff…extra stuff…and spare stuff… When I moved away for college and was presented with half of a normal sized room, which I had to share with another lass, I shed some excess baggage. Over the years, I moved into a bigger dorm room, then a house with a massive bedroom, which I didn’t know what to do with. I pushed all of my furniture to the periphery, unsure of how to use the space.
The most life-altering move of all was studying abroad in Italy. I could only bring what would fit in a large suitcase and a backpacking pack. Weeks before the trip, I packed. Over the remaining weeks, I would take everything out, reduce my load and pack again. Right before the trip, I had done this ritual many more times, re-assessing how much I wanted to literally put on my back, weighing how much worth and need each item had. Ultimately, I had quite a small amount for going thousands of miles away and I thanked myself for my dedication to my back. Every weekend my school had a trip for us, visiting various towns in Italy, some requiring an overnight stay. Each trip, I packed a tiny backpack with one change of clothing, toothbrush, and snacks, a very manageable amount. I laughed at the girls, lugging GIANT suitcases on-board the bus for less than a twenty-four hour trip. How could they possibly need these? For Fall break, I decided to go to England and Spain. I also decided to test myself. I, for one whole week, allowed myself only a backpack. It was a breeze getting on and off the planes, as well as traveling by bus from the airport and then by subway or cab to the hostel or room. I could also hide my bag in the shared room that first night and store it safely in a locker during the day. From this travel all over Italy, as well as Spain & England and a one month stay on a farm in the very north of Italy in the Alps and back to the U.S., I realized that we don’t need a hell of a lot to live.
Back in New York state, I moved and moved and moved again and became more accustomed to living in both tiny places and big spaces interchangeably. Needing to move at least once a year once in Brooklyn, I gained and lost and gained and gained stuff as each new home dictated it’s quota. At one point, while subletting, I had a room literally 5′ x 10′ and I didn’t bat an eye. I would have loved more legroom, but rent was cheap and my needs were small.
This past summer I stayed with my cousin in LA for two months. I had a hard time deciding how to present myself as a New Yorker in Southern California and like the Italy preparations, I dueled over what to go with. Ultimately, I brought a large suitcase and yet found myself wearing a lot of the same things over and over and over again.I shouldn’t even have brought as much as I had.
I’m not trying to pretend that I haven’t increased my load in recent years, especially because of my clothing business, but I have become more conscious of what is essential and what is not. I still struggle with letting things go or with not buying things I like, yet I am much more brash when it’s purging time. In the end, after all this moving and changing, I have realized that it isn’t my stuff that makes up who I am. When we have less and limit ourselves, our needs diminish. Instead of filling every nook and crany of our blank spaces and square footage and consuming more and more of what this crazy world tells us we should have; we should focus on having the things that really count.
