sherlock, dir en grey, cabin pressure, the venture bros., the nightrunner series, akira (manga & film), mononoke, bleach, no. 6., the fall, supernatural, tengen toppa gurren lagann, game of thrones, banana fish, comics/marvel, summer heights high, doctor who, junjou romantica.
&books, poetry, photography, physics, coffee, writing, music, and my cameras.
&i dance in secret, take too many pictures, my tumblr leans more toward fandom than photography; i read as often as i can, and my dreams inspire my life.
currently listening to: julian casablancas, the bravery, the magnetic fields, beirut, mumford & sons, the rapture, arcade fire, the vaccines, the shins, hurts, foals, the mountain goats, the glitch mob, the naked and the famous, and shearwater.
i used to whistle at the northern lights, to the horror of my sister, because, the northern lights are the spirits of the dead playing a game in the sky. the game is a bit like soccer, but with a frozen walrus head. and, if you whistle at the northern lights, they come closer, and closer, and closer, and then — CRACK! they steal your head to play with.
—when i was little, i would hold my breath and hide my thumbs anytime we drove past a cemetery, because someone told me that ghosts could steal your soul and gobble up your thumbs if you didn’t.
people in my hometown tell stories about the thick fog that blankets the tundra in the fall, oozing down the hills and over the brittle mica cliffs, obscuring everything as it wanders. they say the fog is the ghost of sinrock mary, the queen of reindeer, leading her herds in migration across the arctic desert toward the bering sea. i used to run into the fog, so thick i could barely see my hands at the end of out-stretched arms. and i would stand silent and still, eyes-closed and barely breathing, listening for the sound of reindeer hooves on tundra.
—i never killed spiders when i was a kid, because my granny told me that killing a spider makes it rain. and i didn’t want to be responsible for bad weather.
i used to believe that if i hiccoughed 100 times in a row, i would die. again, because someone at school told me it could really happen. and in the days before google and wikipedia, i suppose i was more gullible.
—my mom told me, when i was seven, that when you sneeze suddenly, it means someone’s talking about you, somewhere.
i was terrified of the bathroom in my kindergarten class, because the the lights buzzed and never worked properly, and the room felt too big to be alone in. early in the school year, i overheard a girl in my class talking about the monster in the bathroom; it lives in the dark, and if the lights go out, it pulls you into the mirror with red clawed hands. another kid in my class said ishigaqs lived in the bathroom, and another kid said it was haunted by an angry ghost.
—i told my mom about how scary it was, about all the monsters that lived there, and she told me that monsters hate rhymes; any rhyme i said would protect me, and then everything bad in the bathroom would leave me alone. i memorized as many nursery rhymes as i could, after that. the bathroom still scared me, but i had a bubble of rhymes protecting me, and, at the time, in a world that frequently seemed full of monsters, that made me feel safe.
in episode three of mononoke, two of the characters are a priest and his servant sougen, after the characters are introduced, there is a panel of a painting similar to gustav klimt’s “the kiss,”, the priest and sougen’s shoes are in incredibly suggestive positions, and heavy breathing and gasps can be heard through the heart shaped door. the next time we see sougen, he’s crying.
—i thought it was strange the first time i watched it, it seemed out of place.
later, the priest reveals the two were chanting all night, and sougen was seasick.
—the tone if their voices while they chanted and when they spoke was breathless and strained, and the position of the shoes (and the expressions on the shoes,) is too deliberate to be nothing. that paired with the sexuality of the painting and the shoes; the shape of the door, the noises, and sougen crying, suggests something sinister in the relationship of the priest and his retainer.
maybe i’m reading into this too much, but it bothers me. i can’t stop turning it around in my head, and i always end up at the same conclusion.
[EDIT] i thought it might be shudō between the priest and his retainer, which would make sense for the time and would be fine. but, despite sougen saying that the priest was a good and kind master, i feel like there’s a weird power dynamic present.
