WANT:

• Aubrey Beardsley tattoo
• Back triangle
• Dad tattoo

CURRENT:

• Dad's military photo
• Everything Everywhere All at Once
  • If nothing matters, then all the pain and guilt you feel for making nothing of your life goes away
  • Just be a rock
  • You think because l'm kind that it means I'm naive, and maybe I am. It's strategic and necessary. This is how I fight. The only thing I do know is that we have to be kind. Please, be kind. Especially when we don't know what's going on.
• Grandma's brooch
• Henry Darger - Vivian Girls tattoo
  • childhood abuse: the Lincoln Asylum's practices included forced child labor and severe punishments
  • children's right "to play, to be happy, and to dream, the right to normal sleep of the night's season, the right to an education, that we may have an equality of opportunity for developing all that are in us of mind and heart."
  • he attended Mass daily
  • in the last entry in his diary, Darger wrote: "January 1, 1971. I had a very poor nothing like Christmas. Never had a good Christmas all my life, nor a good new year, and now... I am very bitter but fortunately not revengeful."
  • outsider artist
  • posthumously discovered 15,145-page fantasy novel manuscript (43 years) called The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is known as the Realms of the Unreal.
  • protecting abused and neglected children, and proposed founding a "Children's Protective Society"
  • see through adult lies and becoming a "smart-aleck"
  • They had seized a Glandelinian officer, punishable by hanging.
  • worked as a hospital custodian in Chicago
• Kerry James Marshall painting "The Land That Time Forgot"
  • love for the wounded, esp animals
  • wounded deer representing the horrors of colonialism and apartheid
• Kurosawa Seven Samurai Tattoo
  • no one believed in the samurais, like the story of Raju in Narayan's The Guide
• Lucille Ball
• Mom's elementary school picture
• Shin Yun-Bok
  • korean traditional woman
• The Cure, Forest Tattoo
• Toki
• Watership Down: The Black Rabbit of Inlé, also known as Inlé-rah ("Prince/Chief of the Moon" or "Prince/Chief of the Dead")

Rabbit:

• Birch tree background I learned serendipitously: Renewal: following the last Ice Age, the robust and weather-hardy white birch tree would have been among the first to re-colonize ice-ravaged landscape. In botanical terms, it is known as a pioneer species. In Celtic mythology, therefore, the birch is a symbol of renewal and purification. Significant for me after this past year.
• Hazel from Watership ∂own
• I love the metaphor of the rabbit hole, the entry into the unknown.
• I raised rabbits for 10 years while growing up because my father worked graveyard shift and rabbits were quiet. I was especially attached to Duchess who lived with me 10 years. She witnessed my life and was so close with me.
• In Alice in Wonderland the rabbit takes Alice down the hole. I've tried to push myself to go into the unknown (via drugs, adventures, choices, etc). The hole is always scary. He is also often saying "Oh dear I shall be too late!" which is secretly significant to me because I have a strange physical reaction when I'm late.
• James: tattoo artist. His kindness to me, to kids, to animals. We were at Huntington Library museum and we were both inspired by the wood etched drawings from the 1600's by Topsell
• Pink Floyd's Breathe: "Run, rabbit, run. Dig that hole, forget the sun, And when at last the work is done. Don't sit down, it's time to dig another one."
• Richard Adam's novel Watership Down had an enormous influence on me as a child along with the 70s animated film
  • Fiver's visions. Fiver falling in his dreams...and having to come to terms with death and loss and change.
  • Hazel's death. This scene means so much to me both in the animated version and in the novel. If there was only this much kindness in death.
• The feeling that we are falling through life trying to hold onto things as we go, trying to control where and how we land, but I've learned life is a letting go and a passing through --like floating down stream.
• The Matrix: Neo is told to follow the rabbit...to head into a truer reality (though more painful and hard...it is the truth).
• The nature of rabbits: vegetarian, kind, and love sex. Rabbits are prey and therefore take time to earn your trust. They are playful and also lazy, a bit hedonistic. I love their thump to warn others.