Happy Birthday, Cellar Door!

It's 12.05 AM, and Cellar Door is now FOUR! Lots has happened since January 2006, but I'll spare the details since I've – as you can see – written about it along the way.

I've been documenting my life since I was six; my first diary was a gradient of neons featuring Minnie and Mickey Mouse. I wrote about Cinderella and a blonde boy I had a crush on. Since then, I've kept with it and added about five thousand layers to it all.

In my two years at the VCU Adcenter, I filled seven 8.5 x 11 black, linen-bound sketchbooks with thoughts, ideas, and things I gathered along the way (everything from postcards to Polaroids and candy wrappers). I stopped writing on paper as much when I started this blog, and filled post upon post with the stuff.





I got a little down on my self at the end of 2009 when I looked at my archives and noticed that my frequency of blogging had steadily declined over the years:

2006: 168 posts
2007: 124 posts
2008: 83 posts
2009: 57 posts

I also got a little sad that I was no longer filling books as quickly as I had in school. Had I run out of thoughts? Had my brain stopped racing?



Then I realized that the amount of thinking and documenting hadn't changed, but had been spread across many more platforms over the years. I started taking pictures with everything that could take a picture (even my RAZR for a brief moment in 2006, yikes); I flew onto Twitter in 2007 (I have tiny thoughts all the time and this was finally the perfect place for them); I flew onto Tumblr in late 2008 for my medium thoughts (which were once thrown onto my blog with the rest of them). So really, all of this stuff used to be poured into one place: paper. Then two places: paper and a blog. Now: well, you know where I'm going with this...

4,454 pictures on Flickr
3,899 tweets
676 Tumblr posts

I guess the point I'm getting at is that whatever the platform, the thoughts are flying out as much as they ever were. Thanks for sticking around, guys :] you're inspiring as hell, and only get more so.

The Arrival

I wrote this last night while half awake and just remembered about it! Yes, I'm alive. Hopefully the next time I'm this busy, I'll force myself to stay awake again and write. In short, the past two or three weeks have been solidly filled with a new and super exciting project. In between, I took a long weekend for my birthday! Speaking of, let's talk about one of the coolest gifts I got this year.


The Arrival is a graphic novel. Though: there are no words in it. Shaun Tan drew this entire thing with pencil, and makes one feel like they're looking through a photo album rather than reading a story; check out these clouds he drew in 60 different ways:


The book is about a man who travels to another land to make a better life for himself and his family. The journey begins with their tearful goodbye, the train and ship that take him to the new place, and the immense line of fellow immigrants waiting to sign their way into their new lives.


The man gets lost and confused, can't read the new language, draws pictures to communicate with others, is befuddled by strange-looking foods and creatures, looks for work and meets other people who have come to the same place with similar stories of finding a better life. You see him gaze at the family portrait that he has brought with him while alone in his room, and the loneliness /longing for his family is palpable.


My boyfriend told me that he had read about The Arrival in the New York Times some time ago, so I looked it up and found a review. They put it well:

“The Arrival” tells not an immigrant’s story, but the immigrant’s story. ... By borrowing American imagery to communicate an otherwise universal story, Tan highlights just how central the immigrant experience is to the way America defines itself.

Something about this book feels so real, even though the fantastical gadgets, food, animals and alphabet in this unnamed land are completely made up. Tan's thank-you in the back of the book talks about how he was inspired by things like photographs taken at Ellis Island, and a famous shot of a newspaper boy announcing the sinking of the Titanic. But maybe even more than this, it's because this is how anybody must feel when traveling to a completely foreign place. Even though I had the luxury of the Internet and some prior knowledge of Japanese culture before going over there in the spring (for example), I can identify with this main character a lot of the time in his confusion and feeling of homesickness in a sea full of people. Conveying all of these feelings without even writing a word is truly awesome.

year two!

Over the weekend, my blog turned two. I have been thinking about where to go from here. I was pretty set on moving onto a different phase in the form of a Tumblr page because it is my nature to express myself in little bytes moreso than in longer form, which I sometimes feel pressured into with a blog. But then as I was sifting through the past year of entries (to link back to particular ones), I got a little emotional. I don't think I'm ready to stop with Cellar Door yet. Things will probably just continue to be erratic, as always. So, some highlights, yes?



The following seven entries weren't necessarily written between 26 January 2007 and now, but here are the ones that get the most traffic other than my index page (mostly from search keywords):

An advantage of living in a small town - people tend to type "advantages of living in a small town" into searches for this one... I guess it's a topic that people think about right before making some sort of big life transition. [link]

Versadome - maybe not a lot of people have written about this, making my entry higher on searches and therefore clicked on. [link]

Lee Jeans Ads - I think this is because people are perverts and like to Google Terry Richardson. [link]

Naked Party and Russell Coffee - about our "Death of the Marketing Model" party in 2006 and meeting Russell Davies for coffee. [link]

We are the Hollow Men - presumably because the piece Dylan Trees guest-wrote won a "post of the month" award from Russell's blog... also because it's a brilliant piece of writing. [link]

Dasepo Naughty Girls - this one is probably mostly due to perverts as well; the search terms tend to combine the words "schoolgirl," "Korean," "naughty" and "girls" in various ways. This is one of my favorite movies though, so check it out. [link]

Heron the blind pimp - pretty straightforward search here: "heron blind pimp." Either lots of people know about this video he made, or... there is some famous pimp out there somewhere who is blind and also named Heron. [link]

These next three are the ones I think about over and over again a million times:

State schemas - the top top one. It's a phrase I made up; I love talking about them, writing about them and telling other people about them. [link]

Typewritten - this one's about analogue v. digital and taking pleasure in rituals (no not that kind, more like steeping tea in a diffuser and the like). I have been thinking about this a lot lately (I recently bought a record player) and want to write about it again but am not sure where to start. [link]

Taxi Driver - comparing the protagonists of Taxi Driver & Buffalo '66. I was trying to explore an archetype here but didn't get very far. [link]

This one deserves its own paragraph: my food photography project in August. It was a very cool experience even though I wanted to die for most of it. What ended up happening was my friend Jason thought it was neat and wrote about it on Mental Floss. Well, that gave me 700 hits in one day. A couple of months later, his writeup was a side link in a Mental Floss-summarized article on CNN, and I got 500 more! hooray. This thing actually got me a gig submitting my food photos for a new Mental Floss food trivia section, so hooray again! Also I was approached last week about two other photography projects, so you'll be hearing more about these soon.



I apparently did a lot of thinking about music & culture, particularly with electronic music:

France, France, France. Para One - about music exploding in France and how much more fun they seem to have than the image-conscious hipsters of New York. [link]

Remix insanity - self explanatory title, I think. [link]

DJs vs. Socialites as the center of attention - related to the France entry. [link]

San Francisco and the UK - genre (music & fashion) blending? - also self explanatory. [link]

I still feel very attached to the entries I wrote about my Mom and Dad.

And I still want to partake in this neon aerobics flashmob type of thing I wrote in Hallo Berlin.

Was that annoying or unnecessary to read? hm. Of course I also met great friends in the past year through this thing, including Tristan (who gives me awesome little electronic musical toys he makes and teaches me how to say things like "I like gummy bears" in Japanese) and Sanithna (who is designing something lovely for me). Hi guys :)

Thanks for reading, everyone. Yes, even you.