I really need to pee hang on... sorry, Jelte made me loads of tea which I guzzled in about three seconds. Jelte is fun, he is so fucking smart and we talked about the strange culture of people who think of themselves as normal. What is this culture that negates the human potential and need to strive towards something greater than oneself. This culture being the culture of rat races and mowed lawns. We never mow our lawn because we would rather write, or talk, or play music, we have something we want out of life. Our red apple of eve. Everyone has one or more I think. Everyone is so god damn beautiful, to me it looks like we are made for greater things, than lives of tuna sandwiches and yuppie paychecks, and large cars. Not to insult any of these things, I myself would kill for a tuna sandwich at this very moment, but they seem meaningless to me if they don't have any meaning! What good is a fancy car if you don't have anywhere to drive it? What good is the fancy label of CEO if you are not the CEO of a company that is important to you? So much brain power at your disposal, please don't dispose of it.
I'm quite a sleepy girl just now, having received an email at midnight saying something like "I'm bored, lets go to the school."
"Okay I'll be there in 15 minutes" I said.
I want to read this book "Oscar and Lucinda" but life keeps commandeering my time.
At 2am the beach is a beautiful eldrich place. The waves are like smooth mercury and the your legs get cold in the wind.
"Deep in my heart I'm concealing things that I'm longing to say." I used to always get that song stuck in my head but not so much anymore.

All my favorite things are in colors you can find on a peacock.
Listening to the sounds of carpenters takes me way back. So much for only being young once.

I woke up with my arms covered in peacock writing. Jelte says he always sleeps with his diary so I told him I just sleep with a felt tipped pen under my pillow so I can write on my arms. He told me he would be scared for the welfare of his bedding so I told him that his sheets are my spare ones and he can go see that they are covered in ink spills. When I say covered I mean covered. Also my PJ's. He laughed and asked if he could write a biography of our family.

Okay so I'm pretty much freaking out for no reason.
Was a super hot day today, so hot my hair was frizzeled by the sun rays. I tramped around the lawn eating berries and thinking about this sad tale of fated love a friend and I made in like second grade. We wrote it down and everything, though I must admit it's pretty hard to read our handwriting/grammar/spelling.
Damn! I just rubbed my neck and now my hand is dirty! I'm not kidding! Dusty summer days+sweaty hot=really unbelievably dirty necks.
I need a now cotton blouse.
I need some new rubber boots.
I need a new skirt.
Huh.
So tomorrow this man named Jelte moves in. I think he's going to be here for about two weeks maybe? But who knows. He is amazing, he's quite tall and skinny and does this little thing where he bows just a little when he's laughing that reminds me of Bochay. He was born in Africa and then ended up in the himalayas and some other places I can't remember and now he will be in our tower. He speaks very fast and with an accent that is a bunch of different accents all jumbled up. When he smiles his cheeks get all wrinkled up. I like it when people smile like that, with no thought to their appearance but simply to show joy. Really good actors do that. Like Cate Winslet, who is really pretty but I always remember in "Sense and Sensibility" when her beau runs off and she crys for him not like a pretty weeping maiden but like her whole world has crashed to pieces and her face is ripped apart by her sobbing mouth and her scrunched up eyes and her soggy red blotchy cheeks. Because when you are really sad you don't care what you look like really.
I love rubbing my cheek on my shoulder.
I love sparkly jewelry.
I love printed cotton.
I love the smell of golden summer grass.
I love looking out windows.
I love when the wind ruffles the leaves because it feels like it is ruffling my hair and nobody has ever done that to me before so I have never had the chance to think it is annoying.
I love walks in the dark.
I love moonlight.
I love taking off my shoes.
I love eyeballs (truly, have you ever seen an ugly eyeball?)
I love the stove.
I love to talk about things that I love to think about.
I love the way long roads in the woods look like fakey movie sets.
I love top ramen.

Yesterday morning I made some thick chocolate blueberry pancakes and then dressed myself in green and black, grabbed Maxbadly, and sallied forth into the wet and rainy forest. I had brought several books so I settled under a leafy tree before cracking out my Grimm's Fairy tales and begining my readings. There I stayed until the rain got so heavy that Maxbadly began to hiss and spit at the sky.
Inside in the rain is the best time to make loads of tea. I am partial to vanilla nut tea so I made a ton of that and some tasty curry noodle soup. Sleepy from the dinner party of the last night and being woken up by carpenters and Pam Mills I stumbled around aimlessly until it was time to go work on cleaning to cabin in case Jelte wants to stay there.

It was Daddy's birthday so I slunk up to my room and began to gut shiny old yellowing paper folders. I discovered a family photo from the turn of the century in one of them with a girl right in the middle who looked exactly like me. The gutting was because I was writing a short story called "The Salty Sea Captain" that I wanted to turn into a short graphic novel. I think it turned out really well and I hope he liked it. One of the sweet things about Daddy's birthday is it is in the time when his favorite flowers bloom. He loves the blood red poppies that we grow in our garden so much. Love you Daddy.

last night I dreamt I was in a huge theatre with purple seats at a Niel Gaiman and Amanda Palmer concert. The girl next to me was sad because her boyfriend was supposed to give her a rose and he didn't!
"Oh but look!" I said "There's your rose." Sure enough a lovely purple rose grew out of the right arm of her theatre seat and on her left an orange one. She smiled a big secret smile of the sort always saved for love, buried her face in a rose, and settled down for the show.
Afterwards we tried to run from the stampede of fans but there were big sheets of thick hot pink paper under some of the seats and these purple paper gauntlets strewn all over the floor and I was like, "Peter wait up!" And I wouldn't leave the theatre until I had gotten a huge stack of the pink paper and a gauntlet so I could make my own set.

I have always wanted to pilot a small sea plane. Skip driving cars, all I want is a plane. Sadly, I think that wish will never be realized.
I made myself a small set of shelves out of cardboard, tape, brown black paint, gesso, and sharpie today. It is triangular and stripy and my drawing things go in it.
Also I hung the laundry out in the laundry glade in color coordinated lines.
Today is a sad day but for no real reason.

People people people and now I just want to pass out. Why oh why can't you faint when you want to?

Am so sleeeeeeepy! Got a giant south African vase full of pink (rather stinky) peonies flanked by super tall skinny red candles on the table. Isa and Julie are playing Scrabble and Julie's letters look like the sound a siren makes IUUEEEE.
Question: why is Java so miserable all the time? Charlie, I think its your fault. I think she misses you. Seriously, she looks wilted.
Sounds like a giant beast is roaming the lawn, but really it is the wind.
Cleaning my room I see how everything I own is saturated in my taste. All the stuff in there is (Isa says the rats were having a huge party behind her head last night. "I think they are mating." she says gravely "It's the vocalizing. All this peeping, I have to pound on the wall to get them to cut it out.") attached to me somehow. Maybe I'm too forceful in my taste. How do I make all these gifts and things suddenly become my own the moment I put them in my room? It's like some kind of style force field, everything that comes through my door succumbs to the inevitable transformation of touching Camilla's life.

Today was the elementary school graduation of Adrian Delahunt. As the single graduate of our whole island you can imagine how proud we all are, not just of Adrian but of the rest of us. As I'm sure you know my brothers and my mother and Bob #1 (you know who you are) have been discussing (It's odd how often people say conversation, and argument when they mean discussion, isn't it?) Waldron vs City life. It's in this mood, after this momentous event in the life of a young boy of the island, that I'd like to write a few words myself.

The first thing I think of about life here is the social dynamic. Often people are shocked that a young woman of 16 could possibly survive without 5000 other teens in the same building as her. I always sort of splutter and change the subject, but here's the thing. There are only about 100 full time residents here. That's a tiny fraction of any usual high school and an even tinier fraction of that number are people who are even remotely young. What redeemes this small number of people to interact with, let alone hang out with or like, is that I KNOW each and every one of them. I can tell you what almost every person on this island is likely to be doing at any moment and who they are likely to be doing it with. This is the same kind of knowlege we can glean from animals in the wild: the understanding that there are people and animals out there with totally different agendas then our own, and they can still teach us stuff and that we can still love them. And of course there are those people we might never even have a chance to talk to or who we might reject because of their clothes or jobs and they turn out to understand us almost better than we do ourselves. It's this kind of understanding of the diversety of the human mind that I think helps to strengthen our own minds, to be more forgiving, and less judgemental.

Another thing I think of is the sense of time we earn here. As the rather snobbish child of nobility and old rich I am constanly aware of my ancestors and future decendents as a part of me. Coming from a prestigious family tree, I know that I am, so far at least, a mere twig. Living here in this small community on a small island is the same: each child knows the past of the children before them. We can see that everything we do will not only change the lives of other children but the lives of other children we are likely to know someday. Consequence, good or bad, is recognizable to us. This goes for the natural world as well. Not long ago there were deer and elk living here but we shot them all. Because we are isolated we not only know that it was us that killed them but that no more can ever live here unless we choose to put them here. Humans are very powerful yet we do not always know it. Living here we are forced to face our own impact.

Another thing is the hard philosophy that goes on every day, by what I think is a comparitively gigantic fraction of the population. Thought is valued here. There is a huge percentage of college educated people. In the world 1 out of every 100 people go to college, here about 80 in a 100 maybe. Not to say that college is what makes you smart but just that education is valued however you go about it.

I think people are philosophising and thinking up ideas all the time. I think the mark of the artist is not one who has ideas but one who sees that they have ideas. Small children are often fascinated by the borders of good and evil. Tonight I "slunk into the night as an evil fairy" with practically the entire elementary school. Last night I watched the Burn girls dress up as "the bad witch, fortune teller" and "the bad princess, fairy, tell truther." Teens too always seem to be thinking about the "great questions" "Why are we here?" "Who am I?" "What is it that makes people different?" "Is this love?" "What is death?" "What is life?" "What is art?" I do not pretend to think we come up with very good answers but I do think that the very thinking of such thoughts is deeply important.
Here you remember to think about these things perhaps because of your inexposure to pop culture. I love pop culture and I think it fascinating but I try not to be seduced by it. Culture dictates which thoughts are acceptable to think and which are simply not. On your own or with people who understand you, you can be free to not only push the boundaries of the envelope but not even to notice that there is an envelope at all. To be alone is to get to know your own mind, to get to know your own mind is to see where the greatest potentials lie. The people here experience long periods of a solitude so complete you would not believe.

When we meet with our neighbors they are people we know very well and have perhaps known very well for years. People, in short, with whom we can discuss the deepest of our thoughts. By being so close the community becomes intellectualy sustainable.

Know as you read this that I love many cities but know also that I love them in spite of themselves. I love the towering architecture of Seattle, and the fairylike fogs and pink houses of San Francisco. I love the sunny little coffee shops of Portland, and the freezing promenades packed with people that wind through Oslo and Rennes, I love the feeling that Paris is a living animal and that Phoenix goes on forever. These things that I love about these cities are overall patterns, all encompassing beauties, but what I like about here is the little moments of each day, the walks home in the dark. In the city the world looks beautiful from the window. You are an exquisitely handcrafted cog of a great machine, or the blood cell of a huge creature. But when you zoom in on your own little life as a cog or cell don't you want to be able to see your effect on the organism as a whole? Know what happens when you flush the toilet? Or spit into the sink? Even lose your backpack in the park? What effect are you having? Can you know?

I do not attempt to attack city life, only to express my love of island life. On that note I simply must say how mesmerizing were the leaves of the alder trees tonight. I began my walk home after nearly everyone had gone home but one car still drove up behind me in the dark. The light from the single working headlight turned the alder branches into cloudlike clusters of shining leaves. White teardrops on a black field.

Holy smokes I have no sleep in me, how am I functioning?

The whole world was not in my living room today so I decided not to go to the fish thingy after all. Instead I took my two favorite notebooks, a chair, and my art supply box up to the balcony and drew things, and wrote things, and stared at moss. I did this for 5 hours and have now filled three more pages of my writers notebook and three of my artists notebook.
Milo caught me a moth today, it flew around the candles on his floor and landed on my head. It flew into the candle wax and died but it was okay because it did it by following it's own aesthetic, the light. So, because we were all talking about eternity we decided to memorialize the moth. To never ever forget it, "Moth The Great" it is called. Don't forget it, that moth is going down in the history books of our minds.
Everybody loves Milo's cabin at night. He lights it only by the friendly glow of the fire and of candles and you can hear the surf on the rocks outside. It was interesting to meet the eco camp boys. I quite liked them.
Now I am all peacock blue because I drew pictures all over myself in water soluble ink.

It's weird not having Charlie around anymore. Sad.
I did some drawing today, not much but a little. I love my soft cotton bound notebook, I love the feel of the fine grain paper and the delicate smell of watercolors. When I am weary the work is a relief, I get so focused on my drawings that the rest of the world slowly melts away and I am left with just one or two thoughts to quietly chew down.

Got back from week at Tycho's yesterday night. I smelled like his carpet until I changed my shirt. It was super fun.
Now here I am at the computer desk in the library that I painted like clouds. It's late at night because Maddie dropped in on the island for a surprise visit. It was so surprising that even she was surprised, she had no idea she was coming until she did.
I woke up to a house full of scientists, we ate a long breakfast and then drove up to the school where we picked up the group of kids that is doing some kind of eco camp here for the next week or so. They all piled into the truck with me and Clare (one of the scientists that spent the night and the breakfast with us) so that it sort of bulged out on all sides with arms, and legs, and hair, and also backpacks. We drove up the mountain into the sweltering hot sun and counted plant species and listened to Russel and Madrona talk about ecology.
Milo and I talked a little about the psychological effect on the world from global warming, and we went down the mountain again.
I ended up at Isa's for some chicken slaughtering (ick ick ickedy ick, consider my character built) also with those kids.
At about 4 I got tired and my brain felt rather brutalized after all that I have put it through so I headed home to talk to Julie but she was on the COAST walk, so I grabbed some food, changed, and legged it. On the way of course I had to visit Babs, who was reading ghost stories, and mowing the lawn, and wishing she had palm trees.
The tide was low and I walked along the sand flats for the age it takes to get to hammond. Julie was indeed there and we walked back by way of some summer folk and the Hendersons, their yard was so full of horse tails it looked like it was filled up with a green mist.
On the way home I was accosted by lovely farmers who told me that Maddie was at the house. We biked the rest of the way home and Maddie and I talked of shoes and ships and sailing wax, and United World Colleges (should we go?), and teen pregnancy, and how our friend used to eat syrup soup with pancakes in it.
We went and ate dinner at her house with the hundreds of people there because we were fleeing my house and the hundreds of people there who were playing music so loud the stairway kind of shakes. We sprayed some things with cake flavored perfume and crawled into the sewing room to watch Twilight.

Did cyanotypes with Becky, Julie, Charlie, and Gabriel while eating up all of the tasty lunch Josh made. Mmmm, lunch... when we went to get the mail we grabbed a bunch of mussels and brought them home to a juicy death by butter sauce. In the afternoon we went to the beach to test the water for brackish contamination. Yep, it was brackish. While we were there we ran into all the kids who Milo's Mom has stuck in tents for two weeks. They seemed nice though I still wonder whether they will have worked out how to start a fire by now. Not that I could do much better mind you. Tomorrow sounds like a boating day in the Mellon and the Banana.
In the middle of it all I lay on my side in the shade of the picnic bench on the balcony and just stared at moss for a while.

I just know it will be a crazy day. Becky will be here around six and then it will be Klezmer night and a meeting about water testing at the same time. To give an indication of the sort of afternoon it will be, I dug the rest of the outhouse hole, moved the outhouse with Char, took the dog for a walk with Char, and made us some tea all before I even ate my breakfast. It was a good breakfast too. Strawberry panda cakes and Chai tea. I woke up super late though because I did so much yard work yesterday I was exhausted and because I stayed up super late sitting on a picnic bench staring at stars and funky little pinkish clouds with Milo. There was one star so bright and golden that we could actually watch as it moved across the sky. We felt so at home there on our starlit picnic benches by the trees and we wondered about how certain people feel most at home in certain places. Like Daddy, who is a man of the sea, maybe there are men of the suburbs, and the metro stations, and the tall office buildings.

Winnie A came by this morning and she gave me a magazine about "young innovators" awwwww! So sweet.
It felt rainy and cold when she left so I was to depressed to make it out the door. Instead I baked and baked. Mostly when I am left alone in the house I just cook and clean. Anyway, I made the best cinnamon buns of my life, and some boring brownies and helped Chazly with some vindaloo. It was the cinnamon buns that eventually got me out the door. They were so good I just could not resist but bring them to the scientists working at Juniper Pearl (my name for Mail Bay). They loved them! And they were even still warm when I brought them.

FACT OF LIFE:
Camilla needs to clean out the cobwebs from the music closet.

I showed my garden glade to mum and she loved it. I'm so glad, the purpose of making the glade was to make the deep forest which I love so much accessible for people who DO mind when they get all scratched up by branches and thorns (my legs are currently stripy red and I have a huge gash under my chin).