She visited NYC on Monday and Tuesday, in part to help out Marion who was installing a show in SoHo. Philippe Parreno's Anywhere Out of the World was her favorite work in the Chelsea galleries, although Sean Landers work at Andrea Rosen was great, too. She stayed at the yoga center, which maybe kept her more centered.

She woke up to thunder, lightening, and the sound of falling rain. “Thunderstorms break bad spells,” she thought. Outside the skies were overcast, but there was energy in the air and the earth was open and alive. At work everyone was happy. They surprised themselves as they mirrored each other’s excitement about waking to a storm.

She went to her computer and listened to the music of the internet. Through a fractal composition program, the site converts the four nodes of an IP-Address of any website to music. Artabove made nice meditative sounds like some strange take-off on traditional Japanese music.

She had grown up beside rivers: the Moniteau, the Moreau, the Current, the Osage, and, of course, the Missouri. She saw the rivers swell with the spring rains to run deep, wide and muddy and with the droughts of summer run low so the sand bars showed. Even when she moved to New York City, rivers bordered her life. In Greenpoint, Brooklyn, looking over to Manhattan she would see the East River changing direction with the tide. She rode her bike over the Williamsburg Bridge twice a day and looked down into the dark, dirty waters. Sometimes the East River would bring the smell of the salty sea. Other times it would bring a more pungent odor as barges filled with garbage moved down its banks.

For the past few weeks, she had been feeling out of her element. She was deeply humiliated and self-conscious after social interactions, like dinner with friends or a small party. She continuously said the wrong thing or struck the wrong attitude. At a party a man had commented on the pleasure of the warmth from the kitchen stove at his back. She had told him how she loved the feeling of the heat lamp in the gym’s changing room after a swim, how the baby oil got hot under her fingertips as she rubbed the exquisite warmth into the skin and muscles of her nude body. He seemed taken aback by what she said. She didn’t understand why, it was only the truth.

Last night, she watched Nirvana Unplugged on MTV2. They seemed so innocent. Kurt’s only threat was self-destruction. They seemed pure and idealistic in comparison to Eminem or Puff Daddy. The concert reminded her of the early days in New York and she was sad for a boy who ended his life too soon. She sang along, “All alone is all we are.”

She realized she was depressed. It had been so long since she’d felt this way she hadn’t fully recognized the feeling at first. Was it the lack of rivers? Or the coming of spring? She felt hunger pangs but she couldn't quite tell what she was hungry for. When all was said and done, she realized that she still didn't have enough of whatever it was she needed.

She was looking through the new "Artforum" when she came across something shocking. A work by Dorothea Tanning entitled Rainy-Day Canape that was extremely similar to the work she was doing. She was surprised because she thought she knew Tanning's work--she had seen many of her paintings and had admired them in the past--but she was totally unfamiliar with this body of sculptural work that Tanning had done in the 1970s. The sight of work so close to her own was troubling, but also somehow exciting. After all, she responded to Tanning's sculpture and found it both disturbing and erotic. Wasn't this the exact reaction she wanted from her own? And hadn't there been historic precedents of one artist doing what another had started? Just look at Rachel Whiteread doing Bruce Nauman. Okay, she'd rather that this part of Tanning's work not exist, but now that she was aware of it she couldn't ignore it. Another unbidden "influence."

She and Lisa went to Manhattan this weekend. She stayed in Brooklyn near BAM with Lisa's friends. Driving across the Manhattan Bridge on her way back upstate in the early afternoon, she was suddenly overcome with homesickness for NYC. Even though she was still there gazing at the skyline, it was like she had already left. She physically felt like there was a hole in her heart and she was so overwhelmed by this feeling of loss that she began to cry.

She bit her lip and tried to talk herself out of the feelings. After all, she had received keys to her new studio share in Williamsburg in the mail on Friday. She had a connection to this place. She would be back. But the feeling of loss stayed with her. She missed living in the city and the feeling was surprisingly intense--very similar to the way she had missed Kelly after he died. The five hour drive was filled with longings for NYC and second-guesses about what she was doing so far away from this place she considered home.

The sky began to get dark and, as they drove north through the mountains, the fields became filled with snow. About forty-five minutes outside of Syracuse, she began to see the shadows of deer standing ten feet off the side of the road. At first she saw only one or two, but as they continued down the highway more deer came to meet them--groups of ten or twelve standing down at the edge of the highway as they drove past, staring at them with dark, round eyes.