Termite TV - Life Stories

Okay this is my official life story for the termite tv collective as registered on October... what is today's date? The 29th, 1999 and it can change at any moment. Um, I was born in Jersey City, New Jersey. My father was a used car salesman and my mother was a homemaker. It already sounds like a bad joke. Um, I lived in New Jersey for most of my life. I have two sisters. My father left our family when I was about five so I grew up in a family of women and I was used to having only women around and I generally thought that, ya know, men were pretty useless for a long time since we didn't have any around and we did just fine. I , um, grew up very middle class in the middle class suburbs except that we were on welfare for most of that time and food-stamps. We would like, ya know, sneak into the supermarkets and I would always be humiliated if somebody was there. I um, went to college in New Jersey. I have been interested in a lot of things. I studied journalism, I studied public relations. After college I went to San Francisco and stopped shaving my armpit hair and freed myself from mascara and um, ya know, just engaged in lots of other really subversive activities and even saw a few Grateful Dead shows. San Francisco was great. Then I came back, um, east to Philadelphia because I still wasn't sure what I wanted to do and at that point I think I was interested in environmental education. And um, I also at different times in Philadelphia I was a street vendor, um a concert programmer, a professional photographer clown, a filmmaker, a graduate student. I became an aunt. Met my husband there. Um, spent a lot of time there. The 20s, my 20s. That's when I was young and hip. I um then started a whole new thing of becoming a university professor. I was also a video artist and one of the original termites so I really technically shouldn't have to be sitting in front of the camera. Um, and my latest incarnation is as wife and as mother of an 18-month-old who's, he's safe right now, he's over there. And it's been really interesting because I think um I got through periods of absorption and expulsion in the sense that, ya know, I always think I have everything figured out like journalism, ya know, was the true calling and I had it all figured out and I then did a lot of writing and then I thought this is bullshit and it's too political and ya know and then environmental education was like really the thing and it's important to save the earth but then I realized all the politics behind the non-profits of of the nonprofit world of environmental protection and art was the thing and video and media and I still kind of think that it's pretty fundamental but um I got tired of playing with images and um making television and now ya know motherhood is the real fundamental touchstone thing and it's ya know more important than anything else because you're like affecting this life. And um so I'm forsaking anything electronic and I wanna spend my time behind the sewing machine and of course like nursing 24 hours a day and helping children and doing arts and crafts and um, being a homemaker and and making that um, my thing. And I guess I'm in a period of absorption where I have nothing to say because I'm so overwhelmed by what I'm doing. Um, and I'm a work in progress, this is a life story in progress. I am currently living in Los Angeles. It's much too sunny here. We're gonna go somewhere soon. i think we're gonna move. Simon, are you playing with the microphone? Can you come here. Okay. This is simon. He's a lion. What does a lion say? What does a lion say? I'm teaching him well because he, Simon doesn't respond to authority. it's not a good thing. Anyway I really I don't know, I'm pretty happy. I um, imagine I'll have a million more careers before my time is done. And make millions more discoveries and a million more truths and a million more lies in the world. And, but ya know, things are good right now. And that's it.