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It's my birthday tomorrow, the 2nd. (If anybody is feeling generous, I would love to have gold membership, then I could go find a scanner and post the photographs of empty vodka bottles and other things I found in the street on Broadway last night.) To celebrate, I was going to go camping, but have decided to put that on hold. Instead, I've decided to go to the Portland Zine Symposium, where I will most likely know nobody. This almost meets my specifications of having a birthday in solitude. I guess being unknown is the next best thing.

I hope these workshops teach me something. Ever since high school I've had the idea of making a zine, I just never knew what I wanted to say. I remember my brother coming home from college and handing me a stack of little booklets made out of about 5 or 6 folded pieces of paper each, containing poetry, humor filled with philosophy refrences, and, most importantly, subversive literature. At least to me it was subversive. I wish I could recall the names they were published under. It totally blew my fifteen year-old suburban mind.

Almost immediatley, I made a few attempts to do something in this new medium to which I had been exposed, but it was a fruitless effort. Maybe this symposium that I've heard of through Alex Wrekk (who I've never met) and portland indymedia (where I almost never post) will push me to transfer my ideas into something tangible.

I think this is the perfect time to do so. As of last week, I know more specifically, almost exactly what I want to say to the world. My zine will be somewhat autobiographical, somewhat instructive, about deciding to be liberal in an ultra-conservative family. I've charted out a map in my head, I should start writing it down, because this idea could poor from me more freely than anything I've known before.