Did I mention how this is my favorite time of year? I woke up this morning, and opened my window, and, after discovering that there was no screen on my window (?!) this amazing breeze came through and woke me up. The fall-type breeze, where you can almost smell the leaves in the air, that makes you think of bags of Halloween candy and those candles people put on their lawns on Halloween night. I got all ready for the day, I even got to wear a long-sleeved shirt, and got myself some coffee. Amanda and I ate yogurt and drank coffee outside before class. Simple stuff like this keeps me here and makes me realize that I belong here, this is where I'm meant to be, at least for the time being.

I'm struggling against becoming lethargic. After two years at this school, the sameness is starting to wear on me. I know it's my own fault for not...doing whatever it is that I should be doing. Keeping things interesting. Part of the problem right now is Catherine is across the ocean. That means I laugh less hard, along with lots of other things.

I need something right now. Something to keep me on my toes. Pick me up. Something to look forward to. I've got to start doing things differently.

There are many other things I need right now.

Between the Shadow and the Soul

Sonnet XVII
Pablo Neruda

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way than this:

where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

Back to School, Back to School

Yup. I think this might just be my favorite time of the year. Of course, I also say that during Christmas time, in the middle of fall, and at the beginning of the spring. And summer. Anyway, I love all the new notebooks and pens and books, and this morning I got up and there was coffee brewing in the kitchen. I put on a sweatervest so I would look studious for my first day. I feel good today, and I feel quite optimistic about this year. It's going to be a good one.

I am excited about getting back into my routine. This past week of nothing but hanging out and being a college student once again has been great, but also completely unproductive.

I really don't have much to say.

All My Mistakes

Woo hoo, life is good, I leave for Memphis tomorrow (for good) and I GOT A NEW GUITAR. It's beautiful, no joke. Gorgeous. It's a Mitchell. If it were a boy...we would be married.

Speaking of boys...I was watching Sex and the City last night (don't laugh), and it was all about patterns in dating, and, while I've always known my pattern, Catherine confirmed it for me last night: I am attracted to guys who are unavailable. "Unavailable" comes in many different varieties, so sometimes I think that just cause a guy is straight and doesn't have a girlfriend, then it means he's available. Oh no. There is also the emotionally unavailable guy, and the angsty, "in a bad place" guy as well, along with various and sundry others. Then again, they could be perfectly available, and making up excuses. Either way, it's depressing, I don't know if I can break the cycle. I listed to her all the guys I've liked who have been unavailable, all these guys from high school, college, it adds up, and it's started to wear me out.

So how do I get over this? I don't often find myself attracted to guys who are TOTALLY available, so what do I do? Just date the next decent one who shows interest, even if there is no chemistry whatsoever? Can't do it.

I hope it all works out in the end. I hope I don't have to settle.

Here's me putting my secrets and my life out on the internet. Probably a bad idea, but I'll admit the above pattern to anyone...and I'm sure it's already painfully obvious to those who know me well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDQc6SMNwgY
"But I can't go back, and I don't want to, cause all my mistakes, led me to you"

I know I just posted, but I have something else to share.

I was google-ing "how to tie-dye," but before I started typing "tie-dye," the search assist started trying to finish my search...with what are, apparently, the top things we are wanting to learn how to do...

How to:

tie a tie

avoid speeding tickets

lose weight

read food labels

draw

flirt

live on less

write a resume

kiss

play guitar



We all want to do, or learn how to do, the same things. It's cool to see that people want the same things I want.

Patching things up

For the past couple of days, my mom has been out of town helping Annette move in at Rockhurst, and I was left with the responsibility of my little sisters. By the end of the two days, I was so ready for this stay-at-home mom thing to be over. I don't think I could do it. I got so restless. The only other time I've felt that restless is when I'm babysitting, or back when I used to lifeguard, the worst job in the world. Of course, my mother is one of the greatest women I know, and I respect her so much. But I don't think I could do what she does. I do think think the sacrifices she's made so she can stay at home with us have made me into the person I am today, though, I wouldn't trade it for anything. To sum it up, my childhood was better than yours. The good thing about staying at home, though: I definitely felt needed, and this was fulfilling in a way. I also felt like I was getting shit done; I did laundry that needed to be done, I patched up my holey Toms, washed my car.

I'm especially proud of my patchwork skills on my Toms. If anyone ever needs something patched up, and they don't mind it looking obviously patched in a cute way, then I'm your girl. And I added a lil extra something (the lil pink heart on the left one). That's my trademark. I just decided that.

When I'm a grown up, I want to do it all and have it all and be it all. I hope this is possible.

Sorry for all the heavy blog entries...It's just come to my attention that I have a legit audience, or like maybe three people. People are actually reading this, so maybe I should try to even out my angsty stuff with some lighter stuff, witty observations perhaps.

Also, if you're reading this, thank you for being my audience.

A lil somethin' I wrote a long long time ago

Red and bright green and purple, the bruised color of healing knees, the words had been poured out like cool water from a glass pitcher onto the kitchen floor, the one your mother kept in the china cabinet that you always wanted to use, but never got to; splashed, splattered, smeared onto the walls. Or like mud and sand out of the bottoms of your shoes, speckled with tiny shells outside on a cloudy day on a dirty beach. Or maybe like a bucket of chlorinated water, the smell of it always makes you think of that summer you spent alternating from the sun to the shade, swimming among the concrete and under the diving board, there were flashes of lightning. You were dangerous because life was dull, you said it was safe at the time, comfortable, but it was dull, and life desperately needed lightning, something to electrify you, from the inside out, although you didn’t realize it at the time. Whatever the case, however, the water/sand and mud shells, was poured, and the words were on the wall. The words came from souls, souls that were empty and needed filling, hollow, or else souls that were so damn full of emotions it made them jump up and down—hunger, ecstasy, butterflies, confusion, wonder, and awe. For those who had these full souls, the words spilled like water—the pitcher, remember?—onto the walls of the room, clear and smooth. Easy, you know just how to describe yourself: I am ______. I feel ______. For those who had empty souls, the writing was painful, like extracting a splinter. It was godless, and it was clear in a different way, like a sharp winter day, full of nothingness, and a dull ache. People held hands as they wrote on the walls, those who were unafraid of the feeling of touching and being touched, this is not everyone. Fingers interlocked and thumbs tracing soothing outlines usually facilitated the true kind of writing. Because you recognize what needs to be written on these walls of this room when you stand side by side, even if they don’t understand, even if you don’t understand, it’s okay, there’s nothing wrong with not understanding yourself. And the handwriting—some was scrawled, like the writer wished for it to remain a secret, and maybe if I just write it faster, I can get it all out less painfully. Some were written carefully, with pleasure and relief, pride and acceptance, because this is me and here I am. And when you stand inside the room, you feel as though you are standing inside a spider web because all the writing is interconnected. It’s exhausting, it makes you heart pound because tiny strings are shooting off the walls and joining to the other side because they are the same thing, they are attracted because they are identical. So you feel raw and unprotected amidst it all, like a peeled apple, enveloped in the words and in the human condition. You feel lonelier than you have ever felt in you life because loneliness is something as common as breathing, as thinking. Like you are wrapped up in a blanket in your favorite bed with the secrets and emotions contained in the words, spread out upon, under, beside, along you. It is akin to the feeling of lying beside someone in bed for the first time and feeling a familiarity of being human, and also a strangeness of contact, and even an invasion. But above all, the words crush you, wonderfully crush you, like someone kissing you too hard, and you feel bruised, naked. Because you are ineffective to all the words, you cannot fix them or cover them up, because you ARE all the words, every one of them is a part of you, flowing through your blood and into you heart, through your ventricles and out, all the way to your fingers and toes, making them tingle with the sheer electricity that makes you shake, makes your face turn red.
“It’s fine, it’s fine.”
“But when you said that, I believed you.”
“The world is beautiful, and the best part about it is you and your eyelashes.”
“The words didn’t come to me when I needed them.”
“I fell for you because I hadn’t fallen for anyone else.”
That’s what it said, and the walls were white at first, but as the words were written, colors appeared, sort of like tie-dye, but more like that light box, the one with the sand and the colored light glowing from underneath, vibrant and soft. It was like the great work of art, “this room belongs in a museum,” you thought. Nothing had yet been created that SHOUTED, whispered, shook you by the shoulders, reached out and touched your cheek and violated you because it left you exposed under fluorescent lights, it was too much of you and was difficult to show because you were the kind of person who didn’t show yourself, you skin, your gums, the insides of your hands and legs, the nape of your neck your spine. Some didn’t know what to say so they quoted, they scribbled Dylan and Dante and Donne and Camus and Kerouac across the walls, they wrote the word “incandescent” over and over again because it was their favorite word, and also Virginia Woolf’s favorite word. They wrote the songs that spilled out of their fifth grade CD player, with awful lyrics, but it somehow perfectly described what they needed to describe, “When are you going to realize it was just that the time was wrong?” The writing was ugly, but it was truth, and so it was beautiful. The writing soon leaked from the walls onto the ceiling and the floor, and then it was even more confining and freeing to you, standing in the middle, the words began shouting to one another, and answering one another, Marco Polo style, although the authors of the words had never met.
“I wore that dress for you!”
“I didn’t ask for all this.”
They hadn’t met, well, I suppose they hadn’t met until now, because their words shot off the wall and became acquainted, exchanged small talk and asked one another what their major was, like a couple of awkward college students.

"For what it's worth,

it's never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There's no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again."

Teva Twins

Annette and I climbed Pinnacle yesterday. The climb was a bitch because I'm in horrible shape, but when we got to the top, there was this cool breeze and the sun was setting. Worth it.

Quote of the day--Annette (while bounding down Pinnacle): I feel like I'm a mountain lion!

Me: Maybe you were one in another life...

When I Was a Kid

I miss being a kid. My brother and sisters and I basically spent ninety percent of our respective childhoods behind the fence. There was this little wooded area where no houses had yet been built, and we would build forts, it seemed like the woods would go on forever, like it was impossible to explore all of it. A creek ran through the woods, ran through a tunnel under the street, and we used to see how far the it went, but it was impossible to reach the end and be home in time for dinner. In case we got lost (which is unlikely considering the fact that we were following a river), we left chalk marks on rocks to find our way back. I thought that must have been what the Indians did when they explored the area. We planned to build a dam so we could have a little pond to swim in during the summertime, which was one of those projects that never got finished, although we did end up swimming one day, fully clothed, and got into trouble soon afterward. We stripped down in the laundry room and laid our clothes out to dry on the driveway. There was this really deep part of the creek, the water got cold as you went deeper, and I used to wonder what creatures lived down there in the dark or whether it was even possible to reach the bottom. I remember when it rained a lot in the spring, we would have to wait for the rain to stop, but then when we finally went outside, it seemed like the whole world was covered in green, humid, dripping with sunlight.

What I'm Craving Today

cupcakes

sincerity...really, all the time. It gets reflected in my music. I love that heartbreaking, raw sincerity.

new books

cuddling

sunflower seeds and Harry Potter

sleep

apartment move in time

guitar playing time

someone who will sing to me

Apparently I'm incredibly arrogant.

This is what I thought of bloggers. Or this is what I was worried people might think of me if I started a blog.

But then I said, fuck it, I'm doing what I want to do. I gotta stop the worrying.

Anyway, I just saw the latest Harry Potter movie, which was, as they say in the wizarding world, BRILLIANT. Usually I am really depressed after seeing a Harry Potter movie, but this time, I felt like the whole movie had more meat to it. It was a little darker, less fluffy. To me, there is something so...almost timeless, or maybe nostalgic about Harry Potter. I grew up with it; it makes me remember like ten years of my life simultaneously.

This weekend I'm going to Memphis, which is, at the moment, really the only place I want to be right now. Although I was realizing this about my life (and then becoming unspeakably thankful): Basically everywhere I go, I'm surrounded by, covered, in love. And I know this is no feat of my own. But really, how, HOW did I get so lucky? I feel like I don't know how to love half as well as the people with whom I associate, I feel like I'm learning how to love better from them all the time.

Learning that things will always be missing. That's just the way it goes.

Learning to be more content, because if there is all this love everywhere, then what am I scrambling around looking for all the time?

I keep feeling the need to justify myself for creating this blog, or at least a need to explain my reasons.

1. I keep a journal, but I need something that allows me to expose my writing to...actual people. Not that many, if any, people will read it, but it's still out there, and I still have an audience in mind, which helps me write better.

2. I am a nerd. I love reading other people's writing, especially journal-y stuff like this. So I'm hoping I'm not alone in this hobby and maybe other people can get a little enjoyment, get to know me better, with this blog.

3. Fuck, every sentence I'm writing begins with "I." Anyway, this is also (mainly) for myself, my own enjoyment, and partially my own sanity. Yesterday at the dentist I learned that my jaw issues are most likely a result of stress and keeping all this shit in. So this shit's out.

I gotta work on my language. Need to learn to be a lil classier.

And, the title: It's a Spoon song, but I guess lots of the time I feel really empty-handed when it comes to words, despite English being my major. I don't know why, but the title of this song captures that for me. Much of my writing will be about someone, or something. I also like the sound of the phrase.