Good things

I'm going back to Memphis tomorrow!

Which means...

yoga tomorrow night.

My little geek's birthday party tomorrow night.

My own bed! maybe.

A longish car ride to clear my head.

My friends!!!!!!!!!

The beach soon!

The pool in the meantime!

Also. It's time for a change. I'm getting that familiar feeling of wanting to dye my hair, or cut it off, or get a tattoo or a piercing or something. I have a million tattoo ideas. But none has struck me as important enough for me to get permanently etched onto my body. I'm hoping I'll get a revelation soon. I want to get Annette to design it.

My life=a million exclamation points right now.

I've felt content lately. The kind of contentedness that comes from eating ribs with my family and drinking a Corona with lime and knowing I'll be going back to Memphis in a couple of days. Sometimes I'll be sitting there, and this feeling of "wow, I think I'm happy" will sort of occur to me and I'll feel appreciative for that.

I should tell you about my Oakland/Berkeley visit! I want to start a new blog when I join Lasallian Volunteers and write about my experiences with that, narrow my focus.

Anyway. I'll be living in Berkeley. The city is as pretty as the people. Everyone's always biking around, running. All these steep, rolling hills and tons of green. It's like whoever designed the city put a lot of thought into it, which is a breath of fresh air coming from Memphis. You can taste the liberalism in the air. The house is right near Berkeley campus, so I get to see college students all the time and be jealous, wonder what classes they're going to that I'm missing out on. It's comforting being close to a college. It's a lot like a big Midtown.

And the volunteers and the brothers are great. Really genuine and everyone seems to get along. Comfortable, lots of laughing and joking.

Took a tour of San Francisco, and it's a really colorful, vibrant city. Big Victorian houses all squashed together, parks, the ocean. I want to explore every street. I'm impatient to get to know the place. I want to be a local there immediately, and know where to go. But I'm sure there will be excitement in exploration.

I got lucky.

Maybe,

Maybe, I thought,

I’ll step around those words.

That came from some part of him.

(I can’t tell the heart from other parts of the body.)

Careful and heavy with purpose,

They hit me like someone putting their foot

In the center of my chest.

They walked all over me,

All night.

And when the sun came up,

The blank, white walls rose,

On a bare mattress,

I felt.

A little bruised and beaten,

A little buzzed,

A little space.

And less of the great, crushing, eternal you,

The you of wrinkled foreheads and frenetic energy.

The you of reason and a steering wheel.

Subtraction of a million memories,

I feel it, in this very second, falling away,

The rug pulled out from under me.

It appears that my summer is wide open. Apparently the gods do not want me to go overseas, ever.

I guess it's how you look at it. What am I going to do with my last three months?

Write a book?

Volunteer?

Work?

All of the above?

I'm glad I have more time with people now. But definitely feeling disappointed.

"and it was the nature of those from the tiny shtetl to forgive their first and only loves, so he forced himself to understand, or pretend to understand."

-Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

"With each injury you learn how that patch of you feels. It wakens. Until it heals, you're aware of those nerves.

"This is a privilege?"

"Of course. Every place you injure adds that patch to your consciousness. You grow more alive. And that point of all this is...that when you have hurt every single place on your body, you die! Once you have felt every last nerve ending, at least on your skin, then you have lived in full awareness. Then you die."

-Annie Dillard, The Maytrees

Still you know I'll try again

Cause I believe that we are lucky,

We are golden,

We have stolen moments from the days when we were one.

Thoughts on Packing

It's not so much the stress of getting everything into boxes that bothers me, but the realization of the rate at which time is flying by. What's fun about it, though: I have boxes of things that are special to me, that remind me of certain moments or good times or even not-so-good times. I forget to put things in these boxes throughout the year, so it all accumulates in my room. So I find these things when I'm packing and get to relive everything. Which can be good, can be bad.

Some things I've found that I've put my memory boxes this year:

A "GO ANGELA" sign, I don't know who made it, it looks like boy handwriting though.

A drawing by my little sister Allison that shows me sitting in my desk at school with a thought bubble above my head with her face in it.

AGS 2010 nametag

Chicago transit 3 day pass

Green beads

my numbers from my first race (5K)

old passport

Hold Steady Heaven Is Whenever CD

A belt from my Indian costume

Mix CD list from Catherine

Paper fortune teller

A letter from Quantico, VA

Musicfest lineup

"Who You Are Now"

Nametag from honors conference

Burned copy of Cory Branan

Burned copy of Lucero That Much Further West

My name written in calligraphy

A graded short story

I JUST MOVED IN. But also, I was a completely different person at the beginning of this year. I don't know who that person is anymore, the person who moved in while drinking PBR.

Wow, life feels great right now.

Easy and smooth. Damn. All feels right. I didn't think I'd feel this at peace during my last week at school. I keep repeating that maybe it hasn't hit me...but I think it has. I also think I've prepared myself enough for it, and I think I'm ready for it. I've done all I can do here, I've grown all I can, I've learned all I can. And I've done, grown, and learned A LOT. Wow. The Honors Program senior dinner thing was really heartwarming and fuzzy. Oodles of approval from professors I love. That's one thing I didn't expect about college--that I would actually learn a lot from the people teaching me, duuuuhhh.

What I've done

I've woken in to a dorm room that smelled like my roommate's lilac body spray. I've crawled out of bed and into sweatpants and went to my 8:00 class. I've woken up in a dirty apartment, with a bed full of the limbs of another person. And I made the inconvenient walk across campus in the early morning under arches, back to my car, and back to my house. Also, I've woken up in my very own tiny bed in my large house, and turned on the coffee machine, made a fried egg and toast, and I sunk deep into a routine.

I danced on a rooftop. I danced in foam in a couple of states. I danced covered in paint. I danced to the Flaming Lips live.

I've kissed a lot of people, and I've lost my head with a few people. I've gotten varying degrees of butterflies in my stomach. I once had butterflies that lasted for a good month straight, during which I didn't eat.

I've stayed out all night long in familiar and unfamiliar apartments, all with the same furniture. I've spent afternoons by the pool. I've broken into the pool at night. I've eaten more pounds of Central BBQ than I care to mention. I've fallen in love with the feeling of going to class. I had the perfect porch for people-watching my junior year. The perfect hammock. I I threw up in a car. I've worn out a couple of pairs of Toms. I went arching a couple of times. I've been to the roof of just about every main building on campus, and climbed around on the apartment buildings a good bit. I've played a ton of sand volleyball. I've partied on Beale.

I went to Louisiana, New York, Alabama, Florida, Arkansas, Michigan, Illinois...

I think I've just about checked it all off the list.

I didn't write this

But I should have. Except for the sex on the kitchen table part.

On Making Something Happen

"That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen."

-Charles Bukowski

It occurred to me just now that all anyone (read: I) wants is to feel appreciated, special, beautiful, loved. Damn. Irreplaceable. Like if you were gone, a huge chunk would be missing from this one person's life. The feeling like you don't really have to do anything to be appreciated, but you will (and do) anything anyway. You'd drive a long ways. You'd listen to bad music. You'd put up with it all. Because it's worth it.

I've brushed up against this unconditional love a few times in my life. This is how my parents love me, I know--but when someone loves you out of their own free will in this way, it just about blows you away. This is why love is so hard, because you are putting this massive feeling on the line. If you let yourself be loved in this way by a person, there is always the chance that it won't last, and you wonder if the pain afterwards would be worth the love you get.

I suppose it's not unconditional love if it can be gone eventually. I want to believe in this more than I'd like to admit.

How is it, pray tell, that I feel so bored?

I used to get excited about much smaller things. My life was enough when it wasn't as exciting as it is these days. It's filled with great things these days. Annette and Tom came in town and we saw the Flaming Lips and it was truly amazing. I'm seeing Wilco and the Avett Brothers TONIGHT! School is not difficult. I have all this free time to do whatever I want. My love life is not in a terrible place. I'm not working. I'm going to live in OAKLAND in a few months. How am I not excited every single morning? My friends are great. How am I not ecstatic every single day?