So, here I am in Berkeley. The air is crisp and the city feels clean, and I think that means it's time for a new blog. I want it to focus on my experiences in this city as a Lasallian Volunteer, so who knows, I may keep this one up as well. I need a more linear blog that I can write for my family and friends, and also a more poetry-centered one that is more private.

Here is the link: http://angelaetoomer.wordpress.com/ Enjoy!

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”

—	Louise Erdrich (The Painted Drum)

Memphis wakes to a smell of hot tar,

to cracked sidewalks,

to the sweat and grime of a million tired souls,

scraping themselves off the pavement.

The wanderers,

the prayers muttered under breaths,

about this: "Let me be okay."

The tired, the worn out, the winding blues,

The neon signs,

The atmosphere heavy with exhaled wind,

From lungs that have reached capacity.

The smell of a morning that is hot, already,

The coffee in styrofoam cups,

The days that pass like beads on a rosary.

Please, let me be okay.

This period of transit is never comfortable, but I'm getting more comfortable with dealing with it. I've done a lot of moving back and forth in the past four years. This move is BIG, though. Big but also completely necessary and a relief, in a way.

When I look back at the person I was at this time my freshman year, when I was moving into the dorms and going to my first college parties, I hardly recognize myself. I guess this is a universal thing--and I am so glad I've changed. I think something is wrong if you go through college and remain the same person. Each year, even, I've become a different person. I'm glad I experienced everything I did in college. It was everything I wanted it to be, also something I didn't expect, and so much more. It's so very temporary, that strange college world, but it's a good thing that it's temporary. It had to end, and I wouldn't have done much differently.

I was on campus today dropping off some stuff/saying goodbye to college, for good, and I didn't feel this overwhelming sense of nostalgia. I was surprised. I sort of wanted some kind of catharsis, a big feeling for this place I've been for four years. Instead, I just felt this peace and acceptance that this era is over. I felt gratefulness for having been here. It's time to move on though. I felt the same thing when I moved to Memphis. It's time.

“Mostly we authors must repeat ourselves—that’s the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives, experiences so great and moving that it doesn’t seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before. Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories—each time in a new disguise—maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen.”

—	F. Scott Fitzgerald, from “One Hundred False Starts” in A Short Autobiography

Where is the evidence?

"Summer Solstice" by Stacie Cassarino

I wanted to see where beauty comes from

without you in the world, hauling my heart

across sixty acres of northeast meadow,

my pockets filling with flowers.

Then I remembered,

it’s you I miss in the brightness

and body of every living name:

rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch.

You are the green wonder of June,

root and quasar, the thirst for salt.

When I finally understand that people fail

at love, what is left but cinquefoil, thistle,

the paper wings of the dragonfly

aeroplaning the soul with a sudden blue hilarity?

If I get the story right, desire is continuous,

equatorial. There is still so much

I want to know: what you believe

can never be removed from us,

what you dreamed on Walnut Street

in the unanswerable dark of your childhood,

learning pleasure on your own.

Tell me our story: are we impetuous,

are we kind to each other, do we surrender

to what the mind cannot think past?

Where is the evidence I will learn

to be good at loving?

The black dog orbits the horseshoe pond

for treefrogs in their plangent emergencies.

There are violet hills,

there is the covenant of duskbirds.

The moon comes over the mountain

like a big peach, and I want to tell you

what I couldn’t say the night we rushed

North, how I love the seriousness of your fingers

and the way you go into yourself,

calling my half-name like a secret.

I stand between taproot and treespire.

Here is the compass rose

to help me live through this.

Here are twelve ways of knowing

what blooms even in the blindness

of such longing. Yellow oxeye,

viper’s bugloss with its set of pink arms

pleading do not forget me.

We hunger for eloquence.

We measure the isopleths.

I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude.

The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries.

Fireflies turn on their electric wills:

an effulgence. Let me come back

whole, let me remember how to touch you

before it is too late.

My sneaking suspicion

"The difficulty

with love, I want to say, is sometimes

you only know afterwards that it’s arrived

or left. "

"How You Know" by Joe Mills

“There will be other lives. There will be other lives for nervous boys with sweaty palms, for bittersweet fumbling in the backseats of cars, for caps and gowns in royal blue and crimson, for mothers clasping pretty pearl necklaces around daughters’ unlined necks, for your full name read aloud in an auditorium, for brand-new suitcases transporting you to strange new people in strange new lands. And there will be other lives for unpaid debts, for one-night stands, for Prague and Paris, for painful shoes with pointy toes, for indecision and revisions. And there will be other lives for fathers walking daughters down aisles. And there will be other lives for sweet babies with skin like milk. And there will be other lives for a man you don’t recognize, for a face in a mirror that is no longer yours, for the funerals of intimates, for shrinking, for teeth that fall out, for hair on your chin, for forgetting everything. Everything. Oh, there are so many lives. How we wish we could live them concurrently instead of one by one by one. We could select the best pieces of each, stringing them together like a strand of pearls. But that’s not how it works. A human’s life is a beautiful mess.”

—	Gabrielle Zevin

On this night, after a great night out with friends, I feel very optimistic. I think there are good things for me in my twenties. Actually, my uncle told me this during my visit to LA--he said my twenties and thirties would be good. Let's begin it! I feel good about where I am right now and where I'm going. I just started training for a half marathon and feel like I'm going all kinds of places.

I feel like I'm finally out of the funk of the last 10 months or so. How ridiculous does that sound? This breakup--when I started dating this person, part of the reason I did so was because I didn't think it would end up ever hurting too badly...as in, I didn't think I would ever get so attached. Not that I didn't like him. But just that I didn't think I'd fall quite so hard and have trouble recovering so many months later.

Anyway, I feel good. I think I have excitement and love and newness coming my way. I have good things now, but maybe great things are to come?

Advice for myself:

Slow down. Sit and read for a little bit. Stop worrying all the time. Relax. Do more yoga. Learn to be by yourself.

Shrug it off. Stop watching romantic comedies if they make you feel like your life is less, even though you see the traps and think it's all dumb.

Be present to people. Have conversations and eye contact.

I think I'm just tired.

“I’d made a list in my notebook of all the things I missed about him. The way he wrinkles his nose when he’s thinking was one. How he holds things was another. But now I needed to talk to him for real and no list would substitute. I stood by the phone while my stomach turned itself inside out. During the time I waited, a whole species of butterfly may have become extinct, or a large, complex mammal with feelings like mine.”

—	Nicole Krauss

"I have learned to smoke because I need something to hold onto."

-Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

I feel the same way, and if it were the 194os I might have learned.

I love coming home. Chicago for LV orientation was equal amounts fun and exhausting. This morning, I went for a run that kicked my ass, I took a shower without flipflops on this morning, and ate breakfast. I feel excellent.

I'm also ready to embark on my new adventure in Berkeley, although the whole concept is still not quite real to me yet. I have a couple weeks of work between me and moving, though. I'm ready to get that over with.

Oh! I'm for real running the Minneapolis half marathon this October! Yeah that's in like two months...I gotta get my shit together. It's the official Lasallian Volunteers run of the year, so I think it's the perfect chance. Plus my future roommate and coworker Krysia will be running it with me and can help me train!

Also one of my BFFs Caroline is getting married soon and I am so happy for her and I can't wait for the wedding! I want all of my friends to be happy, and this dude she's marrying seems to make her happy, so I am all for it.

There are so many things happening!

I'll drink to...

Impatience

Ambition

Honor

A jar of wine

Innocence

Whispering

Tired running legs

August.