A Nest Made of Thoughts & Memories

Laughter: The Best Medicine

2010-04-13T22:47:00.002-05:00

Even now, I miss Grams every day. I may not always think about her specifically but something will catch me and a pang will sweep through my heart and leave me breathless for a moment. Today, while going through some of her things, I was swept up anew by feelings of grief and remorse, of not knowing her better and writing down her stories, her life, when I was able because what a life she led. The things she left behind are a small testament to the women she was.

While going through a box of things that had already been neatly piled together, I came across a few well creased pieces of notebook paper that hold little bits of laughter from, I'm assuming, a friend of hers. So I'm going to share them with you now in hopes that if you're having a bad day that this will lighten your mood some.

" Once upon a time, there was a nonconforming sparrow who decided not to fly south for the winter. However, soon the weather turned so cold that h reluctantly started to fly south. In a short time ice began to form on his wings and he fell to earth in a barnyard, almost frozen. A cow passed by and crapped on the little sparrow. The sparrow thought it was the end. But, the manure warmed him and defrosted his wings. Warm and happy, able to breathe, he started to sing. Just then, a large cat came by and hearing the chirping, investigated the sounds. The cat cleared away the manure, found the chirping bird and promptly ate him.

The moral of the story:

Everyone who shits on you is not necessarily your enemy.
Everyone who gets you out of the shit is not necessarily your friend.
And, if you're warm and happy in a pile of shit, keep your mouth shut."

" I woke one early morning

The earth lay cool and still

When suddenly a tiny bird

Perched on my window sill.

So care free and so gay

That slowly all my troubles

Began to slip away.

It seemed it's very trilling

Brought up the morning sun

I stirred beneath the covers

Crept softly out of bed

And slowly lowered the window

And crushed it's fucking head!"

For the record, I don't condone violence to birds, I just found it so shocking it was hilarious.

And lastly, the best and the longest...

"TO ALL EMPLOYEES

It has been brought to my attention that the attendance record of this institution is a disgrace. It has become necessary to revise some of our policies.

The following changes are in effect as of today:

Sickness: No Excuse: We will no longer accept your doctor's statement as proof, as we believe that if you are able to go to the doctor, you are able to come to work.

Death (Other Than Your Own): This is no excuse. There is nothing you can do for them, and we are sure that someone else with a lesser position can attend to the arrangements. However, if the funeral can be held in the late afternoon, we will be glad to let you off one hour early, provided that your share of the work is ahead enough to keep the job going in your absence.

Leave of Absence (For An Operation): We are no longer allowing this practice. We wish to discourage any thoughts that you may need an operation, as we believe that as long as you are an employee here, you will need all of whatever you have and you should not consider having anything removed. We hired you as you are and to have anything removed would make you less than we bargained for.

Death (Your Own): This will be accept as an excuse. But, we would like to have a two week notice, as we feel it is your duty to teach someone else your job.

Also, entirely too much time is being spent in the rest rooms. In the future, we will follow the practice of going in alphabetical order. For instance, those whose names begin with -A- will go from 9:00 A.M. to 9:15 A.M., -B- will go from 9:15 A.M. to 9:30 A.M., and so on. If you are unable to go at your time, it will be necessary to wait until the next day when your time comes again.

Thank you -

The Management"

Gotta love old ladies with a sense of humor.

New Old History

2010-03-18T23:05:00.003-05:00

My schedule has been suddenly, rather unexpectedly filled. I say suddenly, rather unexpectedly because usually my calendar is rather empty. Currently when I look at the calendar above my desk, I lament over the fact that three of the seven days have stickers on them for this week and next week and that some of those stickers extend a good few days. Such as the one for the twenty-sixth of March. The small maroon sticker that came with the calendar has a picture of a butterfly and the curling scrawl states that it is the start of my 'Vacation'. I'm not sure how much a 'vacation' my vacation will be but I hope to have at least some few moments of ease and enjoyment.

Normally, when I think of a vacation I think of leaving the city to visit someplace new or someplace well loved with family or friends or both but relatively, while there is an agenda, it is rather laid back. I can put on my jeans and walk around and browse and enjoy. Well, this vacation fill some of those criteria... partially. I will be leaving the city to visit someplace new (Bridgeport, Alabama); I will be with someone well loved and his family; there is an agenda and unfortunately it isn't that laid back. Especially since I can't imagine being laid back while wearing a hoop skirt.

That's right. I said hoop skirt.

Come the last Friday of this month, I will be travelling two and a half hours, give or take, to an un-well-known piece of Alabama close to Chatanooga called Bridgeport. If you're like me and have never heart of this little city, here's a little information about it. Courtesy of Wikipedia since there isn't a town run website on the place and shortened even further by me.

Bridgeport is a small city in Jackson County, Alabama. The town was originally named Jonesville in the early 1800s when it was settled but was later renamed to Bridgeport to reflect its ideal location next to the Tennessee River and a railroad line. Bridgeport was a strategic site during the American Civil War and on August 26th in 1862, Bridgeport entered a major skirmish. During the latter part of the war, Bridgeport became a source for building gunboats and transports for the Union navy. The USS Chattanooga was built there and became the famous "Cracker Line" which broke the CSA siege of Chattanooga in November of 1863.

And that's it. That's all Wikipedia or anyone else for that matter seems to have on the tiny blip on the map called Bridgeport.

On the other hand, though, the actual event does have a website, which can be found here. If you are interested, I urge you to join or at least come see the event. If the pictures on the website are to be understood correctly, apparently the Siege at Bridgeport was actually filmed and used in the movie Sweet Home Alabama. Having not seen the movie in a number of years, I don't know if this is true or not but I'm sure those of you wanting to know will undoubtedly find out if you search for it.

So wish me luck. This is sure to be an interesting experience. Due to the length of the trip, I am unsure if I will be able to make an entry on the twenty-sixth, the last Friday of this month. I'm not sure when I am to be picked up, by whom (his parents or by him), and I am still a little fuzzy on what I need to bring and what need be left at home.

Small Domestic Turbulence

2010-03-17T23:28:00.004-05:00

Change. Change is something that happens every day. We change our lives irrevocably by deciding to turn left instead of right, wheat bread instead of white, heels instead of tennis shoes... small, insignificant things. The Butterfly Effect. I don't believe that sneezing causes tsunamis, however I do believe that our choices change our life. It's been proven time and time again.

Change happens often in my life. I make friends, I lose friends. I take classes and I either fail them or I pass them and that effects my future further down the line. Even small things, like changing my room layout around so that I am more efficient or less likely to break my toes from stubbing them on the feet of my daybed. So when someone balks so openly at change, I'm baffled and confused, especially when I think that my suggestions make perfect sense, that I've given several viable answers to the same problem. Or maybe just what I perceive to be a problem.

So yes. Very baffling.

Familiarity breeds contempt, or so Grams always told me and while my classmates may have complained when a teacher suddenly changed the orientation of the seating in a classroom, effectively almost bringing everyone to the front row and eliminating those who slept in the back of the class, I didn't complain. I rejoiced. I could thrive in that little bit of chaos because no matter where I was, I knew where I wanted to be. I knew I wanted to be to the right of whatever the focal point was so that I could recline comfortably in my chair, stretch my legs out into the desk across the way from me and toward the front because I tended to like to talk to the teacher. This is not to say that I was a teacher pet, however.

So I guess it just leaves me a little stunned every time I run into opposition from Jerry about something. True, this goes against what I just said, that I like when things are shook up but when you have learned enough about a person, you tend to form an idea of how they'll react, how they process things, and how they reach the conclusions that they do. Now, in some ways, this is a terrible thing that we're all guilty of because this pattern that we start to discern makes it easy for us to manipulate that person. We know what buttons to push at what times, whether it's to elevate a fight by being hurtful, sooth calms by reminding them of their favorite memories, or cheer them up by getting them a little surprise. You can even know how to word something in such a way to bring them around to your way of thinking. So it's good that he shook things up so that I don't fall into this comfortable, perfect pattern.

That doesn't mean it still didn't throw me for a loop. Upon viewing some pictures of his house in it's various stage of construction/deconstruction, I was voicing some of my opinions out loud since eventually he and I will be married and while concurred with a lot of things, other things he became defensive about. Now, a part of me should have known better, especially when he says something to the effect of 'It was a gift from so and so and I've had it for this many years' that I shouldn't poke and prod at it too much. Unfortunately, hindsight is better than foresight any day and instead I poked and prodded. Then I had the gall to argue with him in terms of the placement of objects and here he gets (and rightfully so) a little defensive. He states that he's been here for seven years and he's tried things different ways and this is the way that it's worked for him.

Yes, he appreciates my fresh perspective and he wants my input but now there are some base rules. Such as I have to give him more time to process things - longer than two heartbeats - and he isn't dismissing me when he says 'It's a thought...' It means he's weighing it with past experiences and is either trying to figure it out in his head or trying to figure out how best to put it to not disappoint/agitate me. It isn't fair that he has me figured so easily and yet with him the rules are still morphing because my understanding of him is still morphing...

We'll work this out, as always, but currently I am left a little disheartened about the actual weight of my opinion or ideas and I'm pretty sure it's all in my head, which is making me feel worse. We had an off day today. Maybe later will be better...

The Best Dream I Ever Had

2010-03-11T11:41:00.003-06:00

I know I will not remember it all. Even as I write this, the bits and pieces are fading that strung together so seamlessly just moments before but it really was a most excellent dream. It was a dream about a book, one that by was written by a Sarah Braussen, who does not exist. I remember the dream as if I were reading the book and the story was being told by someone who was always there – I could feel their emotions – but who was not a main character and so was not interacting with…

The story itself is very muddled. I can remember walking up a street which is not unlike a street that I used walk up to take a back way home – to cut through their backyard while no body was home. Except this time, I was being invited in by a girl that the main character knew, at least vaguely. The girl seemed to be in some sort of medical scrubs and unsure of the main character, the girl, but she introduced her to all of her siblings (little sisters and little brothers) as they made their way down the stairs, past the kitchen, and into a work room of some sorts.

There on the workbench table, the girl presented to the main character a small belt of blue plastic that had clear pockets that housed small octagonal shapes with different portions cut out and they were made to be linked up in different ways, any way a kid could imagine to make a shape. On the table, there was a 2-D dinosaur made. The girl who lived there said that she has just bought these, that she remembers playing with them at some time before but not where or when. When the main character states that she’d seen these before, she had played with them during her childhood, the girl became rather confused and turns to ask someone else if she remembers her playing with them during her childhood…

The rest is starting to blur here. There is some organization trying to stop or start something from happening and they know the main character is the key but they are determined to keep her away from the source. They seem to be scientists, mostly elderly women and bearded men. They spend a lot of time talking and scheming, they take the main character and her friends and separate them but somehow the guy, her best friend, escapes and goes through a couple of doors, a couple of small while rooms barely big enough for the tables in them, and finds her, and drags her out. He lies smoothly to whoever gives him an interested look as to why she’s there, free…

Then they’re in some sort of command center, some sort of control room where there are women and men monitoring the status of the source that they seem determined to keep the girl away from and she talks to them. She convinces them that the reason they were told to keep her away from it is because it didn’t want anything but her (or something to that effect). They believe her, and they lock themselves into the control room, with their uppers banging at the door that they’re fools and not to let her into the room – and then she’s in.

Now here the room feels skewed. It’s almost as if it’s coming from a giant’s perspective and the people you’ve come to know all through this journey – they’re just dolls. The room is huge and somehow it maintains the size well with the rest of the people who file into it. It’s grand and dark and gold like a palace and not well lit. The girl climbs onto some sort of mantle while others mill around staring at her. Up there there are four items (I don’t know why four, they just are) and there’s someone guiding her – some old man who keeps asking her all these hard questions about the things she picks up that she us unable to open until she answers his questions – he’s guiding her. She opens one box and her memory returns. She turns, showing the people behind her a miniature of her room, where there’s a work bench, and she declares she grew up in a palace, and this was my room. I created those interlocking toys that you like so much at this work bench right here. With that memory another item opens and as she goes down the line, the old man is nodding, pleased. When she’s done, she turns back to them and declares her remembrance.

She remembers now her history, her story and her purpose. That thing that she had been searching for the most – her purpose. Finally found. She was their creator. Not the creator of everything but of this generation, she was their creator, which is why they felt drawn to her and why some things confused her because they were not made of her, by her, so she had no knowledge of them… So on and so forth, grand little speech that leaves them in awe. The upper management bursts in, sees that they are defeated and then she feels it, as people start to leave. That it’s her time, that she’s going to die and not stay anymore. She walks out slowly with the old man at her side and she tries to come to terms with this short existence into reality – whatever reality it was – and she grieves over the things that she’ll miss.

As they leave the facility, a shot rings out and the old man stumbles, then crumples. She turns him over onto his back and another sort of understanding passes. He was an extension of her, had been there the whole time and had been her silent protector (that’s right, it’s you, which is why the prologue is told in a different way than the rest of the book) and he dies. She’s left feeling more alone than anything because no one else could see him but her, her conscious made into a flesh and form only her eyes could perceive…. But now he’s dead and there’s vengeance to be had for someone having killed a part of her.

It closes with her yelling to the pitch black, at the retreating form of killer and her generation. Closing the book, searching the author’s name on the internet, come across the next book and you read the beginning excerpt where the heroine tracks down three guys and interviews them briefly until she’s sure it wasn’t them… and then I woke up. The dream itself, when living it, was the most interesting, intriguing, thought provoking and vivid dream I’d had in a while and the best written, cohesive one I’ve ever remembered. I didn’t do it justice on paper but it was spectacular in the play by play movie. It was a novel from start to finish and then some and it was… The best dream I ever had.

Fishing for Answers

2010-03-09T23:32:00.004-06:00

I realize now why I am always so aware of wherever Jerry is whenever it comes to attending a party or being around his family - it's because when all else fails and I've said something stupid or embarassed myself to no end, I know that he's there and he loves me. It's because no one else understands me to the extent that he does and it's comforting.

Needless to say nothing about this day was comforting with him gone and me left rather defenseless with his younger sister and mother. I will be brief for unlike last night, I actually wish to escape into oblivion tonight.

First, his mother was actually on time. That alone made me nervous. It wasn't that I wasn't ready for her it was just that no one in my family, especially a woman, is ever anywhere on time despite our best intentions. No one. Second thing that put me a little on edge was how excited both women were to see me. Whenever anyone is that chipper (and they hadn't had their sangrias yet), it tends to make me shy away. While the drive over to the mall in Cool Springs was rather uneventful, we did pass several houses and we all ooo-ed and aaaahhh-ed over some of their architectual detail. I found myself easing into it a little as they dropped the volume of their tone a few notches and settled in for the twenty minute drive. At one point I made a comment about how I wanted a house with a lot of land around it and his mother said something to the effect of, 'Well, I hope you're marrying a millionaire then.' I bit my tongue and didn't say what I was thinking - 'No, I'm just marrying your son.'

We spent the rest of the ride after that comment discussing room designs and open floor concepts.

When we sat down to lunch - and I'm still not sure how we got on to this subject but I can almost garauntee that this time, it actually wasn't me - we began discussing weddings. I remember his mother asking me where I wanted to get married and I told her the truth, that I wanted to be married outside. I mentioned to her that my mother had found a dress for me that she thinks would be perfect for my wedding dress and then I pulled it up on my iPod to show them. They agreed and said it was very fitting. A few bites of bread were taken. We started discussing something else but then were almost immediately back on the fact that the cake I wanted was a pillow design with a thistle and some rings instead of a traditional three-tiered cake. It continued down hill from there - and I say down not because it was bad but just because it snowballed. Sometimes I felt like they understood that I was going to marry him and at other times I felt like his mother would hear a detail (that he and I had discussed and agreed upon) and there would be this dismissal like I wasn't ever going to marry him because of whatever I had said in response to her probing.

The shopping trip went much the same way. Dishes, patterns, plates, food, and every topic they could think of was touched upon, even the fact that I am considering breast reduction when his mother insisted (well, the saleslady convinced her) that I should be fitted for a bra and that a good bra would cure all back problems I was complaining of. Bullshit.

Anyways, it's as the saying goes - nobody suspects the Spanish Inquisition!

At least I think at one point I drove the point of my permanency home to them... His mother was explaining something to me, a term that she had used - thunder pup. Someone young who had a lot of ideas of how things should be done and was very set on these ideas. It was a term from a book she was (or still is) reading. She used this term to describe her son and used an example I had almost heard him use. Apparently, according to her, he wanted his wife barefoot and pregnant. I just smiled rather serenely and told her that I thought I could manage that.

What a day... It is a relief to be home and to be silent for a little while. Even if I am guilty of buying a dress and tank tops that I didn't need with money that wasn't really mine to begin with and probably saying things that I shouldn't have, today wasn't as terrible as I had feared - and yet, in a way, it was worse. Oh well.

Mall Madness

2010-03-08T22:05:00.003-06:00

I know this is going to sound silly and for those of you who have listened to me complain before about my nervousness with his family, feel free to ignore...

I've known Jerry for nearly two years. Just a few days after he and I became an 'official' item, I joined him and his family and friends at a German restaurant downtown to celebrate what was then his twenty-fifth birthday. I wasn't particularly expecting to meet his parents and sister. While I feel that I dressed well, I can distinctly remember mentally kicking myself for not having worn something spiffier (though at the time, I didn't really own anything spiffier) and mentally kicking him for not warning me about his parents.

Now, I will make this disclaimer - I'm not sure he didn't tell me about his family coming. In fact as I type this, I seem to recall the fact that he was unable to pick me up because of the fact that he was picking his sister up in the RX-7 and the convertible didn't have four seats, it only had two since he had started making 'repairs' on it.

Anyways, we met, we chatted, we tried not to be absolutely awkward and afterwards, Jerry, his sister, and I piled in the back seat while his parents climbed into the front of their truck and they drove me home. I don't know where I got the idea but once we reached the house, I asked if they wanted to come in. Some polite etiquette from someone somewhere told me this was what I was supposed to do and I wish I had kept my mouth shut and just said 'Thanks for the lift.' But I of course didn't and my parents had no warning. And that's how Jerry's parents met my parents after just a few hours of getting to know me for the first time.

While it has been nearly two years since that time, there's still that linger dread in seeing them again because of the awkward conversations that are held whenever I'm around. The ones where I'm not quite sure what to say or to what extent or if what I say will make them happy or completely turn them off to me - after two years! Jitters! The saving grace of these shinanigans is the fact that Jerry is always calmly at my side, deflecting when necessary and saving me from the brunt of his mother's repetitive questioning.

Well not tomorrow. No. Today ushers in, as if my weekend hadn't already, my spring break. This week also happens to be the week that his sister had taken off from her job as a nanny and his mother had taken a week off to spend with her daughter from whatever work it is that she does. Well on Sunday, the fact that I was on my spring break slipped out and it was as if his mother could not latch on to the idea fast enough because earlier today I received an invite to go to the mall with them tomorrow. I, of course, said yes because I didn't want to be rude and because Jerry was secretly, and not so secretly, enjoying my discomfort and fretting to him earlier about how I would be alone with his sister and mother. He mentioned that they wouldn't eat me and I told him I wasn't so sure about that.

So tomorrow I get to enjoy for hours their company without my handsome buffer, without his hand rubbing up and down my back comfortingly. I will be left on my own to sink or swim with the womenfolk of his family and I dread it. Not because they're poor company or because they're mean or anything like that - but because sometimes, I speak before I think and backtracking is almost impossible where his mother is concerned...

I'm almost afraid to go to bed because that means that tomorrow gets here sooner... Report to follow tomorrow.

Crossroads

2010-03-05T20:55:00.002-06:00

I'm at a crossroads in my life and I can't even see clearly the paths in front of me. I see what I could do, what I could be but I can't see how to get to the end. There are too many options, too many possibilities, too many sights unseen and too many things left undecided. I'm at a crossroads and I don't even really truly know what my options are and so I'm lost, dazed, confused, and left grasping at straws with my heart aching in my chest.

There are so many choices. Choices that we think are good, choices that we think were initially bad but turn out to be good, choices that end up changing our life forever for better or for worse. Choices that we don't even know are choices until they're upon us and we have to make a quick, sometimes drastic, decision. Then there are those you know you're supposed to make for whatever reason that drives you but they don't actually make you happy so you wonder why you bother but you can't think of a logical reason why not - but you neglect to realize that the fact that you even wonder why bother is reason enough.

Sometimes... sometimes you have to go with the flow and trust that the flow will lead you somewhere where you want to be or need to be, whether you know it or not. If you try to control the flow, you usually end up hurting things that you didn't mean to and make life miserable. So just... go with flow. Go with it and when you need to make a decision, the paths will be clear. Or at least, hopefully clearer than it is with me right now. Because I know they're there. I know they're there, lingering and hovering, waiting for the right moment to strike and cripple me or perhaps finally give me the wings I need. We'll see.

Right now I just know I'm at a crossroads and I just want to find the paths...

My Poor Little Car

2010-03-04T21:56:00.003-06:00

Believe it or not, it's only been a year since I got my drivers license. No, I didn't fail my driver's license test - in fact, I got my motorcycle license at age seventeen. Two years later, I took the driver's license test. So no, I'm not unlucky, I just had no reason to need a car license. After I passed the test, my parents graciously allowed me to use one of their already paid for cars. In this case, it was the only available paid for car that wasn't in use - the PT Cruiser. Yes, it's a 2005 model but one can't be too choosy - more or less free car.

I remember the first time I put a dent in that car. It was around August, I was just leaving my place of work at the time, after picking up my check. It was a Friday, just before I got to spend a weekend up at the lake with Jerry and his family camping. I was backing out of the parking space, turning to go to the little stop sign. I remembered to look out for my back end while I was making the turn but then I failed to take into account where my front end was. So I scraped along the front passenger side fender against a the concrete around a light pole.

I had a fit. I absolutely cried. I knew my father was going to have a fit and when the lady who worked the shift before me came out and asked what happened, I told her and she held me while I cried. She told me to call Jerry, whom she had heard so much about and to tell him what happened, ask him what he thought to do. She said that because I thought daddy might kill me. She had met daddy before, as my sister had once worked at that same place. So I called Jerry, Jerry said he would take a look at it when he got there to pick me up for the weekend and to not bother to tell my parents until they got back. His reason: Why ruin their weekend with worry when there was nothing they could do about it from where they were? So simple, so logical.

Of course, when they got back they had a fit. Just like I thought they would.

When someone put a dent in the front bumper, driver side at a mall parking lot - not even bothering to leave a note and there were no cameras or security around - I cried. I found out by my dad coming in, early in the morning, turning on my light and demanding what happened. I of course couldn't tell him because I had no idea what happened. I had no explanation. I ranted, I raved, I felt sick to my stomach and fretted all day about it. At least this one wasn't my fault but I was outraged - someone had done this to my car! I wouldn't have done this to someone else's car and not tried to contact them!

And with this latest escapade, I just... feel bad for my poor little car. It has had nothing but a hard life under my ownership and I hate that. It is a good little car and can't help that at times its bad.

Today my car started sounding like it was being run by rodents running in a wheel instead of by an engine. When I accelerated, it sounded as if the rodents kicked it into high gear. I felt bad for the little rodents so after getting my lunch, I let the car sit in the parking lot while I went to my other class. After class, I started the car again and unfortunately, the poor rodents were still there, trying to power my car. Sighing, I made my way across the campus parking lot to the red light that would take me home. I was almost to the stop sign before the red light when the check engine light came on - and stayed on. My dad is on speed dial so I called him, he told me to pull over, it sounded like I had thrown a belt so just park it, he'd be there after work. Well, by this time I was already to the red light and unfortunately, he wasn't patient enough to have me explain.

So I calmly hung up, turned around, and parked in the parking lot. I went and told security I was having car troubles and told them it may have to stay overnight, just in case it actually did have to, but that no, I didn't need their assistance, my dad was coming to take care of it after work. And so I waited. He and mom came, I popped the hood, he took a look when I started it and told me to start clearing the stuff out of my car - it was going to have to go to the garage. So I did. Hopped in the Jeep with my mom and dad drove my car to the garage just a few blocks away, Eddie's.

Well today we got a call with a preliminary 'Here's what's wrong.' Turns out that the water pump had been leaking onto the timing belt and causing that noise that I heard. They found this out because they stuck it inside the garage over night and when they came back in the morning, it had peed green fluid all over the floor. That narrowed it down, they said. Turns out that the hesitation that I was feeling in the car was because the spark plugs that my parents had paid the dealership to be changed were never changed like they were charged for. In fact, the spark plugs had been there since they drove the car off the lot - in 2005! They were cracked, rusted, and everything else under the sun so my parents asked them to put the spark plugs in a box so they could take them to the dealership to complain...

So the rough guess is I get my car back in the middle of next week but until then I have to drive my sister's rather cruddy Aveo (long story, too much to explain my disdain). At least I have a car to use and my car is being fixed, courtesy of my parents. I am grateful. I'm still sad for my little car though. Poor little car...

Le Sigh

2010-03-03T23:13:00.003-06:00

I don't really have anything to say here. I have two exams, one on Thursday, one on Friday. I have two papers due, one on Friday and one on Sunday, believe it or not. Jerry is sometimes too good for me (more like almost always too good for me). My room is a catastrophe which is unlikely to be fixed until sometime next week during spring break (my surprise break). I'm not sleeping well and I'm afraid I'm trying to come down with something. Hopefully it'll clear up and I won't actually get sick. I'm very much looking forward to the weekend and all the potential that it holds.

Head hurts, going to bed. I'll see you tomorrow.

Pride and Prejudice

2010-03-02T22:28:00.003-06:00

One of the greatest love stories of all time, Pride and Prejudice, has been on the screen of my television for the better part of the evening. This would be the 2005 version of Jane Austen's 18th century classic, starring such big names as Donald Sutherland, Brenda Blethyn, Penelope Wilton, and Dame Judi Dench.

Now most women, I am sure would probably liken themselves to Jane Bennett, the beauty of the family, the elder sister who is intelligent if not rather subdued or to her more outspoken younger sister, Elizabeth Bennett, who is the heroine of this story. After all, both are rather strong female characters, especially that of Elizabeth Bennett who goes up against not only her mother in matchmaking, but also Lady Catherine de Bourgh and essentially society all in the same breath. Then, she goes up against the hero of the story head on and ends up inevitably falling in love with Mr. Darcy. Jane is strong also, but in a rather subtle way. She possesses the much finer quality of the two Bennett sisters, which is poise as well as grace. While an exceptional beauty, Jane also possesses the good sense not to let it go to her head as some other young lady at the time would have. When Mr. Bingley leaves Netherfield to return to London, Jane shows her backbone as well as her own strong will and exceptional wit by not letting the slight affect her so publicly as others might have.

Both strong female characters to be sure.

But I - I am not like other women. I do not find myself as beautiful or as desirable as Jane, nor as subdued and as elegant as she, either. Her younger sister, Elizabeth, I could probably say I have more in common with but I fail to sport her wit or her balls, so to speak. Instead, I possess a similar bull-headed stubbornness. No, the Bennett that I connect most with would have to be that of Mary - the sister that is usually a forgotten side character that fills in the role as contrast to the other outlandish Bennett women. I say outlandish for I have no love at all for Kitty Bennett, who follows her sister Lydia blindly - not an original thought in her entire head. I also have no love and would say out right that I rather despise Lydia Bennett for her utter stupidity with being swept up and away by Mr. Wickham and finding no fault with the circumstances of such a union before, during, or after with the afore-mentioned Mr. Wickham.

So why Mary? Why the little sister who sits and practices the piano forte though she has no great skill at it? Why the little sister who wears more subdued clothes in comparison to her rather immodest sisters Lydia and Kitty? Who embarasses herself by singing badly at the ball of Netherfield? Why her?

Because I know what it is like to be the younger, forgotten sister. And while she and I both do not possess the grace of her elder sister(s) nor the intelligence of her elder sister(s), we both try very hard. We seek knowledge and while not witty, we try to apply our knowledge when it is warranted and we both seek to accomplish something though we never do. While I am not as plain as she, she and I have much in common.

There is another thing that she and I differ on. While I may not necessarily be the leading lady in my own life, I have certainly been able to obtain the leading gentleman. How I managed to obtain him, I am still at a loss to explain for every day when I am away from him I find myself less and less able to believe in his actuality for he is too good to be true at times. The fact is, though, that he is real and while I am no Elizabeth Bennett, he is most certainly my Mr. Darcy. And while he and I may not have a love story that lasts two centuries like that of Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy, we will at least have one that spans decades and that is enough for me. He is enough for me.

Emerald and Diamonds

2010-03-01T23:01:00.005-06:00

For something so small as this, it was greatly missed. I say 'was' because I merely gave it to a jeweler down in The Village to have it resized. Happily, it is back on my ring finger where it belongs. When purchased from the website that sported this image, the size five and a half was unavailable so we bought a size six instead. Sure, we could have waited to see if a size five and a half would turn up but we were both a bit giddy when we purchased it.

Before my parents dropped me off at college last year, we stopped in at Gatlinburg for a night since the hotels surrounding Johnson City were booked for the Nascar race that was happening at Bristol that same weekend. Since we were short on time and had spent many a year up Gatlinburg during various seasons, we made our way easily to The Village there which is by far our favorite place to go. Not only is it beside the most wonderous breakfast nook ever - which I am happy to say we have it's sibling here at Hillsboro Village in Nashville - the Pancake Pantry, but it also houses the Ole Smokey Candy Kitchen as well as my favorite store, the Celtic Heritage. Over the years, the fare has been rather consistent at all places, in terms of what is sold and what isn't but upon this occasion I had decided that I would like a ring. The ring, I decided, would be symbolic of my commitment to Jerry and my love for him, to be worn at all times, no matter how much it might irritate me. Naturally, then, I chose a silver Claddagh.

The Claddagh, as pictured above, is traditionally depicted as two hands clasping a heart and upon the heart there is a crown. The three elements correspond accordingly - the two hands represent friendship, the heart represents love, and the crown represents loyalty. According to Wikipedia, when the ring is given there is an expression that is said: "With my two hands I give you my heart and crown it with my loyalty." I'm more familiar with the other phrase associated with it: "Let love and friendship reign forever."

Not only is the ring symbolic but also the way one wears the ring. When worn upon the right hand with the crown facing toward the body, then the wearer is not seeing anyone but is looking for love. When worn with the crown facing away from the body, then the wearer's heart has been captured by someone. When worn upon the left hand with the crown facing inward, the wearer is engaged. When worn with the crown facing away from the body, then the wearer is married. Since I was unlikely to encounter anyone who remembered with such accuracy what the ring meant when worn a certain way, I decided to wear it on my left hand, with the crown facing away from me. That is the way that I wear it even now, but not for the same reason as I did then.

When I started wearing it that way then, it was meant to merely put off those who would otherwise try to engage me in an romantic involvement. People tend to notice when one wears one ring over and over and over again on the same ring. The problem I found was that no matter that I wore it day in and day out, in the shower even at times so as not to misplace it, people still failed to take ring very seriously. Agreed, the band was plain and not studded with any type of jewel, but at the time I liked it that way. When things began to become more serious between Jerry and I, we began to search for a more 'convincing' ring to take it's place and later to become my engagement ring.

When Jerry surprised me for Valentine's day last year, we finally stumbled across a ring that gave us an idea of what we were looking for. Before I had been too specific, unsure of what I really sought because I had no notion of what kind of ring I wanted! No, I didn't want gold, no I wasn't a big fan of diamonds even though it was my birth stone, I thought them too over used. No, I didn't want anything modern and I didn't want anything plain but I didn't want something dripping with gems either. And so we searched until nestled in a ring box, in a case, in a little Irish shop that is sadly now closed, there it was - the perfect ring. A part of me will always want the ring although I am very much aware of its ridiculous price. I am also very much aware that if I were to actually have it I would be frightened to wear it for fear that something may happen to it - and that's not the kind of ring to have. It was simple, elegant, and was merely beautiful knotwork with just a handful of tiny diamonds and emeralds. The band that went with it was plain but instead of just a row of diamonds, it had emeralds and diamonds to match the other. A stunning combination that left a wanting in my heart.

After seeing it and finding out what company produced such a beauty, we began the task of finding something similar but the months stretched on and we came to a few conclusions. We knew what my perfect ring was and we knew we couldn't afford it. We knew that it would be impossible to find anything as extragavent as that beautiful set so we would, for lack of a better term, settle for something else. It was with these few hard facts that made finding the one above rather... simple. It was this past summer, believe it or not, when we decided to look a few things up on the internet while we took turn with video games. It was my turn and we had been talking about rings so it seemed logical to look for one on the site we were on, which happened to be Ebay. After a few pages of rings that bored me, I tried refining the search, which turned up more pleasant things. I narrowed it by stone, then by engagement or wedding until finally I found it. Just looking at it a part of me was a little stunned. One, because it was so cheap - believe it or not - and two, because it was just absolutely lovely. It was simple but elegant, an eye catcher without being a bank breaker and it simply pleaded with me. Which made me in turn plead with Jerry as I showed it to him. He too was struck speechless for a moment as he studied it.

We looked at the specs of it, where it came from, how it was made and it had everything - everything! - perfect. It's hallmarked, for one, handmade in Ireland, with an emerald center and eighteen tiny diamonds. There's on on the crown, three in each cuff of the hand, and eleven around the emerald itself. It's silver, not white gold, which means it will age nicely, and shipping wasn't bad either. We made the purchase right then and there and with that, a thrill went through me. We were moving forward. We were making progress.

I waited with great anticipation for the arrival of my ring. I would ask him daily as the date of the approximate arrival neared and it was with great frustration that I was made to wait. I had hoped it would arrive before the weekend, when I spent time with him but by the next weekend it was there. It was mailed in a padded envelop in a tiny bag, wrapped in more padding. When it was first taken out and shown to me, I was almost afraid to handle it. It looked more delicate than the picture had depicted it but there it was, in my warm hands, sliding across my finger with cool precision until it rested, nestled up against my knuckle. That first day and the day after, I kept taking it off to play with it, examine it, marvel at it and criticize it. But by the end of the weekend, I loved it. It took a little convincing, since I gave it back to him the first night, for me to take it home to enjoy it - it was mine after all - but since I said yes, not a day goes by where I don't look at it and love it.

Although my parents know that it's mine, it has yet to be formally given to me as my engagement ring. Nevertheless, I wear it as if it is. Some of his co-workers are already calling me his little wife, because I call him every morning, try to talk to him every lunch, and check on him when he has to stay late for work. Some are even saying that we will be married before the year is out and that there will be a baby soon to follow. Everyone seems to be expecting it, our union, and we aren't going to disappoint. Not because we feel pressured, but because we feel so moved to. What a joyous day it will be when my ring is not just my engagement ring but also my wedding ring. I look forward to that day, whenever it may be, with great anticipation.

Twitter tweet.

Fed Up with February

2010-02-24T16:55:00.002-06:00

I'm tired of being tired
I'm tired of all the bare trees and dead grass
I'm tired of the cold wind biting at my joints
I'm tired of being cooped up inside because it's cold
I'm tired of the clouds always hiding the sky
I'm tired of there not being a lot of sunlight
I'm tired of having to wear so many heavy clothes
I'm tired of the static electricity
I'm tired of the lack of color
I'm tired of my teeth chattering while the car warms up
I'm tired of being limited in my activities by weather
I'm tired of snow and ice and slush and flurries and hail
I'm tired of not having any energy
I'm tired of not feeling well, like I'm permanently sick
I'm tired of burrow under mounds of covers to keep warm
I'm tired of blowing my nose so much from dry air
I'm tired of my ear and jaw popping from pressure changes
I'm tired of hats and scarves and gloves and things
I'm tired of my car getting less gas mileage because it's cold outside
I'm tired of not being able to do anything because of the cold
I'm tired of going stir crazy in this house day after day
I'm tired of having to smile when I just want to sulk about the winter
I'm just so tired of winter. Period.

February Blues

2010-02-24T16:00:00.003-06:00

I have decided that February is a lost cause. Not for any sane reason - after all, it is only a few days shorter than that of the other months but it's hard to want to post something you've written when you think that the month was tacked onto the calendar as an after thought.

Yes, yes, I know there's Valentine's day and I must admit that last year's Valentine's day has still not been topped in surprise and creativity but after that... what good is February?

It's short, it's cold, it's in between the joy of the New Year and the excitement of the coming spring, it just seems like such a waste. It's about the time that the winter blahs, as my mom calls them, start to take effect and give you the awful sensation of cabin fever. So if you don't enjoy the cold and being cooped up all day because of said cold and conditions like snow and ice, you're going to get depressed just a smidgen. The cold saps the warmth out of your bones, makes your skin tingle uncomfortably, any energy you had is quickly surrendered to wind that you have to fight against. It just isn't worth it.

I personally have rather hated this month with a vengeance, almost as much as it has hated me. After all, I go most of the winter without being sick and then February comes along and I am struck blind with headaches, rendered thoughtless with boredom, and all around just feeling icky - like I'm sick constantly but never sick enough to get over it or get better. I am just so fed up with this month that I can't even begin to explain it. Thankfully it will be over soon. Not soon enough for my tastes, though, because I know there will be a few more months before spring, but soon.

And then maybe soon it won't be so hard to smile, to get out of bed in the mornings, to try and function when I get into class - maybe. But at this point and on this day, when it snowed in the sunshine and the wind ate away any comfort I had, I doubt it. I am just fed up with February...

December 24, 2009

2010-01-29T22:36:00.001-06:00

I love my job. I mean it, I really really love my job.

I had to be at work at six this morning, which is fine. I originally took it to mean that it was because somebody didn’t like me and when I told my parents about it, they turned it around saying that it’s the price that I pay for doing a ‘good job’. Either way, I wasn’t a particularly happy camper when I rolled out of bed at five fifteen to don the uniform (red collared shirt and khakis)and went to go fix my cup of coffee and my bowl of cereal. I also wasn’t particularly happy when I started backing down the driveway, only to have to take it out of reverse because I was veering too far to one side because honestly, I wasn’t that awake yet - but I had to go to work.

Upon getting there, I perked up though, especially since everyone seemed to be decked out in their gay apparel (no pun intended). Jessica for example had on a Santa hat with leopard fur around the band of the head and a bell attached to the white puff ball on the end. Okay, so that was pretty, well, -ahem-. Anyways, despite my worst fears the morning passed very quietly without any incident. The first few customers came in, got what they needed and left. And we waited. A few more drifted in, didn’t wander too much, then checked out. Again we waited.

It was during one of these waiting periods, just before a slight rush that I happened to take note of the parking lot, which was empty except for the employee cars, and the store, which was empty except for the employees. Looking over at Tana, who was on the register facing mine at the service desk and making small talk, we happened to remark that we should be playing Christmas music in the store. We both agreed and silence reigned for a few more seconds before I asked the question that had niggled me from the very mention of Christmas music. “Do you happen to know the Twelve Days of Christmas?”

“Yeah, what about them?”

“Can you remember them all?”

And with that, we started the hour and a half long quest for the correct order of the Twelve Days of Christmas.

Everyone can remember, of course, from five down. Five golden rings, four calling birds, three French hens, two turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree. But above five… it gets a little fuzzy, to say the least. After asking numerous people and getting told either they didn’t remember it past five either or some hazy number coupled with something that didn’t sound just right, but close, one of my co-workers was walking by and stopped to listen. Everyone starts to disperse and as I start to turn away, she yells, “Hey Heather!”

“Yeah?”

“How many Toys R Us employees does it take to figure out the Twelve Days of Christmas?”

Everyone, of course, laughed, me included and I told her I’d get back to her on that. Turns out it takes nine of us, me included. At the end of the day, it was Denise who knew at least the most complete version we had to go off of. Here’s the order we got:

1. A partridge in a pear tree
2. Turtle doves
3. French hens
4. Calling birds
5. Golden rings
6. Geese a-laying
7. Swans a-swimming
8. Maids a-milking
9. Ladies dancing
10. Lords a-leaping
11. Pipers piping
12. Drummers drumming

The worst part of it was that even before I went to go ask Denise what the Twelve Days of Christmas lyrics are, I was able to recall with no difficulty whatsoever the Twelve Red Neck Days of Christmas.

A 12 pack of Bud
11 rasslin' (wrestling) tickets
Tin of Copenhagen
9 years probation
8 table dancers
7 packs of Red Man
6 cans of Spam
5 flannel shirts
4 big mud tires
3 shotgun shells
2 huntin' dawgs
and some parts to a Mustang GT.

So after all that, still bored, we took to seeing how many multiple things we could remember. Dan asked me if I remembered all the reindeer and I looked at him and without hesitation I said:

“Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen, Comet and Cupid and Donder and Blitzen, but do you recall? The most famous reindeer of all?”

“Rudolph?”

“Very good.”

Then of course Jessica had to turn around and ask me a question which showed my roots, so to speak…

“Hey Heather, can you name all the dwarves in Snow White?”

“How many of them are there?”

She kind of stared at me for a moment and it didn’t dawn on me why until she said, rather incredulously, “Heather, it’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves!”

Like I said, very blond of me. All in all, it was a very satisfying, very quick day at work. Everyone was very jovial when given the opportunity to laugh and joke.

Hopefully this has brightened your day a little and I hope that you have a very safe and happy holiday. Merry Christmas!

Loss of a Loved One

2010-01-28T21:28:00.002-06:00

When I posted the note on Bear, my eyes were drawn to the end of the post and it brought on tears. Not those beautiful, movie screen tears, the award-winning tears - no, these were uglier. These were the tears that leave your mouth dry, the ones that make you feel like you're choking and they make your skin tingle with heat and displeasure. Big, thick, silent tears, that fell too quickly, too eagerly, and too sadly to do anything but hurt. The kind that make your heart beat just a little harder as its squeezed by pain.

Of course, about this time, Jerry tells me he's going to sleep but before he can say good night I ask him if I can tell him something first and he says of course. So I let him know what I'm feeling. That loss, that pain, that complete and utter sadness. His response is uncertainity at what to say and when I tell him I don't care, I just can't stand the silence, he does something silly - he says 'Hi. You're cute.' That forced a laugh out of me and cause my tightness to ease a little even though the tears still threaten. I tell him so and he says good, because he wants me to enjoy him. I do enjoy him, immensely. But I told him sometimes there's just something stronger than love and its grief and loss - the good news is that they don't last as long as love. He said that that's good and that he wishes he could make me feel better. Then he reminded me of his need to sleep and reminded me, 'Get tomorrow done and we have the weekend. So something to look forward to.' I thanked him for the reminder and we bid each other sweetly goodnight.

I know part of the reason for my weeping is because I didn't help take care of bear as I should have at times. My family and I have a temper and sometimes, as her hips became worse, she would do things that would absolutely just tip one of us over the edge. We never beat or mistreat our animals but we do get frustrated. Sometimes she couldn't hold it anymore and we would come home to find the floor smeared with poop and her backside covered in it as well. Of course, as intelligent as she was, she was ashamed and there wasn't much she could do about it but if we had tried to hurry home or it had happened frequently, even when we were home at the house, we just got angry. Harsh words were spoken to one of the sweetest, most loving dogs I have ever known and I deeply regret that more than I can possibly express. And worse is when she would have to go outside and suddenly her hips would slide and she would fall. More roughly than we should have, I know a few times when it was particularly cold or particularly late at night or particularly early, when we had had to deal with one mess or another or she had driven us crazy with whining, we righted her with a little more force than necessary and I know that didn't help her pain. And I know she didn't understand why in those moments we were being mean to her and I wish she could understand that pain I'm feeling now from it.

I know, if she were a human, she would forgive me, saying she understood but it still doesn't make it right. Of all the creatures on this green earth I should have had the patience with (and I'm sure people, like my mother, can agree), it should have been her. We should have treated her more kindly. I wept while I held her as she whined and was unable to move. I wept as my parents came inside, wept as I looked at my mother, and wept harder as they left. It's been two years now and that pain is as fresh and more potent as it was then. Perhaps recent events have just got my hormones going or perhaps the loss of more loved ones has made the pain of previous losses worse... all I know is that I will not sleep easy tonight and my pillow will likely be wet with tears.

July 15, 2008

2010-01-28T21:23:00.001-06:00

Bear is the white German shepherd that my father got for my mom while I was still young. When daddy brought bear home, you could hold her in both your hands, she was so small. She barely had her eyes open but from the way daddy told it, Bear chose him.

He had gone to see a man about a dog, literally, for mom. At first he wanted a boy dog to help protect mom and us kids, but Bear kept following daddy around. He says that he didn't choose her so much as she chose him.

Bear was always the brightest dog. She wouldn't play much but there were some things that she liked a lot. Like when you placed a blanket or towel over her head and just started playing with her. She would gently bite your through the towel and whine and attack movements. If you put a cookie in one hand and left the other empty then offered her both hands, closed fisted? She almost always was able to choose which hand had the cookie. She'd be a lady about it too and not try to bite your hand off for the cookie, she'd use her paw to indicate which hand the cookie was in.

When we got her, I was just three or four, so she's pretty much been around my entire life. One thing I always found kind of strange was that she hated thunderstorms and would whine and stay next to mom the entire time. She could always feel it coming and go hide in a bathroom or follow mom like a big white furry shadow.

She used to come with us when we went to different states and state parks on the weekend in our airstream. I remember one time when we were at an airstream park, Stephen and Miranda were walking Bear. I wasn't with them, I was somewhere else at the time, but a strange kid came running up to them and Bear instantly started to protect and bark at the kid, nearly bit them.

That's how she was, she would always stay next to mom or us kids, protecting us. She wouldn't bark unless she thought there was a real threat and she didn't like strangers until mom or dad told her it was okay. Generally, she put her body between mom and somone she wasn't familiar with. She was just that way. She was intellegent and protective, just like a mom. Dad used to say she thought of me as a puppy. Whenever someone wasn't sick or not feeling well, she used to do two things - either stay with them or if she thought she was in trouble, she would go into the tub and wait until she was told it was okay.

Then when we moved up here and got Jackie, Bear became a little more playful but by this time, she was already getting up in her years. Nothing bad, she was just older, more sedate. I think I was ten when we got Jackie. Jackie, however, was just a pound puppy who tugged on Bear's ears and Tigger pounced her and everything else. When Bear got tired of taking it, she would take a swipe at Jackie and bring the smaller German Shepherd/Chow mix down but she was always gentle about it like a mom.

Jackie eventually learned to be a little more sedate although she never could figure out how to speak for a cookie or to bark towards the door not away from it. Jackie still barks entirely too much but that's just Jackie. Jackie did learn from Bear, though, and generally sleeps where she can keep an eye on things and make sure there aren't any intruders.

As time passed, things began to get harder for Bear. She would sleep more, her back legs wouldn't support her, her hips started to go bad, she couldn't romp and play with Jackie anymore. This didn't hit quickly and adjusting to it wasn't easy. She would need assistance getting up and down and because of an incident when she was a puppy, we couldn't give her pain medicine. So she would lay there and whine and try to adjust and sleep but she was just in so much pain. Some days were better and she could sometimes get up by herself but time had taken its toll and even with the weight that she had lost, she wasn't getting any better. Her eyes were starting to go and her hearing was almost gone too.

Finally yesterday it got to the point that she could barely keep herself up for a minute or two, for a few dozen steps before her back legs would give out and she'd fall. She couldn't support herself at all barely and not as far as she wanted to go. I stayed with her and tried to make her stand but honestly, she struggled and whined in pain. She just couldn't do it. So that afternoon, during their lunch break, my parents came and took Bear away to the vet. Mom said that it only took them a second, that Bear didn't feel any pain. She said that you could tell that Bear just relaxed and was finally at peace.

In my county, you can't bury your pet but you can have it cremated. Mom and dad are going back on Thursday to pick up the urn and bring it home.

The entire family grieves the loss of one of it's members. You could never ask for a better dog than Bear. We all love and miss you but we're glad you're no longer in any pain.

College Orientation

2010-01-27T20:59:00.002-06:00

The only real thing I have to add here is that I did have notes about orientation but five moves later (to college, from college, to college, from college, and then switching rooms in my house), the notes are long gone. To sum it up, I went to breakfast, tried not to be too awkward, attended the seminars, signed up for classes, fought with advisors about an ACT score that hadn't been entered right in the system - which would required me taking remedial math if it hadn't gotten fixed and I hadn't noticed it - and talking to the English department, my trip was mostly uneventful. I made one friend, Michael, which didn't last long once college actually started, but then I did become best friends with his roommate, Taylor, so I guess that's okay... my parents did rescue me for the second night, we went to Olive Garden, and then after one more day of schedules being confirmed, t-shirts being bought with the school name on it, and my id being made, I was free to go. I happily returned home.

Sorry there isn't more but I'm tired and defeated from the lack of job opportunities in my community...

July 12, 2008

2010-01-27T20:55:00.002-06:00

College Orientation

And so it begins...

We left Wednesday and we were out of Nashville by eleven am. This was actually on time, as we have a five and half hour drive with the joys of trying to avoid Knoxville rush hour in its entirit but still be there before check in closed at eight pm. Easy, you think. Leave at eleven, get there at four thirty, plus an hour (for the time difference) which totals out to five thirty. Wrong. You haven't accounted for the times you'll need to stop for gas, stop for food, stop for a restroom break, stop for a little shopping, or taking the longer way because you're tired of staring at the interstate... Which totals our time to roughly... six thirty ish their time, five thirty our time. About an hour off from the orignal estimated time. But anyways.

After arriving and parking, I was informed by my parents that I would be staying by myself on campus instead of them staying on campus with me as we had discussed. Normally, I would jump at this, but it was six thirty at night after a long time having to sit still in the car, I was in a strange city that I had only visited twice before in my life, surrounded by complete and utter strangers, and I was cold, tired, and hungry. "Welcome to college," was pretty much the response I received and off they went to enjoy themselves leaving me with the combined cash that they had with them and a fully charged cell phone. "Call us if you need us."

So off I tottered to the room which was assigned to me, which was on the first floor of the hall, arms full with the linens and towels provided to me while my parents brought the car around to get the rest of my things out. Upon entering the room I found it excrutiatingly cold but otherwise stark and empty. Placing my things on the bed closest to the door and furthest from the window which overlooked the construction area next door, I promptly left to retrieve the remainder of my bags, wave good bye to the parents and head back to my room to make my bed. Which is exactly what I did, beside claim the left hand side of the sink and make a little note which I placed on the empty matress that simply said 'Hi' with a smiley face.

Phone calls were made and returned, I finished writing, adressing, and stamping a letter and before seven o'clock, I was leaving my dorm rather sure of myself... or at least secure in the knowledge that I had a roof over my head and money in my pocket. If all else failed, I knew where the vending machines were. Setting out across campus, which was surprisingly light out, I immediately went to the post office where I deposited my letter in the appropriate bin and made my way to the Marketplace. Or I should say attempted to make my way to the Marketplace. The doors leading from the post office to the ramp were all locked. A summer student gave me a funny look as I tried not just one set of doors but two before giving up and heading out. Cutting across campus, I expertly found my way over to the Tree House which was also decidedly closed. After such an excursion and the mountain air, that which is called my stomach felt as if it hadn't seen food in closer to three days than a few short hours. Defeated, I returned to the hall to enquire at the desk on what I could do in terms of food.

The answer was quick in coming by way of a board that's set up next to the tv in the lounge area. I could have my pick of pizza places, each number generously provided beneath the corresponding logo. After making my choice, I returned to the front desk where one of the RA's not only dialed the number from memory but also said that I should tell them I'm ordering the college special. As it was Papa John's, the college special is a large one topping pizza. More than I thought I needed but as it was at a reasonable price and I was rather ravenous, I ordered it with ham and a white sauce, told them where to drop it off, and went to my room to count out the change. The entire thing to have it delivered was nine dollars and sixty eight cents. I don't care who you are, that's kind of a steal.

Returning to my room, I found myself alone still, my note undisturbed and the sun setting. Going over everything I had in my bags to occupy myself while I waited for the thirty minutes to pass until the arrival of my pizza, I finally settled on my notebook in which I jotted down brief occurances of the trip and the day in general before counting out the cash and change needed for the pizza. By this time, not only was I hungry but the room seemed to be even colder than before and I was starting to feel the strain of feeling utterly alone. Time passed and as the time neared, I resigned myself to a night of solitude and returned to the lobby to await the forthcoming pizza.

When I arrived, the RA's were participating in some sort of game amongst themselves and as I walked by, I saw a car pull up. As the man got out of the car, carrying a distinctly pizza shaped red shape, I moved hopefully towards the door. He bounded up the steps and knocked on the first set of glass doors to get the RA's attention, one obligingly leaving the game to open the door to admit the Papa John's man. My stomach called out with a joyful growl as I waited for him to take notice of me and the money I had folded in my hand. Nine dollars and seventy cents, almost exact change. As much as I appreciate him doing his job, I only had limited cash funds and couldn't waste what I had.

Paying him, I quickly made my way back through the small maze of halls and key card areas to the vending machine, where I purchased a coke and hurried past a tall guy with a buzz cut back to the safety of my room. The only other people I saw that night were a couple in their late fifties. I heard plenty of people though, especially with my bed being next to the wall and on the otherside of that wall being the main hallway. So up I climbed into bed with a box of pizza and a twenty ounce coke, curling up on the pillows with my copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, alone but now rather content. The wish for music did cross my mind once or twice but otherwise all was still as I munched and read.

Time ticked on and as ten o'clock local time neared, I disposed of my pizza box and ventured outside once more. The night was cloudy but you could see the moon, especially from where I was sitting next to the library.I waited patiently for the phone to ring and ring it did, just as I was about to give up after the third flash of lightning off in the distance. Although the conversation was brief, it put me to ease and I ventured much more willingly to bed. I returned to my room I brushed my teeth, organized things for the next morning, chose what to wear, turned off the light and climbed into bed. Sleep was not quick in coming and it never stayed for more than short bouts at a time, but I slept right through the alarm I set on my phone. If Jerry hadn't called with my wake up call like I had requested, I probably would have missed breakfast entirely and had been late to orientation.

End Day One

Flutter Flutter

2010-01-26T21:52:00.002-06:00

I would like to point something out about this story. While I did go under rather quickly, I distinctly remember the anesthesiologist cracking a joke after I had taken a few breaths from the mask. I don’t remember the joke but I found it funny so I started to shake with laughter. He pulled the mask off my face and said ‘Are you still awake down there?’ I nodded, still laughing and he chuckled, before placing the mask back on my face. A few more breaths and that’s when blackness claimed me.

I had something else that I wanted to put here but after the evening I've had, I don't know whether to talk about Valentine's Day, the future woes and fears, or something completely mundane so I'll save you any extra drivel you might have to shift through. You're welcome.

June 9, 2008

2010-01-26T21:48:00.001-06:00

As most of you know, my surgery was yesterday. The procedure was an arthroscopic surgery on my left knee because of a torn outer meniscus. They were unsure if they would be shaving the cartilage or if they would actually be repeairing the tear and they would not know for sure until they opened the knee up.

I awoke around four thirty at the insistence of my mother, left the house around five thirty, and arrived to check-in for the surgery just a little past six am. My parents received wristbands that were marked PG (for Parent/Guardian) and I was told I would receive mine when my name was called. When we arrived, already the room was becoming crowded with relatives, other young patients, and concerned parents and guardians.The sight was a little heartbreaking but hopeful with all the younger kids there obviously getting the help they needed in some form or another. I was easily the oldest there.

The wait didn't take long. Soon I was being weighed at the station with a nurse, an armband placed on my right wrist, then taken up a floor to room thirteen. Thirteen, you say? Isn't that unlucky? Fortunately, I think just the opposite. I think it very lucky because I've always enjoyed the number thirteen.

Upon arriving in the room, which was cheery (since I my surgery did take place at the children's hospital) and nonthreatening were it not for the hospital bed and other distinctly hospital accessories, I found on the bed a gown and some special socks.After a few tests, I changed into these and took my place on the bed, scooting my legs over for the surgeon and nurse, respectively and at different intervals, to sit. The surgeon explained the procedure again, the anesthesiologist who explained what methods would be used to keep me under, and then the nurse who placed an IV port in my right arm. I still have a purplish bruise from where the tube was inserted.

After the arrival of the man who would actually be performing the procedure, I said good bye to my parents (who were asked to take their seats in the waiting room where we were sitting before) and was wheeled down the hall to the operating room. If you have never had an operation, I have news for you. The actual room is freezing and the table they use is little more than a sheet covered ironing board (as the anesthesiologist pointed out to me). They placed five heart monitors on my chest, as well as one around my finger, then place a mask over my face and after a few deep breaths, I was under.

When I awoke again, I was in an open room, having just been wheeled there after my surgery. My parents were brought in and things were explained to them, pictures handed over of the inside of my knee, and told that the surgeons shaved the cartilage, they did not repair it. Most of it I don't remember. I do remember being awake and lucid enough to ask my mother for my glasses so that I could see the pictures. After that, and handing my glasses back to my mother, my father left to go to work and I closed my eyes to rest as I was wheeled into another room to wait for the effects of the drug to wear off.

Time, when you're in a hospital and under a drug's influence, is fleeting and never lasts as long as you think it should. When I awoke next, more fully aware and functioning this time, my vital signs were taken and I was proclaimed fit to leave at any time. It was about this time that I noticed that my leg was completely covered and my knee itself was in a lot of pain. They literally wrapped me up in an ace bandage from knee to ankle, with more padding on the knee, to keep the swelling down. The pain was to be expected, I know, but still, something about it just made me cringe, this mummy looking knee that didn't even look to be a part of me. I was assisted to the bathroom, where I dressed in privacy more or less with the help of my mother, then waited for the wheel chair to take me out to the waiting Jeep.

And so I was driven home and assisted up to the front yard, the front steps, through the front door to the couch without crutches at around eleven. Yes, it hurt, but I managed. Later in the afternoon, I was able to more or less go where I wanted within a very short distance without assistance. As the night progressed, I was able to move further distances. Today, I can pretty much walk the length of the house and stand but it still hurts. It still feels like something is shifting under my skin that shouldn't be shifting, and the creaking and popping is painful to hear and feel.

Unfortunately, the pain medicine that they gave me has not been working. The hydrocodone that I had left over from my skateboard accident hasn't helped the pain anymore than tylenol would - like candy for a diabetic basicly, no help at all. Lortab is also not working, which was what was perscribed to me yesterday. The only thing that puts a dent in the pain is the left over pain medicine from my oral surgery back in May, the roxicet and even that isn't numbing it well enough.

For those of you who don't know, pain medicine doesn't effect me as it probably would others. Morphine, which I have a mild allergy to and have built up a tolerance to, works just about as well as hydrocodone, which is nearly not at all. So while someone else might trip out on these drugs, I'm pretty much sober, a little sleepy, but still very much myself and grumpy with the pain.

Tomorrow I go to a physical therapist in the morning and she'll help to unwrap the bandage from my leg (which is supposed to stay on for forty eight hours). I'm not looking forward to seeing it or moving it around a lot. I think just me walking around on it is enough.

A Rough Summer

2010-01-25T19:55:00.002-06:00

I just wanted to inform you in case anybody wanted to know, my grams passed away this past summer on June 2nd, 2009. She clung to life to see her last grandchild being brought into the world, my aunt's boy child Quinton. He was born in April, not long after grams birthday and my birthday.

I was there when she died. During 2009, I saw two people die. Was there as they took their last breath and whatever soul or life force faded up into oblivion. Both were maternal grandmothers - my grandmother and Jerry's grandmother. I was there at the end of their beds, respectively.

When grams died, I knelled at the end of the bed and wept as my mother held one hand and my aunt held the other, my father in the corner and the hospice nurse to the side. I knelled there clinging to the end of the bed that hospice had provided and took huge, wracking, ugly sobs. I was scared, I was mourning and I was facing death. I could almost feel it in the room, the stillness, the feeling as if there weren't any oxygen left because there didn't seem to be as she took one shuddering breath after another and then was gone.

Over the summer, I debated on whether or not to take her old room, make it my own. And I worked on it, sanding the floors, hand buffing them, taking off wallpaper the hard way, and painting the entire room by myself. I made it my own but even now, sometimes, at night, I sit in the dark and I'm afraid. I don't believe in malicious spirits, but death happened here and now I'm living. That can be said for every inch of this earth, I'm sure, but this is my room. My haven. And I don't always feel that it is my haven.

The second death was Jerry's grandmother in a hospital, with family gathered round as the machines were turned off and the nurses waited behind curtains silently, waiting for that dreaded flat line. It took longer than I expected for some reason. I think its because movies and television have conditioned me to think that it only takes a few minutes. Instead it took several long moments and in the end, these people who were gathered around me - who had gathered several times, ready to say good bye before - finally seemed to let out a breath they had been holding for years. And there was a sadness in that act too. After so many close calls and rallying together, they were finally able to let go as she finally let go and I felt the same choking sadness well in me. Not because we were particularly close, although she did approve me - Jerry never got that approval from my grams, who didn't want to make any more connections because her time was coming. No, I cried because I knew the feeling and because it was too close...

Sorry for the morbid post tonight but I did say I'd post my old posts here. So here it is and here's my two cents today...

Tweet tweet.

June 3, 2008

2010-01-25T19:52:00.001-06:00

My grandmother is a fighter. She may not have been there during the wars, helping make airplanes and she may not have saved people in deadly fires, she may not have run for office or even done more than just do her best as a divorcee raising two daughters more or less on her own, but she's a fighter, through and through. Something that's been a sort of family trait. Whenever one of the females of our family, be it my sister, my mother, my aunt or me has been particularly fiery, particularly stubborn and hell-bent, it has often been said, 'Alright, Bonnie.'

She's that too. She's beautiful. It isn't the beauty of youth, although she was very pretty when she was younger. Some may say she looks just like other grandmothers, with her hair now streaked a dark grey with bits of silver, the brown gold of her hair just a memory but still a vivid one with wild streaks of that also. Her face may be one lined with her age but it isn't lined in complete sadness. It shows her mischievousness still, it shows her spirit, although the pain and suffering linger there too in a way that cannot be erased.

And she wouldn't erase a single line. She's earned them all. Every freckle from forgotten summers where she tanned the color of copper, every crease and fold of her skin, she's earned. She used to work in a factory while my mother and aunt were growing up. They used to live in the same house that she still lives in, I sleep in their old room. That house was built new for her, with the built in bookcase next to the kitchen and everything. Sure, some of the appliances don't match the other but she loves her house. Loves that street. Loves that life, even in the later years of her life.

Now a new foe enters the field. We aren't completely unfamiliar with it. She's already battled and beaten skin cancer. She's already battled and beaten breast cancer. And she's decided she'll do whatever it takes to battle and beat this new form of cancer, lung cancer.

They aren't a hundred percent sure if it is lung cancer or just a manifestation of the breast cancer but for now they're treating it as lung cancer. If she had decided not to fight, she would have only six months to live. Long enough to see my sister marry. Long enough to see me head off to college. But not long enough for her first great-grandchild or for my diploma. Not long enough for so much that she's earned to live to see.

So I'm fragile right now. So very fragile because that's my grams. That's my hard headed, stubborn as a mule, kick em where it hurts and keep on moving grams and she's fighting a battle she's already fucking won twice. She shouldn't have to fight this hard again. Its so fucking unfair.

If anyone wonders, yes I'm in tears. Because I fought that woman, using the stubbornness and the fiery temperament that I inherited to tell her that she can't quit, that she had to beat the breast cancer. And I'm not about to let her quit now but I am so fragile right now. I need all the support I can get. And I never ask for help lightly.

And if that isn't enough, I have surgery in less than a week.

Fucking hell.

The Queen Is Not A Subject

2010-01-22T23:01:00.002-06:00

Yes, yes, I know you're excited, tonight you actually get a post, calm down...

A friend of mine reminded me of something I haven't checked in the longest of times - Myspace. Myspace and I never had a very warm relationship, mostly because my friends had better things to do than sit on Myspace and talk to me, which surprisingly doesn't seem to be the case with Facebook. Now either this means my friends have less of a life or Facebook is far more enjoyable. I'll let you decide but I'm betting on the latter. I will say this on Facebook's appeal and then drop it, I swear. In terms of ease of use and streamline, Facebook wins hands down. Myspace is finally catching up in applications, games, that sort of thing, but it is rather nice to not be harassed by annoying backgrounds, blaring musing, or eye-spasming animations that glitter and implode. No, Facebook is nice and sterile except for the occasional wall posts that the applications you use would like to post but those are easy to ignore.

No, the reason I'm bringing up Myspace is because of a memory. A few of them actually - some that are mine and some that are Jerry's, memories that I wasn't ever a part of. Going back over my blog is a short matter. After all, before I ever met Jerry I would systematically go back and delete posts, starting fresh over and over again. That's the nice thing about online blogs, you have the option to delete. To edit, to rearrange, to correct a spelling mistake or a grammatical mistake. In real life with pen to paper, you don't have that leisure, that security that with a push of a single button you can delete from this world forever your words. Sure, you can do the whole book burning thing if you like but there are remnants of that all around you. On the internet, you can lose your words to oblivion because with billions upon billions of people accessing it every day from across the world... well, you're just a number. It isn't very real.

Looking back though I'm glad I didn't purge fully. I am a writer. I write best the emotions that affect me the most and the ones that affected me the most are now buried in notes on Facebook and the few remaining posts on Myspace. The reason I left Myspace for Facebook was not because of the reasons mentioned above, although those eventually became the reasons for my not returning. No, the reason I left Myspace was because I was going to college and on Facebook, I could more readily and easily connect. Looking back on the four remaining posts, I think I couldn't have chosen any better posts to keep. Granted, I can't really remember any of the other posts but these posts are more like my earlier posts on this blog - poetic.

I think I'll add them to this blog next week, and my notes from Facebook. In chronological order, of course, but I think it should be done. On top of that, if I have something to say, I can say it. Some insight to the post added or perhaps just something that came to mind, like this has tonight. It will be a way for me to keep some of the parts of the whole centralized. I would say all but that would be inaccurate. In any case I hope you are interesting in seeing a more... personal portion of my life.

Now, as I mentioned earlier, I wasn't the only one who used to write blogs on Myspace. Jerry did as well, which came in handy when he and I first met. Yes, I suppose you could call it (jokingly) stalking, but I think he would agree with me if I were to say that it wasn't stalking, it was merely reconnaissance. I'm glad that he didn't purge like I did because even though he wasn't sure anyone was reading his posts, he kept soldiering on, making a post every few months or so to give a brief update while other times he delivered a rather eloquent little snippet of his life. I have never claimed great understanding of the man I love, nor will I claim that now but I will admit that I understand him better than most. When I first read his posts nearly two years ago, I was trying to figure out the background of a man I hardly knew but now knowing him, loving him, and learning more and more about what makes him him - his past, his present, his dreams, his doubts, everything - taking all that and going back and reading those posts again? I won't lie, it was difficult. Not difficult to read, the man is extremely well read. No, it was difficult because I had that level of understanding that I didn't have before and I understand the people, the places, the things he's referencing to. I can better understand the pain, the anger, the joy, the frustration, the loneliness, everything that did and still does make up the man that I love.

For that, I am extremely grateful. In this day and age, I'm sure it is likely that more people can say that they are also privy to this knowledge, to this experience but I guess I'm old fashioned in the fact that its difficult to share the most intimate part of you - your mind - with the unknown, be it the entire wide web that spans this green earth or a list of friends you've acquired from all over. To me, its precious, not something that should be taken lightly, and the knowledge should never be misused. It has been, for lack of a better term, a blessing to be loved by such a man and I am eternally grateful for it.

Have a safe weekend, sorry for the mushiness. Blame my sinus infection.

Ode to Pajamas

2010-01-18T23:18:00.002-06:00

When I was a kid growing up in West Tennessee, I can distinctly remember when during car rides I would fall asleep, only to be woken gently by my parents when we reached the house. Now, this was when I was very small but I was only woken long enough to be gotten out of the car - the rest was up to my parents. I would have my cheek pressed to their shoulder, arms and legs limp, eyes shut as they would carry me through the kitchen to the room that adjoined theirs. There they would place me in bed and then begin to undress. When you're a child, there are lot fewer clothes to discard. At least, that's what it seemed like to me. There were the velcro shoes - no problem. The tiny socks, the shirt over the head - no bra yet, so they don't have to finagle with that - and then most of the time the pants had some sort of elastic in them. I was usually at least semi-conscious whenever the undressing began because I was aware of arms and legs being lifted, hands gently tugging clothing off and then gently tugging clothing back on. Now, when I was a kid, I have to assume I just slept in an old t-shirt or something because I can't remember but that seems the most accurate possibility.

As I got older, I was forced to wake whenever we reached the house and left to undress myself and redress myself in the privacy of my room. This continues on until this day but I can't help but want those easy days of childhood where someone would take care of you when you were sick or tired, helping you in and out of clothes. It's kind of not fair - I mean, as an adult, you have even more things to wrestle with. I suppose this is why we pair off as often as we do, it's nice to have someone help you with a coat on or off, to help you push your foot into shoes when you're too lazy to untie them and to help pull them off when you can't be bothered to do it yourself. You in turn do it for them too (or at least I hope you do). It all harkens back to childhood when we had someone taking care of us - we don't necessarily want that dependence back but we don't want to be left to deal with everything ourselves.

As a teenager, when we moved to Nashville, I know that I slept in hand-me-downs. T-shirts that were picked up as promotional things, some came from my brother when he out grew them, some from my father when he wore them out, occasionally I was able to buy a pair of pajama pants or two, usually shorts because I didn't like the pants that were available for purchase. It wasn't until I moved into the house that I currently reside at with my parents that I went back to something I'm sure I never had. I can remember dressing gowns, I can remember t-shirts and pajama pants but I can't recall ever having a set of pajamas. Like button down shirt, drawstring pants pajamas. The first pair I recieved were a rather cheery yellow with bright blue clocks on it - digital clocks, analog clocks, and sounds like 'beep beep' filled the yellow space at regular intervals.

Normally, I never wore top and bottom together and I think that's why I insist on wearing the top and bottom together now with the two sets of pajamas that I acquired this last month. Because I mostly wore the bottoms, the bottoms began to fade while the top remained that very bright, cheery yellow. So whenever I did wear the two together, the top looked brand new while the bottoms looked dingy and faded because of repetitive use. Most of the time I wore them both at the same time when I was sick or feeling vulnerable, covered from head to foot. I can remember a few times wearing them for snow days because let's face it, it's warmer and when it's cold outside, you just want to wear cuddly things. Pajamas are rather cuddly by nature, even if they don't seem 'sexy'. They're practical, thus their appeal.

After having to get rid of the first pair of pajamas I can recollect having ever worn, it didn't hit me until this past winter what I was missing. Sure, the fact that Target started carrying some really cute patterns for the pajamas certainly helped but when it came down to it, what I was missing was that cuddly set of pajamas that you can lounge around in and drink hot coco or knit or read a book - that set that it doesn't matter if you're sick or not, they just automatically make you feel better. To me, they make me feel like I'm a little kid again and I've just come fresh from a bath and nothing is more appealing then climbing into a set of nice pajamas to keep in that warmth and to envelop you in softness. Mmmmm... Pajamas, how I love thee...

Haunted House

2009-03-31T14:16:00.002-05:00

The fallen leaves crunch like

Dry, brittle bones beneath the

Heavily booted feet that move

Toward groaning, sagging stairs

That lead to eerily empty rooms

With faded and peeling wallpaper;

Dust choked mantles stand guard

Over soot blackened fireplaces;

Furniture lies rotten and broken

Across the water damaged floors;

A letter yellowed by time lies

Torn and unfinished in a drawer;

Glass broken in over the years

Shines dully through the grime;

A broken doll lies in disarray,

Her arms and legs at odd angles,

Her face ravaged by the elements,

And blue eyes now clouded grey;

From the attic to the basement,

A mystery here resides with the

Ghosts of the past ever present.

Apple Tree

2009-03-31T14:16:00.001-05:00

There is an apple tree

Rooted within my heart

And for eighteen years

All it’s seen is winter

Its bark is like granite

Its branches always bare

No fruit has grown here

In all my lonely years

But there was potential

And you could see that

Even though I thought

That it was hopeless

I thought my tree dead

But you wouldn’t listen

And you swept in with

Your sunlight and rain

And you washed away all

Remnants of suffering

And I finally put forth

New leaves and fruit in

Celebration of our spring

Rewrite: A Dance of Time

2009-03-31T14:12:00.000-05:00

They face like fighters in a ring, muscles taunt and eyes wary as they begin to circle. A man and a woman, the age old couple. It’s a dance of power, a dance of passion. One moves. It’s a cautious testing of the waters – easily dodged. They’re only focused on one another, looking for any shift of weight that might give away the next move. They’re en sync, perfectly matched in these easy moments of playful swipes.

Then the feel of the fight changes and it’s almost tangible. A silent challenge is issued. He lunges, a graceful, lethal ripple of muscle as he reaches for her. She moves quickly so that he only has possession of her wrist instead of all of her. She can almost feel the annoyance rolling off of him in waves of heat for having not obtaining more of her. In a way, it is a sort a heat – the heat of two bodies beginning to entwine in something that is brazenly primal.

They continue to circle, the woman leaning away from her captor, nearly all of her weight supported solely by the strength of his grip. He could release her at any moment, let her fall to the ground, but there is an unspoken knowledge that he wouldn’t let go – he wouldn’t give her up so easily. He lunges forward again, and their eyes lock as he pulls on her arm, acting as a counter balance while his free hand reaches for and captures her other wrist. His fingers are like flesh-covered steel, so strong, so relentless. The struggle to be free has started - the real fight has begun.

Her anger and her instincts guide her as she moves with mounting aggression. She uses her weight, her flexibility, and her knowledge of her opponent to her advantage. She wrests her wrist free of his grasp and she turns, but that doesn’t stop him. He’s used to her tricks, they’re second nature to him now and he knows how to work with them or against them. He catches her again, changes his grip, and forces her to cross her arms over her chest. But it isn’t over.

It’s never over.

She squirms, not giving up, looking for any weakness. Her nails search for tender flesh, finds it, and pierces it – but he only laughs. She throws her weight against his arms, forcing him to either support her or release her, but he pulls her arms tight around herself, pulling her tighter against his chest. Supporting her.

They pause, more of her wanting to do so than his, but he waits, his hands acting as shackles, almost bruising. He doesn’t loosen, doesn’t move – just waits with infinite, infuriating patience. She’ll start up again when she’s ready. She’ll renew her efforts when she thinks he’s not paying attention. Or she’ll give up, give in, and try again. But for now, she stays there, cradled in the shelter of his body. It’s simple. It’s beautiful. It’s unchoreographed. A lull in a violent storm. And for a moment, it’s perfect.

He lets her go as if they had reached some silent agreement. She turns on the balls of her feet in a movement of pure grace that leaves them facing one another once more. Taking a few steps back, she raises her eyes to his and their gazes lock. They start again. A closed circuit of passion and power. Man and woman. Woman and man. The primal dance of time.

Yearly Reflections

2009-01-01T21:55:00.005-06:00

This year was like every year in the sense that during this year a lot happened. This year is different in how much the events of this year have changed me. So here's a moment to reflect on this past year:

I wasn't arrested this year.
I didn't go to the emergency room this year.
I was a part of the Metro Nashville Honors Orchestra.
I went to NSA's prom, April 12th.
I met Jerry, Kris, Coty and Dan.
I turned eighteen.
I got my ears pierced a second time.
I graduated NSA on May 14th.
I had oral surgery to remove my wisdom teeth May 15th.
I attended TenRen.
I started dating Jerry May 18th.
I celebrated Jerry's 25th birthday with him, his family, and his friends on May 26th.
My grandmother was diagnosed with cancer again.
I had knee surgery on June 9th.
I had to go through physical therapy.
I went downtown for 4th of July.
I attended East Tennessee State University orientation.
I attended Eddie Izzard with Jerry.
My sister got married August 2nd.
I got to go Gatlinburg for the first time in years.
I started college at East Tennessee State University on August 25th.
I joined the Fencing club at ETSU.
I started ballroom dancing. Tango's still the best.
Eli and Jerry visited me at college.
I had one of the best Halloween ever.
I went home for Thanksgiving.
I went ice skating with friends.
I went bowling with friends.
I survived Freshman Finals.
I came home for winter break.
I spent Christmas with my family and Jerry's.
I've met the vast majority of Jerry's family.
I lost a lot of great friends but I gained a lot of new ones.
I learned a lot of things in class and a lot of things out of class.
I learned a lot of things about myself.
I met the love of my life.
I'll keep growing and keep looking to the future.
I'll take each day as it comes and look forward to the next day.

Six Month's Eve

2008-11-17T22:20:00.002-06:00

Seven months ago, on April the 12th, I was introduced to a man who changed my life forever. My date was a Navy boy who took special leave just to come down and escort me to my prom. He gets a phone call in the middle of the prom and his face changes, becomes unreadable with a fine line of anger as he grabs his hat and his camera, his phone and me and stalks down the hall of the hotel. As we near the piano next to the staircase, three figures are approaching us - a slender man with a red beard and long red hair tied back, dressed as a WWII paratrooper; a rather tall, attractive woman with long blond hair wearing a hat that wasn't quite a cowboy hat but would have been used on the range and a jacket; and a man who was a little taller than the woman with brown hair, spectacles, dressed like a trapper, fringes on his jacket and all. All and all these were three very interesting characters indeed. They stopped in a half circle around us and introductions were made.

The man that was only a little taller than I (at this point I'm not wearing my heels, I'm barefoot) was named Jerry, the woman's named turned out to be Coty, and the man with her was named Kris. As I greeted them in kind, my date still brooding and trying to act pleasant, I couldn't keep my eyes off of Jerry and finally piped up - 'Look, I'm sorry, but I have to hug you.' Why on Earth would I say something like that? Because it was just amazing to me how someone had the balls to dress up like that and arrive at a rather prestigious hotel and act as comfortable in it as he is with his own skin. It just amazed me and hugging him was the only way I could express how fantastic I thought that was. I'm a girl, I can get away with such things. And that, as they say, was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

At later times, it was expressed to me that the look on my date's face was priceless, a mix of fury and of confusion as Jerry grinned at me and I grinned at him, our arms sliding around one another. Something inside me when he had his arms around me melted, something clicked and when we pulled back, we both recognized it. According to Kris and Coty, it was obvious. We were just right for each other. I wouldn't call it love at first sight because honestly, things like that don't exist in my world. But like at first sight, admiration and respect at first sight for the person you see in front of you, that connection - that definitely took place. Instantaneous, unplanned, we more or less fell into each other's lap. He was just what I needed in my life and I was just what he needed in his.

But let's not jump ahead. The Navy boy who came as my date was actually my some-what boyfriend at the time. I say some-what because I realize that he was seeing other women in Maryland while I was still in Tennessee even if he wouldn't admit it. After all, the hole in the Jeep's windshield where he was having sex with some girl in his Jeep and her stilleto heel actually went through the windshield - well, you don't have to be a rocket scienetist to realize that something was going on behind the scenes. Despite these trysts, he still had visions of a wedding and children with me. Fat chance in hell.

Back to the story though. Navy boy wanted me to get to know some of his friends a bit better and one of them just happened to be Eli, an Army guy stationed in Iraq. Eli is Jerry's cousin, so when I talked to him next, I was actually able to get Jerry's myspace and from myspace correspondence to messaging, Jerry and I soon became very attached - even if we were only friends for then. I invited him, Kris, and Coty to help me celebrate my eighteenth birthday with a new piercing - my ears are double pierced -and a movie - The Forbidden Kingdom. Had I watched the movie with any other group, I don't think I would have enjoyed it as much.

Soon after, I went go-karting and mini-golfing with this trio in what will later be termed, by agreement, as our first date. Kris and Coty were, of course, together while I and Jerry were paired off together, which was just fine with me except I kept having the embarrassing notion of 'I wonder what it would be like to kiss him'. The worst of it was that in later discussions, it was devastatingly obvious to the entire party of my rather impromptu infatuation with a man seven years my senior. Oh yes, this man was a man, with his own house fully paid for and a few cars, a good steady job and wonderful family/community relationship. I was not dealing with some boy just out of high school or in his first year of college, no - I was dealing with a man. Though why he decided to deal with me, a slip of a girl just turned eighteen, about to graduate from high school, is beyond me.

And so we went around in circles, around the track and around each other, never far away from each other in any sense. When we went to supper at Waffle House, I rode in the convertible with him while Coty rode in Kris' truck. My cell phone was in my jacket while we ate and I missed a message from my parents so when we got back to the facilities and I called my parents, they were rather angry and I was afraid that I wouldn't be allowed to go out again because of a particularly bad decision of mine the previous summer and I cried. And you know what? He didn't turn away or shy away from the fact that I was upset. No, he held me, tightly, let me cry and explained to Kris and Coty when they arrived after what had happened - he stood beside me and helped me through a small bit of panic.

When we returned to the course, we played golf and he was never far from me - which is a good thing because at one point when I was trying to retrieve my ball from one of the little pond/waterfall areas, I nearly fell in. Had he not grabbed the back of my pants to keep my balance, I do believe that I would have fallen head first into this shallow water pit. He made me laugh, he made me smile. He rubbed gently with his knuckle along my spine as we watched Kris and Coty take a swing at the brightly colored orbs of interest and was a comforting, warm shadow at my back. He was my silent supporter and seemed determined that I enjoy myself and I did - thoroughly. One of Jerry's friends that stopped by shortly after I met the small group first at the prom stopped by the course and when we went to leave, Jerry and Coty and Kris escorting me to my parent's awaiting vehicle, his friend Dan performed what used to be a tradition, revving up and speeding, tires squealing, out of the parking lot.

Well Dan revved his engine and came up behind us. I heard the noise, turned around in the group that was more or less huddled around me on this fine spring evening, and stumbled backwards, falling as headlights blinded me and Dan's truck rolled to a stop. They helped me up, Dan moved past us, which made me notice my dad had pulled out of the parking lot and was parked right beside where Dan had to pass by. I found out later that dad had his hand on the little revolver he had with him - he has a license, don't worry folks. And nothing happened. Dan left, Jerry and them brushed me off and escorted me to the Jeep and life went on. I heard from Coty and them later that Jerry had chewed Dan out, tore him several new ones, and that man never loses his temper, never loses his cool. I think that was the beginning of the relationship right there. It showed that he was there and that he cared what happened to me, was worried about me...

To Be Continued...

Midnight Scribbles

2008-11-12T22:11:00.002-06:00

What makes me a writer?

Is it the letter I labor over before sending them home to my love? Or perhaps the local coffee shop, whose couch I often occupy as I quietly sip my Chai latte. Maybe it's the glasses that I wear, thick black frames to hide my young and vulnerable face behind. My glasses draw the attention away from my probing blue eyes to the flowers made of glitter on the sides.

Perhaps it's the clothes I wear; eclectic band shirts, random-stuff shirts and shirts from the Harley Davidson brand. Maybe it's the army jacket bought one visit at a local Goodwill store or maybe it's something different, something special, something more. Maybe it's that one pair of jeans, faded beyond belief with more areas torn and exposed instead of mended and clean. Maybe it's the wannabe Vans or my pink Converse - or perhaps my rainbow socks and my graphic underwear.

Or maybe it's the determination to get up every day, head out into that world and face it instead of cowering in some desolate corner that makes me a writer. My experiences - the places I've been, the people I've seen, the books I've devoured and the movies I've danced over; the hardships, the joys, the good and the bad, beautiful and ugly experiences that are out there in the world to possess the knowledge of - all of it. The past I've had, the present I'm living in, and the future that I dream of.

Maybe it's all of these things and maybe it's none of them. Maybe some silent muse sits upon my shoulder, wandering off every now and again to leave me sitting, with my pen poised and only ink dripping from it onto the otherwise pristine or filled page, a black oblivion. When it comes back, I am it's willing slave, listening as it jabbers incoherently in my ear in a tone so sweet it makes my heart ache and I write what comes to me, revising as I let my pen merrily trip along the lines of the paper.

So in short, I don't know.

I never have and I doubt I ever will.

But I know have a talent and so I'll use it. Even if not every attempt is beautiful and perfect, I will write until my last days. Hopefully one day I'll get paid for my lines upon lines of words.

Thoughts On A Poem

2008-11-11T22:33:00.003-06:00

As often as I make the claim to be a writer, I have never had my work published unless you happen to mean a school newspaper - in which case I've been published several times. I've been on television, I've been quoted in newspapers, but I have never had any of my work published. Once, I got an honorable mention for some writing competition I entered in my sixth or seventh grade but still - you get the point.

Nothing.

Nada.

Zilch.

But I love writing. It's what I do. Every day I write something that someone goes 'I never would have phrased it that way but that's brilliant' or 'Very nicely put, you outdid yourself' to which I respond, no I'm a writer. One of the things I want to do before I die is to make that statement a reality. Be published for a short story or a novel, perhaps even a book of poetry. I fill journals and pages upon pages of loose leaf paper, surely some idea in there is just waiting to be taken out of the bag and nourished. Watered with more ideas, warmed by careful dedication until it grows to be a sapling to be pruned with careful slashes of the razor edged tongues of family, friends and editors. If it makes it past all of the pulling, prodding, tying back of limbs and complete severances of branches, then it should be able to grow up into a strong tree. If not, well... start the process all over again.

Composition books, covers covered in permanent marker or stickers, a dazzling array of carefully clipped pictures pasted on from magazines of the time, line a chest that I have in my room, locked carefully away so that no prying eyes can see. I've burned pages, rewritten old poems and songs and stories, expanded and contracted in the realm of my ability but sometimes I just become burned out. Bummed out. So I took almost a month, maybe it was more, to stop writing. Because I couldn't stand the thought of it being a chore. Because my life was in a metamorphosis that I could watch and enjoy or let completely pass me by. A part of me is glad I became this butterfly and another part of me feels as if my wings didn't develop.

Autumn leaves scattered 'cross the sidewalk
Like broken dreams scattered on the floor.
Dry leaves, sapped of life and color,
Crushed beneath the disapproving looks.

A broken time piece sits upon the mantle
A voice so silenced, it echoes down the hall.
Gears lay in the stillness of forever
No longer does the heart beat anymore.

I'll work on this, get back to you... Please don't steal.

November Drivels

2008-11-10T19:47:00.003-06:00

I leave the room full of laughter and silly ideas that bubble from lips, breath sweet from their strawberry smoothies, and enter the solitude of the hallway. The lights seem dimmer than those in the rooms here in this modern dorm room, spaced out more friendly-like on the eyes that they burden. I keep my eyes to the tiled floor that makes up the floor of the entire building except for the lobby and stairs. As I pass doors, I listen, behind every door a new but similiar sound. Some doors hold silence, some doors how laughter like that which I just left but different - not the same at all. Forced laughter, natural laughter, from the belly laughter that makes your eyes tear up... I hear them all as I pass these doors, so similar, only the number changes. True, the door itself may have a poster or left over Halloween decorations but it's still just the gateway into someone else's world.

I hear doors that are filled with silence, not even the rustle of clothing and it's loud. Never has lack of presence been so disturbing as in this bustling bee-hive of a college dorm. Flyers grace every bulletin board available, movies blare from phantom tvs that are understood to be behind the doors but none of them catch your attention like that silence. Sometimes it makes me want to place my hand against the door as if somehow I'll be able to feel a pulse and the silence will lessen instead of deafen. Instead I just keep placing one foot in front of the other, passing another door and then another, music loud and making the door vibrate in it's frame, an instrument strummed lightly and sweetly and then the riotous yells and slams as a game goes on - inside the room or on a screen is hard to tell sometimes. Sometimes I fear the sounds I hear, sometimes I wish I could quietly knock on the door and asked to be let in but all the time I keep walking. I keep moving.

I feel like Alice going down the rabbit hole, strange objects floating beside me as I make it to a stairwell and start to make my dizzying descend. Even the stairwell doors have their own feel in this building. Some ring out and come to a sudden stop as yelling, cat calls and obscenities volley back and forth as a few guys thunder down the stairs past me, making me cringe against the railing for a moment, fearing their wildly swinging arms and legs. Some click quietly as someone slips from one floor to the next, eyes turned upwards and steps measured and controlled. Sometimes its a combination, sometimes you have to slide past the guy caring his bicycle or hold open the door for someone with a basket precariously balanced in her grip. If these stairwells could tell stories, I'm almost afraid to ask what kind of stories they would tell.
My descend is ended as I come to the first floor indoor bike rack, for lack of a better term - it is merely a straight set of bars in the same style as the railing for the stairs, mostly meant to deter students from playing under the stair cases, but it has been utilized as a place to lock bikes to inside of the facility.

I make my way to my room and here I am still, in my chair with what makes my roommate cringe but makes the chaotic side of me very pleased. Empty bottles on the desk, dirty dishes beside the sink, folded and clean clothes in a basket, not hung up yet, yesterday's newspaper and today's laying, unopened, on my desk. Movies, make-up, needed texts for my classes along with print offs, notebooks, and such - not to mention the food. Cookies, the Kroger equivalent to Oreos, a box of Chef Boyardee cups. Even an unopened grape soda can. She cringes when she sees my side of the room, carefully keeps her eyes averted when she's on her side of her room, where everything is neat and has it's place. Dishes never sit, she takes a shower every night, and would never think of wearing the same jeans twice in a row. Something about her discomfort pleases me. Just like handing a bag of pennies to the annoying RAs that come and knock on my door in hopes of collecting the dollar that I owe them for letting me into my room to get my ID that lets me into the cafeteria, my building, and my room pleased me greatly.

Ah well. Therapy is doing wonders for my writing at least.

A Childhood Nightmare

2008-10-08T19:39:00.001-05:00

Picture, if you can, a child of three or four during a time when Clinton was president and the Lewinsky scandal hadn’t happened yet. Videos of Disney classics such as Beauty and the Beast and Cinderella were giving me unrealistic views on men and Pocahontas had just been released. A Nintendo Entertainment System seemed permanently hooked up to the TV in the living room with such games as The Legend of Zelda, Duck Hunt, and Super Mario 3 were near at hand. Life, as they say, was good. So what went wrong? What was the catalyst that had me sit up in bed crying out in fear? Believe it or not, I think it all started when I was shown a classic 1940 Disney film about a puppet boy brought to life who spends roughly eighty-eight minutes trying to become a real boy. Yes, that’s right, I’m talking about Pinocchio.

There’s a scene in the movie where you, as the viewer, zoom-in to where Jiminy Cricket is singing as he stands upon the windowsill, gazing at the stars. Although I’m not sure of the exact song he’s singing, in my recollection he’s singing ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’. I mean, how non-threatening can a cricket get? For some unknown reason, though, this scene and how the viewer seemed to zoom-in to the singing cricket, would make for one sleepless night for my parents and one wild ride for a kid of three or four.

It was a clear night when this event occurred. I had finally settled down enough for my mother to tuck me in and read me a story. When she finished, she reached down and turned on the Crayola nightlight that I had beside my bed before wishing me a final goodnight and shutting the door behind her. Fact: As a child I was afraid of the dark. Even now I find myself quickening my pace to reach the light because of the unfriendly shadows sending a river of dread and fear straight through my heart. For this reason, and for safety reasons as it was later explained, the entire house had little nightlights everywhere. Nightlights in some cultures are considered to help keep the night, the darkness, and the evil that lurks there at bay – but on the night of which I speak, my Crayola nightlight did none of these.

I lay upon my side, my back to the nightlight as I looked towards a different light – moonlight, soft and white, bathed the room in varying shades of black and blue as it filtered through the blinds of my window. Toys and shelves became distorted in the light, taking on slightly menacing forms but it did little more than make my heart race before I laughed quietly to myself and reminded myself what was over there. It was a sort of game I played before I became too tired to think. What things did I have that I loved in the light that could make such shadows that loomed over my head at night? That night, the game lost its comforting feel as my vision seemed to zoom in on the windowsill to a shadow that I could not assign one of my toys to but I was afraid I knew what it was.

It was as if the shadow had read my thought and had decided to rub in the fact that it was indeed a cricket because it moved forward into the moonlight and stayed there, poised on the edge of the windowsill. It seemed to have its own magical quality about it because even in the moonlight, its black body seemed to gleam in a way that made me sickeningly aware of the antennas protruding from its small head, the way its legs seemed poised for a jump. The fact that it was there was enough to make me anxious and have my stomach doing acrobatic tricks but it was what it did next that made me sit upright in bed and start shrieking and crying. It opened its mouth and sang.

My parents, of course, came running in through the adjoining door, my father leading the way as my mother reached for the light switch. They both looked around before sitting on the bed to console me, all the while trying to figure out what happened to put me in the state I was in. Once I was able to explain past the tears and the hiccups, my dad looked around the room for a while, even under my bed, but he couldn’t produce the cricket culprit. After a few hollow statements on how they believed me and that it’s alright now, my parents tucked me back into bed and retreated wearily to their room. Unfortunately, as I lay upon my side, my vision zoomed in again and the cricket made his reappearance and resumed his performance.

Again, my parents came running and when I kept pointing to the window, unable to make it clear through the tears that the cricket was back, my father put two and two together in his sleep befuddled mind and made another round of my room, looking for the fictional cricket. Not wanting the cricket to make a third showing, my father picked me up and put me in his bed, saying that he and my mother would sleep in my room and wait for the cricket to come back. Drained from making such a fuss so late into the night, I curled up sleepily under their covers as they wished me good night, turned out the lights and went into my room to sleep.

Turning my back to the door, I lay facing the windows in their room, the moonlight a little lighter than before as the moon made its way across the heavens. Everything seemed bigger and stranger in their room, a little bit scarier too, but I didn’t care. As long as the cricket didn’t make an appearance on the windowsill in their room, which I watched in wary and weary anticipation, all would be well. I suppose if I hadn’t been expecting it that the round black body of a spider dropping down onto the windowsill from a nearly invisible thread before stepping forward into the moonlight with her many legs would have seemed frightening. As it was, the spider that sat on the corner of their windowsill comforted me and told me a story that to this day, I’m unable to recall the details of. All I remember thinking as I drifted off to sleep was ‘At least it isn’t that scary cricket.’

Silent Distance

2008-09-23T20:40:00.003-05:00

When I picture the distance in my head, all I see is navy blue, stretching as far as I can see, and I can see quite a bit. It's almost as if spotlight it just all around me, not from a certain point but everywhere and although I know I'm standing, I know it isn't ground beneath me. The light around me is a neon blue and just as bright and shining.

You know the legend of a red string tied from your finger to the finger of the one you're meant to be with? Your true love? Well here in my head, it's that seem neon blue and it isn't a string, or even a ribbon - it's an entire road leading back to him. The road isn't easy, with twists and turns and tricks but it can be conquered. I just don't have a way to conquer it and the path leads out of sight. At times it's hard to picture him.

But Friday he came to visit, finally, after not having been with him for a month. I was finally able to touch what had become little more than fantasy, a fantastic dream. It was like a ghost turned into flesh and bone, all those phantom touches felt again and memory replaced by reality. It was so good to have him in my arms again, so very good and my arms have felt empty ever since. Everything has felt empty and hollow ever since. He is the one that completes me, my other half, my soulmate. He and I gave each other our hearts freely and I would never do anything to jeopardize my happiness with him.

So while he was here, why did I cry so much? Why did I lay there with my eyes open, trembling, tears falling from my eyes? I was wasting precious time with him but that's all it was - precious time. Stolen moments because he had to return to work and I had to return to college. He was going to leave the next day and I was only going to have these few short hours with him. Needless to say, I didn't sleep well that night, even for all of my silent tears. Tears that should have waited until he left.

I cried even then, in the sunlight as we stood in my room and his cousin, that drove up with him who is on leave from the Army, stood outside respectfully, giving us time. I had my arms around his waist and I begged him to take me with him as he wiped away my tears, held me tightly in his arms, kissed me over and over again as he said no. As he reminded me of what my parents would think. Of what would happen if I quit college now, in the fifth week of college. And he stood there with tears in his eyes even though he didn't cry, because he hated that he was the one to upset me.

I can stand the 'good-bye for now' but I could never stand a final 'good-bye' from him. I can let him go although it hurts and for a few days after I've been depressed a little because in the end I know one day we won't have to say good-bye unless it's for us to go to work, when we're married, and then it won't be sad. It'll just be an 'until later'. So yes, I can stand this little pain because in the end, I'll have the greater happiness that awaits us.

Perhaps I'm being foolish, but I can't even imagine what will happen when I go home for fall break in a few weeks.

Destructive Games

2008-09-16T21:26:00.003-05:00

I hate when he does this.

When he shuts all of the doors I've taken so much time to open, when I begin to think the bridges we've built are finally able to withstand the weather that is put to it time and time again, I am mistaken and he leaves me alone, cold and weary in the cold once again. I hate this 'if you won't share we me, I'll shut down' when at times, I'm unable to give a clear answer.

And this time? It was me just quoting myself, I wasn't trying to be a pain in the ass, I swear with everything that I am. I said mayhaps to a question in which he quoted me, "That's not an answer." I responded with the rest of the quote, "No, it's an evasion." To which he said fuck it, logged off, and turned off his phone.

Now, I'm not saying that this is unreasonable because we've been having a rough time of it lately, on my end. Why? Because college is nothing but high school drama on steroids with problems in class, with professors, on exams and homework... Everything is turmoil, one that I'd rather not get used to. So I don't blame him for being irritated when I have such problems and try to hash them out myself but still... That would be like me hanging up the phone on him and turning it off. What good does it accomplish?

Hollow

2008-09-15T22:43:00.002-05:00

Since I've been here, whenever anyone thumps me on the back or baps me anywhere along the ribcage, it's sounded hollow. Most of the time, when you thump someone along their back or ribcage, you get at least a thunk noise, a solid noise of flesh hitting flesh but I have none of that. No, I just sound hollow. As if someone has stolen my lungs and I can't breathe here. As if someone has stolen my heart and I'm not living, just drifting like a ghost from day to day. It's like some pieces parts are missing and I'm incomplete up here, unfinished, missing the things that make me real, that make me human, that make me me.

Sad thing is I know who has taken my breath away and stolen my heart - he's just in Nashville where I can't get to him.

A Day Early

2008-09-14T20:52:00.002-05:00

And it was as if fate had decided that if I talked about storms that it would send one my way. My roommate has been dating this guy for two years. They went to high school together, they went to prom, they've spent copious amounts of time at each other's houses and so on and so forth and blah blah blah.

Apparently, he asked her if they could take a two week break before they wanted to make it permanent. This was spawned by arguments they'd allegedly had earlier on in the week. My roommate only goes home every other week (two weeks) and her parents come up on the weekends when she isn't coming home. I can't even image the amount of money these people are spending on gas.... But anyways, he basically didn't want to get back together with her until she got back.

Well, girl that she is, she (and rightfully so) said no and now things are over between them. Now, this may mean that my quiet weekends alone (I'm beginning to like the pattern of only have to deal with her and her buzzing phone every other weekend, not of course including the weekdays when I deliberately try to be out to avoid her and her phone...) are history. This may also mean that her phone will buzz less. This does mean that she's out on the market and I may have to deal with her bringing guys over. Now, I'm okay with some of these changes but the others? We'll have to wait and see I suppose...

Short, rushed, kinda informative, mostly just blowing off steam, regular posts to resume tomorrow.

Significant Oceans

2008-09-11T20:45:00.005-05:00

Everyone's life can be described as an ocean and a ship. It has it's smooth days, where the wind is in your sails and the sky is bright or perhaps a little cloudy if you like that sort of thing. It has it's stormy days, where it feels like you have to hold onto life with every ounce of strength that you have, when the masts have broken and your vessel's going under. You have your in between days, where it feels like you aren't going anywhere, the winds have died; when it feels like you're about to boil, the sun's so hot upon your decks that it feels like hell; when the storms are lighter but just as devastating in the long run, like perhaps a break-up or divorce. To some, that could be the large storm, but in retrospect of some events, they're lessened. So it could just feel like coming to harbor in a safe port.

I've come to view life at college as my big storm. I know in years to come, when the storms become larger and memories of them replace these memories, I'll laugh at how bad I thought things were now, but things are still pretty bad. Not in the sense that I'm hurt, minus some minor cuts and bruises, not in the sense that I'm being threatened, and not in the sense that I'm unable to cope with things day to day. No, this is my storm because my grandmother has cancer for the third time, having to give up the home that was built for her and her ex-husband back when my mom and aunt were kids and live with my parents in their house. This is my storm because my other grandmother is ill and the doctors have yet to pinpoint what exactly is making her so sick, what exactly is making her lose so much weight. This is my storm because I feel like I'm losing a sense of self in this place. Not because there are so many people here, but there are. No, because I've changed from this summer. Yes, it was bound to happen and no, I shouldn't be so surprised, but when I talk to my boyfriend and I don't tell him about nearly falling down the stairs, or guys who think my guy friends are dating me or even something day to day - that's not good.

Being away is enough of a strain, so I sought to distance myself from him instead of provoking more pain on either end. So when I'm told about things that happened at work, things that happened at church or with the family, or even just trips he's had to take, I don't go 'Oh, I wish i had been there. I should have been there,' although sometimes I do like in the case of this past weekend. I simply take it, remember it, but don't attach any emotion to it. I've started bottling things up instead of getting them out in the open. If I discuss something about family problems, I don't always immediately tell him about it and I realize this is hurting us both in the long run if I continue on this path. I'm just not sure how else to cope with this. I mean, it isn't as if I'm across seas, I'm just here in Tennessee, five and a half or so hours away from him, that's all. I should be a bit more mature, a bit more independent than what I'm displaying but it just seems... wrong. So very wrong to be away from my family but especially him.

In my Introduction to Sociology class today, there was something that was on the powerpoint that made me hastily scribble it down in my lack-of-sleep stupor. "Significant others is used to refer to those individuals who are most important in the development of the self." ~George Herbert Mead

I shouldn't allow distance and the frustration and grief of not being able to be beside him cloud my judgement and make me a stranger to someone who has better me and my life and with any luck, will continue to help me improve for the rest of our lives. I only hope that I've helped him in the 'development of the self' also.

What Will You Do, Love?

2008-09-11T20:40:00.004-05:00

"What will you do, love, when I am going,
With white sail flowing,
The seas beyond?-
What will you do, love, when waves divide us
And friends may chide us
For being fond? "

"Though waves divide us, and friends be chiding,
In faith abiding,
I'll be true!
And I'll pray for thee on the stormy ocean,
In deep devotion-
That's what I'll do! "

"What would you do, love, if distant tidings
Thy fond confidings
Should undermine?
And I, abiding 'neath sultry skies,
Should think other eyes
Were as bright as thine?"

"Oh, name it not - though guilt and shame
Were on my name,
I'd still be true;
But that heart of thine - should another shar it -
I could not bear it!
What would I do?"

"What would you do, love, when home returning,
With hopes high-burning,
With wealth for you,
If my bark, which bounded o'er the foreign foam,
Should be lost near home -
Ah! what would you do?"

"So thou wert spared - I'd bless the morrow
In want and sorrow,
That left me you;
And I'd welcome thee from the wasting billow,
This heart thy pillow -
That's what I'd do!"

~Samuel Lover

Passing Thoughts

2008-09-11T17:59:00.002-05:00

Okay, so I lied, I didn't get a chance to post last night. So to make up for that, I'll do two posts right now. One, a writing from Tuesday, and three, a post for today.

I'm surrounded by freedom and the air is sweet. It rained earlier today and I am greatly enjoying the sun through the clouds. It's rays are muted and yet they still lend light to this bustling campus. Voices are overheard, snippets of conversation that leaves the unintentional eavesdropper with an urgent sense of curiosity to learn more. People laugh and joke among themselves as cars weave around groups on their way to class, to eat, to study, or to sleep.

The breeze is cool and damp against my bare shoulders but it recedes, so I don't reach for my jacked. Instead, I continue to listen and to watch. The train, a few hundred feet away from where I'm sitting, creates a steady hum as it moves over the tracks, pierced every now and then by the train's whistle. It's barely four o'clock back home and already the crickets are out in full chorus. Yesterday my roommate captured a cricket that was in our room and set it free outside.

I hear car doors shut, doors to dorms slam, the grinding crunch of skateboard wheels and the hollow sound of the piece of wood that they're attached to echo across the steady din. I feel the thrum of a car engines as they passes underneath where I sit and I hear the cars as their tires crunch over gravel two stories below.

Everything is a rich and vibrant shade of green here, everywhere you look it's green. In some of the trees, you can already begin to see the beginnings of fall. Gorgeous greens take on a sickly yellow-green hue and in some cases, some have already started turning orange and red. I can't wait for the fall here. I have a feeling that it will be magnificent. To think, people pay a lot of money to see the changing of the leaves in Gatlinburg and I get a show right here on campus...

Slime Green Nails and Me

2008-09-09T20:04:00.003-05:00

Having attended an art school for a few years in middle school and my entire high school career, I suppose it isn't any surprise that I accept, nay, welcome change. You're talking to the girl who had her ears pierced in sixth grade when she was twelve. Normal you say? Sure, and perhaps getting the second hole nowadays is normal when you're eighteen and a senior in high school too. When I was a freshman, I was given a few spray cans of that temporary hair dye? I wanted purple and green and blue, but instead I received pink and blue. Of course, at that time, I took what I could get. So usually during lunch, one of my friends would take the spray cans out of my locker, where I had them, play with my hair (put it in a pony tail, pigtails, braid it... it was still pretty short back then so they couldn't do much...) and then basically spray paint it. I would get pink and blue stripes, blue all over with purple dots, pink and blue dots at random - you name it, they tried it.

For some unknown reason to me, people have always enjoyed playing dress up with me. They'll bring clothes from home, make up, nail polish, ribbons and accessories and just treat me like a doll. Most of the time, if I agreed with the vision, I would hold still and do as I was told, enchanted with the reality that there are so many possibilities to change myself. They would put me in corsets, put bows on my pigtails, draw spider webs and trees on my face with eyeliner, coloring it with eye shadow. They'd bring a short skirt for me to wear, some fishnet and pants that were tight with straps on them (like the Tripp pants they sell at Hot Topic still), and arm warmers with metal on them. I would come home with my nails painted black, my nails in a rainbow, my hair a colorful mess and make up still staining my skin, but those few hours at school, I was a beautiful little doll in class. They even used to put temporary tattoos on my body or free hand it with a permanent marker in places that I could cover up from my parents...

Ah the days of being a doll... In a sense, I miss it because I didn't have to make any choices, I was just told to bring a few things and then to sit still or put this on. It was easy. A simple metamorphosis before class, a touch up during lunch, and then back to my normal self (with the exception of the nail polish, colorful hair, etc) to go to my mom's work or home. My mom hated what I did with myself, often commenting on how I should stop, but she never really put her foot down. That was always my dad. I think she understood the need for experimentation and I'm glad she allowed me that little freedom.

As I grew accustomed to the environment of high school and started becoming less wild and more subdued (not that I'm anywhere close to being subdued even now), I began to hate being a doll for all the reasons that I loved it. I wanted to choose what I wore. I wanted to be able to go home and not get disapproving looks from my parents and I didn't like having to jump in the shower as soon as I got home, before dinner. I wanted to make my own choices - so I did. I still hung out with the goth/gamer/techie group so my wardrobe consisted mostly of black things, mostly really lose fitting guy clothes that I stole off various people, although some of them were purchased for me. But I did cease the excessive make up and I began asserting myself a little more forcefully.

Even as I adjusted to this new change where no one played doll with me because dolls shouldn't complain and talk back, they should just do as they were told, I evolved further into my current self. I love color, I always have. I've always loved bright happy colors although my favorite color is purple and I'm usually wearing blue. It got to the point where three out of the five days at school, I'd wear mostly black with a little color but then I'd shift to color the other two days with jeans. Then I shifted a little more, to where I was wearing colors most days and black was reserved for a few occasions. Then I stopped caring and basically wore whatever I felt like for that day, including black with bright color, which made a few of my friends tilt their heads at me...

Then I started clothes that actually fit me. One of my boyfriends when I was a freshman pretty much broke up with me because he thought that I wasn't wearing clothes for my body type. Apparently he wanted clothes that were form fitting and at that point in time, I was uncomfortable with my body, pretty much have been since I was a kid, but luckily with a little help (and a lot of love and support from my boyfriend) I've learned to love myself. But now I wear t-shirts that are still guy t-shirts but they're mediums, comfortable, and show off just enough to see that I have a shape but still leave enough to the imagination. I wear jeans mostly and have tried (in vain) to give up my black wardrobe but at least I don't wear black as much. My hair is longer and I no longer color it with anything, permanent, semi-permanent, or washable. If I wear make up it's for a special occasion and usually because I have to (i.e. my sister's wedding, my graduation, etc...). And usually, I reserve the really colorful and off the wall nail polish for my toes. Which brings us to the title, slime green nails and me. I met a girl with purple hair on Monday named Eliza. Short for Elizabeth. Coming from an art school, people in black, people with different colored hair, people that just seem off don't bother me a bit. Actually, they comfort me. Which is why if you took a look at my friends, you'd find it eclectic but mostly made of guys...

You have Joe, who looks like he should be lifting weights, on the football field or something but is actually a very strong, very big lovable teddy bear of a guy. He's in my Honors Composition class. You have Oran, who is in/was (?) in the army and has come back to finish his education who is also rather large, rather muscular, and a lovable teddy bear. He lives about six or so doors down from me in my hall. There's Jordan, who looks rather gay at times but that's because he works at Old Navy... I mean, what can I say... It's Old Navy. But he is also rather large, not that muscular, and a teddy bear. He's in my Honors Composition class too, and my US History since 1877. There's Justice, who isn't much on the large, or muscular, side. He is, however, intelligent, rather funny, and also an English Major so... Met him at orientation and he's in my history class also. There's Dan, who's scrawny and tall, very talented on the violin and rather athletic in the fact that he likes to run. He lives on the third floor and I met him at orientation too. And then there's Michael, his roommate Taylor, his friends Skinner and Jeff. Of the four, Michael and I are the closest, but Jeff likes my massages and the way I scratch his back in circles, Skinner tolerates and gets along with me pretty well because I'm one of the few (perhaps only) girl friend that Michael has... Skinner also called me a lady, which made me blush a little. Taylor, I question his sexuality because I want to say gay but I also know, having gone to an art school, that just because of the stuff you like, the way you wear your hear, and the clothes you wear doesn't make you gay. But anyways, his birthday was yesterday and I made him a card which he's still awwwwing about, he loves it so much.

And Michael? Well, I kinda didn't give him a choice in being my friend or not. We were split up into our mini-groups at orientation, we went around the room and told everyone our name, where we were from, and our intended major. Upon hearing that he was majoring in German and taking into account that he was wearing black shoes, black pants, black hoodie, and had a DS on the desk in front of him, combined with his glasses? I knew we'd kick it off. After the session, I pretty much went up to him and said if I needed any help with German that I was going to bug him. For the rest of the orientation, we ate and sat next to each other, talking about anime, video games, movies, music, etc. Now we see each other whenever the other's bored or wants to watch a movie or something. Not a bad set up but as one guy pointed out in the laundry room, most people would be quite uncomfortable if they stood next to Michael. After all, he's six foot plus, quite big, and rather menacing in all the black. Plus he's crazy as hell. Which made me laugh and hop down from the washer I was sitting on to hug and be hugged by Michael, which made the guy in the laundry room give me a funny look. I told the guy, 'He's just a big teddy bear...' Gotta love stuff like that.

As you can see, teddy bear is the phrase of the day. I call them teddy bears because they can be big bears of guys, violent, protective, and good if you ever need help with a problem be it personal or in your studies, but they're also funny, intelligent, generally good natured, and are really just looking out for you. I think every girl should have like five of these guys lined up... You'll need them.

I meant to post this on September 9th, 2008 but apparently I pressed the wrong button.

Real post for today later this evening.

All In The Name Of A Clothes Basket

2008-09-08T21:24:00.002-05:00

So I asked my friend for a ride to Walmart because I needed a clothes basket. He thought it'd be funny to come up behind me while I was at the jewelry counter talking to a woman about replacing the battery in my watch while I was there and kicked me on my ass, sending me slamming into the counter. This resulted in a chewing out by me. Then when I was doing laundry earlier tonight, the end result of me picking up the basket I had purchased earlier was me pulling my back. I had to call another friend to help me move my laundry and carry my basket after I had folded my laundry. Right now, I am rightly and thoroughly pissed.

That's all I really have to add about today. Taking meds, can't carry much in my bag tomorrow... I hate college students, especially male college students who do things that are harmful and think it's funny and the chicks who try entirely too hard and more worried about their looks and their boyfriends than their grades... Oh well, that's pretty much the entire nation with the exception of a delightful and unique few...

Chopsticks and History Class

2008-09-08T10:02:00.002-05:00

For the record, I honestly think that Honor classes don't even begin to prepare you for college. When my honors English IV teacher told us that she was going to treat us like we were in college even though we weren't in her AP class, I thought I'd get a taste for the way classes would really be. Oh how wrong I was. She did take things late, she did give us extensions on deadlines, she did give us extra credit... People here will grab you by the balls and swing you by them if you don't read the material, if you don't take the quizzes seriously and especially if you don't seek help for your problem areas. At least I'm learning this early on in the semester instead of the end of it, which is good.

My history class is US History Since 1877 (because the US History Prior 1877 was full when I tried to sign up for it) is actually pretty okay. Sure, it's taught by someone in their fifties, sixties with white hair, a mustache and glasses (pretty much what you'd expect a professor of history to look like) but generally, he tries to make jokes and keep the subject light. He isn't the best lecturer for those of us who would like to take notes because he simply doesn't repeat things. He generally is just a rattling on and on without thinking about repeating years, statistics, names he hasn't written on the board, etc. After you get past that, I suppose some would consider it easy. My problem is that he gives quizzes (announced quizzes, there's one coming up on Wednesday on Chapter 17) that are five questions, multiple choice. Now, either I have a problem understanding the options given to me or I misunderstand the answers given to me to choose from. Or, which is probably the more likely case, I'm not able to compute the textbook. I read the sections, I look up the organizations and people and treaties and such that he gives us to study, but somehow either I'm not grasping what the text is trying to tell me or my study skills are sorely lacking. On this one, I'm voting for both the not grasping the text and my study skills.

Worst of it is, I read the sections then study the morning of the quiz over breakfast with Jordan. This last time, I studied the night before with Joel. You would think I would be better prepared for the quiz but no - oh, no. Jordan got a one hundred on his quiz, Joel's off to class now but since I helped him study before his quiz, I'm sure he also did better than me. I'm going off the fact that he was hugging me constantly after the quiz and calling me his hero and such. So why is it that I'm the one not getting it? I honestly don't understand. I guess it's like chopsticks. Some people pick it up easily, some you have to give the children's version of chopsticks to (where they're attached at the top instead of being separate?), and some you have to teach slowly. I suppose I'm the latter, which bothers me. So I'm off to study for my quiz on Wednesday and hope that the construction outside my window will cease. They seem to be tilling up the land for some reason unbeknownst to me... But everytime something goes -bang- I jump out of my seat like two feet in the air. Gives me a heart attack every time. Music isn't drowning it out which is bad...

I'll post more later probably if I'm not busy, which I don't think I will be but I do have to do my laundry today, running out of clothes. And I have a present waiting for me from my parents next I see them, a webcam and my old iPod fixed. Yay!

Grey Clouds Across the Horizon

2008-09-05T22:16:00.003-05:00

Stray trembles course through my bones, my muscles, as I sit here at my desk with thoughts of the week before, with this week, and of this weekend running through my head. All I can think is that I'm tired. Emotionally, physically... I'm just tired. I'm tired of being away from my family, from my friends, from my love. I'm tired of not being able to sleep in my own bed, I'm tired of not being able to see the walls that I painted with my parents, the clouds I painted with my mom. I'm tired of having to share a room with someone who isn't family and who isn't of my choosing.

I'm tired of not being around people who understand me. They don't know how to deal with me when I'm angry and I don't want to talk about it, I just want to cool off, they don't know how to deal with me when I'm acting like a little kid, just excited about anything and everything. They aren't sure how to read my looks or my movements, they aren't sure what I mean by what I say at times, they can't figure me out. For some, it'll probably take years, a lot of them will never be able to figure it out. A few, a very small few will be able to learn and they'll be few, far between, and very dear to me.

I'm tired of having to handle things by myself. Yes, I know, I have people I can ask help from, advice from, but it just scares me , it does, to know that I'm here stranded. I don't mind doing things like my appointments or my prescriptions, but I can't come home and plop the book down in front of mom and dad and say explain this to me another way. I have arms to hold me, but they aren't arms of people that I know well, they aren't arms of the people I love, they're pleasant strangers. When I'm sad and crying, when I'm angry and pissed of, when I'm just being me or sarcastic or silly - they can't deal with it. I just wish I could go home, but I refuse to fail, I refuse to go home from this place defeated. That's why I keep saying that I'll wait a year.

Oh I'm so tired. So very tired. I haven't been able to sleep well and when I have been able to sleep, it's been short naps. I wake up easily during the night, with sounds from the hallway (people coming in the door, people leaving rooms, people entering rooms, people talking on their cell phones, people walking in groups down the hall - I can hear everything). I think I wake when my roommate rolls over, when my refrigerator turns on and hums for a while. I wish I could just knacker myself out so that I can finally get some sleep, but every time I think I've gotten to that point, I found myself awake in the middle of the night and I wish I could find something to help me.

It isn't all doom and gloom, mind you, it really isn't, but sometimes I get to the point where I'm just heart broken. I miss my friends that understood me, that knew me, that loved me for who I am with all of my little quirks. Here I'm just like everyone's little sister, they look out for me but... I miss my family, I miss my grandmother especially even though my grandmother's sickness at times did depress me. I miss my dog, and I even miss that hateful, mean African Grey parrot that's been around since before I was born. Ye gods, I hope he doesn't last until after I'm dead and gone, that would just be too much... Devil incarnated...

I miss the places I used to frequent, even school. I miss the used bookshop in Hillsboro Village (Bookman & Bookwoman), I miss walking up and down the Village, catching shuttles to places around West End and 21st Avenue, I miss walking around Vanderbilt hospital (both the general and the Children's) and the Vanderbilt campus. Since moving up here back in 2000, with my mom working at Vanderbilt since then, I have become very attached to the place, extremely well versed in places where it's safe to cross, places it's better not going, the best food, the best buys... Everything. That was my stomping ground and I loved it so very much. Although I'm versed vaguely where things are here, it is by far no where near what it was like there.

Sure, some say that the longer I'm here, the more comfortable I'll become, but I miss Nashville. I miss the people, the life there, the prosperity. For being Johnson City, it feels very small. I'm tired of having nothing to do, of not being able get my fix of my favorite sights such as the Parthenon, the Belle Meade Mansion, the houses that were built over by the parks that looked like mini-mansions and mini-castles. I miss every road we went down that was familiar to me and I'm tired of feeling so lost. I feel like my compass is broken, I don't know what direction I want to take anymore. I'm just exhausted. There are so many things, so many many things and I'm not sure where to stop, where they stop, so I guess I'll just stop here and try and at least not be tired in the morning. And that reminds me, it's Friday, I can sleep in and now I can turn off the alarm. Huzzah! A small silver lining.

Stray Thoughts On A Word

2008-09-04T19:28:00.006-05:00

Please - six letters, three of them vowels, three of them consonants. A one syllable word that is either used in polite conversation or used to mean pleasing or pleasurable. Generally, when I use please, I'm either answering a question of whether I'd like to do something or have something or I'm asking someone to do something for me. Most of the time, my please has a meaning but occasionally I just want to look at someone as say please. Please what? they may ask me but you know what? Sometimes I just don't know. I don't know if I'm pleading for my future, forgiveness for my past, or requesting permission for the present. I don't know if I'm asking for someone to listen to me, someone to hold me, someone to just treat me like a human being - I honestly don't know, there are so many options for that open-ended 'please'.

Perhaps I'm asking for forgiveness for being so far from home, perhaps I'm begging for him to take me in his arms when next I see him and every time after, perhaps I regret the choices I've made up to this point concerning college. Perhaps I regret cheating us of our time together, perhaps I'm sorry for leaving the house when my grandmother is so sick and I feel the guilt of not being there for her. I'm sorry for not being a better person but I hope to change that. I hope to make those who supported me proud, those who thought I couldn't succeed ashamed, and I hope to show those who helped me along the way that I was actually worth the effort. Mayhaps it was a plea for a better life, a happier one, one where I can earn my way instead of relying so heavily on others. I can make my own path in this world, I know I can - maybe it was plea to not have to walk it alone. I don't know what I have to ask for, have to say I'm sorry for, or have to thank for except everything and nothing. Maybe that's the point.

At any rate, I've begun to tremble. Perhaps I should go to sleep. Yes, this is über short for me but if I start typing any more, I will sound like the love sick fool that I've already portrayed myself to be, so I'll cease. Until tomorrow, twitter twitter.

Wish Token

2008-09-03T21:01:00.005-05:00

My mother bought me two tokens that I saw that I wanted before I left for college. We hadn't been looking for them, we had actually been shopping for unmentionables, but there they were, on the counter as we were checking out and I just had to get a few. They're metal coin-like objects, about the size of quarters, with shapes cut out the center of them and words written on ether side of the tokens. The first one I picked out was a 'Hug Token', a heart cut out of the center with the words 'Good For One Hug' around one side of it. The other one was a 'Wish Token', a star cut out of the center with the words 'Good For One Wish' around one side of it.

I gave one to my boyfriend on a weekend when I was feeling particularly vulnerable, paranoid about the upcoming leave for college, everything. I, of course, gave him the hug token, because at that time, I just wanted to be held. Hell, I wanted and needed to be held at that time. For most of the day it was all I could do not to cling to him but I finally gave up and just clung to him. He has always been my home, my safe haven, my calm port, my warmth and my light, my joy and my heart. I was glad I got all of the fear and need out of me that weekend because even though it was difficult to leave him in the end, it would have been worse had I bottled it up. He gave me a form of release and relief.

The other token, I have in the bottom of a film canister with quarters on top. Talking to him tonight, I thought of it, and I wished. I wished with all my heart that he were here in front of me or I were there in front of him. I wished for his arms around me, his lips on mine, his heartbeat thundering in my ear... I wished to be curled up next to him, listening to his voice, watching him smile, just in general watching him. I miss the way he walked around, head held high with a mischievous look in his eyes. I miss everything about him, I miss every single thing about him, even the way he bobs his head (which my mother isn't fond of) whenever he's sure of himself or giving me an encouraging signal. I love that man so very much...

Short one for tonight. I miss him too much, and I'm not happy with a few things local, so I'll just let things alone for the night and try to end on a positive note. I love him, he loves me, and we can't wait to see each other again but at least I know we'll see each other soon. Twitter twitter.

Laundry Room Day Dreams

2008-09-02T20:45:00.003-05:00

There's something about having to stay in a warm room with the thrum of washers and dryers running that just lull me into a sense of semi-stupor. The sound of the computer and the sound of a motor running (as in a car motor) have the same effect on me but for now, let's stick to the laundry room because I did laundry today.

It's the thoughts that occur during this time of relaxation when it's just me and the machines that really get me though. From my position curled up on top of the eighth washer, which had my clothes in it, I had a clear view of both the doors that lead into the laundry room so no one was going to sneak up on me. But being on top of the washer and next to a running dryer just made my eyelids start to droop so I rested my head against the wall, my ears intent on any sound of the door opening. I opened my eyes several times because my paranoia got the better of me and a noise I'd hear from the machines would sound like the click of the door opening. But it's those few moments where I actually was able to doze in relative peace that had strange images and thoughts filtering through my head. Perhaps it was partly from the heat... I know not.

But the thoughts I had made me think, why am I here? Why am I doing this? Questions he'd asked me before seemed more lethal in this setting of a college dorm laundry room. Why exactly was I here, in this dorm, on this campus? Was it because I wanted to escape family? Perhaps my family was pressuring me to choose to go somewhere, anywhere, as long as it was college? Did I really choose this path? And if I did, what was I thinking? Why did I decide to stray so far from home, why did I leave those who love me behind and decide to go so far away that they couldn't possibly get to me if there were an emergency? What the hell was I thinking when I did all of this? I still don't have the answers for it.

All I know is that I miss my home. Not necessarily the life that I had over the summer, I would offer some drastic changes for when I returned home for good, but I miss my home and I miss the people that I know and those who I was just beginning to know. I forsake one happiness for something that I thought had to be experienced before my life was complete and now I know it isn't the education you get. It isn't the job you receive, the pay you earn, it isn't even the food that you consume that bring you the greatest joys in life. What brings you the greatest joy that you will ever know is another person or a group of people, like family whether they're the family of friends that you chose or the family you were born into.

I feel like a mistake has been made but I know had I not experienced this, I would have gone through life wondering if my not going was a mistake or not. Now I know. Some are going, oh, she's going to give up now. Hardly. I will finish this year at this university and then, depending on what all happens this year, I may transfer home or I may stay and rent an apartment. Either way, things will change drastically from what they are now and I look forward to that day. And any break my love can get to come visit me. But I'll stay off that subject for fear of being too emotional or something silly.

But my laundry finished and all was well in the end. I'm still here and I will remain here. And no matter what my choice, I know at least one person who will always support me, just like he always has. And I couldn't be any more grateful to him for all that he has been and all that he has done for me. My dearest love, my life, my shining star in this bleak immature existence known as college. Whatever happened to the scholars?

Promises and Observations

2008-09-01T21:45:00.003-05:00

If I have any audience at all, which is pretty difficult to imagine but I will attempt to imagine one all the same, they are probably wondering as to my inconsistency as of late. After all, prior to these past few weeks, I've been pretty good about updating every day even if it meant posting some of my old things just to pacify this said imaginary audience. Instead, you have been met with silence. I will say this to you now - college is going to stomp all over me for a little while so my schedule may be erratic at times but I will still try to update at least once a day, Monday through Friday, with thoughts and problems and such. That's a promise.

While I was brushing my teeth tonight in my bathroom (our dorm rooms all have private bathrooms for every room since it's co-ed by dorm room not by floor), I dropped a little toothpaste into the sink. Now, I didn't think about it, I was most interested in brushing my teeth, flossing them and the likes but I noticed how that seemingly solid blob had slid down a little, like a paint drop, making it's slug-like way down to the drain. Now, there wasn't enough of it to actually make it to the drain so I had to wash it away but it did get me thinking. Sometimes it's the strangest things that trigger your thought process, you know?

I started thinking about how my college career has gone so far. I've started out solid for the first week or two, I've been eating rather regularly, drinking lots of fluids, eating things like salads which I don't normally eat - I mean, I've been doing alright for myself. And so I think of myself at the top of this wash basin. But the more I slide into college life, the more I'm being sucked into things like late-night movies, hours spent playing video games and the likes. As the weeks continue and I continue down this path, I'll be even more entrenched in this habit of not studying like I should and blowing it off for frivolities. Now, those who are looking at this are either going, That's what college is about, fun!; Boy, that girl has a good head on her shoulders.; or You shouldn't coup yourself up in your room/the library and miss what's going on around you. Now, while all of these statements have some merit of truth to them all (college can be fun but you shouldn't shirk off your studies to have that fun because your grades will fall and then you won't be in college but don't keep your nose to the grindstone, lighten up), I've realized that a better schedule needs to be constructed so that by the time I get to the drain (i.e. Winter Break), I'll have earned that break instead of messing around.

Now, some heads may be spinning as to where this all came from but the explanation is simple. I have reading that I need done before class tomorrow that I don't have done and now I'll be a bit behind in the classes. Fortunate for me, a few of them are lecture style. Unfortunate for me, a few of them don't announce quizzes. So it's a fifty fifty if the material I speed read is relevant to the next class or not. So with this thought in mind, I'll take my leave and impart these words of wisdom to current and future college students - Always check your syllabus!

Thursday Morning Drizzle

2008-08-28T13:46:00.002-05:00

Okay, so I haven't been avoiding this, it's more along the lines that I would think about it and then forget about it or be too tired to do much about it. So Tuesday... Tuesday was the floor meeting, meet and great, drink pop and eat ice cream sandwiches, and learn just how many assholes live on your floor. Yay. When I got back from the meeting, I read the pages for History and went to bed, completely knackered, around eleven thirty. Wednesday, I admit it, I gamed. I finally got a chance to play Soul Calibur 4 and I find it absolutely magical. I'm still learning the controls on the Xbox 360 but I mean, for someone with just a basic knowledge of the controller? I did pretty fantastically. Then I had to do laundry after supper and I literally had three of the small washes going at around the same time, which takes them about forty to wash, an hour or better to dry. I say an hour or better because I was tired, I was stressed, and I just shoved all three loads into one of the dryers. My towels are still damp this morning.

That being said, I suppose I'll do an update while I have some time to myself and I'm enjoying the peace and quiet that is the dorm room. I'll be enjoying it even more this weekend because my parents can't get away, my boyfriend needs to stay at work and can't go on a camping trip with his family like he does every year, and, well, I'm stuck here. Which, in comparison, I don't mind because my roommate won't be here. I won't have to listen to the buzzing of her phone, her weird ring tone, her obnoxious phone voice (which goes up several volume notches than her talking voice, her germ phobia, her need to take a shower before she goes to bed every night and to have a fan blowing on her face while she sleeps - I mean the listen honestly goes on. She's a sweet kid, but I think she needs to stay home with mommy so mommy can cater to her needs because I won't. Thankfully, the crying has stopped, her sickness has seemed to have disappeared, and besides the above, she seems to be fairly happy and adjusted. I think I'll be much happier when she's not here this weekend.

The whole 'pack my lunch before my first class in the morning' seems to be going well, the only problem I've found is that it conflicts with what little time I have to eat breakfast so I still have to sort that out. I mean, I have dry cereal but between making my pb&j, picking a bag of chips, grabbing a fruit, packing my water bottles, and checking to make sure I have all my materials, the forty five minutes I have before class barely seem like enough time. You're saying ' Well, you could do some of that before you go to bed,' and believe me, I've tried, but there are some things... Some things it's better to wait until the morning. Like making the sandwich. But honestly, I seem unable to get out of here in a timely manner with eating breakfast. I'll figure it out though, worry not. And before you suggest that I get up earlier, it's bad enough I only had seven hours of sleep last night, getting up earlier won't help my situation currently.

And for the record, I'm going to start doing laundry twice a week. I realize it's a dollar to wash and a dollar to dry but yesterday was ridiculous with three washers. So I'm thinking Monday, I'll do the stuff from the weekend, and Thursday I'll do the stuff from the week. Or something, also to be figured out at a later date. Right now I'm just glad I have clothes to wear in this drizzle.

It's been raining all week and even though I've seen hints of sunshine, it's supposed to rain tomorrow to. It'll be clear this weekend, they say, and I'm looking forward to an extra free day already, but I have a sneaking suspicion it's going to rain next week some too... I'm not sure what's up with all this rain. I mean, I know about the tropical storm and everything, we're talking about the affects that it might have on people's lives and behaviours it were to hit now, at the end of the month, like Katrina did in 2005 in my sociology class, but this drizzle is just sapping it out of you. You never realize how different the walk is from one class to another until you try it on a dry, warm sunny Sunday like I did - a dry run, if you will - then hit the classes, soaked or sprinkled on. It's especially difficult uphill, but I've managed. The only class I've been even remotely late to was today and it was my sociology class, but I arrived before the teacher and the reason I was a bit late was because of Jordan, and my statistics class, but that's because of a detour I took into the ladies' room. After having two bottles of water, it was rather a necessity. I can honestly say I've had more water here than I have ever consumed in a week over the summer.

And I suppose that about wraps things up. I'm okay with the lecture style classes now as long as it's not the intro to music. Her voice grates on the ears in that higher pitched annoying blond sort of way.

Tears and Fears

2008-08-25T21:44:00.002-05:00

To have come this far, over two hundred fifty miles from my home, just to regret it and wish to return home is not just selfish, but it's also abusive. Emotionally, you're rattled as are those affected. You abuse natural resources by hauling all of the stuff here only to decide to move it all back, you abuse the money you signed for loan wise and scholarship wise, and worst of all, you abuse what little time you have on this lovely green earth. Even if you would give everything you have just to go back, even if it was worth the knowledge that you failed your original goal of college. This is what I keep reminding myself when I look at my roommate. She has been homesick since her parents left. Since they have left, she has talked about nothing more than how she hates it here, how she wishes she could go back, how she's not sure she's even going to make it to the semester...

Even though I'm so heartsick about home, I know I'm on better footing in the long run.

How? I have the support of my family, who helped me move up here and are only a phone call away (mom, dad, and Miranda too). I have the support of my wonderful boyfriend, whom, although I think I burden him too much with insignificant worries and fears, has stuck by me and supports whatever decision I make in the end as long as he's somewhere in the plans. I'm thankful for his family, which has been great and supportive also - I mean, I have all of these people who love me, who support me, who are here to catch me when I fall no matter what. Just knowing that makes me feel eons ahead of a lot of these people who seem more interested in themselves and having fun than attending classes.

And classes have just started.

This is what I get as a general impression from the people I've watched. I agree, it can't all be books - I'm all for the Nerf war that occurred earlier tonight between two third years on the second floor in front of the library. I mean, yeah, this stuff is going to get to you and you're going to need to unwind. But some of these guys? And girls, because I question the actual presence of brain cells (most if not all were lost in the tanning/bleaching process) - they act as if the parents are out of town and their parents are doctors, living in this expensively modern place and they are dead set on trashing the hell out of it before the parents come home. The thing is, by the time they realize that the parents are on the way home, there isn't any time to clean up the mess they've made - I'm expecting the campus to be a little less in form of bodies next semester.

At least I know I won't be leaving.

My plan right now is to make it through the first year with the best grades that I can manage, work but not forget to play a little too. After that? It's up in the air. I may continue regularly, give it two full years of college and then become a part time or after this I may become a part time student or even quit all together. I just think I owe this thing a year. After all, I did work to bring up my ACT score, I filled out all of those applications (six applications, one rejection, five acceptances), sent in all of those application fees, filled out the paperwork for FAFSA, filled out the loan papers from the financial aid office... We won't even go into how much money we spent preparing my room for my presence in it, as in making it rather homey and livable instead of a cell...

Hopefully tomorrow won't be too much for me.

Pocky and Watercolors

2008-08-20T22:16:00.004-05:00

In less than five hours, my parents and I will be out on the open road towards Gatlinburg, where we have our reservations at what used to be a Holiday Inn Express but is now a 'lodge' of some sorts. Why Gatlinburg when my college is over an hour away in Johnson City? Because, we felt like it.

No, really it's because of the NASCAR race in Bristol. It has been decided that I am from the North, whether I was born and raised there or not. Not only do I hate tea (sweet, unsweet, cold, or hot), but I hate biscuits. What's worse is that I hate gravy, especially biscuits and gravy. I think that cornbread should have sugar in it instead of just plain Jiffy corn mix and milk. I hate most if not all canned vegetables unless done correctly. Especially green beans. I neither talk with a Southern drawl nor do I put up with NASCAR or stupidity. I just don't fit.

Which is fine, I guess. It would have been scary if my boyfriend and I had actually everything in common. He loves biscuits and gravy, which we generally have at Waffle House. Why Waffle House? Because no matter the hour, he can order a hamburger and biscuits and gravy if he wants while I have a pork chop or whatever else catches my fancy. It is our eat out of choice when we're in a hurry and we're too tired to argue over where to eat. Not that we argue, it's just that he'll suggest Jack in the Crack, I'll suggest Taco Hell, so forth and so on.

Everything (or almost everything) is surprisingly packed in the Jeep leaving me little room but I'll manage somehow. I always do. I can't complain this trip because all of what's in the back is mine. Just mine, no one else's. All of the overnight bags are being placed in the baggage carrier that's already been placed on the Jeep. I've had my last meal at home, said good bye to Donald, the family friend, my grandmother, and my boyfriend - which was a teary business but more on my part than his. One of my friends said that college will be good for me, it'll teach me independence. This friend doesn't know me very well.

After all, he's talking to the kid who, when she was three or four years of age, before they came out with the holster for kids and a leash for the parents, had a dog collar around her waist and a leash for her mom to hold onto. You're talking to the kid that had her parents on first name basis with the principals thanks to her antics. I was hell when I was a kid, I was hell when I was a teenager, I've surprisingly enough calmed down rather nicely and even then I'm the wild child. I've never had a problem with being independent, it's sharing and being a partner instead of just dealing with everything myself that's the learning experience. I'm going to have to let the distance not keep me from telling Jerry something that's bothering me. I'm just going to have to do what I always try to be with him - honest and open. Whatever happens will happen and he and I will work through it.

And what's with the title? I've been eating Pocky all night and I'm staring at my box of watercolors debating on whether or not to pack them. I think I will, for grins and giggles, along with my watercolor paper of course. There. That's decided. Now. Sleep. Perhaps I'll be able to post Friday. I doubt it so if not, happy weekend.

And it looks like I get another hour or two of sleep. Huzzah!

Awakening

2008-08-19T20:35:00.009-05:00

Music is one of the greatest bonds between people. It awakens the senses. It sends your heart pumping into overdrive as adrenaline surges through you if you're listening to rock music as loud as your speakers will let you go without losing any quality of the music, the base turned as high up as it could possibly go - your chest is literally vibrating with the pulse of the bass or the crash of the drums. Your soul weeps for songs that are low in town but hyped up in power, like the Latin hymns. You can connect every human emotion to music because music can become a personification of whatever you could possibly feel. You can always find a song that matches your mood or your thoughts because music is like an unmovable bridge between people. It is the language of the heart and soul, a universal language that just leaves you reeling in the aftermath. Sure, not every band will be your favorite but remember - someone out there loves them, fancies themselves the band's biggest fan.

Well I've been trying to use music as therapy for the past few days, fighting out my fears with bands I normally wouldn't listen to who yelled and screamed at me in indiscernible intervals, and it wasn't even screamo. I've tried to sate my need for weepy songs then listen to songs that contrasted drastically, songs that normally would perk me right up. What I like to call driving music even though I have yet to get a drivers license. I've even taken my vengeance out on my fingers, practicing on my violin relentlessly until my arms were trembling just about as hard as my fingers and for once - for once!- music failed it. It hasn't helped, it hasn't even hindered, all it has done is left everything the same.

I figured talking it out would help. When people ask me if I'm excited about going to college I tell them the truth instead of, 'Do you know how many people have asked me that? I'm sick of it, it's so unoriginal.' I tell them that I'm afraid. That I've never been far from my family, that I don't want to leave the city I love, or the people (like my boyfriend). I don't want to lose the community I built myself, I just want this over with.

Jerry did ask me if I was ready for college. I told him no, that I wouldn't be ready for college until I was already done with it. That was the way it was for high school. My senior year, more than seventy percent of the incoming freshman thought that I was a freshman and it took them over half a year to believe otherwise, that I was, in fact, a senior and graduating. Some of the more adamant freshman said that they were going to make me fail the exams because they wanted another year of high school with me. I'm glad I didn't let them. I mean, sure, my GPA was a joke when I finished high school but my ACT scores were high, especially in English, and I'd been taking honors classes for four years. It was a cruddy GPA and I didn't try as hard as I should have but I still pretty much kicked ass in every subject even if my grade didn't always reflect that.

Every thought about this makes me ache. Tomorrow night is my last night home, my last meal at home, the last time I see my boyfriend, my grandmother, and a family friend, Donald, until closer to Thanksgiving break. Sure, my parents will try and visit me once a month and so will my boyfriend. Donald may even travel up the with parents to visit a few times but I mean it's not enough. I have momentos from everyone, I have pictures of some - I'm not going empty handed per se. But I am going with empty arms and a lonely heart. No trinket, no t-shirt, no book and no photograph can ever replacing actually having someone you care about there for you.

I don't even have to leave home to know that.

Inner Turmoil

2008-08-18T22:00:00.004-05:00

Tears. They can cleanse your heart, cleanse your soul, cleanse your mind. They can unleash emotions that you had rather kept to yourself. They can make a bond stronger or they can break it. They can mend bridges or just add to the river divide. All in all, they can be very therapeutic. Now, I charge you to come across a woman who enjoys crying. Sure, we enjoying crying a little at the end of a particularly moving movie or book, but to actually burst into tears? Unless they're of joy or of laughter, tears are pretty rotten.

I especially have no love for tears. One, because I used to cry, often. Two, because I think it shows weakness. And three, because I'm just one of the guys.When I was a kid, if a teacher pulled me aside for a chat and I was even remotely in the red, I burst into tears. Defense mechanism but when I came back into the class, my face was red, my eyes red rimmed, my lashes sticking together - I'm not one of those girls you can cry prettily unless it's over a movie or something. Tears are good for one thing when you're a girl though - they help you get out of so much trouble.

I also cry when every I'm particularly emotional or involved over a subject. If I'm talking about my boyfriend, no, I'm not about to burst into tears, but if I'm arguing? Oh yes, the tears show. The voice gets choked, the ears start to burn, the nose starts to feel stuffy, the face starts to flush and it's all over folks. The water works start and once they start, it's never easy to take deep breaths to get them under control. Digging my nails into my palm helps a little, pinching my nose sometimes works, but nothing in the world makes it easy for me to stop crying in an emotionally charged situation. Sure, at my sister's wedding, my eyes misted for a moment but that's purely because my sister was crying and I have this annoying habit of crying with those I love.

Now why do I bring this up you ask? Ladies, if you've been following this blog at all, I'm sure you understand. Guys, well, I'll put it to you bluntly. I'm about to leave for college and I'm scared out of my mind. I'm from a close knit inner family (aka my mother, my father, myself, and my dog), I'm used to having someone to talk to when things go wrong, someone to bail me out, someone to borrow money from, get a recommendation from, share things with when we're in the car on the way to somewhere - a well functioning inner family. Dad's in charge and when dad isn't in charge, mom's in charge and when she isn't in charge, I'm usually home alone with the dog.

But yeah, I'm terrified. I'll also be leaving my boyfriend of three months, as of today. Our anniversary is the 18th of May, which is the date we both agreed on as the day we 'officially' became a couple. I feel so high school drama talking about it but I don't know quite how else to phrase it. We were something from the start, we were just more so after a certain point, that point being the day we went to Ren Faire and I didn't correct the veterans when they called the 'red coat' my boyfriend. We had been dating for nearly a month before that, so it seemed rather accurate. Later, I apologized because back then I still wasn't sure if he really wanted this, but he first asked why was I apologizing, then after that we discussed it and said yeah, so what, we're a couple.

Over the summer, it's become serious. Not life or death, still high school drama, 'oh-my-god, how-will-I-ever-live-without-you, if-you-died-I-would-die'. Nothing quite so high strung. Just an honest, mature relationship that knocks me off my feet every time I think about it, makes grown women go awwww and 'why doesn't my boyfriend/husband do that', and my friends have higher aspirations for themselves.

Still, this bedroom feels so sterile and I'm not even done packing all of my clothes and the extra things we bought over the weekend and my care package. I mean, it has my flair everywhere but I feel so detached from it. It's still my sanctuary, sure, but I mean it's different - and I don't like that feeling. I want when someone walks in to use my room as a guest room to feel like they're trespassing a little because while I'm still unmarried, unemployed (I won't be working through college), and in college, this room is mine, every single holiday, every single break unless something else comes up. I'm just so frustrated with this 'What will I take up the first trip, what will mom and dad bring up the next trip, will I need this, will I lose this, will this be worth the effort of taking or should I just buy it when I get there'.

Just... so much stress and it builds so quickly and it's over whelming. Just like the tears. I leave on Thursday, so I have two days home. What is home anyways?

This Time Next Week

2008-08-15T22:12:00.002-05:00

Yeah, so this time next week, I'll be set up in my dorm. Freshman year at a state school, living in the newest dorm that's environmentally friendly on the first floor, which never happens to a freshman. I'll probably have the bed next to the door to our room and the door leading to our bathroom, which will be awful because the dorm door is right next to an outside door.

I'm hopping that when I get there we'll be able to get everything the way we want it to be. Honestly, I hate being by the door but I'm too paranoid to be next to the window. I'm not keen on matching any decor. If she doesn't like my rugs or something, I don't care. It's my stuff and I'll have my side of the room and she'll have hers. Not the best way to look at it but I'm not fashion forward and I don't think I have to be, when it comes to my room decor. Eh, enough about that.

I probably won't post next Thursday, because that's when I leave town officially but I'm crossing my fingers. Perhaps I'll at least get a quick connection, to say I'm here and everything's great. Not that I think anyone reads these mad ramblings, I know I sure wouldn't. I'm hoping by next Friday night I'll have my connection up and everything

So, yeah. Not thrilled about leaving this room, I kinda like living in a space by myself, more or less. I don't have to worry about someone else going through my stuff, asking to borrow a shirt, eating some of my food without asking, looking through my notes, possibly trying to break into my computer, looking over my shoulder - I don't like it at all, but even though I'm willing to take out a loan to pay for the newer, eco-friendly building, I'm not willing to fork over the nearly four thousand five hundred dollars needed to have my own room. I'd rather rent an apartment.

I know I'm taking some things up there - after all, that's what I spent most of the summer packing. But I also know that I'll be buying a lot of things once I'm up there. I'm not looking forward to it. Honestly, I'm scared. I've never been so far away from my family for such a long time and with grams so sick? I don't want to be. I don't want to leave Jerry, I don't want to leave my friends who are staying local. But I chose this school for me and for at least the first year, I'll stick with it. After that, I may come running home, because that place is big and it's scary and there are going to be a lot of people that are going to be rat bastards but there are going to be a lot of people who are going to be great, like Michael. I just hope I don't regret anything.

After all, I'm going to college to continue learning, the book style. If I wanted to keep learning real life experience, I would be saying 'Would you like fries with that?' After my sister's wedding, this should be a piece of cake, right? Right.

Good night world, have a good weekend and I'll see you Monday. Twitter twitter.

Thoughts of Writing

2008-08-14T22:02:00.002-05:00

Everyone's had that day when you've sat down with a blank page in front of you, a pencil or pen in your hand, a million thoughts going in a million different directions, and you just can't seem to grasp one well enough to put it into words. Personally, that kind of thing happens to me often and it drives me crazy because when I do finally harness the ability to write? It's all over the place - just like my thought process. Take writing a letter to my laddy love, for instance. While I'm writing it, it's great, I have great things to say and I know just how I want to say it and what I want to say next. It's a fantastic feeling, never running out of things to say about him or to him, but thank whatever gods may be that I go back and I re-read my letters to him or I would be sending him a jumbled mess.

I was reading a book that Stephen King wrote on how to be a writer, why he's a writer, for my honors composition course this semester and something he said stuck with me. Now, he had gotten the advice from someone else, and I don't have it perfect, but it stuck with me. It's easy to write a lot of words but it's harder to write only the words you need. You can add and add and add all day long but in the end, you lose the message, you lose what you spent all that effort in trying to tell someone. If you can say it in a sentence, do it - it doesn't always have to be the length of a novel. I mean, if you're on a date with a woman at night and you're sitting on a bench, gazing up at the moon, are you going to give a drawn out version of why you think the moon is beautiful and why your date is beautiful? Come on, you're going to get right to it: 'The moonlight adds a very alluring mystical glow about you,' or some such nonsense.

I guess that's what I'm having trouble with the most. I've been writing a letter to him for days, nay, nearly a week now. I know it won't be my last letter, by any means, but this one - this one is important. The first letter, I mailed it to him while I was at orientation. Sure, he didn't get it until I was already back home, but I actually spent the entire ride to Johnson City writing that fabulous man of mine a letter with the intent of sending it to him when I got there - and I did. The second letter, I wrote before I was going to seem him one weekend about a month ago and I left it where he would find it. Just to make sure he would find it, I called him later and wished him a good night over the phone, then told him where to find it. Not very coy of me but I honestly don't care about games. This one - this one I want to hand to him and watch him read it. Silly, but true.

So here I am, with a notebook left over from high school, filling up pages and pages with what we've talked about, thinks I've wanted to tell him but I get my tongue too twisted to say, questions I bumbled in asking and want to clarify - and I'm look at this going, 'Why would I subject anyone to read all of this? Why not just keep it clean and simple?' I mean, he isn't going to sit down with four or five sheets of notebook paper in his hand and read it - I wouldn't expect him to. It's like trying to keep a guys attention while explain why you chose contact lenses over glasses - I mean, he loves the fact he can see your eyes, but honestly? He really doesn't care. So why bother?

Why bother? Why bother writing him a letter when I've written him twice before, when I tell him every time I see him that I love him, when I talk to him every night and I see him every weekend? Because I wake up every day and it's like falling in love all over again. I never cease to find things to love about him, I'm never bored with him, I'm never looking at my watch and going 'Ye gods, when will this end?' On the contrary, I'm wishing for more time with him because he makes me feel like no one else has ever made me feel. He makes he feel beautiful and makes me believe that I'm beautiful. I am happiest when I'm with him and I can't wait to spend the rest of my life with that man.

So why can't I just sit down and write a letter starting off with something like that?

Because I think I just did.

Tangled Nest

2008-08-13T22:05:00.003-05:00

My thoughts are tangled and twisted, contorted into shapes and knots in such a way that I have no idea where one thought begins, ends, or crosses over another not. Everything is monochrome in color and all I hear is white noise, like the constant twittering of birds.

I'm thinking about college, about home, about love and about life.
I'm thinking about my grandmother, my sister, my parents and my boyfriend.
I'm thinking about weekends past, the weekend coming up and the three day weekends in college.
I'm thinking about packing up clothes, of hauling boxes and of my room losing my identity.
I'm thinking about my roommate, about my friends, about my classes and about money.
I'm thinking about financial aid, loans, scholarships and other things.
I'm thinking about marriage, my marriage, the family he and I could make.
I'm thinking about what could I really get with a degree in English, which is a question mark.
I'm thinking about all of my cds, dvds, favorite links and Facebook.
I'm thinking about how I still haven't solved that damn Rubik's cube sitting on the corner of my desk.
I'm thinking about rings, of how I hate diamonds because they seem cheap and common.
I'm thinking about my cell phone, how I wish it would ring more and I'd hear his voice.
I'm thinking about Italian food, my inability to eat a lot of meat, and fresh baked bread.
I'm thinking about ways to please, ways to give, ways to understand someone who is opening up but is slow and cautious in doing so.
Most of all I'm thinking about madness and this headache that's forming around my eyes, behind my eyes, between my eyes, from looking at the computer screen without my glasses and trying to untangle the mass of thoughts that is my nest.

I am left with a hazy crystal ball in the madness of it all and some tea leaves in a bottom of an empty cup that make no sense.

Music = Life

2008-08-12T22:00:00.003-05:00

Music moves
Through a person
Like the wind
Moves through
The trees;
You can't see
The wind but
You can see
The effect it has
On the trees.

Music is like that.

Music strikes
An invisible chord
That makes the body
Vibrate and thrum
In answer
To unseen
Stroking fingers;
A person
Can't help but
Be moved by it.

Music is timeless like that.

Music expresses
Emotions better
Than an actor
Can compare to;
It holds sorrow,
Ignites passion,
Extinguishes hatred,
Nurtures love,
Banishes fears,
And dries tears.

Music is selfless like that.

Music slides
Past all defenses;
It echoes
Through everything
And doesn't care
About shape
Or size
Or age
Or color.
Music doesn't care.

Music is life like that.

~2007

Dear Friend

2008-08-11T22:14:00.001-05:00

Dear Friend,

Why do you sit there, glued to the computer screen? A year ago, you didn't know how to use it or even have an e-mail account. Now you are a willing slave to technology. You don't listen to living, breathing people anymore, you just tell them to e-mail you. You blow off real friends in pursuit of those digital ones.

"Look at this," you tell me. "Did you know about this," you explain. "Have you ever heard of (such a thing)," and I feel like going insane. I want to yell at you, to tell you to make up your mind. That you can't not want me there in physical space with you and then you want me there at the same time. It doesn't work like that! You can't have it both ways! And I want to tell you I'm jaded. That nothing on that contraption will surprise me. That the world technology has given me has been disillusioned, and the only thing new and exciting anymore is actually living. Just living.

So get back to your virtual reality. You probably didn't hear me anyways. You're caught up in this thing, breathing electricity, fed on your inability to keep from it's keys and mouse. You're not you anymore. You're like an addict, unable to deny a craving and unable to stop once you're able to get your fix. You can't stop, can't eat or sleep, your mind gone on things that could be waiting on you in the magical hard drive kingdom. You have to have someone tell you to stop, to keep you from O.D.ing on information.

And you binge, trying to get as much as you can, as fast as you can. As if you were trying to make up for the years you spent in naivety. And when you come back, you seem adrift, lost. Unable to care about the real world. You're cradled in the arms of technology. One day it will bury you alive and pull your plug.

Your Friend,

Mlle Magpie

~2006

Math is Not My Strong Suit

2008-08-07T23:44:00.002-05:00

Rubik's Cubes are the devil... It's now eleven forty one pm and I still haven't solved it.

I will solve it before I go to bed.

Edit: 08-08-08

Alright, so I didn't solve it. My enthusiasm/frustration only lasted until midnight when I grudgingly put it down due to drooping eye-lids.

But I did manage to get the top layer (as in the white all on top and the colors in the correct order - Three yellow leads into three red, three red leads into three green, three green leads into three orange and three orange leads into three yellow)

Late Night Calls

2008-08-06T23:52:00.004-05:00

Sometimes I worry that when I call him, I'll run out of things to say before he's really tired. Or if I call him, he'll be so tired, I'll no more than get the first hello out then he'll yawn. He never yawns unless he's dead on his feet tired and usually when he's that tired and I'm talking to him, he's already in bed.

But I call him anyways because no matter if I've had a fantastic day or if I've had one of the worst days in my life, just hearing his voice, hearing the cadence in his speech when he relates a story or tells me how his day has been, hearing him laugh and I swear, sometimes I can hear him smile - it always makes my day better. He could tell me one of the worst Michael Jackson jokes of all time or tell me a story about one of his friends that should never be repeated, and it's still always worth picking up that phone and pressing send.

Sure, I talk to him every night. Why? Because I'm crazy about him. He and I never run out of things to say. Sure there are lulls in the conversation but they never really stop. And as I've stated before, even if we aren't talking, its the things he says when he's around that lets me know he was thinking of me. Like today, when he told me how he wouldn't be long out in the garage because he can't get enough of talking to me, he's addicted to me - it just makes me feel warm and fuzzy.

He doesn't say them because he has to. He says them simply because they give him, and me, pleasure. He isn't one to throw around I love you, which is one of the things I love about him. It makes hearing it all the more precious and real.

I can't help it, I love hearing him say 'Sleep well, love. Good night.' To see it is one thing but it's completely different to hear it. I love the little fights we have over things like the pros and cons of Star Wars and Star Trek and other relatively unimportant things. It helps us both unwind from our day, even if one of us (*ahem, me*) doesn't have a job. Hey, I'm a full time student, isn't that enough?

I love our fights because no matter who wins and who loses, we both know we've won because we have each other. It's the way he interjects with something I hadn't thought of before, whether he means it in jest or in all seriousness. It's everything about who he is and who I am that makes the conversations worth while. His sister says she's never had him on the phone for longer than ten minutes while I, effortlessly most of the time, keep him for half an hour to an hour.

One does silly things when one is in love. Talking on the phone with your girlfriend for an ungodly amount of time before you go to sleep may be one of them but do you hear me complaining?

Midnight Serenade

2008-08-05T00:11:00.003-05:00

And as the moon creeps over head, the wind makes its lazy way through the leaves, I come to rest my weary head on my pillow and thought of you lull me to sleep.

I remember stories you've told of your family and friends, of the places you've worked and the places you've been, and even though I wasn't there, I feel as if I had been.

I think of the way you nod your head when you're confirming something or telling me it's okay in your own special way and I can't help the smile that transforms into a grin.

Then I remember the sound of your laugh, the curve of your lips, the lift of your eyes at the corners and my heart aches a little, impatient to see that reaction again.

I remember the time spent with your fingers twined in mine, my gentle exploration of those clever fingers, those fingers filled with talent whether tuning a piano or an engine.

I sigh at the thought of your arms around me tight, the way my body fits against your side as we walk around and the comments we get on how well we fit together.

And all the while, I know the light in your eyes, whether it's happiness, love, or mischief as well as I know my own and I can't want to see those blue eyes sparkle next we meet.

I love every hair on your head, every whisker of your beard, every scar and every scratch, every freckle and even the line where your tan begins to fade on your arm.

I love to hear you talk, the way you move your hands when you tell a story, the tilt of your head when you listen and your eyes intent on my every movement also.

I know when we're apart that you know I'm thinking of you, talking about you, dreaming about you, loving you and missing you and I know that you're doing all of those things too.

It's the every day things that we talk about, the every day things that we do, as simple as picking up the phone and as hard as putting it down again.

I know my mother rolled her eyes when she saw me on the phone with you after you had left but I couldn't help it, just the sound of your voice warms me through and through.

You're like my other half, two pieces making one soul and most people go through their entire lives trying to convince themselves they have even a ghost of what we have.

I know it may sound silly, and maybe I'm a fool, but my dearest love, I am an utter and complete fool for you.

Thoughts of a New Life

2008-08-04T11:21:00.003-05:00

It seems as if the summer has passed so quickly compared to years past. I've had summers filled with scrap booking, running around an empty campus, summer school and the likes. I've had summers filled with friends, some still around, others just a mere memory, a vaguely remembered face, and summers filled with crushes and 'boyfriends', all now long gone. But this summer was different. Besides being a transition from high school to college and the joys of packing for such an occasion, this summer has also been about growing personally and I am eternally grateful that I have had my boyfriend there to help me with it all.

Now, I know what you may be thinking. She has a boyfriend, you say, they've been together all summer. Chances are, it'll fall apart during the first semester. Chances are they don't know what love is and they're just dumb kids. They haven't had a chance to live and experience life, they have no idea what they're talking about when they talk about love and life and the future.

Oh how wrong you are.

I met my boyfriend when he came to crash my prom this past April because my date was a friend of his and had ridden down from Maryland to be my date. Upon laying eyes on Jerry, who was wearing a uniform from the second World War, I promptly told him that I had to hug him and proceeded to do so. That next weekend, I invited him and two other people who were both friends with my date and Jerry to help me celebrate my birthday by attending a movie with me, The Forbidden Kingdom. I had just newly turned eighteen.

I feel that I must bring up at this point that Jerry is older than I am by seven years, which has never bothered me because he is a very decent man. He has a strong sense of morals and honor, a very strong relationship with his god, which I respect whole heartily, and is what I like to classify as an old school gentleman. He is the type of man that doesn't understand why men whistle at young things not wearing nearly enough clothing. His kind are few and far between.

This entire summer, nearly every weekend I have spent in his company in some form or another. In the beginning, I didn't see him nearly as often as I would have liked. We would go to movies, to the go-kart track, play put-put golf, walk around the mall and the likes. Then as my parents became more comfortable with him, he was allowed to come pick me up and we would begin to spend entire days together. So I would say I've been spoiled when it comes to this style of life. I greatly look forward to the weekends now more than I ever have because I know something, it doesn't matter what, will be going on and it'll be fantastic.

We 'officially' started dating after my graduation from high school in May but I have a feeling that he and I were pretty much together from the get go. From the start, he's always understood me and I've understood him. It's been an effortless melding of two halves into a whole. In fact, this past Saturday, a family friend met my boyfriend for the first time and he told me how our speech patterns were so similar and so many other things were so mirroring that he said it was like talking to a male me.

Most relationships have problems. One likes music that the other doesn't, they can't agree on television or a movie, the woman is always taking and the man is never receiving anything in return, and so on and so forth. There's a problem, some where that's brought to light and the fighting commences somewhere down the road. With us, we've agreed on just about everything and it's our differences that make us unique and endear us to the other. We've never squabbled over something and if we have bickered, it's been an affectionate fight, not a mean one. We understand when the other's joking.

When we're walking around the mall or somewhere else, we just sort of shake our head at couples that don't seem like a couple at all. It's easy to see that one of them has to be in charge, their body language gives away their dispassionate feelings for one another, they just seem to separate. They aren't smiling and laughing, holding each other's hand or their arm around each other's waists. They seem like ill fitted pieces in this puzzle that we call life. He and I, on the other hand, fit perfectly. If he's in a bad mood, just my talking to him helps and vice versa. We just feel better around each other, and that's what love is. It isn't putting someone down or trying to take control of someone else's life. It's compromise and partnership, it's communication and a willing to be open to each other, but most of all, it's about love.

He and I are nearing our third month together, four since we've known each other and I have a feeling he and I are going to last a long while yet. I'm absolutely crazy about that man, I love and adore him and he is the same way. Happiness knows no bounds when we're together.

So I go forth into this college year and I celebrate the fact that I have found the love of my life and I have nothing to fear as long as we're together.

Concerto in D Minor

2008-07-31T20:44:00.002-05:00

Why I didn't post yesterday :

I was honestly sick (both physically and mentally) and tired (also both physically and mentally). My sister arrived Tuesday night late and since then there's a scramble for last minute adjustments, orders, etc.

Why I won't post anything today:

See above.

Why I most likely won't post anything tomorrow:

See above previous

Hair Cuts and Rings

2008-07-29T22:44:00.002-05:00

When I was a kid, I didn't really have much in the way of style when it came to my hair. My hair started out at a reddish hue upon birth but changed to a near white blond before darkening to blond, and finally mellowing out into the strawberry blond that it is today. As for style - well, I distinctly recall times when my mother, grandmother, or a family friend would take scissors to my hair when my bangs got too long. Most of my hair was one length except for bangs that they insisted be kept at eyebrow level. When they started to reach my lashes, out came the scissors.

As I got older and out of a rural setting, my hair tended to keep to the same style of that of my older sister. Not to say that my older sibling had style, more to the fact that I was mimicking her because - well, she's my big sister. She practically raised me while my parents worked odd jobs just make ends meet, long hours and the likes before we moved. I evolved though. I grew out my hated bangs in middle school until I was able to put it all in a pony tail and not have to worry about it at all. This not having any bangs later became my downfall.

In the seventh grade, I decided that I wanted bangs again, something that would frame my face at an angle, like I usually wear them now. So one night, after taking a shower, I mimicked what I had seen hair stylists do all the time. Part down the middle with a comb then follow the hair down one side until the ends or desired length and cut. The only problem with this theory of doing it yourself is that you can't really tell when things are even and when they aren't, you can't keep an eye on it when you're cutting because if you turn your head, you screw it. Not that I didn't screw it up anyway. Every time I would try to straighten my bangs, I'd cut further back until finally I got frustrated and took scissors to my hair all the way around.

In my defense, the back was actually relatively straight.

My frustration spent, I looked at my ruin of hair not as a rebel but as a sad and scared kid. I was crying when I went across the hall and knocked on my parent's door. I told mom through the door how I had wanted to cut my bangs and when she opened it and saw what I had done, my damp blonde hair hitting around my chin, she simply told me that my bangs didn't go all the way around my head. She told me to clean the mess up and go to bed. It wasn't discussed until that morning.

I went to school the next morning with a bucket hat jammed on my head, trying to hide the horror that was my hair because my mother refused to help me fix it. She had the idea that I did it, I had to learn to live with it. That, and there truly wasn't a way to fix it. Now you have to understand, in middle school, I was a pretty decent size. I wore guy clothes not for any particular reason than because it fit in the shoulders better and it fit across the chest better. I was one of those that was blessed early in some areas. So quite honestly, the hair cut didn't suit me in the least. I looked like a guy from behind and this killed my self esteem. There are Christmas pictures where my hair is barely long enough to tuck behind my ear and stay and frankly, in some of them, hunched over a gift? I do look rather masculine.

It was there that the regrowth period started. I was determined to gain some of my femininity back and so I would grow my hair out. Of course, around summer and fall, I would have it shortened to shoulder length again because after having it short for so long, I could no longer have it long like in my childhood. Occasionally I would go a little shorter than shoulder length, but I never went to my chin again and I've never had short bangs since then.

This summer/fall, though, my hair was nearly halfway down my back. Partially do to the fact that I finally wanted to grow my hair out long but mostly because my boyfriend prefers longer hair (as do most guys). This would have been great except it looked as though I had split ends and my hair stopped flowing. It started to become trendels. Finally, I said 'That's it, I'm getting it cut before the wedding,' and so I did. Its still past shoulder length but its straight with minimal layering and long bangs. Should keep the boyfriend happy and its just lighter feeling.

As for the wedding, which occurs this Saturday... well....

My sister arrives tonight if all goes well, my mother is in charge of the dress, my father seems to be in charge of the cake, I'm in charge of the music as well as being the maid of honor... Chaos at its finest.

If I ever marry, my bride's maids will be bride's men. They will wear kilts and have flower boutonnieres. I will be dressed in a Renaissance style dress, elegant and beautiful, or something else with airs of history about it. I would have an out door wedding, rain or shine, and I would be barefoot. It would be festive, a party, instead of a solemn ceremony. Vows, I don't really care about, as long as they're said from one heart to another and we are declared man and wife. My wedding band would be silver, not gold. I wouldn't have diamonds because they just seem cheap to me, you see them everywhere. I would prefer inlaid stones and intricate scroll work and design on the band. Nothing plain. I like rainbow opals and amethysts, but not necessarily together. Food would be simple yet lovely, as will the entire event. I would probably want a spring wedding, sometime in the middle of the month because of a theory I have.

In the beginning of the month, its new, its just begun. I don't think a wedding should be a 'new beginning', quite honestly. Nor do I think a wedding should be held at the end of the month because it feels like its just ending, there's nothing to look forward to. No, I believe that it should be in the middle of the month to symbolize that it's a continuation of the love, trust and devotion to people have for another.

Just a thought. Twitter twitter.

Oh The Joys of Packing

2008-07-28T11:26:00.005-05:00

Packing is never easy. It's the process of picking up the pieces of your life - throwing away a lot of things you can't remember why you kept in the first place, packing away most of the things of meaning to you, and leaving behind memories. It's the process of leaving the familiar, no matter how much you liked it or not, in order to have the new and unknown. Is where you're going instead of where you are going to be better or worse? Will you be able to live there or will another move have to occur? It's a gamble in every sense.

I feel as if I've been packing all summer. Before my knee surgery in June, I started going through everything in my meager room and organizing it, getting rid of three or four trash bags of things left over from high school and beyond. I did this so that I could easily access things that I love or be able to direct one of the parental units to the appropriate place. I was in my element, cleaning and organizing even though usually I'm not a very clean or organized person - just random bouts of OCD - but it was nice.

After my surgery, however, I was able to move around a lot better than I initially thought and so my room returned to its former chaotic shape with just a hint of the organization of before underneath the layers of... well... layers. Humans, for a reason I have yet been able to explain, tend to layer things, pile things, until you can barely believe that the entire pile hasn't collapsed yet and you're quietly performing a physics experiment in the back of your head - if I place one more item on top, right here, will it fall or will it balance out the item tucked haphazardly in the middle?

And so my summer went, letting things pile on top of each other, my hardwood floor a distant memory and the shape of my desk and shelves barely discernible underneath all of the rubble. I was, of course, at home in the chaos because even though I had no idea where anything was, I had a general idea of where it was and I knew if I dug enough, it was sure to turn up. This did not occur in the case of the Target gift card that I received for graduation ($100) and didn't turn up until yesterday afternoon, but in nine out of ten cases, I was able to find what I was looking for.

Now it is nearly August and I'm counting down both the days till my sister's wedding (five, not including today) and the days remaining until I meet the person I've spent a few hours of my life conversing with (i.e. my new roommate) and I make a transfusion of my old life as a high schooler into that of a college student proper (twenty-five days, not including today). You could say the stress levels are high and the pressure is on most definitely.

But even as I complain, I look at it this way. My sister initially went to a college closer to where we live and I'm going to a college five and a half hours away, one way. She was able to come home on weekends, I'll be lucky to see some of my friends and family in person once a month with the way gas prices have sky rocketed. My sister didn't pack any of her stuff up, nearly, she just left it on the shelves and things thinking she'll be home every weekend. After about two years of her going to the local college, it became apparent that she wasn't coming home as often and we could better use the her room as a guest room. So with her permission, we packed everything of hers up and stuck it in the closet or the attic. I have a distinct advantage because I'm doing my packing and I'll better know what I did and did not pack, what I got rid of and what I've kept.

That's the good news, at least. Familiarity with the things in the box, and I know I pack well. Bad news is that I currently have one large plastic container that will be going in the attic consisting of various odds and ends of my childhood and so forth (a backpack decorated and signed when I was in eighth grade by most of my friends back then, for example), one smaller plastic container that contains all of my violin and piano music that has accumulated for generations in some cases, and two cardboard boxes filled of breakables and things I don't want out in the open for prying eyes (*coughcoughmyfather'smothercoughcough*). All of these are staying here.

As for what I've packed to take with me to college... One large plastic container containing my winter clothes, one large plastic container containing rugs,a comforter, and other knickknacks, one tightly packed cardboard box filled with room necessities such as post it notes, markers, pens, calendar and the likes, and a purple laundry bag with new sheets for the extra long twin bed, pillows, blankets, etc. That's all? you query. Not by half. I have in my closet two of those plastic drawer tower things. One of them is quite large (two shallow drawers, two deeper drawers) that houses such things as sleep things, shoes, belts, ties, and more. The smaller one is only three drawers (of equal size) that house, in order, my games/distractions/what have you, my writing tablets/cards/letter writing things, and school supplies. So although I didn't pack them, per se, they are also coming with me. And on top of that, I still have to pack my books and even more school supplies left over from high school.

I'm sure you've taken note, by now, how I seem to have forgotten a few of the essentials of dorm living such as a fridge, posters, a microwave, so on and so forth. Actually, I haven't, its just there's no need to really pack those any differently, so I'm set. Worry not. Thankfully, I'm nearly done packing. The only problem I foresee is having to cart all of this there. I think I'll make the suggestion to the parental units that since a family friend is coming up to see me sometime that since he's already making the trip to also help bring up some of my things. Even though I'm an English major, it doesn't take much to figure out that there's only so much that a Jeep can hold in one trip.

Lingering Thoughts of You

2008-07-25T22:19:00.004-05:00

For days now, I've been moving through the house in a sort of haze, memory and fantasy melding into one as I think of you. You have no idea how many times I started a letter to you only to stop as the memories got too strong. As silly as it sounds, I miss you every day. I get moments where I just wish our weekends together would never end, whether it means continually losing on the Xbox or curled against your chest while we watch movies. I miss your scent, I miss the feel of your body next to mine, I miss the sound of your voice and listening to your heartbeat, thudding faithfully next to my ear.

"Not a day goes by where I don't think of you, when I don't relive a memory. I talk about you constantly, your praises on the tip of my tongue. Some say I'm in love, that you're the one for me and to never let you go. I respond to this simply that yes, I love you with all my heart and that a future without you is no future at all. "

When I started to miss you more, the strangest thing happens. One of my friends, this particular friend surprising me with this, told me that it was normal but to me it is completely out of the ordinary. I told you of a few things I would do. I ate ramen because I was hungry and I was thinking of when we laughed at how there wasn't anything in the house, it seemed, except ramen. Well I had ramen again today. Twice in one week, and I really am not fond of the stuff. I even made it sort of like a soup like the way you did.

"Before I met you, love was a fleeting thing that blinded me, bound me, and made me an unwilling partner in its games. It would start out gentle and kind before twisting the knife, turning like and love into displeasure and hate. Love was just a villain that changed its mind as easily as the Fates. "

I started watching Star Trek, even though I'm not a Trekkie at all. I vaguely knew the characters because my mother liked them but I suddenly had a memory of the Star Trek figurines on your tv cabinet and I wanted to watch Star Trek. When you got home, you laughed at me, then told me some of the better episodes to watch and I just wished you were there to experience them with me - or, rather, I with you.

"Love was nameless, love was faceless - I couldn't clearly see a future containing the love of another. No wedding bells for me, no walk down the aisle with family and friends in attendance. No children in my arms, to teach, to laugh, to love, and to smile with. All I saw was an empty space beside me and a lonely life ahead of me."

So here it is, nearly Saturday again and I can't wait to see you. I can't wait for my eyes to linger, my fingers to touch your arm, my lips to touch yours. I can't wait to hear your say 'Hello beautiful' or 'Hello dearest' in only the way you do, can't wait to see your smile and hear your laugh. You just bade me goodnight but it seems as if sleep cannot come fast enough, the night cannot change unto light fast enough for my lonely heart. I am as I ever was, and ever will be, yours.

"And then I met you and I think my heart knew, whether my head accepted it or not, that we were going to be together. For a while, I thought love was just taking me on another wild ride, that you would fade into the background just as quickly as you appeared. It never ceases to amaze me, from day to day, what it feels like to be loved. What it is to trust and be trusted, to be devoted to another person completely. In a world mostly given to the shadows of mistrust, paranoia and lies, I stand with these few and precious jewels that you've given me. Devotion, honor, trust, and love. Perhaps someday I'll be able to thank you properly for all of this."

Reflections Before A Storm

2008-07-24T22:30:00.001-05:00

Bricks, carefully laid in the ground ; the design isn't perfect but the path is clear. The maze is well kept, the area around the stones relatively free of plant matter. They call it a maze but its hard to get lost when there's only one way in and one way out. Sure, you could merely ignore the stones and leave the path whenever you like. After all, it is just bricks laid in a circular pattern on the ground. It isn't as if its brick walls. Just man-made stone, man-made pattern, man-made labour. What does it mean if at the end of the day it means nothing? If all your hard work is grown over by grass and forgotten about for generations or maybe for eternity? After all, its just man-made...

A breeze touches my face, making me aware of the moisture on it. The temperature is pleasant but the humidity is like a thin layer of moisture coating your skin; sweat by not, too light for sweat. Almost like condensation on a glass or bottle of water. Not unpleasant but not completely pleasant either. Either way, it's bearable. The breeze is soothing, to hear the leaves in the trees rustle together like the continual rub of satin....

It's strange to think of such luxuries when surrounded by such solitude and reflection as this. It's comforting, walking this maze. No matter how different the day is from one visit to another, no matter how you or your friend and family or your clothes differ, a few things are constant. The path never changes, the stones never change, and the completed feeling you get upon reaching the center never changes. When I sit in the center of that maze, every sound produced, whether mechanical or natural, sounds like music...

Lightning flashes across the sky, lighting the heavy blue grey clouds in a spectacular show. The breeze still plays across my cool face and birds and bugs alike make their presence known in a melodious fashion. Thunder rumbles in the distance like a low, gravelly growl and at the same point I hear what could be a rapidly moving train, a distant helicopter, or rain beating on several objects. The sound edges closer, just like the thunder which grumbles in distaste almost over my shoulder. Sounds like we're in for quite a storm...

Think First...

2008-07-24T22:29:00.003-05:00

I found a lot of similarities after I wrote 'Reflections Before A Storm'. We were going through a few very minor bumps in early July. Little things they seem like now but then, they seemed so important. I felt as if I had disappointed him in some way and the thought ate at me, I felt as if I couldn't say anything to him for a few days. I was as he described me recently - uncertain, but sure of my uncertainty. I hadn't been thinking when I mentioned something to one of his friends that was personal and was later told by him, in very gentle terms, that I shouldn't have made such a comment. After everything had been going so well, it seemed abrupt and it startled me for a few days. I figured this was just the beginning of a line of things that might go wrong, I'll slip up and say something else and he'll get frustrated...

After a few days of mulling it over though, I decided he was right. I just needed to watch what I say to others more carefully. I should do as my mother always told me. Think before you speak. I told her about a month ago when she was explaining something and asked if I was paying attention that I was listening but I didn't hear her. She laughed and said a truer statement was never made. I should listen to her more often.

And I should have realized that he was just trying to help me, he wasn't trying to put me down. That man loves me, more than I care to accept probably, and he would never deliberately say something to upset me. At the same time, he will always tell me the truth. He's my partner and he only meant to help and I should have recognized that earlier. I listen to him closer now when he tells me of something I didn't do or something I should keep in mind. I'm not great at taking criticism but I am learning and I take it better from him than I think I've ever taken it from others.

Later, after we had moved past that minor bump, I decided that perhaps I would use 'Reflections Before A Storm' in a letter to him but I decided that it was just too dry, too dark. Personal but impersonal. Descriptive but much left up to interpretation. Not usually my style but the weather and my mood was having a rather interesting effect on my writing. Perhaps I'll be able to write a letter to him using that maze and I'm sure I will but for now, this will serve as a reminder to think before you speak.

Goddess

2008-07-23T23:22:00.002-05:00

I see a Goddess, and she is I, as I am she. Her body, death in the pale of the moon, is scared, and marred with flecks of amber. Her hair is wild, not curls but not waves, never straight, always an unruly combination of both. The color is special, a blend of copper and gold, of the heavy amber of a good whiskey. Her eyes are frighteningly beautiful to behold, like a snake charms its prey with its gaze, sensuously dangerous. Her eyes are ever changing, always hiding, never clear on anything, not even love.

This Goddess does not know the meaning of the word as her pale body is showcased to the pale moon, her only witness as tears stream unchecked down her cheeks which are freezing to the touch. Her eyes remain open, their blue of the deep, glassy lake, their gray of the stormy clouds, just before a good rain sets in for days, their green an angry emerald that has been overshadowed by the others. Her breath barely stirs, her heart pounding in unison all over her body, nothing more powerful and more sorrowful as that in her chest, where her excuse of a heart does lay.

Her face is calm, her lips trembling slightly as the moon attempts to caress the pale pink, which once born the sweetest of sayings and the most hatefulness of retorts, back to life, but the moon's efforts are all in vain. Nothing stains these lips now but the salt from her tears.
She utters not a sound, not a whisper, her hands to her side, her legs together, her back tall and regal even as you see what is left of the world leak out of her eyes in a deathly pace. Her cheeks turn blue and her heart stutters, that heart of a warrior who has fought many battles bravely, who has taken so much of other's pain but have received little of their appreciation, who let itself be taken away and torn at little by little, until all that is left is the tears. The tears, the disappointments, the pain beyond any recognition.

Her lips loose color and also start to tinge that blue that is the immortal kiss of death, the last kindness the world granted to her. Her heart stutters again, reliving all those times of loneliness, all those betrayals, all those screams of terror and forgetfulness. Reliving those bruises and cuts, almost feeling them blossom on her skin as her heart labors on. Reliving those words of hate said to her, written to her, relayed to her, all of those words of false alliance and hope. This Goddess has heard it all and yet hears nothing now, as if her ears have stopped relaying it to her brain to translate.

Her body starts to weaken as her hand clutches convulsively around the dagger, the dagger of a Goddess. Warm liquid flows freely and heavily down her arm to the blade, where it drips upon the land, lost in such destruction, starts to live again. Blood makes the crops grow, she thought wantonly, as her heart stuttered more forcefully, her breath coming out laboriously. The blood on her other arm makes rivers down her wrist, to lace around her fingers gently before it makes one last bold move and strikes the ground.

Her eyes do not close as her body is lost over to the numbness and it is all that she can do to stay standing before she passes out, all that she had to keep from blinking or brushing the tears away. Her body is limpid, and yet she falls gracefully to her knees, as gracefully as she can fall when her weakness betrays her.

One pulse of life, then silence, as her mind begins to cloud, another pulse of life, then longer silence, and her resolve weakens, and she lays down, still staring at the black and charred ground, unblinking, her thoughts racing and falling, never to get back up. Her hair is spread out in a waterfall of tangled silk, her body bathed in the moonlight, the witness to her destruction and downfall. Her eyes remain open as the last of her breath eases out of her tired lungs and her heart ceases it's trying task of keeping the blood pumping. There isn't enough blood left to pump, it says to the dead of the night, for all of it is spilt upon the ground. She is the object of her own destruction.

Then, I am standing above her, above me, for she and I are one, and I am staring at my own destruction. My own desolate choice, and I weep for us as our body seems to turn to marble, scarred by battles long forgotten, stained by the blood of our enemies and of our own righteous wrong doing. Where our tears lay pooled becomes a lake, to encase our entombed image, where all may see if the look hard enough, but will never be able to touch. A statue of a powerful woman, fallen. A Goddess, turned to stone as all mourn her passing, the dagger still clutched in her hand for all time. Our hand.

We will be born again new, though, for we are the phoenix, the one thing that lasts forever. Forgotten, but not lost. Even now, a babe cries out and her eyes are like ours, her hair like ours, her strength and her vulnerability like ours, but so much different. She will be the new Goddess, she will be us, and we shall be her and the circle of life and death is started anew.

~2005

A Dance of Time

2008-07-22T22:36:00.001-05:00

They face like fighters in a ring, muscles taunt and eyes wary as they circle. A man and a woman, the age old couple. It's a dance of power, a dance of passion. One moves. A testing, almost lazy attempt at it's prey – easily dodged. They're only focused on each other. They move again, en sync, matched in these easy moments of playful swipes at each other.

Then the feeling changes, almost tangible. A challenge. He moves, a powerful, graceful move of muscles, grabbing for her. She moves, so that he only has her arm, not all of her. She can almost feel the annoyance radiating off of him like heat. In a way, it is heat, the heat of two bodies beginning to entwine in something brazenly primal.

They continue to circle, the woman leaning away, nearly all her weight supported by his strength alone. He could drop her at any moment, but it is a silent, secure knowledge – he would not drop her. He lunges again, their eyes locked on each other as he pulls her arm, his free hand reaching, grasping her other arm. His fingers are like steel – so strong their hold on her wrist. The struggle to be free begins. The real fight has started.

Her anger and her instincts guide her as she moves with mounting aggression. She uses her weight, her flexibility, and her knowledge to her advantage. Her wrist slips free and she turns, but that doesn't stop him. He's used to her tricks, knows them, and knows how to work with them or around them. He catches her, changes his grip, and forces her to cross her arms in front of her. But it isn't over.

It's never over.

She squirms, not giving up, looking for a weakness. Her nails look for flesh, finds it, but he only laughs. She throws her weight against his arms, forcing him to support her or let her go, but he pulls her arms tighter, pulls her closer against him. Supporting her.

He keeps his feet from hers. He keeps his weaknesses from her. They pause, more of her wanting to than his, as he waits, his hands still hard, almost bruising. He doesn't loosen, doesn't move, just waits with infinite patience. She'll start when she's ready again. She'll do it when she thinks he's not paying attention. Or she'll give up, try again. But for now, she stays there, cradled in the shelter of his body. It's simple. It's beautiful. It's unchoreographed. A lull in the storm. And for the moment, it's perfect.

He lets her go, mutual silent consent. They face each other again, her turning on the balls of her feet, pure grace. She takes a few steps back and they lock eyes. They start again. A little circuit of power and passion. Their moves as easy and as agile as if they were water. Man and woman. Woman and man. The primal dance of time

~2006

Waiting for the Mail

2008-07-21T16:35:00.000-05:00

You remember when you were a little kid and learning all the jobs that you could be when you grow up? You know, the career days in class when kids would bring in their parents and their parents would explain what their job was, what things they did every day and how cool and exciting it was. Did you ever get a parent who was a mailman? None of my classes never did. Honestly, when I was a kid the mail wasn't thought about until it neared Christmas, with all of the big department store catalogs, or your birthday - that's when I would eagerly wait for someone to retrieve the mail so I could see if maybe I got a card with some money in it or there was something interesting to look through.

As I got older, I started to write letters. Of course, when you're a kid, there isn't much skill in putting pen to paper and forming sentences. That was the easy part. The hard part was actually staying on subject or completing a paragraph. That took time to master, you had to take it slow, think things through, plan ahead on what you would say next - things that when you're a kid, you just don't have the patience for. I'm not sure how grams ever made it through my letters without throwing them away in frustration, but she made it and she always wrote back. The only problem I ever had with her replies were that they were usually in cursive and I had trouble reading it.

Then writing letters, and writing in general, just seemed to flow and I would fill pages of things that I thought should be known. For example, when I lost a tooth, or a story I'd heard at school, something going on in the family perhaps or a performance I wasn't looking forward to. I've always been erratic when it comes to letter writing. Sometimes I'll go for months, not writing anyone, then suddenly I'll think 'wow, I haven't sent a letter in a while' and suddenly I'm making a mental list of people I could send one to. For a while, it'll capture my attention and I'll wait patiently for a letter to return, other times I'll forget completely and after receiving a reply to my letter, will simply set aside to be discovered another day.

I actually keep most of my letters. I haven't quite figured out how to scrapbook them or archive them or anything but I keep them in a photo-box (which is, let's face it, a glorified shoe box) on my shelf. I don't take them out to read them but I know they're there and their stories, their words of wisdom, encouragement, love and laughter are there whether I send a letter or not. Its comforting in a sense because if I need it, I know its there. A helper when it comes to getting older and things aren't as clear as it used to be - years, names of people, events. You know they happened but you just can't quite put them in the right order. Those letters in that box upon my shelf are a kind of personal timeline, there if I need it, there if I don't.

I suppose that's why I still write to people whenever I get my whims. Somethings going on in my life and I want to share it with someone else and have them ask me questions so if I need to look back, I can say 'I remember when...'

Oh well. I don't receive letters anymore, although I have a drawer full of writing pads, pens, cards, envelopes and stamps that have been given to me and that I have bought. My grams lives at home now, my sister calls my mother every day for an update (and she and I were never close anyways), I have no pen pals... so now all I ever get in the mail are bank statements, credit card offers, magazines, catalogs, various important pieces of information like letters from college, but otherwise, completely void of personal touch. Still, I go to the mailbox every day, still hoping that something interesting might come my way.