the untidy revolution

take heed, take heed of the western wind

2011-01-30T19:21:00.000-08:00

Six years ago (six?!) I moved to a place that I lived in for only about half a year and yet it, and the people I met there, dug their way into my heart and made this incredible shift in my life. One of those people, who I met almost exactly six years ago when he drove up from Texas to Wyoming, got married this weekend and I feel so lucky to have him and now his amazing, beautiful wife (who has the best taste in music!) in my life. There are few people I feel completely at home with, but he is one of them and to see him happier than I ever really means the world to me.

Throughout the weekend, I thought so much about the three of us, K, A and I, and all that we did – the hikes and drives around lakes and running into freezing, nearly heart-stoppingly cold water, and how many hours we would spend on rocks warm from the sun talking about the future. Now, the three of us are married, one of us has two insanely adorable children, and all of us seemed to have, somehow, navigated this life so that it not only makes sense, but makes us happy.

So, here’s to friendship and how it makes everything in this super confusing world make a little more sense.

forgetting, and so on

2010-12-17T21:11:00.000-08:00

"Winter kept us warm, covering earth in forgetful snow." -T.S. Eliot

I fall into familiarity so easily when I come back to Pennsylvania, driving with ease past what was once Sweet Daddy's, where I nursed broken hearts in sixth grade, past the Gryphon Cafe, where I I would write and write and write and down overrated biscotti while Louis Armstrong and Ella played in the background, to Valley Forge, where I spent a countless number of sleepless nights wondering what exactly I was doing with my life. And then the sun would rise, there in Valley Forge National Park, and dandelions would tickle my nose and everything smelled like freshly picked apples and caramel and I would watch the world erupt into life.

People ask why I want to leave the east coast when everything here is so beautiful and easy. When my family is here and so many friends and my childhood. And that is exactly why - it knocks the wind out of me, the constant remembering. I drive by the playground where I grew up pitching in softball games and drinking beer in high school, with most of that time spent with someone who is no longer here and never will be and I still, years and years after her death, can't wrap my mind around that. My heart has been broken and put back together one too many times here and I worry sometime, late late at night when the last of the fireflies have died and it's so cold that it hurts to breathe, that my heart will finally just give in.

things I have forgotten to tell you

2010-11-28T19:07:00.000-08:00

I never hated high school the way others did. Nor did I think it was the greatest. Most of my days I waded in a shallow pool of happiness - I did well in school, had good friends, and boyfriends that were more friends than any kind of combustible love affair that left me either breathless or in ruins. Most of high school I treated as a time to get through, to put up with until real life started, when I would feel things more strongly and life would be more than surface level.

So going to my 10 year reunion this weekend was an extension of that status quo I felt growing up. It was vaguely nice seeing people -though the people I really wanted to see I've already kept in touch with. I had one really good conversation with a girl who I haven't kept in touch with, who I spent many an afternoon with writing letters as part of the high school's Amnesty International club, who has a chicken farm and who asked me for advice on how to deal with a mother who just found out she has cancer. Other than that, I enjoyed the whiskey more than the conversation.

Really, what last night proved to me was that I think I made the most out of my time at a high school in the conservative suburbs and was right to always want to, and to finally, leave there. And it's nice to return every 10 years, to see the people whose faces used to populate your every day, and say I'm happy to see you're doing well. That you have pretty children, fun stories about yoga in L.A., are practicing environmental law in D.C. And then I'm happy to leave and return to a world where I feel more free and everything is scarier and more poignant and I cry and laugh with equal enthusiasm. Where when I say I have loved Morocco and Wyoming more than anywhere else, or I want to live in Alaska, people do not ask why.

no one, not even the rain, has such small hands

2010-11-21T21:24:00.000-08:00

i live under blankets these days, hibernating with tea and pumpkin pie and candles are everywhere and i can't stop writing love letters to autumn and everything smells like cloves and the light is always beautifully waning. changes in seasons of course make me remember all the times i've danced in leaf piles, mashing bits of yellow leaves into my hair, giving my hands permanent grass stains. six years ago emile said i love you for the first time just after i jumped into a leaf pile and spun and spun until i ran into him and it was so late at night and i was leaving for wyoming in a matter of days and everything was so happy and so sad and there was such finality in that beginning. thanksgiving, six years ago, i thought i was saying goodbye to the person who i thought was going to be my biggest loss. there was my first thanksgiving in college, when we all stayed in wisconsin, these new friends who became my family, and stuffed ourselves silly with tofurkey and drank wisconsin beer until we fell asleep on old corduroy couches that always smelled faintly of nagchampa and oranges and i forgot i was trying to patch up a relationship i had sabotaged. i remember so well waking up that next morning and eating leftover pie and taking a walk by the river and my roommate telling me, "let's write all about last night and put that paper somewhere safe so we'll never forget anything." there have been thanksgivings with our families for the first time and so much wine and laughing and remembering that as much as we fumble, as many mistakes as we make, as hard as we fall and as much as we bleed, there are times that we can say, as the last of the leaves fall and the trees become their old and crotchety selves, these are the people i love.

good night, good night, wherever you are sleeping

2010-10-31T20:00:00.000-07:00

It's easy to get distracted here. There's the arm-length tall hefeweizens at bars in the village, tiny bookstores with cold green floors and an employee that looks like Harriet the Spy (as an adult, that is), the glorious cold that came rushing in today, sending the neighborhood kittens into the half-burnt church. There are poetry readings and work of course and coffee with friends from another lifetime, when I was someone who never thought they'd return to the U.S., that they'd always live by the sea in Morocco. In red shoes, eating peppermint patties and drinking hot cider, I find myself wishing for some omniscient narrator who can tell me as nice (and as vague as that word entails) as life is right now, it will get better. That I'll wake up exactly where I want to be, which is somewhere far from the easy grit of this city. Where I can be completely alone, watching the stars' old light on some spot on the horizon, once again an unknown entity to all.

I'm writing you now just to see if you're better

2010-10-17T16:05:00.000-07:00

The chill in the air has settled in, finally, and songs about leaves waft from doorways, ours included. A man with a tambourine groans as he sits and stays put at the bottom of the subway stairs. People look to see if there's a place to give him money, but seeing none, they move on, brushing raindrops from bulky gray sweatshirts. And the man shakes his tambourine and the woman selling water ice doesn't show up to the station anymore and I'm drinking tea from red tin containers and football (football football, not soccer) is played in Irish bars. It's autumn in New York.
Has it really been two years since I first moved here, since I would get lost on the subway and end up somewhere where a man from Ghana would give me free chips and tell me how my wallet looked like it was from his country, which he misses but will probably never see again.
Our apartment is cold, which gives me ample opportunity to light as many candles as I want, and the light bounces off his brown sweater and my red dress and, after reverberating off ceiling corners, it zeroes in on us again, making us seem almost ageless, and in this moment, I am happy. Happy fall, friends.

Ray LaMontagne

2010-09-27T19:06:00.000-07:00

I've been to hell and back so many times I must admit you kinda bore me

a fitting farewell

2010-09-06T18:58:00.000-07:00

tipping hats in yankee stadium and beer on bleachers and wine on of course porches and saying hello all over again and, oh, friends, it's an extended farewell to summer and everyone's hair on the subway had halos thanks to the setting sun. there's so much happiness and emptiness, sharing it with and without so many, and I look at all these strangers and as we trek on, through puddles and dropped flowers and last night's vomit and the strawberries no longer in season, there are so many holes. there are so many holes and I'm learning you can't always fill them. that you just have to learn to let life's oddly shaped beauty cover them up a little, leaving just enough space for them to breathe.

we were born before the wind

2010-08-31T20:53:00.000-07:00

and magnificently we will float into the mystic (happy birthday van morrison!)

the heat has returned but I have my heart set on fall, so I'm drinking pumpkin beer and can barely contain my excitement thinking about leaf piles and feet under mounds of blankets on freezing nights and cumin everywhere, on everything.

(and moon dances, yes)

how many nights have I spent like this - exhausted by deadline, wondering what I could have done better, what turn of phrase could have been more beautiful, if I forgot to call someone, if everything will all come crashing down on me tomorrow. but somehow, everything doesn't fall apart. somehow, i have managed to trick everyone into thinking i am normal, drinking orange juice and star gazing and running over the Brooklyn Bridge like everyone else.

but tonight, i retreat into books and writing and letters and craigslist to search for land in montana or argentina or morocco.

the end of the summer

2010-08-22T19:27:00.000-07:00

it's the end of the summer and all i can do is listen to lucinda williams and ray lamontagne and drink beer in pools and tonight it's cherries and cherries and too much wine. we danced in the rain tonight, after the thunder and lightning passed, and i opened my mouth and all the heat and the mugginess and the heaviness rushed to my head and i wished for lakes and mountains and loneliness. tonight i'm trying to finish a short story i'm hoping to submit to some literary journals but it's becoming more difficult, the characters being a little too close to my heart, too wrapped up in the confusion of these days. tell me i am not the only one who wants to leave and run and run and run, westward.

it always drifts off too early, westward to the islands

2010-08-01T19:16:00.000-07:00

"Think of light and how far it falls, to us. To fall, we say, naming a fundamental way of going to the world - falling." -William Kittredge

it is a strange thing, to go home, even now, when home is so close to where i live and to visit is no longer a rarity. it is why i cannot imagine living anywhere for too long, it can be suffocating, everything you remember. sometimes i will give friends from other times in my life tours of this place, the tree where i began to learn Japanese, the tractor-trailer sized tire swing where, while wearing a purple panda shirt, i had my first kiss, the middle school soccer field where we sang over the top renditions of Queen, the house where i grew up and stuffed notes into the floor with the hope that someday, decades from now, a little girl my age would find and take solace in them, in their descriptions of my interpretation of a 10-year-old's world.
it's strange, to see things as they were more than as they are - to know where the ice cream store was that is now a bar, to remember O'Brien's News across the street, where friends made out with their first pack of cigarettes and smoked them behind the library, to see 6th grade versions of yourself and your best friend walking down Lancaster Avenue and speaking of lives we never wanted to tame.
i remember so well crying as i watched my grandparents' car drive away after they had come to visit when i was in fourth grade. i cried because of the finality of all moments, and i promised to always remember that time - leaning out the window, smelling spring, waving to people who could no longer see me. and so i have, remembered.

something about what happens

2010-07-24T06:12:00.000-07:00

does this make sense? does it matter anyway?

(not my favorite version of the song, but, hey, it's lucinda williams so it's still amazing.)

quick life update and then more later: new jobs and shorter hair and packages from best friends who are scattered across the world and who i want someday to all live on the same piece of land somewhere in maine or montana or spain or morocco or new mexico or or or. some disconcerting doctor's visits but it all seems to be alright and we don't let it stop us from dancing, slowly, under street lamps when the world is hot and quiet.

i just stood and looked at the open space (another all time favorite from lucinda)

grace from reading

2010-06-27T16:35:00.000-07:00

"I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, he say, the more I love." -The Color Purple

i never thought this life was possible

2010-06-26T20:08:00.000-07:00

the heat comes easily and we all move so quickly to the front porches and the middle of lakes where we can sing and yell and say so this is why we made it through winter. we sat on gloriously old rugs smelling of nagchampa and nectarines and i looked up and loved minnesota and its bowling alleys where waitresses dance in lieu of taking orders and its rivers that sneak up on you and so much swallowed watermelon and climbable trees. i digress, i meant to say: it was me on a plane to chicago, where one of my best friends met me, hair flying everywhere and us, on the road, where i think we're meant to be all the time and wisconsin, a state i forgot i missed, and we flew by all the cheese and fireworks and the remember-whens and i felt so lucky, getting to the twin cities, with so many of my favoritefavorite people. what do you say when you get to watch another best friend filled with so much love that it bounces off her, onto sidewalks and trees and some i'm sure is making its way down main streets in kansas and maybe tennessee and hopefully it will tango its way to the east coast, where we could use reminders that we are so small, we must dance we must laugh when we get poison ivy and drink while we try not to scratch and always drive past our exit and say tomorrow we hit utah. tomorrow, we start all over again. so cheers to you friends, what a world we live in that the universe drop-kicked us all into the same place. how lucky i am to know you all.

one last song

2010-06-04T20:31:00.001-07:00

It's been so long since I've written anything real. Tonight I will try. Tonight, I'll tell you I got a package from my aunt, who sent me a book that belonged to her best friend who just died and she sent it to me because it's about wandering and always trying to find some concept of yourself that always seems slightly elusive and because she said I'd understand and all I could do was sit on the couch with a beer and cry and cry and shoulders shaking think, has it really been seven years since my closest childhood friend died? Has it really been that long since we walked along Lancaster Avenue, sneaking late late at night, when the fireflies would sleep on your shoulder, into the park where we grew up playing softball, where we drank warm, skunked beer in high school, where we spoke of all the porches we would visit as adults. We promised each other we'd be 90-years-old and happy and drinking spiked lemonade on a porch overlooking some unmarred horizon and I keep thinking of things to tell her and after all these years I wonder when it is that time is supposed to make everything alright. Sometimes, everything seems so small and I want to be so quiet and it's hard to explain this to a beautiful city that never sleeps. Its windows are like fireflies tonight, dancing on tonight's horizon by the bridge, silently moving above a landscape full of old blood and newly mixed cement and spilled Thai food and mouths dribbling tequila and ripped flannel and you and me and everything in between. It is almost midnight and despite the little clothing I have on I can't stop sweating and it is nights like these I wish so much you were here. We could walk, slowly, down the street, stopping beneath a street lamp so we could see each other and say, oh, hey, I miss you. I hope so badly you are somewhere bicycling through naked rain, always.

for the heat, etc.

2010-06-02T21:02:00.001-07:00

because i will never tire of mixes:

http://8tracks.com/annag

and it's stamina that i lack

2010-05-28T11:44:00.000-07:00

because i'll only ever be a middle distance runner

e.e. cummings has been sent to me in text form, for the first time, and i sit down in a park next to a highway because everything is so confusing. the faithful moon follows us these days after we've watched everything brilliantly burn into night and it's skinny-dipping season and oh the home brews are out in force and my hand is happy when it touches my burned neck. some of my closest and most inspiring friends are coming to visit next week and my excitement is burning holes in a stomach full of chocolate-covered strawberries and a crumbling mess of peaches and blackberries.

always Milan Kundera

2010-05-12T14:31:00.000-07:00

"The proliferation of mass graphomania among politicians, cab drivers, women on the delivery table, mistresses, murderers, criminals, prostitutes, police chiefs, doctors, and patients proves to me that every individual without exception bears a potential writer within himself and that all mankind has every right to rush out into the streets with a cry of 'We are all writers!"
-Milan Kundera

beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there.

2010-05-11T19:23:00.000-07:00

I wonder, sometimes, what anyone is supposed to get from reading this blog. I forget, sometimes, that I'm writing this for an audience, and then I wonder why an audience would come back here at all. But, dear reader, if you exist, these days are big and filled with sky and waiting for the fireflies and harboring those Big Life Decisions in my stomach. It is always now, when the chopsticks are discarded, All the Pretty Horses is half read, barely thought out short story ideas litter a floor cold with night, that I revert to the way I've always been: driving past my exit, dreaming of somewhere lonely with a windowsill. I've spent too much time on this coast, and now? The if-not-now-when's are hard to swallow, the beer less so.

I could drink a case of you and still be on my feet

2010-05-01T19:31:00.000-07:00

somehow, it has become summer and I love this, everyone sweating, messy hair clinging to backs of necks, everyone migrating to front porches, where all the stories and the Manu Chao and the home-brews that taste perfectly of burnt peaches come out. I want to ban air-conditioning for days like these, so we can sit on alternate wooden steps, telling stories about eating squirrel in Virginia and that maze of a train station in Buenos Aires and getting lost in Morocco until finally you give up trying to find your hostel and get drunk with men in massive, sinister-looking hoods. I want to toast and toast and toast to you, summer, until we have cheers-ed each other far into August, when we can say, oh, isn't this perfect, look at this world turning into red. Look at all of us, turning into something more beautiful.

but in the end, I missed what it meant

2010-04-27T20:53:00.000-07:00

(and smoke away the night) (prelude: I'm sorry to link to MySpace but I could find the song Ariel Ramirez nowhere online...)
I've hunkered down in my living room for the night, armed with tea and bundles of fleece blankets to ward off the cold that has somehow seeped into this New York City spring full of guitar players in Central Park and rolling in fallen cherry blossom petals and waiting with bated breath for summer. Because then! Then best friends from all over the world will be here and we will sit in corners of bars and they will tell me about hikes in Spain and grad school in Argentina and farming in Colorado and all will be right again. Tonight, after another deadline had passed, I watched the moon's reflection in a puddle and wanted so much to tell someone everything because I could see no stars. This light, tonight, this bright moon in a sky with no stars, it is stripping away all that is safe for me. Promises have become the seed head of a dandelion.

tonight you're on my mind

2010-04-11T19:42:00.000-07:00

I'm getting sick, which gives me an excuse to sit in my faded red t-shirt , read, and listen to Jeff Buckley:

lover, you should've come over

and of course hallelujah

lived in bars and danced on tables

2010-04-06T18:46:00.000-07:00

because deadline is over and i want to hang out with chan marshall

with no lodestar in sight

2010-04-04T19:50:00.000-07:00

(music to read by)
I escape sometimes, when the city becomes its darkest, when some of the lights finally dim, when light bulbs flicker, exhausted, crinkling before they become something to trip over in corners of apartments overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge. After talking about Melbourne to our waitress who hopes to make it big in film here in New York City, I retreated, for just a minute, to the darkest part of the bar to breathe and search in vain for a juke box. How many times have the stories I watched play out happened before? The numbers being asked for, the girls in their red skirts and tall boots crying on the sidewalks, the musicians heaving their drum sets off blue truck beds, all the lonely hope.

because the city lights are fading

2010-03-25T21:42:00.000-07:00

a song to fall asleep by

the smallness of us

2010-03-18T19:53:00.000-07:00

tonight: watching Y Tu Mama Tambien and drinking beer and dreaming of the Mexican countryside and packing for camping and i'm happy. i can't wait for lakes and dirt under fingernails and cheeks pressed to grass and friends who have seen you grow up. there will be guitar at night and card games and more beer and, my favorite, the fires. everything is so perfect in the light of a campfire, skin glowing, silently, people basking in the smallness of us.

this is how it works

2010-03-15T19:22:00.000-07:00

I feel small today, in the way that makes me want to sleep in blue hostel rooms and train cars smelling of cumin and wave goodbye to you and recede behind the Moroccan hills permanently burned into memory. I want sand and dunes and freezing cold showers and me when I was so far away and never going to return. I worry, sometimes, that I will always be like this - ready to jump, grass-stains and all, into the sublimely temporary. I worry I will never know where I belong - or, worse, that I already know and that I'll never go.

define temptation

2010-03-14T12:47:00.000-07:00

The rain won't stop and I take the time to believe it's June. It's all reading and writing and wine and music this weekend, and the prospect of summer teases me and I fall headfirst for its thunderstorms that giggle and save me and destroy everything. I refuse to take my bathing suit off and imagine it all smells like honeysuckle and my friend writes to me about a road trip south, across the border and maybe we'll just keep going. But, for now, it's late nights and talks on porches and I hold my breath, slightly, until I waver and exhale.

come into my world, I've got to show, show, show you

2010-03-06T12:34:00.001-08:00

Oh it is spring and I play Regina Spektor in my car and everyone is in yellow skirts and they twirl and we all exchange small smiles in our eyes. My concentration is shot to hell these days and all I can do is sing along and talk about the Czech Republic to the guy selling cotton candy in Central Park and Thai peanut sauce is all over my shirt, all the time. What I mean is, how do you say the words you know you'll never say? And what happens when you never say them? Life, I suppose.

snowy atlas mountains

2010-02-18T21:30:00.000-08:00

post script: falling hard for this song (listen to snowy atlas mountains)

I don't know if you notice anything

2010-02-18T20:54:00.000-08:00

tonight it's chocolate stout beer and guitar picking and i'm so far away. it's cumin and i'm staring at a city that winks and puddlejumps and waves goodbye as it pirouettes mid-air. it's so easy here, all the moving sidewalks and free samples of sushi and the salsa dancing on every corner. it would be so easy to say i can't do this and hide myself in the snow and the dirt and the corners of billiard halls where my white tank top is yellow with dust by the time the sun comes up. but tonight, it's middlesex by jeffrey eugenides and letters to everyone i know in my head and so much space everywhere. i revel in it, and i'm sorry.

learning loneliness

2010-02-06T13:58:00.000-08:00

Today has been spent in flannel, waiting for snow, finishing "Gilead," which I lovedlovedloved. The prose is so lonely and it makes me, as so many things do, want to tunnel myself away from this world, far away from the facebook message sent to me asking if I got the e-mail about getting the phone call they made three minutes ago. It's cliche to teeter on existential edges, but despite the glorious Nepalese restaurants and the conversation over wine in Jackson Heights and jazz clubs in Harlem, I find myself gravitating toward that old need for all that is lonely: the mountains, the motel based in the harsh glare of neon lights, the corner in a bar in New Mexico where you wonder just how much hope oozes out from the heavily bearded clientele and makes its way to the green linoleum floor.

we had a time, didn't we?

2009-12-29T18:20:00.000-08:00

reading old diary entries, those penned before I had given much of a thought to ever posting personal sentiments in this wild west we call the internet, i am struck by all that has happened in the past 10 years. phrases like "y2k" bring me crashing back to 1999, before i had graduated high school, before morocco and falling in love and waving hands out car windows as i drove in my rusting honda from pennsylvania to wyoming. before ani difranco concerts and chocolate on trains to chicago and spilling secrets in long dark corridors with cold green tiles. how do you describe a decade? it was a melange of moments, of dirt streaked on cheeks, collapsing in fields after chasing geese in illinois, milkshakes and talk of those Big Ideas, some now laughable, in wisconsin - but then, how Big everything was then. it was Where In This World Do I Fit and often still is. this decade, well it was: the summer of saying goodbye; college and all that goes with it - the pretentiousness of academia and the genuine love of learning, the late nights writing about the Rwandan genocide and Marxist feminists and whatever is in between Dostoevsky and Frank O'Hara; falling in and out of love and in love again (and again. and again); my mother's cancer; too many deaths - my best friend, the girl with the beautiful red hair who will forever inspire me to never stop seeking and always drink lemonade on cliff tops and skydive in the czech republic and find my own way in subsaharan africa, and my uncle and my two grandmothers; my love for helene cixous and simone de beauvoir and a million other authors; all the hellos and goodbyes to so many friends who forever changed me with talks in the south of morocco, over indian food, in A Room of One's Own bookstore in Madison, on the floors of kitchens in Wyoming; getting married to my best friend; Morocco, a country i still ache for, a country i still pen love letters to(a country where rooftops were my home, where i wandered, drunk on red wine, through the medinas and spoke of LifeLifeLife in the back of a tiny shop while drinking mint tea always mint tea); the debacle of course that was george w. bush and the overwhelming relief of barack obama; Wyoming, where, while drinking coronas in dark bars and cross country skiing and hiking red cliffs and in the back of cars while listening to patty griffin near fremont lake, i met some of the most amazing people in my life; learning, time and again, what it means to seek out that elusive and unattainable truth as a journalist. It was friends and laughter and sobbing and teetering on the edge and finding myself over and over and warm oceans and freezing lakes and love and writing and.

as usual we're having ourselves one hell of a time

2009-12-08T22:16:00.000-08:00

a classic. i will never tire of this song.

and when we leave the landlord will come and paint over it all

2009-12-04T19:17:00.000-08:00

pumpkin cheesecake crumbs dot the kitchen counter, smeared gently onto a wooden tabletop bought somewhere off a connecticut highway. i easily brush these remnants of thanksgiving into the trash as i listened to a cd i haven't played for years (ani difranco - living in clip). it all plays out so seamlessly: i watch the lights of manhattan dot the horizon once again, we fall deeper into night, i sip tea and i marvel at how easily everything is given and everything is taken away. how long we take to build our stories and where those sentences eventually land. what becomes of our commas, our semi-colons, our ellipses. what will i remember of this night years and years from now? maybe nothing. and maybe that's alright.

but I never had to hold you by the edges like I do now

2009-11-22T16:39:00.000-08:00

I tread quietly these days, watching planes cover the moon, sipping tea. Sometimes there are outbursts, laughter at night in the small crevices of New York City bars. I read (yet another) article about the fall of newspapers and I continue to brace for an end that never quite comes.
This quietness these days, I save my words for letters and e-mails and phone calls. I'm exhausted by small talk and I crave my best friends who are scattered across this world that I'm dying to see.
Tonight, amidst cranberry sauce and Sangiovese wine and too much talk of real estate for my liking, I wrote smallish notes to myself: It's time to leave. But first, the waiting.

the autumn leaves

2009-11-04T18:01:00.000-08:00

The leaves are red and mid-departure, elections are over, a lone striped sock sits sans partner on my living room floor. I am drinking pumpkin beer, candles burn, and I need to write many letters and make many phone calls.
I read about a communal living space in Brooklyn in the new issue of New York Magazine today as I drowned my sleepy self in coffee and I so want to live there. I'm trying to persuade Emile to live in some communal-type living place at some point in our lives - lots of people making Thai food together, reading stories out loud by the fire, watching cold waves crash on rocky shores (well, that's not Brooklyn so much- but maybe Maine?).
My friend showed me pictures of his trip to Portland, and now I have such an urge to live there. So many bookstores (especially Powell's!), little Cuban cafes with yellow walls, bus rides to volcanoes.
p.s. Anais Nin was in my dream last night!

2009-10-22T22:36:00.000-07:00

Tonight: free tickets to "The 39 Steps;" being asked if we wanted to hear someone make chicken sounds as we were en route to McSorley's; free beer at McSorley's; talked about Canada, Chicago, Ireland, and Alaska at McSorley's; asked repeatedly where I am from (people usually guess Germany for some reason); ate a nutella and peanut butter crepe prepared by a guy from Israel and a guy from Egypt, more talk of travel was had; read "Empire Falls" on the subway. Now, spinning in a yellow dress and drinking cherry beer. It is a good night.

changing of the seasons

2009-10-21T19:35:00.000-07:00

There's been an Indian summer these days, the nights warm with clear skies, everyone outside drinking pumpkin beer before the leaves make their final exit. People wore t-shirts today, lots of them, and there was a man singing opera at Grand Central. Tonight, I'm sipping pomegranate tea and watching Northern Exposure and reading Joseph Mitchell's "The Old Hotel." Everything is beautifully small, and I find myself sad and appreciative of the sadness.
It's strange, when someone dies, and I find myself face to face with that ultimate finality of everything. These constant beginnings and endings, I've thought about them my whole life and they make me want to dance with one hand waving free, waving goodbye to a summer that should have already gone.
"Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."
-The Sheltering Sky
For those who read this blog, I miss you all and I promise to become better at keeping in touch. (Especially Elaine - I'm going to be writing you a very, very long e-mail soon. I promise!)
love,
Anna

memories of my grandmother

2009-10-07T19:08:00.001-07:00

I'm not sure what my first memory of my grandmother is. I know she was there, weeks after I was born, helping to take care of me in Palmyra, Virginia, where our neighbors would shoot squirrels and give them to us, leaving us to dry them on our clothes line.
The memories of my grandmother are many and often wrapped in music and art and laughter. She was the one who tried to teach me to play the piano, who encouraged me to pursue art, or whatever the equivalent was to me, who spoke to me of her world travels, of Italy and Sweden and Germany. She was one of the few people who would listen to me when I was a self-righteous teenager; she was the one who woke at 4 a.m., just before we would pull out of the driveway of my grandparents' home in Illinois, to stuff us with toast and cheese and salami. She and my grandfather would stand in the doorway, wave goodbye, and I would cry, even then, even when I was five, because I knew how long it would be until we saw them again.
Waving goodbye to my grandmother now is even harder, because I will never see her again. My grandmother died Tuesday, and I can't really grasp that when I fly into Chicago O'Hare next weekend, she will not be there, waiting for me, ready to tell me about her newest painting or a new rosemalling partner.
I love you, Grandma. I miss you.

to ohio

2009-10-06T13:06:00.000-07:00

this is the Low Anthem song I can't stop listening to...

also this one is beautiful - makes me want to be traveling by train to nowhere in particular.

2009-10-06T10:19:00.000-07:00

Jackson

2009-10-06T09:59:00.000-07:00

2009-10-06T09:46:00.000-07:00

Kim and I; the Sugar Shack, which was right down the street from my house and where I definitely ate one too many mozzarella sticks and drank one too many shakes!; the line between winter and fall.

2009-10-06T09:37:00.000-07:00

Fremont Lake

2009-10-06T09:20:00.000-07:00

Fremont Lake during the first snow of the year.

2009-10-06T09:08:00.000-07:00

Pinedale's cow wall, the relatively new visitor's center that incited many meltdowns while I covered tourism board, and more Pinedale...

2009-10-06T08:57:00.000-07:00

All of these are pretty self explanatory - the last one is the building where I worked while at the Roundup.

2009-10-06T08:46:00.000-07:00

In order: the house in Pinedale where I once lived; Faler's (now called Ridley's?) General Store, where I bought many a frozen pizza; and more Sacred Rim.

2009-10-06T08:37:00.000-07:00

2009-10-06T08:23:00.000-07:00

Kate pretty much always had a camera in her face...

2009-10-06T08:14:00.000-07:00

Kim, her daughter Kate, and Andrew on a hike to Sacred Rim in Wyoming.

2009-10-06T07:54:00.000-07:00

"I'll be waiting on your train when you come back through the western state"

2009-10-06T07:41:00.000-07:00

This is Victor, Idaho - one of the greatest towns I've ever been to! Brad and Jet have an awesome VW van, pictured here, along with their beautiful home.

and there it was, everything

2009-10-05T11:59:00.000-07:00

I was lucky enough to get to go back to Wyoming for vacation last week, so I'm going to post a bunch of photos from that trip. What a place - I'll let the photos speak for themselves. The people in the photos are Jeannette (one of my closest friends and first roommate in Pinedale, Wyoming who now is the co-publisher of an awesome newspaper called the Valley Citizen), Brad (Jeannette's husband who is an amazing photographer - like Jeannette - and works at the Jackson Hole News & Guide) and Andrew (another one of my closest friends, second roomie in Pinedale and another awe-inspiring photographer!)
All these photos are from when Jet, Brad, Andrew, and I went to Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming and spent the day hanging out with good friends, drinking good beer, and eating good food. It was glorious.
The church in the photo is the Chapel of the Transfiguration, an Episcopal church where Jet and Brad got married four years ago. I loved the church - it was beautiful, original, unpretentious - just like Jet and Brad!

2009-10-05T11:42:00.000-07:00

2009-10-05T11:32:00.000-07:00

This is me with Andrew and with Jet. It was a glorious day, full of friends and good beer and food and the Tetons, of course the Tetons.

2009-10-05T11:18:00.000-07:00

photos, photos, and etc.

2009-10-05T11:12:00.000-07:00

more photos from Wyoming

2009-10-05T11:00:00.000-07:00

2009-10-04T12:55:00.000-07:00

set the sails, I feel the winds a'stirrin'

2009-10-03T23:12:00.000-07:00

I write to you by candlelight, the bright lights of Manhattan dancing on the horizon outside my window. Inside our apartment, everything smells like cinnamon and autumn and I drink a beer that tastes like cloves. Everything is warm these days, and I want to live forever under blankets, reading, writing, thinking. Then, when forever is done, I want to take the train for the next forever, riding into sunsets, past the places we have all, regrettably, forgotten.
Tonight I bought a cd by the Low Anthem and it's beautiful, songs about train rides from Louisiana to Ohio and it, as so many things do, makes me want to be wearing gingham and far away from computers and e-mail and all that which I'm not sure has made us a better people.
I loved tonight, watching the new Coen brothers movie (A Serious Man) and drinking tea in the bookstore until midnight and dancing down Broadway to the subway but, ah, what I would give to buy and live out my days in that bookstore in Idaho.

pining for the moon

2009-09-29T21:36:00.000-07:00

My friend Andrew convinced me to actually keep up with this blog, so here I am, at 10:36 at night, sitting in my friend Kim's house before going to bed and writing to you, my dear unknown reader, of things close to my heart. I am back in the place I truly have missed more than I believe it's possible to explain. It doesn't make much sense, I suppose, to miss a place where I lived only for six months, but Wyoming, and Pinedale, have such a pull on me. I felt so emotional that I almost cried when I crossed the border from Idaho to Wyoming, listening to Bob Dylan and Carrie Rodriguez and, passing Fremont, I breathed. Understand I love New York City and I know my time to really hunker down in Pinedale has passed, but I write secret love letters to Wyoming all the time, believing those thoughts will somehow meander across the country and land in the tree branches now covered in yellow and soon to be gloriously, genuinely bare.

those were the reasons, that was New York

2009-03-10T19:23:00.000-07:00

Now, there is Leonard Cohen's "Chelsea Hotel" and dim lights and melting snow and it's spring, already, I think.
(p.s. "all men shall be sailors until the sea frees them")
The city is grand and all nooks and crannies and full of people who are so inspiring and shall never know it. There is the man who works two jobs for his five kids and who sleeps an hour and a half many nights but is so happy and shows me around the thrift shop where he works and points out all his favorite orange shirts and says, "don't I have a great job? I get to sing and dance all day long and nobody tells me to stop." When I leave, I wave goodbye and doubt I'll ever see him again. How is it possible that so many people sift through our lives, indent it, but fade to a speck on the horizon of memory?
I want to write honestly, truthfully, with force, but does anyone do this anymore? I distrust blogs, their faux-realism, their bluntness with no point. What will I be like at 80? At 27 (27?!), I already miss paper, its mustiness, its imperfections. The screen - it doesn't bend or yellow or crinkle with age.
I have too much to say and never know where to begin and so I skim only the surface. So, here it is, the surface: I am reading Lush Life by Richard Price and am loving it so far. I sometimes love my job but wonder if I am not meant to have a little cottage in Alaska/Maine/Montana and grow my own vegetables and grow old in silent moonlight.
In these months, here in New York City, I have wandered around Chinese fish markets, eaten honeydew near gutters, watched the lights of Manhattan appear, slowly, from my window in Queens. Alley cats fight outside my apartment and everything in this city can be so mean and so forgiving all at once. A homeless man holds the door for me and I want to cry.

it's all half-light in here

2008-07-17T19:18:00.000-07:00

it comes in small pieces, little bits of your cabin with gingham, lots of gingham. there's your email that hits, hard, and i think about it while listening to yo la tengo and the new old 97s cd and jonimitchellbobdylanalways. my hair gravitates outside, tired of the inside of this toyota corolla that doesn't have the character of my old, rusting '91 honda accord. i almost died in that car, on the side of some wyoming road in the middle of a blizzard and when i thought i had lost you, it was me in that car, all wool sweaters from mexico and tears above Fremont Lake. it was me and my roommates and talk of Life, What's In Store? and rilo kiley in the background and avocado sandwiches and we shrugged and laughed and said ah well as long as there's letters by candlelight i guess it will be alright. there's too much light these days, too many ceiling lights, not enough non pretentious dingy bars. here, the lack of light is on purpose and otherwise it's a flood of halogen, an assault on your senses until you adapt to an all fake world. your email hits, hard, and my heart subsists on google images and the light that emanates from this laptop. there's so many silences and so much other-meaning behind my words and i think i'll die with novels having been written in my pauses and ellipses...

and the night, i think

2008-07-16T20:20:00.000-07:00

sometimes, i think i could be quiet for the rest of my life. i would make sounds, of course, but not really speak. i could clap instead of asking for cheese or ice cream, and gurgle when wine drips from mouth corners and stains wood and cotton. most of all, i could stare into fire until, finally, i stop feeling so young and insignificant against the backdrop of something so relentlessly ancient. every fire i light reminds me of death and the Sahara and nights spent on the dock overlooking the dirty jammed up river next to my dorm room and where i shouldn't have been in and everything i've meant to remember and forget and dance to and laugh with and at and the end.
the song "Brockwell Park" by the Red House Painters only exists once on youtube, and even then, it's just a cover. it's comforting to know not everything is online, available at the tip of your fingers, only a couple keystrokes away. what's so wrong with searching, with taking trains and more trains until finally you can find a record store where the song does exist, by the artist, and you can take it home in context.
i need to call back so many friends, but instead i've been wishing for a pen pal. i'd tell her/him about apple picking and how i can't wait for fall because of the too big sweaters and everything being red and all the sadness everywhere.

bursting into light

2008-06-14T22:15:00.000-07:00

"Autumn Leaves" plays and a thunderstorm has just subsided and though it's summer, I can smell fall. Everything is burning and red and I'm living smaller these days, more carefully, less rhythmically. An old friend of mine told me my e-mail was an "opus" and I laughed, smallishly, because I write so few e-mails and letters these days. And none of them feel anywhere near the War and Peace-length pieces I once wrote. These days, my e-mails are all about the gray winter, the waveless ocean, the cold cheeks smashed to sand, to rock. I find myself tensing, easily hurt, quickly climbing into myself, wanting to bury my head amongst my own marrow.
I prepare for another move, another round of feeling slightly out of place. I'll be happier there, I guess though I'm clearly not sure, tucked somewhere away from the strip malls boasting too many CVS stores and even the pizza shops grate on me, being a constant, albeit silent, reminder that I'm here. When I tell people about Morocco, they tell me I'm brave to have gone there, and that makes me want to cry. I'm tired of explaining myself. I'm tired of never feeling like I entirely connect to anywhere. Except, of course, Wyoming and Morocco.

2008-05-20T22:28:00.000-07:00

(the following passage is an excerpt from my journal. it's dated May 9, 2003)

Drunk and sentimental. I don't want to go home and forget about these changes, this place, this sky, the way I feel alone and free.
I still have a paper for my women and economic development class and a french final, but I really feel finished. Finished? Can you grasp that? How is it possible to understand that these people, who have helped create pieces of ourself, might slip out of your life completely, that you may never see them again?
How do you say such goodbyes?
How do lives merge, never to even run parallel again? but to be thankful for that one merge, for me to see that I have been happier than I ever have been before. How can I ever thank Morocco for allowing me to learn to fly?

Now this is the present day me:
I am going back to the place that has consumed so many of my thoughts for five years. Five years? Is that possible? I re-read my journal from Morocco, and I can remember everything in such vivid detail. I have physically ached to go back there, and now I am. It's just for a couple days, and I know it will make me want to move there. Places have such a tug on my heart strings.

2008-05-01T17:08:00.000-07:00

sometimes, i will get a whiff of cumin and i will become disoriented, close my eyes, and believe, momentarily, that when i open them the rows of orange juice stands in Marrakech (a city of rose colored walls) will stand before me.
Alexandra Fuller has been in the news lately, and along with her Pinedale and Sublette County and i miss the harshness of Wyoming so much. i open my New York Times and am confronted with the dirt and the isolation and that sought after loneliness i lust after here in the land of SUV drivers doing lines of espresso off steering wheels. i miss the bone crunching cold and not having silence be something to conquer. i make so many promises, so many insha'Allahs that i will return - to wyoming, where a garage still holds a pair of long forgotten sandals and Morocco, where a country holds my heart.

2008-04-30T20:09:00.000-07:00

to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night and day to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight and never stop fighting.

-e.e. cummings

when everything we felt failed

2008-04-10T15:50:00.000-07:00

are we all so lost another time would fit us? we could fall into someone else's mold, someone else's bar, someone else's hands tracing the edges of jukeboxes. i'm listening to the songs that were once my passengers, my sanity driving past the Rockies, when pictures fell from two-toned white walls and i never even noticed. it's that same vague sense of being in constant awe of the world, of having such a seventh-grade crush on the world that it makes me want to write love letters every day and slip them into mountain cracks and river beds. it's that desire to live in backseats until i die from the snow or the heat but not the everyday. i don't want to die in my sleep.
it's strange, wondering if anyone falls upon this blog, this blog where i do not describe at length new technologies or political ramblings. i wonder in the vastness of the internet, does anyone see this? do they like yogurt? do they staple buttons on as i do? do they smash cheeks to grass in hopes of grass stains as permanent as that dimple, that ever-present dimple in the photos of you at age two, clad in red with worried eyes.

Oklahoma State Rep. Sally Kern

2008-03-22T19:24:00.000-07:00

Since we don't have t.v. and I'm not a religious YouTuber, I just recently found out about Sally Kern's insaaane remarks (tell me...exactly which societies have disappeared after embracing homosexuality....??) and am totally at a loss for words. How offensive on so, so, SO many levels. To homosexuals, to Muslims, to hopefully anyone with a conscience. I'm so tired of people, especially freaking ELECTED OFFICIALS, being so unexcusably ignorant. At least once a week or more I'll hear people using "that's so gay" and people accuse me of melodrama when saying that's just as bad as using the N-word. Someone told me Suffolk County is one of the worst places to live if you're gay or black or anything that's not disgustingly mainstream. The anxieties I have about living in this place, and my desire to leave, is eroding the layers of my stomach. I feel so anxious about living here that it sometimes takes all I have to get up in the morning after remembering where I am.

"Honeysuckle is its own revelation"

2008-02-07T19:04:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting here, after reading David Axelrod poetry ("Honeysuckle is its own revelation") and listening to Emile and some random girl talking about socialemotional and academia and so I pretend I'm doing work, but really I'm looking at images of Homer, Alaska. I look out the window and pretend to see the mountains, the lakes, the sense of sanity in a world in which I'm quickly losing faith.
But. I take deep breaths. I swim in the ocean at 2 a.m. and tangle hair with seaweed and finger Argentinian leaves in journals. And the faith, slowly, comes back. And I wish I could hold it, even if it crumbled, like the leaves.

je ne veux qu'elle

2008-01-31T11:22:00.000-08:00

My desk: Trader Joe's pad thai; papers claiming truths about oil, cancer, governments; excavation.
My desktop: Marc Lavoine for the sake of memory in lieu of taste, Guggenheims, Anne Lamott, revolution, YouTube's Moroccan accounts.
My thoughts: The library is open until nine, my throat hurts, minutiae kills me, are revolutions possible in the U.S.?, I can feel burnt out, I can't wait to live in Brooklyn, I'm excited to write an article about super tuesday, I'm going to check out No Logo by Naomi Klein at the library even though I have a million books I need to read at home, I fall in love too hard, too easily with the world and it breaks my heart every day.

judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character

2008-01-20T18:49:00.000-08:00

I so savor my alone time, but when it comes to "alone, alone" time, I'm always at a bit of a loss as to what to do. Typically, during my "me" time, there will be someone else in the house, namely my husband. (Still so crazy to see that typed out. It makes me seem so much older and more mature than I think of myself, this person who's about to turn 26. 26?!) At any time, I can shout out a line from a Charles Bukowski poem just so I know someone else in the world can appreciate what I'm experiencing. Sometimes, I wonder if I have forgotten how to give myself feedback.
Now I have a couple days to myself. I'm wearing Superman underwear, wrapped up in a fleece blanket and watching The Jane Austen Book Club, which I have yet to be impressed with. I'm drinking pomegranate tea and wondering, as I always do around this time of the week, how exactly I'm going to write all my articles by deadline. I need to call lots of friends back, write letters and return e-mails to friends in Spain, but I've done none of that.
I heard clips of the "I Have a Dream" speech while eating in a Jamaican restaurant in Philly this weekend, and it was really jarring and made tears spring to my eyes and my throat clench. I so want to believe this country will, finally, challenge itself, accept its wrongdoings and move on to a place where when a black man or a woman runs for president, we will be able to focus on their platforms and not their race or gender.
Let us all continue to fight for justice.

and some things that i said to her (i'll tell you what i missed)

2008-01-13T18:47:00.000-08:00

In Wyoming, when I would feel overwhelmed, I would walk outside and the infiniteness of everything — the sky, the mountains, the blades of grass, the conversations in little hondas with rust spots — would soothe those chafed life spots. Everything was so big, and I felt so happy being so free and so small. I imagined myself turning corners in London and Algiers and clinking wine glasses on cross-country train trips and screaming love notes to a world content to bang on the pots and pans.
When do we all stop walking to the edge? When do meet in fields and not on cliffs? When does the every-day become something not to surmount, not to defeat? When can we let our shoulders shake; when can we stop being strong and fall, just a little bit? Why must every breath be so obvious?

sometime in between friday night and saturday morning

2008-01-04T22:17:00.000-08:00

It's the time of year everyone talks about new year's resolutions. "Oh hi so and so!" they say at the grocery stores, the banks, the concrete seas that swallow box stores whole and shit them out in tiny alleyways, where the third graders don't venture anymore. They stand with frozen chicken in hand, giggling nervously about the need to lose weight. They gush over cilantro. They ask about family and report back to the suburban soldiers who just don't give a shit anymore.
I've never made new year's resolutions. I turn over no new leaves; I make no new self. I am still me, drinking beer and reading Zadie Smith. I laugh too loudly, write too many letters without sending them, receive stares from passerbys witnessing my version of "Boots of Spanish Leather," complete with new haircut shakes and all.
What is it about the specific marking of a passing of time that makes us reevaluate ourselves? What is it about arbitrary country lines that makes us nationalists? What draws us to countdowns, to straight lines, to rigidity?
My resolution for society? Drink champagne at noon during a siesta, write a collective novel maybe with Antigone playing some sort of lead role, smash dirt in your flannel shirt/face. Stop narrating.

winter: a song, backseat

2007-12-26T21:11:00.000-08:00

"Kathy's Song" by Eva Cassidy plays on Pandora and I sip, sip, sip hot chocolate. The back of the package points out it's hot chocolate, not hot cocoa. I think the difference is chunkiness and the pieces swish between teeth, swinging around the front teeth that aren't impressed. What's this compared to couscous by the sea?
I saw a friend from high school today, but she didn't see me and I didn't say anything. Because, after more than seven years, what is there to say? (How shall I recap life? Chewed pens/rubbing feet/your slighted cello/car windows and I've always been afraid of corduroy, what about you?
Today someone told me life for many people is cold and there are no houses and the children call the shelter their home. But, she said, they keep trying; they hope, we hope. Maybe that's more than me, she asked.

but there's music on clinton street all through the evening

2007-12-25T20:10:00.000-08:00

Coming back to Pennsylvania is a barrage of memories : here's the hotel where your dad lived, the playground where I last saw you before you bicycled naked somewhere the living can't go, my old house with the holes in the wooden floors where my 10-year-old self stuck letters for some future owner.
I recognize everything, though it all seems just outside my grasp. There are "Save Garrett Hill" signs posted on lawns and storefronts throughout Rosemont to, indeed, save "G-Hill," a little neighborhood that prided itself on being one of the last bastions of unpretentiousness in the Main Line. I, too, do not want the annihilation of Garrett Hill Pizza and the emergence of a GAP, but it's no longer my battle. So I stand on the sidelines, watching the bakery workers and the bar owners on the front lines, battling for a place I've never quite understood.
The end of the year, of course, brings about bouts of uncalled for, and much too cliched, nostalgia. At 25, I'm seeing my parents age and watching them witnessing their own aging parents. My grandmother, my father's mother, who once greeted us with plates of cheese and salami after we made the two-day drive from Rosemont to Chicago, is now 91 and can barely hold the phone up to her chin to say she's lonely this Christmas. My grandfather died when I was 13, my dad's only sibling died when I was in college and her second husband died last year. When we flip through photograph albums with her, she almost always prefaces information about each photo with "that person died in..." We all slip away so quietly from this world. We all somehow manage to love and laugh and dance and sob and collapse and almost break and then we fade, waving goodbye to a world that doesn't wave back. But perhaps, just perhaps, it winks.

year after year what we do is undone

2007-11-29T16:56:00.000-08:00

we took pictures with a disposable camera i still haven't developed. after corn kernels in indiana and eating midwest steaks and clinking glasses of not-milk, my mom and i parted ways in omaha after seeing my grandfather and my grandmother one last time before she died from smoking too many cigarettes in the kitchen.
when i pulled into the small wyoming town, it was cold and windy and i wore a black hat and one glove because my '91 honda accord had eaten the other one. there was a christmas tree lighting ceremony that night and my new roommate and photographer at the paper i was about to begin working for ate cookies with me and her dog sadie jumped all over me. we went to faler's and as i walked past the rows of animal heads staring with proud eyes, i bought coffee even though i never drank coffee. it was beer and coffee that night and what do you want in life? and i said this. i think this. snow and wind and the largeness-lostness of it all. van morrison in the kitchen and who do you think you'll be in your next life? me, maybe someone by a campfire, always.

i've spilled the wine

2007-11-28T19:44:00.000-08:00

it's all pseudo tequila shots here, here in the dark damp torn corners of a sort-of island. we left for a week, and when we came back, the yellow leaves had all fallen and i can't stop listening to nina simone. what do you say when someone you don't love tells you they love you? something like : this is life, all feet out of windows and chewed up pens. and i'm sorry it can never be you and me.
writing about shitty health care systems, i momentarily like my job. then i lapse back into apathy and wonder when i'll get the energy to start seriously looking in brooklyn. i'm lackluster even about that. what is it about alaska that pulls me? it's the need for the unknown, for people with torn sweaters, for the lack of pretention and the dustdustdust. then you can say, who's that girl flinging kernels of mud into her hair? and i'll say, oh just me.
it's the need to wake up and say, today, today the world hasn't disappointed me. today i remember where i am, and i like it.

november under lamplight

2007-11-18T18:16:00.001-08:00

I'm sorry blogspot, I've ignored you. These posts are from another place I've dug for myself on the Internet. They obviously weren't all written today but over the last couple months.

doing shots of journalismjobs.com

2007-11-18T18:13:00.000-08:00

I find that age-old obsession washing over me yet again : Leaving with the big L.
When I was four and living in Virginia for the first time since we moved to Buenos Aires, it was all I could do from finger the cold windowpane in my Charlottesville room and dream of Argentinian zoos and my friend's house where I had traded my all-time favorite animal for some beany butt doll I eyed warily and grew to hate.
Once we moved to Pennsylvania, I was happy with the nearby park but often made up songs about China and Japan and told my parents they could not say good night to me because, alas, though they thought I was merely a lump under my comforter, I was actually thousands of miles away in Shanghai. (Somehow, at age five, I actually knew of Shanghai.)
I've dreamed of Maine, Morocco, Algiers, Russia, Ghana, India. And so the story goes.
Now it's Alaska. I routinely check journalismjobs.com and recently found a posting for a writer/editor position at the Anchorage Press, an alternative weekly. I've spent a good chunk of time today devouring their articles and can list what to do and what not to do during an Alaskan winter : take walks, spend time with friends, buy a sun lamp, don't camp out in front of the television. I nod, as though I have any idea of what they're talking about, feign a shiver and dig my seventh-grade flannel out from the depths of the closet. (Yes, it still fits, along with my converse - you know, those shoes that once upon a time weren't made in sweatshop basements.)
(Side note : My husband is watching "Buffy the vampire something or other Slayer" and I keep getting horrific flashbacks of friends forcing me to watch Dawson's Creek.)
Anyway, I'll keep dreaming. But I know if I really was in Alaska, I'd be moping in some bar, going home by myself and counting the days until I got to see the person I love more than anything in the world again. So, I'll just have to wait until we can be those annoying newcomers chomping at the bit to explore the last bit of the Final Frontier together. Until then, Google images and Journalismjobs will have to suffice.

a survival guide : laughter

2007-11-18T18:12:00.000-08:00

Everything I write today, I erase. Here is yet another attempt:

When I talked to her, she told me to come back. I said don't tempt me. I miss feeling like I belong. I miss being surrounded by people I love.

I said : Is that normal? To feel like you don't belong?
She said : There's no such thing as normal. But you're not normal, and you don't belong somewhere that makes you question if you are. Or what you do is.
I said : I know.
She said : I miss your laugh.

So I laughed. And I meant it. I laughed; she laughed; we laughed.

I laugh here too. And sometimes it's genuine. And sometimes it's for survival.

it's all candles and gingham here, little light

2007-11-18T18:10:00.000-08:00

i worry i may be too old-souled for blogging. am i supposed to write more coherent entries that address daily issues? because that's what i do for a living, and i don't want to do that in my spare time. so there you go, non-existent blog readers - you will be receiving no doses of reality from this girl.
well, maybe just a little:
i'm obsessing over alaska. i browse journalismjobs.com daily for jobs in alaska, then proceed to spend way too much time googling images of alaska. i am convinced i will end up there, complete with candles in my windows and grungy checkered table cloths.
will this be me, my entire life? chasing some combination of myself from the past and conceived notions of the future until i wilt somewhere in the middle?
on a lighter note, my ex and i have been exchanging e-mails and it's nice to know we can have a functional friendship after having an extremely fucked up relationship.
or was that all in my head? were we normal, swinging on tree branches and writing love notes in women's studies classes? when did those alleged battles happen?

my legacy in dust

2007-11-18T18:09:00.000-08:00

today: hopefully Into the Wild, rum and coke with little to no backwash, New York Times, wishing there were SCHIP-veto protests here, sad bartenders and not enough calls back to write my articles.
this weekend: some sort of quasi-meat party, forcing myself to pound kitchen tables, dancingdancingdancing in the nude, ghost busters outfits/maybeevenpainting??, library movies, some sort of zygote of a novel, remember i breathe too so maybe i am normal?
the future: alaska in real life instead of the movies, becoming not a citizen, enfants and picnics combined, growing old and laughter.

excuse me sir, you've lost your vegan cheesesteak

2007-11-18T18:07:00.000-08:00

i measure time in letters about first loves and red sweaters, the worn-down soap, in messy beginnings of ends. i do not measure time in yarn, seconds or furrowed eyebrows.
have i changed since i graduated from college three years ago? certainly i've had more conversations over vegan cheesesteaks, more fireflies have been caught and let go. but have i changed? have i grown more cautious? three years ago, i hopped in my car and drove across the country to a town of 1200, where the mountains were always within sight and i didn't finger the windowpane, i flew.
these days, i dance. we dance. Pavement plays in the living room and the wind swings my arms back and forth. but i've got to piece my wings back together again. i've got to smash fists through windows and land gracefully in the grass.

this is how the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper

2007-11-18T18:06:00.000-08:00

friday, my leg tingles. it freezes up and i hit it because i believe it's grown numb, but the sparks shock me and make their way to my heart. my heart, it's supposed to pump something like 6800 litres of blood a day, but mine disappears to climb trees and watches the day end in somebody else's body. like everyone else, i'm too late when i discover it's gone.
(...would you change...?)
i think in parentheses and ellipses; i always have. i once labored over letters and spent an average of seven hours per mixed tape.
i'm beginning to believe fluidity, in all its enigma and beauty and sadness, is one of life's few constants. when do you discover the others?

i am hoping in one or two years, i will need to pass a few minutes in an internet cafe somewhere i've not yet seen, and i'll re-read this. and i'll smile, as i often did in morocco - unless, of course, when i realized Dubyah was effing destroying the world.
asdlkrjaewiojulkzjdaoieruailerkjaklwerjelakwjraes.
i cannot CANNOT wait for that man to be tried as a war criminal.

where did all the indirect objects come from?

2007-11-18T18:05:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, my silence is a scream. The blue light filters through the air; I stare while others think I laugh.
I once fingered gingham, believing I would return to where air not arrogance is breathed and passive voice is not a term. what exactly is the difference between I had thought and I thought? Is the past so necessary that we must fragment that as well?
What do I do here? How do I learn, all over again, to live? Is it melodrama when you really feel you cannot breath; when you really do not understand most people around you? Or is that merely your own reality and you have to find some way to make it merge with others? Has mine ever merged with others?
There are moments when I'm pretty sure it has : in the back of a car, driving around Fremont Lake. With fingers intertwined, discussing the life of balloons. Waking with a smile, forgetting, momentarily, that we live in a place with curtains and wood that's slowly rotting.

Harley Davidson

2007-07-11T15:14:00.000-07:00

There are snippets of songs, not whole melodies, but enough that your capitalistic spirit draws you in and you pull out a credit card with a $516,498.22 limit on it. You could buy anything! The Czech Republic! Cotton candy! Enough Nalgene bottles to fill the old community center on 32nd street!
My friend is becoming a famous actress in Chicago, and now she can't eat falafel sandwiches in peace. She doesn't mind, really, because people ask her about cheese in Wisconsin and if she believes in post-modernism. (Or is that not believe? Or not not believe without the connotations of a double negative?)
Anyway, she still doesn't fork over the quarters for clean sheets, and she still notices that, in time, they smell like avocados - OS NOT OES - and everything is very much a bridge OR EVEN a Brigitte Bardot song.

drop the machete you call history

2007-07-08T20:53:00.000-07:00

Phrases will surface unexpectedly, and your seven-year-old self will emerge from the depths of rainy tents and modern-day tales of red-haired Swedish heroines. The words you've used your entire life no longer seem adequate, as you try to remember how it is that the person you once were uses the same words as the person you are now.
Current self : we wait patiently, for the mountains to erode, for the glaciers to melt, to remember why it is that you're here, munching on peaches and not wearing gingham-dresses in a cottage you've built yourself. There, you could forget proper pronouns.
Former self : I've waited for you to return the letters I wrote you; it's been years and the excuses I've heard include boring notions of time and space.

scarred boots

2007-07-08T18:01:00.000-07:00

It was late and hot - not a sidenote by any means - and the driveway seemed to be more of an island, floating somewhere in disconnected thoughts. I was eating a mango and it was a continuous past tense, there in the hot night time when everything was not not-sterile-bordering-on-a-tango.
I often chewed gum with my front two teeth then, tapped my pointer finger and rarely my pinky and the windows were always the same : remember Virginia? remember Buenos Aires? remember Rosemont/Ottawa/Chicago/Omaha/Wyoming/New Haven/Casablanca?
I fingered my mango pulp, creating obscene gushing noises that hit everyone in the Chevy that passed by. They didn't mind, it was too warm, their air-conditioning was broken and to top it all off, they were playing Jackson Browne. As for me, the glory of it all faded and I sang with the fireflies.

stars, stars

2007-07-05T13:05:00.001-07:00

I woke up early that day, years ago, when I believed a place that named itself "the city of drama" would prove to be my alternative salvation. The kind that comes not from steeples or spilled holy water, but from feet on gravel and mint tea. It was already hot before the sun rose, and my South African traveling partner was still cradling her pillow, a glass of rosewater and a book about an ideological continent on her hostel bedside table.
I slipped on the too-large orange slippers, bought in the 4 p.m. medina where the children beggers asked for coca and the store-owners drowned you in tea and "Insha'Allah" was a way of accepting life instead of religion.We had drank too many bottles of red wine and smoked too much hashish the night before, and I remembered to grab my last-ink-filled pen to write my own impromptu ode to the place where I would feel more lost and more at home than I ever would again.
After I climbed the stairs to the roof, where the man from the coast was dozing in the corner, I watched the world begin in shades of snapped-open blue shutters and old men in white robes selling mangoes. My face pressed to the rose-colored concrete, I took off my mask and promised the Everyday I would never forget this.