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

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

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"

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

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

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)

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?