(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.

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.

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.