chikachikaboom

Jillian: Why can't we just find guys who weird but able to pretend to be normal in public? Does it always have to be one or the other?
Sara: I am convinced that there are only five guys like that in the world, and we've each already dated one. So there's only three left, and they're probably in Nicaragua.

Rainy Days and Lattes

I am sitting in the living room of the new apartment, Maggie is wandering around with her bone in her mouth, making sure that we all take notice of it. The sky is dimming, the further down the channel you go, the darker it gets. Today was a typical day for me here. Familiar and comforting. It began at Heritage getting a patented soy-drink. I then made my way down the street a little bit and stopped at Hearthside to find myself a book. I spent over an hour pouring over the books in there, the overpowering smell of new books making it's way through my nose. I spent over an hour in there and couldn't find anything worth buying. But I was determined to return to the apartment today with a book under my arm.
My next stop was Rainy Day books. Rainy day is a small shop, with creaky wooden floors. Half of Rainy Day's ceiling is over twenty feet high. The other half of the ceiling? Well, I nearly have to stoop to peruse the books. However, the musty smell of used books and the character of the creaky floors and ceilings that don't make sense makes Rainy Day my favorite place to immerse myself in the lives of the characters in those wrinkled and torn pages. In looking through the lives of many characters,an hour later I enlisted the help of the guy behind the counter. He-who-usually-leads-me-in-the-right-direction-in-terms-of-literary-indulgement fell short this time. None of his suggestions gave me that excited under the skin feelings that I get when I find a book that I just want to sit down and read right there in the middle of the store. So, I settled on a Vonnegut that I had never read before.
Though today exemplifies the good things about this place - the sky was unnaturally clear and I spent a pleasant day in book stores with coffee, I am overwhelmed with the knowledge that this is not the place for me. I love it here, I feel at home here, I feel like I belong her, but I need to remind myself that there are many other places to go and so many other bookstores to peruse.

and now I'm watching Maggie is destroying her bone.

I am

an idiot.
i am
a goner.
shit.

an age marked by optimism

And then she looked around her and realized that things only got hard for a short amount of time.
She still got annoyed
oh LORD, did she get annoyed
but she wasn't angry
she wasn't sad
she was able to sit still and smile
smile at the small things
like accidentally egg-less cookies,
sad bear and home.
Sure,
it'll get hard again,
but atleast she could take a deep breath
feel the breeze that she hadn't noticed for months
put on her hoodie
chuckle to herself
and realize that it's sort of become her trade-mark.
She's going home tomorrow
and also in june
another "summer"
of rain and early mornings and fog
the best kind of summer
She's going home tomorrow
to drive to the end of the road to clear her head
to spend time off the island that nurtured her
that made her who she is today
she's trying to accept being off that island
living somewhere new, yet familiar
but she is going home
and she gets to take another deep breath
for being with her family
mother, father, sister
for being with her family
if only briefly.

home.

cause i'm 18 (er... 19) and i don't know what I wannnt.

me: too much writing and studying - i dated something 2004 today.
sara: YOU ARE NOT FIFTEEN NO MATTER HOW MUCH IT MAY FEEL LIKE IT SOMETIMES. it's 2008.

i don't want to hear about your bad day

so much work to do.
so little motivation.
I am quite content sitting on my bed, snuggled under my fuzzy blanket, listening to fiona with my christmas lights on. It's like being in a magical land; all I need now is snow, a lamp post and Mr. Tumnus.

Chronicling a good day:
Yesterday Ann had a long lay-over here in Seattle, so I picked her up at the airport. Naturally, our first stop was to get pastries and coffee. These are the blood of our lives. We wandered around town, met with Tess, met with claire, got very stressed out because we just HAD to get cupcakes and raced to the airport.
When Ann and I were wandering around by ourselves, I don't think I have felt so at home in Seattle. It's weird, your can live in a city for over a year, be friends with people for that long, but still not feel comfortable with them. It just felt right, and I'm sorry to say that I don't feel that way about many of my friends here. I've missed running around town, keeping my fingers crossed in the direction of the weather Gods and finding new nooks and crannies to wedge myself in. Maybe I've gotten too comfortable hibernating, maybe not.

these are the products of a good day.

makeshift newspaper clipping

should be dated mid-afternoon yesterday when I was feeling sorry for myself in the HUB atrium waiting for Bethany to come buy me coffee with her monopoly money. I said, "I'm really disappointed with who I've become, I don't know what happened to the Jillian I used to be who was a good friend and sat on the sidelines watching the drama happen." And then I felt better because I admitted it.
hurrah for admitting something shitty about myself. hurrah for monopoly money.

This time it's on the corners
of the sorry excuse of a newspaper
this student body provides
I only ever play sudoku
I'm lonely today
seems to happen once a month
that my hand feels unusually empty
kind of like my heart
every time I tell myself
I'll be okay
and I am
every time
I am ok, being alone isn't bad
but there are far fewer laughs
when you're alone
the world looks colder
less friendly
I know I'll be okay
but I don't want to be alone anymore
I want to feel like I matter to someone
I don't just mean
in that relationship sort of way
but friends and family too
sometimes I really do just feel
like I'm waiting for some
knight in shining armor
to come save me and make me
feel loved everyday
I know there are people who care about me
I just want to hear it
every so often
because maybe then
my hand will feel less
empty

it's theraputic

Putting on music that I can belt out horrible vocals to and drawing fervently on a large piece of paper.
Each stroke is broken up dancing around my room as I move back to take in the whole drawing.
Stellar dance moves and vocals which don't match the songs.

I haven't felt so much like myself since June.

neat phrases oozing with profundity

It has always bothered me how at the end of super dramatic shows, everything is summed up so nicely. There's a song, and a sound over which allows the viewer to know how the characters all feel, how they are all connected to each other. This bothers me because this doesn't happen in real life, there isn't a concise ending where everything is summed up neatly with a beautifully sad song. I wish it were true. I wish I had a soundtrack to follow me around and a voice over at the end of the day summing up my life and the lives of my favorite friends and family.
So, at the end of my day, I put on the soundtrack that most fits how I'm feeling, and I write down the neat little phrases which ooze with subtle profundity.

Almost every week I want to write that I've been greeted by my past. Sometimes it's in my thoughts, where something on the side of the street or a smell will remind me of something that happened to me. A couple of months ago I was walking to campus and the way the light struck through the unexpected fog and the smell of rain just recently fallen took me into an immediate flashback of driving over the bridge at 6:30 in the morning on my way to another day of tourist herding.
I'll get an email from one of my friends back home, every once in a while, that usually starts with, 'I'm so sorry we never talk, I regret losing touch with you every day'. And just seeing the name of that person takes me back to a memory of a good time with them. And then I regret losing touch with them too.
And then sometimes it's a phone call, and usually more than one on the same day. And you reminisce about middle school and make plans to see each other soon. And you reminisce about two summers ago, because that was a good summer where you grew a lot.
The past is always going to be with us, and it's amazing that we get to reminisce and remind people of the things that we did, and we get to be reminded of the things that we don't remember. So I'm not being greeted by the past every once in a while because it is constantly with me. I am just being reminded that it's there and I was happier once.

and I will be happier again.
and life is short.
but the bad times are shorter.
and when I'm old, if I can say that I've smiled and laughed more than I've cried, then I will feel like my life was more than fulfilling. And then I'll start to tell stories of those times that I was laughing and smiling.
and that will make me laugh and smile.

balloon

swirling things happen when words don't

hurrah!

MARCH!