3000

According to my stat counter, I started this blog in May of 2008. I'm not quite sure why I did, and I'm not quite sure what compelled me to come back, in November of 2013. I wrote sporadically up until mid-2010, and then just stopped. Oddly enough, I continued to get page views, from random places I'd linked the url, or perhaps intrepid Internet trekkers. Truthfully, I think tumblr happened, and I just lost interest in writing when I could instead reblog pretty pictures and spew random text snippets in an attempt at humor. In November of 2012, my senior English class was in the thick of W's, our creative writing assignments, that all seniors do in senior English at my school. Oddly enough, I enjoyed writing, and found I wasn't bad, according to my teacher and my classmates. As always, praise breeds a need for more praise, and a return to the blog felt like a lovely way to get more attention for my writing. (Make of that what you will, I'm a selfish human being.) Initially, I just posted assignments straight from my class (they're tagged "w" if you want to read them!), but the constant stream of writing about certain subjects, or just about My Life tired me out. What if I wanted to write poetry? That'd make a good blog post... and so it happened. Three thousand hits later, I have a Real Life Blog.

These Days

Spring break saps the motivation from my limbs. Time moves at a slower pace (or so it seems), allowing me the gift of a whole book in a day, devoured slowly over many hours. It's been a while since I read for pleasure. Long bus rides make knitting a necessity, and a whole pair of socks sits ninety nine percent completed in my knitting bag. College decisions happened, and still, I'm stuck in limbo. Waitlists happen. With two full days left of pure free time, I'm starting to feel the clouds of doubt descend. Work, this break, has simply... passed me by. A paycheck came for me in the mail today, and I simply read the number and set it aside. I take my job for granted, these days. Even heavy chains of potential probation don't seem to drag me down. These days, I'm floating, and I'm not sure how to come back down. Apathy has set in, and the only things I feel passionate about are those the larger world says don't matter, or those I do on my own time. College has never seemed so far off.

Supernothing (Effort, and Why It Sucks)

Did I mention that effort doesn't come naturally to me?
Have I ever told you that if it weren't for my friends
family
teachers
I'd be a nothing (supernothing, going nowhere fast
and I don't care).
Take today, for example:
Right now, I'm meant to be at a
Dance
(of all things)
Meeting other queer kids and generally having a
Good
Time
(capital letters merited).
And yeah, that'd be awesome but
Effort
Doesn't come easily to me who
Will probably end up on the streets in five years because I
Blow all my money
On knitting needles and
Stolen library books.

Posed

In their eyes, you are not you anymore.
Reduced to a series (collection, grouping, abundance)
Of lines and planes, dark and light,
Shadows and highlights,
Tones.
You look at them but they do not see you,
Only
The precise geometry of your ratios:
Eyes to nose to mouth to chin and shoulders, beyond.
Pure, spatial construction, no
Judgement tweaking fixing just
Faithful recording
Setting your lines down on paper
Capturing
In a moment
What you truly look like.

Sunday

After a week of clouds and heaviness, stepping outside this morning felt like heaven. Still cold, but the clean, snapping kind of cold that comes with the lingering breath of winter, not the sticky oppressiveness of a damp, 40 degree spring. A wind came through last night, and whisked aside any traces of moisture. Even this morning, we still felt the briskness, heating our cheeks and roughly slapping our chins with bouts of cold. Above our hatted heads, the sky seemed washed clean, taking up more space than allotted. It flew down between buildings and scraps of cloud, piggybacking on the wind, a force of depth as much as temperature. The sun glinted, stinging our eyes with a light as bright and cutting as ice. Even in winter, the sun can wound. Trailing tears of cold and light, we continued on our way, still aware of the vastness of the sky, falling away around our heads. We encountered a busy intersection, and paused. Almost unnoticed, we spiraled up and out of ourselves and flew with the clouds, skimming over previously unnoticed buildings and hidden rooftops. The world, for a moment, distilled, small crystalline images forming and melting quickly as snowflakes. When we touched down again, I looked at you and remembered sitting down here and now to write this, on this particular blustery Sunday, just one in a string of Sundays that connect our weeks. In a year, will you even remember?

Random Bits (My Day)

Last night: a random Target shopping cart, probably stolen and dumped, standing forlornly on the corner of a dark and rainy street. My dog sniffed it suspiciously.

Today: the unexpected surprise of early dismissal from practice, and then the complete letdown caused by a huge traffic jam of unknown origins. The firetrucks didn't seem in any hurry.

The Wasteland: phenomenal. Layers upon layers of words and meanings, waiting to be picked apart: the ultimate cake. Delicious.

Unexpected depth: velvet sky turned liquid, the moon suddenly giving light to thousands of unseen miles between Here and There.

Morning tea: arrived on the doorstep sometime during the night, heaven in a cardboard box. Perfect.

Lovely: a meeting of the minds, beyond class, of books and the power of wishlists. These things should happen more often.

Overall: fueled by caffeine, in the best way possible. Amen.

Interior

Slowly, ever so
Slowly I'm
Learning, infinitesimally, to
Take an interest, even
Care a little talk a little stay a little longer
Branch a little fail a little fall a little more
Each
Time
Until
I resemble
Humanity
No longer boxed up
Caged in
Bottled and stoppered feelings mixing colors until they're just
Dark
Murky
Brown.

A Sudden Wave of Being an Adult

Usually, the library isn't mentally draining. There's no pull on my brain, no pressure behind my eyes, the thrumming of monotony normally kept at bay. Today, not so. Endless hours on the children's desk, punctuated only by overly questioning children and slightly overbearing adults. Periodically, the phone rings, inquiries from upstairs. Yes, I say, it's fine. But really, the turbines of monotony only provide anti-power, sapping me of my ability to Get Things Done. A small children's book, reeking of memory, keeps the day bearable. I read the whole thing.

The day drains rather than ends. There's no sharp crack between work and play, work and the rest. On this day, one simply flows into the other. On the bus, my SmartTrip has no money, and I stupidly add the coins to the box before swiping the card. Sixty cents lost, and no bus ride for me. Want to ride? the driver asks. Not worth it, I reply. I'll go through this next time I need the bus. Instead, I disembark and walk a lazy loop to the Metro, descending through wafts of an unidentified stench. Twenty dollars on the card, and maybe a train soon, if I'm lucky.

If I'm lucky.

Wind-Up Girl

No lock and key exist for me to
Open up your head so I
Drink up, crunch down, mascerate
Mundane and esoteric facts, letters and questions that
Inform me, entice me with everything but
how
you
work.

Some days I just want to climb inside your
Head and walk around and
Build a blanket fort and
Curl up and this way at least I know you're thinking

(Of Me).

Work Walk #3

The cold nips at your ears, reminding you yet again that you forgot a hat. Spurred on by the brisk weather, you stride around the corner of the library and swing your way across the street. Your breath plumes out in front of you, even though the thermometer reads thirty-six degrees. Practically balmy. Crossing the street, your gaze momentarily flies skyward. Clouds cover the previously clear sky, and you briefly, achingly, suddenly miss the stars you weren't used to seeing. Your long strides make your boots clump reassuringly down on the frozen sidewalk, and you're so taken with the sound and the glittering lights over the horizon you walk right across an alley without looking. A brief burst of panicked adrenaline propels you the rest of the way, and afterwords you laugh inwardly at the complete lack of trucks coming at you. Across the street, the new addition to the elementary school glows softly under streetlights. The stairs have a poetical air to them, like an unfurled seashell. Were they always there? There's a sneaking suspicion you are just noticing them now. Ahead of you, a couple laughs, boy and girl moving in harmony as they head to an unknown destination. You follow them, momentarily diverted onto a similar path. After all, you are going the same direction. Just before you reach your endpoint (almost caught up to them now), something catches your eye. Hulking and heavy, an orange snowplow sits at the corner, shyly peaking out from the darkness of a lesser known street. The plow in front almost looks like a smile, jauntily curved up towards you. And you? You smile back, in the face of the thirty-six degree weather that can't possibly include snow. Just you and the dinosaur snowplow, grinning.

Ketchup

And she asked,
"What's that stain
On your pants?"
And I said,
"It's ketchup."
Head held high, daring defiance, messy and exposed.
And instead of judging,
She laughed
And said,
"Good for you! Was it worth it?"
And I grinned right back and said,
"Yes!"
And in my head I thought, in passing:
I want a girl who will laugh with me at
Ketchup stains 
On my pants.

Rain Walking

If you turn up your collar, just so, and scrunch your shoulders up around your neck like closed wings, the rain just... slides. It's possible to stay both warm and relatively dry just by keeping the rain off your neck.  You move through and around the drops, a little hutch of warmth and dryness braving the elements. When your hair is short, like mine, you learn these things quickly. As you walk, the rain floods around your feet, the kind of rain that rushes down so hard it continues right onto the sidewalk. You're wading through minuscule rivers, each one carrying its own load of trash and leaves. Slowly, as you continue on your way, you notice... not so much a smell but a feeling. The world slowly washes itself away, the sound of cars replaced by echoing rain and the underlying dirty scent of streets fading into rainy purity. The city, for a moment, feels clean.

What's Coming

High 60's, slight breeze, sun. We uncurl ourselves from the batting and flannel of winter, unwrap in our minds the fresh shoots of spring. Ideas are growing. Here, in the depths of January, we remember days to come. Muscles loosen, shoulders relax, toes uncurl inside suddenly too thick socks. Longingly, we speak, in quiet voices, of green, warmth, single layers next to the skin. As we drink in the blue sky above, so different from the dreary light of yesterday's gray, we think to ourselves, savor this, and bottle the memory for a rainy day.

Disagreement of the Hardest Order

If you don't agree with me
And I don't agree with you
We butt heads.
Even if we agree to be respectful
We butt heads.
Yes, I value you
And your friendship
And your opinion but really
Can't you see how this changes my view of you?
I
try
try
try
not to let your ideas
Poison my idea of you
But sometimes it's
really
really
hard.
I still love you for
Who you are and
The power of your beliefs but
Like I said before,
It's hard.

I know it's best to take in as many different ideas and perspectives as possible, and I know that not everyone will agree with me or my opinions. Your ideas aren't even misguided or invalid or blatantly idiotic like the opinions of so many others; they're lovely, well thought out, logical and rational forces of will, but that's what makes them so hard to swallow. I know that you value your opinions just as much as I value mine, and even though we can talk about them and discuss without taking the other down, the undercurrent of "what if" lurks beneath the veneer of our polite conversation. There's always the backing tone of "I Do Not Agree". Disagreement happens, and I know it happens, but it still makes me sad when I see friends going down a path that I view as blinkered to the wider worldviews on the issue. I try to learn as much as possible, take in as many perspectives as I can, see from all sets of eyes and walk in multiple pairs of shoes. However, I've found that, even as it opens my mind, this strategy makes me more and more suspicious, more questioning, less likely to be bought by one perspective or another. I find it hard to form my own opinions without thorough research and contemplation. I can only hope that my friends do as much research as I do about their opinions, because I feel that one should take make their decisions only after they find at least one viewpoint opposing theirs, and they can still say that their opinion is valid after discussing and researching the other side. It's worked for me, and I can only hope it will work for others.

Some Days

Some days
Some days
Some days I just want to steal other people's words
Make them slip down my throat and then back up
Regurgitated
So I don't have to think about
Everything that makes me
Me.
I feel unoriginal
Burdened by worries, hurries, and
Stress
Crawling up my throat and choking me
Blocking me
Haunting me and hawking me
Tight fingers of a small green goblin
That refuses to let go.

Night Drizzle

Outside the library, a stiff wind blows and the rain drizzles down your neck. The flag on the flagpole shivers along with you as you hurry towards your destination. Cars drift by, each its own little world of warmth and dryness. A few late stragglers huddle together at the bus stop across the street, and you silently commiserate  as you wait for the crossing signal. Instinctively, you hunch your shoulders and turn up your collar, thankful for the black wool of your jacket keeping the wet off. Eerie neon flashing spurs your movements, and you hurry across the street, head down against the wind and rain. Your feet take you away from the glowing lights of restaurants and stores and direct you downhill. You skirt a series of metal grates, thankful your boots grip the slick surfaces. Preoccupied as you are with keeping your footing, glancing at the perpetually parked delivery truck as you cross an alley, you almost forget to look up.

You've been travelling downhill, but it's unclear how high up you actually are, until you look. Directly in front of you, framed by strands of electrical wires and the mishmash weaving of trees, lights, and buildings, the lights of a city appear. In this rain, they appear ghostly and misted over, slowly rising from the cloudy depths of time and space. Even in this weather, the view stops your feet, letting your eyes feel even as your neck shivers and your teeth click together from cold. You've seen this view a hundred times, but here, in this cold rain, it looks especially beautiful. Plumes of fog flow through the streets, and the wind flashes the rain faster. As the cold begins to soak through your hair, your body takes over and your feet continue downward.

When you look up again, the city is gone. In its place, misty trees and the odd under-glow of rainy streetlights blend into dark gray clouds tinted pinkish by city lights. You continue on, boots clump-slapping on the wet pavement, dodging more sidewalk grates and slippery grass. As you near your destination, you realize you can actually hear the rain and wind, but no cars. The world is silent. Looking both ways, you step out into the middle of the street and let your hearing spread out. No cars, no dogs, no city noises. In the distance, a loose street sign clonks against its metal pole, but the wind soon shifts and the rain-sound returns. Complete and utter stillness, in the middle of a city.

At the intersection, the stoplights silently change from green to red to yellow and back, an endless cycle uncaring. In this light, the colors mutes to shades of gray. The whole world reduced to monochrome and senses, where your boots stick to wet asphalt and your turned up collar almost but-not-quite keeps the cold off your neck, where the sound of rain-wind-silence melds with the eye-speak of trees-lights-mist. Even as the cold seeps through your body and trickles down your neck, even as your breath adds to the fog and your breathing ghosts into the silence, the world spreads out, bigger than you can hear-taste-touch-smell-see. Even up here, surrounded by houses and wires and signs-dogs-cars-underglow of city pollution, the mist still rolls down and engulfs, softening edges. And under your feet, the world turns.

Moments

tick
In between moments
tock
The clock thunks
tick
Arms slamming into place like lead doors
tock
Measuring out my time
tick
When thoughts drift between seconds
tock
Before the hand comes down
tick
And slices through my head
tock
Breaking my coherence
tick
Into so many
tock
Shattered
tick
Diamonds
tock

Metal

The room is quiet, except for the occasional page turning or the underlying click-clack of laptop keyboards. The fluorescent lights shine over many toiling (or most likely slacking) high school students, their sweatshirts showing a school name in varying shades of navy, gray, or white. The teacher at the front of the room vaguely scribbles in the margin of some paper they’re grading, probably for the oh-so-lofty upperclassmen they’d rather be dealing with. Nobody likes supervising ninth graders.
I always sit about the fifth row up, in a chair that swings out to the right. I can’t concentrate if the chair goes the other direction. Today, however, concentration is not on my mind. I only have Spanish homework left, and my severe dislike of the subject prevents me from caring if I do a good job or not. The workbook pages pass quickly, with a little help from GoogleTranslate and the dictionary at the back of the chapter. There are more important matters at hand.

Back in the good old days of freshman year, my school hadn’t figured out how to block many music listening websites. There was Youtube, of course (and there still is, thank goodness), but for those of us who took our music seriously and didn’t want to pay, there was Pandora.

Laptop click-thunks open, headphones settle gently into ears. Click-click-click with the mouse and the lovely blue Pandora screen appears. Pandora, simple and brilliantly easy: input an artist, and the algorithms within the program spits back songs by similar artists. It’s better than listening to the radio, with fewer commercials.
So, what shall I listen to today? Well, let’s see what the algorithm gives me. Silence, then tick-tick-tick of a high hat cymbal, then the slow, dull boom-boom of a bass drum. I’ve never heard this song before. Before I can think anything else, fuzzy guitar distortion pounds my ears, and then a voice, gravelly and electronic, and then guitar the riff everyone knows, even if they don’t know where it’s from. I do know this song, but I’m not thinking anymore.

The guitar and the drums reverberate all through my body. I can feel the vibration in the floor. My boots are stuck to the ground, my head feels like it’s about to explode. I’m suddenly a million pounds. I can’t think, or feel, or do anything but listen. I don’t know if my eyes are open or closed, if I’m standing or sitting anymore. As the tempo rises and the guitars shriek, I’m flying too. Just as I’m sure the song is ending, the distortion rises and I slam back into my body, back from my journey riding the spikes and valleys of jagged vocals and throbbing drums. The song peters out with a long trail of background static and one last note.

I remember to breathe again. The feeling slowly returns to my fingers. My feet unstick themselves from the floor. The weight lifts. I experimentally shift in my chair, and my whole body protests. I’ve cramped up in the four minutes I’ve been sitting here. Dazedly, I gather my things for my next class, not sure what just happened or what I just heard. The song plays back through my thoughts. Belatedly, I check the song listing, and a surprised chuckle escapes my throat in this quiet room. The little box flashes an album cover, and the words “Iron Man” followed by the artist. I stop, and frown, and then smile as recognition dawns. Black Sabbath. Still grinning, I leave for my next class, humming under my breath.

Printed News

I just spent two hours reading the paper.

Contrary to what most people seem to think about my generation, I love the newspaper and printed news, and most of all I love the Sunday New York Times. I usually start with the Magazine section, then Style, Arts and Leisure, Sports, Travel, Week in Review, then the Book Review, and lastly the Front Page. It really does take me close to two hours to get through all of that because (get this) I actually read most of it. I skim all the headlines and articles, and read about 1/3-1/2 of the stories on average. I love them Modern Love column in the Style section, the final essay in the Magazine, and the random articles in Week in Review. I tolerate the Sports section (mostly because I think the Washington Post sportswriters are better), but it usually has one or two good articles. I always read the music articles in Arts and Leisure, and at least one Front Page article.

I don't know why I stick so strongly to printed news. My family has always gotten the paper delivered: Washington Post during the week, New York Times on Sundays. We recently started getting the Sunday Post as well, except it's delivered on Saturday, so I get a preview of the greatness that is the Sunday Times. I've been reading the paper basically since I could read, starting with the comics (which I still read religiously) and working my way up. Even on a school day, I still sit down and read most of the front page, and the comics, and the Metro section if I have time. I skim Sports, and whatever extra excerpt there is (Food on Wednesday, Weekend on Thursday, Magazine on Sunday). Whatever I don't get to in the morning, I read when I come home, even if it's at 9:30 at night when I get home from work. It's just something I do. I feel uninformed if I don't read the paper, out of the loop, behind. I treasure that I'm able to pick up the paper in the morning, shake it out of its tight plastic covering, and flip it over to see the day's news. Even if I've already heard about some of the headlines via Facebook or regular Internet escapades, I always go back and read about them in the paper anyway.

Some may say my paper reading ways are a waste of time, that I could just get up to the minute news on the Internet, or save paper and subscribe online. Yeah, I could do that. But really, would it feel the same to sit down for two hours on a Sunday morning at my computer screen, or an iPad? Can I drink tea and not worry about accidentally spilling it on my my news? My computer doesn't smell like ink, doesn't leave a dusky trail on my fingertips. It's just not the same. So, to you, doubters, haters of the printed word, I say this: my two hours with the paper are some of the most relaxed and happy times I have during the week. It's my unwinding time, when I can fill my head with ideas and thoughts not my own, when I can learn about everything that's bigger than me, far off places and new ideas, music, art, lives. The Internet is just not the same, even if the words and articles are identical. My two hours with the paper ground me, and let my mind float, every single day.

Proceed At Your Own Risk

Warning. Unreality Ahead. Proceed At Your Own Risk.

The sign stares at me, its letters black and menacing against the pristine white background. I look around. It’s a perfectly ordinary suburban street, houses displaying tidy lawns and cars parked in driveways. I look back at the sign, then down at the sidewalk. It, too, seems perfectly ordinary. The sky above shows a few clouds, but nothing radical or unheard of.

I proceed at my own risk. One step, two steps, three. Nothing. I step less tentatively. Step. Step. Stepstepstep. Still nothing. Then, out of the corner of my eye, a flash of white. I turn my head. It’s a chicken. White, with yellow legs and a little red floppy bit on top of its head, like any normal chicken. It’s normal sized, normally shaped, and as far as I can tell, behaving in normal chicken fashion. It cocks its head at me.

Warning. Unreality Ahead. Proceed At Your Own Risk.

The words appear in my head without stopping to funnel through my ears. I stop. The warning sounds again, coupled with a cluck. The chicken stares at me, its eyes not leaving my face. Is this normal chicken behavior? The chicken continues staring, and I stare back, searching for the source of the disembodied words now flashing through my head. Warning. Warning. Leave now. Warning. Cluck. The chicken takes a step closer, then another. Step. Step. Stepstepstep.  In response, I back up, matching the chicken step for reverse step. Step. Step. Stepstepste-

The ground disappears beneath me. I’m falling backwards, looking up at the fast shrinking chicken head peering over the edge of what appears to be a hole that wasn’t there before. It forlornly waves a wing at me, shaking its head sadly. Or that might have been my imagination. That’s definitely not normal chicken behavior. This is all my imagination. Any second now, I’ll wake up. Please tell me I’ll wake up. I can’t be falling. There was no hole there, and no chicken. There can’t have been. This isn’t happening . This isn’t happening. This isn’t ha-

I hit the ground.

Splat.

My eyes open. I’m in my own bed. It’s dark. My clock, ever vigilant on the desk at the foot of my bed, reads 11:23. I exhale. Just a dream. Just a dream. Just a-

Cluck.

I look. Nothing. Cluck. There it is again. Cluck. Cluck. Cluckcluckcluckcluckcluck.

Drawers spill out onto the floor, of their own accord. They’re full of chicken feathers. My closet door bursts open, feathers spiraling out in a giant wave of deadly softness. I’m paralyzed. Feathers stream in through the windows, fall from the ceiling, materialize under the bed. I’m being carried on a rising tide of feathers, destination unknown. I can’t breathe. Where are they taking me? Oh god it’s just a dream it has to be a dream PLEASE LET ME WAKE UP I’m so scared I don’t even like chickens where am I going why me why me why why why why why-

Splat.

I open my eyes. Bright sunshine, coolness. Tidy front lawns, cars parked in driveways. A girl stands in front of me, reading a sign with great concentration. She pauses, then takes a step. Step. Step. Stepstepstep. She doesn’t see me. I take a step forward and she turns, locks eyes with me, pauses. I stare, and she stares back.

Cluck.