My lovely friend Audrey has been assisting me with the backend work, and it should be up and running within the next week or so.  Rest assured that I will post a link to it, move over all entries, and point all new and old readers in the right direction in a subsequent post.  Just bear with me while I get the details sorted out.

In other news, happy 2010!  I have made some small resolutions this year, one of the primary ones being that I write more often.  Given my propensity to forget about my online blogs (and the desire to write without boundaries, something I cannot do if I have an audience) I think most of this writing will be relegated to my satchel-sized paper journal.  That being said, writing is an exercise, so I plan on updating this blog almost equally as often.  It’s win-win the way I see it; I get to write as a form of catharsis (paper journal) and I also get to hone my skills at writing for an audience (blog!).

In the works for this blog before I move it over to the new server: a year in review post & possibly a year ahead post.  Stay tuned.

“but the thing is
I love you.”

and loving you makes certain things mine
and so I take those bags home
and I sort through their contents
and figure you out.

when you descend from the sky into our harbor
I’ll be waiting to take you home.
————————————–

This has so much more meaning when I read it aloud.

It also doesn’t really mean anything.  Don’t get too wrapped up in the details.

Well, here goes.  For better or for worse.

Dear you,

If you listen to the following songs, and I mean really listen, maybe you’ll hear the words I dare not attempt to speak in your presence.

1. A Good Start; Maria Taylor
2. Replay; Maria Taylor
3. Small Part of Me; Maria Taylor
4. Hide and Seek; Imogen Heap
5. Star Mile; Joshua Radin
6. Hallelujah; Jeff Buckley
7. I Know, I Know, I Know; Tegan and Sara
8. Where Does the Good Go; Tegan and Sara
9. I Won’t Be Left; Tegan and Sara
10. Make Right With You; Luke Temple

Please come back.

love,
me.

—————————————————–

Dear you,

I’m not sure about you, in a great many respects.  Ours is a strange story.  I don’t think it’s over yet, but I don’t think it’s going to end the way either of us expect it to.

I just hope we both walk away happy.

love,
me.

—————————————————–

Dear you,

I am feeling smothered.

love,
me.

—————————————————–

Dear gym,

You have been calling my name.  Please know that I have heard you, loud and clear.  I am going to graduate from college, and then I’m going to enroll in fitness 101.  I promise.  I very much want to be skinny and tan by the time the next bikini season (potentially my last?!?!) rolls around.

Also, can you please help me find a way to accomplish the skinny goal without losing my boobs?  That would be great.

in gratitude,
me.

—————————————————–

Dear Black Friday shoppers,

Please don’t be crazy.

in anticipation,
me.

—————————————————–

Dear life,

I think we should sit down, have a cup of coffee, and maybe chat about things.  I have some feedback to offer you about the wrenches you’ve been chucking at me lately, and let’s just say it’s more fearful than anything else.

best,
me.

—————————————————–

Dear senior year,

Why have you robbed me of so much sleep?  Quit that.  It’s rude.

in annoyance,
me.

—————————————————–

Dear friends,

Thank you for putting up with me.  You don’t have to, you never have to, but you always do.  Please know that you make my days a little brighter and my burden a little lighter.  And, no matter what you guys say or how honest you are, you always give me hope that things are going to turn out alright.

Thank you for listening to me cry on the phone, or in person, or over iChat.  Thank you for coming over just so I wouldn’t be alone.  Thank you for fielding my endless questions that we all know have no real answer.  Thank you for always being there, even when the issue I bring up is old and should have been discarded.  Thank you for being nice, just for my sake.  Thank you for offering punches, just to make me smile.

Thank you for being amazing when all I feel is mediocre.

with endless love,
me.

—————————————————–

Dear 2009,

Odd-numbered years really aren’t my thing.  Maybe you can redeem yourself this holiday season by setting some things right.

Please.  I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.

begging on my knees,
me.

i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of the tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)
-e.e. cummings

If I could go back in time and meet anyone, right now it would be e.e. cummings, for once again reminding me of everything in this poem.

“Hello.

I know it’s been a long time since I updated my journal, and even longer since I reached out to you. I guess I just wanted to let you know that, sometimes, everything in life turns out okay. That life isn’t fleeting moments of happiness in between pain and growth and everything else; it’s everything else that exists in between these long stretches of just being. I’m happiest when I’m just being, honestly.

And maybe it’s because I grew beyond the person who brought me to my knees, but I feel like I am a better person now because of it. And I thought that you should know. Not really sure why, perhaps I just thought that you’d appreciate knowing that life really does get better, even when it gets bad.

I hope you’re doing well. I don’t know if or when I’ll update my journal, or comment, or a million things. I just know that I felt like reaching out tonight.

I hope I was right.”

Emphasis mine, added today.

Funny how I seem to stumble upon these things right when I need to hear them the most.

Recently, COM 494 has been an odd source of inspiration for me, prompting a deluge of haikus to flow from my pen one week and a partial poem another.  I think it’s the unusual amount of downtime my brain has in that class; in my three-hour HST 306 class, I have to keep my brain engaged in the lecture 100% of the time so as to not appear an idiot when the professor calls on me.  In COM 494, the mental demand isn’t quite on the same level, and Karen often asks questions that naturally prompt my mind to wander.

And so, I write.  Haikus, poems, bits of prose, whatever my brain is thinking, I put it down on the notebook in front of me.  Flipping through these pages would reveal the strangest narrative to one not well-acquainted with the last three months of my life, but for those in the know it’s just another set of details to juggle with everything else.

A few of those haikus are worth sharing.  It should be noted that anything I share (both in this post and in the future) that is of a “creative” nature (short stories and poetry included) should be taken with a grain of creative salt.  While some of these creations are fully truthful, there are equally as many that employ quite a bit of creative liberty.  And, no, I won’t disclose which ones bend the truth and which ones follow it.  That’s part of the fun.

My haikus don’t have a name, though they certainly follow a theme.  Enjoy.

looking over the
glittering Phoenix skyline
you kissed with meaning.

our heavy breathing
cacophony of passion
synchronized. in. out.

wished on a shooting
star for you to fall in love
with me; not enough.

The poem I started working on during last week’s class is a little reliant on metaphors and analogies, and I’m not sure how much I really like that.  It’s also only halfway done, so don’t expect me to share it for a while, if I deem it sharable at all.

On a semi-related note, listening to the song “Red Right Ankle” by the Decemberists the other day prompted me to create a playlist folder by the same name within iTunes.

“This is the story of the boys who loved you, who love you now, and loved you then.  And some were sweet and some were cold and snuffed you, and some just laid around in bed.  Some had crumbled you straight to your knees, did it cruel, did it tenderly.  Some had crawled their way into your heart to rend your ventricles apart.  This is the story of the boys who loved you.  This is the story of your red right ankle.”  -”Red Right Ankle,” the Decemberists.

I just thought it would be cool/useful/neat/interesting to collect songs that reminded me of/I associated with boys who fall into the description presented in the lyrics.  Some are friends, some are lovers, most are exes, but all are important and have shaped me in irrevocable ways as they passed though my life.  At best, it’ll be a musical collection of the moments we shared, one which I can listen to without bitterness or regret.  At worst, it will be an interesting thought experiment that I’ll abandon in favor of more pressing matters, such as the newest episode of Glee.

I’m sort of hoping for the former.

But I’ve been recast,
(Into a new role, a new light, a new mold)
shelved, and forgotten
(reconsidered and abandoned)

and if life is just a quest
to fill our God-shaped holes
then mine should have ended that August night
together, on your balcony.

or that night we walked to the corner store
and I finished your vodka.

or every time you called me beautiful
(and meant it)
or adorable
(and meant it)

no.

it should have ended that night
when you barricaded me against my demons
whispering that,
“neither of us is comfortable in our own skin.”

these miles are kissed with the glitter of hope
and marred with the skid marks of defeat
17 miles of highway become the goodbye letter I could never write.
I’ve got 17 miles to write you out of my life.

———————————————————

It’s funny how life works sometimes.  How different things are now versus how they were then, and how much has stayed the same.  Just an observation.  Nothing to give more than a fleeting thought.

Oh, and the above is a poem I worked on for a handful of the last four weeks or so.  As horribly self-referential as it is, I’m pleased with how it came out.  It was cathartic to write at the very least.

“You change your mind come Monday and turn your back on me.  You’ll take your steps away with hesitance; you’ll take your steps away from me.”

“Cautioners.”  Jimmy Eat World.  Those were the words falling softly out of the speakers, narrating back to me what had just happened in the walls of my house.  James had just decided he didn’t want to waste his time, and he walked out of my life.  It was a Monday.  It was the last day I could call him my best friend and mean it.

At the time I looked at the whole situation with a bitter kind of irony.  Of course Jim Adkins would have the words to narrate my life.  It’s what Jimmy Eat World had been doing for the last few years of my existence.  Of course he would narrate this breakup, and with such perfection.  I found it funny, and Geoff and I laughed about it that night while we ate ice cream in the park.

I didn’t cry.  Not until I crawled into my bed at 3am, alone.  It was then that I let my body succumb to the sobs that had been building over the last 5 hours.

In retrospect, I probably knew that James was going to break up with me.  It’s probably why I made the mix “impulsively.”  On some level, I was consciously aware of the course our relationship would take.  Even so, I don’t think a movie could have planned that moment in my car any better.

This story has a point, I promise.

If you read my last post, then you noticed that it was a list of songs from a mix I called “white noise.”  I made that mix the night I couldn’t sleep last week, the night I stayed up worrying about ASU and law school and friends and my life and, most of all, whether the person I was seeing was going to leave me soon.  I made the mix so I could put it on and drown out all of my worries with white noise.

Looking back on the songs titles I selected and the overall themes of the music, it seems that I’ve once again managed to forecast the soundtrack to my life.  The songs tell the story of the brief kinship we shared better than I could in my own words.  Many aren’t literal comparisons, and some only bleed as deep as the song title, but most are more significant than that.

I think I’m telling you this right now because I want to believe on some level that any amount of forethought, no matter how minute, serves to make the aftermath that much easier to swallow.

We lit our Roman candle, and while he thinks the sparks weren’t there or weren’t enough or weren’t right, I think he just turned around before everything fully came to life.

Each song on this list holds some significance in my life right now.  I’d share those with you, but I’d rather you find your own significance in these songs.

I haven’t come to many conclusions, and I’d be hard-pressed to believe that anyone else could, either.  I think we could all come up with lists that describe the general tenor of human nature, but I don’t think anything we could say would ever fully describe what it is that makes us human.  Humanity in itself is a funny thing.  It’s probably the most valuable thing we have, which is what makes dehumanization so awful.  Given the inherent value in humanity, I find it odd how easily we devalue the humanity of others in our everyday lives.

(A small aside: It’s not just that we dehumanize our enemies.  We dehumanize anyone not within the immediate circle of our lives.  A cashier at a grocery store.  A salesperson in a clothing store.  A law enforcement officer.  That girl you passed in the street.  These people are nothing more than fixtures in your life, stock characters that mean nothing to you.  This sort of dehumanization isn’t inherently dangerous; it only becomes problematic if we allow someone’s status as an “extra” in our story to determine the way we treat them.  I will probably address this in more detail in the future.)

My point, however, isn’t about dehumanization.  It’s about humanity.  After nearly 48 hours of contemplation, I can only come to one solid conclusion about human nature: the only truly consistent aspect of human nature is that we hurt one another.

Think of every person you care about in your life at present.  If you haven’t hurt them yet, you will.  As much as I’ve thought about it, I haven’t yet found a way to escape this small and simple fact.  I don’t really know what to think about this conclusion.  Certainly it paints a bleak picture of humanity.  I have to admit, though, that I’m not too troubled to think that we’re exceptionally skilled at inflicting pain upon one another.

The thing is, as good as we are at hurting those about whom we care, the human soul is resilient.  It’s the only thing that explains why there’s so much love and joy in a world hell-bent on pain.

If given the opportunity to live in a world free of hurt and pain, I would have to pass it by.  A world without hurt and pain is also a world without risk, without joy, and without love.  You can only be hurt by someone you care about, because hurt comes from an exploited vulnerability.  If you don’t care about someone, you’re not likely to make yourself vulnerable to them.  A world without hurt, then, would be a world without vulnerability.  And I don’t know about you, but to me, a world without vulnerability is a world without the possibility of love or happiness.

I don’t know if I’ve made anything clear whatsoever.  I just sort of banged out the thoughts swimming around in my head in an effort to quiet the noise.  I feel it’s appropriate to close with a quote from God-Shaped Hole by Tiffanie DeBartolo.

“I don’t believe in anything.  But I believe in the possibility of everything.”