assymetrical.

She wears a thousand silver bracelets on her right wrist.
With a expo marker in one hand and a curled up, outdated text in the other, she pulls every eye up from their squeaky desk. She paces. Arms up over her head. Leans against the white board with her chunky boots crossed in front. Her voice, that voice that tastes of her british childhood, covered in confidence, perfectly calloused by life, carries truth found in hope; the voice that you can't help drink in pulls a picture of divine love into a room full of young, nervous hearts with twitchy feet. She lifts her hand. She presses the crease of her text with her pointer finger to keep it from folding itself.
Her outfit doesn't make sense. She doesn't know how to use the computer. She smells a lot like musky perfume and a little like cigarette. She's not a clever puzzle to piece together. No costume. No flowery words. No band aids. No botox.

She is. She just is.
She knows she wasn't a mistake.
This hyper, cynical, scarred, disorganized woman was completey and perfectly on purpose.
She knows it.

She warns us of trivial finish lines. She tells us love is never still. She reads aloud and laughs with Flannery O'Connor, cries with Nathaniel Hawthorne, and sees like CS Lewis.


Hey Suzanne.




Thanks.

firefly.

bunks.

Life as a Spudent is back in full swing. The grass is green and the leaves are starting to turn.

We'll meet the 38 girls we'll be living with tonight at the super exciting mandatory floor meeting. Last year I wasn't prepared for the "hey, tell us something about yourself" question that was thrown at us in the first 2 1/2 minutes of sitting in the room full of beautiful strangers. Cassie pulled it together in time to avoid entering the ultra-awkward zone before the hot spot made it's way to our part of the room. Her answer sounded something like, "Uhhhhh Iiii I really like toast. A lot."
Genius. Not too personal and certainly not typical.

And we miss that girl we called Tig. A whole lot.

So here we are in the room we named the treehouse. Twinkle lights, blankets scattered, and Vogue pages and photographs covering every piece of white. We love our house.

Reunions are the best. Ever.
So much yelling. So many hugs.

In other news, I sleep on a top bunk nowadays. The lack of a child-please-don't-fall-of-the-bed bar was at first completely terrifying. But, thank the heavens, my sleeping body stayed exactly where it needed to be.

So good to be here.
So many photographs to share.
...I just need to find outlets for all of my technology that is right now lacking its share of electricity.

More to come.
I could probably write a book about first day of classes. Or an entire book about the interesting pronunciation variations that come with professors reading my name off of that sheet of paper for the very first time.

6,602,224,175

So maybe, “why?” is a dead end. Maybe a lucid definition is for comfort's sake more than for truth's sake.
Asking the answers to reveal themselves to you in a way that you see fit: an insult to the question, to narrow the answer's validity to your idea of lucidity.

green.

Mmmm, no green chile hamburger for me. No way, jose. I'll take that salad that lives in the lonely corner of your delicious sounding menu. Dressing? Nah... that stuff is for the normal kids. You can leave it off. Also, a diet coke and a new digestive system would be great.

So maybe my days of eating KFC and boxes of cosmic brownies are over. And that's really okay because egg substitute, rice cheese product, brown rice bread, and almond milk aren't nearly as awful as they sound. A little mysterious, but not awful.
And I find great joy in watching family members accidentally eat my looks-kind-of-like-cheddar-cheese substitute or take a bite of a deceivingly delicious looking almond butter and jam on fake bread sandwich.

i killed a stinkbug.

It was hideous. I couldn't clean it up. I had air freshener in one hand and about 78345 paper towels in the other. I stood there for like 10 minutes. Staring at the shoe that lived on top of the pile that once was a bug. Whining.

And then Austin dances in. "Really, Flo?" he says. (Flo being my ultra-flattering Dumb and Dumber-inspired nickname that was given to me after I started to work at a restaurant where there exists a soup of the day.)
He shakes his head. Then sends the sad creature down the toilet.

I have such a terrible rep of only half-exterminating insecty things around here.
Oops.

Looking at the mountains feels like drinking a glass of water.



I don't know if I'm ready for the coast just yet.


I won't miss that cafe that lives next to the Chevron, but I'll miss the funny looking house just down the road.

brew.

My brother walks by and witnesses my turning the coffee pot wrong side up to get the last bits into my favorite green mug. "Addict" he mumbles as he passes by.

"UhhhhIiiii I just like the way it tastes."

Hmmph.




This summer I've done some untangling.
My ideas tend to run aimless laps in my head into a big fat knot. I usually don't know where to put things and what ideas should stay ideas and what ideas I should embrace and be challenged by.

But it's less and less scary every day. The whole idea-sorting process. Sure, I feel a lot of pressure right now in my decision making, but I'm sure the majority of the pressure is coming from me. The world might be smaller than I see it in my head. I sat under a tree with maggie gyllenhaal, for goodness sake. It can't be that big. I'll do fine. Yeah, I may not know whhhaat I'll do, but I know I'm capable. Truth is, I have a lot of time. Not just 3 years left to decide what the rest of my life will look like. And I won't be stuck. That's why I'm going to college, right? So I have options. Options have always scared me in the past, but now I'm so grateful they'll exist after this whole college things passes me by.
I'm not gonna rush or worry. What do I want to study? That I can figure out. What will I be passionate about when I'm older? No idea. Older me needs some room to grow.

today.

It's supposed to be a rocketship. But if you think it's a snowmobile, that's cool too.
You really only want mayo on your sandwich again?
I wonder if you remember me from before. But I don't know if you want to remember some of the things that come along with that time in your life. So I won't ask. It's good to know you, little man. You're stronger than most.
You don't smile much. But when you do, it's brighter than yellow.
Your grandparents are lucky to have you as their own- but dear little boy, please be good to them. They carry you in the center of their hearts. They rescued you, did you know? Maybe one day you'll know.




Phone call.
Downtown. 7 o'clock. I'll be there.
You funny humans. We had a good time by that ping pong table once upon a time. We made a circle. Here we are eating enchiladas like we always did before.

The one who wants to be a fighter sits and shakes his shoulders and refuses to take conversation seriously just as i remembered. Girl crazy and always bored, he tells the one next to him to invite that girl he met that one time at that thing.


The one next to me has always been around. Not a thing in common, conversation is an incredible adventure. She and I had so many plans when we were youngins barely menstruating. We'd study psychology and become avid trail runners with more opinions, heavy textbooks, and college boys than we'd know what to do with.
We used to play Weezer in that old gold Toyota with the windows down and green chile vegetarian breakfast burritos in hand. We stayed up all night and watched movies in her little house filled with buddhas and incense.
We never knew why, but we always felt alive when we were together.


You? I haven't seen you in years. I knew I'd run into you eventually. Remember those days we brought our guitars to school and played Eagles and Eric Clapton in the atrium? We all sat around and ate gobbstoppers. So many gobbstoppers. The world was out to get us all. So we played ping pong and guitar and climbed through those cobb-webbed tunnels... remember those tunnels? I named you peaches and I don't remember why. It's really unfortunate that it stuck. And that you always ate those mysterious circus peanuts from the bookstore.

Today I wanted more than anything to trace my world in black ink. I wanted to show someone where they're standing by the angles of lines and the way that they meet.

Drawing makes sense. From eyes to mind to hand.

It makes everything else so quiet. All I hear is the strange language that my hand and my mind speak back and forth.

Quiet.
My head is never quiet.

we lived in a cloud.

Walked through my old school today.
It looked different from my less-terrified perspective.



Doris Day, Andrews Sisters, Perry Como, Nat King Cole.
Their songs spin inside of my record player and I got a little tangled in thoughts just like I used to. Fifteen year old me making up a pretty world in my head all over again.

Cigarette smoking, hair-combed boys with shiny shoes. The art, the music filled with more joy than angst. The cars colored lipstick red and behind the clouds blue. Novels, variety shows and velvet couches.


Poof.

Walk out my bedroom door and back into 2008. A beat up sports utility vehicle the color of grape jelly beans and a sack over my shoulder filled with more tiny contraptions with buttons than any human could really ever need. I'm not wearing a patterned dress snug in the waist, but faded jeans and sandals made of cork. Pfff.

A lot of life happened in the last bit of time.

Beautiful faces and wonderful afternoons spent living together under this bright blue sky dome.


But.
A part of the team is in the hospital. This old compound just isn't the same. There's one mug's worth of coffee left in the pot.
But time will keep moving and a guess will be made. No one will ever know what's best. And predicting is a waste of time. Right now Papa isn't well. Right now my mom isn't a nurse. Right now my mom shouldn't do this alone. Right now some changes will come. Right now we'll keep our heads up and keep learning to take care of each other. Right now? Simple, really.






We sure do miss those Chapman folk. The world is a little different when they're around. Not that we're not capable of making fun by ourselves... but it's like the we reflect the light in each other or something. That whole bringing out the best in someone... it's like that times 2378675. It's a combination of so many things that it makes it hard to just answer 'yeah' to a, "did you have a nice time with your family?" question. I'd rather say, "Mmmmm you'll read about them in my book one day."

Chewy pasta and light pink socks. And we'll just say that the splotchy bleached sleeve is a fashion statement.

Ooops.


I CAN make coffee. If you want ramen with an egg or a mug of coffee. Or both. I'm your woman.

I smile at old people for 8 hour chunks of time.

Yes, I enjoyed the Northwest very much. No, I don't know what to do with the rest of my life. Today the red is hotter than the green. Yeah, working here is great. Sure, I'd love to freshen your decaf. Multigrain or sourdough? It's spelled r.a.n.i. True, it is kind of ironic living in Seattle and all. Bacon or sausage? Yeah, I'll tell my dad you say hello. Order in. Check for 7 please. Have a pretty afternoon.

You strange old humans, I don't know why you get a kick out of my saying no when you ask for a refill or a fork, but you do.

Also, dear humans, staring at me with your eyebrows wrinkled into your forehead doesn't make your enchiladas cook faster.

Ten percent might have been a generous tip back in your day so I won't resent you for this dollar fifty tip. I don't know if you get out much.

Good morning, Blue Moon Cafe. Your name is far more charming than your reality. Silverware scratching plates and mega oldies blaring in the hot kitchen. French fries on the floor and there may or may not be coffee grounds in my shoe. I think the cash register was born before me. Open, you tired machine printing faded receipts. No more playing tricks on me.

glue.