Heavens, is it this time of year again already?

My favorite part of last year was when Brandon tried to endorse me, but because he's much, much sexier than I am everyone decided to nominate him. Even though he lives in Yelm.

The silhouette of the grill on my balcony startles me when I catch a glimpse of it while I'm roaming in the middle of the night. I'm not used to it yet. Last night, pacing restlessly along the lake, I stumbled into a blackberry bramble I wasn't expecting. I need to stop tromping about the neighborhood in the smaller hours, because one of these nights I'm going to come across something tougher than thorns.

I'm actually doing pretty nicely during the days, but at night I still want to be where everything else isn't. I want to be tying each of my toes with helium balloons and wafting over back roads and fields of daisies, doing your hair for the ball and whispering secrets to dirty children with their two front teeth gone. I can fold in half and fit right in your pocket, you know.

To one or the other of them, I would say, "Just what is it that you wanted from me? Here is a list of options; please pick one. Reading minds is among the many things I am no good at." To a few I would say, "Yeah, I didn't know what I was doing, either. Sorry about that."

But I know what I need to do, and that is to sit on balconies and docks and fluffy white clouds, carving a thousand pages of e e cummings into the smallest veins I can dig out. I need a few more late afternoons of ice-cold cocktails and giggling so hard I nearly fall out of deck chairs, of ridiculously grandiose statements that make me screech, "Ow! I think I just rolled my eyes so hard I lodged a contact in my cranium!" I need to fall quickly in and out of love with three dozen pretty boys with visible tattoos and eyeliner, all communicated via a half-smile and a wink from across the room.

No touching, please, unless for hugging and friendly socks on the arm. Your fingerprints are, at this exact moment, freaking my shit out. Get out of my shopping cart, please.

New grill! Come to my house and cook meat and non-meat isotopes! Super fun times!

Caroline and I assembled a grill named Charlotte from an assortment of parts this evening. Barbecues are a-coming.

I opened my bedroom windows for the first time this year on Sunday, and I've been eating super-cold plums and nectarines like they're going out of style. I would follow you home for plums. I love plums.

I'm not sure I'm ready for it to be summer yet. I've spent a lot of time looking at my fingernails lately, really studying them, because I can't seem to drag my thousand-pound eyeballs up above anyone's collarbones. I painted myself into a little corner over here, making stupid decisions and then refusing to deal with their consequences, and I've only just realized that the only way out is to wait for the paint to dry.

Ok, so who do I know that works at Microsoft? I can see you out there, but I don't know just who you are. Come out, come out.

I'm feelin' like a sheep in wolf's clothing, so I'm just going to put my head down on this here desk and my thumb up, and y'all can let me know when the game's over.

I started out the day in soft skirts and pastels, but by evening, when it was time for going out, all I wanted was tight and low-cut, dark eyes and high heels and messy hair. I wanted to look like I understand what all the attention is about, like I could have a garter full of matches hidden under my tight jeans.

For me, understand. Not for you.

My weekend, which was unplanned until Friday evening, has turned into one filled with cocktails and winking and small dark places and sexy people dancing. I miss Cat, who would be right in the middle of all of this, introducing herself to cute boys and making twelve new friends at each party.

It looks like I'm putting together a trip to Florida in August, because evidently I feel a need to go to the hottest places possible at the hottest possible time. Next stop: the surface of the sun. I'm going to visit the grandmas, which makes me feel vaguely panicked.

I hate the feeling that everything I thought was solid is drifting and dissolving, that no new continents are rising anywhere. That someday soon I'm going to run out of rocks. What I need is a hug, two deep breaths, and a little bit of luck.

While I'm there I'll hopefully get to see Amanda and Jimmie and Nick, and we'll all talk too fast about high school and giggle like sixteen year olds and participate in shenanigans. I never feel too small for my skin around any of them, and between that and the Sarah and Jesse visit in two (!) weeks, it's almost like there are life rafts in sight. And I don't find myself dreading a trip back out there the way I usually do, as though I'm learning to forgive the place for everything that happened there. Not that I'll ever move back to the Clearwizzle or call it home, but someday I might not hate it.

When our eyes catch like pinky-swears as you reach over to tuck my hair behind my ear all I can think of is you rolling up your sleeves to wash dishes and it makes me blush to my toes.

I can't blush just a little bit--it's all or nothing with this face. I wish that I had a darker (less freckled) complexion so that people wouldn't be able to see when I turn as red as the tomatoes on my sandwich.

So anyway, what I've done is I've buried a bottle of smiles. Smiles don't go bad, and sometime after one or both of us have gotten bored and wandered away they'll be found, by someone with a spade and a sour disposition. It's not that they'll remember, because they weren't here, but they'll know. And that will be the important part.

Ok, so here's the thing.

We all know that I consider a guiding hand on the small of my back to be one of the sexiest, most intimate touches ever. It's an old fashioned gesture and so it sadly rarely ever happens, especially not in this town where everyone is all scaredy-scared of touching. Regardless, it's something that's been known to (under the right circumstances and with the correct person) make me demand that we turn around right now and go back to someone or another's place. None of you want to know any of this, but I have a point, and my point is that when it is the wrong person touching me there? It gives me the yucky shivers like a strong wind from down a dumpster-filled alley. Makes my skin crawl off, almost.

I didn't quite realize this until today, is all, but as it turns out it gives me a jab-you-in-the-gut-with-my-sharp-elbows reflex faster than touching my ears without permission will. (Although I have, in recent years, started to back down off the ear-touching karate chop. Because this is Seattle, where everyone is scaredy-scared of touching, and my ears are usually safe. Anyway they were, right up until I told you about how much I hate that.)

In case you were wondering, I did not jab Poor Unsuspecting Guy in the gut. But that wasn't for lack of thinking about it.

My further point is that I have decided that this will from now on be my cure for any No Reason Sads. I might be sad, I'll think, but at least the important places for touching are not being touched by the Incorrect Person.

It's been a really strange couple of days, full of things like boxes of sausage and boys chasing me down the street and late-night visits full of psychoanalysis and awkwardness. When I used to get drunk and talk about theoretical physics I'd get excited about the possibility of parallel universes, about the thought that everything splits off in different directions all the time--about the idea that sometimes these different worlds could intersect and that we could enter them without even knowing it. (What? Shut up, drunk logic is awesome.) The past few days have felt like that very thing has happened, that everything is a couple of degrees to the side of where it should be.

The reason I am on hiatus from boys is because I can no longer stomach the possibility that someone will ask me in all seriousness, "So, what do you think about Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's baby? They're saying it might not be his." No really, that actually happened to me today. I quit, and if that makes me shallower than a kiddie pool, well, so be it.

I've been reading lately about prosopagnosia: the inability to recognize faces. It's interesting because people will sometimes have a measurable emotional response without conscious recognition, which suggests that something just below what they realize actually does recognize the face. It suggests that hearts and brains are disconnected.

The other side of prosopagnosia is the Capgras delusion: the delusion that someone close has been replaced by an imposter. In those cases the emotional response is gone even though they understand the face.

Sometimes these things come from a head injury, and sometimes they just come. In whichever case, we've always known that heads and hearts are usually out of synch--that they're just a few degrees apart from each other's orbits.

The clouds cleared suddenly, remembering someplace else that they needed to be, and thirty or so miles of straight empty road steamed slightly in the heat. We were happy to be able to roll down the windows finally, freeing our elbows and spirits and my overbearing hair.

Alex, driving, stuck his head out the window and yelled. He shrugged when I raised an eyebrow at him, asking me to give him a reason why he shouldn't, and Paul snored in the back seat. We rattled through the mid-state backroads, eating beef jerky and bubble gum, sure in the knowledge that we'd one day have everything figured out and nailed down.

What worried us most, then, was that the weight of all the things that we loved would crush our bones into diamonds.

Am I allowed to be cranky for not getting what I didn't know I even wanted? Aw, heck. Let's just put my existential crisis on hold for a bit and look at something cute, shall we?

I've been trying to fly low lately, trying to avoid notice from the bigger birds with the bigger beaks just above me. I take everything much too seriously and then pretend not to, and it's like I'm a little kid holding her breath rather than eat her brussels sprouts. It's just completely ridiculous, and to tell the truth I'm sick-and-tired of being inside my own silly head.

So I figure that at this point, movement in any direction is movement forward.

Camping was fun, although I'm refusing to say so because everyone keeps pestering me about it so that they can I-told-you-so me, and also because I'm stubborn. Sleeping on the ground is tough because I'm a very thin girl with hip bones that jut out, and I sleep on my stomach. So if I ever go again I'll have to find something thicker than a sleeping bag and tent bottom to lay on. I'm glad that I got pestered into going, but you can get that smug look right off your faces because I'm still not going to buy a sleeping bag.

Because I don't write about such things, most of you don't know that I've been on a romantic hiatus for the past couple of months. The new year's resolution that I made and also didn't tell you about was to go on more than four dates with the same boy, and it took me a while to realize that the fact that I needed to make such a resolution constituted something of an unhealthy outlook, not to mention an exhausting pace. So I hit pause and have been giving myself time to reconsider just what I think I'm doing, aside from freaking out and probably treating people poorly.

I don't have any answers yet, but I think I might be learning how not to smash everything I encounter.

I'm back from the woods. The shower that I just took was better than sex, and the nap that I'm about to take? Will probably be even better.

I think that these boys are underestimating the breadth of my camping related ignorance. The closest I've been is making forts in the living room, something I'm not ashamed to admit that I still do. In high school when my family all of a sudden started buying tents and sleeping in the woods on long weekends, I always stayed home and got drunk with my girlfriends. (Enter: the vodka dance.) I'm a city mouse.

Still, I got drunk and promised, and I'm sure that hijinks will ensue. Try not to do anything too interesting without me, and I'll see you all on Sunday. Maybe.

Several things have gone so out of control lately that I've quit trying to steer and am instead just sitting back and watching, like this is a mildly entertaining tv show rather than my life. And in an effort to find a distraction that I won't have to wake up to in the morning (what? At the very least, I know my habits) I hooked the Super Nintendo back up. Bowser, your ass is mine. Again.

I have somehow managed to let myself be talked into going camping this weekend (barring further poor developments with my grandma, who is now in the process of recovering from pneumonia, which is not what she was hospitalized for originally), unless someone knocks some sense and perhaps a backbone into me. I haven't ever been camping before, so if you don't hear from me again after Thursday it's because I've been eaten by bears or have in some other way fallen into a bad teen movie. According to one of the boys, we'll have everything we need: food, alcohol, and radish guns. I think I need to hang out with the ladies more often--we go to gay bars, not the woods.
But it's something I haven't done before, and it's in the name of adventure, and we all know that I'll do all sorts of stupid things in the name of adventure.

I'm not sure who deserves the blame, but during a glance that stuck like velcro we each understood something that we would both be better off not knowing. The sparks that were struck at that point exploded something else, and on this end those pieces hit places I wasn't sure still had feeling.

I don't know what happened over there, but I'm pretty positive that nothing good will come of any of this. Because the only other option is that everything good will come of this, and I've been around enough blocks to be pretty sure that when unfortunate and tragic are both options, they're also usually the outcome.

I was reading, yesterday, about a place called Lake Nyos in Cameroon. The lake sits halfway up a volcano, and it's saturated with carbon dioxide in a way that only happens in two other lakes in the world. It's thermally stratified, so all of the dangerous water is the cold stuff down at the bottom.

But then one day in 1986 something--no one really knows what--happened to make the carbon dioxide in the water effervescence to the surface like an opened can of soda. The lake turned upside down and the gas rolled down the hillside, shifting under the lighter oxygen, killing the 1800 people that didn't think to run away.