Dear everyone,

The heatwave has confused the roadberries that I pass on my way to work: some of them are still green, but even still most of them are cooked. As I don't have a yard I refuse to see the brambles as a nuisance; I refuse, in fact, to see them as anything but charmed.
Of course, I feel that way about most things.

I spent most of the weekend at the Capitol Hill Block Party (with Josh and his awesome sunglasses), watching bands and people and trying not to trip over my own broken feet any more than necessary. The Murder City Devils reunited for the night, and I found myself wishing that I'd gotten to see them the first time around, before I'd gained any regard for my limbs and subsequently a desire to stay out of the pit.

A lot of my time this month has been spent at home, sitting very still and trying to decide if it makes more sense to let things unravel on their own or if I ought to take them to pieces myself. Sundays are still the worst for me, when everything gets all shrill and I become convinced that I've used up my third wish without even noticing. I wonder, usually in midafternoon, how many chances you get to track down new genies. When we still lived in the trailer and I still had stuffed animals I spent a lot of time snugged down in the pile of them, holding very still and pretending to be stuffed with cotton, because I was preparing for the next time things went very badly. I was never sure that I'd be able to get out in time, and nowadays I find myself doing the exact same thing only without the stuffed animals.
Which is, of course, not the way to go about things at all.

Old southern-fried wisdom tells us that these sort of times are meant for hollowing you out so that you're ready for whatever comes along next, which is the way I'm trying to think of it. Because something has to happen eventually; I've had a run of bad luck lately, is all.

And it's you that I'm really pleased with, the way that you all seem to have learned to run without scanning the ground for crooked paving stones. I love that you have largely stopped being so afraid of falling, understanding that skinned knees will heal and are no reason to avoid using your limbs. I am pleased as punch that you're realizing all the astonishing things you're capable of.

I'm not there yet, but I'm right behind you. I'm having a lot of trouble keeping my temper, lately, trouble not saying sharp unkind things. I'm not ready to take back the no touching rule yet, so we're still keeping room for the holy ghost. But I am a believer in the softness of things, in you and me and magic, and I'll get to where you're going one of these days.

love,
me

My dream is still to play the tambourine in an indie band. But just once I'd like to play tambourine during a loud yelling hardcore set--standing in the middle of the stage in a sundress and high-heeled shoes. I'd need some sort of forcefield, I think, to keep the scream-y thrashing musicians from slamming into me, but for just the once it would be fantastic.

Scott and I, stepping up onto the bouncing dance floor, created what could only have been referred to as a sensation. Even though the crowd was stuffed tightly onto the platform, leaving no room for dancing and only room for jumping, it parted in front of us.

Sometimes China made me feel charmed.

Val had left us at a bar at some point hours before, new best friends, and after another bar and a dozen bottles of Tsingtao and a frantic discussion about the Southern novel we were ready to dance. We settled into a charmed circle of open floor near the dj and the flailing transvestite and ignored all of the murmurs that our arrival had caused. The reason for the whispers was obvious; we looked like no one else in the room. I in my skirt, vast expanses of transparent white skin glowing in the black light, was shorter than most of the delicate Chinese girls, and had red hair and blue eyes to boot. Scott was a foot and a half taller than me, heavily muscled, with long black hair and tattoos showing through his thin white shirt.
He looked down and smiled, slid his hand onto the place on my side reserved for the hands of boys, and we fell into the heavy electronic beat.

If we had been paying closer attention we would have noticed the hands that reached across the open space to hesitate, briefly, over our heads and arms, touching them lightly with unsure fingertips before drawing back.

We learned the stingray shuffle early on, almost as soon as we learned to swim. If you were old enough to put your toes in the water by yourself then you were old enough to know not to lift your feet off the sand, to move forward by pushing rather than stepping. If you forgot then you deserved what happened, something I only remembered once I felt the squirm next to my foot and moved away in time to catch the edge of the barb on the underside of my toe. Wanting to avoid the teasing I told them that I had stepped on a broken shell and winced whenever I stepped down for weeks.
It's that stingray lash that I've been thinking of, walking, since yesterday when I tripped mid-stumble and bruised the ends of each of my toes on one foot. Graceful is among the many things that I am not. (Other things that I am not include: a tugboat, twelve bouquets of flowers, smaller than a breadbox, and interested in moving to L.A.. In case you were keeping track.)

A significant number of the things that could go wrong, the last couple of days, have, and so I'll be here on the couch with a cantaloupe and my boyfriend Humphrey Bogart until someone provides me with a compelling reason to leave it. Going to the office tomorrow does not count.
I ought to be cleaning my apartment--if it's cool enough to wear pants it's cool enough to do the dishes, and this place has fallen into disarray--but nuts to that. I'd rather mix up a pitcher of everclear and arsenic and pretend that it's not only Tuesday.

(See also, X.)

I really enjoy late night cab rides home. It always feels like the cab driver and I have a secret, even though, since I gracelessly extracted myself from the situation with the bartender and instituted the no touching rule, we don't.

It has, officially, been Too Hot to Wear Pants this weekend, so I have been thanking the gods of fashion for short skirts and strapless dresses and other bits of hobaggery that have made the heat bearable. How did I live in Florida for so many years refusing to wear anything but jeans? The mind boggles.

Saturday night Steph and I took advantage of her other half being out of town to go to Havana, a newish bar in Capitol Hill. The place was pretty dead when we got there but by the time we left it was quite crowded with the most peculiar bunch I've ever seen. We're pretty sure that the Havana demographic is based largely on who can actually find the hidden entrance, rather than just being the usual Hill crowd. But it was air conditioned and we got a chance to chat and gossip and crowd watch and talk a little bit of Wedding, which is always a lot less fun when there's a fellow around.

After a day comprised entirely of trying not to move--it's hotter in my apartment than it is outside--I met Josh at Neumos for Camera Obscura and Georgie James (hello, hot bass player). We were completely charmed by their Scottish accents, and when they informed the crowd that they'd be headed to the Cha Cha for margaritas we decided to give it a shot. Neither one of us had ever heard anything special about the Cha Cha's margaritas, and for good reason. We didn't end up running into the band but were more than sufficiently amused by the usual Cha Cha crowd, as well as the inexplicable playing of Supertramp's greatest hits on the sound system.

After which was, of course, my cab ride home, and now I'm trying to convince myself that sleep will be possible regardless of the melting off of my flesh. Since we're not allowed to complain about the rain our here, I intend to whine a whole lot about the heat. Make it stop.

I spent a small bit of time this afternoon with a wee baby named Maisy, a name that has an unfortunate association with the careless mama bird in "Horton Hatches an Egg." She's just a few weeks old, which is one of my favorite baby-times: you can tell that they're just taking everything in and figuring it out. You could see her personality developing right inside her little head.
The evening was passed mostly lying in front of the fan, eating plums and cantaloupe and pretending that at any moment a houseboy would appear with a frosty rum drink.

Before Toby's mom split town they lived next door to a withered old French Canadian lady with a terribly quaint accent and a withered apple face. She spent most evenings on her porch, chewing tobacco and spitting daintily in a bucket next to her chair, and some of those evenings we would join her. Tobes and I had a habit of sitting on the steps and going over the last few days, and when something caught her ear she'd jump in with a story. If anything unpleasant happened, invariably she'd sigh and say, "Well, I'll just take a brace and carry on, and if I can't look pleasant I'll look as pleasant as I can."
I spoke with Tobes tonight--hearing a telephone conversation while lying in front of a fan is no easy feat--and at the end of the conversation he made an uncanny impersonation of his old neighbor. And that's just what I plan to do. After all, thistles may at any point bear figs.

Besides, Miss Manners has always told us that, "Good hearted people who hit others with their burdens are rude," and not even melancholy and malcontent are reasons for rudeness.

The weather evidently plans to be unbearably hot this weekend--and yes, I know I'm from Florida, but they have air conditioning there--so if anyone's got any sprinklers I can run through I'll be their best friend. I'll bring a frisbee, and afterwards we can play leap frog. We'll forget, for the weekend, that we are grownups and subject to the ridiculous consequences therefrom.

I must admit that I am, at this exact moment, feeling a little lost. Everywhere I look there are people having babies and getting married and looking for PhD programs, and I am doing...not a lot. I feel like I should be getting my shit together, except the fact is that it's got together as much as it can be. I'm slowly getting ready to re-apply to grad school in the winter and am trying to transition to quality rather than quantity in my interpersonal relationships. I've got a great outfit picked out for tomorrow, a steady volunteering gig, and a good job that I enjoy. I just wrote a letter to my nan. I'm one together girl.
But for all of that I'm still lost, still missing the piece in the middle.

The problem is that I moved out here with all of these plans, and when those plans fell through there wasn't anything to take their place. The little girl who drew flowers on her knees and the insides of her wrists is gone and not a whole lot has filled in the blanks. What I want is to be a person of substance and knowledge and kindness, a person worth being around, but increasingly I feel in my marrow bones that I'm really becoming a girl of not-knowing, narcissism, and walking in circles. I feel like I've gone blind.

After a game or two of leapfrog I'll be able to pull together scraps of my philosophy, remind myself that I'm too young to have anything figured out anyway, and make a new friend at the bus stop. It's all just cover, though, a tissue paper layer over all of my holes. Just so you know.

Holy freaking Christ, you guys--Stace is a mom. Little Ever Charis was born about 2 hours ago, and you know it's probably a good thing they moved to Canada because it'd only be a matter of time before we'd all be plotting when to descend on them en masse and meet the baby.

So, when are we road tripping to Canada?

So in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh and Enkidu have a mighty battle. Enkidu had been made essentially for the sole purpose of being a rival and a distraction for Gilgamesh, but after this battle Gilgamesh just sort of stops and proposes an adventure off into the forest to kill a demon. (I don't remember why he stops, though--I haven't read the Epic in years. Anyone?) And that's it, right: the first time ever that someone wrote down the possibility that what we're fighting against might actually be what we're supposed to be fighting with. They figured it out in Sumeria in 2000ish BC, 400 years or so after the battle supposedly happened, but still a heck of a long time ago.

It's a good idea to occasionally remember that everything I'm just figuring out has always been known, and that it might be high time to start reconciling me with myself.

The other half of the bench, when I sat down, was already occupied by a man on the declining side of aging. His near cheek was mapped with broken blood vessels, his baseball cap sweat stained all around where it snugged to his head.
As is the custom at the bus stop, we chatted idly about Metro transit's inability to be on time. He told me that he had been waiting for twenty-five minutes and that it wasn't so much that he had somewhere to be, it was only that, when you get to be his age, you find yourself tiring of waiting because no one wants to die preparing to be in transit. He couldn't move quickly, I should notice, but he could still move.

He volleyed questions at me, about where I was going and where I had been and what I was reading. Every few moments his hand would pass itself across his eyes, as though it was moving on its own, checking to make sure he was still seeing. I was glad to talk with him, glad for a connection that was uncomplicated and fleeting but deeply satisfying, a conversation like a soft chair after a long walk. He tossed a few chestnuts at me, something about the best apples being the hardest to get to, and something else about the people that are willing to climb for them being the people that deserve to have the apples.

I told him that I had been thinking, lately, of the rerum concordia discors, the discordant concord of things--something I first read about many years ago in Nietzsche and then, in college, came across in Horace. I told him I'd been fighting both for and against and that I couldn't figure out if the way to harmony was to stop fighting in either direction or to keep going. He nodded, understanding my struggle at a glance, and laid a hand on my arm. The skin of his fingers was so soft it was almost not there at all, his fingerprints worn off, his pulse light. We touched eyes for the first time as the bus pulled up and he looked straight at me, kind brown eyes steady. "Young lady, I have faith in you," he said slowly, and then he broke our eye contact and stepped on the bus. I would have thanked him, I think, but there was neither time nor need. We spoke the same language.

I met a snail yesterday, walking up to Capitol Hill in the rain, and I hunkered down to have a chat. Snails are real easy to talk to because they're always on the way to someplace else. I like snails, and the way that when they decide it's time for growing they just close off the parts that aren't working anymore and build something new.

I have been your inbetween girl, your stopping point between here and wherever else. That's been just fine--sometimes you were on your way somewhere and sometimes it was me in transit. But the thing of it is that I'm getting a little tired of being a waystation. I'm thinking about trying to be a destination. The trouble is that I don't know how to go about getting there, how to make this stop being a game of tag where we each touch each other and run away. But I am sleepy and idly reviewing other ideas, thinking of moving to Mongolia to study wind patterns in the sand or to an island in the middle of the Pacific to become a malacologist. Perhaps if I learn how anything else works I'll accidentally figure out how to insert my own self into your bloodstream.

I suppose I'll figure it out. Even snails get where they're going eventually.

While you weren't looking I went out and exchanged this too-big skin for one two sizes too small. I had it lined with the mean reds, too, because I have checked the forecast and the foreseeable future will involve quite a bit of stomping. (I've developed quite a taste for the stomp, recently.) Plus the mean reds, for all their faults, at least actively cancel out the delicately blues, and I am quickly growing tired of that particular shade.

I spent a portion of yesterday evening getting hilariously drunk with Brandon, who always gets funnier the more that I have to drink. Brandon's a delight, so you just go ahead and be jealous.

Sometimes when I see you walking down the street you remind me of old abandoned shops with plywood on the windows, the sort that you find in Florida where the proprietor just couldn't be bothered to come back after the threat of a hurricane never materialized. You don't see these buildings so much anymore, what with the inconceivable boom my homestate is in the middle of now, but during the road trip years they were everywhere. Those shacks always felt resigned, like they knew no one was coming to clear the cracked vinyl chairs out of them and make them someplace new again.
If I knew you I'd be able to take you by the shoulders and shake those old chairs out, but I don't. You're just there, walking down the street. And when you see me with that chair-shaking look in my eye, you'll have to know in all your secret knowing places that it's for you, because I won't be telling.

My friends are gone, and I am sick, sick, sick. (Thanks for the cold, Jesse!) Having them here was amazing, like when you're having a dream where you find a new room in your house but in the dream it makes perfect sense that the room is there. They slid right into life here, fit perfectly with everyone I introduced them to.
Half of me is so sad that they've left, because the visit reminded me just how much I've missed them the last couple of years. The rest of me is just pleased that the three of us have managed the trick of being able to stay relevant to each other even with all of the intervening time and distance and life, because there wasn't any awkwardness or readjusting to ourselves. I am such a lucky punk.

Sarah and Jesse will be here in a handful of hours and I'm so excited I could very well spontaneously combust. I've been doing little excited jumping in a circle dances all day long, which are very difficult to do in adorable stiletto mary janes, but which were the only possible outlet for all of my excitement. I'm going to go vacuum my apartment and then try as hard as I can to make it be time to head to the airport.

The first thing I realized when I woke up this morning was that I was completely incapable of speaking to anyone. There isn't anything wrong with either voice or throat, but I'm positive that if I tried to answer your questions nothing would come out at all. Just a panicked look about the eyes and a fish face.

When you walked over your smile had that new car smell and I knew somewhere in the backs of my knees that you were just the sort I'd like to test drive. I didn't, but right now I like to think of us sitting on the dock with a bottle of wine between us, talking about our individual unrequited love affairs.

The care-and-feeding tag of one of my new shirts advises me--in several languages, one of them, fortunately, English--that I ought not dry the thing in direct sunlight. Which makes me think of Gremlins.

Eventually I found myself in West Seattle at a party full of acquaintances. Sitting on the seawall alone, missing my balcony fireworks, I realized that the place to have the No Reason Sads on a national holiday was probably not where I was. And that was good to know. (I've decided to turn all the No Reasons into learning opportunities. It's the only way to get through them.)

I ended the night in a convertible, top down and freezing but thrilled with being windblown. It reminded me of my very first Seattle Fourth of July, after the party guests went home and Mark and I drove around town very fast in his little red car that he'd brought back from England, scared and shrieking about being a passenger on the driver's side on the Viaduct in the middle of the night.

Dear everyone,

We're not going to talk about June. June and I made an agreement and one or the other of us broke it. Either way, we're currently dead to each other, until one of us breaks and walks over to confess to being the 'tard here.

You know, today was sort of perfect. Steph and Ryan and I made it to the beer festival at happy hour, which meant that we got extra tickets. We sat on the grass in the sun and drank beer for hours, surrounded by dogs, several of which were bulldogs. A cute boy with fantastic sunglasses (awesome sunglasses are sometimes an acceptable substitute for visible tattoos in this new game of looking) stopped by to chat about my dinosaur shirt and then went away, which is exactly what he was supposed to do because no one new is allowed to touch me until I feel differently about things. We stopped by the wading pool, I came home and took a nap. Everything is just. Perfect.

I did not set my hair on fire with the grill, although it was a very near thing. They're not kidding when they talk about fast-lighting charcoal.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I'm holding at a steady 7. Which is so much better than the 3 I was two months ago and the 5 I was on Friday. Right now has a pretty good beat and I could likely dance to it.

If you've been playing along on the home version you'll remember that I am obsessed with your fingerprints. And mine too, but it is yours we have to talk about. Because I have spent a long time now meeting new people, and it has recently occurred to me that dozens and dozens of people have, in the last year-and-a-half, left their fingerprints on me. And I just can't take that kind of pressure. This is why there is the new no touching rule. If your fingerprints are already here, fine. If not, let's just keep the holy ghost between us, shall we?

So, whatever. It's July and the year is halfway over and I know I probably should care, but who can work up the energy? I'd rather use all that effort to figure out how to plant a three-ring circus in your yard like flowers, so in early fall you'll be able to look out your window and see clowns and highwire artists and lion tamers. I'm going to find all of the songs with a trumpet in them and make a mixtape, and then we can get in the car and drive until the tape is over. We're not talking about June and we're not preparing for July. We're going to start looking at our year as not made of parts, but just one lump sum of time that we've got to spend before it runs out.

love,
me

The grill will be broken in tonight, in what is certain to be a touching ceremony. A touching ceremony likely to be filled with beer and third-degree burns.

If you know how to get here, you're invited! Come over, uh, later. I'm going to space right now, but I'll be back in five hours. If you don't know how to get here but want to be invited, let me know and perhaps I'll tell you when I get home.

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.

Dear everyone,

The only nice thing I have to say about the month of May is that it was completely devoid of mimes.

I have noticed that we've built ourselves a world of metaphors, that birds are freedom and trees, age, and that all we need to do to answer our own questions is stand still and let the proper metaphor present itself. But I think the only way to realize that we are being given answers is to remove ourselves from our every day sphere, to step back from the normal flow of information. We already know our Answers, we just have to bring ourselves to a place where we can let ourselves believe in them.

love,

me

My grandma is the one who taught me, by example, to be independent--to learn how to take care of myself because there's never any guarantee that someone will be around to help. Even though she turned 87 last month she still rocks hard, working three mornings a week, crocheting a million doilies, and volunteering at the senior center, helping out people who are often younger than she is. She's had two different kinds of cancer three times now and is more active than my grandad, who's 17 years younger than she is.

She lost both her sister and her only son last year, and since then has been growing increasingly fragile. I wish there was a way to keep her under glass so that future generations will have a chance to meet her. I'm terrified of losing her, of having to live in a world where she is not.

So you can understand my difficulty breathing on learning a few minutes ago that she's been taken to the hospital. I'm scared.

Sasquatch! = both rock and roll, sunburn, freckles that refuse to be covered up, elephant ears, crappy beer, bad crowd surfing, very little rain.

Now. X3. Excited!

I met a small boy today ("I'm six and a half, actually") who wanted to know what the assorted buttons and knobs by the atomic teleporter did. I made things up for a while, but finally confessed that in large part both buttons and knobs were broken. This was the sort of opening he'd been waiting for.

"Speaking of broken, I just lost two teeth!" He grinned wide enough for me to see that while his two front teeth were missing, all the rest of them were firmly in place.

"Oh, neat! How'd you lose them?"

He considered this for a second, one eye scrunched closed, before answering, "Oh, just fiddling with them, I guess. With my tongue, mostly."

"I lost one at school once, bit into an apple and out it came. I had to leave my class and they gave me a popsicle."

His dad gave me a look, and I realized that the boy will probably spend the next week at school testing out my story, trying to work a tooth loose to see if a popsicle will be forthcoming in the nurse's office.

If you need me, I will be:

space
the Gorge
seeing X3
at a BBQ

I'm excited to be going to Sasquatch tomorrow, although I'll be missing a few bands in the morning that I'd like to see. (Fortunately, it looks like they're all playing at the Capitol Hill Block Party or, uh, anywhere else in town since they're all local.) I'd like to be out there today, too, but today is not when the people with cars are going. Anyway, not my people with cars. A car. Whatever.

I walked home from Met Park this evening under a sky that was spitting rain. Sometime just between a tree whose purple-blue flowers smelled of soap and a group of guys smoking pot my favorite song started up inside my headphones and the sky lightened and stopped dripping.

It only lasted half a block or so, but for a very little while I believed again in the power of scotch tape, that I will manage to pull myself out of this and stick myself back together. And then with the scents of soap and pot smoke still lingering in my nose the song ended, and the rain started back up.

My favorite roads were the straight ones, hung low with heavy summer clouds like a day-after theatre set--the end fading out, not hidden by a curve, just a little farther than we could see. Before we knew how to slow ourselves down by stepping on the backs of our own feet, before we knew enough to know that we were missing anything.

We kept a bag of jumbo marshmallows in the glove box at all times, for snacking but mostly for spearing with bits of paper hastily scribbled with messages. Marshmallows are the perfect weight for tossing into the next car without being hard enough to do damage, which makes them the best possible tool for high speed flirting or passing caravan messages or plain old target-based road games.
If you wanted me to, I could probably still cook frito pie under the hood, 40 minutes down the road going 55 miles an hour. This is all still my little red wagon, after all.

This morning I woke up, stumbled into the bathroom, grabbed my toothbrush, put toothpase on it, and then promptly lost my grip and dropped it into the toilet.
On the upside, my toilet is now minty fresh.

So it can only go up from here, right?

When a heroin user finds a vein that they like, they use it over and over again until it collapses. It would make more sense to use different veins each time to avoid these scars, but I guess heroin use and sense don't really go together. The time leading up to the collapse is when they get track marks, long lines of bruises and little individual pin pricks, all the way up the arm opposite from their dominant one.

I spent a lot of time as a very young girl with the local junkies, in garages and the depths of local parks, doing lesser drugs and stroking the ropey scars and cheap tattoos of longtime users. Kids are cruel, and it didn't take long to figure out that the kids my age didn't want anything to do with me, but that the junkies would take in anyone. I was a good student, and as long as I kept my grades up there wasn't any reason for anyone to notice that I spent most of my time missing. It didn't take long for things to turn ugly, and by the time I got to high school I was reformed and sullen and uninterested in touching drugs ever again.

It's been a pretty crappy weekend, and today I played only songs that I need my whole voice to sing along to, because it's in danger of disappearing. Catching up on some filing, I came across a few pictures from the summer after my first year of college, the summer I spent smoking fiercely, wearing black tank tops, and talking too fast. I never appreciated summer vacation enough when I had it. I'm pretty sure I'm not appreciating what I've got now that's good, because I'm not sure how to filter it--there isn't enough time to stop and savor all of it. So instead, I'm documenting, and what I've got now is a firmly entrenched bad mood and a lot of bad memories, both of which are things I'm lucky to have because they mean I'm still alive. I have to take while the taking is good.

So. Hello there. I'm samantha. I like dirty jokes and cursing like a sailor, red shoes and argyle, potato chips, puppies, beer, and the word "pulchritudinous." I like to spend weekday evenings in bars or at home with my tambourine and the northwest's finest indie pop. I do not like people who cheat, telephones, doing the dishes, lettuce, or the look I get when the bartender doesn't think I'm old enough to be in there. My doctor has confirmed that I am finally 5'1" tall. I weigh less than three numbers but no you cannot lift me up to see.

I like daisies, most of all. Daisies and hugs that last just a little too long.

On slow days during the summer that I worked for the state attorney I would roam the aisles of the warehouse, pulling out files at random and thumbing through them. It was probably illegal and certainly unethical, and I don't have any excuse aside from boredom and a total disconnect from the people in those cases. But then one day I pulled out a file and a sheaf of pictures fell out, pictures from what turned out to be a murder scene. But it wasn't just any murder, no, I happened across the documentation of what happens when a father abuses his daughter just one too many times in reaching distance of a knife.
I deserved what I got, arrogantly not respecting the privacy of people just because they were contained in a box instead of standing in front of me. Those poloriods live just on the other side of my eyelids--they've never gone away.

I think we should all pause and notice that I have not yet split town, moved to Fiji, and taken up with a houseboy who only speaks enough English to make margaritas. That's pretty much a triumph of my better judgment, since more than half of me just wants to vanish. Lord, am I restless. The trouble is that I forget to breathe and it makes me crosseyed and everything seems a whole lot bigger than it actually is. I get scared of spring and everything that can happen but might not because I'm so scared and restless. Which makes the not-breathing more.

Last night at dinner our appetizer had flowers on it.

Who is doing less walking and more prancing? Who's thinking about going back to school to major in sass? Just who, do you think, has returned to the regular schedule of eating strawberries and breaking hearts and wearing skirts?

Yeah, no, that's not me, aside from the strawberries and the skirts. But I'm working on it, aided and abetted by a whole lot of time on the balcony, in very small spurts. (Hello, global warming, it's nice to see you!) I've been laid out for the last few days with a head cold, logging hours sleeping on the couch when I'm not out doing something.

But it's more and more spring these days, and I'll be back in my groove soon enough. And then I'll be an unstoppable, navel gazing, cheeky lass. You know, like usual.

I've turned my potted impatients around so that the sun will help them fill out a little bit but man, that plant is out of control. It's going to break into your apartment and steal your playstation and leave a mound of empty Rainer Ice tallboys next to your sofa. Be on the lookout.

TMS stopped by my apartment last night while I was roasting asparagus. I haven't seen him since new years, and he stood in my kitchen and made fun of my chopping technique, and I delighted in the easiness of the mocking. I'm searching for things that are a little less complicated, these days.
He mentioned that he's developed a theory that everyone has to have a Grand Romantic Gesture at least once in their life, one time of frantically running through an airport or showing up somewhere unexpectedly or in some other way proving that real life can sometimes equal a movie. His big dilemma is that he's never sure if this girl is the one he should be making his Gesture towards--what if the next girl deserves it more?
I just pointed out the obvious, that he can't ever be sure that there will be a next girl and so the smart way to go about it is to treat each girl like the correct one and Gesture away. Besides, I wasn't really the one he should be asking, with my 'hey that's MY sandwich, what if I was saving that for later' style of dating, no matter how full of books the other side of my bed happens to be. I was just trying to figure out if I knew how to cook.

So I don't know. TMS will be out there somewhere, making sacrifices to the god of Romance and hoping he figures out how to stop running this summer. I, on the other hand, will be growing flowers from my fingers and toes and trying whatever comes up out just in case it ends up being worthwhile and interesting.

My brother's band had their first show last night, playing five songs at the eighth grade dance. (My father, unable to say anything nice about anyone ever, says, "They were alright for where they are." Where they are, of course, is...at the end of eighth grade. Jerk.) The Behind the Music starts now, with a singer who doesn't want to sing and a steady round of snotty guitar players, breaking up, and drama. My dad and Stacey and I, a seasoned band family, have been trying to tell him that guitar player-related drama is so normal as to be expected, but then I guess these are things that ever rock star has to learn for himself.
Hopefully they'll be able to make a copy of the tape for me, and you better believe there'll be a screening party for the debut of Blood Throne as soon as it shows up on my doorstep.

Anyway, it turns out that he learned one of the most valuable lessons of being a musician last night, which is that as long as you keep playing, the girls will stick around. I'm just glad that there was no booing or ridicule, although their successful first night out has cemented his decision to move out here and start a band as soon as he turns 18.

Weekends, we would hop into the car and head out into the middle of nowhere for the express purpose of looking at the stars that our marginally citified lives denied us. Even on the beach they seemed farther away than they ever did when we lay on top of the car and held hands to make sure we stayed tethered to the earth.

The last few weeks have been a tougher than usual battle between myself and myself, and I have been holding on by my fingernails until I am capable of fixing the things that I have broken just to hear them smash. I am still a little bit fabulous, somewhere.

While on the bus on the way to the bartender's for dinner the other night, I chatted on the phone with Nick. I rarely spend time on the telephone, because I hate phones and wish we could communicate entirely via letters, smoke signals, and soft touches. Catching up with the other coast, however, requires sacrifices, and as we spoke he mentioned that he is currently substitute teaching. This is a revelation that secretly delights me, although I won't tell him that because I am mindful of the day when in our senior year psychology class I accused him of being a closet romantic due to his reluctance to sleep with his dumb blonde girlfriend. That's not something seventeen-year-old boys want to hear, and though he admitted to the fact finally last year, I'm pretty sure that fellows in their 20's have an equal dislike of the notion that their rapport with small children is absolutely adorable. Instead, I accused him of going all everything-I-need-to-know-I-learned-in-kindergarten on me.

He paused. "Well, that's kind of true, though."

I moved the phone away from my mouth, trying desperately not to laugh, as he pointed out that if we were still in kindergarten we'd just call each other names, he'd sing the alphabet--burping it, if I desired--and then we'd have some cookies and juice and a nap. And now I understand just why he's so popular with the little kids: he's still kind of one of them.

I have decided against being cranky for at least the next few days, because it is so very spring outside and spring is for sass, and it's tough to be sullen and sassy at once. (I do so appreciate the opportunity to abuse alliteration in my everyday life.) Which just means that I'll swing the other way and sass you all into unconsciousness but, well, at least I warned you.

My dinner plans for the evening fell through, so I wandered up to the U district to see Sean Wilsey read. I always feel like such an imposter in the U district, which is irrational I know, but I've never really stopped being embarrassed by that grad school thing. But then on the bus home I ended up next to a drunken college boy sloppily consuming a gyro, and remembered why it's just fine that I don't spend a whole lot of time up there. I wasn't a huge fan of college boys while I was in college--Pete was in his mid-20's when I met him--and I really have no time for them now.

There's a secret somewhere in an act of a few years ago, in the fact that you left town with me on your mind. I'm not sure what the secret is, exactly, but I am sure that I'd like to know.

My favorite movie in the entire history of movies was the midnight at the Egyptian special this week, so Steph and I hopped ourselves up on caffeine and stayed up to watch. The print was crappy and jumpy but lord, I think those were my people, with all of the clapping and the laughing and the excitement. And that's just a little embarrassing.

Friday night, my actual anniversary, was spent at the Crocodile and then afterhours at the bar, which is a habit I really need to get out of. The afterhours part, not the Croc part.

After a few days of being missing, the crazy demon cat showed up again last night. I blame this on Jake, who was just slyly asking how my cat was on Friday. And then it was waiting for me this morning when I went out to do my laundry. I'm not sure what I did to deserve such a thing. I could really use an exorcist, if you know one.

I could also use, let's see...a pedicure, a new couch, the moon, and this sandwich called a 'hurricane' that you used to be able to get at the sandwich place across the street from my mom before they changed management. Y'know, just in case.

Dear internet,

In less than 24 hours it will have been three years since I moved to Seattle with a cowboy hat, a car full of clothes and plans, and not a whole lot of common sense. In the intervening years I have kept the hat, sold the car, bought new clothes, made new plans, and acquired little more common sense.

In celebration, I went to Pioneer Square tonight to art walk with two very sexy people. This is important because not once during the evening did I question whether or not I was good enough to be in the presence of either. Sometime in the last three years I've figured out how to have friends without needing to justify why I've got them. If you had known the scared little muppet that moved out here, you'd see this as progress.

Which is not to say that everything's all sunshine and candy, because I still feel broken. This too, however, is progress, because I have learned to admit that I am sad even though I feel like such a nuisance bothering anyone with any such thing. At New Years I promised to learn to shave the edges off of my lows, and I'm working on doing that very thing. I'm working on fixing myself, and this is important because had I given in and stayed in Florida I would very likely be irreparably broken or, let's face it, dead.

(Let's compare and contrast: three years ago, this past Monday. I think that if nothing else, my sunglasses now speak for themselves.)

Regardless of how things are right this second, though, I'm glad that I'm here. I'm glad that I'm where I am now, and I'm glad that the people I've met here are a part of my life. The last three years have healed a lot of wounds, and while I don't want to get all sentimental on y'all, I am amazed that I feel safe enough to be starting to process and let go of the terrible darkness I came from. I was lucky to make it past seventeen, and the fact that the thought of the next sixty years drags on me some nights is a blessing I never thought I'd have.

Aw heck, I've done gone and got all sentimental on you, anyway. Sorry about that.

So, internet, I made my escape, and though a lot of people predicted I'd go crawling back within a few months, I managed to prove them wrong. Hooray for me.

love,
me

I'm pretty sure that while you and I were building a sand castle one day we grew careless of our shovel and lost it to the waves. It was when we abandoned our handiwork to chase after our tools, I think, that the tide stole up and snuck off with what we were in the middle of creating. That was the moment we undermined our chances of making something we could see from space.

I feel broken tonight, softly spiderwebbed through-and-through. And that's fine, because in a few days I'll be full of glue and bandaids and pink ribbons, anxious to patch up not only myself but everyone in the next three counties too, and sheepish for yet again admitting to being damaged. The only way to appreciate being fixed is to also appreciate being broken, or at least that's what I'm telling myself tonight. And so I am home, held together with string and spit and hope, waiting until it is time for today to be over so that tomorrow can start.

Dear everyone,

Another month has gone by, so it's time to pay the rent and talk to you. (I really enjoy the conceit that most of the time I'm talking to myself here. It helps me rationalize why so many of you are silent--it's because you're imaginary.)

I spent most of the month of April being sullen, going out too much, and gesturing wildly. I'd intended to start May off right, by being something other than grouchy, but then this morning my hair straightener was broken. As a result, I've spent the day wandering around town all tousled. If there was ever a way to make me feel like 1998 again, it's by giving me no control over this untidy mop, and the fact that everyone else seems to like it is just sort of adding insult to injury.

Today I met a man with only one leg. The reason I know that he was possessed of just one is because he said, "Hey, do you want to see something?" right before rolling up the leg of his pants and handing the prosthesis to me. It's certainly a charmed sort of something I'm living here. I held his leg awkwardly, not sure how one is supposed to handle such things, until it seemed like he felt I had gotten whatever the point was.

The point that I got, by the way, is that false legs are heavy. I don't know how they compare to real legs, never having held a detached one of those, and I'm not sure that's what I was supposed to be understanding anyway.

I'm still restless and cranky and idly considering running off somewhere. There's a chance Caroline and I will make a field trip to LA next month, to see friends and answer questions and be out of town, and Sarah and Jesse have finally bought tickets for their trip out here in July. In between now and then I'm just going to try not to self-destruct and, hopefully, start sleeping again.

love,
me

The first time I visited the Salvador Dali museum in St. Pete was on an afternoon outing with a family friend who was also a pre-op transsexual, someone I had always known as Stan and was learning to call Dee. Memory records no context for the museum trip, but even still today I recall vividly standing in front of the painting "Hitler Masturbating" just as it came to me exactly what it was that my companion was going through. I can't say if it was something in the painting that triggered recognition, but I stared at that sinister snowscape and figured out just how little I really understood. (At the time I was still just a little too young to know both who Hitler was and what he was doing in the painting. This was, however, the same trip where I fell deeply in love with the massive "Hallucinogenic Toreador.")

The children's museum in the town where I grew up had a touch tunnel, a convoluted carpeted pitch black vault navigable only by fingertips. I hated the point where the ground disappeared, where a cautious hand outstretched reached nothing but open air, where a not-so cautious knee slid, burning, over the edge. Without any visual cues there was no way to catch myself, to keep from falling in the hole. Each time I emerged it was bruised and shaken, no longer confident in the buoyancy of my bones.

I worry over what we are ruining, whether things will ever grow back up in our footsteps, whether we leave poison behind. If I could I would build you a city from pirate's gold and cotton candy, keep you there safe and far away from anyone who might want to slide under you and take what doesn't belong to them. I want to put marks on our foreheads so that all who pass know that we breathe only metaphors, that our fingerprints might burst into flame, that we will give those who might trespass copies of T.S. Eliot poems and soft kisses.

Sometimes I think that the only way to feel like I'm filling up my skin is to paste myself inside, to spread what's there thin like a too-small serving of jam on the last piece of toast. If I could force myself out to my edges and fix myself there, some problems may find themselves solved.

One of my cousins is pregnant again, which means that I've been fielding the usual volley of well-meaning but exasperating, "so when is it going to be your turn?" phone calls. I've stopped responding with the usual put-upon sigh and insulted justification of my lifestyle, because I've finally realized that there's nothing to justify. Which isn't to say that I've quit violently rolling my eyes about the fact that some members of my family seem to see me as a character in a not-very-funny romantic comedy, just waiting for someone to roll in and show me that all I need is love and maybe some Valium. It's just that I've always quietly gone my own way and they've always loudly tried to make me quit it, and at some point I've really got to stop caring. That point, I think, is now.

(By the way, I keep meaning to thank all of you who showed up at my apartment on Saturday night only to have me open the door and screech about cake at you for not slapping me silly. I'd have deserved it. This is why I don't eat sugar.)

And anyway, at this exact moment I am incredibly bored with everything in the world, which probably has a whole lot to do with the fact that I am eating candy corn and have not thumb wrestled anyone in weeks. I want to run away to the south of France and change my name to Diana and affect a British accent and a limp for the next six years. I want to read Somerset Maugham stories to hermit crabs and I want to try on all of my clothes and what I don't want to do is have to explain to anyone why I want to do any such thing.

By the way, have I told you lately how much I object to the smell of white tulips? I'm really not a fan.

Because I have recently fallen into the habit of declaring things that are probably good for me to be for suckers, I went out again last night instead of staying home and sleeping.

You know what I'm going to start using in conversation more often? The word "pulchritudinous." Be on the look out.

After Josh and I missed the fashion show at CHAC we wandered over to Chop Suey to catch the Divorce and an impromtu dance party by some people wearing what 80's fashions would look like if you traveled forward in time and tried to describe them to someone. This includes but is not limited to a blue felt hoodie with clip-art diamonds all over it. No joke. It was Chop Suey's fourth anniversary party, featuring The Spits, who turned out to be a bunch of middle aged guys in costumes tossing firecrackers. Which isn't to say that they were exactly bad, just...unexpected. Unexpected in a moshing-and-firecrackers-and a hat shaped like a bug sort of way. Y'know.

And anyway, most of the time the best part of going out is clomping home through empty streets, a familiar ache in my right calf because that's the side I tend to rest my weight on and accidentally kicking myself in the ankle every third step. It's in those brief walks that I feel most myself, content and untouchable, ready to walk into my empty apartment and fold myself into my rumpled blankets. I'm still rocking the heck out of my twenties, and anyways, playing it safe and staying home is for suckers.

When I was in college, we joked about how it wasn't really a party until someone set themselves on fire.
Last night, on my balcony, Manuel and Robert set themselves on fire. Actually, I think that perhaps they set each other on fire. I'm not really sure, because I was too busy readying myself to run for a smothering agent in case they screwed it up.

We'll talk later. For now, you ought to know that I threw a party that was, apparently, truly a party.

Now I remember why I only do this a couple times a year.

My apartment is currently filled with the smell of panic, of the "holy crap there are a zillion sexy people coming over tomorrow and I'm completely unprepared, due to the fact that I've been out every single day for the last two weeks" variety. (Yeah, I know, how sad for me that there are all these fantastic people around to hang out with. I've turned into Cat.)
So you would think that the logical next step would be to, um, stay home and prepare. But I have just now declared that preparation is for suckers, so I'm going to a party in Belltown instead. If it doesn't look like I've vacuumed tomorrow, that's because I maybe haven't.

And now and again I find myself conducting an idle Proustian review of the curves of the spines I have known, regretting not spending more time trailing fingers over the humps of certain vertebrae. Sometimes it might be a good idea to turn off the nostalgia machine.

I don't have to think about where I'm going when I wake up late at night because my feet automatically lead me straight for my wall of glass, where those same fingers trace the distant outline of the Space Needle. Often it is at that point that I feel a need for donning shoes and clothes, for feeling wind and damp and Seattle air.

Right after I posted last night my power went out. I'm pretty sure that was the universe telling me to get away from my computer and try not to set my hair on fire lighting candles, because it stayed out for a good long while afterwards.

So tonight I'm all hopped up on candy corn and peeps and Cadbury eggs, and since I so rarely eat sugary things I'm pretty much vibrating. I ought to go out with the bartender and crew to see the Posies--heck, right now I could probably run downtown like the roadrunner--but I just kinda feel like hanging out here. I'll probably crash by 9:00, and if anyone comes over they'll find me asleep on the floor with a handful of jellybeans. Which is really terribly undignified.

The giant orange kitty showed up on my balcony tonight, meowing at the back door to get into my apartment. I still have no idea where it actually belongs.

I'm tired tonight, and all of my edges are showing. The mail brought a package full of the usual miscellany from my grandmother, but also a beautiful ring that my grandad had made for me. My grandad is a quiet, hard drinking man, and I often forget that I am his only grandchild and that he loves me just as thoroughly as my grandmother does, just in a reticent engineer sort of way. I'm an unbelievably lucky girl to have the grandparents that I do. This is the first time that I can remember that he's ever given me a gift, and I'm undone.

Which isn't to say that I haven't been slowly unraveling all day, because I have. There are situations that I need to confront and just don't have the energy to take in hand, people for whom I need to lay out my cards. Tobes reminded me today that I'm supposed to be learning the fact that attention does not equal interest, and also that all interest isn't good interest. "Mouse," he said to me at one point, all self-important, "sometimes people think they're being clever when they're really being mean. And mean is what you need to keep away from, because you're made of glass." I'm too delicate, he says, but he means it in a mostly good way. And the problem with being friends so many years is that I can't deny the things he says because he's usually right.

Dear monsters under my bed, please go away. Love, me.

I've been having the same dream about elliptical and circular orbits lately, still convinced that I need to figure out what happens in the intersections.

Unsurprisingly, last night's "quick trip to the bar" turned into "waiting until Jake got off work at midnight so that we could go to a different bar and stay out too late again." To my credit I stuck to two drinks for the whole night, and making new friends is totally worth being sleepy at work.

My mother and her best friend were pregnant at the same time, and ended up having myself and Melissa about a month apart. Today I got a phone call, letting me know that Melissa is getting married next February. I'm thrilled for miss M, of course, but I find this really interesting in a purely anthropological sense. If things keep going at the rate they're currently moving along, I'll shortly be the only single one of my large, extended posse left.
And I just don't know how they do it, my friends, how they manage to sit still long enough to decide any such thing. It's been posited that I've developed a case of lifestyle ADD, and at the very least I do decide every three days to move somewhere else or cut all my hair off or be Scooby Doo. I'm back into my spring-and-summer (ok, and fall-and-winter) schedule of doing things five or six or seven days a week, and making three new friends each time I leave the house.

At some point, I think, there was a memo sent out, and I was probably out somewhere and missed it.

In the meantime, there are things. I'll be having a party next weekend, and between now and then are a couple of shows, three bouts of volunteering (once at the ballet), and possibly an Easter dinner. I don't really celebrate Easter, but I totally celebrate ham, and some of the new friends I've made in the past couple weeks have invited me along to share in the fun.

Halfway through my walk home I passed a man out mowing his grass. The edge of the lawn was level with my lower ribcage, a nice quirk of geography thanks to all of our hills. He was wearing headphones and so was I--I was listening to Rilo Kiley--and as I passed he stopped his lawnmower, so as not to spray me with clippings, and gave me two thumbs up. I smiled and answered back with my own thumbs.

Lord, y'all, this is a busy week. Tonight I'm having dinner with Manuel and then late happy hour with Steph and Ryan. Tomorrow I'll be in Belltown, with probably a quick trip by the bar afterwards as requested, to say hello to Jake. Thursday, there's happy hour with the Metrobloggers, and Friday is the Band of Horses show. I plan to abstain from fried foods until late Friday night, just in case they interfere with Band of Horses for the third time. If you need me, I will not be home.

All of which is, of course, awesome. I'm not sure who this girl is, but I'm having a lot more fun than I did when I was the girl who lived in Florida.

There is a huge fluffy orange cat that seems to have decided it lives here. It started out just hanging out by the front door, rolling around and being cute and trying to duck in the door before I closed it, but now it's started ambushing me from bushes and staircases and behind the neighbor's motorcycle. I'm not prepared to take in someone else's cat, so I'm really not sure what to do.

Thursday I met up with Josh for the Fruit Bats show. I heard all about Amsterdam, frites were had, and the band tricked us into an encore by ending their set 3/4 of the way through. I didn't realize that passionate feelings about the Fruit Bats were possible, but apparently I continue to underestimate their drawing power. Since then, I've pretty much succumbed to the headache of death and feeling a little bit like I have the flu, although I did make it to the space store yesterday and then out for Jean's birthday. I haven't played Clue in a million years, but apparently I'm nowhere near competitive enough to win. I also have no spreadsheet-based strategy. My friends are terribly nice great big nerds, and I love them to pieces.

Whenever I'm doing laundry and it's time to head back down to the laundry room, I become convinced that I've left my keys down there. There is no reason at all to think any such thing--I've never locked my keys in the laundry room before. It happens, nevertheless, every single time.

One of my favorite parts of Boston was all of the history there. It hit me in ways that all the history in China didn't, likely because it was the history of myself, because it held answers to the secrets behind my own fingerprints. And since I'm nothing if not an obsessive navel gazer, they were welcome answers. I'm pretty sure I have to figure out my own secrets before I can set to really understanding yours, which is at the bottom of it all my point. I think.
At any rate, in the few days I've been back, strangers have told me even more stories than they usually do. You don't know it, but I'm keeping all of your stories until I get a chance to look behind your fingerprints too. You can't get rid of me, no matter how hard you might not try. Sorry about that.

Part of my restlessness has broken out in concocting elaborate outfits, some of which I'm actually wearing in public. If you see me out looking more put together than usual, it's because my brain just won't stop spinning and I'm trying to find outlets for it. (In case you were wondering, my favorite piece so far for spring is a very delicate pale pink corset. I have no idea what to wear with it, but I love it, and if any of my ladies want to come over and help me be less sartorially retarded, I'd appreciate it. I'm fully aware that I won't always be able to pull off things that are very tight and the same color as my skin, so I'd like to get some use out of it now.)
Now that I have a tambourine you're welcome to invite me to come play it in your band.

To celebrate the fact that we are girls, Caroline and I spent about seven hours--from about 9:00 to about 3:30--in my other favorite bar last night. We take our drinking seriously, people. I've closed down bars before, but never actually hung around in one after it was closed. Felt like one of the cool kids. The crowd of regulars was amusing and obligingly complimentary, I may have made a new friend, and Caroline and I are now going to start having delusions of rock star.
It was exactly the sort of night that I've been complaining about not having enough of.

So today is a day for recovery, and a day for trying out a new recipe. Tomorrow will be a day for going to see the Fruit Bats at Neumos. Things are currently pretty rocking.

So, how do you guys feel about grapefruit? Because my mother seems to be harvesting her fruit trees, and she's sent me this big box full of grapefruit. And the thing about that is that I don't actually like grapefruit, and I'm honestly unsure what to do with them.

As a result, there's grapefruit here for you if you want it, or if you can give me a good enough reason to haul some to you. (A good line to use is, "hey samantha, come over and see my new puppy. Oh, and could you bring some of that grapefruit along too?")

Dear everyone,

I came home last night, after a flight that was an hour and a half late, exhausted. The lovely Ryan came to pick me up, because I have lovely friends. While we were in line to get on the plane the people in front of me asked what sort of mechanical errors had kept things on the ground back here in Seattle. You could see the agent thinking hard about whether or not to answer the question, before finally saying, "I don't know, they didn't tell me."
That is the answer I preferred to hear.

Boston was, as I've already told you, wonderful. By the end of my day of walking I found myself giving directions to other people, and half the people I passed looked like people I already knew. Jude and I talked and talked and talked, and a bus driver asked me to mail a letter for him. (And holy christ, I can order the best cannoli I've ever had online!. Well, in July I can. The world is a good and bright place.) As we were leaving for the airport the sky started to cloud over and by the time we got there it was raining, ending the unseasonable 60 degree weather that the city was using to seduce me. Boston: 1 samantha: 0

Now I am home and not planning to go anywhere for a little while at least, and I can already tell that once I've had a little bit of sleep I'll go back to being restless and slightly malcontented. That's how spring goes around here. I want to be going out and drinking beer and talking to strangers. April is already looking to be another busy month, full of shows and parties and inappropriate behavior. You'll be able to find me right in the middle of all of that--I'll be the littlest one, and I'll be smiling.

Love,

me

Seriously, Boston is kind of magical, and if I were even a little less in love with Seattle I'd crawl into an apartment in the North End and get a new biomedical research administration job out here. Heck, I might just anyway.

The buzz phrase at this conference is "post-genomic era." It's like, ok, we've mapped the genome, so now what? Scientific ADD.

Today I took myself on a seven-or-eight mile walking tour of Boston, from my hotel in the back bay out to Bunker Hill and back, with a little detour through the theatre district. (Look who's spent 24 hours of her life in Boston now!) I made a few friends along the way, including a French couple who wanted to know more about Paul Revere. As it turns out, it's difficult to talk about American history in French. I did manage to communicate that he had something like 16 kids, which seemed to impress them.

I was having dinner tonight when a man from the large group near me came over and apologized for disturbing my "quiet evening alone." I thanked him, but you guys, I was eating in the Omni Parker House. I wasn't alone. I was hanging out with Dickens, Emerson, and Longfellow, JFK, Ho Chi Minh, and Malcolm X. I was having a hot dog and real Boston Baked Beans and Boston Cream Pie in the restaurant that invented it. I was having a great time.

I know you'll all tell me to come back in February and see how much I like it then, but right now Boston's at the top of my list for places to go when I eventually leave Seattle.

Oh man, you guys, I'm kind of in love with Boston.

I leave for Boston in the morning, to catch up with my old buddy Jude and, incidentally, also hit another conference for work. I've been having terrible dreams for the last few days--my raver days ended because of an unfortunately well-aimed bullet to the forehead of a friend, and one of the guys that died on Saturday was an acquaintance of mine, and it's all just mashed up in my head. I'm jumping at every little noise, triple-checking that my door is locked. If we were still thirteen I'd be having a slumber party, and I might still anyway.

I've been unbearably excited about this trip for days, because hanging out with Jude will be a little bit like coming home. I miss the Flagler kids in dramatic, nonsensical ways. There will be much drinking and incessant nostalgia, so if you're in a bar in Boston over the next few days and you hear things like, "Hey, do you remember when Jesse set your face on fire?" you'll know it's us. Also, sightseeing, because I do love playing tourist.

None of you (aside from Captain Toby of the HMS Poor Judgment) know this, but I was a candy raver very briefly in the mid-90's. It was a scene that I was too young for, and things everywhere in my life went very badly very quickly not too long afterwards, but the people that I met raving really were some of the nicest, most accepting people I've ever known. So this has been really tough to take in, above and beyond the fact that it's just too horrible to be believed.

I'm still in a mood like a Magritte painting, so the weekend could involve anything from spontaneous tap dance numbers to hucking grenades at watermelons, all overlaid with a threat of random drunkenness. If any of y'all bitches need me, I will be out charming old men and alcoholics. Just look for me in bars. Or gutters.
Or, heck, right behind you.

The house of samantha has become a refuge of boringness in a world that is otherwise glamorous and exciting. And that's a great big lie, but the truth is that it's not-quite-spring-time and I am restless and insufferable, and the only thing keeping me from pulling up all my roots and setting off free is that I've done that before and it didn't work.

Tonight's actually the worst sort of night, because my chest aches from a cough I can't quite get rid of and I got drenched on the way home, so I really don't want to leave the house. But at the same time I don't want to be here alone because all that I'll do is pace around and talk to myself about how I really need to vacuum. This is why I ought to have roommates, and why you should all be glad that you aren't mine. Still, it's really too bad that my old roommate the magician isn't here to sit on me until I calm my shit down.

Instead, perhaps I'll turn up the heat and the radio and vacuum in my underpants, which would at least be a productive use of my currently endless time. Last night I was so tired of myself that I was in bed by 10:30, which is mighty early for this insomniacal waif. Once it's actually spring and the air isn't so damn full of waiting anymore I'll go back to normal. I always do. But in the meantime, it's going to be a pretty manic couple of months.

Just to warn you.

My French tutor just dumped me via email:

"I'm so sorry. I won't be able to make it tonigh... and actually, it was going to be our last class. I'm moving to Olympia this coming week-end, and I am going to commute to Seattle every day, but I won't have anyone to look after the kids while we have French, so I will have to head back to Olympia right after work..."

And I have to say, I've never been broken up with through the internet before. So...anyone know a good French teacher?

She sat down across from me at the airport and started crying, and with her curly blonde hair and delicate features she so reminded me of another crying blonde that I wanted to go sit at her feet and worship.
She had her headphones in, and I couldn't begin to think of how to approach this beautiful girl to ask what she was leaving behind that would make her cry so. I didn't want to watch--that would be rude--but since I couldn't actually stop watching I made do with making glances past her, sweeping my eyes from left to right as though I was looking around the gate area. While I watched (or didn't) a little boy walked up from behind me and handed her a wad of tissues. She nodded and thanked him, thickly, but didn't stop crying.

I decided to walk home from Jeff's birthday brunch (which was yummy! Happy birthday, Jeffrey!) because it was a lovely day and I'm just so glad to be home. On the way I called Dave, because he's been having a hard time of it lately, down in Berkeley, and the last few days have been no picnic for me either. I needed someone to remind me that whoever it is I turn into around my father isn't really me, that it's just a pretend girl to hide the things I don't want him to tear down. I learned a lot about being patient last year, even if I am still working on letting go.

(PS: Chas? Is this better?)

At night my dog sleeps by my door, and when I wake up in the small hours I can hear her shifting against it. If I were the sort of girl who slept with the door open she'd be in here, but I'm not.

Tomorrow I get to go home. My Metroblogging compatriots have been especially entertaining this week, which makes me a little homesick. I'd intended to post once or twice while I've been gone, but finding a stable internet connection has been nearly impossible. In case you weren't already aware of this, I am not a big fan of the woods.

I don't know what's been up this past year with the boys that I used to have crushes on coming out of various woodworks and admitting having felt similar things, but I'm really enjoying it. If you boys keep this up, my head is going to get too big to fit through doors.

I've been exhausted lately, waking up feeling like I haven't gone to sleep at all.

So far the second leg of my trip hasn't been so bad, although tomorrow is the day that everyone will be spending together, and I'm not really looking forward to all of the bickering that's going to be involved. What I'd really like is to be in any room in Seattle with a warm thumb trailing back and forth across my knuckles, but what I want doesn't really figure into anything at all. I decided to take this trip and I'm going to live with it. As long as it doesn't kill me.

What really amazes me is the sense of entitlement that my brothers have, the fact that they've grown up in relative comfort and stability and don't so much realize it. I keep myself from going all, "Boy, when I was your age..." but I sure do think it. As a result neither one of them has the need to make everything right like I always did.

There is some concern that my brother will fail the eighth grade out of sheer laziness.

Continuing what seems to have been our Nashville theme, Mike and I went out drinking again last night. This time we hooked up with the lovely Ryan and visited a dive of a beer bar, a bar with a couple of really good country bands called Tootsies, and Coyote Ugly, respectively. In the middle one, a man stopped to tell me that he thought I looked like a singer. I decided that it was a compliment.
The bathroom in Coyote Ugly was easily the filthiest bathroom I've ever seen, and I say that in light of the pits-and-troughs I came across in China. Mike, my Asian hip-hop-listening-to compatriot surprised the heck out of me by knowing all the words to a few country songs. I love it when you guys pull shit like that, out of nowhere.
Additionally, it turns out that you might not want to take directions from a drunk guy, especially when you're in a town he's only been in for a couple days.

Tonight we went to a hockey game, because we don't have professional hockey in Seattle and Mike's never been to a game. These people take their hockey seriously, occasionally yelling inexplicable things like, "Get off the phone!" at the players. Beforehand we had dinner at some place where we met a fellow from Pittsburgh who wanted to talk to us about sports. I'd have been annoyed except I was involved in a brief but ardent love affair with the mushrooms on my hamburger.

Tomorrow I'm headed to North Carolina, armed with Arctic Monkeys for the older of the boys and Common Market for the little one. I'd prefer to just go home, but another couple of days out of the office will probably be good for me.

Y'all? I'm not kidding. Jungle.

I've had way too much to drink this evening to try and put something meaningful together, but after I got settled Mike and I headed downtown for fried catfish and ribs and beer. A few hours (and a whiskey) later, we found ourselves at an actual honkey tonk, which was pretty much a lot of fun. I want to open a honkey tonk in Seattle, all Rockabilly.
Then we came back and grabbed our drink tickets for the opening reception, and we kept drinking. I've got a southern accent that won't quit, which is terrible 'cause I spent so many years pretending I didn't have one.

Mike rented a PT cruiser, and we got lost in what may have been the projects. The ride home consisted of a lot of cursing at the under construction roads, as well as Mike occasionally crowing, "Bring it, bitches!" The rest of the week might actually contain such things as a hockey game.

You guys? My hotel has an indoor jungle.

There is something to be said for evenings spent in a warm heap crowned by a purring kitty. On the other hand, there's not much at all to be said for very early in the morning when the kitty has stopped purring and has instead decided that toes are blanket monsters that need attacking.
This is why I don't have a cat.

My cold has made my ears all stuffed up, and since I spend my free time with a mumbler I'm spending a lot of it questioning what I've just heard.

My shuttle to the airport comes at 4 AM, and good thing too because I'm getting really restless. I am just no good at all of this being stationary. And I haven't been going out enough lately--not out out. There hasn't been a whole lot of carousing, of drinking and dancing and coming home way too late coated in sweat and needing to be completely disinfected. So I'll be off having adventures in Nashville, and when I come home you and me are going to do some serious something. And we'll enjoy it.

The earthworms are back out, which means that during my walks to and from work I have to split my attention between the usual staring at the sky and watching my feet. And you know what those earthworms mean, right? They mean that spring is coming.

On Sunday morning I'm leaving for a conference in Nashville, with a two-day stopover afterwards in North Carolina to visit my family. That part of the trip will involve a lot of people that aren't me arguing with each other, and not nearly enough drinking.

I feel a little better today, a little less like I've been hit by a truck full of sore throats and yuck. I want desperately for the weather to cooperate so that I can wear my swirly blue skirt, but it insists on being windy and sometimes made of hail. It will almost certainly snow next week, since I'll be gone.

We all know that I've never seen a picture of my parents together, just the two of them, from the time that they actually liked each other. And no matter how many late nights I spend trying to fit two separate pictures together I just can't make things match up, which makes perfect sense since we never really know what transpires between two people in and out of love, but which drives me mad. I need to learn that I don't have to be able to see the past to move away from it.

Instead, I've been focusing on a specific picture of my mother, from when she was about seventeen. Her t-shirt says "100% crazy" and she's got her thumbs hooked through rainbow striped suspenders. A fedora rests smugly on top of her straight waist-length hair and she leans cockily against what might just be a Nova. It's this picture that reminds me that my mother and I are the same, that she also once wanted to drive and drive until she fell off the edge of the world, that she spun until she was dizzy and sang along to the radio at the top of her lungs just like me. It helps me understand that she took some wrong turns and by taking them taught me what not to do as best she could.

In a tin-roofed trailer the sound of a rainstorm is deafening, loud past disbelief. Too loud for conversation, or for television, or for reading, such a storm forces contemplation. It's impossible to pretend that you're anywhere else.
That's how I spent summer evenings for many years--curled up in a corner, actively aware of just where I was.

Whatever sickness is going around my office seems to be making a stop here, which is completely not allowed because I don't have the free time for being sick this month. In the meantime I'm learning how to play chess and petting a kitty, occasionally at the same time. Today I'll be in Greenwood and then out for Alicia's birthday, which may or may not involve a stop at Neumos to see Band of Horses.

While I wait I hold my hand up to the lightbulb, watching myself lit up from the other side. I'm not quite sure just how thick the connections are that hold what's me inside. Holding still, I trace with my eyes the edge of me.

"Were you in love with him?"
"I thought I was, then. Which means yes, doesn't it? I mean, if it's what I thought I was feeling then it must have been what I was feeling, right? So, sure. Yes."
"What happened?"
"He wasn't in love with me back, not so far as I could tell. One day I got tired of the maintenance and just sort of...stopped feeding it, and it wandered off. Like a stray cat."

Tonight I walked past a recently burned house, a blackened series of holes that still smell like a campfire. I have always been afraid of being caught in a housefire--it's something that wakes me up in the night, panicked, a fear that has hounded me for years. Somehow standing in front of the house, a block away from my own, I couldn't work up any fear. And as I walked farther I thought about it, and I realized that the whole time I stood in front of it most of my mind was occupied with what happens after I stop waiting, when I look away and feel other eyes tracing the edge of me.