I'm seeing thistles everywhere lately, climbing hills formerly lined in ivy but now guarded by thistles, rounding corners to find thistles looming, purple-topped and foreboding, thistles in every neighborhood garden and roundabout and curbside grass. Small thistles masquerading as clovers but secretly covered in spines. Thistles where formerly there was nothing. TMS says that it's a sign that the universe is listening to my oft-repeated mantra about thistles bearing unexpected figs, and that the only thing left to do now is to figure out what sign the universe is trying to send me.

Is it mocking me with all of these figless thistles everywhere I turn, or is it promising an abundance of upcoming rewards from all of the up again and at anothering? Have the thistles been reading my horoscope, which has been telling me for months that since Saturn has spent the last two and a half years teaching me lessons it's eventually going to start handing out presents for working so hard to become a better person through all of the death and sorrow and bad luck and failing and near misses and crying in cabs? (Dear Saturn, do you need my address? I could use a serious break.) Or are noxious weeds more interested in rain than sun and therefore faring better than the plants who are waiting for nicer weather?

Life being what it is (a total dick), the universe is probably mocking me, and a weed is probably just a weed. After all, the whole point of combining figs and thistles was originally about how good things don't come from false prophecies, even if Millay sure managed to extract a lot of brilliance out of all of those things.

Here, though, it's more about how thistles are related to asters and daisies, their sweeter, less rebellious cousins, and my irritating tendency to believe that somewhere behind the thorns there might always be flowers--that everything spiny and unforgiving might one day decide to relax and grow fruit. And though I am both very tired and very merry, as a rule, I am also lately plagued by thorns, and a little worried about what that might mean. This kingdom of metaphors always gives us answers, but not always the answers that we want.

There was one man who officially survived both atomic bomb blasts in Japan, having his eardrums ruptured and his skin blasted in Hiroshima only to head back to Nagasaki and find himself surrounded by the same white light. A documentary a few years ago located a whole bunch more double survivors, but only the one was ever officially recognized. (I bet they gave him a really nice certificate.) He figured that since he could have died on either of those days, the rest of his time here just counted as a bonus, and he lived until just a few months ago.

So I mean, technically we could really survive anything, and each day after everything is basically a bonus. But that's an awful lot of responsibility to be carrying around with us. Especially since everything else is already so heavy.

I wanted to give you planets, plucked from among the more distant galaxies, but my arms are just so tired from the heft of trying so often and failing so hard. And planets spoil so quickly, much faster than you'd imagine that they would, wilting and expanding.

Late at night I couldn't sleep because the phone wasn't, hasn't been ringing, and somehow I started reading about cellular memory. It appeals to me, the idea that we keep parts of ourselves stashed in all of our cells instead of just in our brains, that someone with a transplant can develop ideas and habits and memories unrelated to the rest of themselves. Later, in my dream, I swapped our hearts while you were sleeping. You didn't notice the change, commenting only that colors seemed suddenly brighter and plums sweeter, but I missed my own uneven thump so I switched them back.

I don't think it was my heart you wanted, anyway, and I need it for surviving all of the anything awake. My heart is just as tired as my hands.

It's discouraging to start to summit a molehill only to find halfway up that you are actually on a mountain, and the ground and the top are equally far away and hostile. I'm not sure what business molehills have, hiding their mountains until it's too late to find somewhere safer, but there should have been a warning. A sign or an angry rhinoceros or 30 feet of razor wire. Something. Because now I'm stuck.

I think about those photos of insects covered in dew, sleeping and jeweled, turning back into plain old insects once they wake up and move, and how few who hadn't seen them transformed and sparkling would ever believe that they could be so beautiful. And the bowerbirds of Australia and New Guinea, amassing collections of beetle shells and flowers and fruit and arranging them carefully for hours, hoping that their combination of colors and objects is the right one. That one hypothetical golden frog left behind on the riverbanks of Panama, waving to no one at all. About how most of nature centers around the fact that almost no one gets to have what they want, but are still driven to try for it.

If I were smarter, I'd bring mountaineering gear with me whenever I left the house, ready to encounter frozen summits and hostile conditions around every corner, accepting that almost all surprises are unpleasant ones, that almost none of them come with warning signs or tiger pits or guards with machine guns. If I were smarter, I would have learned my lesson by now.

Sometimes I think of all of these love letters stacked unread in my fingertips, waiting, and I worry that they will end up forgotten under floorboards and behind walls, still unread. Discovered only later, maybe, by a generation who has never heard the beating of my little bird heart. Like the cactus I saw in the desert, holding their blooms for moths that might never come.

There's this documentary about making a documentary in the Amazon that I watch all the time, where a local tribesman pulls an anaconda out of a hole by its tail. They tell the camera that the point of doing this is to relocate the anaconda somewhere where it is less likely to eat a cameraman and get itself killed, but really I think the point is to watch a man pull a giant snake out of a hole by its tail. It seems that the anaconda emits a scent that makes it hard to miss, and I wonder about the people living in those jungles in all the years before the cameras came, learning that that smell meant snake and that it was possible--even desirable--to forcibly remove it from where it had hidden. Like pulling a rabbit out of a hat, if rabbits ate jaguars.

I think about those lost Amazon tribes living among the snakes, not knowing they were lost until strangers showed up to tell them that they had been found.

And I think about how we are all sometimes, a little bit, a lost Amazon tribe waiting to be found by someone intrepid and not even realizing it. Looking for explorers who know only how to mangle our languages and customs but would like to learn why we tip our poison darts with rainbows scraped only from the reddest of frogs, how we pull magic snakes from thin air, what the names of our constellations are. Lost and foreign, but not unknowable.

1.Laying on a deck chair in Arizona, propped up by an arm not my own, feeling the warmth of the day gathered liquid in my bones. Watching for shooting stars and not seeing them but also not caring much because I can feel them, too, in my bones, fizzing like champagne.

2. After a couple of days watching out the window I had seen the landscape open up unexpectedly into all manner of shapes--scrub grass and cactus and wide windy valleys, cloud shadows and canyons and trees. In lower Oregon, after careening around curves that left the whole of the road ahead a mystery the world out the window folded in a new way and spread apart to reveal cows threaded along the shoulder, ambling, forcing the car down to their speed. Close enough to touch.

3. Around us the world had started to look familiar again, tall trees and grey skies, my insides sinking out of vacation and back to real life. If I had blinked I would have missed it, but on the side of the road stood a small sign informing passers-by that they have just crossed the 45th parallel north, that they are at the halfway point between the equator and the north pole, and like a balloon with a cut string my brain is in both steamy jungles and the frozen north at once. I imagine another trip along that line, through Acquitaine and Lombardy to Croatia and Mongolia and back around to South Dakota and Oregon. All of the halfway places up here and then maybe after, all of the other halfway places.

After 1,900 miles of road, we are home. Not one single scorpion or rattlesnake anywhere along the way, which turned out to be a little disappointing after all of the dire warnings from everyone and their brother. Also, the southwest doesn't seem to believe in roadside stands at all, which was kind of a shame because I believe very deeply in roadside stands.

It's always amazing to watch the landscape change, how Arizona fades into Utah which abruptly becomes Nevada. We have so much space that has so few people. A lot of our route was along two lane highways where it was possible to not see another car for an hour or more, just asphalt spooling out in front and behind and trees and clouds everywhere. I don't think I would like to be a long haul trucker, but I can definitely see the appeal.

On the way to North Carolina I flew through Chicago. Chicago was my first trip on an airplane as an adult, and turning into the airport the sky and the water were the exact same shade. This time was the same, and turning toward the airport I couldn't tell up from down.

A mile up in a different sky going home, we pass next to and sometimes over a huge storm, brutally beautiful, flickering brilliantly with lightning. For a few minutes the storm is all I can see and I watch it, flashing constantly, crackling audibly even from this distance. Once we fly past the end of it I can see inside the storm, the lightning illuminating pillars of clouds, and I think that this is something people were not meant to see.

We're leaving for the desert tomorrow, not bringing the computers, and having a plain old adventure. I'll be back sometime this weekend, probably sunburned, dusty, and relaxed.

A mile in the air and during the time when it is late at night across the country I woke up disoriented, crammed against the window. Outside the ground was dark but the sky was covered in stars, closer than I had ever noticed them. I wondered briefly if they were noticing us, too, and then the quiet weight of the stranger next to me shifted and the scarf covering my legs slipped and I lost most of the stars to a few stray wisps of clouds.

At the airport, a woman waited with a balloon and her camera trained on the doorway. She had been standing there some time, and so by the time I found my family and said hello and dumped my bag on one of my brothers she was shifting her weight from one foot to the other, clearly uncomfortable standing so long in her high brown wedges. We waited a while, to see who she thought was coming, but if they were in the airport they were slow to find the way out.

Later, we took a walk with the dogs, fireflies glinting in the hedges. Every few steps the breeze swept down a new gust of magnolias and everyone working in yards or sitting on porches waved when we walked past.

On Sunday I went to visit Niko again, bringing his parents some dinner straight from Coolio's cookbook. He's reached the witching hour, which is a little misleading since it goes on for way more than an hour, but you can't blame the guy for being a little annoyed about how things work here in the outside world. (Although as a grownup, I'd be pretty stoked about sitting in a vibrating chair with a white noise bear on my head. I'll have to look into recreating that.) His little brain is disorganized, all of his little elves trying to file a whole world full of new information as quickly as possible, and it's making him a little grumpy.

Anyway, a trick from one of the books about babies is to wrap the little guy up tight, hold him on his side like a football, jiggle him a little, and shush loudly near his ear. When you do this his eyes get all round and his elves take a breather, and I would really like to find a way to incorporate that process into my own life. All of my relaxation techniques are coming from baby books from now on.

I'm starting to learn the differences. Between feelings and enthusiasm. Between running and leaving, between heads and hearts, between sunrise and sunset. Sometimes it takes me longer than average, but I almost always get there. I love maps, only I can never seem to find them for the places I really want to be. Maps of eyes instead of maps behind eyes. They're all differences that feel subtle but turn out to need bridges and rope swings and dirt bikes to navigate.

I wake up in the night and listen to the sounds, doors slamming and buses passing and those birds that never go to sleep, plotting in my head how future archaeologists would recreate this scene, these days. Because they are much more important to the future than any artifacts I might leave behind. All of these shoes are great, of course, but they are ultimately not the point.

But you know, even if they tried to recreate it, it wouldn't be quite right. Like those dioramas in the Museum of Natural History that you just know have slightly missed the point. They'd get the duvet and the clock right, but forget the birds. So I scribble maps to these times in my head, x marking the spot, repeating the directions over and over to myself until I know just how to get here again.

It all means more to me than it would to those future archaeologists, anyway.

The mildly insane part of the trip I'm taking next week is that it is to go watch the older of my baby brothers graduate from high school, an event that is making me recall with alarm the shenanigans that we got up to during that summer after graduation. But you know, my siblings are so much younger than me that I don't really know what it's like to have siblings, and I am excited about the possibilities of having adult relationships with my brothers. I am also excited about how it's only a couple more years before I will have an ally (read: drinking buddy) at family gatherings.

About a day and a half after I get back from that is where the actual lunacy happens, because I will be flying down to Arizona and then driving back up with a boy I have only recently begun dating, and about whom I am obviously not going to say anything aside from to point out that this trip was his idea, which points to an encouraging commitment to adventure and/or slightly insane decision-making skills. I have been lucky enough to see a lot of the country out of car windows--up and down the east coast, diagonally from the Atlantic to the Pacific--but I have never seen the desert from anywhere. We're going up through Utah, which gave me space poisoning and cowboy poetry when I was there a few years ago, and then across the top of Nevada and up to Oregon and then home. Almost a week of not being at work, with great tunes and someone I like to smooch and the potential for some spectacular roadside stands, one sunburned arm, and a soft seersucker dress sticking crumpled to the small of my back. (Also: swimming in the Great Salt Lake with all the sea monkeys.) It could be a disaster, of course, but Magic 8-Ball says "outlook good".

All I need is air in the spare, friends.

It has been two years now since I came back from Italy, and I find myself drifting into daydreams of other places, ranking where it is I would rather be, changing my imaginary plan and the places I want to see. Distantly, when I am done with grad school I want to spend a little while in Greece and then maybe Spain, but that is far from now. I want to carve out tiny pockets in the wall of all this time to go other places, to climb to the tops of new buildings and lean out far into unfamiliar winds, to sit in dim bars late into the night talking to strangers, sink my bones into unfamiliar soil. I don't know how so many people stay so firmly planted.

So I am making plans, friends, and that means that in just a few weeks I am going to see the Grand Canyon. It has always been on my list of places to go, but vaguely--it would be nice, and all, but who goes to Arizona? Turns out, I do.

The end of my first year of graduate school is rapidly approaching, which means that I am something close to halfway done. This looks like progress but still feels like the very beginning of things. Time has turned into a series of funhouse mirrors that I am very much on the wrong end of. I'm sure that at the end of all of this I will say that it seems like it started only yesterday, and if that happens someone should probably just go ahead and kick me. Hard.

There's quite a bit of traveling coming up, to the east coast and back and then down to the southwest and up--if you have been wondering to yourself whether or not I am doing anything mildly insane in the name of adventure soon, the answer is, as usual, yes--but first I have to get through the next couple of weeks. Turns out, these final papers aren't going to just write themselves.

Given an opportunity to have my genes looked at and analyzed and pinned to boards like butterflies I of course went for it. Our bones are mysteries that we can see like shadows, but our genes are as remote as space and I will takes the chances I am given to look both out and in.

It's reassuring to find out that my genes tell me things that I already know--that I am likely to have a heart that beats in 3/4 time and creaks now and again, that I have blue eyes, run poorly and with little coordination, am overly sensitive to pain and less likely than average to learn from my mistakes.When all of my puzzle pieces were fitting together even before I was a person, the universe was making for me these possibilities, leaving unlocked doors that would turn out to open without me even knowing.

We're still parsing genes, of course, and science is science but even it can't go very far. Sill, space is always coming closer and so are our insides, and it might not be too long before we're sure that we ourselves are where they meet in the middle.

Some people study zugunruhe, the urge in migratory animals to move. When they're trapped and unable to go anywhere we can watch them, notice the disruption in their sleeping habits and how anxious they get just around dusk, measure the changes in their endocrine controls and what it is in their bodies that tells them where to go and how to get there.

You can fake zugunruhe by simulating long days, tricking brains into thinking that time is moving in different ways inside than it is outside. Our brains don't know both at once, of course, so the trapped fakely long days are what's real, forever, or at least until they end. They think that the more days a creature is stricken with zugunruhe, the longer their habitual migration might be. You'll have the longing to move for many more days if you're going across the world or to the moon or all the way under the water than if you're just going downstate. For example.

For a long time they thought that only species with active migratory patterns felt the longing, the endocromatic urge to run until it's too dark to see, for days and weeks and months. But now they have started really looking, and have noticed the restlessness even in species that seem perfectly content to stay where they are. The feeling is just as precisely timed for these animals, too, but they have evolved to think around it and stay put. It's still there, though, somewhere, and if they ever need to move again their brains will remember how, and where to go. They can all get somewhere else, once they realize that they need to.

Sometimes life writes itself, but most often it wriggles in my hands like an impatient kitten wanting badly to be somewhere else. Which is a shame, really, because what we ought to be keeping closest is the afternoons sitting sun-drenched and laughing in favorite places, making outrageous plans that will never come to fruition because their appeal lies entirely in the planning. The time smiling and high fiving about adding a new member to our little community to bring up with love and laughter and outrageous plans. The waking up slowly, content, in a bright strange room slowly becoming familiar, listening to the songs from nearby church bells. This is what we fight through the everything else for.

Things tend to all go wrong, one after another, but every now and again they go right in the exact same way.

Honestly, what I could use right now is a vacation with a swim-up bar and for this baby to go ahead and get himself born so that I can snuggle his tiny face off and then commence with our very serious agenda of reading AA Milne poems together. I'm getting kind of tired of reciting "Buckingham Palace" to myself.

This morning between snooze alarms someone knocked at my front door, which is never good news, since good news sleeps between 2 and 8 AM. Sure enough, I stumbled groggily to the door and opened it to find my building manager in his bathrobe, standing in a lake that was suspiciously specific to my apartment. At some point during the six hours between when I went to sleep and just then, my water heater finally gave up the ghost.

Honestly, it's something of a relief. I had been waiting for the thing to go since my refrigerator gave up last year, all of the new appliances signaling that I have been living in the same place for perhaps too long. Not that I'm going anywhere, except eventually back home to see what in my apartment is seaworthy in case Lake Samantha sticks around for a little while. I've always wanted to stage my own pirate battle.

The thing is that I only know how to play my cards anywhere but close to my chest, handing them out to strangers instead, showing them to anyone who passes by, planting them in fields across three counties. Cards visible from space! Cards sewn into the lining of all of my clothes and craftily made into hearts to wear on my sleeves.

You would think that, after losing all of these decks of cards over all of these years, I would have learned how to be cautious. To figure out the intentions of the other players before I throw my hand in the air like confetti on new year's. You would think that, but you would be wrong. Head first is the only way I know how to run, no matter how many paper cuts, or where.

The real trouble is that I want to see all of your cards, too, but there's just no delicate way to ask without looking like I am cheating at this game, when the truth is that I don't even know the rules, and I am tired of cards. Tired of cards and rules and hearts and space and wondering and betting and losing and running.

One of these days, I will show you my cards and you will show me your cards, and then we will leave them on the table and go walking instead. One of these days.

I think I went back to Florida partly looking for a story, for a narrative to tie together all of these threads that had suddenly been snipped. I hadn't expected to be so untethered, so frightfully lost, and so somewhere inside the folds of my brain I was sure that giving it all wrapping would make things make sense, would explain how I had ended up in this place without a path. Even if I had to force it a little.

When we were younger we wore mood rings, and our insides never matched the cool blue of their stones, so we would blow on them to heat them up. The effort of turning them red paradoxically cooled our rage for a moment, giving us time to take another breath before everything started up again. The thing about everything is that it always starts up again.

There aren't any stories, of course, which I really knew all along. Everything that throws us off the rails doesn't get to mean anything at all. I might not like it, but the act of looking diverted my panic enough that when I looked up again I realized I could figure out a way back. Not to where I thought I was going, maybe, but in the end somewhere is better than nowhere.

The buttercups started showing up this weekend, stretching gold through all the green, poisonous if too readily handled but sweet all the same. By next weekend my slow stroll home from Sunday brunch will be lined with them, sparkling invitingly, asking to be held to all manner of things in order to show the truth. If I could I would pickle a jar full of them to have in the silent winter months when yellow means nothing at all.

This morning I ate a tangerine too ripe to wait, falling brainlike from the peel before it was half gone, tumbling itself into sections around my hands. It was too sour to eat, maybe already past the point of ripeness, and it made the whole peeling experience suddenly somehow sinister. I am blaming all of this on the wind.

You could almost set your watch by the revolutions in my runaways, how as soon as the spring shows up somewhere under the clouds and behind this terrible wind all I want to do is run downhill and away, someplace new, into space. Adventure or misadventure, or both.

Soon it will be time for coming home at dawn soaked in sweat from dancing and laughing, shoes coated and sticky from liquor spilled down bare legs in crowded rooms and damp from running through unattended sprinklers, smelling of smoke from bonfires and tasting of bourbon. I think a lot about my apple tree, this time of year, and how in the first burst of spring it puts all of its effort into making flowers that are unlikely to be visited by the right sort of bees, only making leaves once the blooms have faded.

If it turns out I'm missing, it will be because I have tired of fighting the wind and have hopped on a tramp steamer bound for Argentina to start a new life learning the tango and making maracas and hunting crocodiles. Adventure and misadventure.

I'm thinking almost exclusively in boating metaphors, lately, all about ballast and tempests and ports, under the water and the nature of the sunrise, and the last three lines of Gregory Corso's "Leaky Lifeboat Boys." It tends to make one a bit seasick, of course, but on the other hand the world of boating is rife with the sort of forced metaphors that I so dearly love.

We knew all about boats once, or at least enough about them not to get swallowed by the waves, enough to find scallops for cooking and shallows for swimming. But then we moved away from the water and the sun and our stride slowly lost the soft rolling motion of the sea. I don't really know anything at all about boats anymore, although I still dream in heat and sand. Still, there is a certain kind of truth to be found in the tang of salt water and ropes of windblown hair, a truth forgotten over all these miles and lost under all these words.

But then, one that we might find again, remembering under trees and skies that are different but still softly similar.

I met this inchworm this weekend. He seemed friendly enough, inching along the picnic table, until we nudged him. Quick as anything he reared up, back legs anchored firmly and front legs splayed, looking for all the world like he would gladly chew our faces off with his angry little jaws.

I took notes. I'm not sure that this is a bad way to react to all of this in the unfortunately lately and now-and-again.

A thing I think about at least once a day but almost never mention, because I tire of knowingly raised eyebrows and that pout that says oh man, next she's going to start talking about aerosolized pig brains again, is how strangely long my arms look from the perspective of my eyes. (Honestly, half the reason I don't do drugs is because there's no real need to.) It confuses me, how terribly far away my hands are, how disproportionately spiderlike they look, as if someone stretched them and they never quite sprang back into shape. I wonder if this is why I knock things over all the time, talking with my hands, not because I'm so clumsy but because my arms are so long. My hands are practically on the moon.

I think about what it must have been like to be a dinosaur, to peer back at your heavy long tail and wonder that it could even be a part of you, something so distant. (Full disclosure: I wonder about what it must have been like to be a dinosaur maybe more often than I think about my arms.)

I was in Florida this weekend, memorializing and talking and getting bit by no-see-ems like it's my job, and a picture surfaced in which my crazy skeleton arms were just too obvious not to exclaim about. And it turns out that they run in the family, these gangly disproportionate appendages. Which won't make me marvel at the distance between me and the end of my extremities any less, but which makes me feel less like I'm imagining it.

I'm not sure where the path out of these woods will be, so I am throwing tiny paper airplanes weighed down with matches in every direction. There is too much space that is dark and cold, and too many monsters waiting behind trees and in bushes and in tiny spider holes to grab us as we walk by. Fast as lightning, we might go missing.

It's troubling, the amount of time left, fighting to change what doesn't want to change in an effort to shift the view of all of those years. One long corridor of days after days and only monsters grabbing at our ankles to break up the time. From far away they sometimes look like kittens, which is how they get us to come too close. It's easier to snatch than it is to chase.

The flowers are here, springing up everywhere, unfurling and breaking up the winter's greens and browns. With luck, one of them will have some good news somewhere inside. My supply of optimism is running dangerously low.

Mostly, I am thinking about the end of a Tony Hoagland poem about a dogwood tree:

so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It’s been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.

I feel like our options are either that, or nothing at all.

I dreamed of flying Cadillacs, burning, and you standing under them letting the ashes sift softly on to your umbrella. You didn't understand the screaming or the panic around you, strolling and whistling softly, as though the chaos and the flames just over your head were nothing out of the ordinary. From where I stood, in a window across the street, you seemed a quiet island, and I wondered about the peace you hid under that umbrella.

Awake in empty rooms I see faces from the corner of my eye, in bushes and under streetlights and in the center of spider webs, and I worry about Charles Bonnet Syndrome or whether it is just too much time alone with my books. Surely, if I were going blind, the lady would have noticed while she was peering into my head just a few weeks ago. Maybe my brain is bored, and my visual cortex is playing its own game of solitaire. There's always been only a little bit of a divide between how the landscape looks in my sleep and how it holds itself when I'm awake, and maybe for a little while that line is blurring, spurred on by the spring and the grief and the lack of sleep.

I always have trouble unseeing secret images once I know they're there, in magic eye posters and Dali paintings and Rorschach blots. Patterns refuse to smooth themselves and the image looks like an old woman and a young woman at the same time. Of all the things I could be seeing everywhere, faces are definitely not the worst.

You know, when the SS Eastland fell over on a calm day in the Chicago River it was just doing what it was supposed to, mostly, adding more lifeboats and reinforcing its deck to avoid repeating what had happened to the Titanic. If it has paused and thought about it, the boat might have realized that its center of gravity had changed, that it was feeling a little wobbly and slow to react, but somehow ships never really think about those sorts of things. It just readied itself for a party while inside of it everything went wrong.

Whole families were wiped out that day, laid out in makeshift morgues with no one to claim them. They all just readied themselves for parties, too, while around them everything went wrong. The boat was raised pretty quickly and made seaworthy again as a training gunship where it was useful for quite some time. The people, those who made it and those who didn't, all faded into obscurity just as quickly.

I wonder about the moment when the band stopped playing to abandon ship, when the only sounds left to hear were the snapping of lines and the creaking of decks and the stampeding of panicked passengers. When the boat finally shrugged its shoulders and settled sideways into the shallows and mud, tired from holding up all of those people and that concrete and those boats, and what it sounded like in the fractions of seconds between when the music ended and everything else flowed in.

Last year we learned that our bodies glow with lights we can't see, and this is what I have been thinking about lately. In my head are these continents populated with soft lights--dim moving trails from people pacing, sleepless and wandering, billions of softly breathing people emitting a low glow just like everyone else, not knowing about their light and, for a time, not caring. Animals, too, raccoons glowing and stealing your trash, birds shining softly in their sleep in a tree branch, fluffy bunnies bouncing brightly like a child's toy.

At the end of things, I imagine, that glow slowly fades until in the dark we match our background. Surrounded by all of those lights but no longer one of them.

Our molecules are always around, somewhere, even when they're not in our shapes. We've talked about this before, about how it takes a decade for the molecules of each breath to completely disperse around the world. I've always found this comforting, the idea that my parts are made up of your parts and the parts of everyone that was before. My grandma's molecules are still there, some of them still together, traveling around the world, never really gone.

I'm going back in a couple of weeks, to leave what's left of my grandparents somewhere beautiful. I've never had any feelings about this sort of things before, but now I find myself solaced some by the idea that they will sink into the ground together and eventually become part of the glow from something else. That they may have left us, but they're never really going to be gone.

I picked up a bad head cold in the last week--the kind where the altitude change going downhill can be felt somewhere behind my face--and between that and everything else I have been hazy, keeping busy and participating in things, but only with part of my brain. The rest of it feels like it is watching, categorizing, taking notes and trying to figure out how to reconcile all of the after I have left with the before.

Everyone heard about my grandma if they had more than a conversation or two with me, for as long as I can remember--she was such a constant presence in my life, and I admired her so much. In the obituary she's called "our hero" and it is true. There were a lot of close calls over the last couple of years, but none of the almost prepared me for the end of things.

It's the getting used to it that I like least of all.

We lost my grandma last night. She was a very great lady. If we were living in the future, they would have figured out how to make the best grandmas bionic, so that we would always have them.

We were lucky to have had her for as long as we did.

My first tattoo was almost 10 years ago. I had just moved away to college and just turned 18, and I had always wanted a tattoo, so why wait any longer? I was so happy to be on my own and somewhere new. Since I'd only been living in St. Augustine for a couple of weeks and had done almost no research into the subject, my roommate and I went to the only shop I knew about, because I had seen the bumper stickers for it around town. I handed the giant man behind the counter a tiny print out of a .gif I had found on the internet somewhere and left the rest to him. I wanted it farther up my side but the waist of my pants would have made it hard to heal right there, which is how I ended up with a tattoo of a fairy on my butt. The pain I remember most is the pain of my legs falling asleep, propped uncomfortably on a chair that didn't recline flat.

I loved it, then--and loved showing it off, since unbuttoning my pants in public to show off a new tattoo felt unbearably cool at 18--and am still fond of it now, although to be honest I mostly forget that it's there. It was more about having the freedom to do it than it was about what or where, and many of my former suitors are more familiar with it than I am, since it takes a lot of maneuvering for me to get a close look at it. This new one is almost the opposite of that, not a high five to all the possibilities of the future but a solid forever reminder about some of the best parts of the past. Ten years ago it would never have occurred to me that I would want to remember anything.

The past ten years have quieted the frantic screeching in my brain some. I want to set fewer things on fire now. Around here we are preparing for spring. I spent part of the weekend getting the containers ready for planting, mixing dolomite and fertilizer into pots and earthboxes, preparing the worm box for new bedding. I took a class about making borscht and finished sewing some blankets for a highly anticipated new baby. I still want to high five the future, but no longer as a way to spite the past. I'm learning, if slowly.

I believe in reminders, in keeping close parts of where we come from in order to forget neither how far we have come nor how many people have helped us get so far. We're all of us a collection of high points and low points and seconds where everything comes into focus.

I was always a watcher, naturally, waiting to see what people would do, what would happen next. Sometimes being small and quiet and easily fading into backgrounds is a benefit. I learned a lot about watching out back of my grandparents' house--even I couldn't spend all of my time reading, so I'd cross the grass to the water and see what would happen. If you sat long enough the little crabs would come back out of their holes and scuttle through the mangrove roots, the little fish would come out of their hiding spots under the shadows, and the shore birds would leave their perches in the branches and go back to fishing. There was always a hush down there, only cicadas and sometimes a jumping fish, the rustle of a heron stepping precisely through the mangroves. For most of my life, my grandparents lived right next to that water.

But everything changed, and my granddad died and my grandma had to move, and now that quiet belongs to someone else. I've been feeling a little unmoored since the day I went to say goodbye, a little sad about the notion that there was finally a cap put on the possibility of new memories there. I thought about it for a long while and finally decided that I should always have that place with me, that place where I was always happy and safe and loved, and where I learned my first lessons about the joy that can be found in looking.

At the eye doctor yesterday she levered open my pupils a teensy bit more and peered inside my eyes. I couldn't remember what exactly I was keeping back there. Had I cleaned up the boxes of last summer and glances from across rooms A - L, the leftover petals from a bundle of nasturtiums and the exact way the clouds look at 3:00 on Sunday afternoons? Was the cadillac polished, and all the little elves that run me wearing new uniforms and running on working treadmills? I could picture what it looked like in there, the doctor's light sweeping across the dim open rooms scattered with lumps that could be stacks of books but then again could be monsters or tiger traps or maps for buried treasure.

If she noticed she didn't say anything, merely giving me a piece of paper to trade for new spectacles downstairs and mildly chastising me for wearing my contacts too much and not letting enough air in for the elves. I left and bought myself some flowers, a perfect blue spike of delphinium and the deepest pink carnations, figuring that I might as well take advantage of the momentary extra space in my eyes. Walking, the glare was too much for my vulnerable pupils, so I stuck to the shady side of the street. I like it best there, anyway.

We're planning things for spring, my favorite hobby, planning parties and adventures and bad ideas, planning dresses and tights and leather jackets, planning sewing and working and napping. I love planning. There are trapeze classes to take and spa time to schedule and baby blankets to make. Anticipating fun is almost as much fun as having it.

There are certain things that I am trying to change, but they are resisting. I am planning on stomping around and being impatient until they give in. This never works, but it's always my approach anyway.

It snowed yesterday, for a few minutes, the ground too warm to agree with what was in the air. The internet lit up with the news, with jokes about igloos and snowplows, but by the time we could get outside it had already stopped. No way to tell that it had been snowing and not just raining.

This morning everything was frosted, sparkling in the cold sun, the daffodils bowing a little under the extra weight, the heavy pink flowers in the trees a little wrinkled. I have been running around in all the usual ways, lately, in bars and at musicals and dance parties, still waiting, focusing like a puppy presented with a slice of bacon. If I stare any harder at what I want to be happening, it might all burst into flames.

In the 4th grade we had an intern that sent all of the girls into a flutter--almost certainly, we all thought that he looked just like Marky Mark or JTT. (Actually, since we all spoke almost exclusively in Baby-Sitter's Club slang, we probably thought that he was totally "cushee". Lord.) Everyone did their best to be the one to get the intern's attention, mostly by gathering in groups and giggling and then running away which, it should be noted, is still my primary tactic when confronted with a cute boy. Some girls brought him presents or gave him their lunch cookies or wore the dresses that, at any other time, they would fight their mom to not have to wear. We weren't sure what to do, but we felt in our bones that we should be doing something.

This was the same year that one of the girls stole a Playgirl from her mom, and we would all huddle around it whenever we could, intrigued and repulsed. None of us were sure what we were supposed to do with all of that information, but if it was something moms were hiding then we definitely wanted to know. A bunch of us got caught with it one day and it was confiscated, but by then we pretty much had it memorized. (Also, the year that I was mayor of Enterprise Village. It was a big year.)

Anyway, everyone had a plan to get the attention of the intern. My plan was genius. I would write the intern a story. And then he could keep it forever, and always remember me. So I did--I wrote the intern a story about a group of kids who get lost in the woods and come across a cave inhabited by some number of people on PCP. History doesn't record either the outcome of the story or the intern's reaction or, for that matter, just how I knew about PCP in the 4th grade.

Still, it just goes to show that I have always been like this.

This schedule gets to me sometimes, working full time and being in grad school full time, drinking and dance parties, watching nature documentaries on the couch, cooking and laundry and, every once in a while, cleaning. The only way to have breathing room is to make breathing room, and so I am holding life to the time between deep breaths. I'm dawdling on the walk home to peer into the friendly faces of the daffodils along the sidewalk and buying shoes for other seasons, looking up from typing typing typing about efficient markets in time to catch the fading moments of the sunset and the Space Needle twinkling through the deepening gloom.

A little breathing is all I need, until everything shrinks back down to manageable proportions. It always does eventually.

Oh, Spring. I have been ignoring you, smashing into someone else's turn with all of this bluster and flash, all of these cold windy nights. I don't feel like I got a whole winter's worth of winter, and I am worried that you have torn open all of these flowers too early, that you will take a little break before you are here for good and that in the meantime all of those flowers will die. I'm just having a hard time trusting you.

I'd rather not have to step over a sidewalk pasted with the thick purple petals of the flowers that line my walk, you see. I like those petals to stay where they are until they turn brown, I prefer them not hurled to the ground before their time. I'm sure you understand.

But yesterday on the bus Hemingway told me, "When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest." And, fine. He's sort of right. So I give in, Spring. Nice to see you again.

There is one thing that I want very badly right now, and as is usually the case it is taking up my whole brain--I am frequently a whole lot like a golden retriever or a three year old. I sometimes think that this is why I tend toward impatience, because the rest of my brain is knocking the focusing part around with its elbows, suggesting that we try and feel more than one thing at a time, but that one section is busy staring hard at a fixed point. Lions get distracted by the four points of a chair because they can't focus on more than one thing at once, and I am very often the same.

All of this nervous energy keeps me more awake than caffeine, but the crash is always so much worse.

One of my favorite parts of traveling is the chance to realize one more time how friendly and helpful most people are. (People are friendly and helpful in Seattle, too, but since I live here I am not as often in need of their assistance.) Looking even moderately confused will almost always cause people to pause in whatever they're doing to make sure you're not lost or in trouble, and if you are, to help you find your way again. The old man on the bus made sure that we knew we would end up on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge, the scowling teenager helped us confirm that we were heading in the direction we wanted to be in, the bartender at the Tonga Room offered to take our picture as many times as it took to get it right.

Part of why I don't mind traveling alone is that every time I go anywhere, people are almost always friendly. Sometimes others are not quite so nice--sometimes they try to give you 100 Euro for a blowjob--but almost everyone makes an effort to be kind. Traveling is a good reminder to be helpful to people I meet that are visiting my city--to not always rush past someone holding a map upside down or not quite finding the Space Needle through the fog. To offer to keep taking pictures until the perfect one happens.

I walked across the Golden Gate Bridge, friends, and it was terrifying. So terrifying that I had to have two fruity cocktails at the Tonga Room later. San Francisco loved us--the weather was beautiful and the food was delicious and everyone was so friendly. New cities are the best.

I'm heading to San Francisco tonight, to spend the long weekend exploring a new city and eating many delicious things with a couple of my favorite adventure partners. I love new cities, and how quickly the landscape becomes my place, even if only for a couple of days. Fun and adventure always happens with these people--hot tubs full of Swedish boys, Mexican tranny bars, makeout puppy piles--and I could really use a couple of days out of town, so this is going to be terrific.

We knew all about phantom limbs long before World War II came along and gave us enough victims to make a scientific fact out of it. Ahab felt it, growling about his wooden leg on the deck of the Pequod. We always knew that what was missing sometimes still felt like it was there, that all of our body is part of our brain. That all of our body is part of the past.

I wonder about our brains full of boxes, memories unfiled and nibbled through by mice, found again only when we pass by chance a tree that smells familiar or a jukebox playing the wrong song. About how the cracks between our fingers get larger when we're not looking and let the smaller parts fall through, leaving behind us a breadcrumb trail of raised eyebrows and impatiently tapping feet and the most secret of smiles.

I can't say for sure how we got from there to here, but I bet that with a lamp and a little bit of time we could follow our own trails back and remember everything, piece by piece. I think that in the end, we'd find ourselves somewhere new.

Just because I don't talk really about love and those things, you know, here, doesn't mean I won't elsewhere--today I am over at The Giant Typo talking about collecting love stories, being a big goofy sap, and not giving up on being hopeful.

Like clockwork, the end of January comes around and I find myself rolled under by a case of the smash-everythings, wanting to kick everyone who talks about the weather, ever, and then leave town and change my name. Learn to whittle, and start a jug band, maybe. Something other than this routine, all of these same old things. January and I are always wanting to move in opposite directions.

Sleeping, I dream lately of angry miniature crocodiles, thrashing in pools of water in rooms full of people, leaping at throats and biting off fingers. In these dreams no one else seems to notice their missing digits, or how the water all turns red at their feet.

I wonder about the fighting, and when it stops--when we can let go and realize that good enough really is pretty good. How long it will take me to stop fighting against and start going with, how to smooth these fists out of my hands.

I startle myself with my own shadow often enough to call it all the time, continually confused by the different directions my shadow can come from depending on where the light around me is. I walk to and from most places, and Seattle is so dark, and everywhere I go I can feel someone behind me...except when I turn around, heart in my throat, it's just me sneaking up on myself again.

On Friday night I walked with my umbrella in a drizzle, jumping at each shift in the bushes. About to cross the street, I turned to look for cars, and discovered two joggers only a couple of feet behind me. Most of the time, my imagination weighs heavier than whatever is actually around.

They say that one of the Mars rovers is stuck in the sand now, two wheels broken, digging itself in deeper each time it tries to heave itself out. From down here on Earth the people in charge are going to try to rock the poor stationary thing into a better position for getting sun into its solar panels, and then it will hibernate. If they can wake it back up again come summer it might tell us whether Mars is filled with iron or puppies or if it sloshes while it orbits, but until then it will sit there stranded and motionless on what sounds like a relatively hostile patch of sand. In the meantime its twin will continue to trundle across the land on the other side of the planet.

Late one of these nights, lit only by streetlights or the glow in a dim bar or the brief flashes of passing cars, I might tell you the story about how the stranded Mars rover met the spacebat, how the bat rested its tired leather hands on the sleeping metal shell and how, come summer, they both found a friend.

Unsurprisingly, I talked myself into making a list. Here are a whole mess of things that I want to do, off the top of my head. Let's get to work on some of these. Because you know? I do some pretty fun things, but it feels like bragging to talk about it. Not bragging if it's part of the list, though.

1. Tango in Argentia | 2. Eat brains | 3. Feed a baby giraffe | 4. Buy a dresser that doesn't require assembly | 5. Take a trapeze lesson | 6. Swim with bioluminescent plankton in Puerto Rico | 7. See the Galapagos | 8. Have a bulldog | 9. Spend a month in Tuscany | 10. Learn how to make small talk | 11. Know enough French to have a conversation in France | 12. See hot lava | 13. Visit the Zeus Cave on Crete | 14. See the Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic | 15. Visit all 50 states (31/50, so far) | 16. Go to Mexico | 17. Dig clams on a coast | 18. Learn to whistle | 19. Get married | 20. Have a family | 21. Own a lake house or someplace in the country for vacations | 22. Have a portrait taken | 23. Get another apple tree so Herbie will be able to produce fruit | 24. Go zip lining | 25. Make baby blankets for pregnant friends | 26. Have a date for New Years Eve | 27. Eat lobster from Maine in Maine | 28. Perfect a signature dish for dinner parties | 29. Finish the last four books of "In Search of Lost Time" | 30. Switch my lightbulbs to CFLs | 31. Clean out the filing cabinet | 32. Stick packets of flower seeds in the pockets of clothes in stores | 33. Learn to take compliments gracefully | 34. Visit Spain | 35. Find a job that lets me travel and help people | 36. Look at space through a very big telescope | 37. Skinny dip near a waterfall | 38. Throw another surprise party | 39. Have a picnic at Point No Point | 40. Go fishing | 41. Learn to drive a stick shift | 42. Visit City Lights bookstore | 43. Ride a hot air balloon | 44. See a moose not in a zoo | 45. Make more of my wardrobe than I buy | 46. Ride a camel not in a zoo | 47. Get a drink from a swim up bar | 48. Have a fancy day at a spa | 49. Ride a donkey at the Grand Canyon | 50. Finish grad school | 51. Find a pair of jeans that fit perfectly, and then buy several of them | 52. Visit the Smithsonian | 53. See the noble rhinoceros not in a zoo | 54. Visit Yosemite | 55. Compliment more people sincerely and specifically | 56. Stop biting my nails | 57. Have a whole room just for books | 58. Learn to make my own stationary | 59. Send someone to college who otherwise wouldn't be able to go | 60. Drink champagne in France | 61. Go to Lake Vanda in Antarctica | 62. Get my worm box back in working order | 63. Eat at Tilth | 64. Learn how to alter clothes | 65. Learn to play the pedal steel | 66. Visit Thailand | 67. Sit in a hot spring | 68. Start volunteering again | 69. Go in a cave | 70. Get up the first time my alarm goes off consistently | 71. Be able to do at least one pull up | 72. Write love notes | 73. Ride the Orient Express | 74. Visit Mongolia | 75. Play tambourine in a band | 76. Make cheese | 77. Grow enough tomatoes to be able to can some | 78. Pay off student loans | 79. See a reindeer in Iceland | 80. Create a recipe box or binder | 81. Discover a song that I can actually karaoke well | 82. Ride the Trans-Siberian express | 83. Learn to re-wire a lamp | 84. Have a romantic weekend at Treehouse Point | 85. Become a better public speaker | 86. Hold a pygmy marmoset | 87. Eat fresh crab on the Dungeness Spit | 88. Grow more edible flowers | 89. Make all my own cleaning products | 90. Saber off the top of a champagne bottle | 91. Learn to juggle | 92. Visit the Hermitage | 93. Sleep in a castle | 94. Go to the ballet at least once a year | 95. Not feel guilty spending bits of my savings on adventures | 96. Pick up a Sleepy Lizard in Australia | 97. Meet a pangolin. Tell it that its name is Nicodemus | 98. Be able to lift my carry-on over my head (aka, No More Sad Noodle Arms) | 99. High five some manner of non-human primate | 100. Go on an archaeological dig | 101. Learn to fold a fitted sheet | 102. Make a ship in a bottle without a kit | 103. Have one of granddad's old fishing maps framed. | 104. Visit the Wieliczka Salt Mine | 105. Live in Paris

Last summer, science told us that our bodies glow in the dark, shining out visible light that is 1,000 times less than what our eyes are equipped to see. But we already knew that, didn't we, that the spaces between our eyes and our brains are too large to see the things that might matter most. And here we are, moving through space, glowing without realizing it, wondering why plants are always flowering around us and why we have trouble getting to sleep at night.

I have been thinking about life lists, about making one, and looking at lists that other people have made. I'm pretty big on just doing things because they sound like fun, and it's encouraging to see that some of the adventures that I have had are things that appear on peoples' lists. I feel like I'm doing an ok job at life--I've taken a cross-country road trip, traveled in Italy alone and in China with friends, eaten a whole lot of escargot, learned how to sew--but maybe I should make a list. I like lists. (Here's a thing: sometime soon, once we get our scheduling together, I am going to take a trapeze class. This scares the bejeezus out of me, which is obviously why it has to be done.) There are a ton of things left to be done: tango in Argentina, eat brains (not human, you zombies), feed a baby giraffe, buy a dresser I don't have to assemble myself. Maybe a list is the thing.

There was a list, once. I made it in approximately high school and carried it around in my wallet until it fell apart. I don't remember what was on it...something about learning the violin, I think, and probably learning to draw. A bunch of things, written on lined notebook paper and folded three times. In college I typed up the fading list in a teensy font and carried that around for a while. It's probably somewhere. Not the most useful of lists.

I think about this a lot, is all, the ways we all spend the time between now and the end. All of us passing each other, shining softly, trying our best not to get swallowed up by all of this time we have left, hammering together stories out of scraps and wisps of moments and glances and adrenaline. Trying to fill the space between our eyes and brains with whatever we have at hand.

Lately I dream of natural disasters, of drowning, and while it would be nice to say that this is because I think too much about the people of Haiti, that's not really why. Tangible tragedy only haunts me when I'm awake--these are things that I can help with in tiny tiny ways, and sometimes all movement counts.

It's the rest of it that pulls in the tides. Everyone surrounded by palm trees and white sand, most of them miserable or dying or both, and nothing I can do about any of it.

I just wonder, is all. About the other people looking tired in the airport, sitting quietly with their expressions facing inward and shoulders heavy. About all of the things that are broken and drowning and lost, and when it becomes possible again to muster the effort to push everything up one more time. Just before coming home I always feel like a very small rabbit staring down something too large and bright to even have a form.

Back home and off the plane, the first breath outside feels like the first breath after holding the last one walking past a graveyard. Safe again, and a little dizzy from the close call.

I'm heading to Florida tonight, to hang out with my mom and look at my grandmothers and maybe make some animal noises with various children of various cousins. Luckily, the weather seems to have quit freezing the fruit trees and gone back to being half the reason to go to Florida in the winter, and I went into homework lockdown recently and got almost everything for next week's classes done, so I plan to relax a lot and stuff my face with things that don't exist in Seattle. (See: Chick-fil-A, my favorite sandwich, fresh orange ice cream. Alligator tails that I will wrest off with my bare hands. The usual.)

Next month I'm going to San Francisco, which I am unreasonably excited about because I have always wanted to go down there, but all of my previous trips have fallen through. I'm going with friends and have friends down there, so I'm sure the whole weekend will be crammed with hilarity and shenanigans. But I've spent all this time wanting to go to SF and not any time at all figuring out what I want to do while I get down there. So I guess I have some research to do.

Here is a list of places that are helping in Haiti.

Haiti is a poor, poor country, its buildings are collapsed, and thousands of people could be dead already. The living could definitely use some help.

The other day someone asked me, "What would make you happiest?"

I answered, "Um. A bucket full of puppies?

Man, I don't know. True love and high adventure? I'm pretty happy as it is. Maybe what would make me happiest would be for life to keep going just as it is only even more--more traveling, an awesome fella to have adventures with, a job where I am more involved in the mission. Or maybe that's greedy, and I just want to keep getting to have a good time with some of the smartest, most creative people ever.

Also, I would like to be about nine inches taller and about two times hotter. And, world peace."

I've been thinking about that ever since--I would have to be someone else if my brains weren't constantly chattering at me about something--because it didn't seem quite right. Could that actually be true? When did life live along to the point where it was so awesome that I no longer need something different, but instead more of the same? Shouldn't there have been a memo or something? I mean, missing an awesome fella, a closer proximity to outer space, and someone else's face (ok, and world peace) is the same thing as not missing anything at all. All the more parts are things I can and have plans to do myself.

Thing is, it feels true. Which is...a bit of a surprise, although it shouldn't be, since it's what I've been aiming at. I'd give myself a high five if I hadn't already tried that and so wasn't already aware of how silly it looks. I guess now I really need to get to work on finding that bucket of puppies.

I was playing cat's cradle with our stories, weaving them around and through my fingers, plucking here and maneuvering there, and ending up with a tangle. I'm almost as bad with my hands as with my feet. Although the fact is that my heart is still the clumsiest of them all.

We ran like children through the dark, all forehead and elbows, dodging streetlamps and raindrops and tiny tiny comets, stumbling on loose paving stones and catching ourselves at the last moment. Streaking light through our own skies, lungs burning with laughter.

If all rectangles were squares it would take the same amount of time to get back to each of our corners. If all rectangles were squares, secrets and memories would be equal distances apart, and easier to comb into friendlier patterns. Easier to untangle.

So this friend of mine started fashion school a little while ago, and one of her assignments was to interview someone with a different style than her own. (She's got that whole sexy tomboy thing going on.) She sent it to me recently, and I wondered, "what am I supposed to do with this?" until I remember that this is practically what the internet was invented for. So ok, let's talk about fashion. Or ok, let's copy and paste about fashion. (For authenticity, imagine that I am answering these while waving my hands around, because man am I a hand talker.)

You almost never wear pants. What's the deal with that, anyway?
(laughs) It's a couple of things, I guess. I realized a couple of years ago that dresses were more comfortable, and that I thought a lot less about what might be wrong with my body when I felt comfortable in my clothes. Pants are so binding And then it turned out that I liked the act of dressing deliberately, and there are a lot more options when half of your outfit isn't jeans.

How would you describe your style?
I'm actually really boring. But I guess by default you'd have to call my style "girly", what with all the dresses and heels. Plus I love lace and satin and jewelery and sparkly things.

What are some of your favorite pieces?
I made a locket with pictures of my maternal grandparents in it a while ago, and it makes me feel safe every time I wear it. A couple of months ago I bought some really great ankle boots (these ones) and I wear them everywhere all the time and people always compliment them. And colored tights--this fall and winter I've been wearing a lot of different shades of gray and also this pair that is a dusty rose.

What are you never seen without?
A very confused look, a ring that my grandfather had made for me and another from the gumball machine at the bar down my street. It used to have plastic eggs with a ring, a condom, and a fortune in them, which I found hilarious. Now it's just a fortune and a tampon, which seems less optimistic.

I'm also usually wearing some sort of jewel-tone color. Seattle's a pretty gray city, and I figure that with my red hair I'm already going to be visible from space, so there's no reason not to. Plus, my skin is so fair that softer colors don't look as good. I like the idea of brightening things up.

Do you buy new or vintage?
Ummmm, both. Vintage often fits better, but I don't usually have the patience for vintage shopping. A lot of my jewelery is vintage. I'm pretty hard on clothes and shoes, what with all of the walking and falling down, so I tend to buy less expensive things that won't matter so much when I rip them.

And of course, some of my clothes I make myself, when I have time.

What's your favorite thing about fashion?
I love that it can be art that you take everywhere with you, and how it's possible to completely transform your mood just by changing your outfit. Wait, that's two things, isn't it? Hell.

What's your least favorite thing about fashion?
I don't like that people don't dress for events anymore--I used to volunteer at the ballet, and it drove me crazy to see people there in things like jeans and flipflops. I know I'm old fashioned, but I don't like that comfort has taken the place of showing respect for the people around us. Also, I don't like most of the Spring 2010 Louboutin collection.

Yesterday was the perihelion, but the sun and I are old pros at this by now. I tossed up a rope and the sun hooked it over an extra loop of plasma, and we set up a message bucket easy as pie.

I told the sun about plans, about travels and hijinks and schemes, about how I intend to start smiling at people instead of looking at my feet so much. I told it about how my elbows are always wearing holes in my sweaters and how my hats always come apart at the seams, how I managed to dance in heels all night on a floor covered in confetti and not fall once. I told it about the specific feeling of sliding on to a smooth bench in a familiar place, of a soft wind ruffling my hair just before stepping in to a cab. Of late nights and hands in my hair, and the specific muscles that ache from laughing and nothing else.

I told it about a little yellow frog in Panama that waves at all the other frogs, friendly little golden frogs that can't be heard over the rushing of the water that they live near and had to adapt with gestures. Except that they're not in Panama anymore, not outside, because all the frogs were dying from a fungus and the scientists had to choose between taking them away or letting them die altogether. And now those riverbanks are unbroken green and no gold. About the dangers of breathing through your skin and seeing through your eyes.

The rest of the bucket I filled up with a rainbow, an atlas, and three funny jokes, and a sandwich and thermos of coffee and a blanket for the long trip back around. I hear it gets cold out there in space, even if you are the sun.

(You guys, I can't resist new things. It's troubling.)

2010!

When you arrived last night I was just starting to break a sweat in a dance party, wearing an adorable dress and with pretty awesome hair, and my first kiss for the year was at least a straight boy for once, if one that is also just a pal. Some things happened that I didn't like, but there was also a hilarious romantic goose chase trying to corral a boy for a friend that ended up crashing an after party that was maybe not so happy to see us. I started you off for real well-rested and not hung over and eventually watching Robert Downey Jr. be stupidly hot, and then eating one of my favorite sandwiches in Seattle, so we'll call all of that a good start.

2010, I am suspicious of you because everyone keeps crowing about all of the good feelings they have about you. By now I know better than to tempt you like that. But I'm still hopeful, I guess. I have done a lot of failing, but I have tried hard the last few years to do more good things than bad ones, so I kind of hope that I'm always getting closer to a year where ok is not a triumph. Maybe we can try for actually sincerely good? Or more good than bad and less bad and more alright?

Anyway, let's talk about this. We have a whole year to get it right.

heart,
me

Hey there, 2009.

At the beginning of you, I said, "I am going to go ahead and decide right now that this year is going to be awesome, and full of cookies and aardvarks and pangolins and robots and movies and whiskey and friends and memories and smiles and high fives." And man, I should consider a career as a prophet, because that is totally what happened.

2009 was a calm, calm year, full of laughing and not a lot else, which was exactly what I needed it to be after all the turmoil and crying in cabs of the last few years. I didn't have any relationships so I didn't have any breakups to recover from, and none of my people died. I found my first wild four leaf clover. Nothing happened in 2009 aside from starting graduate school, and I am ok with that. I wrote some things, but by and large 2009 looked like a jeans ad, all attractive people smiling in the sun, and I imagine that I will always look back on it fondly but absently.

The year can be summed up, I think, by two photos: this one, in which I have just cooked dinner with some of my favorite people and we are planning a surprise party when someone said something funny and we all laughed until we cried. I laughed so hard it hurt a lot this year. And then there is this, looking straight down a mountain covered in flowers and fog and seeing only a quiet beautiful field with something else beautiful behind it, just hidden in the clouds.

I really needed you, 2009. Even though I fought hard against all of my impulses for shattering and breaking and setting on fire, for heat and motion and madness. I have called you boring, and you were, but boring isn't really bad. Not always.

But for 2010, less boring! In a good way. I spent a lot of time deliberately not doing things because I didn't want to deal with the fallout, and there has to be a way in the middle. So that's my plan: finding the middle way toward hilarity and fulfillment without being either monastic or destructive. No problem.

Thanks for taking it easy on me, 2009. I'll pause in the middle of my dance party to drink in your honor tonight.

heart,
me

Hey, tradition! Here is 2009 in pictures:



and my favorite things documented by other people:



2009 has not been amazing, but it has also not been awful, so I am ok with how it has all turned out.

The whole traveling experience turned out to be alarmingly easy, with not a single line at security and all flights on time. By the time my last flight came in early and my luggage even earlier, I was prepared to face something like a burned down apartment when I got home--my luck is never that good, and I am usually a pretty lucky flier.

I always forget about flying over the country at Christmastime, all of those towns that I may never go to twinkling sweetly with Christmas lights, little constellations strung across the dark ground, not thinking about the airplane flying lonely and quiet above them.

There were deer only 20 feet or so away from us on Wednesday--closer than I have ever been to a deer--and I would have liked to have paused and looked at them except that I was on the back of a renegade horse with a serious dislike for mud and also for me. (Probably because I kept up a running monologue about how I didn't trust it, although to be fair to me I only started that after the first time it took me into the the trees.) I'm sure that they were adorable or majestic or whatever it is that deer are when they're not running away, but by that point in the ride all I wanted in the world was to not be on that horse any more.

Christmas morning is a lot more my speed these days, now that my brothers are old enough to sleep past 6 am and the event can start with bellinis and end with eating a thing made almost entirely of cheese and ham.

The best part of going away is coming home, cresting the hill on the interstate by the West Seattle bridge exit and seeing my town spread all glittery just ahead.

Merry Christmas, friends! So far there has been a very, very Southern variety show, a movie about blue cat people, a lot of dog petting, and getting a knee trapped between a tree and a horse. Some of these things have been more fun than others, but on the other hand my knee is turning a lot of festive shades of red and blue and green and yellow.

I'm heading to North Carolina tonight for Christmas, which should be entertaining because I love airports, even during the holidays. I like how anonymous airports are, and I like watching people going places. I don't particularly like sitting on airplanes for a million hours or dealing with the time difference at the end, but that's just what happens when you move 3,000 miles away from your family.

It will be nice to get out of town for a week, since I've had my fill of awkward run-ins in this town for at least the rest of the year. This time last year it was snowing snowing snowing, and life was about to get all brokedown like a French film. (I miss the snow.) This year I'll be lounging with my family and petting some dogs and wrapping presents and going to sleep at reasonable hours.

I take traveling fashion very seriously, because I do not believe that being on an airplane overnight is an excuse to wear sweatpants in public. (I don't believe that anything but the flu is a reason to wear sweatpants in public, and then only to the corner store for nyquil.) I think that the most comfortable traveling outfit is a long-sleeved black dress, tights, and my favorite gray ankle boots, with a scarf that I bought in Italy that is big enough to double as a blanket for freezing airplanes. Now if only I could figure out how to sleep on airplanes, everything would be awesome.

You see? I sure did stand on a lake.

People are starting to round up the last decade in lists and things, and I can't even deal--10 years is a mighty long time, y'all. I have trouble enough just pulling together my thoughts on each year on its own. (Which reminds me, I forgot the six year anniversary of this thing here. Happy anniversary, thing.)

But! The facts are these: a whole lot of things are different from what they were 10 years ago. When it turned 2000, I was 17 and walking along a sidewalk in a neighborhood in Pinellas Park, Florida with a friend and my ex boyfriend who was about to start dating that friend. I was also grumpy, and presumably half drunk on some concoction involving peach schnapps and Albertson's brand vodka. The boy was a baseball player who had Jared Leto hair.

In the intervening time I have done all of the things that you can do in 10 years--gone to college, moved 3,000 miles to a town full of strangers, built a pretty incredible life full of amazing people. I've been to Canada and China and Italy, started graduate school, met David Crosby and Graham Nash in a bar in Delaware. There have been births and deaths and boyfriends and notboyfriends and a whole lot of makeouts and shenanigans. A whole decade is quite a lot of time.

Really, the main thing is this: things have been good, and are always getting better.

We made it back from Whistler not even a little bit frostbitten. The weekend involved the usual amount of impromptu dance parties and hilarity, and a very memorable afternoon spent dangling a whole lot of feet above the ground in a little box strung between two mountain tops. Which would have been a whole lot scarier were we not fortified by the bottle of cinnamon whiskey I had hidden in my purse.

On Saturday afternoon a couple of us broke off from the main group and rented what were possibly unnecessary snow shoes in order to crunch our way out to a lake. Snow shoes are a whole lot louder than I would have thought, but we hauled ourselves around the lake and walked out on to the beach right at the prettiest of hours. The ice was smooth and some people in the distance were playing hockey, and we stepped out of our shoes and gingerly out on to the ice. The only sounds were the cheers coming from the game across the lake and the boom of the ice cracking a little somewhere in the distance, and then right under my feet.

(Hey, bonus: here is a video that Josh made when we didn't know he was making a video, in which I stare at my snowshoes a lot because I am so incredibly in love with snow.)

We're heading up to Whistler for a long weekend, to revisit the hilarity of the out of town life and find the Bumble and establish a peppermint mine, or whatever it is that people do in snowy mountain places. I will probably end up freezing to death in the woods somewhere, as this past week has taught me that I do not have the required arctic wardrobe, but fortunately for me there is also a hot tub involved. So that probably all equals out.

I'm actually really excited, because there will be SNOW everywhere for days, and I'm sure there will come a time that I am a big snow grump like everyone else, but that time is not now. I don't think the altitude of Whistler is high enough to give me space poisoning, and it is basically going to be a solid four days of fun times, with luck.

Sitting around a table the talk turned, as it often does, to technology, and then to the invention of cars and the way it must have felt the moment that it became possible to move so quickly. I made a joke about how I probably would have been something of a Luddite even then--what are you doing with all that time you're saving going so fast, what's wrong with good old horses--but it really wasn't a joke. I genuinely don't think that newer is always better or that faster is more fun than slower. What's wrong with taking the long cut or talking to the people in front of me instead of fiddling with a tiny computer in my pocket? I wish all this technology would get off my lawn. Maybe progress doesn't always mean something new and extra shiny.

But I guess some of us have to be old fashioned, if only to stay a fixed point that everyone else is moving away from. I already have in this bag all of these quaint ideas about love and friendship and manners, so maybe I'll stop feeling guilty about preferring my own slower, quieter ways. Some of us just aren't made to move so fast.

The bank down the street from me left its sprinklers on overnight, so when I left to walk to work this morning the sidewalk for half the block was a solid sheet of ice, all sparkly in the morning sun. I thought that I had prepared for the cold by wearing pants instead of a dress, but navigating an ice rink before coffee was very nearly beyond me.

It was a waste of water, all that ice spread over the sidewalk, but it sure was pretty--all layers and ribbons and tiny ice confetti. I would rather have stayed there to watch what happened to it, what melted first and where it all went, but there were other things that had to be done. It's supposed to be record-breakingly cold this week, though, so with a little luck there will be more ice to come. I'll have my snow boots ready, just in case.

Sometimes the weight of all of this looking pulls too heavily on my elbows, until I'm not sure that I can any longer hold up the heft of all of these things. There is too much to see and no way to cram it all into my eyeballs, to fix it in the back of my brain.

I think sometimes that we are mithridatizing ourselves to all of this beauty, letting these slow sweet poisons drip through our veins because we can't get enough of seeing. Is there any way to keep from becoming immune to what is perfect if we are noticing it all the time? Mithridates himself tried to poison himself and failed because he had spent his life trying so hard not to be poisoned. Surely he knew that it would go wrong but had to try anyway. He tested his immunity and found it true when he least wanted it to be. Someday all of this will cause us to miss what we most want to see.

And sometimes with my eyes closed I can still feel this cupped in my hands, throbbing with tiny mouse heartbeats. I'm never sure then what to say or to who, how to describe when my fingers feel like light blue lace and my arms burnt through like Sunday morning. Sometimes I think I think too much.

I'm keeping a list of all the things that steal my heart, and it's getting a little long. There was that tree that gently dropped a single leaf on the top of my head and an old man in a knit hat who smiled and motioned me toward the bus before him. A small dog that carried its own leash in its mouth. A friend making sure the deviled eggs weren't too spicy, and three more nestled around a table, working. A late night smile and a hand in my hair.

I wonder about hearts, and how we live with them riddled with holes big enough to see through. And maybe this is why I wonder so much about the octopus, living with three hearts in the cold and the dark. There's a kind of heart disease named after them, the broken heart syndrome, where sometimes emotional stress can cause the heart to suddenly weaken. Three is, I think, too many--I'm sure the one is vulnerable enough.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and I am excited beyond description, even though the turducken won't be making an appearance this year. On the upside, we'll actually have a wishbone for once, and as usual more food than should be allowed.

After the zombie party, Josh said, "every so often you’re lucky enough to find that you’re living in the middle of this life that you never thought to imagine for yourself." I don't know quite how I got here, but I'm sure glad I did. There are a lot of adventures left to be had.

I am tired and worn thin, waiting for a change, and inexplicably anxious. These last few months have taken their toll.

Everything larger is too big, so I focus in on all the details. Details are what I am best at. The beadwork and ruffles on the cuff of my gloves, hidden by my coat sleeve. A high-necked gray blouse that no one else likes because they don't know about the row of tiny buttons that climb the back of my neck under the soft fall of my hair. The specific sensation of sitting on the floor in the back room of a tiny gallery, watching someone play the guitar while the foot of the stranger behind taps softly on my lower back in time with the beat. Drinking beer from a can in a paper bag, and wearing jewel tone clothes on dark rainy nights. Whatever makes everything large a little bit smaller.

Just until something changes.

PS, this is what nature in action looks like.

There's a tree next to my second bus stop on the way to school, so I stand under it twice a week, waiting. There was a storm while its leaves were yellowing, and one of the lower-down branches broke but didn't fall. The leaves on it stopped yellowing and started browning while all of the other leaves got brighter and brighter and then fell off. The brown leaves are still there, the only ones left on the tree now.

On Saturday night I was clomping up hill to the bus when I noticed a tiny owl sitting on the sidewalk in front of me, glaring. It seemed disinclined to move and I tried to edge around it, not wanting to startle it if it was hurt. The owl turned its head and followed my movement, still not moving, still looking profoundly annoyed at me. Nothing is as good at looking annoyed as an owl. So I retreated backwards a few steps downhill--no easy feat in my heels--and walked out into the street to avoid the owl altogether. It was only then, when the streetlight and I hit the right angle and it flashed in both the eyes of the owl and the eyes of the rat he was sitting on, that I realized why he was refusing so steadfastly to go anywhere.

Last night I dressed up as a zombie for the first time.

I was pretty against the whole idea from the beginning, given my quite logical distrust of zombies and my frequent zombie nightmare, but a close friend was turning 30 on Friday the 13th and having a zombie birthday, so resistance was simply not an option. I went for the fresh zombie look, in order to avoid having to rip up my clothes.

Surprisingly, I haven't ever wandered around in public smeared in either real or fake blood before, and it was interesting to watch strangers react. Some people wanted to bond over the last time they went out dressed as a zombie, and some of them just whispered and pointed at us. My cab driver home, memorably, almost screeched away when he noticed the blood all over my face and then nearly hyperventilated trying to make sure that I didn't need to go to the hospital.

My main conclusions from the night are that fake blood is extremely itchy, and that people dancing like zombies are quite possibly the funniest thing in the known universe.

Physics demands that when we nudge our buttered bread off of the table it will land butter side down. I wonder if these are the same rules that drive all of our coin tosses, if the side that has the most anticipation layered on top is actually the one that always loses. If it's our hopes that weigh us down.

On an evening in Rome I came across a fountain, which is not that uncommon an occurrence--Rome is liberally laced with fountains. I was exhausted, having spent the day getting thoroughly lost on streets that, I could swear, appeared on the map on the opposite side of town. I flung myself down next to the fountain, thoroughly discouraged, and halfheartedly tossed in a coin. And that was when I discovered I wasn't alone.

Lounging against a wall and smoking a cigarette was a girl who scoffed at me in an accent I couldn't place. How could I expect my wish to come true if I tossed it in such a desultory fashion? She demonstrated how it ought to be done, throwing a coin over her shoulder and winking at me when it hit the water with a satisfying plop. We passed a few minutes tossing coins into the fountain in the silliest ways we could think of--on one foot, between our legs, over the other person's shoulder. And wouldn't you know, when I left to plod along in search of dinner, my shoulders felt so much straighter.

I don't think any of those wishes have come true yet in fact but they have a little in spirit, and in either case I'm pretty sure that those coins, at least, landed butter side up.

Man, that island sure is pretty.

Late, late on Saturday night we finished watching a movie and found that the tide was out. I borrowed some yellow rubber boots and a flashlight and walked out just a little past where the water hit--I could feel the water cooling the boots and slowly numbing my toes. And then I turned off the flashlight.

Behind me, in the cabin, my friends were cuddled up watching another movie. Nothing moved around me but the water lapping gently at my ankles and the stars pushed back the clouds covering them. I could have stayed right there and right then forever.

Today we're going to take a boat to an island and stuff 13 people into cabins with beds for 12, and have an adventure for the weekend. There's a big storm happening, and I have read enough teenage pulp horror fiction to know that this is the perfect setting for something terrible to happen, but with a little luck we'll just cozy up in piles and play board games and drink hot toddies and tell jokes. And all make it back out alive.

With a little luck, all the wind and waves and laughing will blow these mean reds right out from under my eyelids, calm the 3/4 time waltz of my heart, smooth these fists out of my hands.

We described our memories in blanks, fitting our hands around the spaces held by what is no longer there. Excavating, fingers caked in the dirt of what once belonged, creating distance and cracks large enough to funnel through a cleansing breeze. What we used to be, but aren't, now. Better and worse, and smaller.

I made a game out of drowning the sun in smaller and smaller places--a hiss in the ocean and a cloud of steam in a puddle and something new altogether in a vitreous humour. Blotting out the light to see what was behind it like a little girl playing hide and seek.

Sometimes I wonder if what is going to drown us all in the end is what used to be there and still is, somewhere, just looking different than how we remember. Everything has to go somewhere.

The last three Halloweens have involved three very different costumes and three very different experiences. I think it's the costume that's the factor. (Actually, the last three Halloweens have involved sitting on my couch, but the pre-Halloween parties still hold the point.) Baberaham Lincoln partied like a lunatic until around 4 am. As a giraffe I made out like crazy at a smoky after party. As a skeleton, I had to stop dancing because I was laughing too hard at dancing zombies and was home alone by 2:30.
I'm not sure what the lesson here is, exactly, but I think it has something to do with flesh.

Yesterday was a year since my granddad passed away. I'm still not used to it. I'm still not sure I want to be.