“There are some among us who live in rooms of experience we can never enter”

john steinbeck

I am, at this moment, in that forbidden room.
And for the sake of it, 

for the sake of me,
I'm taking a break from the blog.

A break from the burning desire for validation I lay at it's feet,

a break from trying to lay feelings bare

which are not yet big enough to face this big bad world.

So I'm taking a break,
a day,
a week,
a month.
I don't know.
But I'll be back.

to burn away my shame
i'd jump from the highest cliffs
leap from the highest towers
into a sky aflame and raging with sea-blue
redemption.
i would soar before my fall,
and fly
too close to the sun.

you would see my
silhouette.
the impression
of a girl that could be,
of a nimble if
a might have been
that navigates the sky
so easily;
she uses the changing clouds
the sagging cotton skies
as beacons marking the way,
using the course of the wind
to lead her home.
you would see the black of me
undisturbed by the light
the darkest parts of me
an underbelly aglow
unbroken by laughter,
and
with no such golden child to compare it to
that shadow of a me
would break your heart
with the purity of it's wrongness.

i would be an angry bruise
against and aging sun
high on the heady fumes
of a million extinguished dreams
drunk to the point of belligerence
from sipping at the steady fountain
of prayers,
constantly running between
the ancient rotting terra firma
and that place called the Promised land.
an endless stream of fermented hope
refined, strained, and steeping,
stewed to an alcoholic tar
aged by the distance
between every human heart and his Creator.

i promise this to you,
sometime between the last instant
of toe on ground stability
between the moment i leapt for my
penance
and the time when
bare foot bleeding
skin peeling
nerves screaming
from the burning off of my pain
and the dissolution of my self-pity;
between the time i take flight,
and that ever unsure landing,
whether a sad last thud,
or at a screeching run
with fists and hair flying,
heart humbled and backbone mended,

Whether into the ground or across it i land,
somewhere, between takeoff and letdown,
i will forgive,
i will have burned within myself,
incinerated in the fires of my sudden
short-lived bravery:
my past,
the memory, the marker of my life,
and will have dropped it's ashes
across the oceans.

and in the hands of another
whether fate
Gravity
or Something greater
will be the verdict,
the passing down of a sentence.
the great decider,
the judge of all things
will spew forth the terms of my indictment,
and i might only pray that it rain down on me
run over and through me,
touching every crack
and dry spot,
and stick fast to me
a baptism in punishing healing hoping stinging honey.
only He will tell,
the angry bellowing Future,
prodding me to take my turn,
He
will say
will weigh my penance
my leap
my tears and my singed face
against all i have done.
and whether i will land, or whether i will crash
I will be the bard that brings forth the tale,
and strumming, humming,
scarred and shivering
I will bear witness to all.

this is a lazy blog. :) an old poem i found, because it's the end of the semester and I'm roommate hunting, life reorganizing, brain straightening, and the world appears to be spinning very fast.

i'm waiting

"The universe was a place of wonders, and only habituation, the anaesthesia of the everyday, dulled our sight. She had read, a couple of days back, that as part of their natural processes of combustion, the stars in the skies crushed carbon into diamonds. The idea of the stars raining diamonds into the void: that sounded like a miracle, too. If that could happen, so could this. Babies fell out of zillionth-floor windows and bounced. There was a scene about that in François Truffaut's movie L'Argent du Poche...She focused her thoughts. "Sometimes," she decided to say, "wonderful things happen to me, too."”

salman rushdie

the satanic verses

so maybe not yet. 

maybe today wasn't the day for the wonderful thing.

maybe the wonderful thing is waiting for me to hold up my end.

but one of these days, man

happiness is gonna hit me like a train.

and every morning?

getting out of the bed?
dotting the i's ---crossing the infinite t's?

every day is training.

to make sure i'm ready to take all that annihilating joy

and let it crush all my fear.

that's what i think.

funnier ways to put off writing your philosophy paper (because i still had 10 minutes)

boot) stop using numbers to demarcate sequence, make up your own sequential device and piss on millenia of mathematical progress. boot comes before one. the end.

car) realize that creating your own sequential devise is a perfect demonstration of conceptualism, and that you actually ARE using philosophy and use that to rationalize spending even more time blogging, because you are getting "warmed up for your paper"

nugget) realize that getting warmed up for your paper is a very important process which you have neglected far too often in the past, and suppose that it might greatly improve your writing skills.

pantaloon) attempt to stretch your brain, fingers, and wrist muscles in preparation for this epic writing journey

nerfherder) let wrist stretching lead to body stretching, which leads to side cramp because you ate WAY too many almonds and did not wait an hour before physical exertion.

proctologist) hold your belly and moan lightly while typing a blog about procrastination. realize, while typing blog, that the word wrist is positively absurd, and needs a sixth letter because it looks naked and vulnerable and wrong.

pork) begin to mentally philosophize about nakedness and vulnerability in human beings and the universal need to protect them.

bandoleer) become distraught because you have realized that you are philosophizing, and obviously warmed up and should probably start your paper.

598)  seek counsel from your goldfish about angst, but realize that there is an epic youtube video where some guy freaks out over world of warcraft and realize that staring at other people's problems is wayyyy better than paying attention to your own.



10) realize that can never be your life, stop talking to your goldfish, begin using real numbers again, do not think about naked wrists, and chastely begin your paper, which is due in 12 hours.

zeus help me.

ways to put off your philosophy paper

1) think about how miserable it is to write philosophy.


2) decide you really haven't been working out enough, and end up at the gym!


3) accept a last minute invitation to the world's cheapest, most delighful sushi

4) decide on the way home from sushi, that you need to stop eating out, and stop at the store for veggies, nuts, berries, bananas.

5) realize upon arriving home, that you NEED broccoli, in the way Nicholas Cage needs to stay away from dramatic acting roles.

6) find four different spices to put on your broccoli, to assess the best way in which to flavor your fiber.

7)remember you forgot to blog, and MUST blog, lest the blog gustapo come cut off your toes in your sleep. (which by the way you won't be getting any of tonight, because you have this very important to do list to complete)

8) check your email, check your other email, check for facebook, spend an inordinate amount of time gawking at the ludicrously overpersonal posts of friends from middle school.

9) remember that your computer chair is actually a giant bouncy ball.

10) wholeheartedly embrace the chaos which is brought on by previous realization.

11) take picture of exactly how miserable it is to procrastinate a blog.

12) spend only an instant realizing you aren't entirely sure what aforementioned essay is to be about.

13) realize you can't POSSIBLY start a paper at 11:42, you must wait for a whole time (like twelve, which means i have 18 more minutes to procrastinate, before i have to find another good reason to procrastinate)

the moment it hits

All we really want, when we realize we've been terribly wrong, is to be forgiven. there is something to be said for the moment when you have to be brutally honest with yourself about what's happened, about what's happening in your life. That moment of complete truth can be a god unto itself, the Vishnu the creator and the destroyer both. It is metamorphic. but as a girl, as a human, I am weak in so many ways, and when I realize I've been wrong, the best way for me to find strength, is to find some tenderness in this great world which can plant the seed.

there's a moment when you look into a mirror and your heart is asking a question, and it's showing in every inch of your face, and your pupils become the tiny dots that sit at the bottom of every question mark. there's a moment when the mirror comes to life, and a finger points directly at you. and as every second passes it looks more and more like the pretend super death ray finger guns children play cowboys and indians with, and that gunpoint conviction is enough to nearly break you in half.

and we must choose. in the face of a threat whose only bullet is our own shame, we can either let the terror take us, and cry. We can be buried in it. Or we can see it for what it is, responsibility, waiting for us to take it up, to make it right.

Do you know me well enough by now to know that I have been making the wrong choice?

Because I most definitely have.

my little goldfish puck died last night. he was in a small bowl and i needed to go get an air pump for it, and i kept putting it off. I know he might have died for a million different reasons, the foremost being that he was a 28 cent goldfish intended for being fed to bigger, less peaceful critters; but it hit me hard.

Puck became everything i had been putting off, letting get away from me, using all the excuses of "I'm just going through something right now, I'm just under a lot of pressure." I was manipulating myself into believing it was ok to surrender, repeatedly, to what simply amounts to LIFE.

I've been letting that indicting finger intimidate me, and in the face of that imaginary threat, i've been quaking in my boots.

And so this morning, as the tears were threatening, as I almost gave up, the snow came. Fat drops, like flowers, falling everywhere, hushing all sounds, and upon closer inspection, upon venturing out coatless and mismatched; the tiny, breathless shhhh's the issued upon landing shamelessly on arms, on eyelashes, on ears and noses. Carelessly frizzing my hair with the wetness of it's absolution.

So yes, I suck a bit. I've been navigating as best I thought I could from some muddled crack of panicked resignation, but the goal today, for this week, because that's maybe all I can handle, is to start moving again, to stay in motion. And to let that inertia sweep me into saving myself.

I hope.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes --

The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs --

The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,

And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round --

Of Ground, or Air, or Ought --

A Wooden way

Regardless grown,

A Quartz contentment, like a stone --

This is the Hour of Lead --

Remembered, if outlived,

As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow --

First -- Chill -- then Stupor -- then the letting go -- 

emily dickinson.

i am actually feeling so much more something today. if not more redblush vivid, then something closer, the pinktinged hope of warming fingers, maybe. but then there was emily, and she knew why my smile is stiff, why it takes me a few seconds to remember to laugh. 

but this morning it was those last few words that made me curl my toes and stretch my arms, just to feel the blood rush to the farthest reaches of me. 

to reteach my nerves their joyous pliability.

and celebrate lay-down casuality.