i'll let you know when i get there

In my first years of college I was home for winter break, looking through a box of high school letters and photos.  I was newly Christian at the time, and looked at my "old life" with curious speculation.  I don't remember what prompted the advice, but my mom suggested I just get rid the pictures of my on-again-off-again high school boyfriend and I.  What was the point of keeping them around, anyway?  Besides, what if someday they brought pain or discomfort to my future husband?  Easier to just throw them out.  I woke up the other night suddenly with the memory of a small lock diary in my mind.  The diary that contained the narrative of some of my first experiences with men.  Thoughts and feelings and lists.  Aches and resolve.  Glimpses into my forming heart.  Now just nebulous mysteries, really; it did not survive the cut.  Those sixteen-seventeen year old words were thrown out, along with piles of pictures, in a sanctimoni...

The truly terrible cacophony of smells and noises. You try finishing your dinner with someone across the curtain shitting the bed. Someone in the hallway on the phone, crying.  "There's nothing else they can do for her." That was the third floor. On the seventh floor, a man with green socks gets to walk laps around the hall all day.  There's the obese man.  The young man.  Nurse Joan with a beard and venom toward Hillary Clinton.  Chatty nurses.  The nurses who zone out to your TV for awhile without really saying a word.  Packs of visitors who travel in a cloud of stale cigarette smells.  An endless ricochet of beeping IVs.  The neighbor needs help going to the bathroom for the fifteenth time since I've been there.  Wants to tell the nurse a joke. There's a look of desperation on everyone's faces, and not just here.  On the highways too.  No one's seen the sun in months.  Not really.  It's just a hurried shuffl...

Ash Wednesday.  Sitting on a bench outside the cathedral (historic but unimpressive). Even after Mardi Gras discourse I will assert with confidence that there is no God, not here not anywhere and I'm no worse off for knowing it. There is a magic to it all. Some unnamed connection between the details of every day and one. Some pull toward a city or repulsion from. Energy and exhaustion. And yes, even love. But let's not shout about knowing. Let's not lean in to italicize the greatness of our truth. Let's not give it names or dogmas or presume to know the facts of an abstract. Let's not. Why would we? "Even with all we understand about the world, there are still things that cannot be explained by science." Why presume humans are capable of understanding everything about everything? Isn't that the height of hubris? We humans, self-crowned animals that, evolutionary speaking, are barely a blip on the radar. Like America in re...

Five hours into her hospital stay, she begins to run a fever.  Ice packs come out.  Two more bags drip fluid. It's funny how much effort goes into avoiding the fragility of it all.  They talk about starting her on antibiotics.  "That doesn't sound good," she says softly, but goes no further. Funny how often we live with that terror in the room.  When is a sign a sign?  What is normal about any feeling at all?  The unthinkable stretch between 0 and 10.  When the baby is born, at last, isn't that only the beginning?

Ants have taken over the kitchen.  The bathroom too.  I clear them away and feel awful,  like some genocidal maniac.  Is it better to spray them or crush them?  Do they even feel pain?  My empathy barometer is sensitive these days- setting off alarm at even the imagined pain of others. Later, I'll find escapees still crawling on my leg or neck and think nothing of squashing them instantly. It's unseasonably hot here, no wonder they're confused.  I've never read Silent Spring but I'm sure we're living it.  And it's hard to know what one can do to help anything at all, being one.  There's always escape to a greener, more temperate country while it remains so.  Today I am grateful for two working legs, arms and eyes.  While they last.  For two cats and one partner to celebrate life with in this little cave.  For family far away.  For close friends.  For daily walks and podcasts and coffeebean.  For books ...

I've been on a seemingforever hiatus here because for some reason I couldn't log out of my school email address in order to log in to this and I was too full of general ennui to troubleshoot that nonsense. So here I am, a few weeks from 35, without a single school email account to my name, logging in.  Just as content and confused and ever. Donald Trump is President of the United States of America- a fact that continues to induce anxiety and general rage bursts. Despite high hopes and because of a lack of plans, Vancouver is still California for now.  And that's fine.  A lot of everything to sort and say another day, but for now- a short list. Things to not: yaaas slay ya girl

And the country is pretty much on a war path toward its own destruction and I'm two weddings behind and a few pounds down and last week was blue and what if the next earthquake or a Truman show upset threw it all up in the air. Hungry hippos for humans and nine hours of sleep with minor disturbances. I've been a mediocre friend and a mediocre teacher and a mediocre human for a minute. But it's not forever and its not too late. Hard to be everything. Zen gardens and herbal oils yeah yeah yeah it's not my jam. Stop using the words just very really so What Sometimes I find that I'm still a little mad about the way I let things be.