Ne Me Quitte Pas

Jogging through the drizzle on Hennepin avenue and my head's been pounding for a week. It's paralyzing and frightening to think that I've consumed bottles and bottles of Excedrin and my headaches always come back. Like telemarketers or Mormons on bicycles or election years. You know, the other inevitables of life. Dopamine degrades and bills pile.

Every Monday feels the same. It's usually raining or threatening as much. I start in the morning and promise myself that this segment of seven days will be better. I'll be strong and positive and not lost in thought on the bus. I won't skip classes or smoke and maybe this evening I'll run after genetics and probably pick up my organic textbook and power through 100 pages. That doesn't work, though, and I spend a few hours hitting the snooze and gallivanting around campus in cowboy boots without ever actually making it to class, and soon it's midnight and the melatonin is begging me to sleep.

It's so humid I feel like I'm drowning.

Trusting/Thrusting

I guess you could say I'm a mild disaster, you know, the whirlwind of American Crew hair gel, Aveda exfoliant, Parliaments, Orbit Sweet Mint, Neutrogena oil-absorbing sheets, scuffed cell phone, Tiffany key chain, cheap-ass blue bic lighter. My pockets are always so fucking full, but, like Shane says, I feel naked without all of my things to comfort me. I can't downsize all of my clothing and I can't pay my visa bill and I can't flinch when I make someone else cry. "It's so easy to hurt others when you can't feel pain."

I'm feeling so indie today in my obnoxious green and white sunglasses from Nick and Abercrombie cutoffs (I'm praying you're laughing at how accidentally ironic I am, listening to Ashanti and Kellie Pickler and pretending to be a critic). I'm still sore from this weekend's antics and Kara ripped her Taverniti Sos and had to scratch away crusted blood on her toenails. I haven't cried in months but you can't say that means I'm happy. James picked up these stupid sheets from TJ Maxx and they're ridiculously soft (like so many boys have said about my ever-thinning, in-need-of-plugs hair) and I would torch them if they didn't match my room so well. I would light up all of these remnants of people and places and past adventures because I'm working really hard on focusing on the now. Or maybe what's ahead. John in the future tense is a successful doctor with a few vaguely ethnic children. Snore.

AH! I'm terribly disjointed but I suppose I wouldn't have it another way. Put-together people with good credit histories and perfect skin and clothes they can afford bore me. Give me a depressed, blonde, Jimmy Choo-wearing alcoholic with mounds of debt and emotional baggage and the tendency to skip class to smoke a few cigarettes any day.

This whole trust/honesty thing comes up a lot in my life, at least in the last year. Let me in let me in people shout at me, or maybe whimper, but that's not my nature. I'm sarcastic and mean when I'm upset, which is often. The issue is that I don't usually know what's wrong and how can I tell everyone something I don't know. My child-like enthusiasm for novelties and new people gets me in trouble all the time. It takes me too long to decide anything (especially those important things everyone needs to know right away, apparently). I need a real fortune cookie with a real fortune and not some bushlit that says "you are creative and action-oriented."

Here's the thing: there are a lot of bad things about me, but I'm ever-unapologetic. I binge on M&Ms and get too drunk whenever I have the time and look in every semi-reflective surface so often that I know where and when pimples are going to show three weeks in advance. Kiss-and-tell, run-around, arrogant, caffeinated disaster. I can't buy anything I really want and I don't need anything for this birthday but a really fucking big hug, a $250 waffle iron, $335 jeans, a black iPod shuffle that I don't deserve after breaking three apple products and a platinum AmEx card with 0% interest and crazy fucking rewards. I'm too busy and I don't have time for mental breakdowns or sex and I suppose that's the way I function best. I haven't been smilely and optimistic for a couple of years. I don't mean to say I'm unhappy. Jenna says that she always knows I'm coming home because she can hear me singing outside of her window (bless her for leaving out any adjectives describing what I call singing). That song from singing in the rain wakes me up to 39 seconds every morning and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Here's something good about me: I don't remember heartache or sore muscles or people that don't matter when they leave. My past is idealized; I can wake up everyday content with all of my flaws and misgivings and smile.

Solvable Predicaments

I’m running late again, and it’s humid and my back is drizzled with sweat that’s starting to seep through the ratty grey sweater I found at Target for six dollars last winter. “Well,” my mother would say in that tone of hers, “Who wears a sweater when it’s eighty degrees?” I suppose that’s fair, but you know how I hate any contest to my judgment.

All of my shoes are packed up for my hike back to Minneapolis so I’m wearing these: black Nunn Bush loafers with tasslels (you know the ones) from Kohl’s or somewhere. I can’t remember. They are shitty and cheap and rub against my Achilles and the heels are so loud, men turn to see a long-legged woman in something akin to Manolos, following their smug grins with a grimace of immediate disappointment. These shoes are hacked up. Salt lines from two years ago when I wore them to Turnabout. I still have the pants that ripped when they pulled my feet out from under me on the pavement outside of Lourdes. It’s hard to step confidently out the door when you’re treading on these.

I’ve spent the last three weeks hunched over the cryostat, hold up in a dark room staining slides, waiting and waiting in this fluorescent hole in the wall. I’m the only one who uses the stairwell in Stabile and I like it that way. It’s only six flights to my lab, but I’ve lost count and missed the 7th floor more than once. Out of breath, I’m trying to remind myself that “health” as I see it should really be more about cardiorespiratory fitness and muscle mass and BMI, and not whether-or-not-I-can-fit-into-those-jeans-that-have-always-been-a-bit-too-small. I spend so much time permeablizing membranes with 1% Triton and blocking with serum and what am I really doing? I’m stalling so my paycheck can grow and grow and maybe I can buy dolce jeans that actually fit (joking, why would I want jeans like that?) and those Gucci sandals on sale at Neiman’s.

When August leaves, so do I.

Hematoxylin and Eosin

Today, I gave blood as a small form of protest. I'm vying for equality here in the most generous way possible. This is my lunch sit-in. Rosa Parks would be so proud, but she couldn't "fight the power" by convincing the bus driver she was white. She didn't rest because she was tired, and I'm not giving blood because replacing a pint consumes about 650 calories.

The truth is that I'm not okay with passivity. I don't like waiting to be called. If you don't answer, I don't even want to talk anymore. I don't like being second. This game isn't fair anyway. The FDA can't tell me my blood isn't good enough. I don't receive directions or implications or expectations well. I'd rather slough them off or, better yet, trample them in my cowboy boots. Fuck you for telling me what I can't do. If you knew me at all, you'd know this part first.

I have this long list of wants. First and foremost, I want to always be creatively in charge and exert this odd form of chaotic control. Don't move my toothbrush.

I know I'm this messy, disastrous, unpredictable fixture in your life and I don't call you when I'm supposed to, but sometimes I'm sweet and bring you flowers and a Chai, or buy you the only thing you really wanted for your birthday. I just want to walk in and out of your life whenever the fuck I feel like it, but don't expect that freedom from me. You just don't get it yet, do you?

What else do I want? Everything. I want to fit into my jeans perfectly. Some are too big and others are too small and my waist oscillates between fitting comfortably into those teeny Dolce jeans I inherited and hardly squeezing into the Tavernitis I splurged on with Kara. I want more Elie Taharis, because these are perfect. I want thicker hair and lighter eyes and slimmer feet. I want to do gymnastics and speed-skate in the Olympics and learn French in two weeks and get a 39 on the MCAT. I want to be an MD PhD and backpack through South America and drive a convertible or a little red motorcycle.

This is all just a tantrum I'm throwing because summer is packing its bags and sauntering South, and this summer was perfect and excellent except for the disappearance my sisters and all that money I wasted on plane rides and Thai food. (I'm still getting over the fact that I paid for that twelve-dollar pina colada.) I had so much fun. I made soup and lasagna and cookies with Ghirardelli chocolate chips and drove to North Dakota for nothing but chocolate pudding cake and dancing in the street of something that can hardly be considered a city. I stumbled home after a game of Ring of Fire (or drove home the next morning). I almost stole a giant remote control. Friday, we'll find out if our soccer team got 1st in our league.

This is all beside the point. All I'm really trying to say is that I'm O negative. My blood is nice to have in an emergency. And so am I.

Alone/Alive

Amy puts it best, I guess, and sometimes I wish she wouldn't so I could sleep. Or so I could act naive and tell myself if I listen to country and drink the right amount of coffee that I can be happy, but I'm like the title to someone else's autobiography. Vertigo. Illusions of movement. Tilting. Spinning. I'm sitting on the rocks down by a Silver Lake that looks nothing like a necklace from Tiffany and Co and the river glides by me silently. I can't tell if the geese are swimming or being carried or maybe I'm not sitting and I'm running past them. An old man on a bicycle approaches, but he must have mistaken me for someone else.

On the phone with you and I can hear the click of a lighter in the background. You pause before you answer because you're dragging from a Newport and I don't ask if you're still there, because I can make out your heavy exhale. The background noise is thick where you are and I can hardly pull your voice from what seems like a torrent of rain falling around you. It sounds like your mouth is full or you're talking through a wall to me, and maybe you are. I'm still waiting for you to respond I think, but it's been a few weeks.

The air feels like rain could condense into my eyebrows and my sisters are eighteen and someone called me a man today while I was trying my best to act like I was looking for a girlfriend. And of course you're not here and I make twenty calls while I'm sitting by the river and no one answers and everyone calls back, but I don't feel like talking anymore. I watch my phone backlight slide back into darkness, embracing three missed calls and a text message I never meant to answer. Oh okay.

The clouds spider their fingers around the horizon and it feels like the sun is setting in a time lapse video because I've only been propped up here for an hour but it's already dark.

There is little I can say about the teenagers riding past me on three Magnas and a Huffy. Someone walks two dogs and I'm wearing green and my eyes feel bloodshot. And I'm the only one not holding something or someone and two women embrace and I think I caught myself smiling, but it was the sad sort of smile you give someone at a funeral or a memorial service because you recognize the flinching in their eyes but can't think of anything to say.

I feel a little like graffiti or a traffic accident or a deck of cards used to play Euchre like I did at Eagle Bluff. Staying silent for a long time always makes me feel a little unsettled and a little sick to my stomach like I walked into Harvard market to pick up a box of cigarettes and smoked through half of them on my way to class. It's impossible to say things using mixed metaphors and all I can do is sip on decaf alone in Perkins or stand by the white lilacs in the rain that have decided to bloom a month late this year.

It stopped raining for the party because I asked God to wait a while and he complied, and now he's compensating because another Thunderstorm will keep you awake tonight, but I'll sleep heavily and your call won't wake me when I'm tangled in no one's T-shirt but my own.

I'm Limping, but Nothing Hurts

Browsing through the New York Times, I ran across this article on two young gay men who have been married (dare I use this word without igniting an offensive political debate?) for over three years. Joshua dresses Ben to go out partying, and the latter settles the former into married life. The can finish each other’s sentences and share similar decorating interests. I would imagine choosing silverware and bedding were an ordeal, but they hire someone to mow the lawn. The scariest fact is that one is 24 and the other is barely 25. Now, I may not be a math major, but I've taken enough calculus to know that means they got married when they were hardly 21.

Kara and I were at Target yesterday when she started pseudo-joking. She hollered, "My biological clock is ticking!" down the aisle adorned with baby rattles and $70 infant car seats. Again with the complex math (times three, take the derivate, carry the one…) I replied, “Yeah, you’ve only got 20 years of fertility left.”

I stopped in my tracks. Here we are, on the brink of legal insobriety, and I can’t shake the feeling that I’m just sitting around in some overstuffed Coffman Union chair until my youth walks out on me. There are thousands of people engaged and marrying and “settling down” all around me, some are younger. I can’t decide if choosing a mate is a sign of maturity or an aching need to grow up. The manifestation of either is all too eerie to face.

What’s maybe worse is finding someone now, fearing commitment and hunkering down until I feel old enough to marry or settle down. It's too much like placing feelings in boxes until I’m old enough to understand or accept them. All I can think about lately is how much I just want to marry and adopt a sweet little girl so Kara and I can dress her in Burberry onesies and feed her from a Dior bottle and literally place sterling silver spoons in her mouth.

Wait, no, about face. I’m twenty and I’ve got something like ten years of singularity and self-searching and selfishness and education left to experience. I’ve forgotten what it’s like to wake up next to someone. I can’t sleep in the same bed, and it’s not been too long since it happened almost every night. Now, I get uncomfortable and hot and would rather just sleep alone with another cold pillow and wake up by myself to the sound of the rain on the rocks, my eyes a little dry and pink.

How can I want something I’m not nearly ready to incite? Forever is far too long of a time and not quite tangible for someone like me, who feels 16 and can’t remember further back than 6th grade. I need future blinders like a horse in the Kentucky Derby. I only want to see a week. I want this hour to be perfect. I only want to know this second, because dividing my life into some indefinite period when I have finally grown up is too significant and abstract. I’m selfish and think about Gucci and not tuition, Burberry and americanos and tequila and not rent. I can’t afford myself and I just can’t seem to give a damn, which is worse than the lack of self-control.

Stop, stop, stop. I’ve been reading this poem by ee cummings a lot lately. Once a day, it would seem. Though it’s not anything, it’s something.

==== ==== ==== ====

in time of daffodils(who know
the goal of living is to grow)
forgetting why,remember how

in time of lilacs who proclaim
the aim of waking is to dream,
remember so(forgetting seem)

in time of roses(who amaze
our now and here with paradise)
forgetting if,remember yes

in time of all sweet things beyond
whatever mind may comprehend,
remember seek(forgetting find)

and in a mystery to be
(when time from time shall set us free)
forgetting me,remember me

==== ==== ==== ====

I’m just trying to say that I’m not looking to make a home with anyone else, but I would like to feel there every now and then.

Gluing Feathers or Something

I'm just writing to write, because I can't write about Global Village or progressive book stores or homosexuality in modern Korea. I need to push something out to convince myself that there I can still form words by pressing on keys.

I have been thinking too much lately about things like this:

You can tell a lot about a person by his/her ___. Fill in the blank please, pour everything you've got into it: hair color, favorite wine, big toe, etc. You can tell a lot about a guy by the length of his dick/how he likes his steak/the color of his eyes. ETC. Et cetera. And so on. And so forth.

How can we classify people? I'm easy, I guess. I sleep on my stomach. My hair circles clockwise. My shoes oscillate somewhere between sizes 10 and 12. I love snow in December and hate it in March. I always wake up early. I listen to Ashlee Simpson and Elvis and Bon Iver and the Mavericks. I cannot listen to two trains of thought at once.

I can't hear what I'm not listening to.

Excuse me while I wax nostalgic.

Oh Great Sights

Thinking outrageously, I write in cursive.
I hide in my bed with the lights on the floor.
Wearing three layers of coats and leg warmers,
I see my own breath on the face of the door.

I think I've used that quote from Sufjan before, but I like to repeat my stories. Most days, I talk so loud, because I don't feel like anyone is listening (if you're listening, sing it back, etc).

It feels like someone has placed my time in an envelope and then in a tiny, wooden music box with the spinning ballerina inside that an elephant munched down like circus peanuts. I can hear the music (I think it's someone singing Azure Ray or Death Cab for Cutie), and I know I have some time here somewhere for progress or change or positivity, but I would much rather just watch re-runs of Will and Grace and listen to old Relient K and never change from exactly the person who I am right now. This is how I am when I feel like this:

For the past few days, I have woken up in the perfect atmosphere to lay with someone else. It's just a little too warm and the sheets are slanted with morning sunlight that wakes me gently. Jack Johnson plays somewhere in the background: Bubble Toes, probably. My legs are tangled in sheets and pillows, though, not other legs; it's not an arm making my neck ache. I move free from fear of waking someone from their even breathing.

It isn't a person I miss. I think that's the scariest part of all. I don't want anyone specific there (here, I mean), and I don't know if I ever really have. I just like the evenness of matched breaths and my stomach on anyone's back. That's a paradigm that I always feel safe discussing.

It's funny when I ask myself if I'm happy. I am nearly certain that I am happy, and that I have always been happy, and that I will always be happy. I'm not joyous or ecstatic; these things take tequila... or other things that leave me waking up with regret, like Mr. Last-nameless from almost forever ago. This is always the second I know that I have not been in that Bohemian l.o.v.e. that just makes the world around you fuzzy and mushy like butter that your roommate left out of the fridge for an entire weekend.

I'm still believing that when I find that sort of extended happiness, I won't experience this car-towing espresso karmic whiplash that tries to handcuff me to some cat or Taylor Swift song. I'm not coming back. Those people are rocks and hard places, baby, and I have some control over the voices in my head. "The opposite of love is not hate. It's indifference," and I just don't/can't care anymore.

Oh, I am not quite sleeping.
Oh, I am fast in bed...

Is it March 14th yet?

I Don't Feel Any Different

The clanking of crystal.

So, everybody, out your best suit or dress on.
Let's make believe we are wealthy for just this once.

=== === === ===

Manhattan.
Two thousand eight. It sounds so ominous.

Let's take a moment to reflect on my two thousand seven. Look back before you look forward (etc.) I can't even remember how I rang it in. The events were as follows:

franklin ave, the cities every weekend, hot tubbing in cedars 94, taste of minnesota, dg feed, dg formal, relationship-single-faux.dating-together-not.together-single, chicago, new york, alone for spring break, watching stars, middle river, a very sweet v-day, leaderquest, the mayo clinic & a.f then banana republic then maybe the daily, jose cuervo, barbie hoes, cheap vodka (karkov, silver wolf, etc), miller high life, uv blue, xmas sweater parties, cry, cry cry,

and laughter.

I Smoke Myself to Sleep.

This day is possibly the most perfect fall day weather that I have ever experienced: sixty-something with no clouds in the sky, and I was lucky enough to score an outside seat at Espresso Royale, where I sit in my raddest hipster-outfit... writing on my angsty blog. Sometimes I am just too much for myself! Artsy and such with lots of exposed calf-muscles.

Of course, the man to the left of me was just as lucky with his large pack of mentholated Newports that he insists on smoking incessantly. The woman next to me is smoking as well and "not well" as she (a landlord, I gather) is on the phone with her lawyer. The wind is changing directions and either way just results in ashes on my jeans. I have turned up Joshua Radin to irritate them away and, thus far, have failed in my attempts.

I don't have much to say, but sometimes I just enjoy letting my thoughts flow obnoxiously long (like the voicemails i leave on ridiculous answering machines).

Interesting tidbits in the life of John:

Xu (my accounting TA-guy) decided to announce when our first surprise quiz is occurring. However, he wouldn't tell us what it would cover... except that we should "pay attention to chapter 8 and make sure to look over pages 396-411 in our textbook." Oh Xu, you are so sneaky. How will I ever decipher your cryptic emails? I'm surely doomed to fail your course. However, your simple class is leaving me with an A- sitting at 95%. There is something illogical about those curve numbers.

Someone chose to "deface" the phone book attached to the pay phone in front of me, changing "Dex" to "Dextrose". If that isn't offensive, I don't know what is. Note to science-nerds (I'm not claiming immunity): when you choose to deface anything, try to throw in some sort of racist or sexist slur coupled with a signature marking your territory. It will convince people that you are actually hardcore... and spreading ignorance. Isn't that the point of graffiti? No, I think not.

On top of that, an Escalade driver is trying her very best to parallel park into a spot clearly only wide enough for a Prius.

I am now officially into changing into a completely new outfit at about 11:30 every day. I just can't stay out of my own closet!

I got the new Dashboard CD (and it's like they put a new one out every time I start a new relationship). That's a weird thought, actually, because it's actually about right the more I think of it. "Would it kill you breathe?" Maybe it would, Chris. Maybe it would.

"Don't pull that bullshit with me. Canadian twenty? This is America." I enjoy catching tidbits of cell phone conversations.

I want a daffodil. I want to always roll my pants up, because it makes people wonder if I actually bike or if I'm just a big douchebag. I would obviously regret to inform that it was a little bit of btoh. I want a Cabernet Sauvignon-fueled dance party. I want to be able to weave together a Halloween costume in the nick of time. I want people to wonder why I'm wearing a tie. I want to be notorious like James Dean and JFK and Elvis. I want to be so famous that I have to have my babies in Africa. I want denim and denim and denim and True Religion and Rock and Republic Seven for all Mankind and other brands that sound like social uprisings or post-hardcore bands. I want to not be asked on a date at work. I want to be so alive that it feels like my pores are splitting and giving life to everything around me. I want to reek of awe and wonder and Thanksgiving dinners. I want to be the colored-page of the newspaper, even if that means that I have to pose as the funny-page. I want a week off. I want to be credit-card debt free and decaffeinated and fueled by something other than grande lattes and franzia and anxiety.

"and I want life in every word to the extent that it's absurd."

I believe in clean breaks. Chris just made me think of that. I have recently said (and maybe always known) that I can never promise anyone I'll always be in their life as long as possible. I'm not like that. I'm a train who constantly switches tracks. I'm more of a helicopter: loud, roaming, all-seeing? Maybe not, but I'm trying to gain some perspective or something.

I believe in spirituality and karma and karma and religion that is more of a guideline than a hard-fast rule. I think everyone understands their own religion completely, especially those that just don't believe in religion at all. I believe that you can appreciate what you have without ever losing it. I believe that not everything happens for a reason. Somethings just happen. I believe in emo haircuts and self expression and leopard print and maybe even juicy couture sweatsuits and Uggs. I believe in forging your own style. Julie told me today that even though I don't match I was "starting my own trend." Maybe that's the key. Maybe, you always match and you always know what's going on... because at least you know that you don't know.

Scratch that helicopter thought. I'm more like a grasshopper. See how small my line of vision is? Every now and then I can jump to see so much more, but never everything... just everything I see.

Style is about being confident. If you think you're pulling it off, you're pulling it off. That's probably the only thing Banana Republic will teach me. If you think your shoulders look big in that blouse, they do. If you think combat boots match with caramel cashmere dresses, well they probably do.

I think that I'm done for now. Sometimes, I just need things like this to be stable and all-encompassing and karmically-inclined and open. Glasnost. Etc.

Close your eyes and I'll kiss you. Tomorrow I'll miss you. Remember I'll always be true, and, dear, while I'm away I'll write home everyday... and I'll send all my loving to you.

All my loving.