Age and I are hitting the Lent slopes

That's right, Lent in the fall! Oslo in the summertime. Breakfast for dinner. I'm at the top of the mountain and the ride down isn't looking so bad. It's easier when you have a sponsor, like in AA. It'll be interesting to see how long I can last, but I know I'll eventually break down and give in. Curiosity is natural, isn't it? If I'm stalking people I don't even care about, am I really going to stop stalking the ones I (foolishly) do care about? Or maybe I can. I don't know. The real question here is... can I give up Gossip Girl and The Hills? Oh man. I may be in too deep right there, past the point of recovery. Who can resist Chuck Bass's permanent sinister gaze or Serena's slight speech impediment, or Blaire's round peasant-like face? See, that's exactly what I'm talking about. (Not the TV show.) But how can you erase things from your memory, and is remembering the same as missing something? Who knows. I will, I'm sure, but not for awhile.

I have to stop dreaming in metaphors. No I don't.

In a half-dream, sleep was a foreign language document that wouldn't fit in the box I needed it to. I would push it down, and the box would move up. We went back and forth like this a few more times before my dream self got fed up with it all and told myself, "Sleep is not a foreign language!" and I really went to sleep. I don't need a sign like a dream to tell me my job is miserable.

I miss Philly, too.

I think I'm glad to be home? I don't know why I thought it would be easy to live without my dear friend nearby, I did it for three years after all. Everything feels different now, not that I expected things to be just as they were when I left, but I don't know what it's supposed to be now. Sometimes I wish I had stayed on the east coast, but I think about how miserable I was there and wonder if location makes any difference at all, if I'll feel like this wherever I go, whoever is there or not...

"I wonder if you're mythologizing me like I do you."

In my dreams it's always Christmas time and you're telling me what I already know, but shouldn't it be different in dreams? We were driving through Nic's neighborhood and every house was on fire. You put your arm around me like in a song, and at home I found a note with our names on it together, as if we'd always received things addressed to the both of us. No, I know you must not be mythologizing me like I do you, and when I think of what you probably are doing I have to laugh to myself. I'd rather remember things the way I wanted them to be and not what they actually were, but it's hard when you keep ending things in dreams.

on writing and being home.

I haven't felt inspired to write anything in awhile, and I'm almost tired of talking about my book, or explaining what prose poetry is. It's a wonderful feeling when someone tells me how much they enjoyed the book, or what their favorite poems were (usually Lemonade or the long one about nights in IV), but some of those poems have been with me for three years. I'm tired of them and I want new ones, but nothing comes. And all of a sudden I feel like whatever I write, people will be reading and judging, like I have to come up with an instant hit. Maybe I'll go back to my paper journals for awhile.

There probably won't be anymore lovely photos from out at sea since someone crashed the boat into the breakwater (not me!), but I've been swimming at the pool with giggly little girls who are thrilled at the prospect of Hello Kitty goggles, building IKEA furniture, reorganizing my bedroom and trying to make my clothes fit in it somehow, working off my east coast paleness at the beach with Michael, rocking the bells with Age, watching the Olympics and wondering why I was never concerned with actually swimming fast when I was on the swim team in high school.

I hope someone will want to go to UG tomorrow night.

home, finally.

nothing new.

I wonder what I have inside me that makes me optimistic in the face of inevitable doom and makes me believe the impossible can happen. Actually, I think I know.