mothers

Moms can be good at lassoing you back to reality. Without mine, I might be basing my rental decisions on really old Hawaii-smelling apartments with cute blue vintage stoves and sea horse knobs on the bathroom cabinets. Yesterday helping M unpack and arrange his things, he asked me if I thought we'd be okay without our moms. I don't know, but he says we will be.
The real question is how long can I keep up all this pining before complete defeat/apathy sets in?

Lonely hours in the golden city I think of this person I barely even know

I need to get into a race I can win, because I'm not winning this one. I'm not sure how much I would enjoy that, winning. I think I'm a glutton for rejection! Awhile ago, Danit created these terrible photoshop masterpieces to make me feel better. Maybe I'll put one up on my wall at work.

Sorry for ignoring you, little blog. I think this one is done. I think I'll start a new one.

sad joy

Maybe it's because when we met it seemed like we were each other's only friends and protectors, and it stayed that way for awhile, but in the past few weeks in the whirl of bridal showers, bachelorette parties, and weddings, I've felt like a little girl who doesn't want to share her best friend with anyone else. I am so happy for Meg, and even had to keep from sobbing loudly during the wedding ceremony (embarrassing), but for some reason I was so sad when I came home from Austin. I keep thinking of her standing on her front porch with Will, crying and waving to me and her family as we drive away, and feeling the way I did when I left Baltimore - like I'd abandoned her. I did abandon our plan to move to Austin last year, for a good reason, but then mostly out of fear. I wish I could be more brave, like Meagan.

Now this song will always remind me of the two of us dancing at her wedding.

Is she stupid?

In Baltimore when I was really in the doldrums and if Meg wasn't around to listen to me cry or blast 80s music and do a dance for me, I'd drink champagne, eat chocolate cake, and watch Kat Williams clips on YouTube, and that would cheer me up. I don't know how I could eat the things I did back then and not gain weight, but I guess that's part of getting older and more seahagley. Now I watch clips of Mel from Flight of the Conchords.

I made very few friends at the writing workshop I went to last summer,

and have kept in touch with fewer, although I did try to keep in touch with one person, who never wrote back. I thought of that week in Portland just now when I finished watching a movie on TV, a film adapted from a popular nonfiction book about a woman who goes on a trip of self discovery, and saw the name of someone from my poetry group appear in the closing credits. I felt proud; not like at our thesis reading when Jenn read from her little orange book or when Panta read from her pomegranate book, but proud still. And it dawned on me that it must be coming very close to this year's Tin House workshop and I began fantasizing about what it would be like to go again, but this year stay at Reed instead of sharing Tali's attic with Age and riding the bus for an hour every morning, and try to make more friends. You know what's sad? Even if for some miraculous reason my very new job would let me go, I haven't written anything new since then that I could submit with my application. Maybe I'll have my own writing workshop that week, an evening workshop, where I'll force myself to work on the beetle book. Does anyone have a studio in a serene landscape that I can use?

riding on city buses for a hobby is fine

Yesterday I took the bus in LA for the very first time. It was, like, pretty cool.



It was the most fun I've ever had on a bus, with Michael, shopping, eating potato pancakes, and not getting sick.