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It's not that I'm doing nothing with my life. I'm just doing nothing with my education.

I teach English, and I was an English major, so I guess that's something. It's also the one thing I repeatedly swore I would never do.

I don't write anymore. It's not that I don't want to; I think I've mostly just forgotten how.

See this post? Peppered with "I"s. The capital kind.

In other news, my friend published another book. Buy it on Amazon. Please.

Manic

Mills people are really awesome. Every time I interact with any of my Mills friends, I just get so stoked that I decided to go there and got to meet all those genius individuals. No words to explain it.


And, my equally awesome housemate Erin just asked Zak if he wanted to be a polygamist so she could use his gym discount.


I am so blessed.

:P

My Weeks' Todo

1. Send an email
2. Pay Lavender's Electric Bill
3. Deposit my paychecks
4. Laundry
5. YA Homework Reading
6. Find a poem about history
7. Free the spider.

Things 4

My calendar says school in one hour and I am hoping the rain outside the window will shut up before I have to go out in it.

Mills College is a black hole.

There are many dark haired lesbians and sideways artists with half-goatees. One man is lanky and towers over me like the crooked man who walked a crooked mile. I like to poke their papers with my fingertips and watch their words bleed into my skin. I wonder if he has a crooked cat.

In the hallway, I trapped a spider in a tupperware. It is an unhappy, fuzzy bug. I will free him later this evening.

Still raining and I've left my umbrella in the car.

Done with Semester One

- A 1/4 of the way done with graduate school.

- The floor is covered in cookie crumbs. My dorm room windows are foggy.

- The Bay Area is cold and understands an inkling of winter: forty-two degrees this morning and I shivered in my blankets before remembering I had a thermostat. Temperature regulator.

- Jesus is on my bookshelf. He watches me sleep and sometimes it is comforting and sometimes I am afraid because he Knows. Whatever it is that I am always hiding. And I never know what I am hiding, for.

- It is easier to write when I am thinking. Today I am not because my fingers are cold.

- I want to live in the city. I want to live in the sometimes sun. I like our friends in the city. They are warm and memory and feel bless-ed ages even though it's only been since August. September. January. My life will be young when I am old.

- I said our because you are my home.

As of Yet the Mice go Un-named

Tonight was a long night of Catch Phrase, cheesecake, and Lost--a long, full night at a house up the hill. 

Tomorrow promises to be equally pleasing. Rather than spend the afternoon Lesson Planning for the last day before Spring Break, I'm traipsing down the hill with a gang of new friends to watch a "concert" in Fresno (which means, a friend of my "new friend" Charles is playing at some obscure location so he's roped me, and Tyler Hall--an old friend! from Santa Clarita--and a couple others into escaping off the Bubble). Two nights in a row not spent huddled in the Cave? Yes, please. 

Last night we got the television working--FINALLY, after months of frustrated visitors--and watched Bourne Supremacy. It was the first movie I've watched since my arrival in January. The last movie I saw up here was Miss Potter. (I cried. Alone. In the Cave.)

So for anybody who is interested: we FIXED the television set and have a full-working theatre system on the main floor. 

----

Spring Break is two days away. My students have a countdown till the end of school and I was shocked and horrified to hear them announce that the days' count is somewhere in the thirties. 

I only get to do this once, my heart whispered.

----

I also spent a lot of time today contemplating grad school, and the implications of donating two years of my life to living in the San Francisco area, studying poetry and going to underground readings in obscure coffee shops throughout the city while joining the bohemians in pursuit of Freedom, Beauty, Truth, and Love.

In another life, I lived in France and was a voice of the Bohemian Revolution.

----

The subject of "Purpose and Passion" came up in tonight's interactions. I like obscure, feeling-type purposes. Consequence of being an artist? Am I am artist? Not quite.

But there is an unfinished painting in a makeshift easel beside me. 

Freedom, Beauty, Truth, and Love.

I suppose if I spend my life in pursuit of these four things, it covers the span of nearly every person's passion--of every Good Purpose, perhaps.

I'll start with the journey of a Russian Pilgrim, read beneath the warm stare of an icon, in the shadow of a Cave too big for my size and too small for my most secret dreams.

Doodles

I hate Macs. I miss Microsoft "Paint." :( Anyone have any ideas for a potential equivalent?

On an entirely different note: I am going to graduate school at Mills College in Oakland. In about two years, I will have an MFA in Poetry.

Look out, world. 

I just miss you all too much

So, I stayed away a day. A brief hello to the nether-world of internet.

This post may take me two hours to complete, because the internet shuts off every thirty seconds.

Currently, my dad is traipsing about the roof, taking down our Christmas lights and I just could NOT resist the opportunity to inform you all of our belated de-decorating. As the Valentines' Day hearts go up around the house, my mom has finally decided to order down the remnants of Christmas.

On my desk are three packets, addressed to USF, Mills College, and Seattle Pacific. At the conclusion of this posting, I shall pick them up, cradle them in my twitching arms, and send them off to the criticism of their recipients. And then we shall see if I have a future.

Last night I had a nightmare that I was a Disney princess performing on a large stage. I had a plastic knight on a white horse and everything. My dress was long and pretty and pink and my hair in those perfect little ringlet curls. But as soon as I stepped off the stage, the crowd rushed me and my audience ripped my hair off my head and broke my crown and knocked over my knight. His arm shattered off. It was bizarre. They were angry, for I was feeding them lies about Happy Endings. So I let them rip me apart. And I was left looking like something from Cinderella pre-Fairy Godmother.

Only Cinderella still looked like a princess in her rags.

On my journey home yesterday, I had a long talk with my dad about life. We discussed romance and Don McLean and motorcycle road trips and treks across the sierras. I feel enlightened, and inspired to keep walking. To keep moving forward. To rest in my high school room and muse over old notes, letters, love stories. And to wait, and keep waiting, for another fall of rain.

"And in the streets the children screamed,
the lovers cried and the poets dreamed
but not a word was spoken.

The church bells all were broken.

And the three men I admire most: the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost
They caught the last train for the coast
the day the Music Died."

Prepare Yourselves

Ladies and Gentlemen, Friends, Family, Enemies and Loves:

I. Have. Begun. My. Personal. Statements.
And they are rocking my world.

I decided to first work on Seattle Pacific's, since it's a Christian University and they don't want to know why I want to go there; they want to know what's gotten me here, as it relates to my personal journey.

So I've got a paragraph down. *ahem*

By my junior year of college, if asked about my spiritual life I would have presented my dissertation beginning with a pretentious snort and ending with: "God's a malicious deity who got bored and created these humans who could choose to either worship him for eternity, or spend it burning with all the other individualists." No, I didn't grow up in a pagan household, nor did I go to a school-for-heathens--in fact, Westmont College prides itself in the presence of God on its campus. We all attended chapel three times a week, took the compulsory religious courses, and demonstrated our 'Christian fidelity' through enrollment in as many "Ministry Clubs" as possible.


ba ha. Anyway, a little later, after salvaging my dignity and explaining that this is a story of grace, I explain my initial motivation for picking up the pen:

Though I didn't have the nerve to doubt this obscure Listener/Diety/Other, I decided we--the Christian community--had gone severely wrong somewhere in our summation of Him. I didn't know how to pray anymore, so I began to write.

Even if I decide the page-and-a-half I have is not worthy of submission and do away with it, it's been an interesting experience, trying to trace my reasons for turning my back on, and then running full force towards, that Other against whom I held so many grudges, only to fall faceforward at His feet--not finding Him grinning "maliciously" as I had anticipated,

but gazing down in a sigh, from a face streaked with Tears.

Flailing.

I am having ... trouble ... writing ... anything.

I have to start my "Statement of Purpose" for three graduate schools who all want to know, "Why study here?" "What is your 'intellectual autobiography'?" "Describe your development as a writer?" and I only have--blank screens and empty pages and a vague humming in the back of my mind that sounds suspiciously like the ticking of a clock. But the clock is on steroids and the deadlines are in cohorts with Time and they're both working against--me.

Against me.

God. Give me something significant to say. Please.


I am missing people. People. and conversation.