Every Day a Love Letter

   Not too long ago, I was hiking through the arboretum near our school with a friend. Unsurprisingly, we immediately went off the path. I love getting lost, so I'm always happy to do it with a buddy. We ended up on the top of a cliff (a less dramatic person would call it a large hill, but whatever). Instead of turning around and finding the trail to circumvent this whole situation, we decided to keep going in this direction.   It turns out, a bunch of loose dirt + large rocks + ill-advised shoes + heavy bags = teetering + falling + deciding to just scoot down on my butt. This is actually my go-to hiking maneuver, because I am both mature and competent.   Once we made it down the cliff face (large hill), we found a helpful sign warning us that our chosen path was a poor one. No shit. Well, I had to wash those pants anyway, and we found the trail again quickly, before deciding to get lost a few more times.

 I write, I read, I read about writing.  I think that books about writing are some of the strangest in the world. Also, yes, they can be extremely dry. I admit it! A writer can be witty and hilarious and profound, but ultimately a chapter about meter will follow a certain pattern, beat-for-beat (Yes, I feel clever for that). Luckily, I like meter very much. I bet that everybody likes  some  writing about writing. In an intro-level literature class, we all read an excerpt of Anne Lamott's book  Bird by Bird,  an essay called "Shitty First Drafts," and I can say with confidence that at least half of us genuinely enjoyed it, and another thirty percent valiantly pretended to. Half is not so bad for one assigned reading.  Mary Oliver understands my burning need for examples in her poetry handbook, and graciously provides me with one every other page. Richard Hugo is not afraid of a monologue in  Triggering Town,  and I like him so much that I don'...

 Summer means yard sale season. I love everything about it. I love the neon-green signs with sharpies and an arrow (time and address optional), I love when there's obnoxious music playing directly from someone's phone speaker, I love listening to people talk. I suspect that the most interesting conversations in the universe happen during yard-sales, something about sitting in fabric camping chairs and watching strangers rummage through your life that shakes stories loose.  This picture is from a yard-sale that a family of musicians were holding before they moved to Bali to form a jazz band. I admit, I eavesdrop.  At yard sales, I've seen skateboards, bunnies, entire dining room sets, a marionette puppet, and cumulatively enough graphic tee-shirts to clothe my high school's graduating class twice-over. And I don't even make a hobby of going to yard-sales, I just follow the arrows when I come across them.   I think that my favorite part about yard sales is the ele...

 On a day when classes were driving me and my friend crazy, we accidentally spent an entire day together. After doing a little homework, watching in inadvisable amount of TV, and going on a hike, we decided to hop on a bus and go to the fancy neighborhood. On the way, we called another friend and decided to all meet up later, to eat dinner and watch the next episode of X-Men '97.  I love adventures. This adventure was cozy and non-threatening, which is even better. The fancy neighborhood is a little downtown area in the historical district. We joked that we felt European, because the roads are cobblestone and street-lights were wrought-iron. Vines were climbing up buildings in a cute way, not a dilapidated one-- we were living it up!  Fancy neighborhood is also home to one of my favorite stores, a suitably fancy vinegar and oil store. I like going there and asking for lots of samples and not buying anything, so I convinced my friend to go with me. As we should have expect...

   Tonight we had our monthly board game night. My dad grilled the burgers that me and my mom made this afternoon, and we ended up chatting around the grill about role-playing games and podcasts and skunks.  Actually, I only learned how to grill a week or so ago. Now that it's stopped raining so much, we've been using it every chance we get. My dad taught me what temperature to cook at, that you should leave some spots warm but not hot, that sometimes all the grease dripping into the flame causes a big dramatic kick-up, plus all the special ways that  our grill in particular  is broken but still safe to use, promise. He said that the bonus to grilling at events is that nobody expects you to talk too much, because you're focusing. The other bonus is that you are the person in charge of all the good food and food smells, so people will kind of hang around and be near you. It's a solid middle-ground of socialization.   I was sous-chef with the burgers, di...

 I'm not even entirely certain that that's what it was. But, a few years ago, a very good story happened to me. I was sixteen years old in another country, I had no phone to contact my parents, and I tested positive for COVID-19. So, I isolated from my travel group in Aurelio's house, alone with a few books. Aurelio's wife very graciously cooked dinner for me on that first night, before another patient joined me and we drove each other insane instead of ourselves. She spoke almost no English and I didn't speak much more Spanish than that, enough to express gratitude and that was really all.  That first night, delirious with sick and scared, she made a thick green soup. She said what it was, and I forgot. It is still the best thing I have ever tasted in my life. I am determined to figure out what it was-- I've ruled out Brussels sprouts but spinach is still possible, though I'm leaning asparagus.  Other, more interesting things happened amidst that delirium. ...

 This morning I decided that I needed to write, and I can never write at home. I need to be around people who aren't paying attention to me, in a chair that's mostly comfortable but certainly un-slump-able, so I went to a caf é . This particular caf é had a special today, so I could get both a coffee and a chocolate croissant, and it's also got windows which let in the perfect amount of light on an overcast day like today.  I've been going on lots of errands instead of writing. Errands, if I'm honest, are not so bad. I enjoy going on everyday quests to accomplish the things that adults need to accomplish in their day: acquiring groceries, getting gas, yard work. The real problem is that most of these errands include shopping, and shopping more than two days in a row always upsets me. Part of this is the anxiety I have around spending money, but more than that, shopping overwhelms me with a staggeringly broad range of choices for me, the consumer.  Well, I'd much...

 I secretly wish to be a drummer. Specifically, a girl drummer for a rock band, that exact mental image-- hair short and dyed, wailing on a full kit, angry in that sexy way that women always are in movies made for men. Drum kits are sadly very expensive and I have a full enough schedule as it is, so that dream will remain on the back burner for a while. But I have one special indulgence, and it's listening to Paul Simon.  No, Paul Simon is not a drummer. Or a girl. Or sexy-angry (sorry, Paul!). Paul Simon  did  record the album  Graceland  with a bunch of South African artists including the Gaza Sisters and the Boyoyo Boys, among others, with a lot of inspiration from the mbaqanga style. (Note: there's still debate about if this was appropriation or appreciation, especially given the cultural boycott on South Africa due to Apartheid at the time of recording).  Paul Simon himself is actually pretty coincidental to my enjoyment of the album. I mean, the ...

 Last night me and my friends went to a goth dance event downtown. I danced until my clothes were so soaked with sweat that they added a couple pounds (the benefit of wearing black, nobody can tell), someone got a tattoo, and then it was one in the morning and we all needed milkshakes more than we've ever needed anything before. DQ was too far out of the way, so we ended up at Dick's Drive-In, along with apparently the entire population of Capitol Hill.   While we were in line figuring out who was going to pay back whom, we saw: a young boy with spikes on his Converse, a man wearing a toga, a couple in matching red T-shirts, and a busker playing the trombone to some background jazz music. Man, this guy was good! And loud-- we could hear him as we left, even with the windows down.   When I was in elementary school band, I played the flute. The trombonists sat right behind us, and while I never got hit in the back of the head or anything, I definitely considered t...

 Today, me and my parents went to our local "No Kings" protest. We made signs and chanted along and listened to the mayor poorly but earnestly stumble through a speech-- his policies are better than his public speaking. Mostly we stood along the busiest road in the city with a bunch of signs and cheered when cars honked at us.  If I'm honest I was surprised at how nice everyone was. The protestors I knew would be cool, but drivers heading past us were mostly very polite. Lots of waves and thumbs-ups. Nobody flipped me off once! There was a lot of honking in solidarity to the cause, which as far as happy reasons for headaches ranks pretty high up there.   A few weeks ago there was a strike at my university amongst some of the student employees. I didn't cross the picket line, of course; I had been one of the striking workers last spring. On the picket line, there were plenty of nice people, but also a lot of rude and scary individuals. More than a handful of people we...

 Back home for the summer and I had a perfect breakfast: two eggs on toast, chocolate milk for fun, and raspberries that were drying next to the sink. We were worried about the raspberries molding, so the family was in an 'Everything Must Go!' raspberry headspace, and I had a whole bunch. I didn't eat much fresh fruit in the last year, mostly bananas and apples because they can generally be trusted to keep and they're easy to toss in a backpack. Plus, they're cheap here.  In my mind, berries are a very summery thing, like tote bags, slip n' slides, and ice cream trucks. Even though the sky was fighting to remain gray for the first chunk of the day, raspberries were my little rebellion. Yes, it really is summer! How else could this be my breakfast?  I don't have much to say about raspberries. They're a simple pleasure and I think that most people already appreciate them without an explanation. I'm about to enjoy a peach after I type this up, to my sum...

 I have a special laugh that I only use when I almost run into a stranger. Usually this happens when I am distractedly leaving a room-- today it was as I left the restroom to go study, because I was thinking about Mr. Rogers and his not-so-secret 143 code. Anyway I love bumping into strangers because it is the perfect everyday amount of embarrassing. I will laugh my bumping-into-strangers-laugh,  she will smile awkwardly, I will apologize, and we both go on our ways. I also love bumping into strangers because it requires that we both stop and make brief eye contact and notice something about each other. Today my stranger had long black hair and smiled mostly without involving her teeth. I would never have noticed this about her if I hadn't almost run her over. I'm trying to invite embarrassment into my life more. Living passionately necessitates humiliation, so I am performing at open-mic nights and making brutal small talk with people whom I've got nothing in common with. ...

 I'm moving out of my crappy dorm room tomorrow, and then I'll be back in my home town for a few months. I'm going to wake up in the morning, file paperwork with Human Resources, take a final exam, ferry boxes and bags into a car which will drive to the storage locker place, ferry the boxes and bags into the storage locker, drive the car back to my crappy dorm room, ferry more boxes and bags into the car, drive the car back home to my parents' house, and then I'm going to fall asleep, surrounded by unpacked things which I can only imagine will be resentful of their cardboard trappings and will probably haunt me in my nightmares. I'm really looking forward to it.  The truth is that I've come to love my crappy dorm room. One time, me and my roommate saw a fawn walking by a meter from our window. My walls were covered in postcards from people important to me. We filled the room up with lamps so we never had to turn on the ugly florescent overhead light. Yes, we...