everything i do.

So my computer monitor broke yesterday. And I have a lot that I want to write about that has nothing to do with my day-to-day boring updates, but I can't until I back up all of my thesis research.

and in the morning.

I wish Larry Burrows were still alive. I would have had a major crush on him. Oh well, he can be my Jacques Cousteau. I haven't had a picture in a while, so....



Things are good. Page 13 of my thesis (actually page 16 if I put it into Times New Roman, a font which I hate and can't work with until the final copy). I have written 3 pages today alone. I read in a book somewhere that I'm supposed to congratulate myself on every small victory, so that's what that's about.

I think each step of life is important, and I am happy to be taking the step that I am taking right now. When people ask me how I am, I always say I'm good. And that's because I am. It's a reserved, controlled kind of good that any self-directed woman would be proud of. My roommates and I sat in my bedroom last night, talking about men. I told Nina I would only want to be in a "right now" relationship if it all. The truth is, I'm not even sure I want that. I've never not cared so much. It's nice. Then again, if I really didn't care, would I be writing about it right now, you might ask? I think coming to terms with my apathy is different than the apathy itself. I'm surprising myself, and I think that's a good thing. Do I make any sense? Do I ever? Yeah, no, probably not. Especially since this really cute guy reading a long novel totally caught my eye at Literati the other night.

Can't wait to leave the country for a long long time. Might move to Greece with Leslie in any case. Or might keep to Ireland. Finding out about Japan and the two-year program on Wednesday. In my heart, I know I am a romantic (not in the 'love' sense (I am not that at all), but in the poetic sense), so I will be building this up for a long time to come.

Why can't I stop rambling?

Back to work. I'm at the Charles Young Library. It is dark and dusty and there are spiders everywhere. I'm pressed up against the wall on the fifth floor. Maybe I should just leave. I think I'm going crazy because of the place I am in, not because of my own inner turbulence. Something about ecocriticism.

thursday.

Going to Tennessee?

filled with gray.

I can no longer think in a linear fashion, so instead I am going to throw random things out here onto the Internet.

Ernesto Laclau is coming to UCLA on Friday to discuss post-Marxist theory and I can't go because I work at a magazine on Fridays that promotes the kind of positive social change that ultimately reinforces the socially inscribed class system and the idea of paternalism to its fullest.

My Uncle Tommy passed away this morning and my dad is flying to Tennessee for the funeral. I can't go. He and my dad were very close (he's actually my dad's uncle, my grandpa's brother, but we call him my uncle). I can see his face in my mind, hear his laugh tinged with East Tennessee goodwill. I see his house on the river bend, the porch swing, the old Chevy he restored in their dirt driveway. I think of his patio and the paddleboat and the family reunions and the potato salad. And I can't help but think of how everything is falling away, my connection to my southern identity. My grandpa has passed away, one of my grandmas has dementia and can no longer remember my name, I missed my cousin's wedding (still very upset about this), my Uncle Tommy is gone.

Tennessee is inscribed in me. But what happens when my family no longer owns the land? What happens when I can't afford to fly to see my cousins and aunts and uncles and my grandmas? I guess the most honest answer would be to say that I simply cannot let that happen. No matter how deeply I want to travel the world, I need to come full circle. And not in the single lifetime sense, but in the deeply ingrained family ties and blood connection and hundreds of years old psychological connection to the landscape kind of sense. None of my friends from California seem to understand this. My parents probably know exactly how I feel, not that we ever speak of it. To move away from Tennessee is only to move away bodily. It is always with you: the guitars and the harmonicas and the jokes and the cold chill wind in the winter and the barbecue joints.

There is a homesickness in me deeper than I understand. It's not a homesickness for the Bay Area, but for the place where my family actually really truly belongs. And that place is not San Francisco. It's on that old dirt road leading up to the house my grandpa built or running down the hills or even at Wal-Mart. It's strange. Very strange. Perhaps my thesis on the Southern connection to place, which became dislodged and redefined in the Great Depression through photographic and journalistic representation is my way of exploring this hardly understandable, certainly inexpressible nostalgia.

I was going to keep going, but that really took everything out of me. I will miss you, Uncle Tommy.

on my mind.

I danced for four hours last night, and all the sudden when the DJ picked the beat back up again, I understood the Sherwood Anderson short story "Adventure." I felt more myself than I have felt in years. It was defiance and comprehension and simplicity. I have never been more happy to be nothing but myself. All of my friends were there and the DJ was amazing and everyone was dancing and, oh, I was just so happy to be grown up. Not that any of that had to do with the short story, because that short story is depressing and fatalistic. But I understood what it meant to walk out the door uninhibited and run and dance in the rain. I'm still not so sure that I understand what it means to crawl back inside and hide my sexuality, but I think that's a generational thing.

once a cheetah...

Last night was my birthday, and last night was also wonderful.

In other news:

• My hair is now red. No more blonde for me for now.
  
• I have almost finished the first section of my thesis.
  
• I am a bondage librarian. Apparently.
  
• A Nikon DSLR is in my future. Today.
  
• I know where to find all the guys who are my type now. Kind of ridiculous. I ran into the creative, funny, dark, mysterious boy mecca.
  

just say no to graduate school.

I know I had my heart set on Ireland. I know I wanted green hills and salty air and Norman architecture.

But I think I may teach English in Greece instead. I could learn Greek, learn to like kids, make money, and meet a charming guy distantly related to Alexander the Great... or something.

I'm also applying for a year-long teacher assistant program in Japan, where I could do all of the above except with Japanese and the charming guy would be related to legendary samurai warriors... or something else.

I'd spend my days on islands steeped in history and delicious foods. I'd stop being vegan. Life would be so simple and easy.

Then after all of that is done, I can return to Ireland, where maybe I could even work on those organic farms for a few weeks like I've dreamed of.

Perhaps these plans may never happen. Perhaps they will be compromised and changed and transformed and I will end up in India or London or Puerto Rico. But I do know that the prospect of such things - the availability of such adventures to graduating students - makes this quite definitely the most exciting turning point in my life so far.

the lights are out.

I think of Brian sometimes when my days are long and when I watch too many romantic comedies. Oh, who am I kidding? I think of him at least once a day, probably a hell of a lot more.

I think of other people too, though. I think of Tyler and the mysterious way he made me lose myself for a few weeks. I think of Mark and how that only ever could have happened in a foreign country.

I think of how I could have done without most of the relationships I’ve been in, if I could just erase everything but those three weeks, that one night, and Brian.

Brian won’t speak to me anymore. It doesn’t matter how much I think of him. He’s right not to talk to me. I’ve broken his heart ten times too many, and, apparently, I’m incapable of doing anything else. So until we both find other people to make us happy, our relationship will be a continual torture. A euphoric torture at times. But painful and fucked up nonetheless.

At the end of the day, though, when Wilshire calms down and we have to turn the lights on in the living room and when we start to get ready to go out on Friday and Saturday nights, I think of how much I needed this. How much I needed Tyler to show me – completely unintentionally – that I will never settle for anything again. That I shouldn’t fear being alone. That finding love and feeling wanted, that won’t solve anything.

I think I was in continual relationships for so long because I desperately wanted to lose myself to someone else. Just forget who I was and know that I was in love, so my identity would come second. Then, a few months in, I would realize what I was doing and I would run as fast as I could (which is pretty fast these days), try to discover myself again. But then I would end up back in another blissful beginning, forgetting why I ran away in the first place.

Now, I have thrown all that away - recycled it, actually. This year will be about myself. I will be leaving Los Angeles in 8 months, hopefully never to return. There is no point in losing myself because, after those 8 months are up, my own identity is the only thing I can be sure of. I think that most days this makes me very proud. It makes me happy even. Nine times out of ten, you will see me with a smile on my face. Whether I’m at work at the magazine, with my friends, out at a party, running in the morning before the dry heat comes and swallows up Brentwood, dashing around campus trying to write my thesis, or sitting in class pondering gendered narratives, I’m quite content with my accomplishments.

But every so often, I catch myself thinking that I want those romantic comedies. And that’s when I think of Brian.

But I also think of him because I know no one else in the world who understands me quite so acutely as he does. Then again, Catherine and Heathcliff understood each other as one soul, and they destroyed one another’s lives.

So if I just leave it alone, just leave myself to my thinking, everything is more than fine. And I know that one day I’ll wake up in New York, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, Galway, Knoxville, Chicago…. And I’ll look back and be grateful that I forced myself to exist for no one but me. That is, after all, what a good feminist should have done from the start.

magnetized.

Slain, by your zirconium smile
I was slain by your olivine eyes,
Slain, I was lying in piles, hoping shovels would cast me in.
Furnaces burn everlasting, black tattoos of you on to me.Furnaces burn everlasting, black tattoos.
Burn, brand my memory, black tattoo of you.
Wash me with your mouth, brackish bright water from your eyes.
Homing pigeons fly to hover by your window white and shy.
Homing pigeons fly to hover by.
Spill my ashes to the wind.
Ghosts gather what they found
Now we can struggle in the web.
We can struggle
With white spider stars come down.
And night blowing black from the ground.

Laura Veirs

ground beef smileys.

I am completely overextended, and I didn't even know it until now.

Honors Thesis
Literary Mag Editor
3 Classes
Intern at Magazine
Freelance Editor for Literary Agent
Party Girl by Night

Oh, how do I do it all and still plan for my six months in Ireland and make new friends and start writing for the LA blog again? Not possible, perhaps?

I guess I'll have to make it possible. If I don't update for three months, it's because I've died on my desk or somewhere between Powell and the Arts Library and forgotten to let everyone know.