in a place little known, long forgotten.

What is the difference between the swastika and the Confederate flag?

I don't know. And it terrifies me.

With my family being from all over the Southern United States, reading its literature has pretty much made me realize that – my entire life – I have been attempting to rationalize where I come from. The white pillars holding together my great uncle's front porch used to excite me. Now all I can think about when I picture them is the hate and blood and rope and crosses and cattle that were burned in those pillars' honor. Deny it all I want, the South is full of ghosts. Full of justifications for racial inequity. And although the inequity that exists in the South today is much different than it was in the 1960's, I hate that such a glaring inequity still exists there.

When I think of the South this way, it makes me hate where I have come from, hate everything my family's name was built on. I love my father and I loved my grandfather with all of my heart, but I hate those who I didn't know. I can't stop it. Thinking that they might have taken part in such heinous crimes. Even just the thought of them committing the heinous crime of ignoring others' heinous crimes. And all of the ghosts that the South has tried to live down with their "Don't tread on me"'s and their beautiful smiles, they have followed me here to California. And they will follow me everywhere I go.

There is no way to stop what has already been played out. I can't edit it out. I can't pretend it never existed. All I can do is cling to the hope that what my father said is true, that his side of the family, at least, fought for the Union and against a way of life they didn't believe in.

calm black coffee.

I miss the days when getting wasted was a privilege and not a pre-requisite to a fabulous weekend. With this in mind, I have resolved to stay in and bond with myself tonight and to bond with my friends tomorrow over some painting and Lost/Arrested Development.

Tonight, I have also resolved to resolve the following in my next relationship (if I ever have another serious relationship because, seriously, waaaaay too much work): I don't want to ever feel like I have to explain why I love someone. As soon as you ask someone that cliched phrase, "Why do you love me?" you have killed the love. I will never again attempt to quantify the amount that I care for someone. In fact, I would be so happy to never say "I love you" again (except to family, of course, because that is a different kind of love, an assumed love). If you really do love someone, those words are unnecessary. The word love, as Addie Bundren explains, was made up and is used by people who are trying to make up for a lack of it in their lives. I don't want to hear about it. I like to express myself in subtle, romantic ways. Not overtly. Not in rigid lines. I don't want to have to shape my mouth a specific way, to place my tongue against the back of my top teeth, to even begin to form that liquid sound the same way that every other lover does for every other lover. I have always wanted a unique "love," a singular, unquantifiable, unjustifiable passion for another person. So why should I have to fit all of that into one word that means the same thing to millions of other people? I do not think that I love the same way that the girl that lives across the hall from me does. And she doesn't love the same way the boy on the first floor loves. So why, then, is this word so revered as the only way to say what we feel? I say, fuck it. I say, never again. And if that upsets whoever I end up with, well, I guess they don't have the same perception of love that I do. And if our definitions of love can't square up, then, well, we wouldn't last anyway.

nice dream.

I have so much work to do, and all I want to do is paint.

thought bubble.

So I've had an idea for a newspaper piece in my head since last week. Two pieces actually.

I wanted to do a sort of Los Angeles "neighborhoods guide" to thrift stores and unique (and affordable!) boutiques in the various areas of the city. I was thinking of this as an amazing self-funded project that I would be researching for the rest of the year (and pretty much putting my heart and soul into). I would probably write the series during the summer for publication as soon as school starts next fall.

So what inspired this? I was thinking of my first year in Los Angeles, when I came expecting to find shopping everywhere and still thinking that Melrose was the place to be. Not so quickly, I found out that, in order to not get ripped the fuck off in L.A., you have to know all the tiny little places and go out of your way to find unique stuff that you can't find at Urban Outfitters down the street (not that I find anything inherently wrong with UO). Basically, I want to share the information I'll be learning with people like me: without cars, without a lot of money, and with a lot of fashion-oriented creativity.

In order to get my information, I'd want to do various stop and chats with fashionable people, research online resources, pull information from guidebooks, and do a hell of a lot of traveling.

I was thinking I would format it in a 4-week series (or longer, who knows), complete with amazing maps and photographs and reviews that the Daily Bruin design team would hate me for requesting.

My second idea was a guide just like this, but for little coffee shops in Los Angeles. None of that Coffee Bean/Starbucks bullshit. The only thing is, this would probably take a lot more anticlimactic research (i.e. I wouldn't be receiving any good outfits from it). I'd be willing to do either or both really.

Anyway, that's all. I just needed to get that out there. It's been floating in my head for a while, and I'll be needing to pitch the idea to the Arts & Entertainment section soon.

all dressed up.

cat butt: probably the cutest thing... ever.

i am resurrecting this lazarus-style.

Three colors. Blue, red, and yellow. Blue of the sky. Red of the freshly painted shed. Yellow of the summertime grass under her bare feet. The sun plays a losing game of hide and seek behind the sparse clouds. Slowly, she lowers herself onto her knees and then into a cross-legged sitting position. The shed door swings open and her best friend comes galloping toward her in a pair of cracked cowboy boots and a loose skirt. These were the days before they pierced their ears and fought over David, and just after they discovered the newspaper and its cruel way of revealing everyone's secrets. That is something a best friend would never do.

Allison gazes at her friend as she comes closer, and she raises her right hand to her right eyebrow to shade her eyes from the sun. The bright light sets her eyes ablaze with a brilliant blue, like the glow that emanates from the center of a campfire. Sara Ann leans in and gives her a kiss on her forehead. She closes her eyes and smiles.

My mom doesn’t know I left the house. Let’s make this quick, she whispers. Then she grabs Allison’s hand and they run toward the lake with fingers interlocked. Their tan legs shimmer as they sprint and jump over all the small rocks that lay in their path. Sara turns to look in Allison’s direction, and strands of her long blond hair stick to her lips. The birds perusing the ground for traces of food take hurried flight as they approach. Allison and her best friend run, run, run until the land stops and the water begins. But they never stop moving. They jump over the edge.

Allison thinks of this moment that took place forty years in the past, after the newspapers and David and pierced ears and after the wrinkles began to etch themselves into her forehead. She thinks of this, and pours another cup of coffee for the man sitting at the counter.

it's the small things in life.

Normally, I don't like to post twice in one day, but I just re-read my favorite section of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and I can't help fall to my knees in the face of literary genius.


"He had a word for it too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear. ...

I would think about his name until after a while I could see the word as a shape, a vessel, and I would watch him liquify and flow into it like cold molasses flowing out of the darkness into the vessel, until the jar stood full and motionless: a significant shape profoundly without life like an empty door frame; and then I would find that I had forgotten the name of the jar. I would think: The shape of my body where I used to be a virgin is in the shape of a _____ and I couldn't think Anse, couldn't remember Anse. ...

And so when Cora Tull would tell me I was not a true mother, I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words. ...

One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too."


And then I get the chills and have to close the book. Not because the book is anywhere close to being over (in fact, these words come only about 2/3 into the book), but because my fingers start to shake and I am reminded of how small my words really are.

organic creation.

I like bananas
And I like oranges, too.
But most of all, dear,
I just really like you.

Because I believe in shifting forms.
Because I believe in changing ideas.
Because I believe in sweet, delicate cerezas.
And just because I want to.

the faint.

Despite all of the bills and arguments about the past and all of the papers I have yet to write, I really like how this quarter is starting. Much better than the last because of all of the heartache I had to get over last quarter and all of the adjustments to new people and a new job. Well, thankfully, all of that is over now, and I'm ready to start fresher than before. All of the new people I have become closer with and all of the new places I plan to see are just amazing. And the dancing helps, too. Can I just say how excited I am to be here right now?

Okay, cool.

In other news, I think my friend Monica is getting us into a bar tonight. She has leftover wristbands of some sort.

east tennessee christmas.

Tennessee was up and down.

Good: clean air, my family all being together at once, a cabin in the mountains, this restaurant called TomatoHead, photographs, Christopher's music, the accents, beautiful weather.

Bad: the break-in at my house, no internet, i contracted some sort of crazy vomiting flu from the nursing home.