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.

carbon by carbon.

Shifting the focus, your face or the backdrop. Your eyes or Geary Street. Pressing the silver button, the shutter clicks. So definitive. Etched on film forever. The camera falls from my eye and I feel your hands reach for me. The saving of a memory, the preservation of a moment you may have already forgotten. Your lips thank me in a way your words never could, never did, never even attempted to do.

The photograph didn't print correctly, the whole roll of film disappeared into space. Memories I thought I had forever never even existed without the proof of pictures.

I am a blank sheet of paper. I am not waiting to be colored in, to be scribbled all over. I am simply living, simply meeting people I don't care a thing about, simply smiling because I know everyone else wants me to. I don't want those photographs. I don't want you. I am glad that those photographs never even developed. They have been erased. Now if I could just erase the way you held my hand for the first time, how you laughed when you carried me down the steps of that old mansion falling to pieces, the memory of your breath bouncing off of the cold cold water, shivering, scared, quiet, clumsy.

I think somewhere I have hope that I will have laughter with someone that will filter down the staircase and fill up the living room.

But right now, my advice for myself and anyone that cares about me is not to bother trying. I let myself be vulnerable because he told me to. I refuse to take anyone's advice anymore. I have never felt this way before because I have never found something so uncomplicated and easy and I have never let my guard down so fully. And now I know that I will never do it again. Nothing is uncomplicated. Nothing is easy. Nothing is perfect. Nothing is worth compromising yourself.

Now, I am off to yet another night of shallow parties, filled with people I don't care to get to know, flashes of the past, and then quick attempts to erase it all with the present.

And I am done with the melodrama for today.

shake hands.

I went out to dinner last night at this chic lounge called Dulce. I think it's owned by Ashton Kutcher or some shit. After dinner on Melrose, my friends and I somehow ended up in Westwood at my friend's apartment, then at a party where I ran into two people from my high school, then carrying a chair home from said party, and finally sitting on the curb somewhere talking and laughing.

Things are getting better. And I just know that this year will be the strangest conglomeration of happenings, all rolled into a fantastic, nostalgia-inducing nine months. And my classes sound pretty good. And the magazine interview went really well. I walked into the office and people were playing ping pong. Nonetheless, I think I'm too busy for an unpaid internship right now.

So I'll just forget about Burlingame and unpack all my things and get comfortable.

thoughts from the 5.

Saturday. Back in Los Angeles. Not yet 21. Friends are clubbing. New apartment is wonderful. Looking forward to forgetting the past and getting back on campus. Mostly empty. Okay, completely empty. Fine until I had time to myself to think. Want new people in my life (and to keep the old ones too). Downtown Los Angeles may help. But not until I am 21. 4 weeks until real people.

Decided that my future will not include being sad about the recent past. Execution, however, is the problem.

I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy. I will be happy.

I hate copy-paste.

under the tunnel.

I once knew a girl in the years of my youth
With eyes like the summer, all beauty and truth
But in the morning I fled, left a note and it read
"Someday you will be loved"

I cannot pretend that I felt any regret
Because each broken heart will eventually mend
And as the blood runs red down the needle and thread
Someday you will be loved

You'll be loved, you'll be loved
Like you never have known
And the memories of me
Will seem more like bad dreams
Just a series of blurs
Like I never occurred
Someday you will be loved

You may feel alone when you're falling asleep
And every time tears roll down your cheeks
But I know your heart belongs to someone you've yet to meet
And someday you will be loved

You'll be loved, you'll be loved
Like you never have known
And the memories of me
Will seem more like bad dreams
Just a series of blurs
Like I never occurred
Someday you will be loved

You'll be loved, you'll be loved
Like you never have known
And the memories of me
Will seem more like bad dreams
Just a series of blurs
Like I never occurred
Someday you will be loved
Someday you will be loved



I go back to Los Angeles tomorrow. I am starting new.

stars in a jar.

I am in so much pain that I cannot lead a normal life without the aid of vicodin.

But I am afraid of being addicted to said painkiller, so I have refused to take it all day.

Now I feel like I'm coming down with the flu.

Life is uninteresting, thus my nonattendance here. I can sum it up with the following verbs: shopping, sleeping, drinking (smoothies), reading, writing, outlining, planning, reading, reading, reading, READING.

I don't want to leave home and return to LA, but I also do terribly. My body has kind of made my decision for me to stay a bit longer. I'm going to miss my mommy something awful. My dad has already left for Tennessee so I said my goodbyes to him. Okay, no more boringness. Back to my misery.

tributary.

Fuck this guy. So glad he graduated so I don't have to see his leather-jacket wearing, chain-cigarette-smoking, frat-boy smirking, thirty year-old but still hitting on sorority girls, insecure piece of good-looking man in my classes anymore. Or on my month-long trips to England. Thank you very much, GQ, for reminding me of what I no longer have to deal with. But, no, he is definitely not the next James Dean. Don't insult a legend like that.

waiting in the grass.

I found out today that I may have cervical cancer within the next ten years. Since I woke up, this has been following me. I rode my bike up and down the streets of the town where I grew up. I had meant to go to the park, but I couldn't stop pedaling. I twisted up and down the streets beyond the railroad tracks, saw dogs playing with their owners on their lawns, children in strollers, leaves as they dropped from the trees, readying themselves for autumn.

When I got to the park, I laid my bike down on a big tree that I had once climbed at my friend's birthday party. I sat in the grass and thought of the past, of my lost intimacy with my felicitous space. How my space here, my "nest" as Bachelard would call it, is more than a house. It is the blue sky of Burlingame and the green grass and the families and the swimming pools and the freshly paved streets.

I sat in that park when I was re-united with Brian one summer, the summer of our purest affections. He came up behind me and kissed me while I sat on the grass re-reading Pride and Prejudice and listening to Radiohead on my iPod. I used to ditch class and go to that park and talk to friends. Countless picnics and dog walks took place right there. In the middle of the night, with my first boyfriend, we hid under the kid's jungle gym and stole kisses. Colin did back flips off of the new play structures. I have a photograph of Saleh on the monkey bars.

I return to that park, that extended patch of grass, and I must look again at myself, at who I am becoming. My world will shift in the next year and I will never feel this way again. I may find that I am in the early stages of cancer. My friends and I have drifted apart in the last few weeks. I find that I need purpose in my life, direction, even if that direction may be unconventional (I've been seriously considering agriculture). I find that things are not what they once were, that maybe they never were that way, maybe my nostalgia has transformed everything and made it beautiful, when the real life memories were more dirty, more impatient, more meaningless.

It has to work itself out. I have to find a way to love who I am. Because right now, my feelings are contingent upon the love I receive from others. And right now, that is the last thing I need.

at last.

Got my wisdom teeth pulled today, watched half of the first season of Californication while on vicodin. Now it has worn off and my mouth is dying a little bit. Stronger painkillers please.

It's nice having people bring me smoothies and applesauce and mashed potatoes and make me cream of wheat though. Still, I want to go out tomorrow night and I need my cheeks to de-puff by then, even if the chipmunk look kind of works for me.

I have an interview with a magazine I love love love when I get back to LA. And, no, it isn't a fashion magazine, thank God.

settle for nothing.

Sitting at the library, staring at three books about space and representation in modern and postmodern literature. Can't bear to open the pages of articles such as:

"The Contents and Discontents of Kipling's Imperialism." "Rimbaud and Spatial History." "The Socio-spatial Dialectic." "Spatializations: A Critique of the Giddensian Version." "Politics and Space/Time." "Quantum Philosophy, Impossible Geographies and a Few Small Points About Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Sex (All in the Name of Democracy)."

I just want to walk outside, grab my bike from the bike rack, and ride to get some passion fruit tea and say fuck it. Maybe run into a few people along the way.

I've been running 4 miles a day. It feels good but direction-less. What I am running from only I will ever really understand.

Watching the Republican Convention last night, I rolled my eyes a record number of times in two hours' time.

mere illustrations.

I played tour guide to my L.A. friends all weekend, and now I am exhausted. So after I read this 200-page dissertation on FSA photography and Eudora Welty, I am going to watch Weeds and nap all day.

I don't know which of my two homes I most dread coming home to. Is it here in the Bay Area, beautiful and pristine? With my high school friends and my parents? Smoking outside my elementary school and wasting minutes, hours, days? Or is it in Los Angeles, where I can do anything? Where I have a two-story Brentwood condo? Where I have to constantly reinvent myself and force myself to learn new things and write 20-page (and 40-page) papers?

Which place is home to more of my isolation? Where do I alienate myself more? Where is there more heartbreak and confusion and shallow relationships, all ending in a snap of the fingers, all regrets, all sorries, all I'll never do that agains.

I have realized that I have torn everything down in both places. All of my decisions have added up to nothing again. All I can do is start over. It's terrifying.