standing up again.

A night at the Academy of Sciences, a day in the car, a walk by the water, a few puffs of a cigarette.

Days pile up beautifully, gracefully, like individual ripples of water as they stretch out and embrace one another.

My last quarter of my undergraduate education. I try to reassure myself that this is only the beginning. Of course, I know that is true. I know that Rebecca asked me to move to San Francisco with her last night. I know that is entirely possible. I think of bars and co-ops and music and quiet evenings with nothing but cold air by my side. It will have to come after Ireland, but it will come eventually.

From my window, pieces of light tap me on the shoulder. They wake me up. I wanted to come back here. My last quarter, and I finally wanted to come back. It's freeing and jarring and very open and I can already feel a vague nostalgia wrapping its arms around me.

I do not know how to end my random series of thoughts. I could continue with the list of amazing things we have planned for the next ten weeks, my last ten weeks in this empty, crowded city. But I will not. I have always preferred mystery. I always side with the unknown.

late storms.

Fingers interlocked, elbows locked. He touches your hair and brushes your cheek, whispers something sweet, and you think you can't think anything at all right at this moment. But if you're thinking you can't think something, doesn't that still mean you're thinking it? And if you know you can think it, does that mean whatever you feel is fleeting, self-created? You forget as he whispers more words. They aren't meant to be funny. You break into soft laughter, give him your eyes with your eyebrows raised, lips parted as your laughter cascades down the path, through the grass and flowers.

Purple has turned to shades of gray in the black night sky. Everything is white, black, gray, absence of light, fullness of life. When you are young, you grow ripe in the night air. You learn to live in a world of nighttime, turning the stars into little lanterns to light the path to the top of this hill. Somewhere in the star-littered sky, someone watches you and smiles. You look back at your interlocked fingers, you think of how hard his shoulder presses into yours. Maybe you are watching this scene from outside of your own body. Maybe those are the eyes you feel pressing you as you straighten your posture, lifting your legs to your chin to try to keep your core warm.

In the room, a British flag above the doorway, his family lineage, a parade, quiet music, a glass of water. He asks you to return, you think of the impossible possibilities encompassed in the humid room. That is all they are. Impossible possibilities, with more emphasis on the former. You keep it that way. He will too, you know he will, even if his whispered words form the shapes of open doorways, miles of highways, airplanes and hot air balloons. You decide you will remember him only through words, words which cannot possibly distill what you felt as the sky looked down on you.

write and write everything right out.

May 18. I am so excited.

1. ‘Make Light’
2. ‘Little Secrets’
3. ‘Moth’s Wings’
4. ‘The Reeling’
5. ‘Eyes As Candles’
6. ‘Swimming In The Flood’
7. ‘Folds In Your Hands’
8. ‘To Kingdom Come’
9. ‘Sleepyhead’
10. ‘Let Your Love Grow Tall’
11. ‘Seaweed Song’

I am going out to Ethiopian food in the Mission tonight with a someone.

Other than the fact that I just paid tuition for the last time and am now broke, I am fabulous amazing excited happy happy happy.

wide awake on friday morning.

After a stressful week, I am now sipping English breakfast tea and eating veggie wraps at 1 in the afternoon. Then my momma is taking me shopping (i.e. I don't have to pay a dime and I get new shoes for summer in Dublin).

My thesis is in. My adviser gave me an A and lots of positive comments. I'm so excited to present it now. I plan on changing the humanities one paper at a time (ha! if only...).

I had an amazing dream last night that involved me hip hop dancing in front of over 100 people, one of my favorite UCLA professors, music, England, and being the class clown.

So far, spring break has been exactly what I needed. I've finished A Portrait of the Artist, rented a Chinese film, hung out in the city, gotten boba, eaten great food, seen friends, and so on. I can't wait to see what else happens. If I don't get to Napa, I may slap some bitches.

I have been so happy lately. I looked at my journal from the last two months, and I realized that at the end of each entry, I write about how satisfied I feel at the end of each day. This is how my life is meant to be lived, I think.

Okay, I plan on making my next update more earth-shattering.

forever is a long, long time.

The new Phoenix album pretty much rules my life. Passion Pit is also up there. And if I can ever find this Grizzly Bear leak, all the pieces of my life will come together into one whole so beautiful elation will prohibit me from comprehending my very being.

That is all.

ma chambre lumineuse.

This afternoon, when I finally caught my breath, I decided to spend some time in the courtyard behind the communications building on campus. I sat under light filtered through bright green leaves and low-hanging branches, watching a boy strum a guitar.

I have moments where I miss something while I am experiencing it. This happened one night when my friends and I got dressed up to go out to a club on Melrose. I smiled as I took each step down the empty street. I asked them, "Do you guys think you will miss this one day?" They laughed at me, and I never got my response. My question drifted into the air and flew up above us. This happened another afternoon in February, when the rain fell down in thick drops and broke Leslie's umbrella. Leslie and I ran home along Wilshire screaming and laughing so hard I almost couldn't walk. My jeans soaked up so much dirty water that I had to will myself to take each step. As we turned the corner to our apartment, I said to Leslie, "I will always remember this. I am nostalgic for this moment right now, as it's happening."

Similarly, I missed campus today as I sat on the red stone benches. I missed it like it was a piece of me I was letting go. In some ways it is. I have realized far too late that I could have made my own life in Los Angeles. Now, I know. Now, I run around attending lectures about Faulkner and France and the Caribbean, I stay in the Reading Room until it closes, I spend time with my professors. I try to make up for lost time, for misplaced passions. The landscape of campus is itself a home space to me, not so much rigidly defined in its perimeters. Rather, the idea of the kind of light that filters into the windows of Royce is part of my oneiric home, part of my dreamed ideal space. I am letting go of that for broader definitions.

Yesterday, my English professor hugged me good-bye. Other than the fact that this man is my idol and basically the embodiment of everything I love about everything in the world, this hug made me realize how much more contact I have made in the last year, how much closer things have come to my core (if you will excuse the cliche), how much I have made myself vulnerable and offered myself up to be changed by scholarship. I walked with him to the library, and then I stepped inside. As I scanned the bookshelves, my eyes started to water. I couldn't place the emotion: happiness, sadness, satisfaction, resignation, hope. I only know there is some sort of affinity here, some sort of right answer if I only keep asking questions.

Well, now I'm supposed to take what I learned and apply it somewhere. No one ever specified where. I guess I'm just supposed to know. Well, I don't. But I can tell you I'll be searching, I'll be searching endlessly.

orange and blue.

I apologize for the lack of meaningful updates lately. I hardly have time to breathe. But I am still alive in case anyone is curious. Anyone at all? No? Not so much? Okay, I'll go back to doing my thing.

things that remind me.

Wallace Stevens, "Sunday Morning," 1915

I

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late

Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,

And the green freedom of a cockatoo

Upon a rug mingle to dissipate

The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.

She dreams a little, and she feels the dark

Encroachment of that old catastrophe,

As a calm darkens among water-lights.

The pungent oranges and bright, green wings

Seem things in some procession of the dead,

Winding across wide water, without sound.

The day is like wide water, without sound,

Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet

Over the seas, to silent Palestine,

Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

II

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?

What is divinity if it can come

Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,

In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else

In any balm or beauty of the earth,

Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?

Divinity must live within herself:

Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;

Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued

Elations when the forest blooms; gusty

Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;

All pleasures and all pains, remembering

The bough of summer and the winter branch.

These are the measures destined for her soul.

III

Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.

No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave

Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.

He moved among us, as a muttering king,

Magnificent, would move among his hinds,

Until our blood, commingling, virginal,

With heaven, brought such requital to desire

The very hinds discerned it, in a star.

Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be

The blood of paradise? And shall the earth

Seem all of paradise that we shall know?

The sky will be much friendlier then than now,

A part of labor and a part of pain,

And next in glory to enduring love,

Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

IV

She says, “I am content when wakened birds,

Before they fly, test the reality

Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;

But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields

Return no more, where, then, is paradise?”

There is not any haunt of prophesy,

Nor any old chimera of the grave,

Neither the golden underground, nor isle

Melodious, where spirits gat them home,

Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm

Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured

As April’s green endures; or will endure

Like her remembrance of awakened birds,

Or her desire for June and evening, tipped

By the consummation of the swallow’s wings.

V

She says, “But in contentment I still feel

The need of some imperishable bliss.”

Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,

Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams

And our desires. Although she strews the leaves

Of sure obliteration on our paths,

The path sick sorrow took, the many paths

Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love

Whispered a little out of tenderness,

She makes the willow shiver in the sun

For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze

Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.

She causes boys to pile new plums and pears

On disregarded plate. The maidens taste

And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

VI

Is there no change of death in paradise?

Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs

Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,

Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,

With rivers like our own that seek for seas

They never find, the same receding shores

That never touch with inarticulate pang?

Why set the pear upon those river banks

Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?

Alas, that they should wear our colors there,

The silken weavings of our afternoons,

And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!

Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,

Within whose burning bosom we devise

Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

VII

Supple and turbulent, a ring of men

Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn

Their boisterous devotion to the sun,

Not as a god, but as a god might be,

Naked among them, like a savage source.

Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,

Out of their blood, returning to the sky;

And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,

The windy lake wherein their lord delights,

The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,

That choir among themselves long afterward.

They shall know well the heavenly fellowship

Of men that perish and of summer morn.

And whence they came and whither they shall go

The dew upon their feet shall manifest.

VIII

She hears, upon that water without sound,

A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine

Is not the porch of spirits lingering.

It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”

We live in an old chaos of the sun,

Or old dependency of day and night,

Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,

Of that wide water, inescapable.

Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail

Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;

Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;

And, in the isolation of the sky,

At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make

Ambiguous undulations as they sink,

Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

saturday afternoon.

I almost threw up in my French class yesterday. I would say that is really disgusting (it is, objectively), but it's actually kind of amazing. I went out with Leslie's friends from up north on Thursday, and I had a fucking amazing time. I have finally reached a point where my shyness seems like a distant memory. I look at Los Angeles as a short-term commitment. Whether or not I say stupid things means nothing. Besides, everyone else does it. Why can't I? Regardless, I have found that most shy people are egotistical. They want everyone to think they are impossible to figure out, that only the best of the best have earned the privilege of getting to know them. I think that's bullshit.

Also, yesterday, I got several text messages from unknown numbers who knew me by my first name... I should probably start giving out a fake number.

Other than this, I am really just learning a lot and spending time with people I love. I am going to an art opening tonight.

Okay, I'm boring myself.

a something and a something else.

I don't know how I missed this in January, but it changed my life right now. Stephen Colbert mock-seriously yet somehow also intelligently speaking about T.S. Eliot and poetry in modern America: here.

A really awesome analysis about the tension that comes with the end of Savage Detectives: here.

A faceplanting kid: here.

Why I love men who make me laugh (in a male poet's words): here.

The world is just as bad of a place as i always thought it was: here.

page 75. exhausted. must keep pouring more cups of coffee. must keep moving. despite this, i am incredibly happy. strange how that works out. the numbness itself is the antidote.

remember everything.

Because I seem to have misplaced my copy of Paradise Lost, I can't get much work done today. Instead, I post photographs from the last week.

dance marathon ended being up a lot cooler than i thought.

the eyes/claws of the tiger.

for marie's birthday, we went out to all-you-can-eat korean bbq in k-town.

we threw caroline a surprise party. she was so surprised, she turned invisible.

nicole's boyfriend is a professional tap dancer. we had to beg him to dance in front of the whole party though.

caroline, leslie, nina, zach, and alleyperformed as well.

rebecca just watched and ate a lot of brownies.